Table of Contents
The Moabites live on the edge of the Bible’s story, east of the Jordan, always next to Israel and never quite part of it. On this site they keep appearing for different reasons: as children of Lot, as the people who took the land of the giant Emim, as worshippers of Chemosh, and as one of the nations that each had their own Elohim. I collected those threads here.
Children of Lot
Chronological Nations and Tribes lists the Moabites and Ammonites as descendants of Lot, living east of the Jordan River at the same time as the Israelites. The origins of two great nations reads Lot and his daughters, after the escape from Sodom, as the start of these two peoples, much as Hagar and Ishmael start another. The Oahspe tells a different origin on First Book of God:
When Lot departed out of Zoar, there went with him two tribes, and there were born of the house of Lot, offspring to the two tribes who accompanied him, and these became the nations in after years known as Moabites and Ammonites
Oahspe, First Book of God
The same passage calls them Foneceans who followed the doctrines of Zarathustra.
The land of the giants
The Moabites did not settle an empty land. On Emites, the Emim were a people “great, and many, and tall” who were defeated by the Moabites, who then took their land. Rephaites explains the names: the Moabites called these giants Emim, the Ammonites called them Zamzummim, and both were counted among the Rephaim. Anakim and Zuzites place related peoples in the same region, between Bashan and Moab.
Chemosh and Baal of Peor
The god of Moab was Chemosh. King Josiah of Judah describes him as the national god of the Moabites, associated with war and destruction, and The Bible: Blend and unify ‘the Gods’ into One links him with child sacrifice. On Yahweh deliberately woven throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, Judges 11:24 has Jephthah speak of Chemosh as the god who gives Moab its land, in the same breath as Israel’s own God. Baal adds the Baal-Peor episode of Numbers 25, where Israelites join the Moabite worship of Baal of Peor.
The Mesha Stele brings the Moabites’ own voice into it. King David describes the stone, found in 1868 at Dhiban in modern Jordan, which commemorates King Mesha’s victories over Israel, and King Hezekiah’s religious reforms notes that it gives the credit for those victories to Chemosh.
Each nation its own Elohim
Mauro Biglino reads these gods as real rulers. On Elohim, Yahweh is one Elohim overseeing only the family of Jacob, while others like Chemosh ruled peoples such as the Moabites. In the video The Laws for Humans he says a group of Elohim gave the Moabites, Ammonites, Amalekites, Edomites and Israelites each their own rules and regulations. The video Gods of the Bible makes the same point about Chemosh of Moab and Dagon.
Kept out, and let in
The law was hard on them. The Gerim quotes Deuteronomy in the World English Bible:
An Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter into YHWH’s assembly; even to the tenth generation shall no one belonging to them enter into YHWH’s assembly forever,
Deuteronomy 23:3 (WEB)
The same page notes that the Mishnah later limited the ban to men. And one Moabite woman became an ancestor of kings. The Old Testament – The Hebrew Bible summarizes the Book of Ruth, in which a Moabite widow joins Israel and becomes an ancestor of King David through Boaz. Moab also returns in war and prophecy: Lords of the Earth – Judges has Ehud defeat Eglon, king of Moab, and on Numbers Balaam saddles his ass and rides with the princes of Moab.
Related pages
For every page I tagged with Moabites, see the Moabites tag archive.
