Amos 6:1-14

3. "AT EASE IN ZION"

Amos 6:1

The evil of the national worship was the false political confidence which it engendered. Leaving the ritual alone, Amos now proceeds to assault this confidence. We are taken from the public worship of the people to the private banquets of the rich, but again only in order to have their security and extravagance contrasted with the pestilence, the war, and the captivity that are rapidly approaching.

"Woe unto them that are at ease in Zion"-it is a proud and overweening ease which the word expresses-"and that trust in the mount of Samaria! Men of mark of the first of the peoples"-ironically, for that is Israel's opinion of itself-"and to them do the house of Israel resort! Ye that put off the day of calamity and draw near the sessions of injustice"-an epigram and proverb, for it is the universal way of men to wish and fancy far away the very crisis that their sins are hastening on. Isaiah described this same generation as drawing iniquity with cords of hypocrisy, and sin as it were with a cart-rope! "That lie on ivory diwans and sprawl on their couches"-another luxurious custom, which filled this rude shepherd with contempt-"and eat lambs from the flock and calves from the midst of the stall"-that is, only the most delicate of meats-"who prate" or "purr" or "babble to the sound of the viol, and as if they were David" himself "invent for them instruments of song; who drink wine by ewerfuls-waterpot-fuls-and anoint with the finest of oil-yet never do they grieve at the havoc of Joseph!" The havoc is the moral havoc, for the social structure of Israel is obviously still secure. The rich are indifferent to it; they have wealth, art, patriotism, religion, but neither heart for the poverty nor conscience for the sin of their people. We know their kind! They are always with us, who live well and imagine they are proportionally clever and refined. They have their political zeal, will rally to an election when the interests of their class or their trade is in danger. They have a robust and, exuberant patriotism, talk grandly of commerce, empire, and the national destiny; but for the real woes and sores of the people, the poverty, the overwork, the drunkenness, the dissoluteness, which more affect a nation's life than anything else, they have no pity and no care.

"Therefore now"-the double initial of judgment "shall they go into exile at the head of the exiles, and stilled shall be the revelry of the dissolute"-literally "the sprawlers," as in Amos 6:4, but used here rather in the moral than in the physical sense. "Sworn hath the Lord Jehovah by Himself-‘tis the oracle of Jehovah God of Hosts: I am loathing the pride of Jacob, and his palaces do I hate, and I will pack up a city and its fullness. For, behold, Jehovah is commanding, and He will smite the great house into ruins and the small house into splinters." The collapse must come, postpone it as their fancy will, for it has been worked for and is inevitable. How could it be otherwise?" Shall horses run on a cliff, or the sea be ploughed by oxen-that ye should turn justice to poison and the fruit of righteousness to wormwood! Ye that exult in Lo-Debar and say, By our own strength have we taken to ourselves Karnaim." So Gratz rightly reads the verse. The Hebrew text and all the versions take these names as if they were common nouns-Lo-Debar, "a thing of naught"; Karnaim, "a pair of horns"-and doubtless it was just because-of this possible play upon their names, that Amos selected these two out of all the recent conquests of Israel. Karnaim, in full Ashteroth Karnaim, "Astarte of Horns," was that immemorial fortress and sanctuary which lay out upon the great plateau of BaShan towards Damascus; so obvious and cardinal a site that it appears in the sacred history both in the earliest recorded campaign in Abraham's time and in one of the latest under the Maccabees. Lo-Debar was of Gilead, and probably lay on that last rampart of the province northward, overlooking the Yarmuk, a strategical point which must have often been contested by Israel and Aram, and with which no other Old Testament name has been identified. These two fortresses, with many others, Israel had lately taken from Aram; but not, as they boasted, "by their own strength." It was only Aram's preoccupation with Assyria, now surgent on the northern flank, which allowed Israel these easy victories. And this same northern foe would soon overwhelm themselves. "For, behold, I am to raise up against you, O house of Israel-‘tis the oracle of Jehovah God of the hosts-a Nation, and they shall oppress you from the Entrance of Hamath to the Torrent of the ‘Arabah." Everyone knows the former, the Pass between the Lebanons, at whose mouth stands Dan, northern limit of Israel; but it is hard to identify the latter. If Amos means to include Judah, we should have expected the Torrent of Egypt, the present Wady el ‘Arish; but the Wady of the ‘Arabah may be a corresponding valley in the eastern watershed issuing in the ‘Arabah. If Amos threatens only the Northern Kingdom, he intends some wady running down to that Sea of the ‘Arabah, the Dead Sea, which is elsewhere given as the limit of Israel.

The Assyrian flood, then, was about to break, and the oracles close with the hopeless prospect of the whole land submerged beneath it.

4. A FRAGMENT FROM THE PLAGUE

In the above exposition we have omitted two very curious verses, Amos 6:9, which are held by some critics to interrupt the current of the chapter, and to reflect an entirely different kind of calamity from that which it predicts. I do not think these critics right, for reasons I am about to give; but the verses are so remarkable that it is most convenient to treat them by themselves apart from the rest of the chapter. Here they are, with the verse immediately in front of them.

"I am loathing the pride of Jacob, and his palaces I hate. And I will give up a city and its fullness" to (perhaps "siege" or "pestilence"?). "And it shall come to pass, if there be left ten men in one house, and. they die, that his cousin and the man to burn him shall lift him to bring the body t out of the house, and they shall say to one who is in the recesses of the house. Are there any more with thee? And he Shall say, Not one and they shall say, Hush! (for one must not make mention of the name of Jehovah)."

This grim fragment is obscure in its relation to the context. But the death of even so large a household as ten-the funeral left to a distant relation -the disposal of the bodies by burning instead of the burial customary among the Hebrews-sufficiently reflect the kind of calamity. It is a weird little bit of memory, the recollection of an eye-witness, from one of those great pestilences which, during the first half of the eighth century, happened not seldom in Western Asia. But what does it do here? Wellhausen says that there is nothing to lead up to the incident; that before it the chapter speaks, not of pestilence, but only of political destruction by an enemy. This is not accurate. The phrase immediately preceding may mean either "I will shut up a city and its fullness," in which case a siege is meant, and a siege was the possibility both of famine and pestilence; or "I will give up the city and its fullness" in which case a word or two may have been dropped, as words have undoubtedly been dropped at the end of the next verse, and one ought perhaps to add "to the pestilence." The latter alternative is the more probable, and this may be one of the passages, already alluded to, in which the want of connection with the preceding verses is to be explained, not upon the favorite theory-that there has been a violent intrusion into the text, but upon the too much neglected hypothesis that some words have been lost.

The uncertainty of the text, however, does not weaken the impression of its ghastly realism: the unclean and haunted he use: the kinsman and the body-burner afraid to search through the infected rooms, and calling in muffled voice to the single survivor crouching in some far corner of them, "Are there any more with thee?" his reply, "None"-himself the next! Yet these details are not the most weird. Over all hangs a terror darker than the pestilence. "Shall there be evil in a city and Jehovah not have done it?" Such, as we have heard from Amos, was the settled faith of the age. But in times of woe it was held with an awful and a craven superstition. The whole of life was believed to be overhung with loose accumulations of Divine anger. And as in some fatal hollow in the high Alps, where any noise may bring down the impending masses of snow, and the fearful traveler hurries along in silence, so the men of that superstitious age feared, When an evil like the plague was imminent, even to utter the Deity's name, lest it should loosen some avalanche of His wrath. "And he said, Hush! for," adds the comment, one "must not make mention of the name of Jehovah."

This reveals another side of the popular religion which Amos has been attacking. We have seen it as the sheer superstition of routine; but we now know that it was a routine broken by panic. The God who in times of peace was propitiated by regular supplies of savoury sacrifice and flattery, is conceived, when His wrath is roused and imminent, as kept quiet only by the silence of its miserable objects. The false peace of ritual is tempered by panic.