5. AMMON.--_Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Ammon and because of four I will not turn It back; for that they ripped up Gilead's women with child--in order to enlarge their borders!_ For such an end they committed such an atrocity! The crime is one that has been more or less frequent in Semitic warfare. Wellhausen cites several instances in the feuds of Arab tribes about their frontiers. The Turks have been guilty of it in our own day.[243] It is the same charge which the historian of Israel puts into the mouth of Elisha against Hazael of Aram,[244] and probably the war was the same; when Gilead was simultaneously attacked by Arameans from the north and Ammonites from the south. _But I will set fire to the wall of Rabbah_--Rabbath-Ammon, literally _chief_ or _capital_ of Ammon--_and it shall devour her palaces, with clamour in the day of battle, with tempest in the day of storm_. As we speak of "storming a city," Amos and Isaiah[245] use the tempest to describe the overwhelming invasion of Assyria. There follows the characteristic Assyrian conclusion: _And their king shall go into captivity, he and his princes_[246] _together, saith Jehovah_.
6. MOAB.--_Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Moab and because of four I will not turn It back; for that he burned the bones of the king of Edom to lime._[247] In the great invasion of Moab, about 850, by Israel, Judah and Edom conjointly, the rage of Moab seems to have been directed chiefly against Edom.[248] Whether opportunity to appease that rage occurred on the withdrawal of Israel we cannot say. But either then or afterwards, balked of their attempt to secure the king of Edom alive, Moab wreaked their vengeance on his corpse, and burnt his bones to lime. It was, in the religious belief of all antiquity, a sacrilege; yet it does not seem to have been the desecration of the tomb--or he would have mentioned it--but the wanton meanness of the deed, which Amos felt. _And I will send fire on Moab, and it shall devour the palaces of The-Cities_--Ḳerîoth,[249] perhaps the present Ḳureiyat,[250] on the Moab plateau where Chemosh had his shrine[251]--_and in tumult shall Moab die_--to Jeremiah[252] the Moabites were the sons of tumult--_with clamour and with the noise of the war-trumpet. And I will cut off the ruler_--literally _judge_, probably the vassal king placed by Jeroboam II.--_from her_[253] _midst, and all his_[254] _princes will I slay with him: Jehovah hath said_ it.
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These, then, are the charges which Amos brings against the heathen neighbours of Israel.
If we look as a whole across the details through which we have been working, what we see is a picture of the Semitic world so summary and so vivid that we get the like of it nowhere else--the Semitic world in its characteristic brokenness and turbulence; its factions and ferocities, its causeless raids and quarrels, tribal disputes about boundaries flaring up into the most terrible massacres, vengeance that wreaks itself alike on the embryo and the corpse--_cutting up women with child in Gilead,_ and _burning to lime the bones of the king of Edom_. And the one commerce which binds these ferocious tribes together is the slave-trade in its wholesale and most odious form.
Amos treats none of the atrocities subjectively. It is not because they have been inflicted upon Israel that he feels or condemns them. The appeals of Israel against the tyrant become many as the centuries go on; the later parts of the Old Testament are full of the complaints of God's chosen people, conscious of their mission to the world, against the heathen, who prevented them from it. Here we find none of these complaints, but a strictly objective and judicial indictment of the characteristic crimes of heathen men against each other; and though this is made in the name of Jehovah, it is not in the interests of His people or of any of His purposes through them, but solely by the standard of an impartial righteousness which, as we are soon to hear, must descend in equal judgment on Israel.