“Therefore, behold, I will deliver you to the children of the east for a possession, and they will set their encampments in you, and make their dwellings in you. They will eat your fruit and they will drink your milk. And I will make Rabbah a pasturage for camels, and the children of Ammon a fold for flocks, and you will know that I am Yahweh.”
Their punishment was to be that their country would be taken over by the very people whom they probably despised the most, the desert nomads, the ‘children of the east', who would simply use their capital city and their land as a pasturage and sheepfold. Civilisation would cease. Ammon would be no more (Ezekiel 21:32). It would be total humiliation.
Ammon itself was a wilder country than the more civilised and sophisticated Moabites, but none feel their status more than those who feel the superiority of having risen above their even wilder desert neighbours. The thought that their country, and their proud cities, which had been theirs for centuries, and which distinguished them from their desert neighbours, would become mere pasturage and sheepfolds for such desert-dwellers would have appalled them.