Edom's Land Becomes a Measured Haunt for Wild Creatures

Edom's streams become pitch, and smoke rises as a lasting waste

And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch. It shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up for ever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever.

Pitch and unending smoke are poetic desolation of Edom's land. The forever language is oracle hyperbole of ruin, not a charter to create wastelands, not mapping onto modern ethnic enemies, and not colonial possession of an empty map.

Rulers vanish, thorns take the palaces, and wild creatures receive a measured allotment

But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness. They shall call the nobles thereof to the kingdom, but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing. And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.

The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest. There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow: there shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her mate. Seek ye out of the book of the LORD, and read: no one of these shall fail, none shall want her mate: for my mouth it hath commanded, and his spirit it hath gathered them. And he hath cast the lot for them, and his hand hath divided it unto them by line: they shall possess it for ever, from generation to generation shall they dwell therein. Confusion-line and emptiness-stones replace nobles. The habitat is allotted to creatures with mates. The measured haunt is the poem's last camera, not political demonization of a people and not a call to drive humans out so owls can nest.