The Book of Amos: “What do you see, Amos?”

Amos (on left), with Nahum, Ezekiel, and Daniel.  Detail of mural by John Singer Sargent, Boston Public Library.

Amos is another book of Old Testament prophecy.  Obviously I am not zipping through the Old Testament prophets at a clip that keeps the details firmly in memory, but Amos seems very much of a piece with the rest of the prophets, which is to say: Rhetorical, focused on punishment to the point of ranting, accusatory, somewhat tedious to a modern reader.  It has, like several of the other prophecies, a quiet little coda that says that everything will be great for Israel, after the countless years of horrible torments and comeuppance get wound up.

I wonder if people who read the Bible quite regularly experience a different style, a different “feel,” among the various prophets.  Probably they do.  I actually don’t.  For me, the Bible mostly reads like the Bible.  It reminds me of reading Italian literature, which I always thought had a real sameness to it – but then one day I realized that the same guy, William Weaver, was the go-to translator for all of the marquee Italian novels.  So, do modern Italians write in a similar style, or am I perceiving the style in English of William Weaver?  Did Hebrew prophets write in similar styles, or am I perceiving the style of the NIV Committee on Bible Translation?

Anyway, Amos is “one of the shepherds of Tekoa” and the book is “what he says concerning Israel two years before the earthquake.” (1:1)  That “two years before the earthquake” is terrific, reminding us that this was written down for a specific audience that wasn’t us.  This was originally intended for the generation that would be all like “Oh yeah, sheesh, the earthquake, I remember the earthquake.  Two years before that?  Oh yeah, that was when I still lived up in Abkahak.  That must be why I don’t remember this Amos guy.”

Anyway, Amos starts off by talking about how the Lord is going to punish all of Israel’s neighbors – Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab – for their various wrongdoing.  There is a stock phrasing that gets repeated for all of them: “For three sins of [Damascus], even for four, I will not turn back my wrath.”  It sounds great, but I don’t quite understand what it means.  At first, I tried to make sense of it as meaning something like “I’ll forgive the first few sins, even the fourth sin I’ll let slide, but after that KAPOW!”  But, that’s not what those words mean with the “not” in there.  With the “not,” I’m not sure what they mean.

I mean, obviously the gist is that God is going to bring on the punishments.  And if the original Israelite audience is feeling pretty smug at this point, they have another think coming, because at 2:4 Amos says the same thing about Judah, and at 2:6, it’s Israel’s turn.  And, it will remain Israel’s turn for the rest of the book.  The message is pretty straightforward: “I will crush you as a cart crushes when loaded with grain.” (2:13)

Chapter Three begins with a series of rhetorical questions to the effect that there is no smoke without fire, leading up to the idea that prophets wouldn’t make prophecies if God wasn’t speaking through them.  Then, Amos says that God says that he will punish the Israelites mightily.  Specifically, he will punish them because he is angry about “the oppression within her people” and “they who do not know how to do right, …who hoard plunder and loot in their fortresses.” (9,10)  This is the kind of passage where someone with my own class background wants to cheer a little bit, because we like the idea of God taking on those fat cats with their oppressive ways and their disproportionate claim on a society’s resources.  But wait a minute – the people of Israel isn’t just the fat cats, it’s also the working Joes and the widows and orphans on the other end of the exploitation stick.  So why are they ALL going to get punished, Amos?

The NIV’s section headings for Chapters 4 and 5 clarify it, if we were in any suspense: “Israel Has Not Returned to God” and “A Lament and Call to Repentance.”  Don’t be fooled by Amos 4:4:

Go to Bethel and sin; Go to Gilgal and sin yet more.
Bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three years.

It’s not a commandment!  It’s supposed to be read in conjunction with 4:5:

Burn leavened bread as a thank offering and brag about your freewill offerings –
Boast about them, you Israelites, for this is what you love to do,” declares the Sovereign Lord.

So, Amos is mocking his audience for their bad behavior.  He’s telling them that they sin all the time, that they regularly make pagan sacrifices but are lax in their responsibility to the temple, that their sacrifices to God are meager and don’t follow the proscribed rules, and then they brag about what little they gave.  They’re a despicable lot, and they deserve whatever they have coming.  People probably loved Amos; everyone would have thought he was brilliantly speaking some righteous truth about certain of their neighbors.

In Chapter 6, the focus is on complacency and pride.  The complacency section has some more of that vaguely leftist feel to it:

4 You lie on beds adorned with ivory
    and lounge on your couches.
You dine on choice lambs
    and fattened calves.
5 You strum away on your harps like David
    and improvise on musical instruments.
6 You drink wine by the bowlful
    and use the finest lotions,
    but you do not grieve over the ruin of Joseph.
7 Therefore you will be among the first to go into exile;
    your feasting and lounging will end.

Again, the average Israeli goatherd probably wasn’t lounging on ivory beds, but this passage also begs the question of why it would be bad to emulate David, who was pretty much God’s favorite human who ever lived.  I mean, I know why I personally don’t feel like David is a great role model, but I’m surprised to see him cast as a bad example right here in the Bible.

In Chapters 7 and 8, there is a charming pattern where God shows Amos something and has him identify it, each time as a lead-in to some more stern prophecy. 

8:1 This is what the Sovereign LORD showed me: a basket of ripe fruit.
2 “What do you see, Amos?” he asked.
“A basket of ripe fruit,” I answered.
Then the LORD said to me, “The time is ripe for my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.”

I really love the pure rhetoric at work here.  Baskets and fruit have nothing to do with it; the only function of the exchange is to bring up the concept of “ripeness.”  And what a stretch!  Because, you could show 100 people a basket of ripe fruit, and I’d guess fewer than ten would say “that’s a basket of ripe fruit.”  They’d say “that’s a basket of fruit” or perhaps “that’s three apples, five bananas, and some grapes.”  But Amos is the perfect straight man in this case.  Then, God’s punchline sounds like something Mohamed Ali might have said.  Of course, Mohamed Ali was picking on other prizefighters, which kept his threats from seeming especially sinister.  There’s a different power dynamic when God says it:

3 “In that day,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “the songs in the temple will turn to wailing.  Many, many bodies—flung everywhere!”

Which brings us to the final chapter, Chapter Nine, which has the NIV headings “Israel to be Destroyed” (10 verses) and “Israel’s Restoration” (5 verses).  We’ll close with Verse 8, which pretty much summarizes not only the Chapter, but to an extent the whole Book of Amos and, come to think of it, much of Old Testament prophecy as a whole:

8 “Surely the eyes of the Sovereign LORD
    are on the sinful kingdom.
I will destroy it
    from the face of the earth.
Yet I will not totally destroy
    the descendants of Jacob,” declares the LORD.