Ezekiel 25:10

Ezekiel 25 has a special character. The nations around Israel, and those living inside its land, rejoiced at the destruction of Jerusalem and of the sanctuary. So God would carry out judgment on them. Ammon, Moab, Edom, and the Philistines are the objects of this prophecy… So the judgment that fell on them would teach these nations this: although Jerusalem had not been a faithful witness, Jehovah alone is God.

The main question is who the sons of the east are. Some (both Jews and Christians) take them to be the Chaldeans. But Theodoret seems to me more right, who views them as the Ishmaelites. After Nebuchadnezzar's great overthrow of the existing state, they would pitch their tents, tend their flocks and herds — in short, live their wandering life in the land of those who had celebrated the desecration of Jehovah's sanctuary, the ruin of Israel's land, and the captivity of Judah… It was a greater blow to become the possession of the wandering Bedouins than to have simply fallen under the towers and strength and skill of the Babylonians.

If we look back at the history of Ammon it will have constant meaning for us… The land he covets for himself, as we find in the history of the Judges. Yet he can take real possession of nothing, being only the wandering raider that everything shows him to be. So, as others have noted, we have no cities of the land of Ammon. We find nothing that shows real working of the soil or the care of the farmer. Rabbah is his one city… In the fitting ways of God, He gives up the land of Ammon to raiders like himself, "the sons of the East"… men whose hand was against everyone, and everyone's hand against them.

How true it is that God resists the proud! We have heard of Moab's pride. He resented it all the more because they dared to say, as they would have liked to believe, that "the house of Judah is like all the nations." But it was not so, either in their privileges or in their punishment — though sadly they were too much alike in their sins. What Moab disliked was not this, but the mercy God had shown Israel and their calling to be at the head of the nations as the witness of Jehovah. So He carried out judgments in Moab, so that they might know Him. The God of Israel governs the nations.

Moab, in full company with Ammon in his later history and in his spirit, becomes a sharer of his doom. Other places of Scripture treat them as if they were one. The company he keeps testifies of the man he is; this is a lesson about association which is always needed.

The sons of Ammon have been destroyed, and beyond any repair that man can make…

Both Ammon and Moab were related to Israel by blood, since they came from Lot (Gen. 19:37-38). They were in constant conflict with Israel… Scripture promises both Ammon and Moab a national restoration in the latter days, that is, when the Lord comes (Jer. 48:47; 49:6). Let us remember that these nations were proud in the extreme. And these judgments on proud, self-exalting, God-forgetting nations are not limited to the past. He will repeat them in the future when He judges the nations.