Moab's Downfall

…Israel was formidable and hard to face. So, with great bitterness and a love of mischief, they set about stripping him of his help and persuaded him to offend the God who is over all.

They kept this attitude to the very end. Whenever Israel had offended God and happened to fall into misfortune, they boasted over him and jeered, charging God with being utterly powerless, the God who promises to save those who worship him.

The blessed Jeremiah is witness to this in his vision against them, where he says: “The horn of Moab is broken, and his arm is shattered. Make him drunk, for he magnified himself against the Lord” (Jeremiah 48:25–26). And again: “For thus says the Lord: Arioth is taken, and the strongholds are seized. And Moab will perish as a people, for he magnified himself against the Lord” (Jeremiah 48:40–42).

For in time the tyrant of the Assyrians and Babylonians came to lay Judea waste, and he took the cities of Samaria. The Moabites, for their part, smiled at those who had perished, mocked them beyond measure, and went on heaping insult on the glory of God.

For this reason they too have been given over to desolation and have utterly perished, cities, people, and every household together, so that now it seems almost as if they had never existed.

The vision before us, then, recalls what befell them, plainly by wrath from above, and says: “By night the Moabite will perish; for by night the wall of the land of Moab will perish” (Isaiah 15:1).

Some who have studied these matters closely have handed down that, when the Babylonians were about to make war on them, an earthquake struck and shook the chief city of the Moabites so violently that its whole wall fell of itself in the night and the dark. When this happened, before the enemy attacked, their hope of safety all but perished. That is why he says that the land of Moab will perish by night.

“But grieve,” he says, “over yourselves” (Isaiah 15:2). It is as if he said: Many times you raised your brows high and gloated over the misfortunes of others; but now the war is running against you yourselves, and the harm that comes of it hangs over your unholy heads. Grieve, then, not over any others, but over yourselves.

“For Lebedon will perish, where your altar is” (Isaiah 15:2). I said that the Moabites had become fierce and arrogant, trusting in the deceits of demons and supposing that by the magician's art they would prevail over the power of all, even of Israel himself, though God should defend him. So in the place called Lebedon they had an altar and a sacred precinct of no ordinary construction. There they performed their divinations and prided themselves greatly, and they held the place more sacred than any other. But, he says, even the workshop of your divination will perish.

“There you will go up…” (Isaiah 15:2)