Amos 8: A basket of fruit, and the end it announces

A basket of summer fruit becomes one of Amos’s simplest and most severe visions. The sound play between fruit and end cannot be carried into English, but the interpretation is explicit: the period of passing by Israel has reached its limit. The chapter then moves into ordinary commerce and finds the same refusal that worship has concealed elsewhere. Merchants observe the new moon and Sabbath while waiting impatiently to shrink the measure, enlarge the price, falsify the scales, and push the needy into sale. The LORD’s oath answers those particular works with a heaving land, darkness at noon, and feast songs turned into mourning. The last judgment is stranger still: a famine of hearing the LORD’s words. People run widely in search of the voice that prophets were earlier told to silence, while established religious oaths continue without recovering it.