You won’t find wild lions today in Israel. But lions used to range much more widely than they do now, and in biblical times they were a menace that shepherds in Israel had to contend with. David did as a shepherd boy, and Amos—who “was among the sheepbreeders of Tekoa” (1:1), and a “herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs” (7:14)—must have as well. He might speak from experience when he uses the image of a shepherd “rescuing from the mouth of the lion two legs or a piece of an ear” (3:12).
God would call David to be “shepherd” of his people Israel as king (2 Samuel 5:2). And Amos was likewise taken from following the sheep, but instead of being made a king and shepherd of God’s flock like David, Amos was made into something more terrifying, but not less royal—a lion that would tear the flock apart. Amos was made God’s mouthpiece to Israel, and his mouth was a lion’s mouth, and the word of the Lord through him was a lion’s roar:
Yahweh roars from Zion
and utters his voice from Jerusalem;
the pastures of the shepherds mourn,
and the top of Carmel withers (1:2).
Thus the question:
The lion has roared;
who will not fear?
My Lord Yahweh has spoken;
who can but prophesy? (3:8).1
The name Amos derives from the verb to “bear” or “carry,” and in his case it might be fitting to understand it as something like “burdened.” His ministry was a heavy weight. For not only had he been “no prophet, nor son of a prophet” (7:14), but compelled into this ministry by God it was almost nothing but exposing sin and announcing judgment that no one wanted to hear. He rebukes the oblivious and self-indulgent elites “who lie on beds of ivory, and stretch themselves out on their couches… but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph” (6:4-6), so certainly he himself was grieved over the ruin proclaimed. We can feel his grief when we hear him speak in his own voice in chapter 7, where he sees visions of God preparing devastation by locusts and fire and intercedes: “Oh my Lord Yahweh, please forgive! How can Jacob stand? He is so small!” (7:2) and, “Oh my Lord Yahweh, please cease!” (7:5). God does relent from these particular disasters, but an end is indeed coming for the northern kingdom of Israel, and it’s the burden of Amos to roar it forth.
REJECTING THE WORD OF THE LORD
The lion roars, and it’s one of Israel’s chief sins that she won’t listen: “I raised up some of your sons for prophets… but you… commanded the prophets, saying,‘You shall not prophesy’” (2:11-12). The people “hate him who reproves in the gate. and they abhor him who speaks the truth” (5:10).
This is the issue in Amos’ confrontation with Amaziah, the wicked priest of Beth-El, who reports to Israel’s king Jeroboam II that “Amos has conspired against you” and that “the land is not able to bear all his words” (7:10). Amaziah tells Amos to go back home to Judah and prophesy there, but to “never again prophesy at Beth-El, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom” (7:12-13). It seems Amaziah was anxious to keep Yahweh from the affairs of state. Beth-El means “house of God.” Jacob named it that originally when he saw the vision of the ladder to heaven in Genesis 28, and vowed that Yahweh would be his God. But here, the priest of Beth-El looks to banish Yahweh from this house and reject the vow of his father Jacob. God’s answer is to double down in judgment: Amaziah has led Yahweh’s bride Israel to prostitute herself in Beth-El (cf. 1 Kings 12:25-33), so now Amaziah’s wife “will be a prostitute in the city,” his sons will die by the sword, his land parceled out, he will die in the uncleanness that he has loved, and Israel will go into exile (7:17).2
What will be the final consequences for a people determined to reject the Lord’s word?
I will send famine in the land.
Not a famine for bread,
and not of thirst for water—
rather, from hearing the words of Yahweh.
And they will wander from sea to sea,
and from north to east they will roam,
to seek the word of Yahweh,
and they will not find it. (8:11-12)
Does this threaten that God will no longer speak or send prophets at all? Maybe. But the famine is specifically said to be one of “hearing” the words of the Lord, as if his words might be present but obscured by a judicial deafness (cf. Isaiah 6:10) so that the people stagger around fainting from thirst (v. 13), not because water isn’t there—according to v. 11, it is—but because in “swearing by the Guilt of Samaria” and committing themselves to the idolatries at Dan and Beersheba (v. 14) they are forsaking the fountain of living water and hewing out broken cisterns that can’t hold any (cf. Jeremiah 2:13). They might find themselves in a situation much like today, Bibles everywhere but a famine of really hearing God’s word.
PRESUMPTION IN WORSHIP
Israel’s failure to hear is embodied in their wicked practices. A consistent charge that Amos makes against Israel is their straightforward economic oppression and financial corruption. They “sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals” (2:6; cf. 4:1). They exact high taxes on the backs of the poor (5:11), they pervert justice for the sake of bribes (5:12), they eagerly anticipate the end of the Sabbath, which they take to be a burden, so that they can get to the marketplace and cheat in their business with shoddy products and false balances (8:4-7). The wealthy indulge in their luxury with no concern for those who they crush, or even with the destruction that their wickedness is calling down. The drunken “cows of Bashan” (4:1) and those “at ease” and “feeling secure” at their rich revelries of song and drink (6:1-7) are called out and exposed.
Wickedness like this, the failure to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (5:24), makes their outward religion loathsome to God. It makes their worship a presumptive show, a “perfect farce” as one commentator puts it.
Two worship scenes in Amos describe a completeness of corruption with patterns of seven. One is in 4:4-5 where the people are sarcastically invited to fill up the measure of their sin with a list of seven actions: coming, transgressing, multiplying transgression, bringing sacrifice, offering leavened thanksgivings, proclaiming freewill offerings, and publishing them. The other worship scene is in 5:21-23 where again we have fullness of corruption in seven liturgical acts—feasts, solemn assemblies, ascension offerings, tribute offerings, peace offerings, songs, and harp-strumming—met with the sevenfold repudiation of God’s hating, despising, taking no delight, not accepting, not looking, commanding removal, and not listening.
All of this is a sobering reminder that economic policies and practices matter deeply to God, and it’s worth noting that even in our New Covenant era, the worship of the church in Corinth was in danger of judgment from God because of the rich callously shaming the poor during the celebration of the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:20-22; cf. also the churches of Pergamum and Thyatira in Revelation 2:12-29).3 Isaiah has a similar rebuke for those who trample God’s courts and presume to offer sacrifice when “their hands are full of blood” (Isaiah 1:15).
PRESUMPTION IN STATUS
Even if this worship is done ostensibly in Yahweh’s honor, he wants none of it. Israel’s special status as God’s people will not help them either, rather the opposite: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will visit all your iniquities upon you” (3:2). But they presume to look forward even to the Day of the Lord. They are foolish to do so: “Woe to you who desire the Day of the Lord! Why would you have the day of the Lord? It is darkness, and not light… Is not the Day of the Lord darkness and not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?” (5:18-20).
Their worship is rejected, their hope in God’s justice is presumptuous, and amazingly even the value of their history as the people of the exodus is radically relativized: “Are you not like the Cushites to me, O people of Israel?… Did I not bring up Israel from Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir?” (9:7). Here, God downplays the deliverance from Egypt by saying, in effect, “Big deal, the Philistines and Syrians had similar experiences.” If the exodus makes them special, it isn’t special enough to exempt them from coming disaster. That should have been clear from the opening salvo, in which God roars his judgments against the nations only to line Judah and Israel up for punishment right along with them (1:3-2:8). They are no better than the surrounding kingdoms (cf. 6:2). They imagine that God is with them, but they are unprepared to meet him:
[B]ecause I will do this to you,
prepare to meet your God, O Israel! (4:12).
They are unprepared to meet God because they have not reckoned with him as he truly is. Amos presents us with three doxologies, all of them focused on Yahweh’s transcendent power as the creator of heaven and earth, who maintains the cycle of day and night, who sends the rain and brings judgment (4:13, 5:8-9, 9:5-6). None of these doxologies offer much in the way of comfort to a wicked people; in fact quite the opposite, since the last of them re-affirms God’s power after depicting him as a pursuing hunter who will chase down every last one of his victims with perfect thoroughness, once again sevenfold: (1) He will take them from Sheol, (2) he will pull them down from heaven, (3) he will search out and (4) take them from the top of Carmel, he will (5) command the sea serpent to bite them, he will (6) command the sword to slay them, and he will (7) set his eyes on them for disaster (9:2-4).
The sliver of hope that perhaps “Yahweh, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph” (5:15) seems by the final chapter to be closed off completely.
Except that as it turns out, Yahweh will be restore his people, for no discernible reason at all.
SALVATION IN AMOS
In the final verses, God declares that he will
“[R]aise up the booth of David that is fallen
and repair its breaches,
and raise up its ruins
and rebuild it as in the days of old,
that they may possess the remnant of Edom
and all the nations who are called by my name” (9:11-12)
Interpreters debate what precisely the “booth of David” refers to, not to mention the ambiguities generated by seemingly mismatched Hebrew pronouns in this verse. But at a minimum there is some kind of restoration of Davidic authority and the bringing of non-Israelites under its sway. Whether this originally envisioned conquest or peaceful incorporation is also debated, and the Greek version of this promise speaks of a “remnant of mankind seeking the Lord,” dropping the specific reference to Edom (cf. Acts 15:17), but the common bottom line is that gentiles are brought under Davidic influence, and the vision is of a restored Eden, with an abundance of peace and prosperity, untroubled by enemies outside or, apparently, wickedness inside (9:13-15).
When the Lord’s brother James cited this text at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, he took its reference to “gentiles called by my name” as confirming as valid the early church’s experience of gentiles who were turning to Christ and receiving the Holy Spirit. The “booth of David” had been raised up in the resurrection of Christ, the Son of David, who now sat on the throne of heaven and was calling out a people for his name. Modern critical scholars can speculate on the exact intention of “booth of David” for the original author (definitely not the prophet Amos, according to them), but the apostolic interpretation (as always) sees Jesus here.
In the context of Amos, what’s striking is the gratuitous nature of this divine intervention for good and for salvation. No repentance that we see precedes it, God simply saves. In 5:14-15, God does exhort the people to “seek good, and not evil, that you may live, and so Yahweh, the God of Hosts, will be with you,” so maybe repentance is implicit. But even in that case, repentance is God’s gift (cf. Acts 11:18; 15:11). And also, why this grace to Israel who the whole book of Amos has spent denouncing as no better than her neighbors?
What Amos teaches us is that a people who close their ears to the word of Lord and engage in wicked practices will find him—the omnipotent maker of heaven and earth, the God of Hosts—to be a hotly pursuing lion who fixes himself on them for destruction. The God who dwells in Zion is no tame lion.
But he is good, and his grace is not tame either, and by the grace of the Lord Jesus4 we may yet seek him and be saved.
Daniel Hoffman received his M.Div from Reformed Theological Seminary (Jackson, MS) in 2012. He has taught in Georgia and South Korea, where he lives with his wife, Kelly, and baby daughter, Lucia.
- Cf. Hosea 13:7-8; Joel 3:16. ↩︎
- Amos never uses the language of prostitution for Israel’s sin or idolatry. In fact, in Amos it isn’t even obvious that the prophet ever references contemporary worship of other deities (what precisely 5:26 describes and the time to which it refers are debated, and an argument can be made that 8:14 has false Yahwism in view rather than worship of false deities)—But the calf shrine at Bethel, despite originally intended to depict Yahweh is certainly connected with idolatry and false deities in the wider biblical context (cf. 2 Kings 17:16), and even if Amaziah would have professed loyalty to Yahweh, the determined rejection of Yahweh’s prophet in favor of his own religious system would seem to warrant the rhetoric of prostitution or adultery to describe it (cf. Matthew 12:39). In any case Hosea, Amos’ (slightly younger) contemporary, certainly speaks plainly of idolatrous whoredom in Israel (e.g. Hosea 5:3). ↩︎
- In fact, in the opening charges against Israel in Amos 2:6-8, the sins of economic oppression and injustice (v. 6-7), sexual immorality involving a father and son going in to the same woman (v. 7), and corrupting religious ritual with oppression and drink (v. 8) all find their parallels in the Corinthian church (cf. 1 Corinthians 6:1-8, 5:1, 11:20-22). ↩︎
- There is little in Amos of anything that would traditionally be regarded as “messianic.” Yet in the first of the doxologies, in 4:13, Amos speaks of God as the one “who declares to man what is his thought.” That is how the MT reads. Interestingly though, the LXX apparently understands the Hebrew “what is his thought” as “messiah” (the Hebrew of each is very close), and translates as “declares unto man his Christ.” ↩︎