_CIVILISATION AND JUDGMENT_
AMOS iii.-iv. 3.
We now enter the Second Section of the Book of Amos: chaps. iii.-vi.
It is a collection of various oracles of denunciation, grouped partly
by the recurrence of the formula _Hear this word_, which stands
at the head of our present chapters iii., iv. and v., which are
therefore probably due to it; partly by two cries of _Woe_ at v. 18
and vi. 1; and also by the fact that each of the groups thus started
leads up to an emphatic, though not at first detailed, prediction of
the nation's doom (iii. 13-15; iv. 3; iv. 12; v. 16, 17; v. 26, 27;
vi. 14). Within these divisions lie a number of short indictments,
sentences of judgment and the like, which have no further logical
connection than is supplied by their general sameness of subject, and
a perceptible increase of articulateness from beginning to end of
the Section. The sins of Israel are more detailed, and the judgment
of war, coming from the North, advances gradually till we discern
the unmistakable ranks of Assyria. But there are various parentheses
and interruptions, which cause the student of the text no little
difficulty. Some of these, however, may be only apparent: it will
always be a question whether their want of immediate connection
with what precedes them is not due to the loss of several words
from the text rather than to their own intrusion into it. Of others
it is true that they are obviously out of place as they lie; their
removal brings together verses which evidently belong to each other.
Even such parentheses, however, may be from Amos himself. It is only
where a verse, besides interrupting the argument, seems to reflect
a historical situation later than the prophet's day, that we can be
sure it is not his own. And in all this textual criticism we must
keep in mind, that the obscurity of the present text of a verse, so
far from being an adequate proof of its subsequent insertion, may be
the very token of its antiquity, scribes or translators of later date
having been unable to understand it. To reject a verse, only because
_we_ do not see the connection, would surely be as arbitrary, as the
opposite habit of those who, missing a connection, invent one, and
then exhibit their artificial joint as evidence of the integrity of
the whole passage. In fact we must avoid all headstrong surgery, for
to a great extent we work in the dark.
The general subject of the Section may be indicated by the title:
Religion and Civilisation. A vigorous community, wealthy, cultured
and honestly religious, are, at a time of settled peace and growing
power, threatened, in the name of the God of justice, with their
complete political overthrow. Their civilisation is counted for
nothing; their religion, on which they base their confidence, is
denounced as false and unavailing. These two subjects are not, and
could not have been, separated by the prophet in any one of his
oracles. But in the first, the briefest and most summary of these,
chaps. iii.-iv. 3, it is mainly with the doom of the civil structure
of Israel's life that Amos deals; and it will be more convenient
for us to take them first, with all due reference to the echoes of
them in later parts of the Section. From iv. 4-vi. it is the Religion
and its false peace which he assaults; and we shall take that in the
next chapter. _First_, then, Civilisation and Judgment (iii.-iv. 3);
_Second_, The False Peace of Ritual (iv. 4-vi.).
* * * * *
These few brief oracles open upon the same note as that in which the
previous Section closed--that the crimes of Israel are greater than
those of the heathen; and that the people's peculiar relation to God
means, not their security, but their greater judgment. It is then
affirmed that Israel's wealth and social life are so sapped by luxury
and injustice that the nation must perish. And, as in every luxurious
community the women deserve especial blame, the last of the group of
oracles is reserved for them (iv. 1-3).
_Hear this word, which Jehovah hath spoken against you, O children of
Israel, against the whole family which I brought up from the land of
Egypt_--Judah as well as North Israel, so that we see the vanity of
a criticism which would cast out of the Book of Amos as unauthentic
every reference to Judah. _Only you have I known of all the families
of the ground_--not world, but _ground_, purposely chosen to stamp
the meanness and mortality of them all--_therefore will I visit upon
you all your iniquities_.
This famous text has been called by various writers "the keynote," "the
licence" and "the charter" of prophecy. But the names are too petty
for what is not less than the fulmination of an element. It is a peal
of thunder we hear. It is, in a moment, the explosion and discharge
of the full storm of prophecy. As when from a burst cloud the streams
immediately below rise suddenly and all their banks are overflowed,
so the prophecies that follow surge and rise clear of the old limits
of Israel's faith by the unconfined, unmeasured flood of heaven's
justice that breaks forth by this single verse. Now, once for all, are
submerged the lines of custom and tradition within which the course of
religion has hitherto flowed; and, as it were, the surface of the world
is altered. It is a crisis which has happened more than once again in
history: when helpless man has felt the absolute relentlessness of the
moral issues of life; their renunciation of the past, however much they
have helped to form it; their sacrifice of every development however
costly, and of every hope however pure; their deafness to prayer, their
indifference to penitence; when no faith saves a Church, no courage a
people, no culture or prestige even the most exalted order of men; but
at the bare hands of a judgment, uncouth of voice and often unconscious
of a Divine mission, the results of a great civilisation are for its
sins swept remorselessly away.
Before the storm bursts, we learn by its lightnings some truths
from the old life that is to be destroyed. _You only have I known
of all the families of the ground: therefore will I visit your
iniquities upon you._ Religion is no insurance against judgment, no
mere atonement and escape from consequences. Escape! Religion is
only opportunity--the greatest moral opportunity which men have, and
which if they violate nothing remains for them but a certain fearful
looking forward unto judgment. You only have I known; and because you
did not take the moral advantage of My intercourse, because you felt
it only as privilege and pride, pardon for the past and security for
the future, therefore doom the more inexorable awaits you.
Then as if the people had interrupted him with the question, What
sign do you give us that this judgment is near?--Amos goes aside into
that noble digression (vv. 3-8) on the harmony between the prophet's
word and the imminent events of the time, which we have already
studied.[268] From this apologia, verse 9 returns to the note of
verses 1 and 2 and develops it. Not only is Israel's responsibility
greater than that of other people's. Her crimes themselves are more
heinous. _Make proclamation over the palaces in Ashdod_--if we are
not to read Assyria here,[269] then the name of Ashdod has perhaps
been selected from all other heathen names because of its similarity
to the Hebrew word for that _violence_[270] with which Amos is
charging the people--_and over the palaces of the land of Egypt, and
say, Gather upon the Mount_[271] _of Samaria and see! Confusions
manifold in the midst of her; violence to her very core! Yea, they
know not how to do uprightness, saith Jehovah, who store up wrong and
violence in their palaces._
"To their crimes," said the satirist of the Romans, "they owe their
gardens, palaces, stables and fine old plate."[272] And William
Langland declared of the rich English of his day:--
"For toke thei on trewly · they tymbred not so heigh,
Ne boughte non burgages · be ye full certayne."[273]
_Therefore thus saith the Lord Jehovah: Siege and Blockade of the
Land!_[274] _And they shall bring down from off thee thy fortresses,
and plundered shall be thy palaces._ Yet this shall be no ordinary
tide of Eastern war, to ebb like the Syrian as it flowed, and leave
the nation to rally on their land again. For Assyria devours the
peoples. _Thus saith Jehovah: As the shepherd saveth from the mouth
of the lion a pair of shin-bones or a bit of an ear, so shall the
children of Israel be saved--they who sit in Samaria in the corner
of the diwan and ... on a couch._[275] The description, as will be
seen from the note below, is obscure. Some think it is intended
to satirise a novel and affected fashion of sitting adopted by
the rich. Much more probably it means that carnal security in the
luxuries of civilisation which Amos threatens more than once in
similar phrases.[276] The corner of the diwan is in Eastern houses
the seat of honour.[277] To this desert shepherd, with only the
hard ground to rest on, the couches and ivory-mounted diwans of the
rich must have seemed the very symbols of extravagance. But the
pampered bodies that loll their lazy lengths upon them shall be left
like the crumbs of a lion's meal--_two shin-bones and the bit of an
ear!_ Their whole civilisation shall perish with them. _Hearken and
testify against the house of Israel--oracle of the Lord Jehovah,
God of Hosts_[278]--those addressed are still the heathen summoned
in ver. 9. _For on the day when I visit the crimes of Israel upon
him, I shall then make visitation upon the altars of Bethel, and the
horns of the altar_, which men grasp in their last despair, _shall
be smitten and fall to the earth. And I will strike the winter-house
upon the summer-house, and the ivory houses shall perish, yea, swept
away shall be houses many--oracle of Jehovah._
But the luxury of no civilisation can be measured without its women,
and to the women of Samaria Amos now turns with the most scornful
of all his words. _Hear this word_--this for you--_kine of Bashan
that are in the mount of Samaria, that oppress the poor, that crush
the needy, that say to their lords, Bring, and let us drink. Sworn
hath the Lord Jehovah by His holiness, lo, days are coming when
there shall be a taking away of you with hooks, and of the last of
you with fish-hooks._ They put hooks[279] in the nostrils of unruly
cattle, and the figure is often applied to human captives;[280] but
so many should these cattle of Samaria be that for the _last of them
fish-hooks_ must be used. _Yea, by the breaches_ in the wall of the
stormed city _shall ye go out, every one headlong, and ye shall be
cast ..._[281] _oracle of Jehovah_. It is a cowherd's rough picture
of women: a troop of kine--heavy, heedless animals, trampling in
their anxiety for food upon every frail and lowly object in the way.
But there is a prophet's insight into character. Not of Jezebels,
or Messalinas, or Lady-Macbeths is it spoken, but of the ordinary
matrons of Samaria. Thoughtlessness and luxury are able to make
brutes out of women of gentle nurture, with homes and a religion.[282]
* * * * *
Such are these three or four short oracles of Amos. They are probably
among his earliest--the first peremptory challenges of prophecy to
that great stronghold which before forty years she is to see thrown
down in obedience to her word. As yet, however, there seems to be
nothing to justify the menaces of Amos. Fair and stable rises the
structure of Israel's life. A nation, who know themselves elect, who
in politics are prosperous and in religion proof to every doubt,
build high their palaces, see the skies above them unclouded, and
bask in their pride, heaven's favourites without a fear. This man,
solitary and sudden from his desert, springs upon them in the name of
God and their poor. Straighter word never came from Deity: _Jehovah
hath spoken, who can but prophesy?_ The insight of it, the justice of
it, are alike convincing. Yet at first it appears as if it were sped
on the personal and very human passion of its herald. For Amos not
only uses the desert's cruelties--the lion's to the sheep--to figure
God's impending judgment upon His people, but he enforces the latter
with all a desert-bred man's horror of cities and civilisation. It is
their costly furniture, their lavish and complex building, on which
he sees the storm break. We seem to hear again that frequent phrase
of the previous section: _the fire shall devour the palaces thereof_.
The palaces, he says, are simply storehouses of oppression; the
palaces will be plundered. Here, as throughout his book,[283] couches
and diwans draw forth the scorn of a man accustomed to the simple
furniture of the tent. But observe his especial hatred of houses.
Four times in one verse he smites them: _winter-house on summer-house
and the ivory houses shall perish--yea, houses manifold, saith the
Lord_. So in another oracle of the same section: _Houses of ashlar
ye have built, and ye shall not inhabit them; vineyards of delight
have ye planted, and ye shall not drink of their wine_.[284] And in
another: _I loathe the pride of Jacob, and his palaces I hate; and I
will give up a city and all that is in it.... For, lo, the Lord is
about to command, and He will smite the great house into ruins and
the small house into splinters._[285] No wonder that such a prophet
found war with its breached walls insufficient, and welcomed, as the
full ally of his word, the earthquake itself.[286]
Yet all this is no mere desert "razzia" in the name of the Lord, a
nomad's hatred of cities and the culture of settled men. It is not
a temper; it is a vision of history. In the only argument which
these early oracles contain, Amos claims to have events on the side
of his word. _Shall the lion roar and not be catching_ something?
Neither does the prophet speak till he knows that God is ready to
act. History accepted this claim. Amos spoke about 755. In 734
Tiglath-Pileser swept Gilead and Galilee; in 724 Shalmaneser overran
the rest of Northern Israel: _siege and blockade of the whole land!_
For three years the Mount of Samaria was invested, and then taken;
the houses overthrown, the rich and the delicate led away captive. It
happened as Amos foretold; for it was not the shepherd's rage within
him that spoke. He had _seen the Lord standing, and He said, Smite_.
But this assault of a desert nomad upon the structure of a nation's
life raises many echoes in history and some questions in our own
minds to-day. Again and again have civilisations far more powerful
than Israel's been threatened by the desert in the name of God, and
in good faith it has been proclaimed by the prophets of Christianity
and other religions that God's kingdom cannot come on earth till the
wealth, the culture, the civil order, which men have taken centuries
to build, have been swept away by some great political convulsion.
To-day Christianity herself suffers the same assaults, and is told by
many, the high life and honest intention of whom cannot be doubted,
that till the civilisation which she has so much helped to create
is destroyed, there is no hope for the purity or the progress of
the race. And Christianity, too, has doubts within herself. What is
the world which our Master refused in the Mount of Temptation, and
so often and so sternly told us that it must perish?--how much of
our wealth, of our culture, of our politics, of the whole fabric of
our society? No thoughtful and religious man, when confronted with
civilisation, not in its ideal, but in one of those forms which
give it its very name, the life of a large city, can fail to ask,
How much of this deserves the judgment of God? How much must be
overthrown, before His will is done on earth? All these questions
rise in the ears and the heart of a generation, which more than any
other has been brought face to face with the ruins of empires and
civilisations, which have endured longer, and in their day seemed
more stable, than her own.
In face of the confused thinking and fanatic speech which have risen
on all such topics, it seems to me that the Hebrew prophets supply us
with four cardinal rules.
First, of course, they insist that it is the moral question upon
which the fate of a civilisation is decided. By what means has this
system grown? Is justice observed in essence as well as form? Is
there freedom, or is the prophet silenced? Does luxury or self-denial
prevail? Do the rich make life hard for the poor? Is childhood
sheltered and is innocence respected? By these, claim the prophets,
a nation stands or falls; and history has proved the claim on wider
worlds than they dreamt of.
But by themselves moral reasons are never enough to justify a
prediction of speedy doom upon any system or society. None of the
prophets began to foretell the fall of Israel till they read, with
keener eyes than their contemporaries, the signs of it in current
history. And this, I take it, was the point which made a notable
difference between them, and one who like them scourged the social
wrongs of his civilisation, yet never spoke a word of its fall.
Juvenal nowhere calls down judgments, except upon individuals. In his
time there were no signs of the decline of the empire, even though,
as he marks, there was a flight from the capital of the virtue which
was to keep the empire alive. But the prophets had political proof of
the nearness of God's judgment, and they spoke in the power of its
coincidence with the moral corruption of their people.
Again, if conscience and history (both of them, to the prophets,
being witnesses of God) thus combine to announce the early doom of a
civilisation, neither the religion that may have helped to build it,
nor any remanent virtue in it, nor its ancient value to God, can avail
to save. We are tempted to judge that the long and costly development
of ages is cruelly thrown away by the convulsion and collapse of an
empire; it feels impious to think that the patience, the providence,
the millennial discipline of the Almighty are to be in a moment
abandoned to some rude and savage force. But we are wrong. _You only
have I known of all the families of the ground_, yet I must _visit upon
you your iniquities._ Nothing is too costly for justice. And God finds
some other way of conserving the real results of the past.
Again, it is a corollary of all this, that the sentence upon
civilisation must often seem to come by voices that are insane, and
its execution by means that are criminal. Of course, when civilisation
is arraigned as a whole, and its overthrow demanded, there may be
nothing behind the attack but jealousy or greed, the fanaticism of
ignorant men or the madness of disordered lives. But this is not
necessarily the case. For God has often in history chosen the outsider
as the herald of doom, and sent the barbarian as its instrument. By
the statesmen and patriots of Israel, Amos must have been regarded as
a mere savage, with a savage's hate of civilisation. But we know what
he answered when Amaziah called him rebel. And it was not only for its
suddenness that the apostles said the _day of the Lord should come as
a thief_, but also because of its methods. For over and over again has
doom been pronounced, and pronounced truly, by men who in the eyes of
civilisation were criminals and monsters.
Now apply these four principles to the question of ourselves. It will
scarcely be denied that our civilisation tolerates, and in part
lives by, the existence of vices which, as we all admit, ruined the
ancient empires. Are the political possibilities of overthrow also
present? That there exist among us means of new historic convulsions
is a thing hard for us to admit. But the signs cannot be hid. When
we see the jealousies of the Christian peoples, and their enormous
preparations for battle; the arsenals of Europe which a few sparks
may blow up; the millions of soldiers one man's word may mobilise;
when we imagine the opportunities which a general war would furnish
to the discontented masses of the European proletariat,--we must
surely acknowledge the existence of forces capable of inflicting
calamities, so severe as to affect not merely this nationality
or that type of culture, but the very vigour and progress of
civilisation herself; and all this without our looking beyond
Christendom, or taking into account the rise of the yellow races to a
consciousness of their approach to equality with ourselves. If, then,
in the eyes of the Divine justice Christendom merits judgment,--if
life continue to be left so hard to the poor; if innocence be still
an impossibility for so much of the childhood of the Christian
nations; if with so many of the leaders of civilisation prurience
be lifted to the level of an art, and licentiousness followed as
a cult; if we continue to pour the evils of our civilisation upon
the barbarian, and "the vices of our young nobles," to paraphrase
Juvenal, "are aped in" Hindustan,--then let us know that the
means of a judgment more awful than any which has yet scourged a
delinquent civilisation are extant and actual among us. And if one
should reply, that our Christianity makes all the difference, that
God cannot undo the development of nineteen centuries, or cannot
overthrow the peoples of His Son,--let us remember that God does
justice at whatever cost; that as He did not spare Israel at the
hands of Assyria, so He did not spare Christianity in the East when
the barbarians of the desert found her careless and corrupt. _You
only have I known of all the families of the ground, therefore will I
visit upon you all your iniquities._