_COMMON-SENSE AND THE REIGN OF LAW_
AMOS iii. 3-8; iv. 6-13; v. 8, 9; vi. 12; viii. 8; ix. 5, 6.
Fools, when they face facts, which is seldom, face them one by one,
and, as a consequence, either in ignorant contempt or in panic. With
this inordinate folly Amos charged the religion of his day. The
superstitious people, careful of every point of ritual and very greedy
of omens, would not ponder real facts nor set cause to effect. Amos
recalled them to common life. _Does a bird fall upon a snare, except
there be a loop on her? Does the trap itself rise front the ground,
except it be catching something_--something alive in it that struggles,
and so lifts the trap? _Shall the alarum be blown in a city, and the
people not tremble?_ Daily life is impossible without putting two and
two together. But this is just what Israel will not do with the sacred
events of their time. To religion they will not add common-sense.
For Amos himself, all things which happen are in sequence and in
sympathy. He has seen this in the simple life of the desert; he is
sure of it throughout the tangle and hubbub of history. One thing
explains another; one makes another inevitable. When he has illustrated
the truth in common life, Amos claims it for especially four of the
great facts of the time. The sins of society, of which society is
careless; the physical calamities, which they survive and forget; the
approach of Assyria, which they ignore; the word of the prophet, which
they silence,--all these belong to each other. Drought, Pestilence,
Earthquake, Invasion conspire--and the Prophet holds their secret.
Now it is true that for the most part Amos describes this sequence
of events as the personal action of Jehovah. _Shall evil befall, and
Jehovah not have done it?... I have smitten you.... I will raise up
against you a Nation.... Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel!_[363] Yet
even where the personal impulse of the Deity is thus emphasised, we
feel equal stress laid upon the order and the inevitable certainty
of the process. Amos nowhere uses Isaiah's great phrase: _a God of
Mishpat_, a _God of Order_ or _Law_. But he means almost the same
thing: God works by methods which irresistibly fulfil themselves. Nay
more. Sometimes this sequence sweeps upon the prophet's mind with
such force as to overwhelm all his sense of the Personal within it.
The Will and the Word of the God who causes the thing are crushed out
by the "Must Be" of the thing itself. Take even the descriptions of
those historical crises, which the prophet most explicitly proclaims
as the visitations of the Almighty. In some of the verses all thought
of God Himself is lost in the roar and foam with which that tide of
necessity bursts up through them. The fountains of the great deep
break loose, and while the universe trembles to the shock, it seems
that even the voice of the Deity is overwhelmed. In one passage,
immediately after describing Israel's ruin as due to Jehovah's word,
Amos asks how could it have happened otherwise:--
_Shall horses run up a cliff, or oxen plough the sea? that ye
turn justice into poison, and the fruit of righteousness into
wormwood._[364] A moral order exists, which it is as impossible to
break without disaster as it would be to break the natural order by
driving horses upon a precipice. There is an inherent necessity in
the sinners' doom. Again, he says of Israel's sin: _Shall not the
Land tremble for this? Yea, it shall rise up together like the Nile,
and heave and sink like the Nile of Egypt._[365] The crimes of Israel
are so intolerable, that in its own might the natural frame of things
revolts against them. In these great crises, therefore, as in the
simple instances adduced from everyday life, Amos had a sense of what
we call law, distinct from, and for moments even overwhelming, that
sense of the personal purpose of God, admission to the secrets of
which had marked his call to be a prophet.[366]
These instincts we must not exaggerate into a system. There is no
philosophy in Amos, nor need we wish there were. Far more instructive
is what we do find--a virgin sense of the sympathy of all things, the
thrill rather than the theory of a universe. And this faith, which is
not a philosophy, is especially instructive on these two points: that
it springs from the moral sense; and that it embraces, not history
only, but nature.
It springs from the moral sense. Other races have arrived at a
conception of the universe along other lines: some by the observation
of physical laws valid to the recesses of space; some by logic and the
unity of Reason. But Israel found the universe through the conscience.
It is a historical fact that the Unity of God, the Unity of History
and the Unity of the World, did, in this order, break upon Israel,
through conviction and experience of the universal sovereignty of
righteousness. We see the beginnings of the process in Amos. To him the
sequences which work themselves out through history and across nature
are moral. Righteousness is the hinge on which the world hangs; loosen
it, and history and nature feel the shock. History punishes the sinful
nation. But nature, too, groans beneath the guilt of man; and in the
Drought, the Pestilence and the Earthquake provides his scourges. It is
a belief which has stamped itself upon the language of mankind. What
else is "plague" than "blow" or "scourge"?
This brings us to the second point--our prophet's treatment of Nature.
Apart from the disputed passages (which we shall take afterwards
by themselves) we have in the Book of Amos few glimpses of nature,
and these always under a moral light. There is not in any chapter
a landscape visible in its own beauty. Like all desert-dwellers,
who when they would praise the works of God lift their eyes to the
heavens, Amos gives us but the outlines of the earth--a mountain
range,[367] or the crest of a forest,[368] or the bare back of the
land, bent from sea to sea.[369] Nearly all his figures are drawn
from the desert--the torrent, the wild beasts, the wormwood.[370]
If he visits the meadows of the shepherds, it is with the terror of
the people's doom;[371] if the vineyards or orchards, it is with
the mildew and the locust;[372] if the towns, it is with drought,
eclipse and earthquake.[373] To him, unlike his fellows, unlike
especially Hosea, the whole land is one theatre of judgment; but it
is a theatre trembling to its foundations with the drama enacted upon
it. Nay, land and nature are themselves actors in the drama. Physical
forces are inspired with moral purpose, and become the ministers of
righteousness. This is the converse of Elijah's vision. To the older
prophet the message came that God was not in the fire nor in the
earthquake nor in the tempest, but only in the still small voice. But
to Amos the fire, the earthquake and the tempest are all in alliance
with the Voice, and execute the doom which it utters. The difference
will be appreciated by us, if we remember the respective problems set
to prophecy in those two periods. To Elijah, prophet of the elements,
wild worker by fire and water, by life and death, the spiritual had
to be asserted and enforced by itself. Ecstatic as he was, Elijah
had to learn that the Word is more Divine than all physical violence
and terror. But Amos understood that for his age the question was
very different. Not only was the God of Israel dissociated from the
powers of nature, which were assigned by the popular mind to the
various Ba'alim of the land, so that there was a divorce between His
government of the people and the influences that fed the people's
life; but morality itself was conceived as provincial. It was
narrowed to the national interests; it was summed up in mere rules
of police, and these were looked upon as not so important as the
observances of the ritual. Therefore Amos was driven to show that
nature and morality are one. Morality is not a set of conventions.
"Morality is the order of things." Righteousness is on the scale of
the universe. All things tremble to the shock of sin; all things work
together for good to them that fear God.
With this sense of law, of moral necessity, in Amos we must not fail
to connect that absence of all appeal to miracle, which is also
conspicuous in his book.
We come now to the three disputed passages:--
iv. 13:--_For, lo! He Who formed the hills,_[374] _and createth
the wind,_[375] _and declareth to man what His_[376] _mind is; Who
maketh the dawn into darkness, and marcheth on the heights of the
land--Jehovah, God of Hosts, is His Name._
v. 8, 9:--_Maker of the Pleiades and Orion,_[377] _turning to morning
the murk, and day into night He darkeneth; Who calleth for the waters
of the sea, and poureth them forth on the face of the earth--Jehovah
His Name; Who flasheth ruin on the strong, and destruction cometh
down on the fortress._[378]
ix. 5, 6:--_And the Lord Jehovah of the Hosts, Who toucheth the
earth and it rocketh, and all mourn that dwell on it, and it riseth
like the Nile together, and sinketh like the Nile of Egypt; Who hath
builded in the heavens His ascents, and founded His vault upon the
earth; Who calleth to the waters of the sea, and poureth them on the
face of the earth--Jehovah_[379] _His Name._
These sublime passages it is natural to take as the triple climax
of the doctrine we have traced through the Book of Amos. Are they
not the natural leap of the soul to the stars? The same shepherd's
eye which has marked sequence and effect unfailing on the desert
soil, does it not now sweep the clear heavens above the desert, and
find there also all things ordered and arrayed? The same mind which
traced the Divine processes down history, which foresaw the hosts of
Assyria marshalled for Israel's punishment, which felt the overthrow
of justice shock the nation to their ruin, and read the disasters of
the husbandman's year as the vindication of a law higher than the
physical--does it not now naturally rise beyond such instances of the
Divine order, round which the dust of history rolls, to the lofty,
undimmed outlines of the Universe as a whole, and, in consummation of
its message, declare that "all is Law," and Law intelligible to man?
But in the way of so attractive a conclusion the literary criticism
of the book has interposed. It is maintained[380] that, while none
of these sublime verses are indispensable to the argument of Amos,
some of them actually interrupt it, so that when they are removed it
becomes consistent; that such ejaculations in praise of Jehovah's
creative power are not elsewhere met with in Hebrew prophecy before
the time of the Exile; that they sound very like echoes of the Book
of Job; and that in the Septuagint version of Hosea we actually find
a similar doxology, wedged into the middle of an authentic verse of
the prophet.[381] To these arguments against the genuineness of the
three famous passages, other critics, not less able and not less
free, like Robertson Smith and Kuenen,[382] have replied that such
ejaculations at critical points of the prophet's discourse "are
not surprising under the general conditions of prophetic oratory";
and that, while one of the doxologies does appear to break the
argument[383] of the context, they are all of them thoroughly in the
spirit and the style of Amos. To this point the discussion has been
carried; it seems to need a closer examination. .. We may at once
dismiss the argument which has been drawn from that obvious intrusion
into the Greek of Hosea xiii. 4. Not only is this verse not so suited
to the doctrine of Hosea as the doxologies are to the doctrine of
Amos; but while they are definite and sublime, it is formal and
flat--"Who made firm the heavens and founded the earth, Whose hands
founded all the host of heaven, and He did not display them that thou
shouldest walk after them." The passages in Amos are vision; this is
a piece of catechism crumbling into homily.
Again--an argument in favour of the authenticity of these passages
may be drawn from the character of their subjects. We have seen the
part which the desert played in shaping the temper and the style of
Amos. But the works of the Creator, to which these passages lift
their praise, are just those most fondly dwelt upon by all the poetry
of the desert. The Arabian nomad, when he magnifies the power of
God, finds his subjects not on the bare earth about him, but in the
brilliant heavens and the heavenly processes.
Again, the critic who affirms that the passages in Amos "in every
case sensibly disturb the connection,"[384] exaggerates. In the
case of the first of them, chap. iv. 13, the disturbance is not at
all "sensible"; though it must be admitted that the oracle closes
impressively enough without it. The last of them, chap. ix. 5,
6--which repeats a clause already found in the book[385]--is as much
in sympathy with its context as most of the oracles in the somewhat
scattered discourse of that last section of the book. The real
difficulty is the second doxology, chap. v. 8, 9, which does break
the connection, and in a sudden and violent way. Remove it, and the
argument is consistent. We cannot read chap. v. without feeling that,
whether Amos wrote these verses or not, they did not originally stand
where they stand at present.
Now, taken with this dispensableness of two of the passages and this
obvious intrusion of one of them, the following additional fact
becomes ominous. _Jehovah is His Name_ (which occurs in two of the
passages),[386] or _Jehovah of Hosts is His Name_ (which occurs at
least in one),[387] is a construction which does not happen elsewhere
in the book, except in a verse where it is awkward and where we
have already seen reason to doubt its genuineness.[388] But still
more, the phrase does not occur in any other prophet, till we come
down to the oracles which compose Isaiah xl.-lxvi. Here it happens
thrice--twice in passages dating from the Exile,[389] and once in a
passage suspected by some to be of still later date.[390] In the
Book of Jeremiah the phrase is found eight times; but either in
passages already on other grounds judged by many critics to be later
than Jeremiah,[391] or where by itself it is probably an intrusion
into the text.[392] Now is it a mere coincidence that a phrase,
which, outside the Book of Amos, occurs only in writing of the time
of the Exile and in passages considered for other reasons to be
post-exilic insertions--is it a mere coincidence that within the Book
of Amos it should again be found only in suspected verses?
There appears to be in this more than a coincidence; and the present
writer cannot but feel a very strong case against the traditional
belief that these doxologies are original and integral portions
of the Book of Amos. At the same time a case which has failed to
convince critics like Robertson Smith and Kuenen cannot be considered
conclusive, and we are so ignorant of many of the conditions of
prophetic oratory at this period that dogmatism is impossible. For
instance, the use by Amos of the Divine titles is a matter over
which uncertainty still lingers; and any further argument on the
subject must include a fuller discussion than space here allows of
the remarkable distribution of those titles throughout the various
sections of the book.[393]
But if it be not given to us to prove this kind of authenticity--a
question whose data are so obscure, yet whose answer fortunately is of
so little significance--let us gladly welcome that greater Authenticity
whose undeniable proofs these verses so splendidly exhibit. No one
questions their right to the place which some great spirit gave them
in this book--their suitableness to its grand and ordered theme, their
pure vision and their eternal truth. That common-sense, and that
conscience, which, moving among the events of earth and all the tangled
processes of history, find everywhere reason and righteousness at work,
in these verses claim the Universe for the same powers, and see in
stars and clouds and the procession of day and night the One Eternal
God Who _declareth to man what His mind is_.
FOOTNOTES:
[363] iii. 6_b_; iv. 9; vi. 14; iv. 12_b_.
[364] vi. 12.
[365] viii. 8.
[366] iii. 7: _Jehovah God doeth nothing, but He hath revealed His
secret to His servants the prophets._
[367] i. 2; iii. 9; ix. 3.
[368] ii. 9.
[369] viii. 12.
[370] v. 24; 19, 20, etc.; 7; vi. 12.
[371] i. 2.
[372] iv. 9 ff.
[373] iv. 6-11; vi. 11; viii. 8 ff.
[374] LXX. _the thunder_.
[375] Or _spirit_.
[376] _I.e. God's_; a more natural rendering than to take _his_ (as
Hitzig does) as meaning _man's_.
[377] See above, pp. 166 f. _n._
[378] Text of last clause uncertain; see above, p. 167.
[379] LXX. _Jehovah of Hosts_.
[380] First in 1875 by Duhm, _Theol. der Proph._, p. 119; and after
him by Oort, _Theol. Tjidschrift_, 1880, pp. 116 f.; Wellhausen, _in
locis_; Stade, _Gesch._, I. 571; Cornill, _Einleitung_, 176.
[381] Hosea xiii. 4
[382] Smith, _Prophets of Israel_, p. 399; Kuenen, _Hist. Krit.
Einl._ (Germ. Ed.), II. 347.
[383] v. 8, 9.
[384] Cornill, _Einl._, 176.
[385] Cf. viii. 8.
[386] v. 8; ix. 6, though here LXX. read _Jehovah of Hosts is His Name_.
[387] iv. 13. See previous note.
[388] v. 27. See above, pp. 172 f. _n._: cf. Hosea xii. 6.
[389] xlvii. 4 and liv. 5.
[390] xlviii. 2: cf. Duhm, _in loco_, and Cheyne, _Introduction to
the Book of Isaiah_, 301.
[391] x. 16; xxxi. 35; xxxii. 18; l. 34 (perhaps a quotation from
Isa. xlvii. 4); li. 19, 57.
[392] xlvi. 18, where the words שמו צבאות fail in LXX.; xlviii. 15
_b_, where the clause in which it occurs is wanting in the LXX.
[393] But I have room at least for a bare statement of these
remarkable facts:--
The titles for the God of Israel used in the Book of Amos are these:
(1) _Thy God, O Israel_, ישראל אלהיך; (2) _Jehovah_, יהוה; (3) _Lord
Jehovah_, יהוה אדני; (4) _Lord Jehovah of the Hosts_, יהוה אדני צבאות;
(5) _Jehovah God of Hosts_ or _of the Hosts_, צבאות אלהי יהוה or הצבאות.
Now in the First Section, chaps. i., ii., it is interesting that we
find none of the variations which are compounded with _Hosts_, צבאות.
By itself יהוה (especially in the phrase _Thus saith Jehovah_, אמר כה
יהוה) is general; and once only (i. 8) is _Lord Jehovah_ employed.
The phrase, _oracle of Jehovah_, יהוה נְאֻם, is also rare; it occurs
only twice (ii. 11, 16), and then only in the passage dealing with
Israel, and not at all in the oracles against foreign nations.
In Sections II. and III. the simple יהוה is again most frequently used.
But we find also _Lord Jehovah_, יהוה אדני (iii. 7, 8; iv. 2, 5; v.
3, with יהוה alone in the parallel ver. 4; vi. 8; vii. 1, 2, 4 _bis_,
5, 6; viii. 1, 3, 9, 11), used either indifferently with יהוה; or in
verses where it seems more natural to emphasise the sovereignty of
Jehovah than His simple Name (as, _e.g._, where _He swears_, iv. 2, vi.
8, yet when the same phrase occurs in viii. 7 יהוה alone is used); or
in the solemn Visions of the Third Section (but not in the Narrative);
and sometimes we find in the Visions _Lord_, אדני, alone without יהוה
(vii. 7, 8; ix. 1). The titles containing צבאות or צבאות אלהי occur
_nine_ times. Of these _five_ are in passages which we have seen other
reasons to suppose are insertions: two of the Doxologies--iv. 13, צבאות
אלהי יהוה and ix. 5, הצבאות יהוה אדני (in addition the LXX. read in
ix. 6 צבאות יהוה), and in v. 14, 15 (see p. 168) and 27 (see p. 172),
in all three צבאות אלהי יהוה. The _four_ genuine passages are iii. 13,
where we find הצבאות אלהי יהוה preceded by אדני; v. 16, where we have
צבאות אלהי יהוה followed by אדני; vi. 8, אלהי יהוה צבאות, and vi. 14,
צבאות אלהי יהוה. Throughout the last two sections of the book נְאֻם is
used with all these forms of the Divine title.
_HOSEA_
"For leal love have I desired and not sacrifice
And the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offerings."