2. FOR WORSHIP, JUSTICE
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 a hundred left; and she that goeth forth a 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!" 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. "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. He that made the Seven Stars and Orion, that turneth the murk, 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 on strength, and bringeth down 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 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 ehyde. "
"Wherefore, because ye trample on the weak and take from him a present of corn, ye have built houses of ashlar, 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 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 recognizes 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. That is very true. But it does not meet this further difficulty, that the verses (Amos 5:14-15) plainly make interruption between the end of Amos 5:13 and the beginning of Amos 5:16; 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 Amos 5:13. For all these reasons, then, I take Amos 5:14-15 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.
Amos 5:13 had said the time was so evil that the prudent man kept silence. All the more must the Lord Himself speak, as Amos 5:16 now proclaims. "Therefore thus saith Jehovah, God of Hosts, Lord: On all open ways. lamentation, and in all streets they shall be saying, Ah woe! Ah woe! And in all vineyards lamentation, and they shall call the ploughman to wailing and to lamentation them that are skillful 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, 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 savor 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. Ephesians 5:2 etc. "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 meat offerings that ye brought Me in the wilderness, forty years, O house of Israel. 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; and I will carry you away into exile far beyond Damascus, saith Jehovah-God of Hosts is His Name!" So this chapter closes like the previous, with the marshaling 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.