Amos — who's who

From Tekoa, six miles south of Bethlehem in the hill country of Judah, on the edge of the wilderness that falls toward the Dead Sea. A herdsman — the Hebrew word boqer suggests cattle as well as sheep — and a dresser of sycamore figs, which need scoring for the fruit to ripen. He insists at Bethel that he is no prophet and no prophet's son: the LORD took him from following the flock and sent him north. His ministry is placed in the 760s or 750s BCE, in the long late prosperity of Jeroboam II, two years before an earthquake mentioned also in Zechariah. He prophesies almost entirely in the northern kingdom though he is from the south. The book that bears his name is the most concentrated single statement of social-justice prophecy in the Hebrew Bible.

The priest of the royal sanctuary at Bethel, the great northern shrine that Jeroboam I had founded two centuries earlier as a counterweight to Jerusalem. A state employee, doing his job. Sends word to King Jeroboam II that Amos has been conspiring against the throne in the midst of the house of Israel and that the land cannot bear all his words. Then turns to Amos directly and tells him to go home to Judah and prophesy where his bread is paid, because Bethel is the king's sanctuary and a temple of the kingdom. Amos answers, refuses the category of prophet-for-pay, and then pronounces a personal curse on him — wife, children, land, life — that the book records without softening.

Son of Joash, king of the northern kingdom from roughly 786 to 746 BCE — the longest-reigning king the north ever had and the one under whom the kingdom reached its greatest territorial extent and prosperity. He never appears directly in Amos. Amaziah sends him a message; Amos pronounces that the LORD will rise against his house with the sword. The kingdom's prosperity outlived him by less than thirty years. Samaria fell to the Assyrians in 722.

The wealthy women of the capital city, addressed in chapter 4 by a figure that has shocked readers in every century. Bashan, east of the Jordan, was famous for its cattle; the figure is calculated. The prophet's complaint is that they oppress the poor, crush the needy, and tell their husbands to bring more wine. The hook through the lip is the prophet's at his most savage. The address is class-specific rather than gendered in any modern sense — Amos's whole concern is with the small wealthy elite of the capital — but the figure carries assumptions about the women's complicity in the order their husbands run that modern readers have rightly examined. They stand in the book as the most visible beneficiaries of a system that, the prophet insists, is about to fall.

The figure at the centre of Amos's social critique. The righteous sold for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes; the head of the poor trampled into the dust of the earth; the small farmer whose field has been swallowed by the estate next door; the debtor whose cloak has been kept overnight against the law; the widow at the city gate who cannot get a fair hearing; the labourer paid in measures lighter than the law allows. They are not characters in the sense Amaziah is a character. They are the persistent figure of the indictment, the ones on whose backs the prosperity of Samaria has been built. They never speak in the book; they are spoken for, by the prophet whose voice is given to them and by the LORD whose ear is — the prophet insists — already listening for the cry.

The God of Amos. The book opens with a roar — the LORD roars from Zion, and utters his voice from Jerusalem — and the voice that runs through the book is one of the most uncompromising in the prophetic tradition. The Yahweh of Amos is not a tribal deity invested only in his own people; the oracles of chapters 1 and 2 indict the surrounding nations for crimes the LORD will judge, and chapter 9 adds: Did I not bring up Israel from Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir? He is also the LORD God of hosts — sebaot, the armies of heaven — and the visions that close the book show him standing beside the altar, calling for the capitals to be struck. The day he comes will not, the prophet says, be the day his audience has been hoping for.