Amos 2:9

Yet destroyed I The pron. is emphatic: -Yet I(whom you thus requite) destroyed the Amorites, that mighty and seemingly invincible nation, from before you, and settled you in their land." Destroyed before(lit. from before) you: the same expression in Joshua 24:8 a passage belonging to the Hexateuchal narrator, commonly designated by the letter E: "And I brought you into the land of the Amorite, who dwelt beyond Jordan, and they fought with you; and I gave them into your hand, and ye possessed their land, and I destroyed them from before you"; cf. also Deuteronomy 2:21-22. Amoriteis the term used (1) in the passage just quoted, and frequently, of the peoples ruled by Sihon and Og, east of Jordan, conquered by the Israelites; (2) as a general designation of the pre-Israelitish population of the territory W. of Jordan, especially in the Hexateuchal writer -E," and in Deuteronomy (as Genesis 48:22; Deuteronomy 1:7; Deuteronomy 1:19-20; Joshua 24:15; Joshua 24:18, and occasionally besides (as Judges 1:34-35; Judges 6:10; 2 Samuel 21:2): see, more fully, the writer's Commentary on Deuteronomy, pp. 11 12. It is used here, evidently, in the second sense.

like the height of the cedars&c. A hyperbolical description of the stature and strength of the Amorites: cf. Numbers 13:32; Deuteronomy 1:28 ("a people greater and taller than we; cities great and fenced up to heaven"). The cedar was, among the Hebrews, the type of loftiness and grandeur (Isaiah 2:13; Ezekiel 17:23; Ezekiel 31:3).

his fruit from above, and his roots from beneath i.e. completely, or, as we might say, root and branch:not only was the fruit which existed destroyed, but the stock from which fresh fruit might have been put forth afterwards was destroyed likewise. For the figure comp. Hosea 9:16; Ezekiel 17:9; and especially Job 18:16; Isaiah 37:31, and the Inscription on the tomb of Eshmunazar, king of Sidon (Corp. Inscr. Sem. I. i. p. 19), Isaiah 50:11 (an imprecation uttered against any one who violates the tomb): "may he have no root beneath, or fruit above, or any beauty among the living under the sun."