Verse 1
The Lord asked why Malcam (lit. their king; also called Milcom or Molech, cf. Jeremiah 19:5; Deuteronomy 12:31), the god of the Ammonites, had (from the Ammonites’ viewpoint) taken over territory that formerly belonged to the tribe of Gad. Was it that there were no descendants of the Gadites to maintain control of it? No, they had not gained it by default but by stealing it from the Israelites. The Assyrians under Tiglath-Pilesar III had removed the Israelites from Transjordan in 734 B.C., and the Ammonites had moved into their territory then. It was the king of Ammon, not its do-nothing god, who had taken possession of Gad’s territory.
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