The Judgment of the Nations and of Israel

The book opens with a long indictment. Amos reviews the peoples neighboring Israel, lists their crimes, and announces God’s judgment on each. The Israelites who listened approved without difficulty the condemnation of their enemies. But the oracles aim at peoples ever closer to Israel: after the foreign nations comes Judah, the brother kingdom, then Israel itself, struck more harshly than all.

The oracles against the nations

Amos delivers his oracles on a single refrain: for three crimes and for four. It is a way of counting proper to Hebrew poetry, where one names a number, then the next, to say that the measure is full: repeated crimes, piled up to the point that God decides to strike. To each people the prophet announces a punishment, most often a fire that will devour its palaces, and he declares the sentence irrevocable: “For three crimes of Damascus, and for four I will not convert it.” Amos 1:3. What he will not turn back is this punishment. One by one the peoples are named and their crimes recalled, nearly all of them acts of war. Damascus, capital of the Arameans, crushed its enemies with savage cruelty. Gaza, city of the Philistines, and Tyre, the Phoenician port, handed over whole peoples to slavery. Edom, the people descended from Esau the brother of Jacob, pursued Israel his brother with relentless hatred; Ammon slaughtered even the pregnant women in its wars; Moab desecrated the bones of a dead king. Then comes Judah, the southern kingdom, condemned for a fault of another order: having rejected the law of God.

The judgment falls on Israel

After the nations and Judah comes Israel’s turn, and it is on Israel that the oracle weighs most heavily. The same refrain opens the accusation, and this time the crimes are injustices committed within the people of God itself: “For three crimes of Israel, and for four I will not convert him: because he hath sold the just man for silver, and the poor man for a pair of shoes.” Amos 2:6. This reversal is the heart of the indictment. Israel believed itself safe because it was the chosen people; Amos shows it that election is a charge: the people who received the law of God owe, more than any other, justice to their brothers.

Hear this word

The words of Amos against Israel unfold in three discourses, each opened by the same formula, “Hear this word.” The first establishes God’s right to judge his people. “For the Lord God doth nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets.” Amos 3:7. God does not send misfortune without first announcing it through a man he chooses; the judgment is always preceded by a warning. This is why Amos speaks: whoever has received this word can only pass it on, compelled as one trembles at the roar of the lion. “The lion shall roar, who will not fear? The Lord God hath spoken, who shall not prophesy?” Amos 3:8. The second recalls the warnings God had already sent, famine, drought, plagues, to bring Israel back to him. Five times the same refrain returns: “Yet you have not returned to me, saith the Lord.” Amos 4:6. Since these appeals remained without effect, God announces that he will come himself for the judgment, which will be accomplished by the ruin of the kingdom and the deportation of the people: “Be prepared to meet thy God, O Israel.” Amos 4:12. The third discourse is a lamentation. Amos already weeps for the fall of Israel as for a death: “The virgin of Israel is cast down upon her land, there is none to raise her up.” Amos 5:2. And it is in the heart of this mourning that he sends out the call to turn to God and live.

The oppression of the poor

Throughout these discourses, Amos describes a society where the powerful strip the weak. The poor are sold, crushed, stripped even of their cloak taken in pledge. When a poor man borrowed, his garment was taken as security for the debt; yet this cloak was often his only covering for the night, and the law of Moses commanded that it be returned to him before evening (Exodus 22:26). The rich kept it. Justice itself is corrupt. At the city gate, where the elders gave their judgments, the judges let themselves be bought and the right of the poor is trampled: “Enemies of the just, taking bribes, and oppressing the poor in the gate.” Amos 5:12. Amos also targets the merchants: “Hear this, you that crush the poor, and make the needy of the land to fail.” Amos 8:4. As soon as the religious feast is over, they hurry to reopen their stalls. There they cheat on the measures: they shrink the ephah, the measure of grain (about 22 liters), to give less, and enlarge the shekel, the weight of silver in payment (about 11 grams), to demand more; they rig the scales and sell even the refuse of the wheat. The same hand that offered sacrifices cheated the poor at the market.

Luxury and false security

While the people suffer, the rich live in abundance, lying on beds of ivory, eating the best lambs, indifferent to the disaster threatening the kingdom. Amos turns on the women of Samaria, the capital, whom he calls fat cows: “Hear this word, ye fat kine that are in the mountains of Samaria: you that oppress the needy, and crush the poor.” Amos 4:1. And he casts a woe on those who sleep in a false security, sure that nothing will reach them: “Woe to you that are wealthy in Sion, and to you that have confidence in the mountain of Samaria.” Amos 6:1.