25:1–7 Oracles against the nations typically include a direct address by God to the nation concerned; charges of an arrogant attitude and/or actions, especially against the Lord’s people; and a prediction of the nation’s coming doom.192 The oracle against Ammon contains each of these elements in turn. The prophet is told to set his face toward the Ammonites and prophesy against them, just as he earlier set his face toward Jerusalem and other targets of the Lord’s wrath (4:3, 7; 6:2; 13:17). The charge against the Ammonites is that they rejoiced over the profaning of the Jerusalem temple, the destruction of the countryside, and the exiling of the people of Judah. They assumed that the Babylonian invasion meant that the triangular relationship between the people of Judah, her land, and her deity was broken forever—a state of affairs from which they might expect to profit.193 Yet even though those tragic events were caused by Judah’s own sin, the nations around Judah were culpable for their response to these events and would be held to account. The appropriate response to such a tragedy in the life of God’s people would be quiet and solemn mourning, rather than wild cheering (“saying heʾakh,” an example of onomatopoeic jeering; 25:3), as if Judah’s defeat were somehow a vindication of the power of their own gods. In reality, the Ammonites escaped disaster only because of the Lord’s causing the lot to fall on Jerusalem rather than Rabbah, the Ammonite capital (cf. 21:20–22). Instead of lamenting Jerusalem’s sad fate, however, the Ammonites celebrated Judah’s downfall with hands, feet, and their whole souls (25:6).

Under the Abrahamic covenant, such an attitude of disrespect demanded judgment from the Lord if Judah was still regarded as his people (cf. Gen. 12:3). For the Lord to have done nothing over such an insult would have been to declare Judah’s relationship with him null and void. But through the prophet the Lord affirms that his relationship with Judah still matters to him; as a result, judgment is coming upon Ammon. The Lord’s earlier decision to direct Nebuchadnezzar toward Jerusalem rather than Rabbah (Ezek. 21:18–22) was a stay of execution for the Ammonites, not a permanent reprieve.

In due season the Lord will hand the Ammonites over to the “people of the East” (v. 4), a generic description for nomadic raiders from the neighboring desert regions (cf. Judg. 6:3, 33; 7:12; Job 1:3). These peoples have no use for occupation and permanent settlement but will set up their temporary encampments throughout the land, stealing the Ammonite produce and turning their important cities into pasturage for their camels and goats (Ezek. 25:4–5). The people of Ammon will be cut off, caused to perish, and destroyed—a threefold punishment to match their earlier threefold rejoicing over Judah’s downfall (vv. 4, 7). When that happens, they will “know that I am the Lord” (vv. 5, 7)—they will recognize the sovereign power of the Lord to judge not only his own people but the nations more broadly. The idea of a god judging his own people was commonplace in the ancient Near East, but gods rarely claimed worldwide rule or the power to judge other nations. Israel’s God, however, controls the destiny of all peoples.

25:8–11 A similar fate awaits Ammon’s southern neighbor, Moab.194 Moab mocked Judah’s distinctiveness, claiming that her destruction by the Babylonians meant that she was just like all the other nations (v. 8). But, even though that status was what Judah wished for and pursued at times, the Lord’s honor was intimately connected with the proposition that Israel was not like the nations around her—and never could be (cf. 20:32). The Lord had chosen Israel despite her pattern of sin and rebellion, and the demonstration of Judah’s special status before the Lord would become clear to all when he meted out punishment against Moab for questioning it. Like Ammon, Moab will be given over into the hands of the nomadic people of the East, for them to possess her territory (25:10). Far from Judah’s being the nation abandoned by her God and placed on the scrap heap of history, the result of the Lord’s judgment will be the complete obliteration of the Ammonite name, as well as the destruction of the territory of Moab. This judicial act will affect her western frontier, the “flank” of Moab facing Judah, as well as her major cities: Beth-jeshimoth, Baal-meon, and Kiriathaim (v. 9). Strikingly, these cities were historically part of the Israelite-occupied Transjordan (cf. Josh. 13:17), which Ezekiel does not regard as part of the “ideal” Promised Land in Ezekiel 47:13–48:29.

25:12–14 Whereas Ammon and Moab simply mocked Judah’s destruction, the Edomites seem to have adopted a more active stance in supporting the Babylonian invasion, as Obadiah makes clear. Rather than helping their distant relatives, Edom took advantage of the situation to steal Judah’s possessions, cut down fugitives fleeing from the Babylonians, and hand over any who escaped (Obad. 11–14). But the Lord will judge Edom in turn, using his own people as the agents of judgment—which presupposes their restoration and return to their own land. Instead of Israel’s being on the receiving end of the Lord’s anger and wrath, as they were for the first part of the book (Ezek. 7:8; 13:13; 20:8, 21; 22:20), that wrath will now be poured out on Israel’s enemies and those who assaulted her.

25:15–17 The last of the shorter oracles moves south and west to address Israel’s longstanding enemies, the Philistines. They too joined Edom in seeking revenge on God’s people as an expression of their never-ending enmity toward Israel (v. 15). Their actions mirror those of the Edomites in acting vengefully (v. 15; cf. v. 12) and of the Ammonites in bearing malice in their souls (v. 15; cf. v. 6), but their revenge is small and paltry compared to the vengeance the Lord will wreak upon them, as well as on the entire seacoast—the coastal plain between the hill country that forms Israel’s heartland and the Mediterranean Sea. The Cherethites (v. 16) were a subgroup within the Philistines, originating on Crete. Here their name forms a wordplay in Hebrew: “I will cut off the Cherethites” is wehikratti ʾet-keretim.