Amos 8

1. By the type of the ripe fruit Jehovah had shown the ripeness of Israel not for judgment, but for punishment (cf. Rev. 14:18). The fruit harvest is the very last harvest of the year; when this crop is gathered there is nothing more to do. And for Israel all had been done that could be done. Houghton.

1,2. Summer fruit ripens quick and soon decays. The people had ripened for ruin, and their ruin was near at hand. God can pass by them, sparing and deferring His judgments no longer. H. C.

2. This ripeness not being to service was inevitably to destruction. There is never any other alternative. Where matured powers are not employed for the service of God and of mankind, but are simply used for selfishness, decay and destruction must follow. Houghton.

It is a solemn lesson, applying to each soul as well as to communities. By neglect of God’s voice, and persistence in our own evil ways, we can make ourselves such that we are ripe for judgment, and can compel longsuffering to strike. Which are we ripening for, the harvest when the wheat shall be gathered into Christ’s barns, or that when the tares shall be bound in bundles for burning?

3. The tragedy of that fruit-gathering is described with extraordinary grimness and force in the abrupt language of verse 3. The merry songs sung in the palace (this rendering seems more appropriate here than “temple”) will be broken off, and the singers’ voices will quaver into shrill shrieks, so sudden will the judgment be. Then comes a picture as abrupt in its condensed terribleness as anything in Tacitus, “Many the corpses; everywhere they fling them; hush!” We see the ghastly masses of dead (“corpse” is in the singular, as if a collective noun), so numerous that no burial-places could hold them; and no ceremonial attended them, but they were rudely flung anywhere by anybody (no nominative is given), with no accustomed voice of mourning, but in gloomy silence. It is like Defoe’s picture of the dead-cart in the plague of London. Such is ever the end of departing from God—songs palsied into silence or turned into wailing when the judgment bursts, death stalking supreme and silence brooding over all. A. M.

4-6. The guilty people are once more exhorted to hear the threatened judgments of the Almighty, and the recital of those judgments is prefaced by a further description of their oppressions of the poor. So eager are they to drive hard bargains, and wrest from the poor the last pittance of their earnings, they cannot wait for the new moon and for the Sabbath to pass over—so would they hurry off their religious duties to get back again to their extortion and fraud. Their religion stood in the way of their sin in no other respect than that it demanded a few hours’ suspension of trade and business. It utterly failed of its proper influence—viz., to make their heart thoroughly benevolent, and, consequently, their business life just. What a depth of corruption in morals do such sketches of the ways of business and trade reveal! The reader will be careful to note how sharply the Lord rebukes and exposes such outrages on human rights and on commercial justice, and how fearfully He punishes the guilty. H. C.

The crimes that ripened men for this terrible harvest are next set forth, in part, in verses 4-6. These verses partly coincide verbally with the previous indictment in Amos 2:6, etc., which, however, is more comprehensive. Here only one form of sin is dealt with. And what was the sin that deserved the bad eminence of being thus selected as the chief sign that Israel was ripe and rotten? Precisely the one which gets most indulgence in the Christian Church—viz., eagerness to be rich, and sharp, unkindly dealing. These men, who were only fit to be swept out of the land, were most punctual in their religious duties. They would not on any account do business either on a festival or on Sabbath, but they were very impatient till—shall we say Monday?—morning came, that they might get to their beloved work again. Their lineal descendants are no strangers on the exchanges or in the churches of New York or London. They were not only outwardly scrupulous and inwardly weary of religious observances, but, when they did get to “business,” they gave short measure and took a long price, and knew how to turn the scales always in their own favor. It was the expedient of rude beginners in the sacred art of getting the best of a bargain, to put a false bottom in the ephah, and to stick a piece of lead below the shekel weight, which the purchaser had to make go up in the scale with his silver. There are much neater ways of doing the same thing now; and no doubt some very estimable gentlemen in high repute as Christians, who give respectability to any church or denomination, could have taught these early practitioners a lesson or two. They were as cruel as they were greedy. They bought their brethren as slaves, and if a poor man had run into their debt for even a pair of shoes, they would sell him up in a very literal sense. Avarice, unbridled by the fear of God, leads by a short cut to harshness and disregard of the claims of others. There are more ways of buying the needy for a pair of shoes than these people practised. Some serious reflections ought to be driven home to us, who live in great commercial communities, and are in manifold ways tempted to “learn their ways, and so get a snare unto our souls,” by this gibbeting of tempers and customs, very common among ourselves, as the very head and front of the sin of Israel, which determined their ripeness for destruction. A. M.

What branch of commerce is without its delusive labels, its broken promises, its advertising fictions, its postponed payments, its calculated bankruptcies, its hollow contracts? The brilliant audacities of the great commercial centres have their lame and creeping copies, hardly less cruel or calamitous, back in the little rural villages, in sight of graveyards where sleep the ashes of clean-handed ancestors, living and dying, in their day, in the faith of a God who has righteousness and judgment for the habitation of His throne. The grand difficulty with our popular piety is that it is still trying to find a way, in this nineteenth century of the Gospel, of serving two gods together. Is there any remedy? The remedy will be found by finding through what popular mistakes the mischief has crept in, and by raising against them the everlasting principles of the Bible morality, the old-fashioned safeguards of personal uprightness, on the staunch commandments of a God of righteousness. F. D. H.

5. Saying, When will the new moon be gone.** When shall we have done with these solemn feasts wherein we are not allowed to buy and sell? would God these new moons and Sabbaths were once past that we might sell our corn at a high rate, making the measure of the wheat small, and the weights wherewith the silver is weighed great and heavy; and falsifying the balances by deceit. Bp. H.

Making the ephah small, and the shekel great. The ephah was a measure containing one and one-tenth bushels of our measure. The shekel here mentioned is not a piece of money, but a fixed weight of two hundred and twenty grains, or just over half an ounce. The Jews had no coined money before the return from Babylon, when they coined silver of the weight of a shekel. All mercantile transactions were carried on by lumps, bars, or rings of the precious metals, weighed by acknowledged standard weights. Thus we see how these fraudulent traders cheated in two ways; first, by having the ephah, which held the corn they sold, too small, and then by having the shekel, which weighed the silver they received in payment, too heavy. Further, they sold the refuse (literally, “that which fell”) of the wheat—that is, the grains which, being shriveled, fell through the sieve, and which contained no flour. Tristram.

The world predominates in our hearts, when it engrosses the principal train of our thoughts; when it is the last idea that possesseth us when we lie down, and the first when we arise: when it distracts us in our attendance on the duties of religion, interrupts our devotion in prayer, diverts our attention in hearing and fetters our minds in meditation. I mean not to assert, that every degree of influence which it has in these respects betrays its absolute ascendancy over the mind; for who then could free himself of this charge? But when these worldly thoughts engross the mind by its own consent, when they make us grudge the time bestowed on religion, and eager to resume our earthly occupations, as soon as we have lulled our consciences with an unmeaning attendance on its ordinances—when, like the Jews of old, we say of the Sabbath, “what weariness! when will it be over, that we may sell corn?” This is not only a preferring of the world to God, but in reality a solemn mockery of Him, not less provoking than open profanity itself. R. W.

7. The “excellency of Jacob” cannot with propriety mean anything else than Him who is, or ought to be, the sole ground of confidence and occasion of “boasting” to the nation (Hos. 5: 5). He gives his own being as the guarantee that judgment shall fall. As surely as God is God, injustice and avarice will ruin a nation. We talk now about necessary consequences, and natural laws rendering penalties inevitable. The Bible suggests a deeper foundation for their certain incidence, even the very nature of God Himself. As long as He is what He is, covetousness and its child, harshness to the needy, will be sin against him, and be avenged sooner or later. God has a long and a wide memory, and the sins which He “remembers” are those which He has not forgiven, and will punish. A. M.

8. The prophet asks with sublime impressiveness whether the enormities practised in Israel are not such as to make the land itself shudder as with the convulsions of an earthquake. Must not every inhabitant mourn in godly sorrow for such wickedness, or mourn under the infliction of due chastisement? B. C.

9. I will cause the sun to go down at noon. This points to no eclipse, but has a distinct historical reference. Not by gradual decay, but by a sudden unlooked-for crash, was Israel to perish. Pekah was a military chief. He had reigned for seventeen years over Israel in peace, when, along with Rezin, king of Syria, he attempted to extirpate the line of David, and set a Syrian, son of Tabeal, on the throne of Ahaz, who was weak and helpless. Tiglath-pileser swooped suddenly down on Pekah, and swept away the whole population of the east and north—Gilead, Bashan and Galilee, to the plain of Jezreel. Pekah’s sun set, and all was night, with no dawn. Tristram.

8-10. Something darker beyond is dimly hinted in that awful, vague, final threat, “the end thereof as a bitter day.” Now all these threats were fulfilled in the fall of the kingdom of Israel; but that “day of the Lord” was, in principle, a miniature foreshadowing of the great final judgment. Some of the very features of the description here are repeated in the new test, with reference to it. We cannot treat such prophecies as this as if they were exhausted by their historical fulfilment. They disclose the eternal course of Divine judgment, which is to culminate in a future day of judgment. The oath of God is not yet completely fulfilled. Assuredly as He lives, and is God, so surely will modern sinners have to stand their trial; and, as of old, the chase after riches will bring down crashing ruin. We need that vision of judgment as much as Samaria did when Amos saw the basket of ripe fruit, craving, as it were, to be plucked. So do obstinate sinners invite destruction. A. M.

11-13. The time would come when they who now despised it would sigh in vain for a word from Jehovah. They had silenced the prophets (2: 12), and perhaps had already banished Amos (7: 12), and the time would come when Jehovah would take them at their word. Then He would send a hungering into the land, that bitterest of all hunger, not for bread, but for the comfort and light of the Word of God. The fulfilment of this threat began with the destruction of Israel; but even to this day it is continued, in those of that people who are looking and longing for their Messiah, refusing to find Him in Jesus of Nazareth. Houghton.

11. This was to be the righteous retribution for slighting the Divine warnings given through the prophets. In the day of darkness and perplexity they should hunger and thirst for one word from heaven, and should not obtain it. The Word of the Lord would be precious indeed, when it was no longer to be heard. Then would they seek a vision of the prophet; but the law shall perish from the priest, and counsel from the ancients. B. C.

What the judgment itself is that is threatened. It is a famine, a scarcity, not of bread and water (which are the necessary supports of the body, and the want of which is very grievous), but a much sorcer judgment than that, even a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. This was a token of God’s highest displeasure against them, when He would no more speak to them as He had done, and when He would no more afford them the means of bringing them to repentance. H.

No one could feel the value of a Divine revelation and ministry more than Amos. He prized the prophetic mission as one of Israel’s richest mercies; to hear God speaking to his own soul was his greatest privilege and comfort. For God no more to speak, for a cessation or a suspension to come of the condescending intercourse of the Divine teacher, for the hoarse voice of reproof as well as the gentle tones of pity to be silent, was felt by him to be the greatest of evils. Amos saw that that was coming. There had come mildew, and blight, and scarcity, and want, and the land had groaned; but blacker clouds of evil were in the distance, were sailing nearer and nearer. “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God,” so cries the prophet, “that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord: and they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it.” We see the value which is here set on Divine truth for the nourishment of man’s soul. We see here a comment on the everlasting maxim, “Man liveth not by bread alone.” We see here how in a fulness of sufficiency we may be in straits.

Blessed be God that this worst of judgments—this famine of the word of life—has befallen none of us yet. We may have lost many comforts and joys that we greatly prized; but we have the Bible left, we have the manna which falleth from heaven, the Gospel and the ordinances of Christ left, we have the water of life left, sheaves upon sheaves of Divine instruction are being reaped every Sabbath. God’s banquetting house is open, and the tables are spread, and servants come to us week after week, telling how the King has made a great supper, and all things are ready, and we are to come to the marriage. But if men will not come now, and eat and be satisfied, days of famine shall follow; they shall follow in eternity. Stoughton.

12. Why was the search vain? Has not God promised to be found of those that seek, however far they have gone away? The last verse tells why. They still were idolaters, swearing by the “sin of Samaria,” which is the calf of Bethel, and by the other at Dan, and going on idolatrous pilgrimages to Beersheba, far away in the south, across the whole kingdom of Judah (Amos 5:5). It was vain to seek for the Word of the Lord, with such doings and worship. The truth implied is universal in its application. God’s message neglected is withdrawn. Conscience stops if continually unheeded. The Gospel may still sound in a man’s ears, but have long ceased to reach farther. There comes a time when men shall wish wasted opportunities back, and find that they can no more return than last summer’s heat. There may be a wish for the prophet in time of distress, which means no real desire for God’s Word, but only for relief from calamity. There may be a sort of seeking for the Word, which seeks in the wrong places and in the wrong ways, and without abandoning sins. Such quest is vain. But if, driven by need and sorrow, a poor soul, feeling the thirst after the living God, cries from ever so far off a land of bondage, the cry will be answered. But let us not forget that our Lord has told us to take heed how we hear, on the very ground that to him that “hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away.” A. M.

13. Youth and strength, with all their spirits and energy, would be unavailing. There would be no renewal of strength for those who had not waited on the Lord. B. C.

14. “The sin of Samaria” was the calf set up at Bethel by Jeroboam, who committed a great sin in so doing, and made Israel to sin. “The manner,” or way, “of Beersheba” is rendered “the god of Beersheba” in the Greek version, which expresses the sense rather than the words. The “way” or “manner” signifies the same with “the way of worship;” and the phrase is often used so in the Acts, particularly chap. 19:23; 24:14. Here it is taken figuratively for the god or object of their worship. Beersheba was a place noted for idolatry. W. Lowth.