_THE BOOK OF AMOS_
The genuineness of the bulk of the Book of Amos is not doubted by
any critic. The only passages suspected as interpolations are the
three references to Judah, the three famous outbreaks in praise of
the might of Jehovah the Creator, the final prospect of a hope that
does not gleam in any other part of the book, with a few clauses
alleged to reflect a stage of history later than that in which Amos
worked.[112] In all, these verses amount to only twenty-six or
twenty-seven out of one hundred and forty-six. Each of them can be
discussed separately as we reach it, and we may now pass to consider
the general course of the prophecy which is independent of them.
The Book of Amos consists of Three Groups of Oracles, under one
title, which is evidently meant to cover them all.
The title runs as follows:--
_Words of 'Amoṣ--who was of the herdsmen of Teḳôa'--which he saw
concerning Israel in the days of 'Uzziah king of Judah, and in
the days of Jarab'am son of Joash,_[113] _king of Israel: two
years before the earthquake._
The Three Sections, with their contents, are as follows:--
FIRST SECTION: CHAPS. I., II. THE HEATHEN'S
CRIMES AND ISRAEL'S.
A series of short oracles of the same form, directed impartially
against the political crimes of all the states of Palestine, and
culminating in a more detailed denunciation of the social evils
of Israel, whose doom is foretold, beneath the same flood of war
as shall overwhelm all her neighbours.
SECOND SECTION: CHAPS. III.-VI. ISRAEL'S
CRIMES AND DOOM.
A series of various oracles of denunciation, which have no further
logical connection than is supplied by a general sameness of
subject, and a perceptible increase of detail and articulateness
from beginning to end of the section. They are usually grouped
according to the recurrence of the formula _Hear this word_, which
stands at the head of our present chaps. iii., iv. and v.; and by
the two cries of _Woe_ at v. 18 and vi. 1. But even more obvious
than these commencements are the various climaxes to which they
lead up. These are all threats of judgment, and each is more
strenuous or explicit than the one that has preceded it. They
close with iii. 15, iv. 3, iv. 12, v. 17, v. 27 and vi. 14; and
according to them the oracles may be conveniently divided into six
groups.
1. III. 1-15. After the main theme of judgment is stated in 1, 2,
we have in 3-8 a parenthesis on the prophet's right to threaten
doom; after which 9-15, following directly on 2, emphasise the
social disorder, threaten the land with invasion, the people with
extinction and the overthrow of their civilisation.
2. IV. 1-3, beginning with the formula _Hear this word_, is
directed against women and describes the siege of the capital and
their captivity.
3. IV. 4-12, with no opening formula, contrasts the people's
vain propitiation of God by ritual with His treatment of them
by various physical chastisements--drought, blight and locusts,
pestilence, earthquake--and summons them to prepare for another,
unnamed, visitation. _Jehovah God of Hosts is His Name._
4. V. 1-17, beginning with the formula _Hear this word_, and
a dirge over a vision of the nation's defeat, attacks, like
the previous group, the lavish ritual, sets in contrast to it
Jehovah's demands for justice and civic purity; and, offering a
reprieve if Israel will repent, closes with the prospect of an
universal mourning (vv. 16, 17), which, though introduced by a
_therefore_, has no logical connection with what precedes it.
5. V. 18-26 is the first of the two groups that open with _Woe_.
Affirming that the eagerly expected _Day of Jehovah_ will be
darkness and disaster on disaster inevitable (18-20), it again
emphasises Jehovah's desire for righteousness rather than worship
(21-26), and closes with the threat of captivity beyond Damascus.
_Jehovah God of Hosts is His Name_, as at the close of 3.
6. VI. 1-14. The second _Woe_, on them _that are at ease in
Zion_ (1, 2): a satire on the luxuries of the rich and their
indifference to the national suffering (3-6): captivity must come,
with the desolation of the land (9, 10); and in a peroration the
prophet reiterates a general downfall of the nation because of its
perversity. _A Nation_--needless to name it!--will oppress Israel
from Hamath to the River of the Arabah.
THIRD SECTION: CHAPS. VII.-IX. VISIONS WITH
INTERLUDES.
The Visions betray traces of development; but they are
interrupted by a piece of narrative and addresses on the same
themes as chaps. iii.-vi. The FIRST TWO VISIONS (vii. 1-6) are
of disasters--locusts and drought--in the realm of nature;
they are averted by prayer from Amos. The THIRD (7-9) is in
the sphere, not of nature, but history: Jehovah standing with
a plumbline, as if to show the nation's fabric to be utterly
twisted, announces that it shall be overthrown, and that the
dynasty of Jeroboam must be put to the sword. Upon this mention
of the king, the first in the book, there starts the narrative
(10-17) of how Amaziah, priest at Bethel--obviously upon hearing
the prophet's threat--sent word to Jeroboam; and then (whether
before or after getting a reply) proceeded to silence Amos, who,
however, reiterates his prediction of doom, again described as
captivity in a foreign land, and adds a FOURTH VISION (viii.
1-3), of the Ḳaits or _Summer Fruit_, which suggests Ḳêts, or
_End_ of the Nation. Here it would seem Amos' discourses at
Bethel take end. Then comes viii. 4-6, another exposure of the
sins of the rich; followed by a triple pronouncement of doom
(7), again in the terms of physical calamities--earthquake (8),
eclipse (9, 10), and famine (11-14), in the last of which the
public worship is again attacked. A FIFTH VISION, of the Lord by
the Altar commanding to smite (ix. 1), is followed by a powerful
threat of the hopelessness of escape from God's punishment (ix.
1_b_-4); the third of the great apostrophes to the might of
Jehovah (5, 6); another statement of the equality in judgment
of Israel with other peoples, and of their utter destruction
(7-8_a_). Then (8_b_) we meet the first qualification of the
hitherto unrelieved sentence of death. Captivity is described,
not as doom, but as discipline (9): the sinners of the people,
scoffers at doom, shall die (10). And this seems to leave room
for two final oracles of restoration and glory, the only two in
the book, which are couched in the exact terms of the promises
of later prophecy (11-15) and are by many denied to Amos.
Such is the course of the prophesying of Amos. To have traced it must
have made clear to us the unity of his book,[114] as well as the
character of the period to which he belonged. But it also furnishes
us with a good deal of evidence towards the answer of such necessary
questions as these--whether we can fix an exact date for the whole
or any part, and whether we can trace any logical or historical
development through the chapters, either as these now stand, or in
some such re-arrangement as we saw to be necessary for the authentic
prophecies of Isaiah.
Let us take first the simplest of these tasks--to ascertain the
general period of the book. Twice--by the title and by the portion
of narrative[115]--we are pointed to the reign of Jeroboam II.,
_circa_ 783-743; other historical allusions suit the same years. The
principalities of Palestine are all standing, except Gath;[116] but the
great northern cloud which carries their doom has risen and is ready
to burst. Now Assyria, we have seen, had become fatal to Palestine
as early as 854. Infrequent invasions of Syria had followed, in one
of which, in 803, Rimmon Nirari III. had subjected Tyre and Sidon,
besieged Damascus, and received tribute from Israel. So far then as the
Assyrian data are concerned, the Book of Amos might have been written
early in the reign of Jeroboam. Even then was the storm lowering as he
describes it. Even then had the lightning broken over Damascus. There
are other symptoms, however, which demand a later date. They seem
to imply, not only Uzziah's overthrow of Gath,[117] and Jeroboam's
conquest of Moab[118] and of Aram,[119] but that establishment of
Israel's political influence from Lebanon to the Dead Sea, which must
have taken Jeroboam several years to accomplish. With this agree other
features of the prophecy--the sense of political security in Israel,
the large increase of wealth, the ample and luxurious buildings, the
gorgeous ritual, the easy ability to recover from physical calamities,
the consequent carelessness and pride of the upper classes. All these
things imply that the last Syrian invasions of Israel in the beginning
of the century were at least a generation behind the men into whose
careless faces the prophet hurled his words of doom. During this
interval Assyria had again advanced--in 775, in 773 and in 772.[120]
None of these expeditions, however, had come south of Damascus,
and this, their invariable arrest at some distance from the proper
territory of Israel, may have further flattered the people's sense
of security, though probably the truth was that Jeroboam, like some
of his predecessors, bought his peace by tribute to the emperor. In
765, when the Assyrians for the second time invaded Hadrach, in the
neighbourhood of Damascus, their records mention a pestilence, which,
both because their armies were then in Syria, and because the plague
generally spreads over the whole of Western Asia, may well have been
the pestilence mentioned by Amos. In 763 a total eclipse of the sun
took place, and is perhaps implied by the ninth verse of his eighth
chapter. If this double allusion to pestilence and eclipse be correct,
it brings the book down to the middle of the century and the latter
half of Jeroboam's long reign. In 755 the Assyrians came back to
Hadrach; in 754 to Arpad: with these exceptions Syria was untroubled by
them till after 745. It was probably these quiet years in which Amos
found Israel _at ease in Zion_.[121] If we went down further, within
the more forward policy of Tiglath-Pileser, who ascended the throne in
745 and besieged Arpad from 743 to 740, we should find an occasion for
the urgency with which Amos warns Israel that the invasion of her land
and the overthrow of the dynasty of Jeroboam will be immediate.[122]
But Amos might have spoken as urgently even before Tiglath-Pileser's
accession; and the probability that Hosea, who prophesied within
Jeroboam's reign, quotes from Amos seems to imply that the prophecies
of the latter had been current for some time.
Towards the middle of the eighth century--is, therefore, the most
definite date to which we are able to assign the Book of Amos. At so
great a distance the difference of a few unmarked years is invisible.
It is enough that we know the moral dates--the state of national
feeling, the personages alive, the great events which are behind the
prophet, and the still greater which are imminent. We can see that Amos
wrote in the political pride of the latter years of Jeroboam's reign,
after the pestilence and eclipse of the sixties, and before the advance
of Tiglath-Pileser in the last forties, of the eighth century.
A particular year is indeed offered by the title of the book, which,
if not by Amos himself, must be from only a few years later:[123]
_Words of Amos, which he saw in the days of Uzziah and of Jeroboam,
two years before the earthquake_. This was the great earthquake
of which other prophets speak as having happened in the days of
Uzziah.[124] But we do not know where to place the year of the
earthquake, and are as far as ever from a definite date.
The mention of the earthquake, however, introduces us to the answer
of another of our questions--whether, with all its unity, the Book
of Amos reveals any lines of progress, either of event or of idea,
either historical or logical.
Granting the truth of the title, that Amos had his prophetic eyes
opened two years before the earthquake, it will be a sign of
historical progress if we find in the book itself any allusions to
the earthquake. Now these are present. In the first division we find
none, unless the threat of God's visitation in the form of a shaking
of the land be considered as a tremor communicated to the prophet's
mind from the recent upheaval. But in the second division there is
an obvious reference: the last of the unavailing chastisements, with
which Jehovah has chastised His people, is described as a _great
overturning_.[125] And in the third division, in two passages, the
judgment, which Amos has already stated will fall in the form of an
invasion, is also figured in the terms of an earthquake. Nor does
this exhaust the tremors which that awful convulsion had started;
but throughout the second and third divisions there is a constant
sense of instability, of the liftableness and breakableness of the
very ground of life. Of course, as we shall see, this was due to the
prophet's knowledge of the moral explosiveness of society in Israel;
but he could hardly have described the results of that in the terms
he has used, unless himself and his hearers had recently felt the
ground quake under them, and seen whole cities topple over. If,
then, Amos began to prophesy two years before the earthquake, the
bulk of his book was spoken, or at least written down, after the
earthquake had left all Israel trembling.[126]
This proof of progress in the book is confirmed by another feature.
In the abstract given above it is easy to see that the judgments
of the Lord upon Israel were of a twofold character. Some were
physical--famine, drought, blight, locusts, earthquake; and some
were political--battle, defeat, invasion, captivity. Now it is
significant--and I do not think the point has been previously
remarked--that not only are the physical represented as happening
first, but that at one time the prophet seems to have understood
that no others would be needed, that indeed God did not reveal to
him the imminence of political disaster till He had exhausted the
discipline of physical calamities. For this we have double evidence.
In chapter iv. Amos reports that the Lord has sought to rouse Israel
out of the moral lethargy into which their religious services have
soothed them, by withholding bread and water; by blighting their
orchards; by a pestilence, a thoroughly Egyptian one; and by an
earthquake. But these having failed to produce repentance, God must
visit the people once more: how, the prophet does not say, leaving
the imminent terror unnamed, but we know that the Assyrian overthrow
is meant. Now precisely parallel to this is the course of the Visions
in chapter vii. The Lord caused Amos to see (whether in fancy or in
fact we need not now stop to consider) the plague of locusts. It was
so bad as to threaten Israel with destruction. But Amos interceded,
and God answered, _It shall not be_. Similarly with a plague of
drought. But then the Vision shifts from the realm of nature to that
of politics. The Lord sets the plumbline to the fabric of Israel's
life: this is found hopelessly bent and unstable. It must be pulled
down, and the pulling down shall be political: the family of Jeroboam
is to be slain, the people are to go into captivity. The next Vision,
therefore, is of the End--the Final Judgment of war and defeat, which
is followed only by Silence.
Thus, by a double proof, we see not only that the Divine method in that
age was to act first by physical chastisement, and only then by an
inevitable, ultimate doom of war and captivity; but that the experience
of Amos himself, his own intercourse with the Lord, passed through
these two stages. The significance of this for the picture of the
prophet's life we shall see in our next chapter. Here we are concerned
to ask whether it gives us any clue as to the extant arrangement of
his prophecies, or any justification for re-arranging them, as the
prophecies of Isaiah have to be re-arranged, according to the various
stages of historical development at which they were uttered.
We have just seen that the progress from the physical chastisements
to the political doom is reflected in both the last two sections of
the book. But the same gradual, cumulative method is attributed to the
Divine Providence by the First Section: _for three transgressions, yea,
for four, I will not turn it back_; and then follow the same disasters
of war and captivity as are threatened in Sections II. and III. But
each section does not only thus end similarly; each also begins with
the record of an immediate impression made on the prophet by Jehovah
(chaps. i. 2; iii. 3-8; vii. 1-9).
To sum up:--The Book of Amos consists of three sections,[127]
which seem to have received their present form towards the end of
Jeroboam's reign; and which, after emphasising their origin as
due to the immediate influence of Jehovah Himself on the prophet,
follow pretty much the same course of the Divine dealings with
that generation of Israel--a course which began with physical
chastisements, that failed to produce repentance, and ended with the
irrevocable threat of the Assyrian invasion. Each section, that is to
say, starts from the same point, follows much the same direction, and
arrives at exactly the same conclusion. Chronologically you cannot
put one of them before the other; but from each it is possible to
learn the stages of experience through which Amos himself passed--to
discover how God taught the prophet, not only by the original
intuitions from which all prophecy starts, but by the gradual events
of his day both at home and abroad.
This decides our plan for us. We shall first trace the life and
experience of Amos, as his book enables us to do; and then we shall
examine, in the order in which they lie, the three parallel forms in
which, when he was silenced at Bethel, he collected the fruits of
that experience, and gave them their final expression.
* * * * *
The style of the book is simple and terse. The fixity of the
prophet's aim--upon a few moral principles and the doom they
demand--keeps his sentences firm and sharp, and sends his paragraphs
rapidly to their climax. That he sees nature only under moral
light renders his poetry austere and occasionally savage. His
language is very pure. There is no ground for Jerome's charge that
he was "imperitus sermone": we shall have to notice only a few
irregularities in spelling, due perhaps to the dialect of the deserts
in which he passed his life.[128]
The text of the book is for the most part well-preserved; but there are
a number of evident corruptions. Of the Greek Version the same holds
good as we have said in more detail of the Greek of Hosea.[129] It is
sometimes correct where the Hebrew text is not, sometimes suggestive of
the emendations required, and sometimes hopelessly astray.
FOOTNOTES:
[112] The full list of suspected passages is this: (1) References
to Judah--ii. 4, 5; vi. 1, _in Zion_; ix. 11, 12. (2) The three
Outbreaks of Praise--iv. 13; v. 8, 9; ix. 5, 6. (3) The Final
Hope--ix. 8-15, including vv. 11, 12, already mentioned. (4) Clauses
alleged to reflect a later stage of history--i. 9-12; v. 1, 2, 15;
vi. 2, 14. (5) Suspected for incompatibility--viii. 11-13.
[113] So designated to distinguish him from the first Jeroboam, the
son of Nebat.
[114] Apart from the suspected parentheses already mentioned.
[115] Chap. vii.
[116] And, if vi. 2 be genuine, Hamath.
[117] 2 Chron. xxvi. 6. In the list of the Philistine cities, Amos
i. 6-8, Gath does not occur, and in harmony with this in vi. 2 it is
said to be overthrown; see pp. 173 f.
[118] 2 Kings. In Amos ii. 3 the ruler of Moab is called, not king, but
שׁופט, or regent, such as Jeroboam substituted for the king of Moab.
[119] According to Grätz's emendation of vi. 13: _we have taken
Lo-Debar and Karnaim_. Perhaps too in iii. 12, though the verse is
very obscure, some settlement of Israelites in Damascus is implied.
For Jeroboam's conquest of Aram (2 Kings xiv. 28), see p. 177.
[120] In 775 to Erini, "the country of the cedars"--that is, Mount
Amanus, near the Gulf of Antioch; in 773 to Damascus; in 772 to
Hadrach.
[121] vi. 1.
[122] vii. 9.
[123] Even König denies that the title is from Amos (_Einleitung_,
307); yet the ground on which he does so, the awkwardness of the
double relative, does not appear sufficient. One does not write a
title in the same style as an ordinary sentence.
[124] Zech. xiv. 5, and probably Isa. ix. 9, 10 (Eng.).
[125] iv. 11.
[126] Of course it is always possible to suspect--and let us by all
means exhaust the possibilities of suspicion--that the title has
been added by a scribe, who interpreted the forebodings of judgment
which Amos expresses in the terms of earthquake as if they were
the predictions of a real earthquake, and was anxious to show, by
inserting the title, how they were fulfilled in the great convulsion
of Uzziah's days. But to such a suspicion we have a complete answer.
No later scribe, who understood the book he was dealing with, would
have prefixed to it a title, with the motive just suspected, when
in chap. iv. he read that an earthquake had just taken place. The
very fact that such a title appears over a book, which speaks of the
earthquake as past, surely attests the _bona fides_ of the title.
With that mention in chap. iv. of the earthquake as past, none
would have ventured to say that Amos began to prophesy before the
earthquake unless they had known this to be the case.
[127] Except for the later additions, not by Amos, to be afterwards
noted.
[128] Cf. ii. 13; v. 11.; vi. 8, 10; vii. 9, 16; viii. 8 (?).
[129] See below, p. 221.