Amos 8:8 - Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible

Shall not the land tremble for this? - ^o: “For the greater impressiveness, he ascribes to the insensate earth sense, indignation, horror, trembling. For all creation feels the will of its Creator.” “It shall rise up wholly as a flood,” literally, “like the river.” It is the Egyptian name for “river, which Israel brought with it out of Egypt, and is used either for the Nile, or for one of the artificial “trenches,” derived from it. “And it shall be cast out and drowned,” literally, “shall toss to and fro” as the sea, “and sink as the river of Egypt.” The prophet represents the land as heaving like the troubled sea. As the Nile rose, and its currents met and drove one against the other, covered and drowned the whole land like one vast sea, and then sank again, so the earth should rise, lift up itself, and heave and quake, shaking off the burden of man’s oppressions, and sink again. It may be, he would describe the heaving, the rising and falling, of an earthquake. Perhaps, he means that as a man forgat all the moral laws of nature, so inanimate nature should be freed from its wonted laws, and shake out its inhabitants or overwhelm them by an earthquake, as in one grave.