Amos 8:10 - Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible

I will turn your feasts, religious, though idolatrous in your temples, see Amos 8:3, and your ordinary civil feasts in your palaces, into mourning: see Amos 8:3. And all your songs into lamentation: this ingemination doth assure the thing, and forebode the sadness of their state. I will bring up sackcloth; as all inwardly shall be sadness, so all that appears outwardly shall speak their sorrow and sadness. Upon all loins; all sorts of persons should put on this mourning, and gird it close to their loins that it might afflict them the more, a custom very general in those times and places. Baldness upon every head; partly pulling off the hair of the head through anguish, or shaving the head and beard in sign of greatest sadness, as the Eastern people did: see Micah 1:16. As the mourning of an only son: this is accounted the greatest mourning, and seems proverbially to express such mourning, Jeremiah 6:26 Malachi 12:10, which see; so God will afflict this people with greatest sorrows, and fill them with greatest mourning. The end; you may hope these troubles will be over, and come to an end, but that will be little to your comfort; a bitter day, which you shall wish you had never seen, shall succeed your dark night, as indeed it doth to this day.