The Prophet’s Visions and Encounter with Amaziah (8:1-3): While this section contains two different types of visions and a biographical insert, it should be regarded as a unit that has been given its present form by the disciples of the prophet.
The first two visions, in 7:1–3 and 7:4–6, are “event visions,” portraying what is about to happen, and they are identical in their form. The third and fourth visions, in 7:7–9 and 8:1–3, are “wordplay visions,” in which the meaning of what is seen depends on Yahweh’s interpretation of the word used. The biographical account of 7:10–17 shows the reaction of the priest Amaziah to the judgment announcement in 7:9 and is bound to the third vision by the use of “sword” in both 7:9 and 7:11 and by the reference to “sanctuaries” in both 7:9 and 7:13. Thus the whole unit holds together by its common subject matter of visions and the reaction to them.
Visions were frequent means of God’s communication with the prophets. In an ecstatic state of heightened consciousness, the prophet was granted to see and to hear God’s voice and actions, of which others were unaware. For example, Isaiah sees and hears God in the heavenly court (in Isa. 6). In an account similar to that in our passage, Jeremiah sees and hears God’s future judgment upon the people in the form of a military attack by the mysterious enemy from the North (Jer. 4:19–22). Or in Jeremiah 1:11–12, he is asked what he sees, and the Lord then interprets the meaning of the “branch of the almond tree” for him. There is no way we moderns can analyze or explain such prophetic experiences. We can only say that they were validated by Israel’s subsequent history, and we accept them at face value as belonging to the traditions of our faith.
It is not necessary that we consider the visions in this unit to have been granted Amos all at one time. Nor do the visions form a “call” to the prophet, marking the beginning of his ministry. Indeed, the first vision (7:1–3) takes place in the late spring, the second (7:4–6) in midsummer, the fourth (8:1–3) in autumn. Amaziah’s reference to “all” of Amos’s words, in 7:10, implies that the prophet has been preaching for some time. And the content of the visions, which proclaims the exile and end of Israel, is consonant with the prophet’s preaching in 5:2, 5, 17 and 6:7. The implication is, therefore, that the visions occurred in those days when Amos was also given the messages now found in chapters 5 and 6.
Like all of the prophets, Amos undoubtedly experienced opposition to his announcements of judgment—no people like to hear that they are going to die at the hand of their God. The encounter with Amaziah in 7:10–17 portrays that opposition brought to a head in the objection of the royal priest at the king’s sanctuary. Amos’s life was in danger.
In one sense, however, the first two visions in verses 1–6 form an apologetic for the prophet’s ministry, as did 3:3–8. By telling of his intercessions on behalf of his sinful compatriots, intercessions that have twice turned aside the wrath of God, Amos shows that he has had no desire to see the death of his people. Like so many of the prophets both before and after him, he has vigorously exercised the prophetic function of interceding for the good of his nation.
We do not often realize that the prophets of the OT not only proclaimed God’s judgment on their sinful folk but also defended that folk in tearful intercession before the throne of God (cf. Jer. 9:1). Moses, the first and greatest of the prophets, undertook strenuous asceticism to turn aside God’s judgment (Deut. 9:17–20, 25–29). Jeremiah pleaded so frequently with God for the forgiveness of his people that God finally had to tell him to be quiet (Jer. 7:16–17; 11:14; 15:1). Ezekiel likened prophetic intercession to a soldier filling up a breach in a fortification that Israel might stand in battle in the day of the Lord (Ezek. 13:5). Thus Amos, by his prayers in 7:2 and 7:5, is fulfilling the role of a true prophet.
It is interesting to note in this section that Amos is the only one in Israel who sees the condition of his people correctly. “Jacob,” Amos’s favorite name for the northern kingdom (3:13; 6:8; 8:7; 9:8), is “so small,” he says (7:2, 5). That is, Jacob is so weak, so helpless, so pitiful. But this is the people who boasted in their pride of their security and wealth, their military prowess and their lavish cult (see the comments on 5:18–6:14). In the light of God’s word, Amos sees their true condition; they are pitiful and small. We can be grateful that God saw our real natures behind all of our equally foolish and proud claims, that God pitied us as a father pities his children and came to rescue us in Jesus Christ.
8:1–3 This fourth vision, after the confrontation with the priest Amaziah, serves to reiterate and make final what Amos has already proclaimed in his third vision, 7:7–9: Reading literally, as in the RSV, the “end” has come upon God’s people Israel. Or in the NIV, she is ripe for punishment. The Lord will no longer pass over Israel’s sin or pass by their faithlessness. The wages of their sin is death, and that wage will be paid. Amaziah’s warning has not deterred the prophet. God has shown Amos the vision of the end, and the fulfillment of the vision is irrevocable.
In his commentary on Amos, James Mays has suggested (p. 141) that the vision is prompted by the sight of a basket of fruit brought to the temple as an offering at the autumn festival. Perhaps so, though the prophets needed no external stimuli to prompt the word of God to them. Rather the wicker basket (cf. the same word used for “cages” in Jer. 5:27) is just there, attached to no one, an object in space, suspended, filled with fruit that ripens late in the fall, such as olives or figs. (The text literally reads “summer fruit,” as in the RSV.)
The significance of the summer or ripened fruit is explained by God by means of a wordplay. The Hebrew word for “summer fruit” is qāyiṣ, the word for “end” is qēṣ, and both were probably pronounced in a similar manner at the time of Amos. Thus the emphasis of the oracle of Yahweh, in verses 2–3, is on “end,” finis, close, termination of Israel’s life in the dark day of the Lord that is coming, a judgment that Ezekiel later pronounces also on Judah by means of a deadly repetition (see Ezek. 7:5–7).
The OT rarely speaks in generalities, however, and so Amos spells out three graphic details of the end, in verse 3. There will be funeral lamentations or wailing instead of joyous songs (cf. 8:10). Corpses will be everywhere, shamefully unburied food for the dogs and the birds (cf. 1 Kgs. 14:11; Jer. 16:4). Deathly silence will prevail throughout the land—the still, sad silence of sin punished by the Lord over all life and death. Israel has refused to honor God’s sovereign name in obedience and faith. Its death will therefore show forth the fact that God is Adonai Yahweh, ruler of heaven and earth.
Additional Notes
8:3 The text of this v. is somewhat corrupted. The plural form (šîrôt) for songs is not elsewhere found, and it is unusual to say that the songs themselves will wail. Perhaps the reading was šārôt, for female singers (cf. 2 Sam. 19:35; 2 Chron. 35:25; Eccl. 2:8), and the line should be rendered, “The female singers of the temple will wail.” Or the verb could be transitive and the line read, “They will wail the temple songs at that time,” although the NIV reading is a third possibility.
There is also a question as to whether hêkāl should be read as temple or “palace.” Female singers are elsewhere always associated with the royal court in the references cited above. But 8:10 supports the reading as “temple.”
The End and the God of the End (8:4-14): In 7:8 and 8:3, Amos has announced the end of Israel, and the thought of that end dominates this whole section. One by one, the prophet will take up those aspects of Israel’s life that will come to an end, until finally the totality of Israel’s existence will be seen to be fated for extermination by the God who is Lord both of its beginning (cf. 2:9–11) and of its end.
8:4–8 By their unjust business practices, the merchants of Israel are bringing “the poor of the land to an end” (reading the Hebrew, as in the RSV). With the growth of urban culture in the northern kingdom, many peasants were left without land and were at the mercy of those who sold them food. Here we see the avarice of the merchants. They cannot wait for the holy days, with their periods of rest, to end so they can get on with their unjust commerce.
The New Moon was a festival celebrated at the beginning of every lunar month, and the text implies that commerce was forbidden on it. Certainly the celebration of the Sabbath on every seventh day was from the earliest times commanded as a day of rest from any sort of labor (Exod. 20:8–11; 23:12; 34:21; cf. 35:3; Num.15:32–36; Neh.13:15–22; Jer.17:21–27). Moreover, the command to rest from work was understood as a gracious gift of God, who gave human beings both their labor (cf. Gen. 2:15) and their rest from labor. But heedless of the lordship of God, the merchants of Amos’s time chaffed at the interruption in their greedy pursuit of wealth.
To line their own pockets with unjust gain, the merchants falsified the size or content of the ʾêpâ (NIV: measure), which was a forty-liter vessel used to measure out a standard portion of grain. They added to the size of the “shekel” (see the RSV), which weighed about 11.5 grams, and which was placed on a balance scale to determine how much silver was owed for the grain. And they even bent the balance scale out of shape in their own favor—the verb ʿût has the meaning “to bend” or “to distort,” verse 5. All such dishonest practices were specifically forbidden in Israel’s law (Lev. 19:35–36; Deut. 25:13–16; cf. Mic. 6:10–11) and were an “abomination” to the Lord (Prov. 11:1; 16:11; 20:10, 23), finally violating the covenant command not to steal (Exod. 20:15) and profaning the name of the Lord of the covenant.
With such dishonest gain the greedy merchants then could purchase the debt-ridden poor as slaves for as little as the price of a pair of sandals, verse 6. And so desperate were the helpless poor for food sometimes that they would even buy swept up grain-leavings from the floor that had chaff mixed in with them, verse 6. The powerful had taken for themselves the lordship over human life that belonged to God.
The oracle therefore announces that the true Lord will bring an end to such injustice and the land that harbors it, and that announcement is sealed by God’s oath, verse 7. The Lord swears by the Pride of Jacob, and the NIV has capitalized the name to indicate that it is a divine title. That is, Yahweh is Israel’s Pride, just as in 1 Sam. 15:29 Yahweh is its glory, and Yahweh is swearing by himself, as in 6:8 and 4:2. Such an interpretation has been rightly questioned. In 5:18–6:14, the prophet has dealt with Israel’s proud self-confidence. Some commentators have therefore suggested that “the pride of Jacob” is ironic: Yahweh’s oath is as unalterable as Israel’s false arrogance. Others have maintained that the “pride of Jacob” refers to the land of Israel, as in Ps. 47:4, but given the fate of the land in Amos 8:8, this seems questionable. Probably the second solution is best: over against the proud self-confidence of Israel God sets his oath, and that will mean the end of Israel’s possession of its land. Not only will they go into exile, which has been previously stated, but the very ground on which they set their feet will rise up against them.
Recalling 1:1, many have interpreted verse 8, along with 9:5, to refer to an earthquake, but Amos is not dealing with natural events. He is announcing the shaking of the land and of the whole cosmos by the coming of the day of the Lord. It is appropriate therefore that this oracle is followed by 8:9–10.
8:9–10 Once again Amos prophesies that the end of Israel’s life will come about at the time of the day of the Lord (cf. 5:18–20 and the comment there). Verse 9 reiterates what he has said in 5:18, 20: the whole cosmos will be affected by God’s final wrath. But this time the darkness is perhaps also creation’s participation in the mourning that will come upon Israel (cf. Rom. 8:22). More than that, perhaps it is also sign of God’s mourning (cf. Gen. 6:6), for Yahweh speaks in the first person in this oracle, and each verb emphasizes “I” . . . “I” . . . “I.”
The end that is emphasized in this passage, however, is the end of Israel’s joy (cf. Isa. 24:8; Jer. 7:34; 16:9; 25:10–11). The religious festivals, with their hymns of rejoicing, will be turned into fasts of lamentation (cf. Ezek. 26:13; Lam. 5:14–15), with the donning of sackcloth and the shaving of the head (cf. Ezek. 7:18; see Joel 1:8, 13 and the comments there). Rather than sing, Israel will weep—bitterly, as if weeping for the loss of an only son (cf. Jer. 6:26; Ezek. 27:30–31; Zech. 12:10).
At the time of Amos, and indeed, up until the time of Daniel in the second century BC, Israel had no formal belief in life after death. The essence of one’s personality was contained in one’s name (cf. 1 Sam. 25:25), and the only immortality expected was to live on in one’s name, passed down to one’s son (cf. 1 Sam. 24:21). Thus, if an only son died, not only was the son lost, but one’s own immortality, embodied in the preservation of one’s name, was at an end. To weep for the death of an only son was therefore to weep without hope for the future. That is the end that God here sets before Israel, a total end, with nothing to follow.
8:11–14 Israel has refused to hear the word of the LORD delivered by the prophets (2:11–12), and the priest Amaziah has tried to put an end to Amos’s preaching in the northern kingdom (7:12–13, 16). Indeed, the book of Amos as a whole gives evidence that Amos’s preaching went largely unheeded by the indolent wealthy who ran and ruled Israel’s society (cf. 5:18–6:14). But there will come days, God announces in this oracle, when the Israelites will finally realize that disaster is coming upon them, and then—too late—they will seek the word of the Lord.
Few passages in Amos are more poignant than this one, which might be compared to the tragic Saul’s futile quest for some word from the Lord (cf. 1 Sam. 28:5–15). We have pictured here a desperate population, staggering, that is, running to and fro in an agitated state of distress, wandering the length and breadth of their land, like a starving man seeking food or a dehydrated wanderer in the desert seeking water. Frantically they search for the word of God, but that word has been withdrawn from them, because God has withdrawn from them (cf. Hos. 5:15). The Lord has abandoned them to their fate (cf. God giving over sinners in Rom. 1:24, 26, 28).
“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4 RSV; cf. Deut. 8:3). Apart from the word of God, human life knows only chaos (cf. Gen. 1:2; John 15:5). It is the word that speaks order into creation and that sustains all the processes of nature (Neh. 9:6, etc.). It is the word that motivates all history and brings it to fulfillment (Isa. 55:10–11; John 19:30). It is the word alone that gives guidance (Ps. 119:105) and forgiveness (Ps. 27:7; 143:7) and blessing (Num. 6:22–27) and fruitful life (Ps. 1:2–3). It is in the word that God draws near to his chosen people (Deut. 4:6–8; John 14:9) and abides with them (John 15:10). Nothing more clearly signals the end of Israel than the fact stated in this oracle that it will no longer be given the word of God.
The phrase at the beginning of verse 13, in that day, normally marks the beginning of a new oracle, but as they now stand, verses 13–14 must be interpreted in continuity with verses 11–12. Thus, the thirst referred to in verse 13 is the same thirst mentioned in verse 11—thirst for hearing the words of the Lord. And because the word of the Lord cannot be found, even the vigorous youths, the promise for the future in Israel, will be utterly weak and helpless (such is the meaning of faint here, cf. Jonah 4:8). The fairest and strongest too will be swept away in the holocaust of the day of the Lord.
Israel swears here not by the name of its God but by its own worship practices, at Bethel and Dan and Beersheba (cf. 5:5). Samaria is named instead of Bethel to signify the royal house’s worship at Bethel (cf. 7:13). Dan is the other royal site, along with Bethel, where Jeroboam I erected a golden calf (1 Kgs. 12:28–29). Beersheba was a place of pilgrimage, and the Hebrew reads “the way of Beersheba” (so too the RSV), not the god of Beersheba as the NIV has it. In short, Israel’s trust is in its own cultic exercises at the three sites; in those it places its confidence (cf. 5:21–23; 4:4–5; 5:4–5). But if the word of the Lord is withdrawn from worship, Israel has nothing and no one upon whom to rely. It is bereft of all help and salvation. It shall fall and never rise again. That funeral dirge first uttered in 5:2 is affirmed once again.
Additional Notes
8:6 Selling even the sweepings with the wheat: Some have suggested that this line properly belongs at the end of v. 5.
8:8 Instead of like the Nile, the MT reads “like the light,” omitting only a yod. The versions support the NIV translation.