_ATROCITIES AND ATROCITIES_
AMOS i. 3-ii.
Like all the prophets of Israel, Amos receives oracles for foreign
nations. Unlike them, however, he arranges these oracles not after,
but before, his indictment of his own people, and so as to lead up
to this. His reason is obvious and characteristic. If his aim be
to enforce a religion independent of his people's interests and
privileges, how can he better do so than by exhibiting its principles
at work outside his people, and then, with the impetus drained from
many areas, sweep in upon the vested iniquities of Israel herself?
This is the course of the first section of his book--chapters i. and
ii. One by one the neighbours of Israel are cited and condemned in
the name of Jehovah; one by one they are told they must fall before
the still unnamed engine of the Divine Justice. But when Amos has
stirred his people's conscience and imagination by his judgment of
their neighbours' sins, he turns with the same formula on themselves.
Are they morally better? Are they more likely to resist Assyria? With
greater detail he shows them worse and their doom the heavier for all
their privileges. Thus is achieved an oratorical triumph, by tactics
in harmony with the principles of prophecy and remarkably suited to
the tempers of that time.
But Amos achieves another feat, which extends far beyond his own day.
The sins he condemns in the heathen are at first sight very different
from those which he exposes within Israel. Not only are they sins of
foreign relations, of treaty and war, while Israel's are all civic and
domestic; but they are what we call the atrocities of Barbarism--wanton
war, massacre and sacrilege--while Israel's are rather the sins of
Civilisation--the pressure of the rich upon the poor, the bribery
of justice, the seduction of the innocent, personal impurity, and
other evils of luxury. So great is this difference that a critic more
gifted with ingenuity than with insight might plausibly distinguish
in the section before us two prophets with two very different views
of national sin--a ruder prophet, and of course an earlier, who
judged nations only by the flagrant drunkenness of their war, and a
more subtle prophet, and of course a later, who exposed the masked
corruptions of their religion and their peace. Such a theory would be
as false as it would be plausible. For not only is the diversity of
the objects of the prophet's judgment explained by this, that Amos had
no familiarity with the interior life of other nations, and could only
arraign their conduct at those points where it broke into light in
their foreign relations, while Israel's civic life he knew to the very
core. But Amos had besides a strong and a deliberate aim in placing
the sins of civilisation as the climax of a list of the atrocities of
barbarism. He would recall what men are always forgetting, that the
former are really more cruel and criminal than the latter; that luxury,
bribery and intolerance, the oppression of the poor, the corruption
of the innocent and the silencing of the prophet--what Christ calls
offences against His little ones--are even more awful atrocities than
the wanton horrors of barbarian warfare. If we keep in mind this moral
purpose, we shall study with more interest than we could otherwise do
the somewhat foreign details of this section. Horrible as the outrages
are which Amos describes, they were repeated only yesterday by Turkey:
many of the crimes with which he charges Israel blacken the life of
Turkey's chief accuser, Great Britain.
In his survey Amos includes all the six states of Palestine
that bordered upon Israel, and lay in the way of the advance of
Assyria--Aram of Damascus, Philistia, Tyre (for Phœnicia), Edom,
Ammon and Moab. They are not arranged in geographical order. The
prophet begins with Aram in the north-east, then leaps to Philistia
in the south-west, comes north again to Tyre, crosses to the
south-east and Edom, leaps Moab to Ammon, and then comes back to
Moab. Nor is any other explanation of his order visible. Damascus
heads the list, no doubt, because her cruelties had been most felt
by Israel, and perhaps too because she lay most open to Assyria. It
was also natural to take next to Aram Philistia,[209] as Israel's
other greatest foe; and nearest to Philistia lay Tyre. The three
south-eastern principalities come together. But there may have been a
chronological reason now unknown to us.
The authenticity of the oracles on Tyre, Edom and Judah has been
questioned: it will be best to discuss each case as we come to it.
Each of the oracles is introduced by the formula: _Thus saith,_ or
_hath said, Jehovah: Because of three crimes of ... yea, because
of four, I will not turn It back._ In harmony with the rest of the
book,[210] Jehovah is represented as moving to punishment, not for a
single sin, but for repeated and cumulative guilt. The unnamed _It_
which God will not recall is not the word of judgment, but the anger
and the hand stretched forth to smite.[211] After the formula, an
instance of the nation's guilt is given, and then in almost identical
terms he decrees the destruction of all by war and captivity. Assyria
is not mentioned, but it is the Assyrian fashion of dealing with
conquered states which is described. Except in the case of Tyre and
Edom, the oracles conclude as they have begun, by asserting themselves
to be the _word of Jehovah_, or of _Jehovah the Lord_. It is no
abstract righteousness which condemns these foreign peoples, but the
God of Israel, and their evil deeds are described by the characteristic
Hebrew word for sin--_crimes_, _revolts_ or _treasons_ against Him.[212]
* * * * *
1. ARAM OF DAMASCUS.--_Thus hath Jehovah said: Because of three
crimes of Damascus, yea, because of four, I will not turn It
back; for that they threshed Gilead with iron_--or _basalt
threshing-sledges._ The word is _iron_, but the Arabs of to-day call
basalt iron; and the threshing-sledges, curved slabs[213] drawn
rapidly by horses over the heaped corn, are studded with sharp basalt
teeth that not only thresh out the grain, but chop the straw into
little pieces. So cruelly had Gilead been chopped by Hazael and his
son Ben-Hadad some fifty or forty years before Amos prophesied.[214]
Strongholds were burned, soldiers slain without quarter, children
dashed to pieces, and women with child put to a most atrocious
end.[215] But _I shall send fire on the house of Hazael, and it shall
devour the palaces of Ben-Hadad_--these names are chosen, not because
they were typical of the Damascus dynasty, but because they were the
very names of the two heaviest oppressors of Israel.[216] _And I
will break the bolt_[217] _of Damascus, and cut off the inhabitant
from Biḳ'ath-Aven_--the Valley of Idolatry, so called, perhaps,
by a play upon Biḳ'ath On,[218] presumably the valley between the
Lebanons, still called the Beḳ'a, in which lay Heliopolis[219]--_and
him that holdeth the sceptre from Beth-Eden_--some royal Paradise
in that region of Damascus, which is still the Paradise of the Arab
world--_and the people of Aram shall go captive to Ḳir_--Kir in the
unknown north, from which they had come:[220] _Jehovah hath said_ it.
2. PHILISTIA.--_Thus saith Jehovah: For three crimes of Gaza and
for four I will not turn It back, because they led captive a whole
captivity, in order to deliver them up to Edom._ It is difficult
to see what this means if not the wholesale depopulation of a
district in contrast to the enslavement of a few captives of war.
By all tribes of the ancient world, the captives of their bow and
spear were regarded as legitimate property: it was no offence to
the public conscience that they should be sold into slavery. But
the Philistines seem, without excuse of war, to have descended
upon certain districts and swept the whole of the population
before them, for purely commercial purposes. It was professional
slave-catching. The Philistines were exactly like the Arabs of to-day
in Africa--not warriors who win their captives in honourable fight,
but slave-traders, pure and simple. In warfare in Arabia itself
it is still a matter of conscience with the wildest nomads not to
extinguish a hostile tribe, however bitter one be against them.[221]
Gaza is chiefly blamed by Amos, for she was the emporium of the trade
on the border of the desert, with roads and regular caravans to Petra
and Elah on the Gulf of Akaba, both of them places in Edom and depots
for the traffic with Arabia.[222] _But I will cut off the inhabitant
from Ashdod, and the holder of the sceptre from Askalon, and I will
turn My hand upon Ekron_--four of the five great Philistine towns,
Gath being already destroyed, and never again to be mentioned with
the others[223]--_and the last of the Philistines shall perish:
Jehovah hath said it_.
3. TYRE.--_Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Tyre and
because of four I will not turn It back; for that they gave up a whole
captivity to Edom_--the same market as in the previous charge--_and did
not remember the covenant of brethren_. We do not know to what this
refers. The alternatives are three: that the captives were Hebrews
and the alliance one between Israel and Edom; that the captives were
Hebrews and the alliance one between Israel and Tyre;[224] that the
captives were Phœnicians and the alliance the natural brotherhood
of Tyre and the other Phœnician towns.[225] But of these three
alternatives the first is scarcely possible, for in such a case the
blame would have been rather Edom's in buying than Tyre's in selling.
The second is possible, for Israel and Tyre had lived in close alliance
for more than two centuries; but the phrase _covenant of brethren_ is
not so well suited to a league between two tribes who felt themselves
to belong to fundamentally different races,[226] as to the close
kinship of the Phœnician communities. And although, in the scrappy
records of Phœnician history before this time, we find no instance of
so gross an outrage by Tyre on other Phœnicians, it is quite possible
that such may have occurred. During next century Tyre twice over basely
took sides with Assyria in suppressing the revolts of her sister
cities.[227] Besides, the other Phœnician towns are not included in the
charge. We have every reason, therefore, to believe that Amos expresses
here not resentment against a betrayal of Israel, but indignation at
an outrage upon natural rights and feelings with which Israel's own
interests were not in any way concerned. And this also suits the lofty
spirit of the whole prophecy. _But I will send fire upon the wall of
Tyre, and it shall devour her palaces...._
This oracle against Tyre has been suspected by Wellhausen,[228] for
the following reasons: that it is of Tyre alone, and silence is kept
regarding the other Phœnician cities, while in the case of Philistia
other towns than Gaza are condemned; that the charge is the same as
against Gaza; and that the usual close to the formula is wanting. But
it would have been strange if from a list of states threatened by the
Assyrian doom we had missed Tyre, Tyre which lay in the avenger's
very path. Again, that so acute a critic as Wellhausen should cite
the absence of other Phœnician towns from the charge against Tyre
is really amazing, when he has just allowed that it was probably
against some or all of these cities that Tyre's crime was committed.
How could they be included in the blame of an outrage done upon
themselves? The absence of the usual formula at the close may perhaps
be explained by omission, as indicated above.[229]
4. EDOM.--_Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Edom and
because of four I will not turn It back; for that he pursued with the
sword his brother_, who cannot be any other than Israel, _corrupted
his natural feelings_--literally _his bowels of mercies--and kept aye
fretting_[230] _his anger, and his passion he watched_--like a fire,
or _paid heed_ to it--_for ever._[231] _But I will send fire upon
Teman_--the _South_ Region belonging to Edom--_and it shall devour the
palaces of Boṣrah_--the Edomite Boṣrah, south-east of Petra.[232] The
Assyrians had already compelled Edom to pay tribute.[233]
The objections to the authenticity of this oracle are more
serious than those in the case of the oracle on Tyre. It has been
remarked[234] that before the Jewish Exile so severe a tone could not
have been adopted by a Jew against Edom, who had been mostly under
the yoke of Judah, and not leniently treated. What were the facts?
Joab subdued Edom for David with great cruelty.[235] Jewish governors
were set over the conquered people, and this state of affairs seems
to have lasted, in spite of an Edomite attempt against Solomon,[236]
till 850. In Jehoshaphat's reign, 873-850, _there was no king of
Edom, a deputy was king_, who towards 850 joined the kings of Judah
and Israel in an invasion of Moab through his territory.[237] But,
soon after this invasion and perhaps in consequence of its failure,
Edom revolted from Joram of Judah (849-842), who unsuccessfully
attempted to put down the revolt.[238] The Edomites appear to have
remained independent for fifty years at least. Amaziah of Judah
(797-779) smote them,[239] but not it would seem into subjection,
for, according to the Chronicler, Uzziah had to win back Elath for
the Jews after Amaziah's death.[240] The history, therefore, of the
relations of Judah and Edom before the time of Amos was of such a
kind as to make credible the existence in Judah at that time of the
feeling about Edom which inspires this oracle. Edom had shown just
the vigilant, implacable hatred here described. But was the right
to blame them for it Judah's, who herself had so persistently waged
war, with confessed cruelty, against Edom? Could a Judæan prophet
be just in blaming Edom and saying nothing of Judah? It is true
that in the fifty years of Edom's independence--the period, we must
remember, from which Amos seems to draw the materials of all his
other charges--there may have been events to justify this oracle
as spoken by him; and our ignorance of that period is ample reason
why we should pause before rejecting the oracle so dogmatically as
Wellhausen does. But we have at least serious grounds for suspecting
it. To charge Edom, whom Judah has conquered and treated cruelly,
with restless hate towards Judah seems to fall below that high
impartial tone which prevails in the other oracles of this section.
The charge was much more justifiable at the time of the Exile, when
Edom did behave shamefully towards Israel.[241] Wellhausen points
out that Teman and Boṣrah are names which do not occur in the Old
Testament before the Exile, but this is uncertain and inconclusive.
The oracle wants the concluding formula of the rest.[242]
5. AMMON.--_Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Ammon and
because of four I will not turn It back; for that they ripped up
Gilead's women with child--in order to enlarge their borders!_ For such
an end they committed such an atrocity! The crime is one that has been
more or less frequent in Semitic warfare. Wellhausen cites several
instances in the feuds of Arab tribes about their frontiers. The Turks
have been guilty of it in our own day.[243] It is the same charge
which the historian of Israel puts into the mouth of Elisha against
Hazael of Aram,[244] and probably the war was the same; when Gilead was
simultaneously attacked by Arameans from the north and Ammonites from
the south. _But I will set fire to the wall of Rabbah_--Rabbath-Ammon,
literally _chief_ or _capital_ of Ammon--_and it shall devour her
palaces, with clamour in the day of battle, with tempest in the day of
storm_. As we speak of "storming a city," Amos and Isaiah[245] use the
tempest to describe the overwhelming invasion of Assyria. There follows
the characteristic Assyrian conclusion: _And their king shall go into
captivity, he and his princes_[246] _together, saith Jehovah_.
6. MOAB.--_Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Moab
and because of four I will not turn It back; for that he burned
the bones of the king of Edom to lime._[247] In the great invasion
of Moab, about 850, by Israel, Judah and Edom conjointly, the rage
of Moab seems to have been directed chiefly against Edom.[248]
Whether opportunity to appease that rage occurred on the withdrawal
of Israel we cannot say. But either then or afterwards, balked of
their attempt to secure the king of Edom alive, Moab wreaked their
vengeance on his corpse, and burnt his bones to lime. It was, in
the religious belief of all antiquity, a sacrilege; yet it does not
seem to have been the desecration of the tomb--or he would have
mentioned it--but the wanton meanness of the deed, which Amos felt.
_And I will send fire on Moab, and it shall devour the palaces of
The-Cities_--Ḳerîoth,[249] perhaps the present Ḳureiyat,[250] on
the Moab plateau where Chemosh had his shrine[251]--_and in tumult
shall Moab die_--to Jeremiah[252] the Moabites were the sons of
tumult--_with clamour and with the noise of the war-trumpet. And I
will cut off the ruler_--literally _judge_, probably the vassal king
placed by Jeroboam II.--_from her_[253] _midst, and all his_[254]
_princes will I slay with him: Jehovah hath said_ it.
* * * * *
These, then, are the charges which Amos brings against the heathen
neighbours of Israel.
If we look as a whole across the details through which we have been
working, what we see is a picture of the Semitic world so summary and
so vivid that we get the like of it nowhere else--the Semitic world
in its characteristic brokenness and turbulence; its factions and
ferocities, its causeless raids and quarrels, tribal disputes about
boundaries flaring up into the most terrible massacres, vengeance that
wreaks itself alike on the embryo and the corpse--_cutting up women
with child in Gilead,_ and _burning to lime the bones of the king of
Edom_. And the one commerce which binds these ferocious tribes together
is the slave-trade in its wholesale and most odious form.
Amos treats none of the atrocities subjectively. It is not because
they have been inflicted upon Israel that he feels or condemns
them. The appeals of Israel against the tyrant become many as the
centuries go on; the later parts of the Old Testament are full of
the complaints of God's chosen people, conscious of their mission to
the world, against the heathen, who prevented them from it. Here we
find none of these complaints, but a strictly objective and judicial
indictment of the characteristic crimes of heathen men against each
other; and though this is made in the name of Jehovah, it is not in
the interests of His people or of any of His purposes through them,
but solely by the standard of an impartial righteousness which, as we
are soon to hear, must descend in equal judgment on Israel.
Again, for the moral principles which Amos enforces no originality
can be claimed. He condemns neither war as a whole nor slavery as a
whole, but limits his curse to wanton and deliberate aggravations of
them: to the slave-trade in cold blood, in violation of treaties and
for purely commercial ends;[255] to war for trifling causes, and that
wreaks itself on pregnant women and dead men; to national hatreds, that
never will be still. Now against such things there has always been in
mankind a strong conscience, of which the word "humanity" is in itself
a sufficient proof. We need not here inquire into the origin of such
a common sense--whether it be some native impulse of tenderness which
asserts itself as soon as the duties of self-defence are exhausted,
or some rational notion of the needlessness of excesses, or whether,
in committing these, men are visited by fear of retaliation from the
wrath they have unnecessarily exasperated. Certain it is, that warriors
of all races have hesitated to be wanton in their war, and have
foreboded the special judgment of heaven upon every blind extravagance
of hate or cruelty. It is well known how "fey" the Greeks felt the
insolence of power and immoderate anger; they are the fatal element in
many a Greek tragedy.[256] But the Semites themselves, whose racial
ferocity is so notorious, are not without the same feeling. "Even the
Beduins' old cruel rancours are often less than the golden piety of
the wilderness. The danger past, they can think of the defeated foemen
with kindness, ... putting only their trust in Ullah to obtain the
like at need for themselves. It is contrary to the Arabian conscience
to extinguish a Kabîla."[257] Similarly in Israel some of the earliest
ethical movements were revolts of the public conscience against
horrible outrages, like that, for instance, done by the Benjamites of
Gibeah.[258] Therefore in these oracles on his wild Semitic neighbours
Amos discloses no new ideal for either tribe or individual. Our view is
confirmed that he was intent only upon rousing the natural conscience
of his Hebrew hearers in order to engage this upon other vices to which
it was less impressionable--that he was describing those deeds of
war and slavery, whose atrocity all men admitted, only that he might
proceed to bring under the same condemnation the civic and domestic
sins of Israel.
We turn with him, then, to Israel. But in his book as it now stands
in our Bibles, Israel is not immediately reached. Between her and
the foreign nations two verses are bestowed upon Judah: _Thus saith
Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Judah and because of four I
will not turn It back; for that they despised the Torah of Jehovah,
and His statutes they did not observe, and their falsehoods_--false
gods--_led them astray, after which their fathers walked. But I will
send fire on Judah, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem._
These verses have been suspected as a later insertion,[259] on the
ground that every reference to Judah in the Book of Amos must be
late, that the language is very formal, and that the phrases in which
the sin of Judah is described sound like echoes of Deuteronomy. The
first of these reasons may be dismissed as absurd; it would have been
far more strange if Amos had never at all referred to Judah.[260]
The charges, however, are not like those which Amos elsewhere makes,
and though the phrases may be quite as early as his time,[261] the
reader of the original, and even the reader of the English version,
is aware of a certain tameness and vagueness of statement, which
contrasts remarkably with the usual pungency of the prophet's style.
We are forced to suspect the authenticity of these verses.
We ought to pass, then, straight from the third to the sixth verse
of this chapter, from the oracles on foreign nations to that on
Northern Israel. It is introduced with the same formula as they are:
_Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Israel and because
of four I will not turn It back_. But there follow a greater number
of details, for Amos has come among his own people whom he knows
to the heart, and he applies to them a standard more exact and an
obligation more heavy than any he could lay to the life of the
heathen. Let us run quickly through the items of his charge. _For
that they sell an honest man_[262] _for silver, and a needy man for a
pair of shoes_--proverbial, as we should say "for an old song"--_who
trample to the dust of the earth the head of the poor_--the least
improbable rendering of a corrupt passage[263]--_and pervert the way
of humble men. And a man and his father will go into the maid_,
the same maid,[264] _to desecrate My Holy Name_--without doubt some
public form of unchastity introduced from the Canaanite worship into
the very sanctuary of Jehovah, the holy place where He reveals His
Name--_and on garments given in pledge they stretch themselves by
every altar, and the wine of those who have been fined they drink
in the house of their God_. A riot of sin: the material of their
revels is the miseries of the poor, its stage the house of God! Such
is religion to the Israel of Amos' day--indoors, feverish, sensual.
By one of the sudden contrasts he loves, Amos sweeps out of it into
God's ideal of religion--a great historical movement, told in the
language of the open air: national deliverance, guidance on the
highways of the world, the inspiration of prophecy, and the pure,
ascetic life. _But I, I destroyed the Amorite_[265] _before you,
whose height was as the cedars, and he was strong as oaks, and I
destroyed his fruit from above and his roots from below._ What a
contrast to the previous picture of the temple filled with fumes
of wine and hot with lust! We are out on open history; God's gales
blow and the forests crash before them. _And I brought you up out of
the land of Egypt, and led you through the wilderness forty years,
to inherit the land of the Amorite._ Religion is not chambering and
wantonness; it is not selfish comfort or profiting by the miseries
of the poor and the sins of the fallen. But religion is history--the
freedom of the people and their education, the winning of the land
and the defeat of the heathen foe; and then, when the land is firm
and the home secure, it is the raising, upon that stage and shelter,
of spiritual guides and examples. _And I raised up of your sons to
be prophets, and of your young men to be Nazirites_--consecrated
and ascetic lives. _Is it not so, O children of Israel? (oracle of
Jehovah). But ye made the Nazirites drink wine, and the prophets ye
charged, saying, Prophesy not!_
Luxury, then, and a very sensual conception of religion, with all
their vicious offspring in the abuse of justice, the oppression of
the poor, the corrupting of the innocent, and the intolerance of
spiritual forces--these are the sins of an enlightened and civilised
people, which Amos describes as worse than all the atrocities of
barbarism, and as certain of Divine vengeance. How far beyond his own
day are his words still warm! Here in the nineteenth century is Great
Britain, destroyer of the slave-traffic, and champion of oppressed
nationalities--yet this great and Christian people, at the very time
they are abolishing slavery, suffer their own children to work in
factories and clay-pits for sixteen hours a day, and in mines set
women to a labour for which horses are deemed too valuable. Things
improve after 1848, but how slowly and against what callousness of
Christians Lord Shaftesbury's long and often disappointed labours
painfully testify. Even yet our religious public, that curses the
Turk, and in an indignation, which can never be too warm, cries out
against the Armenian atrocities, is callous, nay, by the avarice of
some, the haste and passion for enjoyment of many more, and the
thoughtlessness of all, itself contributes, to conditions of life and
fashions of society, which bear with cruelty upon our poor, taint our
literature, needlessly increase the temptations of our large towns,
and render pure childlife impossible among masses of our population.
Along some of the highways of our Christian civilisation we are just
as cruel and just as lustful as Kurd or Turk.
* * * * *
Amos closes this prophecy with a vision of immediate judgment.
_Behold, I am about to crush_ or _squeeze down upon you, as a waggon
crushes_[266] _that is full of sheaves._[267] An alternative reading
supplies the same general impression of a crushing judgment: _I will
make the ground quake under you, as a waggon makes it quake,_ or _as
a waggon_ itself _quakes under its load of sheaves_. This shock is to
be War. _Flight shall perish from the swift, and the strong shall not
prove his power, nor the mighty man escape with his life. And he that
graspeth the bow shall not stand, nor shall the swift of foot escape,
nor the horseman escape with his life. And he that thinketh himself
strong among the heroes shall flee away naked in that day--'tis the
oracle of Jehovah._
FOOTNOTES:
[209] As is done in chap. vi. 2, ix. 7.
[210] So against Israel in chap. iv.
[211] So Isa. v. 25: נטויה ידו ועוד אפו שב לא Cf. Ezek. xx. 22: ידי
את והשיבותי
[212] פשעים
[213] Called _lûh_, _i.e._ slab.
[214] These Syrian campaigns in Gilead must have taken place between
839 and 806, the long interval during which Damascus enjoyed freedom
from Assyrian invasion.
[215] 2 Kings viii. 12; xiii. 7: cf. above, p. 31.
[216] _He delivered them into the hand of Hazael king of Aram, and
into the hand of Ben-Hadad the son of Hazael, continually_ (2 Kings
xiii. 3).
[217] No need here to render _prince_, as some do.
[218] So the LXX.
[219] The present Baalbek (Baal of the Beḳ'a?). Wellhausen throws
doubt on the idea that Heliopolis was at this time an Aramean town.
[220] ix. 7.
[221] Doughty: _Arabia Deserta_, I. 335.
[222] On the close connection of Edom and Gaza see _Hist. Geog._, pp.
182 ff.
[223] See _Hist. Geog._, pp. 194 ff. Wellhausen thinks Gath was
not yet destroyed, and quotes vi. 2; Micah i. 10, 14. But we know
that Hazael destroyed it, and that fact, taken in conjunction with
its being the only omission here from the five Philistine towns,
is evidence enough. In the passages quoted by Wellhausen there is
nothing to the contrary: vi. 2 implies that Gath has fallen; Micah i.
10 is the repetition of an old proverb.
[224] Farrar, 53; Pusey on ver. 9; Pietschmann, _Geschichte der
Phönizier_, 298.
[225] To which Wellhausen inclines.
[226] Gen. x.
[227] Under Asarhaddon, 678-676 B.C., and later under Assurbanipal
(Pietschmann, _Gesch._, pp. 302 f.).
[228] And he omits it from his translation.
[229] So far from such an omission proving that the oracle is an
insertion, is it not more probable that an insertor would have taken
care to make his insertion formally correct?
[230] There seems no occasion to amend with Olshausen to the _kept_
of Psalm ciii. 9.
[231] Read with LXX. לנצח שׁמר, though throughout the verse the LXX.
translation is very vile.
[232] In other two passages, Boṣrah, the city, is placed in parallel
not to another city, but just as here to a whole region: Isa. xxxiv.
6, where the parallel is the _land of Edom_, and lxiii. 1, where it
is _Edom_. There is therefore no need to take Teman in our passage as
a city, as which it does not appear before Eusebius.
[233] Under Rimmân-nirari III. (812-783). See Buhl's _Gesch. der
Edomiter_, 65: this against Wellhausen.
[234] Wellhausen, _in loco_.
[235] 2 Sam. viii. 13, with 1 Kings xi. 16.
[236] 1 Kings xi. 14-25.
[237] 2 Kings iii.
[238] 2 Kings viii. 20-22.
[239] 2 Kings xiv. 10.
[240] 2 Chron. xxvi. 2.
[241] See, however, Buhl, _op. cit._, 67.
[242] It is, however, no reason against the authenticity of the
oracle to say that Edom lay outside the path of Assyria. In answer to
that see the Assyrian inscriptions, _e.g._ Asarhaddon's: cf. above,
p. 129, _n._ 4.
[243] Notably in the recent Armenian massacres.
[244] 2 Kings viii. 12.
[245] xxviii. 2, xxvii. 7, 8, where the Assyrian and another invasion
are both described in terms of tempest.
[246] The LXX. reading, _their priests and their princes_, must be
due to taking Malcam = _their king_ as Milcom = the Ammonite god. See
Jer. xlix. 3.
[247]
"Great Cæsar dead and turned to clay
Might stop a hole to turn the wind away."
[248] 2 Kings iii. 26. So rightly Pusey.
[249] Jer. xlviii. 24 without article, but in 41 with.
[250] Though this is claimed by most for Ḳiriathaim.
[251] Moabite Stone, l. 13.
[252] xlviii. 45.
[253] The land's.
[254] The king's.
[255] See above, p. 126.
[256] δυσσεβίας μὲν ὕβρις τέκος (Æschylus, _Eumen._, 534): cf.
_Odyssey_, xiv. 262; xvii. 431.
[257] _I.e._ a tribe; Doughty, _Arabia Deserta_, I. 335.
[258] Judges xix., xx.
[259] Duhm was the first to publish reasons for rejecting the passage
(_Theol. der Propheten_, 1875, p. 119), but Wellhausen had already
reached the same conclusion (_Kleine Propheten_, p. 71). Oort and Stade
adhere. On the other side see Robertson Smith, _Prophets of Israel_,
398, and Kuenen, who adheres to Smith's arguments (_Onderzoek_).
[260] "It is plain that Amos could not have excepted Judah from the
universal ruin which he saw to threaten the whole land; or at all
events such exception would have required to be expressly made on
special grounds."--Robertson Smith, _Prophets_, 398.
[261] _Ibid._
[262] צדיק, _righteous_: hardly, as most commentators take it, the
_legally_ (as distinguished from the _morally_) _righteous_; the
rich cruelly used their legal rights to sell respectable and honest
members of society into slavery.
[263] By adapting the LXX. So far as we know Wellhausen is right in
saying that the Massoretic text, which our English version follows,
gives no sense. LXX. reads, also without much sense as a whole, τὰ
πατοῦντα ἐπὶ τὸν χοῦν τῆς γῆς, καὶ ἐκονδύλιζον εἰς κεφαλὰς πτῶχων.
[264] So rightly the LXX. Or the definite article may be here used in
conformity with the common Hebrew way of employing it to designate, not
a definite individual, but a member of a definite, well-known genus.
[265] On the use of Amorite for all the inhabitants of Canaan see
Driver's _Deut._, pp. 11 f.
[266] The verb עוק of the Massoretic text is not found elsewhere, and
whether we retain it, or take it as a variant of, or mistake for,
צוק, or adopt some other reading, the whole phrase is more or less
uncertain, and the exact shade of meaning has to be guessed, though the
general sense remains pretty much the same. The following is a complete
note on the subject, with reasons for adopting the above conclusion.
(1) LXX.: _Behold, I roll_ (κυλίω) _under you as a waggon full
of straw is rolled_. A.V.: _I am pressed under you as a cart is
pressed_. Pusey: _I straiten myself under you, etc._ These versions
take עוּק in the sense of צוּק, _to press_, and תחת in its usual
meaning of _beneath_; and the result is conformable to the well-known
figure of the Old Testament by which God is said to be laden and
weary with the transgressions of His people. But this does not mean
an actual descent of judgment, and yet vv. 14-16 imply that such an
intimation has been made in ver. 13; and besides טעיק and תעיק are
both in the Hiphil, the active, _to press_, or causative, _make to
press_. (2) Accordingly some, adopting this sense of the verb, take
תחת in an unusual sense of _down upon_. Ewald: _I press down upon you
as a cart that is full of sheaves presseth_. Guthe (in Kautzsch's
_Bibel_): _Ich will euch quetschen_. Rev. Eng. Ver.: _I will press
you in your place_.--But וקע has been taken in other senses. (3)
Hoffmann (_Z.A.T.W._, III. 100) renders it _groan_ in conformity
with Arab. 'îḳ. (4) Wetzstein (_ibid._, 278 ff.) quotes Arab. 'âḳ,
to _stop_, _hinder_, and suggests _I will bring to a stop_. (5) Buhl
(12th Ed. of Gesenius' _Handwört_, sub עוּק), in view of possibility
of עגלה being threshing-roller, recalls Arab. 'aḳḳ, _to cut in
pieces_. (6) Hitzig (_Exeg. Handbuch_) proposed to read מפיק and
תפיק: _I will make it shake under you, as the laden waggon shakes_
(the ground). So rather differently Wellhausen: _I will make the
ground quake under you, as a waggon quakes under its load of sheaves_.
I have only to add that, in the Alex. Cod. of LXX., which reads κωλύω
for κυλίω, we have an interesting analogy to Wetzstein's proposal;
and that in support of the rendering of Ewald, and its unusual
interpretation of תחתיכם which seems to me on the whole the most
probable, we may compare Job xxxvi. 16, תחתיה מוצק לא. This, it is
true, suggests rather the choking of a passage than the crushing of
the ground; but, by the way, that sense is even more applicable to a
harvest waggon laden with sheaves.
[267] _Waggon full of sheaves._--Wellhausen goes too far when he
suggests that Amos would have to go outside Palestine to see such
a waggon. That a people who already knew the use of chariots for
travelling (cf. Gen. xlvi. 5, JE) and waggons for agricultural
purposes (1 Sam. vi. 7 ff.) did not use them at least in the lowlands
of their country is extremely improbable. Cf. _Hist. Geog._, Appendix
on _Roads and Wheeled Vehicles in Syria_.