Amos 1:1-2:16
For three transgressions, and for four
Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab, then Judah, each in the same formula. By the time he reaches Israel the pattern is established and the audience is already agreeing.
People of the Bible
Amos
A herdsman from Judah who walked north into a rich country and told it its worship was noise.
Amos is not a professional. He keeps sheep at Tekoa and tends sycamore figs, and he says so plainly when challenged: I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet’s son. He is sent to Israel in a prosperous reign, and he opens by pronouncing judgment on six surrounding nations in turn, which would have been popular, then on Judah, and then on Israel itself, at greater length than all the others combined. The priest at Bethel tells him to go home and earn his bread somewhere else.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Amos
- 01
- 02
Amos 5:21-24
I hate your feast days
Take away from me the noise of your songs, I will not hear the melody of your viols. But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
- 03
Amos 7:7-9
A plumbline
The LORD stands on a wall made by a plumbline with a plumbline in his hand, and asks what he sees. The answer is a plumbline, and the meaning is that the measuring is not arbitrary.
- 04
Amos 7:10-17
I was no prophet
Amaziah tells him to flee to Judah and prophesy there for a living. He answers that he was a herdsman and a gatherer of sycamore fruit, and that the LORD took him from following the flock.
Why it matters
Amos is the reason the phrase social justice has an Old Testament pedigree. His charge is not idolatry but the selling of the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes, beds of ivory, and wine drunk in bowls while the ruin of Joseph goes unnoticed. God says he hates their feast days and will not hear the melody of their viols, and then names the alternative in one line that Martin Luther King quoted: let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
9 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
