Amos 8
The fourth vision: a basket of summer fruit, qayitz, and the wordplay on qetz — the end. The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass by them.
Summary
The fourth vision is formally the simplest in the sequence. The LORD shows Amos a basket of summer fruit — qayitz in Hebrew — and when Amos reports what he sees, the LORD pronounces: The end — qetz — has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass by them. The pun works on the shared consonants of the two words: the overripe summer fruit, at the limit of its keeping, standing for a people at the limit of its season. After the third vision's plumb line, which moved from measurement to verdict, the fourth vision moves from verdict to announcement: the end, not the measurement, is what the LORD is now holding. The songs of the palace will be wailings; the dead bodies will be thrown out everywhere; silence.
The social indictment resumes in the second movement of the chapter. Those who trample on the needy and bring the poor of the land to an end are the same merchants who, through the Sabbath and the new moon, wait impatiently for the sacred time to end so they can reopen the markets where they make the ephah small and the shekel great — shortchanging the measure and inflating the price — and deal in false balances and sell the sweepings of the wheat alongside the grain. The LORD swears by the pride of Jacob that he will never forget any of their deeds. The announced punishment moves into cosmic register: the sun will go down at noon, the earth will be darkened in broad daylight, feasts will become mourning, songs will become lamentations, sackcloth will be on every waist, and every head will be shaved. The end of the chapter announces a famine unlike any of the physical famines the LORD has already sent: a famine not of bread or of water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. The people will wander from sea to sea and from north to east seeking the word, and they will not find it.
- 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.