The Book of Habakkuk

Italian, Late 17th-Early 18th Century. 

Daniel in the Lion's Den with an angel bearing the prophet Habakkuk.

I remember that, when I began this project and much of the Bible was known only in barest outline, that the Book of Habakkuk sounded especially exotic.  Within a few years, I thought, I would be checking out Habakkuk, and would think some deep thoughts about what it contained, and share them with you, my devoted readers.  

Well, I was considerably younger then.

Habakkuk is another short ‘un, with only three chapters.  It also has three distinct sections, although the first and second section don’t exactly line up with the chapter division.  The first section, labelled “Habakkuk’s Complaint,” begins with Habakkuk the Prophet asking God why he tolerates injustice, violence, strife, and corruption.  God responds that he’s actually about to do something about that that you would not believe even if you were told (1:5), specifically that he’s going to have the Babylonians sweep down upon the region and conquer all before them.   

The logic here, familiar enough from my earlier reading of the prophets, must be that the Israelites are to be punished en banc for their failings.  It’s worth mentioning, though, that without this context the answer given by God is a bit counterintuitive.  The first thought on how to remedy violence, strife, and injustice wouldn’t normally be an invasion from a neighbor with enormous military resources who 

fly like a vulture swooping to devour;
they all come bent on violence.  
Their hordes advance like a desert wind
and gather prisoners like sand. (1:8-9)

The second section, reasonably labelled “Habakkuk’s Second Complaint,” is really a somewhat more elegant phrasing of the same question: why does God put up with the powerful and wicked picking on the decent majority?  

The answer this time is harder for me to understand, or possibly just a bit scattered.  God’s response starts with deriding the wicked as arrogant, inclined to drink, and greedy.  Then, if they behave this badly, and take people captive, will not all of them taunt him with ridicule and scorn…? (2:6)  This almost seems to imply that wickedness is self-limiting, since anyone who seriously steps out of line will be taken to task by the community.  And, sure, that dynamic does exist in human communities to a certain extent, but it's not exactly foolproof, and I can’t imagine that poor Habakkuk would have found it a satisfying response.  

Later in the answer, though, there’s more indication that God will be taking an active part in the comeuppance – The cup from the Lord’s right hand is coming around to you, and disgrace will cover your glory (2:16).  So, maybe we’re supposed to gather that the general humiliation of all the wicked is not just something that happens as a matter of course, but rather something that will come later on down the line as a part of divine retribution.

The third section, “Habakkuk’s Prayer,” is a text for sacred music, as you can tell from the last line of the book: For the director of music.  On my stringed instruments. (3:19)  It is On shigionoth and has three areas labeled Selah, with footnotes to the effect that nobody really knows what these words mean.  The text describes God rising up from the mountains in the form of a conquering army, causing plague and storms and natural disasters.  This fills Habakkuk with terror and awe, yet also with joy: The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go to the heights. (3:19)

The Book of Nahum: "An attacker advances against you, Nineveh."

The Book of Nahum is a short one – three straightforward chapters in two pages – so I think we can sort it out pretty quickly.  Keep in mind that I’m a dope; no doubt there are Nahum specialists who dedicate a lifetime to uncovering the rich tapestry of meaning and inspiration that’s embedded in these two pages.  No doubt there’s a school of thought that Nahum is the keystone to the whole Bible, the crux of the entire Judeo-Christian tradition and experience.  I’ve been known to miss that kind of thing.

But what I see is, Nahum is predicting some serious hurt for the city of Nineveh.  It looks like they’ve been exerting a bit of the ol’ oppressive hegemony over Judah, that nobody much cares for their too-successful businessmen, and that everybody – at least, everybody in Judah – would like to see them brought down a peg.

God, too, has had enough of Nineveh.  He was merciful with them when they heeded the prophecies of Jonah, but that is in the past.  Or maybe the future, or on an alternative timeline, I'm not sure.  In any event, instead of smiting the Israelites, this time he’s going to smite their opponents on their behalf.

1:12 This is what the Lord says:

“Although they have allies and are numerous,
    they will be destroyed and pass away.
Although I have afflicted you, Judah,
    I will afflict you no more.
13 Now I will break their yoke from your neck
    and tear your shackles away.”

As I’ve been observing in the other books of the Prophets, not frequently but for years now, there continues in Nahum the whiplash alternation between (mostly) the God of vengeance and violence and (occasionally) the God of peace and forgiveness.  Well, in the dog-eat-dog world of the time, vengeance and violence towards other people may well have felt like peace and forgiveness for oneself.

1:6 Who can withstand his indignation?
    Who can endure his fierce anger?
His wrath is poured out like fire;
    the rocks are shattered before him.
7 The Lord is good,
    a refuge in times of trouble.
He cares for those who trust in him,
8  but with an overwhelming flood
he will make an end of Nineveh;
    he will pursue his foes into the realm of darkness.

And that, really, is that.  Filling out Chapters 2 and 3 is little more than an elegant stream of what we’d call “trash talk” – taunts, threats, the smug warnings of someone who is pretty confident they’re going to win the fight.

1:14 "...I will prepare your grave,
    for you are vile.”

 

2:1 An attacker advances against you, Nineveh.
    Guard the fortress,
    watch the road,
    brace yourselves,
    marshal all your strength!

 

3:5-6 “I am against you,” declares the Lord Almighty.
    “I will lift your skirts over your face.
I will show the nations your nakedness
    and the kingdoms your shame.
I will pelt you with filth,
    I will treat you with contempt
    and make you a spectacle.

 

3:12-13 All your fortresses are like fig trees
    with their first ripe fruit;
when they are shaken,
    the figs fall into the mouth of the eater.
Look at your troops—
    they are all women!

…or so says my NIV, which was printed in 1983.  It looks like these days the NIV says “weaklings” instead of “women,” and ditches the jeering exclamation point.  Hmm.  I wonder whether that was a much needed fix to the translation, or if the actual sexist taunt has been bowdlerized, or if “it’s complicated.”  Hang on….  OK, cross-checking with the other translations, I’m pretty sure the actual sexist taunt has been bowdlerized.  It appears that the armed forces of Nineveh were indeed a bunch of girly-men.

And once God has knocked them flat, is anybody going to feel sorry for them?  No way!

3:19 Nothing can heal you;
    your wound is fatal.
All who hear the news about you
    clap their hands at your fall,
for who has not felt
    your endless cruelty?

Wrapping up Micah

In the course of my obviously inadequate religious education, I’d occasionally ask why the Old Testament was still kept in the Christian Bible – indeed, why it still makes up MOST of the Christian Bible – if it had been, as I was told, superseded by the New Testament.  The answers amounted to so much hemming and hawing, but one thing I picked up is that it was important to have the Old Testament on hand since it contains the prophecies of the coming of Christ that are then fulfilled in the New Testament.

In retrospect, it was probably a little naïve to expect those prophecies to actually be there.  They’ve certainly been conspicuous by their absence up to now, and even desperate stretches like “the fourth guy in the furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is obviously Jesus” have been pretty thin on the ground.  So, it commands some attention that the heading for Micah 5 is “A Promised Ruler From Bethlehem.”  You have my full attention, Mr. Micah!
 

2 But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
though you are small among the clans[b] of Judah,
out of you will come for me
    one who will be ruler over Israel,
whose origins are from of old,
    from ancient times.”

3 Therefore Israel will be abandoned
    until the time when she who is in labor bears a son,
and the rest of his brothers return
    to join the Israelites.

4 He will stand and shepherd his flock
    in the strength of the Lord,
    in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
And they will live securely, for then his greatness
    will reach to the ends of the earth.

5 And he will be our peace

Hmm.  Jesus famously comes from Bethlehem, from a really distinguished family.  Verses 4 and 5 certainly hold up, from a Christian perspective.  Really, the only line that doesn’t quite fit is “one who will be ruler over Israel.”  Otherwise, 90% of the prophecy pans out, which is about as flamboyant of a slam dunk as one ever sees in the predicting-the-future business.

The only problem is, the ruling over Israel part is really what Micah himself is interested in.  If you back out just a little and capture 5:1 and the entirety of 5:5, you see that this is a prophecy about not just any leader from Bethlehem, but a leader from Bethlehem who will lead the Israelites to victory against the Assyrians next time they invade.  And, as you continue into 5:6, it gets a little fuzzy whether the guy from Bethlehem is going to be individually awesome, or the foremost among a group of seven or eight guys who will “rule the land of Assyria with the sword.” (6)  Ultimately, for the Israelites, their “hand will be lifted up in triumph over [their] enemies, and all [their] foes will be destroyed.” (9)  And you know what?  Suddenly I’m not really feeling like this prophecy has been very successful.  Certainly it no longer seems to have much to do with Jesus Christ.

In Chapter 6 we turn briefly to the genre of courtroom drama.  I’m speaking literally, for – at least in NIV translation – God announces through Micah that “the Lord has a case against his people; he is lodging a charge against Israel.”  The complaint is that God has done a lot for the Israelites on the understanding that they will behave, and they don’t behave.  He reminds them that he freed them from Egypt, set them up with their own country, and set them up with a complete manual of how to live rightly, and all he asks in return is for them “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with [their] God.” (8)

Put that way, it sounds pretty reasonable.  “My people, what have I done to you?” asks God (through Micah) in verse 3.  “How have I burdened you?  Answer me.” (3)  Oh snap!  There’s no way for the Israelites to answer that!  I mean, God has been nothing but good to the Israelites, as long as you leave out the long litany of plagues, famines, and conquests which God has inflicted on the Israelites ever since he required them to “go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor” (Genesis 32:37) after the Golden Calf incident.

The Israelites don’t mount this defense, though.  Presumably they blurt out a full confession under questioning, like a Perry Mason villain, because we proceed directly from accusation to the punishment phase: “Therefore, I have begun to destroy you, to ruin you because of your sins….  Therefore I will give you over to ruin and your people to derision; you will bear the scorn of the nations.” (13, 16)  Wow, I didn’t see that coming!  Oh wait, actually I did.  This is the punchline for a great many, if not most, of the prophecies.

But in the final chapter, Micah 7, there’s something else that we have also seen before in the prophets: after all of the anger, the vindictiveness, and the gleeful, disproportionate punishments, there is a sudden transition to a vision of merciful, compassionate God.  Here’s Micah:

18 Who is a God like you,
    who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
    of the remnant of his inheritance?
You do not stay angry forever
    but delight to show mercy.
19 You will again have compassion on us;
    you will tread our sins underfoot
    and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.
20 You will be faithful to Jacob,
    and show love to Abraham,
as you pledged on oath to our ancestors
    in days long ago.

It’s a compelling, even beautiful way to end the book of Micah.  And I suppose that an infinite and complex God, a God beyond understanding, could exhibit mercy and a vengeful spirit at the same time.  The problem of course that we humans aren’t really capable of receiving mercy and punishment simultaneously.  The very concept of mercy requires a withholding of punishment.  So, the Prophets’ merciful/punishing God is hard to make coherent sense of.  At best, it is an incomprehensible mystery.  

Michael Reads Micah

Jan van Eyck, Micah, from the Ghent altarpiece, 1432.

 

It has been not quite two years since the last entry in this enterprise, which was begun 15 years ago this month.  I guess it’s reasonable to stand back from myself and say “Lo, here is a guy who has had trouble staying excited about reading the Bible.” 

At the very least, I have trouble staying excited about reading the prophets.  Most of what they have to say is reiteration of the formula that God will punish the people because he’s angry about their bad behavior, and occasionally reward the people for their good behavior.  Since “the people” means a whole bunch of people, of whom most are surely behaving well part of the time and behaving poorly part of the other time – we’re talking about humans, here – this is much like saying “God is random.”  Well, it’s not, because the prophets also define what good behavior is, which is to say doing what the prophets want.  This makes their message more like “God is an incredibly powerful bully who will beat you up if you don’t do what I say.”

That’s my memory of it, anyway.  But Micah seems to jump right back into this groove.  The first section heading of Chapter 1 is “Judgement Against Samaria and Jerusalem,” the big cities of Israel and Judah respectively.  The second section heading is “Weeping and Mourning.”  I actually don’t know where the section headings come from – they’re just traditional editorial markings, I think, more or less consistent among translations.  But they definitely summarize Micah 1 well enough.

In Micah 2, we start with “Man’s Plans and God.”  The first two verses warn of woe to thieves, especially those who seize fields and houses.  Then, in the third to fifth verses, God says that he is going to crush “this people,” humiliate and cast them off the land.  As written, it’s one of any number of examples of the “because some people are dodgy, everybody’s going to get it” mechanism.

Micah 2:6 to 11 is labelled “False Prophets,” but that’s not actually what it’s about.  It’s about people complaining about the gloom and doom of prophets like Micah.  He mocks them for wanting more joyful prophecies.  Then, we end the chapter with “Deliverance Promised,” in which God promises to gather up the “remnant of Israel” like a happy, prosperous herd of sheep.  So I guess Micah is capable of busting out a little optimism after all.

Micah 3 is a fiery if vague condemnation of Israel’s civil and religious elite – they “despise justice and distort all that is right” – whereas Micah 4 is back in the joyful mode, predicting a happy future of Jerusalem in which “every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree” and the Jews will live happy in the protection of God:

All the nations may walk in the name of their gods;
We will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever. (5)

Also in Chapter 4, Micah makes reference to the Jews being taken into captivity in Babylon and then being rescued and returned to their homeland (10).  Without any better sense of the context than what I’ve learned in this project, I am pretty sure that that’s what all of Micah, or at least all that we're looking at so far, is about. 

To recap: after a long line of kings, Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians and many of the elites were hauled off to that city.  There, they forged a strong religious identity, to the point which when they were allowed to return to their homeland many years later, the relatively scruffy folks who had been living their lives in the meantime seemed like so many heathens.  Obviously they needed to be put back in their place, and fairly obviously, I think, the Book of Micah was part of this campaign.

Now, Chapter 1 begins by saying that it was written “during the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah,” so the ruin he predicts for Samaria and Jerusalem was a spot-on prediction!  Chapter 2’s language about punishing those who steal fields and houses, and gathering up the remnant of Israel, sounds like invective against people who took possession of the property left vacant by the exiles.  The happy ending in Chapter 4 is about the wonderful new era of prosperity and serious religion that will return to Jerusalem, once the exiles have reimposed their will over the riff-raff.

I will make the lame a remnant, those driven away a strong nation.
The Lord will rule over them in Mount Zion from that day and forever.
As for you, O watchtower of the flock, O stronghold of the Daughter of Zion,
The former dominion will be restored to you; Kingship will come to the Daughter of Jerusalem. (7-8)

Micah is a seven-chapter book, so we’ll be back sometime within the next two years with coverage of Chapters 5, 6, and 7!

 

The Book of Jonah: And how he never got to Tarshish

Tucked incongruously among the angry denunciations of the other prophets, the Book of Jonah is a charming, upbeat tale of divine compassion and human frailty. It is of course the familiar tale of Jonah and the Whale, and as much fun as it would be to say, as I have before about other familiar tales, “it’s a different story in the text than the one you think you know,” that wouldn’t be true in this case. It is, in fact, exactly the story you know.

But let’s recap: Jonah, son of Amittai, gets tapped by God to go deliver some prophesy against the large, prosperous city of Nineveh. Like many of us, he doesn’t feel cut out for the work of persuasion, so he books a ship to Tarshish. No one knows where Tarshish was, exactly, but it was some sort of Phoenician outpost in the Western Mediterranean. It was as far from Israel and from Nineveh as you could get, in other words.

Now, since the Hebrews, although more or less monotheistic themselves, live in a polytheistic context where most folks believe in a multitude of local gods, Jonah’s strategy is rational enough. If he can get out of his god’s territory, maybe he’s off the hook. Except, of course, that his god is God, and isn’t tied to a locality, and therefore can’t be run away from. This, I suspect, is the main intended take-home of this story.

Because, God isn’t going to let Jonah off the hook. He afflicts the ship with a mighty storm. The sailors realize that there must be supernatural forces at work, and through divination determine that the fault is Jonah’s. That their pagan divination works is an odd note, but we’ve seen plenty of this going all the way back to pharaoh’s magicians. Pay this detail no mind.

Instead, enjoy this detail: when Jonah admits to the sailors what he has done, and tells them they will have to throw him overboard to survive, they don’t want to do it. They’re decent human beings! They do their best to try to make landfall without killing their passenger. But they can’t, and finally they do a lot of praying for forgiveness before they, well, kill their passenger.

As you know, however, Jonah doesn’t drown! As the seas quickly calm around the ship and its newly converted crew, Jonah is swallowed by a whale, or at least a “great fish,” where he stays alive but presumably rather uncomfortable for three days. He finds this whole experience a rather convincing demonstration of God’s power, does some repenting, and gets vomited up on a beach. One pictures him waking up to see a crude arrow sign stuck in the sand, pointing the way to Nineveh.

So, What Happens After the Bit With the Whale, Again?

In the less familiar second half – the Book of Jonah, incidentally, has four short chapters and occupies only about a page and a half of my Bible – Jonah arrives in Nineveh. He delivers a message typical of Old Testament prophesy, to wit that they’ve been very wicked and that God will destroy their city in forty days. The people of Nineveh, however, have an unusual reaction to this news. They believe it. Like Jonah in the fish, they repent. “He’s right,” say all the people. “We are quite awful.” They begin to fast and wear sackcloth. When the king hears about it, he concurs entirely. Putting on sackcloth himself, he plops down in the dust. “Maybe if we forsake evil and ask God nicely, he’ll spare us,” he proclaims.

Now, recall that God didn’t have Jonah say “shape up or else.” He had Jonah say “God will destroy your city in 40 days.” So on Day 41, when nothing happens, Jonah is really pissed off. “That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish,” he complains. “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live” (4:2-3). This is a very attractive vision of God, who elsewhere in the Old Testament is not remarkable for relenting to send calamity. To a very young reader, indeed, it might be confusing why Jonah is so upset.

Why is he so upset? Well, God has “made him a liar,” as we say, and he fears he will look foolish to the people he was threatening. But more importantly, he is showing the unpleasant but wholly human trait of feeling righteous indignation when seeing other people avoid punishment. And I suppose thirdly, he may just be disappointed that he’s missing the show he paid for, like some people leaving an auto race where there were no fiery crashes.

So Jonah hikes out in the desert to sulk.

In the final act, God first grows a vine to shelter him from the sun, and then has it wither. Jonah is upset about this, too. God says something like, “you’re all bent out of shape about this one little vine. Nineveh has 120,000 people. Shouldn’t I care about them?” In a way, this seems like the opposite of the each-little-sparrow concept that we seem to see more often in the Bible, in which every detail counts and none more than any other. To me, though, this reasoning seems like a breath of fresh air. “Get a sense of proportion, Jonah! Not going to render an eighth of a million people homeless just so you feel a sense of closure about your prophecy gig!” This seems eminently reasonable.

The book ends abruptly, so I will too.

The Book of Obadiah

Melozzo da Forlì,“Obadiah” in the Sacristy of St. Mark, ca. 1477, as snaffled without so much as
a how-do-you-do from another guy's Bible blog.

The book of Obadiah is just one chapter long, and is probably – indeed, I have just confirmed it with a quick Google – the shortest book in the entire Bible.  It is a pretty straightforward condemnation of the Edomites and the people of Esau, who God is going to punish but good.  In order for this to make much sense, I had to look up who the Edomites were, and remind myself who Esau was.

Esau, as I recalled when consulting an eminent authority, was the older twin brother of Jacob, son of Issac, son of Abraham, the one who didn’t get to be a patriarch because he was screwed out of his birthright in the famous “mess of pottage” scam.  Well, he didn’t get to be an Israelite patriarch, anyway.  Instead, it turns out that he took off to the southeast, and became a patriarch of the Edomites. 

The Edomites are naturally a weak and sinful people, at least according to these scriptures written by the Israelites.  We’ve seen them quite a bit over throughout the Bible, but if you’re like me you kind of blip over the unfamiliar names of the small neighboring peoples.  Refresher: the Edomites are the ones who wickedly refused to allow the Israelites to route the Exodus through their county, but were later conquered and vassalized by Judah during the age of Kings.  They live south of the Dead Sea, where the roads coming out of Egypt up towards Babylon and Persia have to go through passes in the uplands, and therefore control bottlenecks on the trade routes used by neighbors much, much more powerful than themselves.

So that’s the context.  What the prophet Obadiah is angry about is that when Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem, the Edomites weren’t sad about it. There might even have been snickering.  Indeed, there was probably a fair amount of complicity:

13 You should not march through the gates of my people
    in the day of their disaster,
nor gloat over them in their calamity
    in the day of their disaster,
nor seize their wealth
    in the day of their disaster.
14 You should not wait at the crossroads
    to cut down their fugitives,
nor hand over their survivors
    in the day of their trouble.

So: the Edomites have been conquered and are looked down on by the more powerful Israelites, who define them as the descendants of their own very clever ancestor’s stupid lummox of a brother.  When the Babylonians, hugely more powerful than either, put Judah to the sword, at least some of the Edomites are more than willing to join in on the fun.  This sense of being betrayed by a junior partner, and of being humiliated by those whom one is used to being able to humiliate, is naturally pretty galling to the Israelites.

Hence Obadiah’s rage.  And none of the happy ending business where God will relent after a few years of punishing the Edomites, either. 

18 Jacob will be a fire
    and Joseph a flame;
Esau will be stubble,
    and they will set him on fire and destroy him.
There will be no survivors
    from Esau.”
The LORD has spoken.

Did you follow that?  The people of Jacob (the smart brother) and Joseph (Jacob’s even smarter son, he of the amazing technicolor dreamcoat) will not stand for this shit; they will take on the people of Esau (the dumb brother/uncle) and, well, there will be no survivors.  I guess that last part was pretty straightforward.

Now, it’s worth mentioning that when I was trying to figure out where Edom was, I stumbled on a little knowledge (which is of course a dangerous thing) about the Nabataeans, the Arabian group that would eventually build Petra.  Seems that during the period that Judah was falling, the Nabataeans were expanding northward, into Edomite territory.  This pressure, plus Judah’s weakness when its ruling class was in exile, tempted many Edomite herders to start migrating into the unprotected Israelite lands.  It strikes me that this wouldn’t have been any too pleasing to the likes of Nehemiah and Ezra when they got back to town and set up shop.  The Book of Obadiah, then, is fairly openly serving notice to the Edomites that they should, at best, consider themselves back under the yoke of Jerusalem.

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.