Idumea in the context of "History of the ancient Levant"

Herod Archelaus (Ancient Greek: Ἡρῴδης Ἀρχέλαος, Hērōidēs Archelaos; 23 BC – c. AD 18) was the ethnarch of Samaria, Judea, and Idumea, including the cities Caesarea and Jaffa, for nine years (c. 4 BC to AD 6). He was the son of Herod the Great and Malthace the Samaritan, brother of Herod Antipas, and half-brother of Herod II. Archelaus (a name meaning "leading the people") came to power after the death of his father Herod the Great in 4 BC, and ruled over one-half of the territorial dominion of his father. Archelaus was removed by the Roman emperor Augustus when Judaea province was formed under direct Roman rule, at the time of the Census of Quirinius.

The Qedarites (Ancient North Arabian: 𐪄𐪕𐪇, romanized: qdr) were an ancient Arab tribal confederation centred in their capital Dumat al-Jandal in the present-day Saudi Arabian province of Al-Jawf. Attested from the 9th century BC, the Qedarites formed a powerful polity which expanded its territory throughout the 9th to 7th centuries BC to cover a large area in northern Arabia stretching from Transjordan in the west to the western borders of Babylonia in the east, before later consolidating into a kingdom that stretched from the eastern limits of the Nile Delta in the west till Transjordan in the east and covered much of southern Judea (then known as Idumea), the Negev and the Sinai Peninsula.

The Qedarites played an important role in the history of the Levant and North Arabia, where they enjoyed close relations with the nearby Canaanite and Aramaean states and became important participants in the trade of spices and aromatics imported into the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean world from South Arabia. Having engaged in both friendly ties and hostilities with the Mesopotamian powers such as the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires, the Qedarites eventually became integrated within the structure of the Achaemenid Empire. Closely associated with the Nabataeans, who may have eventually assimilated the Qedarites at the end of the Hellenistic period.

Salome I (c. 65 BCE – c. 10 CE) was the sister of Herod the Great and the mother of Berenice by her husband Costobarus, governor of Idumea. She was a nominal queen regnant of the toparchy of Iamnia, Azotus, Phasaelis from 4 BCE.

Edomite is a Northwest Semitic Canaanite language, very similar to Biblical Hebrew, Ekronite, Ammonite, Phoenician, Amorite and Sutean, spoken by the Edomites in Idumea (modern-day southwestern Jordan and parts of Israel) in the 2nd and 1st millennium BC. It is extinct and known only from an extremely small corpus, attested in a scant number of impression seals, ostraca, and a single late 7th or early 6th century BC letter, discovered in Horvat Uza.

Like Moabite, but unlike Hebrew, it retained the feminine ending -t in the singular absolute state. In early times, it seems to have been written with a Phoenician alphabet. However, by the 6th century BC, it adopted the Aramaic alphabet. Meanwhile, Aramaic or Arabic features such as whb ("gave") and tgr/tcr ("merchant") entered the language, with whb becoming especially common in proper names. Like many other Canaanite languages, Edomite features a prefixed definite article derived from the presentative particle (for example as in h-ʔkl ‘the food’). The diphthong /aw/ contracted to /o/ between the 7th and 5th century BC, as foreign transcriptions of the divine name "Qos" indicate a transition in pronunciation from Qāws to Qôs.

Costobarus (Greek: Κοστόβαρος) was an associate of Herod the Great (who made Costobarus governor of Idumea) and second husband of Herod's sister Salome I. He was also known as Costobar.

Another member of the Herodian dynasty was Costobar, who was the brother of Saul. Both Saul and Costobar were likely grandsons of Costobarus.

Qos (Edomite: 𐤒𐤅‬‬𐤎 Qāws, later Qôs; Hebrew: קוֹס‎ Qōs) also Qaus (Akkadian: 𒋡𒍑 Qa-uš), or Koze (Greek: Kωζαι Kōzai) was the national god of the Edomites. He was the Idumean structural parallel to Yahweh. The name occurs only twice in the Old Testament (if a possible allusion in an otherwise corrupted text in the Book of Proverbs is excluded) in the Book of Ezra and Nehemiah as an element in a personal name, Barqos ("son of Qos"), referring to the 'father' of a family or clan of perhaps Edomite/Idumaean nəṯīnīm or temple helpers returning from the Babylonian exile. Outside the Bible, Qos is frequently invoked in names found on documents recovered from excavations in Elephantine, where a mixed population of Arabs, Jews and Idumeans lived under the protection of a Persian-Mesopotamian garrison.