Amos7chapter 7

The timing of the first vision is agricultural and cruel. The king's mowings were a first cut of the spring growth taken as a royal levy; the latter growth was what the ordinary farmer had left to live on. Locusts arriving at that exact point would take everything the crown had not already taken.

The plumb line is a builder's tool — a weight on a cord, held against a wall to test whether it is upright. It does not push the wall over. It simply shows that the wall is out of true and cannot be saved, which is why the mason condemns it.

Amaziah's title tells you what Bethel had become. He is priest of Bethel, and he reports Amos to the king as a conspirator, then orders him out with the words: it is the king's sanctuary and a royal house. The northern shrine was a department of the government, and its priest behaved like a civil servant protecting his minister.

Amos's answer describes his actual working life. He was a herdsman — the word used elsewhere of a man who managed flocks on a substantial scale — and a dresser of sycamore figs. That job is real horticulture: sycamore figs must be pierced or nipped a few days before ripening to produce edible fruit, and it was low-status, seasonal work done in the warm lowlands, not near Tekoa's hills. He travelled for it.