AMOS VI.

KNAVES AND FOOLS.

"Shall horses run upon the rock, or will one plough the sea with oxen? that ye have turned justice into poison, and the fruit of righteousness into wormwood" (vi. 12).

AMOS's message could hardly by the largest charity be described as a gospel of grace. It is the gospel of law—for that, too, is a gospel: to understand and obey the laws by which God governs His world is the way of peace, to ignore or defy them is the way to destruction. True child of the desolate pasture-land as he was, he had learned from its phenomena the relentlessness of law: its occasional grim sights and eerie sounds had invested his imagination with a sort of sombre majesty. In the delineation of terrors he is at home, and the proclamation of Woes is a natural part of his mission. Already he has pronounced a solemn Woe unto you upon thosewho desire the day of Jehovah (v. 18), possibly also upon those who turned justice to wormwood, and laid righteousness prostrate on the earth (v. 7); now he proclaims it upon those that are at ease those whose luxury had lulled them into a feeling of false security.

Here, as usually elsewhere, it is the aristocrats whom Amos is addressing, the men of wealth and influence. Their sense of security was not unnatural. The nation was at peace, their own resources were abundant, their God was manifestly favourable, and they were resolved to retain that favour by their elaborate and costly worship, and by their enthusiasm for religion as they understood it. But more than that: the capital cities both of Israel and Judah were deemed, not without historical justification, to be wellnigh impregnable. In point of fact, Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom, kept the besieging Assyrian army at bay for three years, before she finally met the doom which Amos had pronounced upon her thirty years or so before; and a century and a half afterwards it took the Babylonians eighteen months to effect the capture of Jerusalem. Splendidly situated, both those cities were defended by the surrounding mountains; and both imagined themselves to be further secured, beyond the possibility of menace, by the good-will and the protecting power of their God. As the mountains were round about Samaria and Jerusalem, so, they believed, would Jehovah be round about His people. Hence their confidence, which Amos derides, in the mountain of Samaria. Let the worst come to the worst, they had God and the mountains, and that would surely be enough. To this airy confidence, Amos retorts with his crushing "Woe unto them that are at ease in Zion, and that are confident in the mountain of Samaria."

As so often happens, with this confidence went conceit. The people styled themselves the foremost nation—a word worth noting, as Amos comes back upon it twice again in the course of his address. Accustomed as we have been by history and experience to empires on a mighty scale, there may seem something rather ridiculous in this self-designation of Israel, a country at most a hundred and fifty miles in length and a good deal less in breadth. But it has to be remembered that, with the exception of Assyria and Egypt, the peoples bordering upon Israel, and with whom she was most familiar, were small like herself; and, apart from this, as we are told in the book of Kings, and reminded in the last verse of this chapter of Amos, during the reign of the enterprising Jeroboam the Second, the territory of Israel had been restored to its ancient limits, and the glories of the old Davidic empire had been in a measure revived; for the king " restored the border of Israel from the entrance of Hamath in the far north to the sea of the Arabah, that is, the Dead Sea, in the south " (2 Kings xiv. 25). So, if Israel held her head high, it was not without reason.

But Amos, if the words in verse 2 be really his, punctures their pride by a few historical illustrations. Turning their attention to one or two towns in northern Syria, and then to the Philistine Gath, he asks scornfully, " Are you better than these kingdoms? or are your borders greater than theirs?"1 Great and strong as they were, they had fallen; and what was Israel, that she should be able to offer an effective resistance? Was she greater or stronger than they were? There was something as ludicrous to the clear-eyed Amos as to us in Israel's claim to be the premier nation, especially when such an ambitious people as Assyria was beginning to stir, which possessed both the power and the will to lay all the little western nations in the dust.

So we are to picture these leaders of the national life as men whose heads were swollen with a ridiculous sense of their nation's place in the world, men unable to measure the political forces or estimate the political probabilities of the day, and foolishly confident of their own impregnability, whatever might betide; bringing on—like the fools they were—by their wanton and supercilious conduct, the evil day which they imagined they had put far away from them. But that general picture is more sharply defined. In one of the most graphic passages in the Old Testament, Amos takes us into one of these aristocratic mansions, and lets us see something of the life led by these prominent and fashionable leaders. Their furniture is of the costliest. The couches upon which they loll—how the simple shepherd would despise the very sight of them!—are inlaid with ivory brought from distant lands. They are not only indolent and profligate, they are extravagant gluttons; they eat the lambs out of the flock. Here perhaps we can detect a note of sorrow as well as of anger; it is a shepherd who is speaking, vexed to think that his little lambs should be destined to come upon the tables of the sort of men he denounces. They eat the calves out of the midst of the stalls. They are topers as well. Not content with cups, they drink wine out of huge bowls. But the aesthetic side of life was not forgotten. Their banquets, at which wine flowed so freely and the dainties were so toothsome, were enlivened by music, vocal and instrumental: idle songs were sung to a strumming accompaniment. These revellers, too, believed in good perfumery: they anointed themselves with oil of the very choicest kind—"the first of the oils"—a scornful allusion to the nation's description of itself as the first of the nations (vi. 1). The " premier " oil for the leaders of the " premier " nation—how fitting! But the most damning charge of all Amos reserves to the last: " they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph," or more literally, they are not sick for the wound of Joseph. The people, called here by the name of their great ancestor Joseph, are broken—the whole book of Amos makes that plain enough—broken morally and spiritually, broken largely by the sort of men whose manner of life he has just been describing, and soon to be broken even physically and politically by the deadly onslaught of the Assyrians; but these indolent, dissolute political leaders care nothing about it. The test of a true statesman is that he is grieved, sick, when the people are broken—as, for example, by social injustice. But the leaders and statesmen of those days did not care.

Therefore, says Amos: those who have breathed the atmosphere of Amos learn to tremble when he utters his "therefore," for they know that something terrible is coming. "Therefore they shall go captive with the first that go captive." Here again there is a bitter ironical allusion to their conceited designation of Israel as the foremost nation, and to their effeminate indulgence in the choicest perfumes. So be it, says the prophet, in his grim way: foremost in empire, foremost in foppery, foremost therefore in destruction. Then, when they are marched off in dismal procession to the miseries of exile, " the riot of the revellers shall depart," says Amos in the alliterative way of Hebrew prophecy; and, when the land has been swept clear of them, the silence would fall like music on the prophet's indignant heart.

Such a civilization as Amos has just so vividly described could only end in one way; and he represents Jehovah as solemnly swearing by Himself—He can swear by none greater—that He will deliver up the wicked city (Amos is thinking, no doubt, chiefly of the capital), and all that is in it, to the ravages of the invader. The mention of so solemn an oath always shows that the soul of the prophet is very deeply moved. Once before we met a similar oath,—when Amos threatened the cruel women of Samaria for crushing the poor in order to supply them selves with money for strong drink (iv. 2). Nothing rouses Amos's wrath like that; and we may be sure that his soul is at white heat here, as, with equal solemnity, he announces the doom of the city.

We could infer without difficulty from all that has gone before, and especially from his picture of the gluttonous, drunken, luxurious, noisy nobles, the reasons for that doom; but he happens to express them here in a terse and telling phrase, which is highly significant for his outlook upon society. " I detest the pride of Jacob—that is, the proud temper of the people, and the things in which they showed it, ostentatious wealth, luxury, houses—and I hate his palaces" Thus saith Jehovah, and thus saith also His prophet. He hates the palaces, with their gorgeous furnishings and their pampered inhabitants. But this must be very carefully noted—otherwise the gravest injustice is done to Amos, and his message is misrepresented—that his hatred of the palaces and his scorn of the nobles are deeper than the mere disgust of a simple peasant at the luxurious refinement of the city. The pomp of the great city houses is detestable, not only because it is pomp, but more because it has cost too dear: it has cost the happiness of the poor and the character of the rich. They have been built upon cruelty, extortion, injustice (iii. 10)—that is why Amos hates them, and that is the key to his message: passion for justice burns within his soul, and hurls him against the serried ranks of wealth and lust. Hate the evil and love the good; let justice roll on like a river. We must not then glibly dispose of Amos's criticism of the social situation in his day, by regarding it as the criticism of an unsympathetic and rustic mind, that found its ideal in the simple desert tent, and had no appreciation whatever of cities and the civilization which they imply. We are safe in saying that Amos would have given short shrift to the silken couches inlaid with ivory: the shepherd, happy in his tent, would have had little but contempt for those who indulged in the luxury of winter and summer houses (iii. 15). But his estimate is not to be so easily disposed of, for it is a moral estimate—the estimate of a man to whom righteousness was the supreme thing in the universe. His message is by no manner of means "Down with the aristocracy." It is " Return unto God " (iv. 6), " Seek good and not evil * (v. 14), "Let righteousness roll like a perennial stream " (v. 24). His root objection to the wealthy men of his time is not that they have money, but that they " do not know to do the thing that is straight " (iii. 10). There is much in Amos that a superficial criticism might interpret as a polemic against culture itself, as if the city were necessarily a weltering abomination, in which the poor were crushed into silence by the heel of wealth—

"City of festering streets by Misery trod,

Where half-fed, half-clad children swarm unshod,

Whilst thou dost rear thy splendid fane to God,"

and as if the ideal were to be found in the country, where life is simple and little exposed to the temptations of avarice or display. But it were unjust to Amos to regard him so: his message is primarily a religious one, and only inferentially social. Hate the evil and love the good—that is a motto as applicable to the city as the country, and as capable of realization. Amos would probably never have cared as much for the palaces, or felt so completely at home in them, as Isaiah: he had not the vision of the trans figured City which haunted the imagination of that great prophet (cf. Isa. i. 26). But neither would he have said, in his own name and in God s, " I hate his palaces," had these palaces been inhabited by men who hated the evil and loved the good, who considered the poor and sought to establish justice in the gates. Even in the city, " even in a palace, life may be led well."

But the cities and palaces of Amos's time, being what they were, must fall; and, in one of his very weirdest passages, he pictures a scene in the beleaguered city, after destitution has become acute and pestilence has begun to rage. Most of those who do not perish by the sword will die of the plague. The fine houses will be full of dead men; one is pictured as crouching silently in the corner of some desolate, plague-stricken mansion. A friend comes to carry out the bones of the dead for burial: he asks the cowering survivor if he is alone, or if there is any one alive beside him, and he hurriedly replies, " No! Hush! We must not make mention of the name of Jehovah." It is Jehovah who has brought this terrible thing upon them,—for " shall evil happen in a city, and Jehovah not have done it? " (iii. 6),—and the very mention of His name may bring Him upon the scene to inflict upon them some evil more terrible still: so silence is the only wisdom. It is very gruesome—this conversation in one of the stately houses of the doomed city, with the dead and dying all about, and the stench of pestilence in the air. But this, Amos means, is what sin brings a nation to; and the destruction will be hideously complete. The great palatial houses will be smashed into fragments, and the little houses into smithereens—by the enemy, no doubt, but with the consent, and at the command, of God Almighty.

As Amos contemplates the injustice that is rampant in society, he cannot find words to express his amazement. " Shall horses run upon the rock," he asks, " or will one plough the sea with oxen,2 that ye have turned justice into poison, and the fruit of righteousness into wormwood? " For insight and force there is nothing to surpass this in the whole of Amos: it is the tersest and finest expression of his faith in the inexorableness of physical and moral law. Who but a fool, he means, would think of driving horses over jagged crags?—though not correct as a translation, it would be true to Amos's meaning to paraphrase, "Who would think of attempting to drive horses up a cliff? " Who but a madman would dream of ploughing the sea with oxen? The oxen and the fool who drove them would be drowned. The end of all such attempts would be futility, ruin, and death. Everybody knows it is madness to attempt to violate the physical order: no one could be found so imbecile as to seek to oppose it in either of the ways suggested by these illustrations. Well, then, says Amos, there is a moral as surely as there is a physical order: how can men be such fools as not to see that the violation of the one carries penalties as terrible as the violation of the other? Were they mad men, he means, that they had poisoned justice at its source, and let a foul stream of wrong run through society? God is everywhere, law is everywhere, and neither can be successfully defied: the man or class or nation that attempts to defy Almighty God and His laws will sooner or later be broken in pieces and ground to powder. They had turned the world upside down, God would have to turn it downside up and crush them in the process. The knave is always a fool. The moral order would be vindicated, Amos assures them, when their houses were shivered into atoms, and they themselves were buried beneath the ruins.

The closing words of this speech of Amos give us another glimpse of that incurable national conceit which he had satirized so scathingly at the beginning of his address. They were jubilant over the recovery of two towns east of the Jordan, Lo-debar and Karnaim, which had apparently been held by the Syrians. Amos indulges here in the same sort of grim word-play as he had already used in denouncing Bethel and Gilgal (v. 5). Lo-debar means in Hebrew no-thing, and Karnaim means horns, which to the Hebrews were the symbol of strength. So what Amos means is something like this: " You have taken Lo-debar, have you? Good. You will find that the town will not belie its name, it will prove to be a veritable Nothing; your victory is a futile, worthless thing. You have taken Karnaim by your own strength, have you? You, who ought to be singing after a victory, 'Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory' have now succeeded in pushing God completely out of your lives, despite the great parade of your public worship, and have got the length of attributing your victories to yourselves. You have horns, have you? Well, do you think they will enable you to butt off the onset of the Assyrian army?"—that army which Isaiah described in these immortal words (v. 26-29):

" See! hastily, swiftly they come,

     None weary, none stumbling among them.

The band of their loins never loosed,

     The thong of their shoes never torn.

 

Their arrows are sharpened,

     Their bows are all bent.

The hoofs of their horses are counted as flint,

     And their wheels as the whirlwind.

 

Their roar is like that of the lioness,

     And like the young lions they roar,

Thundering, seizing the prey,

     And bearing it off to a place of security."

What folly to think that poor little Israel, for all her boasted strength, could face so terrible a foe! And that foe was assuredly coming. Nay, it was Israel's own God that was leading him on: " For, behold, I am about to raise up against you, O house of Israel, a nation, which shall crush you from the one end of the land to the other!"

And let it never be forgotten, in reading Amos, that his gloomy threats were fulfilled. There is both Biblical and Assyrian evidence for that. The Hebrew historian tells us that " the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria and besieged it three years. In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes " (2 Kings xvii. 5, 6). And in a few simple words, charged with terrible content, Sargon, the Assyrian king who captured Samaria, thus describes his victory: " Samaria I besieged, I captured: 27,290 of her inhabitants I carried away; fifty chariots I collected from their midst. My viceroy I placed over them, and imposed the tribute of the former king upon them." All this, which happened in 721 B.C., within thirty years or so after Amos had foretold it, surely proves that he was, as he claimed to be, one of the servants to whom the Lord had revealed His secret (iii. 7).

1 A very simple and apparently necessary change in the text yields this meaning.

2 There is very little doubt that this is the correct translation of this clause.