Rejection is strong medicine, even when by rights it must take place and the Torah itself prescribes it
But unlike the Babylonians, the Amonites and Moavites didn’t turn first to plunder the Temple’s treasures. They entered, says the midrash (Introduction to Eichah Rabbah 9), with another goal in mind, one that beckoned them more strongly than the promise of mere gold and silver: They were there to search for the sefer Torah kept there, intent on excising from it the verse of “Lo yavo Amoni uMoavi b’khal Hashem,” which bars male descendants of those two nations from ever marrying into Klal Yisrael.
The midrash doesn’t say whether they succeeded in finding and vandalizing the sefer Torah, but it does tell us that the Amonim and Moavim entered the Kodesh Hakodoshim (perhaps knowing there was a sefer Torah reposed in the Aron alongside the Luchos). Once inside that most sacred inner sanctum, these heathens encountered an unexpected sight: The Keruvim, their cherubic forms ascending from out of the Kappores atop the Aron.
They seized the holy Keruvim and went out to the marketplaces of Yerushalayim. There, they exultantly paraded their unexpected find back and forth through the streets, proclaiming with glee, “Didn’t this nation always claim it doesn’t worship foreign gods? Well, look what we’ve found of theirs and what they’ve been worshipping! We’re all the same after all!”
As a result of this spectacle of sacrilege, the midrash concludes, Hashem swore at that moment to erase Amon and Moav from the world, as the pasuk (Tzefaniah 2:9) states, “Therefore Hashem, the G-d of Israel, swore that Moav will be like Sedom and Amon like Amora.”
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