Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Amos 7:14

Then answered Amos, and said to Amaziah, I [was] no prophet, neither [was] I a prophet’s son; but I [was] a herdsman, and a gatherer of sycamore fruit:

14. I was no prophet, and I was no prophet’s son ] i.e. not one of the “sons of the prophets,” as the companies, or guilds, of prophets, at Beth-el, Gilgal, and other places, are called in the Book of Kings (1Ki 20:35; 2Ki 2:3; 2Ki 2:5; 2Ki 2:7; 2Ki 2:15; 2Ki 4:1; 2Ki 4:38; 2Ki 5:22; 2Ki 6:1; 2Ki 9:1). In Semitic languages ‘son’ is often used in the figurative sense of belonging to: thus in Syriac bar naggr, ‘a son of the carpenters,’ means a member of a carpenters’ guild. Amos disclaims being a prophet by trade or profession, who might, for instance, have adopted his vocation without any special fitness, or inward call, or who might have even prosecuted it solely with a view to the material advantages accruing from it: no motives such as these had actuated him; he was a simple herdsman, and cultivator of sycomore trees; and he was following the flock, at the moment when the summons came, bidding him be a prophet to Jehovah’s people.

an herdman ] Lit. a cow – (or ox -) herd; but it is very possible, especially in view of the next verse (“from following the flock ”), that br ( ) is here an error for nd ( ), the rare word used in Amo 1:1 to describe Amos as a keeper of the peculiar breed of sheep called naad.

and a dresser (R.V.) of sycomores ] The sycomore (or “fig-mulberry”) not our tree of the same name was a common (Isa 9:10; 1Ki 10:27), but useful tree, which grew abundantly in the mild climate of the Shephlh, or Maritime Plain (1 Ki. l.c.; 1Ch 27:28), as it does still in that of the deep Jordan valley: in Egypt, where it also grew (Psa 78:47), and where it is found still, its wood was used for doors, boxes, coffins, and articles of furniture (Wilkinson-Birch, Anc. Eg., ii. 416). It attains the size of a walnut-tree, has wide-spreading branches, and, on account of its shade, is often planted by the way-side (cf. Luk 19:4). The fruit grows, not on the branches, but on little sprigs rising directly out of the stem, and in clusters like the grape (see the representation in the Dict. of the Bible, s.v.): it is something like a small fig, in shape and size, but insipid and woody in taste. The fruit is infested with an insect (the Sycophaga crassipes), and till the ‘eye’ or top has been punctured, so that the insects may escape, it is not eatable [185] . This operation, it is probable, is what is here alluded to. Bls is a verb derived from balas, which in Ethiopic means a fig, or (sometimes) a sycomore (see Dillmann’s Lex. Aeth., col. 487), and in Arabic denotes a species of fig; in Hebrew, it may be inferred that it denoted the similarly shaped fruit of the sycomore, and the derived verb will have signified to deal with, handle, or dress the fruit of the sycomore. The LXX. having no doubt in view the method of rendering the fruit edible, referred to above, render by , pricking or nipping (hence Vulg. vellicans) [186] .

[185] Cheyne, ap. W. R. Smith, Proph., ed. 2, p. 396.

[186] Theophrastus and Dioscorides, in their descriptions of the process, use a compound of the same verb, . Theoph. iv. 2 : Diosc. i. 180 , . Cf. Bochart, Hieroz. ii. 39. (p. 384; 406 Rosenm.).

Tekoa is however much too cold for sycomores to have ever grown there: the tree is not found in Syria above 1000 ft. above the sea, and Tekoa is more than twice as high as that. We must suppose the “naad-keepers of Tekoa” (Amo 1:1) to have owned lands in the ‘wilderness’ or pasture-ground, stretching down to the Dead Sea on the east (above, p. 126); and here, in some sufficiently sheltered situation, must have grown the sycomore-trees, which the prophet ‘dressed.’

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

14 17. Amos’ retort.

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

I was no prophet – The order of the words is emphatic. No prophet I, and no prophets son I, for a herdsman I, and dresser of sycamores. It may be, Amos would meet, for the peoples sake, Amaziahs taunt. He had a living, simple indeed, yet that of the prophets was as simple. But chiefly he tells them of the unusual character of his mission. He did not belong to the order of the prophets, nor had he been educated in the schools of the prophets, nor had he any human training. He was thinking of nothing less; he was doing the works of his calling, until God took him from following the flock, and gave him his commission. Rup.: He promises humbly what he had been, what he had been made, not by merits, but by grace, that he had not assumed the prophetic office by hereditary right, nor had he begun to prophesy out of his own mind, but, being under the necessity of obeying, he had fulfilled the grace and the command of God who inspired and sent Him. Twice he repeats, The Lord took me; the Lord said unto me; inculcating that, what Amaziah forbade, God bade. All was of God. He had but obeyed. Jerome: As then the Apostles, when the Scribes and Pharisees forbade them to teach in the Name of Jesus, answered, We must obey God rather than man Act 5:29, so Amos, when forbidden by the idol-priests to prophesy, not only prophesies, shewing that he feared God bidding, more than their forbidding, but he boldly and freely denounces the punishment of him who endeavored to forbid and hinder the word of God. Rup.: heaven thundered and commanded him to prophesy; the frog croaked in answer out of his marsh, prophesy no more.

Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible

Verse 14. I was no prophet] I am an extraordinary messenger of God. I am not called to the prophetic office but for this occasion. I have no message to Judah, and therefore need not go there. I have a message to Israel alone, and I must faithfully deliver it.

For the account which Amos gives here of himself, see the introduction. See Clarke on Am 1:1.

Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible

Then answered Amos: so soon as this false accuser had under the vizard of friendship given advice, and withal intimated his resolution to use his authority to make Amos desist if he did not do it voluntarily, Amos gives him answer readily, boldly, and yet smoothly, and outshoots the court pontiff in his own bow.

Said to Amaziah; not fearing his person or his power.

I was no prophet; not originally, or by succession, or by study, or by any human designation and preparation, as many have been;

neither was I a prophets son; my father was no prophet, nor was I bred up in the school of the prophets, such as 2Ki 2:3,5,7,15; 4:38; 6:1. Though you call me seer, whether ironically or seriously, I matter not, but assure you I am not such by art, or trade, or for a livelihood.

But I was a herdman; by breeding, choice, and occupation I was and still am a herdman, and have my concerns in that mystery in or near Tekoa in Judah, on which I can live; though I prophesy without stipend or salary, I needed not to run into the prophets work for my bread.

And a gatherer of sycomore fruit: the tree and fruit is known by one name; Palestine abounded with both; and the fruit was sweet, not large, yet good for food for man or cattle, as some fruits are with us; on these I could still, as I formerly did, live, and be content.

Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole

14. I was noprophetin answer to Amaziah’s insinuation (Am7:12), that he discharged the prophetical office to earn his”bread” (like Israel’s mercenary prophets). So far frombeing rewarded, Jehovah’s prophets had to expect imprisonment andeven death as the result of their prophesying in Samaria or Israel:whereas the prophets of Baal were maintained at the king’s expense(compare 1Ki 18:19). I wasnot, says Amos, of the order of prophets, or educated in theirschools, and deriving a livelihood from exercising the publicfunctions of a prophet. I am a shepherd (compare Am7:15, “flock”; the Hebrew for “herdsman”includes the meaning, shepherd, compare Am1:1) in humble position, who did not even think of prophesyingamong you, until a divine call impelled me to it.

prophet’s sonthat is,disciple. Schools of prophets are mentioned first in First Samuel; inthese youths were educated to serve the theocracy as publicinstructors. Only in the kingdom of the ten tribes is the continuanceof the schools of the prophets mentioned. They were missionarystations near the chief seats of superstition in Israel, andassociations endowed with the Spirit of God; none were admitted butthose to whom the Spirit had been previously imparted. Theirspiritual fathers travelled about to visit the training schools, andcared for the members and even their widows (2Ki 4:1;2Ki 4:2). The pupils had theircommon board in them, and after leaving them still continued members.The offerings which in Judah were given by the pious to the Levites,in Israel went to the schools of the prophets (2Ki4:42). Prophecy (for example, Elijah and Elisha) in Israel wasmore connected with extraordinary events than in Judah, inasmuch as,in the absence of the legal hierarchy of the latter, it needed tohave more palpable divine sanction.

sycamoreabounding inPalestine. The fruit was like the fig, but inferior; according toPLINY, a sort of compound,as the name expresses, of the fig and the mulberry. It was only eatenby the poorest (compare 1Ki10:27).

gathererone occupiedwith their cultivation [MAURER].To cultivate it, an incision was made in the fruit when of a certainsize, and on the fourth day afterwards it ripened [PLINY,Natural History, 13.7,14]. GROTIUSfrom JEROME says, if it benot plucked off and “gathered” (which favors EnglishVersion), it is spoiled by gnats.

Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible

Then answered Amos, and said to Amaziah,…. With much freedom, boldness, and intrepidity, and yet with modesty and humility; not at all moved by his frowns or his flattery:

I [was] no prophet, neither [was] I a prophet’s son: he was not a prophet originally, or from his youth, as Kimchi; he was not born and bred one; neither his father was a prophet, by whom he could get any instructions in the mystery of prophesying; nor was he a disciple of any of the prophets, or brought up in any of their schools as some were; he was no prophet till the Lord called him immediately, at once, from his secular employment to this office; and therefore did not take it up to get a livelihood by Jarchi and Aben Ezra interpret it, that he was not one of the false prophets that prophesied for hire, and took a reward:

but I [was] an herdsman, and a gatherer of sycamore fruit; that is, originally: this was the employment he was brought up in from his youth, and was in it when he was called to be a prophet; he looked after cattle, both great and small; and at a certain time of the year used, to gather sycamore fruit, which was a kind of figs; and by, its name had the resemblance both of figs and mulberries. Some take it to be what were called Egyptian figs; these he gathered, either for the use of his masters, or for food for himself, or for the cattle, or both: or he was an “opener” of them, as the Septuagint; he cut, them, and made incisions in them; for, as Pliny l, Dioscorides m, and Theophrastus n observe, this fruit must be cut or scratched, either with the nail, or with iron, or it will not ripen; but, four days after being scratched or cut, will become ripe. Mr. Norden o, a late traveller in Egypt, has given us a very particular account of this tree and its fruit.

“This sycamore (he says) is of the height of a beech, and bears its fruit in a manner quite different from other trees; it has them on the trunk itself, which shoots out little sprigs in form of grape stalks; at the end of which grow the fruit close to one another, almost like bunches of grapes. The tree is always green, and bears fruit several times in the year, without observing any certain seasons: for I have seen (says he) some sycamores that have given fruit two months after others. The fruit has the figure and smell of real figs, but is inferior to them in the taste, having a disgusting sweetness. Its colour is a yellow, inclining to an ochre, shadowed by a flesh colour. In the inside it resembles the common figs, excepting that it has a blackish colouring with yellow spots. This sort of tree is pretty common in Egypt; the people for the greater part live upon its fruit, and think themselves well regaled when they have a piece of bread, a couple of sycamore figs, and a pitcher filled with water from the Nile.”

This account in several things agrees with what Pliny p and Solinus q relate of this tree and its fruit; very likely there might be many of these trees in Judea; there seem to have been great numbers of them in Solomon’s time, 1Ki 10:27; and perhaps it was one of these that Zacchaeus climbed, in order to see Christ, Lu 19:4; for this sort of trees delight in vales and plains, such as were the plains of Jericho; and in the Talmud r we read of sycamore trees in Jericho; and of the men of Jericho allowing the branches of them to be cut down for sacred uses. These also grew in lower Galilee, but not in upper Galilee; and that they were frequent in the land of Israel appears from the rules the Misnic doctors s give about the planting, and cutting them down; and in the opening of these trees, and making incisions in them, and in gathering the fruit of them, Amos might be concerned. Kimchi and Ben Melech say the word signifies to “mix”, and that his business was to mix these together with other fruit. Aben Ezra observes, that in the Arabic language it signifies to dry; and then his work was, after he had gathered them, to lay them a drying. Some render the word a “searcher” t of them; as if his employment was to look out for them, and seek them where they were to be got: however, be this as it will, the prophet suggests that he had been used to a low life, and to mean fare, with which he was contented, and did not take up this business of prophesying for bread, and could return to his former employment without any regret, to get a maintenance, if so was the will of God. The Targum gives it a different sense,

“for I am a master of cattle, and have sycamores in the fields;”

and so Jarchi, Kimchi, and Ben Melech, represent him as suggesting that he was rich, and had no need of bread to be given him, or to prophesy for that.

l Nat. Hist. l. 13. c. 7. m L. 1. c. 143. n Hist. l. 4. c. 2. o Travels in Egypt and Nubis, vol. 1. p. 79, 80. p Nat. Hist. l. 13. c. 7. q Polyhistor. c. 45. r T. Bab Pesachim, fol. 56. 1. 57. 1. & Menachot, fol. 71. 1. s Misn. Shevath, c. 9. sect. 2. & Bava Bathra, c. 2. sect. 7. t “disquirens”, Montanus, Vatablus “perquirens”, Junius & Tremellius, Piscator, Cocceius, Burkius. So R. Sol. Urbin Ohel Moed, fol. 31. 2.

Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible

Amos first of all repudiates the insinuation that he practises prophesying as a calling or profession, by which he gets his living. “I am no prophet,” sc. by profession, “and no prophet’s son,” i.e., not a pupil or member of the prophets’ schools, one who has been trained to prophesy (on these schools, see the comm. on 1Sa 19:24); but (according to my proper calling) a boqer , lit., a herdsman of oxen (from baqar ); then in a broader sense, a herdsman who tends the sheep ( ), a shepherd; and a boles shiqmm , i.e., one who plucks sycamores or mulberry-figs, and lives upon them. The . . boles is a denom. from the Arabic name for the mulberry-fig, and signifies to gather mulberry-figs and live upon them; like and , i.e., according to Hesych. , to eat figs. The rendering of the lxx , Vulg. vellicans , points to the fact that it was a common custom to nip or scratch the mulberry-figs, in order to make them ripen (see Theophr. Hist. plant. iv. 2; Plin. Hist. nat. 13, 14; and Bochart, Hieroz. i. 384, or p. 406 ed. Ros.); but this cannot be shown to be the true meaning of boles . And even if the idea of nipping were implied in the word boles , it would by no means follow that the possession of a mulberry plantation was what was intended, as many commentators have inferred; for “the words contain an allusion to the ‘eating of bread’ referred to in Amo 7:12, and the fruit is mentioned here as the ordinary food of the shepherds, who lived at the pasture grounds, and to whom bread may have been a rarity” (Hitzig). From this calling, which afforded him a livelihood, the Lord had called him away to prophesy to His people Israel; so that whoever forbade him to do so, set himself in opposition to the Lord God.

Fuente: Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament

The Reply Of Amos To Amaziath, The False Prophet

Verses 14-17:

Verse 14 reports Amos’ disclaimer to Amaziah of any religious or academic polish or training in any school of the prophets, 2Ki 2:5; 2Ki 2:7; 2Ki 2:15-18. He further asserts that he is not the son of a prophet, to parrot what he might have heard a father-prophet prophecy. He simply affirms that his heritage and experience is that of an herdsman and a gatherer of sycamore fruit. This replies to Amaziah’s insinuation that he simply prophesied to earn his bread, like so many mercenary prophets in Israel. The fruit he gathered was used by the poor only and was of a poorer quality than from figs. From this humble life came God’s prophet of doom, who spoke with both dignity and authority, 1Ki 10:27.

Verse 15 recounts Amos’ words “and the Lord took me as I followed the flock, and the Lord said unto me,” Thus Amos witnessed that the message he delivered was from and of the Lord, not of his own invention. Thus Amos prophesied under the mandate “Go, prophecy to my people Israel.” It was much as David was taken, typical, of Jesus the true shepherd, 2Sa 7:8; Psa 78:70-71; Psalms 23 rd and John ch. 10. God claims Israel as “my people.” As He called Peter, Andrew, James, John and Matthew from busy labors to do His will, bear His message, He still calls men to fields of labor, Mat 4:15-21.

Verse 16 contains Amos’ direct address, sharp reply to the chief priest of the idol temple who ordered him to prophecy not, but go away, leave them alone, v. 12, 13. In essence Amos said, “Amaziah, God called me to prophecy; my commission and accountability is from Him, not you. For Amaziah had said, don’t drop your load of judgment doom on Israel, Eze 21:2; Mic 2:6; Mic 2:11, my people. The ungodly regard the testimony of God’s servants as a wearisome, burdensome dropping. They rather love to hear pretty things, complimentary things, for which they have itching ears, as expressed 2Ti 4:3.

Verse 17 contains a theological outline of judgments and woes that were to fall on Amaziah and Israel as follows:

1. Thy wife shall be violently forced to be an harlot in the city, while you look on, unable to prevent her dishonor, Isa 5:11. His “Thus saith the Lord,” is much more forceful than Amaziah’s “thou sayest.”

2. Your sons and daughters are to fall or be slain by the sword.

3. Your land shall be divided by line, among the invaders.

4. You shall die an exile in a polluted, foreign, or heathen land, 2Ki 17:6; Isa 15:5; Jer 2:7.

5. Fifth, Israel shall surely, without fail, go into captivity out of and away from her land, to Assyria and Babylon, for her willful idolatry, breach of God’s law, and adamant continuing that way, Exo 20:1-5; Deu 28:15-62.

Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary

The Prophet Amos first pleads for himself, that he was not at liberty to obey the counsel of Amaziah, because he could not renounce a calling to which he was appointed. As then he had been sent by God, he proves that he was bound by necessity to prophesy in the land of Israel. In the first place, he indeed modestly says, that he was not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet: why did he say this? To render himself contemptible? By no means, though the words apparently have this tendency; but it was to gain for himself more authority; for his extraordinary call gave him greater weight than if he had been brought up from his childhood in the schools of the prophets. He then shows that he became a prophet by a miraculous interposition, and that the office was not committed to him by human authority, and in the usual way; but that he had been led to it as it were by force, so that he could not cast aside the office of teaching, without openly shaking off the yoke laid upon him by God.

This account then which Amos gives of himself ought to be noticed, I was not a Prophet, nor the son of a Prophet Had he said simply that he was not a Prophet, he might have been accused of presumption: how so? No one takes to himself this honor in the Church of God; a call is necessary; Were an angel to descend from heaven, he ought not to subvert public order; (Gal 1:8) for all things, as Paul reminds us, ought to be done decently and in lawful order in the Church; for the God of peace presides over us. Had Amos then positively denied that he was a Prophet, he might on this account have been thrust away from his office of teaching, for he wanted a call. But he means that he was not a Prophet who had been from his childhood instructed in God’s law, to be an interpreter of Scripture: and for the same reason he says that he was not the son of a Prophet; for there were then, we know, colleges for Prophets; and this is sufficiently evident from sacred history. As then these colleges were instituted for this end — that there might be always seminaries for the Church of God, so that it might not be destitute of good and faithful teachers, Amos says that he was not of that class. He indeed honestly confesses that he was an illiterate man: but by this as I have already said, he gained to himself more authority inasmuch as the Lord had seized on him as it were by force, and set him over the people to teach them: “See, thou shalt be my Prophet, and though thou hast not been taught from thy youth for this office, I will yet in an instant make thee a Prophet.” It was a greater miracle, that Christ chose rude and ignorant men as his apostles, than if he had at first chosen Paul or men like him who were skillful in the law. If then Christ had at the beginning selected such disciples, their authority would have appeared less: but as he had prepared by his Spirit those who were before unlearned, it appeared more evident that they were sent from above. And to this refers the expression the Prophet uses, when he says, Jehovah took me away: for it intimates that his calls as we have said, was extraordinary. The rest we shall defer till to-morrow.

Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary

(14) I was . . .An interesting biographical touch. Prophecy, like other occupations, tended to form a hereditary guild, but Amos was not by birth a prophet. The word for gatherer is rendered in the LXX. and Vulg. nipper, or pincher. There was a custom mentioned in Theophrastus, Hist. Plant., iv. 2, Pliny, Hist. Nat., xiii. 14, of pinching or scratching the mulberry-fig in order to make it ripen. But it is very doubtful whether this is the meaning of the Hebrew word here, which is nowhere else employed.

Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)

14-17. The prophet’s reply. 14, 15. Amos was a prophet not by profession, but by divine call.

I was no prophet Better, throughout Amo 7:14, with margin, “I am.” I am not a professional prophet, guided by mercenary motives.

A prophet’s son This expression is not to be understood in the sense that the father of Amos was not a prophet, but in the sense, “I am not a member of a prophetic guild.” Son is used in that sense of the companies of prophets at Beth-el, Gilgal, and other places (1Ki 20:35; 2Ki 2:3 ; 2Ki 2:5; 2Ki 2:7, etc.). This interpretation is supported also by the use of the word son in the general sense of belonging to in other Semitic languages.

Herdman Literally, tender of cattle (Introduction, p. 192).

Gatherer of sycomore fruit R.V., “dresser of sycomore trees” (Introduction, p. 192).

Jehovah took me said While he was following his ordinary occupation the divine call came to forsake all and become a prophet of Jehovah to Israel. This call he could not resist (Amo 3:8). Of these verses G.A. Smith says, “It is the protest of a new order of prophecy, the charter of a spiritual religion.” Amos was indeed “the founder and the purest type of the new order of prophecy.”

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Amo 7:14. I was no prophet, &c. Houbigant reads this, I am no prophet, neither am I a prophet’s son; that is, “I am not accustomed to act as a prophet; this is not my condition of life, and therefore it is in vain that you bid me to go and prophesy in Judah; I have only this once taken upon me the person and office of a prophet, because such was God’s immediate command to me.” We may collect from this answer, that Amos did not prophesy at other periods of his life; but that what we now have of his prophesies were delivered almost all at the same time; for, if he had frequently been in this capacity, he would not have said, I am not a prophet. By sycamore fruit, is generally understood a kind of wild figs, which were common in Egypt and Palestine. See Zec 13:5.

Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke

Blessed be the Lord for making his servants faithful. Who but must admire the humbleness and modesty of Amos, in his account of his call to the ministry! And who but must be delighted with the firmness of the man, while acting as the servant of the Lord? Observe what holy zeal and boldness an heart truly devoted to the Lord finds in the Lord! Faithful servant of thy God, valiant Amos! Even in the degenerate age in which we live, still there is grace enough in the Church to admire, if not to follow thy bright example in being bold amidst the Amaziah’s around, to glorify the Lord God of Israel, whether men will hear, Or whether they will forbear.

REFLECTIONS

I take occasion, from the noble conduct of the Prophet in this Chapter, in opposing the priest of Bethel, to remark to the Reader and mine own heart no less at the same time, how truly blessed it must be, thus to defend the truths of God, whenever or by whomsoever they are opposed. Cowardice in a minister of God is worse than in the soldier of an earthly prince; for the deserting the cause of this world is but for a day, but running from the Redeemer’s standard affects a whole eternity. Had the Prophet been a time-serving man, no doubt the charge of Amaziah would have alarmed him, and soon bought him over. But as his study was to approve himself to God, he felt that holy indignation, which not only repelled the attack, but gave him an honest boldness to reprove in his Lord’s name. And never was there a day in the Church of God, when a modest firmness became more necessary than the present. Lord! give thy servants, whom, like Amos, thou hast called to the work, grace, like Amos, earnestly to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints. Let an holy zeal make them earnest to win souls, and to consider that faith worth contending for, which gives God all the glory of salvation, and exalts the Lord Jesus as the source and fountain of all spiritual life, in grace here and glory to all eternity. And do thou, Lord, carry on thy work in their heart, and the hearts of thy people, that both may be living under the rich anointings of God the Holy Ghost! Amen.

Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

Amo 7:14 Then answered Amos, and said to Amaziah, I [was] no prophet, neither [was] I a prophet’s son; but I [was] an herdman, and a gatherer of sycomore fruit:

Ver. 14. Then answered Amos and said to Amaziah ] With no less courage, I suppose, than Paul and Barnabas used to the stubborn Jews, Act 13:46 ; see Joh 1:19 ; Joh 1:21 ; or Basil to Valent, the emperor, or Johannes Sarisburieusis to the Pope, A.D. 1540; or Bishop Ridley, when offering to preach before the Lady Mary, and receiving a repulse, he was brought by Sir Thomas Wharton, her servant, to the dining place, and desired to drink, which after he had done, he paused a while, looking very sadly; and suddenly broke out into these words: Surely I have done amiss. Why so? quoth the knight. For I have drunk, said he, in that place where God’s word offered hath been refused; whereas, if I had remembered my duty, I had departed immediately and shaken off the dust of my shoes for a testimony against this house. These words were by the said bishop spoken with such a vehemence, that some of the hearers afterwards confessed the hairs to stand upright on their heads.

I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet’s son] Neither born nor bred a prophet; neither have I rashly or ambitiously put myself upon this tremend employment; my call thereto was extraordinary. The prophet’s scholars were called their sons, 2Ki 2:8 ; 2Ki 2:5 ; 2Ki 2:7 ; 2Ki 2:15 Isa 8:18 Mar 10:24 1Co 4:14 ; 1Co 4:17 .

But I was a herdman, and a gatherer of sycamore fruit ] Of low condition, and hardly bred; so that I could live with a little, and needed not to turn prophet, ventris causa, for food sake. When one said to the philosopher, If you will but please Dionysius you need not feed upon green herbs, he presently replied. And if you can feed upon green herbs you need not please Dionysius. Nature is content with a little, grace with less. It is not for a servant of God to be a slave to his palate: Luther made many a meal of a herring.

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

NASB (UPDATED) TEXT: Amo 7:14-17

14Then Amos replied to Amaziah, I am not a prophet, nor am I the son of a prophet; for I am a herdsman and a grower of sycamore figs. 15But the LORD took me from following the flock and the LORD said to me, ‘Go prophesy to My people Israel.’ 16Now hear the word of the LORD: you are saying, ‘You shall not prophesy against Israel nor shall you speak against the house of Isaac.’ 17Therefore, thus says the LORD, ‘Your wife will become a harlot in the city, your sons and your daughters will fall by the sword, your land will be parceled up by a measuring line and you yourself will die upon unclean soil. Moreover, Israel will certainly go from its land into exile.’

Amo 7:14 I am not a prophet, nor am I the son of a prophet Amos was asserting God’s call to speak not to a profession (cf. Amo 7:15), a VERB must be supplied in this statement. The PRESENT TENSE fits this context, but not Amo 7:15. It could be translated, I was not a prophet. Implication, but now I am.

This statement by Amos seems to contrast prophet with son of a prophet. If so, the distinction would be between a person called to speak for God as an individual versus a person called by God to be a part of a group of prophets (i.e., Samuel, 1Sa 10:5-6; 1Sa 10:10; 1Sa 19:20; 1Ki 20:35; 2Ki 2:3-7; 2Ki 4:38; 2Ki 6:1). In the latter case son would refer to a member of a group, not a family.

for I am a herdsman and a grower of sycamore figs See full notes in Introduction. In this context it may function as a way of showing Amos’ wealth or occupation. He did not need to prophesy to eat!

Amo 7:15 took me from following the flock This VERB (BDB 542, KB 534, Qal IMPERFECT) has a strong theological connotation of God’s sovereign choice and action (e.g., Exo 6:7; Deu 4:20; Deu 4:34; 2Sa 7:8; 1Ki 11:37; Jer 43:10). God called Amos to speak for Him!

This is a play on the word shepherd, used metaphorically for (1) God Himself; (2) Israel’s leaders; and (3) by implication, the nation. Israel and Judah as a whole were God’s sheep.

Go prophesy to My people Israel There are several IMPERATIVES in this context.

1. Go, BDB 229, KB 246, Qal IMPERATIVE

2. Prophesy, BDB 612, KB 659, Niphal IMPERATIVE

3. Hear, Amo 7:16, BDB 1033, KB 1570, Qal IMPERATIVE

My people Israel This is a Covenant phrase (cf. Amo 7:8; Amo 7:15; Amo 8:2) using Jacob’s new name (cf. Gen 32:28). See Special Topic: Israel (the name) .

Amo 7:16 This is Amos characterizing Amaziah’s words, which were opposite of YHWH’s.

against the house of Isaac This is the only use of this phrase in the OT. It may be parallel to house of Jacob (cf. Amo 3:13) or house of Israel (cf. Amo 5:1; Amo 5:3-4; Amo 5:25; Amo 6:1). It was a disparaging comment by Amaziah about Amos’ preaching in the north.

Amo 7:17 Amos says this priest’s wife will be publicly raped (and become a common prostitute), his children killed, his property divided among others, and he, himself, will go into exile for life in Assyria. He will be an example of what will happen to all of Israel’s leaders.

In a real sense these judgments on Amaziah meant that neither he nor his descendants would be priests.

1. Wife will be unfit for marriage to a priest (cf. Deu 22:23-24).

2. No children will survive him.

3. He dies in a foreign land unable to pass on his priestly credentials.

(See David A. Hubbard, Joel and Amos (Tyndale Old Testament Commentary, p. 217).

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

This is a study guide commentary which means that you are responsible for your own interpretation of the Bible. Each of us must walk in the light we have. You, the Bible, and the Holy Spirit are priority in interpretation. You must not relinquish this to a commentator.

These discussion questions are provided to help you think through the major issues of this section of the book. They are meant to be thought provoking, not definitive.

1. Does God change His mind? How?

2. How is repentance related to forgiveness?

3. How do you know who truly speaks for God? (Prophet, Priest, or Sage)

4. Is God’s judgment eschatological or temporal?

Fuente: You Can Understand the Bible: Study Guide Commentary Series by Bob Utley

a prophet’s son. Prophets were not hereditary as priests were. Compare Heb 1:1.

herdman. See notes on Amo 1:1,

gatherer = preparer.

Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics

neither: 1Ki 20:35, 2Ki 2:3, 2Ki 2:5, 2Ki 2:7, 2Ki 4:38, 2Ki 6:1, 2Ch 16:7, 2Ch 19:2, 2Ch 20:34

an herdman: Amo 1:1, Zec 13:5, 1Co 1:27

a gatherer: Rather, as bolais is rendered by the LXX and Vulgate, , vellicans “a scraping,” or a scraper of sycamores; for the fruit does not ripen till it is rubbed with iron combs.

sycamore fruit: or, wild figs

Reciprocal: Gen 47:3 – What is Exo 3:1 – kept 1Sa 16:19 – with the sheep 1Ki 19:19 – he with 1Ch 17:7 – I took thee 2Ch 1:15 – sycamore trees 2Ch 9:27 – the sycamore Job 30:4 – for their meat Psa 78:70 – and took Psa 131:1 – neither Pro 30:3 – neither Jer 17:16 – I have Hos 12:10 – have also Mat 4:18 – for Luk 19:4 – a sycamore Joh 7:15 – letters 1Pe 3:15 – and be

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

Amo 7:14. The speech of Amaziah implied that he considered Amos as one of the regular prophets who had no other occupation. In that case it would not matter very much where he worked, just so he did the work of a prophet. He would then not be idle from his life’s work were lie to go into the land of Judah and continue his regular occupation. But Amos enlightened him on the subject and told him that he was not that kind of prophet, but was a shepherd by occupation. He had been called as a special servant of the Lord for the missioD of delivering the predictions intended for the 10-tribe kingdom, and only incidentally to include some things pertaining to Judah. Prophets son means one of the young men who were being trained by the regular prophets, not a son in the usual sense of that word.

Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary

Amo 7:14-15. I was no prophet Not originally, or by study, or by any human designation; neither was I a prophets son Neither was I bred up at the schools of the prophets; as those usually were who took that office upon them. But I was a herdman By breeding and occupation I was, and still am, a herdman; and a gatherer of sycamore fruit I got my livelihood also in part by gathering wild figs for those who had occasion for them. The Lord took me, &c. As I was following my flock, and thinking of nothing else; and said unto me By an extraordinary irradiation, or impulse of his Divine Spirit; Go, prophesy unto my people Go, and as a prophet divinely commissioned, reprove, instruct, exhort, and warn my people of the calamities impending over them, and which will assuredly fall upon them, unless they avert them by turning to me in true repentance.

Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

7:14 Then answered Amos, and said to Amaziah, I [was] no {h} prophet, neither [was] I a prophet’s son; but I [was] an herdman, and a gatherer of sycomore fruit:

(h) Thus he shows by his extraordinary calling, that God had given him a charge, which he must necessarily execute.

Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes

2. The response 7:14-17

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)

Amos replied that he was not a prophet by his own choosing; he did not decide to pursue prophesying as a career. Neither had he become a prophet because his father had been one. In Amos’ culture it was common and expected for sons to follow in their father’s line of work, though this was not true of genuine prophets. It is possible that Amos meant that he was not the son of a prophet in the sense that he had not been trained in one of the schools of the prophets under the tutelage of a fatherly mentor (cf. 2Ki 2:1-15; 2Ki 4:1; 2Ki 4:38; 2Ki 5:22; 2Ki 6:1-7; 2Ki 9:1). [Note: B. Smith, p. 139, n. 56.] Rather Amos had previously earned his living in a totally unrelated occupation. He had been a herdsman and a nipper of sycamore figs. The term "herdsman" refers to someone who bred livestock, not just a shepherd who looked after animals. A nipper of sycamore figs was one who pierced sycamore figs so they would be edible.

"The fruit is infested with an insect (the Sycophaga crassipes), and till the ’eye’ or top has been punctured, so that the insects may escape, it is not eatable." [Note: W. R. Smith, cited in Samuel R. Driver, The Books of Joel and Amos, p. 212.]

"Or, the term may refer to the practice of slitting the sycamore-fig before it ripens-a process that ensures that it will turn sweet." [Note: Niehaus, p. 463. Cf. Wolff, p. 314.]

Thus Amos had a respectable agricultural business background before he moved to Israel to prophesy. He had not been a "professional" prophet like many of the false prophets. He had not always made his living by being a prophet but only functioned as a "called" prophet. Therefore, Amaziah should not think that Amos came to Israel to prophesy because that was the only work that he could do or to make money.

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)

Amo 3:3-8, Amo 7:14-15

THE MAN AND THE PROPHET

THE Book of Amos opens one of the greatest stages in the religious development of mankind. Its originality is due to a few simple ideas, which it propels into religion with an almost unrelieved abruptness. But, like all ideas which ever broke upon the world, these also have flesh and blood behind them. Like every other Reformation this one in Israel began with the conscience and the protest of an individual. Our review of the book has made this plain. We have found in it, not only a personal adventure of a heroic kind, but a progressive series of visions, with some other proofs of a development both of facts and ideas. In short, behind the book there beats a life, and our first duty is to attempt to trace its spiritual history. The attempt is worth the greatest care. “Amos,” says a very critical writer, “is one of the most wonderful appearances in the history of the human spirit.”

1. THE MAN AND HIS DISCIPLINE

Amo 1:1, Amo 3:3-8, Amo 7:14-15

When charged at the crisis of his career with being but a hireling-prophet, Amos disclaimed the official name and took his stand upon his work as a man: “No prophet I, nor prophets son; but a herdsman and a dresser of sycamores. Jehovah took me from behind the flock.” We shall enhance our appreciation of this manhood, and of the new order of prophecy which it asserted, if we look for a little at the soil on which it was so bravely nourished.

Six miles south from Bethlehem, as Bethlehem is six from Jerusalem, there rises on the edge of the Judaean plateau, towards the desert, a commanding hill, the ruins on which are still known by the name of Tekoa.

In the time of Amos Tekoa was a place without sanctity and almost without tradition. The name suggests that the site may at first have been that of a camp. Its fortification by Rehoboam, and the mission of its wise woman to David, are its only previous appearances in history. Nor had nature been less grudging to it than fame. The men of Tekoa looked out upon a desolate and haggard world. South, west, and north the view is barred by a range of limestone hills, on one of which directly north the grey towers of Jerusalem are hardly to be discerned from the grey mountain lines. Eastward the prospect is still more desolate, but it-is open; the land slopes away for nearly eighteen miles to a depth of four thousand feet. Of this long descent the first step, lying immediately below the hill of Tekoa, is a shelf of stony moorland with the ruins of vineyards. It is the lowest ledge of the settled life of Judaea. The eastern edge drops suddenly by broken rocks to-slopes spotted with bushes of “retem,” the broom of the desert, and with patches of poor wheat. From the foot of the slopes the land rolls away in a maze of low hills and shallow dales that flush green in spring, but for the rest of the year are brown with withered grass and, scrub. This is the “Wilderness” or “Pasture-land of Tekoa,” {2Ch 20:20} across which by night the wild beasts howl, and by day the blackened sites of deserted camps, with the loose cairns that mark the nomads graves, reveal a human life almost as vagabond and nameless as that of the beasts. Beyond the rolling land is Jeshimon, or Devastation-a chaos of hills, none of whose ragged crests are tossed as high as the shelf of Tekoa, while their flanks shudder down some further thousands of feet, by crumbling precipices and corries choked with debris, to the coast of the Dead Sea. The northern half of this is visible, bright blue against the red wall of Moab, and. the level top of the wall, broken only by the valley of the Arnon, constitutes the horizon. Except for the blue water-which shines in its gap between the torn hills like a bit of sky through rifted clouds-it is a very dreary world. Yet the sun breaks over it, perhaps all the more gloriously; mists, rising from the sea simmering in its great vat, drape the nakedness of the desert noon; and through the dry desert night the planets ride with a majesty they cannot assume in our more troubled atmospheres. It is also a very empty and a very silent world, yet every stir of life upon it excites, therefore, the greater vigilance, and mans faculties, relieved from the rush and confusion of events, form the instinct of marking, and reflecting upon, every single phenomenon. And it is a very savage world. Across it all the towers of Jerusalem give the only signal of the spirit, the one token that man has a history.

Upon this unmitigated wilderness, where life is reduced to poverty and danger; where nature starves the imagination, but excites the faculties. of perception and curiosity; with the mountain tops and the sunrise in his face, but above all with Jerusalem so near, -Amos did the work which made him a man, heard the voice of God calling him to be a prophet, and gathered those symbols and figures in which his prophets message still reaches us with so fresh and so austere an air.

Amos was “among the shepherds of Tekoa.” The word for “shepherd” is unusual, and means the herdsman of a peculiar breed of desert sheep, still under the same name prized in Arabia for the excellence of their wool. And he was “a dresser of sycamores.” The tree, which is not our sycamore, is very easily grown in sandy soil with a little water. It reaches a great height and mass of foliage. The fruit is like a small fig, with a sweet but watery taste, and is eaten only by the poor. Born not of the fresh twigs, but of the trunk and older branches, the sluggish lumps are provoked to ripen by pinching or bruising, which seems to be the literal meaning of the term that Amos uses of himself-“a pincher of sycamores.” The sycamore does not grow at so high a level as Tekoa; and this fact, taken along with the limitation of the ministry of Amos to the Northern Kingdom, has been held to prove that he was originally an Ephraimite, a sycamore-dresser, who had migrated and settled down, as the peculiar phrase of the title says, “among the shepherds of Tekoa.” We shall presently see, however, that his familiarity with life in Northern Israel may easily have been won in other ways than through citizenship in that kingdom; while the very general nature of the definition, “among the shepherds of Tekoa,” does not oblige us to place either him or his sycamores so high as the village itself. The most easterly township of Judea, Tekoa commanded the w, hole of the wilderness beyond, to which indeed it gave its name, “the wilderness of Tekoa.” The shepherds of Tekoa were therefore, in all probability, scattered across the whole region down to the oases on the coast of the Dead Sea, which have generally been owned by one or other of the settled communities in the hill-country above, and may at that time have belonged to Tekoa, just as in Crusading times they belonged to the monks of Hebron, or are today cultivated by the Rushaideh Arabs, who pitch their camps not far from Tekoa itself. As you will still find everywhere on the borders of the Syrian desert shepherds nourishing a few fruit-trees round the chief well of their pasture, in order to vary their milk diet, so in some low oasis in the wilderness of Judea Amos cultivated the poorest, but the most easily grown of fruits, the sycamore. All this pushes Amos and his dwarf sheep deeper into the desert, and emphasizes what has been said above, and still remains to be illustrated, of the deserts influence on his discipline as a men and on his speech as a prophet. We ought to remember that in the same desert another prophet was bred, who was also the pioneer of a new dispensation, and whose ministry, both in its strength and its limitations, is much recalled by the ministry of Amos. John the son of Zacharias “grew and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his showing unto Israel.” {Luk 1:80} Here, too, our Lord was “with the wild beasts.” {Mar 1:18} How much Amos had been with them may be seen from many of his metaphors. “The lion roareth, who shall not fear? As when the shepherd rescueth from the mouth of the lion two shinbones or a bit of an ear It shall be as when one is fleeing from a lion and a bear cometh upon him; and he entereth a house, and leaneth his hand on the wall, and a serpent biteth him.”

As a wool-grower, however, Amos must have had his yearly journeys among the markets of the land; and to such were probably due his opportunities of familiarity with Northern Israel, the originals of his vivid pictures of her town-life, her commerce, and the worship at her great sanctuaries. One hour westward from Tekoa would bring him to the highroad between Hebron and the North, with its troops of pilgrims passing to Beersheba. {Amo 5:5; Amo 8:14} It was but half-an-hour more to the watershed and an open view of the Philistine plain. Bethlehem was only six, Jerusalem twelve, miles from Tekoa. Ten miles farther, across the border of Israel, lay Bethel with its temple, seven miles farther Gilgal, and twenty miles farther still Samaria the capital, in all but two days journey from Tekoa. These had markets as well as shrines; their annual festivals would be also great fairs. It is certain that Amos visited them; it is even possible that he went to Damascus, in which the Israelites had at the time their own quarters for trading. By road and market he would meet with men of other lands. Phoenician peddlers, or Canaanites as they were called, came up to buy the homespun for which the housewives of Israel were famed {Pro 31:24}-hard-faced men who were also willing to purchase slaves, and haunted even the battle-fields of their neighbors for this sinister purpose. Men of Moab, at the time subject to Israel; Aramean hostages; Philistines who held the export trade to Egypt, -these Amos must have met and may have talked with; their dialects scarcely differed from his own. It is no distant, desert echo of life which we hear in his pages, but the thick and noisy rumor of caravan and market-place: how the plague was marching up from Egypt; {Amo 6:10} ugly stories of the Phoenician slave-trade; {Amo 1:9} rumors of the advance of the awful Power, which men were hardly yet accustomed to name, but which had already twice broken from the North upon Damascus. Or it was the progress of some national mourning-how lamentation sprang up in the capital, rolled along the highways, and was re-echoed from the husbandmen and vinedressers on the hillsides. {Amo 5:16} Or, at closer quarters, we see and hear the bustle of the great festivals and fairs-the “solemn assemblies,” the reeking holocausts, the “noise of songs and viols”: {Amo 5:21 ff.} the brutish religious zeal kindling into drunkenness and lust on the very steps of the altar, {Amo 2:7-8} “the embezzlement of pledges by the priests, the covetous restlessness of the traders, their false measures, their entanglement of the poor in debt {Amo 8:4 ff.} the careless luxury of the rich, their “banquets, buckets of wine, ivory couches,” pretentious, preposterous music. {Amo 6:1; Amo 6:4-7} These things are described as by an eyewitness. Amos was not a citizen of the Northern Kingdom, to which he almost exclusively refers; but it was because he went up and down in it, using those eyes which the desert air had sharpened, that he so thoroughly learned the wickedness of its people, the corruption of Israels life in every rank and class of society. But the convictions which he applied to this life Amos learned at home. They came to him over the desert, and without further material signal than was flashed to Tekoa from the towers of Jerusalem. This is placed beyond doubt by the figures in which he describes his call from Jehovah. Contrast his story, so far as he reveals it, with that of another. Some twenty years later, Isaiah of Jerusalem saw the Lord in the Temple, high and lifted up, and all the inaugural vision of this greatest of the prophets was conceived in the figures of the Temple-the altar, the smoke, the burning coals. But to his predecessor “among the shepherds of Tekoa,” although revelation also starts from Jerusalem, it reaches him, not in the sacraments of her sanctuary, but across the bare pastures, and as it were in the roar of a lion. “Jehovah from Zion roareth, and uttereth His voice from Jerusalem.” {Amo 1:2} We read of no formal process of consecration for this first of the prophets. Through his clear desert air the word of God breaks upon him without medium or sacrament. And the native vigilance of the man is startled, is convinced by it, beyond all argument or question. “The lion hath roared, who shall not fear? Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?” These words are taken from a passage in which Amos illustrates prophecy from other instances of his shepherd life. We have seen what a school of vigilance the desert is. Upon the bare surface all that stirs is ominous. Every shadow, every noise-the shepherd must know what is behind and be warned. Such a vigilance Amos would have Israel apply to his own message, and to the events of their history. Both of these he compares to certain facts of desert life, behind which his shepherdly instincts have taught him to feel an ominous cause. “Do two men walk together except they have trysted?”-except they have made an appointment. Hardly in the desert; for there men meet and take the same road by chance as seldom as ships at sea. “Doth a lion roar in the jungle and have no prey, or a young lion let out his voice in his den except he be taking something?” The hunting lion is silent till his quarry be in sight; when the lonely shepherd hears the roar across the desert he knows the lion leaps upon his prey, and he shudders as Israel ought to do when they hear Gods voice by the prophet, for this also is never loosened but for some grim fact, some leap of doom. Or “doth a little bird fall on the snare earthwards and there be no noose upon her?” The reading may be doubtful, but the meaning is obvious: no one ever saw a bird pulled roughly down to earth when it tried to fly away without knowing there was the loop of a snare about her. Or “does the snare itself rise up from the ground, except indeed it be capturing something?”-except there be in the trap or net something to flutter, struggle, and so lift it up. Traps do not move without life in them. Or “is the alarm trumpet “blown in a city”-for instance, in high Tekoa up there, when some Arab raid sweeps from the desert on to the fields-“and do the people not tremble?” Or “shall calamity happen in a city and Jehovah not have done it? Yea, the Lord Jehovah doeth nothing but He has revealed His purpose to His servants the prophets.” My voice of warning and these events of evil in your midst have the same cause-Jehovah-behind them. “The lion hath roared, who shall not fear? Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?”

We cannot miss the personal note which rings through this triumph in the reality of things unseen. Not only does it proclaim a man of sincerity and conviction: it is resonant with the discipline by which that conviction was won-were won, too, the freedom from illusion and the power of looking at facts in the face, which Amos alone of his contemporaries possessed.

St. Bernard has described the first stage of the Vision of God as the Vision Distributive, in which the eager mind distributes her attention upon common things and common duties in themselves. It was in this elementary school that the earliest of the new prophets passed his apprenticeship and received his gifts. Others excel Amos in the powers of the imagination and the intellect. But by the incorrupt habits of his shepherds life, by daily wakefulness to its alarms and daily faithfulness to its opportunities, he was trained in that simple power of appreciating facts and causes, which, applied to the great phenomena of the spirit and of history, forms his distinction among his peers. In this we find perhaps the reason why he records of himself no solemn hour of cleansing and initiation. “Jehovah took me from following the flock, and Jehovah said unto me, Go, prophesy unto My people Israel.” Amos was of them of whom it is written, “Blessed are those servants whom the Lord when He cometh shall find watching.” Through all his hard life this shepherd had kept his mind open and his conscience quick, so that when the word of God came to him he knew it, as fast as he knew the roar of the lion across the moor. Certainly there is no habit which, so much as this of watching facts with a single eye and a responsible mind, is indispensable alike in the humblest duties and in the highest speculations of life. When Amos gives those naive illustrations of how real the voice of God is to him, we receive them as the tokens of a man, honest and awake. Little wonder that he refuges to be reckoned among the professional prophets of his day who found their inspiration in excitement and trance. Upon him the impulses of the Deity come in no artificial and morbid ecstasy, removed as far as possible from real life. They come upon him, as it were, in the open air. They appeal to the senses of his healthy and expert manhood. They convince him of their reality with the same force as do the most startling events of his lonely shepherd watches. “The lion hath roared, who shall not fear? Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?”

The influence of the same discipline is still visible when Amos passes from the facts of his own consciousness to the facts of his peoples life. His day in Israel sweltered with optimism. The glare of wealth, the fulsome love of country, the rank incense of a religion that was without morality-these thickened all the air, and neither the people nor their rulers had any vision. But Amos carried with him his clear desert atmosphere and his desert eyes. He saw the raw facts: the poverty, the cruel negligence of the rich, the injustice of the rulers, the immorality of the priests. The meaning of these things he questioned with as much persistence as he questioned every suspicious sound or sight upon those pastures of Tekoa. He had no illusions: he knew a mirage when he saw one. Neither the military pride of the people, fostered by recent successes over Syria, nor the dogmas of their religion, which asserted Jehovahs swift triumph upon the heathen, could prevent him from knowing that the immorality of Israel meant Israels political downfall. He was one of those recruits from common life, by whom religion and the state have at all times been reformed. Springing from the laity and very often from among the working classes, their freedom from dogmas and routine, as well as from the compromising interests of wealth, rank, and party, renders them experts in life to a degree that almost no professional priest, statesman, or journalist, however honest or sympathetic, can hope to rival. Into politics they bring facts, but into religion they bring vision.

It is of the utmost significance that this reformer, this founder of the highest order of prophecy in Israel, should not only thus begin with facts, but to the very end be occupied with almost nothing else than the vision and record of them. In Amos there is but one prospect of the Ideal. It does not break till the close of his book, and then in such contrast to the plain and final indictments, which constitute nearly all the rest of his prophesying, that many have not unnaturally denied to him the verses which contain it. Throughout the other chapters we have but the exposure of present facts, material and moral, nor the sight of any future more distant than tomorrow and the immediate consequences of todays deeds. Let us mark this. The new prophecy which Amos started in Israel reached Divine heights of hope, unfolded infinite powers of moral and political regeneration-dared to blot out all the past, dared to believe all things possible in the future. But it started from the truth about the moral situation of the present. Its first prophet not only denied every popular dogma and ideal, but-appears not to have substituted for them any others. He spent his gifts of vision on the discovery and appreciation of facts. Now this is necessary, not only in great reformations of religion, but at almost every stage in her development. We are constantly disposed to abuse even the most just and necessary of religious ideals as substitutes for experience or as escapes from duty, and to boast about the future before we have understood or mastered the present. Hence the need of realists like Amos. Though they are destitute of dogma, of comfort, of hope, of the ideal, let us not doubt that they also stand in the succession of the prophets of the Lord.

Nay, this is a stage of prophecy on which may be fulfilled the prayer of Moses: “Would to God that all the Lords people were prophets!” To see the truth and tell it, to be accurate and brave about the moral facts of our day-to this extent the Vision and the Voice are possible for every one of us. Never for us may the doors of heaven open, as they did for him who stood on the threshold of the earthly temple, and he saw the Lord enthroned, while the Seraphim of the Presence sang the glory. Never for us may the skies fill with that tempest of life which Ezekiel beheld from Shinar, and above it the sapphire throne, and on the throne the likeness of a man, the likeness of the glory of the Lord. Yet let us remember that to see facts as they are and to tell the truth about them-this also is prophecy. We may inhabit a sphere which does not prompt the imagination, but is as destitute of the historic and traditional as was the wilderness of Tekoa. All the more may our unglamoured eyes be true to the facts about us. Every common day leads forth her duties as shining as every night leads forth her stars. The deeds and the fortunes of men are in our sight, and spell, to all who will honestly read the very Word of the Lord. If only we be loyal, then by him who made the rude sounds and sights of the desert his sacraments, and whose vigilance of things seen and temporal became the vision of things unseen and eternal, we also shall see God, and be sure of His ways with men.

Before we pass from the desert discipline of the prophet we must notice one of its effects, which, while it greatly enhanced the clearness of his vision, undoubtedly disabled Amos for the highest prophetic rank. He who lives in the desert lives without patriotism-detached and aloof. He may see the throng of men more clearly than those who move among it. He cannot possibly so much feel for them. Unlike Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. Amos was not a citizen of the kingdom against which he prophesied, and indeed no proper citizen of any kingdom, but a nomad herdsman, hovering on the desert borders of Judaea. He saw Israel from the outside. His message to her is achieved with scarcely one sob in his voice. For the sake of the poor and the oppressed among the people he is indignant. But with the erring, staggering nation as a whole he has no real sympathy. His pity for her is exhausted in one elegy and two brief intercessions; hardly more than once does he even call her to repentance.

His sense of justice, in fact, had almost never to contend with his love. This made Amos the better witness, but the worse prophet. He did not rise so high as his great successors, because he did not so feel himself one with the people whom he was forced to condemn, because he did not bear their fate as his own nor travail for their new birth. “Ihm fehlt die Liebe.” Love is the element lacking in his prophecy; and therefore the words are true of him which were uttered of his great follower across this same wilderness of Judea, that mighty as were his voice and his message to prepare the way of the Lord, yet “the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he.”

2. THE WORD AND ITS ORIGINS

Amo 1:2, Amo 3:3-8 and PASSIM

We have seen the preparation of the Man for the Word. We are now to ask, Whence came the Word to the Man?-the Word that made him a prophet. What were its sources and sanctions outside himself? These involve other questions. How much of his message did Amos inherit from the previous religion of his people? And how much did he teach for the first time in Israel? And again, how much of this new element did he owe to the great events of his day? And how much demands some other source of inspiration?

To all these inquiries, outlines of the answers ought by this time to have become visible. We have seen that the contents of the Book of Amos consist almost entirely of two kinds: facts, actual or imminent, in the history of his people; and certain moral principles of the most elementary order. Amos appeals to no dogma nor form of law, nor to any religious or national institution. Still more remarkably, he does not rely upon miracle nor any so-called “supernatural sign.” To employ the terms of Mazzinis famous formula, Amos draws his materials solely from “conscience and history.” Within himself he hears certain moral principles speak in the voice of God, and certain events of his day he recognizes as the judicial acts of God. The principles condemn the living generation of Israel as morally corrupt; the events threaten the people with political extinction. From this agreement between inward conviction and outward event Amos draws his full confidence as a prophet, and enforces on the people his message of doom as Gods own word.

The passage in which Amos most explicitly illustrates this harmony between event and conviction is one whose metaphors we have already quoted in proof of the deserts influence upon the prophets life. When Amos asks, “Can two walk together except they have made an appointment?” his figure is drawn, as we have seen, from the wilderness in which two men will hardly meet except they have arranged to do so; but the truth he would illustrate by the figure is that two sets of phenomena which coincide must have sprung from a common purpose. Their conjunction forbids mere chance. What kind of phenomena he means, he lets us see in his next instance: “Doth a lion roar in the jungle and have no prey? Doth a young lion let forth his voice from his den except he be catching something?” That is, those ominous sounds never happen without some fell and terrible deed happening along with them. Amos thus plainly hints that the two phenomena on whose coincidence he insists are an utterance on one side, and on the other side a deed fraught with destruction. The reading of the next metaphor about the bird and the snare is uncertain; at most what it means is that you never see signs of distress or a vain struggle to escape without there being, though out of sight, some real cause for them. But from so general a principle he returns in his fourth metaphor to the special coincidence between utterance and deed. “Is the alarum-trumpet blown in a city and do the people not tremble?” Of course they do; they know such sound is never made without the approach of calamity. But who is the author of every calamity? God Himself: “Shall there be evil in a city and Jehovah not have done it?” Very well then; we have seen that common life has many instances in which, when an ominous sound is heard, it is because it is closely linked with a fatal deed. These happen together, not by mere chance, but because the one is the expression, the warning, or the explanation of the other. And we also know that fatal deeds which happen to any community in Israel are from Jehovah. He is behind them. But they, too, are accompanied by a warning voice from the same source as themselves. This is the voice which the prophet hears in his heart-the moral conviction which he feels as the Word of God. “The Lord Jehovah doeth nothing but He hath revealed His counsel to His servants the prophets.” Mark the grammar: the revelation comes first to the prophets heart; then he sees and recognizes the event, and is confident to give his message about it. So Amos, repeating his metaphor, sums up his argument. “The Lion hath roared, who shall not fear?”-certain that there is more than sound to happen. “The Lord Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?”-certain that what Jehovah has spoken to him inwardly is likewise no mere sound, but that deeds of judgment are about to happen, as the ominous voice requires they should.

The prophet then is made sure of his message by the agreement between the inward convictions of his soul and the outward events of the day. When these walk together, it proves that they have come of a common purpose. He who causes the events-it is Jehovah Himself, “for shall there be evil in a city and Jehovah not have done it?”-must be author also of the inner voice or conviction which agrees with them. “Who” then “can but prophesy?” Observe again that no support is here derived from miracle; nor is any claim made for the prophet on the ground of his ability to foretell the event. It is the agreement of the idea with the fact, their evident common origin in the purpose of Jehovah, which makes a man sure that he has in him the Word of God. Both are necessary, and together are enough. Are we then to leave the origin of the Word in this coincidence of fact and thought-as it were an electric flash produced by the contact of conviction with event?

Hardly; there are questions behind this coincidence. For instance, as to how the two react on each other-the event provoking the conviction, the conviction interpreting the event? The argument of Amos seems to imply that the ethical principles are experienced by the prophet prior to the events which justify them. Is this so, or was the shock of the events required to awaken the principles? And if the principles were prior, whence did Amos derive them? These are some questions that will lead us to the very origins of revelation.

The greatest of the events with which Amos and his contemporaries dealt was the Assyrian invasion. In a previous chapter we have tried to estimate the intellectual effects of Assyria on prophecy. Assyria widened the horizon of Israel, put the world to Hebrew eyes into a new perspective, vastly increased the possibilities of history, and set to religion a novel order of problems. We can trace the effects upon Israels conceptions of God, of man, and even of nature. Now it might be plausibly argued that the new prophecy in Israel was first stirred and quickened by all this mental shock and strain, and that even the loftier ethics of the prophets were thus due to the advance of Assyria. For, as the most vigilant watchmen of their day, the prophets observed the rise of that empire, and felt its fatality for Israel. Turning then to inquire the Divine reasons for such a destruction, they found these in Israels sinfulness, to the full extent of which their hearts were at last awakened. According to such a theory the prophets were politicians first and moralists afterwards: alarmists to begin with, and preachers of repentance only second. Or-to recur to the language employed above-the prophets experience of the historical event preceded their conviction of the moral principle which agreed with it.

In support of such a theory it is pointed out that after all the most original element in the prophecy of the eighth century was the announcement of Israels fall and exile. The Righteousness of Jehovah had often previously been enforced in Israel, but never had any voice drawn from it this awful conclusion that the nation must perish. The first in Israel to dare this was Amos, and surely what enabled him to do so was the imminence of Assyria upon his people. Again, such a theory might plausibly point to the opening verse of the Book of Amos, with its unprefaced, unexplained pronouncement of doom upon Israel:-

“The Lord roareth from Zion, And giveth voice from Jerusalem; And the pastures of the shepherds mourn, And the summit of Carmel is withered!”

Here, it might be averred, is the earliest prophets earliest utterance. Is it not audibly the voice of a man in a panic-such a panic as, ever on the eve of historic convulsions, seizes the more sensitive minds of a doomed people? The distant Assyrian thunder has reached Amos, on his pastures, unprepared-unable to articulate its exact meaning, and with only faith enough to hear in it the voice of his God. He needs reflection to unfold its contents; and the process of this reflection we find through the rest of his book. There he details for us, with increasing clear-mess, both the ethical reasons and the political results of that Assyrian terror, by which he was at first so wildly shocked into prophecy.

But the panic-born are always the stillborn; and it is simply impossible that prophecy, in all her ethical and religious vigor, can have been the daughter of so fatal a birth. If we look again at the evidence which is quoted from Amos in favor of such a theory, we shall see how fully it is contradicted by other features of his book.

To begin with, we are not certain that the terror of the opening verse of Amos is the Assyrian terror. Even if it were, the opening of a book does not necessarily represent the writers earliest feelings. The rest of the chapters contain visions and oracles which obviously date from a time when Amos was not yet startled by Assyria, but believed that the punishment which Israel required might be accomplished through a series of physical calamities-locusts, drought, and pestilence. Nay, it was not even these earlier judgments, preceding the Assyrian, which stirred the word of God in the prophet. He introduces them with a “now” and a “therefore.” That is to say, he treats them only as the consequence of certain facts, the conclusion of certain premises. These facts and premises are moral-they are exclusively moral. They are the sins of Israels life, regarded without illusion and without pity. They are certain simple convictions, which fill the prophets heart, about the impossibility of the survival of any state which is so perverse and so corrupt.

This origin of prophecy in moral facts and moral intuitions, which are in their beginning independent of political events, may be illustrated by several other points. For instance, the sins which Amos marked in Israel were such as required no “red dawn of judgment” to expose their flagrance and fatality. The abuse of justice, the cruelty of the rich, the shameless immorality of the priests, are not sins which we feel only in the cool of the day, when God Himself draws near to judgment. They are such things as make men shiver in the sunshine. And so the Book of Amos, and not less that of Hosea, tremble with the feeling that Israels social corruption is great enough of itself, without the aid of natural convulsions, to shake the very basis of national life. “Shall not the land tremble for this,” Amos says after reciting some sins, “and every one that dwelleth therein?” {Amo 8:8} Not drought nor pestilence nor invasion is needed for Israels doom, but the elemental force of ruin which lies in the peoples own wickedness. This is enough to create gloom long before the political skies be overcast-or, as Amos himself puts it, this is enough

“To cause the sun to go down at noon, And to darken the earth in the clear day.” {Amo 8:9}

And once more-in spite of Assyria the ruin may be averted, if only the people will repent: “Seek good and not evil, and, Jehovah of hosts will be with you, as you say.” {Amo 5:14} Assyria, however threatening, becomes irrelevant to Israels future from the moment that Israel repents.

Such beliefs, then, are obviously not the results of experience, nor of a keen observation of history. They are the primal convictions of the heart, which are deeper than all experience, and themselves contain the sources of historical foresight. With Amos it was not the outward event which inspired the inward conviction, but the conviction which anticipated and interpreted the event, though when the event came there can be no doubt that it confirmed, deepened, and articulated the conviction.

But when we have thus tracked the stream of prophecy as far back as these elementary convictions we have not reached the fountain-head. Whence did Amos derive his simple and absolute ethics? Were they original to him? Were they new in Israel? Such questions start an argument which touches the very origins of revelation.

It is obvious that Amos not only takes for granted the laws of righteousness which he enforces: he takes for granted also the peoples conscience of them. New, indeed, is the doom which sinful Israel deserves, and original to himself is the proclamation of it; but Amos appeals to the moral principles which justify the doom, as if they were not new, and as if Israel ought always to have known them. This attitude of the prophet to his principles has, in our time, suffered a curious judgment. It has been called an anachronism. So absolute a morality, some say, had never before been taught in Israel; nor had righteousness been so exclusively emphasized as the purpose of Jehovah. Amos and the other prophets of his century were the virtual “creators of ethical monotheism”: it could only be by a prophetic license or prophetic fiction that he appealed to his peoples conscience of the standards he promulgated, or condemned his generation to death for not having lived up to them.

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

To no sane observer can the religious history of Israel appear as anything but a course of gradual development. Even in the moral standards, in respect to which it is confessedly often most difficult to prove growth, the signs of the nations progress are very manifest. Practices come to be forbidden in Israel and tempers to be mitigated, which in earlier ages were sanctioned to their extreme by the explicit decrees of religion. In the nations attitude to the outer world sympathies arise, along with ideals of spiritual service, where previously only war and extermination had been enforced in the name of the Deity. Now in such an evolution it is equally indubitable that the longest and most rapid stage was the prophecy of the eighth century. The prophets of that time condemn acts which had been inspired by their immediate predecessors; they abjure, as impeding morality, a ceremonial which the spiritual leaders of earlier generations had felt to be indispensable to religion; and they unfold ideals of the nations moral destiny, of which older writings give us only the faintest hints. Yet, while the fact of a religious evolution in Israel is thus certain, we must not fall into the vulgar error which interprets evolution as if it were mere addition, nor forget that even in the most creative periods of religion nothing is brought forth which has not already been promised, and, at some earlier stage, placed, so to speak, within reach of the human mind. After all it is the mind which grows; the moral ideals which become visible to its more matured vision are so Divine that, when they present themselves, the mind cannot but think they were always real and always imperative. If we remember these commonplaces we shall do justice both to Amos and to his critics.

In the first place it is clear that most of the morality which Amos enforced is of that fundamental order which can never have been recognized as the discovery or invention of any prophet. Whatever be their origin, the conscience of justice, the duty of kindness to the poor, the horror of wanton cruelty towards ones enemies, which form the chief principles of Amos, are discernible in man as far back as history allows us to search for them. Should a generation have lost them, they can be brought back to it, never with the thrill of a new lesson; but only with the shame of an old and an abused memory. To neither man nor people can the righteousness which Amos preached appear as a discovery, but always as a recollection and a remorse. And this is most emphatically true of the people of Moses and of Samuel, of Nathan, of Elijah, and of the Book of the Covenant. Ethical elements had been characteristic of Israels religion from the very first. They were not due to a body of written law, but rather to the character of Israels God, appreciated by the nation in all the great crises of their history. Jehovah had won for Israel freedom and unity. He had been a spirit of justice to their lawgivers and magistrates. {Isa 28:1-29} He had raised up a succession of consecrated personalities, {Amo 2:1-16} who by life and word had purified the ideals of the whole people. The results had appeared in the creation of a strong national conscience, which avenged with horror, as “folly in Israel,” the wanton crimes of any person or section of the commonwealth; in the gradual formation of a legal code, founded indeed in the common custom of the Semites, but greatly more moral than that; and even in the attainment of certain profoundly ethical beliefs about God and His relations, beyond Israel, to all mankind. Now, let us understand once for all, that in the ethics of Amos there is nothing which is not rooted in one or other of these achievements of the previous religion of his people. To this religion Amos felt himself attached in the closest possible way. The word of God comes to him across the desert, as we have seen, yet not out of the air. From the first he hears it rise from that one monument of his peoples past which we have found visible on his physical horizon-“from Zion, from Jerusalem,” {Amo 1:2} from the city of David, from the Ark, whose ministers were Moses and Samuel, from the repository of the main tradition of Israels religion. Amos felt himself in the sacred succession; and his feeling is confirmed by the contents of his book. The details of that civic justice which he demands from his generation are found in the Book of the Covenant-the only one of Israels great codes which appears by this time to have been in existence; or in those popular proverbs which almost as certainly were found in early Israel.

Nor does Amos go elsewhere for the religious sanctions of his ethics. It is by the ancient mercies of God towards Israel that he shames and convicts his generation-by the deeds of grace which made them a nation, by the organs of doctrine and reproof which have inspired them, unfailing from age to age. “I destroyed the Amorite before them Yea, I brought you up out of the land of Egypt, and I led you forty years in the wilderness, to possess the land of the Amorites. And I raised up of your sons for prophets, and of your young men for Nazarites. Was it not even thus, O ye children of Israel? saith Jehovah.” We cannot even say that the belief which Amos expresses in Jehovah as the supreme Providence of the world was a new thing in Israel, for a belief as universal inspires those portions of the Book of Genesis which, like the Book of the Covenant, were already extant.

We see, therefore, what right Amos had to present his ethical truths to Israel, as if they were not new, but had been within reach of his people from of old.

We could not, however, commit a greater mistake than to confine the inspiration of our prophet to the past, and interpret his doctrines as mere inferences from the earlier religious ideas of Israel-inferences forced by his own passionate logic, or more naturally ripened for him by the progress of events. A recent writer has thus summarized the work of the prophets of the eighth century: “In fact they laid hold upon that bias towards the ethical which dwelt in Jahwism from Moses onwards, and they allowed it alone to have value as corresponding to the true religion of Jehovah.” But this is too abstract to be an adequate statement of the prophets own consciousness. What overcame Amos was a Personal Influence-the Impression of a Character; and it was this not only as it was revealed in the past of his people. The God who stands behind Amos is indeed the ancient Deity of Israel, and the facts which prove Him God are those which made the nation-the Exodus, the guidance through the wilderness, the overthrow of the Amorites, the gift of the land. “Was it not even thus, O ye children of Israel?” But what beats and burns through the pages of Amos is not the memory of those wonderful works, so much as a fresh vision and understanding of the Living God who worked them. Amos has himself met with Jehovah on the conditions of his own time-on the moral situation provided by the living generation of Israel. By an intercourse conducted, not through the distant signals of the past, but here and now, through the events of the prophets own day, Amos has received an original and overpowering conviction of his peoples God as absolute righteousness. What prophecy had hitherto felt in part, and applied to one or other of the departments of Israels life, Amos is the first to feel in its fullness, and to every extreme of its consequences upon the worship, the conduct, and the fortunes of the nation. To him Jehovah not only commands this and that righteous law but Jehovah and righteousness are absolutely identical. “Seek Jehovah and ye shall live seek good and ye shall live.” {Amo 5:6; Amo 5:14} The absoluteness with which Amos conceived this principle, the courage with which he applied it, carry him along those two great lines upon which we most clearly trace his originality as a prophet. In the strength of this principle he does what is really new in Israel: he discards the two elements which had hitherto existed alongside the ethical, and had fettered and warped it.

Up till now the ethical spirit of the religion of Jehovah had to struggle with two beliefs which we can trace back to the Semitic origins of the religion-the belief, namely, that, as the national God, Jehovah would always defend their political interests, irrespective of morality; and the belief that a ceremonial of rites and sacrifices was indispensable to religion. These principles were mutual: as the deity was bound to succor the people, so were the people bound to supply the deity with gifts, and the more of these they brought the more they made sure of his favors. Such views were not absolutely devoid of moral benefit. In the formative period of the nation they had contributed both discipline and hope. But of late they had between them engrossed mens hearts, and crushed out of religion both conscience and common-sense. By the first of them, the belief in Jehovahs predestined protection of Israel, the peoples eyes were so holden they could not see how threatening were the times; by the other, the confidence in ceremonial, conscience was dulled, and that immorality permitted which they mingled so shamelessly with their religious zeal. Now the conscience of Amos did not merely protest against the predominance of the two, but was so exclusive, so spiritual, that it boldly banished both from religion. Amos denied that Jehovah was bound to save His people; he affirmed that ritual and sacrifice were no part of the service He demands from men. This is the measure of originality in our prophet. The two religious principles which were inherent in the very fiber of Semitic religion, and which till now had gone unchallenged in Israel, Amos cast forth from religion in the name of a pure and absolute righteousness. On the one hand, Jehovahs peculiar connection with Israel meant no more than jealousy for their holiness: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore will I visit upon you all your iniquities.” {Amo 3:2} And, on the other hand, all their ceremonial was abhorrent to Him: “I hate, I despise your festivals. Though ye offer Me burnt offerings and your meal offerings, I will not accept them Take thou away from Me the noise of thy songs; I will not hear the music of thy viols. But let justice run down as waters, and righteousness as a perennial stream.” {Amo 5:21 ff.}

It has just been said that emphasis upon morality as the sum of religion, to the exclusion of sacrifice, is the most original element in the prophecies of Amos He himself, however, does not regard this as proclaimed for the first time in Israel, and the precedent he quotes is so illustrative of the sources of his inspiration that we do well to look at it for a little. In the verse next to the one last quoted he reports these words of God: “Did ye offer unto Me sacrifices and gifts in the wilderness, for forty years, O house of Israel?” An extraordinary challenge! From the present blind routine of sacrifice Jehovah appeals to the beginning of His relations with the nation: did they then perform such services to Him? Of course, a negative answer is expected. No other agrees with the main contention of the passage. In the wilderness Israel had not offered sacrifices and gifts to Jehovah. Jeremiah quotes a still more explicit word of Jehovah: “I spake not unto your fathers in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices: but this thing I commanded them, saying, Obey My voice, and I will be your God, and ye shall be My people.” {Jer 7:22 f.}

To these Divine statements we shall not be able to do justice if we hold by the traditional view that the Levitical legislation was proclaimed in the wilderness. Discount that legislation, and the statements become clear. It is true, of course, that Israel must have had a ritual of some kind from the first; and that both in the wilderness and in Canaan their spiritual leaders must have performed sacrifices as if these were acceptable to Jehovah. But even so the Divine words which Amos and Jeremiah quote are historically correct; for while the ethical contents of the religion of Jehovah were its original and essential contents-“I commanded them, saying, Obey My voice”-the ritual was but a modification of the ritual common to all Semites; and ever since the occupation of the land, it had, through the infection of the Canaanite rites on the high places, grown more and more Pagan, both in its functions and in the ideas which these were supposed to express. Amos was right. Sacrifice had never been the Divine, the revealed element in the religion of Jehovah. Nevertheless, before Amos no prophet in Israel appears to have said so. And what enabled this man in the eighth century to offer testimony, so novel but so true, about the far-away beginnings of his peoples religion in the fourteenth, was plainly neither tradition nor historical research, but an overwhelming conviction of the spiritual and moral character of God-of Him who had been Israels God both then and now, and whose righteousness had been, just as much then as now, exalted above all purely national interests and all susceptibility to ritual. When we thus see the prophets knowledge of the Living God enabling him, not only to proclaim an ideal of religion more spiritual than Israel had yet dreamed, but to perceive that such an ideal had been the essence of the religion of Jehovah from the first, we understand how thoroughly Amos was mastered by that knowledge. If we need any further proof of his “possession” by the character of God, we find it in those phrases in which his own consciousness disappears, and we have no longer the heralds report of the Lords words, but the very accents of the Lord Himself, fraught with personal feeling of the most intense quality. “I” Jehovah “hate, I despise your feast days Take thou away from Me the noise of thy songs; I will not hear the music of thy viols {Amo 5:21-23} I abhor the arrogance of Jacob, and hate his palaces {Amo 6:8} The eyes of the Lord Jehovah are upon the sinful kingdom {Amo 9:8} Jehovah sweareth, I will never forget any of their works.” {Amo 8:7} Such sentences reveal a Deity who is not only manifest Character, but is urgent and importunate Feeling. We have traced the prophets word to its ultimate source. It springs from the righteousness, the vigilance, the urgency of the Eternal. The intellect, imagination, and heart of Amos-the convictions he has inherited from his peoples past, his conscience of their evil life today, his impressions of current and coming history-are all enforced and illuminated, all made impetuous and radiant, by the Spirit, that is to say the Purpose and the Energy, of the Living God. Therefore, as he says in the title of his book, or as someone says for him, Amos saw his words. They stood out objective to himself. And they were not mere sound. They glowed and burned with God.

When we realize this, we feel how inadequate it is to express prophecy in the terms of evolution. No doubt, as we have seen, the ethics and religion of Amos represent a large and measurable advance upon those of earlier Israel. And yet with Amos we do not seem so much to have arrived at a new stage in a Process, as to have penetrated to the Idea which has been behind the Process from the beginning. The change and growth of Israels religion are realities-their fruits can be seen, defined, catalogued-but a greater reality is the unseen purpose which impels them. They have been expressed only now. He has been unchanging from old and forever-from the first absolute righteousness in Himself, and absolute righteousness in His demands from men.

Fuente: Expositors Bible Commentary