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away from following the flock, and the Lord said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my people Israel. Now therefore hear thou the word of the Lord: Thou sayest, Prophesy not against Israel, and drop not thy word against the house of Isaac. Therefore thus saith the Lord: Thy sons and thy daughters shall fall by the sword, and thy land shall be divided by line; and thou shalt die in a polluted land: and Israel shall surely go into exile away from his land.'

§ 9. The vision of summer fruit.-The scene with Amaziah is immediately followed by the fourth vision, containing one of those plays upon words in which the Hebrew poets delighted. We met with one at the call of Jeremiah.

Thus the Lord God shewed unto me: and behold a basket of summer fruit (kayitz). And he said, 'Amos, what seest thou?' And I said, 'A basket of summer fruit.' Then said the Lord unto me, 'The end (kaitz) is come upon my people of Israel; I will not again forgive them any more. And the women singers of the temple shall howl in that day, saith the Lord God: there shall be many dead bodies in every place.'

§ 10. A fresh denunciation.-The fourth vision is succeeded by a fresh and more detailed denunciation of judgement. On this occasion the prophet attacks the rich traffickers and 'corner' men who add fraud to oppression. In the last paragraph some think that the passage about a spiritual thirst is interpolated, for Amos does not elsewhere seem to give his countrymen credit for any even future desire to hear the word and know the will of God.

Hear this, O ye that trample upon the needy, even to make the poor of the land to cease, saying, 'When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn, and the sabbath, that we may open wheat?' (by making the measure small, and the weight great, and falsifying the balances of deceit.) The Lord hath sworn by the pride of Jacob, Surely I will never forget any of their works.' Shall not the land tremble for this, and every one mourn that dwelleth therein ?

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And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day: and I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into a dirge; and I will bring up sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness

upon every head; and I will make it as the mourning of an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day.

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, 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.] In that day shall the fair virgins and young men faint for thirst, they that swear by the guilt of Samaria, and say, 'As thy god, O Dan, liveth'; and, 'As liveth the way to Beer-sheba'; even they shall fall, and never rise up again.

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The guilt of Samaria is its altars, or perhaps it is the golden calf of Beth-el. 'As liveth the way to Beer-sheba' seems a very odd oath, but Dr. Smith says there are parallels to it. To-day Arabs swear wa hyat, by the life of, even of things inanimate; "By the life of this fire, or of this coffee." And as Amos here tells us that the Israelite pilgrims swore by the way to Beer-sheba, so do the Moslems affirm their oaths by the sacred way to Mecca.'

§ 11. The vision of the smitten sanctuary.—On this oration there follows the fifth and last vision. At its close Amos once more reiterates his point that Jehovah' is the God not only of Israel, but of other nations as well. The mere fact that he brought the Israelites out of Egypt is no proof that they can reckon on his perpetual favour, be they righteous, be they sinners. He brought up' the Aramaeans from Kir and the Philistines from Caphtor equally with the Israelites from Egypt. He is the world-ruler (such is the inevitable inferenceAmos anticipating the second Isaiah), and his every operation is dictated by Righteousness. And therefore his eyes must be upou the sinful kingdom to destroy it.

I saw the Lord standing over the altar, and he said: Smite the capitals, that the thresholds shake: and cut them off on to the head of all of them; and I will slay the residue of them with the sword: he that fleeth of them shall not flee away, and he that escapeth of them shall not be delivered. Though they dig into Sheol, thence shall mine hand take them; 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 hide themselves from before mine eyes in the

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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.

[And the Lord God of hosts is he that toucheth the earth and it melteth, and all that dwell therein mourn: and it riseth like the Nile, all of it together, and sinketh like the Nile of Egypt. He buildeth his upper chambers in the heaven, and hath founded his vault upon the earth; he calleth to 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. Did I not bring up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and Aram 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.

Smite the capitals.' The altar meant is the altar at Beth-el, the chief Israelitish sanctuary and national religious centre.' The smiters are God's agents or servants: presumably, therefore, angels. The capitals were 'globular ornaments at the top of the columns, which supported the roof of the temple' (Driver).

'The Serpent.' The reference is probably 'to an imaginary monster, supposed by the Hebrews to have its home at the bottom of the ocean, and to be at the disposal of the Almighty' (Driver). 'Caphtor.' This Caphtor is probably Crete, but the position of Kir is uncertain.

'Did I not bring up Israel.' The lack of conjunctions and dependent clauses in Hebrew is often sorely felt and impairs the meaning. What Amos really meant would be better brought out if we translate:Though I brought up Israel from Egypt, did I not also bring up the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir?' I am no mere national God, and I show no unrighteous partialities or favouritism. The indignant questions of the prophet show a marvellous religious purity and breadth of view, which hardly penetrated unto the general Jewish consciousness till quite modern times.

§ 12. The future restoration.—Sin must bring its own punishment both to society and the individual. The divine punishment is not outward and arbitrary, but inward and necessary. But as in a human ruler and judge there is opportunity both for punishment

and for forgiveness, so too in the Divine Ruler and in the Divine Judge there is room for the second as well as for the first. If punishment is divine, so and still more so is forgiveness. Expulsion from the divine favour may be rightly followed by restoration to the divine presence.

So it would not be surprising or unwarrantable if the prophecy of Amos, up till this point seeming to include all Israel in the sweep of a foretold doom, should at the end, for a purified remnant, become forgiving and restorative. We do as a matter of fact find this gracious conclusion. Exile is for all, but not destruction. Exile shall sift and purify; it shall not utterly destroy. But the manner of the change awakens suspicion. It is appended most abruptly to the last utterance of sore retribution--a sudden transition within a single sentence. And the restoration promised and foretold seems too material for Amos. Surely his restoration would be the reign of righteousness, not a mere era of fertility? Whether an editor's interpolation has expunged the prophet's own conclusion it is impossible to say. But as it stands, the comforting 'epilogue' seems perhaps hardly worthy of this purest, sternest, most ethical and most ideal of all the great company of prophets. Amos is the seer of righteousness: to this he clings even though the future of his own brethren in the northern kingdom be shrouded in impenetrable darkness and gloom. Even if Israel must perish, God's righteousness remains. Again, though the authenticity of the first paragraph of the epilogue may be defended by the analogy of other prophetical writings, and by the thought that the highest object of divine punishment is purification and amendment, and not annihilation, the second paragraph with its apparently clear allusion to the fall of the Judaic kingdom must surely be much later than Amos.

[Nevertheless, I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, saith the Lord. For, lo, I command, and I will shake the house of Israel among all nations, like as corn is shaken in a sieve, yet shall not a grain fall upon the earth. All the sinners of my people shall die by the sword, who say, The evil shall not overtake or surprise us.

In that day will I raise up the booth of David that is fallen, and close up the breaches 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 over whom my name hath been called, saith the Lord.

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that the ploughman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that

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soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop new wine, and all the hills shall melt. And I will turn the captivity of my people of 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 of them. 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.]

'The remnant of Edom.' The meaning is that the empire of David shall be restored to its former limits.'

'Over whom my name hath been called,' i. e. 'in token of conquest or ownership. The reference is to the nations which had been conquered by David. In virtue of their subjugation by him, they had passed under the dominion of Jehovah' (Driver).

'The ploughman shall overtake the reaper.' With this hyperbolic description of the fertility of the soil and the graciousness of the seasons in the restored Israel, when the ploughman shall hardly have finished ploughing before the reaper will be called upon to reap, and when the vintage of the autumn shall for sheer abundance be scarcely concluded before the season for sowing the next year's seed has already arrived, we may compare the lovely description of the garden of Alcinous in the seventh book of the Odyssey. We may also compare the blessing which is promised. as the reward of obedience in the Book of Leviticus: And your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time.'

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