Amos 1
ButlerJehovah the God of hosts." That is a great lesson, and one that religion is too apt to forget.
On the surface Amos may seem to make too much of mere morality, but it is only an appearance. With him, to do right is to serve God, and the motive must be the love of God and of our neighbor. The central note of his prophecy rings like a prelude of the great definition of the apostle: “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” Elmslie.
Chap. 1. After a very brief introduction, which gives us the name of the author and the date of his prophecies, the chapter proceeds at once to name the crowning sin of five adjacent nations, and to announce the judgments of God upon them. They are Syria, the Philistines, Tyre, Edom and Ammon. His main object in this is to make the stronger impression upon Israel. If for their sins God must scourge and even exterminate heathen powers sitting in the dimness of the light of nature, how much more must He for your sins scourge you to whom His Word has come! H. C.
1. The words of Amos. The prophets do not all use the same formula as the preface of their message. Frequently it is The word of the Lord came. The opening of Jeremiah is exactly the same as we find here—The words of Jeremiah. In each case the context shows that the words of the prophet were not his own, strictly speaking, but had a Divine origin. Here Amos says that he saw these words, and the verb which he uses is limited to prophetic vision. What he utters, therefore, was not revealed to him by flesh and blood, but by the God of Israel. B. C.
How natural does it now seem that Amos, living at Tekoah, should have been a “herdman”! For Tekoah is situated just within the edge of the great wilderness, and most of its people would be herdsmen and shepherds—the region being adapted only to pasturage—like as David, though living at Bethlehem, the fruitful, still, since Bethlehem was near the wilderness, kept his father’s flocks, and carried them into the pastures of such desert-wilds as were the haunt of lions and bears. Bart.
“Two years before the earthquake,” in King Uzziah’s reign; a visitation which struck such terror into the hearts of the people that Zechariah (chap. 14: 5) still dwells upon it even after the return from Babylon. But well known as it was then, there is nothing to settle its date now. All we know is that it happened while Jeroboam II. was still alive, and at the height of his glory, and probably, therefore, during the first twenty years of Uzziah’s reign. R. P. S.
2. The original word “roar” is used commonly of the lion, and denotes here that the Lord has aroused Himself like the lion of the forest, to assert His rule among the nations, and especially to visit retribution on those which had filled up the measure of their sins. The last half of the verse is characteristic of Amos. A man who came up among herdmen would naturally think of these rather than other effects of the Lord’s sore judgments. Carmel was ordinarily clothed with verdure even to its summit; hence the fitness of saying “the top of Carmel shall wither.” This mountain lay in the northwest part of the kingdom of the Ten Tribes. The word Carmel means a fruitful field, a fact which makes this allusion the more forcible.
3. In the passage commencing here and extending to chap. 2: 6, eight kingdoms are brought up in succession, with Judah and Israel last. Each receives its message, beginning, “Thus saith the Lord;” in each is the phraseology—“For three transgressions, and for four, I will not reverse it;” each specifies the last and most heinous crime, for which, especially (it would seem), the judgment named is sent; and each closes with naming the judgment. This remarkable uniformity in style no doubt had its object. It naturally implied that the same God of nations was taking them all successively in hand to administer justice and judgment upon each and on the same principles, common to all. It was well adapted to confirm the impression that Jehovah is indeed the ruler of nations, and holds them to a solemn responsibility, here in time, to bear themselves justly and not oppressively toward each other. Moreover, as already intimated, these nations contiguous to Judah and Israel are mentioned first, to prepare the minds of the men of Judah and Israel to hear their own sin and doom—first to stir up their sense of justice and draw out their approval of God’s righteous ways, and then to say to them, “Thou art the man!” “Damascus” represents Syria, a strong and flourishing kingdom on the north and northeast of Israel. It was the capital. Their last sin was that of “threshing Gilead”—putting its inhabitants to torture and death under the huge threshing-wain, armed with savage iron teeth, and drawn by animals over the grain.
4,5. The judgment was a devouring fire sent on the royal house of Hazael, and of his son and successor, Ben-hadad. (Both his father and his son bore this name, Ben-hadad; but Amos must allude to the son. See 2 K. 13 : 3, 24.) Tiglath-pileser, king of Assyria, fulfilled this prediction. He took the people into captivity to Kir, the river and region known as Cyrus, in Iberia. (See this fact in history, 2 K. 16 : 9.) “The king of Assyria went up against Damascus and took it, and carried the people of it captive to Kir, and slew Rezin.”
6-8. Gaza, the northern of the five chief cities of the Philistines, represents here the whole cluster. Gath, the only one of the five not named here, is omitted, probably because it was already laid waste—i.e., during the reign of Uzziah (2 Chron. 26 : 6, 7). This was within the personal knowledge of Amos. Their crowning sin was that they carried the entire body of their captives to Edom and sold them for slaves.
9,10. Tyre suffered fearfully from the arms of both Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander the Great. They were the fire of Jehovah’s vengeance upon her, specially for her sin of selling all her captives into the horrible slave marts of Edom.
11,12. Edom himself comes next—an ancient kingdom southeast from Palestine, strong in arms, and very considerably advanced in culture at the time when Israel, forbidden by him to travel through his territory, journeyed round it to reach the Jordan and pass into Canaan, n.c. 1451. His crowning sin lay in his animosity against his brother Jacob. Intensely jealous of the greatness of the Hebrew nation, Edom had almost never neglected any opportunity to let loose his wrath upon them. As stated here, he had “pursued his brother with the sword,” and had “cast off all pity.” The original more precisely says he “corrupted,” in the sense of suppressing and smothering the natural dictates of sympathy and compassion. “His anger did tear"—the common word used when savage beasts of prey tear in pieces their victims, and he “kept his wrath forever,” not suffering even the lapse of time to abate its ferocity. Teman and Bozrah were principal cities in Edom, and here represent the nation. H. C.
11. Pursued him with the sword. We have instances enough of their aggressive warfare recorded in the historical books; but the prophet’s words imply many more. The language of Jehoshaphat’s prayer shows what had been the temper of Edom and Israel respectively. “The children of Ammon and
Moab and Mount Seir, whom Thou wouldest not let Israel invade, when they came out of the land of Egypt, but they turned from them, and destroyed them not; behold, they reward us, to come to cast us out of Thy possession, which Thou hast given us to inherit” (2 Chron. 20 : 10, 11). Edom’s sin and punishment are the burden of Obadiah’s prophecy. B. C.
13-15. Ammon and Moab, nations taking their name and descent from the two sons of Lot, were ancient kingdoms on the east of Jordan, and of course contiguous to the country of the two and a half tribes here called Gilcad. The last and fatal sin of Ammon was their horrid cruelty upon the pregnant mothers of Gilcad, as if it were their purpose to exterminate not only the living population, but the unborn no less. God holds nations solemnly responsible for the sin of cruelty. It was an insignificant apology for such cruelty that they wanted more territory. The indignation of the Lord against them for such cruelty stands out in the grouping of fire, the war-ery of battle, the tempest and whirlwind, among the figures that set forth the vengeance due and about to fall on Ammon. Oh, how sublimely grand is such vengeance on a nation guilty of such horrid sin! Let us not fail to note the solemn lesson, which all people of every age should learn from this recital of Jehovah’s judgments on nations for violating the plain dictates of common justice and humanity.
Chap. 2. This chapter continues the unfinished series of kingdoms doomed for their national sins—Moab, the last outside of the chosen people; then Judah and Israel. Israel once reached, becomes the subject of rebuke, expostulation, and threatened doom throughout this chapter and the four next following. H. C.
4. Judah. The other nations had sinned without law; they had violated the dictates of conscience. Edom had been pitiless, Moab impious toward the dead. But Judah knew God, as the Lord, a covenant God. They had His written law, the revelation of His will, and despised it. In the law and commandments of God they possessed the truth. They forsook this for lies, idols, images of false gods, and this from very early times. Their fathers had walked after—had worshipped these. They preferred Baal-peor, and Baalim and Ashtaroth, to the true God that brought them out of Egypt, who daily fed, guarded and guided them. The lies that they loved deceived them, and their descendants were led astray by their example.
5. I will send a fire. This prediction was lit-
erally fulfilled. (See 2 K. 25:9.) It is repeated by Jeremiah (17:27).