Amos 4
Hear this word, you cows of Bashan: the wealthy women of Samaria who oppress the poor are addressed with the prophet's most shocking figure and a hook through the lip.
Summary
Chapter 4 opens with the address to the cows of Bashan — the wealthy women of the capital city of Samaria — who oppress the poor, crush the needy, and call on their husbands to bring more wine. The figure is precise: Bashan, east of the Jordan, was famous for its well-fed cattle, and the prophet applies it to the women of the prosperous ruling class with a calculation that takes the figure from insult to prophecy of ruin. The LORD swears by his holiness that hooks and fishhooks will drag them out through breaches in the wall. Modern readers have rightly examined the figure for its gendered assumptions, but the prophet's primary register is class — the small wealthy elite of the capital on whose comfort the rural poor have been ground down.
The chapter then moves into a sustained liturgical irony. The LORD commands the people to keep going to Bethel and Gilgal, to keep bringing their offerings and tithes and sacrifices of thanksgiving, to keep proclaiming their freewill offerings — for so you love to do. The worship system is functioning at full capacity; the critique is that the functioning worship, without the justice it was supposed to embody, is merely a performance the wealthy enjoy. After this ironic liturgy, the LORD recites five calamities he has already sent — famine, drought, blight and mildew and the locust, plague like that of Egypt, the overthrow of some cities — and follows each with the refrain yet you did not return to me, declares the LORD. Five disasters, five refusals, and then the most direct statement: therefore thus I will do to you, O Israel; because I will do this to you, prepare to meet your God.
- Amos 1The chapter opens with the superscription placing Amos in the reign of Jeroboam II, two years before the earthquake, then immediately with the roar: the LORD roars from Zion and utters his voice from Jerusalem.
- Amos 2The chapter opens with the sixth and seventh oracles — Moab, for burning the bones of the king of Edom to lime, and Judah, for rejecting the law of the LORD — and then, having walked the full circle of nations, lands on Israel.
- Amos 3The chapter opens with the address Hear this word, the first of three such addresses that structure chapters 3 through 5.
- Amos 4The chapter opens with the cows of Bashan address — the wealthy women of the capital whose only recorded speech is telling their husbands to bring more wine — and announces that hooks and fishhooks will take them out through breaches in the wall.
- Amos 5The chapter opens with a lament — a dirge for Israel in the present tense, as if the fall has already happened: Fallen, no more to rise, is the virgin Israel; forsaken on her land, with none to raise her up.
- Amos 6Chapter 6 opens with a double woe — against those at ease in Zion and those who feel secure in Samaria — and then invites the audience to look around the region: are these nations better than Israel, are their territories larger? Then it describes, with a precision that reads like a reporter's note, the world of the upper class: they lie on beds of ivory and stretch themselves out on their couches; they eat lambs from the flock and calves from the midst of the stall; they sing idle songs to the sound of the harp; they drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but they are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph.
- Amos 7The chapter opens with the first two visions.
- Amos 8The fourth vision opens with the LORD showing Amos a basket of summer fruit.
- Amos 9The fifth and final vision gives no object and no question.