CHAPTER IX

_THE FALSE PEACE OF RITUAL_

AMOS iv. 4-vi.

The next four groups of oracles[287]--iv. 4-13, v. 1-17, v. 18-27 and vi.--treat of many different details, and each of them has its own emphasis; but all are alike in this, that they vehemently attack the national worship and the sense of political security which it has engendered. Let us at once make clear that this worship is the worship of Jehovah. It is true that it is mixed with idolatry, but, except possibly in one obscure verse,[288] Amos does not concern himself with the idols. What he strikes at, what he would sweep away, is his people's form of devotion to their own God. The cult of the national God, at the national sanctuaries, in the national interest and by the whole body of the people, who practise it with a zeal unparalleled by their forefathers--this is what Amos condemns. And he does so absolutely. He has nothing but scorn for the temples and the feasts. The assiduity of attendance, the liberality of gifts, the employment of wealth and art and patriotism in worship--he tells his generation that God loathes it all. Like Jeremiah, he even seems to imply that God never instituted in Israel any sacrifice or offering.[289] It is all this which gives these oracles their interest for us; and that interest is not merely historical.

It is indeed historical to begin with. When we find, not idolatry, but all religious ceremonial--temples, public worship, tithes, sacrifice, the praise of God by music, in fact every material form in which man has ever been wont to express his devotion to God--scorned and condemned with the same uncompromising passion as idolatry itself, we receive a needed lesson in the history of religion. For when one is asked, What is the distinguishing characteristic of heathenism? one is always ready to say, Idolatry, which is not true. The distinguishing characteristic of heathenism is the stress which it lays upon ceremonial. To the pagan religions, both of the ancient and of the modern world, rites were the indispensable element in religion. The gifts of the gods, the abundance of fruits, the security of the state, depended upon the full and accurate performance of ritual. In Greek literature we have innumerable illustrations of this: the _Iliad_ itself starts from a god's anger, roused by an insult to his priest, whose prayers for vengeance he hears because sacrifices have been assiduously offered to him. And so too with the systems of paganism from which the faith of Israel, though at first it had so much in common with them, broke away to its supreme religious distinction. The Semites laid the stress of their obedience to the gods upon traditional ceremonies; and no sin was held so heinous by them as the neglect or infringement of a religious rite. By the side of it offences against one's fellow-men or one's own character were deemed mere misdemeanours. In the day of Amos this pagan superstition thoroughly penetrated the religion of Jehovah, and so absorbed the attention of men, that without the indignant and complete repudiation of it prophecy could not have started on her task of identifying morality with religion, and of teaching men more spiritual views of God. But even when we are thus aware of ceremonialism as the characteristic quality of the pagan religions, we have not measured the full reason of that uncompromising attack on it, which is the chief feature of this part of the permanent canon of our religion. For idolatries die everywhere; but everywhere a superstitious ritualism survives. It continues with philosophies that have ceased to believe in the gods who enforced it. Upon ethical movements which have gained their freedom by breaking away from it, in the course of time it makes up, and lays its paralysing weight. With offers of help it flatters religions the most spiritual in theory and intention. The Pharisees, than whom few parties had at first purer ideals of morality, tithed mint, anise and cummin, to the neglect of the essence of the Law; and even sound Christians, who have assimilated the Gospel of St. John, find it hard and sometimes impossible to believe in salvation apart from their own sacraments, or outside their own denominational forms. Now this is because ritual is a thing which appeals both to the baser and to the nobler instincts of man. To the baser it offers itself as a mechanical atonement for sin, and a substitute for all moral and intellectual effort in connection with faith; to the nobler it insists on a man's need in religion of order and routine, of sacrament and picture. Plainly then the words of Amos have significance for more than the immediate problems of his day. And if it seem to some, that Amos goes too far with his cry to sweep away all ceremonial, let them remember, besides the crisis of his times, that the temper he exposes and seeks to dissipate is a rank and obdurate error of the human heart. Our Lord, who recognised the place of ritual in worship, who said, _Thus it behoveth us to fulfil all righteousness_, which righteousness in the dialect of His day was not the moral law, but man's due of rite, sacrifice, tithe and alms,[290] said also, _I will have mercy and not sacrifice_. There is an irreducible minimum of rite and routine in worship; there is an invaluable loyalty to traditional habits; there are holy and spiritual uses in symbol and sacrament. But these are all dispensable; and because they are all constantly abused, the voice of the prophet is ever needed which tells us that God will have none of them; but let justice roll on like water, and righteousness like an unfailing stream.

For the superstition that ritual is the indispensable bond between God and man, Amos substitutes two other aspects of religion. They are history as God's discipline of man; and civic justice, as man's duty to God. The first of them he contrasts with religious ceremonialism in chap. iv. 4-13, and the second in chap. v.; while in chap. vi. he assaults once more the false political peace which the ceremonialism engenders.

1. FOR WORSHIP, CHASTISEMENT.

AMOS iv. 4-13.

In chap. ii. Amos contrasted the popular conception of religion as worship with God's conception of it as history. He placed a picture of the sanctuary, hot with religious zeal, but hot too with passion and the fumes of wine, side by side with a great prospect of the national history: God's guidance of Israel from Egypt onwards. That is, as we said at the time, he placed an indoors picture of religion side by side with an open-air one. He repeats that arrangement here. The religious services he sketches are more pure, and the history he takes from his own day; but the contrast is the same. Again we have on the one side the temple worship--artificial, exaggerated, indoors, smoky; but on the other a few movements of God in Nature, which, though they all be calamities, have a great moral majesty upon them. The first opens with a scornful call to worship, which the prophet, letting out his whole heart at the beginning, shows to be equivalent to sin. Note next the impossible caricature of their exaggerated zeal: sacrifices every morning instead of once a year, tithes every three days instead of every three years.[291] To offer leavened bread was a departure from the older fashion of unleavened.[292] To publish their liberality was like the later Pharisees, who were not dissimilarly mocked by our Lord: _When thou doest alms, cause not a trumpet to be sounded before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men._[293] There is a certain rhythm in the taunt; but the prose style seems to be resumed with fitness when the prophet describes the solemn approach of God in deeds of doom.

_Come away to Bethel and transgress, At Gilgal exaggerate your transgression! And bring every morning your sacrifices, Every three days your tithes! And send up the savour of leavened bread as a thank-offering, And call out your liberalities--make them to be heard! For so ye love_ to do, _O children of Israel: Oracle of Jehovah._

_But I on My side have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and want of bread in all your places--yet ye did not return to Me: oracle of Jehovah._

_But I on My side withheld from you the winter rain,_[294] _while it was still three months to the harvest: and I let it rain repeatedly on one city, and upon one city I did not let it rain: one lot was rained upon, and the lot that was not rained upon withered; and two or three cities kept straggling to one city to drink water, and were not satisfied--yet ye did not return to Me: oracle of Jehovah._

_I smote you with blasting and with mildew: many of your gardens and your vineyards and your figs and your olives the locust devoured--yet ye did not return to Me: oracle of Jehovah._

_I sent among you a pestilence by way of Egypt:_[295] _I slew with the sword your youths--besides the capture of your horses--and I brought up the stench of your camps to your nostrils--yet ye did not return to Me: oracle of Jehovah._

_I overturned among you, like God's own overturning of Sodom and Gomorrah, till ye became as a brand plucked from the burning--yet ye did not return to Me: oracle of Jehovah._

This recalls a passage in that English poem of which we are again and again reminded by the Book of Amos, _The Vision of Piers Plowman_. It is the sermon of Reason in Passus V. (Skeat's edition):--

"He preved that thise pestilences · were for pure synne, And the southwest wynde · in saterday et evene Was pertliche[296] for pure pride · and for no poynt elles. Piries and plomtrees · were puffed to the erthe, In ensample ze segges[297] · ze shulden do the bettere. Beches and brode okes · were blowen to the grounde. Torned upward her tailles · in tokenynge of drede, That dedly synne at domesday · shal fordon[298] hem alle."

In the ancient world it was a settled belief that natural calamities like these were the effects of the deity's wrath. When Israel suffers from them the prophets take for granted that they are for the people's punishment. I have elsewhere shown how the climate of Palestine lent itself to these convictions; in this respect the Book of Deuteronomy contrasts it with the climate of Egypt.[299] And although some, perhaps rightly, have scoffed at the exaggerated form of the belief, that God is angry with the sons of men every time drought or floods happen, yet the instinct is sound which in all ages has led religious people to feel that such things are inflicted for moral purposes. In the economy of the universe there may be ends of a purely physical kind served by such disasters, apart altogether from their meaning to man. But man at least learns from them that nature does not exist solely for feeding, clothing and keeping him wealthy; nor is it anything else than his monotheism, his faith in God as the Lord both of his moral life and of nature, which moves him to believe, as Hebrew prophets taught and as our early English seer heard Reason herself preach. Amos had the more need to explain those disasters as the work of the God of righteousness, because his contemporaries, while willing to grant Jehovah leadership in war, were tempted to attribute to the Canaanite gods of the land all power over the seasons.

What, however, more immediately concerns us in this passage is its very effective contrast between men's treatment of God and God's treatment of men. They lavish upon Him gifts and sacrifices. He--_on His side_--sends them cleanness of teeth, drought, blasting of their fruits, pestilence, war and earthquake. That is to say, they regard Him as a being only to be flattered and fed. He regards them as creatures with characters to discipline, even at the expense of their material welfare. Their views of Him, if religious, are sensuous and gross; His views of them, if austere, are moral and ennobling. All this may be grim, but it is exceeding grand; and short as the efforts of Amos are, we begin to perceive in him something already of the greatness of an Isaiah.

And have not those, who have believed as Amos believed, ever been the strong spirits of our race, making the very disasters which crushed them to the earth the tokens that God has great views about them? Laugh not at the simple peoples, who have their days of humiliation, and their fast-days after floods and stunted harvests. For they take these, not like other men, as the signs of their frailty and helplessness; but as measures of the greatness God sees in them, His provocation of their souls to the infinite possibilities which He has prepared for them.

Israel, however, did not turn even at the fifth call to penitence, and so there remained nothing for her but a fearful looking forward to judgment, all the more terrible that the prophet does not define what the judgment shall be.

_Therefore thus shall I do to thee, O Israel: because I am going to do this to thee, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel. For, lo, He that formeth the mountains, and createth the wind, and declareth to man what His thought is, that maketh morning darkness, and marcheth on the high places of earth, Jehovah, God of Hosts, is His Name._[300]

2. FOR WORSHIP, JUSTICE.

AMOS v.

In the next of these groups of oracles Amos continues his attack on the national ritual, and now contrasts it with the service of God in public life--the relief of the poor, the discharge of justice. But he does not begin with this. The group opens with an elegy, which bewails the nation as already fallen. It is always difficult to mark where the style of a prophet passes from rhythmical prose into what we may justly call a metrical form. But in this short wail, we catch the well-known measure of the Hebrew dirge; not so artistic as in later poems, yet with at least the characteristic couplet of a long and a short line.

_Hear this word which I lift up against you--a Dirge, O house of Israel_:--

_Fallen, no more shall she rise,_ _Virgin of Israel!_ _Flung down on her own ground,_ _No one to raise her!_

The _Virgin_, which with Isaiah is a standing title for Jerusalem and occasionally used of other cities, is here probably the whole nation of Northern Israel. The explanation follows. It is War. _For thus saith the Lord Jehovah: The city that goeth forth a thousand shall have an hundred left; and she that goeth forth an hundred shall have left ten for the house of Israel._

But judgment is not yet irrevocable. There break forthwith the only two promises which lighten the lowering darkness of the book. Let the people turn to Jehovah Himself--and that means let them turn from the ritual, and instead of it purge their civic life, restore justice in their courts and help the poor. For God and moral good are one. It is _seek Me and ye shall live_, and _seek good and ye shall live_. Omitting for the present all argument as to whether the interruption of praise to the power of Jehovah be from Amos or another, we read the whole oracle as follows.

_Thus saith Jehovah to the house of Israel: Seek Me and live. But seek not Bethel, and come not to Gilgal, and to Beersheba pass not over_--to come to Beersheba one had to cross all Judah. _For Gilgal shall taste the gall of exile_--it is not possible except in this clumsy way to echo the prophet's play upon words, "Ha-Gilgal galoh yigleh"--_and Bethel_, God's house, _shall become an idolatry_. This rendering, however, scarcely gives the rude force of the original; for the word rendered idolatry, Aven, means also falsehood and perdition, so that we should not exaggerate the antithesis if we employed a phrase which once was not vulgar: _And Bethel, house of God, shall go to the devil!_[301] The epigram was the more natural that near Bethel, on a site now uncertain, but close to the edge of the desert to which it gave its name, there lay from ancient times a village actually called Beth-Aven, however the form may have risen. And we shall find Hosea stereotyping this epigram of Amos, and calling the sanctuary Beth-Aven oftener than he calls it Beth-El.[302] _Seek ye Jehovah and live,_ he begins again, _lest He break forth like fire, O house of Joseph, and it consume and there be none to quench at Bethel._[303] ...[304] _He that made the Seven Stars and Orion,_[305] _that turneth the murk_[306] _into morning, and day He darkeneth to night, that calleth for the waters of the sea and poureth them out on the face of the earth--Jehovah His Name. He it is that flasheth out ruin_[307] _on strength, and bringeth down_[308] _destruction on the fortified._ This rendering of the last verse is uncertain, and rightly suspected, but there is no alternative so probable, and it returns to the keynote from which the passage started, that God should break forth like fire.

Ah, _they that turn justice to wormwood, and abase_[309] _righteousness to the earth! They hate him that reproveth in the gate_--in an Eastern city both the law-court and place of the popular council--_and him that speaketh sincerely they abhor_. So in the English mystic's Vision Peace complains of Wrong:--

"I dar noughte for fere of hym · fyghte ne chyde."[310]

_Wherefore, because ye trample on the weak and take from him a present of corn,_[311] _ye have built houses of ashlar,_[312] _but ye shall not dwell in them; vineyards for pleasure have ye planted, but ye shall not drink of their wine. For I know how many are your crimes, and how forceful_[313] _your sins--ye that browbeat the righteous, take bribes, and bring down the poor in the gate! Therefore the prudent in such a time is dumb, for an evil time is it_ indeed.

_Seek good and not evil, that ye may live, and Jehovah God of Hosts be with you, as ye say_ He is. _Hate evil and love good; and in the gate set justice on her feet again--peradventure Jehovah God of Hosts may have pity on the remnant of Joseph._ If in the Book of Amos there be any passages, which, to say the least, do not now lie in their proper places, this is one of them. For, firstly, while it regards the nation as still responsible for the duties of government, it recognises them as reduced to a remnant. To find such a state of affairs we have to come down to the years subsequent to 734, when Tiglath-Pileser swept into captivity all Gilead and Galilee--that is, two-thirds, in bulk, of the territory of Northern Israel--but left Ephraim untouched. In answer to this, it may, of course, be pointed out that in thus calling the people to repentance, so that a remnant might be saved, Amos may have been contemplating a disaster still future, from which, though it was inevitable, God might be moved to spare a remnant.[314] That is very true. But it does not meet this further difficulty, that the verses (14, 15) plainly make interruption between the end of ver. 13 and the beginning of ver. 16; and that the initial _therefore_ of the latter verse, while it has no meaning in its present sequence, becomes natural and appropriate when made to follow immediately on ver. 13. For all these reasons, then, I take vv. 14 and 15 as a parenthesis, whether from Amos himself or from a later writer who can tell? But it ought to be kept in mind that in other prophetic writings where judgment is very severe, we have some proof of the later insertion of calls to repentance, by way of mitigation.

Ver. 13 had said the time was so evil that the prudent man kept silence. All the more must the Lord Himself speak, as ver. 16 now proclaims. _Therefore thus saith Jehovah, God of Hosts,_[315] _Lord: On all open ways lamentation, and in all streets they shall be saying, Ah woe! Ah woe! And in all vineyards lamentation,_[316] _and they shall call the ploughman to wailing and to lamentation them that are skilful in dirges_--town and country, rustic and artist alike--_for I shall pass through thy midst, saith Jehovah._ It is the solemn formula of the Great Passover, when Egypt was filled with wailing and there were dead in every house.

The next verse starts another, but a kindred, theme. As blind as was Israel's confidence in ritual, so blind was their confidence in dogma, and the popular dogma was that of the _Day of Jehovah_.

All popular hopes expect their victory to come in a single sharp crisis--a day. And again, the day of any one means either the day he has appointed, or the day of his display and triumph. So Jehovah's day meant to the people the day of His judgment, or of His triumph: His triumph in war over their enemies, His judgment upon the heathen. But Amos, whose keynote has been that judgment begins at home, cries woe upon such hopes, and tells his people that for them the day of Jehovah is not victory, but rather insidious, importunate, inevitable death. And this he describes as a man who has lived, alone with wild beasts, from the jungles of the Jordan, where the lions lurk, to the huts of the desert infested by snakes.

_Woe unto them that long for the day of Jehovah! What have you to do with the day of Jehovah? It is darkness, and not light. As when a man fleeth from the face of a lion, and a bear falls upon him; and he comes into his home_,[317] _and_, breathless, _leans his hand upon the wall, and a serpent bites him._ And then, as if appealing to Heaven for confirmation: Is it not so? _Is it not darkness, the day of Jehovah, and not light? storm darkness, and not a ray of light upon it?_

Then Amos returns to the worship, that nurse of their vain hopes, that false prophet of peace, and he hears God speak more strongly than ever of its futility and hatefulness.

_I hate, I loathe your feasts, and I will not smell the savour of your gatherings to sacrifice._ For with pagan folly they still believed that the smoke of their burnt-offerings went up to heaven and flattered the nostrils of Deity. How ingrained was this belief may be judged by us from the fact that the terms of it had to be adopted by the apostles of a spiritual religion, if they would make themselves understood, and are now the metaphors of the sacrifices of the Christian heart.[318] _Though ye bring to Me burnt-offerings and your meal-offerings I will not be pleased, or your thank-offerings of fatted calves, I will not look at them. Let cease from Me the noise of thy songs; to the playing of thy viols I will not listen. But let justice roll on like water, and righteousness like an unfailing stream._

Then follows the remarkable appeal from the habits of this age to those of the times of Israel's simplicity. _Was it flesh- or meal-offerings that ye brought Me in the wilderness, forty years, O house of Israel?_[319] That is to say, at the very time when God made Israel His people, and led them safely to the promised land--the time when of all others He did most for them--He was not moved to such love and deliverance by the propitiatory bribes, which this generation imagine to be so availing and indispensable. Nay, those still shall not avail, for exile from the land shall now as surely come in spite of them, as the possession of the land in old times came without them. This at least seems to be the drift of the very obscure verse which follows, and is the unmistakable statement of the close of the oracle. _But ye shall lift up ... your king and ... your god, images which you have made for yourselves;_[320] _and I will carry you away into exile far beyond Damascus, saith Jehovah--God of Hosts is His Name!_[321] So this chapter closes like the previous, with the marshalling of God's armies. But as there His hosts were the movements of Nature and the Great Stars, so here they are the nations of the world. By His rule of both He is the God of Hosts.

3. "AT EASE IN ZION."

AMOS vi.

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_[322]--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!_...[323] _Ye that put off the day of calamity_[324] _and draw near the sessions of injustice_[325]--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_[326]--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;_[327] _who drink wine by ewerfuls--waterpotfuls--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.[328] 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 ver. 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_[329] _the pride of Jacob, and his palaces do I hate, and I will pack up a city and its fulness._[330]... _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_[331]--_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 Ḳarnaim._ So Grätz 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 nought_; Ḳarnaim, _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.[332] 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.[333] 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 pre-occupation 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_[334]--_a Nation, and they shall oppress you from the Entrance of Hamath to the Torrent of the 'Arabah._ Every one 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.[335]

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, 9 and 10, 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 fulness_ to ...(perhaps _siege_ or _pestilence_?). _And it shall come to pass, if there be left ten men in one house, and they die,_[336] ... _that his cousin_[337] _and the man to burn him shall lift him to bring the body_[338] _out of the house, and they shall say to one who is in the recesses of the house_,[339] _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[340]--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.[341] 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 fulness_, 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 fulness_..., 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_.[342] The latter alternative is the more probable, and this may be one of the passages, already alluded to,[343] in which the want of connection with the preceding verses is to be explained, not upon the favourite 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 house; 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 traveller 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[268] See above, pp. 82 ff. and pp. 89 ff.

[269] With the LXX. באשור for באשדוד.

[270] שד (ver. 10).

[271] Singular as in LXX., and not plural as in the M.T. and English versions.

[272] Juvenal, _Satires_, I.

[273] _Vision of Piers Plowman._ Burgages=tenements.

[274] Or _The Enemy, and that right round the Land!_

[275] _In Damascus on a couch: on a Damascus couch: on a Damascus-cloth couch:_ or _Damascus-fashion on a couch_--alternatives all equally probable and equally beyond proof. The text is very difficult, nor do the versions give help. (1) The consonants of the word before _a couch_ spell _in Damascus_, and so the LXX. take it. This would be in exact parallel to the _in Samaria_ of the previous half of the clause. But although Jeroboam II. is said to have recovered Damascus (2 Kings xiv. 28), this is not necessarily the town itself, of whose occupation by Israel we have no evidence, while Amos always assumes it to be Aramean, and here he is addressing Israelites. Still retaining the name of the city, we can take it with _couch_ as parallel, not to _in Samaria_, but to _on the side of a diwan_; in that case the meaning may have been _a Damascus couch_ (though as the two words stand it is impossible to parse them, and Gen. xv. 2 cannot be quoted in support of this, for it is too uncertain itself, being possibly a gloss, though it is curious that as the two passages run the name Damascus should be in the same strange grammatical conjunction in each), or possibly _Damascus-fashion on a couch_, which (if the first half of the clause, as some maintain, refers to some delicate or affected posture then come into fashion) is the most probable rendering. (2) The Massoretes have pointed, not _bedammeseq_ = _in Damascus_, but _bedemesheq_, a form not found elsewhere, which some (Ges., Hitz., Ew., Rev. Eng. Ver., etc.) take to mean some Damascene stuff (as perhaps our Damask and the Arabic _dimshaq_ originally meant, though this is not certain), _e.g._ _silk_ or _velvet_ or _cushions_. (3) Others rearrange the text. _E.g._ Hoffmann (_Z. A. T. W._, III. 102) takes the whole clause away from ver. 12 and attaches it to ver. 13, reading _O those who sit in Samaria on the edge of the diwan, and in Damascus on a couch, hearken and testify against the house of Jacob_. But, as Wellhausen points out, those addressed in ver. 13 are the same as those addressed in ver. 9. Wellhausen prefers to believe that after the words _children of Israel_, which end a sentence, something has fallen out. The LXX. translator, who makes several blunders in the course of this chapter, instead of translating ערשׂ couch, the last word of the verse, merely transliterates it into ἱερεῖς!!

[276] Cf. vi. 4: _that lie on ivory diwans and sprawl on their couches_.

[277] Van Lennep, _Bible Lands and Customs_, p. 460.

[278] See p. 205, _n._ 4.

[279] The words for hook in Hebrew--the two used above, צִנּוֹת and סִירות; and a third, חוֹחַ--all mean originally _thorns_, doubtless the first hooks of primitive man; but by this time they would signify metal hooks--a change analogous to the English word _pen_.

[280] Cf. Isa. xxxvii. 29; 2 Chron. xxxiii. 11. On the use fish-hooks, Job xl. 26 (Heb.), xli. 2 (Eng.); Ezek. xxix. 4.

[281] The verb, which in the text is active, must be taken in the passive. The word not translated above is הַהַרְמוֹנָה _unto the Harmôn_, which name does not occur elsewhere. LXX. read εἰς τὸ ὄρος τὸ Ῥομμάν, which Ewald renders _ye shall cast the Rimmon to the mountain_ (cf. Isa. ii. 20), and he takes Rimmon to be the Syrian goddess of love. Steiner (quoted by Wellhausen) renders _ye shall be cast out to Hadad Rimmon_, that is, _violated as_ קדשֹות Hitzig separates ההר from מונה, which he takes as contracted from מענה, and renders _ye shall fling yourselves out on the mountains as a refuge_. But none of these is satisfactory.

[282] I have already treated this passage in connection with Isaiah's prophecies on women in the volume on Isaiah i.-xxxix. (Expositor's Bible), Chap. XVI.

[283] Cf. chap. vi. 4.

[284] v. 11.

[285] vi. 8, 11.

[286] Cf. what was said on building above, p. 33.

[287] See p. 141.

[288] v. 26.

[289] v. 25.

[290] Another proof of how the spirit of ritualism tends to absorb morality.

[291] Ver. 4: cf. 1 Sam. i.; Deut. xiv. 28. Wellhausen offers another exegesis: Amos is describing exactly what took place at Bethel--sacrifice on the morning, _i.e._ next to the day of their arrival, tithes on the third day thereafter.

[292] See Wellhausen's note, and compare Lev. vii. 13.

[293] Matt. vi. 2.

[294] גֶשֶׁם: _Hist. Geog._, p. 64. It is interesting that this year (1895) the same thing was threatened, according to a report in the _Mittheilungen u. Nachrichten des D.P.V._, p. 44: "Nachdem es im December einigemal recht stark geregnet hatte besonders an der Meeresküste ist seit kurz vor Weihnachten das Wetter immer schön u. mild geblieben, u. wenn nicht weiterer Regen fällt, so wird grosser Wassermangel entstehen denn bis jetzt (16 Febr.) hat Niemand Cisterne voll." The harvest is in April-May.

[295] Or in the fashion of Egypt, _i.e._ a thoroughly Egyptian plague; so called, not with reference to the plagues of Egypt, but because that country was always the nursery of the pestilence. See _Hist. Geog._, p. 157 ff. Note how it comes with war.

[296] Apertly, openly.

[297] Men.

[298] Undo.

[299] _Hist. Geog._, Chap. iii., pp. 73 f.

[300] This and similar passages are dealt with by themselves in Chap. XI.

[301] Cf. LXX.: Βαιθὴλ ἔσται ὡς οὐχ ὑπάρχουσα.

[302] The name Bethel is always printed as one word in our Hebrew texts. See Baer on Gen. xii. 8.

[303] Wellhausen thinks _at Bethel_ not genuine. But Bethel has been singled out as the place where the people put their false confidence, and is naturally named here. LXX.: τῷ οἴκῳ Ἰσραήλ.

[304] Ver. 7 is plainly out of place here, as the LXX. perceived, and therefore tried to give it another rendering which would make it seem in place: ὁ ποιῶν εἰς ὕψος κρίμα, καὶ δικαιοσύνην εἰς γὴν ἔθηκεν. So Ewald removed it to between vv. 9 and 10. There it begins well another oracle; and it may be that we should insert before it הוי, as in vv. 18, vi. 1.

[305] Literally _the Group_ and _the Giant_. כימה, Kimah, signifies group, or little heap. Here it is rendered by Aq. and at Job ix. 9 by LXX. Ἀρκτοῦρος; and here by Theod. and in Job xxxviii. 31, _the chain_, or _cluster, of the group_ Πλειάδες. The Targ. and Pesh. always give it as Kima, _i.e._ Pleiades. And this is the rendering of most moderns. But Stern takes it for Sirius with its constellation of the Great Dog, for the reason that this is the brightest of all stars, and therefore a more suitable fellow for Orion than the dimmer Pleiades can be. כסיל, the Fool or Giant, is the Hebrew name of Ὠρίων, by which the LXX. render it. Targum ניפלא. To the ancient world the constellation looked like the figure of a giant fettered in heaven, "a fool so far as he trusted in his bodily strength" (Dillmann). In later times he was called Nimrod. His early setting came at the time of the early rains. Cf. with the passage Job ix. 9 and xxxviii. 31.

[306] The abstract noun meaning _deep shadow_, LXX. σκιά, and rendered _shadow of death_ by many modern versions.

[307] So LXX., reading שׁבר for שׁד; it improves the rhythm, and escapes the awkward repetition of שׁד.

[308] So LXX.

[309] Possible alternative: _make stagnant_.

[310] _Vision of Piers Plowman_, Passus IV., l. 52. Cf. the whole passage.

[311] Uncertain; Hitzig takes it as the apodosis of the previous clause: _Ye shall have to take from him a present of corn_, _i.e._ as alms.

[312] See above, p. 33.

[313] Cf. "Pecca fortiter."

[314] As, for instance, the prophet looks forward to in iii. 12.

[315] _God of Hosts_, perhaps an intrusion (?) between אדני and יהוה.

[316] I have ventured to rearrange the order of the clauses, which in the original is evidently dislocated.

[317] Lit. _the house_.

[318] Eph. v. 2; etc.

[319] No one doubts that this verse is interrogative. But the Authorised Eng. Ver. puts it in a form--_Have ye brought unto Me?_ etc.--which implies blame that they did not do so. Ewald was the first to see that, as rendered above, an appeal to the forty years was the real intention of the verse. So after him nearly all critics, also the Revised Eng. Ver.: _Did ye bring unto Me?_ On the whole question of the possibility of such an appeal see above, pp. 100 ff., and cf. Jer. vii. 22, which distinctly declares that in the wilderness God prescribed no ritual to Israel.

[320] Ver. 26 is very difficult, for both the text and the rendering of all the possible alternatives of it are quite uncertain. (1) As to the _text_, the present division into words must be correct; at least no other is possible. But the present order of the words is obviously wrong. For _your images_ is evidently described by the relative clause _which you have made_, and ought to stand next it. What then is to be done with the two words that at present come between--_star of your god_? Are they both a mere gloss, as Robertson Smith holds, and therefore to be struck out? or should they precede the pair of words, צלמיכם כיון, which they now follow? This is the order of the text which the LXX. translator had before him, only for כון he misread רֵיפָן or רֵיוָן: καὶ ἀνελάβετε τὴν σκηνὴν τοῦ Μωλὸχ καὶ τὸ ἄστρον τοῦ Θεοῦ ὑμῶν Ῥαιφάν [Ῥεφάν, Q], τοὺς τύπους αὐτῶν [om. AQ] οὓς ἐποιήσατε ἑαυτοῖς. This arrangement has the further evidence in its favour, that it brings _your god_ into proper parallel with _your king_. The Hebrew text would then run thus:--

[אלהיכם כוכב] ואת מלככם סכות את ונשאתם לכם עשיתם אשר צלמיכם כיון

(2) The translation of this text is equally difficult: not in the verb ונשאתם, for both the grammar and the argument oblige us to take it as future, _and ye shall lift up_; but in the two words סכות and כיון. Are these common nouns, or proper names of deities in apposition to _your king_ and _your god_? The LXX. takes סכות as = _tabernacle_, and כיון as a proper name (Theodotion takes both as proper names). The Auth. Eng. Ver. follows the LXX. (except that it takes _king_ for the name _Moloch_). Schrader (_Stud. u. Krit._, 1874, 324; _K.A.T._, 442 f.) takes them as the consonants of Sakkut, a name of the Assyrian god Adar, and of Kewan, the Assyrian name for the planet Saturn: _Ye shall take up Sakkut your king and Kewan your star-god, your images which_... Baethgen goes further and takes both the מלך of מלכיכם and the צלם of צלמיכם as Moloch and Ṣelam, proper names, in combination with Sakkut and Kewan (_Beitr. z. Sem. Rel._, 239). Now it is true that the Second Book of Kings implies that the worship of the host of heaven existed in Samaria before its fall (2 Kings xvii. 16), but the introduction into Samaria of Assyrian gods (among them Adar) is placed by it after the fall (2 Kings xvii. 31), and besides, Amos does not elsewhere speak of the worship of foreign gods, nor is the mention of them in any way necessary to the argument here. On the contrary, even if Amos were to mention the worship of idols by Israel, would he have selected at this point the Assyrian ones? (See, however, Tiele, _Revue de l'Histoire des Religions_, III., p. 211, who makes Koun and the planet Keiwan purely Phœnician deities.) Some critics take סכות and כיון as common nouns in the construct state. So Ewald, and so most recently Robertson Smith (_O.T.J.C._, 2): _the shrine of your king and the stand of your images_. This is more in harmony with the absence from the rest of Amos of any hint as to the worship of idols, but an objection to it, and a very strong one, is that the alleged common nouns are not found elsewhere in Hebrew. In view of this conflicting evidence it is best therefore to leave the words untranslated, as in the text above. It is just possible that they may themselves be later insertions, for the verse would read very well without them: _And ye shall lift up your king and your images which you have made to yourselves_.

[321] The last clause is peculiar. Two clauses seem to have run into one--_saith Jehovah, God of Hosts_, and _God of Hosts is His Name_. The word שמו = _His Name_, may have been added to give the oracle the same conclusion as the oracle at the end of the preceding chapter; and it is not to be overlooked that שמו at the end of a clause does not occur elsewhere in the book outside the three questioned Doxologies iv. 13, v. 8, ix. 6. Further, see below, pp. 204 f.

[322] _In Zion_: "very suspicious," Cornill. But see pp. 135 f.

[323] I remove ver. 2 to a note, not that I am certain that it is not by Amos--who can be dogmatic on such a point?--but because the text of it, the place which it occupies, and its relation to the facts of current history, all raise doubts. Moreover it is easily detached from the context, without disturbing the flow of the chapter, which indeed runs more equably without it. The Massoretic text gives: _Pass over to Calneh, and see; and go thence to Hamath Rabbah, and come down to Gath of the Philistines: are they better than these kingdoms, or is their territory larger than yours?_ Presumably _these_ _kingdoms_ are Judah and Israel. But that can only mean that Israel is the best of the peoples, a statement out of harmony with the irony of ver. 1, and impossible in the mouth of Amos. Geiger, therefore, proposes to read: "Are you better than these kingdoms--_i.e._ Calneh, Hamath, Gath--or is your territory larger than theirs?" But this is also unlikely, for Israel's territory was much larger than Gath's. Besides, the question would have force only if Calneh, Hamath and Gath had already fallen. Gath had, but it is at least very questionable whether Hamath had. Therefore Schrader (_K.A.T._, 444) rejects the whole verse; and Kuenen agrees that if we are to understand Assyrian conquests, it is hardly possible to retain the verses. Bickell's first argument against the verse, that it does not fit into the metrical system of Amos vi. 1-7, is precarious; his second, that it disturbs the grammar, which it makes to jump suddenly from the third person in ver. 1 to the second in ver. 2, and back to the third in ver. 3, is not worth anything, for such a jump occurs within ver. 3 itself.

[324] Davidson, _Syntax_, § 100, R. 5.

[325] חמם שׁבת; LXX. σαββάτων ψευδῶν, on which hint Hoffmann renders the verse: "you that daily demand the tribute of evil (cf. Ezek. xvi. 33), and every Sabbath extort by violence." But this is both unnecessary and opposed to viii. 5, which tells us no trade was done on the Sabbath. שבת is to be taken in the common sense of sitting in judgment (rather than with Wellhausen), in the sense of the enthronement of wrong-doing.

[326] To this day, in some parts of Palestine, the general fold into which the cattle are shut contains a portion railed off for calves and lambs (cf. Dr. M. Blanckenhorn of Erlangen in the _Mittheilungen u. Nachrichten_ of the D.P.V., 1895, p. 37, with a sketch). It must be this to which Amos refers.

[327] Or perhaps _melodies_, _airs_.

[328] Of course, it is possible that here again, as in v. 15 and 16, we have prophecy later than the disaster of 734, when Tiglath-Pileser made a great _breach_ or _havoc_ in the body politic of Israel by taking Gilead and Galilee captive. But this is scarcely probable, for Amos almost everywhere lays stress upon the moral corruption of Israel, as her real and essential danger.

[329] מתאב for מתעב.

[330] Some words must have dropped out here. For these and the following verses 9 and 10 on the pestilence see pp. 178 ff.

[331] So Michaelis, יָם בְּבָקָר for בִּבְקָרִים.

[332] Gen. xiv. 5; 1 Macc. v. In the days of Eusebius and Jerome (4th century) there were two places of the name: one of them doubtless the present Tell Ashtara south of El-Merkez, the other distant from that fourteen Roman miles.

[333] Along this ridge ran, and still runs, one of the most important highways to the East, that from Beth-Shan by Gadera to Edrei. About seven miles east from Gadera lies a village, Ibdar, "with a good spring and some ancient remains" (Schumacher, _N. Ajlun_, 101). Lo-Debar is mentioned in 2 Sam. ix. 45; xvii. 27; and doubtless the Lidebir of Josh. xiii. 26 on the north border of Gilead is the same.

[334] With the article, an unusual form of the title. LXX. here κύριος τῶν δυνάμεων.

[335] 2 Kings xiv. 25. The Torrent of the 'Arabah can scarcely be the Torrent of the 'Arabim of Isa. xv. 7 for the latter was outside Israel's territory, and the border between Moab and Edom. The LXX. render _Torrent of the West_, τῶν δυσμῶν.

[336] Here there is evidently a gap in the text. The LXX. insert καὶ ὑπολειφθήσονται ὁι κατάλοιποι; perhaps therefore the text originally ran _and the survivors die_.

[337] Or _uncle_--that is, a distant relative, presumably because all the near ones are dead.

[338] Literally _bones_.

[339] LXX. τοῖς προεστηκόσι: evidently in ignorance of the reading or the meaning.

[340] The burning of a body was regarded, as we have seen (Amos ii. 1), as a great sacrilege; and was practised, outside times of pestilence only in cases of great criminals: Lev. xx. 14; xxi. 9; Josh. vii. 25. Doughty (_Arabia Deserta_, 68) mentions a case in which, in Medina, a Persian pilgrim was burned to death by an angry crowd for defiling Mohammed's tomb.

[341] The Assyrian inscriptions record at least three--in 803, 765, 759.

[342] As in Psalm lxxviii. 50. הִסְגִּיר, to give up, is so seldom used absolutely (Deut. xxxii. 30 is poetry and elliptic) that we may well believe it was followed by words signifying to what the city was to be given up.

[343] Pp. 141 f.