Victims of Wrath
The dearth of detail enables us to identify the underlying issues — how we treat people and how we so easily slip into situations where we dehumanise them.
In Edom a man lifts his sword against his own brother. (Shades of Jacob and Esau fighting in the womb.) This suggests family breakdown. Another possibility is that it means kinsman; ‘brother’, that is, in the sense of the clan, so perhaps we are to think of civil war or ethnic cleansing. And if our world is a global village, then every man is our brother, every woman our sister, every person our kinsman.
So how did we ever get ourselves into this state? Presumably few of the Ammonites ever actually had such hatred of pregnant women that they derived personal satisfaction from disembowelling them. Can we envisage two other possibilities? One is that it started with a bit of antipathy, leading to acrimony, which in the face of some resistance became physical, and before they knew what they were doing it had all got out of control. The other is that the perpetrators were simply under pressure, possibly orders, and those in charge had a very different agenda and no intention of doing the dirty work themselves.
The Word of God may become clearer if we look at ourselves. Rape and ill-treatment of pregnant women are not unknown in our world, but there are also many more subtle ways of dehumanising people, such as alienation, misrepresentation, exploitation and unhealthy competition, backed by a policy of might is right and aided and abetted by all kinds of economic hand-outs and sweeteners. The result is the same — hurt, anger, sorrow and regret — all further forms of punishment and dehumanisation in themselves which seem to require nobody to administer.
Recognising such situations, trying to understand what is going on and where it may lead by entering into the experience of victims may be a much more effective way of responding to Amos’s words than simply lining up behind him in condemnation.