Amoschapter 8
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Speaks with:Amos 7×4Amos 5×3Amos 6×2Lamentations 4×1Micah 7×1Jeremiah 9×1
Summary
Chapter summary
A basket of summer fruit, ripe to the point of rot, and the pun that carries it: the end is come upon my people Israel. The merchants can hardly wait for worship to finish ('When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell grain? and the sabbath, that we may set forth wheat?'), shrinking the ephah, inflating the shekel, falsifying the balances, selling the sweepings of the wheat and buying the poor for silver. So the land will heave like the Nile, the sun go down at noon, and feasts turn into mourning as for an only son. Then the strangest judgment: 'a famine… of hearing the words of Jehovah' (8:11).
Context
Prophecy · Amos — Amos overview
- A. 1–3 A basket of summer fruit: the end has come
- B. 4–6 Selling the refuse of the wheat with false balances
- C. 7–10 Feasts turned to mourning, the sun set at noon
- D. 11–14 A famine of hearing the words of the LORD
The outline
A.A basket of summer fruit: the end has comevv. 1 to 3
Read vv. 1 to 3 →B.Selling the refuse of the wheat with false balancesvv. 4 to 6
Read vv. 4 to 6 →C.Feasts turned to mourning, the sun set at noonvv. 7 to 10
Read vv. 7 to 10 →D.A famine of hearing the words of the LORDvv. 11 to 14
Read vv. 11 to 14 →
The world behind this chapter
Amos 8The history
The vision is a basket of summer fruit, and the point is a sound. The Hebrew word for the ripe end-of-season fruit sounds almost exactly like the word for the end. The fruit is at its best and about to spoil, which is the whole message in one image.
The merchants' complaint dates the scene precisely. Trading stopped on the new moon and on the Sabbath, and these men are waiting impatiently for the holy day to be over so they can reopen. They kept the calendar perfectly and hated every hour of it.
The cheating is technical and checkable. Making the ephah small means using an undersized dry measure when selling grain; making the shekel great means using a heavy stone weight when taking payment in silver, since coins did not yet circulate and silver was weighed out. Sets of inscribed Israelite stone weights have been excavated, and dishonest traders carrying two sets is exactly the abuse the Law legislates against. Selling the sweepings of the wheat means passing off the chaff and dirt swept from the threshing floor as grain.
The mourning imagery at the end is a household in grief: sackcloth on every waist, every head shaved, and the sound of a family that has lost its only son — which in that society meant the end of the family line, the land, and the name.
What it meant to them
Notice who is being defrauded: the poor and the needy, sold for silver and for a pair of sandals. Amos treats a rigged scale in a village market as the same category of crime as the atrocities in chapter one.
The judgment announced fits the crime with terrible precision. A famine is coming — not of bread or water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. People who had told the prophet to shut up would go from sea to sea looking for a word and not find one.
Sources cited
- Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions
- John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews, Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Amos 8. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.