Amos — themes & analysis

The most quoted verse in Amos, and one of the most quoted verses in the Hebrew Bible, sits at the centre of a passage in chapter 5 that is otherwise harder than its most famous line: I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the peace offerings of your fattened animals, I will not look upon 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 line has been quoted by Martin Luther King Jr. on the Washington mall and by every later social-justice tradition that has wanted to enlist the prophets. It is worth reading in its full context.

What Amos is saying is sharper than the line on its own. He is not saying that worship and justice are both important. He is saying that worship without justice is not pleasing to God; it is hateful to God. The festivals he is attacking are not pagan festivals. They are Yahweh's festivals — the same feasts the Torah commands, conducted in the same sanctuaries, by the same priests, with the same offerings. The whole religious system of the northern kingdom in 760 BCE is functioning, and it is functioning at high prosperity. What is missing is not the cult. What is missing is the justice the cult was supposed to be the honest expression of. And in the absence of justice, Amos says, the cult has become noise — the noise of solemn assemblies, the melody of harps — that God is asking, in language closer to disgust than to disappointment, to be turned off.

The word translated justice is mishpat — the practical decision in a particular case, the ruling at the city gate, the verdict in the dispute about the field boundary, the judgment in the case of the widow's loan. The word translated righteousness is tzedakah — the kind of conduct that holds the community right with itself, the giving that is not charity but obligation, the speaking truthfully when it costs something. The image — let mishpat roll down like waters and tzedakah like an ever-flowing stream — is hydraulic and exact. In the dry hill country of the prophet's home, water that flows year-round is the difference between a settlement and ruins. What Amos is asking for is not occasional justice, ceremonial justice, justice as a periodic gesture. He is asking for justice as the perennial stream that makes the rest of the life possible. Without it, everything else is theatre.

The line has lost none of its force in twenty-eight hundred years. Every tradition that has used it has used it in contexts where the official cult — the formal religion of the community — was functioning normally while the community's treatment of its poor was not. The passage is a standing rebuke to the possibility of separating the two. Amos does not offer a way to reconcile worship and injustice. He says the LORD cannot hear the one until the other is attended to.

Where to follow it: Amos 2 (the Israel oracle — the social crimes named), Amos 5 (let justice roll down like waters), Amos 6 (not grieved over the ruin of Joseph), Amos 8 (the famine of hearing the word of the LORD).

Chapter 4 opens with a passage that has shocked readers in every century: Hear this word, you cows of Bashan, who are on the mountain of Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to your husbands, Bring, that we may drink. The Lord GOD has sworn by his holiness that, behold, the days are coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks. The address is to the wealthy women of the capital city, and the figure is calculated. Bashan, east of the Jordan, was famous for its cattle — well-fed, sleek, prized at market. To call the rich women of Samaria the cows of Bashan is to identify them precisely with the well-fattened animal whose only future is the slaughterhouse, and to do so in their own faces, in their own city, while they are calling for another round of wine.

The passage has often been read as misogynist, and modern readers have to take that reading seriously. What it more clearly is, on closer reading, is class-specific. Amos's complaint is not against women as such; the prophet is not interested in domestic life or in any moral category that would map onto modern gender criticism. His complaint is against the small wealthy class of the capital, women and men, who have built their comfort on the dispossession of the rural poor — and the women of that class, in the prophet's economy of address, have been telling the husbands what to bring home from the markets where the bringing has cost the poor what they could not afford to give. The hook image is the prophet's at his most savage: a fishhook through the lip of the well-fattened animal, which is also the well-fattened woman, marched away to the destruction the prosperous city is about to face.

What the chapter does, in its first verses, is refuse the comfortable distance the prosperous always want from the consequences of the order they live inside. The women of Samaria are not the cause of the system. They are the most visible beneficiaries of it, and the system is going to fall, and they will fall with it. The address in the second person — you cows of Bashan, you who oppress the poor, you who say to your husbands — refuses to abstract the indictment into a comment on the times. It puts it in the face of the named hearers.

Amos is one of the first prophets to refuse rhetorical gentleness with the rich, and the refusal has been part of the prophetic vocabulary ever since. Chapter 6 extends the portrait: the beds of ivory, the lambs from the flock and the calves from the stall, the wine drunk from ceremonial bowls, the anointing with the finest oils — and the phrase that is the moral diagnosis of the whole: they are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph. The prosperous do not grieve over what their prosperity has cost. This is, Amos says, the specific spiritual condition the LORD abhors.

Where to follow it: Amos 4 (the cows of Bashan address), Amos 6 (beds of ivory; not grieved over Joseph), Amos 8 (the merchants who cheat the measure).

In chapter 5 Amos performs one of the most surprising rhetorical inversions in the prophetic literature. Woe to you who desire the day of the LORD, he says. Why would you have the day of the LORD? It is darkness, and not light, as if a man fled from a lion, and a bear met him, or went into the house and leaned his hand against the wall, and a serpent bit him. Is not the day of the LORD darkness, and not light, even very dark, and no brightness in it? The line is unsettling because, in the prophetic and popular tradition Amos's audience had inherited, the day of the LORD was the day every faithful Israelite was supposed to want — the day when Yahweh would intervene, defeat the nations, and vindicate his people.

What Amos is doing is taking the same expression his audience uses with confidence and turning it back on them. The day of the LORD will come, he agrees; that is correct. What is not correct is the assumption that, when it comes, his audience will be on the right side of it. The day, in Amos's mouth, is not the day Yahweh defeats Israel's enemies. It is the day Yahweh judges the world, and the audience that has been crushing the poor and trampling the head of the needy into the dust is going to discover, on that day, that they have been on the wrong side of the judgment all along. The image of fleeing from a lion only to meet a bear, going into the house only to be bitten by the serpent in the wall, is precise. The day from which there is no escape into the safety the audience has been counting on is what the day of the LORD turns out to be.

The move has had an enormous afterlife. It is the formal source of the later prophetic and apocalyptic insistence that the day of judgment is not automatically good news for the religious community awaiting it; the same move appears, in different forms, in the New Testament parables of separation, in the Pauline insistence that not all who say Lord, Lord enter the kingdom, in every later religious tradition that has needed to remind itself that being on the inside of the cult is not the same as being on the right side of the judgment the cult points toward.

Amos, working in 750 BCE in a sanctuary at Bethel, is the first prophet whose words survive making it. The audience that had wanted the day of the LORD is told, in its own sanctuary, that the day they want is not the day they are imagining. Chapter 4 prefigures the same move: the LORD's command to prepare to meet your God, after five disasters and five refused returns, is not an invitation. It is a warning from the God who is already standing at the altar ready to bring the building down.

Where to follow it: Amos 4 (prepare to meet your God), Amos 5 (woe to you who desire the day of the LORD), Amos 9 (the Lord at the altar; no escape).

Chapters 7 through 9 give the structural spine of the book in a sequence of five visions, each in a tightly composed paragraph, each turning on a simple object that Amos sees the LORD holding or showing him. The first two are calamities the prophet talks God out of. The LORD is forming a swarm of locusts, ready to consume the late grain after the king's mowings; Amos cries, How can Jacob stand? he is so small. And the LORD repents and says, It shall not be. The LORD is calling for fire to devour the great deep and the land; Amos cries, How can Jacob stand? he is so small. And the LORD repents again. Then comes the third vision, and the structure changes.

The LORD is standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. The LORD says, Amos, what do you see? Amos says, A plumb line. The LORD says, Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass by them. The high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword. The plumb line is the mason's measure — a weight on a string — and the wall has been built crooked. There is no asking for relief from the plumb line. The plumb line is the truth of what the wall is. Amos does not intercede after the third vision; the time for intercession is over.

The fourth vision is a basket of summer fruit, qayitz in Hebrew, which puns on qetz, the end. The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass by them. The fifth and last is the Lord himself standing beside the altar, calling for the capitals of the pillars to be struck so that the threshold shakes, and saying that no one who flees, no one who tries to hide on Carmel or in Sheol or at the bottom of the sea, will escape his eye.

The visions take the indictment of the social oracles and translate it into the language of seeing. The prophet is not arguing now; he is reporting what he has been shown. And what he has been shown is that the wall is crooked, the fruit is at the end of its season, and the Lord is at the altar, not as the altar's protector but as the one who has come to bring the building down. The sequence from intercession to silence to absolute cosmic pursuit is one of the most precisely engineered structural movements in the prophetic literature.

Where to follow it: Amos 7 (locusts, fire, plumb line — first three visions), Amos 8 (summer fruit — the fourth vision), Amos 9 (the Lord at the altar — the fifth vision).

The only narrative scene in the Book of Amos sits between the third and fourth visions, in chapter 7. Amaziah, the priest of the royal sanctuary at Bethel, sends a message to King Jeroboam: Amos has conspired against you in the midst of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words. Then Amaziah turns to Amos directly: Go, you seer, flee away to the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king's sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom. The line is the most concentrated portrait of the relationship between the official cult and the prophetic word in the Hebrew Bible. Amaziah is not necessarily a corrupt priest in any personal sense. He is a state employee, doing his job, which is to keep the religious life of the kingdom in good order; the prophet from Judah whose words are too much for the land to bear is a problem, and Amaziah handles him as a problem.

Amos's answer is one of the most quoted self-introductions in the prophetic tradition: 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. Now therefore hear the word of the LORD. The answer does several things at once. It refuses the professional category Amaziah has tried to put Amos in. He is not a prophet by trade; he has not come from a school of prophets; he has no economic interest in his prophecy. He cannot be paid off and cannot be told to take his bread elsewhere because he was not making his bread by prophesying in the first place. The LORD took him from the flock; that is the whole credential.

And then, having refused the category, he turns the indictment on Amaziah personally — your wife, your children, your land, you yourself — in the most exposed prophetic curse the chapter contains. Your wife shall be a harlot in the city, and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword, and your land shall be divided by line; you yourself shall die in an unclean land, and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.

The episode has been read by every later religious tradition that has needed to think about what to do when the official religion tells the prophet to take his message somewhere it pays better. The herdsman from Tekoa, refusing the category and naming the cost, is the figure those later traditions have looked back to. The scene is also the book's only piece of narrative, and its placement — between the third vision (the plumb line, after which Amos does not intercede) and the fourth (the basket of summer fruit, the end has come) — is exact. The priest tries to stop the prophet between the measurement and the verdict. He cannot.

Where to follow it: Amos 7 (Amaziah confronts Amos; I was no prophet).