'The ROCK, the crag' — both a common Hebrew noun and the name of Edom's cliff-fortress capital. Obadiah's taunt turns on the double sense: 'you who dwell in the clefts of the SELA' (1:3) means at once 'in the crags' and 'in Sela.' Edom's heartland is the red-sandstone highlands south-east of the Dead Sea — a country of gorges and rock-cut strongholds reached through narrow ravines, which gave the nation its sense of being untouchable. ⚠ Sela is commonly pictured as PETRA, the rose-red Nabatean city carved into this same stone, and travellers have read Obadiah with Petra in front of them for centuries — but the Nabatean city is later; the Edomite Sela was probably an earlier fortress-summit nearby (often identified with Umm el-Biyara, the flat-topped cliff above the Petra basin, or with es-Sela further north). Amaziah of Judah captured a 'Sela' and renamed it Joktheel (2 Kings 14:7). The geography is the point either way: a home where no army could follow.