'Thus hath the Lord God shewed unto me: and behold a basket of
summer fruit. 2. And He said, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A
basket of summer fruit. Then said the Lord unto me, The end is come
upon My people of Israel; I will not again pass by them any more.
3. And the songs of the temple shall be howlings in that day, saith
the Lord God: there shall be many dead bodies in every place; they
shall cast them forth with silence. 4. Hear this, O ye that swallow
up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail. 5. Saying,
When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? and the
sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small, and
the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit? 6. That
we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes;
yea, and sell the refuse of the wheat? 7. The Lord hath sworn by
the excellency of Jacob, Surely I will never forget any of their
works. 8. Shall not the land tremble for this, and every one mourn
that dwelleth therein? and it shall rise up wholly as a flood; and
it shall be cast out and drowned, as by the flood of Egypt. 9. And
it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will
cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in
the clear day: 10. And I w ill turn your feasts into mourning, and
all your songs into lamentation; and I will bring up sackcloth upon
all loins, and baldness upon every head; and I will make it as the
mourning of an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day. 11.
Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a
famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the Lord: 12. And they shall wander
from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall
run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it.
13. In that day shall the fair virgins and young men faint for
thirst. 14. They that swear by the sin of Samaria, and say, Thy
God, O Dan, liveth: and, The manner of Beer-sheba liveth; even they
shall fall, and never rise up again.'--AMOS viii. 1-14.
There are three visions in the former chapter, each beginning as verse
1. This one is therefore intended to be taken as the continuation of
these, and it is in substance a repetition of the third, only with more
detail and emphasis. An insolent attempt, by the priest of Beth-el, to
silence the Prophet, and the fiery answer which he got for his pains,
come between. The stream of Amos's prophecy flows on, uninterrupted by
the boulder which had tried to dam it up. Some courage was needed to
treat Amaziah and his blasphemous bluster as a mere parenthesis.
We have first to note the vision and its interpretation. It is such as a
countryman, 'a dresser of sycamore trees' would naturally have.
Experience supplies forms and material for the imagination, and moulds
into which God-given revelations run. The point of the vision is rather
obscured by the rendering 'summer fruit.' 'Ripe fruit' would be better,
since the emblem represents the Northern Kingdom as ripe for the
dreadful ingathering of judgment. The word for this (_qayits_) and that
for 'the end' (_qets_) are alike in sound, but the play of words cannot
be reproduced, except by some clumsy device, such as 'the end ripens' or
'the time of ripeness comes.' The figure is frequent in other prophecies
of judgment, as, for instance, in Revelation xiv. 14-20.
Observe the repetition, from the preceding vision, of 'I will not pass
by them any more.' The first two visions had threatened judgments, which
had been averted by the Prophet's intercession; but the third, and now
the fourth, declare that the time for prolonged impunity is passed. Just
as the mellow ripeness of the fruit fixes the time of gathering it, so
there comes a stage in national and individual corruption, when there is
nothing to be done but to smite. That period is not reached because God
changes, but because men get deeper in sin. Because 'the harvest is
ripe,' the long-delayed command, 'Put in thy sickle' is given to the
angel of judgment, and the clusters of those black grapes, whose juice
in the wine-press of the wrath of God is blood, are cut down and cast
in. It is a solemn lesson, applying to each soul as well as to
communities. By neglect of God's voice, and persistence in our own evil
ways, we can make ourselves such that we are ripe for judgment, and can
compel long-suffering to strike. Which are we ripening for--the harvest
when the wheat shall be gathered into Christ's barns, or that when the
tares shall be bound in bundles for burning?
The tragedy of that fruit-gathering is described with extraordinary
grimness and force in the abrupt language of verse 3. The merry songs
sung in the palace (this rendering seems more appropriate here than
'temple') will be broken off, and the singers' voices will quaver into
shrill shrieks, so suddenly will the judgment be. Then comes a picture
as abrupt in its condensed terribleness as anything in Tacitus--'Many
the corpses; everywhere they fling them; hush!' We see the ghastly
masses of dead ('corpse' is in the singular, as if a collective noun),
so numerous that no burial-places could hold them; and no ceremonial
attended them, but they were rudely flung anywhere by anybody (no
nominative is given), with no accustomed voice of mourning, but in
gloomy silence. It is like Defoe's picture of the dead-cart in the
plague of London. Such is ever the end of departing from God--songs
palsied into silence or turned into wailing when the judgment bursts;
death stalking supreme, and silence brooding over all.
The crimes that ripened men for this terrible harvest are next set
forth, in part, in verses 4 to 6. These verses partly coincide verbally
with the previous indictment in Amos ii. 6, etc., which, however, is
more comprehensive. Here only one form of sin is dealt with. And what
was the sin that deserved the bad eminence of being thus selected as the
chief sign that Israel was ripe and rotten? Precisely the one which gets
most indulgence in the Christian Church; namely, eagerness to be rich,
and sharp, unkindly dealing. These men, who were only fit to be swept
out of the land, were most punctual in their religious duties. They
would not on any account do business either on a festival or on Sabbath,
but they were very impatient till--shall we say? Monday morning
came--that they might get to their beloved work again.
Their lineal descendants are no strangers on the exchanges, or in the
churches of London or New York. They were not only outwardly scrupulous
and inwardly weary of religious observances, but when they did get to
'business,' they gave short measure and took a long price, and knew how
to turn the scales always in their own favour. It was the expedient of
rude beginners in the sacred art of getting the best of a bargain, to
put a false bottom in the _ephah_, and to stick a piece of lead below
the shekel weight, which the purchaser had to make go up in the scale
with his silver. There are much neater ways of doing the same thing now;
and no doubt some very estimable gentlemen in high repute as Christians,
who give respectability to any church or denomination, could have taught
these early practitioners a lesson or two.
They were as cruel as they were greedy. They bought their brethren as
slaves, and if a poor man had run into their debt for even a pair of
shoes, they would sell him up in a very literal sense. Avarice,
unbridled by the fear of God, leads by a short cut to harshness and
disregard of the claims of others. There are more ways of buying the
needy for a pair of shoes than these people practised.
The last touch in the picture is meanness, which turned everything into
money. Even what fell through the sieve when wheat was winnowed, which
ought to have been given to anybody, was carefully scraped up, and,
dirty as it was, sold. Is not 'nothing for nothing' an approved maxim
to-day? Are not people held up as shining lights of commerce, who have
the faculty of turning everything into saleable articles? Some serious
reflections ought to be driven home to us who live in great commercial
communities, and are in manifold ways tempted to 'learn their ways, and
so get a snare unto our souls,' by this gibbeting of tempers and
customs, very common among ourselves, as the very head and front of the
sin of Israel, which determined its ripeness for destruction.
The catalogue of sins is left incomplete (compare with chapter ii.), as
if holy indignation turned for relief to the thought of the certain
judgment. That certainly is strongly affirmed by the representation of
the oath of Jehovah. 'He can swear by no other,' therefore He 'swears by
Himself'; and the 'excellency of Jacob' cannot with propriety mean
anything else than Him who is, or ought to be, the sole ground of
confidence and occasion of 'boasting' to the nation (Hos. v. 5). He
gives His own being as the guarantee that judgment shall fall. As surely
as God is God, injustice and avarice will ruin a nation. We talk now
about necessary consequences and natural laws rendering penalties
inevitable. The Bible suggests a deeper foundation for their certain
incidence--even the very nature of God Himself. As long as He is what He
is, covetousness and its child, harshness to the needy, will be sin
against Him, and be avenged sooner or later. God has a long and a wide
memory, and the sins which He 'remembers' are those which He has not
forgiven, and will punish.
Amos heaps image on image to deepen the impression of terror and
confusion. Everything is turned to its opposite. The solid land reels,
rises, and falls, like the Nile in flood (see Revised Version). The sun
sets at midday, and noon is darkness. Feasts change to mourning, songs
to lamentations. Rich garments are put aside for sackcloth, and flowing
locks drop off and leave bald heads. These are evidently all figures
vividly piled together to express the same thought. The crash that
destroyed their national prosperity and existence would shake the most
solid things and darken the brightest. It would come suddenly, as if the
sun plunged from the zenith to the west. It would make joy a stranger,
and bring grief as bitter as when a father or a mother mourns the death
of an only son. Besides all this, something darker beyond is dimly
hinted in that awful, vague, final threat, 'The end thereof as a bitter
day.'
Now all these threats were fulfilled in the fall of the kingdom of
Israel; but that 'day of the Lord' was in principle a miniature
foreshadowing of the great final judgment. Some of the very features of
the description here are repeated with reference to it in the New
Testament. We cannot treat such prophecies as this as if they were
exhausted by their historical fulfilment. They disclose the eternal
course of divine judgment, which is to culminate in a future day of
judgment. The oath of God is not yet completely fulfilled. Assuredly as
He lives and is God, so surely will modern sinners have to stand their
trial; and, as of old, the chase after riches will bring down crashing
ruin. We need that vision of judgment as much as Samaria did when Amos
saw the basket of ripe fruit, craving, as it were, to be plucked. So do
obstinate sinners invite destruction.
The last section specifies one feature of judgment, the deprivation of
the despised word of the Lord (vs. 11-14). Like Saul, whose piteous wail
in the witch's hovel was, 'God ... answereth me no more,' they who paid
no heed to the word of the Lord shall one day seek far and wearily for a
prophet, and seek in vain. The word rendered 'wander,' which is used in
the other description of people seeking for water in a literal drought
(iv. 8), means 'reel,' and gives the picture of men faint and dizzy with
thirst, yet staggering on in vain quest for a spring. They seek
everywhere, from the Dead Sea on the east to the Mediterranean on the
west, and then up to the north, and so round again to the
starting-point. Is it because Judah was south that that quarter is not
visited? Perhaps, if they had gone where the Temple was, they would have
found the stream from under its threshold, which a later prophet saw
going forth to heal the marshes and dry places. Why was the search vain?
Has not God promised to be found of those that seek, however far they
have gone away? The last verse tells why. They still were idolaters,
swearing by the 'sin of Samaria,' which is the calf of Beth-el, and by
the other at Dan, and going on idolatrous pilgrimages to Beer-sheba, far
away in the south, across the whole kingdom of Judah (Amos v. 5). It was
vain to seek for the word of the Lord with such doings and worship.
The truth implied is universal in its application. God's message
neglected is withdrawn. Conscience stops if continually unheeded. The
Gospel may still sound in a man's ears, but have long ceased to reach
farther. There comes a time when men shall wish wasted opportunities
back, and find that they can no more return than last summer's heat.
There may be a wish for the prophet in time of distress, which means no
real desire for God's word, but only for relief from calamity. There may
be a sort of seeking for the word, which seeks in the wrong places and
in the wrong ways, and without abandoning sins. Such quest is vain. But
if, driven by need and sorrow, a poor soul, feeling the thirst after the
living God, cries from ever so distant a land of bondage, the cry will
be answered. But let us not forget that our Lord has told us to take
heed how we hear, on the very ground that 'to him that hath shall be
given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken
away.'
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