Amos 5:25

Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings,.... No; they were not offered to God, but to devils, to the golden calf, and to the host of heaven: so their fathers did in the wilderness forty

Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?

Their fathers and they, though at so great distance of time, are one people, and so the prophet considers them in this place. Have ye offered? did you not frequently omit to offer, and yet were not reproved or plagued for the omission, when your frequent removes, and many other difficulties, made it unpracticable? so little is sacrifice with your God! and yet, when you did offer, was it to me only? or did you not sacrifice to idols and false gods, and provoked me? Will-worship and idolatry have been hereditary diseases in your generations; and it is well known, too, that these idolaters fell in the wilderness, and are made admonitions to you. Sacrifices of beasts slain, as the word properly speaks. Offerings: minchah, in general, is any gift or present made, but particularly here it is a gift or present of fine flour, oil, and frankincense unto God with the sacrifice. In the wilderness forty years: it was a broken number of years in exact account, that is, thirty-eight years and eleven months; but, as is common in such cases, the full and round number is taken and so the account runs here, and in , forty years. O house of Israel; you of the ten tribes.

Amos 5:25 Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?Ver. 25. Have ye offered unto me sacrifices, &c.] i.e. To me only, and not to other gods also? did ye not begin betime to play the idolaters? and do ye not "fill up the measure of your fathers?" Matthew 23:32. They sojourned in Egypt, and brought thence a golden calf: Jeroboam sojourned there, and brought home two; which were no sooner up than you were down upon your knees, where still you continue at your mawmet worship. Is it not even so, O house of Israel? And was it not even so in the wilderness, where and when I bore with your "evil manners" (ετροποφορησα) "about the time of forty years," Acts 13:18 (for full forty it was not, but thirty-eight only and some few months), and was provoked by you ten times, Numbers 14:22, when I had but newly brought you out of Egypt, Amos 3:1-2. So that your idolatry is hereditary; and therefore the more ingrained and to be abhorred. God alone is to be worshipped, Exodus 20:2-3 1 Kings 18:21; truly that there be no halting, and totally that there be no halving. Be the gods of the heathen good fellows, saith one: the true God is a jealous God, and will not share his glory with another. For indeed he is the one, Deuteronomy 6:4, and only God, Psalms 86:10, besides whom, Psalms 18:32, without whom, 1 Samuel 2:2, and beyond whom, 1 Kings 8:6, there is none other, Deuteronomy 4:39, nor any like him, 2 Samuel 7:22, nor any with him, Isaiah 44:24; he is the only Lord, and besides him there is none other, Joe 2:27.

(25, 26) Much uncertainty belongs to the interpretation of these verses and their connection in thought. Some commentators would treat Amos 5:25 as a statement, and not a question, the first word being read as a definite article, and not an interrogative prefix in the Hebrew. But the construction of the following words forbids this supposition, and nearly all exegetes follow the LXX., Vulg., Targ., in taking the sentence as interrogative. Is the expected answer negative or affirmative? Heb. usage points to the former. So Ewald and Keil According to the latter, the words apply to the nation as a whole, or to the great mass of the people, individual exceptions being passed by. The following verse is then taken in an adversative sense, “To me ye have offered no sacrifices, but ye have borne,” &c. The opposition is between the Jehovah-worship, which they suspended, and the idol-worship which they carried on. This is a possible interpretation, as Driver (Heb. Tenses, § 119a, foot-note) admits. But as that writer shows (l.c.), it is more in consonance with grammatical usage to translate in Amos 5:26 by a future, as Ewald does: “So ye shall carry away the tabernacle,” &c., i.e., when driven into exile. To this thought Amos 5:27 forms a natural development: And I will carry you away captive, &c. Moreover, in the light of this interpretation the logical connection of Amo 5:21-27 becomes much simpler: “I, Jehovah, abhor the mechanical round of corrupt and hollow ceremonial cloaking wickedness of conduct. Live righteously. Did I exact punctilious discharge of ceremonial in the desert wanderings? [No.] Therefore I shall submit you once more to the discipline of exile wanderings.” On the meaning of the difficult clause, Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made for yourselves, as well as on the rendering of the LXX. and St. Stephen’s quotation of the passage, see Excursus B. Kuenen is scarcely justified in founding an argument on this passage as to the origin of the Sabbath. B (Amos 5:26). Three obscure points render this verse one of the most difficult in the Old Testament. 1. As to tense. The interpretation to which preference has been given in the commentary on the text—the time being regarded as future—has been decided on grounds of grammatical usage only. But certainly the larger number of commentators have rendered the verb as a past tense, “But ye bore the tabernacle,” &c., the time referred to being that of the desert wanderings. This view is upheld by Hitzig, Kuenen, Keil, Henderson, and also by R. S. Poole. It is also supported by the LXX. 2. The word Sikkûth, rendered tabernacle, or tent, in the E.V. and by the LXX., is derived from a root signifying both to interweave and to cover—an etymology which confirms the above rendering. Ewald’s conjecture that it signifies “stake,” inferred from the Aramaic Sekkitho, is to be rejected. The conception of Moloch being carried in a tent may be illustrated from the Egyptian monuments of Rameses XII. Birch (Egypt, S. P. C.

Verse 25. Have ye offered unto me sacrifices] Some have been led to think that "during the forty years which the Israelites spent in the wilderness, between Egypt and the promised land, they did not offer any sacrifices, as in their circumstances it was impossible; they offered none because they had none." But such people must have forgotten that when the covenant was made at Sinai, there were burnt-offerings and peace-offerings of oxen sacrificed to the Lord, Exodus 24:5; and at the setting up of the tabernacle the twelve princes of the twelve tribes offered each a young bullock, a ram, and a lamb, for a burnt-offering; a kid for a sin-offering; two oxen, five rams, five he-goats, and five lambs, for a peace-offering, Numbers 7:12, c. which amounted to an immense number of victims offered in the course of the twelve days during which this feast of the dedication lasted. At the consecration of priests, bullocks and rams to a considerable number were offered, see Leviticus 8:1, c. but they were not offered so regularly, nor in such abundance, as they were after the settlement in the promised land. Learned men, therefore, have considered this verse as speaking thus: Did ye offer to me, during forty years in the wilderness, sacrifices in such a way as was pleasing to me? Ye did not; for your hearts were divided, and ye were generally in a spirit of insurrection or murmuring.

25. Did ye bring unto me sacrifices &c.] The question evidently requires a negative answer; and the emphatic words in the sentence are not, as has been sometimes supposed, unto me (which hold in the Hebrew quite a subordinate position), but sacrifices and offerings (which follow immediately after the interrogative particle). The prophet shews that sacrifice is no indispensable element of religious service, from the fact that during the 40 years in the wilderness—which, nevertheless, was a period when, above all others, Jehovah manifested His love and favour towards Israel (Amos 2:9-10)—it was not offered. bring] of a sacrifice, as Exodus 32:6; Leviticus 8:14; 1 Samuel 13:9. sacrifices and offerings] Rather, and meal-offerings: see on Amos 5:22. The same combination, Isaiah 19:21; Psalms 40:6.

Have ye offered - (better, “Did ye offer”) unto Me sacrifices and offerings? Israel justified himself to himself by his half-service. This had been his way from the first.

21-25. The popular service is an abomination to Jehovah. The prophet represents Jehovah as out of sympathy with and even hostile to the popular worship. In what sense this is to be understood see on Hosea 6:6.