You'll also probably recall from our study of Genesis that these two sons were the result of shameful, drunken encounters between Lot and his two daughters. Lot and his two daughters were the only people who escaped from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and when his daughters viewed the smoke rising to the heavens, they thought the whole human race was being wiped out. These young ladies had been raised in a pagan society and they didn't have the faith to believe that the whole world wasn't on fire, for the only world they had ever known was on fire. In their fear and confusion, before they clearly saw the situation as it actually was, they concluded that their father was the only man left on earth and that the human race would die out unless they took action. If they had been raised in a godly culture they would have believed the words of the angels who visited them before the Lord rained fire and sulphur from the heavens. They would have known the Scriptures that the Lord had plans for the human race and that a Redeemer was coming someday. But because Lot had unwisely raised them among sinful idolaters, they devised a sinful plot. They got their father so drunk that he had no idea what he was doing and they each had incestuous relations with him, resulting in the conception of Moab and Ben-Ammi. This sin had far-reaching consequences because by Amos' day, which was approximately 1,500 years after the lifetimes of Abraham and Lot, the descendants of Lot had been plaguing the descendants of Abraham so horribly and for so long that the Lord vows to return their violence upon their own heads. Today we are viewing the prophecy against Ammon and tomorrow we will be viewing the prophecy against Moab.
"This is what the Lord says: 'For three sins of Ammon, even for four, I will not relent. Because he ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead in order to extend his borders, I will set fire to the walls of Rabbah that will consume her fortresses amid war cries on the day of battle, amid violent winds on a stormy day. Her king will go into exile, he and his officials together,' says the Lord." (Amos 1:14-15) Gilead was part of the territory the Lord gave to Israel but other nations kept wanting it for themselves. King Hazael of Syria (referred to as the land of Aram in the Bible) attacked Gilead and struck down with the sword the men who were defending the city and then struck down the children and ripped the pregnant women open. Hazael sought to wipe out not only the current generation of people in Gilead but also to prevent new generations from coming up. The Ammonites behaved in the same manner. They wanted Gilead for themselves and they committed the same type of genocide against its inhabitants. In the book of Jeremiah the Lord accuses the Ammonites of attacking and occupying Gad (another name for Gilead) and the Lord tells them their punishment will be: "I will bring terror on you from all those around you...Every one of you will be driven away, and no one will gather the fugitives." (Jeremiah 49:5)
The incident referred to here, in regard to the Ammonites and the people of Gilead, may have occurred during the time of the judges. In Judges 10 we learned that the Ammonites, in league with the Philistines, attacked Gilead and "shattered and crushed" the people there and that "for eighteen years they oppressed all the Israelites on the east side of the Jordan in Gilead" and that the Ammonites even crossed the Jordan to attack the people of Israel within the territories of Judah, Benjamin, and Ephraim. Under the leadership of Jephthah, the Israelites defeated the Ammonites in Judges 11 and they devastated twenty towns of the Ammonites and subdued this enemy. However, the era of the judges is not the only time the Ammonites attacked the region of Gilead during Old Testament times, so their acts of cruelty against the Israelites in Gilead may have taken place on more than one occasion.
What happened to the ancient Ammonites? King Saul and King David won several victories over them. But they were not destroyed as a people by Saul or David. It appears that they became subject to Assyria when the Assyrian Empire was the dominant empire of the region. The Assyrians did not destroy the nation, although they may have laid siege to and destroyed some of the cities, but forced the people to pay tribute to them. King Tiglath-Pileser of Assyria bragged in the records of his reign that the king of the Ammonites had kissed his feet in humility and subservience. It appears that Ammon then became subject to the Neo-Babylonian Empire when it conquered Assyria. Ammonites were also mentioned during the era of the Medo-Persian Empire, which conquered the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The book of 1 Maccabees, which is not included in the Biblical canon of most Christian denominations but is contained in the Jewish Apocrypha, states that the Ammonites teamed up with other neighboring tribes to resist the revival of Jewish power that occurred during the era of Judas Maccabeus which took place during the time period of 170 to 134 BC. Judas Maccabeus was a Jewish military leader who successfully defended Judah from invasion by Antiochus Epiphanes IV of the Seleucid Dynasty of Greece. He also put down the uprising of the Ammonites. In today's world they do not exist as a nation or as a distinct group of people.
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