Jacob saw the leaders of Esau listed in the Torah — king after king after king (Genesis 36:31-43) — and was afraid. "How can I stand against all of them? I am one man." The Holy One said: "Look what is behind you." And when Jacob looked, he saw the generations of Isaac, the generations of Abraham, the covenant stretching back and forward through time. He was not one man. He was the culmination of everything that had come before him (Genesis 25:19).
Obadiah's vision of Edom's judgment enters here because the rabbis connected Esau's fourteen kings to Edom's eventual fall. Edom had kings while Israel had none — and the rabbis noted the irony: Edom's royal succession proved its instability, not its strength. A nation that cycles through kings is a nation that cannot agree on who it is. Israel, by contrast, had no kings yet — it had a covenant. The covenant was worth more than any throne.
"These are the generations of Jacob: Joseph" (Genesis 37:2) — the verse that follows the list of Edom's kings. The rabbis read the juxtaposition as deliberate. Edom has fourteen kings; Jacob has Joseph. But Joseph will become the viceroy of Egypt. Joseph's children, Ephraim and Manasseh, will become tribes. The seed of one faithful man outweighs the record of fourteen kings whose names are already forgotten by the nations who succeeded them.