Amos6chapter 6

The feast described here has a name in the wider culture. Texts from Ugarit and later Semitic sources describe the marzeah, an elite drinking society that met for lavish banquets, sometimes in connection with the dead, with its own membership, property, and reputation for excess. The word Amos uses for the revelry of those who stretch themselves out is that term.

Every luxury named is a specific extravagance. Beds inlaid with ivory match the carved ivories excavated at Samaria. Lambs from the flock and calves from the stall means eating the young breeding stock and the specially fattened animals rather than what a household would normally eat. Drinking wine from bowls means the large basins used for ritual sprinkling, not cups — deliberately absurd quantities.

The finest oils were an expensive import used for anointing at feasts, and the idle songs strummed to the harp are dismissed as amateur composing in the manner of David — the comparison is meant to sting, since David's songs were worship and these were background music.

The two towns named at the end are a bitter pun. Lo-debar means roughly nothing at all, and Karnaim means horns, the standard image for strength. Israel had recently taken both in Jeroboam's wars, so the boast becomes: we took Nothing by our own strength, and captured Horns by our own horns.