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To this prosperity and this sickness Amos spoke. The first of that succession of prophets whose utterances are preserved for us in the Bible, he is clearly something new in Israel. Yet he is equally clearly the voice of the ancient ways. Of his life we know almost nothing. A herdsman from the fringe of the Judean wilderness (1:1),²⁶ he had occasion to travel into the northern kingdom. He did not at all like what he saw there, and at the great shrine of Bethel he gave vent to himself. No priest or professional prophet (7:14),²⁷ his only authentication was the Word of Yahweh which had come to him and demanded to be spoken (3:8; 7:15). He was thus a man of the charisma like the judges of old. Only charisma now no longer summoned to leadership in the state, but to the severest criticism of it.

1. The message of Amos seems to the reader rather plain and altogether thrilling. It is the classic ethical protest. It is classic because every prophet after Amos was to take it up; it is classic because it was never said better—it could not be said better. With savage anger Amos lashes at those who have placed gain above rectitude:

Ah, these that turn justice to poison,

thrust righteousness down to the ground

They do hate him who rebukes crookedness in the court,²⁸

abhor him who speaks with integrity!

Wherefore, because you trample on the weak

take from him “presents” of grain,

Houses of hewn stone you have built,

but you’ll not get to live in them;

Delightful vineyards you have planted,

but you’ll never drink their wine.

For I know that many are your crimes

and countless your sins,

Who harass honest men, take bribes,

and push aside the needy in the court.

(5:7, 10-12; cf. 2:6-16; 8:4-10)

But Amos knew that society’s sin is far more than overt crookedness and greed. It is also a luxury-loving ease that places its comfort above human beings and is unconcerned about the deep schism in the social order. How the prophet scores the gentle ladies of the kingdom, calling them fat “Bashan cows” of Samaria (4:1)! How he excoriates a pampered society amusing itself before the Deluge!

Ah these careless ones in Zion,

complacent ones in Samaria’s mount,

Elite of the very top nation,

to whom the house of Israel must resort,

Who put far off the evil day,

and make unjust assizes present fact,²⁹

Who lounge on ivory divans,

are sprawled upon their couches,

And eat choice lambs from the flock,

together with stall-fattened calves;

Who improvise to the sound of the harp,

just like David, they compose all sorts of songs,³⁰

Who drink wine by the bowl,

and anoint themselves with the finest of oils;

But over the rupture of Joseph they are not sick!

(6:1, 3-6)

Nor can a society so broken possibly heal itself by much religion. The busy religion of a people that has flouted all righteousness will avail nothing with God; nay more, it is a positive offense to him. Never has it been put better than Amos put it!

I do hate, I do despise your pilgrim feasts,

take no pleasure in your high holy days,

Though you offer to me (your) burnt offerings

and your meal offerings, I won’t accept them;

And to the peace offerings of your fat animals I’ll pay no attention.

Take away from me the noise of your songs;

to the melody of your harps I’m not listening.

But let justice roll down like waters,

and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream.

(5:21-24)

Thus it was at a time when society desperately needed criticism, yet when established religion could not deliver that criticism, nor even criticize itself, that the protest had to come from outside the organized church. And that, plainly, was a horrible state of affairs.

The intent of Amos’ message, then, is plain—as plain as a blow in the face. Nor is there need to argue that it is a relevant message in all ages; it is desperately relevant. It tells us what we need to hear: that a society that cares more for gain than for honor, for its living standard than for God, is sick to the death; that a church which has no rebuke for society, which demands lavish support before righteous behavior, is no true church but a sham of a church. Amos tells us that no amount of religious activity and loyalty to church can make a man’s conduct in business and society of no concern to God, nor can a correct creed play substitute for plain obedience to the divine Will in all aspects of life. He tells us that a church which makes a dichotomy between faith and ethics, to the point of making small insistence upon the latter, is under the judgment of God along with the society of which it has become a part.

2. Relevant indeed! But one might well ask what this has got to do with the hope of the Kingdom of God? Amos’ message is one of almost unrelieved doom. True, he called for repentance (5:4, 14-15), and to the repentant he held out hope. But it is plain that he did not expect repentance: the doom is both sure and soon. Israel is a tottering, jerry-built wall out of line with the plumb line of God (7:7-9)—tear it down! Israel will be left “the crumbs of a lion’s meal”³¹—two legs and a piece of an ear (3:12). So real was the coming ruin to Amos that he set up a wailing over the doomed nation as if for the dead:

She has fallen, never again to rise,

has virgin Israel;

Hurled headlong upon her land,

there is none to pick her up.

(5:2)

One might well ask what such black doom has to do with our topic.

But we shall badly mistake Amos and the other eighth century men if we do not understand their preaching as a powerful reactivation of the covenant faith. It is rooted and grounded in that sense of the intimate relationship between God and people which was the heart of all Israelite believing. It addresses the people as nothing other than the people of Yahweh, the subjects of his rule and partners of his covenant, and reminds them what that relationship means.

Now it is not to be supposed that Israel really needed to be reminded of her election. On the contrary, it was a fixed idea with her; she believed it all too well. Her whole tradition asserted with unanimous voice that God had chosen her out of all the families of the nations to be his people, and she cherished that belief with all her heart. Yahweh was her God, and she his people; Yahweh had therefore blessed her and would continue to do so. As Yahweh’s own people she might face the future without fear and even look forward with confidence to the Day of Yahweh (5:18), when he would intervene in history to judge his foes and establish his rule upon earth. Why should Israel not be confident? Is not the establishment of God’s rule the establishment of his people? And the Israelite state is the people of God.

In short, the whole notion of covenant and election had been made a mechanical thing, the deeply moral note inherent in it blurred and obscured. It had been forgotten that the covenant was a bilateral obligation, requiring of its people the worship of Yahweh alone and the strictest obedience to his righteous law in all human relationships. Or if the obligation was remembered at all, it was imagined that lavish sacrifice and loyal support of the shrines discharged it. The bond between God and people was thus made into a static, pagan thing based on blood and cult—a total perversion of the covenant idea. And religion was accorded an altogether pagan function: to coerce the favor of God by the sedulous manipulation of the ritual so that protection and material benefit might be secured for individual and nation.

Amos totally rejected this mechanized notion of the covenant. But this did not involve either Amos or any of the other prophets in a rejection of the belief that Israel was a chosen people. On the contrary, they affirmed it again and again. Indeed it seemed to Amos that the whole national past had been no less than a history of God’s grace—a grace repaid by the grossest ingratitude (2:9-12). But to be chosen, said Amos, is not to be pampered; it is to shoulder double responsibility. To sin against the light of grace is felony compounded, nay capital crime. All nations, Israel included, stand equally before the bar of God’s justice (chs. 1–2). There are no pet nations, elite races: “Are you not just like Ethiopia’s sons to me, sons of Israel? . . . Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt—and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Arameans from Kir?” (9:7.) Election is for responsibility. With what logic, and yet a logic so hard for favored people to grasp, Amos reasons (3:2)! He moves from plain premise to unheard-of conclusion. This is the premise: “Only you have I known (i.e., chosen) of all the families of the earth.” And this is the inexorable conclusions: “Wherefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities”!

But in saying this Amos is only harking back from a perverted notion of the covenant to the true one. The people of God is a community knit to one another by its bond with the covenant God. It is a brotherhood, for within it all human relationships are regulated by the righteous law of that God; and all stand equally under that law. The covenant is not mechanical and in the nature of things; it is a bilateral, moral agreement and can be voided. Mistreatment of the brother voids it, for he who crowds his brother spits on the law of God and, in that fact, does not keep covenant with him. In short, Israel is the people of God, but only as she keeps his law and exhibits his righteousness. Because Israel has not done so, but has egregiously violated the covenant brotherhood, Israel is no true people of God!

It is in the light of this theology that we must understand Amos’ ethical preaching. It is important that we note this, for it is too often missed. We take the ethical attack without the idea pattern upon which it was marshaled, and that attack becomes a noisy, angry thing—and Amos something he was not at all. He was no revolutionary summoning the downtrodden masses to the barricades. He was no humanitarian, moved by the plight of the poor, who advanced a program of social reform designed to cure the national malady. He was—let us not mistake it—no teacher of a new ethic which would ultimately, so the handbooks used to tell us, tame the rough-and-ready morality of the people and lift them to the heights of ethical monotheism. Amos was no innovator, but a man of the ancient ways. His ethical protest was drawn from a well five hundred years deep. His were the ethics of the Decalogue; of Nathan, who called David a murderer to his face (II Sam. 12:1-15); of rugged Elijah coming down to Jezreel to meet his enemy Ahab and curse him for his crime against Naboth (I Kings 21). Yet for all his roots in the past, Amos was no Nazirite, no Rechabite, who thought to cure the ills of society by a flight to a past that never was. Amos was plainly and simply a man of the covenant who denounced all greed, immorality, and social iniquity as a sin against the covenant God. He advanced no cure for the schism of society save a restoration of the covenant brotherhood which had created Israelite society in the first place:

Seek good and not evil, that you may live;

And so Yahweh God of Hosts may be with you, as you say he is.

(5:14)

3. Just here is the tremendous contribution of Amos to the notion of the Kingdom of God apparent. With Amos the rejection of that blasphemous identification of the people and the Kingdom of God with the Israelite state had become total. Resistance to that identification, as has been said, was not new. It went back to the ancient feeling that the monarchy was not God’s order and, even if looked upon as a tolerable and necessary order, was to be brought into line with God’s order. It was this feeling that was behind purge after purge, revolution and attempted revolution, which had torn the body politic of Israel for generations. But heretofore the hope had persisted that the state could be made God’s order, or at least driven into some conformity with it, by political action. Amos quite gave up any hope of this. Indeed, after Jehu’s horror any sensible man might. It is true that Amos was taken for a revolutionary, another nābî’ plotter preaching sedition against the state (7:10-13), but his indignant denial (7:14-15) is borne out by the facts. Here is a new thing: never again, so far as we know, did a prophet seek to reform the state by direct political action.

But we certainly cannot see in this any lessening of tension with the state, but rather a heightening of it. There is no attempt to purge the state, because the state is beyond external correction. It is under the judgment of God. The bond between Israel and God has been broken; idolatry, gross immorality, and unbrotherly greed on a nationwide scale have broken it. “Call his name Lo-ammi, for you are not my people and I will not be your God,” said Hosea (1:9). And since Israel has parted company with God, is truly no longer his people, all her exuberant confidence in the future is a false confidence. She has no future but utter and inescapable ruin. Thus it was that Amos leaped upon the popular desire for the Day of Yahweh, the day when Yahweh would intervene in history to establish his rule and to judge his foes. Israel has nothing to hope for from that day—for Israel is herself among Yahweh’s foes:

Ah you that eagerly desire the Day of Yahweh,

What do you want with the Day of Yahweh?

it is darkness, not light;

As if a man were fleeing from a lion,

and a bear attacks him;

Or were to come home and lean his hand on the wall,

and a snake bites him.

Is not the Day of Yahweh darkness and not light,

even black darkness with not a ray of light in it?

(5:18-20)

Here is the most shockingly novel note in all eighth-century prophecy: that God can and will cast off his people. This note runs through Amos’ preaching and rises to a thundering crescendo: “Behold, the eyes of Lord Yahweh are on the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth” (9:8a). God has rejected the Israelite state, and has rejected it totally.

This meant that the hope of the establishment of the Kingdom of God—the hope embodied in the dream of the Day of Yahweh—began to be divorced from the Israelite state and driven beyond it. The northern kingdom is under sentence of death; Israel’s hopes can never be fulfilled in terms of that kingdom. If we had to put Amos’ message in a word, might we not paraphrase it thus? The Kingdom of Israel is not the Kingdom of God! It can neither be that Kingdom nor inherit it. It cannot be the Kingdom of God, because it has flouted the laws of God and violated the covenant brotherhood. The Kingdom of Israel is under the judgment of God—and the judgment is history!

4. Let us not suppose that the words of Amos are ancient words. They are very modern. They are spoken to us and clamor for our attention. We dare not refuse to listen, for it is very late. We are, to be sure, in all externals as little like ancient Israel as possible. Yet in us there is written her hope, and also her delusion and her failure.

We, too, have longed and do long for the Kingdom of God, and dark days heighten the longing. Of course, tongue-tied as we are in the language of faith, we would never put it that way. We would speak of an end to war and fear, a community of nations, the triumph of justice and brotherhood, a moral world order. But there is small difference, in the stuff of it, between what we long for and the hope of ancient Israel that God’s people would one day be established under his rule to live out its days in peace and plenty. We earnestly desire the Kingdom of God, although we do not know by what name to call it. With but a recollection of a parent’s recollection of a grandparent’s faith in that Kingdom, we desire it because we cannot help doing so.

But we might ask to what extent Amos’ indictment of society is applicable to us today. In one sense the answer is obvious: it is fully applicable. It takes no skill, nor even a very sharp conscience, to point out that our society, like that of ancient Israel, is shot through with the crimes which Amos denounced: injustice and greed, immorality, pleasure-loving ease, and venality. Nor does one have to be a Cassandra to understand that these things are society’s sickness, for which a doctor’s bill will surely have to be paid. The indictment of Amos is an indictment of all societies, including our own.

But are we then to apply directly to our society the thundering negation which Amos gave to the hope of the Israelite kingdom? Have we nothing to look forward to but an impending and well-deserved doom? There is a sense in which to say so would not seem fair. To admit that we are guilty before the indictment of Amos is to say but half the truth. For, if compared with other societies that have existed and do exist, ours is not a bad society at all but a very good one. We are a nation founded on Christian principles; our political institutions and our national dogma of the rights and the dignity of man have grown out of these principles. We have so many churches, and these have so many active members, that we can claim to be a Christian nation. What is more, the shadow of the Church and her teachings falls across the nation and the national character more powerfully than most of us realize. The indictment of Amos, and of the other prophets and of Christ, has been, in a measure, taken seriously: stupendous efforts have been made to better the lot of mankind; injustices have been corrected and will continue to be corrected. Ours is a society as good to live in as any that has ever been. We ought to give thanks for it. For all its obvious faults it is worth defending; if we do not defend it, we are forty times purblind. Surely we may pray for God’s guidance as we do so!

But will we then commit the fatal error? Will we, like Israel, imagine that our destiny under God and God’s purposes in history are to be realized in terms of the society we have built? The temptation to do so is subtle. After all, we may claim a Christian heritage from which human liberties have flowed; we have churches and support them lavishly; but Communism, for example, is totally godless and so destructive of all that is noble in man that scarcely one redeeming thing can be said of it. Between the two there is simply no comparison. Surely God, if he be just, will further our efforts and will defend us from his foe and ours—for we are his good Christian people! As for ourselves, we will labor and pray for the winning of the world to Christ and the victory of his Kingdom—for it is either that sort of world or a chaos in which nothing which we value would be safe. And if the victory of Christ—which we tend to equate with our own best interests—seems remote, we will turn to yet busier activity, for that is all we know how to do. Surely if we thus energetically serve him, God will protect us and give us the victory!

To this hope Amos speaks a resounding No! Let us understand his words clearly: God does not in that sense have favored people. No earthly state is established of God, guaranteed of God, and identified with his purposes. Nor has any earthly order, however good, the means of setting up God’s order in terms of its own ends. On the contrary, all societies are under the judgment of God’s order, and those that have been favored with the light doubly so! Indeed, before we can have any hope of a righteous order established by God, we must, like Israel, learn that our order is not God’s but must conform to it or perish. Wherever, says Amos, the schism of society is set forward, there is society perishing. Wherever men who have known of righteousness can speak only of their right to crowd for what they can get; wherever men who have known of Christian brotherhood behave as if they believed in favored races; wherever men who have heard a higher calling grow soft in the enjoyment of the ease that money can buy—there is society under judgment. And the judgment is history. Nor will it greatly matter to those who have to face it whether the barbaric tool of that judgment is Assyria or Russia.

Does Amos then leave society no hope? For sinful society, as sinful society, none! Man’s disorder cannot inherit the Kingdom of God but must, on the contrary, live ever in history’s judgment. The very hope of peace must remain for it a Utopian dream, which it pursues as a will-o’-the-wisp. Nor are there any external means by which an unrighteous society may avert the judgment that awaits it. Certainly the busy activity of its religion, and the formal correctness of its worship, is of no avail. It is true—although Amos does not mention it—that a nation may, by wise statecraft and sufficient strength, manage to postpone the judgment and survive through centuries of time. Because this is so, it is not irrelevant what policies a nation pursues; and we ought to pray that our nation may choose its course wisely. Amos, however, is not concerned with political realities, but with moral ones. And his verdict stands: a society which flouts the righteous laws of God is none of his and cannot forever endure. No comfort there, to be sure, but the alternative mankind must face. And if that alternative seems to brush aside the political realities which conditioned Israel’s survival, and which govern ours, it may nonetheless be accorded a deeper relevance. For the choice before man remains this: to enter anew into covenant with God to live as his people under his rule—or the judgment of history without end.

So Israel yearned for the Day of Yahweh, the day of the victory of God’s Kingdom. And week by week our prayer goes up: “Thy kingdom come.” It is well that we so pray; it is our proper prayer. But how is it that we dare to pray it except as his obedient children? If we are to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” we must also learn to pray, and to mean it quite seriously, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

¹ This can be suspected rather than proved. A court and harem such as Solomon had inevitably breeds favoritism. Certainly Solomon did not stint his household any luxury. Favored wives, such as pharaoh’s daughter, naturally received preferred treatment (I Kings 7:8-12). While we know nothing of the merits of the two sons-in-law who were made district governors (I Kings 4:11, 15), their presence certainly indicates a desire to consolidate power in the family.

² David had also subjected conquered peoples to forced labor (II Sam. 12:31).

³ I Kings 5:13 speaks of a levy of thirty thousand Israelites. It has been estimated that this would be comparable to five million Americans today. Cf. W. F. Albright, “The Biblical Period,” The Jews: Their History, Culture and Religion, L. Finkelstein, ed. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1949), p. 28. This article, incidentally, is highly recommended as an accurate thumbnail sketch of Israel’s history.

⁴ The background of the transaction is not clear. A casual reading would leave the impression that the cities were ceded to Hiram in payment for materials received (vs. 11), but vs. 14 (Hiram pays Solomon!) shows that the real purpose was to raise cash. Cf. most recently J. A. Montgomery, The Books of Kings (International Critical Commentary [New York: Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1951]), p. 204; he believes that the towns were pawned against a cash loan.

⁵ Concerning the temple cf. Chap. I, note 35.

⁶ A. Alt (“Israels Gaue unter Salomo,” Alttestamentliche Studien für Rudolf Kittel; Beiträge zur Wissenschaft des alten Testaments, 13 [1913], 1-19) has argued that Solomon exempted his own tribe, Judah, from his district organization. W. F. Albright (“The Administrative Divisions of Israel and Judah,” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society, V-1 [1925], 17-54) has disagreed. The debate hinges about the very ambiguous verse, I Kings 4:19. Regardless of the correct reading of the verse in question, one may doubt if Solomon could have afforded to favor his own tribe to such an extent.

⁷ Cf. J. Morgenstern, Amos Studies I (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1941), pp. 202-5.

⁸ The extent of Shishak’s depredations is known from his own inscription, found at Karnak, which lists over 150 places—many of them in northern Israel and Edom as well as in Judah. Cf. Albright, “The Biblical Period,” p. 30. The reader will find excerpts from Shishak’s list conveniently in G. A. Barton, Archaeology and the Bible (7th ed.; Philadelphia: American Sunday School Union, 1937), pp. 456-57.

⁹ Dates given for the kings of the Divided Monarchy are those of W. F. Albright and will be found in table form on the back cover of the reprinted article mentioned in note 3 above. Cf. idem, “The Chronology of the Divided Monarchy of Israel,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 100 (1945), 16-22.

¹⁰ A. Alt (“Das Königtum in den Reichen Israel und Juda,” Vetus Testamentum, I-1 [1951], 2-22) has recently related the inability of the northern state to achieve a stable dynasty to the lively charismatic tradition that existed there. It seems to me that Alt is correct. But the dynastic stability of Judah cannot be explained by the supposition that such a tradition was largely lacking in the southern state. The strong prestige of the Davidic house, and the growing influence of the “David idea” must be taken into account.

¹¹ On the function of the cherubim and the winged bulls cf. Graham and May, Culture and Conscience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), pp. 248-60; W. F. Albright, “What Were the Cherubim?” The Biblical Archaeologist, I-1 (1938), 1-3.

¹² The Samaria ostraca are a group of inscribed potsherds which list quantities of oil and wine received as revenue at the court. They date from the reign of Jeroboam II (contemporary of Amos), but the administrative system which they represent may be assumed to be much older. Cf. W. F. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1942), pp. 141-42. For a translation of some of them with bibliography cf. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, J. B. Pritchard, ed. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 321.

¹³ The Bible speaks of Jezebel’s father as “king of the Sidonians.” The power of the Sidonian Phoenicians (Canaanites) was now at its height. Tyre was the chief city. Cf. Albright, “The Biblical Period,” p. 33. For an excellent, brief discussion of Phoenician civilization, idem, “The Role of the Canaanites in the History of Civilization,” Studies in the History of Culture (Menasha, Wis.: Banta Pub. Co., 1942), pp. 11-50.

¹⁴ Cf. Chap. I, p. 38.

¹⁵ Far our richest source of knowledge are the texts discovered at Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast in the decade prior to World War II. For a useful introduction cf. C. F. A. Schaeffer, The Cuneiform Texts of Ras Shamra-Ugarit (London: Oxford University Press, 1939). For a complete translation of the texts cf. C. H. Gordon, Ugaritic Literature (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1949); cf. idem, The Loves and Wars of Baal and Anat (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1943) for a popular treatment. For an excellent and brief discussion of Canaanite religion cf. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, ch. III.

¹⁶ Cf. Chap. I, pp. 23, 37.

¹⁷ For a thorough discussion of the prophet orders cf. A. R. Johnson, The Cultic Prophet in Ancient Israel (Cardiff: University of Wales Press Board, 1944).

¹⁸ That one of them should curse Ahab for sparing the life of Ben-hadad is to be explained only in the light of the strongly nationalistic and isolationist bias of the early prophets. Ahab’s clemency would ordinarily seem not only humanitarian but politically wise in view of the impending Assyrian menace. Cf. note 21 below.

¹⁹ Although the prophets did not themselves go so far, some of them—especially Hosea and Jeremiah—to an extent sympathized with their feelings. After all, Jeremiah highly commended their loyalty to their principles; cf. Jer. 35; 2:1-2; Hos. 9:10 ff.; 11:1-7. Cf. W. F. Albright, “Primitivism in Western Asia,” in A Documentary History of Primitivism, Vol. I (A. O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935]), pp. 421-32.

²⁰ Albright, “The Biblical Period,” p. 38, points out that proper names compounded with Baal are quite frequent in the Samaria ostraca of the next century. In any case a reading of Hosea alone is enough to show that Baal worship was far from uprooted.

²¹ The Bible does not mention this battle at all, but we know of it from Shalmaneser’s own inscriptions. Awareness of the danger which the Assyrian posed for them both is the best explanation for Ahab’s desire to make peace with Ben-hadad (I Kings 20:31-34). For translation of relevant portions of the cuneiform texts, cf. Pritchard, op. cit., pp. 278-79.

²² In 841 B.C. This too is known from Shalmaneser’s inscriptions; cf. Pritchard, op. cit., p. 280.

²³ This has been partially illustrated by archaeology; cf. Albright, “The Biblical Period,” pp. 39-40.

²⁴ Most commentators see in the cryptic words of Amos 6:13, “thing of nought” (Heb. lō’ dābār) and “horns” (Heb. qarnayim), the names of two places known from other references in the Bible to have existed in north-central Transjordan. The verse would then read, “You that rejoice over Lodebar, that say, ‘Is it not by our might that we have seized Qarnaim for ourselves?’ ” Presumably allusions to victories of Jehoash or Jeroboam over the Arameans are intended.

²⁵ I am in agreement with those who regard the popular notion of the Day of Yahweh as eschatological, i.e., the time when Yahweh would break into history to judge his foes and establish his rule. See my article “Faith and Destiny,” Interpretation V-1 (1951), 9 ff.

²⁶ His home was Tekoa (1:1), a site which still wears its ancient name (Khirbet Taqû‘), a few miles southeast of Bethlehem overlooking the steep pitch down to the Dead Sea.

²⁷ It is difficult to agree with those—recently A. Haldar, Associations of Cult Prophets Among the Ancient Semites (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1945), p. 112; Miloš Bič, “Der Prophet Amos—Ein Haepatoskopos,” Vetus Testamentum, I–4 (1951), 292-96—who maintain that the words (1:1; 7:14) nôqēd and bôqēr (“herdsman”) denote a cultic functionary. Even granting that the words may on occasion have had a cultic significance, this is no proof that they must always do so. The fact that the early prophets were closely linked to the cult must not be driven to such extremes. The sense of Amos 7:14 is that Amos was not a professional religionist at the time of his call; cf. H. H. Rowley, “Was Amos a Nabi?” Festschrift Otto Eissfeldt, J. Fück, ed. (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1947), pp. 191-97.

²⁸ Literally, “that reproves in the gate.” The city gate, as we know from numerous references in the Old Testament, was where the elders sat to administer justice. It thus corresponds to the court, as we would understand it.

²⁹ Literally, “and bring near the seat (sitting) of violence.” Reference seems to be to courts where violence, instead of justice, is dispensed. But the sense is uncertain; see the commentaries.

³⁰ The Hebrew, which the English follows, reads, “like David they devise for themselves instruments of music.” To many commentators this seems unlikely because: (a) while David was famed as a composer of songs, we do not hear that he invented musical instruments; and (b) the context speaks of banquets with music, which is a place where ditties might be improvised but scarcely the place to devise novel musical instruments. The proposed emendation, following Nowack, etc., changes but one Hebrew letter. It is, however, a conjecture.

³¹ The expression is George Adam Smith’s in The Book of the Twelve Prophets (rev. ed.; New York: Harper & Bros., 1928), I, 148.