A Closing Lamentation (Amos 5:16-17).
Having previously opened with a lamentation, Amos closes with a lamentation by YHWH, for he is well aware that on the whole his words would not be heeded. (As always happens the few would respond and find fullness of life, and the majority would harden their hearts). In His lamentation YHWH envisages a whole country in mourning, both town and country, both expert mourner, and novice, both in the streets and in the vineyards, and it would be because He Himself would have passed through their country in severe and awful judgment (described briefly in 2 Kings 15:29; 2 Kings 17:5; 2 Kings 18:9-10 read in the light of Leviticus 26:24-33; Deuteronomy 28:47-58).
‘Therefore thus says YHWH, the God of hosts, the Lord,'
“Wailing will be in all the broad ways,
And they will say in all the streets, Alas! Alas!,
And they will call the husbandman to mourning,
And such as are skilful in lamentation to wailing.
And in all vineyards will be wailing,
For I will pass through the midst of you,
Says YHWH.”
As the people listened to the preaching and prophesying of Amos, and looked around at the prosperity and security which their nation was enjoying, we can understand why they found it very easy to dismiss his words as those of ‘a fanatic'. They did not then realise that within forty years of the commencement of Amos's ministry, and thus within the lifetime of many of his hearers, Samaria would lay in ruins, their whole land would be devastated and in mourning, and the cream of the people would be in exile. All that they looked around at would be gone. But YHWH realised it, and He warned them of the lamentations that were coming.
The picture is one of unrelieved gloom. The streets of the cities filled with mourning, and the people of the cities, and the men working in the fields and in the vineyards and olive groves in the countryside, uniting with the professional mourners in bewailing both their own fate and the dead who lay around them. The whole land will be filled with lamentation. For the vineyards, which were usually places of joy and rejoicing, to be wailing was an indication of how bad things would be (see the similar picture in Isaiah 16:10). And all because YHWH will have ‘passed through the midst of them' (compare Exodus 12:12). And this was not just some vision of a future possibility, it was the unbreakable, unfailing ‘word of YHWH'.