Chapter 2 starts out with a prophecy against Moab. The Moabites, like the Ammonites from our last study session, were related to the Israelites through Abraham's nephew Lot. But this familial relationship never inspired the Moabites to extend the hand of friendship to Abraham's descendants. The Moabites, along with many Midianites, were afraid of the Israelites after the Lord brought Israel out of Egypt. They were concerned about their number and about whether they might seek to take over the entire land, regardless of the fact that the Israelites made no move to harm them in any way and were simply camping nearby on their route to the promised land. But one of the strategies the Moabites (in league with the Midianites) attempted to use was to entice the men of Israel into idolatry. They reasoned that if they could get the Israelites to worship gods other than the God of Israel, the God of Israel would destroy the Israelites in anger. In Numbers 25 we found the beautiful and exotic pagan women of Moab and Midian using their powers of sexual attraction in order to lure young Israelite men to their heathen festivals. The men who unwisely went with them went so far as to eat foods sacrificed to idols, to bow down before idols, and to engage in sexual immorality with the women. This incident resulted in a plague that took the lives of 24,000 men of Israel. But the entire nation did not fall into idolatry and the plot of Israel's enemies failed.
That's just one example of Moab's reluctance to be on good terms with Israel but what's interesting is that the prophecy of judgment against Moab in today's text is not about anything the Moabites did to the Israelites. It involves instead an incident regarding the Edomites, who were descended from Jacob's brother Esau.
"This is what the Lord says: 'For three sins of Moab, even for four, I will not relent. Because he burned to ashes the bones of Edom's king, I will send fire on Moab that will consume the fortresses of Kerioth. Moab will go down in great tumult amid war cries and the blast of the trumpet. I will destroy her ruler and kill all her officials with him,' says the Lord." (Amos 2:1-3)
The Bible does not describe this particular happening for us anywhere in the Old Testament. But we know that there was war between Moab and Edom during the era of the book of 2 Kings. During that time the nation of Moab was subject to the nation of Israel but King Mesha of Moab revolted against paying tribute to Israel. King Ahab of Israel had just died and King Mesha thought Ahab's successor, Joram, might be caught off guard by the rebellion and might not be able to command the army as well as his father in order to put down the revolt.
King Joram called upon King Jehoshaphat of Judah to come to his aid, which he did, and they allied themselves with an unnamed king of Edom along the way and he joined them with his troops. The Moabites decided to attack the camp of the forces of Joram and Jehoshaphat but the Lord defended the men of Israel and Judah. The Moabites then turned their attention to attacking the capital city of Edom but were foiled in this attempt too, leading to the shocking incident at the end of 2 Kings 3 in which the king of Moab took his firstborn son (who must have been an adult since he was with the army) and sacrificed him to the Moabite gods on top of the wall before going back to his own country, presumably to make a statement such as: "I'll be back!" We do not know whether he returned and was successful in capturing the king who had allied himself with Joram and Jehoshaphat, or whether he came back at a later date and dug that king's bones up from his grave and desecrated them, but it's clear that the Moabites at some point in time sinned so horribly against the people of Edom that the Lord had to take action against them. The Moabites must have perpetrated far more evil against the Edomites than they did against the Israelites since it is for whatever they did to Edom that the Lord speaks the words of our text today.
There is no doubt that the Moabites were exceedingly evil, for a person who would sacrifice their own son in hope that "the gods" would give him victory over another king is a person whose soul is utterly depraved. Not only did he have no pity on his own child, but this son was the crown-prince of Moab---his successor---and was almost certainly second-in-command of the army or even the top general of the army. So we find Mesha caring nothing about his son and not taking into consideration the security of his nation (ensuring a smooth transition of power should he himself be killed in battle) and not taking into consideration the morale and safety of his troops (by slaughtering a top commander in front of them).
Where are the Moabites today? There is no nation of Moab on the earth and no distinct group of people known as the Moabites. When the Assyrian Empire rose to power, Moab became subject to Assyria as did many other nations of the region at that time. When the Neo-Babylonian Empire rose to power and conquered Assyria, they also conquered or absorbed Moab, at which time Moab as a nation appears to have disappeared from history. It was common practice for both Assyria and Babylon to deport the majority of the citizens from any nation they conquered. The Moabites who survived being subjugated and conquered by these ancient superpowers must have been dispersed throughout other lands. There are probably people on earth today who are genetically related to the Moabites of the Old Testament but their genetic material is mixed with that of many other cultures into which the Moabites were assimilated. When the Lord said He would destroy Moab, He did not necessarily mean that every Moabite would be wiped from the face of the earth. But He meant that the nation would cease to exist and that there would come a time when no separate culture known as the Moabites would exist in the world. We can clearly see that this prophecy has come true.
No comments:
Post a Comment