Amos 5
Seek me and live — but the day of the LORD is darkness, not light. The chapter contains the most quoted verse in Amos and the first prophetic reversal of election theology.
Summary
Chapter 5 opens in the formal register of the lament — the dirge — applied to Israel as if the death has already occurred: Fallen, no more to rise, is the virgin Israel; forsaken on her land, with none to raise her up. The city of a thousand will lose nine hundred; the city of a hundred will lose ninety. This is the prophet reporting a fait accompli, not issuing a warning. Then the address pivots: Seek me and live. The people are not to seek Bethel or cross to Gilgal or cross over to Beersheba, for these sanctuaries will become nothing. The one who made the Pleiades and Orion, who turns deep darkness into morning, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out upon the surface of the earth — the LORD is his name — is the one to be sought.
The day of the LORD passage follows, performing the most significant rhetorical inversion in the chapter: woe to those who desire the day of the LORD, for it is darkness and not light. The image of fleeing a lion only to meet a bear, of going into the house only to be bitten by the serpent in the wall, is the prophet's figure for the inescapability of a judgment the audience has been confident would vindicate them. Then the most quoted passage: I hate, I despise your feasts; I take no delight in your solemn assemblies; though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen; but let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. The Hebrew behind justice is mishpat — practical judgment at the city gate — and behind righteousness is tzedakah — the conduct that holds the community right with itself. The image is hydraulic: the perennial stream, not the seasonal wadi, is what the prophet is demanding.
- 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.