Amos 8, The Demise of Israel

8:1 Then the Sovereign Yahweh showed me a vision, a basket of summer fruit. 2 And he said, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then Yahweh said to me, “The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again fail to judge them. 3 The songs of the temple will become wailings in that day,” declares the Sovereign Yahweh. There will be dead bodies everywhere, and they will carry them out of the city in silence.

4 Hear this, you who trample on the needy and bring the poor of the land to an end, 5 saying, “When will the new moon be over, that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may offer wheat for sale, that we may make the ephah small and the shekel great and deal deceitfully with false balances, 6 that we may buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals and mix chaff in with the wheat?”

7 Yahweh has sworn by His name, the Pride of Jacob: “I will never forget any of their evil deeds. 8 Won’t the land tremble because of them, and everyone mourn who dwells in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt?”

9 “And on that day,” declares the Sovereign Yahweh, “I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. 10 I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring the sackcloth of mourning on every waist and the shaving of every head with grieving; I will make it like mourning for an only son and the end of it like a bitter day.

11 “Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Yahweh, “when I will send a famine on the land—not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of Yahweh. 12 They will wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they will run to and fro, seeking the word of Yahweh, but they will not find it.

13 “In that day beautiful young girls and young men will faint for thirst. 14 Those who swear by the Guilt of Samaria, and say, ‘As your god lives, O Dan,’ and, ‘As the Way of Beersheba lives,’ they will fall, and never rise again.”

Like summer fruit that is ripe for harvest, Israel is now ripe for judgment. Though Yahweh has not brought the full consequences of Israel’s rebellion outlined in Leviticus 26 before, the time has now come. Though they used to go to the idolatrous temple at Bethel in rejoicing, now they will go in mourning for all the death that takes place. Amos says, actually, “Many, many bodies—flung everywhere! Silence!”

The crimes of Israel include rampant corruption. They keep the Sabbath by not conducting business on it, but when they do conduct business, it is with dishonest scales, dishonest contents, and enslavement.

Yahweh is the Pride of Jacob, and His pride must be upheld with judgment. It will be as if an earthquake destroys everything, or like a flooding Nile River that overwhelms all. It will be like the failure of the sun to shine. All the behaviors of mourning typical in that culture, the wearing of scratchy sackcloth and shaving of the head, will be the behaviors of everyone, because everyone will be mourning as if their firstborn had been killed.

And the worst thing of all will be a famine of God’s words. As long as Yahweh is speaking to His people there is hope. But there will be a drought of divine revelation that will make the people desperate. The best of their land, their youth, will faint. Those who trusted in the god they worshiped at their false temple in Samaria, or who trusted in the god worshiped in Dan, or who made pilgrimage to the south to worship in Beersheba, will have their hopes dashed and be destroyed. They weren’t worshiping the Pride of Jacob after all.

May we not make the same mistake.