Those Antagonistic Relatives, Ammonites and Moabites Could Be Our Relatives

 Nadene Goldfoot                                            

 "G-d invited Moses up to Mount Nebo where He showed His beloved prophet the Promised Land before his death. Deuteronomy 34:4–5 records, “Then the Lord said to him, ‘This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, “I will give it to your descendants.” I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over into it.’ And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in Moab, as the Lord had said.”

Jordan River runs from Mt. Hermon to the Dead Sea of about 87 miles directly but has to wind around for 200 miles. Tributaries from Transjordan are Rivers Yarmuk, Jabboak, Heshbon

Abraham had a nephew named Lot.  Lot traveled from Aram-Naharaim with his Uncle Abe to Canaan with him on his contingent.  Lot's father was Haran who was Abraham's brother, both sons of Terah of Ur of the Chaldees.  Each traveled with their own sheep and sheepherders to their new site for this was to be a permanent move.

The sheepherders had a quarrel over pasture-land and invading each other's choice spots.  They parted company with Lot settling in the city of Sodom.  This was a poor choice of people, as he was captured by 5 kings (like mayors of their towns) who had just attacked the country.  Abraham rescued Lot. He had all the sheepherders with him.  It was quite the escape, with Sodom on fire and Lot's wife looking back at it and turning into salt, quite a hot fire at that.  At a later  point, his daughters produced 2 sons Lot had sired when drunk, Ammon and Moab.  From them came the Ammonites and the Moabites.  

    1.   Ammonites, one of the Bull worshippers;   didn't listen to the lecture from Lot's Uncle Abraham about what  G-d was not.  

Ammonites were found in Transjordan and of course were Semitic, related to Abraham. Remember that this was in the days of human sacrificing.  

 They were known best  from the 13th to 18th centuries BCE, then declined, and were absorbed into Arab tribes. They kept attacking the Israelites after Israelites had occupied Canaan.  The Ammonites were defeated at the hands of Jephtah, the Israelite judge who lived in Gilead and King Saul.   Jephtah even defeated the Ephraimites, his cousins,  who  opposed his leadership. The Bible repeats the story  Jephtah said that before fighting the Ammonites, he vowed to sacrifice whatever came first from his home, should he return safely;  he was met by his daughter and,, with her consent, performed his vow.  (Judg: 11).  (I notice that she and Abraham's son, Isaac, also went along with being human sacrifices).  Back then, they may have taken that ritual to be the norm, hard to believe, though.

Abraham's DNA, I figure, would be the same as Moses and his brother, Aaron;  and Aaron had to be in today's DNA lingo, a J1 haplotype as they were from the tribe of Levi, one of the 12 tribes of Jacob.  Of course, the DNA does mutate somewhat through 4,000 years so would be carrying that knowledge, too.  All of the males born with Abraham as the origin should be of J1. J1 is known as the Cohen gene-meaning from the direct line of Aaron.  All other Levites may have an altered line of J1.   

They were changed with new titles from Israelites to Jews much later after Solomon's death in 920 BCE, to past 135 CE when the Romans killed Bar Kokhba who held Jerusalem for 3 years and then was killed.  Those remnants in Judah became known as Jews.

 Great question! The Hebrew Bible doesn’t have a whole lot to say about individual Moabite men, and those texts that do talk about Moabite men (like Num 22-24) don’t talk about them in relationship to Moabite women.

This is probably because the Moabites, who were Israel’s close neighbors, were primarily of concern to the Israelites when it came to war or Moab’s political alliances with Israel’s enemies or to intermarriage. So what Moabite men and women did amongst themselves wasn’t really important to the biblical authors. It only mattered when they interacted with the Israelites in some way.

The alleged sexual promiscuity of the Moabite women was primarily a concern to biblical authors who believed that these women would lead Israelite men into worshiping Moabite gods (see Num 25:1-5 and 1Kgs 11:1-8). The idea that the foreign woman is a dangerous temptress is a very common theme in the Bible; it is probably a literary device rather than a reflection of historical reality—that is, these are ancient “yo’ mama” slanders, not historical facts. The role of Moabite men in influencing Moabite women’s behavior doesn’t really come into the picture, because the stories aren’t about actual relationships and actual people. Yo, yea of little faith, our DNA might give us an idea through Mt haplotypes,, and remember, this was back in the days of human sacrificing.  Sex offenses, hmmm, a whole town was slaughtered because of a rape.    

   2. Moabites were living in Transjordan which is bounded by the Heshbon River in the North, and the  Zered River in  the South, the Jordan River and the Dead Sea to the West, and the Syrian Desert on the East.                                        

 They were the brothers of the Ammonites.  They spoke a biblical Hebrew.  Moabites took the land from the Rephaim (Emim), an  even more ancient people in Transjordania in the time of Abraham who apparently settled near Jerusalem in the "Valley of Rephaim."                            

During the 40 years of the Exodus (c.1579-1500 BCE) part of the Moab land came under the rule of the Amorite monarch, Sihon.  After his defeat by the Israelites, it was occupied by the Israelites, giving all three reason to fight over it.  Moabites originally were divided into family tribes, then united into a single kingdom, and it was their 2nd ruler, King Balak who summoned Balaam (Heathen prophet who was divinely inspired) to curse the Israelites.   Of course, the curse was turned into a blessing on the Israelites. 

                                                Baal Peor
 It was on Balaam's advise that the Midianites invited the Israelites to worship Baal Peor and Balaam was killed by the Israelites on the battlefield.  Balaam had the characteristics of a Mesopotamian priest and soothsayer but also appears as a faithful servant of G-d.  The rabbis listed him as one of the 7 prophets who spoke to heathen nations.  the biblical report of Balaam's reproof by his ass (donkey) is interpreted by Maimonides as a vision.  

Resource:

The new Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://www.bibleodyssey.org/articles/moabite-men/