Amos 7
The first three visions — locusts, fire, plumb line — and the narrative hinge: Amaziah the priest tells Amos to go home to Judah, and Amos answers that the LORD took him from following the flock.
Summary
Chapter 7 opens the vision sequence that will occupy the final three chapters of the book. The first two visions share a structure: the LORD shows Amos a catastrophe forming — a swarm of locusts devouring the late growth after the king's mowing, then a call for fire to consume the great deep and the land — and Amos intercedes each time with the same plea: Forgive, O LORD, or Cease, O LORD. How can Jacob stand? He is so small. Both times the LORD relents. The intercession functions as a measure of prophetic relationship; the prophet can still, at this stage, talk God back from the edge. The third vision changes the structure. The LORD is standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, and holds a plumb line in his hand. He asks Amos what he sees; Amos answers, A plumb line. The LORD announces he is setting a plumb line in the midst of his people — and then no intercession follows. The wall has been measured; it is crooked; the high places of Isaac will be desolate; the sanctuaries of Israel will be laid waste; the house of Jeroboam will fall by the sword.
Between the third and fourth visions falls the only narrative episode in the book. Amaziah, the priest of the royal sanctuary at Bethel, sends a message to Jeroboam II: Amos has conspired against you in the midst of the house of Israel; the land cannot bear all his words. Then he turns to Amos directly and tells him to flee to the land of Judah, eat bread there, prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king's sanctuary and a temple of the kingdom. Amaziah is not necessarily corrupt in any individual sense. He is the state religious official handling a political problem. Amos's answer refuses the category Amaziah has placed him in: I was no prophet, nor a prophet's son, but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs; and the LORD took me from following the flock, and the LORD said to me, Go, prophesy to my people Israel. The credential is not a school or a tradition or a salary. It is the act of God that interrupted a working life. Then Amos pronounces a curse on Amaziah: wife, children, land, and the priest himself dying in an unclean land, with Israel going into exile.
- 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.