Amos 9

9:1 I saw the Lord standing beside the altar: and he said, Smite the chapiters, that the thresholds may shake: and break them in pieces on the head of all of them; and I will slay the last of them with the sword: there shall not one of them flee away, and there shall not one of them escape. Though they dig into hell, thence shall mine hand take them; and though they climb up to heaven, thence will I bring them down. And though they hide themselves in the top of Carmel, I will search and take them out thence; and though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea, thence will I command the serpent, and he shall bite them. And though they go into captivity before their enemies, thence will I command the sword, and it shall slay them: and I will set mine eyes upon them for evil, and not for good. For the Lord, the God of hosts, is he that toucheth the land and it melteth, and all that dwell therein shall mourn; and it shall rise up wholly like the River; and shall sink again, like the River of Egypt; it is he that buildeth his chambers in the heaven, and hath founded his vault upon the earth; he that calleth for the waters of the sea and poureth them out upon the face of the earth; the LORD is his name. Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the LORD. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir? Behold, the eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth; saving that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, saith the LORD. For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all the nations, like as corn is 10 sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth. All the sinners of my people shall die by the sword, which say, The evil shall not overtake nor prevent us.

11. In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen, and close up the breaches 12 thereof; and I will raise up his ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old; that they may possess the remnant of Edom, and all the nations, which are called by my name, saith 13 the LORD that doeth this. Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains 14 shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. And I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit 15 of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be plucked up out of their land which I have given them, saith the LORD thy God.

In this closing chapter the prophet reaches the utmost height of sublimity. Jehovah, standing upon the altar at Bethel, smites down with terrible blows the sanctuary there of Jero- boam’s calf. In vain do the worshippers flee away; neither hell nor heaven can screen them from the Almighty. In vain do they hide in the multitudinous caves and thick forests of Carmel: God’s hand searches them out, and in the very depths of the sea He commands ser- pents to bite them. And by this visitation of the Eternal Israel is to be sifted “like as corn is sifted in a sieve.” Tossed ceaselessly to and fro, ever in motion, finding on earth no nation where it may make its home, Israel is to be scattered throughout all lands. But it is not forsaken of God. Not the least grain is to fall to the ground. Only the chaff perishes. Fierce as may be the tossing within the sieve, the providence of God guards and keeps within its circle all that is good.

And, finally, there is a restoration for Israel, but it is to be wrought through Judah. When Amos wrote Uzziah was reigning in the pleni- tude of his power. Yet he describes the house of David as a mere booth (in our version taber- nacle), a palace no longer, but a hut of boughs, such as Jonah erected to hide his head. And such the royal dynasty had become when its representative was a Galilean carpenter. But God would “close up its breaches, and raise its ruins, and build it as in the days of old” (5: 11). And upon this was to follow an era of peace and happiness, and Israel was to be no more up- rooted out of its land. From the hut of Naz- areh was to commence a new church, in which all the nations of the earth were to be blessed, and among them Israel itself. For “I will bring again the captivity of My people of Is- rael, . . . and I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God” (verses 14, 15). When we remember that Amos, though of Judah, was a prophet sent to Israel, we cannot but be struck with the reappearance of the same phenomenon which we noticed in speaking of the prophet Hosea—viz., that the blessedness of the latter days is consistently by all the prophets asso- ciated with the family and lineage of David. R. P. S.

Chap. 9. This chapter opens with the fifth and last special vision shown the prophet; affirms the complete destruction of the guilty, apostate people of Israel; denies in vivid forms all possibility of their escape (verses 1-7, 10), yet promises the rescue of a small remnant (verses 8, 9); predicts the raising up of the fallen tent of David, and the saving of the true Israel for an era of extraordinary and long-con- tinued prosperity. H. C.

1. In the previous visions Amos had been shown the nature, the certainty, the nearness of Israel’s overthrow. Here he sees the Lord Himself come down to execute judgment. He is described as standing upon, or perhaps by, the altar. B. C.

I paraphrase it thus: “I saw the Lord stand- ing beside the great altar of burnt offering in Jerusalem, and He said, ‘Smite the capitals of the columns, and make the very thresholds tremble, and dash them in pieces upon the heads of all the people within, and the remnant of them I will slay with the sword; whoever flees shall not escape, and he that gets away shall not be finally delivered.’” In this vision the people are supposed to be assembled in the temple for safety against the judgments of God, but He comes down with His destroying angel and orders the whole temple to be crushed down from pinnacle to basement, that it may fall crashing upon the heads of the assembled throng. Then, whom the falling temple does not crush, the sword shall slay, and none shall escape. H. C.

3. The contrast between the height of Carmel and the sea that washes its base is very natural. Should they fly as far as Carmel, as the securest place in Israel, they would find no hiding-place there, and should they plunge into the sea, and reach its bottom, the tooth of the deadly serpent awaited them.

4. Though they go into captivity.** Suppose them to have escaped the promiscuous slaughter, and to suffer themselves to be quietly led away by the conquerors, they may not look for safety. Absolute submission will not shield them. The threatening words of Moses would be literally fulfilled: “Among these nations . . . thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life” (De. 28 : 65).

5. The prophet, to show how terrible was the enmity they had provoked, adds, as before (4 : 13 ; 5 : 8, 9), a sublime description of the power and majesty of Jehovah. B. C.

5,6. These bold descriptions of Jehovah’s power over the material world are adduced here in the same line of thought with the preceding—to show how hopelessly futile must be every attempt of guilty men to evade His scourge or escape His retributions. The manner of the original is graphic: “And the Lord Jehovah of Hosts—He is touching the earth, and then it melts, and all the dwellers in it mourn; its whole surface is lifted up like the rising Nile, and then subsides as the river of Egypt (the effects of an earthquake, as in Amos 8 : 8). He builds His chambers in the heavens; He has founded His arched vault upon the earth (i.e., the blue concave firmament. He calls for the waters of the sea, and then pours them out upon the face of the earth—Jehovah, His name.” H. C.

6. He calls for the waters of the sea in the course of His common providence, causes vapors to ascend out of it, and pours them out in showers, the small rain, and the great rain of His strength, upon the face of the earth; this was mentioned before as a reason why we should seek the Lord (chap. 5 : 8) and make Him our Friend, as it is here made a reason why we should fear Him and dread having Him our Enemy. H.

7. This verse aims to confront and demolish another delusive reliance of the apostate people—viz., that, being the seed of Abraham and children of the covenant, brought by a series of miracles into the land of promise, they were invincible against any heathen power, since their God would surely protect them. The Lord replies to their thought, “What are ye to Me more than the Cushites and Ethiopians? I did indeed bring you up out of Egypt; so I also brought the Philistines from Caphtor (Crete), and the Syrians from Kir”—the region of the river Cyrus. Does such a removal insure the perpetual prosperity of any people? H. C.

Have not I brought up. God seems to use the language in which the people boasted of what had been done for their ancestors. It was most true that His hand had rescued them. As it is said before (chap. 3 : 2), You only have I known of all the families of the earth. But when they cast off their allegiance to Him, and became like the heathen around them, they renounced their high and peculiar position. Their deliverance from Egypt, which should have made them serve God faithfully, had no more significance for them than the migrations of neighboring nations. Their movements also had been determined by the providence of God.

8. The sinful kingdom is that of the Ten Tribes. It was founded in rebellion, it was maintained by the observance of idolatrous worship at Dan and Bethel. The people were hindered from going up to Jerusalem to keep the solemn feasts, lest they should desire to return to their allegiance to the royal line of David. Jeroboam had made Israel to sin, and his sin had been loved and followed by others. The kingdom was sinful, and therefore, after due probation, the kingdom must be destroyed. Not so the race to which its subjects belonged. The house of Jacob should not be utterly destroyed. Among them there should ever be a remnant, a few in every age found faithful, worthy to bear the name of Jacob, or Israel.

9,10. The image employed here expresses at once the dispersion and preservation of Israel. Their dispersion had been foretold by Moses (Lev. 26 : 33 ; De. 28 : 64). The people are to be scattered among all nations (cf. Hos. 9 : 17), yet not one individual is to be overlooked. The remnant shall be saved, but the sinners cut off. Davison says on this passage: “This concise prophecy contains a draught of determinate history; the kingdom, the body politic, to be destroyed from off the face of the earth; but the people, the stock, not to be destroyed. The people to be sifted through all nations; but the seed so sifted not to perish, nor its least grain to fall to the earth. It is a history made up of opposite particulars; destruction and preservation, scattering and perpetual custody combined. It is the true outline of Jewish history. Is it of any other whatever? Place the prophecy in any imaginable age; after the fall of the kingdom of Israel, or after the Babylonian conquest; the phenomenon of its fulfilment remains; its constant, perpetual fulfilment.” B. C.

The centrifugal force of world-wide dispersion, with the centripetal of national cohesion, could not have been more distinctly expressed. It is not the calamity of national downfall, of expatriation and wandering to the ends of the earth, of proscription and outrage such as may well make Christians blush, even when it still breaks out in our own century; it is not even the tragic cause, as Christians believe, of this unmatched disaster, and which weighs like a doom not finally exhausted. It is the power of resistance—the invincible reaction against all forces of change or dissolution—the stubborn identity with his fathers, which from the heights of modern commerce or the fair equality of intellectual and political conflict, as from the depression of other days, makes the Jew still retire into solitude, to nurse a sad memory or a hope yet unfulfilled. Were the Jews converted, and were Palestine restored to them, would unbelief be able to hold its own? Cairns.

11. The tabernacle of David. Under the figure of rebuilding a tabernacle, that was partly demolished by force, partly decayed with age, the prophet foretells the restoring of the kingdom of David to one of his seed after it should be fallen into a very low condition, and the enlargement of his subjects in the room of those who had shaken off their obedience. Bp. Chandler.

The reigning family of David had been sadly broken down by the revolt under Jeroboam; far more so still by their apostasy into idol-worship, oppression and other immoralities, for all which God had doomed the sinners of His people to be utterly cut off; but the day will come for rearing up again this royal line and its kingdom. He will wall up the breaches of the “double house,” the two kingdoms (for so the plural pronoun, rendered “thereof,” should naturally mean): “I will raise up David’s ruins and build his tent as in days of old.” These promises suggest the original covenant with David’s line (2 Sam. 7:16). “And thy house and thy kingdom shall be established forever before thee; thy throne shall be established forever.” King Messiah is to come in this royal line, and, according to the strain of this prophecy, events ripen for His coming. Only in Him can this prophecy find an adequate fulfilment. H. C.

It is striking that Amos, prophesying in

Israel, closes with a promise, not to the Ten Tribes primarily, but to the royal house of David and to Israel only through its restoration. Strange comment on human greatness, that the royal line was not to be employed in the salvation of the world until it was fallen. The royal palace had to become the hut of Nazareth ere the Redeemer of the world could be born, whose glory and kingdom were not of this world. Who came to take from us nothing but our nature, that He might sanctify it, our misery that He might bear it for us. Pusey.

11,12. In Acts 15:14-17 James says, “Simon Peter has been relating to you how God has visited the Gentiles to convert some of them to Himself; and to this agree the words of the prophet Amos;” and then he quotes substantially from the Septuagint version these two verses. James gives the general sense with entire accuracy—viz., that God had of set purpose called the Gentiles within the pale of His Church, to inherit in it among His people.

13-15. Great prosperity and abundance are implied. The reaper will have so much to do, and the ploughman withal is so eager to get in readiness a large field, that he treads on the heels of the reaper. The mountains terraced and cultivated in grapes to their summits shall seem to distil new wine. It flows down their declivities as if the mountains themselves were becoming liquid. H. C.—This must certainly be understood of the abundance of spiritual blessings in heavenly things which all those are and shall be blessed with who are in sincerity added to Christ and His Church; they shall be abundantly replenished with the goodness of God’s house, with the graces and comforts of His Spirit; they shall have bread, the bread of life, to strengthen their hearts, and the wine of Divine consolations to make them glad; meat indeed and drink indeed, all the benefit that comes to the souls of men from the Word and Spirit of God; these had been long confined to the vineyard of the Jewish Church, Divine revelation and the power that attended it were to be found only within that enclosure; but in Gospel times the mountains and hills of the Gentile world shall be enriched with these privileges by the Gospel of Christ preached and professed and received in the power of it. H.

I cannot close this Book of Amos without a passing tribute to his clear, forcible and earnest style; to the richness of his figures, drawn chiefly from the familiar but often sublimely grand fields of nature, and from the scenes of husbandry; to the sublime and solemn grandeur with which he recites the significant names of Jehovah, God of Hosts; and not least, to his warm sympathy with the wronged and outraged poor, and to his intense abhorrence of the luxury, pride, ostentation, and especially the oppression which manifestly was the crowning and damning sin of the leading men in the kingdom of Israel. We shall need to go far to find keener invectives against these Heaven-provoking sins, or a more earnest wielding of Jehovah’s thunders against the oppression of the poor, the perversions of justice, and the enslaving of men. H. C.

So ends this ancient and memorable book of prophecy. The storms roll far away into the distance, and there is a vision of peace. Any fulfilment of the prophecy in the comparative prosperity of Judah under Uzziah, and its escape from Assyria, would be quite inadequate to meet the prophet’s language. Most of it has not been fulfilled in any literal sense, but its Messianic yearnings have found an abundant spiritual fulfilment in the glories of the Christian dispensation, and to the Messianic age it is applied in the speech of James to the Apostolic Synod. Farrar.

1 : 1 THE vision of Obadiah.

Thus saith the Lord God concerning Edom : We have heard tidings from the LORD, and an ambassador is sent among the nations, saying, Arise ye, and let us rise up against her in battle. Behold, I have made thee small among the nations : thou art greatly despised. The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, O thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high ; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground ? Though thou mount on high as the eagle, and though thy nest be set among the stars, I will bring thee down from thence, saith the LORD. If thieves came to thee, if robbers by night, (how art thou cut off !) would they not steal till they had enough ? if grapegatherers came to thee, would they not leave some gleaning grapes ? How are the things of Esau searched out ! how are his hidden treasures sought up ! All the men of thy confederacy have brought thee on thy way, even to the border : the men that were at peace with thee have deceived thee, and prevailed against thee ; they that eat thy bread lay a snare under thee : there is none understanding in him. Shall I not in that day, saith the LORD, destroy the wise men out of Edom, and understanding out of the mount of Esau ? And thy mighty men, O Teman, shall be dismayed, to the end that every one may be cut off from the mount of Esau by slaughter. For the violence done to thy brother Jacob shame shall cover thee, and thou shalt be cut off for ever. In the day that thou stoodest on the other side, in the day that strangers carried away his substance, and foreigners entered into his gates, and cast lots upon Jerusalem, even thou wast as one of them. But look not thou on the day of thy brother in the day of his disaster, and rejoice not over the children of Judah in the day of their destruction ; neither speak proudly in the day of distress. Enter not into the gate of my people in the day of their calamity ; yea, look not thou on their affliction in the day of their calamity, neither lay ye hands on their substance in the day of their calamity. And stand thou not in the crossway, to cut off those of his that escape ; and deliver not up those of his that remain in the day of distress. For the day of the LORD is near upon all the nations : as thou hast done, it shall be done unto thee ; thy dealing shall return upon thine own head. For as ye have drunk upon my holy mountain, so shall all the nations drink continually, yea, they shall drink, and swallow down, and shall be as though they had not been. But in mount Zion there shall be those that escape, and it shall be holy ; and the house of Jacob shall possess their possessions. And the house of Jacob shall be a fire, and the house of Joseph a flame, and the house of Esau for stubble, and they shall burn among them, and devour them : and there shall not be any remaining to the house of Esau ; for the LORD hath spoken it. And they of the South shall possess the mount of Esau ; and they of

the lowland the Philistines: and they shall possess the field of Ephraim, and the field of 20 Samaria: and Benjamin shall possess Gilead. And the captivity of this host of the children of Israel, which are among the Canaanites, shall possess even unto Zarephath; and the cap- 21 tivity of Jerusalem, which is in Sepharad, shall possess the cities of the South. And saviours shall come up on mount Zion to judge the mount of Esau; and the kingdom shall be the LORD’S.