CHAPTER VI

_THE MAN AND THE PROPHET_

The Book of Amos opens one of the greatest stages in the religious

development of mankind. Its originality is due to a few simple ideas,

which it propels into religion with an almost unrelieved abruptness.

But, like all ideas which ever broke upon the world, these also have

flesh and blood behind them. Like every other Reformation, this one

in Israel began with the conscience and the protest of an individual.

Our review of the book has made this plain. We have found in it, not

only a personal adventure of a heroic kind, but a progressive series

of visions, with some other proofs of a development both of facts and

ideas. In short, behind the book there beats a life, and our first duty

is to attempt to trace its spiritual history. The attempt is worth the

greatest care. "Amos," says a very critical writer,[130] "is one of the

most wonderful appearances in the history of the human spirit."

1. THE MAN AND HIS DISCIPLINE.

AMOS i. 1; iii. 3-8; vii. 14, 15.

When charged at the crisis of his career with being but a

hireling-prophet, Amos disclaimed the official name and took his

stand upon his work as a man: _No prophet I, nor prophet's son, but

a herdsman and a dresser of sycomores. Jehovah took me from behind

the flock._[131] We shall enhance our appreciation of this manhood,

and of the new order of prophecy which it asserted, if we look for a

little at the soil on which it was so bravely nourished.

Six miles south from Bethlehem, as Bethlehem is six from Jerusalem,

there rises on the edge of the Judæan plateau, towards the desert, a

commanding hill, the ruins on which are still known by the name of

Teḳôa'.[132]

In the time of Amos Tekoa was a place without sanctity and almost

without tradition. The name suggests that the site may at first have

been that of a camp. Its fortification by Rehoboam, and the mission

of its wise woman to David, are its only previous appearances in

history. Nor had nature been less grudging to it than fame. The men

of Tekoa looked out upon a desolate and haggard world. South, west

and north the view is barred by a range of limestone hills, on one

of which directly north the grey towers of Jerusalem are hardly to

be discerned from the grey mountain lines. Eastward the prospect

is still more desolate, but it is open; the land slopes away for

nearly eighteen miles to a depth of four thousand feet. Of this

long descent, the first step, lying immediately below the hill of

Tekoa, is a shelf of stony moorland with the ruins of vineyards. It

is the lowest ledge of the settled life of Judæa. The eastern edge

drops suddenly by broken rocks to slopes spotted with bushes of

"retem," the broom of the desert, and with patches of poor wheat.

From the foot of the slopes the land rolls away in a maze of low

hills and shallow dales, that flush green in spring, but for the rest

of the year are brown with withered grass and scrub. This is the

_Wilderness_ or _Pastureland of Tekoa_,[133] across which by night

the wild beasts howl, and by day the blackened sites of deserted

camps, with the loose cairns that mark the nomads' graves, reveal a

human life almost as vagabond and nameless as that of the beasts.

Beyond the rolling land is Jeshimon, or Devastation--a chaos of

hills, none of whose ragged crests are tossed as high as the shelf

of Tekoa, while their flanks shudder down some further thousands of

feet, by crumbling precipices and corries choked with debris, to the

coast of the Dead Sea. The northern half of this is visible, bright

blue against the red wall of Moab, and the level top of the wall,

broken only by the valley of the Arnon, constitutes the horizon.

Except for the blue water--which shines in its gap between the torn

hills like a bit of sky through rifted clouds--it is a very dreary

world. Yet the sun breaks over it, perhaps all the more gloriously;

mists, rising from the sea simmering in its great vat, drape the

nakedness of the desert noon; and through the dry desert night the

planets ride with a majesty they cannot assume in our more troubled

atmospheres. It is also a very empty and a very silent world, yet

every stir of life upon it excites, therefore, the greater vigilance,

and man's faculties, relieved from the rush and confusion of events,

form the instinct of marking, and reflecting upon, every single

phenomenon. And it is a very savage world. Across it all, the towers

of Jerusalem give the only signal of the spirit, the one token that

man has a history.

Upon this unmitigated wilderness, where life is reduced to poverty and

danger; where nature starves the imagination, but excites the faculties

of perception and curiosity; with the mountain tops and the sunrise

in his face, but above all with Jerusalem so near,--Amos did the work

which made him a man, heard the voice of God calling him to be a

prophet, and gathered those symbols and figures in which his prophet's

message still reaches us with so fresh and so austere an air.

Amos was _among the shepherds of Tekoa_. The word for _shepherd_ is

unusual, and means the herdsman of a peculiar breed of desert sheep,

still under the same name prized in Arabia for the excellence of their

wool.[134] And he was _a dresser of sycomores_. The tree, which is

not our sycamore, is very easily grown in sandy soil with a little

water. It reaches a great height and mass of foliage. The fruit is

like a small fig, with a sweet but watery taste, and is eaten only by

the poor. Born not of the fresh twigs, but of the trunk and older

branches, the sluggish lumps are provoked to ripen by pinching or

bruising, which seems to be the literal meaning of the term that

Amos uses of himself--_a pincher of sycomores_.[135] The sycomore

does not grow at so high a level as Tekoa;[136] and this fact, taken

along with the limitation of the ministry of Amos to the Northern

Kingdom, has been held to prove that he was originally an Ephraimite,

a sycomore-dresser, who had migrated and settled down, as the peculiar

phrase of the title says, _among the shepherds of Tekoa_.[137] We shall

presently see, however, that his familiarity with life in Northern

Israel may easily have been won in other ways than through citizenship

in that kingdom; while the very general nature of the definition,

_among the shepherds of Tekoa_, does not oblige us to place either

him or his sycomores so high as the village itself. The most easterly

township of Judæa, Tekoa commanded the whole of the wilderness beyond,

to which indeed it gave its name, _the wilderness of Tekoa_. The

shepherds of Tekoa were therefore, in all probability, scattered across

the whole region down to the oases on the coast of the Dead Sea, which

have generally been owned by one or other of the settled communities in

the hill-country above, and may at that time have belonged to Tekoa,

just as in Crusading times they belonged to the monks of Hebron, or are

to-day cultivated by the Rushaideh Arabs, who pitch their camps not far

from Tekoa itself. As you will still find everywhere on the borders

of the Syrian desert shepherds nourishing a few fruit-trees round the

chief well of their pasture, in order to vary their milk diet, so in

some low oasis in the wilderness of Judæa Amos cultivated the poorest,

but the most easily grown of fruits, the sycomore.[138] All this

pushes Amos and his dwarf sheep deeper into the desert, and emphasises

what has been said above, and still remains to be illustrated, of the

desert's influence on his discipline as a man and on his speech as a

prophet. We ought to remember that in the same desert another prophet

was bred, who was also the pioneer of a new dispensation, and whose

ministry, both in its strength and its limitations, is much recalled by

the ministry of Amos. John the son of Zacharias _grew and waxed strong

in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his showing unto

Israel_.[139] Here, too, our Lord was _with the wild beasts_.[140] How

much Amos had been with them may be seen from many of his metaphors.

_The lion roareth, who shall not fear?... As when the shepherd rescueth

from the mouth of the lion two shin-bones or a bit of an ear.... It

shall be as when one is fleeing from a lion, and a bear cometh upon

him; and he entereth a house, and leaneth his hand on the wall, and a

serpent biteth him._

As a wool-grower, however, Amos must have had his yearly journeys

among the markets of the land; and to such were probably due his

opportunities of familiarity with Northern Israel, the originals of

his vivid pictures of her town-life, her commerce and the worship

at her great sanctuaries. One hour westward from Tekoa would bring

him to the high-road between Hebron and the North, with its troops

of pilgrims passing to Beersheba.[141] It was but half-an-hour more

to the watershed and an open view of the Philistine plain. Bethlehem

was only six, Jerusalem twelve miles from Tekoa. Ten miles farther,

across the border of Israel, lay Bethel with its temple, seven miles

farther Gilgal, and twenty miles farther still Samaria the capital,

in all but two days' journey from Tekoa. These had markets as well

as shrines;[142] their annual festivals would be also great fairs.

It is certain that Amos visited them; it is even possible that he

went to Damascus, in which the Israelites had at the time their own

quarters for trading. By road and market he would meet with men of

other lands. Phœnician pedlars, or Canaanites as they were called,

came up to buy the homespun for which the housewives of Israel were

famed[143]--hard-faced men who were also willing to purchase slaves,

and haunted even the battle-fields of their neighbours for this

sinister purpose. Men of Moab, at the time subject to Israel; Aramean

hostages; Philistines who held the export trade to Egypt,--these

Amos must have met and may have talked with; their dialects scarcely

differed from his own. It is no distant, desert echo of life which

we hear in his pages, but the thick and noisy rumour of caravan and

market-place: how the plague was marching up from Egypt;[144] ugly

stories of the Phœnician slave-trade;[145] rumours of the advance of

the awful Power, which men were hardly yet accustomed to name, but

which had already twice broken from the North upon Damascus. Or it

was the progress of some national mourning--how lamentation sprang

up in the capital, rolled along the highways, and was re-echoed

from the husbandmen and vinedressers on the hillsides.[146] Or, at

closer quarters, we see and hear the bustle of the great festivals

and fairs--the _solemn assemblies_, the reeking holocausts, the

_noise of songs and viols_;[147] the brutish religious zeal kindling

into drunkenness and lust on the very steps of the altar;[148] the

embezzlement of pledges by the priests, the covetous restlessness of

the traders, their false measures, their entanglement of the poor

in debt;[149] the careless luxury of the rich, their _banquets_,

_buckets of wine_, _ivory couches_, pretentious, preposterous

music.[150] These things are described as by an eyewitness. Amos

was not a citizen of the Northern Kingdom, to which he almost

exclusively refers; but it was because he went up and down in it,

using those eyes which the desert air had sharpened, that he so

thoroughly learned the wickedness of its people, the corruption of

Israel's life in every rank and class of society.[151]

But the convictions which he applied to this life Amos learned at

home. They came to him over the desert, and without further material

signal than was flashed to Tekoa from the towers of Jerusalem. This

is placed beyond doubt by the figures in which he describes his call

from Jehovah. Contrast his story, so far as he reveals it, with

that of another. Some twenty years later, Isaiah of Jerusalem saw

the Lord in the Temple, high and lifted up, and all the inaugural

vision of this greatest of the prophets was conceived in the figures

of the Temple--the altar, the smoke, the burning coals. But to his

predecessor _among the shepherds of Tekoa_, although revelation also

starts from Jerusalem, it reaches him, not in the sacraments of her

sanctuary, but across the bare pastures, and as it were in the roar

of a lion. _Jehovah from Zion roareth, and uttereth His voice from

Jerusalem._[152] We read of no formal process of consecration for

this first of the prophets. Through his clear desert air, the word

of God breaks upon him without medium or sacrament. And the native

vigilance of the man is startled, is convinced by it, beyond all

argument or question. _The lion hath roared, who shall not fear?

Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?_

These words are taken from a passage in which Amos illustrates

prophecy from other instances of his shepherd life. We have seen

what a school of vigilance the desert is. Upon the bare surface all

that stirs is ominous. Every shadow, every noise--the shepherd must

know what is behind and be warned. Such a vigilance Amos would have

Israel apply to his own message, and to the events of their history.

Both of these he compares to certain facts of desert life, behind

which his shepherdly instincts have taught him to feel an ominous

cause. _Do two men walk together except they have trysted?_--except

they have made an appointment. Hardly in the desert, for there men

meet and take the same road by chance as seldom as ships at sea.

_Doth a lion roar in the jungle and have no prey, or a young lion

let out his voice in his den except he be taking something?_ The

hunting lion is silent till his quarry be in sight; when the lonely

shepherd hears the roar across the desert, he knows the lion leaps

upon his prey, and he shudders as Israel ought to do when they

hear God's voice by the prophet, for this also is never loosened

but for some grim fact, some leap of doom. Or _doth a little bird

fall on the snare earthwards and there be no noose upon her?_ The

reading may be doubtful, but the meaning is obvious: no one ever

saw a bird pulled roughly down to earth when it tried to fly away

without knowing there was the loop of a snare about her. Or _does the

snare itself rise up from the ground, except indeed it be capturing

something?_--except there be in the trap or net something to flutter,

struggle and so lift it up. Traps do not move without life in them.

Or _is the alarum trumpet_[153] _blown in a city_--for instance, in

high Tekoa up there, when some Arab raid sweeps from the desert on

to the fields--_and do the people not tremble?_ Or _shall calamity

happen in a city and Jehovah not have done it? Yea, the Lord Jehovah

doeth nothing but He has revealed His purpose to His servants the

prophets._ My voice of warning and these events of evil in your midst

have the same cause--Jehovah--behind them. _The lion hath roared, who

shall not fear? Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?_[154]

We cannot miss the personal note which rings through this triumph

in the reality of things unseen. Not only does it proclaim a man of

sincerity and conviction: it is resonant with the discipline by which

that conviction was won--were won, too, the freedom from illusion and

the power of looking at facts in the face, which Amos alone of his

contemporaries possessed.

St. Bernard has described the first stage of the Vision of God as the

Vision Distributive, in which the eager mind distributes her attention

upon common things and common duties in themselves. It was in this

elementary school that the earliest of the new prophets passed his

apprenticeship and received his gifts. Others excel Amos in the powers

of the imagination and the intellect. But by the incorrupt habits of

his shepherd's life, by daily wakefulness to its alarms and daily

faithfulness to its opportunities, he was trained in that simple power

of appreciating facts and causes, which, applied to the great phenomena

of the spirit and of history, forms his distinction among his peers.

In this we find perhaps the reason why he records of himself no solemn

hour of cleansing and initiation. _Jehovah took me from following the

flock, and Jehovah said unto me, Go, prophesy unto My people Israel._

Amos was of them of whom it is written, "Blessed are those servants

whom the Lord when He cometh shall find watching." Through all his

hard life, this shepherd had kept his mind open and his conscience

quick, so that when the word of God came to him he knew it, as fast

as he knew the roar of the lion across the moor. Certainly there is

no habit, which, so much as this of watching facts with a single eye

and a responsible mind, is indispensable alike in the humblest duties

and in the highest speculations of life. When Amos gives those naïve

illustrations of how real the voice of God is to him, we receive them

as the tokens of a man, honest and awake. Little wonder that he refuses

to be reckoned among the professional prophets of his day, who found

their inspiration in excitement and trance. Upon him the impulses of

the Deity come in no artificial and morbid ecstasy, removed as far as

possible from real life. They come upon him, as it were, in the open

air. They appeal to the senses of his healthy and expert manhood.

They convince him of their reality with the same force as do the most

startling events of his lonely shepherd watches. _The lion hath roared,

who shall not fear? Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?_

The influence of the same discipline is still visible when Amos

passes from the facts of his own consciousness to the facts of

his people's life. His day in Israel sweltered with optimism. The

glare of wealth, the fulsome love of country, the rank incense of

a religion that was without morality--these thickened all the air,

and neither the people nor their rulers had any vision. But Amos

carried with him his clear desert atmosphere and his desert eyes. He

saw the raw facts: the poverty, the cruel negligence of the rich,

the injustice of the rulers, the immorality of the priests. The

meaning of these things he questioned with as much persistence as he

questioned every suspicious sound or sight upon those pastures of

Tekoa. He had no illusions: he knew a mirage when he saw one. Neither

the military pride of the people, fostered by recent successes over

Syria, nor the dogmas of their religion, which asserted Jehovah's

swift triumph upon the heathen, could prevent him from knowing that

the immorality of Israel meant Israel's political downfall. He was

one of those recruits from common life, by whom religion and the

state have at all times been reformed. Springing from the laity and

very often from among the working classes, their freedom from dogmas

and routine, as well as from the compromising interests of wealth,

rank and party, renders them experts in life to a degree that almost

no professional priest, statesman or journalist, however honest or

sympathetic, can hope to rival. Into politics they bring facts, but

into religion they bring vision.

It is of the utmost significance that this reformer, this founder of

the highest order of prophecy in Israel, should not only thus begin

with facts, but to the very end be occupied with almost nothing

else, than the vision and record of them. In Amos there is but one

prospect of the Ideal. It does not break till the close of his

book, and then in such contrast to the plain and final indictments,

which constitute nearly all the rest of his prophesying, that many

have not unnaturally denied to him the verses which contain it.

Throughout the other chapters we have but the exposure of present

facts, material and moral, nor the sight of any future more distant

than to-morrow and the immediate consequences of to-day's deeds.

Let us mark this. The new prophecy which Amos started in Israel

reached Divine heights of hope, unfolded infinite powers of moral

and political regeneration--dared to blot out all the past, dared to

believe all things possible in the future. But it started from the

truth about the moral situation of the present. Its first prophet not

only denied every popular dogma and ideal, but appears not to have

substituted for them any others. He spent his gifts of vision on the

discovery and appreciation of facts. Now this is necessary, not only

in great reformations of religion, but at almost every stage in her

development. We are constantly disposed to abuse even the most just

and necessary of religious ideals as substitutes for experience or

as escapes from duty, and to boast about the future before we have

understood or mastered the present. Hence the need of realists like

Amos. Though they are destitute of dogma, of comfort, of hope, of the

ideal, let us not doubt that they also stand in the succession of the

prophets of the Lord.

Nay, this is a stage of prophecy on which may be fulfilled the prayer

of Moses: _Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets!_ To

see the truth and tell it, to be accurate and brave about the moral

facts of our day--to this extent the Vision and the Voice are possible

for every one of us. Never for us may the doors of heaven open, as they

did for him who stood on the threshold of the earthly temple, and he

saw the Lord enthroned, while the Seraphim of the Presence sang the

glory. Never for us may the skies fill with that tempest of life which

Ezekiel beheld from Shinar, and above it the sapphire throne, and on

the throne the likeness of a man, the likeness of the glory of the

Lord. Yet let us remember that to see facts as they are and to tell the

truth about them--this also is prophecy. We may inhabit a sphere which

does not prompt the imagination, but is as destitute of the historic

and traditional as was the wilderness of Tekoa. All the more may our

unglamoured eyes be true to the facts about us. Every common day leads

forth her duties as shining as every night leads forth her stars. The

deeds and the fortunes of men are in our sight, and spell, to all who

will honestly read, the very Word of the Lord. If only we be loyal,

then by him who made the rude sounds and sights of the desert his

sacraments, and whose vigilance of things seen and temporal became the

vision of things unseen and eternal, we also shall see God, and be sure

of His ways with men.

Before we pass from the desert discipline of the prophet, we

must notice one of its effects, which, while it greatly enhanced

the clearness of his vision, undoubtedly disabled Amos for the

highest prophetic rank. He who lives in the desert lives without

patriotism--detached and aloof. He may see the throng of men more

clearly than those who move among it. He cannot possibly so much feel

for them. Unlike Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Amos was not a citizen

of the kingdom against which he prophesied, and indeed no proper

citizen of any kingdom, but a nomad herdsman, hovering on the desert

borders of Judæa. He saw Israel from the outside. His message to her

is achieved with scarcely one sob in his voice. For the sake of the

poor and the oppressed among the people he is indignant. But with the

erring, staggering nation as a whole he has no real sympathy. His

pity for her is exhausted in one elegy and two brief intercessions;

hardly more than once does he even call her to repentance. His sense

of justice, in fact, had almost never to contend with his love. This

made Amos the better witness, but the worse prophet. He did not rise

so high as his great successors, because he did not so feel himself

one with the people whom he was forced to condemn, because he did

not bear their fate as his own nor travail for their new birth. "Ihm

fehlt die Liebe." Love is the element lacking in his prophecy; and

therefore the words are true of him, which were uttered of his great

follower across this same wilderness of Judæa, that mighty as were

his voice and his message to prepare the way of the Lord, yet _the

least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he_.

2. THE WORD AND ITS ORIGINS.

AMOS i. 2; iii. 3-8; and _passim_.

We have seen the preparation of the Man for the Word. We are now

to ask, Whence came the Word to the Man?--the Word that made him a

prophet. What were its sources and sanctions outside himself? These

involve other questions. How much of his message did Amos inherit

from the previous religion of his people? And how much did he teach

for the first time in Israel? And again, how much of this new element

did he owe to the great events of his day? And how much demands some

other source of inspiration?

To all these inquiries, outlines of the answers ought by this time to

have become visible. We have seen that the contents of the Book of

Amos consist almost entirely of two kinds: facts, actual or imminent,

in the history of his people; and certain moral principles of the

most elementary order. Amos appeals to no dogma nor form of law, nor

to any religious or national institution. Still more remarkably, he

does not rely upon miracle nor any so-called "supernatural sign."

To employ the terms of Mazzini's famous formula, Amos draws his

materials solely from "conscience and history." Within himself

he hears certain moral principles speak in the voice of God, and

certain events of his day he recognises as the judicial acts of God.

The principles condemn the living generation of Israel as morally

corrupt; the events threaten the people with political extinction.

From this agreement between inward conviction and outward event Amos

draws his full confidence as a prophet, and enforces on the people

his message of doom as God's own word.

The passage in which Amos most explicitly illustrates this harmony

between event and conviction is one whose metaphors we have already

quoted in proof of the desert's influence upon the prophet's

life. When Amos asks, _Can two walk together except they have

made an appointment?_ his figure is drawn, as we have seen, from

the wilderness in which two men will hardly meet except they have

arranged to do so; but the truth, he would illustrate by the figure,

is that two sets of phenomena which coincide must have sprung from

a common purpose. Their conjunction forbids mere chance. What kind

of phenomena he means, he lets us see in his next instance: _Doth

a lion roar in the jungle and have no prey? Doth a young lion let

forth his voice from his den except he be catching something?_ That

is, those ominous sounds never happen without some fell and terrible

deed happening along with them. Amos thus plainly hints that the

two phenomena on whose coincidence he insists are an utterance on

one side, and on the other side a deed fraught with destruction.

The reading of the next metaphor about the bird and the snare is

uncertain; at most what it means is that you never see signs of

distress or a vain struggle to escape without there being, though

out of sight, some real cause for them.[155] But from so general

a principle he returns in his fourth metaphor to the special

coincidence between utterance and deed. _Is the alarum-trumpet blown

in a city and do the people not tremble?_ Of course they do; they

know such sound is never made without the approach of calamity. But

who is the author of every calamity? God Himself: _Shall there be

evil in a city and Jehovah not have done it?_ Very well then; we have

seen that common life has many instances in which, when an ominous

sound is heard, it is because it is closely linked with a fatal deed.

These happen together, not by mere chance, but because the one is the

expression, the warning or the explanation of the other. And we also

know that fatal deeds which happen to any community in Israel are

from Jehovah. He is behind them. But they, too, are accompanied by a

warning voice from the same source as themselves. This is the voice

which the prophet hears in his heart--the moral conviction which he

feels as the Word of God. _The Lord Jehovah doeth nothing but He

hath revealed His counsel to His servants the prophets._ Mark the

grammar: the revelation comes first to the prophet's heart; then he

sees and recognises the event, and is confident to give his message

about it. So Amos, repeating his metaphor, sums up his argument.

_The Lion hath roared, who shall not fear?_--certain that there is

more than sound to happen. _The Lord Jehovah hath spoken, who can

but prophesy?_--certain that what Jehovah has spoken to him inwardly

is likewise no mere sound, but that deeds of judgment are about to

happen, as the ominous voice requires they should.[156]

The prophet then is made sure of his message by the agreement between

the inward convictions of his soul and the outward events of the day.

When these walk together, it proves that they have come of a common

purpose. He who causes the events--it is Jehovah Himself, _for shall

there be evil in a city and Jehovah not have done it?_--must be

author also of the inner voice or conviction which agrees with them.

_Who_ then _can but prophesy?_ Observe again that no support is here

derived from miracle; nor is any claim made for the prophet on the

ground of his ability to foretell the event. It is the agreement of

the idea with the fact, their evident common origin in the purpose of

Jehovah, which makes a man sure that he has in him the Word of God.

Both are necessary, and together are enough. Are we then to leave

the origin of the Word in this coincidence of fact and thought--as

it were an electric flash produced by the contact of conviction with

event? Hardly: there are questions behind this coincidence. For

instance, as to how the two react on each other--the event provoking

the conviction, the conviction interpreting the event? The argument

of Amos seems to imply that the ethical principles are experienced by

the prophet prior to the events which justify them Is this so, or

was the shock of the events required to awaken the principles? And

if the principles were prior, whence did Amos derive them? These are

some questions that will lead us to the very origins of revelation.

The greatest of the events with which Amos and his contemporaries

dealt was the Assyrian invasion. In a previous chapter we have tried

to estimate the intellectual effects of Assyria on prophecy.[157]

Assyria widened the horizon of Israel, put the world to Hebrew

eyes into a new perspective, vastly increased the possibilities

of history and set to religion a novel order of problems. We can

trace the effects upon Israel's conceptions of God, of man and

even of nature.[158] Now it might be plausibly argued that the new

prophecy in Israel was first stirred and quickened by all this

mental shock and strain, and that even the loftier ethics of the

prophets were thus due to the advance of Assyria. For, as the most

vigilant watchmen of their day, the prophets observed the rise of

that empire, and felt its fatality for Israel. Turning then to

inquire the Divine reasons for such a destruction, they found these

in Israel's sinfulness, to the full extent of which their hearts

were at last awakened. According to such a theory the prophets were

politicians first and moralists afterwards: alarmists to begin with,

and preachers of repentance only second. Or--to recur to the language

employed above--the prophets' experience of the historical event

preceded their conviction of the moral principle which agreed with it.

In support of such a theory it is pointed out that after all the

most original element in the prophecy of the eighth century was the

announcement of Israel's fall and exile. The Righteousness of Jehovah

had often previously been enforced in Israel, but never had any voice

drawn from it this awful conclusion that the nation must perish. The

first in Israel to dare this was Amos, and surely what enabled him

to do so was the imminence of Assyria upon his people. Again, such a

theory might plausibly point to the opening verse of the Book of Amos,

with its unprefaced, unexplained pronouncement of doom upon Israel:--

_The Lord roareth from Zion,_

_And giveth voice from Jerusalem;_

_And the pastures of the shepherds mourn,_

_And the summit of Carmel is withered!_

Here, it might be averred, is the earliest prophet's earliest

utterance. Is it not audibly the voice of a man in a panic--such a

panic as, ever on the eve of historic convulsions, seizes the more

sensitive minds of a doomed people? The distant Assyrian thunder has

reached Amos, on his pastures, unprepared--unable to articulate its

exact meaning, and with only faith enough to hear in it the voice of

his God. He needs reflection to unfold its contents; and the process

of this reflection we find through the rest of his book. There he

details for us, with increasing clearness, both the ethical reasons

and the political results of that Assyrian terror, by which he was at

first so wildly shocked into prophecy.

But the panic-born are always the still-born; and it is simply

impossible that prophecy, in all her ethical and religious vigour, can

have been the daughter of so fatal a birth. If we look again at the

evidence which is quoted from Amos in favour of such a theory, we

shall see how fully it is contradicted by other features of his book.

To begin with, we are not certain that the terror of the opening verse

of Amos is the Assyrian terror. Even if it were, the opening of a book

does not necessarily represent the writer's earliest feelings. The rest

of the chapters contain visions and oracles which obviously date from

a time when Amos was not yet startled by Assyria, but believed that

the punishment which Israel required might be accomplished through a

series of physical calamities--locusts, drought and pestilence.[159]

Nay, it was not even these earlier judgments, preceding the Assyrian,

which stirred the word of God in the prophet. He introduces them with

a _now_ and a _therefore_. That is to say, he treats them only as the

consequence of certain facts, the conclusion of certain premises. These

facts and premises are moral--they are exclusively moral. They are the

sins of Israel's life, regarded without illusion and without pity. They

are certain simple convictions, which fill the prophet's heart, about

the impossibility of the survival of any state which is so perverse and

so corrupt.

This origin of prophecy in moral facts and moral intuitions, which are

in their beginning independent of political events, may be illustrated

by several other points. For instance, the sins which Amos marked in

Israel were such as required no "red dawn of judgment" to expose their

flagrance and fatality. The abuse of justice, the cruelty of the rich,

the shameless immorality of the priests, are not sins which we feel

only in the cool of the day, when God Himself draws near to judgment.

They are such things as make men shiver in the sunshine. And so the

Book of Amos, and not less that of Hosea, tremble with the feeling

that Israel's social corruption is great enough of itself, without

the aid of natural convulsions, to shake the very basis of national

life. _Shall not the land tremble for this_, Amos says after reciting

some sins, _and every one that dwelleth therein_?[160] Not drought nor

pestilence nor invasion is needed for Israel's doom, but the elemental

force of ruin which lies in the people's own wickedness. This is enough

to create gloom long before the political skies be overcast--or, as

Amos himself puts it, this is enough

_To cause the sun to go down at noon,_

_And to darken the earth in the clear day._[161]

And once more--in spite of Assyria the ruin may be averted, if only the

people will repent: _Seek good and not evil, and Jehovah of hosts will

be with you, as you say_.[162] Assyria, however threatening, becomes

irrelevant to Israel's future from the moment that Israel repents.

Such beliefs, then, are obviously not the results of experience, nor

of a keen observation of history. They are the primal convictions

of the heart, which are deeper than all experience, and themselves

contain the sources of historical foresight. With Amos it was not

the outward event which inspired the inward conviction, but the

conviction which anticipated and interpreted the event, though when

the event came there can be no doubt that it confirmed, deepened, and

articulated the conviction.[163]

But when we have thus tracked the stream of prophecy as far back as

these elementary convictions we have not reached the fountain-head.

Whence did Amos derive his simple and absolute ethics? Were they

original to him? Were they new in Israel? Such questions start an

argument which touches the very origins of revelation.

It is obvious that Amos not only takes for granted the laws of

righteousness which he enforces: he takes for granted also the

people's conscience of them. New, indeed, is the doom which sinful

Israel deserves, and original to himself is the proclamation of it;

but Amos appeals to the moral principles which justify the doom, as

if they were not new, and as if Israel ought always to have known

them. This attitude of the prophet to his principles has, in our

time, suffered a curious judgment. It has been called an anachronism.

So absolute a morality, some say, had never before been taught in

Israel; nor had righteousness been so exclusively emphasised as the

purpose of Jehovah. Amos and the other prophets of his century were

the virtual "creators of ethical monotheism": it could only be by

a prophetic licence or prophetic fiction that he appealed to his

people's conscience of the standards he promulgated, or condemned his

generation to death for not having lived up to them.

Let us see how far this criticism is supported by the facts.

To no sane observer can the religious history of Israel appear

as anything but a course of gradual development. Even in the

moral standards, in respect to which it is confessedly often most

difficult to prove growth, the signs of the nation's progress

are very manifest. Practices come to be forbidden in Israel and

tempers to be mitigated, which in earlier ages were sanctioned to

their extreme by the explicit decrees of religion. In the nation's

attitude to the outer world sympathies arise, along with ideals of

spiritual service, where previously only war and extermination had

been enforced in the name of the Deity. Now in such an evolution it

is equally indubitable that the longest and most rapid stage was the

prophecy of the eighth century. The prophets of that time condemn

acts which had been inspired by their immediate predecessors;[164]

they abjure, as impeding morality, a ceremonial which the spiritual

leaders of earlier generations had felt to be indispensable to

religion; and they unfold ideals of the nation's moral destiny, of

which older writings give us only the faintest hints. Yet, while the

fact of a religious evolution in Israel is thus certain, we must not

fall into the vulgar error which interprets evolution as if it were

mere addition, nor forget that even in the most creative periods

of religion nothing is brought forth which has not already been

promised, and, at some earlier stage, placed, so to speak, within

reach of the human mind. After all it is the mind which grows; the

moral ideals which become visible to its more matured vision are so

Divine that, when they present themselves, the mind cannot but think

they were always real and always imperative. If we remember these

commonplaces we shall do justice both to Amos and to his critics.

In the first place it is clear that most of the morality which Amos

enforced is of that fundamental order which can never have been

recognised as the discovery or invention of any prophet. Whatever

be their origin, the conscience of justice, the duty of kindness to

the poor, the horror of wanton cruelty towards one's enemies, which

form the chief principles of Amos, are discernible in man as far back

as history allows us to search for them. Should a generation have

lost them, they can be brought back to it, never with the thrill

of a new lesson, but only with the shame of an old and an abused

memory. To neither man nor people can the righteousness which Amos

preached appear as a discovery, but always as a recollection and a

remorse. And this is most emphatically true of the people of Moses

and of Samuel, of Nathan, of Elijah and of the Book of the Covenant.

Ethical elements had been characteristic of Israel's religion from

the very first. They were not due to a body of written law, but

rather to the character of Israel's God, appreciated by the nation

in all the great crises of their history.[165] Jehovah had won for

Israel freedom and unity. He had been a spirit of justice to their

lawgivers and magistrates.[166] He had raised up a succession of

consecrated personalities,[167] who by life and word had purified

the ideals of the whole people. The results had appeared in the

creation of a strong national conscience, which avenged with horror,

as _folly in Israel_, the wanton crimes of any person or section of

the commonwealth; in the gradual formation of a legal code, founded

indeed in the common custom of the Semites, but greatly more

moral than that; and even in the attainment of certain profoundly

ethical beliefs about God and His relations, beyond Israel, to all

mankind. Now, let us understand once for all, that in the ethics of

Amos there is nothing which is not rooted in one or other of these

achievements of the previous religion of his people. To this religion

Amos felt himself attached in the closest possible way. The word of

God comes to him across the desert, as we have seen, yet not out

of the air. From the first he hears it rise from that one monument

of his people's past which we have found visible on his physical

horizon[168]--_from Zion_, _from Jerusalem_,[169] from the city of

David, from the Ark, whose ministers were Moses and Samuel, from the

repository of the main tradition of Israel's religion.[170] Amos

felt himself in the sacred succession; and his feeling is confirmed

by the contents of his book. The details of that civic justice

which he demands from his generation are found in the Book of the

Covenant--the only one of Israel's great codes which appears by this

time to have been in existence;[171] or in those popular proverbs

which almost as certainly were found in early Israel.[172]

Nor does Amos go elsewhere for the religious sanctions of his

ethics. It is by the ancient mercies of God towards Israel that he

shames and convicts his generation--by the deeds of grace which made

them a nation, by the organs of doctrine and reproof which have

inspired them, unfailing from age to age. _I destroyed the Amorite

before them.... Yea, I brought you up out of the land of Egypt, and

I led you forty years in the wilderness, to possess the land of the

Amorites. And I raised up of your sons for prophets, and of your

young men for Nazirites. Was it not even thus, O ye children of

Israel? saith Jehovah._[173] We cannot even say that the belief which

Amos expresses in Jehovah as the supreme Providence of the world[174]

was a new thing in Israel, for a belief as universal inspires those

portions of the Book of Genesis which, like the Book of the Covenant,

were already extant.

We see, therefore, what right Amos had to present his ethical truths

to Israel, as if they were not new, but had been within reach of his

people from of old.

We could not, however, commit a greater mistake, than to confine the

inspiration of our prophet to the past, and interpret his doctrines as

mere inferences from the earlier religious ideas of Israel--inferences

forced by his own passionate logic, or more naturally ripened for him

by the progress of events. A recent writer has thus summarised the

work of the prophets of the eighth century: "In fact they laid hold

upon that bias towards the ethical, which dwelt in Jahwism from Moses

onwards, and they allowed it alone to have value as corresponding to

the true religion of Jehovah."[175] But this is too abstract to be an

adequate statement of the prophets' own consciousness. What overcame

Amos was a Personal Influence--the Impression of a Character; and it

was this not only as it was revealed in the past of his people. The God

who stands behind Amos is indeed the ancient Deity of Israel, and the

facts which prove Him God are those which made the nation--the Exodus,

the guidance through the wilderness, the overthrow of the Amorites,

the gift of the land. _Was it not even thus, O ye children of Israel?_

But what beats and burns through the pages of Amos is not the memory

of those wonderful works, so much as a fresh vision and understanding

of the Living God who worked them. Amos has himself met with Jehovah

on the conditions of his own time--on the moral situation provided

by the living generation of Israel. By an intercourse conducted, not

through the distant signals of the past, but here and now, through the

events of the prophet's own day, Amos has received an original and

overpowering conviction of his people's God as absolute righteousness.

What prophecy had hitherto felt in part, and applied to one or other

of the departments of Israel's life, Amos is the first to feel in its

fulness, and to every extreme of its consequences upon the worship,

the conduct and the fortunes of the nation. To him Jehovah not only

commands this and that righteous law, but Jehovah and righteousness are

absolutely identical. _Seek Jehovah and ye shall live ... seek good

and ye shall live._[176] The absoluteness with which Amos conceived

this principle, the courage with which he applied it, carry him along

those two great lines upon which we most clearly trace his originality

as a prophet. In the strength of this principle he does what is really

new in Israel: he discards the two elements which had hitherto existed

alongside the ethical, and had fettered and warped it.

Up till now the ethical spirit of the religion of Jehovah[177] had

to struggle with two beliefs which we can trace back to the Semitic

origins of the religion--the belief, namely, that, as the national God,

Jehovah would always defend their political interests, irrespective

of morality; and the belief that a ceremonial of rites and sacrifices

was indispensable to religion. These principles were mutual: as the

deity was bound to succour the people, so were the people bound to

supply the deity with gifts, and the more of these they brought the

more they made sure of his favours. Such views were not absolutely

devoid of moral benefit. In the formative period of the nation they had

contributed both discipline and hope. But of late they had between them

engrossed men's hearts, and crushed out of religion both conscience and

common-sense. By the first of them, the belief in Jehovah's predestined

protection of Israel, the people's eyes were so holden they could

not see how threatening were the times; by the other, the confidence

in ceremonial, conscience was dulled, and that immorality permitted

which they mingled so shamelessly with their religious zeal. Now the

conscience of Amos did not merely protest against the predominance of

the two, but was so exclusive, so spiritual, that it boldly banished

both from religion. Amos denied that Jehovah was bound to save His

people; he affirmed that ritual and sacrifice were no part of the

service He demands from men. This is the measure of originality in our

prophet. The two religious principles which were inherent in the very

fibre of Semitic religion, and which till now had gone unchallenged

in Israel, Amos cast forth from religion in the name of a pure and

absolute righteousness. On the one hand, Jehovah's peculiar connection

with Israel meant no more than jealousy for their holiness: _You only

have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore will I visit

upon you all your iniquities._[178] And, on the other hand, all their

ceremonial was abhorrent to Him: _I hate, I despise your festivals....

Though ye offer Me burnt offerings and your meal offerings, I will not

accept them.... Take thou away from Me the noise of thy songs; I will

not hear the music of thy viols. But let justice run down as waters,

and righteousness as a perennial stream._[179]

It has just been said that emphasis upon morality as the sum of

religion, to the exclusion of sacrifice, is the most original element

in the prophecies of Amos. He himself, however, does not regard

this as proclaimed for the first time in Israel, and the precedent

he quotes is so illustrative of the sources of his inspiration that

we do well to look at it for a little. In the verse next to the one

last quoted he reports these words of God: _Did ye offer unto Me

sacrifices and gifts in the wilderness, for forty years, O house of

Israel?_ An extraordinary challenge! From the present blind routine

of sacrifice Jehovah appeals to the beginning of His relations with

the nation: did they then perform such services to Him? Of course, a

negative answer is expected. No other agrees with the main contention

of the passage. In the wilderness Israel had not offered sacrifices

and gifts to Jehovah. Jeremiah quotes a still more explicit word of

Jehovah: _I spake not unto your fathers in the day that I brought

them out of the land of Egypt concerning burnt offerings and

sacrifices: but this thing I commanded them, saying, Obey My voice,

and I will be your God, and ye shall be My people._[180]

To these Divine statements we shall not be able to do justice if

we hold by the traditional view that the Levitical legislation was

proclaimed in the wilderness. Discount that legislation, and the

statements become clear. It is true, of course, that Israel must

have had a ritual of some kind from the first; and that both in the

wilderness and in Canaan their spiritual leaders must have performed

sacrifices as if these were acceptable to Jehovah. But even so the

Divine words which Amos and Jeremiah quote are historically correct;

for while the ethical contents of the religion of Jehovah were its

original and essential contents--_I commanded them, saying, Obey

My voice_--the ritual was but a modification of the ritual common

to all Semites; and ever since the occupation of the land, it had,

through the infection of the Canaanite rites on the high places,

grown more and more Pagan, both in its functions and in the ideas

which these were supposed to express.[181] Amos was right. Sacrifice

had never been the Divine, the revealed element in the religion of

Jehovah. Nevertheless, before Amos no prophet in Israel appears to

have said so. And what enabled this man in the eighth century to

offer testimony, so novel but so true, about the far-away beginnings

of his people's religion in the fourteenth, was plainly neither

tradition nor historical research, but an overwhelming conviction

of the spiritual and moral character of God--of Him who had been

Israel's God both then and now, and whose righteousness had been,

just as much then as now, exalted above all purely national interests

and all susceptibility to ritual. When we thus see the prophet's

knowledge of the Living God enabling him, not only to proclaim an

ideal of religion more spiritual than Israel had yet dreamed, but

to perceive that such an ideal had been the essence of the religion

of Jehovah from the first, we understand how thoroughly Amos was

mastered by that knowledge. If we need any further proof of his

"possession" by the character of God, we find it in those phrases

in which his own consciousness disappears, and we have no longer

the herald's report of the Lord's words, but the very accents of

the Lord Himself, fraught with personal feeling of the most intense

quality. _I_ Jehovah _hate, I despise your feast days.... Take thou

away from Me the noise of thy songs; I will not hear the music of

thy viols._[182]... _I abhor the arrogance of Jacob, and hate his

palaces._[183]... _The eyes of the Lord Jehovah are upon the sinful

kingdom._[184]... _Jehovah sweareth, I will never forget any of

their works._[185] Such sentences reveal a Deity who is not only

manifest Character, but surgent and importunate Feeling. We have

traced the prophet's word to its ultimate source. It springs from

the righteousness, the vigilance, the urgency of the Eternal. The

intellect, imagination and heart of Amos--the convictions he has

inherited from his people's past, his conscience of their evil life

to-day, his impressions of current and coming history--are all

enforced and illuminated, all made impetuous and radiant, by the

Spirit, that is to say the Purpose and the Energy, of the Living God.

Therefore, as he says in the title of his book, or as some one says

for him, Amos _saw_ his words. They stood out objective to himself.

And they were not mere sound. They glowed and burned with God.

When we realise this, we feel how inadequate it is to express

prophecy in the terms of evolution. No doubt, as we have seen,

the ethics and religion of Amos represent a large and measurable

advance upon those of earlier Israel. And yet with Amos we do

not seem so much to have arrived at a new stage in a Process, as

to have penetrated to the Idea which has been behind the Process

from the beginning. The change and growth of Israel's religion are

realities--their fruits can be seen, defined, catalogued--but a

greater reality is the unseen Purpose which impels them. They have

been expressed only now. He has been unchanging from old and for

ever--from the first absolute righteousness in Himself, and absolute

righteousness in His demands from men.

3. THE PROPHET AND HIS MINISTRY.

AMOS vii., viii. 1-4.

We have seen the preparation of the Man for the Word; we have sought

to trace to its source the Word which came to the Man. It now remains

for us to follow the Prophet, Man and Word combined, upon his

Ministry to the people.

For reasons given in a previous chapter,[186] there must always be

some doubt as to the actual course of the ministry of Amos before

his appearance at Bethel. Most authorities, however, agree that

the visions recounted in the beginning of the seventh chapter form

the substance of his address at Bethel, which was interrupted by

the priest Amaziah. These visions furnish a probable summary of

the prophet's experience up to that point. While they follow the

same course, which we trace in the two series of oracles that now

precede them in the book, the ideas in them are less elaborate. At

the same time it is evident that Amos must have already spoken upon

other points than those which he puts into the first three visions.

For instance, Amaziah reports to the king that Amos had explicitly

predicted the exile of the whole people[187]--a conviction which,

as we have seen, the prophet reached only after some length of

experience. It is equally certain that Amos must have already exposed

the sins of the people in the light of the Divine righteousness. Some

of the sections of the book which deal with this subject appear to

have been originally spoken; and it is unnatural to suppose that the

prophet announced the chastisements of God without having previously

justified these to the consciences of men.

If this view be correct, Amos, having preached for some time to

Israel concerning the evil state of society, appeared at a great

religious festival in Bethel, determined to bring matters to a

crisis, and to announce the doom which his preaching threatened and

the people's continued impenitence made inevitable. Mark his choice

of place and of audience. It was no mere king he aimed at. Nathan had

dealt with David, Gad with Solomon, Elijah with Ahab and Jezebel.

But Amos sought the people, them with whom resided the real forces

and responsibilities of life: the wealth, the social fashions,

the treatment of the poor, the spirit of worship, the ideals of

religion.[188] And Amos sought the people upon what was not only a

great popular occasion, but one on which was arrayed, in all pomp and

lavishness, the very system he essayed to overthrow. The religion

of his time--religion as mere ritual and sacrifice--was what God

had sent him to beat down, and he faced it at its headquarters, and

upon one of its high days, in the royal and popular sanctuary where

it enjoyed at once the patronage of the crown, the lavish gifts of

the rich and the thronged devotion of the multitude. As Savonarola

at the Duomo in Florence, as Luther at the Diet of Worms, as our

Lord Himself at the feast in Jerusalem, so was Amos at the feast in

Bethel. Perhaps he was still more lonely. He speaks nowhere of having

made a disciple, and in the sea of faces which turned on him when

he spoke, it is probable that he could not welcome a single ally.

They were officials, or interested traders, or devotees; he was a

foreigner and a wild man, with a word that spared the popular dogma

as little as the royal prerogative. Well for him was it that over

all those serried ranks of authority, those fanatic crowds, that

lavish splendour, another vision commanded his eyes. _I saw the Lord

standing over the altar, and He said, Smite._

Amos told the pilgrims at Bethel that the first events of his time in

which he felt a purpose of God in harmony with his convictions about

Israel's need of punishment were certain calamities of a physical kind.

Of these, which in chapter iv. he describes as successively drought,

blasting, locusts, pestilence and earthquake, he selected at Bethel

only two--locusts and drought--and he began with the locusts. It may

have been either the same visitation as he specifies in chapter iv.,

or a previous one; for of all the plagues of Palestine locusts have

been the most frequent, occurring every six or seven years. _Thus the

Lord Jehovah caused me to see: and, behold, a brood_[189] _of locusts

at the beginning of the coming up of the spring crops._ In the Syrian

year there are practically two tides of verdure: one which starts after

the early rains of October and continues through the winter, checked

by the cold; and one which comes away with greater force under the

influence of the latter rains and more genial airs of spring.[190] Of

these it was the later and richer which the locusts had attacked. _And,

behold, it was after the king's mowings._ These seem to have been a

tribute which the kings of Israel levied on the spring herbage, and

which the Roman governors of Syria used annually to impose in the month

Nisan.[191] _After the king's mowings_ would be a phrase to mark the

time when everybody else might turn to reap their green stuff. It was

thus the very crisis of the year when the locusts appeared; the April

crops devoured, there was no hope of further fodder till December.

Still, the calamity had happened before, and had been survived; a

nation so vigorous and wealthy as Israel was under Jeroboam II. need

not have been frightened to death. But Amos felt it with a conscience.

To him it was the beginning of that destruction of his people which

the spirit within him knew that their sin had earned. So _it came to

pass, when_ the locusts _had made an end of devouring the verdure of

the earth, that I said, Remit, I pray Thee,_ or _pardon_--a proof that

there already weighed on the prophet's spirit something more awful than

loss of grass--_how shall Jacob rise again? for he is little_.[192]

The prayer was heard. _Jehovah repented for this: It shall not be,

said Jehovah._ The unnameable _it_ must be the same as in the frequent

phrase of the first chapter: _I will not turn It back_--namely, the

final execution of doom on the people's sin. The reserve with which

this is mentioned, both while there is still chance for the people to

repent and after it has become irrevocable, is very impressive.

The next example which Amos gave at Bethel of his permitted insight

into God's purpose was a great drought. _Thus the Lord Jehovah made

me to see: and, behold, the Lord Jehovah was calling fire into the

quarrel._[193] There was, then, already a quarrel between Jehovah

and His people--another sign that the prophet's moral conviction of

Israel's sin preceded the rise of the events in which he recognised

its punishment. _And_ the fire _devoured the Great Deep, yea, it was

about to devour the land_.[194] Severe drought in Palestine might well

be described as fire, even when it was not accompanied by the flame

and smoke of those forest and prairie fires which Joel describes as

its consequences.[195] But to have the full fear of such a drought, we

should need to feel beneath us the curious world which the men of those

days felt. To them the earth rested in a great deep, from whose stores

all her springs and fountains burst. When these failed it meant that

the unfathomed floods below were burnt up. But how fierce the flame

that could effect this! And how certainly able to devour next the solid

land which rested above the deep--the very _Portion_[196] assigned by

God to His people. Again Amos interceded: _Lord Jehovah, I pray Thee

forbear: how shall Jacob rise? for he is little._ And for the second

time Jacob was reprieved. _Jehovah repented for this: It also shall not

come to pass, said the Lord Jehovah._

We have treated these visions, not as the imagination or prospect of

possible disasters,[197] but as insight into the meaning of actual

plagues. Such a treatment is justified, not only by the invariable

habit of Amos to deal with real facts, but also by the occurrence of

these same plagues among the series by which, as we are told, God had

already sought to move the people to repentance.[198] The general

question of sympathy between such purely physical disasters and the

moral evil of a people we may postpone to another chapter, confining

ourselves here to the part played in the events by the prophet himself.

Surely there is something wonderful in the attitude of this shepherd

to the fires and plagues that Nature sweeps upon his land. He is

ready for them. And he is ready not only by the general feeling of

his time that such things happen of the wrath of God. His sovereign

and predictive conscience recognises them as her ministers. They

are sent to punish a people whom she has already condemned. Yet,

unlike Elijah, Amos does not summon the drought, nor even welcome

its arrival. How far has prophecy travelled since the violent

Tishbite! With all his conscience of Israel's sin, Amos yet prays

that their doom may be turned. We have here some evidence of the

struggle through which these later prophets passed, before they

accepted their awful messages to men. Even Amos, desert-bred and

living aloof from Israel, shrank from the judgment which it was his

call to publish. For two moments--they would appear to be the only

two in his ministry--his heart contended with his conscience, and

twice he entreated God to forgive. At Bethel he told the people all

this, in order to show how unwillingly he took up his duty against

them, and how inevitable he found that duty to be. But still more

shall we learn from his tale, if we feel in his words about the

smallness of Jacob, not pity only, but sympathy. We shall learn that

prophets are never made solely by the bare word of God, but that even

the most objective and judicial of them has to earn his title to

proclaim judgment by suffering with men the agony of the judgment he

proclaims. Never to a people came there a true prophet who had not

first prayed for them. To have entreated for men, to have represented

them in the highest courts of Being, is to have deserved also supreme

judicial rights upon them. And thus it is that our Judge at the Last

Day shall be none other than our great Advocate who continually

maketh intercession for us. It is prayer, let us repeat, which, while

it gives us all power with God, endows us at the same time with moral

rights over men. Upon his mission of judgment we shall follow Amos

with the greater sympathy that he thus comes forth to it from the

mercy-seat and the ministry of intercession.

The first two visions which Amos told at Bethel were of disasters in

the sphere of nature, but his third lay in the sphere of politics.

The two former were, in their completeness at least, averted; and

the language Amos used of them seems to imply that he had not even

then faced the possibility of a final overthrow. He took for granted

_Jacob_ was _to rise again_: he only feared as to _how_ this should

be. But the third vision is so final that the prophet does not even

try to intercede. Israel is measured, found wanting and doomed.

Assyria is not named, but is obviously intended; and the fact that

the prophet arrives at certainty with regard to the doom of Israel,

just when he thus comes within sight of Assyria, is instructive as to

the influence exerted on prophecy by the rise of that empire.[199]

_Thus He gave me to see: and, behold, the Lord had taken His

station_--'tis a more solemn word than the _stood_ of our

versions--_upon a city wall_ built to _the plummet,_[200] _and in

His hand a plummet. And Jehovah said unto me, What art thou seeing,

Amos?_ The question surely betrays some astonishment shown by the

prophet at the vision or some difficulty he felt in making it out.

He evidently does not feel it at once, as the natural result of his

own thinking: it is objective and strange to him; he needs time to

see into it. _And I said, A plummet. And the Lord said, Behold, I

am setting a plummet in the midst of My people Israel. I will not

again pass them over._ To set a measuring line or a line with weights

attached to any building means to devote it to destruction;[201]

but here it is uncertain whether the plummet threatens destruction,

or means that Jehovah will at last clearly prove to the prophet the

insufferable obliquity of the fabric of the nation's life, originally

set straight by Himself--originally _a wall of a plummet_. For God's

judgments are never arbitrary: by a standard we men can read He shows

us their necessity. Conscience itself is no mere voice of authority:

it is a convincing plummet, and plainly lets us see _why_ we should

be punished. But whichever interpretation we choose, the result is

the same. _The high places of Israel shall be desolate, and the

sanctuaries of Isaac laid waste; and I will rise against the house

of Jeroboam with the sword._ A declaration of war! Israel is to be

invaded, her dynasty overthrown. Every one who heard the prophet

would know, though he named them not, that the Assyrians were meant.

It was apparently at this point that Amos was interrupted by Amaziah.

The priest, who was conscious of no spiritual power with which to

oppose the prophet, gladly grasped the opportunity afforded him by

the mention of the king, and fell back on the invariable resource of

a barren and envious sacerdotalism: _He speaketh against Cæsar._[202]

There follows one of the great scenes of history--the scene which,

however fast the ages and the languages, the ideals and the deities

may change, repeats itself with the same two actors. Priest and Man

face each other--Priest with King behind, Man with God--and wage

that debate in which the whole warfare and progress of religion

consist. But the story is only typical by being real. Many subtle

traits of human nature prove that we have here an exact narrative

of fact. Take Amaziah's report to Jeroboam. He gives to the words

of the prophet just that exaggeration and innuendo which betray the

wily courtier, who knows how to accentuate a general denunciation

till it feels like a personal attack. And yet, like every Caiaphas

of his tribe, the priest in his exaggerations expresses a deeper

meaning than he is conscious of. _Amos_--note how the mere mention

of the name without description proves that the prophet was already

known in Israel, perhaps was one on whom the authorities had

long kept their eye--_Amos hath conspired against thee_--yet God

was his only fellow-conspirator!--_in the midst of the house of

Israel_--this royal temple at Bethel. _The land is not able to hold

his words_--it must burst; yes, but in another sense than thou

meanest, O Caiaphas-Amaziah! _For thus hath Amos said, By the sword

shall Jeroboam die_--Amos had spoken only of the dynasty, but the

twist which Amaziah lends to the words is calculated--_and Israel

going shall go into captivity from off his own land_. This was the

one unvarnished spot in the report.

Having fortified himself, as little men will do, by his duty to

the powers that be, Amaziah dares to turn upon the prophet; and he

does so, it is amusing to observe, with that tone of intellectual

and moral superiority which it is extraordinary to see some men

derive from a merely official station or touch with royalty.

_Visionary,_[203] _begone! Get thee off to the land of Judah;

and earn_[204] _thy bread there, and there play the prophet. But

at Bethel_--mark the rising accent of the voice--_thou shalt not

again prophesy. The King's Sanctuary it is, and the House of the

Kingdom._[205] With the official mind this is more conclusive than

that it is the House of God! In fact the speech of Amaziah justifies

the hardest terms which Amos uses of the religion of his day. In all

this priest says there is no trace of the spiritual--only fear, pride

and privilege. Divine truth is challenged by human law, and the Word

of God silenced in the name of the king.

We have here a conception of religion, which is not merely due to

the unspiritual character of the priest who utters it, but has its

roots in the far back origins of Israel's religion. The Pagan Semite

identified absolutely State and Church; and on that identification

was based the religious practice of early Israel. It had many healthy

results: it kept religion in touch with public life; order, justice,

patriotism, self-sacrifice for the common weal, were devoutly held

to be matters of religion. So long, therefore, as the system was

inspired by truly spiritual ideals, nothing for those times could be

better. But we see in it an almost inevitable tendency to harden to

the sheerest officialism. That it was more apt to do so in Israel

than in Judah, is intelligible from the political origin of the

Northern Schism, and the erection of the national sanctuaries from

motives of mere statecraft.[206] Erastianism could hardly be more

flagrant or more ludicrous in its opposition to true religion than at

Bethel. And yet how often have the ludicrousness and the flagrancy

been repeated, with far less temptation! Ever since Christianity

became a state religion, she that needed least to use the weapons of

this world has done so again and again in a thoroughly Pagan fashion.

The attempts of Churches by law established, to stamp out by law all

religious dissent; or where such attempts were no longer possible,

the charges now of fanaticism and now of sordidness and religious

shopkeeping, which have been so frequently made against dissent by

little men who fancied their state connection, or their higher social

position, to mean an intellectual and moral superiority; the absurd

claims which many a minister of religion makes upon the homes and

the souls of a parish, by virtue not of his calling in Christ, but

of his position as official priest of the parish,--all these are the

sins of Amaziah, priest of Bethel. But they are not confined to

an established Church. The Amaziahs of dissent are also very many.

Wherever the official masters the spiritual; wherever mere dogma or

tradition is made the standard of preaching; wherever new doctrine is

silenced, or programmes of reform condemned, as of late years in Free

Churches they have sometimes been, not by spiritual argument, but

by the _ipse dixit_ of the dogmatist, or by ecclesiastical rule or

expediency,--there you have the same spirit. The dissenter who checks

the Word of God in the name of some denominational law or dogma is

as Erastian as the churchman who would crush it, like Amaziah, by

invoking the state. These things in all the Churches are the beggarly

rudiments of Paganism; and religious reform is achieved, as it was

that day at Bethel, by the abjuring of officialism.

_But Amos answered and said unto Amaziah, No prophet I, nor prophet's

son. But a herdsman_[207] _I, and a dresser of sycomores; and Jehovah

took me from behind the flock, and Jehovah said unto me, Go, prophesy

unto My people Israel._

On such words we do not comment; we give them homage. The answer

of this shepherd to this priest is no mere claim of personal

disinterestedness. It is the protest of a new order of prophecy,[208]

the charter of a spiritual religion. As we have seen, the _sons of the

prophets_ were guilds of men who had taken to prophesying because of

certain gifts of temper and natural disposition, and they earned their

bread by the exercise of these. Among such abstract craftsmen Amos

will not be reckoned. He is a prophet, but not of the kind with which

his generation was familiar. An ordinary member of society, he has been

suddenly called by Jehovah from his civil occupation for a special

purpose and by a call which has not necessarily to do with either gifts

or a profession. This was something new, not only in itself, but in

its consequences upon the general relations of God to men. What we see

in this dialogue at Bethel is, therefore, not merely the triumph of a

character, however heroic, but rather a step forward--and that one of

the greatest and most indispensable--in the history of religion.

There follows a denunciation of the man who sought to silence this

fresh voice of God. _Now therefore hearken to the word of Jehovah

thou that sayest, Prophesy not against Israel, nor let drop thy words

against the house of Israel; therefore thus saith Jehovah...._ Thou

hast presumed to say; _Hear what God will say_. Thou hast dared to

set thine office and system against His word and purpose. See how

they must be swept away. In defiance of its own rules the grammar

flings forward to the beginnings of its clauses, each detail of the

priest's estate along with the scene of its desecration. _Thy wife

in the city--shall play the harlot; and thy sons and thy daughters

by the sword--shall fall; and thy land by the measuring rope--shall

be divided; and thou in an unclean land--shalt die._ Do not let us

blame the prophet for a coarse cruelty in the first of these details.

He did not invent it. With all the rest it formed an ordinary

consequence of defeat in the warfare of the times--an inevitable item

of that general overthrow which, with bitter emphasis, the prophet

describes in Amaziah's own words: _Israel going shall go into

captivity from off his own land_.

There is added a vision in line with the three which preceded the

priest's interruption. We are therefore justified in supposing that

Amos spoke it also on this occasion, and in taking it as the close of

his address at Bethel. _Then the Lord Jehovah gave me to see: and,

behold, a basket of Ḳaits_, that is, _summer fruit. And He said, What

art thou seeing, Amos? And I said, A basket of Ḳaits. And Jehovah

said unto me, The Ḳets--the End--has come upon My people Israel. I

will not again pass them over._ This does not carry the prospect

beyond the third vision, but it stamps its finality, and there is

therefore added a vivid realisation of the result. By four disjointed

lamentations, _howls_ the prophet calls them, we are made to feel

the last shocks of the final collapse, and in the utter end an awful

silence. _And the songs of the temple shall be changed into howls

in that day, saith the Lord Jehovah. Multitude of corpses! In every

place! He hath cast out! Hush!_

These then were probably the last words which Amos spoke to Israel.

If so, they form a curious echo of what was enforced upon himself,

and he may have meant them as such. He was _cast out_; he was

_silenced_. They might almost be the verbal repetition of the

priest's orders. In any case the silence is appropriate. But Amaziah

little knew what power he had given to prophecy the day he forbade it

to speak. The gagged prophet began to write; and those accents which,

humanly speaking, might have died out with the songs of the temple

of Bethel were clothed upon with the immortality of literature. Amos

silenced wrote a book--first of prophets to do so--and this is the

book we have now to study.

FOOTNOTES:

[130] Cornill: _Der Israelitische Prophetismus. Five Lectures for the

Educated Laity._ 1894.

[131] Amos vii. 14. See further pp. 76 f.

[132] Khurbet Taḳûa', Hebrew Teḳôa', תְּקֹוע, from תקע, _to blow a

trumpet_ (cf. Jer. vi. 1, _Blow the trumpet in Tekoa_) or _to pitch a

tent_. The latter seems the more probable derivation of the name, and

suggests a nomadic origin, which agrees with the position of Tekoa

on the borders of the desert. Tekoa does not occur in the list of

the towns taken by Joshua. There are really no reasons for supposing

that some other Tekoa is meant. The two that have been alleged are

(1) that Amos exclusively refers to the Northern Kingdom, (2) that

sycomores do not grow at such levels as Tekoa. These are dealt with

on pp. 79 and 77 respectively.

[133] 2 Chron. xx. 20.

[134] נֹקֵד, nôḳêd, is doubtless the same as the Arabic "naḳḳâd,"

or keeper of the "naḳad," defined by Freytag as a short-legged and

deformed race of sheep in the Bahrein province of Arabia, from

which comes the proverb "viler than a naḳad"; yet the wool is very

fine. The king of Moab is called נוֹקֵד in 2 Kings iii. 4 (A.V.

_sheep-master_). In vii. 14 Amos calls himself בּוֹקֵר, _cattleman_,

which there is no reason to alter, as some do, to נֹוקֵד.

[135] בֹּולֵס, bôlês, probably from a root (found in Æthiopic) balas,

_a fig_; hence one who _had to do with figs, handled them, ripened

them_.

[136] The Egyptian sycomore, _Ficus sycomorus_, is not found in Syria

above one thousand feet above the sea, while Tekoa is more than twice

as high as that. Cf. 1 Kings x. 27, _the sycomores that are in the

vale_ or _valley land_, עֵמֶק; 1 Chron. xxvii. 28, _the sycomores

that are in the low plains_. "The sycamore grows in sand on the

edge of the desert as vigorously as in the midst of a well-watered

country. Its roots go deep in search of water, which infiltrates

as far as the gorges of the hills, and they absorb it freely even

where drought seems to reign supreme" (Maspero on the Egyptian

sycomore; _The Dawn of Civilization_, translated by McClure, p. 26).

"Everywhere on the confines of cultivated ground, and even at some

distance from the valley, are fine single sycamores flourishing as

though by miracle amid the sand.... They drink from water, which has

infiltrated from the Nile, and whose existence is nowise betrayed

upon the surface of the soil" (_ib._, 121). Always and still

reverenced by Moslem and Christian.

[137] So practically Oort (_Th. Tjidsch._, 1891, 121 ff.), when

compelled to abandon his previous conclusion (_ib._, 1880, 122 ff.)

that the Tekoa of Amos lay in Northern Israel.

[138] In 1891 we met the Rushaideh, who cultivate Engedi, encamped

just below Tekoa. But at other parts of the borders between the

hill-country of Judæa and the desert, and between Moab and the

desert, we found round most of the herdsmen's central wells a few

fig-trees or pomegranates, or even apricots occasionally.

[139] Luke i. 80.

[140] Mark i. 18.

[141] v. 5; viii. 14.

[142] See p. 36.

[143] Prov. xxxi. 24.

[144] vi. 10.

[145] i. 9.

[146] v. 16.

[147] v. 21 ff.

[148] li. 7, 8.

[149] viii. 4 ff.

[150] vi. 1, 4-7.

[151] See pp. 136 f.

[152] i. 2.

[153] שׁופר, as has been pointed out, means in early Israel always

the trumpet blown as a summons to war; only in later Israel was the

name given to the temple trumpet.

[154] See further on this important passage pp. 89 ff.

[155] _Shall a little bird fall on the snare earthwards and there be no

noose about her? Shall a snare rise from the ground and not be taking

something?_ On this see p. 82. Its meaning seems to be equivalent to

the Scottish proverb: "There's aye some water whan the stirkie droons."

[156] There is thus no reason to alter the words _who shall not

prophesy_ to _who shall not tremble_--as Wellhausen does. To do so is

to blunt the point of the argument.

[157] See Chap. IV.

[158] See pp. 53 ff.

[159] See pp. 69 f.

[160] viii. 8.

[161] viii. 9.

[162] v. 14.

[163] How far Assyria assisted the development of prophecy we have

already seen. But we have been made aware, at the same time, that

Assyria's service to Israel in this respect presupposed the possession

by the prophets of certain beliefs in the character and will of

their God, Jehovah. The prophets' faith could never have risen to

the magnitude of the new problems set to it by Assyria if there had

not been already inherent in it that belief in the sovereignty of a

Righteousness of which all things material were but the instruments.

[164] Compare, for instance, Hosea's condemnation of Jehu's murder of

Joram, with Elisha's command to do it; also 2 Kings iii. 19, 25, with

Deut. xx. 19.

[165] See above, p. 10.

[166] Isa. xxviii.

[167] Amos ii.

[168] _Ante_, p. 74.

[169] i. 2.

[170] Therefore we see at a glance how utterly inadequate is Renan's

brilliant comparison of Amos to a modern revolutionary journalist

(_Histoire du Peuple Israel_, II.). Journalist indeed! How all this

would-be cosmopolitan and impartial critic's judgments smack of the

boulevards!

[171] Exod. xx.; incorporated in the JE book of history, and,

according to nearly all critics, complete by 750; the contents must

have been familiar in Israel long before that. There is no trace in

Amos of any influence peculiar to either the Deuteronomic or the

Levitical legislation.

[172] See especially Schultz, _O. T. Theol._, Eng. Trans. by

Paterson, I. 214.

[173] ii. 9-11. On this passage see further p. 137.

[174] If iv. 13, v. 8 and ix. 6 be genuine, this remark equally

applies to belief in Jehovah as Creator.

[175] Kayser, _Old Testament Theology_.

[176] v. 6, 14.

[177] See above, p. 18.

[178] iii. 2.

[179] v. 21 ff.

[180] Jer. vii. 22 f.

[181] See above, p. 23.

[182] v. 21-23.

[183] vi. 8.

[184] ix. 8

[185] viii. 7.

[186] Chap. V., p. 71.

[187] vii. 11.

[188] On the ministry of eighth-century prophets to the people see

the author's _Isaiah_, I., p. 119.

[189] So LXX., followed by Hitzig and Wellhausen, by reading יֵצֶר

for יֹוצֵר.

[190] Cf. _Hist. Geography of the Holy Land_, pp. 64 ff. The word

translated _spring crop_ above is לקש, and from the same root as

the name of the latter rain, מַלְקֹושׁ, which falls in the end

of March or beginning of April. Cf. _Zeitschrift des deutschen

Palästina-Vereins_, IV. 83; VIII. 62.

[191] Cf. 1 Kings xviii. 5 with 1 Sam. vii. 15, 17; 1 Kings iv. 7 ff.

See Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, 228.

[192] LXX.: _Who shall raise up Jacob again?_

[193] So Professor A. B. Davidson. But the grammar might equally well

afford the rendering _one calling that the Lord will punish with the

fire_, the ל of לריב marking the introduction of indirect speech (cf.

Ewald, § 338_a_). But Hitzig for קרא reads קרה (Deut. xxv. 18), to

occur, happen. So similarly Wellhausen, _es nahte sich zu strafen mit

Feuer der Herr Jahve_. All these renderings yield practically the

same meaning.

[194] A. B. Davidson, _Syntax_, § 57, Rem. 1.

[195] i. 19 f.

[196] Cf. Micah ii. 3. חֵלֶק is the word used, and according to the

motive given above stands well for the climax of the fire's destructive

work. This meets the objection of Wellhausen, who proposes to omit

חֵלֶק, because the heat does not dry up first the great deep and then

the fields (_Ackerflur_). This is to mistake the obvious point of the

sentence. The drought was so great that, after the fountains were

exhausted, it seemed as if the solid framework of the land, described

with very apt pathos as the _Portion_, would be the next to disappear.

Some take הלק as _divided_, therefore cultivated, ground.

[197] So for instance, Von Orelli.

[198] Chap. iv.

[199] See Chap. IV., p. 51.

[200] Literally _of the plummet_, an obscure expression. It cannot

mean plumb-straight, for the wall is condemned.

[201] 2 Kings xxi. 13: _I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of

Samaria and the plummet_ or _weight_ (מִשְׁקֹלֶת) _of the house

of Ahab_. Isa. xxxiv. 11: _He shall stretch over it the cord of

confusion, and the weights_ (literally _stones_) _of emptiness_.

[202] John xix. 12.

[203] The word _seer_ is here used in a contemptuous sense, and has

therefore to be translated by some such word as _visionary_.

[204] Literally _eat_.

[205] מַמְלָכָה בֵּית--that is, a _central_ or _capital sanctuary_.

Cf. הַמַּמְלָכָה עִיר (1 Sam. xxvii. 5), _city of the kingdom_,

_i.e._ chief or capital town.

[206] 1 Kings xii. 26, 27.

[207] _Prophet_ and _prophet's son_ are equivalent terms, the latter

meaning one of the professional guilds of prophets. There is no need

to change herdsman, בוקר, as Wellhausen does, into נוקד, shepherd,

the word used in i. 1.

[208] Cf. Wellhausen, _Hist._, Eng. Ed., § 6: "Amos was the founder

and the purest type of a new order of prophecy."