Amos and the Cosmic Imagination (Society for Old Testament Study Monographs)

AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION SOCIETY FOR OLD TESTAMENT STUDY MONOGRAPHS Series Editor Margarent Baker Series Edito...

Author: James R. Linville

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AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION

SOCIETY FOR OLD TESTAMENT STUDY MONOGRAPHS Series Editor Margarent Baker Series Editorial Board Katharine J. Dell; Paul Joyce; Edward Ball; Eryl W. Davies Series Advisory Board Bertil Albrektson; Graeme Auld; John Barton; Joseph Blenkinsopp; William Johnstone; John Rogerson Ashgate is pleased to publish the revived Society for Old Testament Study (SOTS) monograph series. The Society for Old Testament Study is a learned society based in the British Isles, with an international membership, committed to the study of the Old Testament. This series promotes Old Testament studies with the support and guidance of the Society. The series includes research monographs by members of the Society, both from established international scholars and from exciting new authors. Titles in the series include: The Old Testament: Canon, Literature and Theology Collected Essays of John Barton John Barton Jeremiah’s Kings A Study of the Monarchy in Jeremiah John Brian Job Hebrew Bible and Ancient Versions Selected Essays of Robert P. Gordon Robert P. Gordon The Personiﬁcation of Wisdom Alice M. Sinnott Saul and the Monarchy: A New Look Simcha Shalom Brooks ‘There’s such Divinity doth Hedge a King’ Selected Essays of Nicolas Wyatt on Royal Ideology in Ugaritic and Old Testament Literature Nicolas Wyatt

Amos and the Cosmic Imagination

JAMES R. LINVILLE University of Lethbridge, Canada

© James R. Linville 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. James R. Linville has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identiﬁed as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Linville, James Richard Amos and the cosmic imagination 1. Bible. O.T. Amos – Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title 224.8’06 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Linville, James Richard. Amos and the cosmic imagination / James R Linville. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-7546-5481-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Bible. O.T. Amos—Commentaries. I. Title. BS1585.53.L56 2007 224’.8077—dc22 2007025875

ISBN 978-0-7546-5481-0 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents List of Abbreviations Transliteration Scheme Preface Part I

Imagining Amos

1

Landscaping Amos’ Cosmic Temple

2

Amos among the Historians, Mythmakers and Poets

vii ix xi

3 13

Part II Speech and Theophany 3

The Words of Amos: Amos 1:1–2

41

4

Eight Nations: Amos 1:3–2:16

47

5

The Mantle of Amos: Amos 3:1–15

69

6

On Mountains and High Places: Amos 4:1–13

81

Part III Speech and Silence 7

Lament: Amos 5:1–17

101

8

Festival of Exile: Amos 5:18–27

113

9

No One, No Sound, Nothing: Amos 6

121

Part IV Who Will Not Prophesy? 10

Deception: Amos 7:1–17

133

11

Silent Harvest: Amos 8:1–14

151

12

The Capital: Amos 9:1–6

159

13

The Turning: Amos 9:7–15

169

Bibliography Name Index Scripture Index

177 187 191

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List of Abbreviations AB ABR ANETS AOAT BASOR BHS Bib BibInt BSac BZAW CBQ CBQMS CTA CurTM EvT ExpTim FOTL HAR HBT HSM HTR HUCA IBS ICC JBL JBQ JR JSPSup JSOT JSOTSup JSS JSSR KAT LAI LBI NCBC NEB NIBC NJPS NRSV

Anchor Bible Australian Biblical Review Ancient Near Eastern Text and Studies Alten Orient und Altes Testament Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Biblia hebraica stuttgartensia Biblica Biblical Interpretation Bibliotheca Sacra Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die altestamentische Wissenschaft Catholic Biblical Quarterly Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Monograph Series Corpus des tablettes en cunéiformes alphabétiques Currents in Theology and Mission Evangelische Theolgie Expository Times The Forms of the Old Testament Literature Hebrew Annual Review Horizons in Biblical Theology Harvard Semitic Monographs Harvard Theological Review Hebrew Union College Annual Irish Biblical Studies International Critical Commentary Journal of Biblical Literature Jewish Bible Quarterly Journal of Religion Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series Journal of Jewish Studies Journal for the Scientiﬁc Study of Religion Kommentar zum Alten Testament Library of Ancient Israel Library of Biblical Interpretation New Century Biblical Commentary New English Bible New International Bible Commentary New Jewish Publication Society Version New Revised Standard Version

viii

OBO OPTAT OTG OTL OTS RB REB Rel RSV SAAS SBLDS SBLSS SBTS SJLA SOTSM StudBL SJOT UF VT VTSup WAW WBC ZAW ZWT

AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION

Orbis biblicus et orientalis Occasional Papers in Translation and Textlinguistics Old Testament Guides Old Testament Library Oudtestamentische Studiën Revue biblique Revised English Bible Religion Revised Standard Version State Archives of Assyria Studies Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series Society of Biblical Literature Semeia Studies Sources for Biblical and Theological Study Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity Society for Old Testament Study Monographs Studies in Biblical Literature Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament Ugarit Forschungen Vetus Testamentum Vetus Testamentum Supplements Writings from the Ancient World Word Biblical Commentary Zeitschrift für die altestamentische Wissenschaft Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie

Transliteration Scheme This book is intended for academics who know Hebrew but also for students who may have no familiarity with the language. In view of this, I have chosen to offer transliterations, being more technical for the consonants than the vowels. The consonantal scheme outlined here that of the Society of Biblical Literature. For the most part, pronunciation is relatively straightforward, but in a few cases, some additional comment is beneﬁcial.             m          

      zayin        samech        

) b g d h w z x + y k, K l m, M n, N s ( p, P c, C q r #& #$ t

glottal stop – brief breathing pause: not pronounced. b g d h w or v z like ‘ch’ in Scottish ‘loch’ t y k l m n s guttural sound, not pronounced p or f ts q r s sh t

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Preface Every part of the Bible has attracted a massive amount of critical commentary: Jewish, Christian and non-confessional. The book of Amos is extremely well represented in the ever-growing ﬁeld of biblical studies. What then could be hoped to be achieved by adding to the existing scholarship? The motivation for this book stemmed from the many changing directions of biblical research over the past few decades. For many years now, historical-critical interests and literary approaches have uneasily shared the limelight. The latter has been marked by an inherent diversity and experimentation while the former line of research has had to contend with a growing crisis of conﬁdence in many quarters. The debates over historical methodology are far from settled, but the face of historical research into the origins of the biblical materials has been changed forever. Even among the many scholars who reject the more recent proposals for late compositional dates for much of the Hebrew Bible, awareness of the textuality of the redacted texts is very high. Analyzing the religious and intellectual contexts of the later stages of production is now seen as a far more important enterprise than it was a decade ago. On the one hand, these newer approaches have produced a number of insightful studies of many biblical books and the readers of some introductory text-books become well acquainted with these developments. On the other hand, a number of new introductions to the Hebrew Bible and its prophetic corpus have yet to acknowledge the full potential of the new historical approaches or the well developed ﬁeld of literary studies and their impact on more conservative ways of interpreting the Bible. Part of this may stem from the attempt to address as wide an audience as possible. This causes some authors to tread perhaps too lightly or to sit rather precariously on the proverbial fence when dealing with issues that are signiﬁcant points of contention between confessional and secular criticism. This volume was born out of a desire to integrate the new historical sensibilities with a literary approach to produce something of a more creative reading of Amos. Above all, my goal was to produce a volume situated ﬁrmly within the secular ﬁeld of religious studies in which even Amos’ defense of the poor and weak can be subject to critical analysis. I do not know if there ever was an Amos of Tekoa who left his ﬂocks behind in Judah to denounce business and religious practices in the northern kingdom of Israel. I consider it possible that such an individual existed but I do not know how to prove it with any conﬁdence simply from the biblical book that bears that name. The book, however, remains an historical artefact, and a ﬁnely written one at that. It is the product of the human mind and imagination in a world far removed in time and culture from my own. Bridging that distance is easier said than done. The ﬁnal version of the present study is far less experimental than its earlier manifestations but I hope it opens up new ways of addressing what is one of the most popular books of the Hebrew Bible. The ﬁnal tone of the volume, however, has been set by a desire to present an in-depth treatment of Amos not only to biblical scholars but to readers with far less experience

xii

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in the critical examination of the Bible. It is not an introductory text, but those with some familiarity with the Hebrew Bible in English should not ﬁnd it impenetrable. Amos is full of alliteration, deliberate ambiguity, puns and other word-plays. Any attempt to present the full poetic beauty and complexity of the book without reference to these features is doomed to fail. To this end, I have chosen to transliterate the Hebrew for the beneﬁt of readers who have not studied the language. The transliteration system is relatively simple, merging the technical and ‘general purpose’ scheme employed for the publications of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). Consonants are rendered according to accepted technical practice to avoid ambiguity inherent in the simpler scheme. In the SBL ‘general purpose’ system some Hebrew consonants are represented by two Roman characters, for example, ‘’, #$, is rendered as  and this can be mistaken for two separate Hebrew characters. On the other hand, vowels are rendered as per the SBL ‘general purpose’ scheme and spares the reader unnecessary complications. This compromise allows non-Hebrew readers to understand the approximate sounds of the Hebrew terms and yet preserves a relatively accurate way of seeing patterns of repeated consonants. In a few cases, the similarity between words is not readily apparent in transliteration. In those cases I have complemented the transliteration with the Hebrew characters themselves so that the uninitiated can see the visual similarities. This book has been in the making for many years and there are a number of people who have provided me with the necessary inspiration, encouragement and chastisement to see it through to the end despite various crises, relocations, and severe bouts of writer’s block. Ashgate Publishing has not only been supportive but also very patient. I am forever grateful to Francis Landy and Ehud Ben Zvi of the University of Alberta. It is there I began work on the book of Amos in 1998 with the help of a post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and this resulted in a number of papers which formed the starting point for the present volume. Further work proceeded in ﬁts, false starts and full stops but both Ehud and Francis continued to think I still had something worth saying about Amos. In this regard, I am also indebted to Philip Davies. I would also like to say ‘thanks’ to my colleagues and friends here in Lethbridge; Hillary Rodrigues, Tom and Sharon Robinson, John Harding, for all their support and especially Lisa Kozleski, who served as my editor and managed to stay cheerful despite the daunting task she faced. Any resemblance the language of this book bears to standard English is largely due to her effort. Two of my students here in Lethbridge must also be named. Mick Macintyre and Helen Connolly read Amos with me on numerous enjoyable occasions and I wish them the best of success in their continuing academic endeavours. Helen also proofread this commentary and worked with me on the transliterations. I deeply appreciate the many hours she devoted to this project. I, of course, remain fully responsible for any remaining errors or oddities. If this work makes its reader pause to consider alternative routes to thinking about Amos and the other biblical prophetic books the way Mick and Helen have made me rethink what I thought I once knew, then I shall consider this volume a great success. This book is dedicated not only to them, but also to the other students at the University of Lethbridge who have made my ﬁve years here so enjoyable and rewarding, including Chelsea Masterman, Chris Roth, J’Lean Lawton, Erika Jahn, Nicole Hembroff, Lori Alexander and Natasha Elder.

PART I Imagining Amos

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Chapter 1

Landscaping Amos’ Cosmic Temple The bay-trees in our country are all witherer’d And meteors fright the ﬁxed stars of heaven; The pale-fac’d moon looks bloody on the earth, And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful change. Richard II, II.iv.8–111

Shakespeare must have had a deep appreciation for the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. The Welsh Captain in Richard II abandons his post, speaking of withered trees, frightened stars, and a moon both pale and bloody: ominous portents of the fall of a king. But the Captain does not actually quote his whispering prophets. They and their unheard whispers do not so much predict fearful change as they are its omens, symbols and embodiments. The biblical prophets, however, are not remembered for their hushed tones. Many are given speech after deafening speech, but they, too, ﬁnd withered trees and darkened moons to be portents and symbols of the destruction of many a king and country. And still, when looking at the biblical prophets, we would do well to consider the ominous image painted by the Bard. The world of Amos, like that depicted in any literary text or play, is an imaginary one. Perhaps something might be said of the historical Amos but the real man is hidden. Yet, ancient Judah’s scribes have left a masterpiece of Hebrew literature in his name. We must only be careful not to mistake the portrait for the person, the landscape for any real time and place. The book of Amos is all about transformations. Amos was a herdsman. Now he wears the prophet’s mantle and in so doing is accused of plotting the fall of a king. The world has corrupted itself. It will die and be reborn. Yet this transformation is timeless. All the political and military upheavals that the book gives as the backdrop of Amos’ preaching follow an eternal model of creation, destruction and recreation. The contingencies of time and place become subservient to the trans-historical processes of cosmic realities. This is the mythic world of our imaginary, literary Amos. It oscillates between heaven and earth, the past and the future. It has long been realized that the Bible’s prophetic texts employ a wide selection of mythic motifs and images, and I will demonstrate something of this range in the book of Amos. I also will demonstrate how these are not mere literary ﬁgures or survivals from earlier religious conceptions, but are also fundamental to the book which is itself an articulation of paradigmatic cosmic themes. In this sense, it is a mythic text in its own right. Equally important, however, is that the book of Amos, like the rest of prophetic literature, embeds these mythic themes and progressions 1

All quotes from William Shakespeare are from The Illustrated Stratford Shakespeare (London: Chancellor Press, 1982).

4

AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION

in a new plot: that of the ancient (and often ignored) prophet of God. The cosmic myth articulated in Amos’ message is cast as words of a prophet who is himself an instantiation of a mythical prototypical messenger. Beyond the actual message of judgement, destruction and rebirth is an exploration of an idealized interaction between human and God; it is a model for the experience of producing the text itself. In the ﬁnal vision in Amos 9, God is seen standing on an altar issuing an order to strike the capital of the temple’s columns and shake its thresholds, bringing it all down on the heads of the people. Here, a glimpse of a common mythic motif in the ancient Near East emerges, the macrocosmic temple in heaven. There, one sees the throne room of the god, the model upon which earthly temples are made, and the foundation of creation. Many ancient myths tell of the establishment of a divine hierarchy only to culminate in the building of a palace for the god or a temple-city on earth. The Israelites had their own versions of this. Jon D. Levenson, for instance, has written on the ancient Israelite temple’s cosmic dimensions. The orders to construct the tabernacle in Exodus have lengthy references to the requirement to keep the Sabbath, the festival of imitating the divine rest at the end of the world’s creation (see Exod. 31:12–17, 35:1–3). Leviticus twice associates an order to revere the sanctuary with keeping the Sabbath (Lev. 19:30, 26:2).2 The exodus in the Hebrew Bible is deeply mythic, linking the creation of Israel as a distinct people to a particular way of life and religion and ultimately to the creation of the world itself. The Psalms are rich in such imagery; the elevated language of poetry links heaven and earth. Psalm 2 celebrates God who is ‘seated in heaven’ and has installed his King ‘on Zion’, his ‘holy mountain’ (vv. 4, 6). Ps. 48:2–3 (Eng. vv. 1–2), sings of Yahweh, ‘who is acclaimed in the city of our God, his holy mountain’. 3 The mountain is called beautiful, the joy of all the earth. But here, idealizations of the real Jerusalem give way to mythic conceptions although they are sometimes mishandled in English translations. Many translations, including the New Revised Standard Version, read the word  in v. 3 as indicating that Zion is in the ‘far north’ but this produces a geographical anomaly. Zion is an intrinsic part of the Jerusalem environs. It is better to see  not as the direction towards Zion, but as a claim that Zion is none other than Mount Zaphon, roughly the Syrian equivalent to Greece’s Mount Olympus, the abode of the gods.4 In Psalm 48, heaven and earth are linked through Zion. Yahweh, the divine king, robed in majesty, is celebrated in Psalm 93. The permanence of the earth is equated with the permanence of his throne. The eternal deity’s majesty exceeds that of the thundering seas, which is a clear reference to primeval waters.

2

Jon D. Levenson, ‘The Temple and the World’, JR 64 (1984): 275–98. Christian English Bibles occasionally use different verse numbering than the traditional Jewish text. In those cases, I will include the English numbering after the Hebrew or in parentheses. 4 See N. Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit: The Words of Ilimilku and his Colleagues (Biblical Seminar, 53; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1998), pp. 44, 73. Other mountains could be associated with Zaphon, see Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches (London: Continuum, 2001), pp. 671, 673. 3

LANDSCAPING AMOS’ COSMIC TEMPLE

5

Psalm 65 is directed towards God in Zion, commenting on the blessings of the divine house. God is credited with providing all the bounty of nature. The prophetic writings, themselves the poetic equals of the Psalms, are familiar with such ideas, too. A new earthly temple is often associated with Jewish utopias such as in Ezekiel 40–48. There are clear echoes of paradise in some of these temple images. Ezekiel in chapter 47 sees water ﬂow from the temple that provides for every living thing. All forms of trees will be nourished by it, and their fruit will be food and medicine for all (cf. Ps 46:5, Eng. v. 4).5 Jeremiah 17:12 calls God’s eternal throne of glory his ‘sacred shrine’. Isaiah 65:17–18 employs language that echoes Gen. 1:1, and tells of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth. It reads: See! I am creating new heavens and a new earth And the ﬁrst will not be remembered; they will not come to mind. But delight and rejoice for evermore over what I am creating! See! I am creating Jerusalem – a joy, and her people – a delight!6

Of course, the heavenly archetype can have many earthy manifestations. In the book of Amos, Zion ﬁgures as does the shrine at Bethel and a few other places. All such shrines were meant as representations of the cosmic prototype (I will have more to say about the details of this in the next chapter). This prototype is the conceptual landscape in which the action of the book of Amos takes place. Or, more accurately, Amos uncovers the cosmic reality as hidden bedrock beneath the shifting fortunes of the human and natural world, and, once uncovered, reduces it to chaos. This is what the present study is concerned with: the way Amos imagines the dissolution of the cosmos through a poetic attack on this ephemeral cosmic structure and the resulting paradise that ensues when God restores the universe. Yet, the structure of that universe, at least as it manifests itself in our imaginations, is itself built of the very words that doom it to chaos. To explore this ‘word-world’ requires something of a long journey with many twists and turns of phrase. Language in Amos is not a neutral quantity. The use of ambiguity, double meanings, alliteration and the like was widespread in the literature of the ancient Near East. Playful etymologies could be used to link deities with particular natural forces and could be used as an operative element in magic. To manipulate the name of an object into another word was to have control over it. The Hebrew scribes had a similar creative bent. Behind the superﬁcial levels of meaning there are allusions to alternative meanings. There are aural and visual puns, words with similar sounds and spellings that allow the reader to relate ideas and concepts not otherwise linked by grammar and syntax. Recent academic literature is full of newly discovered examples of such creativity. From the poetry of the Psalms and Job to prose in books like Samuel, the scribes loaded their texts with dense webs of allusion, patterned sounds and layers of meaning.7 In this volume, I will follow the 5 Pss. 52:10 (Eng. v. 8) and 92:13–15 (Eng. vv. 12–14) liken the righteous to cedars and palms growing in the temple, which continue to bear fruit despite their great age. 6 Biblical translations are mine except as indicated. 7 See, for instance, the excellent collection of papers: Scott B. Noegel (ed.) Puns and Pundits: Word Play in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Literature (Bethesda, MD:

6

AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION

shifting linguistic landscape as it translates its own depiction of the natural world into the cosmic temple before ordering it destroyed, only to rebuild the world anew as a paradise. So let us return to Amos’ opening lines, and sacriﬁce a bit of English word order to show the Hebrew patterning of words: 1 The words of Amos, who was among the stockmen from Tekoa, who prophesied concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah, King of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam, son of Joash, King of Israel, two years before the earthquake. 2 And he said, ‘Yahweh from Zion roars, And from Jerusalem he gives his voice. Mourn [do] the pastures of the shepherds Dry up [does] the top of Carmel.’

The phrase, ‘the words of Amos’, is an odd way to begin a book of divine oracles; only Jeremiah has a similar opening. There is an implied tension between the prophet and God that will come to the surface later in word games of compulsion and coercion. The narrator’s dating of Amos to the reigns of two kings sets the text historically, and yet the added reference to the earthquake casts an ominous shadow. There is a pronounced geographical disjunction in these two verses. Amos is from Tekoa, south of Jerusalem, and his visions concern the kingdom of Israel to the north. Yet, the centre of divine speech is Zion and Jerusalem. There is a symbiosis between the human and the natural. The pastures express the emotions of their shepherds. There is irony: the top of Carmel, the mountain whose name suggests a ‘Garden Land’, withers away. More ironic is how such a view of chaos in v. 2 comes from such a ﬁnely structured example of Hebrew poetry. It opens with God’s mountain, Zion, and closes with the desiccated Mount Carmel. Between these two mountains stand Jerusalem and the shepherd’s pastures. Verbs close the ﬁrst two lines in the quoted speech, while in the second pair the verbs come ﬁrst, as if to hasten the terrible effect of the roaring. Order and symmetry bring to life chaos and destruction. The inhabitants of the city and the shepherds themselves are noticeable for their absence. The effect of the desiccating voice on Amos’ fellow herdsmen is left up to the reader’s imagination. This is the poetic landscape of Amos. And the reader would do well to remember how Yahweh ‘roars’ and ‘gives his voice’; such words have an uncanny way of echoing in this mysterious landscape between the mountain of the garden land and the mountain of God. Yahweh roars from Zion, Amos in Tekoa hears, and Carmel withers. Tekoa has its own ominous portents, the name being based on a Hebrew root that can mean ‘to thrust (a weapon)’ or ‘to blow a horn’.8 So we can imagine our prophet going north to initiate that violent sound by confronting a corrupt king. But let us now jump ahead to the start of Amos’ ninth and ﬁnal chapter and the book’s last of ﬁve chilling visions: CDL Press, 2000). 8 See Judg. 3:21 for thrusting a weapon and many instances in Joshua 6 regarding the noisy fall of Jericho. Also note Jer. 6:1: ‘in Tekoa blow  the shofar’, and Ezek. 7:14.

LANDSCAPING AMOS’ COSMIC TEMPLE

7

9:1 I saw Adonai standing on the altar, and he said, ‘Strike the capital, and the thresholds will shake. Cut them off, the ﬁrst/head of them all.9 And the last of them I will slaughter with the sword. No refugee of theirs shall ﬂee. No fugitive of theirs shall take ﬂight.’

In the third vision, God was ﬁrst seen standing on a wall (Amos 7:7), but now he stands on the altar itself. Amos has entered the world of the divine as much as God has imposed himself on the natural and human order in Amos 1:1–2. This is the divine roar; the withering of Carmel and the mourning of the pastures are implicit in the destruction of the temple. This temple is not the one in Jerusalem, Bethel or anywhere else. It is God’s heavenly temple; it is the cosmos. Intimations of this will surface in the following passage. After witnessing how God vows that no refugee will escape, we read how the people will be cut off or even crushed with the temple debris. Any remnant will be dragged back from heaven, the underworld and the ocean’s ﬂoor only to be exiled and killed (Amos 9:2–4). Afterwards, God’s terrifying power is celebrated (vv. 5–6). This ﬁfth vision and its aftermath show the sweeping away of any boundaries set for human life. With the loss of the eternal landmark for creation, the world is set adrift in chaos as it was in the prophet’s vision of the ﬁery consumption of the great, primal ocean (Amos 7:4–6). Yet, the dissolution of the ordered universe is the point at which the book begins to make its dramatic shift towards recreation and a new paradise. But why was such literature produced? A brief return to that most eloquent Elizabethan provides one answer. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the tragic hero is moved to vengeance after the ghost of his father reveals his killer’s identity. The villain is the dead monarch’s own brother, who has now married the queen and become king. Hamlet arranges a (strategically lengthened) performance of ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ that offers a suitable parallel to the crime against his father. Hamlet gambles that upon seeing ‘The Mousetrap’, as he calls the play, the murderer would lose his composure: I have heard, That guilty creatures, sitting at a play, Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul, that presently They have proclaim’d their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. Hamlet II.ii.598–600

The Amos I am dealing with in this volume is similar to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and even has much in common with the characters portrayed in the melodrama produced by the Danish prince. They are the servants of their author; they draw their audiences Hebrew can have various meanings in this context, including ‘head’ or ‘ﬁrst’, and, as will be discussed in the ﬁnal chapter, even ‘poison’. 9

8

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into their ﬁctive world. Like Hamlet’s ‘Mousetrap’, the book of Amos is something of a trap. It would be rare to ﬁnd a biblical scholar willing to commit to the notion that Amos was produced without a message if not an agenda or ideology to impart to its reader. But alongside the social or politico-religious motivations of the book’s composition and editing processes there is also an individual, human element in the book, and that is as much a trap as any rhetorical intent to convince a reader of any point of view. On either the social or personal level, the bait in Amos’ trap is its beautifully crafted condemnations of all that is ugly with the world: its selﬁshness, greed, injustice and violence displaced from the reader by its setting in a former time, place and circumstance. Yet, the trap’s sting is its universality, timelessness and demands for a personal engagement. There is no way out; the text leads one to concur that destruction is past and imminent, and if one chooses to side with the prophet and hopefully be spared, the text leads one to conclude that the call to prophecy itself is not bound by Amos’ life and times. The word of doom is not constrained by the limits of the text. But should this reading of Amos be so utterly grim? Hamlet is a tragedy; as much as the prince of Denmark caught a murderer, the prince himself was caught in the violent aftermath. Amos is a comedy; there is a very bright light at the end of its tunnel. I do not wish to disown the book’s glorious ending or strike it from my ideal book of Amos on the grounds that it was penned by someone other than the one (or ones) who produced the ﬁrst eight and one half chapters. Yet, this vision of a new Eden is itself as much bait as it is the prize. The world is recreated as beautiful, plentiful and stable, yet this world is also the product of the same mythic, cosmic processes as the forces of destruction. Can it really endure? Like the restoration of Job’s fortunes, one can ask if the ending of Amos is not deliberately superﬁcial, leading the reader to probe ever deeper the themes of the book as a whole. Shakespeare had his own reasons for presenting the vengeful prince turned playwright, some purely artistic or personal and some maybe even political. Perhaps the Bard, too, found himself sometimes unpleasantly trapped by implications of bringing his characters, plots and poetry to the public. But what of Amos? What sort of social dynamics lay behind it? As will be outlined in the next chapter, the book of Amos should be seen as the property of the latter half of the Persian period, when so many of the now familiar biblical traditions were taking a familiar shape. Typically, scholars look to the earliest possible dates ﬁrst (mid eighth century BCE), although many do date some parts of Amos to Judah’s post-monarchic period. Rather than begin with the hypothetical ‘historical Amos’, this study begins with the post-monarchic setting as the locus for the construction of the book as a whole, while remaining open to the idea that it contains many passages of a more ancient provenance. In this sense, this study is grounded in the so-called ‘minimalist’ paradigm that has raised a good deal of controversy in Hebrew Bible studies. This unpleasant situation resulted from the furious debates over how much of the Hebrew Bible’s depiction of Israel’s religious and political history is a reliable source of information for historians. The labels ‘minimalism’ and ‘maximalism’ represent two extremes of opinion possible (as opposed to the actual positions of the individual scholars which are typically

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far more nuanced than the well-publicized polemics suggest).10 In any case, many scholars now raise serious critiques of long-held notions underlying biblical studies, especially the common assumption that there is an essential kernel of historicity behind most biblical depictions of the past. This includes conceptualizing the prophetic books as literary productions reﬂecting on the past and creating a world of meaning by articulating a heritage of great prophets in Israel’s history. Too often, scholars have turned literary artefacts like Amos into sociological information about actual prophets without coming to terms with such texts as literary productions, as I will describe in the next chapter. Some cautions concerning the new historical approaches must be raised, however. The academic work labelled ‘minimalism’ must be understood as historical– critical research and not, as some polemicists would have it, a rejection of historical inquiry. The greatest contribution of the new approaches to historical–critical research is in its examinations of the social, institutional and ideological contexts of the production of the biblical texts. In general, these contexts are found within the Jerusalem priesthood and scribal institution of Persian and/or Hellenistic Jerusalem. The new approaches emphasize the production of prophetic literature as part of the construction of a heritage and the transmission and further development of older traditions. The social standing of the compilers and authors is vitally important. One scholar holds that the producers of the Hebrew Bible were scribes who functioned as ‘brokers of divine knowledge’ to the illiterate masses.11 Many modern readers of the Bible remain brokers of divine knowledge to their synagogues and churches and many are brokers of intellectual knowledge to university, college or popular audiences. Scholars are often respectful towards the work of their predecessors, and yet, scholarship is an industry that thrives on innovation and progress. The ancient writers hardly shared an identical world-view to ours, but like us, they would have had to strike a suitable balance between tradition, adaptation and innovation. There would always be circumstances that required new ideas and ways of thinking about tradition. Inherited stories and oracles attributed to the great prophets of old would have been given a new emphasis and meaning as circumstances changed. The new historical paradigm also demands awareness of the high artistry of these prophetic texts. Even more so than modern readers, the ancient audience would have been caught in the subtleties of Amos and, presumably, would have relished the experience. Developing these subtleties was all part of the producers’ role as the literati: why produce a book that can be understood completely the ﬁrst time? 10

The bibliography is growing steadily. Some representative works are the two part essay by Charles Isbell, ‘Minimalism: The Debate Continues Part I’, JBQ 32 (2004): 143–7; Charles Isbell, ‘Minimalism: The Debate Continues Part II’, JBQ 32 (2004): 211–23; Keith W. Whitelam, ‘Representing Minimalism: The Rhetoric and Reality of Revisionism’, in Alastair G. Hunter and Philip R. Davies (eds) Sense and Sensitivity: Essays on Reading the Bible in Memory of Robert Carroll (JSOTSup, 348; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 2002), pp. 194–223. 11 Ehud Ben Zvi, ‘The Urban Center of Jerusalem and the Development of the Literature of the Hebrew Bible’, in W.E. Aufrecht, N.A. Mirau and S.W. Gauley (eds) Urbanism in Antiquity: From Mesopotamia to Crete (JSOTSup, 244; Shefﬁeld, Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1997), pp. 194–209 (200).

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Who would ever reread it? One might even argue, as Ehud Ben Zvi does, that the complexity of the literature is part of the mechanism by which these ‘brokers’ defended their status in society.12 The message or agenda of Amos, then, may be found in the religious, social and political interests of this educated elite stratum of society. Still, there is much more to this literature than only that. It must have meant something on a very deep level to those who produced and read it. But what purpose could these Jerusalem scribes have had in preserving, editing, or even fabricating the words of an ancient critic of the Northern Kingdom? At whom was their rhetoric and poetry aimed? There are implications to this question beyond institutional agendas. How was the literary world shaped by the reality, and even personal experiences of its producers? How would the image of the brave Amos from Tekoa have motivated and inspired the people shaping the traditions of his prophesying and visionary experiences into the book familiar to us today? Of course, none of these questions can be answered with anything other than speculation. Yet, something might be said of it. Audiences ‘enter’ the worlds depicted in the literature they read or hear. Or better, they enter the worlds created in their imaginations. Readers can identify with particular characters, and respond in sympathy with them.13 However, for characters that actually existed or were believed to exist, the duration of the emotional inﬂuence on a reader’s actions may be signiﬁcantly increased.14 While literary theorists probe how readers enter a textual world, other scholars are interested in how textual worlds enter and shape perceived reality. Some scholars have noted a close relationship between art and religion, at least in psychological terms.15 Hjalmar Sundén holds that religious experience can result when people discover that their own situations are like those facing the characters in literature they consider sacred. A corollary to this self-discovery is the realization that one’s own world includes the God from the sacred text.16 God will act in the believer’s life as he acted in the story or tradition. The potential depth of the role adoption should not be underestimated and is comparable to learning 12

Ehud Ben Zvi, ‘Studying Prophetic Texts Against Their Original Backgrounds: Pre-Ordained Scripts and Alternative Horizons of Research’, in S.B. Reid (ed.) Prophets and Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Gene M. Tucker (JSOTSup, 229; Shefﬁeld, Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1996), pp. 125–35 (133). 13 David S. Miall, ‘Affect and Narrative: A Model of Response to Stories’, Poetics 17 (1988): 259–72; David J.A. Clines, ‘Language as Event’, in R.P. Gordon (ed.) The Place is Too Small For Us: The Israelite Prophets in Recent Scholarship (SBTS, 5; Winona Lake IN: Eisenbrauns, 1995), pp. 166–75 (167–9), excerpted from David J.A. Clines, I, He, We, and They: A Literary Approach to Isaiah 53 (JSOTSup, 1; Shefﬁeld: JSOT Press, 1976), pp. 53–6, 59–65. 14 Eva M. Dadlez, What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions (University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 160–61. 15 Paul W. Pruyser, ‘Lessons from Art Theory for the Psychology of Religion’, JSSR 15 (1976): 1–14; Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, ‘Religion as Art and Identity’, Rel 16 (1986): 1–17. 16 Hjalmar Sundén, ‘Saint Augustine and the Psalter in the Light of Role-Psychology’, JSSR 26 (1987): 375–82. This journal volume features the proceedings of a symposium on Sundén’s theories. See also Nils G. Holm, ‘An Integrated Role Theory for the Psychology of Religion: Concepts and Perspectives’, in B. Spilka and D.N. McIntosh (eds) The Psychology of Religion: Theoretical Approaches (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 73–85 (73–6).

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a foreign language ﬂuently. The patterns perceived in the textual world shape the recipient’s own reality.17 What Sundén says about readers should also be seen as relevant to writers, especially if the writers are working with some form of received story or tradition. Indeed, Sundén himself develops his ideas partly in response to an examination of Augustine’s writings about his personal encounter with God through his engagement with the Psalms. In our case, that received story is the inherited traditions of ‘ancient Israel’ including, presumably, traditions about a prophet named Amos. Also part of the tradition is the well-established mythic conceptions of the macrocosmic temple and the cycle of creation, destruction and recreation. An undercurrent of this work, therefore, is the question of the link these scribes made between themselves and the ancient prophets, and between their own audiences and those ancient hearers harangued by Amos and company. What traps did the scribes lay for their readers, and what traps did they ﬁnd themselves caught up in? How did God’s communications with Amos shape the perception of God in the lives of the scribes? In many of the Bible’s prophetic texts, it is not clear how much autonomy the prophetic voice has. Are the oracles compositions of a prophet describing what God says, or are they the very words of God? The question of autonomy is at the heart of the vision-cycle in the Amos-book, and, as will be illustrated here, many other passages in the book too. These scribes transmitted an older tradition of heroes and arch-villains. They would have seen their own world, at least in part, through the lenses of these traditions. At least some of them would have walked in their heroes’ footsteps, or at least tried to, caught as they were between their vision of the past and their present realities. Powerful empires and economic factors that had as much impact on them emotionally as they did ﬁnancially, and politically shaped their world. What would it have been like to remember King David when you are not allowed to forget Artaxerxes? Indeterminacy, intrigue, masks and traps: these are well-known items in the tool kit of both storyteller and playwright, but they are also the stuff of real lives. If the subjective and unpredictable ‘human element’ behind the text is to be acknowledged, care must be taken to keep from reducing every feature of the Amos-book to institutional propaganda. On the other hand, neither should Amos be reduced to manifestations of psychological phenomena for which there is no real data since there is no access to the real minds that produced it. Yet the human element does not go away even if it is ignored. People produced the book of Amos. The present study, therefore, is something of a thought experiment in that it treats Amos as expressing the producers’ desire to fulﬁl in their writings a personal religious quest, whose success is attained vicariously through Amos. This quest is to explore the nature of communicating on behalf of an omnipotent deity. ‘Brokers’ of divine knowledge they may well have been, but this work is predicated on the assumption that they were meditating on the divine knowledge as well. They have created a world of words in which the secrets of this knowledge might be divined, at least by the initiated. Alas, all that remains of these great minds are those words. 17

Hjalmar Sundén, ‘What is the Next Step to be Taken in the Study of Religious Life?’, HTR 58 (1965): 445–51 (446–7); Hjalmar Sundén, ‘Exegesis and the Psychology of Religion’, Temenos 11 (1975): 148–62.

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This study, then, explores Amos’ word-world. That world is an imaginary, mythic space pregnant with meanings and associations. Built upon traditional motifs and images, the book’s words are not only signs but also embodiments of the world the language itself constructs and destroys. Francis Landy ﬁnds the prophet Hosea torn between normal and paranormal prophetic and shamanic experiences: This tension may also be exhibited in the pressure on language in the poetry of the book, mediating between inspiration and control, the desire to articulate a fragmenting reality and the collapse of language which that articulation necessitates.18

This study traces how the collapsing language of Amos is itself a double entendre that speaks of a more transcendent, cosmic reality. But it is also in this chaos, both cosmic and linguistic, that the potential for restoration and reconstruction is found. The word-world of Amos describes a tension between a prophetic voice inspired to speak destruction and a will to intercede on behalf of those marked for death. Amos found that prophecy was inevitable. His realization, expressed as a rhetorical question, ‘Who can but prophesy?’ (3:8) leaves the readers to ﬁnd their own prophetic voices, ones they presumably uncover by ever more closely identifying with Amos himself. Amos provides a means to a vicarious divine–human interchange through the paradigmatic ﬁgure of an ancient prophet. It is an interchange, however, that is on some levels inscrutable and problematic.

18

Francis Landy, Hosea (Readings; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1995), p. 17.

Chapter 2

Amos among the Historians, Mythmakers and Poets Admit the excuse of time, of numbers, and due course of things, Which cannot in their huge and proper life Be here presented. King Henry V, V.3–6.

As intimated in the last chapter, the ﬁeld of biblical studies is in a period of great change and uncertainty. More optimistically, it is a period of great potential for exploring new directions of research. In this chapter, I will elaborate on a number of issues introduced already: the production of the book of Amos as a mythic text, some of the key elements in the cosmic imagination displayed in the book, and the creative use of language within it. I must also pay my debts and situate my work in the context of the massive amount of research done on Amos already. Readers of Amos are well served by a number of existing, and excellent, histories of scholarship and bibliographies.1 Even so, it is perhaps still presumptuous of me to take my Shakespearean shortcut, but be that as it may, I shall focus on some representative examples of key methodological issues and recent research. One broad generality that can be made about a good deal of historical–critical work on Amos (and other prophetic books as well) is that there is a tendency to isolate the ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ layers of the text and to interpret these according to what might be called a ‘transcript’ model of interpretation. That is, commentators attempt to recover the historical circumstances of each prophetic pronouncement and then interpret the meaning of it as applying speciﬁcally to those circumstances. For instance, John Hayes writes in his 1988 commentary that: The book of Amos must be understood in terms of a close reading of the text in light of the historical events as reconstructed from all available sources. The prophets addressed speciﬁc historical situations and conditions; they did not address religious, moral, or political issues in general.2

Hayes’s comments still ring true for a number of interpreters of prophetic literature. Randall E. Otto asserts that prophetic texts must be read against their historical circumstances if the intention of the authors (the true goal of interpretation) is to be understood.3 But who was the ‘historical Amos’? The only possible source for his 1 See especially M. Daniel Carroll R., Amos —The Prophet and His Oracles: Research on the Book of Amos (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002). 2 John H. Hayes, Amos the Eighth-Century Prophet: His Times and His Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988), p. 38. 3 Randal E. Otto, ‘The Prophets and their Perspectives’, CBQ 63 (2001): 219–40.

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name and life is the book of Amos itself. This book is set during the reigns of kings Jeroboam of Israel and Uzziah of Judah. Scholars put this as the middle of the eighth century BCE. As I will describe in the course of my commentary, the book of Amos makes a number of statements about the prophet’s occupation before his prophetic calling. Scholars have often been interested in these claims and have attempted to relate Amos’ preaching to various reconstructions of his social and ﬁnancial standing. Was he a shepherd of simple means or was he a wealthy owner of ﬂocks and land? Richard C. Steiner’s Stockmen from Tekoa, Sycomores from Sheba offers a sophisticated analysis of the terminology describing Amos’ occupation. Steiner demonstrates that Amos was a stockman whose vocation often involved, but was not restricted to, supplying animals for the sacriﬁcial cult in Jerusalem.4 This book does not offer a full interpretation of Amos, but it is a valuable resource regarding the meanings of some highly signiﬁcant but debated terms in the biblical text. The places where Amos delivered his oracles are largely left to the readers’ imagination: only in 7:10–17 is Bethel speciﬁed. Yet, the book is often interpreted according to reconstructions of the historical prophet’s career that see him leave his home in Tekoa in Judah and journey to Bethel and Samaria. Moreover, there are questions about the nature of his preaching. One issue that divides many scholars is whether the closing verses (Amos 9:11–15), famous for their abrupt turn from judgement to restoration, can be reconciled with the life and times of the historical prophet. The book is full of oracles and threats of doom, but in 9:8–10, all the sinners of God’s people will meet a violent end. In vv. 11–15 the prediction of a surviving remnant becomes a full-blown oracle of salvation. There are three main theories as to the origins of the book of Amos and the question of Amos’ last minute change of tone.5 Some scholars ﬁnd no inconsistency and link virtually the entire book to a very brief moment in Amos’ life. Stanley N. Rosenbaum regards the book of Amos as the ‘brief outpouring of one man’s soul’, which took up less than a half hour and has been only lightly supplemented by later additions, for example, Amos 3:7.6 Others scholars accommodate the shift in tone by relating the two themes to different phases in the prophet’s reconstructed life. In their massive commentary in the Anchor Bible series, Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman write, ‘what concerns us most is the interpretation of the book of Amos as it now stands complete’.7 Yet, a large part of their interpretative effort sees each discrete passage interpreted in the light of a tentative history of Amos’ prophetic mission. The book’s ﬁnal vision of prosperity (Amos 9:11–15) is placed relatively early in the prophet’s career. He eventually turns from hope that Israel would repent to an awareness that 4

Richard C. Steiner, Stockmen from Tekoa, Sycomores from Sheba, (CBQMS, 36; Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2003). 5 There are, of course, literary, theological and other studies of the book that do not address compositional or redactional questions. 6 Stanley N. Rosenbaum, Amos of Israel: A New Interpretation (Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1990), pp. 82–3, 100. See, too, Julian Morgenstern, Amos Studies Parts I, II, and III in Two Volumes (2 vols; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1941), Vol. I, pp. 10–12, who reorganizes the content of Amos to ﬁt his notion of a uniﬁed address. 7 Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Amos: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB, 24a; New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 143.

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judgement is all Israel deserves. Amos 7 tells how Amos falls foul of Amaziah, the priest of Bethel. When Amos is ordered out of the royal shrine, the prophet offers a prediction of destruction in return (Amos 7:10–17). The book immediately turns to other matters, but Andersen and Freedman say that Amos refused to be silenced by the priest and at this point delivered his ‘Great Set Speech’, now preserved in Amos 1–2. The commentators do allow that this lengthy biblical passage itself was ‘polished … for publication’.8 Polished it may be, but it is still a transcript. Andersen and Freedman wonder if the prophet was not interrupted at 2:8, which necessitated a digressive response. This response, recorded in the following verses, prevented him from ﬁnishing the ﬁnal oracle of the speech according to the formulaic pattern of the preceding seven. Andersen and Freedman write that Amos’ resistance continued even when Amos was taken as a prisoner to Samaria, an event not mentioned in the book itself.9 For his part, John D.W. Watts has a contrary view of Amos’ change of heart and message. He thinks that Amos accepted the orders of the priest and left for Judah where he then uttered the salvation oracles.10 Julius Wellhausen’s comments on this change of tone in Amos are often cited. He ﬁnds it striking that ‘roses and lavender’ should follow ‘blood and iron’.11 Many scholars follow him in arguing that that the ending of Amos, along with a few other passages (most notably, three of the oracles against various nations in Amos 1–2), is the work of later writers and editors. These scholars usually see the most recent redactional layers of the Amos-book as being early Persian or late neo-Babylonian. The Persian era is the so-called ‘postexilic period’, a time when salvation prophecy was coming to the fore as an expression of the renewed hopes surrounding the restored sanctuary and city of Jerusalem. Amos’ harsh message was thus moderated by the addition of a new, hopeful ending (Amos 9:11–15). Hans Walter Wolff proposes six redactional layers: two from Amos’ own time, a somewhat later layer by his school of disciples, a Josianic redaction and then a deuteronomistic one. Finally, a post-exilic redaction completed the extant book. Wolff notes that the post-exilic contribution is striking for its lack of rewriting of the older layers that spoke unequivocally about destruction. The supplements are said to be motivated by the general spirit of the later writers’ times.12 8

Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. 85–6, quote, p. 86. Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. 6, 83–8. 10 John D.W. Watts, Vision and Prophecy in Amos (expanded edn; Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), pp. 54–7, 85, 118. So, too, does Rosenbaum, Amos of Israel, pp. 99–100. 11 Julius Wellhausen, Die kleinen Propheten übersetzt und erklärt (Berlin: Reiner, 1892), p. 94, denies that any part of Amos 9:8–15 is from Amos. 12 Hans Walter Wolff, Joel and Amos: A Commentary on the Books of the Prophets Joel and Amos (W. Janzen, S.D. McBridge, Jr., C.A. Muenchow, trans.; Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), pp. 90–91, 354–5. Robert B. Coote, Amos Among the Prophets: Composition and Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), employs a simpliﬁed version of Wolff’s thesis while Izabela Jaruzelska, Amos and the Ofﬁcialdom in the Kingdom of Israel: The Socio–Economic Position of the Ofﬁcials in the Light of the Biblical, The Epigraphic and Archaeological Evidence (Poznanzka Drukarnia Naukowa: Poznan, 1998), adopts Wolff’s schema without argumentation. 9

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Jörg Jeremias’s commentary represents an advance on older historical–critical studies. Jeremias calls attention to the difﬁculty in recovering the authentic words of Amos against the book’s ‘multilayered history of transmissions’.13 While Jeremias points to a complex literary reshaping of the original oracle series, he focuses on the representation of the message, and not on any presentation of the prophetic persona. Still, earlier editions of the book are given more emphasis than the later ones and Jeremias begins his commentary by focusing on the ‘Period and Person’ of Amos himself.14 Jeremias’s commentary is transitional, treating the whole book of Amos as a signiﬁcant issue for critical inquiry and not a hurdle to clear before arriving at the original book or ipsissma verba of the prophet. Even so, Jeremias’s work remains strongly linked to the redactional studies of the past. In his 2001 study, The Book of Amos as Composed and Read in Antiquity, Aaron W. Park offers a synchronic and diachronic/textual analysis of Amos. He also gives consideration to the interpretation of Amos in later writings. Park identiﬁes three editions of Amos, including the foundational text or Grundschrift that goes back to the historical prophet. Park ﬁnds evidence that an Amos-school produced a second edition, while a Josianic edition was subsequently completed (late seventh century BCE). He does not attempt to delineate the original edition’s contents but maintains that much of it probably goes back to Amos.15 While advancing the work of Jeremias, Park’s analysis is extremely problematic. Park demonstrates that post-exilic and rabbinic interpretations of Amos were quite adaptable, but if this is the case, then one must wonder about Park’s failure to investigate whether any part of the book of Amos was written or rewritten in the Persian period. Park’s arguments attempt to pre-empt debate on the historical prophet. On the one hand, he rightly objects to the scholarly tendency to grant the passages original to Amos pride of place in research. He comments that an early redactor could have employed a diversity of genres; variety in the employment of literary forms is not necessarily indicative of late rewriting. Park is also correct in calling attention to the possibility that passages expressing hope of restoration were expressed in the monarchic period. This undermines the common view that the pre-exilic prophets were exclusively preachers of judgement and disaster.16 On the other hand, judgement oracles may have been written in the post-monarchic period. The burden of proof is more egalitarian than Park allows. Early dates are in need of as much proof as late ones, but he is unwilling to provide such proof. His methodology considers the possibility of late redaction only when it is improbable that the passage in question stems from a single human life.17 Park argues the following:

13 Jörg Jeremias, The Book of Amos (trans. Douglass Stott; OTL; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), p. ix. Jeremias’s student, Dirk U. Rottzoll, Studien zur Redaktion und Komposition des Amos Büches (BZAW, 243; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), develops a more complex, redactional model based on a structural analysis of the book of Amos. 14 Jeremias, Amos, pp. 1–9. 15 Aaron W. Park, The Book of Amos as Composed and Read in Antiquity (StudBL, 37; New York: Peter Lang, 2001). 16 Park, Amos, pp. 29–34. 17 Park, Amos, pp. 37–9.

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[S]ince the ﬁnal form of a prophetic book claims that the present is the work of the prophet, we must begin with that point. If and only if we can refute its claim based on our experience and perception according to the law of literature, we can challenge the ﬁnal redactor’s claim and seek for an alternative. Otherwise, we should render a judgment that its claim is ‘correct’ until proven wrong.18

This approach, which is common in historical criticism of the Hebrew Bible, has been the subject of sharp objections. For instance, Ben Zvi writes that this approach is really an appeal to the authority of the unknown writers who composed the superscriptions of the prophetic books. Such appeals require proper interpretation of the superscriptions. For example, do they really imply a modern sense of ‘authorship’ of the book’s contents? Moreover, they assume that the writer of the superscription is reliable in the matters under question. As Ben Zvi says any argument along these lines for the origins of the prophetic materials is tenuous.19 [T]he text itself must not be read according to a governing assumption that attribution in the heading refers to historical authorship, either in partial; or full terms. If one were do [sic] that, one would fall into circular reasoning, already assuming what one is set to investigate.20

Philip R. Davies also complains of the logical circle in which historical reconstructions are made based on assumptions of the general correctness of a biblical account while the texts are interpreted in the light of those same reconstructions.21 The effect of what Robert P. Carroll calls the ‘speculative, “dating-by-reference-to-the-narratedcontents-of- biblical-books-approach” ’, is to avoid critical questioning of biblical claims.22 This same avoidance also seems behind Park’s reliance on Rudolph Otto’s conception of the ineffability of religious experiences in which a person has an overwhelming encounter with the numinous ‘Other’, the mysterium tremendum. According to Park, the biblical prophets had such experiences. Moral value judgements are generated only secondarily as such experiences are beyond normal faculties. Therefore, the experiences cannot be subject to critical examination. Only the transmission of the record of such experiences can be so investigated.23 18

Park, Amos, p. 36. Ben Zvi, ‘Studying Prophetic Texts’, pp. 128–9. 20 Ben Zvi, ‘Studying Prophetic Texts’, p. 129. 21 Philip R. Davies, In Search of Ancient Israel (JSOTSup, 148; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1992), pp. 36–40. See, too, Ben Zvi, ‘Studying Prophetic Texts’, and David Henige, ‘In Good Company: Problematic Sources and Biblical Historicity’, JSOT 30 (2005): 29–47. 22 Robert P. Carroll, ‘Jewgreek Greekjew: The Hebrew Bible is All Greek to Me. Reﬂections on the Problematics of Dating the Origins of the Bible in Relation to Contemporary Discussions of Biblical Historiography’, in Lester L. Grabbe (ed.) Did Moses Speak Attic? Jewish Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period (JSOTSup, 317; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 2001), pp. 91–107 (102). 23 Park, Amos, pp. 35–9, citing Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relationship to the Rational (trans. John W. Harvey; 2nd edn; London: Oxford University Press, 1950). 19

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Park is badly misusing Otto’s thoughts in this regard and totally ignoring any methodological debate on such theories that have arisen since Otto ﬁrst wrote in the early part of the twentieth century. Otto is describing conceptual categories in which the sense of ‘the numinous’ precedes ‘the holy’, the latter having attached to it moral judgements. Otto is not talking about judgements by others of the veracity of one person’s overwhelming religious experiences.24 In truth, the issue is not really about value judgements on the reality of prophecy but of the social dynamics of ancient Judah that produced literature attributed to prophets from the past. Park ignores the fundamental difference between texts attributed to prophets and the social and psychological phenomenon of prophecy itself. Park does maintain that the book of Amos was redacted after the time of Amos but his date for this ﬁnal layer of composition of Amos is no more soundly argued than his reasoning for trusting in a historical Amos. He writes that the book probably reached its ﬁnal form between 722 and 597 BCE.25 He argues that it is very unlikely that the reference to exile in 9:14–15 refers to the exile of Judah because there is no ﬁrm evidence to link other passages in Amos to the period after the fall of Jerusalem. The superscription of Amos reminds Park of the synchronic dating scheme employed by the ﬁrst edition of the Deutronomistic History (Dtr1), that many date to the period of King Josiah. On the grounds of such passages as 2 Kgs 19:20–34; 22:15–20; Jer. 22:1–9; 26:18–23; 36:20–26, which tell of prophetic interaction with royalty, Park surmises that the redacted prophecy of Amos was to be recited before a king. In demonstrating this, he points to the closing phrase of the book of Amos, ‘says Yahweh your god’ (9:15). He takes the singular possessive as pointing to a lone addressee of the redacted book as a whole (cf. the plural possessives in ‘your god’ in Amos 4:12 and 5:17). Park reasons that Josiah was the likely audience of the completed book.26 Far too much of the burden of Park’s demonstration is born by a single possessive pronoun. Park is correct to note that the pronoun most likely addresses the intended audience of the book, but that audience need not be one speciﬁc individual. It may serve a literary function to draw the reader (any reader) into the text’s world at the very ﬁnal instance.27 Park has argued for when and why the book of Amos was produced on the grounds of descriptions of prophets and kings found in the redacted 24

Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 140, writes, ‘The tremendum, the daunting and repelling moment of the numinous, is schematized by means of the rational ideas of justice, moral will, and the exclusion of what is opposed to morality; and schematized thus, it becomes the holy “wrath of God”, which Scripture and Christian preaching proclaim.’ 25 Park, Amos, pp. 50–51, following Wilhelm Rudolph, Joel–Amos–Obadja–Jona (KAT, 13.2; Gutersloh: Mohn, 1971), p. 285. 26 Park, Amos, pp. 52–67. He ignores alternative theories that would date the ﬁrst DtrH to the post-monarchic period: for example, James R. Linville, Israel in the Book of Kings: The Past as a Project of Social Identity (JSOTSup, 272; Shefﬁeld, Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1998). 27 James R. Linville, ‘Visions and Voices: Amos 7–9’, Bib 80 (1999): 22–42 (41–2). A ‘frame break’ like this can also occur within a book at the end of an episode of particular importance: notice that the closing descriptions of the great gathering at the dedication of Solomon’s temple in 1 Kgs 8:65 in which the king celebrated the feast before ‘Yahweh our god’.

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literature in the Bible, not on any ancient description of how oracles of prophets became redacted literature in the ﬁrst place. It simply cannot be demonstrated that the ﬁnal redactors or ﬁrst owners of prophetic books used these documents in a manner analogous to the way this literature describe the actions of ancient prophets, confronting ﬁgures of authority on religious and moral matters. Another recent study of Amos is equally problematic in terms of dating. Karl Möller treats mostly Amos 1–4.28 Möller accepts that the book attained something like its ﬁnal form only shortly after Amos’ ministry and asks his readers to suspend judgement on sources. He holds that the book is structured as if the prophet is leading a debate with an eighth-century BCE audience and emphasizes the ‘rhetorical situation, the circumstances that led to its compilation’.29 Möller’s assertion is close to a circular argument. While it is possible that the book of Amos is a depiction of an eighth-century BCE warning to Judah, it is not necessary that this is the actual date of the book’s composition. As a product of post-monarchic reﬂection on the past, the apparent ‘rhetorical situation’ can be part of the text’s artistry. The implied rhetorical situation is not the same as the social discourses that produced the book. Randall Otto separates ‘meaning’, the message of the oracles in their original context, from ‘signiﬁcance’, the perceived relevance of the oracles to later audiences. ‘Meaning’, therefore, cannot be known any better than knowledge of the historical context allows.30 But, if knowledge of meaning is dependent upon knowledge of historical context, then the former is indeterminable if the latter is obscure. As is well known, the reliability of the historical information about many periods in ancient Israelite history is now a hotly debated question. One could argue instead that the modern interpretational effort in historical research should really be placed on the ‘signiﬁcance’ of the completed books: at least one is dealing with far less hypothetical texts and contexts than by beginning with the historical prophet. Indeed, efforts at granting continuing signiﬁcance to old collections through editorial or more extensive writing efforts may have completely masked the historical contexts of any authentic oracle’s meaning. One could also reintroduce the notion of the ‘meaning’ of the developing book or passage at any stage of its development as a new, historically contingent discourse. Stefan Paas has made a considerable contribution to the study of Amos although he, too, unjustiﬁably privileges the ‘historical’ prophet. In his monograph, Creation and Judgement, he studies creation imagery employed in eighth-century BCE prophetic literature, including Amos. Paas emphasizes interpreting relevant passages as part of the whole prophetic book although a ‘moderate’ amount of source and redaction criticism remains necessary. Paas asserts that certainty here is not possible except when there are divergent textual traditions. It is especially dubious when engaging perceived ideological tensions within texts.31 Paas prefers to ‘leave room 28

Karl Möller, A Prophet in Debate: The Rhetoric of Persuasion in the Book of Amos (JSOTSup, 372; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 2003). 29 Möller, Prophet in Debate, p. 104. 30 Otto, ‘Prophets’, p. 237. 31 Stefan Paas, Creation and Judgement: Creation Texts in Some Eighth Century Prophets (OTS, 47; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003), pp. 176–7.

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to maintain the theological paradoxes of the author’.32 Paas argues that, despite the probability of some literary shaping and expansion by later editors, it is a reasonable assumption that the book of Amos goes back to a prophet by that name. He observes that sociological approaches have shown considerable promise in helping deﬁne the role of prophets in ancient societies while comparative studies of prophecy in the wider ancient near eastern world are also helpful.33 Again, however, there is confusion between historical personages and books as historical artefacts. Oswald Loretz, who argues that prophecy in the ancient Near East involved relatively short divine messages in sharp contrast to the lengthier texts attributed to the biblical prophets, attempted a rather different route to interpretation in 1992. Amos is a post-exilic production based on the collection of the vision reports and a diversity of other material dealing with the fall of the northern kingdom. This provides a paradigm of the fall of Judah and the Babylonian exile. Loretz also concludes that Amos’ moral and social critique is part of the post-monarchic inheritance of earlier wisdom and judicial thought and not the legacy of eighthcentury BCE prophecy.34 He considers that primary questions for further research should concern the ‘why and how of the development of the genre Prophetic Book’.35 This is a direction that a number of scholars have since travelled and it is a path that I will journey down as well. Paas, however, criticizes Loretz for ignoring some key issues in such comparisons. Above all, Loretz has mistakenly compared a prophetic book with prophetic utterances in concluding that the book of Amos must be far younger than the prophet Amos. Paas also complains that Loretz repeats the tenuous assumption that shorter oracles are necessarily older and fails to take into account the possibility of unique cultural developments within Israel. He also challenges Loretz’s conclusion that prophecy in Israel and the ancient Near East originated as oracles addressed to a monarch regarding a crisis.36 While Paas is justiﬁed in some of these criticisms, his acceptance of the relevance of sociological research and claims that a ‘prophet was not a literary creation but he functioned in a broader social context’ leaves him on less solid ground. 37 No student of the Hebrew Bible or the ancient Near East would deny that Israel or her neighbours had prophets. Yet the social reality of prophecy need not be reﬂected in the extant biblical literature. Paas assumes, but does not prove, that the information in a prophetic book’s superscription (which he admits is redactional in origin) ‘need not be rejected out of hand’ and that the ﬁrst order of business in discussing the possibility of late redaction involves researching the suspect passages ‘against the background of the historical and social reality that the book describes’.38 Yet, it is the social reality described in the book that must be examined prior to using it as an

32

Paas, Creation, p. 177. Paas, Creation, p. 178. 34 Oswald Loretz, ‘Die Entstehung des Amos-Buches im Licht der Prophetien aus Mari, Assur, Ishchali und der Ugarit-Texte’, UF 24 (1992): 179–215. 35 Loretz, ‘Entstehung des Amos-Buches’, p. 24: my translation, emphasis in original. 36 Paas, Creation, pp. 179–81. 37 Paas, Creation, p. 178. 38 Paas, Creation, p. 178. 33

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historical context by which to investigate other features of the book. That being said, Paas’s monograph provides great insights into the mythical language and conceptions within Amos, and the signiﬁcance of his work on the conceptual background and literary shaping of the book should not be downplayed.39 There is at least one example of an ancient near eastern text in which a prophet is a ‘literary creation’. In ‘The Prophecies of Neferti’, written during the reign of the twelfth dynasty’s founder, King Amenemhet I (ca. 2000 BCE), the central character is described as a priest of Bastet who entertains Egyptian King Snefru (of the fourth dynasty) with his eloquent speech. The king requests to hear of the future instead of the past and Neferti’s resulting prophecies are written down. The predictions concern how a great king will arise and undo the damage done by a terrible war. The hero is called Ameny, a clear reference to Amenemhet I. Neferti speaks of the upheavals when the ‘Asiatics’ held sway. The troubles of Egypt are described as far more than simply political or military. The prophet’s speech anticipates some of the concerns found in biblical prophetic literature. He says that there is ‘silence before evil’, the land has died, the Nile runs dry and the shore lands have turned to sea while Re has withdrawn from humanity. All of creation seems to be undone. The prophet reports that there will be a call to Re: ‘What was made have been unmade, Re should begin to recreate’. Yet, the god remains mysteriously present, overlooking the earth. In the end, a king will return from the south and ‘Order will return to its seat, while Chaos is driven away’.40 The text itself hardly reports an actual prophetic utterance and one should not employ it to describe fourth dynasty prophets in Egypt. Lechtheim calls it a ‘historical romance in pseudo-prophetic form’.41 Lechtheim also observes that his succession was not particularly troublesome and that themes of national distress and the ordering of chaos were more of a common literary topos than a description of lived reality.42 Although this text is very much distanced from Amos in terms of date, language and culture, it serves as a warning that not all texts about prophets are about historical prophets. Loretz is not alone in interpreting the book of Amos as largely a product of the post-monarchic period. Jennifer M. Dines has penned an all too brief article on Amos in The Oxford Bible Commentary. She considers Amos to come from the Persian or early Hellenistic period while accepting that some passages may be much older. Dines is very sensitive to the literary shaping of the book with its rich images and thematic and verbal interconnections and ambiguities, but remains interested in the text as an historical artefact. She interprets the book as emphasizing the continuing

39 Paas devotes a lengthy chapter to ‘Creation Texts in Amos’, in Creation, pp. 183– 326. Also see his articles, ‘“He Who Builds His Stairs into Heaven…” (Amos 9:6a)’, UF 25 (1993): 319–25; ‘Seeing and Singing: Visions and Hymns in the Book of Amos’, VT 52 (2002): 254–74. 40 Miriam Lechtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings. Vol 1. The Old and Middle Kingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 139–45. I am grateful to Scott Noegel for bringing this text to my attention. 41 Lechtheim, Egyptian Literature, p. 139. 42 Lechtheim, Egyptian Literature, p. 134.

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relevance of the past to the post-monarchic Judaean audience.43 This is a far superior historical model than the ‘transcript’ model so often employed. Not as brief, but still quite concise, is Richard James Coggins’s volume on Joel and Amos in the New Century Bible Commentary series. Coggins looks to the post monarchic period as the historical context against which one should investigate the socio–religious information provided in the book of Amos.44 Dines and Coggins are among a group of scholars who emphasize the social production of literature attributed to prophets and not the social phenomenon of prophecy itself. Michael H. Floyd writes that scholars must differentiate the history of prophecy from the history of the prophetic books; as well, he asserts that the history of prophecy is not the same thing as the history of the books of prophecy. He also comments that the tendencies of scholars to see prophetic books as composed by prophets or containing transcripts of prophetic pronouncements pre-empts critical discussion on the paucity of evidence for schools of prophetic disciples.45 Christopher R. Seitz writes: In sum, the model which explained peculiarities in the prophetic literature of the preexilic period by seeking its origin in oral speech and secondary redaction must be set aside at this juncture in Israel’s history, given new developments in prophecy and the prophetic literature. Now the prophet plays a role in the depiction of the literature, rather than giving rise to that literature as original oral speaker. It is the word of God, as such, that seeks a hearing, through whatever narrative features assist in this goal (vision, angelic voices, prophetic response, divine speech to prophet and other ﬁgures in the divine realm).46

This, in turn, is part of a larger movement that regards the ‘Israel’ depicted in the biblical texts as a composite portrait of a nation and its history. As Philip R. Davies writes, ‘biblical Israel is a problem, and not a datum, when one engages in historical research’.47 Biblical Israel is a construct of attributive language laden with ethnic, ethical and theological values. The Hebrew Bible offers an ‘imagined Israel’ and the historical critic has a signiﬁcant task to understand the conceptual framework 43 Jennifer M. Dines, ‘Amos’, in John Barton and John Muddiman (eds) Oxford Bible Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 581–90. 44 Richard James Coggins, Joel and Amos (NCBC; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 2000), pp. 76–7. 45 Michael H. Floyd, ‘“Write the Revelation!” (Hab 2:2): Reimagining the Cultural History of Prophecy’, in Ehud Ben Zvi and Michael H. Floyd (eds) Writings and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy (Symposium; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000), pp. 103–43 (104, 126). In the same volume, James L. Crenshaw, ‘Transmitting Prophecy Across Generations’, pp. 31–44 (31–2), comments that the axiom that the biblical prophets addressed historical situations is inadequate because it is an obstacle in viewing the transmission of the literature. See also Philip R. Davies, ‘The Audiences of Prophetic Scrolls: Some Suggestions’, in Stephen Breck Reid (ed.) Prophets and Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Gene M. Tucker (JSOTSup, 229; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1996), pp. 48–62; Ben Zvi, ‘Studying Prophetic Texts’. 46 Christopher R. Seitz, ‘The Divine Council: Temporal Transition and the New Prophecy in the Book of Isaiah’, JBL 109 (1990): 229–47 (234). 47 Davies, In Search, pp. 36–9.

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shaping this imagined nation.48 This includes a legacy of prophetic spokespersons for the national deity. The real starting point for historical interpretation of the prophetic texts, then, is an enquiry into how they articulate religious and national symbols. Emphasis should shift from recovering the social reality of the so-called ‘classical prophets’ to the way a selection of material attributed to ancient prophets became ‘classics’. As noted already, other ancient near eastern cultures preserved records of prophetic oracles. The bulk of our evidence comes from Mari and Nineveh.49 None of the extant texts show anything like the scope of compilation, redaction and interpretation that eventually produced the Hebrew Bible. Only the beginnings of such a process can be found in the collections of oracles to Esarhaddon. Despite this, Martti Nissinen ﬁnds in it a model to explain the beginnings of the biblical prophetic literature.50 More recently, Nissinen has tackled the development of the unique genre of ‘prophetic book’ extant only in the Hebrew Bible. He argues that this genre was a reaction to the crises caused by the fall and reconstruction of Jerusalem. Nissinen observes that the latter would have been almost as traumatic as the former.51 ‘As a consequence, prophecy became a theological concept with the whole corpus of authoritative literature as the sounding board.’52 The minimal linkage of the prophetic texts to the Bible’s historical narratives suggests to some that these links may well be redactional. It would be wrong, they argue, to take the information provided in the superscriptions at face value.53 Regardless of whether the Bible contains material that goes back to historical prophets, it is best to see the corpus as articulating a legacy of ancient prophets and in so doing, interpreted history as the working out of divine plans and judgements.54 48 Linville, Israel in Kings, pp. 16–37. Of course, this does not mean there was no ‘historical Israel’. Davies, In Search, clearly delineates between the biblical and historical Israels, as well as ‘ancient Israel’, the academic construct. 49 As attested by the number of collections of paper and monographs over the past several years: Martti Nissinen (ed.) Prophecy in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context: Mesopotamian, Biblical, and Arabian Perspectives (Symposium; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000); Martti Nissinen, References to Prophecy in Neo-Assyrian Sources (SAAS, 7; Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 1998); Ehud Ben Zvi and Michael H. Floyd (eds) Writings and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy (Symposium; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000). 50 Martti Nissenen, ‘Spoken, Written, Quoted, and Invented: Orality and Writtenness in Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy’, in Ben Zvi and Michael H. Floyd (eds) Writing and Speech, pp. 235–71 (245–54). See, too, Martti Nissinen with contributions by C.L. Seow and Robert K. Ritner, Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East (WAW, 12; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), pp. 97–124. 51 Martti Nissinen, ‘How Prophecy Became Literature’, SJOT 19 (2005): 153–72 (155–61). 52 Nissinen, ‘How Prophecy Became Literature’, p. 161. 53 Philip R. Davies, Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures (LAI; Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox, 1998), p. 117; Robert P. Carroll, ‘Inventing the Prophets’, IBS 10 (1988): 24–36; Ben Zvi, ‘Studying Prophetic Texts’. 54 John Barton, Oracles of God: Perception of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1986): 115–16, 273, speaks of a ‘prophetic age’ expressed in biblical literature. Edgar W. Conrad, ‘Messengers in Isaiah and the Twelve: Implications for Reading Prophetic Books’, JSOT 91 (2000): 83–97, argues that the Book of the Twelve

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Nissinen writes that ‘the prophets appear as paradigmatic ﬁgures of the shared past of the Second Temple community’ while Davies thinks that a ‘further aspect of this negotiation between historiographical and “prophetic” literary collections is the production of the idea of “prophecy” as an institution of divine guidance of national history, an idea visible in the “Deuteronomistic” materials.’55 The scribal institutions of Jerusalem likely included both the authors and audiences of the prophetic scrolls and these writers would have had some role in the education of the larger population.56 Davies links the production of prophetic books to the scribal institution and highlights the promulgation of political ideology along with intellectual reﬂection as being primary religious modes of expression of these writers in the context of their profession. Davies sees the archiving activities of the scribes to be of great importance and he surmises that as old prophetic oracles were copied, categorized and collected, interest in them also grew. With scribal embellishment, he asserts, they became literary texts. While he writes that ‘such literary “prophecies” ’ may have also been produced in the post-monarchic periods, he wonders if the source for these may have been in the scribal curriculum.57 Michael H. Floyd disagrees with Davies that the production of prophetic books may be restricted to scribal schools, noting that there may have been non-academic contexts for writing and prophetic texts, such as cultic spheres. He notes that Davies himself links scribes elsewhere in the ancient Near East to temples and rituals and sees them engaged in magic and the writing of mythology. Floyd is also quick to disagree with Joseph Blenkinsopp who also links scribes to non-religious institutions.58 The expression ‘mantic scribalism’ is used not only to describe the origins of apocalyptic texts but also a range of texts considered in some way ‘prophetic’, including histories, collections of oracles, and psalters. Scribes, both within and outside of their academic functions, could serve as prophets, writing and studying ‘in order to discern divine involvement in human affairs’.59 The overlap of scribal and prophetic activity explains two important developments. First, oracular speeches were studied in written form, constructs a prophetic history spanning the Assyrian period to the restoration of the Temple in the Persian period. See also Erhard S. Gerstenberger, ‘Psalms in the Book of the Twelve: How Misplaced Are They?’, in Paul L. Redditt and Aaron Schart (eds) Thematic Threads in the Book of the Twelve (BZAW, 325; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 72–89 (83–7). 55 Nissinen, ‘How Prophecy Became Literature’, p. 156; Philip R. Davies, ‘“Pen of Iron, Point of Diamond” (Jer 17.1): Prophecy as Writing’, in E. Ben Zvi and M.H. Floyd (eds) Writings and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy (Symposium; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000), pp. 65–81 (77), emphasis original. 56 For example, Davies, ‘Audiences of Prophetic Scrolls’, p. 49; Davies, Scribes and Schools, p. 116; Nissinen, ‘How Prophecy Became Literature’, p. 160. 57 Davies, Scribes and Schools, p. 18. 58 Floyd, ‘Write the Revelation’, pp. 132–40, referring to Davies, Scribes and Schools, p. 18, and Joseph Blenkinsopp, Sage Priest Prophet: Religious and Intellectual Leadership in Ancient Israel (LAI; Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox, 1995), pp. 33–4. Floyd cites for support Lester L. Grabbe, Priests, Prophets, Diviners, Sages: A Socio–Historical Study of Religious Specialists in Ancient Israel (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1995), p. 180. 59 Floyd, ‘Write the Revelation’, p. 142.

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with annotations and expansions. Rewriting was itself a prophetic reinterpretation. Secondly, it explains the canonization of a select group of theologically normative texts. Prophets were needed to discern those texts of importance in explaining divine actions such as exile and restoration.60 James L. Crenshaw describes the early transmission of prophetic material as attempting to adapt the texts to new situations and to ‘wrest their hidden meaning by hook or by crook’.61 That this was something of a struggle is indicated in Num. 12:68 where Moses’ message is claimed to be clear while other prophets are said to speak only in enigmas. Given limited literacy and frequent oral transmission of traditions, the written word had connotations of divine power and religious leaders would have used this to their advantage. The result was an increased emphasis on books whose origins were thought to be divine. The multivalence of the prophecies may also have led to the decline of prophecy as they were open to competing interpretations.62 This open-endedness, however, may have led to applicability of the texts to new and different situations, thus providing reasons to preserve the texts as a living tradition, not to mention efforts by interested parties to claim to have the ‘proper’ interpretations. In this way, the ambiguity played into the dynamics of the literati seeking high social and religious status.63 Ben Zvi bases his notion of the ‘brokers of divine knowledge’ on the model of Deut. 17:18 and Ezra 3:4. They presumably were at least partially accepted: they could not exist on their own, requiring certain resources to function. In return, they acted as intermediaries between the written word of God and its interpretation on the one hand, and the larger population on the other. Their efforts would have communicated something of the divine presence both in the perceived history of the people and in their immediate circumstances.64 The written text became a ‘material symbol of YHWH’s word and teaching, as well as a source of communal memory’.65 As ‘animators’ of the prophetic characters they identiﬁed with both the prophetic voices and with Yahweh.66 Based on the opinion of Ben Sira in 39:1, 6, that the man of wisdom who studies the ancient prophecies is given a spirit of intelligence by God and will make his own pronouncements, Nissinen argues that the scribe would ‘assume a role closely related to prophecy: the inspired exercise of wisdom becomes an act of divination: “I will again pour

60

Floyd, ‘Write the Revelation’, pp. 142–3. Crenshaw, ‘Transmitting Prophecy’, p. 37. 62 Crenshaw, ‘Transmitting Prophecy’, pp. 38–42. 63 Ben Zvi, ‘Studying Prophetic Texts’, p. 133. 64 Ehud Ben Zvi, ‘Introduction: Writings, Speeches, and the Prophetic Books—Setting an Agenda’, in Ehud Ben Zvi and Michael H. Floyd (eds) Writings and Speech in Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy (Symposium; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000), pp. 1–29 (8–12). 65 Ben Zvi, ‘Introduction’, p. 13. 66 Ben Zvi, ‘Introduction’, p. 14. Lester L. Grabbe, ‘Prophetic and Apocalyptic: Time for New Deﬁnitions—And New Thinking’, in Lester L. Grabbe and Robert D. Haak (eds) Knowing the End from the Beginning: The Prophetic, The Apocalyptic and their Relationships (JSPSup, 46; London, New York: T. & T. Clark, 2003), pp. 107–33, also considers it possible that the scribes may have acted as visionaries in their own right. 61

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out doctrine like prophecy … and bequeath it to future generations” ’ (Ben Sira 24:33).67 Much work remains to be done regarding the social contexts in ancient Judah and Israel in which religious writings were composed and transmitted. Presumably, the literate classes were not all of one mind on any given theological, political or ethical issue. Yet, given the diversity of work already done, it is possible at least to generalize and say with some conﬁdence that deep thought went into the material now preserved in the Hebrew Bible. I think it is reasonably safe to build interpretations on the assumption that these texts were the result of complex discourses. More speciﬁcally, the writers, transmitters and re-writers sought to address theological, political, social and ethical issues by teasing from the received texts maxims, role models, examples and precedents, not to mention insights into the mind and nature of God. They adapted the texts to reﬂect their own thoughts and reﬂections. Not only were texts themselves transmitted and changed, but new forms of texts arose, including lengthy historiographical works and prophetic books. Although the sort of mythological texts known from other ancient near eastern societies fell by the wayside if they ever were part of Judah’s and Israel’s literary repertoire, I think it is also fair to say that the new forms of literature that arose in their place do not reﬂect a fundamentally different, ‘non-mythological’, mindset or consciousness, but merely a different kind of mythology addressing a different society with a different religious heritage. The ‘divine guidance’ of history reﬂected in this allows us to speak of ancient Israel’s historical imagination as mythic in nature. The biblical narrative, from creation to the restoration of Judah after the exile, remains a unique kind of literature in the ancient near eastern world but, like more widely recognized forms of mythology, it tells of cosmic and national origins. It provides national, ethnic and religious identity both through positive markers of ‘who is an Israelite’ and through the construction of the ‘other’: other nations, other customs, other gods. It is fair to say that in the second temple period, the now biblical prophets were signiﬁcant culture heroes, enshrining the values of faith and obedience in a past that tradition taught was marked by apostasy, violence and hardship. The eponymous ﬁgures of the Latter Prophets appear to me in some ways like the prophets that Shakespeare’s Welsh Captain mentions: symbols of fearful change as much as announcers of it. But they are more than that too; they are also vehicles for meditating on a variety of profound religious concepts, and they became the objects of contemplation themselves.68 Within the prophetic corpus many mythical tropes can be found. Crenshaw comments that besides highlighting a number of themes, the transmitters of prophetic literature also ‘reﬂected on mythic adumbrations of familiar notions (the garden or vineyard of YHWH)’ (as in Isaiah 5, 27), or ‘elevated the linguistic

67

Nissinen, ‘How Prophecy Became Literature’, p. 160. For Micah as a model for later readers, see Harry P. Nasuti, ‘The Once and Future Lament: Micah 2:1–5 and the Prophetic Persona’, in John Kaltner and Louis Stulman (eds) Prophecy in the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honour of Herbert B. Huffmon (JSOTSup, 378; London: T and T Clark, 2004), pp. 144–60. 68

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register to the lyrical (utopian visions of Zion)’.69 One famous example is Isaiah’s references to Yahweh’s battle with the serpent Leviathan (Isa. 27:1), which is based on a widespread near eastern motif of a divine battle with the forces of chaos, linked to ancient cosmogonies.70 Mythological motifs within many biblical texts were once seen as survivals from earlier ideas. These had not been fully effaced from ancient Israel’s new and unique linear and ‘historical’ consciousness that had broken the repetitive cycle of mythology. This perception has been under attack from a number of quarters.71 At least some oracles against foreign nations have been inﬂuenced by mythic traditions, but not, according to John B. Geyer, those in Amos 1–2.72 Larger expanses of text in prophetic books may follow the plots and motifs familiar from ancient near eastern mythology. This too, has been recognized previously. For instance, Ronald Simkins bases his analysis of Joel on the ancient near eastern combat myth that he ﬁnds provides a pattern for the shaping of the whole book.73 I propose that there is a more fundamental level to the mythology of the prophetic texts. It is worth regarding the wide diversity of traditions about Yahweh’s legitimate prophets as exemplars of a general ‘myth of the ancient prophet’ who is on a mission to warn and or pronounce judgement on an apostate people, a disclosure of the horrible consequences they are facing, and vision of a new found prosperity for the pious, if only after enduring tremendous hardship and loss. The ancient prophets were often ignored by the people; or the people were led astray by ‘false’ prophets speaking lies. Each eponymous prophet is an implied ‘myth-maker’, and is himself the product of a mythical construction of Israel’s and Judah’s history. The ‘myth of the ancient prophet’ pattern is represented in biblical literature in a number of ways. At times it is evidenced in texts like 2 Kings 17, which recalls how God sent his servants the prophets to warn Israel and Judah, only to have their warnings spurned (vv. 13–14). The book of Amos not only recalls the silencing of the prophets (2:12), but Amos is banished himself (7:10–13). The traditional ﬁgure of the prophet is manifested in many guises and forms of literature such as Isaiah, Moses, Elijah or Hosea. Of the prophetic books themselves, each is unique in its own right. Most have the mythic element of the struggle against chaos: the prophet’s words oppose a corrupt or apostate power. The individuality of each text, however, 69

Crenshaw, ‘Transmitting Prophecy’, pp. 43–4. Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1–39: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB, 19; New York: Doubleday, 2000), pp. 372–3. David Tsumura, Creation and Destruction: A Reappraisal of the Chaoskampf Theory in the Old Testament (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005), attempts to undermine the common perception that many biblical passages have little if anything to do with the Chaoskampf myth. His exegesis of the creation accounts in Genesis is detailed and painstaking, but his dismissal of other references to Yahweh’s defeat of the sea, Leviathan, and Rahab (Pss. 74:13–14; 89:10–11 (Eng. vv. 9–10); Job 3:8 and Isa. 27:1), as purely metaphorical (however much the metaphor developed from knowledge of the myth-type) is less than convincing. 71 N. Wyatt, ‘The Mythic Mind’, SJOT 15 (2001): 3–61 (11); Paas, Creation, p. 104. 72 John B. Geyer, ‘Mythology and Culture in the Oracles Against the Nations’, VT 36 (1986): 129–45. 73 Ronald Simkins, Yahweh’s Activity in History and Nature in the Book of Joel (ANETS, 10; Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991). 70

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is not really a sign of inconsistency or contradiction, but of alternative instantiations of traditional paradigms on which to hang diverse meanings. The collection seems to be greater than the sum of its parts, producing not only an anthology in which each component carries meaning but a composite history of eternally relevant divine revelation. We may see in the prophetic texts a reshaping and re-articulation of beliefs about divine power, human society and destiny, all cast as the oracles and other pronouncements of the prophets of old. New forms of social and eschatological myths are expressed in which primordial powers of creation are brought into discussions of sin, punishment and restoration. These are set in the past but often their imagery is projected into the future. In the Book of the Twelve this is sometimes in the form of the important theophanic conception of the impending ‘day of Yahweh’. I follow Nicholas Wyatt who links the biblical texts to the ideological formation as an expression of ‘mythological mode of thought’ that embraces every form of religious narration and allusions to narratives.74 Myth is not to be restricted to speciﬁc genres or styles or writing, especially if one is employing a more universal sense of the term or looking cross-culturally. Thus, it achieves nothing to declare, for example, that Genesis 1–11 is not truly mythic because it is written in prose and not the poetic forms employed by Israel’s ancient near eastern neighbours, or that only one deity appears and not the hosts of gods and goddesses known from other religious systems. It is still quite common to ﬁnd deﬁnitions of myth that stress their narrative setting in the primordial, sacred past that is outside of conventional human history. Stefan Paas in his recent book, Creation and Judgement, asserts this in regards to Genesis 1–11.75 I seriously question the necessity of a ‘time out of time’ for myth. While a sharp dichotomy between human and primordial time might work well in analyzing the religious conceptions of some cultures, we cannot assume the same for all cultures. There is, for example, a chronological link made in Genesis between the creation passages and the subsequent ‘history’. Paas himself writes that history can be considered mythic in scope when ‘it is considered to be determinative for the present’, as in the case of exodus informing the understanding the return from exile.76 I agree with Leonard L. Thompson, who writes that the Jordan crossing episode in Joshua ‘constitutes a separate, interdependent verbal symbol system that contributes directly to Israel’s construction of reality’ and, as such, is myth.77 The land in Joshua has a metaphorical component; it represents the totality of social order and its occupation represents the ordering of the cosmos from chaos.78 Rather than a speciﬁc genre of writing, or one with speciﬁc kinds of temporal conceptions or setting, I prefer to see mythology as a more encompassing term for the products of culturally speciﬁc modes of thought that articulate relationships between the human, 74

Wyatt, ‘Mythic Mind’, p. 50. Paas, Creation, pp. 103–4. 76 Paas, Creation, p. 426. 77 Leonard L. Thompson, ‘The Jordan Crossing: Sidqot Yahweh and World Building’, JBL 100 (1981): 343–58 (252). Cf. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Other People’s Myths: The Cave of Echoes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 31, 35. She observes that myths do not by themselves have meanings. They are paradigms by which meaning may be derived; they ‘symbolize themselves’. 78 Thompson, ‘Jordan Crossing’, p. 356. 75

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natural and divine realms employing traditional oral or literary motifs, plots and styles and forms. The events and characters in mythology create a symbolic universe through which the community might understand or even question the foundational patterns of a meaningful life. The setting is often primordial, but in some instances may be seen as trans-historical, or paradigmatic despite being dateable within the society’s own sense of its past. In this sense, even the gospels are examples of this: instantiations of a story that is not just the model, but in some respects, the vehicle for salvation for those who place their faith in it. They have clear links to the primordial, especially the Gospel of John, but are obviously set in the not too distant past of the writers. In the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible, the poetic oracles, intercessions and admonitions, along with the snippets of narrative and vision reports, treat the threatened breakdown of the social and cosmic order. When we engage the literary worlds of the prophetic corpus, we engage their sacral spheres. In Eliadean terms, the texts open a sacred time with the textual geography becoming sacred place: an access point to primordial powers of creation.79 The prophets represent an ideal type of human: the chosen messengers of Yahweh, who are at times even admitted to the heavenly council. The frequent cosmic imagery of creation, of theophany, of monumental social and environmental catastrophe and rebirth afﬁrm that the historically deﬁned prophecies have a connection with primordial powers. In this light, the prophetic text becomes a vehicle for rearticulating the struggle against chaos by reshaping myths of creation, primordial combat, national origins, and eschatology. Amos’ visionary experiences, ‘two years before the earthquake’, is, on the one hand, a speciﬁc moment in the past. On the other hand, it is but a microcosm of the struggle against chaos: so often imagined as the ‘day of Yahweh’. While the prophets have their own ideas of what the ‘day’ was, is, or will be, there is an ‘archetype’ or prototype that each text, within its own independent sacral sphere, manifests as the moment of terrifying change. Mythic discourse may produce speciﬁc genres of oral or written literature, or canons of various prose or poetic material. In other cases, a wide variety of styles, forms and modes of expressions may be employed. Mythic discourses may merge with other forms of discourse. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty comments that myths function only in relationship with one another. This provides a frame in which supplementary meanings can be evoked as well as producing multiple versions of the basic myth. Myths, then, can even survive when the original literary form is lost. A signiﬁcant aspect of this survival process is what she calls ‘meta-myths’, that is, myths about myths.80 These meta-myths are a product of the continuing dialogue a culture has with its mythic inheritance. Her main examples are the many Indian myths about sacriﬁces. Doniger O’Flaherty identiﬁes a pattern in which later myths legitimize the use of substitutes, ﬁrst for human, then animal sacriﬁcial victims.

79

Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (Willard R. Trask, trans.; New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 19. 80 Doniger O’Flaherty, Other People’s Myths, pp. 31, 38.

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Meta-myths, she says, ‘allow a tradition to make innovations without cutting down its roots.’81 Oracular and other revelatory literature is, of course, central in the Bible’s prophetic corpus. These are prefaced with superscriptions and feature occasional narrative passages giving some level historical framework. The addition of these elements to the developing books is part of Judaean ‘meta-mythic’ discourses in which pre-existing mythic, legendary, and historical traditions were reshaped, reconﬁgured and re-valorized according to the rising importance of historical narrative in Judaean expressions of identity. The afﬁrmation of permanent, unchanging tradition against a reality of constant reinterpretation is a well-known paradox of religious thought.82 If there was once a fully articulated combat myth starring Yahweh, it is lost to us. Yet, vestiges of it survive in the biblical materials. The divine defeat of Sea and River, well known from the Baal myths of ancient Ugarit, are not only alluded to in some poetic and prophetic materials, but are written large in the very story of the exodus and the crossing of the Jordan in Joshua. Psalm 74 recalls the creation along with the destruction of Leviathan and other sea monsters while Psalm 77 meditates on the redemption of Israel that saw the waters repulsed as the divine warrior made his way through the sea, placing his people in the care of Moses and Aaron. Psalm 89 links the divine defeat of Sea and River at creation to royal ideology, the Davidic king receiving god-like power to control over the water himself. As Richard J. Clifford writes, ‘the stories of the exodus-land taking and the cosmogonies deserve to be called a “national history” since both tell how a nation/people arose’.83 These compositions apply the divine warrior and combat myths to a variety of paradigmatic and formative events in the history of Israel. They are not combat myths per se, but preserve in other forms a now lost mythic narrative. In the prophetic corpus, themes of creation, divine warfare and guidance of human and natural affairs are written into the setting of a prophet from the past addressing various moral, economic and political circumstances. They become the content of the discourse attributed to these prophets who themselves embody paradigmatic characteristics. They are the ideal humans, representatives of both humanity and God, who mediate between heaven and earth. Old mythic ideas, then, remain current even in the formulation of a radically different kind of literature. Even if the origins of the biblical prophetic literature do go back to real prophets, there remains a mystiﬁcation of the origins of the developed corpus. The scribes who collected, edited and expanded these texts

81

Doniger O’Flaherty, Other People’s Myths, p. 113. She regards Heb. 9:12–14 as a meta-myth of the Last Supper/Eucharist. 82 Doniger O’Flaherty, Other People’s Myths, p. 31; E. Theodore Mullen, Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries: The Deuteronomistic History and the Creation of Israelite National Identity (SBLSS, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), pp. 36–7. Sally F. Moore, ‘Epilogue: Uncertainties in Situations, Indeterminacies in Culture’, in S.F. Moore, B.G. Myerhoff (eds) Symbol and Politics in Communal Ideology (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 210– 39 (221). 83 Richard J. Clifford, ‘Creation in the Psalms’, in Richard J. Clifford and John J. Collins (eds) Creation in the Biblical Traditions (CBQMS, 24; Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1992), pp. 57–69 (60).

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remain invisible to us. The prophetic superscriptions locate the source of the texts with ancient prophets, not later writers. When the literati in the Persian province of Yehud sought to preserve their interpretations of prophetic texts as authoritative, they were forced to revert to tradition itself and add to it anonymously.84 Bernard M. Levinson calls exegesis the vitalizing principle in the stability that a ﬁxed canon of revelation provides, adding that a religion shows its true creativity in how it ‘overcomes’ its canon and yet adapts itself to it. Interpreters innovate but do so claiming that the new interpretation is implicit in the canon itself and that no innovation or transformation has actually taken place. One example he gives is that of modiﬁcation to divine law in Deuteronomy. This results in a paradoxical situation in which the displacement of earlier conception of law is done through associating the innovation with the displaced tradition.85 As for the innovative author, Levinson holds that he ‘renders his own voice silent by attributing that voice to the authoritative source, and thereby emerges all the more powerfully as a true author, thinker and reworker of tradition.’86 Doniger O’Flaherty comments that such ‘cultural amnesia’ concerning the origins of tradition is necessary for mythology.87 She observes how the Indian epics are incredibly complex in such regards. The narrator of the epic Mahabharata, the sage Vyasa, also appears in it as the father of several important characters and performing several religious ceremonies.88 The Indian meta-myths Doniger O’Flaherty discusses deconstruct the ideologies of the previous myth and ritual complexes by re-telling storys in which the symbolic identiﬁcation of the sacriﬁcer with the victim afﬁrmed in older mythologies is actually taken literally in the new account. One modern South Indian example, which has not repudiated animal sacriﬁce, illustrates this and also shows the confused temporal conceptions that can be involved, not to mention the role of the storytelling itself: A Brahmin refused to worship Matangi [a low-caste South Indian goddess]. All kinds of evils came upon his household. When he enquired the reason, he was informed that it was because of his refusal to worship Matangi. He was ordered to take the part of the storyteller in the buffalo sacriﬁce to the goddess, and then, later in the ceremony, to take the part of the buffalo, while his wife would play the part of Matangi. So he was killed, his membrane made into drums, his arms cut off and placed in his mouth, his fat spread over his eyes, and all the other things done to him that were customarily done to the buffalo. Then all the castes worshiped Matangi, and the Brahmin was brought back to life. Then all these things were done to a buffalo, and this was the origin of the buffalo sacriﬁce.89

Within the story world, the embedded narrative of the buffalo sacriﬁce is recounted at a time prior to the origin of that offering. This storyteller assumes the role of 84

Ben Zvi, ‘Introduction’, pp. 13–14. Bernard M. Levinson, ‘You Must Not Add Anything to what I Command You: Paradoxes of Canon and Authorship in Ancient Israel’, Numen 50 (2003): 1–51 (8–10, 36–44, 47–48). 86 Levenson, ‘You Must Not Add Anything’, p. 48. 87 Doniger O’Flaherty, Other People’s Myths, pp. 29–31. 88 Doniger O’Flaherty, Other People’s Myths, p. 149. 89 Doniger O’Flaherty, Other People’s Myths, pp. 108–109, citing Theodore W. Elmore, Dravidian Gods in Modern Hinduism (Lincoln, NE: 1915), pp. 119–20. 85

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the sacriﬁcial animal and he is treated as such. On the other hand, the buffalo then becomes the surrogate for the Brahmin.90 In many cases, confused temporality in biblical literature is explicable in terms of redactional activity. It remains possible, however, that some of this confusion is the result of embodying mythic prototypes within historically situated exemplars. So, too, is this observed with other motifs and ideas. In Amos 2:12, one ﬁnds a complaint concerning Israel’s history of silencing prophecy. This passage may be anticipating Amos’ own banishment from Bethel (7:10–17) but it may also be a reference to the general pattern of the ancient and ignored prophet established not only by the Bible’s prophetic corpus, but by its narrative histories too. We read in Amos 3:7–8 that God reveals his plans to his prophets and that prophecy is the inevitable result of terrifying divine action. In Amos 9:1–2, the prophet is implicated in the destructive action of God himself destroying the cosmos before its eventual recreation. That recreation fulﬁls the prophet’s own earlier pleas for mercy (Amos 7:1–6). Although the text of Amos displays a brilliant literary progression, it has little in the way of chronological exposition to guide the reader. Rather, one is treated to a series of oracles, vignettes and surreal visions in which diverse past, present, future and trans-historical realities are juxtaposed. Symbiosis between heaven, nature, and culture was something recognized by many ancient cultures. In the Ramesside period in Egypt, thrones were sometimes depicted on daises represented by the hieroglyph for ‘righteousness’. The dais was also symbolic of the Primeval Mound, the ﬁrst land to emerge in the primordial sea. The link between divine righteousness and creation is also found in the Hebrew Bible. In Psalm 89:15 (Eng. v. 14), for example, righteousness is declared to be God’s throne (and see also Ps. 97:2).91 If divine righteousness should fail, Paas says that: God’s throne would fall, and with it the basis for his ruling power by means of which He maintains the world and His people. In such a situation, which for Israel was inconceivable, existence itself would become impossible…This connection between justice and order in creation is likely the reason that Israel’s prophets, when addressing the people in the form of a judicial charge, appeal to very fundamental cosmological themes. They call heaven, earth, and mountains as witnesses (Isa. 1:2A; Jer. 2:12; Mic. 6:2).92

One should go further, however, and note how Amos imagines the sweeping away of all things before predicting a new creation in its place. It is not imagined merely on a rhetorical level to add an ominous threat to the prophet’s ethical teachings, but it occurs on an imaginative, literary plane in which the unthinkable becomes reality. Thompson writes of Joshua that the ‘mythic frame thus not only assures the separation of cosmos and chaos, it also fabricates a sacral sphere which surrounds the socially constructed world and acts as a buffer zone between ordered cosmos and threatening creator and sustainer of order’.93 In Amos, however, the ‘sacral sphere’ is permeable; the social world begins to manifest a threatening deity. The frequently 90 91 92 93

Doniger O’Flaherty, Other People’s Myths, p. 109. Paas, Creation, p. 87. Paas, Creation, pp. 87–8. Thompson, ‘Jordan Crossing’, pp. 357–8.

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complex metaphorical constructions and many deliberately ambiguous expressions in Amos combine to shape an alternate reality in the reader’s imagination; these same literary devices also call into question that world’s stability. The ambiguity in language embodies the transformability of the cosmos, and it is in this regard that Amos offers its famous shift from judgement to restoration. This malleability is also evident in the context of another thematic trajectory in Amos. At key points, so-called ‘doxological’ passages or ‘hymn fragments’ depict the theophanic manifestation of the deity in the human realm (4:13; 5:8–9; 9:5–6). These represent a reassertion of sacrality within the natural world that goes far beyond God’s control of political or natural events. Scholars differ on what to call these passages because of disagreements as to when they were added to the book of Amos, their function within it, and how they relate to similar passages in other biblical books.94 Yet, they are recognized as highly signiﬁcant to the structure and over-all imagery of the book. I do not think it wise, however, to restrict their perceived impact on the book to precise delineations of their genre or overly rigid structural analyses. There is a growing ominous atmosphere to the portrayals of the deity as the book of Amos progresses. These ﬁnally lead to Amos’ visionary experiences, his intercession with God and his falling into the deity’s entrapping word plays in Amos 7 and 8. At the same time, human life is increasingly appears to be taking place in ‘sacred space’. Social injustices often have a subtext of cultic or theological errors; domestic and mundane imagery have overtones of cultic, sacred time. Characters almost inadvertently speak of rituals and religious festivals. The climax comes in Amos’ ﬁfth vision (Amos 9:1–2) in which he sees God in a temple and is told to strike a column’s capital to destroy the structure: the world is revealed to be an all-embracing macrocosmic temple while, paradoxically, the efﬁcacy of the divine voice is transferred to the prophet. The writers/compilers of Amos, then, employ the foundational beliefs in ritual efﬁcacy to empower a representation of cosmic renewal and constructive communication between humanity and God. The whole world is brought into sacred transformative space in which even the prophet’s earlier intercession appears to be ultimately effective. Amos’ transformation of the natural world into sacred space operates within a poetic universe that manifests the paradigmatic cosmic temple. As a cosmic symbol in biblical literature, the temple is a reﬂection of the abode of the deity, a ‘heaven on earth’ often associated with mountains. The temple was a microcosm of heaven. In Mesopotamian and Egyptian conceptions, temples were considered the deity’s throne and were placed on the sites where chaos was defeated in the primordial past.95 As Paas notes, Ps. 11:4 describes Yahweh in his holy palace, on his heavenly throne while other texts put his throne on earth. Within the temple, there was no separation between heaven and earth. Psalm 78:68 speaks of God’s selection of the tribe of Judah and of his beloved Mount Zion. The next verse recalls how he built his sanctuary like the high heavens and the eternal earth. Jeremiah 3:17 calls 94

See the lengthy discussion in Paas, Creation, pp. 198–326, and the bibliography there. Paas, ‘Seeing and Singing’, relates these passages to the ﬁve vision reports in Amos. 95 Paas, Creation, pp. 88–9.

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Jerusalem the throne of God while Psalm 24 links creation to the lived reality of the psalmist’s world.96 Paas writes, ‘the act of creation can be depicted in terms of temple construction and vice versa’.97 Psalm 24:7–9 calls on the ‘gates’ and ‘eternal doors’ to lift their heads up high to allow the ‘King of Glory’ to enter. This is clearly associating the ‘mountain of Yahweh’ that the righteous could visit with a primordial temple. The image also calls attention to Jacob’s dream experiences described in Gen. 28:10–19. Terriﬁed, Jacob declares that the place where he had the vision of the ascending and descending angels the ladder or stepped ramp and where the deity appeared beside him is none other than the ‘House of God’ and the ‘Gate of Heaven’ (v. 17). This is the aetiology of how the sacred site of Bethel, the ‘House of El (God)’, received its name. Amos, of course, has something to say about the corruption at this shrine and will learn ﬁrst hand how God’s ownership of this house has been usurped (see especially Amos 7:10–17). Paas argues that Amos 9:6 describes God as ‘He who builds his stairs into Heaven’, arguing from Egyptian descriptions of elevated divine thrones that what is being depicted is God creating a ‘Primeval Mound’, an early step in creating the world. Also associated with this imagery in Amos 9 is a term meaning ‘bunch’ that Paas relates to Egyptian conceptions of bundles of reeds carrying the heavens upward.98 More will be said of this in the ﬁnal chapter but it is worthwhile to note at this point that in Amos 9:11–15, the ‘fallen sukkah of David’ will be restored, which evokes ideas of the Exodus, restored harvests, temples and monarchy. David’s royal line will again rule other nations in God’s name. The earth will burst forth with its produce as Israel is ‘planted in their soil’. 2 Samuel 7:10, part of God’s dynastic promise to David and a response to David’s plan to build a temple, mentions the ‘planting’ of Israel in its place.99 Exodus 15:17 speaks of Israel being brought to and planted in the mountain of God’s inheritance, the place of his sanctuary that he has made. A vision of Yahweh’s temple throne is found in Isa. 6:1–4. Isaiah sees his lord sitting on a high throne, his robes ﬁlling the temple. Not only does God manifest himself, but ﬁery, serpentine and winged entities – the seraphim – attend him as the ‘thresholds’ of the structure shake. So, too, do they shake in Amos’ temple theophany in Amos 9:1. The seraphim in Isa. 6:3 declare God’s holiness, and, according to most translations, ‘the whole earth is full of his glory’ (for example, NRSV) or ‘his presence ﬁlls the earth’ (NJPS). Levenson, however, notices that a verb meaning ‘ﬁlls’ is not present in this verse but rather a noun, ‘fullness’. He offers the translation ‘the fullness of the whole earth (or, world) is his glory’.100 This glory, , is the deity’s ‘divine radiance’ present in the temple. Levenson observes that if his translation is defensible, then Isaiah imagines the world as a divine manifestation of the enthroned deity.101

96

Paas, Creation, pp. 91–2. Paas, Creation, p. 93. 98 Paas, ‘He Who Builds’, pp. 320-21. 99 A negative sense of cultic ‘planting’ is the erection of Asherah symbols, cf. the ban on this practice in Deut. 16:21. 100 Levenson, ‘Temple and World’, p. 289. But see Hab. 3:3 in which God’s splendour ‘ﬁlls’ the earth. 101 Levenson, ‘Temple and World’, pp. 289–90. 97

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As noted in the previous chapter, the word ‘north’ is sometimes also used as a name for Zion, as in Ps. 48:3 (Eng. v. 2). ‘Zaphon’, however, is also the sacred mountain of Ugarit, home of the god El. Isaiah 14:13 mocks the king of Babylon who allegedly attempted to usurp divine prerogative by ascending to heaven and taking a place in the ‘mountain of assembly in the recesses of Zaphon’. Job 26:5–14 offers a glimpse of divine rule, recounting not only God’s primordial battle against Rahab but how he stretched ‘Zaphon’ out over chaos and ‘hangs the earth over nothingness’ (v. 7). In this image, we can see the earth suspended between the heavens and the underworld. Zaphon/Zion, however, exists not only in mythic but in actual geography. The sacred mountain is a ‘cover’ over chaos. It is a microcosm of divine order within the city of Jerusalem. The sacred mountain of Zion and Jerusalem are often imagined as the centre of the earth linking the earth and heaven as in Ezek. 5:5. More importantly, in Ezek. 38:12, God’s enemies will plan to destroy a restored Israel that dwells at the centre or ‘navel’ of the world. Jonathan Z. Smith writes that such cosmic ‘navels’ not only represent the closeness of the earth to heaven at that point by recalling the world’s birth but also the separation of the earth from the heavens.102 Both Bethel and Jerusalem/Zion ﬁgure in Amos. As the book progresses, the veneer of the natural and human-constructed world is stripped away, and behind these sacred sites is revealed to be the true temple, the heavenly abode. The temple is unveiled only to be destroyed, and then recreated as the axis linking heaven and earth is re-established. This locates a means of communion between humanity and the deity, but in so doing also establishes new boundaries between sacred and profane. It may be that casting Amos as a product of metamythic processes allows a real integration of literary and historical criticism. The beauty and enigmas of the language become vehicles for expressing something of the ineffable nature of reality as understood by the ancient writers. What of the scribes who compiled, edited, and transmitted the oracles attributed to the ancient prophets? What parallels did they ﬁnd between their heroes’ relationship with God and their own? How did this perception actually inﬂuence how these writers shaped, or even to some extent invented, the tradition they were transmitting? At the end of the ﬁrst chapter, I surveyed the thought of Sundén as opening a way to think about how characters in religious writing provide a way of interpreting lived reality. Doniger O’Flaherty can add to this discussion: It has often been asserted that our lives are models for myths (to borrow yet another formulation from Clifford Geertz); what is less obvious but equally true is that our lives are often models of myths. The myth supplies an ideal that may be fantastic, impossible to live out literally, but that is no less useful in the construction of our lives. It is a target (positive or negative) that we can never reach, like Zeno’s tortoise, but that establishes the full range of the scale in which we actually live.103

All this implies that the meaning and social function of texts, Amos included, cannot simply be taken for granted. The range of meanings would have been as wide as the 102

Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘The Wobbling Pivot’, in Jonathan Z. Smith, Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (SJLA, 23; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978), pp. 88–103 (98–9). 103 Doniger O’Flaherty, Other People’s Myths, p. 155.

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number of people who had access to them, either for personal reading, or as texts heard in public exposition, and even retold or described afresh from memory in purely oral contexts.104 We cannot be sure that books like Amos were read or discussed publicly, but if priestly scribes mediated divine knowledge, then teaching from books is a very real possibility (although the lessons for the masses may have been ‘dumbed-down’ in comparison with the scribes’ own theological discussions). A small book, such as Amos, might be read or recited start to ﬁnish, although this is not necessarily the way it was presented. A longer text, like Isaiah, could be thought of as a collection intended to be read only in excerpts.105 How much commentary would have followed each recited (or improvised) passage is something that is certainly in the realm of the speculative. More seriously, we cannot even be sure that ancient readers or reciters followed the structural divisions of the (now-biblical) texts identiﬁed by modern scholars. If we are to allow for public recitation, however, it is rather banal simply to assert that the speaker would have tried to convince the audience that the book contains valuable religious insights. Audiences do interact with text, assimilating to themselves the role of the narrator, or of main characters. In terms of a performed text, one should recognize a double audience: the actual hearers, and the characterroles the audience assumes.106 Of course, skilled rhetoricians may try to ascribe roles to their audience, sometimes treating them as if they are the apostate Israelites the prophet himself condemned, and at other times speaking as if the audience and the prophet are in league. The members of the audience, however, may assume, reject, or ascribe roles according to their own sensibilities. This is all part of the negotiation of the meaning of tradition, and is social interaction as much as any political process; negotiations can break down, or progress be made despite disagreement. Was the Persian period a time of unbridled optimism? Probably not. Even though Amos ends on a positive note, as do most prophetic books, we cannot be certain that that ending, even if it is secondary, reﬂected a prevailing opinion that all was well with God’s people and divine judgement had been relegated to history. The elite owned the written words, or was it the words that owned them? For as much as they inscribed their own ideology within it, they produced texts that may have been used against them by any of the populace who heard the stinging commentary of the ancient prophets and felt wronged by the wealthy and powerful. Symbols tend to be slippery items, capable of immense transformations as time and circumstance dictate. And Amos, the sheep-dealer or herdsman from Tekoa, is just such a symbol. The historical and prophetic texts that construct the idea of a prophetic age vilify, or at least criticize, virtually every aspect of the ancient society. And the elite would offer themselves as the guardians of Israel’s religious life, ensuring

104 Interplay between oral and written tradition is evidenced in many other cultures. See, for instance, William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Susan Niditch, Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (LAI; Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996). 105 Davies, Scribes and Schools, p. 122; Barton, Oracles of God, pp. 149–50. 106 Joyce Louise Rilett Wood, Amos in Song and Book Culture (JSOTSup, 337: Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 2002), p. 112.

AMOS AMONG THE HISTORIANS, MYTHMAKERS AND POETS

37

that they would never again deserve exile. The evil kings, corrupt prophets and complacent Israelites of the past became symbols of all that could be wrong with the world. Alongside the scoundrels were a few individuals, including other prophetic ﬁgures, who deﬁed king, priest and popular opinion. Their ghostly voices, recovered and recorded in the temple’s library and scribal school, were beacons shining in the midst of a dark history of God’s brutal vengeance. These voices were offered as symbols of communion with God and of his everlasting links to Israel. But whatever institutional agenda may have motivated the biblical texts per se, the social meaning of these texts cannot be reduced solely to that agenda. Once the guild of scribes released it to the hearing and, one might add, good memories, of the population as a whole, they would have lost at least some control over its characters, and once Amos of Tekoa became a symbol for one disillusioned scribe’s own life-story, then Amos’ words once again might be heard in deﬁance of the highest authority in the land.

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PART II Speech and Theophany

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Chapter 3

The Words of Amos: Amos 1:1–2 The ﬁrst four chapters of Amos take the reader from the introduction of Amos as the receiver of revelation to the theophanic celebration of the divine name of the ﬁrst of the so-called ‘doxologies’. This long section has many twists and turns, with the mind’s eye surveying a landscape of war and atrocity; a place ravaged by divine retribution. The prophet stands in the middle between God and humanity and between the reader and the literary cosmos. The series of oracles contain a number of rhetorical traps that not only catch the conscience of our prophet’s audience and us as readers, but also of the prophet himself. Amos 1–4 covers an expanse of text often taken to contain four separate sections. The ﬁrst two verses of the book, the superscription and so-called ‘motto’, are sometimes understood to introduce the whole of the book and are frequently treated by interpreters as a separate section. The lengthy and formulaic poem denouncing eight nations that follows in Amos 1:3 into chapter 2 is likewise sometimes read as an easily identiﬁable section in its own right. It is constructed of eight similar (albeit not identical) oracles of judgement that are rightly identiﬁed as examples of ‘Oracles Against the Nations’ (OAN) so common in biblical prophetic literature. What is interesting in Amos, however, is that the series ends with an oracle against Judah and then one against Israel whereas the OAN form is usually employed in the Bible to declare divine retribution on the enemies of the Israelite nation while predicting salvation for God’s people. In Amos, the oracle-series is tightly patterned, but identifying where in Amos 2 the eighth oracle actually ends is unclear. The ﬁnal oracle does not have all of the characteristic features of the other seven. Instead, it develops into a lengthy and multi-faceted judgement against Israel. For many interpreters, a new section of the book begins with Amos 3 and continues to the end of Amos 6, an expanse of text that is comprised of a variety of other kinds of prophetic oracles. This is justiﬁable but it is necessary here to emphasize a number of themes that develop over the course of Amos 1–4 and this is best done by not imposing too sharp a break between chapters 2 and 3. One of the most signiﬁcant issues to notice in Amos 1–4 is the tension set up between the prophet and God. Most of the section all but ignores Amos as a character. He appears by name only in Amos 1:1, and is referred to in the third person in the second verse. The subsequent oracles provide no details about the life of Amos, nor is Amos even identiﬁed explicitly as the speaker. His own voice blurs or merges with the divine voice. Yet, in a few key places, it seems as if Amos speaks quite independently from God. These tensions are but a part of the inherent tensions at the core of the symbiotic relationship linking the divine, human and natural worlds. Resolution of this disturbed symbiosis is the essential drama of many mythologies. In Amos, the tensions begin in the ﬁrst two verses:

42

AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION 1 The words of Amos, who was among the stockmen from Tekoa, who prophesied1 concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah, King of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam, son of Joash, King of Israel, two years before the earthquake. 2 And he said, ‘Yahweh from Zion roars, and from Jerusalem he gives his voice. The pastures of the shepherds mourn The top of Carmel dries up.’

The superscription of v. 1 provides far more details than is usual in the prophetic corpus. Perhaps this is the result of a merger of two different introductions or that one introduction was subsequently expanded.2 As the text stands now, however, there is an interesting poetic quality to its prose exposition of the prophet. After a single phrase introduces the subject, Amos’ words, the second and third line each begin with the relative pronoun  indicating Amos’ home in Judah and that his prophetic oracles concern Israel.3 This pair of lines is followed by a parallelistic dating formula, placing Amos in ‘the days of’ two particular monarchs. The ﬁnal line adds a third dating scheme but it steps outside of the realm of politics and professions and aligns the ‘words of Amos’ with natural history. Verse 2 picks up on the ﬁrst words of verse 1, moving effortlessly from ‘the words of Amos’ to ‘he said’. In the two pairs of lines of quoted speech in v. 2, the parallelism so characteristic of Hebrew poetry can be easily seen. I have mentioned already the framing structure of beginning and ending with references to mountains, the sacred Mt. Zion and the ‘garden land’ of Carmel that, by Amos 9:3, will take on a more cosmic aspect. Yahweh is the subject of the ﬁrst two parallel lines. The couplet begins with ‘Yahweh’ and ends with ‘his voice’, which provides a framing structure built on the primary concepts in the passage. Each line employs different terms to mark largely the same location and the same action. ‘Roar’ is parallel to ‘give his voice’, a word-pair that will be encountered again. The structure is simpler in the second pair of lines, each of but three words in Hebrew. In these, the verb appears ﬁrst while a two word construction indicating the subject follows. Both deal with the effect of the divine speech described in the ﬁrst pair of lines. Beyond these structural points, however, there is much more to say of Amos’ opening two verses. As is typical in the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic literature, we are introduced to the prophet immediately. As Ben Zvi argues regarding Micah, prophetic superscriptions are integral to the completed books. They are markers of the genre of prophetic books and provide historical settings for the prophetic characters. They are

1 For , ‘to prophesy’, instead of ‘have visions’, see Ehud Ben Zvi, A Historical– Critical Study of the Book of Obadiah (BZAW, 242; Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1996), pp. 12–13, but notice that the same Hebrew root is used to label Amos a ‘seer’ (Amos 7:12). 2 According to many, including Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 117; Jeremias, Amos, p. 11; Park, Amos, p. 71. 3 James Luther Mays, Amos: A Commentary (OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1969), p. 18, holds that the second relative pronoun refers back to the ‘words’ of Amos. Möller, Prophet in Debate, p. 157, convincingly argues that both pronouns refer to Amos. This is grammatically less troublesome.

THE WORDS OF AMOS: AMOS 1:1–2

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signals to the reader how to understand the following content.4 As Yvonne Sherwood and John D. Caputo write, they introduce Amos’ words contained in the book like an ‘irrevocable death sentence.’5 The second verse of Amos gets straight to the point, highlighting the impact of the deity’s words on the world. Often called the motto of the book, Amos 1:2 has been the subject of debate. As is well known, there are numerous connections between this passage and subsequent parts of Amos. Terry Collins ﬁnds a number of thematic ‘threads’ winding through Amos. Leonine imagery and the encountering of Yahweh begin in Amos 1:2. Other threads, such as ‘mourning’ and ‘vegetation’ can also be found there. Collins considers ‘feasting’ another thread, but one should also identify its antithesis: famine and drought as implied in Amos 1:2.6 I would suggest we ﬁnd another thread early on as well, that is, the relationship between the deity and the prophet. Although Paul sees Amos 1:2 as an introduction to the Oracles against the Nations in Amos 1–2, I prefer what is perhaps the more common view that v. 2 is an overture or supplies a primary motif for the whole of the book. Paul links the content of 1:2 to the wider ancient near eastern divine warrior motif in which deities’ voices are able to cause terrible upheaval in nature, and are often described as that of a lion.7 The lion’s roar is a prominent attribute of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible.8 With this in mind, it seems better to link Amos 1:2 to the whole of the book since the destruction of the natural world is a theme not restricted to Amos 1–2. For Park, 1:2 is redactional and, along with the superscription, is meant to guide the reader to interpret the book from a Jerusalem perspective.9 One could also see the verse as an integral part of the imagery of the book, establishing the mythic nature of the material, especially the ancient motif of the divine warrior manifesting himself the voice of the deity that sometimes shakes the earth. One of the many texts found among the ruins of the late second millennium BCE Syrian port city of Ugarit reads, ‘Ba[al gives] forth his holy

4

Ehud Ben Zvi, Micah (FOTL, 21B; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 20–21. Yvonne Sherwood and John D. Caputo, ‘Otobiographies, Or How a Torn and Disembodied Ear Hears a Promise of Death (A Prearranged Meeting between Yvonne Sherwood and John D. Caputo and the Book of Amos and Jacques Derrida)’ in Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (eds) Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 209-39. 6 Terry Collins, ‘Threading as a Stylistic Feature of Amos’, in Johannes C. De Moor (ed.) The Elusive Prophet: The Prophet as a Historical Person, Literary Character and Anonymous Artist (OTS, 45; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2001), pp. 94–104. 7 Shalom M. Paul, Amos: A Commentary on the Book of Amos (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), pp. 38–42. Also see Mays, Amos, p. 21; Jeremias, Amos, pp. 13–14; James Limburg, ‘Sevenfold Structures in the Book of Amos’, JBL 106 (1987): 217–22 (217); Ernst R. Wendland, ‘ “The Word of the Lord” and the Organization of Amos’, OPTAT 2 (1988): 1–51 (9); Möller, Prophet in Debate, pp. 159, 170. 8 Brent A. Strawn, What is Stronger than a Lion? Leonine Image and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (OBO, 212; Freibourg: Academic Press, 2005), pp. 34–35. Strawn describes the lion as Yahweh’s ‘familiar’. 9 Park, Amos, pp. 69–70. 5

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AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION

voice (); the high places of the ea[rth] quake.’10 Möller questions whether Amos 1:2 is theophanic by pointing to a non-theophanic Assyrian text, in which a dog asserts his superior strength over the fox and wolf, likening himself to a lion who can dry up both river and mountain with his bellow. The desiccation of the natural world is only a symbol of the fear the dog instils.11 In Amos, however, the association of this divine voice with Jerusalem and Zion suggests that there is more to the second verse than simply fear or setting an emotional tone for the rest of the book. Certainly by 4:13 the book of Amos turns decidedly towards theophanic imagery; one should not shut the door to the possibility of ﬁnding the start of this thread in Amos 1:2. It should be remembered, however, that the verse is construed as Amos’ speech: ‘He said, “Yahweh roars”’. Möller notes how the direct quote is a strategy to engage the reader with the ﬁgure of the prophet and his message and to lend authority to the passage.12 In Amos 1:1–2 there is no sense of a real tension or struggle between prophet and deity, merely the implication that they have independent voices, even if they appear to want to say much the same sort of thing. This, however, will change. Of course, in Amos 7, the prophet makes a stunning reappearance in the text as the theme of the prophetic encounter with Yahweh comes to a head. The unusual construction opening of Amos, ‘The words of Amos’ instead of the ‘words of Yahweh’ appears more often in the wisdom traditions (for example, the ‘words’ of ‘the wise’, Prov. 22:17; of Agur, Prov. 30:1; of Lemuel, Prov. 31:1; cf Eccl. 1:1).13 Little should be built on this in terms of linking the book of Amos speciﬁcally to wisdom traditions per se. Instead, I think it best to view this construction as accenting the person of Amos for reasons which have to do with the overall themes and trajectories within the book itself. Edgar Conrad suggests this when he relates Amos’ opening to the similar one in Jeremiah. Both books have references to Yahweh’s roaring and giving his voice (Amos 1:2, Jer. 25:30). Both are unconventional in that their respective prophetic characters have nonprophetic occupations (Jeremiah is a priest). Both books are concerned with the fall of kingdoms and temples.14 One could also add that Jeremiah reﬂects on the painful inevitability of prophecy, likening it to an uncontainable ﬁre within him (Jer. 20:9).15 As I will illustrate below, Amos also ﬁnds prophecy impossible to resist. In the ﬁrst two verses of Amos there is the positing of two, not always distinct, voices which will struggle for primacy as the book progresses: that of Amos and of Yahweh. The voices are heard among the clamour of the earthquake mentioned in Amos 1:1. It provides more than information about the date of Amos. It foreshadows the image 10

Paul, Amos, pp. 38–9, citing CTA 4:vii:29–35. Möller, Prophet in Debate, p. 162. 12 Möller, Prophet in Debate, pp. 170–71. 13 Paul, Amos, p. 33. He also notices a similar construction in the historical narratives (‘Affairs of Solomon’, 1 Kgs 11:41; ‘Words of Nehemiah’, Neh. 1:1). 14 Edgar W. Conrad, ‘Forming the Twelve and Forming Canon’, in Paul L. Redditt and Aaron Schart (eds) Thematic Threads in the Book of the Twelve (BZAW, 325; Berlin de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 90–103 (98–9). 15 ‘I said, “I will not bring him [God] to mind, and I will not speak any more in his name”, but it was in my heart—like a ﬁre burning, contained inside my bones. I am exhausted holding it within and I cannot endure.’ 11

THE WORDS OF AMOS: AMOS 1:1–2

45

of destruction wrought by the desiccating roar of the god. This ominous earthquake signals in no uncertain terms that Amos’ words are not his alone; this tension echoes throughout the book. One might also want to relate Jeremiah’s unpleasant encounters with political ﬁgures to Amos’ run-in with Amaziah, the priest of the royal shrine of Bethel. Jeremiah must replace a scroll burned by King Jehoiakim (Jeremiah 36). Ironically, Amaziah’s own accusations to King Jeroboam about Amos seem to embrace the very destructive power implied in the divine speech a prophet is meant to bring to the world. In Amos’ opening two verses, however, this tension between deity and prophet has not come to the fore, but the seeds of it are sown. There is also a pronounced geographical disjunction in Amos 1:1–2. Geography is not neutral in this word-world. It carries tremendous symbolic value. As noted already, Amos, from Tekoa, prophesies against Israel. God roars from Zion and Jerusalem. Jerusalem and Judah will reappear in a few places in the rest of the book, but given the accent in 1:2 on the city as the locus of the divine speech, it is a centre that is strangely hollow: Amos is not from Jerusalem, nor is he ever described as going there. This raises an interesting question: if Amos is the vehicle for the divine voice, what connection has he with its point of origin? The sense of distance is only heightened in Amos 2, when Judah itself is the object of God’s wrath (vv. 4–5). If the voice roars from Zion, then who is its mouthpiece there? The disembodiment of the divine voice, or at least its dislocation to the north via the wanderings of the Tekoan Amos, gives the book’s hero the appearance of being something of a ﬁsh out of water.16 The word goes from Jerusalem without any mention of mediation by the religious authorities in Jerusalem. This elevates the divine voice above being simply the words of the men in charge of the city. Rather, it is autonomous, mysterious, and beyond the control of mere humanity. The very sound of God’s roaring and ‘giving his voice’ from Jerusalem in 1:2 is intimated again in the lions of 3:4 and even 3:8, a passage that clearly raises the question of the prophet’s autonomy. ‘The lion has roared, who will not be afraid, My lord Yahweh has spoken, who will not prophesy?’ One of the more peculiar terms used in Amos 1:1–2 is the reference to the pastures ‘mourning’, a theme that has many reﬂections later in the book. In 1:2 it is in parallel with the reference to the tops of Carmel drying up. The lack of any semantic relationship between these two terms has led some to propose that the Hebrew word  ‘to mourn’ can also have the meaning ‘to wither’, or that, in this instance, it should be emended to a different word with the unambiguous meaning of ‘to wither’, .17 There is, however, no real justiﬁcation for this, as it is carrying the requirements for parallelism to an extreme.18 Personiﬁcation of inanimate things is hardly rare in the Hebrew Bible. Joel 1:9–12 richly plays off the contrasting

16 Carroll, ‘Inventing the Prophets’, pp. 29–30. Carroll points out that none of the prophets who have a biblical book named after them are said to come from Jerusalem, and the reason why must remain a mystery. 17 Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 125; J. Alberto Soggin, The Prophet Amos: A Translation and Commentary (London: SCM, 1987), p. 28. Hayes, Amos, p. 62, has ‘languish’ while Jeremias, Amos, p. 11, have ‘mourn’. 18 David J.A. Clines, ‘Was There an  II “Be Dry” in Classical Hebrew’, VT 42 (1992): 1–10.

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imagery of desiccation and mourning. In Lam. 1:4, the roads to Zion mourn because no one attends the festivals, and the city walls lament in 2:8. Mourning becomes a signiﬁcant theme in Amos. The verb reappears in Amos 5:16, in which the farmers or husbandmen are called to mourn alongside those trained in lamentation. The potential personiﬁcation of the land and the association between the land and its inhabitants of 1:2 is evidenced in Amos 8:10 in which the land trembles and its inhabitants mourn. In 9:5, the mourning of the land’s inhabitants again is predicted when Yahweh touches the earth and it melts. Möller, who still holds to some nuance of desiccation in the term, points out that even ‘to dry up’ (root ) can be used to refer to distress or death as in Ps. 22:16 (Eng. v. 15); Job 14:11–12; Ezek. 37:11; as such, we can see that either verb in Amos 1:2 can ﬁt both subjects, the pastures and summit of Carmel. The combined image is one of intensiﬁcation, since Carmel, mentioned second, is a powerful symbol of fertility.19 The desiccating roar of the creator God that makes the land mourn is an ominous opening to the book. This god is death, the landscape shattered by an earthquake that seems to shatter the very language out of which our literary universe is created. The reader encounters the theme of ‘overturning’ (Hebrew ) what was and was it expected is encountered time and again; it both orientates and disorientates the book.20 Before the ﬁnal turn of fortunes in the closing verses, the full implications of that terrible voice will be played out. Amos describes the voice. But who is he, and what is it like to be driven from one’s own home to a hostile kingdom to deliver a word of doom? These are the kind of issues about which the book itself has much to say, albeit only under the surface of its brutal accusations and predictions.

19

Möller, Prophet in Debate, p. 164. He also points out that both verbs are employed in Jer. 12:4 and 23:10. 20 Sherwood and Caputo, ‘Otobiographies’, pp. 210–11.

Chapter 4

Eight Nations: Amos 1:3–2:16 3 Thus said Yahweh, ‘For the three rebellions1 of Damascus and for four,  [I will not return/withdraw it/him]2 On account of their threshing Gilead with iron sledges 4 I will send ﬁre against the house of Hazael3 And it will devour the citadels4 of Ben Hadad. 5 I will break the bar of Damascus5 and cut off the ‘one enthroned’6 in the Valley of Sin7 and the sceptre-bearer from the ‘House of Delight’ [Beth-eden].8 And the people of Aram will be exiled to Kir.’ Said Yahweh.

So begins a long series of formulaic oracles against eight nations that runs to the close of Amos 2. This initial oracle is followed by 1:6–8 concerning Gaza and the Philistines, while vv. 9–10 see ﬁre directed at Tyre for its offences. Edom does not escape punishment for its sins according to 1:11–12 and neither do the ‘Sons of Ammon’ (vv. 13–15). Chapter 2 continues in a similar vein, pronouncing doom and exile on Moab and its king (2:1–3). The three and four sins of Judah ensure that they, 1

The term here can be used of political revolutions as well as religious transgressions. See James R. Linville, ‘What Does “It” Mean? Interpretation at the Point of No Return in Amos 1–2’, BibInt 8 (2000): 400–24, for more on this enigmatic expression and the scholarship it inspired. 3 2 Kgs 10:32–3 says Hazael destroyed Gilead. Paul, Amos, pp. 50–51, observes how in Amos’ oracle Hazael and Ben Hadad are probably used to refer to two different dynastic families of Aram and not the monarchs themselves. 4 Hebrew  may refer to either palaces or fortresses. The word is very similar to the name ‘Aram’ of which Damascus is the major city. 5 A reference to the bar sealing the city gates. 6 The participle may be read as ‘one dwelling’ or the ‘the one sitting’ but notice the obvious parallelism with ‘scepter-bearer’ in the next line. 7 ‘Sin’ is from , that can also mean ‘nothingness’ or ‘disaster’. The word used sometimes to name infamous places. In Amos 5:5, Bethel with its heterodox shrine will become ‘nothing’. Bethel is even named ‘Beth-awen’ (‘House of Sin’) in 1 Sam. 13:5; 14:23; Hos. 4:15; 5:8; 10:5 and elsewhere. Paul, Amos, pp. 52–3, and Jeremias, Amos, p. 17, ﬁnd a comparable derogatory reference here in Amos. 8 A place on the Euphrates River called bit-adini is simply ‘Eden’, in 2 Kgs 19:12; Isa. 37:12; and Ezek. 27:23. Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 129, and Jeremias, Amos, p. 17, are right to emphasize the sarcasm in Amos 1:5 behind the word’s meaning, ‘delight’ or ‘luxury’ (cf. the garden in Genesis 2–3). 2

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too, will not escape the ﬁre (vv. 4–5). In these oracles many phrases are repeated verbatim (or nearly so) and form structural elements in the poem. Interpreters have spent considerable effort attempting to understand the exceptions to the patterns and very often diachronic solutions are offered. Of course, other scholars have found such solutions to be forced. For instance, Robert B. Coote’s ‘C’ editor is said to have added three oracles to an original ﬁve. Judah’s mention reﬂects the reality of its fall to Babylon, while Tyre and Edom are mentioned because they are Judah’s ‘most vehement mercantile competitors’.9 On the other hand, Shalom Paul has made the case that all oracles are original.10 Regardless of that debate, the structural features and formulae of the oracles require some discussion. Variations within the series are also interesting from a synchronic point of view. A number of distinct structural elements are usually identiﬁed. Below I adapt the presentation of Andersen and Freedman and that of Möller.11 Variations in some of these follow two distinct patterns, labelled ‘A’ and ‘B’. 1. A divine speech formula, ‘Thus says Yahweh’, introduces each oracle. 2. A ‘graded numerical sequence’ (three and four rebellions) provides the justiﬁcation for divine punishment. Only the name of the accused changes from one oracle to the next. 3. An example of these sins is given in each oracle and this is introduced by the preposition , ‘on account of’. The oracles with shorter descriptions of sin are pattern A, while the expanded ones are pattern B. 4. In each case but the last (against Israel), there is an announcement of a punishing ﬁre. The ﬁre will ‘consume’ the ‘citadels’. 5. The pattern A oracles have a lengthened punishment following the references to ﬁre, while those with lengthy accusations of sin have relatively short punishments (B). 6. A formula declaring the oracle to have been spoken by Yahweh (or Adonai Yahweh in 1:8) closes pattern A oracles. Two pattern A oracles appear ﬁrst (against Aram and the Philistines), followed by two B oracles (Tyre and Edom). The next two oracles, concerning Ammon and Moab, follow pattern A. The Judah oracle is pattern B, and at least at the outset, the oracle against Israel follows suit.12 This ﬁnal oracle does not have the formulaic ending. As the Israel oracle proceeds, references are made to the pre-history of the division of the kingdom, and so it may be read as more universal, something also reinforced by the opening two verses of Amos 3.13 The repeated formulae, however, link all of the oracles together. Judah and Israel are depicted as little different from 9

Coote, Amos Among the Prophets, pp. 112–14 (quote p. 114). Paul, Amos, pp. 16–27. Geyer, ‘Mythology and Culture’, pp. 139–40, thinks that the ﬁrst seven oracles, Amos 1:3–2:5, may be secondary. 11 Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. 202–6; Möller, Prophet in Debate, pp. 172–3. 12 It is the B pattern oracles (excepting that against Israel, which follows its own course, in any case) that many scholars ﬁnd secondary. 13 Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. xxviii–xxix, 215, 335; Paul R. Noble, ‘Israel Among the Nations’, HBT 15 (1993): 56–82 (71); Linville, ‘What Does “It” Mean?’, p. 401. 10

EIGHT NATIONS: AMOS 1:3–2:16

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other nations in their behaviour. The sins of the kingdom of Judah and Israel include transgressions against God directly, rather than the crimes against humanity that characterize the offences of the other nations. Moreover, the reﬂections in the poem about Judah and Israel’s history with God set these nations further apart from the others. The continuation of the ﬁnal oracle seems to play off the speciﬁc, ‘northern’ reference to the name Israel, and build up a judgement on the greater ‘Israel’ that would include Judah. It is possible to view all of 1:3–2:16 as a relatively uniﬁed poem within the greater structure of the book. The poem calls to the attention a world deﬁned by endless sin. Each of the nations is condemned for its ‘three and four’ transgressions. This gives an air of intolerable persistence, whether one thinks in terms of the sequence itself, the idea of ‘one sin too many’ for God to overlook or forgive, or in the sum of the two numbers: seven here being a symbol of complete depravity.14 Once the initial decisions as to the meanings of the terms and their allusions are made the repetitions and formulaic structure of the poem seem to lure the reader into a sense of conﬁdence that the composition is easily understandable: a feeling that is ultimately dashed when one delves deeper into it. Modern interpreters have noted at least some aspects of this conﬁdence game. They often interpret the poem according to a scenario in which Amos is haranguing the masses of the northern kingdom of Israel and lures his audience into agreeing that foreign nations deserve a ﬁery fate at the hands of God. This, of course, includes their arch-rival, Judah. He then introduces his real point, the oracle against Israel itself. The force of this surprise ending is to prove to the prophet’s Israelite audience that they, too, are culpable.15 This scenario however, does not actually ﬁt a Persian setting for the book as a whole, since the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel was old news, and the book of Amos as we now know it is probably a Judaean product. Moreover, one should expect a condemnation of Israel in the book, particularly in view of Amos 1:1, which speciﬁes that the prophet denounced that northern realm.16 For his part, Möller’s version of this scenario is more nuanced but requires a monarchic era date to work. He interprets the poem as a literary construct, albeit one whose own rhetorical strategies follow that of the historical prophet closely. Möller is aware that the book as a whole addresses a Judaean audience who is cast in the role of Amos’ audience.17 14

See the different analyses of Robert B. Chisholm, Jr. ‘ “For Three Sins…Even for Four”: The Numerical Sayings in Amos’, BSac 147 (1990): 188–97 (190–94); Meir Weiss, ‘The Pattern of Numerical Sequence in Amos 1–2: A Re-examination’, JBL 86 (1967): 416–23 (419– 23); B. Kingston Soper, ‘For Three Transgressions and for Four’, ExpTim 71 (1959–60): 86–7. 15 Paul, Amos, pp. 76–7; David A. Dorsey, ‘Literary Architecture and Aural Structuring Techniques in Amos’, Bib 73 (1992): 305–30 (306–7). 16 Linville, ‘What Does “It” Mean?’, pp. 407–8. 17 Möller, Prophet in Debate, pp. 194, 215. But see his comments on p. 203 in which he rather illogically historicizes the literary and the rhetorical, stressing that ‘the prophet’s charges must have been well justiﬁed if ever he was to convince his hearers of his position. Thus, Israelite society must have been thoroughly permeated by the kind of social injustice referred to.’ To judge others as guilty simply because there is an accusation is hardly a foundation for law, neither should it be for historical inquiry. The subjectivity of the accusation needs to be taken into account. For a critique of this kind of thinking, see David J.A. Clines,

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Möller rightly observes, however, that the Judaean reader approaches the book with the knowledge that the predicted judgement on Israel has been fulﬁlled with the destruction of the nation in 722 BCE. He says the knowledge that Amos’ attempts were futile only adds to the rhetorical effect of the book on Judah, urging them to repent even if Israel did not. The Judah oracle makes sure that they do not miss the point.18 If one is to favour a date after the fall of Judah, the poem of 1:3–2:16 still has its share of rhetorical traps. The traps play on the tendency of readers to reduce options in interpreting enigmatic phrases, while as the poem progresses, other constructions and intertextual allusions allow an ever increasing number of options, ultimately leading to the possible inversion of earlier suppositions. Before turning to explicate this, however, other issues are pressing. Since Oracles Against the Nations (OAN) are present in many biblical prophetic books, their function in the religious life of ancient Israel and Judah has rightfully attracted a lot of attention. The oracle series in Amos is rather different than most other biblical examples of OAN, according to John H. Geyer. He claims that in Amos 1–2 (and Ezekiel 25) there is no mythological content, only vague historical references and a speciﬁc indictment against the accused which is lacking in the very mythological OAN in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other parts of Ezekiel.19 Geyer uses the term ‘myth’ in reference to ‘accounts of the origin of the cosmos involving god(s) and the continued regency of the divine being(s) over the natural world’.20 A myth, however, need not include a cosmogony. The latter part of his deﬁnition, ‘the continued regency of the divine being(s)’ alone can be sufﬁcient. One should not ignore Amos 1:1–2, which is at least partially theophanic, as setting the tone for the rest. The poem against the nations in Amos establishes a pattern for divine action against Israel. Of the more obviously mythic OAN in other biblical books, Geyer ﬁnds that the principle error on the part of the nations was hubris, of usurping a divine role or status and hence disturbing cosmic order. These oracles can be linked to ritual atonements intended to restore the cosmos through the ‘sacriﬁce’ of the nations which neutralizes the negative, destroying aspects of Yahweh (cf. Num. 16:47, Jer. 46:10; Isa. 34:5–6; Zeph. 1:7).21 In Amos, the poem against the eight nations does not recreate the cosmos at the expense of foreign powers. Rather, the rhetoric is directed in particular at the whole of the Israelite nation. Because the chief cause of chaos is not so much the atrocities of the nations but the sinfulness of Judah and Israel, the sacriﬁce of the nations in the ﬁre is insufﬁcient to appease the offended deity. Atonement requires the sacriﬁce of God’s own people. And so, while ‘Metacommentating Amos’, in David J.A. Clines, Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible (JSOTSup, 205; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1995), pp. 77–93, who complains bitterly of how commentators typically adopt the ideology of the biblical text they are studying to the detriment of academic rigour. 18 Möller, Prophet in Debate, p. 216. 19 Geyer, ‘Mythology and Culture’, p. 129. These references are too vague to link to speciﬁc events, pp. 135–6. 20 John B. Geyer, Mythology and Lament: Studies in the Oracles about the Nations (SOTSM; Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 5. 21 Geyer, Mythology and Lament, pp. 179–81.

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not employing ‘myth’ in the same way as the other OAN, as recognized by Geyer, our poem in Amos plays a role in the greater mythic cycle of the book. It is setting an earthly stage for cosmic processes. The tone is set in the ﬁrst of the oracles. Surely the references to the ‘one enthroned’, and the ‘sceptre bearer’ of Aram and later Philistia (Amos 1:5, 8) provide an image of pomp and perhaps of presumption to divine status too.22 Such insinuations are also evident with reference to the staff or sceptre, the šbet refers to divine rule. In the hymn that closes Micah, God is asked to shepherd his people with his šbet (Mic. 7:14). In Ezek. 27:37 God says he will make the people pass under his šbet, bringing them into the bonds of the covenant. The power roaring from Zion and Jerusalem (Amos 1:2) opposes the rulers who presumed too much. Moreover, one can see Jerusalem juxtaposed with the citadels and houses of these would-be deities. Mount Zion towers over the ‘Valley of Sin’ (Amos 1:5). The exile of Aram to Kir seems at ﬁrst glance to be a divinely sanctioned political deportation. Yet, later in the book we learn that Yahweh brought Aram up from Kir as much as he brought Israel from Egypt (Amos 9:7). Thus, Aram’s exile reverses its ‘exodus’. While the mythic allusions in the ﬁrst oracle are not very plain, the references do begin to pile up as the oracles progress. The sections about Judah and then Israel are particularly mythic, referring to covenant, Law, and the exodus. Above all, myth is often about identity. The questions ‘who is Israel?’ and ‘who is Israel’s god?’ will prove to be prominent in Amos 2. In the poem of Amos 1–2, a primary agent of the transformation of perceived reality is the ambiguity of a number of expressions, the chief of which is the phrase . The two words are the negative particle followed by the verbal root šwb, to which is attached a masculine singular pronoun, -, which identiﬁes the direct object. This pronoun may be understood as either ‘it’ or ‘him’. Given the speciﬁc form of verb employed here (ﬁrst person, singular, imperfect in the  stem) a very literal translation would be ‘I will not cause it/him to return’. The problem is that the verb itself carries many senses and possible nuances, such as ‘to turn’, ‘to withdraw’, or ‘to repent’. Moreover, there is no obvious noun mentioned previous to 1:2 to which - may refer. Some then ﬁnd that it refers to something not yet named explicitly in the book. Interpreters of the phrase have put almost two dozen solutions forth.23 Many scholars understand God to be saying that he will not revoke the word of punishment or punishment itself.24 Some suggest that, more speciﬁcally, the declaration refers back to the voice of God in 1:2.25 Wolff and others say that the announcement of punishment will not to be revoked.26 Others point to speciﬁc things ‘it’ might be, for instance, the ‘day of Yahweh’.27 On the other hand,

22

Paul, Amos, p. 52. See Linville, ‘What Does “It” Mean?’, for a discussion of these. 24 Möller, Prophet in Debate, pp. 178–80. 25 Andersen and Freedman, Amos, p. 235. 26 Wolff, Joel and Amos, pp. 138–39. Cf. Num. 23:20, in which a similar construction (with a feminine sufﬁx) is used by Balaam to say he cannot revoke a blessing. 27 Victor Maag, Wortschatz, Text und Begriffswelt des Buches Amos (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1951), pp. 240, 245–7. 23

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the pronoun can be read as referring to ‘him’, the nations named in the oracles. The grammatical difﬁculties (singular vs. plural, masculine pronouns vs. feminine nations/cities) have been adequately explained by Michael Barré, who argues that God is denying any hope for the accused nations of ever returning to the Davidic Empire.28 There are a number of other options as to what kind of return is denied.29 A return from exile could be envisioned, as exile is a punishment that appears in a few of the oracles of Amos 1 itself (1:5, 15).30 Perhaps teasing the reader into this conclusion are references to some of the accused exiling others (for example, 1:6, 9): let the punishment ﬁt the crime. Another kind of return has also been proposed: God denies that the nations will ever be brought back to him in repentance; this is yet another possible meaning for the verb.31 The slipperiness of the verb is evident in Hosea, too; in 11:5–9, Israel will not return to Egypt but will fall under the suzerainty of Assyria. A little later (v. 9), God says that he will not turn to destroy Ephraim, while at v. 7 God declares that his people depend on his turning back to them in forgiveness, or that the people are bent on turning away from him.32 And yet, God admits that he cannot give his people up and turn to destroy them (Hos. 11:8–9, cf. 14:5–9). The shifting directions implied in ‘to turn / return’ are echoed in God’s own changes of heart. Coote observes that Amos’ is reversible.33 Paul R. Noble has also noticed the shifts. He ﬁnds a dual meaning in the phrase. On the one hand, ‘it’ is the punishment that is to be irrevocable. On the other hand, the enigmatic expression is drastically re-evaluated as a statement that the promise of restoration with which the book ends will not be revoked.34 Interestingly, the word ‘yoke’ has the same consonants as the preposition ‘on account of’ used in Amos, . Amos’ expression ‘on account of three and four rebellions’ might then be read as a reference to a ‘yoke of three rebellions and of four’ that God refuses to remove from the various peoples.35 Lamentations 1:14 speaks about the ‘yoke of my rebellions’, while in the verse immediately preceding, the personiﬁed city of Jerusalem complains that God has sent ﬁre into her bones and she was ‘turned’ back. This is the same verb we see in Amos 1–2 (albeit with the added term ‘back’). It is used with the sense of defeating or impeding someone’s actions. In verses such as Isa. 14:27; 43:13 and Job 9:12; 11:10; 23:13, the verb is 28

Michael L. Barré, ‘The Meaning of l šybnw in Amos 1:3–2:6’, JBL 105 (1986):

611–31. 29 And combinations of things: Anthony R. Ceresko, ‘Janus Parallelism in Amos’ “Oracles Against the Nations” (Amos 1:3–2:16)’, JBL 113 (1994): 484–93. 30 Hayes, Amos, p. 70, citing the great medieval Jewish commentators Rashi, Ibn Ezra and Kimhi. 31 Julian Morgenstern, ‘Amos Studies, Part IV, The Address of Amos-Text and Commentary’, HUCA 32 (1961): 295–350 (314, 337). 32 Many read it as if ‘my people’ are incessantly ‘turning away’ from God (e.g. RSV). Landy, Hosea, p. 140, argues from context that it is more likely that God is saying his own turning is the hope of Israel. 33 Coote, Amos Among the Prophets, pp. 116–18. 34 Paul R. Noble, ‘ “I Will Not Bring ‘It’ Back” (Amos 1:3): A Deliberately Ambiguous Oracle?’, ExpTim 106 (1994–95): 105–9 (108). 35 F. Zorell, ‘Zu Amos 1, 3. 6. usw.’, Bib 6 (1925): 171–3.

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used to ask if it is possible to ‘stop’ or ‘turn back’ Yahweh or his hand. In Amos, a statement such as ‘I will not turn him (the accused nations) back’, is out of the question. It will, however, work with a rhetorical question, ‘Shall I not stop him?’, that is, prevent further atrocities beyond the three and four already committed.36 Of course, if one will entertain a question, it could also be ‘Shall I not bring him back?’ which would lead to the kind of reversibility seen by Coote and Noble. The result is that once a reader looks deeply into the poem, one of its primary refrains is not so much a statement but a riddle. The disorder of multiple meanings is potentially homeopathic. It allows the reader to ﬁnd new resolutions to real world situations. I believe that in the Amos-book such a remedy is to be found in the process of suffering the disorder and confusion in the very process of reading.37 It forces the reader to attempt to make order, even as it continually deconstructs any order created. Yvonne Sherwood thinks that Amos resonates well with the surrealists’ aim of proving that thought is ultimately fragile, that puns can ‘detonate’ convention. All this is to produce an interpretative ‘panic’. She writes: And in the case of Amos, this idea – that prophecy is about dislocating convention, reconﬁguring word–image and God–nation relationships – can be expanded into a whole dislocative poetics of the text. As a trap for the mind’s eye the image concentrates on the book’s obsession with a hysterically multiplying chain of traps.38

While Sherwood concentrates on Amos’ fourth vision (Amos 8:1–3), this chain of traps has its ﬁrst links in Amos 1. The chain progresses through the poem against the nations capturing its reader in its many enigmas, repetitions and reversals. The initial Damascus oracle, translated above (Amos 1:3–5), speaks of terrible atrocities against Gilead. Metaphorically, at least, they have threshed Gilead with iron sledges. But the ﬁrst oracle does not develop any details of this crime or of the suffering of the people of Gilead. Rather, it develops God’s response to the offending population and their rulers. Two dynasties are mentioned by name while the one enthroned and the ‘wielder of the sceptre’ also meet their doom. These will be themes repeated in many of the other oracles, but not in those against Judah and Israel. The morality and destiny of Israelite kings are hardly ever at issue in this book, except in Amos 7. These four references to rulers are intriguing given the reference to the four ‘rebellions’ of Damascus. As a ﬁnal summation in the ﬁrst oracle, Aram is exiled to Kir; but Damascus will be heard from again. Israel will go into exile beyond Damascus (Amos 5:27) while 9:7 says that God once delivered Aram from Kir. And so Aram is to go back to its place of origin, its own exodus reversed, its identity and history stripped away. No less cruel than the sins of Damascus are those the Philistines, and it is to that topic our poem now turns:

36

Linville, ‘What Does “It” Mean?’, p. 414. Walter Redfern, Puns (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 1–26. 38 Yvonne Sherwood, ‘Of Fruit and Corpses and Wordplay Visions: Picturing Amos 8.1–3’, JSOT 92 (2001): 5–27 (12–13). 37

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Thus said Yahweh, ‘For the three rebellions of Gaza and for four, . On account of their exiling a complete exile, To remove [them] to Edom, 7 I will send ﬁre against Gaza, and it will devour her citadels. 8 I will cut off the one enthroned from Ashdod And the sceptre-bearer from Ashkelon. And I will turn my hand against Ekron, And the last of the Philistines will perish.’ Said Adonai Yahweh.

Like its predecessor, this second oracle follows pattern A, with brief detailing of sins. In the ﬁrst oracle, a single crime is mentioned with a single clause: threshing with iron sledges. Here, a deportation is mentioned in two clauses. In the ﬁrst clause, ‘their exiling a complete exile’, ah, the repetition of roots is standard Hebrew fare, but this will not be the last time in Amos that alliteration on the consonants of the word ‘exile’ will be found. Does this exile represent the transport of the ‘threshed’ Gileadites to market? Or has Philistia exiled Aram? The text does not permit us to make a decision. In any case, the victims’ destination, Edom, will prove of great importance. The fate of the accused Philistines, however, is already familiar. Enthroned sceptre-bearers will be cut off. Destruction through the length and breadth of the Philistine lands is evidenced not only by the image of the dying remnant but also by speciﬁc mention of four of the ﬁve Philistine cities (Gath being left out); these four cities are an ironic reﬂection of their four sins.39 Yet, Philistia is also mentioned in Amos 9:7, which likens their exodus from Caphtor to that of both Israel and Aram. Philistia, however, will not have their exodus reversed by an exile but will die. In v. 8, God vows to ‘turn my hand’ against Ekron, ironically employing the same verb as in the enigmatic expression . God will not ‘withdraw’ the punishment against Philistia but instead will ‘turn against’ the guilty. In subsequent oracles, allusions back to God refusing to withdraw his hand add to the wealth of meanings.40 The third oracle, against Tyre, begins at 1:9 with all of the familiar formulae but follows the B pattern with shorter punitive declarations. The short presentation of their crimes, however, recalls the previous two oracles, picking up again on the theme of exile and a number of key terms: 9

Thus said Yahweh, ‘For the three rebellions of Tyre And for four . On account of their removing a complete exile to Edom – And they did not remember the covenant of brotherhood – 10 I will send ﬁre against the wall of Tyre, And it will devour her citadels. 39

On the absence of Gath, which is not unique to Amos’ discussion of Philistine cities, see Paul, Amos, p. 56. 40 Linville, ‘What Does “It” Mean?’, p. 415.

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Tyre’s forgetting the ‘covenant of brotherhood’ is a general theme which is also found in the next oracle. Against the relatively long accusation against the city, Tyre receives only the prediction that ﬁre will be sent to devour its palaces. There is no mention of its rulers, inhabitants, or satellite cities. Yet, the repetition in the previous two oracles that Edom was the destination of the deportees makes this shortening understandable in the light of what is to follow. Given that the book is a Judaean product one might ﬁnd here a subtle critique of Judaean self-righteousness of the fate of the north that never enjoyed a ‘restoration’ along the lines of Jerusalem. The fourth oracle follows the pattern of the third: 11

Thus said Yahweh, ‘For the three rebellions of Edom And for four,  For his pursuing his brother with the sword – And he annihilated his women [or, ‘stiﬂed his mercy’], And his wrath tore ceaselessly, And he keeps his anger without end – 12 I will send ﬁre against Teman And it will devour the palaces of Bozrah.

This is the longest denunciation of atrocities so far in the series and it completes something of a cycle spanning the ﬁrst half of the series of eight. Oracle two complains of Philistine deportations to Edom. So, too, is Edom the recipient of deportees from Tyre. Now Edom herself is addressed. Thus, the ﬁrst half of the eightfold oracular series seems to conclude with an arch-villain being identiﬁed. Its cruelty is depicted with a double entendre. On the one hand, the ﬁrst two lines of the accusation are a parallel construction appearing to speak in terms of the destruction of human life. In the ﬁrst line, Tyre’s ‘brother’ is pursued with the sword. The second line has a peculiar construction referring to the destruction of . This plural noun is often taken to mean ‘his mercy’ or ‘his compassion’. With this meaning, the line provides an excellent parallel with the subsequent references to Edom’s wrath and anger. The same word, however, can also mean ‘womb’ and so on the strength of Judg. 5:3, takes this as a reference to women. The verb used with this word in Amos 1:11, ‘annihilate’, aptly ﬁts the context of brutal killing and offers a good parallel to the previous mention of the sword. This kind of double entrendre, with one meaning providing a parallel with a preceding term and the other with a subsequent one in a three line set, is called Janus parallelism, and is a device quite common in the Hebrew Bible.41 ‘Annihilate’ and ‘mercy’ also appear together in Jer. 13:14. Three of the terms in this accusation against Edom appear in Ps. 78:38 that describes God extending his mercy and withholding his outrage (the terms correspond to the terms I translate above as ‘mercy’, ‘annihilate’ and ‘wrath’. In Amos 1:9–10, then, one may detect another reference to the hubris of foreign rulers, the wording suggesting that the Tyrian king’s rage rivals that of a god.

41

Paul, Amos, pp. 64–6, see, too Shalom M. Paul, ‘Amos 1:3–2:3: A Concatenous Literary Pattern’, JBL 90 (1971): 397–403.

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A number of interpreters notice a connection between this oracle and traditions about Israel and Edom sharing an ancestor.42 The Hebrew Bible elsewhere declares Edom to be the brother nation of Israel, through Esau, the estranged sibling of Jacob (Gen. 25:19–34). In Genesis 27, Jacob steals Esau’s blessing and so is marked to die by the hand of his older brother. Rebecca warns Jacob but also foresees that Esau’s fury will eventually subside. Amos, however, declares that Esau’s rage has never waned. The implied violence against women symbolizes the pain caused to the two nations’ ancestress, a struggle that affected her even before she gave birth to her sons (Gen. 25:21–8). Numbers 20 tells how Israel requested passage through the land of Edom on the way to Canaan. Verses 18–21 record Edom’s repeated refusal including the threat, ‘lest I come out with the sword against you’ (v. 18) and perhaps this is echoed in Amos 1:11. More allusions and direct references to Israel’s ancestral and national myths of origins will be found in Amos 2–3 and, indeed, at other points in the book. For a third time, ﬁre devours the citadels – language stereotypical of the whole series – but no further details or digressions are given. The steady increase in the detailing of the atrocities at the expense of divine retribution (pattern B) should be taken as a rhetorical strategy. Although the text clearly does not imply that divine retribution is tardy in coming, the increasing length of the accusations, not to mention the horrible violence of the crimes themselves, creates a desire for an elaborate retribution. This desire is hardly fulﬁlled with the oracle’s ﬁery refrain, which, stripped of any elaboration, becomes little more than a simple cliché. But now another familiar refrain is taken up again and, once more, the reader is thrust into a world that is both strangely familiar and deeply disturbing: 13 Thus said Yahweh, ‘For the three rebellions of the Sons of Ammon And for four . On account of their ripping open the expectant mothers43 [or ‘invading the mountains’] of Gilead, In order to widen their territory, 14 I will kindle ﬁre on the walls of Rabbah, and it will devour her palaces. With a shout on a day of battle, with a tempest on a day of storm. 15 Their king shall go into exile, he and his princes together,’ Says Yahweh.

Gilead, the hapless victim of Aram’s wickedness in 1:3, suffers again. But like the Arameans, the Ammonites’ punishment is exile. The poem seems to be starting over again, but there is a shift in the pattern as the ﬁre is now ‘kindled’, and not ‘sent’. This temporary change brings to the forefront once again the threat of the ﬂames. Since ‘Sons of Ammon’ is the standard way of referring to the Ammonites in the Hebrew of the Bible, the speciﬁc choice to refer to the people and not places of that land seems to go hand in hand with the description of the atrocity they are charged with. 42

Paul, Amos, pp. 63–4; Jeremias, Amos, p. 30. This horrible image appears elsewhere: see 2 Kgs 15:16; Hos. 13:15 (Eng. v. 16). Paul, Amos, p. 68, gives some extra-biblical attestations as well. 43

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‘Sons’ destroy women who are expecting children of their own. My translation of 1:13 misrepresents the original Hebrew by being excessively wordy. Only four words exist in the Hebrew to describe the action of Ammon against the ‘hills’ and/ or ‘expectant mothers’ of Gilead.44 The monstrous image is produced quickly. The reader must make the space against the rapid ﬂow of the text to appreciate this other example of Janus parallelism. On the one hand, it recalls the previous oracle’s murder of women. On the other hand, it looks ahead to the widening of borders.45 The verb  means to ‘split/break open’, and its root lies behind v. 5’s ‘valley’. It also has military connotations of forcing one’s way into enemy territory (1 Chron. 11:18; 2 Chron. 21:17; 32:1). This verb is sometimes used of Yahweh ‘splitting’ the primeval waters (Prov. 30:20), or dividing the sea during the exodus (for example, Exod. 14:16, 21). In Psalm 78:13 the sea is split, but in v. 15 Yahweh splits rocks to open channels of water. Yahweh’s appearance will shake mountains and split valleys according to Mic. 1:4. Interestingly, Mic. 1:3 refers to the descent of the deity from his heavenly abode and how he will ‘stride upon the high places of the earth’, an image which will be found in Amos 4:13. Although it may be reading too much into the text of Amos, the Babylonian creation myth, Enuma Elish, imagines Marduk splitting open the body of Tiamat, and then using her dismembered corpse to create the cosmos.46 Given the word-play established in Amos 1:13, it is possible to read how the Ammonites have ‘split the hills of Gilead’ as much as a deity might, creating a new land for themselves through the destruction of a maternal symbol of creation. The prediction of Ammon’s fall is relatively elaborate and gives a sense of vindication; the evildoers are now truly getting their just reward. Fire is kindled against Rabbah, whose name means ‘the Great [city]’: poetic and alliterative justice for the violent ‘widening’  of Amman’s borders. The closing couplet in v. 14 not only describes the fall of Ammon, but anticipates a more signiﬁcant theme in Amos: With a shout on a day of battle; with a tempest on a day of storm.

Later in Amos (5:18–20), we will read of the impending theophany of the ‘day of Yahweh’, something that Amos 1:14 appears to anticipate. The term I translate as ‘tempest’ can refer to the emotion of rage (2 Kgs 6:11) but often refers to a divinelysent storm. Jeremiah 23:19 and 30:23 refer to the ‘Storm of Yahweh’ that torments the wicked. The theophany represented in Jer. 29:6 employs three terms from Amos’ Ammon oracle: ‘tempest’, ‘storm’ and ‘ﬁre’. Nahum 1:3 says that the storm and the tempest are Yahweh’s path while the clouds are but dust beneath him. Jeremiah 4:13 likens the divine chariots to the storm. The conﬂation of battle and storm imagery in Amos 1:14, however, lifts the punishment above the level of retribution through 44 Hebrew , is the plural of  ‘hill/mountain’ or is from the adjective  ‘pregnant’ used as a plural noun. 45 Ceresko, ‘Janus Parallelism’, p. 486, but Paul, Amos, p. 68, rules out the connection with hills. 46 Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 253–5. I am not suggesting that a cognate verb is employed in this Akkadian text. Paul, Amos, p. 68, cites CTA 6.ii30–32, and observes how, in the myth of Baal and Mot, the goddess Anat splits Mot (‘Death’), the verb here is an Ugaritic cognate to Amos’ Hebrew term.

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exclusively human agents. Judgement on Ammon has mythic dimensions, and exile of the ruler and his princes is the result (1:15). The seemingly ‘real-world’ deportation of Ammon’s aristocracy does not minimize the mythic nature of the punishment imagined in Amos 1:14–15. In Amos 9:4, death in captivity closes a series of scenarios in which God is describing the total annihilation of his people. The series includes references to Sheol and heaven (v. 2), the top of Carmel, and the bottom of the sea with its serpent (v. 3). But one has no time to dwell on the mythic imagery of the fall of Ammon. The rhythm of the book asserts itself again: 2:1

Thus said Yahweh, ‘For the three rebellions of Moab And for four . On account of his burning the bones of the king of Edom to lime I will send ﬁre against Moab, and it will devour the palaces of Kirioth. 2 Moab will die in [the] uproar, With a shout, with a sound of a shofar. 3 And I will cut off the judge from her midst And all the princes I will slay with him,’ Said Yahweh.

The most interesting feature of this oracle is that the only sin mentioned is the desecration of the mortal remains of Edom’s king. Is there real concern here for the king of Edom or did the Moab usurp God’s own vows of ﬁery retribution? In any case, some commentators have been concerned about the seemingly minor offences of Moab and have proposed slight emendations of the text to the effect that Moab has been performing human sacriﬁce or burned the bones in offering ‘to a demon’. Paul argues against any reading that implies human sacriﬁce, saying that Amos has accused the foreign nations of moral outrages, not cultic offences.47 The extant Hebrew text makes sense as it is and so an emendation should be resisted. Yet, as implied in the two cases of Janus parallelism and numerous allusions in the poem discussed above, over the sound of the king’s bones being turned to lime, , one should hear overtones of the demon, . Andersen and Freedman comment that if a sacriﬁce were intended, a verb other than ‘to burn’ would have been employed.48 This verb ﬁts the context of a sacriﬁce far better than Andersen and Freedman allow. Burning eliminated the remains of a sacriﬁce (for example, Exod. 12:10; 29:34; Lev. 4:12, 21). During Josiah’s desecration of heterodox religious sites, priests are ‘sacriﬁced’ and human bones ‘burned’ on the altars (1 Kgs 13:2; 2 Kgs 23:16, 20). In Deut. 12:31, ‘burn’ is used instead of terms with basic meanings of ‘sacriﬁce’ to denote the speciﬁc acts of offering human lives to deities. In Amos 1:2, then, we may ﬁnd a reference to Moab’s attempt to purge the world of the Edomite king’s mortal remains though a cultic ritual. It should be remembered, too, that the word ‘bones’ can also mean ‘power’ or ‘might’ (Gen. 26:16; Deut. 8:17), and so Moab’s actions may be an allusion to Moab exceeding the sins of the other nations who exported and received the deportees of the ‘complete exiles’. 47 48

Paul, Amos, pp. 72, 73. His discussion of the verse has considerable bibliography. Andersen and Freedman, Amos, p. 288.

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The spelling and sound of the Hebrew term ‘lime’ is also very close to a word meaning violence, destruction or devastation, . That word is used to bewail the Israelites’ proclivity to ‘hoard violence  and destruction  in their citadels’ (Amos 3:10). The term for citadels here is the same as employed in the poem of Amos 1–2, and so we may read the Moab oracle as a foreshadowing of the kind of violence of which Israel is later accused. Interestingly,  is also used in the second of the hymnic theophanic refrains of Amos (5:8–9). In 5:9, we ﬁnd it employed as an epithet of Yahweh: ‘The unleasher of devastation upon the strong! Devastation comes upon the fortress!’ ‘Devastation’ as a divine quality is found elsewhere. In Isa. 13:6 and Joel 1:15, the day of Yahweh is said to be ‘like devastation from Shaddai’ [‘Almighty’] . The alliteration in these verses is obvious and the repetition implies that the deity is a ‘devastator’. Perhaps one can ﬁnd an allusion to sacriﬁcing the King of Edom to this ‘devastator’ in Amos 2:1. What should be recognized in Amos 1:1 is not one deﬁnite reading to the exclusion of all others but a web of allusion and insinuation – an interpretative panic, in Sherwood’s terms – in which Moab may be accused of a human sacriﬁce to a demon or even to Yahweh. There may even be a distant reﬂection of the enigmatic story in 2 Kgs 3 in the imagery and word-plays of Amos 2:1. Israel ﬁghts alongside Judah and Edom against Moab, whose king is called a  ‘stockman’ as is Amos (1:1). When the battle goes against the king, he offers his son as a burnt offering. A ‘great wrath’ comes upon Israel as they withdraw from the ﬁght (2 Kgs 3:27). Nothing of the deity to whom the king makes his offering or even the deity from which the wrath comes is said. One then wonders what particular horrors are in store for Moab when her own sentence is declared in Amos. This comes in terms strangely similar to many of the previous oracles. The burning of Kirioth phonetically recalls the destination of exiled Aram: Kir. The fate of Moab is linked to that of Ammon, revealed in a similar line structure. Moab’s punishment comes with the same ‘shout’ of battle (2:2; 1:15). There is, however, no exile for Moab as was granted the Ammonite king: Moab shall die in the ‘uproar’. Both this and the Ammon oracle return to one of the opening themes, retribution against the ruling class as the ‘judge’ is cut off and his ofﬁcials are slain (Amos 2:3). If the alliteration is any indication, the ﬁre sent against the citadels of Kirioth seems to be the agent of this, as God says ‘I will cut off  the judge from her midst ’. The Ammon and Moab oracles are of the A pattern, stressing punishment and not accusations of grotesque cruelty. As such, they seem to fulﬁl the hope for a substantial divine retribution not found in the previous two oracles. The allusions to human sacriﬁce, however, introduce a sense of clearly cultic/religious intent in addition to maintaining an emphasis of violence to other human beings. But the poem moves on:

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Thus says Yahweh, ‘On account of three transgressions of Judah and on account of four . On account of their rejection of the instruction of Yahweh and his statutes they have not kept. Their lies have led them astray, those their fathers followed. 5 I will send ﬁre against Judah and it will devour the citadels of Jerusalem.’

On one level, the Judah oracle is noteworthy simply for its banality. Its simplicity is, however, deceptive. It was from Jerusalem and Zion that God’s voice roared (1:2), and so the condemnation of Judah destabilizes the literary world by calling into question its authoritative centre. It is that authority that Judah has rejected. They are not accused of the inhumanity of the other nations. The accusation recalls the wilderness wanderings of Israel and the traditions and laws concerning following foreign religious practices. It is interesting, therefore, that in Deut. 12:29–31, the ‘burning’ (as in the Moab oracle) of human sacriﬁces is said to be a Canaanite practice Israel is not to follow. The word meaning ‘led them astray’ in Amos 2:4 is also used in 2 Kgs 21:9 and 2 Chron. 33:9 to describe how evil King Manasseh misled the Judaeans into copying the practices of the Canaanites. Manasseh is also charged with ‘passing his son through the ﬁre’ (2 Kgs 21:6, 2 Chron. 33:6). The Judaeans in Amos follow after lies. The language suggests that both false prophecy and false gods are found alluring.49 Whatever their content, the ‘lies’ are construed as the active agents in the passage. The process is circular. The Judaeans tell ‘lies’, which, in turn, delude them. This cycle, the oracle alleges, has been going on for generations. The reference to the ancestors links Judah’s sins to those of the whole Israelite people in antiquity. This, in turn, raises the question of the special relationship of all of the Israelite people with Yahweh, a relationship that elsewhere in Amos is also linked to the exodus myth (3:1–2). It is a relationship that is perpetually strained. Strikingly, details of the punishment due Judah are lacking. All we read is that ﬁre is sent against her and Jerusalem’s citadels are devoured. Yet, this clichéd response represents the severing of divine–human contact as it is from Jerusalem that the divine voice emanates (Amos 1:2). This ultimately leads to the annihilation of the world. But the identity of Judah, sinning since the time of the ancestors, is wrapped up in the greater nation, and it is to that our poem now turns: 2:6

Thus says Yahweh, ‘On account of three transgressions of Israel and on account of four, . on account of their selling the righteous for silver, and the needy for sandals. 7 Those persecuting/trampling into the dust of the earth the head of the poor50 pervert the way of the humble. A man and his father go to the girl, and so profane my holy name. 8 On garments taken in pledge they sprawl beside every altar. And wine taken as ﬁnes they drink in the house of their god(s).

49

Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. 299–302. Paul, Amos, pp. 75–6. This line is quite unclear in Hebrew. Coggins, Joel and Amos, pp. 101–2, concludes only that some form of terrible oppression is in view. 50

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This is the ﬁnal oracle and the climax of the series is reached. The familiar opening formulae are in place but there is no mention of sending ﬁre in response to the offences. Interpreters have long recognized a rhetorical build-up to the Israel oracle, thinking that this eighth oracle was a ‘surprise’ ending that would have shocked a northern audience. From the point of a view of a Judaean readership, however, this scenario is troublesome, as it overplays the likelihood that Judaean readers would have imagined the bygone Israelites celebrating an oracle against Judah while being completely shocked at an oracle against Israel. As I have noted above, it is better to see the readers looking to their own interests ﬁrst, and, as the oracular poem progresses to its condemnation of Judah, wondering just when the book is going to fulﬁl its advertised claim and be a book of prophetic words against Israel (Amos 1:1). Finally, at 2:6, the book begins to address its main subject. The oracle appears to return to the theme of oppression, so familiar to the reader of the ﬁrst six oracles, although commentators have struggled with exact nature of the offences described here. Among the various options include that of bribery of judges, and the accusations appear to reﬂect the selling of people into slavery for inconsequential debts.51 Yet, the oracle suggests overt religious offences as well. The parallelism between the ‘righteous’, ‘needy’, ‘poor’ and ‘humble’ in Amos 2:67 (and see 5:12) need not be seen as inconsistent, but is a feature of other religious discourses, including that of some Dead Sea Scrolls. The latter term, , can be used to describe a pious character, ‘humble’ or ‘meek, and not ﬁnancial or social status.52 Moses himself is said to be ‘humble’ (Num 12:13). Zephaniah 2:3 encourages all the ‘humble of the earth’ that have carried out God’s ordinances. In Psalm 25:8–9, we ﬁnd an interesting combination of  and . God is said to instruct sinners ‘in the way’  (that is, God’s ways of upright living). He also ‘leads’ (verbal form of the root ) the  in righteousness and teaches them ‘his way ’. The book of Amos is well known among Bible readers for its biting social commentary but its defence of the poor is actually part of its defence of ‘proper’ religion. The connection serves an ideological purpose within the prophetic myth. The victimized poor are on the same side as the silenced prophets and the ‘righteous’ who remain devoted to Yahweh. In the discourse of much of the biblical prophetic corpus, those accused of heterodox religious practices are also likely to attract accusations of committing social injustices. Conversely, those who oppress the poor have the wrong religion. Poverty is not often dependent on whether one is moral or pious; these qualities are not mutually dependent. The prophetic ideology is linked to the conception of the deity as the founder of natural and moral order, a role requiring actions against the agents of disorder. Here, however, the ideology shows its inherent contradictions as the punitive destruction meted out is so extensive that even the poor would suffer from it. To be sure, Amos and other prophetic texts make claims to the contrary, but the tension is quite palpable. Amos 2:7 is easily read as indicating the corruption of these people’s humble piety and/or the persecution of

51 52

Paul, Amos, pp. 77–9; Coggins, Joel and Amos, pp. 100–102. Coggins, Joel and Amos, p. 100.

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them for it. In any case, the ‘religious’ contexts of the accusation cannot be denied. Rather, it only anticipates what is to come. ‘A man and his father go to the girl, and so profane my holy name’ says v. 7. Interpreters have argued whether this line speaks of social or religious offences. Some argue that some sexual indiscretion is in view, since ‘go to’ is often a euphemism for sexual liaisons. Perhaps the woman is abused because she is a slave or has becomes legally betrothed to the young man through their affair, implying that the father is now sinning by sleeping with her.53 Others, however, say that the odd expression ‘the girl’ indicates that she is a cultic prostitute or even a goddess. Amos 2:8 has obvious references to shrines (‘house of their god’, ‘every altar’) and 8:14 speaks of the goddess Ashimah of Samaria.54 Their case is somewhat overstated, and Andersen and Freedman’s reading of Amos 8:14 is very plausible but not certain. There is little evidence that the concept of ‘cult-prostitute’ was a reality in Israel, let alone the wider ancient near eastern world.55 Even without a direct reference to cultic prostitution, there may be allusions to ritual offences in this line, especially in view of the perversion of the straight and narrow path earlier in the verse. The role of ‘the girl’ may be clariﬁed by the use of the expression, ‘profaning my holy name’. It is used often in the context of the worship of other deities and Barstad thinks this is the issue in 2.7. For instance, in Leviticus 18, classes of people the Israelite men must not have sexual relations with are listed. Included in this list is a ban on child sacriﬁce to Molech, which is said to profane the name of Israel’s God (v. 21, and see Lev. 20:3).56 Leviticus 18, however, has a progressive structure, framed at the beginning (vv. 1–5) and the end (vv. 24–30) with references to the deity who bans the Israelites from behaving like the Canaanites. The series of injunctions describes a number of cases in which incest and other kinds of inappropriate heterosexual relations are forbidden (vv. 6–20). Then comes the ban on profaning the divine name through child sacriﬁce (v. 21). Forbidden next is the ‘abomination’ of male homosexuality, followed by the deﬁling ‘perversity’ of bestiality (vv. 22–3). While Barstad is correct in noting the severity of the crime of child sacriﬁce, it needs to be noted that the accent in the whole chapter is on specifying a range of purportedly ‘foreign’ practices – be they sexual liaisons or child sacriﬁce – by which the land became deﬁled and subject to depopulation. Barstad links Amos 2:7 to v. 8 since, without any sexual indiscretion implied in ‘go to the girl’, the former verse becomes meaningless. The girl is the host of the luxuriant excess and drinking ‘in the house of their god’ and ‘beside every altar’. Barstad relates this to Amos 4:1 in which the oppressive ‘cows of Bashan’ (wealthy women of Samaria) call for more drink. A similar scene unfolds in 6:4–7 in which the end of the ‘marzeah’ festivities 53 See the variety of opinions in Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 133, 166–7; Paul, Amos, p. 44, 81–2; Douglas Stuart, Hosea–Jonah (WBC, 31; Dallas: Word Books, 1989), p. 306; Jeremias, Amos, pp. 36–7; Rudolph, Joel–Amos–Obadja–Jona, pp. 142–3. 54 Erling Hammershaimb, The Book of Amos: A Commentary (trans. J. Sturdy; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), pp. 48–9; Soggin, Amos, p. 48; Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. 318–9. 55 Hans M. Barstad, The Religious Polemics of Amos: Studies in the Preaching of Amos II 7b–8, IV 1–13, V 1–17, VI 4–7, VIII 14 (VTSup, 34; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1984), pp. 21–33. 56 Barstad, Religious Polemics, pp. 19–21.

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is predicted.57 Barstad builds too much on the distinction between sexual and cultic transgressions and on the predominantly cultic contexts in which God’s name is said to be profaned. As noted above, the verbal construction in Amos 2:7 ‘to go to’ can often imply sexual relations but the cultic allusions cannot be dispensed with either. It is best to see in the illicit journey of the man and his father another case of Amos’ skilful, deliberate ambiguity which implies so much with so few words.58 The wording of 2:7 recalls that of the Judah oracle. The ancestors ‘walked after’ lies (2:4), while the same verb appears as ‘to go’ in 2:7.59 One could also see the Israelite’s ‘going’ to the girl as a reﬂection of the how the ‘path’ of the humble had been perverted (2:7). In Amos 2:8, garments that are taken in pledge against debts become mattresses ‘beside every altar’, while wine purchased with ﬁnes is enjoyed ‘in the house of their God’.60 This reinforces the ideology that holds that the unjust have the wrong religion and the people with the wrong religion are unjust. The second half of v. 8 is another statement pregnant with ambiguity. Given the many altars, what is the ‘House of lhem’? The expression is the possessive ‘their’ attached to a word very often used to refer to God, and so the ‘house’ is easily identiﬁed as a temple dedicated to Israel’s deity. Yet, the Hebrew noun can also be read as plural and so Amos 2:8 may deplore not only the partying at the expense of those who have paid ﬁnes but also that the celebrations occur in a temple dedicated to the partiers’ ‘gods’.61 Still, the northern shrine in the town of Bethel, whose name means ‘House of El (God)’, ﬁgures prominently in later sections of Amos. It is at Bethel that Jeroboam I set up a golden calf as a representative of the deity who brought Israel up out of Egypt (1 Kgs 12:25–33). Amos 2:8, then, while clearly referring to oppressive corruption and the abuse of privilege, raises the question of whether the accused actually have any awareness of who ‘their god’ really is or should be. But as the chapter progresses, the reader will be left in no doubt: 9

But I destroyed the Amorite from before them/for their sake,62 whose height was as high as the cedars and whose strength was like the oaks! I destroyed his fruit from above, and his roots from below! 10 And I brought you up from the land of Egypt

57

Barstad, Religious Polemics, pp. 33–6. Coggins, Joel and Amos, pp. 102–3, argues that the passage is very general, with all manner of offences having the consequence of profaning Yahweh’s name. 59 Paul, Amos, p. 82. 60 For this interpretation of the relevant words, see Paul, Amos, pp. 83–7. 61 Möller, Prophet in Debate, p. 206, writes that the third person speech effects an ironic distancing effect, as Yahweh implies that he is not ‘their god’ and is not ‘easily manipulated by cultic rituals replacing obedience’. I do not see the reference in this verse to rituals intended to manipulate the deity. 62 The Hebrew expression ‘from before them’ certainly implies a geographical sense, but can also be used causatively, as in Josh. 2:10; 4:23; Isa. 63:12, as noticed by Rudolph, Joel–Amos–Obadja–Jona, p. 139, Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 134, and Paul, Amos, p. 87. My sense is that the causal understanding is at least as important here as the more popular alternative. 58

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AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION and led you through the wilderness forty years to possess the land of the Amorite! 11 I raised up, from among your sons, prophets And, from your valiant ones, Nazirites.63 Indeed, is this not so, Sons of Israel?’ Oracle of Yahweh.

English does not allow for easy reproduction of the threefold use of the pronoun ‘I’ in vv. 9–10, each at the start of a different line, or the absence of that same pronoun at the start of v. 11.64 The subsequent word order in v. 11 puts the focus not on the actual institutions of prophecy and Nazirite vow-takers, but on where these people were found, ‘from among your sons…from your valiant ones.’ This accent is reinforced by the rhetorical question at the end of 2:11, ‘Is this not so, Sons of Israel?’ An important shift appears in v. 10. Amos 2:6–9 refer to Israel in the third person (for example, ‘ﬁnes they imposed… before them’) but in vv. 10–11 the second person is employed. This shift heightens the emotive engagement with the address and drives home the focus on God’s actions for the Israelites in contrast to his actions regarding the Amorites. There is also a shift from accusations delivered speciﬁcally against the northern kingdom of Israel to accusations concerning ‘Greater Israel’, the trans-historical Israel to which the ideal reader belongs. This ‘Greater Israel’ is implied in the exodus and conquest mythology, themes to which the book will return, most notably Amos 3:1–2.65 The Judah oracle, likewise, implies the whole of the people in its reference to the ancestral disobedience of Torah. As Dines observes, there is no mention of the giving of the law on Sinai in vv. 9–10.66 The conquest and divine protection during the wilderness wanderings after the ﬂight from Egypt are far more important at this point than the law. The wilderness has led to a land imagined in rich terms. Even the forty year period is seen here as a positive time, not a time of punishment.67 The Amorites are described as a verdant forest. Yet God has destroyed the boughs and roots of this great people for the sake of Israel. There is no condemnation of the Amorites, no indication that they deserved their fate. Here, God seems to play a role like the ancient Mesopotamian hero, Gilgamesh, who destroys Humbaba and his forest.68 The forest metaphor in Amos 2 seems to cast God as the usurper. Does God regret destroying so mighty a nation for so ungrateful a people? This is a question the text does not ask, let alone answer, but it is one that is implied. The critical reader may also ask how this god’s behaviour is any better than the nations mentioned earlier 63

For the laws regarding the institution of the Nazirite devotees who vow to not drink wine, see Num. 6:1–21. 64 Hebrew verbs carry indications of gender and number of subjects so the absence of nominative pronouns is typical. 65 Linville, ‘What does “It” mean?’, p. 401; Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. xxviii– xxix, 215, 335; Noble, ‘Israel Among the Nations’, p. 71, regards vv. 9–12, as referring to the greater Israel. Dines, ‘Amos’, pp. 583–4, also considers ‘people of Israel’ in v. 12 inclusive. 66 Dines, ‘Amos’, p. 583. 67 Paul, Amos, p. 91, cf. Hos. 2:16; 13:5. 68 Tablet 5 of the Epic of Gilgamesh. See Dalley, Mesopotamian Myths, pp. 71–7.

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who are accused of the worst sort of atrocities. Or is it that these nations are judged for their usurping of the divine prerogative to eradicate populations? God’s raising of prophets and Nazirites speaks of a time of communion between God and Israel. The rhetorical question seeking conﬁrmation that such a communion existed seems directed as much toward the readership as to the textual audience of the character Amos. By agreeing to the proposition and accepting this as their own history, the audience takes on board the implications of being blessed by prophets and Nazirites. By extension, they participate in the metaphorization of the Amorites as trees that were uprooted to make room for Israel. And in so doing, they, too, are asked whether the sacriﬁce of this great forest was not in vain. The Nazirites and prophets should have been proudest of the new oaks and cedars of an even more verdant forest, but Israel has become yet more timber to clear. Ironically, it is Israel who has made a start in this direction, eliminating what God himself raised up: 2:12

But you made the Nazirites drink wine, And concerning the prophets, you ordered, ‘Do not prophesy.’

Drinking and silencing are two focal points of God’s involvement with Israel. The wine given to the Nazirites should be associated with the wine conﬁscated and consumed in 2:8 and also may be a metaphorical cause of the deluded Judaeans in 2:4 and the ‘humble’ who were led astray in v. 7. In 4:1, the ‘cows of Bashan’ order their lords to bring them something to drink. In 4:7–8, God recounts once again how he treated Israel: chastising them with a drought. An end to the drinking is predicted in 5:11 when God predicts that Israel will enjoy none of the produce from their vineyards. In yet another transformation, the last of Israel’s wine is accompanied by another drought, but not of wine or even water, but of the word of God (8:11–12). Thus, leading the Nazirites to break their vows of abstaining from wine will result in the ultimate stiﬂing of the prophetic word, something Israel also prefers. All of this will ultimately be on God’s terms, not Israel’s, but this terrible fate is itself ultimately reversible: one day they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, says the second to last verse of the book. What follows Amos 2:11–12 is a message of doom, but it is quite unlike the pronouncements of the previous seven oracles: there is no ﬁre. With the destruction of Jerusalem predicted in 2:5, what of any substance is left for Yahweh’s ﬁre to burn? The destruction of the symbolic centre of creation brings to an end one theme in the poem. In the Judah oracle, the poem avoided any elaboration on further punishment due Judah. Now, however, at the end of the poem, there is considerable discussion on the fate of all Israel. Like so many passages in Amos, however, it is fraught with ambiguity, mystery, and ultimate reversal. Behold, I am [causing] groaning  under/instead of you, As groans  a cart overloaded with cut grain.

2:13

Again we have an emphasis on the divine actor’s self-reference, as the deity calls attention to himself through use of ‘I’ immediately after ‘behold’. As much as

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Yahweh acted against the Amorites, so he now acts against his own people.69 But how he will act has occasioned much debate among commentators. The verbal root behind v. 13’s and is quite unclear and many alternatives are proposed.70 A verb known from post-biblical Hebrew is cognate to an Arabic term meaning ‘to split open’ and an Ugaritic word for ‘to rend’. Hence, Amos 2:13 may offer the image of the prominent ruts created by an overloaded cart as a metaphor for an earthquake.71 Some ancient versions are supported by another Arabic word meaning ‘to creak, groan’. It is therefore possible to achieve a reference to an earthquake. God says that he will ‘make it groan beneath you’.72 Paul argues for a root with an Arabic cognate meaning ‘hamper, hinder’ and this has the support of some Septuagint manuscripts. He prefers this because the following description of the defeat of armies is not well introduced by an image of an earthquake.73 As Möller points out, however, the connection between the two images may be ironic: the armies are put to ﬂight by the earthquake they had no chance to ﬁght.74 These proposals are all difﬁcult to defend on the basis of the Hebrew which lacks any noun or pronoun to indicate a direct object, making for a somewhat awkward construction: ‘I am hindering beneath you’ or ‘I am splitting beneath you’ without indicating who is hindered or what is split. If one sees the verb as indicating the sounds of someone or something under stress, however, a very different image is produced, as offered by the Revised English Bible, ‘Listen, I groan under the burden of you, as a wagon creaks under a full load.’ This gives a very different sense than the aforementioned proposals since it is God who seems to have been suffering at the excess burden of dealing with the Israelites. But one can build more on the divine frustration. The ﬁrst instance of our mystery word appears to be in the  stem that usually gives a causative sense. Moreover, the preposition  can mean ‘instead of’ rather than ‘under’. So, a reader may also wish to read ‘I will cause groaning instead of you’. The preposition can also carry nuances of recompense or compensation (for example, Gen. 30:15), so another reading could be, ‘I will cause groaning in retaliation against you’. God staggers and groans under the weight of an overloaded cart but he vows that Israel, too, shall suffer in kind. They will not be able to run, even to save their own lives (vv. 14–15). Verse 13 has more riches. The accented divine ‘I’ in v. 13 recalls the accented divine self-references in vv. 9 and 10, in which the destruction of the Amorites and the exodus are mentioned. This is a clue that the ‘I’ of v. 13 is indeed the climax.75 But the imagery of clear cutting and uprooting of the magniﬁcent forest that was the Amorite nation and the leading of Israel through the wilderness are images that come together here. The great oaks and cedars are now reduced to cut grain, albeit a large amount of it. The term in Amos 2:13 for cut grain provides an apt metaphor 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 171. Paul, Amos, p. 94, offers a good discussion. Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 171; Jeremias, Amos, p. 43. Paul, Amos, p. 94, considers this possible but not most likely. See Paul, Amos, pp. 44, 94–5; and see Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, pp. 307, 319, ‘bog down’. Möller, Prophet in Debate, pp. 209–10. Paul, Amos, p. 94; Jeremias, Amos, p. 43.

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in other biblical passages for God’s slain foes (Jer. 9:22; Zech. 12:6; Mic 4:12). That word alliterates with ‘Amorite’. If there was a tinge of regret for destroying the Amorite nation one may well ask here if Yahweh is suffering under the burden of eliminating them for the sake of Israel. But perhaps we should see Israel in the cart and not the Amorites. The exodus to the land has been reduced to a cart ride out of it. And perhaps we might hear in God’s groans his pain at having to exile Israel. The bloody harvest that is intimated here aptly introduces the following descriptions of military defeat in vv. 14–16 and also anticipates the punning vision of ‘summer-fruit’ and the ‘end’ of Israel in Amos 8:1–2. The description of Israel’s fate in Amos 2:14–16 is purely military. Israel’s armies will be destroyed; their mightiest warriors will ﬁnd themselves powerless. The fate of the elderly, the women and children, not to mention the pious, is left to the reader’s imagination. There is a series of seven clauses predicting this end, signalling a sense of completeness in its vision of destruction: 2:14

Flight will perish from the swift, And the mighty will not ﬁrm up his strength.76 The valiant will not save his life. 15 The wielder of the bow will not stand,77 And the swift of foot shall not escape; Nor will the horseman escape with his life. 16 And the ﬁrm-hearted among the valiant will ﬂee naked on that day. Oracle of Yahweh.

Each stage in the series is relatively short, but there is a slight progression in line length as one proceeds In the ﬁrst three lines the victims of God’s wrath are identiﬁed with a single word, the ‘swift’, the ‘mighty’ and the ‘valiant’. In the next three, two words are employed, ‘wielder [of the] bow’, ‘swift [of] foot’, ‘rider [of a] horse’. Three words are needed in the seventh case, ‘ﬁrmest-hearted (among the) valiant’. This lengthening (albeit slight), concentrates on the abilities and skills of the warriors in the context of relating how these skills will not prevail. As for the fate that awaits them, the lengthening pattern is not so clear, but the ﬁnal line is the longest of the series. The ﬁnal stage of lengthening, the inclusion of the line ‘on that day’, provides a singular note of ﬁnality. But even here, there is a hint of the reversibility of God’s declared fate for Israel. Except for the phrase, ‘on that day’, the series begins and ends with the ‘escape’ clause. In the ﬁrst, the verb is ‘perish’, but the closing thought suggests some kind of survival. A remnant, stripped of weapons and clothing, runs for dear life. In its closing, the poem has gone full circle and the promise of ‘no return’ has only led to an intimation that Israel might be brought back after all. Yet, at what cost is this achieved? The oracular poem seems to deal with political realities but employs various mythic conceptions, not the least of which are the primary myths of the Israelite 76 Hebrew  is rendered rather woodenly as ‘ﬁrm up’, to ease comparison with v. 16, in which it appears again in ‘ﬁrm-hearted’. 77 ‘Wielder’ here is not the same term as that in Amos 1:5, 8 for the one holding the sceptre.

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people as told in other biblical literature, the exodus and conquest. Besides the great accent on what might now be called ‘crimes against humanity’ and some of the other references to violence, exploitation and corruption are expressed in association with cultic offences, even if at times this is only on the level of allusion. The rich wordplay in the poem suggests a poetic landscape of shifting imagery and possibility, of one thing being a mask for another. As Amos progresses, we will see the cultic, indeed, cosmic, imagery come to the fore, almost totally replacing mundane reality.

Chapter 5

The Mantle of Amos: Amos 3:1–15 Amos 3 is the ﬁrst of a series of passages that begin with a conventional prophetic formula: ‘hear this word’ (see Amos 4:1; 5:1). The chapter builds on the national mythology recalled in the poem against the nations and develops the theme of the prophets, silenced by Israel according to 2:12. Although the northern kingdom is singled out later in chapter 3 (Samaria, vv. 9, 12; Bethel, v. 14) as beﬁts the historical setting of our prophetic character, the chapter really concerns all of Israel. There is a considerable readerly engagement required in the chapter; rhetorical questions demand answers which do not come via any character, and a rhetorical strategy operates in the grey area between the readers’ own, extra-textual existences and their projection of themselves into the text. The strategy also causes a reassessment of that projection: are the readers to identify with the Israelites or with the prophet? 3:1

Hear this word which Yahweh spoke against you, Sons of Israel, against all of the family that I brought up from the land of Egypt, saying: 2 ‘Only you have I known of all the families of the earth, Therefore I will repay you all your iniquities.’

Amos 3:1–2 looks both forward and backwards. The selection of Israel as God’s holy nation has already been implied in 2:10–11, and all of Israel is in view here as well. Yet, the opening line of Amos 3, ‘Hear this word’, marks an introduction to a new discourse, however related it might be to what preceded it. Israel and other nations are equated here by referring to both as ‘families’. Yet, Israel is the only one that God has ‘known’. This single word speaks volumes from the world of Israel’s national mythology. It calls to mind the patriarchal stories and especially the choice of Abraham, and it reinforces the exodus theme, which is now taking on a great signiﬁcance in the book. God ‘knows’ Israel in a way he does not ‘know’ the Arameans, Philistines and the other peoples mentioned already in the book, even though the Arameans and Philistines have each had their own exodus (9:7). The kind of familiarity implied by the verb ‘to know’ is great, and speaks of an intimacy far beyond simple acquaintance. It can even be used of sexual intercourse as in Gen. 4:1. The relationship between God and Israel stands in contrast to the actions of the man and his father in Amos 2:7, who profane God’s holy name by ‘going to’ the same girl. God’s exclusive knowledge is, therefore, mocked by the promiscuity that the Israelites enjoy.1 If God knows Israel among the families of the earth, by implication, Israel should know God. But Israel’s knowledge is suspect and it is a suspicion that will grow as the book progresses. Do the Israelites visit a goddess’ 1

This is true at least for Israelite men. Perhaps the girl in 2:7 is a victim of abuse.

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shrine, or attend heterodox marzeah festivals? Already in Amos 2:8 Israel drinks in the house of its god or gods. In 3:10, Israel does not know how to do right, while in 5:12 God knows how many their transgressions are. Knowledge in the relationship between God and Israel is a theme that continues and reaches a crescendo at the end of chapter 4, where the exodus myth is replaced with themes of cosmic creation. Knowledge is a curious thing, and Amos 3:3–8 offers a chilling insight into reality. The reader stands between the invisible prophet and the equally invisible audience: 3:3

Do two walk together, without meeting? Does a lion roar in a forest, when prey he has none? Does the young lion give his voice from his lair, without a capture? 5 Does a bird fall upon a trap on the earth, when bait there is none? Does the trap spring up from the earth, without capturing [anything]?2 6 If a shofar sounds in a city, do the people not tremble? If evil happens in a city, has Yahweh not done it? 7 For Adonai Yahweh will not act in any way Without revealing his secret to his servants, the prophets. 8 A lion has roared, who will not fear? Adonai Yahweh has spoken, who will not prophesy? 4

The two series of rhetorical questions lead the audience along and make them agree to seemingly simple propositions. This traps them into agreeing to a more difﬁcult assertion, or at least to acknowledge its great moral implications that the implied audience has apparently forgotten. That more difﬁcult assertion appears to be found in v. 6. The sound of the shofar is a signal that will terrify a populace. When they hear it, they must tremble. Who are the travelling companions, and what do the lion and the trap signify? Who blows the shofar? But with the second inquiry of v. 6, the cat is out of the bag. Yahweh is behind the lion’s ambushes, the snares, and the besieged city. And, as v. 7 says, the prophets have always known this. So we must ask whether the shofar is blown by the prophet in warning to his fellow citizens, or, as in the case of Joshua’s attack on Jericho (Joshua 6), is it blown by the attacking army? On whose side is the prophet or even Yahweh? With the roaring there is fear, and if the roar is that of God, must we all be prophets? Most scholarly treatments of this passage follow the ‘transcript’ model of interpretation. In that scenario, the prophet typically is seen addressing an audience who are reluctant to credit Amos with any authority. His questions of them are intended to shake them of their complacency and make them realize that it is Yahweh who is behind any misfortune they suffer. The ﬁnal pair of questions in v. 8 is Amos’ own justiﬁcation for his prophetic mission.3 The passage has also been subject to diachronic analysis, and many scholars would excise v. 7 as a late addition, while some would also dissociate v. 8 from vv. 1–6.4 The passage has, 2 The Hebrew does not include the word ‘anything’ but repeats the verb ‘to capture’ for emphasis. 3 Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 184; Paul, Amos, pp. 104–5. Mays, Amos, p. 59. 4 e.g. Rottzoll, Studien, pp. 112–13.

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however, attracted some interesting holistic and literary analyses, particularly for its rhetoric. Both Möller and Yehoshua Gitay see the passage as intimately linked to its larger context although they, too, see the force of the passage as directed towards shaking Israel of its belief that Yahweh would do them no harm and legitimizing Amos as a prophet.5 Emphasizing these themes are justiﬁed when interpreting Amos 3:3–7 but, on the level of the book as a whole, readers must respond for themselves on behalf of whoever they think these inquiries are directed toward. The game, in fact, has been given away since the start of the book and very recently so in Amos 3:1–2. For a Persian-era Judaean audience of the whole book, familiar with other prophetic materials, these references in Amos would have occasioned no surprise. Many scholars think Amos 3:3–6 (and even 3:1–2) has a certain shock value in its turning the tables on the complacent.6 Again, such an interpretation may work under a ‘transcript model’ in which the hypothetical historical Amos is preaching to a rowdy bunch of Israelites, but it cannot work for the reader. The reader, of course, may construe the implied audience as complacent and self-righteous, but ultimately this implied audience is simply a construct of the readership based on what they understand the ‘historical’ circumstances of the passage to be. Yet, Amos 3:1–8 has a great rhetorical structure which does have implications for the intended readership and the modern reader, too. This stage is reached with the tension between v. 7, in which the prophetic servants of God receive revelation of God’s inner musings, and v. 8, which implies that prophecy is incumbent upon all. Before that, however, the enigmatic questions lead the reader to paint an ominous mental picture. Who are the companions who travel together, the birds, the lions and their prey and, above all, the city dwellers and the watchman? No allegorical meaning should be detected in the series of question from vv. 3–5 according to a number of interpreters. As Möller says, these images are ‘drawn from common experience’.7 Also widely noted is the series progression from a seemingly innocent scenario to a more ominous one with v. 6 providing a climax in which the threats are to humans directly, while second part of that verse introduced God as the author of the evil that befalls humanity.8 Yet, if the progression is towards revealing the punishing deity, one wonders how Möller can justify claiming that vv. 1–5 are ‘surely not intended as an allegory.’9

5 Möller, A Prophet in Debate, pp. 217–50; Yehoshua Gitay, ‘A Study of Amos’s Art of Speech: A Rhetorical Analysis of Amos 3:1–15’, CBQ 42 (1980): 293–309. See also, Tim Bulkeley, ‘Cohesion, Rhetorical Purpose and the Poetics of Coherence in Amos 3’, ABR 47 (1999): 16–28. See my somewhat different take on this in James R. Linville, ‘Amos Among the “Dead Prophets Society”: Re–Reading the Lion’s Roar’, JSOT 90 (2000): 55–77. 6 For instance, Möller, A Prophet in Debate, pp. 228–9. 7 Möller, Prophet in Debate, p. 229; Hammershaimb, Amos, p. 58. Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. 394, 400, contradict themselves on this issue, rejecting an allegorical approach, yet linking the lion of v. 4 with the leonine roar of Yahweh in Amos 1:2 and noting the similar linkage in 3:8. 8 Möller, Prophet in Debate, p. 229. 9 Möller, Prophet in Debate, p. 229.

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The two travelling companions of v. 3 seem to echo the exodus mentioned in v. 1.10 In particular, they recall Amos 2:10, where God reminds Israel that he brought them out of Egypt and led them for forty years. Many interpreters ﬁnd clear associations between Amos 3:2 and v. 3, not the least of which is the shared consonants in the verbs ‘I have known’ and ‘having met’. Although in v. 2 sounds very different from o in v. 3, the actual consonantal roots of the two verbs are similar. When viewed in Hebrew characters this is more obvious, ‘to know’ is (dy while ‘to meet’ is d(y. The frequency of word-plays in the Hebrew Bible suggests that these two terms should be related to one another in Amos 3:2–3. As a number of scholars have noticed, the implication is clear: the travelling companions are implicitly God and Israel.11 Whether the two companions have met by design or accident, however, is a matter of some dispute as the Hebrew is rather ambiguous on this point.12 God’s knowing Israel and their wilderness wanderings together, however, seem to have been deliberate, as Hos. 11:1 puts it, ‘out of Egypt I have called my son.’ But, perhaps, Amos 3:3 insinuates that Israel had no real idea of what lay behind their journey together and so Israel trivialized it as a chance meeting. As in 2:8, with the ‘house of their god(s)’, an ambiguity in the Hebrew appears to have a role in depicting the breakdown in the relationship between Yahweh and Israel. This breakdown raises questions about Israel’s knowledge of their own ‘true’ identity. Making readers pause to consider, or ‘suffer’, these alternatives allows them to work out all of the implications of their multiple meanings.13 Few ancient readers (or modern ones for that matter) would miss the connection between the two inquiries of Amos 3:4 and the second verse of the book. In 3:4, the lion roars and gives its voice; the same words are used in 1:2 to describe divine speech. By implication, Yahweh has caught something. The Israelites have trekked through the wilderness to set up a kingdom with all of its trappings. Now nature becomes the vehicle for the revelation of the divine threat to the world of culture. Has the exodus been a trap? Simple logic has equally ominous overtones in 3:5 when one is led to concede that bait is, indeed, necessary to explain birds falling on a snare, and that a victim has been found when the trap has been sprung. Verse 6 strikes even closer to home, associating the sound of a signal horn with a terriﬁed populace. And here the allusions and associations are terrifying. The lion had his prey ‘in a forest’ , while the shofar blast strikes fear ‘in a city’, .14 With only the transposition of two consonants, the place of the lion’s feast becomes a community of men, women and children. Most important is the second question of v. 6, the seventh 10

Hayes, Amos, p. 124, who suggests a comparison with Lev. 26. See too, Gitay, ‘Amos’s Art of Speech’, p. 295. 11 Jeremias, Amos, p. 52, n. 16; Hayes, Amos, p. 124; M. Daniel Carroll R., Contexts for Amos: Prophetic Poetics in Latin American Perspective (JSOTSup, 132; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1992), p. 186; Gitay, ‘Amos’s Art of Speech’, p. 295. 12 Mays, Amos, p. 60, thinks the former is the case; Paul, Amos, pp. 109–10, prefers the latter. 13 For more the idea of ‘suffering’ an ambiguous and pun-ridden text, see my ‘What does “It” Mean?’ 14 Again, the pronunciation differences mask the shared Hebrew consonants: r(yb (in a forest) and ry(b (in a city).

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in the series. It asks one to conﬁrm that God’s actions are implied when some evil or disaster befalls a city. If there were a point to the deceptively simple questions asked previously, it would be to highlight that any disaster is God’s action. Some readers interpret the verse as implying that Amos’ audience had forgotten God’s part in disasters that have befallen them. Reminding them of this is the whole point of the passage.15 This is a theme that can be found in Amos 5:18–20 and 9:10, too, but it does need to be qualiﬁed. Much of the Hebrew Bible can be read as a reminder that God not only provides good for Israel, but also punishment. The Amos passage follows the conventions of the literature in using the purportedly over-conﬁdent and naïve ancient Israelites as foils for the heroes of the book. There is more going on here, though. The shofar is ‘sounded’; the verb is the same root as in the name of Amos’ hometown, Tekoa, and it was the shofar which sounded the death knell of Moab (2:2). Now the sound is heard in a context that suggests that it is heralding God’s ﬁre against all of Israel. How would an ancient scribe or priest read such a passage to his fellow Jerusalemites? Acting out the character of God or the prophet, he may foist on his audience the role of the foolish northerners. However, depending on the intensity of his performance as God’s spokesman, and the temperament of each individual audience member, any such identity-ascription may be rejected. These points raise the question of whether audiences were willing to ‘play the role’ of the ignorant apostates as much as modern congregations enthusiastically listen to pastors ‘preaching to the converted’, as if they were yet to believe. This kind of role playing is only one part of community self-expression; it is almost a ritual of conversion. It is one that identiﬁes the true members, albeit through their playing the role of the outsiders who come to believe in the central tenants of the community. If so, then the true performance is not that of the reader, but rather of his audience as they rediscover what they knew all along. Thus, in conﬁrming their belief, they break character, since, as the Amosbook and the other examples of the ‘Myth of the ancient Prophet’ relate, the real ancient Israelites never did heed their prophets. The theme of the prophetic warning has already presented itself in the reference to the lion’s roar (v. 4) and the shofar (v. 6), which should be taken as allusions to the role of the prophet in manifesting the divine voice.16 In v. 7, however, this is spelled out plainly. Möller interprets vv. 6–7 in the light of the following v. 8 and concludes that v. 7 implies that Amos must speak since he knows Yahweh’s plan. He argues that Amos’ audience is then forced to admit that Amos must speak. Möller, in commenting on earlier interpretations of the passage which sees it in terms of the historical Amos’ strategy of confronting his audience with his own authority as a legitimate prophet and God’s true intent to punish them, writes that the same may be said on the level of the text.17 He notes that the arrangement of the text ‘implicitly portrays the prophet’s audience as evoking Amos’ reaction recorded in vv. 3–8.’ The effect of his rhetoric is that ‘the audience cannot but concede that if Yahweh has spoken, one must prophesy … Amos, his prophet, has no choice but to convey 15 16 17

For example, Mays, Amos, p. 61; Paul, Amos, p. 112. Jeremias, Amos, p. 53. Möller, Prophet in Debate, p. 231.

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what has been revealed to him.’18 In my view, this is stressing the textual scenario of Amos and the implied audience too much, considering the lack of any attention given the reader. As I have argued elsewhere, the reader may well identify with the implied speaker, not with the implied audience. So, given that the rhetoric has led to the conclusion that prophecy is inevitable, and that the book of Amos is the prophet’s words that contain declarations of Yahweh, how does the reader fulﬁl the prophetic role?19 Verse 7, as noticed by Dines, reﬂects the divine council in heaven with Amos’ title for God, ‘Adonai Yahweh’ and the revelation of his ‘secret’ to the prophets. It is to this assembly in heaven that prophets are sometimes admitted (cf. 1 Kgs 22:19–23; Isa. 6:1–8).20 The deity’s ‘secret’ has some speciﬁc references in other biblical passages. In Psalm 25:14, the ‘secret’ of God and knowledge of his covenant is intended for those who fear him. Eliphaz criticizes Job for pretending to know too much, asking ‘Do you hear the secret of God?’ (Job 15:8). The same term is also used to refer to the divine assembly itself (Jer. 23:18; Ps. 89:8, Eng. v. 7). Most interesting is Jer. 23:22 that has the deity demanding that if the false prophets had indeed stood in his council, they would have warned the people to repent. Amos 3:7 appears to revolve around a similar motif with the prophet as the intermediary between humanity and the divine. This is a role that is imagined as requiring the physical presence of the prophet in the council of the god. What is intriguing is that the term for ‘secret’ or ‘council’ is o. This recalls the word ‘destruction’ o intimated in the term for ‘lime’ and the fate of the king of Edom in the Moab oracle (2:2). It also anticipates that same term that appears in 3:10 and 5:9. The claim that evil events that unfold are the result of divine action raises a series of interesting questions. Should the ‘threshing’ of Gilead, the deportations, and the murder of expectant women in the poem against the nations be considered the results of divine action or human excess and sin? Of course, one should not expect ancient theologians to have a better grip on such perplexing issues than anyone else who has wrestled with them over the millennia, but raising the issue here calls to mind the possible allusions to hubris in the poem against the nations in which the foreign nations usurp the divine right to control the destiny of nations. The paradox of the divine control of history and human free will appear to come together in another pregnant ambiguity in 3:6. One may read ‘If evil happens in a city, has Yahweh not done it?’ as something of a ‘trick’ question that also implies ‘If there is evil in a city, will Yahweh not act?’ And so even if no overt signs of a threat may be found, the question carries relevance: the deity must react to evil. How? By creating an ‘evil’ threat in punishment.21

18

Both these quotes: Möller, Prophet in Debate, p. 233. See my ‘Amos among the “Dead Prophets Society” ’. 20 Dines, ‘Amos’, p. 584, also notes that the term ‘servants’ can be used of very highranking ofﬁcials such as ambassadors. 21 Linville, ‘Dead Prophets Society’, p. 71, the translation is from the REB. Supporting such translations is Martin J. Mulder, ‘Ein Vorschlag zur Übersetzung von Amos III 6b’, VT 34 (1984): 106–8. 19

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In the beginning of the book the divine voice ‘roars’ from Zion. In Amos 3:7, prophets are trusted with God’s secret, and presumably the interchange takes place in the sacred realm symbolized by holy places on earth. The two perspectives, of roaring and of secrets, come together in v. 8: A lion has roared, who will not fear? Adonai Yahweh has spoken, who will not prophesy?

The prophets know what God intends because God tells them. The lion of v. 8 is a clear metaphor for Yahweh, returning the reader to the roaring deity of 1:2.22 The roar is now inspiration for prophesy, so the prophet himself must take the role of the lion. The imperative is reinforced through yet another word-play. Once again, there is alliteration: lion,  and ‘fear’ .23 The word ‘fear’ is also commonly used to speak of the reverent ‘fear’ of God. In v. 6, the people ‘tremble’. Once the author of the evil is revealed to be Yahweh, the possibility exists that ‘trembling’ can be replaced with ‘reverence’, if one understands the ‘roar’ to be the divine voice. Readers familiar with the genre of prophetic books would have no difﬁculty with this. But we must imagine Amos’ audience within the text, as well. We need not adopt a ‘transcript’ model of interpreting this passage, but the genre of the prophetic text does imply in general terms an audience for the ‘historical’ prophet. However readers imagine that audience, they must answer Amos’ questions on its behalf. Readers are drawn into the textual world while never quite becoming one of the complacent Israelites, ignorant of the signs of God’s enmity, nor losing a sense of the distance between themselves and Amos. While numerous scholars see Amos 3:8 as declaring the legitimacy of Amos the prophet, my sense is that the verse also openly declares the relevance of the book as a whole: it is a claim for the legitimacy for the Myth of the Ancient Prophet. The secrets of God are in the books. Readers have a presence outside the text and a (perhaps shifting) presence within it as well. For readers in their normal, extra-textual identities, the rhetoric may serve as an incentive to base their own religious views ever closer to the ideology of the texts and the body of interpretation growing up around them, to interpret their world, its history and destiny, in accordance with what they understand and are taught the prophetic books to be about. In this sense, Amos 3:8 may be a brilliant ‘frame-break’, in which the book becomes self-referential, shifting focus from the implied speaker and audience to the actual readership. We might see an extreme form of taking up Amos’ prophetic mantle in some of the Qumran documents. The writer of the Habakkuk Pesher, one of the better known of the Dead Sea Scrolls, alludes brieﬂy to Amos 3:7.24 In the ‘Interpretation 22

Linville, ‘Dead Prophets Society’, p. 73. And again the visual similarity is more pronounced in Hebrew characters hyr) ‘lion’; )ryy ‘to fear’ (3 masc. sing). 24 A number of Qumran books are of the pesher genre. These are commentaries in which a portion of a biblical book would be quoted followed by a commentary explaining the meaning of the passage in the light of contemporary events. This is followed by the next passage in the biblical book and its ‘pesher’. 23

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of Habakkuk’, the Teacher of Righteousness is said to be a recipient of divine knowledge concerning the mysteries of the words of ‘his servants the prophets’ (1QpHab 7:1–5, interpreting Hab. 2:2).25 The Qumran biblical interpretations are also revealing in another way. Interpretation could be based on one or two key words or ideas. Word-plays, the use of synonyms, and even different textual traditions could also be brought to bear in the interpretation.26 Of course, the Qumran texts are much later than the Persian era, and one could hardly say that the producers of this library had the ‘correct’ interpretation of the material that eventually found its way into our bibles. Yet, it is unlikely that they were the ﬁrst people to read the prophets as having a level of meaning not accessible to those without special theological insights, whether derived from a particular educational background or a divine ‘gift’. It is hardly unreasonable to see the edited and redacted texts as designed to provoke conversation, to engage with their leading characters, and to open diverse paths to interpretation and application. With this in mind, we might turn to reappraise Amos 3:3–8. Drawn into the text, the audience may, in their own minds, surrender to the rhetoric of v. 8 and take up their calling as they continue onto the next passage. Scholars often draw a sharp line between v. 8 and v. 9, thinking the latter to be the start of an entirely new oracle. In terms of a formal delineation of passages, this is justiﬁed, but it is only through overemphasizing structure to the expense of thematic and rhetorical development that the two passages should be seen to have little to do with each other:27 3:9

‘Make heard in the citadels in Ashdod And in the citadels in the land of Egypt, say, “Gather upon the mountains of Samaria, And see the great uproar within her and the oppressions in her midst!” 10 They do not know honest action,’ Oracle of Yahweh, ‘Those stockpiling violence and destruction in their citadels!’

Who can these unnamed messengers be? Or rather, who can see themselves as these messengers? Later, in v. 13, there are further orders to hear Yahweh and warn the house of Jacob, yet there is no indication who is to do this. While developing the prophetic theme from the imperative implications of 3:8, v. 9 also plays off the opening of the chapter. The order to ‘Hear this’ in 3:1 has transformed into an 25

Maurya P. Horgan, Pesharim: Qumran Interpretations of Biblical Books (CBQMS, 8; Washington: Catholic Biblical Association, 1979), pp. 16–17, 37–8; Florentino García Martinez and Eibert J.C. Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition I, (1Q1–4Q273) (2 vols; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000), pp. 16–17. On the reference to Amos, see A. Graeme Auld, ‘Amos and Apocalyptic: Vision, Prophecy Revelation’, in D. Garrone and F. Israel (eds) Storia e tradizioni di Israel: Scritti in honore di J. Alberto Soggin. (Brescia: Paideia, 1991), pp. 1–14 (p. 5). 26 Horgan, Pesharim, pp. 244–7. Interpretation could be based on one or two key words or ideas. Word-plays, the use of synonyms, and even different textual traditions could also be brought to bear in the interpretations. 27 See my article, ‘Dead Prophets Society’, pp. 74–5.

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imperative to make something heard. The threefold repetition of ‘citadels’ also recalls the tremendous emphasis on the doom of these buildings in the many nations accused in Amos 1–2. In 3:9–10, however, the foreign palaces receive not ﬁre but the prophetic word. Ashdod, representative of all the foreign nations mentioned in the opening chapters, and Egypt, the land out of which Israel was once delivered, receive what Israel once tried to silence (cf. Amos 2:11–12). Out of all the families of the earth, the Israelites alone are known by God. This intimacy is then contrasted in 3:10 by Israel’s lack of knowledge of ‘honest action’. This expression is ironic in the light of 3:6–7. There the same verb, ‘to do’, is used of evil that occurs in a city, and the evil that is ultimately the action of God. God ‘knows’ Israel and will punish them for what they do not know. And it is that punishment that the book now turns to announce. There is a similarity in sound between ‘destruction’, ,in v. 10 and the divine ‘secret’, , in v. 7. The prophets are privy to the deity’s intention, while the people store up only ‘havoc’. Paul also ﬁnds alliterative word-play between the participle ‘those storing up, , and ‘Egypt’, mi, and between, ‘destruction’, and the Philistine city name Ashdod, the play relating the names of the called witnesses to the crimes they are to behold.28 One may wish to go a little further and see in Samaria’s violence the ‘essence’ of these foreign nations. Once again, the nature and true identity of Israel are implicitly called into question. The next verse offers the divine response to such confusion: 3:11 Therefore, thus says Adonai Yahweh, ‘An enemy surrounds the land, He will bring down your might and your citadels will be plundered.’

The judgement on the ‘citadels’ of Samaria seems to be the judgement missing from the poem against the nations in Amos 2. Amos 3:11 also recalls the closing verses of Amos 2 and the military defeat of the land. Although different terms are used here, there are also echoes of the fate of the mighty oaks and cedars that symbolized the power of the Amorites (2:9). One might also hear the shofar that terriﬁed the city in 3:6. But who is this unnamed enemy? That enemy could be any nation, but one can perhaps detect the transformation of the foreign witnesses into the instrument of divine wrath against Samaria for her ‘Egyptian’ and ‘Philistine’ behaviour. The witnesses to Samaria’s violence are transformed into the enemies who will cause the destruction their own names seem to imply, and the prophet is implicated in the process. 3:12

Thus says Yahweh, ‘As the shepherd rescues from the mouth of the lion Two leg-bones, or a piece of an ear, So will the Sons of Israel be rescued – the inhabitants of Samaria – with the head of a bed and torn ﬁne fabric.29

28

Paul, Amos, p. 117. The exact identity of the items in this line is debated. Lawrence Zalcman, ‘Laying to Rest’ (Amos III 12)’, VT 52 (2002): 557–9, suggests a slight emendation including re-dividing the words that results in the translation I reproduce here. 29

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The lion has roared; he surely has caught something. The shepherd, whose pastures mourned with the desiccating roar of God in Amos 1:2, now apparently mourns over his ravaged ﬂock himself. He saves but scraps (just what items are pulled from the ruins of Samaria in the last line is very uncertain). Amos worked with animals around Tekoa (Amos 1:1). In 7:15, he claims that God took him from the ﬂock to be a prophet. Are we to see Amos as the shepherd in 3:12? Is he the watchman whose shofar struck fear in 3:6? So far in the book, the prophet has not spoken words that will keep Israel in good standing with God, but words of destruction. The watchman, who should have signalled a call to defend, seems to be on the side of the attackers, signalling the charge. Israel fell upon the prophet, hoping to win peace and quiet. They have fallen into God’s own trap and have received war, violence and the silence of death. But where does this leave Amos, caught between the overwhelming imperative to prophesy and knowing that the content of these revelations will bring terrible destruction to those to whom he is supposed to be a blessing. Is it so easy for a shepherd to become the predator? This is one of the most interesting features of the myth of the ancient prophet: the rejected guardian announces the destruction of his own people. The passion to prophesy brings with it painful experiences, including the difﬁcult ethical issues of theodicy and divine ﬁat. Later, we will see Amos refusing to ‘roar’, but inevitably the lion will win the war of words, if only to turn and recreate afresh what was destroyed. But long before these passages are encountered, the prophetic alter-ego of the reader is given yet another task: 3:13

‘Hear and warn the house of Jacob,’ Oracle of Adonai Yahweh, God of Hosts. 14 ‘ For on the day of my visiting the rebellions of Israel upon himself I will visit the altars of Bethel. The horns of the altar will be cut off and fall to the earth.30 15 And I will strike the winter house and the summer house. I will destroy the houses of ivory, and the great houses will come to an end.’ Oracle of Yahweh.

In this ﬁnal passage of Amos 3, the themes of hearing and repeating the prophetic word are intertwined. Once again the mantle of the prophet must be taken up. This time, however, it is in the name of Adonai Yahweh, God of Hosts; the fuller divine name bringing to mind Yahweh’s lordship over the heavenly legions and divine entourage. The cosmic imagery is reinforced by reference to the destruction of the Bethel’s altars. The ‘fall’ of the altars ‘to the earth’ recalls the fall of the birds into the traps.31 The destruction meted out to these altars is associated with that for the ‘rebellions’ of Israel (the same term as in the ‘three and four’ formula in Amos 1–2). The punishment is not simply military or political, but cultic. The signiﬁcance of the altars is such that only after their destruction is predicted is that of the houses mentioned. All of this, v. 14 tells us, will happen on the same ‘day’. Already in 2:16 we have read of a day in which the mightiest will be defeated and ﬂee naked from divine judgement while Ammon would suffer on a day of battle and tempest (1:14). 30 31

Hebrew shows the alternation between plural and singular altars. Bulkeley, ‘Cohesion, Rhetorical Purpose’, p. 26.

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These references, which alone might be simply taken as general temporal references, carry great symbolic signiﬁcance in concert, especially given the later references to the ‘day of Yahweh’ in 5:18–20 and other mentions of a ‘day’ of judgement. In 3:14, however, the ‘day’ is ﬁrst linked to the destruction of sacred space, an event at the core of the ﬁfth and climactic vision in the book (9:1) that will symbolically destroy the cosmos. Here, however, it is only houses that are destroyed. But like so much else in Amos, these houses are built on the shifting sands of hidden meanings. As much as the reference to the exodus in 3:1 evokes the whole of the Israelite people, so too, does the reference to the descendants of the patriarch Jacob. The fate of the ‘house [lineage/household] of Jacob’ is the same as the fate of ‘House of God’. This, too, foreshadows the cataclysm of the ﬁfth vision. The destruction of Bethel’s altars also recalls earlier passages. In v. 12 parts of a bed are rescued from Samaria. The word for bed is related to the word for ‘to stretch out’ and recalls the Israelites reclining on misappropriated garments in 2:8, while the salvaged cloth in 3:12 also recalls the conﬁscated garments in 2:8.32 There they relax and drink in front of every altar in the house of their god(s). With the predicted fall of the ‘house of Jacob’ and the shrine at Bethel in 3:13, it is no wonder that that the summer and winter houses along with the great houses of ivory will crumble too. But again, there is more than just palaces in view. The house of ‘winter’ (or harvest),, is just an audible façade for a house of ‘disgrace’, . It will be smashed against the house of ‘summer’, , or at least of summer’s ‘end’, , (and the same season will draw to a sudden close in 8:2, as well). God will also destroy the ivory houses of ‘insult’ . And so will perish the ‘great houses’ – a parting sarcasm on the might and pomp of the doomed. The ‘visiting’ of Israel’s sin upon them recalls the same terminology in v. 1, rounding the chapter out by returning to a key word. Yet, in vv. 1–2, Israel was called the people of the exodus. In contrast, the use of the name Jacob in v. 13 to refer to Israel speaks not of the time of the exodus, but of an earlier, patriarchal time. Genesis 28 offers a charter myth for the sacrality of Bethel. At the site of what would become Bethel, Jacob dreams of a ladder ascending to Heaven. God appears to him and promises that he would never abandon him and that his descendants would constitute a great nation (Gen. 28:10–15). Jacob instituted Bethel as a sacred site and built an altar at God’s command (Gen. 28:10–22; 35:1–7). Sleeping with a stone for a pillow, Jacob contrasts sharply with the loaﬁng and drinking of Amos 2:8. Interestingly, Gen. 28:14 includes the prediction that Jacob’s descendants would become a blessing to ‘all of the families of the earth’. The same expression is used in singling out Israel from the nations in Amos 3:1–2. Jacob, the source of the blessing for the world, has become Jacob the doomed nation. But what of the stone horns of Bethel’s altar that fell to earth? Would other travellers sleep on them and receive new dreams and new promises?

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Bed h+m; ‘to stretch out’ h+n

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Chapter 6

On Mountains and High Places: Amos 4:1–13 Amos 4 has a logical progression, from concentrating on the accused to a concentration on God himself. The beginning and end of the chapter are well balanced. The offences committed by the ‘cows of Bashan’ (referring at least to the women of Samaria, if not the whole population) in v. 1 are described with a series of three participle constructions, while in 4:13 a long series of participles describe God. The ‘cows’ offend on the mountain of Samaria, and possibly meet their fate on another mountain (4:1–3). But the ﬁnal verse of the chapter says that God made the mountains, and treads on the earth’s high places. God swears by his holiness in 4:2, and his transcendent might is revealed in 4:13. All that comes in between are contrasts between human and divine action and inaction. There is, therefore, a great procession in the chapter that relates Israel’s love of false religion and a recounting of chastisement by God: a chastisement that, for all intents and purposes, achieved little. Five times we read, ‘you did not return to me’ (4:6, 8, 9, 10, 11). In v. 12, Israel is told to prepare to meet their god, while the name and glory of that deity are revealed in 4:13. But before hearing that declaration, we must hear something else: 4:1

Hear this word, cows of Bashan on the mountain of Samaria! Oppressors of the poor, crushers of the needy, Those saying to their lords, ‘Bring, and we will drink’. 2 Adonai Yahweh swears by his holiness, ‘Indeed, behold, days are coming upon you, You will be lifted by hooks and your remnant in ﬁsh-baskets. 3 And each woman will go out [through] the breaches in front of her And she will be cast onto Harmon.’ Oracle of Yahweh.

The destruction of Israel’s great houses and Bethel represents the end of a lifestyle of luxury and exploitation. This trajectory comes to a head in Amos 4. In vv. 1–3, drunkenness and the exploitation of the poor are in view, just the sort of offences Amos 2:6–8 decried. As in that earlier passage, identity is a central theme.1 Part of the difﬁculty in interpreting Amos 4:1–3 is that the grammatical genders of the addressees in the passage are inconsistent. The initial imperative, ‘hear’ is a masculine plural, while the vocative, ‘cows’, is feminine. The participles describing the acts of the 1

My comments on Amos 4:13 are adapted from a paper entitled ‘Who were Amos’ “Cows of Bashan”?’, read in Nov. 2000 at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Nashville TN.

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accused (‘oppressors’, ‘crushers’, ‘[those] saying’) are also in the feminine plural. Oddly, the ﬁnal verb in the series is complemented with the object ‘their lords’, whose possessive sufﬁx is in the masculine plural form. Moreover, God employs a masculine plural to warn that days are coming ‘upon you’. Also grammatically masculine are the individuals who will be ‘lifted’ with, or in, whatever implements are speciﬁed in the difﬁcult passage. As the passage continues, however, the gender of the addressees again becomes feminine, with ‘women’ speciﬁed outright in Amos 4:3. This inconsistency may be a sign that both men and women are criticized here, with the added insult to the men of having their masculinity ridiculed.2 If ‘cows of Bashan’ refers, at least on its most basic level, to women, what is being said about them? To Wolff, ‘cows’ is a shocking term of abuse.3 Others rightly caution against reading the pejorative connotations of the Western conception into an ancient near eastern setting. One could also point to numerous complimentary expressions in the Song of Songs that are easy to misjudge against modern terms for feminine beauty.4 Regardless of how one interprets it, one should detect bitterness towards the luxury of their lifestyle, given its context in 4:1. That bitterness is not so much analyzed by a number of modern scholars as it is shared.5 Although some scholars advise caution in accusing these women, or at least use moderate language in agreeing with Amos, many conclude that the women were the true behind-thescenes cause of the exploitation that Israel’s poor suffered.6 Wolff calls them ‘an elegant lot of tyrannical and drink-happy ladies’.7 Paul understands the ‘pleasantly plump’ pedigreed cattle to be the ‘pampered leading ladies of Samaria, whose main purpose in life is to tend to their own self-indulgence, irrespective of the cost – to others.’ They are ‘uppity upper-class women’ who make ‘incessant demands’.8 Perhaps the strongest assertion of this sort is by James Mays: Not that the women are the direct perpetrators of oppression! Rather, they make their lords (husbands) the instruments of their own desire, ruling the society of Israel from behind the scenes with sweet petulant nagging for wealth to support their indolent dalliance. The power behind the corrupt courts (5:10f.) and odious business practices (8:4ff.) is theirs.9

I would ask, however, where does Amos say all of this? Yes, he condemns the women for oppression, but he says nothing of their corrupting the judiciary and trade. Nor does he say that the men are to be more or less excused for their part in the matter. Throughout the rest of the Amos-book, women are never speciﬁed as the cause or even the most culpable perpetrators of such corruption. Many modern commentators are harder on the women of Samaria than the book of Amos is. That is not to say, 2

Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. 420–21. Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 205. 4 Mays, Amos, pp. 71–2, Coggins, Joel and Amos, p. 116. For instance, Song 4:1, ‘Your hair is like a ﬂock of goats.’ 5 See the complaints about this in Clines, ‘Metacommentating Amos’. 6 Hayes, Amos, p. 139; Jeremias, Amos, pp. 63–4. 7 Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 205. 8 Paul, Amos, pp. 128–9. 9 Mays, Amos, p. 72. 3

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however, that Amos can easily escape feminist critique. Judith E. Sanderson calls attention to the lack of balance in Amos as a whole. It clearly sees the suffering of the poor, but not in terms of its impact on women, who would have represented a disproportionate number of the needy. For example, there is no mention of the hardships and brutality suffered by women in the aftermath of the war that Amos predicts will be the ﬁtting punishment of Israel. Sanderson ﬁnds that only with the mention of the murdered pregnant women in Amos 1:13 did Amos recognise the effect of war on women and react with any real compassion. In Amos 7:10–17 the prophet predicts that the wife of the priest Amaziah will end up prostituting herself in the city and that their children will die. This is the punishment of Amaziah; a priest would be particularly dishonoured if his wife engaged in such activities (cf. Lev. 21:7, 14). Thus, the woman’s destiny is not really presented in terms of its effect on her.10 She concludes that ‘This imbalance of the book as a whole has only fuelled the ﬁres of misogynistic interpretation’.11 One might add, however, that the divine judgement frequently called down on Israel and the nations in Amos is seen for its consequences on the innocent, whether they are grown women or men or children. This is part of the conceptual framework of much of the Bible that advocates societywide punishment for the excesses of only some of its members. Another area of confusion in some interpretations is whether Amos 4:1–3 deals primarily with social injustice or religious improprieties. In my opinion, this choice is rather artiﬁcial. In 2:6–8, the lying about at shrines and drinking conﬁscated wine encapsulate both social and sacral offences. An unjust political and economic system dishonours the divine (relative to their own views on what a just society is, of course). Likewise, they would ﬁnd it hard to believe that an utterly apostate political elite that profanes the divine name would be capable of justice in human affairs. The two lines of critique go hand in hand. As noted already, the altars in 2:8 are identiﬁed only with the enigmatic phrase, House of their god(s). The lack of a clear identiﬁcation of whom Israel actually worships as god or gods may reﬂect the degree to which the prophet is implying Israel has strayed. In 2:9–11, however, Yahweh identiﬁes himself by recounting his beneﬁcence toward Israel in the exodus and the conquest and the granting of Nazirites and prophets. Another unveiling will take place on a much grander scale in Amos 4. In Amos 3:13–14, unidentiﬁed people are urged to ‘hear and warn’ the House of Jacob. The punishment includes the destruction of the altar at Bethel. The Bethel shrine represents a sphere of social life in which presumably men possessed high levels of control. This ‘house’ speaks of the patriarchal promise and Israel’s special relationship with God. In the ﬁnal verse of chapter 3 (v. 15), however, focus shifts to opulent domestic houses. It would be in this sphere of life that the wealthy, high status women may have the most inﬂuence on their husbands and fathers, who were the priests, kings and ofﬁcials who rule Israel politically and economically. The domestic imagery of 3:15 continues into chapter 4, with the seemingly simple reference to the women who will be punished. But the Hebrew term,  ‘lord’ 10

Judith E. Sanderson, ‘Amos’, in C.A. Newsom and S.H. Ringe (eds) The Women’s Bible Commentary (London: SPCK, 1992), pp. 205–9 (205–7). 11 Sanderson, ‘Amos’, p. 206.

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used in 4:1 to refer to the spouses of the ‘cows’, is a very unusual term if all that is meant is ‘husbands’. The word-play between these ‘lords’ and Amos’ reference to his lord ‘Adonai Yahweh’ in 4:2 is widely recognized. It suggests that the reference to the women’s ‘lords’ implies religious apostasy on their part.12 In Amos 4:4, Amos sarcastically calls his audience to ‘come to Bethel and transgress’, thereby returning focus directly to the men’s world of temple, cult and sacriﬁce, however domestically one wants to interpret vv. 1–3. Whoever the cows of Bashan are, they are hardly to be reduced to only the wives of the powerful men. Their brief appearance in Amos 4 is linked to a far greater trajectory in which the whole history of Israel’s encounter with Yahweh is under scrutiny. As such, it operates on a mythic plane, which is something already intimated by the earlier references to the house of Jacob and Bethel. Bashan is mentioned a number of times in the Hebrew Bible and has strong connections with mythic conceptions of Israel’s past and future. The place is named most often in reference to the conquest and dividing of the land once belonging to King Og, who was the last of the mysterious giant race of Rephaim.13 In Josh. 17:1, Bashan is allotted to the descendants of Machir, because he was a formidable warrior. In the myth of Israelite origins, then, it is a place of special and powerful men. Hans Barstad talks of a prophetic tradition about Bashan that is distinct from its use in other texts. He also points out that, of the many references to Bashan in the prophets, only Jer. 22:20 and Amos 4:1 are judgements against Israel itself. Barstad develops his understanding of Amos 4:1 in view of these prophetic texts, but his employment of the contexts of the other Bashan references in his interpretation is a procedure not shared by many other scholars.14 On the other hand, I am not so sure that one should see a separate prophetic tradition. Certainly the people who wrote and rewrote the prophetic books could well have been acquainted with other literature and oral traditions too. A closer look at some of the other Bashan references that scholars often appeal to in understanding Amos 4:1 is in order. Ezekiel 27:6 is part of a long oracle against presumptuous Tyre, whose grand ﬂeet is propelled by oars made from Bashan’s great trees. Divine action against Bashan’s magniﬁcent trees in Isa. 2:13 is only a part of God’s retribution against all that is proud and arrogant in the world, including humanity; thus, it has some afﬁnities to the Ezekiel verse. Other verses that scholars often appeal to in understanding the expression in Amos also reveal, upon closer scrutiny, signiﬁcant contexts that should be attended to. Deuteronomy 32:14 is often appealed to, since it suggests that ﬁne meat could be produced in Bashan. But much more is said than that. Moses sings of how God nourished Jacob with the generous meat that Bashan could provide. Israel, of course, spurns such divine compassion. Again, Bashan is mentioned in the context of hubris. Other verses that commentators on Amos 4:1 appeal to include Isa. 33:9, Nah. 1:4 and Zech. 11:2, but these also include the theme of divine judgement.15 12

Paul, Amos, p. 129, recognizes the word-play but does not relate it to speciﬁc charges of false worship. For ‘lord’ as ‘husband’, see Gen. 18:12; Judg. 19:26; Ps. 45:12 (Eng. v. 11). 13 Examples include Num. 21:33; Deut. 3:11; Josh. 13:12. 14 Barstad, Religious Polemics, pp. 38–9. 15 These verses are mentioned by Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 205; Terence Kleven, ‘The Cows of Bashan: A Single Metaphor at Amos 4:1–3’, CBQ 58, (1996): 215–7 (219);

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Rather than just refer to Bashan’s prosperity, Amos 4 appears to me to express a similar condemnation of a selﬁshness or haughtiness borne of good fortune. Something a little different is found in Psalm 22. Through the ﬁrst two thirds of the psalm (vv. 1–19, Eng. vv. 1–18), the singer tells of abandonment by God, of being committed to the dust of death. The strong bulls of Bashan (v. 13; Eng. v. 12), dogs and lions surround the singer.16 Wolff’s interpretation misses the point of the psalm when he claims that this reference to Bashan bulls indicates that the ‘cows of Bashan were especially demanding of their herdsmen’.17 At issue is the singer’s terror in the face of enemies and obstacles. Psalm 22 is an apt prayer for the victims of Amos’ Bashan cows. Another signiﬁcant verse is Ezek. 39:18 in which there is a call for wild birds and beasts to consume on the mountains of Israel the blood of enemy warriors and princes, all of whom are called rams, goats, bulls, and the fatlings of Bashan. As in the case of Psalm 22, the contexts are often ignored by Amosscholars.18 At issue is not only the ﬁne cattle that may be raised in Bashan, but that its animals evoke images of an overpowering threat that can only be alleviated by divine violence. These passages suggest that the name Bashan would evoke mythic conceptions and not simply the awareness of a fertile region’s economic potential. Most telling is Psalm 68. In v. 16 (Eng. v. 15), the mountain of Bashan is a – . The expression literally means ‘mountain of god(s)’, signifying Bashan’s height and majesty.19 A certain irony is found in the following verses when Bashan is contrasted with Yahweh’s dwelling: Sinai being mentioned in v. 18, and Jerusalem in v. 30 (Eng. vv. 17, 29). In v. 23 (Eng. v. 22), God says he will retrieve his people from the depths of the sea and from Bashan, so that they may have a bloody victory over God’s enemies. The association of Bashan with the sea suggests that Bashan is imagined as a place of exile, death or absence from God. Again, mythic conceptions control the use of the name Bashan. Psalm 68 has more points of contact with Amos. Although Bashan is not mentioned in this connection, the singer in v. 31 (Eng. v. 30) asks God to rebuke the beasts of the marsh along with the ‘calves of the people’. Psalm 68:6–7 (Eng. vv. 5–6) attributes to Yahweh the care of the poor and underprivileged. Women bring news of God’s victory and the rich spoils there for the taking (vv. 12–14, Eng. vv. 11–13). Thus, Amos 4:1 can be read as a kind of ironic reversal of the imagery in the psalm. Wealthy women make demands of their lords to provide, presumably, for some festivity. All of this, of course, is to the detriment of the poor and needy. As I will point out below, this psalm has other implications for the understanding of Amos. The rich mythological content of Psalms 22 and 68 have led a number of scholars to the conclusion that Amos 4:1–3 is primarily a polemic against some form of heterodox worship rather than against socio–economic exploitation. A.J. Williams Hayes, Amos, p. 138. 16 In vv. 21–2 (Eng. vv. 20–21) a plea for deliverance from dogs, lions and wild oxen is offered. 17 Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 205. 18 Kleven, ‘Cows’, p. 219; Hayes, Amos, p. 138; Jeremias, Amos, p. 63. 19 The use of ‘god’ to indicate greatness or magnitude is not unique to this verse in the Bible.

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thinks that Amos is denouncing a fertility cult with language that is ambiguous as to whether women or men are criticized.20 Some hold that the term ‘cows’ was probably the self-designation of female worshippers of a bull-like manifestation of Yahweh.21 Alternatively, Hans Barstad argues that both male and female devotees are referred to with the single term ‘cows’.22 He highlights the weak textual evidence in the Hebrew Bible that cattle provided a metaphor to use in reference to women speciﬁcally, although he does point to Jer. 2:24 and Hos. 4:16 for cases in which the term could be applied to an apostate people following the wrong deity. Psalm 68:16– 17 (Eng. vv. 15–16) provides ample evidence of the mythic conceptions surrounding Mt. Bashan. Moreover, Barstad argues that the context of Amos 4:1–3 suggests that a religious polemic is the more likely possibility, especially in view of Amos 4:6–9.23 These interpretations are possible, but there seems precious little to suggest that ‘cows’ is more plausibly a technical term for worshippers than it is a label coined for the occasion. The evidence hardly provides a clear impression of a speciﬁc religious tradition that is being criticized in Amos. The other Bashan references do, however, imply that ‘cows of Bashan’ is a loaded expression that ﬁts a conﬂated critique of economic oppression and apostasy. The two merge in the same metaphor that evokes a mythological worldview that will be capitalized upon as the chapter progresses. This implication is stronger, given that Amos 4:1 may actually embrace a pun on the name Bashan. ‘Bashan’ connotes fertility, and the word ‘cow’ (plural ) is also quite close to a verb that means ‘to bear fruit’, . Thus, the fertile ones who should provide, take and even make demands on their lords to give them all the more. According to Williams, the place name ‘Bashan’ may also play on a common Semitic word for ‘serpent’. In Ps. 68:23 (Eng. v. 22), Bashan is paralleled with the sea, making this association too close to be ignored. Williams translates that verse as ‘I will return from the Dragon, I will return from the depth of the sea’. And so, Amos may be comparing the people’s rebelliousness with the chaos monster.24 The mythic connotations of Bashan are not solely in the direction of God’s punishments or on the torments of humanity, however. Bashan also provides an image of salvation. Ezekiel 39:18, as noted above, links the destruction of the fatlings of Bashan to the eventual salvation of Israel. More signiﬁcant is Jer. 50:19 in which Israel are sheep scattered by Assyria and Babylon. Yahweh will lead them back to their pastures in Carmel and Bashan.25 Micah 7:14 offers a similar image of Gilead and Bashan. In the restoration of Israel, the riches of Bashan now become a symbol of nature and humanity once again in harmony with God. Even here, then, references to Bashan in Amos highlight the gap between what the spiritual state of humanity actually is,

20

A.J. Williams, ‘A Further Suggestion About Amos IV 1–3’, VT 29 (1979): 206–11. Paul F. Jacobs, ‘ “Cows of Bashan”– A Note on the Interpretation of Amos 4:1’, JBL 104 (1985): 109–10; Klaus Koch, The Prophets, Vol. I, The Assyrian Period (2 vols.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), p. 46. 22 Hans M. Barstad, ‘Die Basankühe in Amos IV 1’, VT 25 (1975): 286–97. 23 Barstad, ‘Basankühe’. See also Rosenbaum, Amos of Israel, pp. 57, 65–6. 24 Williams, ‘Further Suggestion’, p. 209. 25 Cf. the desiccation of Carmel in Amos 1:2. 21

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and what it should be. Indeed, it is also an image of what it will be again, given the oracle of restoration found at the end of the Amos-book. The ‘cows of Bashan’, therefore, seem to me to possess an intentionally ambiguous identity. On the simplest level, they can be seen to be the rich women of Samaria, and yet, these women themselves are but a metaphor for the Israelites as a whole, with the men receiving the added insult of having their masculinity ridiculed by the overt description of the punished people as women. If one wishes to focus on the accused women here, one must at least admit that the book does not go so far as to blame them for being the root of all evil in Israel, as some modern scholars allege. On the other hand, the Amos-book does not question the frequent use of feminine metaphors to refer to the Israelite nation as a whole, and in fact, it employs it in 5:1. This suggests that, behind any critique of the women in 4:1, there is a conﬂation of or even confusion between the denunciation of real women and of the Israelite population as a whole. There is little to suggest that the writers of Amos explored the implications of the imagery employed. The metaphor of the greedy cattle of Bashan is, therefore, easily, if not fairly, interpreted according to prevailing gender biases, leading to the severity of any attack on real women in Amos 4:1–3 being so grossly overestimated by some modern scholars. Of course, a divine accusation in the Bible is at once a guilty verdict, but just what punishment is seen to ﬁt the crime in the latter half of v. 2 and in v. 3 is not easy to determine. 4:2bα

And you will be lifted by baskets And your remnant in ﬁsh-pots. 3a And each woman will go out [through] the breaches in front of her b And be cast onto Mount Rimmon. bβ

This translation of v. 2 smoothes over a number of issues.26 In v. 2bα, o has occasioned considerable debate with various cognates in Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic proposed. The word may mean ‘shields’, but what kind of imagery is then provided in the line is uncertain, to say the least.27 Wolff links the term to the Hebrew root that means ‘hook’ and deduces that Amos is speaking about the exiles being lead like cattle, tied together with ropes through nose rings.28 ‘Ropes’ itself is another possibility, but the argument for an Akkadian cognate is not that strong.29 Some ﬁnd Exod. 16:33 instructive since that verse employs e to refer to baskets. Paul also ﬁnds an Aramaic cognate with such a meaning. Hence, Paul writes that Amos is referring to baskets. This can be reinforced by reference to Amos 4:2bβ in which ocan be easily understood as ‘ﬁsh-pot’ although o can also refer to thorns or hooks.30 Terence Kleven objects to ﬁnding mixed metaphors in Amos 4:2, 26

Shalom M. Paul, ‘Fishing Imagery in Amos 4:2’, JBL 97 (1978): 183–95; Paul, Amos, pp. 129–36. 27 Paul, Amos, p. 131. 28 Wolff, Joel and Amos, pp. 203–4; 207–8. 29 Paul, Amos, p. 131; Kleven, ‘Cows’, pp. 222–3. Kleven attempts to reassert the connection, but adds no new evidence. 30 Paul, Amos, pp. 132, 134–5.

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claiming that the introduction of ﬁshing imagery has no place in the oracle against the ‘cows’. He prefers to have the ‘cattle’ led away by ropes attached to nose rings or hooks in their foreheads, an image well known from ancient near eastern iconography of the deportation of prisoners.31 I am not as convinced as Kleven, however, that switching metaphors from the cattle to ﬁsh weakens the imagery. Indeed, God’s power to transform will be fully in view in the ﬁnal verse of the chapter. Moreover, if the Bashan cows are indeed in the image of the mythical sea-monster, then God’s rhetoric has aptly reduced them to little ﬁshes. Williams holds that ﬁsh and cattle metaphors are not exclusive and both could be intended, and this is probably the best position to take.32 Another nuance can be added as well. As found in the Hebrew of Amos 4:2bα, our enigmatic word translated as ‘baskets’ has the preposition ‘in’ attached to it, resulting in o, two of the ﬁrst three consonants of which evoke recollection of the name ‘Bashan’. Verse 3, however, is also difﬁcult. The ﬁrst word is usually translated as breaches (in the city’s defensive walls) and through these the defeated population is led out. Yet, Hayes thinks that death and not exile is in view, so he understands this word in the context of corpses bloated to the point of bursting.33 This reading is linked to some issues in line 4, that is, the destination of the punished; but even if one sees death, and not exile, as the fate of the women, there is little to support reading the ﬁrst word of line 3 as a direct reference to corpses against the more typical reading of ‘breaches’ in a wall (cf. Amos 9:8). In the latter half of the verse, the troubles do not disappear. On the one hand, the verb is pointed as if it is active, ‘you will cast’, but it makes more sense to follow the ancient versions and read a passive, ‘you will be cast’.34 On the other hand, if we view the passage in terms of the book as a whole, we ﬁnd another ambiguous use of the verb ‘to cast’ in 8:3. As I will describe below, some commentators would emend it to a passive as well. As an active verb, its subject seems to be God who has thrown numerous corpses to and fro. And so perhaps the women in 4:3 are removing the corpses, and in so doing are embodying the actions of God. But to where? The word o, which I rendered above as ‘onto Mount Rimmon’, has troubled translators. Paul’s comment is to the point: ‘Ingenious suggestions are not wanting; only a suitable solution is still wanted.’35 Targum renders the word as ‘mountain of Armenia’. The Greek, however, reads the ‘mountain of Remman’.36 The Vulgate has ‘Armon’, apparently Mt. Hermon, which is a peak in the borderland between Israel and Aram, a site that Wolff thinks is intended, although this would require some emendation in the Hebrew.37 Andersen and Freedman 31 Kleven, ‘Cows’. He suggests that the reference to ‘ﬁsh-hook’ need not be taken too literally, saying that it may perhaps it was a standard term for any implement that resembled hooks used in ﬁshing (pp. 221–2). This is one of the weaker parts of his argument. 32 Williams, ‘Further Suggestion’, p. 209. 33 Hayes, Amos, p. 141. 34 Hayes, Amos, pp. 141–2; Jeremias, Amos, p. 56. 35 Paul, Amos, p. 136. 36 Paul, Amos, p. 136. 37 Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 207.

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ﬁnd a reference to a place called ‘Harmon’ in northern Syria, otherwise known as Hermal.38 Williams also supposes it to be a mountain named ‘Harmon’ that has some connection with the region of Bashan and is also associated with so-called fertility religions.39 Hayes says it could be read as dung-pit, a ﬁtting place for corpses.40 My suggestion of ‘Mount Rimmon’ is a best guess that is partly grounded in the Greek tradition. It is also worth pointing out that there was an Aramean deity named Rimmon, whose temple is mentioned in 2 Kgs 5:18. Here, the Aramean general Naaman, a new believer in Israel’s god, receives permission from Elisha to enter the temple of Rimmon to serve his king faithfully, even if he must assist the king in bowing to the Aramean deity. Perhaps one might be prepared to see in Amos 4:3 an exile to this place, or even the desecration of a mountain sacred to this god by the casting of Israelite corpses there. In Amos 5:26–7, other deities, or at least their images, are to be carted away beyond Damascus. Still, I favour ‘Mountain of Rimmon’, not for its Aramean connections, but rather with a site closer to the wanderings of Amos. Although there is no mountain called Rimmon in the Hebrew Bible, there is a cliff or rock of that name in Judg. 20:45–7. According to the story that unfolds there, it was the place of refuge of the ﬂeeing Benjaminites after the slaughter at the hands of their countrymen. This place is only a few miles east of Bethel, and so, if this is the eventual destination of the vanquished of Amos 4:3, it is an ominous reﬂection back to Amos 3:14. According to Judges 20, only 600 Benjaminites were able to save their lives by ﬂeeing to Rimmon after the slaughter by their fellow Israelites. Perhaps we should see it as a place where vengeance will eventually subside, and a remnant be allowed to remain. Yet, in the madness that is the closing chapters of Judges, the mercy shown the refugees at Rimmon only leads, in chapter 21, to more bloodshed and the kidnapping of women on behalf of the Benjaminites. Interestingly, this mercy is shown them when the rest of Israel is moved by the violent ‘breach’ God made in Israel, by all but destroying one tribe (Judg. 21:15). In Amos 4:3, the women go through breached walls on the way to their own fate. Will, then, the cows of Bashan eventually be led back to the verdant ﬁelds and pastures? Can humans intervene and stop God from totally destroying Israel? The ﬁrst question is answered by the glorious prediction of eventual salvation. Yet it is a bitter salvation, as the image of the shepherd saving but scraps from the lion’s kill would suggest (3:12). The possible reference in Amos 4:3 to a site so close to Bethel and Gilgal also anticipates the next verse: 4:4

‘Come to Bethel and transgress, to Gilgal and transgress all the more!41 Bring your sacriﬁces in the morning, [Every] third day your tithes. 5 Offer leaven in thanksgiving, And declare freewill offerings loudly!

38 David Noel Freedman and Francis I. Andersen, ‘Harmon in Amos 4:3’, BASOR 198 (1970): 41–2. 39 Williams, ‘Further Suggestion’, p. 210. 40 Hayes, Amos, p. 142, emending the consonants to, as in Isa. 25:10. 41 ‘Transgress’ here is derives from same root translated as ‘rebellions’ in Amos 1–2.

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AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION For this you love, Sons of Israel.’ Oracle of Adonai Yahweh.

Here the cultic imagery is obvious. But rather than bring Israel to God, the rites drive them apart. As I will describe below, both places saw signiﬁcant events take place in the establishment of Israel, yet both are also scenes of apostasy. The sarcasm expresses outrage at Israel’s apparent belief that God would be pleased with inappropriate offerings: leavened bread, and self-aggrandizing public declarations. With such an attitude, any offering would have been illegitimate. Amos 4:4–5 mocks the demand that the lords bring drink in 4:1, and the same verb ‘bring’ is employed in v. 4. The Hebrew root behind the word for morning, , evokes a similar sounding word for cattle that, although not used elsewhere in Amos 4, still reinforces the previous passage. Verses 4–5 may have been anticipated much earlier. Misappropriated garments and wine are the stuff of the festival in 2:8. That Israel has sold itself to such practices, however, is more than aptly expressed with the phrase, ‘this you love’. If God received illegitimate sacriﬁces and offerings what has God given Israel? We have already heard of the Nazirites and prophets who were scorned. But a new phase is opened in 4:6–8. 4:6

‘But I myself gave you cleanliness of teeth in all your cities, Lack of bread in all of your places. But you did not return to me.’ Oracle of Yahweh. 7 ‘And I myself withheld from you the showers for three months before harvest, And I made it rain on one city but on another city I did not make it rain. On one ﬁeld it would rain, but the ﬁeld on which it did not rain would wither. 8 Two or three cities would stagger to one city to drink water, But not be satisﬁed. But you did not return to me.’ Oracle of Yahweh.

This is a tremendously ironic passage. It represents the ﬁrst two of ﬁve reminiscence of unsuccessful divine chastisement of Israel. Each end with the refrain, ‘you did not return to me’. The ﬁrst two recollections in the series, vv. 6–8, each begin with an expression emphasizing the pronoun ‘I’, highlighting that the divine action described must be compared to the actions of Israel described in vv. 4–5. The deity claims in v. 5 that Israel loves practices such as offering leaven, strictly forbidden in the Pentateuch ritual laws (for example, Lev. 2:11; 6:10), but then claims to have sent no bread. Whenever the famine and droughts of vv. 6–8 are meant to have occurred, it would seem to manifest the ‘evil’ that may befall a city as described in 3:6, evil that is Yahweh’s doing. The implication here is that those tottering from town to town do not realize just who it was who has made them suffer like this. Yet, in better times they offer gifts of thanksgiving that only makes matters worse. The second recollection of the series, vv. 7–8, is unusual for its length and God seems to play games with Israel, sending rain on one town but not another, and watching as refugees take to the roads. The drought appears all the worse for God’s teasing them with false hopes. As was the case in 2:9, 10 and 13, the accent is on God himself as if God is taking some wicked delight in declaring his own arbitrariness, something reinforced by the repetitive presentation of his actions. It is, however, a tremendously

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odd image. God remembers only their refusal to heed the warnings of famine and drought. Where then, did they get the animals to sacriﬁce and the crops to offer? The text does not just lament Israel’s lack of a true religion. Rather, it has both parties talking at cross-purposes, with Israel misunderstanding what true communication is all about. There are the silenced prophets (2:12) to attest to this. Nature, humanity and the divine are intricately linked in a symbiotic relationship. Nature provides the sacriﬁcial offerings people are to make so that the deity will preserve order in the cosmos. The order is disturbed: Israel reneges on their cultic and moral obligations and so Yahweh refuses to hold up his part of the bargain. But God is not ﬁnished recounting his lessons for Israel: 4:9

‘I struck you with scorching and mildew. Your many gardens and vineyards, your ﬁg-trees and your olive trees The locust devoured. But you did not return to me.’ Oracle of Yahweh. 10 ‘I sent against you pestilence, in the manner of Egypt. I slew your valiant ones with the sword, along with your captured horses. I lifted the stench of your camps up to your nostrils. But you did not return to me.’ Oracle of Yahweh.

From the cities to the ﬁelds and orchards, and then on to the ﬁeld of battle, all is rotten and stinks. The desiccation of the ﬁelds recalls the withered top of Carmel in 1:2. The devoured trees of 4:9 are as much a metaphor for the destruction of Israel as the destroyed oaks and cedars of 2:9 were of the Amorites. The image of the rotting corpses of the army recalls the defeated soldiers of 2:14–16. As was the case in Amos 2, Amos 4 now moves backward through time. The cities, orchards, and ﬁelds of the land given to Israel fade from view as the text introduces the myth of plagues against Egypt to describe the lessons that Israel spurned. The manner of this recollection implies that Israel perhaps is no longer considered the people of God. They can be treated as any other nation that suffered to show the power of God. 4:11 ‘I overturned you as God overturned Sodom and Gomorrah: You were like a brand rescued from the burning. And you did not return to me.’ Oracle of Yahweh.

Now the punishments of Israel are likened to the total destruction of the two nonIsraelite cities destroyed by ‘ﬁre and brimstone’ in days of Abraham (Genesis 18– 19). The recollection of one historical period is in terms of a more ancient one. And yet, it is at this point that God himself turns. Israel is like a brand saved from the burning. Like Lot and his relatives being spared the ﬁre and brimstone, a remnant escapes. The word here is the same as in 3:12, in which only scraps are rescued from the lion and bits of furniture from the ruins of Samaria. There is an ironic reversal that recalls the naked warrior of 2:15 and anticipates the salvation at the end of the book. The ﬁnal ‘you did not return to me’ (4:11), however, assures the reader that ultimate salvation is yet far in the future:

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Therefore, this I will do to you Israel! Because, even this I will do to you! Prepare to meet your god, Israel!

Again, the Hebrew wording is hard to understand. Each word is clear but the repetition is unusual. Perhaps a copyist conﬂated two divergent versions of the passage, or some kind of corruption took place.42 Some interpreters claim that the repetition stemmed from the passage’s original oral delivery and that the speaker made some physical gesture (perhaps pointing to something) and repeated himself to make his point.43 Such a transcript theory for the recording of this verse is implausible, to say the least. Rather, repetition may be a representation of a divine rage that makes coherent speech all but impossible. God lingers over the unspeciﬁed threat before blurting out the equally unspeciﬁc, ‘prepare to meet your god!’ The reader, too, must pause to contemplate what ‘this’ is.44 Is it the previous refusal to return, or is it a more horriﬁc fate yet to come? The passage seems to relish the suspense.45 The repeating of the verb ‘to do’ in successive clauses in v. 12, however, has its own precedent. In 3:6–7 one ﬁnds it again twice. Even if God has done the evil that befalls a city, he still does nothing without revealing it to his servants. Thus, his threatened actions in 4:12 include the very prophetic warning that is intended to strike fear in the people. The use of the word , ‘because’, is curious, however. It shares the same consonants as the Hebrew root underlying the name Jacob, the original name of the man later called Israel. Thus, in 4:12 God, in his rage, names Israel twice, but also evokes the other name of the man who founded the shrine of Bethel and received the promise of fathering a great nation. The stuttering speech replaces the calculated, obsessive repetition in the series of reminiscences. It effects a shift from what God has done to what God will do and what Israel has not done to what they should do. Once they walked together; they must have encountered one another, according to 3:3. But now the meeting seems to be even more obvious. Just who this god is that brings such calamity is revealed in 4:13: 4:13

For Behold! The former of mountains,46 Creator of wind, Who declares to humanity what his thoughts are. Maker of dawn from darkness. The strider upon the high places of the earth. Yahweh, God of Hosts, is his name.

42 Paul, Amos, p. 150, offers a good discussion of the various positions, while defending the accuracy of the extant Hebrew text. 43 Paul, Amos, p. 150. Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 222, thinks along the same lines but argues that the verse is a secondary addition from the time of King Josiah. 44 My translation uses ‘this’ twice, but in the original two different words are found. 45 Möller, Prophet in Debate, pp. 280–81, following Carroll R., Contexts, p. 215. 46 As a potter works clay (Jer. 18:3–6). The word is also used in the story of the creation of humanity in Gen. 2:7.

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This verse is brilliantly composed of ﬁve participial clauses before the declaration of the divine name. It evokes memories of the similar forms used to describe the actions of the accused in 4:1 (oppressors, crushers, those saying). Andersen and Freedman hold that these verbs in 4:13 are titles, almost names, of the divine.47 I have followed them in this while recognizing that constructions are not functioning exclusively as proper nouns. Amos 4:13 highlights the nature and power of the divine, and emphasizes the revelation of divine knowledge to humanity. This then, is the god Israel is to meet, and it afﬁrms the claim of 3:7 that God’s thoughts are revealed. Amos 4:13 is the ﬁrst of three similar passages that share (with some variation in exact form) the refrain ‘Yahweh is his name’ (including 5:8–9 and 9:5–6). They are often called ‘hymnic fragments’ or doxologies.48 In general, they describe theophanic manifestations and, like so many other passages in Amos, they operate in the world of myth and imagination. Crenshaw links them to oaths required in sacred laws and a ‘theophany of judgment’.49 Paas identiﬁes a number of other passages with comparable refrains naming Yahweh and observes that the vast majority of them occur in prophetic books.50 Jeremias ﬁnds the hymn in Job 5:9–10 to be the closest parallel in the Hebrew Bible to these three Amos passages. The hymn shares much of the same imagery as the Amos doxologies and it is of similar structure, employing participles to celebrate the attributes and works of God. Jeremias writes that it is no accident that creation themes are interwoven in judgemental passages. The genre of these kinds of hymns was the celebration of divine power to order chaos. In adapting this kind of hymn to the book of Amos, however, the positive image of God ordering chaos to preserve the world is inverted. Yahweh has the power to overturn the cosmic order in view of human transgressions.51 Although there are many proposals for the exact social setting of the participial hymn genre, their association with some kind of cultic or ritual practices is a defensible generality. The use of such styles in Amos, therefore, would have brought not only the speciﬁc content of the verses to the mind of the ancient reader but something of the ritual background of the style in general.52 Encountering them in Amos would have evoked something of the larger context in which such compositions were typically recited. As Paas notices, the irony is that instead of answering the call to bring offerings to Bethel and other places, Israel should prepare for a real encounter with their deity. Paas also notes that the word

47

Andersen and Freedman, Amos, p. 453. Mays, Amos, p. 83, goes beyond any evidence in asserting that the three all come from the same hymn. 49 James L. Crenshaw, Hymnic Afﬁrmation of Divine Justice: The Doxologies of Amos and Related Texts in the Old Testament (SBLDS, 24; Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975), pp. 37–8. 50 See the recent discussion in Paas, Creation, pp. 198–326. His list of comparable biblical passages celebrating Yahweh’s name, discussed on pp. 222–30, includes Exod. 15:3; 34:14; Isa. 47:4; 48:2; 54:5; Jer. 10:16; 31:35; 32:18; 33:2; 46:18; 50:34; 51:15; Hosea 12:6; Ps. 68:5. 51 Jeremias, Amos, pp. 76–8. 52 Perhaps the genre developed from covenant renewal ceremonies or ‘holy war’ traditions: see the discussion in Paas, Creation, pp. 209–19. 48

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‘prepare’ is sometimes used in cultic contexts.53 The evocation of cultic forms of speech may have served to bring the book’s audience to a realization that the true meaning of the ritual practices is just such an encounter. Specialized rules of conduct, actions and language set ritual time and place apart from the norm. And so the ﬁrst of the doxologies evokes these special situations to evoke a sense of transcendence. This passage, along with the second hymnic doxology in 5:8–9, is a step towards revealing all of creation to have a foundation in the cosmic order established by God. Amos 4:13 is steeped in cosmological language and the ﬁve participial clauses in 4:13 display another chiastic structure. The revelation to humanity is at the important central position. A frame is achieved with reference to mountains in the ﬁrst clause and to high places in the ﬁnal one. Between each of these references to solid items and the central line are things far less tangible: wind and light. Alongside the chiasm, there is also a sequential progression. From creation to revelation and the coming dawn, the hymn concludes the image of Yahweh himself striding across the mountains. There are a number of nuances in structure and wording in the verse, however. The ﬁrst parallel pair of lines links the creation of mountains to that of the wind. It is a curious thing to parallel mountains with wind, but creation of the natural world is a controlling theme, with mountain and wind representing the totality of nature. While the reading , ‘wind’, is probably not to be disputed in Amos 4:13, there is a similar word  that means ‘width’ or ‘expanse’. ‘Wind’ may have been chosen as a counterpart to ‘mountains’ because of the possible allusion to Yahweh creating the ‘wide spaces’. Two concepts – a powerful windstorm and the idea that such phenomena are beyond the control of humanity – are central to the imagery, however. Paas relates this passage to traditions of Yahweh as a weather god.54 The word ‘wind’ has many other meanings, including ‘breath’, transience and emptiness.55 It also means ‘spirit’. Joshua has the spirit of God within him (Num. 27:18), as does Elijah and, in turn, Elisha (2 Kgs 2:9, 15). In Isa. 42:5, the spirit is given to all the earth’s inhabitants. What, then, is the  that God creates in Amos 4:13? If we look at it not only as a natural phenomenon but also as one of the spiritual gifts given to humanity, its parallel pair is not with the mountains but with the ‘thought’ revealed to humanity. The Septuagint reads ‘spirit’ in Amos 4:13, which Wolff explains as an attempt to make a smoother transition to the next clause. As Wolff suggests, the creation of the wind is the counterpart to the making of the mountains in the poetic parallelism and also works in relationship to what follows. The meaning shifts from the natural phenomena, the mountains and wind, to a divine action regarding humans in the central line.56 Paas sees the ‘wind’ as the bearer 53

Paas, Creation, p. 303. The examples he gives, 1 Chron. 22:3, 5; 28:2 do not really illustrate this. But, at Mt. Sinai God demands that people prepare themselves for his manifestation (Exod. 19:1, 15; 34:2). Animals can be prepared for sacriﬁce in Num. 23:1. It should be noted, however, that this word can also be used to refer to making more mundane preparations. 54 Paas, Creation, p. 271. 55 Job’s life is like wind (Job 7:7) while Eccl. 1:14 and 2:11 complain of striving after wind. 56 Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 223. Wolff does not employ the term ‘Janus parallelism’, but it would be apt.

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of the divine word and divine power to order chaos.57 Psalm 18 has some striking imagery that combines creation and divine warrior motifs that can illustrate what seems to be in view in Amos 4:13. Yahweh, ‘in his sanctuary’ (Ps. 18:7–8, Eng. v. 6–7), hears the calls of the singer and, shaking the earth and mountains, comes down ‘riding a cherub’ and descending ‘on the wings of the wind’ or ‘outstretched wings’ (v. 11, Eng. v. 10).58 The next verse speaks of the deity surrounded by clouds and darkness as his ‘sukkah’ or covering (cf. the ‘sukkah of David’ in Amos 9:11). In Psalm 18:16 the ocean ﬂoor and the foundations of the world are exposed by the blast of Yahweh’s breath (Eng. v. 15). Also noteworthy is Psalm 104 as noticed by Paas.59 Yahweh spreads the heavens out like a tent and rides the ‘wings of the wind’. The winds are also called his messengers (Ps. 104:2–4). What action is in view in that central position of these ﬁve lines in Amos 4:13 is not readily apparent. Some prefer to see the line as indicating that God knows the thoughts of people.60 Many others, however, think that the phrase most probably deals with the revelation of God’s plan to humanity.61 The latter is the most obvious although, as we shall see, the former works as well. Although different terms are used, the thoughts of God that are disclosed can be related to the revelation of his secret to his servants the prophets in 3:7. Yet, the great cosmic imagery of 4:13 does not reveal any hint of prophetic privilege. Humanity knows God’s thoughts because they are revealed to them, and this is as great a principle of divine nature as the act of creation. Paas draws his reader’s attention to Ps. 147:19 for its linking of creation themes with revelation.62 This psalm ends with a notice that revelation is only given to Israel. Amos 4:13 seems to offer something of a democratization of divine knowledge that is at odds with this and Amos 3:7. This discrepancy has been seen already between 3:7 and 3:8, but it is a disjunction that, as I argued above, is only apparent. It serves to enlist the reader’s or hearer’s sense of identity with the prophets. Likewise, the readers of 4:13 must search to ﬁnd the knowledge that God is said to have disclosed. The fourth line of the doxology is also disputed. Möller translates, ‘the one, who is going to turn [‘the turner of’] dawn into darkness’.63 In Hebrew, the line has but 57

Paas, Creation, p. 272. According to Mitchell Dahood, Psalms I. 1–50: Introduction, Translation and Notes (AB, 16; New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 107, ‘wind’ is probably an error for ‘outstretched’, but in view of Ps. 104:3–4, in which ‘wings of wind’ has the wind as divine messengers, this seems unlikely. 59 Paas, Creation, p. 272. 60 Hammershaimb, Amos, p. 75; Cullen I.K. Story, ‘Amos—Prophet of Praise’, VT 30 (1980): 67–80 (69). 61 Wolff, Joel and Amos, pp. 223–4; Hayes, Amos, p. 150; Jeremias, Amos, p. 66; James L. Crenshaw, ‘’, CBQ 34 (1972): 39–53, p. 43; Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. 453, 456, read  as ‘to Adam’, the primordial human, instead of ﬁnding the common noun ‘humanity’. 62 Paas, Creation, pp. 273–4. 63 Möller, Prophet in Debate, p.287. See also Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 211. Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, pp. 335–6, wonders if the Septuagint (and a few Hebrew manuscripts) are not original in saying that God made the dawn and darkness. 58

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three words. The ﬁrst word is ‘maker’ and  is usually taken as a reference to ‘morning’. The third word, ah, is usually interpreted as ‘darkness’. Given the fact that there are no prepositions in the line, it is less than clear whether  is made from, or into, ah. Moreover, both of these words can be differently interpreted. Paul argues that ah is actually derived from a word meaning ‘brightness’. Hence, he sees the early morning darkness turned into ‘glimmering dawn’. He calls attention to Joel 2:2 in which , ‘soot’, is employed.64 So we are left with the question of whether dawn evicts the darkness or whether light is vanquished by blackness. In the second theophanic hymn, God both lightens the darkness and turns day into night (Amos 5:8). In 4:13, God creates mountains and emptiness. Humanity can hear God’s inner musings while they are unable to hide anything from him. God exercises control over human thoughts, making the prophetic imperative overwhelming to those who ﬁnd revelation in the passage. The imperative is coercive and manipulative. Yahweh brings light but perhaps also darkens the sky, as if the light of God’s thoughts can be easily concealed.65 Such is the role of the prophet in Isa. 6:8–10; 28:7–13; 29:9–14. The prophet’s work is to cloud the mind of the hearers so that they do not understand. Prophecy is a book written, but sealed. The reader is illiterate. Also in Isaiah 29, however, one ﬁnds reference to the potter (cf. ‘former’ of the mountains) and his superior status to the pot (v. 16). More interestingly, this passage is introduced by a mockery of those who think to hide their plans from God (v. 15) and work in the dark. The terms are different from those in Amos 4:13 but the relationship is striking. It is fruitful ground for both ancient and modern creative exegesis. The defeat of metaphorical darkness is developed further in the ﬁnal clause. Here God is the ‘strider’ upon the high places of the earth. At face value, this is a poetic image highlighting God’s mastery over the mountains (cf. the mountains of Samaria and possibly Mount Rimmon in Amos 4:1–3). Much more is at stake, however. The word  ‘high places’ not only denotes hills or mountains but the shrines that were sometimes built upon them. These cultic places generally meet with the scorn of the biblical writers. Thus, the ‘high places of Isaac’ in Amos 7:9 are doomed to destruction. Yahweh treads upon the ‘high places of the earth’ in Mic. 1:3, melting the mountains when he leaves his sanctuary to bring judgement to the world. In Amos 4:13, the creation of the mountains creates a link between heaven and earth. The wind is also more than just a natural phenomenon but is closely associated with revelation and divine power. To tread on the ‘high places’, then, is to suggest divine manifestation on the heights, but employing terms that also evoke sacred space in which the deity may also appear. In Deuteronomy 32, Moses sings of how Yahweh allotted each nation their land but, after discovering ‘Jacob’ in the wilderness, Yahweh bore him away like an eagle and set him down on the ‘high places of the earth’ (v. 13). The poem continues with Moses recalling the rebelliousness of Jacob’s descendents. Another meaning for  is ‘back’ and, with this in view, the full power of the god is evidenced in 64

Paul, Amos, pp. 137, 155. This is despite the objections of William Rainey Harper, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Amos and Hosea (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1905), pp. 104–5, who rejects any reference to spiritual light or darkness, as suggested by commentators in earlier centuries. 65

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Amos 4:13: Yahweh treads upon the ‘back of the earth’, just as he will tread on the backs of his enemies in Deut. 22:29 or, in the deeply mythological Job 9:8, upon the back of the sea. Thus, the coming of knowledge and light is accompanied by God’s victory over the controversial high place shrines.66 In this poetic verse, therefore, the symbiosis between God, nature, and humanity the deity once created is highlighted, but only in response to the breaking of that relationship as described earlier in the chapter. Since humanity disturbed the balance, the deity’s manifestation is violent. By evoking a sense of sacred space around the reader, the text is actually paving the way for the vicarious encounter with God in Amos’ visionary experiences in the book’s closing three chapters. The former of the mountains in 4:13 is also the one who forms the locusts that devour the harvest in Amos’ ﬁrst vision (7:1). In both cases, a participial form of the root yr is employed. The third vision concludes with the image of Yahweh shattering the ‘high-places’ of Isaac and the sanctuaries of Israel, and destroying the house of Jeroboam (Amos 7:9). The strider of 4:13, according to Crenshaw, tramples on those elevated sites on which Israel builds her sanctuaries, like a conqueror trampling over the backs of his victims.67 Further aﬁeld, Yahweh is imagined as treading a winepress when he acts in violence (for example, Isa. 63:2). Treading grapes as a metaphor of divine punishment is also found in Jer. 25:30, which has a number of other parallels with Amos. Yahweh roars and gives his voice from the heights; compare Yahweh’s voice on Zion in Amos 1:2, and the lions of Amos 3:4, 8). Israel’s treading on the backs of enemies is mentioned in Deut. 33:29. In a verse rife with mythic connotations, Yahweh tramples the sea (or the sea-god Yam) in Hab. 3:15. In Job 9:8 Yahweh stretches out the heavens and treads on the sea, themes also found in Ps. 77:20 (Eng. v. 19). The singer of the psalm in Hab. 3:19 gloriﬁes the strength of God because the deity makes the singer ‘tread upon the heights’. Most signiﬁcant, however, is Mic. 1:3: ‘For behold Yahweh is coming from his place, and he will descend and tread upon the heights of the earth.’ By accessing what must be a common stock of mythical imagery, the writer of Amos 4:13 heightens the emotional impact of the book and, in turn, makes the visions themselves even more intense when they are ﬁnally encountered in Amos 7–9. The ﬁrst vision has Yahweh ‘forming’ locusts. The second involves a cosmic ﬁre burning up the ‘great deep’. There is a transference of imagery from the deity treading on the ‘high places’ in 4:13 to him standing on a wall in the third vision, and ﬁnally on an altar in the ﬁfth. The visions make prophecy inevitable as Amos is tricked into declaring doom after successfully interceding. Yet the reader already knows the power of prophecy as revealed in the lion’s roar (3:8). But the transition from 4:12 to the hymn of v. 13 already reﬂects this mystery. The sinners are told to prepare to ‘meet’ their god. The root , however, can also form words meaning ‘to call’. So while the ﬁrst doxological hymn forces the sinners to ‘meet’ their god, the reader may once again take up the prophetic mantle with Amos and announce the deity’s presence.

66

Crenshaw, ‘’, pp. 42–4, emphasizes the repudiation of Canaanite sanctuaries

in 4:13. 67

Crenshaw, ‘’, p. 43.

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PART III Speech and Silence

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Chapter 7

Lament: Amos 5:1–17 Amos 5:1–17 displays yet another symmetrical or chiastic formation.1 Despite this, diachronic explanation, emendation and rearrangement have been used to explain its present form.2 Even so, the Hebrew of the Masoretic Text is hardly unintelligible. The ﬁner details (and perceived problems) of the structure need not delay us, but many scholars interpret the passage along the following lines. Amos 5:1–17 begins and ends with references to songs of mourning. In 5:1–3, the prophet calls attention to the dirge he sings over the house of Israel. Matching the initial dirge are predictions of Israel’s own lamenting at the end of the section in vv. 16–17. An internal frame is achieved by vv. 4–6 and vv. 14–15. In the former, one ﬁnds an exhortation to seek God and to avoid the towns of Bethel, Gilgal, and Beersheba (implicitly, to avoid the shrines there). In vv. 14–15, there is a further exhortation to seek – this time good and not evil. Moving further towards the centre of the longer passage yet another frame can be found in v. 7 and vv. 10–13, although the mismatched lengths of the components are a bit troubling to the schema. The theme here is accusation and threat, with a rather mysterious conclusion in v. 13. The central core is vv. 8–9, the second of the theophanic doxologies. But we begin at the beginning: 5:1 Hear this word that I am lifting against you, A lament, House of Israel! 2 ‘Fallen, never again to rise is the Virgin Israel! Abandoned on her land: no one to raise her!’ 3 For thus says Adonai Yahweh, ‘The city that marches out a thousand shall have left but a hundred. The [city of] one hundred marchers shall have left but ten to the house of the Israel.’

The one who treads on the high-places of the earth has his song of glory in 4:13, while Virgin Israel, left, has her lament. She cuts a pathetic image, with no one to lift her up from the ground, , even if God is powerful enough to form mountains and create wind and reveals secret to humanity, . Surely, Israel has met her god. The thoughts of God revealed to humanity in 4:13 result in the dirge 1 This is well recognized. See, for instance, Paul, Amos, pp. 157–81; Dorsey, ‘Literary Architecture’, pp. 312–4; Jan de Waard, ‘The Chiastic Structure of Amos V 1–17’, VT 27 (1977): 170–7; N.J. Tromp, ‘Amos 5.1–17: Towards a Stylistic and Rhetorical Analysis’, in A.S. van der Woude (ed.) Prophets, Worship and Theodicy: Studies in Prophetism, Biblical Theology and Structural and Rhetorical Analysis and on the Place of Music in Worship (OTS, 23; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1984), pp. 56–84. 2 Very extensive emendations are proposed in Harper, Amos and Hosea, pp. 110–20, and Watts, Vision and Prophecy, pp. 13–16.

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of 5:2, and especially the wailing in vv. 16–17: humanity echoes the divine word spoken against them. The stench of the defeated armies of 4:10 should be detected also in 5:3. So, too, could 4:11’s brand snatched from the ﬁre be found in the remnant left after the massacres of 5:3. And, perhaps it is the creation of this remnant that is in view in vv. 4–6 and vv. 14–15, with their pleas to seek God and righteousness. The decimated cities of v. 3 have their own reﬂections in the book. Israel’s obsequious tithes are rejected in 4:4. Now, a tenth of Israel’s soldiers are allowed to return to their shattered people, a brutal reminder of the warrior who ﬂed naked in 2:16. More gruesomely, the thousand become a hundred, the hundred but ten: the pattern of declining numbers is a slide that threatens total annihilation, regardless of the series stopping with a handful of escapees. The decimation will continue. In Amos 6:9, one reads, ‘If ten are left in one house they will die.’ But Amos 5 does not develop this ominous trajectory without giving some advice. This advice is found immediately following, in Amos 5:4–5, which contains a six-line speech of God with a complex structure: 5:4a 4b

Thus says Yahweh to the House of Israel, ‘Seek me and live. 5a Do not seek Bethel, b To Gilgal you must not [or, will not] come. c Beersheba you must not [or, will not] pass. d For Gilgal to exile will go, e And Bethel will become nothing.’

These are some of the richest verses in the book for their brilliant manipulation of language, clever word-plays and alliteration. It begins as if it were offering a standard parallel construction. In v. 4b the addressees are asked to seek God and live, an imperative and a statement of purpose or consequence. The ﬁve lines in v. 5 offer a counterpoint, noting what not to seek and why. Verse 5a offers only a parallel to the imperative of v. 4b while the reason for obeying this commandment is not given until the ﬁnal clause, v. 5e. In this way, the Bethel statements form a chiastic frame around the remaining three clauses. A ban on travel to Gilgal is in 5b is matched with a rationale provided in 5d, leaving Beersheba squarely in the middle in 5c. Andersen and Freedman explain this chiasm as a device to focus attention on Bethel, while N.J. Tromp says Judaean readers will notice an emphasis on themselves, given that Beersheba, far to the south of Jerusalem, is in the central position.3 Jerusalem is surrounded with banned places. This makes the lack of accent on the city itself interesting. But, for all the emphasis at the start of the book on the divine voice roaring from Zion, 5:4–5 implies that God is not really found in any place, an idea that is reinforced by the judgement against the city declared in Amos 2. It is by seeking God that one may live. This is achieved, according to 5:14–15, by pursuing goodness, righteousness and justice ‘in the gate’. The gate of which city is not speciﬁed, nor does it need to be. It is any city.

3

Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. 478–9; Tromp, ‘Amos v 1–17’, p. 65.

LAMENT: AMOS 5:1–17

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My translation of the warning against Bethel in Amos 5:5 hides a widely recognized word-play with very similar syllables near the beginning and at the end: ––. Through the alliteration, Bethel is associated with the initial negation . This association is apt, since in the ﬁfth line Bethel itself becomes ‘nothing’. Amos’ manipulative naming may be the inspiration for Hosea, when he uses this word to call Bethel a ‘house of nothing’ or bt (Hos. 4:15; 5:8; 10:5).4 If standard theories on the relative dating of Amos and Hosea are set aside (something easily accommodated under the new historical frameworks accepted by the present work), the inﬂuence may be in the opposite direction. Be that as it may, another Hosea passage provides some interesting parallels. Hosea 12:4–5 (Eng. vv. 3–4) recalls Jacob’s tricking of his brother, his wrestling with God and his meeting God at Bethel. In 12:9 (Eng. v. 8) one reads, ‘Ephraim said, “Ah, I am rich, I have found wealth for myself. In all my gain there has not been found any guilt that is sin.” ’ The words for wealth and guilt share the same consonants as Amos’ ‘nothing’. Wealth is something good to ﬁnd, but for all of Israel’s seeking in Bethel, they shall come up with nothing of value at all. What is more, the ‘nothingness’ of the famous shrine in Bethel is compounded by the war of words that will play out between Amos and the priest of Bethel, Amaziah in 7:10–17. There the ‘house of God’ is claimed by the priest to be a royal shrine and sanctuary. The implication is plain as the priest has negated the shrine’s name and nature; it is nothing. The negation of the shrine is also plainly in view in the ﬁnal vision of the book, Amos 9:1. The prophet himself is implicated in the divine plan to destroy the (cosmic) temple to initiate the destruction of the world. The word-play on the name Gilgal in Amos 5:5 is much less subtle, also involving a sense of ironic reversal: ‘To Gilgal do not come … For Gilgal to exile will go’, but embracing some very obvious alliteration in 5d. .5 There is an irony in this injunction and prediction that makes it a ﬁtting complement to the predication of Bethel’s fate: do not come, for you shall be sent away. There are also important allusions in this ban on Gilgal that make it a poignant reference here in Amos. Already in 4:4–5, the implied audience is sarcastically told to increase their sins at Bethel and Gilgal by bringing offerings and tithes. The Hebrew Bible never fully describes the religious cult at Gilgal, but there are other injunctions against it. Hosea 12:11 refers to the sacriﬁce of bulls there. Hosea 4:15 bans travel to Gilgal and to bt, advising people not to swear by Yahweh’s life. The misfortunes of Israel began at Gilgal and, according to Hosea 9:15, it was there the deity disowned them, explaining that, because of their misdeeds, he will ‘drive them from my house’. The books of Samuel make some reference to the place, most notably in 1 Samuel 10–11 with the start of the reign of Saul. Saul offered an inappropriate sacriﬁce there and so received Samuel’s prediction that he will be deposed (1 Sam. 13:7–14). Saul also allowed illicit plunder to be brought to Gilgal, which again earned him the scorn of both the prophet and God (1 Sam. 15:10–33). Most signiﬁcantly, however, Gilgal ﬁgures large in the conquest myth in Joshua. It is the site of a stone monument 4

Paul, Amos, pp. 163–64. The emphatic sequence of inﬁnitive and ﬁnite forms of the same verb is brilliantly preserved by Paul, Amos, p. 157, ‘For Gilgal shall go into galling exile’. 5

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representing the twelve tribes erected to mark the miraculous crossing of the Jordan River (Josh. 4:15–24). As the narrative continues, the Israelite males are circumcised – an obvious reference to covenant and divine promise – in a rite that is said to ‘roll away’ the shame of slavery in Egypt. The Hebrew root for roll, , is then used as the etymology of the place name ‘Gilgal’. It is also at Gilgal where the Israelites celebrate the ﬁrst Passover in their new land (Josh. 5:2–11). Gilgal in Amos 5:5 has clear connotations of some form of illicit ritual activity and reasons given for the ban on travel there – its impending exile – implies a reversal of the exodus and conquest myths, conceptions that are central to Israel’s self-identity. With this in mind, not coming to Gilgal means not entering the land of promise. Oddly, however, there is no condemnation of the Judaean city of Beersheba in Amos 5:5. Paul explains this by claiming that the central focus of the book is on the northern kingdom; had the writer wanted to make a word-play on the name as was done for the previously mentioned places, this could have been easily accomplished.6 In Amos 8:14, those who swear by the ‘Strider’ or ‘path’ of Beersheba (literally, ‘Well of the Oath’) are among those who will faint with thirst on the day of God’s withdrawal. Surely the irony of a ‘dry well’ is intended. But 8:14 also suggests that Beersheba should not be discounted as too peripheral to warrant a prediction of doom in 5:5. Those who go to Gilgal will be exiled from it. Those who seek Bethel will ﬁnd but a delusion. Perhaps for Beersheba one could ﬁnd both injunction and repercussion in a single line that forms the centre of the structure. The key is to be found in the mythic history of the place. We have seen how the story of Jacob at Bethel may lie behind a number of passages in Amos. For Beersheba, we must turn to Genesis once again. In Gen. 21:32–3, Abraham concludes a pact with Abimelech and Phicol with an oath at Beersheba. There he invokes the name of Yahweh. After the aborted sacriﬁce of Isaac, Abraham settles for a time in Beersheba (Gen. 22:19). Isaac himself travels there where God appears to him to reafﬁrm the promise to his father. Isaac builds an altar and invokes the divine name (Gen. 26:23–4). A similar theophany also greets Jacob when he travels by there on his way to Egypt, with God telling him not to fear, for his offspring will become a great nation in Egypt (Gen. 46:1–4). In Kings, Elijah ﬁrst stops at Beersheba before his journey to Horeb, where he encounters God (1 Kgs 19:3). If allusions to such traditions about Beersheba may be read into Amos 5:5, then the order not to pass by that place may be taken as a prediction that the same kind of afﬁrming theophany that greeted the patriarchs and Elijah will be denied the implied audience. Indeed, the grammar of the Beersheba line is not a true imperative, but an imperfect with the negation .7 It may, therefore, be read two ways: once in parallel with the grammatically similar preceding line and with an imperative force in view of the prohibition on seeking Bethel (‘Do not pass’) and, secondly, as a negated factual statement anticipating the subsequent clauses

6

Paul, Amos, p. 164. This is also the case in the previous line about Gilgal. The initial ban on seeking Bethel is differently constructed, with the negation  and an imperfect verb, a combination which carries a clear prohibition. The subsequent lines employ the different negative particle, , with imperfect verbs, which can give a prohibitive sense but may also negate factual statements. 7

LAMENT: AMOS 5:1–17

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in which threatening predictions are made (‘you will not pass’). In this sense, the central line operates as a Janus parallelism. Whatever problem the writer had with pilgrimages to Gilgal and Beersheba (Amos 8:14), the following exhortations in 5:6 only turn into another opportunity to threaten Bethel and the House of Joseph. Rather than seek Bethel, one is advised to: 5:6 Seek Yahweh and live! Lest he advance like a ﬁre, House of Joseph! And it devours, with no one of Bethel to quench [it].

This verse completes the thought of v. 5, returning the reader to the object of a proper search and providing some incentive to do just that. The ‘no one’ who can snuff out the ﬂames returns the reader to the start of Amos 5, and the ‘no one’ who could raise the Virgin Israel. Naming Israel the House of Joseph in v. 5:6 recalls the youngest and favoured son of Jacob and the patriarch’s journey past Beersheba into Egypt to reunite with Joseph and his other sons (Gen. 46:1–4). There is yet another level to this imagery. Rachel names her son ‘Joseph’ [ysp] to reﬂect her wish, ‘May Yahweh give [lit. ‘add’ ysep] another son for me’ (Gen. 30:24). But in Amos, the ‘House of One More’ is where ‘no one’ who can save him. This ‘no one of Bethel’ also a looks back at Bethel’s becoming an illusive nothing. But who are those who would seek Bethel and not God? 5:7

Those who overturn justice to wormwood leave righteousness on the ground.

Without even pausing for a note to indicate that the subject has changed, the text then turns to describe the God that those who desire to live should seek: 5:8

[The] maker of Pleiades and Orion, [The one who] overturns deep darkness into morning darkens day into night. [The] summoner of the waters of the sea pours them upon the face of the earth. Yahweh is his name! 9 Unleasher of devastation upon the strong! Devastation comes upon the fortress! 8

This second hymnic passage (cf. 4:13, 9:5–6) is the centrepiece of 5:1–17 and the book as a whole. It contrasts the actions and attributes of God with those of the accused in v. 7, and there are some striking parallels in expression and form. The subjects of both passages are said to be capable of overturning or transforming something, although the ordering of day and night is a far different thing to turning justice into metaphorical weeds. Likewise, the earth ﬁgures in both. But abandoning righteousness on the ground is but a small accomplishment compared to pouring out the sea upon it. The power to commit crimes is answered by an appeal to the power of ritual texts to instil an air of transcendence. The sarcasm of Amos 4 is gone. There is no call to bring offerings and tithes to Bethel or Gilgal but a warning to stay away 8

Ancient versions make God the subject of the whole verse, ‘He brings ruin’, which may ﬁt 5:8’s pattern better.

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from those places. The theophany imagined in 5:8–9 opens up a breach between the sacred and the profane able to touch anyone, no matter how far they are away from any shrine or holy place. Here Yahweh is not the maker of the mountains but of the stars. Although astrology seems not to have been as developed in Judah and Israel as elsewhere in the ancient Near East, the belief that the stars were inscribed with divine plans was hardly unknown.9 Job 38:31–4, which refers to both constellations mentioned in Amos 5:8, suggests that although the order of the night sky is the work of Yahweh, there is a ‘law of heaven’ that can impose itself on the earth. Paas ﬁnds evidence in this passage that the stars of Amos 4:13 may be associated with the extremes of weather and the changing seasons.10 Yet, the contrast with the people is one of power or capacity, not character. Yahweh’s defence of the poor is not celebrated. His establishment of justice in not mentioned. Verse 8, like 4:13, the ﬁrst theophanic doxology, operates predominantly on a cosmic realm. Of primary interest is the word , ‘deep darkness’. This term typically has negative connotations and can be associated with chaos.11 Although this darkness is turned into morning, day is eventually turned back into night. Although this may simply establish the daily cycles of the sun, it has a particularly ominous tone. The next line has Yahweh ‘summon’ (using the root  ‘to call’ cf. ‘prepare’ in 4:12) the waters. This may evoke memories of the gathering of the waters in Genesis 1:9–10 that resulted in the unveiling of dry ground. Yet, as Amos 4:13 continues, the waters are gathered only to ﬂood the world, clearly bringing to mind the story of Noah. Like the hymns and Amos 4:7, Amos 5:9 also employs a participial clause. It seems to be part of the revelation of v. 8 but comes after the declaration of the divine name Yahweh (cf. 4:13). It also brings the discussion back down to earth indicating that Yahweh will destroy the powerful. Thus, the one who unleashes devastation in this world is associated with the cosmic imagery of v. 8, and especially with the allusions to the universal ﬂood. Yet, 5:9 may have more to do with cosmic imagery than ﬁrst meets the eye. On the one hand, ﬁnding deities’ names or references to the morning in the words for ‘devastation’ and ‘strong’ is tenuous at best.12 On the other hand, ‘devastation’, , recalls not only the lime to which the bones of Moab’s king were reduced but the divine name Shaddai. These two terms are linked in Joel 1:15 and Isa. 13:6, so perhaps here, too, we may ﬁnd an allusion to ‘devastation from the devastator’. The word for unleashing that destruction has a root meaning of ‘to ﬂash’. Oddly, it can also refer to ‘brightening’ up, ‘to become cheerful’. There is, therefore, a certain power in the implication that God cheerfully destroys fortresses. This becomes all the more poignant when, later in Amos 5, he brings lamentation and grief to Israel. Verse 9 seems to be a linking verse, not only contrasting the actions of corrupt humanity with a powerful deity, but illustrating how the cosmic deity may act on earth. This sets an ominous tone for the following passage that returns to accusation: 9 10 11 12

Paas, Creation, p. 282. Paas, Creation, pp. 283–4. Paas, Creation, pp. 284–5. Paas, Creation, pp. 288–9.

LAMENT: AMOS 5:1–17

107

5:10

They hate the one who chastises in the gate. The speaker of integrity they abhor. 11 Therefore, because of your trampling upon the poor, And the levies of grain you take from him, Houses of cut stone you have built, but you will not dwell in them. Beautiful vineyards you have planted, but you will not drink their wine. 12 Because I know your many transgressions and the magnitude of your sins. Harassers of the righteous! Bribe-takers! The needy in the gate you push away!

These three verses are tightly composed. The city gates, the sites where justice is supposed to be dispensed and social cohesion maintained, frame the passage and, in each case, these gates have become the scenes of corruption. At the centre of the passage is the threat of punishment. Despite this self-contained structure, the passage has its links to 5:7–9. Echoes of the theophany are found in the use of participles to indicate people. Here, however, such verbs initially deﬁne the victims (v. 10), while in v. 12, the wicked are so indicated. As the sinners and God were contrasted in vv. 7–9, so, too, are the oppressors and the oppressed. The form of v. 12b also recalls to some extent the form of v. 9, and so the juxtaposition between the cosmic god and the corrupt people is reafﬁrmed. There is very little in the accusations of 5:10–12 that has not been said earlier in the book of Amos. Still, the passage plays a role in developing the theme of manipulated speech. As we have seen, the core of the ﬁrst theophany was the revelation to humanity. The second includes no counterpart to this but, in 5:10, the accused hate and abhor those who speak words of truth and correction; the image of the silenced prophets of 2:12 re-emerges. This accent on the rejection of reasonable speech is particularly poignant, given the emotional lament that is sung at the outset of Amos 5 and the prophecy that Israel will be reduced to wailing in 5:16–17. But, this elegant structure is disturbed by the difﬁcult verse that follows the second theophany: 5:13

Therefore, the prudent will keep silent in that time, For an evil time it is!

This verse echoes proverbial wisdom against speaking too hastily, but it hardly shares such simple logic.13 As was the case with ‘no return’ in chs. 1–2, it is rife with multiple meanings. It is an enigma that strikes at the heart of the book and its dual vision of death and restoration. Hammershaimb writes that 5:13 may express how the worldly wise would fear to take up the cause of the oppressed. If this is what is intended, then Amos is hardly approving such action.14 Mays thinks the verse was added by an editor who rightly thought it best to wait for the judgement of God than to rely on the corrupted judgements of humanity.15 Jeremias and Wolff think

13 Cf. Prov. 10:19, ‘When words are many, transgression does not cease, but restrained of speech are the wise. 14 Hammershaimb, Amos, p. 84. 15 Mays, Amos, pp. 97–8.

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in terms of secondarily added advice not to oppose the divine judgement.16 William J. Urbrock writes that ‘it seems the verse is also inviting readers of the book not to stand with those who refuse to listen to prophecy, like Amos’ contemporaries (2:12; 7:12–13), but to accept this book and its message in reverential silence, for Yahweh speaks through it’.17 We may have here another frame-break, a point at which the book becomes self-referential. But if so, we must then wonder if the producers are asking their own readers to consider their day and age an ‘evil time’. Of course, corruption can (and probably does) occur in any society and religious commentators may never be fully pleased with the state of piety in their communities. It is easy to see an educated elder in Persian Jerusalem teaching from this part of Amos. Yet, if the readers or hearers identify with the characters in the book, it is possible that this passage may actually focus attention on the judged. The term , ‘prudent’ or ‘wise,’ may be a patronizing label to help the reader identify with the less ignorant of the accused, to gain the cognitive space that is Urbrock’s ‘reverential silence’. Such a rhetorical demand for silence operates in similar terms to its logical antithesis, the prophetic imperatives of Amos 3:8, 9, 13. Given the ingenuity in word-play and allusion that the ancient writers were capable of, it is hardly ‘prudent’ to keep silent about how ancient editors and scribes may have produced equally ingenious interpretations of Amos 5:13, although one can but scratch the surface of these possibilities. Perhaps they read as ‘the wealthy’.18 Thus, the verse creates an ironic fate for those who abused the poor and hated righteous speech in the previous verses. The term  can also name a speciﬁc kind of literary composition. It is used in the superscriptions of Psalms 32, 42, 44 and 45. Psalm 47:8 (Eng. v. 7) also refers to a  dedicated to God. Perhaps Amos 5:13 is implying that such songs will fall silent.19 In Amos 5:23, God asks to be spared the sounds of ‘your songs’ and ‘your instruments’. But do the wise of Israel or their hymns really fall silent? Paul thinks that 5:13’s  is not derived from a verbal root  meaning ‘to keep silent’, but from a homonymous root meaning to ‘mutter’ or ‘moan’ (as used in Ps. 4:5, Eng. v. 4) and he translates Amos 5:13 as, ‘At such a time the prudent one (?) moans’.20 In Lamentations 1–2, the widowed city Jerusalem sits and weeps following the Babylonian deportations, with none to comfort her (1:1–3, cf. Amos 5:1–3). In Lam. 2:9–10, the grieving city receives no instruction and prophets ﬁnd no visions. The city’s elders sit in silence on the ground, covered with dust and sackcloth. In Lam. 2:18, however, there is a call to give God no respite, to pour one’s heart out to God for mercy for the infants. The silence of Amos 5:10, then, may well be the reverential silence that leads eventually to these kinds of renewed pleas. Word-play on the two meanings of 

16

Jeremias, Amos, pp. 93–94; Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 250. William J. Urbrock, ‘The Book of Amos: The Sounds and the Silences’, CurTM 23 (1996): 245–53 (252). 18 Gary V. Smith, ‘Amos 5:13: The Deadly Silence of the Prosperous’, JBL 107 (1988): 289–91; Jared J. Jackson, ‘Amos 5.13 Contextually Understood’, ZAW 98 (1986): 434–5. 19 Paul, Amos, p. 175. 20 Paul, Amos, pp. 175–6. 17

LAMENT: AMOS 5:1–17

109

is evident in Ps. 4:5 (Eng. v. 4).21 A somewhat different situation arises in the  that is the relatively brief Psalm 32. The singer describes how their suffering for sins lasted only as long as they remained silent. When the transgressions were admitted, forgiveness and reconciliation followed. This is the lesson of repentance that the psalm develops towards its conclusion. Fittingly, the chosen verb for ‘instruct’ in Ps. 32:8 is based on the same root as . So what, then, do  and the root  mean in Amos 5:13? Perhaps the wise moan and/or cry to God, the ﬁrst step to repentance and reconciliation; or they sit in their reverential or, perhaps, penitential silence. The songs themselves may be struck silent or turned into dirges. Or is it that the wise keep silent during the punishment of Israel to create the ‘famine’ of the word of God predicted in Amos 8:11–13? If the wise keep silent, then they are implicated in the hardening of Israel’s heart that will lead to such a tragic display of divine power. The possible routes to interpretation, and hence the theological lessons that could be taught, are numerous. Limiting possibilities here is certainly an unwise silencing of the creative voice. There is also a biting irony in 5:13–14. The silence or wailing is followed by something familiar: 5:14

Seek good, and not evil, so that you may live. And it will be that Yahweh, God of Hosts, will be with you, as you say.

To render true any claim that God is with one is to side with those who were hated in v. 10 for speaking with integrity. To seek the good and search for God is the path to true speech. But more advice is to follow in Amos: 5:15

Hate evil and love good, establish justice in the gate. Perhaps Yahweh, God of Hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.

Now, good and evil are not alternative quests, but are the objects of the two strongest emotions. One must love, one must hate. The love of false religion that was earlier mocked is now openly despised. In 5:15, the city gate is in view once again, and the hated ones of v. 10 are to be restored. In the progression from this hate of justice to the hating of evil, one encounters the multi-vocality of . This uncertainty and ﬂexibility leads only to a more ominous ambiguity in v. 15. No more does one seek what is right and live. Now it is only with a ‘perhaps’ that the desired result of right action might come. Once again Israel is called Joseph, but the boy that was ‘one more’, has become a threatened remnant. For all the advice and admonitions of 5:4–15 and the hope that life might yet be found, the book still totters on the brink of declaring a total annihilation. The ‘perhaps’ of v. 15 is rendered even more chilling in the next two verses. There, one ﬁnds an unqualiﬁed prediction: 5:16 Therefore, thus says Yahweh, God of Hosts, Adonai, ‘In every square, wailing! In every street they will say, “Woe! Woe!” They will summon the farmer to mourning,

21

Paul R. Rabbe, ‘Deliberate Ambiguity in the Psalter’, JBL 110 (1991): 213–27 (215).

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AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION And to wailing, those who know dirges. In every vineyard there will be wailing, When I pass through your midst.’ says Yahweh.

17

The prophetic introduction at the start of this passage builds on the divine names employed earlier, but expands them into an ominous title. Amos 5:3 has Adonai Yahweh, while vv. 4–6 have but Yahweh. This short name is also given in the refrain in v. 8. In vv. 14–15, however, a longer appellation appears, ‘Yahweh, God of Hosts’. In v. 16 it is even longer, ‘Yahweh, God of Hosts, Adonai’. With this concentration on the expanding titles of God, the cosmic nature of God is brought to mind. It is as something of a denouement, therefore, that the ﬁnal divine name and the ﬁnal word in the section is simply Yahweh. This hardly marks a weakening of the imagery, since Amos 5:16–17 depicts a manifestation of divine judgement. But rather than lift the reader’s eye to the creation of the universe, these verses bring God into the midst of the people. The concentration on the vocal responses highlights the enigma of v. 13. No more will the patriarchs or their descendants ‘pass’ Beersheba and receive a vision and a blessing. Instead, God ‘passes through’ and devastates his people. Amos 5:17 is sometimes related to Exod. 12:12’s reference to Yahweh passing through the midst of Egypt, leaving behind countless dead.22 Egypt is a brooding presence in Amos. The exodus is mentioned in 2:10, 3:1, and 9:7. In 3:9, Egypt is summoned to witness Israel’s upheavals. Israel suffers pestilences like Egypt did (4:10). The Nile ﬂoods provide a graphic image for the predicted punishment of Israel in 8:8 and for divine power in the ﬁnal theophany, 9:5. Amos 5:17 also alludes to the ritual imagery that sometimes surrounds theophanies. In Gen. 15:17, the divine torch passes between the parts of animals sacriﬁced and cut in two. In Exod. 33:19 and 34:5–6, God ‘passes before’ Moses. Amos 5:17 appears to invert otherwise positive manifestations of Yahweh. The deity’s destructive manifestation may well be his last; it is a ﬁnal transformation of the theophany that sealed the covenant.23 Only particular people who were ritually puriﬁed could safely negotiate the physical space between God and Israel, and only in particular circumstances. In Exod. 33:3–5, the people mourn when they hear that God will not go with Israel because they are a stiff-necked people. God says that if he were for a single moment to go ‘in your midst’, his people would be destroyed. But Moses prays for forgiveness and the divine presence in the midst of such a people (Exod. 34:8). What God seems to threaten in Amos 5:17, then, are the ritual barriers that protect Israel from God as much as they protect God’s holiness from Israel. God wants to be ‘with’ Israel, to make true Israel’s claims that he already is present. But the gap between them is wide, and any bridge is ultimately unstable. Divine presence in these circumstances can have destructive consequences. The transformative power revealed in the ambivalent silence or wailing in 5:13 and the songs of misery called for in 5:16–17 is magniﬁed in Amos 7–8, in which 22 Crenshaw, Hymnic Afﬁrmation, pp. 39–41. An argument to the contrary is offered by Michael James Hauan, ‘The Background and Meaning of Amos 5:17b’, HTR 79 (1986): 337–48. 23 Crenshaw, Hymnic Afﬁrmation, p. 41; Hauan, ‘Amos 5:17b’, pp. 347–8.

LAMENT: AMOS 5:1–17

111

Amos’ intercessions are eventually pre-empted by God’s entrapping puns. God controls speech, and perhaps the mysteries and plays in Amos 5 are intended to cause one to ponder, to break down resistance to the overwhelming force that leads to the union of divine and human speech. Adonai Yahweh has spoken so there must be a prophet. But in almost as many words, the lion roars and there is terror, as Amos 3:8 would have it. Amos 5 closes with the songs of the lion’s victims. What songs link the voices of humanity and God that do not also separate them? The great historical work, Chronicles, portrays the original temple in such a way as to legitimise the manner in which the second temple was organized. This includes the institution of singers recruited from the priestly tribe of Levi by David to offer praise to God.24 Their song, recorded in 1 Chron. 16:8–36, marks them as more than simple singers; they invoke Yahweh, a priestly role (cf. Num. 10:10).25 In 1 Chron. 25:1, the sons of Asaph are said to prophesy with musical instruments. 2 Chronicles 29:26–27 speak of the musical instruments of David being used by the Levites of Hezekiah’s day. 2 Chronicles 29:30 also refers to the Levites praising God with the lyrics of David and Asaph the seer, and this verse appears to be the sort of thing that Amos 5:21–5 is declaring to come to an end, for Yahweh loathes and rejects the festivals of Israel. He refuses to accept their burnt offerings and he demands silence from the indolent musicians. As we will see below, in Amos 6:5, the corrupt and complacent are criticized for musical feats that earn a sarcastic comparison with David. The choirs in Chronicles provide a background concept of musical prophecy, of true speech against which to assess the various religious and secular songs that one could hear in post-monarchic Jerusalem. In this way, it is an interesting counterpoint to Amos, making it come alive with its many references to song and speech. Unlike many other prophetic books, Amos does not disparage prophets. What seems more at issue than a difference between ‘true’ and ‘false’ prophecy is something more general: the identiﬁcation of true speech that reﬂects the will and mind of God, and speech that reﬂects the true attitude of the human speaker regarding obedience to God. The book of Amos imposes a moral value and a destiny on all speech and all songs, not to mention a transcendent quality; and this, presumably, would not exclude even those of the Levites or their audience. One is left to wonder, then, at what the text’s producers saw occurring on a spiritual level in their own literary efforts.

24

In 2 Chron. 20:19–21, acts of prophecy are associated with thanksgiving and music. Sara Japhet, I and II Chronicles: A Commentary (OTL; Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox, 1993), p. 315. 25

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Chapter 8

Festival of Exile: Amos 5:18–27 5:18

Woe to those longing for the day of Yahweh! What is in it for you, the day of Yahweh? It is darkness and not light! 19 As when a man ﬂees from the lion and the bear meets him, or he comes into the house, leans his hand on the wall and a snake bites! 20 Is it not darkness, the day of Yahweh, and not light, Gloom, with no brightness in it?

This ominous declaration about the day of Yahweh opens a compelling section that extends to the end of the chapter. Still, vv. 18–20 react to the preceding section in that the opening ‘woe’, , evokes the cries of – in v. 16. Again, similarities sound and spelling carry meaning in peculiar ways. The unpointed spelling of , ywh, at the start of v. 18 shares its three letters with the divine name at the end of the ﬁrst two clauses of that verse, hwhy. If those who lament in 5:17 are those hoping for some respite on the day of Yahweh, 5:18–20 says they are mistaken, a kind of mistake that is illustrated in v. 19 itself. Should we see people ﬂeeing the divine lion of 3:4, 8? In 5:19, the divine lion has transformed into a bear and even the snake becomes a metaphor for the divine. The darkness of the day of Yahweh evokes the memory of divine control over light and darkness afﬁrmed in 4:13 and 5:8. But what is this ‘day of Yahweh’? The expression appears a number of times in the prophetic books. Scholars have attempted to relate it variously to Israel’s early eschatological beliefs, to a cultic festival of Yahweh at the New Year, to conceptions of holy war, the covenant, or a theophany in which the deity appears to judge or save his people.1 With a number of differences in detail, most scholars see in Amos 5:18– 19 a repudiation of a popular hope that one day in the future Yahweh would intervene dramatically for the beneﬁt of his people.2 A. Joseph Everson actually uses the plural in the title of his study on the subject, ‘The Days of Yahweh’, and demonstrates that this concept and related ideas were not conceived of in the pre-exilic and exilic eras as a singular event. Instead, it was a useful concept to interpret various events in the past or future. He considers Amos’ use of it to be quite early, and so it lacked the full development of thought that marked other biblical attestations.3 Yair Hoffmann maintains that, for Amos, the day of Yahweh was a general and occasional term 1

See Cornelius van Leeuwen, ‘The Prophecy of the Yom Yahweh in Amos V 18–20’, in A.S. van der Woude (ed.) Language and Meaning: Studies in Hebrew Language and Biblical Exegesis (OTS, 19; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974), pp. 113–34, for an overview and critique. 2 Paul, Amos, p. 182; Barstad, Religious Polemics, pp. 109–10. 3 A. Joseph Everson, ‘The Days of Yahweh’, JBL 93 (1974): 329–37, also, K.A.D. Smelik, ‘The Meaning of Amos V 18–20’, VT 37 (1986): 246–8.

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for a disputed idea that only later developed into a technical, eschatological term. Despite many other differences in thought, he agrees with Everson that Amos’ use of the expression has no eschatological, cosmic or universalistic overtones, but merely pointed to God defeating his enemies. Both also ﬁnd that eschatology was a feature of later uses of the expression, with Hoffmann adding that this is the case in all other attestations except Ezek. 13:5.4 It might be objected, however, that Amos 5:18–20 says very little at all about the day, other than that people will be very surprised by it and that the day will be dark indeed. If eschatological nuances to the expression had already developed by the time Amos 5:18–20 had been penned, it would have conveyed such ideas to the audience by itself, without any accompanying, overt descriptions of eschatological events. For his part, Cornelius van Leeuwen takes a relatively broad meaning of eschatology to include radical changes in the present world order, and so ﬁnds some level of eschatological thought in Amos 5:18–20.5 Elsewhere in Amos, there is an aura of a great transformation of the world, both in terms of judgement and, ﬁnally, restoration, although it is admittedly restrained when compared to other prophetic books. Since standard chronology of the biblical texts plays little role in the present work, we can fruitfully look at some other passages to illuminate Amos 5:18–20. In Joel 1:15–2:2, an alarm is to be sounded in Zion for the coming day of Yahweh, a day of darkness and gloom. There is a plea for repentance, but as in Amos 5:15, hopes of God’s relenting seem somewhat muted, at least initially. ‘Who knows, but he may turn and relent’ (Joel 2:12–14). After the people are vindicated, however, prophecy will be universal. The sun will darken and the moon will turn to blood. Those who invoke God’s name will be saved (Joel 3:3–5; Eng. 2:30–32). The clearly eschatological imagery has numerous connections with Amos. Joel 4:14 (Eng. 3:14) seems to complete the reversal of the meaning of the day of Yahweh. Joel 4 (Eng. Joel 3) speaks of condemnation of the nations for their abuse of the people of Judah. These nations are called to war on the day of Yahweh. Again it is a day of darkness (Joel 4:14–15) but God will protect his own forgiven people (vv. 16–21; Eng. 3:14– 21). In Zephaniah, all Judah is to be wiped out, indeed, as is all humanity (1:2–6). Silence and attention is demanded because the day of Yahweh is coming (1:7, 14). Zephaniah 1:9 says, ‘On that day’ punishment will come, apparently referring to the day of Yahweh of v. 7. Verses 15–16 talk of a day of wrath, distress, darkness, and gloom. It is also a day of shofar and war cry against the fortiﬁcation. A plea is issued to repent and to seek God ‘before the day of Yahweh’s anger’ overtakes the people (Zeph. 2:1–3). ‘Perhaps’ they will ﬁnd shelter on the day of Yahweh’s anger (v. 3). Continuity within the book itself suggests that this day of anger is none other than the day of Yahweh. A righteous God recounts his chastisements (3:5–7) while in 3:8, he calls his people to wait for him and the day he will arise and accuse the nations and deliver punishment. All the people will then be puriﬁed (v. 9). On that day, according to Zeph. 3:11, shame for past sins will be wiped away. Again, the ‘day’ spans both judgement and salvation. 4

Yair Hoffmann, ‘The Day of the Lord as a Concept and a Term in the Prophetic Literature’, ZAW 93 (1981): 37–50 (41–8); Everson, ‘Days of Yahweh’, p. 335. 5 Van Leeuwen, ‘The Prophecy’, pp. 133–4.

FESTIVAL OF EXILE: AMOS 5:18–27

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In many cases, a special day is predicted in which a violent transformation will take place. A predicted day of battle appears ﬁrst in Amos 1:14 that will mark the destruction of Ammon. In the rhetorical perspective of the poem against the nations, this day of battle is something good. The ﬁnal words of the extended oracle against the two Israelite nations predict the ﬂight of the mighty ‘on that day’ (2:16). In Amos 3:14, ‘that day’ will see God punishing Israel for her transgressions, while the altars of Bethel will be destroyed. Amos 4:2 is more general, predicting that ‘days are coming’ in which the cows of Bashan will be led away. An ‘evil day’ is rejected as unthinkable in Amos 6:3; or at least the folly of this rejection is lamented by the speaker. Ironically, the people bring near a time in which violence will rule. ‘On that day’ of punishment the temple singers will wail, according to Amos 8:3. Amos 8:9 says that ‘on that day’ the sun will go down at noon, and God will darken the earth in the bright light of day. The mourning of the dead will be a ‘bitter day’ (8:10). The image of a singular day of punishment is broadened into coming days of famine and drought of the divine word (8:11). ‘On that day, the beautiful young women and young men will faint from thirst’ (8:13). These ‘days’ do not really match the scope of apocalyptic imagery in Zephaniah and Joel, although the bitter day of mourning, the sun setting at midday and the earth melting in Amos 8:8–10, is an awesome image, to be sure. Perhaps the greatest image of an eschatological event in Amos is 9:2–4 that imagines people hiding in Sheol, ascending even to heaven, and to mountaintops or down to the bottom of the sea. From the very limits of creation, then, God will search them out and take them. In 5:19, those who ﬂee the lion meet the bear, or enter a house and meet the serpent. In 9:3–4, those who ﬂee God encounter not a simple snake, but the mythical serpent found at the bottom of the sea. Wherever they seek refuge, they will be taken. The third theophany follows in 9:5–6. The earth melts, it heaves and sinks, and the people mourn. A title like the ‘day of Yahweh’ does not mark Amos 9:2–6. Yet, it is hard to think that these images have nothing to do with the day imagined in Amos 5:18–20. The darkness of that day has been intimated in many places in Amos. But, paradoxically, ‘on that day’ the sukkah of David will be repaired and Israel’s restoration begun (9:11). ‘Days are coming’, says 9:13, when the ploughman will even overtake the reaper, so abundant will be the earth’s bounty. In Amos, therefore, even if its eschatological conceptions are comparatively muted, there appears to be a conﬂation of a time of punishment and a time of restoration, as there was in Joel and Zephaniah. Ironically, then, the potential for misunderstanding the day of Yahweh, in 5:18– 20, as light and not darkness, is reinforced by the very passage that closes the book. The rhetoric of 5:18–20 plays off a common belief, or at least a belief easily ascribed to anonymous others, that God will one day provide limitless bounty for Israel. It is not that the writer of Amos would reject this belief, but rather, the writer develops the implications of the violent processes at work in such a transformation. It brings something desirable, an end to sin and corruption, but it presupposes a moral and judgemental selection of who will survive the transformation. But who are those who are imagined as placing their hopes in the day of Yahweh? Who would pray for a day of vengeance or justice at the public ritual, domestic rites or in the privacy of one’s own mind? Probably no one in ancient Israel would have

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thought God had no capacity or will to allow harm to come to them. At the very least, they would only have thought this until some misfortune befell them, their loved ones, or the next town down the road. Given the inevitability of suffering within any human society, not to mention the living conditions and political/military climate of the ancient world, this would not have taken long. Belief in a triumphant day of vindication over one’s enemies is as easily ascribed to victims of injustice as it is to a myopic, complacent and comfortable elite who think present good fortune is only indicative of greater glory to come. The terms ‘light’, ‘darkness’ and ‘gloom’ from Amos 5:18–20 not only reﬂect the Amos theophanies, but they also appear in the context of the ninth plague against Egypt in Exod. 10:21–23. Darkness descends on the Egyptians, but for the Israelites there is still light.6 Still, the context of Amos 5:18–20 seems to direct the day’s darkness toward the corrupt, not the victims of oppression. But is the victim’s faith that the day would bring vindication and justice really less naïve than the conﬁdence of their oppressors? For as much as Amos 5 tries to restrict the delusion about the day to the oppressors of the poor, it calls into question the entire mythic structure of divine judgement and actions on earth. Despite a call to repent and let righteousness well up like rivers (Amos 5:24) and to seek God and the good (5:14–15), there is precious little in Amos that actually calls for the relief of the misery of the poor. Rather, the preferred response to corruption is divine violence. But how could a nation be destroyed and only the sinners in it be made to suffer (cf. Amos 9:8–10)? In the review of past chastisements in Amos 4:6–12, God’s violence seems arbitrary; his punishments of drought, famine and pestilence are hardly discriminating between rich and poor, just or criminal. Recall that God ‘made it rain on one city but on another city I did not make it rain’ (4:7). In view of this, hope in the day of Yahweh seems a little desperate indeed! At its conclusion, the book of Amos clings to hope desperately, with almost the same naivety that it elsewhere challenges. Yet this may be the primary reason for the production of the myth of the ancient prophet: to enshrine in the past instantiations of divine promises that order in nature and society will be restored. But the critical scholar must ask whether the poor and oppressed in Amos are championed as loudly as is often assumed or whether they are little more than foils and their plight a pretext for the scribes imagining the divine power imagined in cosmic transformation as part of their own bid to remain relevant in society. But perhaps we should not be so cynical. To undermine the possibility of compassion and hope is to subvert the very reason for living. Victims often have little else. The calls for justice resound in Amos once more: 5:21

I hate, I despise your festivals! I will not recognize your assemblies! Even if you offer me burnt offerings, your gifts I will not accept! Peace offerings of your fatlings, I will not regard! 23 Remove from before me the clamour of your songs, The music of your harps I will not hear. 24 But let justice roll like water, and righteousness as an eternal river! 25 Did you bring sacriﬁces and gifts to me in the wilderness [those] forty years, House of Israel? 22

6

Andor Szabó, ‘Textual Problems in Amos and Hosea’, VT 25 (1975): 500–24 (505).

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What began with a question about the future, ‘What is the day of Yahweh to you?’, has become a question about the past. The wilderness wanderings are imagined as a time prior to the development of the Israelite sacriﬁcial system, as they are in Jer. 7:22–3.7 Already in Amos 2:10, the forty–year journey is mentioned. Instead of Israel giving God sacriﬁces, God gave Israel Nazirites and prophets. The lack of the need for sacriﬁces reﬂects an idealization of the wilderness, in which God and Israel walked together and, indeed, knew each other intimately (cf. Amos 3:1–3). That intimacy, however, is but a painful memory. The dark gloom of the day of Yahweh appears to descend instantly on Israel at the outset of 5:21. Yet it is a night illuminated by the ﬂames of emotion. The words ‘I hate … I despise’ recall the stammering, repeated threat of 4:12.8 The prosperity of Israel provides no cause to make offerings to God; rather, it is an embarrassment and disgrace. This is the same content as Amos 4:4–5 inverted. Israel ‘loved’ to offer sacriﬁces, but God cannot even muster sarcasm anymore. He demanded that Israel hate evil. Now he stutters as he declares that he, himself, hates and despises. Amos 5:23–4 does not refer to the familiar theme of turning all songs into dirges, but to silence. This is a ﬁtting response to the stiﬂed prophets of 2:12. In 6:5 and 6:7 idle musicians are destined for exile, which is also the prediction of 5:27. The silence demanded of the festival singers and musicians in 5:23 is, therefore, a conception that winds its way through the book; it is a ﬁtting counterpoint to the subversion and coercion of voices that one also encounters. Rather than music, festivals and sacriﬁces, God would have justice ‘roll like water’ (5:24). In the word roll we hear once more the root word for Gilgal and for ‘exile’. There is a certain irony here, as that place marks the place where Israel once crossed the Jordan on dry ground, and is a place destined for exile in 5:5. The image of waters rolling and perpetually ﬂowing as a metaphor for righteousness anticipates 8:8 where God asks if the earth should not melt and heave like the Nile in recompense for Israel’s dishonesty. In 9:5–6, God makes the earth swell and subside like the Nile, and he has the power to pour the waters of the sea on the earth (cf. 5:8). If the audience of 5:24 tries to mimic God’s example by opening the ﬂoodgates of righteousness, then there would be no need for God to touch the earth and reduce solid ground to a liquid chaos or to ﬂood it by summoning the waters of the sea and pouring them out over the earth (5:8). Amos 5:24 recasts the image of primordial waters not simply as agents of destruction or chaotic upheaval, but as life-giving agents of cosmic order. The cosmic allusion in 5:24 should not be downplayed given the accent on the rejection of sacriﬁce and cult, not to mention the exodus myth. Yahweh afﬁrms that the initial survival of Israel did not depend upon sacriﬁce and that, like that period, he can do without them again. According to the Pentateuch, it was during the wilderness wanderings that Israel received her law, both social and cultic. The formation of Israel in the wilderness, before it possessed land, cities and temples, is idealized in Amos 5:25, only to lament its loss. Entry into the land, marked by the monument at Gilgal, has not been the establishment of a permanent system of 7

See Paul, Amos, pp. 193–4, for a discussion of the discrepancies between this claim and some Pentateuch passages. 8 Jeremias, Amos, p. 101.

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social and cultic order. Such services drive Israel away from God and so the deity returns the favour. Rather than model the symbiosis of giving that is represented in sacriﬁce, Yahweh claims he would rather have humans symbolize cosmology by letting the primeval waters of righteousness ﬂow. In 5:27, however, we ﬁnd exile in a prediction that Israel will be driven beyond Damascus.9 But if Israel brought up no offerings to God during the exodus, what will they take up during the exile when there are once again outside of their land? The answer comes in 5:26–7 where another possible reason for the rejection of the sacriﬁces is implied. God must share Israel’s devotion. 5:26

‘You shall carry Sikkuth, your king, and Kiyyun, your images; Star of your god [or: your star-god(s)], which you have made for yourselves. 27 And I will exile you beyond Damascus.’ Says Yahweh: the God of Hosts is his name!

The astral deities Sikkuth and Kiyyun will no more have any gifts carried to them, but their own images will be carried off. As Paul points out, 5:26 is mocking processions in honour of such gods, linking the processions ironically to the long march of Israel’s deportees. This march, of course, is the will of Yahweh, the true God of (astral) hosts.10 The irony of this recalls the exclamation, ‘prepare to meet your God’ in 4:12. When it was ﬁrst issued, it introduced the ﬁrst of the theophanies in 4:13. The closing line of 5:27 surely recalls the refrain. Israel’s making of images for gods of the night sky is again a pale imitation of Yahweh, God of Hosts, who made the constellations in the second theophany. There is a postscript to all the ‘overturning’ or ‘transforming’ that goes on in the middle of Amos 5 and it is linked to the closing verses of the chapter. In the ancient text called the Damascus Document, copies of which were found at Qumran, Amos 5:26 actually becomes an oracle of refuge and salvation (7:14–16). The exile of ‘Sikkuth your king’ is imagined as the preservation of the books of the law, because it reminded the author of the word ‘sukkah’ or tabernacle. The writer refers to Amos 9:11, which predicts the restoration of the sukkah of David. ‘King’ is also a cipher for the congregation, while Kiyyun are the books of the prophets, writings () that the commentator says were despised by Israel. Perhaps this association was made because the same letter begins both words. The ‘star’ is every righteous interpreter of Torah who has found sanctuary in ‘Damascus’, the metaphorical place of refuge of the ‘true’ congregation.11 Thus, what may once have been a prediction of doom has become a prediction of how the law and prophets were preserved in a dark age. This very creative exegesis is, of course, much later in time than when we imagine our late Persian scribes. Yet, why should we deny such high levels of play and creativity to them, or even to the initial authors of the passages that make up the book of Amos? Their deity is a ‘word-scattering force’ who uses a ‘negative alchemy’ to

9 10 11

Paul, Amos, p. 192. Also note the frequent plays between exile and Gilgal. Paul, Amos, pp. 194–8. See the discussion of this in Park, Amos, pp. 178–88.

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turn light into darkness and ‘song of joy into lamentations’.12 They construe their deity as the true master of words, the material that creates our literary landscape and all that is in it. People may know that Yahweh will have his day, but they do not know what it will entail. Fleeing the lion only brings one to the bear or the snake, and exile will eventually bring only death (9:4). Amos 5:18-27 demands that people create the very primordial waters from which a new creation might be born. Their righteousness must roll like the waters: yet even here, we can hear sounds of embodying the sweeping away of the present order: Gilgal and exile.

12

Sherwood and Caputo, ‘Otobiographies’, pp. 211, 215.

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Chapter 9

No One, No Sound, Nothing: Amos 6 6:1 Woe to the carefree in Zion and the smug on the mountain of Samaria,1 Notables of the ﬁrst of the nations! To them the house of Israel comes! 2 Pass by Calneh and see, and go from there to Hamath Rabbah, Go down to Gath of the Philistines. Are [you] better than these kingdoms? Or are their territories larger than your territories?

Amos 6 is the second of the ‘woe’ oracles, the ﬁrst of which spanned 5:18–27. Again, the theme is overconﬁdence and self-righteousness. Mays argues that 6:2 should be read as the words of the notables of v. 1, a case of ‘unmitigated bragging’, as in 5:14; 6:13; 8:5; 9:10.2 A closer look at the wording, however, suggests that it is best to view 6:2 as the words of the prophet or God, asking one to compare Israel with other nations. The ﬁrst clause asks one if Israel and Judah are better than ‘these kingdoms’.3 The second comparison clearly makes Israel the bigger. What could be the point of this question that seems to undermine the force of the ﬁrst? One solution is to emend and reverse the implication of the question.4 A better answer is to ﬁnd the pair of questions afﬁrming the equality of all these nations. One kingdom is no better than the others. In turn, the others are no larger. Equality is afﬁrmed in the opening poem against the nations. It is quite ﬁtting, then, that 6:1 would refer to Zion and Samaria together. In Amos 9:7, the Israelites are said to be like the Cushites to God, and both Egypt and the Philistines have had exoduses comparable to Israel’s. Therefore, leading ﬁgures of Zion and Samaria are hardly the heads of the chief nation. Despite the modesty of their land, they are immodest in character in this sarcastic portrayal of them. They even try to cheat fate, as the next verse implies: 6:3

Those pushing away the evil day bring near a Sabbath of violence.

This is a difﬁcult passage as it seems to stay far more than its few words might suggest at ﬁrst. Those seeking to avoid the ‘evil day’ appear to be rejecting any thought of the sort of ‘darkness’ that will ensue on the day of Yahweh in 5:18–20 or the ‘bitter day’ of 8:10. The irony of someone attempting this only to draw near to a fate that is the same, or even worse, is familiar from 5:19. What that worse thing might be is variously interpreted. The expression  has generated a good 1 The Hebrew term more literally reads ‘those who are conﬁdent’, but ‘the smug’ includes the obvious connotations of inappropriate self-esteem in this particular passage. 2 Mays, Amos, p. 115. 3 Paul, Amos, p. 201. 4 For example, BHS apparatus.

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amount of debate. The second word is not problematic, meaning ‘violence’. The ﬁrst word may be derived from a root meaning ‘to sit’, and hence a seat or ‘throne’ and, in derivation from that, a ‘rule’ of violence.5 The critical apparatus in Biblia hebraica stuttgartensia (BHS) proposes an emendation of the consonants to , ‘year of’, or , ‘destruction’. Some interpreters argue that the consonants as found in the Hebrew, , should be read as the root ‘to cease’. Therefore the expression means ‘violent end’.6 If this were the case, however, it would be more natural to read such a phrase as a ‘cessation of violence’, which is just the opposite of what was probably intended.7 There is more to this than ﬁrst meets the eye, however. The Greek reads the line as ‘false Sabbaths’. It is uncertain whether the Septuagint’s Vorlage was the traditional Jewish Masoretic Text, but Hebrew ‘Sabbath’ derives from the root ‘to cease’. Therefore, I argue that the Masoretic Text could be read as a ‘Sabbath of violence’, a reading that would have ironic parallelism with the ‘evil day’. Indirect support for this can be found by observing how some other terms that appear shortly after the suspected ‘Sabbath’ in 6:3 also appear in Amos 8. Right after the suspected ‘Sabbath’ reference in Amos 6:3, vv. 4–7 offer a mockery of the sort of rest that is supposed to occur on the seventh day. An exile is promised that will sweep away the indolent revellers. In 6:8, God says he hates the ‘pride of Jacob’. In Amos 8:4–6, corrupt merchants are quoted as longing for the end of the day of rest so that they can continue their exploitations. Their implicit reluctance to cheat and exploit on holy days (8:6) is hypocrisy equal to any direct Sabbath infraction. As Amos 8 continues, however, God vows by the ‘pride of Jacob’ that he will forget none of Israel’s misdeeds (v. 7).8 It would seem that Amos 6 is foreshadowing this passage in the later chapter. But what is meant by ‘bringing near a Sabbath of violence’? ‘Bringing near’ is an expression that occurred already in 5:25, in which Israel is asked to deny that they brought near or offered sacriﬁces during their forty-year wandering. What they are now offering to God is a day of violence. They reject the thought of evil befalling themselves, but they ensure that evil will come upon others. But in making this accusation in 6:3, the sentence is declared in as many words. The Sabbath of violence will be their doom and is a perverse declaration about the nature of the Day of Yahweh. This combined accusation and judgement works in a manner similar to 5:5’s injunction and prediction that Israel should not and, indeed, will not pass Beersheba. Lamentations 2:6 and Hos. 2:11 (Eng. v. 9) refer to God’s abolition of the Sabbath in his anger. In Amos, there may be not so much abolition as a transformation of a day of peace and rest to one of bloody vengeance. The Sabbath ﬁgures again in the judgement of Israel. In 2 Chron. 36:21, the exile of Jerusalem was intended to: fulﬁl the word of Yahweh from the mouth of Jeremiah until the land had accepted its Sabbaths, all the days of her devastation it kept Sabbath, to fulﬁl seventy years.

5 Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 272; Mays, Amos, p. 113; Andersen and Freedman, Amos, p. 551. Vulgate has ‘throne of iniquity’. 6 Rudolph, Joel–Amos–Obadja–Jona, pp. 215–16; Soggin, Amos, p. 103. 7 Paul, Amos, p. 205. 8 The ‘pride of Jacob’ is also something favourable in Ps. 47:5 (Eng. v. 4).

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Here, the land has rest from Israel’s sinful actions while they are in exile. The selfserving days of rest in Amos 6:4–6 are then turned upside-down. The loungers and impatient, corrupt merchants will encounter a bloody enemy, and the land will have its rest from them. In this sense, the promised Sabbath will indeed lead eventually to the cessation of violence. There are still more permutations of this violent Sabbath. It evokes the similar (but not identical) word, ,which can mean ‘staff’, ‘sceptre’ or ‘tribe’. Thus, the indolent may try to shrug off the evil day, only to ﬁnd a violent enemy or ruler.9 Such an enemy is intimated in the condemnations of Aram and Philistia (Amos 1:5, 8) whose ‘sceptre-bearers’ will be eliminated. If there is an allusion in 6:3 to a ‘tribe’, then one could ﬁnd it foreshadowed in Amos 6:1–2 in which other nations are mentioned and v. 14 in which a nation is raised up against Israel. A different image is presented in the  of Ps. 45:8 (Eng. v. 7). There, the divinely sanctioned king is gloriﬁed. His eternal, royal staff  symbolizes his righteousness. The glories of the king include anointing and the music of stringed instruments (vv. 8–9; Eng. vv. 7–8), the things the notables in Amos 6:4–6 are said to do for their own beneﬁt and enjoyment. They treat themselves like divinely sanctioned royalty, which is an implication also found in the contrast between the status of the notables and the demand that they compare their ‘kingdom’ with others. Their hubris is accentuated by the lack of any mention of their own king in Amos 6, while an odd reference to David is made in 6:5. But there, he is not imagined as a king, but rather the model musician. To add to the irony of the book, the ‘king’ of nobles may be found in the images to be carried off into exile in 5:26. The word has another interesting sense. It is the name of the 11th month (Feb.–March). And so, with the promise of the ‘Sabbath of violence’, strains of a month of bloodshed can also be heard. It is probably pointless to argue which of the many alternatives and allusions were foremost in the mind of the writer. But who are they who reject the thought of the evil day of Yahweh, only to observe a Sabbath of terror? 6:4

Those who lie on beds of ivory, sprawled on their couches. Those who eat lambs from the ﬂock and calves from the stalls. 5 Those who improvise upon the harp; like David, devising for themselves instruments of song. 6 Those who drink from wine-bowls, and anoint [themselves] with the ﬁnest oils, but are not sickened over the ruin of Joseph. 7 Therefore, now they will be exiled at the head of the exiles. Spent will be the ‘sprawlers’ spree.’10

As Paul points out, the declaration to the carefree and secure notables of 6:1 has a certain sardonic sarcasm behind it that is revealed in vv. 4–6. The nobles in v. 1, who like to think that they are the ‘ﬁrst’ (root ) of the nations and who anoint themselves with the ‘ﬁnest’ () oils (v. 6), will be exiled at the ‘head’ () of the deportees in v. 7. To add to the irony, it is a ‘nation’ that will harass Israel 9

Cf. Ezek. 7:11 in which violence is said to have grown into a ‘rod of wickedness’. This line is from Paul, Amos, p. 199, who offers a ﬁne counterpart to the Hebrew’s alliteration. 10

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(v. 14).11 Verse 7 also repeats the root of the word ‘exile’. The word ‘bowl’ used in v. 6, , is hinted at in v. 7b that has its own internal alliteration in describing the apparent abolition of a festival, . Amos 1–7 seem to imply that the Sabbath and other sacred times have been corrupted and transformed into a ‘marzeah’ festival while David’s prophetic psalms have been turned into idle songs. Anointing with oil has great religious signiﬁcance in the Hebrew Bible, while 6:6 also alludes to impiety in that wine is drunk from bowls that are often reserved for sacriﬁces.12 The impression of a religion turned upside-down would be familiar to those who remember Amos 2:7–8, in which people lay about on conﬁscated garments in temples drinking conﬁscated wine. The ‘lambs from the ﬂock’ that feed the revellers bring to mind a more ominous image, that of the scraps saved by the shepherd in 3:12. The use of the expression ‘couches of ivory’ (6:4) reinforces this. In 3:12, only fragments of couches will be rescued from Samaria, while ivory, šn, houses will be demolished according to 3:15. In 6:4–6, the nobles relax in a doomed building and eat animals that are but an omen of their own fate. In 6:1, they were ‘the carefree’  of Zion and the smug of Samaria. Accusations of the subversion of religion in 6:4–7 is clear, but the one word that has elicited the most commentary in this regard is the of the sprawlers that will be removed. Although Hammershaimb prefers reading it in Amos 6:7 simply as ‘clamour’, he has little support from other scholars.13 Most relate it to a particular kind of religious feast of ancient Near East, the so-called marzeah.14 References to such assemblies or institutions can be found in Ugaritic sources of the late second millennium BCE as well as Phoenician, Punic and Nabatean documents, some of whose dates stretch to centuries later. Most signiﬁcantly, it is known from the Aramaic documents found at Elephantine and datable to the ﬁfth century BCE. The primary event appears to be a banquet and, from Jer. 16:5 (the only other biblical attestation) and a Nabatean inscription, this could well be a funeral banquet. Barstad ﬁnds Amos not to be simply condemning the excessiveness of the morally decadent banquets, but the sacred meal of a Samaritan marzeah for its connection with nonyahwistic deities.15 This ﬁnal point, however, is reading too much into the passage as there is no speciﬁc mention of other deities. As was the case with the ‘cows of Bashan’ in Amos 4:1–3, it is best to ﬁnd a complex of meanings in which a perverted yahwistic religion is as much in view as the worship of other deities entirely, not to mention the economic and social exploitation and decadence. If what is in view is a funerary marzeah celebration (yahwistic or otherwise), one can follow Harry

11

Paul, Amos, pp. 200–201. Jeremias, Amos, pp. 112–13. Paul, Amos, p. 208, thinks the size of the bowls may be more at issue here. 13 Hammershaimb, Amos, p. 102. 14 Kevin M. McGeough, ‘Locating the marzihu Archaeologically’, UF 35 (2003): 407–20. 15 Barstad, Religious Polemics, pp. 127–42. On the other hand, Cristl Maier and Ernst M. Dörfuß, ‘ “Um mit ihnen zu sitzen, zu essen und zu trinken” Am 6,7; Jer 16,5 und die Bedeutung von ’, ZAW 111 (1999): 45–57, argue that funerary references in Jeremiah 16 are only redactional and no comparable features are to be found in the extra-biblical sources. 12

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Mowvley, who connects the feast in Amos to the predicted fate of the celebrants.16 This is the sort of ironic fate that is well attested in Amos, and so the term may have been chosen simply for its allusive connotations and not to specify a particular ritual that Amos was condemning. Divine anger at the perversion of yahwistic worship and social obligations receives redoubled force in what immediately follows: 6:8 Adonai Yahweh has sworn by his life, Oracle of Yahweh, God of Hosts, ‘I abhor the pride of Jacob and his citadels I hate. I will deliver up the city and its fullness.’

Here, again, one ﬁnds a mass of divine labels, driving home just who Israel’s god is as well as severe emotive language. God’s oath is by his own life, and his own being is contrasted with Jacob’s ‘pride’. Elsewhere, this is something God can swear by (8:7), and so in 6:8 God rejects even the basis for a communion between himself and Israel: Jacob is proud and God hates. The use of the word ‘citadels’ draws the readers back to the oracles against the nations in Amos 1–2, while the God’s hating , in turn brings to mind once more the carefree  . The following verses take a closer look at the morbid aftermath of the city and its fullness is delivered up: 6:9

It will be that if ten men remain in one house they will die.

10

And his kinsman, his cremator, will lift him, to take bones out of the house, and will say to the one who is in the recesses of the house, ‘Are there more with you?’ He shall say ‘No’. And he will say ‘Silence, for one must not invoke the name of Yahweh’.

The chilling imagery of this short passage is not moderated by the difﬁculties of its language. One of the problems is the subject of the singular verb ‘lift’ is not easy to identify since two nouns may fulﬁl the role. Some follow the Greek in reading the verb as plural.17 On the other hand, the two nouns may refer to the same individual.18 The ﬁrst of these is usually understood as indicating a kinsman, but its pronunciation, , recalls the name of David. The visual similarity is more obvious in Hebrew characters: dwd, dywd. The great king was mentioned in 6:5, and so one can hear an echo of idle musicianship. On the other hand, it anticipates the eventual restoration of the sukkah of David in 9:11. The second noun in the series of 6:10 is often read as a unique variant of the verb , ‘to burn’. This would refer to cremation or the burning of incense for the dead.19 Paul translates it as ‘embalmer’, linking it to a Rabbinic Hebrew word meaning ‘resin’, and a Samaritan term ‘to anoint’. He concludes that Amos 6:10 refers to someone who anoints the dead.20 No solution 16

Harry Mowvley, The Books of Amos & Hosea (Epworth Commentaries: London: Epworth, 1991), p. 69. 17 Paul, Amos, pp. 215–16. 18 Mays, Amos, p. 118; Soggin, Amos, p. 106; and Jeremias, Amos, p. 109. 19 Gary V. Smith, Amos: A Commentary (LBI; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989), p. 196; Szabó, ‘Textual Problems’, p. 506. 20 Paul, Amos, pp. 215–16.

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really solves all of the problems, and it is probably best to admit defeat and build on what one might be reasonably certain. The image is of death and destruction, and the conversation is morbid and laconic. Hebrew is far more economical that English. Only two words ask after the presence of others. These words are answered with but one. Someone then demands silence. ‘Silence’ is an already familiar theme, but this particular interjection is new to the reader. It will be found again in 8:3, however. The term used in these two places, , is often associated with proper reverence at theophanies (Hab. 2:20; Zeph. 1:7; Zech. 2:17). To Susan Niditch, the word is a ‘brief counter charm, an attempt to “silence” the curse or turn it away.’21 Jeremias notices that the reader might take some delight in the demanded silence over and against the celebration of the divine name in the three theophanies.22 The absence of a counterpart to these celebrations of the divine name at the close of Amos 6, however, prevents the readers from fully expressing this delight, as if they themselves are being advised against it. Again, the world of the readers and the characters they identify with merge, and it is perhaps a deliberate ambiguity that makes the speaker of the injunction against invoking the divine name so hard to identify. It could be the one demanding quiet.23 Conversely, it could be the comments of the narrator. For Sherwood and Caputo, the call to not invoke Yahweh speaks to very construction of the literary cosmos, its foundations, landscape and the products of human culture built up on it. Silence and the exclusion of the divine name from speech seem intended to stave off the destruction of that cosmos: [A]n expression of a literal fear of a God who is somehow provoked by language, a noninvocation of a God who is hurt by language and who in turn hurts language, and whose relation to language is a radical taking away. God is hush because Gaod is the name given to the future that is monstrous—monstrous beyond all possibility of domestication, bringing home, because it makes unheimlich [uncanny, unearthly] all that we mean by home, which is how we read all those allusions to crumbling and unsafe houses.24

Yet, silence in a world of words is an ironic declaration. There can be no silence, no avoidance of the divine. God has moved through the midst of his people; he is ‘with’ Israel in the most dangerous way possible. The perverted festivals summoned him, but not in the way that respects the ontological distance between God and humanity, or in one that respects the danger inherent in God’s presence. Silence can be the act of hiding from God or the ﬁrst step in restoring the defences that allow God and humanity to approach one another safely. The destruction of the ten souls within the house seems to be the ﬁnal chapter in the decimation of the city of one thousand warriors and that of one hundred in 5:3, but it is a theme that is continued into v. 11:

21

Susan Niditch, The Symbolic Vision in Biblical Tradition (HSM, 30; Chico CA: Scholars, 1980), pp. 39–40. See too, Stephen G. Dempster, ‘The Lord is His Name: A Study of the Distribution of the Names and Titles of God in the Book of Amos’, RB 98 (1991): 170–89 (188–9). 22 Jeremias, Amos, p. 117. 23 The opinion of most commentators, including Mays, Amos, p. 119; Paul, Amos, p. 216. 24 Sherwood and Caputo, ‘Otobiographies’, pp. 220–21.

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6:11 For behold, Yahweh commands, and the great house will be struck to pieces and the little house to splinters.

The smashing of houses recalls the destruction of the winter and summer houses, and the great houses of ivory in 3:15. Now, even the little house will be destroyed. Could it be that God will punish even the poor? The same word for ‘little’ appears in two more verses of consequence. In 7:2 and 7:5 Amos declares that Jacob is so ‘small’ that he cannot endure divine punishment. God relents, but only temporarily. The destruction of buildings large and small, and the terrible silence demanded to keep God at bay, rounds off the discussion so far in Amos 6. Verse 11 seems, therefore, to be a great place to end the section. Yet, a few more verses are to be found before the book takes its dramatic change of direction and introduces us to Amos’ visions. Rather than being anti-climactic, however, they add much to the chapter: 6:12

Can horses run on a rock, Or one plough the sea with oxen?25 Yet you have turned justice into poison and righteousness into wormwood.

This verse’s connections with the preceding are made partly through the repetition of sounds. In the third line , ‘poison’, is in parallel with the following reference to the poisonous ‘wormwood’, but this word is also spelled the same way as ‘ﬁrst/ choicest’ in 6:1, 6–7.26 Paul also ﬁnds that the reference to ‘horses’, s, alliterates with ‘pieces’, r, while (rendered above as ‘the sea with oxen’) echoes the sounds of ‘splinters’, , in the previous verse.27 In the ﬁrst two lines of v. 12 the writer is resorting to the frequently employed device of the rhetorical question. The ﬁrst question implies that horses would not be unwise enough to race over craggy rocks, while the other imagines a patently absurd situation. These impossibilities call attention to the accomplishments of those addressed here. The transforming of justice and righteousness into poison and wormwood recalls 5:7–9, and brings to mind, once again, the dismal but hurtful human capacities, in contrast to the power of God.28 This contrast with the theophany ﬁts well with 6:10’s ban on invoking the divine name. The contrast is also apparent in the verses that close Amos 6. At their centre is the divine name, and the power of Israel is insufﬁcient to save them from the ones God will raise up against them:

25 Dividing the last plural noun to arrive at a collective singular ‘ox’ and the word ‘sea’, Mays, Amos, pp. 120–21; Jeremias, Amos, p. 109. For more elaborate emendations see Oswald Loretz, ‘Amos 6:12’, VT 39 (1989): 240–42; Szabó, ‘Textual Problems’, pp. 506–7; Alan Cooper, ‘The Absurdity of Amos 6:12a’, JBL 107 (1988): 725–7. 26 Smith, Amos, p. 210; Paul, Amos, p. 218, are among those who recognize the play here. 27 Paul, Amos, p. 218. 28 Also note the similar sounding words for ‘morning’ in 5:8, , with the reference to the ploughing oxen in 6:12, .

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‘[You] who rejoice over Lo-Dabar, who say, “Have we not by our own power taken Karnaim for ourselves?” 14 For behold, I am raising against you, O House of Israel,’ Oracle of Yahweh, God of Hosts, ‘a nation, And they will oppress you, from Lebo-Hamath to the Wadi Arabah.’

The chapter ends at v. 14 as it has begun; false hopes are shattered and, like the image in 5:19, it is a case of an ironically poetic justice. The House of Israel rejoices in capturing Lo-Dabar,, but the name of this place can also be read as ‘no-thing’. The name Karnaim literally means ‘a pair of horns’. Horns are a symbol of strength, and so Israel rejoices for their victory over such a symbolic place.29 Rejoicing over ‘nothing’, however, is what their victory celebrations over Karnaim amount to. Already God has predicted his own victory over ‘Karnaim’. In 3:14, the ‘horns’ of the altar at Bethel – itself doomed to become nothing – will be cut off. Moreover,  can mean ‘word’ as easily as it can mean ‘thing’ so the verse may be mocking those who rejoice in silence. This ‘no-word’ reverses the ‘word’ Yahweh spoke through Jonah in 2 Kgs 14:25–6. Jeroboam II scored victories from LeboHamath to the Sea of Arabah; victories that are called divine salvation for God’s oppressed people. Lebo-Hamath is sometimes used to mark a northern border (Num. 13:21). The Sea of Arabah of 2 Kings (cf. Deut. 3:17) may be related to Amos’ Wadi Arabah, and probably refers to a place near the north end of the Dead Sea, or the southern most extent of Jeroboam’s kingdom.30 The book of Amos seems to imply that Jeroboam II’s victories amounted to nothing. Later in Amos, the destruction of the house of Jeroboam itself is predicted (Amos 7:9).31 Although ‘House of Israel’ can easily refer to all the Israelite peoples, its use in Amos 6:14 appears restricted to the Israel of Jeroboam II. This new concentration on only the fate of the north returns the book to its main theme and setting, the words of Amos against the northern kingdom of Israel in the time of that king. This is signiﬁcant, since the next chapter begins with Amos’ ﬁrst-person vision reports, and the story of Amos confronting Jeroboam’s priest. Amos 6 ends a major part of the book of Amos with an accent on extremities. The decimation of the thousand soldiers continues until the remaining ten die. Only one mourner is left in the innermost part of the house. Rejoicing in nothing and in silence brings its inevitable reward. The references to Sabbaths and festivals imply a stark juxtaposition between earthy opinions of religion and divine demands. The ﬁnal phase of Amos 6 is a promise that God will raise a nation against Israel. Between the verb ‘raise’ and its object is the long oracle formula, with a relatively full name, Yahweh, God of Hosts, a celebration of the deity that someone is afraid to invoke in v. 10. In the ﬁnal verse of the chapter, the use of the full name causes a delay in 29

Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. 580–81; Paul, Amos, p. 219; Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 288; Mowvley, Amos and Hosea, p. 71. 30 Paul, Amos, p. 219. 31 This assumes that the Amos passage is subsequent to the historical tradition recorded in 2 Kings, not to mention calling into question the declaration of Jonah. Andersen and Freedman, Amos, p. 588, say that the brief mention of Jonah in Kings was used to cancel the word against Jeroboam by Amos.

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hearing just what this deity proposes to do, calling more attention to the actor than the action. So, too, does the fact that the name of the nation to rise against Israel is not given. It need not be. What is important is the deity who will bring the armies against Israel. And, like the theophanic doxologies evoked in the ﬁnal verses of Amos 6, it is this name that the text dwells upon. Israel has met her god. He is death and will soon appear in a most profound way.

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PART IV Who Will Not Prophesy?

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Chapter 10

Deception: Amos 7:1–17 The ritualization and sacralization of the world reaches its climax in the ﬁnal three chapters. These chapters are composed of a variety of kinds of materials, some with strong connections to the preceding oracles and theophanic hymns. Yet, one also encounters some new developments. There are the ﬁve reports of visions in which Amos speaks in his own voice, and the appearance of a brief narrative episode in which Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, confronts Amos. The chapters raise the judgement imagery to its ultimate, cosmic level and then at the end suddenly turn to describe a reconciliation between a punished people and their God. Most scholars see Amos 7–9 as a distinct section within the book and a number of different reconstructions of the compositional history have been proposed. The question of whether 9:11–15 was appended secondarily is a primary question in this regard. Despite the extreme likelihood that these chapters, like the rest of Amos, are composite in nature, the artistry of the literary collage is quite high, as some have noticed already.1 The chapters clearly reﬂect a lot of earlier content in Amos, and so the changes in style, form and perspective are not so much jarring as they are part of the mounting tension and suspense. We can also see the poetic process of landscaping – turning the natural and historical into the timeless and heavenly – continue but now with even more frightening consequences. Chapter seven contains the ﬁrst three of the visions and the encounter between Amos and Amaziah. Considerable ink has been expended discussing the relationship between this narrative and the vision cycle, with various theories on how and why the text achieved its present sequence. In general, however, most modern scholars do see the Bethel encounter as building on a number of key terms from the third vision that immediately precedes it, and so regardless of whether it is by the same author, the piece ﬁts well in its present location, even if it separates vision three from its structurally similar fourth vision at the start of chapter eight. The ﬁrst two visions return the reader to a number of themes found earlier: the destruction of agriculture and a punitive ﬁre. Yet, the imagery is heightened, especially in the latter instance as it is the ‘great deep’ that is being consumed by the ﬁre and not merely the crops by locusts as imagined in the ﬁrst vision. The ﬁrst two visions also see Amos pleading with God, ﬁrst to forgive and then to ‘stop’: intercessions that, at least temporarily, seem successful. As if picking up from chapter two’s statements on the inevitability of prophecy, however, the third and fourth visions draw Amos into prophecies of doom through clever word-plays. God asks Amos to identify seemingly innocuous objects and then reveals that hidden in Amos’ responses are words of doom. These two visions, and the intervening story of 1

Francis Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech in Amos’, HAR 11 (1987): 223–46.

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Amaziah’s attempt to remove Amos from Bethel, as well as the prophet’s rebuke of the priest, often speak of ‘houses’ or parts thereof. God is seen standing on a wall, the ‘house (royal dynasty) of Jeroboam’ is said to be doomed, ‘high places’ (hilltop shrines) and sanctuaries are also marked for destruction. Bethel, the ‘House of God’, is claimed to be a royal facility, returning the reader to the rebellious hubris of the oracles against the nations in Amos 1–2. Yet it is singers in the palace who will wail while silence is demanded because of all the dead. In these passages, the cosmic aspects of the natural landscape and constructed cityscapes are clearly revealed. God is seen on a wall, but which wall is up to the reader’s imagination. It could be part of a particular shrine or building or one of the building-blocks of creation itself, a foundation for not only religious and royal buildings but for human households as well. The fourth vision is followed in chapter eight by a short series of chilling oracles in which the mythic contents of the theophanic hymns become not mere descriptions of divine power, but vows of divine response to continued oppression of the poor and the impatient disregard of the Sabbath and other holy times. Portrayals of both time and place are moving towards the revelation of the universe’s creator and destroyer. The locusts come after the ‘king’s mowings’ (Amos 7:1) but now the deity calls for a day of famine – ‘but not for bread…but for hearing the words of Yahweh’ (Amos 8:11). It is in the ﬁfth vision (Amos 9:1) that the universe is reduced to a single image of Yahweh in his macro-cosmic temple and the divine word to a command to destroy it. It collapses the material world into cosmic realities, and the prophet who once stood up to God and then was tricked into speaking for him, now describes the moment of his implication in the very work of destruction. This destruction, however, is the key to restoration, and after the ﬁnal hymnic theophany, God turns and Amos predicts that once again Israel will be ‘planted’ in their land: 7:1

This Adonai Yahweh showed me: Behold, he is fashioning locusts when the late-crop was starting to grow – the late-crop follows the king’s mowings! 2 And when they had ﬁnished devouring the land’s herbage, I said, ‘Adonai Yahweh, forgive please! How can Jacob stand? He is so small!’ 3 Yahweh relented concerning this, ‘It shall not be’ said Yahweh. 4 This Adonai Yahweh showed me: Behold, calling to judgement by ﬁre [was] Adonai Yahweh! [or, calling to strive against the ﬁre of Adonai Yahweh!] And it devoured the great deep and it was devouring the ﬁeld. 5 I said, ‘Adonai Yahweh, stop! Please! How can Jacob stand? He is so small!’ 6 Yahweh relented concerning this, ‘This, too, shall not be’, said Adonai Yahweh.

These two visions initiate the series of ﬁve that carries the reader into the ﬁnal chapter of the book. This ﬁrst pair includes the ﬁrst reference to Amos himself since 1:1–2. There is at once a sense of immediacy and intimacy achieved by the ﬁrst-person narrative style. The reader sees what Amos sees and hears what he hears. Finally the reader catches a glimpse of Amos interacting with his God. Yet, it is strange and uncanny. No time, place or circumstance is given. Amos intercedes against the judgement. Yet, God relents and the divine and the human voices once again merge.

DECEPTION: AMOS 7:1–17

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It is a pattern that is repeated before being reversed in succeeding passages.2 Francis Landy writes: The poetic quality derives, however, not from formal properties, but from the focus on the prophet’s voice in extremis as it emerges from its web of indictment and prognostication. This voice separates itself from that of God, to protest against the horror of what it sees; its struggle with that of God, a struggle of concession and silence, is the dramatic and poetic climax of the book. The prophet is witness and spokesman, for the smallness and innocence of Jacob. God’s unexpected reprieve grants the prophet immense persuasive power and a place in the line of great intercessory prophets; God is recalled to his own memory. At the same time, the divine retraction is provisional, itself rhetorical.3

The reversal will be reversed, only to turn around once again. The repetition in these visions has a strong rhetorical effect. Paul observes how doubling, even when using different symbols, reinforces the legitimacy of a message without changing meaning, a strategy that can be found with the dreams of Joseph and Pharaoh (Gen. 37:5–9; 41:1–7).4 In Amos, however, the replication suggests conﬁrmation of God’s initial action, despite the apparent success of the intercession: Amos vainly struggles against God.5 But if God is recalled to his own memory, then we, too, are called to turn our minds back and to remember. In Amos 4:13, one reads, ‘For behold, the former of the mountains.’ One might hear the echoes of such a divine title in 7:1, ‘Behold, the former of locusts!’ The juxtaposition of God as the majestic creator of the mountains and of destructive insects, against which humanity has no defence, is a powerful image. This destroyer god manifests himself only after the king had his share of the land’s bounty, but before the people have had a chance to reap their own harvest, which only adds to the ominous tones.6 In Amos 5:8, the participle ‘calling’ is used to present God as the one summoning the waters that are poured out on the land. One might be inclined to ﬁnd in 7:4 an ironic reﬂection of this: God calls for the ﬁre. God has the power to destroy the land with water, but he also has the power to destroy the water with ﬁre. There is a sense of growing impatience and desperation in the sequence of the two visions, even as much as the repeated themes and motifs reinforce each other. The locusts are a terrible plague, but are of this world. The manifestation of Yahweh with a cosmic ﬁre, however, transcends the bounds of the earth. Its horror is evidenced in its devouring the great deep before it is turned loose on the land. The cosmology that locates the dry land amidst the watery chaos is destroyed. The water burns ﬁrst, leaving the land adrift in the great ﬁre, without place, without hope. Amos’ own responses differ between the two visions. At ﬁrst he cries, ‘forgive’ (7:2),

2

Linville, ‘Visions and Voice’, treats this separation and merger in a somewhat different

manner. 3

Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech, p. 227. Paul, Amos, p. 224. 5 Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 225. 6 So Mays, Amos, pp. 127–8; Wolff, Joel and Amos, pp. 227–8, and others. But Paul, Amos, p. 227, thinks the late planting actually precedes the reaping of the king’s portion, so the locusts devour everything. 4

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as if the plague of insects can be accommodated in a worldview of divine judgement and compassion. But at the sight of God with his ﬁre, Amos can only call out ‘stop’ (v. 6); there can be no means by which he might understand this. God’s own answer also varies. At ﬁrst God says ‘It shall not be’. But the sequence is recognized in his second response: ‘This, too, shall not be’. God acknowledges his own graciousness to Israel, but also the limits of his forbearance.7 These limits will be exceeded by the time the third vision is read. An intimation of the desperation and of the split between Amos and God may be found in Amos 7:4’s difﬁcult expression, larib bš, which, like so many passages in Amos, can be interpreted in a number of ways. Many interpreters take the expression as indicating some kind of legal proceeding or ordeal involving ﬁre, which is a frequent image in the prophetic material. James Limburg argues that in Amos 7:4, the preposition has an instrumental sense, in that the ﬁre is the agency of divine punishment that is sent after God calls for an accusation to be made.8 On the other hand, constructions with the verb ‘to contend’, rb, when used in legal contexts, would typically employ the preposition b to indicate the defendant against whom the accusation rb, is made (cf. Gen. 31:36; Judg. 6:32). Hence God would be calling for someone to present against the ﬁre.9 To avoid some of the syntactical difﬁculties, a simple emendation is sometimes proposed. This divides the consonants differently, resulting in lrbb š: ‘And behold, he was summoning a rain of ﬁre’.10 This rain would stand in stark irony to the withering droughts of Amos 4 and the desiccating divine word of 1:2. No emendation may be necessary, however. Job says that if he ever had a chance to argue his case with God, the deity would listen to reason. Job asks rhetorically ‘would he strive (rb) with () great strength against me?’ (Job 23:6). The imagery in this passage presupposes some kind of quasi-legal proceedings brought against the deity. Even so, the verb rb does not really imply a purely judicial kind of contest given that the instrument of divine contention is ‘strength’ and not any kind of argument per se. As elsewhere, the ambiguity in the passage may reveal a complex set of meanings, and not one in particular. On the one hand, God is seen pronouncing that his judgement will come with ﬁre. Amos is then a passive spectator to the vision until he dares to intercede again. On the other hand, the deity may be implying that someone ‘strive against the ﬁre of Adonai Yahweh’. The whole world may be addressed here but more likely the one challenged is Amos himself. He already once opposed the will of the fashioner of the locusts and won a reprieve. But what could he say or do against the ﬁre? Unlike Job, who is denied the opportunity to plead his case with a deity who restrains his power, Amos is given a chance to bring a charge against God’s use of might. Amos cannot ﬁght this battle with his own power. Amos can muster no argument. He does not even bother to ask for forgiveness, as he 7

Lyle Eslinger, ‘The Education of Amos’, HAR 11 (1987): 35–57 (39–40). James Limburg, ‘Amos 7:4: A Judgment with Fire?’, CBQ 35 (1973): 346–9. See too, Paul, Amos, pp. 226, 230–32. 9 Paul, Amos, pp. 230–32, offers a good discussion and bibliography. 10 Delbert R. Hillers, ‘Amos 7:4 and Ancient Parallels’, CBQ 26 (1964): 221–5, traces the idea to Max Krenkel, ‘Zur Kritik and Exegese der kleinen Propheten’, ZWT 14 (1866): 271. See also Jeremias, Amos, p. 123; Wolff, Joel and Amos, pp. 292–3. 8

DECEPTION: AMOS 7:1–17

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did in the ﬁrst case (and thereby implies an admission of guilt). Now he merely asks God: ‘Stop, Please! How can Jacob stand? He is so small!’ This is surely based more on emotion than reason. The reference to Israel as Jacob marks a shift in conception from national to personal, as if Jacob is remembered as a child.11 God relents, but is it for tiny Jacob’s beneﬁt, or some other reason? The growing impatience in God’s response in the second vision and the greater desperation of Amos give the impression of God toying with his prophet, testing the limits of his will to intercede and to speak in his own voice. If a repeated vision indicates legitimacy, then God’s relenting is strongly afﬁrmed. The atmosphere is not one of ﬁnal peace and security, however, but of brooding anger that will ultimately be unleashed. And there seems to be nothing Amos can do to stop it. The second vision has signiﬁcantly increased the stakes, from the farmer’s crops being ravaged to a cosmic ﬁre, leaving the world adrift in ﬂames. There are clear mythic references here as noted by Paul, Limburg, and others.12 The ‘great deep’ not only derives from ancient Hebrew cosmology (Gen 7:11), but is well known from other ancient near eastern mythologies and often plays a role in many combat mythologies. Drying up of the seas is also part of the biblical imagery, as in Isa. 51:9–10.13 One curiosity of Amos 7:4 is that when the cosmic ﬁre reaches the earth, the term used is leq, a word that denotes a particular parcel of land, and not the earth as a whole. The feminine form,  (used in Amos 4:7) typically means ‘ﬁeld’ or ‘a plot of land’ in general. The masculine form, as in 7:4, however, is more speciﬁc, usually used to indicate a particular ﬁeld or the prescribed allotment of some other commodity to someone. Amos 7:4 not only employs the masculine, but preﬁxes it with the deﬁnite article to it (‘the plot of land’). This speciﬁcity results in a degree of awkwardness. In the ﬁrst vision, our prophet differentiates between the royal harvest, which was successfully completed, and the regrowth, which was presumably intended for the people but was eaten by the locusts. In the second vision, then, perhaps the tract of land consumed by the ﬁre was the holdings of the poor. Also possible is that that the term may here refer to Israel’s portion of the earth. The same term appears in Deut. 32:9 Yahweh’s people are called his ‘portion’.14 Interestingly, this verse also uses the name Jacob to identify the deity’s ‘inheritance’. Note the use of that name in the ﬁrst two visions. On the other hand, our mysterious word may be looking forward to the end of the chapter. In Amos 7:14, Amaziah’s land will be ‘divided’, the verb used is based on the root word as ‘ﬁeld’. Thus, Amos’ description of the cosmic ﬁre seems to even exceed what he will later predict as the fate of the apostate priest.15 Yet, if there is an anticipation of Amaziah’s judgement, then the call for Amos to contend with the ﬁre also anticipates that Amos’ own intercession will not ultimately be successful. Amos is falling into a trap, and it will be sprung in the very next passage:

11 12 13 14 15

Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 226. Limburg, ‘Amos 7:4’, p. 348; Paul, Amos, p. 331–2; Paul, Amos, p. 232. Coggins, Joel and Amos, p. 139. I am grateful to my proofreader, Helen Connolly, for these observations.

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AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION This he showed me: behold, Adonai standing on a wall of  [tin]! And in his hand was ! 8 And Yahweh said to me, ‘What do you see, Amos?’ And I said, ‘’. Adonai said, ‘See me setting  in the midst of my people Israel. Never again will I pass by them. 9 The high-places of Isaac will be destroyed and the sanctuaries of Israel laid waste. And I will rise against the House of Jeroboam with the sword’. 7:7

At the outset of this report there is an intimation that it will be a repeat of the previous kind of vision, however, the reader is treated to something else. The deity stands on a wall with something in his hand. The line may be read as Yahweh standing beside the wall, but one eighth century BCE limestone carving – a votive image or a stela – from Til Barsib shows a deity standing on a gate ﬂanked by two towers.16 Accent soon falls on the item Amos is asked to identify. Manipulation is the keyword. God does not need to know what Amos sees, because he showed it to the man himself.17 The sight of it is an omen, its name a prophecy; Amos’ declaration of the name implicates him in delivering the fateful word. No intercession is found. Amos’ ‘small Jacob’ is now God’s ‘my people, Israel’. Jacob, the patriarch who was renamed Israel is now a nation with high places, sanctuaries and a royal house. The rhetoric is sharp. Israel is not too ‘small’ to destroy after all. The pathetic image of baby Jacob, unable to stand, is replaced with one of a doomed kingdom that stands too proudly. Scholars have laboured over how to interpret the key term , which appears only here in the Hebrew Bible. The bulk of evidence now suggests that the mysterious word means ‘tin’ and not ‘lead’ (and from ‘lead’, the traditional understanding of a plumb line).18 A ‘wall of tin’ is a strange image, but in Jer. 1:18; 15:20, the prophet’s invulnerability is depicted as metal fortiﬁcations.19 In Ezek. 4:3 there is an iron wall.20 But if an iron or bronze structure implies strength, what could a tin wall suggest? Some think it implies the metal bronze, and so a material suitable for the manufacture of weapons.21As Paul points out, however, there is no indication that 16 This deity appears to be associated with the moon and may be the Assyrian deity Sin. Relating it to Amos 7:7 is Christoph Euhlinger, ‘Figurative Policy, Propaganda und Prophetie’, in J.A. Emerton (ed.) Congress Volume Cambridge 1995 (VTSup, 66; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997), pp. 297–349 (pp. 321–3). A more detailed description and larger drawing can be found in Othmar Keel, Goddesses and Trees, New Moon and Yahweh: Ancient Near Eastern Art and the Hebrew Bible (JSOTSup, 261; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1998), pp. 67–8, 70, and ﬁgure 10 in the appendix to Part II. 17 Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 228. 18 Michael Weigle, ‘Eine “unendliche Geschichte”: Kn) (Am 7,7–8)’, Bib 76 (1995): 343–87. H.G.M. Williamson, ‘The Prophet and the Plumb-line: A Redaction-critical Study of Amos vii’, in A.S. van der Woude (ed.) In Quest of the Past (OTS, 26; Leiden E.J. Brill, 1990), pp. 101–21, defends the traditional understanding. 19 In Zech. 2:9, God will be a ‘wall of ﬁre’ for the new Jerusalem. 20 Paul, Amos, p. 235, ﬁnds a number of ancient near eastern references to metal walls. 21 Hartmut Gese, ‘Komposition bei Amos’, in J.A. Emerton (ed.) Congress Volume, Vienna 1980 (VTSup, 32; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981), pp. 74–95 (81–2); A. Graeme Auld,

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this tin has been, or is intended to be, alloyed. He proposes that it is better to see it as symbolic of softness and perishability, since the metal on its own is very weak.22 The tin wall may already imply the weakness of the shrines and sanctuaries of Israel and the house of Jeroboam (Amos 7:9). Alan Cooper argues, from the structurally similar vision of 8:1–2, that the  of Amos 7:7 need carry no symbolic value at all, since any object whose name could be turned into a pun declaring the doom of Israel could have been employed.23 But the ‘summer fruit’ of 8:1 speaks of prosperity, making the vision of the ‘end’ of Israel all the harsher. This recalls the false expectations of the earlier references to the ‘day of Yahweh’ and the rejection of the ‘evil day’. In the third vision, therefore, the tin should imply that something is not quite right with Israel. The association between the tin wall and the tin in the hand of God suggests that, whatever the wall represents, it has fallen into the hand of God, and he shall do as he pleases with it. But what does the tin that God will place in the midst of Israel represent? In Jer. 1:13–15, a steaming kettle pours its wrath out from the north, and hence, God will punish his people by sending enemies from that direction. But if, in Amos 7:8, God places mere tin in the midst of Israel, then the image is as weak as the metal. For , there is no change in the consonants as in Amos 8:1–2 ( ‘summer fruit’ becoming  ‘end’), or vowels as in the ‘watchful’ God and the ‘almond’ in Jer. 1:11–12. The  should likewise transform, if not into a different word, then at least into the same word with a different meaning. A number of scholars have proposed that the  God places in Israel is a compromise between two other words, one with a softer ﬁnal consonant, the other with a harder one. Both of these words, however, have a very similar meaning. The tin in God’s hand, therefore, becomes the sounds of someone crying grief and misery,  or.24 Such an interpretation is reinforced by the fourfold repetition of the word itself, something that surely draws attention not only to what the word denotes, but its sound as well, not to mention the extent of the predicted suffering. Amos’ only reply to God is the name of the item. Therefore, his own cries of distress may be heard onomatopoetically in that fateful word. He is compelled not only to prophesy concerning the divine ‘lion’s roar’, but he also shares in the expression of fear that prophecy would bring when it is fulﬁlled (cf. Amos 3:8). The depths of the image have yet to be fully plumbed. The word  may also play on the ﬁrst person pronoun, ; this interpretation has gained some popularity.25 Much of the evidence for it comes from oath formulas in which someone swears by his own life. In these cases, ‘I’ is not really a pronoun but an epithet.26 Amos (OTG; Shefﬁeld: JSOT Press, 1986), p. 20. 22 Paul, Amos, pp. 234–5. 23 Alan Cooper, ‘The Meaning of Amos’s Third Vision (Am 7:7–9)’, in M. Cogan, B.L. Eichler and J.H. Tigay (eds) Tehillah le-Moshe: Biblical and Judaic Studies in Honor of Moshe Greenberg (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997), pp. 13–21 (18). 24 Gese, ‘Komposition’, pp. 81–2. Andersen and Freedman, Amos, p. 759, suggest that there may be a word spelled as in Amos 7:7–8 that means ‘grief’ speciﬁcally. 25 Franz Praetorius, ‘Bemerkungen zu Amos’, ZAW 35 (1915): 12–25 (23); Jeremias, Amos, pp. 132–3; Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 229. 26 Cooper, ‘Amos’s Third Vision’, p. 20.

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A connection between such oaths and the exact wording of Amos 7:8 is not really obvious, but given the sheer bizarreness of the vision itself, one should perhaps not expect perfect linguistic formulations. But if  could be God, then could not Amos have seen himself as well?27 Amos’ apparent rejection of the idea that he is a prophet (7:14) sees him use the ﬁrst person pronoun no less than three times, the ﬁrst two of which occur at the end of phrases, as is the case in 7:7–8: ‘Not a prophet am I, Not a son of a prophet am I, a herdsman am I, and a tender of ﬁgs.’ This strongly recalls the  of the vision. Cooper writes that the ‘I’ who entered Bethel is ‘not the prophet; it is God manifest in the prophet.’ It is ‘a moment of absolute prophetic sympathy with God’.28 The prophetic/divine ‘I’ of Amos 7:14 and the metaphorical sound of Israel itself suffering under divine punishment continue a number of themes from earlier in the book. The divine manifestation will certainly lead Israel to meet her God (cf. 4:12). The imperative nature of prophesy from Amos 3:8–9, 13 is recalled here, as are the songs of mourning predicted in 5:16–17 when Yahweh passes through the midst of Israel. These recollections make it easier to agree with Cooper. Yet, the ﬁrst two visions suggest that the merging of the prophetic and divine voice is not all that is involved in the third vision. Amos has twice succeeded in gaining agreement to his words from God. Now God wrestles control of speech from Amos. ‘Absolute prophetic sympathy’ may be the illusion spun by the coercion of Amos, of his inability to say anything other than what is demanded of him. But Amos is not really a prophet, at least so he says. He is a man, and he reveals here nothing of what he thought of God’s pun. Amos is trapped. The enigmatic term  has one more allusion. It may be read as ‘I will strike’ from the verb . It hardly makes good grammar or syntax (especially the last line) but the following reading is suggestive of the ﬁnal vision in Amos 9:1:29 7:7

Adonai was standing on a wall [that] I will strike, And by his hand I will strike. 8 And Yahweh said to me, ‘What do you see, Amos?’ And I said, ‘I will strike.’ Adonai said, ‘See, me setting ‘I will strike’ in the midst of my people Israel.

With this, the prophet is set on his inadvertently admitted mission of destruction against Israel. This reading can then inform the following scene. In Amos 7:7–8, the distinction between the prophet and the deity blurs as Amos is drawn ever closer to striking Israel with his own words as the efﬁcacy and not merely the ‘roar’ of divine speech is realized. Curiously, with his manifestation on the wall in the third vision, God says he will no longer ‘pass by’ for his people (7:8 and see 8:2). This recalls God’s passing through the midst of Israel in 5:17. It has been suggested that

27

Coote, Amos Among the Prophets, pp. 92–3. Cooper, ‘Amos’s Third Vision’, pp. 20–21. 29 Andersen and Freedman, Amos, p. 758, report that in 1902 Reidel proposed emending to the text to read ‘I will strike’, but that this forced other changes in the text: W. Riedel, ‘Bemerkungen zum Buche Amos’, in Altestamentliche Untersuchungen 1 (Vol. 1; Leipzig, 1902), pp. 19–36. 28

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this expression indicates that God refuses to ‘forgive’ Israel.30 One could appeal to the similar, but not identical, expressions in Mic. 7:18 and Prov. 19:11. Perhaps the enigmatic (literally, ‘for him’) in the Amos passages is the result of a desire to stress alliteration and rhythm over clarity of meaning. Each of the words of the phrase in question features a long ‘o’ sound and the phrase begins with the consonant . There is further alliteration in vision 3 (although not in vision 4). The ‘midst’, , of Israel is echoed in the devastation and in the threat of the sword, both derived from the root  (7:9). With the meaning of the expression uncertain, one is led to investigate the options, slow down and concentrate on the text and, above all, consider the growing impatience of God. Jeremias offers a chilling interpretation: At the same time, the conclusion (‘I can no longer …’) makes it clear that ultimately, the protective ‘wall of tin’ was God’s own protection, protection not only against external enemies, but above all against himself, since he cannot bear, and indeed intends to punish, injustice and violence toward the weak of his people.31

God is now ‘in the midst’ of Israel and is no longer respecting the necessary distance between himself and humanity to preserve human life. The image is rife with ritual connotations, since ritual actions and ritual spaces in temples deﬁne how and when select people may decrease the physical distance between them and the place where God’s presence is manifest. The wall that Jeremias sees as the proper boundary between the divine and human realms is destroyed, and God’s presence becomes oppressive and destructive. But it is only the reverse of what the Israelites had been accused of doing; they take their ease in the house of their God and at his altar. This action has been stressed at a number of points in the ﬁrst six chapters. Overturning the temple traditions and conceptions of sacred space comes to the fore as the third vision proceeds. God’s speech continues in 7:9 and high-places and sanctuaries, along with the royal household, are to be destroyed. The whole image of the vision is of God striding upon the high places of the earth, as in 4:13. Then, in another of the mysterious transformations of the book, the visions are interrupted by something equally strange and uncanny. It should probably be called ‘prose’ in English, but representing it in a verse style may do the richness of its structures more justice: 7:10

And Amaziah, priest of Bethel, sent [word] to Jeroboam, king of Israel, saying, ‘Amos has conspired against you in the midst of the House of Israel. The land is unable to endure all his words 11 For thus said Amos, “By the sword shall Jeroboam die And Israel surely will be exiled from his land.” ’ 12 Amaziah said to Amos, ‘Seer, go, take [literally, ‘ﬂee’] yourself to the land of Judah And there eat bread and there prophesy. 13 But at Bethel do not again prophesy Because a sanctuary of the king is it And the house of the kingdom is it.’32 30 31 32

Niditch, Symbolic Vision, p. 21. Jeremias, Amos, p. 133. Word order in English is sacriﬁced again to illustrate the Hebrew word order.

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AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION 14 Amos answered, and he said to Amaziah, ‘No prophet am I. And no son of a prophet am I.33 But a herdsman am I And a tender of sycamore ﬁgs. 15 But Yahweh took me from behind the ﬂock, And Yahweh said to me, “Go, prophesy to my people Israel.” 16 Now, hear the word of Yahweh, You say, “Do not prophesy against Israel, And do not drip upon [preach against] the house of Isaac.” 17 Therefore, thus says Yahweh “Your wife shall prostitute [herself] in the city. Your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword. Your land, with a measuring line, shall be divided And you, upon an unclean land, shall die And Israel will be exiled from his land.” ’

In the visions, we saw an internal struggle and engaged only Amos’ reporting of the proceedings. Now, reporting shifts from the ﬁrst person to the third person. But in this narrative, the narrator says very little, only reporting who is speaking and to whom. This reluctance to colour our perspective with details might be taken as an attempt at objectivity, but it scarcely masks the bias in the book: Amos is right and the priest is wrong. The lack of detail is striking. The narrator gives no corroboration to the claims Amaziah makes to his king, that Amos has ‘conspired’ or even said the things that are attributed to him.34 We also do not know if Amos left Bethel as directed by the priest. The story is not of Amos’ call to be a prophet or even of his upsetting the authorities. Rather, the narration is solely concerned with the war of words between the two men. One is under obligation to his king to rid the land of a pesky troublemaker; the other is under obligation to a god who is determined to be rid of his people. Amos is caught in the middle. He has just been coerced into declaring and admitting his role in the doom of Israel. Amos does not really say that Jeroboam’s dynasty will end with the sword but he quotes Yahweh as vowing to use the sword against the house of Jeroboam. By claiming that Amos has ‘conspired’, Amaziah has made it seem as if the predicted violent death of the king is due to some kind of rebellion by Amos instead of a divine judgement. The reader, sensitive to all the permutations of the third vision, however, may wonder if Amaziah’s claim of Amos’ involvement in a conspiracy is not entirely off base. He and the prophet are engaged in a rhetorical battle, but it is not one the priest will win. Amos is given not only the ﬁnal say, but also the longest. By the time he is ﬁnished, Amaziah’s words are turned around into a self-fulﬁlling prophecy in an odd parody of the prophet’s own visionary experience. What political consequences

33 ‘Son of a prophet’ is typically taken to mean a prophet’s assistant, apprentice or a member of a guild of prophets. Cf. 2 Kgs 2:12, in which Elisha calls Elijah ‘father’. 34 Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 310, and Mays, Amos, pp. 135–6, think Amaziah reported Amos’ words accurately.

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come of this debate we can only wonder, but the war of words is won. The reader is left with a question, however. Was the victorious rhetoric Amos’ or God’s? Landy writes about Amos’ inner conﬂict. In the visions, Amos the person struggles with Amos the prophet, a strife that is a reﬂection of the conﬂict between God and Israel. In Amos 7:10–17, however, Amos, God’s spokesman, attracts attention from the priest, a representative of the deity. But rather than conﬁrm Amos’ encounters with God, the priest tries to sever the communication with the divine.35 He is, by his own admission, an ofﬁcial of the crown, not of God.36 This irony is reﬂected in the words chosen for each of the characters. The prophecy against the ‘house of Jeroboam’, in 7:9, is heard throughout the following few verses. Bethel itself is the ‘House of God’, and the alleged conspiracy is in the House of Israel. Bethel becomes, in v. 12, not the ‘House of God’ but the King’s sanctuary (cf. the sanctuaries of v. 9) and a ‘house of the kingdom’. The latter may be a palace or, as Paul argues, it is more likely a state temple.37 The name of Bethel is then humanized and politicized; it is no longer really the House of God.38 García-Treto observes how, when the episode begins, full titles are in order: Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sends word to Jeroboam, King of Israel. This emphasizes ‘the inﬂated self-importance of the priest’.39 In 7:9, God declares the end of the high places of Isaac and the sanctuaries of Israel. Jeroboam’s fate, too, is sealed. But Amaziah reports a plot directly against the king by Amos, and remains silent about God’s role in the affair, or any possible reasons for such a calamity befalling the nation, beyond Amos’ purported conspiracy. He reports a prediction that will see Jeroboam die by the sword, but replaces mention of the destruction of the high places and sanctuaries with mention of an impending exile (7:10–11).40 Landy also observes that ‘biblical characters are constantly misquoting each other. … Every distorted message reveals an aspect of the character and motivation of the speaker’.41 The real conspiracy, then, is Amaziah’s. He portrays himself as the disinterested subject, ignoring the predicted fate of what he should be most interested in, the shrine of Bethel, only to accentuate what would most concern the king. He plays a double game that both warns and awakens the king to the threat posed by the prophet. One cannot be certain that the priest himself believes in the conspiracy theory.42 35

Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 234. Francisco O. García-Treto, ‘A Reader-Response Approach to Prophetic Conﬂict: The Case of Amos 7:10–17’, in J.C. Exum, D.J.A. Clines (eds) The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible (JSOTSup, 143; Shefﬁeld, Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1993), pp. 114–24 (118– 19); Paul R. Noble, ‘Amos and Amaziah in Context: Synchronic and Diachronic Approaches to Amos 7–8’, CBQ 60 (1998): 423–39 (428–30). 37 Paul, Amos, p. 243. 38 Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 236. See too, Eslinger, ‘Education of Amos’, p. 45. 39 García-Treto, ‘Reader-Response’, p. 119. 40 See Amos 5:5 with the repeated exile and the similar sounding place name, Gilgal. 41 Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 235. 42 Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, pp. 235–6. See too, Paul, Amos, p. 240; Eslinger, ‘Education of Amos’, pp. 43–4; García-Treto, ‘Reader-Response’, pp. 119–21; Noble, ‘Amos and Amaziah’, pp. 428–9. 36

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The advice that Amos should go to Judah and ‘eat bread’ there, however, is linked to the passage in an intricate system of alliteration and irony. ‘The land is unable to bear all’ of Amos’ words, ––– (v. 10). Thus, the prophet is advised to ﬂee away to the land of Judah and eat, , bread there (v. 12). Building on this, ‘bread’, , anticipates the priest’s statements that Bethel is the king’s,  and  (vv. 12-13). The alliteration and repetition paint a picture of the priest trivializing Amos; Amos should look to his empty stomach and not to the affairs of a state that is not his own.43 Even Amaziah’s order to ‘ﬂee’ (instead of actually declaring Amos ‘banished’) has a certain patronizing tone, which is also emphasized by the repetition of sounds – (v. 12), while the priest’s direction to ‘never again’, –, prophesy at Bethel (v. 13) recalls very closely God’s own statement that he ‘will no longer’, –,pass Israel by (v. 8).44 The deity, however, gets the last word in this matter as in 8:2 he reiterates his vow to not pass by Israel any more. The absence of any mention of God in Amaziah’s warning to the king is all the more striking, given the priest’s admission that Amos is, in fact, a ‘seer’. The tables are sure to turn against him. Amos’ enigmatic reply (Amos 7:14–17) is brilliantly written. Amos does not deny nor conﬁrm that he is a seer, ,but he says that he is neither a ‘prophet’, , nor a ‘son of a prophet’. This has disturbed a number of commentators. Peter R. Ackroyd sees v. 14 as a rhetorical question, ‘Am I not a prophet?’, but Amos’ further statements that he has other occupations makes this difﬁcult to defend.45 Some argue that the ﬁrst particle should be understood as an emphatic particle resulting in ‘I am a prophet’, while the second is a standard negation ‘but I am not a son of a prophet’ (a professional who prophesies for money).46 The parallelism in the two lines, however, suggests that Amos is denying both titles. The following statement, detailing Amos’ occupations, further supports this.47 Many scholars read 7:14 as Amos describing his life’s work before he was called to be a prophet. Mays translates, ‘No prophet was I, nor a son of a prophet, but I was a herdsman.’48 This very simple solution has the support of the Greek, but I still prefer to read all of the verbless clauses in 7:14 in the present tense. In Zech. 13:4–5, there is an allusion to Amos 7:14: anyone who even attempts to prophesy will be executed as liars. This includes those who mask their intents by refusing to wear a hairy mantle and deny 43

To ‘eat bread’ portrays Amos as a paid prophet who should earn his living in Judah, so Soggin, Amos, p. 126, Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 311, and many others. Auld, Amos, pp. 29–30, detects urgency in Amaziah’s urging that Amos should go to Judah before his next meal. 44 Eslinger, ‘Education of Amos’, pp. 444–5. 45 Peter R. Ackroyd, ‘A Judgment Narrative Between Kings and Chronicles? An Approach to Amos 7.9–17’, in G.W. Coats and B.O. Long (eds) Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), pp. 71–87 (83–4). See the objections of Paul, Amos, pp. 244–5. 46 H. Neil Richardson, ‘A Critical Note on Amos 7.14’, JBL 85 (1966): 89; Ziony Zevit, ‘A Misunderstanding at Bethel: Amos VII 12–17’, VT 25 (1975): 783–90; Ziony Zevit, ‘Expressing Denial in Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew and in Amos’, VT 29 (1979): 505–9; Simon Cohen, ‘Amos Was a Navi’, HUCA 32 (1961): 175–8. 47 Yair Hoffmann, ‘Did Amos Regard Himself as a Nabi?’, VT 27 (1977): 209–12 (210–11). 48 Mays, Amos, pp. 134, 138–9. Soggin, Amos, p. 126, offers something similar.

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that they are prophets. This suggests that the Amos verse is being understood in Zechariah as a statement of Amos’ current situation. Of course, the way the writer of Zechariah read Amos is not necessarily the same way we must read it. Yet, it lends support to reading the passage as Amos denying being a prophet or a ‘son of a prophet’. Many think that Amos is denying that he is a professional prophet, or a member of a prophetic guild, while still deﬁning himself in terms of his life on the land. Thus, Amos is saying that he does not need to earn his living by prophecy. As 7:15 continues, he describes how he is compelled by God to prophesy, despite his real occupation on the land.49 As noted above, many take the directive to ‘eat bread’ in Judah as a circumlocution for ‘earn your keep’. But, as I have observed, ‘eating bread’ is involved in the passage’s phonetic complexity and the priest’s attitude toward Amos.50 It is tenuous to restrict the expression as used here to being only a reference to employment or pay. The parallelism between ‘prophet’ and ‘son of a prophet’ in v. 15 appears to me to deny any association with prophets (professional, ascetic, amateur or whatever) at all. I prefer Hoffmann’s view that proposes that Amos is wrestling with his own self-identity. He denies any association with past prophets (for example, Elijah or Elisha), but remains moved to prophesy.51 His being ‘taken’ by God implies compulsion, if not obsession. The lines ‘Who can but fear … who can but prophesy’, and ‘Amos, what do you see?’ should echo in one’s mind when reading the enigmatic story of Amos and Amaziah. But if God has caught Amos, then he will also catch the priest. This is suggested in Amos’ quotation of God’s command that he should ‘go’, , and prophesy (v. 15) that echoes Amaziah’s order ‘go, take yourself’,– and prophesy in Judah (v. 12). The priest’s sarcastic order has been both ratiﬁed and inverted by God. Amos will prophesy, but not in Judah. The weapons in the struggle between the priest and Amos are not appeals to some divine test (at least in 1 Kgs 18 the prophetic strategy of choice), or appeals to the king’s soldiers (presumably an option open to Amaziah). Rather, the weapons are those of rhetoric, and the writer has stacked the deck against the priest. The herdsman, Amos, proves himself a formidable foe. He wrestles control from Amaziah, who called him a ‘seer’. Amos returns this by denying being any sort of ‘prophet’. The implication is that even if Amos were willing to admit having some kind of formal status as an intermediary, Amaziah would have picked the wrong title for him. The priest cannot even tell one of God’s intermediaries from another, let alone identify one who is professionally a herdsman and ﬁg-tender. This is ironic, since the opening line of the book uses the verbal root of Amaziah’s term ‘seer’ to say that Amos ‘had visions’ or ‘prophesied’. Yet, it is noteworthy that Amos 1:1 employs the verb, not a noun. It identiﬁes what happened to Amos, not what Amos is. 49

Wolff, Joel and Amos, pp. 313–14; Jeremias, Amos, pp. 139–40; Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. 789–90; Elizabeth Achtemeier, Minor Prophets, I (NIBC, 17; Peabody MA: Hendrickson, 1996), p. 223. 50 As my student, Helen Connolly, accurately translated into colloquial English, Amos is told to ‘Get stuffed!’ 51 Hoffmann, ‘Did Amos Regard Himself’, p. 212.

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Likewise, Amos himself denies the label ‘prophet’, but says he has been called to ‘prophesy’. But if Amos does follow orders to return to Judah, he will not just ‘eat bread’. Amos’ claims to a life on the land imply that he can set a far more bountiful table than the priest imagines. As the text progresses into the next chapter, this is ironically recalled. It is people like Amaziah who will go hungry when Yahweh withdraws his word from the earth, and people suddenly realize how much they need it (Amos 8:11–13). Amaziah has politicized the priesthood and temples, while Amos has refused to institutionalize prophethood. Amaziah is not easily out-classed at poetic parallelism, but he is still defeated by Amos. The priest’s statement to the king about the content of Amos’ preaching employs two parallel lines: the king shall die and Israel shall be exiled. His advice to Amos is threefold: he should ﬂee away to Judah, eat bread there, and prophesy. His skill at parallelism is also displayed in his dual statement that Bethel is the king’s sanctuary and a royal house. The skilled priest, however, is ultimately upstaged by Amos’ fourfold response. He is no prophet, nor a son of a prophet, but a cattle breeder and tender of ﬁgs.52 He [Amos] undercuts Amaziah’s rhetoric also through a reversal of its technique: If Amaziah’s self-aggrandizement in inﬂated language is derived from royal patronage; Amos’ parallelism is progressive self-denigration that reﬂectively impugns Amaziah’s claims. A cowherd can speak as well as a priest, and may equally well be chosen by Yahweh.53

God’s taking of Amos from the ﬂock echoes God’s commission to David and the new king’s pastoral responsibility, as many have noticed (cf. 2 Sam. 7:8).54 Amos’ claim of being a herdsman, , also alludes to the similar sounding word used to denote the prophetic action of ‘inquiring’ or ‘seeking’ (a response from God), .55 More signiﬁcantly, the Hebrew consonants  form two different roots used to create the words for ‘oxen’ used in Amos 6:12 and ‘morning’ in Amos 4:4. Equally chilling is that the root underlying ‘oxen’ or ‘herdsman’ is also used to name a cultic functionary who practices divination by interpreting marks on the entrails of sacriﬁced animals (2 Kgs 16:15).56 The allusion to an ability to interpret omens suggests that Amos can determine the future from the actions of Amaziah, who, as priest, would have offered many sacriﬁces. The allusion to ‘morning’ also brings to mind the enigmatic light and revelation of secrets in the ﬁrst doxology (Amos 4:12). The image of the pastoral occupation and allusion to the investigative role of the one ‘taken’ by God is reinforced by Amos’ threefold repetition of ‘I’, , at 52

Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 237. Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 237. See also García-Treto, ‘Reader-Response’, pp. 122–3. 54 Including Mays, Amos, p. 139; Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 236. 55 Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 236. 56 Milos Bič, ‘Der Prophet Amos—Ein Haepatoskopos’, VT 1 (1951): 293–6, argues that Amos was just such a functionary. This proposal has met with little support. See, for instance, John Write, ‘Did Amos Inspect Livers?’, ABR 23 (1975): 3–11. The most recent work on the terms describing Amos’ occupations is Steiner, Stockmen from Tekoa. 53

DECEPTION: AMOS 7:1–17

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the end of the ﬁrst three clauses of Amos 7:14. This corresponds to the repetition of the similar sounding, but very mysterious  in the third vision.57 And so Amos does ‘strike’ back at the priest. Amos 7:16–17 is interesting for the way it uses two introductions to Amos’ words of doom to the priest, ‘Now, hear the word of Yahweh’ and ‘Therefore, thus says Yahweh’, which are interrupted by the recollection that Amaziah tried to silence prophecy. Thus, Amaziah’s attempt to silence Amos is surrounded by Amos’ declarations that he speaks for God. Amaziah misquoted Amos and now suffers the same indignity. Amos says that Amaziah forbade him to prophesy against Israel and the ‘house of Isaac’ and the content of the quoted words differs greatly from what Amaziah is reported to have said. But a few aspects of Amos’ version of events are accurate. Amaziah never refers to God, and Amos does not suggest otherwise. Neither does Amos construe the words of the priest as indicating a knowledge of to whom Israel belongs (7:14). But when Amos describes how he came to speak, it was Yahweh who took him to prophesy to his people, Israel. Amos turns Amaziah’s words on their head. The priest says, ‘do not again (prophesy)’ – (v. 13) while Amos claims he said, ‘do not drip’, – (v. 16). Depending on context, the Hebrew root Amos uses,, can refer to moisture dripping or to preaching. Micah 2:6 says ‘ “Do not preach,” they preach’. Later in that chapter, a preacher is described as someone uttering falsehoods and preaching of wine and liquor (v. 11). Speaking and dripping are sometimes metaphorically associated. Words drip like dew in Job 29:22. The honey that metaphorically ‘drips’ from the lips of a loose woman in Prov. 5:3 has clear sexual allusions and the same can be said of the term’s occurrence in Amos 7. Perhaps Amos is putting into the mouth of the priest an order to be quiet that has been intensiﬁed with an obscenity. This possibility seems plausible in view of Amaziah’s actual words to Amos, that he ‘eat bread’ in Judah. Rather than being a simple dismissive reference that Amos earn his daily bread by prophesying in someone else’s town, ‘eat bread’ itself has sexual allusions in other biblical passages (Gen. 39:6–9; Exod. 2:20; Prov. 6:26).58 According to Amos, the only one left alive of Amaziah’s family will be his wife, reduced to a life of prostitution (Amos 7:17). This fate has clear sexual connotations and makes explicit what is only implicit in the previous dialogue. The book of Amos, quite unlike Hosea, expends virtually no ink in denouncing religious apostasy through metaphors of Israel as a sexually promiscuous woman. Rather, father and son go to the same girl in 2:7, a verse whose wider context includes denunciations of religious and cultic behaviour. In that verse, the sexual allusion is provided by the verb ‘to go’ and that same verb appears in Amaziah’s order that Amos go, lk, and the same consonants immediately reappear in ‘take yourself’, lk, to the land of Judah (7:12). As noted above, Amos employs the same verb in the context of God’s command (v. 16). Although Amos shies away from calling the nation a ‘whore’ for its apostasy, something that Hosea has no reservations about, the predicted fate of 57

Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 236. Gary A. Rendsburg, ‘Word Play in Biblical Hebrew: An Eclectic Collection’, in Scott B. Noegel (ed.) Puns and Pundits: Word Play in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Literature (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2000), pp. 137–62 (150–52). 58

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Amaziah’s wife who is reduced to prostitution seems at once judgement on the priest and symbolic of the quality of his religious leadership of his people and the fate of the nation. Only after the prediction that she will prostitute herself is the death of her sons, daughters and husband mentioned (7:17). Amaziah’s children will die ‘by the sword’, which is the same fate as that prophesied for Jeroboam and his house (vv. 9–10). Like Amos in the third (and soon the fourth) vision, he is caught by his own words. Amaziah claims that due to the conspiracy against the king, the land, , could not bear Amos’ talk and that Israel would be exiled away from his land,  (7:10–11). Perhaps little should be made of the switch in terms, but one might see ‘land’ being used in reference to the political state of the king, while ‘ground’ is used more in terms of the actual life-giving soil. It is interesting that Amos himself employs only the latter term, although he uses it thrice in v. 17. Amaziah’s ground will be divided and he will die on unclean soil. Israel will be exiled from his own ground (also using the word ‘exile’ twice, against Amaziah’s single use). It is upon the  that the Virgin Israel lies, with none to help her (Amos 5:2). The sexual connotations and allusions surrounding the theme of prophecy in Amos 7:10–17 highlight the theme of the efﬁcacy of the Yahweh’s speech and perhaps the divine seductions to which Amos falls victim. The roaring lion and the mysterious  lead him to utter words of destruction that he himself twice tries to resist. The sexual nature of prophecy in the course of the war of words in Amos 7, however, is undone as the book leads to its conclusion. ‘To drip’ is also used in images of great prosperity and paradise. The mountains drip wine in Joel 4:18 (Eng. 3:18), and such a vision of dripping plenitude helps close Amos (9:13). The abundance implied by this and Amaziah’s purported attempt to stop Amos ‘dripping’ implies a correlation between fertility and divine speech, prophecy and the cosmic structure. Famine and drought have failed to win repentance according to Amos 4:6–10. But in Amos 8, famine will be revisited with even more dire consequences. In Amos 7’s war of words, Amaziah does not have a chance. But there is a certain bitter reality that lies behind Amos’ rhetorical victory. If Amos, God’s chosen herdsman, is taken from a pastoral to a prophetic role, then Amos’ shepherding days are not over but radically transformed. One would think someone else took over the care of his ﬂocks and herds, but what of Amos’ new ﬂock, Israel? Twice Amos interceded for them, but now he offers no indication of his resisting the God who took him. Lyle Eslinger argues that the Amaziah episode marked a turning-point in Amos’ own self-perception. He ﬁnally concedes to God’s will and agrees that the destruction of Israel is justiﬁed.59 Elsewhere, I have wondered if, in Amos’ words to the priest, there is not a sense of resignation. He can do nothing but prophesy doom.60 But God is not through with his manipulative naming game, as the fourth vision will soon reveal. Amos 7 clearly marks a progression towards the climax of the book in chapter 9. The ﬁrst two visions can be seen as intercessory rituals, the second of which has clear cosmological allusions. The third vision has God enigmatically standing on a ‘wall’ as noted above, perhaps best seen as a border between the ‘sacred’ and profane’ as 59 60

Eslinger, ‘The Education of Amos’, pp. 54–5. Linville, ‘Visions and Voices’, pp. 32–3.

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the prophet stands in the liminal zone between the human and divine realms. The discovery of the sacred within the mundane landscape is ironically reinforced even as the priest tries to ‘humanize’ divine space and place the king ahead of God. The prophesied end of Amaziah’s priestly line, however, is only part of the undoing of the created order, of wiping away the intuition that is supposed to keep the balance between the two spheres.

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Chapter 11

Silent Harvest: Amos 8:1–14 8:1

This Adonai Yahweh showed me: A basket of summer fruit . 2 He said, ‘What do you see, Amos?’ I said, ‘A basket of summer fruit’. Yahweh said to me, ‘The end has come to my people, Israel; Never again will I pass him by. 3 And the temple singers will wail on that day.’1 Oracle of Adonai Yahweh. ‘Many a corpse In every place he cast’.2 ‘Silence!’

Amos is tricked again. The simple image of plenty is turned into Israel’s doom as the basket of fruit ironically plays with the meaning of ‘dripping’ prophecy that Amos claimed Amaziah tried to end. Just as the locusts transformed into ﬁre in the ﬁrst two visions, the game of luring the prophet grows more serious. An enigmatic piece of tin became the cries of Israel at its fall and one who would bring it to pass. Now, one sees and tastes ‘edible death, delicious destruction’.3 This fourth vision is easier to understand than the enigmatic third. The meaning of the words, the word-play, and its symbolic content are quite obvious. The vision is not, however, anticlimactic. Its simplicity, allied to its repetition of previous motifs, adds to the sense of ominous doom. The term for basket, , can also mean cage (Jer. 5:27), and so perhaps one might want to ﬁnd in the vision not only the prediction of an ‘end’ but an insinuation of exile. In the fourth vision, Amos does not report seeing Yahweh. Neither does the deity do anything other than speak, although he makes no overt predictions of direct action on his part. The end merely comes; it is not sent, and the deity repeats his plan to never pass by again. Israel is abandoned to her fate. How to understand v. 3 has divided interpreters. Paul construes the latter part of the verse as a series of short outbursts, ‘So many corpses! Strewn everywhere! Hush!’4 This translation, however, requires an unjustiﬁed emendation of the

1

Or perhaps ‘palace’ singers. For ‘temple’, see Lynell Zogbo, ‘Rhetorical Devices and structure “At the Service” of the Message: The Final Vision in the Book of Amos’, JOTT 16 (2003): 45–66 (53). 2 Following Hebrew word order to preserve the ambiguity as detailed below. 3 Sherwood, ‘Of Fruit and Corpses’, p. 10. 4 Paul, Amos, p. 253.

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Masoretic Text’s third person perfect, ‘he cast’, to a passive.5 Wolff and Andersen and Freedman isolate it from the speech begun in v. 2.6 Hayes, however, reads it as a continuation of the previous divine speech.7 Paul is right to read the last part of v. 3 as the anticipated funeral lament but I remain non-committal as to whether the ﬁnal word  (silence) belongs to it.8 Landy offers: Many are the corpses everywhere He has cast hush.9

Elsewhere in the Bible has is most often used as an interjection, but we will have opportunity to return to Landy’s idea below. Landy does observe, however, that the lines in the verse have become progressively shorter, from the ﬁrst long line concerning the singers, to the ﬁnal line of three syllables,  : ‘he (has) cast hush’.10 This shortening is all the more obvious if ‘hush’ (one syllable) is set apart from ‘cast’ (two syllables), as a line unto itself. A ﬁnal, single sound is heard that demands no further sound at all. The interjection in 8:3 has strong afﬁnities with that in 6:10. Both deal with corpses, and the speakers in both remain somewhat mysterious. In Amos 6, however, bodies could at least be gathered. No such dignity is accorded the dead in chapter 8. They are cast everywhere. The latter chapter also recalls the use of the same verb in 4:3, with corpses or exiles ‘cast’ onto the mysterious Harmon. In Amos 6 one is advised not to invoke the divine name. In Amos 8, ‘Silence’ says it all. But who speaks? Perhaps the women referred to in the opening of 8:3 are the ones who later demand silence as part of their lament. But it may be separate from that quoted dirge. Is it a demand that the singers be still? Or is it God’s command to Amos not to intercede, for the prudent to say nothing (5:13)? Perhaps it is a narratorial interjection, a warning to the readers, drawing them into the story world, as much as Amos 3:8–9’s demands of them prophecy. The loss of integrity of the story-world of the fourth vision is accompanied by a blurring between the divine, prophetic and storytelling voices.11 In the demanded silence, however, one can hear. The already mentioned mourning is not a pleasant sound, but the command also anticipates the following address:12 8:4 5

Hear this, tramplers of the needy destroying the destitute of the land, Who say, ‘When will the new moon be over so we can sell grain?

5 Paul, Amos, p. 255. Cf. Jeremias, Amos, p. 143. Also see Hayes, p. 196, ‘In every place one will dump (them)’. Some would emend to passive and also read a future tense: Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 317. Niditch, Symbolic Vision, p. 36, emends to an imperative. 6 Wolff, Joel and Amos, pp. 317, 319–20; Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. 794, 797–9. 7 Hayes, Amos, pp. 196, 208. 8 Paul, Amos, p. 253. 9 Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, pp. 230–31. The subject of ‘cast hush’ is implicitly God, speaking of himself in the third person. 10 Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 231. 11 Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, pp. 231–2; Linville, ‘Visions and Voices’, pp. 35–6. 12 Linville, ‘Visions and Voices’, pp. 34–7.

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And the Sabbath, so we may open the wheat?13 To shrink the ephah, To enlarge the shekel, To bend the scales of deceit; 6 To acquire with silver the poor, And the needy for a pair of sandals. The chaff of the wheat we will sell!’ 7 Yahweh has sworn by the pride of Jacob, ‘Never will I forget any of their deeds’

As before, not only are there offences against the social order, but hypocritical religion is also in view. The New Moon feasts had a great signiﬁcance in the ancient Judaean world, even if some priestly texts did not seem much interested in it. In the second temple period, however, lunar calendars became favoured by some groups. It was a celebration of the rhythms of nature and apparently had little to do with the commemoration of any historical events. Its establishment is not speciﬁed in Genesis 1, but the priestly creation account does refer to the creation of the greater and the lesser light and other heavenly bodies on the fourth day to govern seasons and times (vv. 14–18).14 Most signiﬁcant in that story, however, is the establishment of the seventh day, the Sabbath as a sanctiﬁed day of divine rest. It is not surprising, then, to ﬁnd the Sabbath observance as compromised as the New Moon celebrations in Amos 8:5. The verbal root of ‘Sabbath’ appears in 8:4 when the merchants are accused of having destroyed (, lit. ‘brought to an end’) the poor, while they long for the end of the holy day themselves in v. 5. This association between ‘destroy’ and the purportedly inconvenient weekly holiday evokes the ‘Sabbath of violence’ of 6:3, with which the notables of Zion and Samaria are confronted. The merchants longing for a market day of oppression is their ‘Sabbath of violence’, and it is about to be turned back on them. The oppression of the poor repeats some of the oracle against Israel in 2:7. The words for ‘grain’, , and the sale of this commodity, , (8:5–6) employ an identical root  that can also mean ‘to break in pieces’. The result is a punning reinforcement of the ‘trampling’ of the poor in v. 4. The sounds of the sale of the grain are doubly strengthened by the similar sounding words for Sabbath and ‘destroy’. Hebrew  also echoes in the word for wheat, , that is found in vv. 5–6. The merchants’ longings, however, take on a surreal air with the series of short inﬁnitive phrases, ‘to shrink … to enlarge … to bend … to acquire’, before breaking the pattern by doubling in the ﬁnal instance (acquiring the poor and the needy) and then returning to the earlier theme of the sale of grain (or at least the refuse of it). This poetic patterning makes the quoted speech seem more of a twisted corporate jingle than a reﬂection of any real-life conversation. The deceptive weights and measures, then, should recall the basket of summer fruit and how it masked an ominous, impending reality. It is only the sacred times of new moon and Sabbath that see a cessation of corruption but, ironically, it is only those sacred times that call attention to the crimes and therefore profane their holiness. Yahweh swears never to forget.

13 14

Paul, Amos, p. 256, thinks in terms of opening grain bins to sell the contents. Keel, Goddesses and Trees, pp. 102–9.

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Divine speech dominates the next passage, and its culmination is ominous: God swears that he will never forget. God’s memory will reduce the earth to chaos: 8:8

‘On account of this, will not the earth shake, and all who dwell on it mourn? And everything rise like the Nile, be tossed and subside like the Nile of Egypt? 9 And it will be on that day,’ oracle of Adonai Yahweh, ‘I will make the sun set at noon. I will darken the earth in the light of day. 10 I will turn your festivals into mourning and your songs to a lament. I will put on every loin sack-cloth, and upon every head, baldness. And I will set it as mourning for a beloved child, the end of it as a bitter day.’

This passage capitalizes on the vocabulary and imagery of the ﬁrst two theophanies with their references to darkness and the sea. Justice was once ‘transformed’, while God’s power of transforming darkness was acknowledged (5:7–8). ‘Overturn’ is heard again in 8:10, as festivals turn into funerals. One oddity of v. 8 is that the ﬁrst use of the word Nile is actually spelled as if what was meant was ‘as the light’, , instead of the more normal spelling of  as in the second reference. The light of day is snuffed out ‘on that day’ (8:9). The Nile references embrace something of an irony. The earth is likened to the river’s cycles, and as the Nile subsides so the earth dies. Yet, the river’s annual ﬂoods bring life and prosperity to Egypt. The inversion of the natural order in this image is as profound as the noon-time darkness. The festivals, celebrations of the union of heaven and earth, now ironically call attention to the chasm between God and humanity. In v. 8, God vows to never forget. One wonders, however, if here he is also recalling – if only to rescind – his covenant with all ﬂesh: that never will he destroy the earth by ﬂood again (Gen. 9:15–16). The book’s trajectory towards binding together the sacred and profane realms to destroy and then recreate is getting close to its ultimate goal. With the receding Nile perhaps new life will re-emerge. Amos 8:7–10 also brings to mind the exodus from Egypt, something mentioned in Amos 3:1–2. The Israelites will mourn for their beloved children, as the Egyptians must have for their ﬁrst-born sons when God passed through their midst (Exod. 12:23–9). In Amos 3, God vows to punish his people because of their special relationship. In Amos 8, however, the punishment is detailed in far more cosmic terms than appear in the earlier chapter. Egypt is the chaos out of which Israel was born, a chaos that biblical narrative places within its sense of ‘historical’ time. Yet, the birth of Israel is sometimes assimilated to the very creation of the universe, such as in Ps. 77:15–21 (Eng. vv. 14–20) that clearly associates the salvation from Egypt with Yahweh’s mythical defeat of the Sea.15 Similarly, Psalms 114, 135, and 136 all speak of creation and the exodus/conquest cycle. Richard J. Clifford argues that cosmogonic themes are not to be considered surprising in references to national origins.16 The loss of an ordered cosmos, the sun setting at noon, earth quakes and so forth illustrate universal disaster. Amos 8:8–10 drives this horror home by making it ‘personal’, stating that the judgement will be

15 16

See Clifford, ‘Creation in the Psalms’, p. 64. Clifford, ‘Creation in the Psalms’, pp. 65–6.

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the bitterness of mourning a beloved child. There is no time to dwell on the personal, however, as divine speech about the repercussions to the entire land continues: 8:11 ‘Behold, days are coming’, oracle of Adonai Yahweh ‘in which I shall cast a famine onto the land. No famine of bread nor thirst for water, But of hearing the words of Yahweh. 12 And they will totter from sea to sea And from the north to the east they will wander to seek the word of Yahweh, but they will not ﬁnd [it].’

The extraordinary imagery of preceding verses appears at ﬁrst glance to moderate in this passage to a more ‘natural’ form of punishment: famine. Yet the absence of God suggests something more terrible. The ‘bitter day’ of the previous verse now extends into many impending ‘days’. The time when they could have heard the ‘words of Yahweh’ (v. 11) are gone: they will be reduced to the desperation of seeking a singular ‘word’ (v. 12). God has cast a famine and drought of silence, as much as he casts corpses everywhere. Indeed, as noted above in Landy’s translation, he has ‘cast hush’, but it is God himself who will keep quiet. According to Deut. 30:11–14, Torah is not too difﬁcult for Israel to obey. Neither is it ‘in the heavens’ or ‘beyond the sea’. Rather it is in Israel’s heart and mouth. The outward search in Amos 8:11–12 is a metaphor for failure to complete an inward one. The mourning of 8:3, 10 will come to nothing. Famine and drought was supposed to lead Israel to return to God in 4:6–8. That chastisement failed, and so now it is not the food and water that is withdrawn, but God himself. There is a great irony here, that the ‘thirst’ leads people from sea to sea. They seek Yahweh, but ﬁnd the cosmic enemy Yam instead. The irony is doubled by the word ‘to wander’,  (v. 12). The verb can also mean ‘to swim’ (Isa. 25:11) or ‘to row’ (Isa. 33:21, Ezek. 27:8, 26). The word as employed in Isaiah 28:15 and 28:18 is uncertain, but may refer to a torrent of water or a scourge. Ironically, this scourging of a thirsty people implies that they must ‘swim’ from sea to sea: capital punishment for swearing by the ‘life’ of the ‘Strider’ of the “Well of the Oath’. The directions of the search for God in 8:12 are curious. ‘Sea to sea’ has sometimes been taken to mean the Dead Sea on the east to the Mediterranean in the west. With the previous references to divine control over waters, an allusion to the cosmic sea surrounding the earth may be found. Israel will also search from the ‘North’ to the ‘East’, apparently disregarding the South. Some surmise that Amos, a Judaean, still believes that one can ﬁnd the word of God in the southern kingdom. Thus, the search is in the wrong direction.17 This may be reading too much into the missing direction though. Wolff suggests that the search is through the wide territories of Israel’s exile.18 Andersen and Freedman think that the South is referred to by one of the ‘seas’, possibly the Gulf of Aqaba. They, and others, conclude that the directions indicated imply that the search is over all of the earth.19 Yet, the word ‘north’ is itself the name for Mt. Zaphon, the home of the gods in Canaanite mythology; it is a name 17 18 19

Paul, Amos, pp. 266–7; cf. similar view by Soggin, Amos, p. 139; Mays, Amos, p. 149. Wolff, Joel and Amos, pp. 330–31. Andersen and Freedman, Amos, p. 825; Hayes, Amos, p. 212; Jeremias, Amos, p. 151.

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that is even used of Mt. Zion. In Hebrew, ‘east’ is derived from a word meaning ‘to rise’, and so one may see in the combination of north and east a wandering from the divine mountain to the ‘place of the rising sun’ and yet the word of God is not to be found. ‘Do not drip’, Amos claims to have been ordered (7:6). God gave Nazirites to Israel and prophets too. The prophets were ordered not to prophesy, and the Nazirites were induced to break their vow by drinking wine (2:11–12). Now no one prophesies. The Israelites have found the quietude they were seeking. But there is a price to pay: the word of Yahweh no longer drips life onto the land: 8:13

On that day the beautiful virgins and the valiant men will faint from thirst Those swearing by the guilt of Samaria, saying, ‘By the life of your god, Dan, by the life of the ‘way to/Strider of Beersheba’.20 They shall fall, and not arise again. 14

Against the divine oath by the pride of Jacob in 9:7, the doomed have made oaths of their own.21 The ‘Guilt of Samaria’, , may actually be a goddess, Ashimah. Barstad argues she was the patron goddess of Samaria.22 Some allusion to a divinity in the deprecating word ‘guilt’ used in Amos 8:14 is well justiﬁed although one need not follow Barstad’s speciﬁc reconstruction of Samarian religion. But who is Dan’s god? Barstad assumes that this is a manifestation of Baal. 23 Dan is one of the two sites in Israel that Jeroboam I used as sites for his counter-cult involving golden calves, when he became king of the northern territories (1 Kgs 12:29–30). The other was Bethel. This is the ‘sin of Jeroboam’, as it is frequently called in Kings.24 The establishment of this heterodox religion is ambiguous. Jeroboam declares that the images represent the divine power behind the exodus, a story with clear connections to that of the golden calf at Sinai (Exodus 32). Saul M. Olyan ﬁnds in Amos 8:14 an unambiguous reference to such an improper worship of Yahweh at Dan.25 It is, however, interesting that in Lev. 4:3, the sacriﬁce of a bull expunges the sins of an anointed priest who has brought ‘guilt’ onto the people. Instead of helping expiate the ‘guilt of Samaria’, the allusion to the calf at Dan makes the guilt all the worse. The situation pertaining to Samaria and Dan is compounded by the enigmatic second oath, by the life of the ‘way’ or ‘path’  of Beersheba. Eventually, Muslims would come to swear by the route to Mecca (or by the pilgrimage itself), but similar

20 Barstad, Religious Polemics, p. 146, asserts that such oaths employ nouns in the construct (‘life of’), and not verbs ‘[as] lives’. 21 The oaths are discussed at length in Barstad, Religious Polemics, pp. 143–201, and Saul M. Olyan, ‘The Oaths of Amos 8.14’, in G.A. Anderson and S.M. Olyan (eds) Priesthood and Cult in Ancient Israel (JSOTSup, 125; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1991), pp. 120–49. 22 Barstad, Religious Polemics, p. 181. In 2 Kgs 17:30 her image is made by the men of Hamath in formerly Israelite shrines but she is not said to be a deity actually worshipped by the Israelites. 23 Barstad, Religious Polemics, p. 187. 24 In 1 Kgs 14:16, it is described as one of the root causes of the fall of the north, and not even the ‘good’ king Jehu stops the worship of these icons (2 Kgs 10:29). 25 Olyan, ‘Oaths’, pp. 138–41.

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oaths from earlier times are unknown.26 One solution is to emend ‘path’ to ‘your beloved’ or ‘kinsman’ or the like (root  with the possessive sufﬁx ), which some see as the appellation of a deity.27 Re-vocalizing the Masoretic Text to achieve, ‘your (divine) council/assembly’, on the strength of Ugaritic references is problematic, since the parallels are not very close.28 Some would connect 8:14 with the Ugaritic ‘dominion’ and, hence, another divine appellative. Jeremias translates, ‘power of Beer-sheba’.29 Barstad ﬁnds parallels not only in Ugaritic sources but also in Hellenistic references to the goddess Derceto, particularly associated with Ashkelon, a city relatively close to Beersheba.30 Barstad, however, also argues that the deity of Beersheba is Baal and he further concludes from 8:14 that Beersheba’s Baal was one of the ‘more high ranking’ of the many manifestations of Baal.31 A better solution is to address the context of the literary imagery in the Amos-book as a whole. Hayes prefers to maintain the Masoretic Text and read ‘way of Beersheba’, but he also suggests an alternative solution that I prefer. Amos 8:14 may refer to the one who ‘treads’, or in my terms ‘strides’, on the high-places of the land (cf. 4:13). Hayes says this would be Yahweh.32 No emendation of the consonants would be necessary: only a change in vocalization is needed to achieve the required participle. But can one be sure that this ‘strider’ is Yahweh? In Amos 2, Israel partied in the house of ‘their god(s)’, leaving open the question of who they thought their patron deity was or is. In chapter 8, much the same ambiguity may be present. Oaths by Yahweh are not only acceptable, but are required, according to some biblical texts (for example, Deut. 6:13; 10:20), while swearing by the name of other gods is strictly forbidden as in Josh 23:7–8). The potential play on ‘guilt’ and ‘Ashimah’ raises the possibility that Israel is swearing by some foreign gods. Yet, these are not the only oaths that can earn the scorn of the biblical writers. Theft, murder, adultery and the worship of Baal and other gods are all potential sins of the people, as is swearing falsely. The latter (with a variety of terminology) is not always associated closely with polytheism. In Mal. 3:5, it is a sin mentioned alongside sorcery, adultery and the oppression of workers and the underprivileged. Isaiah 48:1 speaks of those who swear by the name of Yahweh and invoke him, but not ‘truth or righteousness’. Many more examples can be found (for example, Jer. 5:2; Ps. 24:4). As observed already, the corrupt merchants offer some kind of reluctant acceptance of Sabbath restrictions, surely depicted here as a corrupted Yahwistic institution. A similar critical opinion of outwardly Yahwistic oath-takers could well be in view in Amos 8:14. Leviticus 5:4 refers to rash oaths ‘for good or bad’ that can lead to ‘guilt’. Later in the chapter, compensation is demanded of liars and those convicted of false oaths to expiate their guilt (vv. 20–26; Eng. 6:1–7). In Leviticus 5, then, ‘swearing’ and ‘guilt’ are 26 Olyan, ‘Oaths’, p. 127, n. 4, reports that Muslims take oaths by the route to Mecca. Barstad, Religious Polemics, p. 193, says the oath is by the pilgrimage, not the route. 27 Olyan, ‘Oaths’, pp. 123–35, defends the emendation at length. Before this, Barstad, Religious Polemics, pp. 192–3, had already offered objections to such a proposal. 28 Olyan, ‘Oaths’, p. 122, n. 2; and Paul, Amos, p. 271. 29 Jeremias, Amos, p. 152. 30 Barstad, Religious Polemics, pp. 194–7. 31 Barstad, Religious Polemics, p. 197. 32 Hayes, Amos, pp. 214–15.

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associated in a context that has nothing to do with the worship of other deities. The injustice of the Israelites makes any worship and any oath by Yahweh questionable. It could simply be a profanation of his name, by a false oath (Lev. 19:12), or a sexual indiscretion (Amos 2:7). Whatever the implied illicit practices condemned in Amos 8:14 are they seem to have spanned all of the Israelite lands. The ‘guilt of Samaria’ is followed by references to Dan and Beersheba, the two towns that are often named as spanning all of Israel from North to South (for example, Judg. 20:1; 1 Sam. 3:20).33 And, as it has earlier in the book, Beersheba marks the boundary between Israel and the wilderness, life in the land, and the ancient promise to the patriarchs. Those who swear by it shall fall and, like the ‘virgin Israel’, never again rise. Mastery of speech is a theme throughout Amos 7–8. The compulsion of the prophet to speak has been graphically portrayed. He is tricked, coerced and ‘taken’ to prophesy. The prophet, as Landy points out, is the ‘ideal Israel, open to God’s word’.34 Amos represents not only the divine voice, but also its extinction, and the longing for it. The prophet is the divine lion’s prey; but out of the fear that breeds prophecy, the ‘divine hunger’ is heard through him, and divine secrets are revealed to him (3:7). Thus, the prophet loses himself in the compulsion to speak for God, and yet, the prophet becomes the only one truly conscious.35 Which is the voice of the prophet and which is God’s? It is no longer certain. Amos 7 started with Amos talking of his own experiences. After 8:3, ‘oracles of Yahweh’ abound (8:3, 9, 11), and Amos fades from view.36 Is it he who announces that the contents are indeed the word of God? Or has the reader assimilated the character to his or her own identity? Who can but prophesy? But any complacency about the implications of this assimilation is shattered. Amos suddenly reappears, and the true impact of prophecy is revealed.

33 And this may explain why Dan is found here, and not a reference to the more famous calf-site at Bethel. 34 Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 240. 35 Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, pp. 240–41. 36 Linville, ‘Visions and Voices’, pp. 34–5.

Chapter 12

The Capital: Amos 9:1–6 9:1 I saw Adonai standing on the altar,1 And he said, ‘Strike the capital,2 and the thresholds will shake, Sever them, at the head/the ﬁrst of them all. And the last of them I will slaughter with the sword. No refugee of them shall ﬂee.3 No fugitive of them shall escape. 2 If they dig down to Sheol, from there my hand will take them. If they ascend to heaven, from there I will bring them down. 3 If they hide on the top of Carmel, from there I will search and take them. If they conceal [themselves] from my eyes on the ﬂoor of the sea, From there I will command the serpent and it will bite them. 4 If they go into exile before their enemies, From there I will command the sword and it will slaughter them.’

The ﬁfth vision is horrifying, and the horror is magniﬁed by the suddenness of its reporting and the lack of introductory formulae or narrative details. The emphasis is not so much on Amos, but on what he sees and what he hears. In Amos 9, the prophet is to be much more than merely a neutral observer and reporter. God was ﬁrst seen standing on a wall (cf. 7:7), but now he stands on the altar itself. It is a sight that is reminiscent of Judg. 13:20 in which Manoah and his wife see the ‘messenger of Yahweh’ ascending to heaven in the ﬁre of the altar. In Amos 9, there is, of course, no indication which altar is meant, although many scholars think it is Bethel.4 Jeremias is certainly right in recognizing the cosmic dimensions of the sanctuary of 9:1, but it cannot be positively identiﬁed as the altar of Bethel in view of these very connotations.5 Since all of the Israelite lands are included in the territory stretching from Dan to Beersheba (8:14), the altar of 9:1 could be anywhere.6 It is, 1 I prefer ‘on’ and not ‘beside’ for its more terrifying imagery, as suggested by Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 336; Linville, ‘Visions and Voices’, p. 37, and see the discussion above concerning Yahweh ‘on’ the wall in Amos 7:7. 2 Often translated in plural, the term in Hebrew is singular. 3 ‘Flee’ and ‘refugee’ repeat the same verbal root. 4 Crenshaw, Hymnic Afﬁrmation, p. 132; Mays, Amos, p. 152; Paul, Amos, p. 274; Soggin, Amos, p. 122. 5 Jeremias, Amos, p. 156. In ‘Visions and Voices’, p. 37, I wrote that the context ‘perhaps’ leads one to think of the Bethel shrine. I am now certain that the scene should not be restricted to that sanctuary. 6 This is increasingly recognized. Achim Behrins, Prophetische Visionsschilderunen im Alten Testament: Sprachliche Eigenarten, Funktion und Geschichte einer Gattung (AOAT, 292; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2002), p. 99, argues this on the basis of the mythic imagery of v. 2.

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in fact, everywhere. This is the heavenly temple, the ‘reality’ behind the any earthly temple’s man-made façade and foundational structure of the cosmos as a whole. Now, rather than result in a guarantee of the welfare of the people, the manifestation of God signals their demise.7 The prophet is a representative of God but also of the people. With the command to strike, the prophet is implicated in the destruction of his own people. There are a number of difﬁculties in the passage, especially the ﬁrst verse. The term ‘capital’ probably does not refer to the top of a column supporting the sanctuary roof, but perhaps a free standing column of some uncertain signiﬁcance. According to 1 Kgs 7:21, Solomon’s temple included two ‘pillars’.8 The destruction of the column in Amos, however, has implications for the whole temple structure as the ‘thresholds’ of the temenos, or outer wall, shake. The difﬁculties of 9:1 have led some interpreters to think that the verse may be corrupt.9 A number, however, hold that the existing difﬁculties in the verse are preferable to any emendation.10 As written in the Masoretic Text, ‘strike’, , is an imperative, although no vocative is to be found. A number of interpreters notice that in Amos 9:1 God declares that he will act and so they emend the text to make God the subject of ‘strike’. J. Alberto Soggin understands Yahweh to say to Amos, ‘I will shatter violently the capitals’.11 Jeremias argues that having Amos receive an order to attack the temple structure would be a unique occurrence in the Hebrew Bible and would be at most a purely symbolic act. Prophets are often asked to perform odd acts as symbols of divine judgements but these requests also include an interpretation of their signiﬁcance.12 These arguments are not convincing. The whole vision is taking place in the presence of the divine, and so symbolic acts can be expected to carry a tremendous signiﬁcance. Moreover, the impact of this particular act is explained as Yahweh continues to speak about the death of one and all. There is no need to emend away the imperative. But to whom is it addressed? The only other character in the scene is Amos himself, but some commentators say that God is not commanding him. Some comment that a mere human could not strike the capitals of the sanctuary hard enough to destroy them. For instance, Andor Szabó supposes Amos might have hit the capitals with a stick, but not hard enough to shatter them.13 This interpretation is certainly too literalistic. Achim Behrens rightly points out that other biblical See also, Coggins, Joel and Amos, p. 151, who thinks that ‘any unacceptable cult practice’ and so any such altar is in view. 7 As noted by Jeremias, Amos, p. 157. 8 Aaron Schart, ‘The Fifth Vision of Amos in Context’, in Paul L. Redditt and Aaron Schart (eds) Thematic Threads in the Book of the Twelve (BZAW, 325; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 46–71 (50). He also points out that Amos 9:1 speaks of a single capital and therefore, one column. 9 Schart, ‘The Fifth Vision’, p. 49, considers the present text unintelligible. 10 Paul, Amos, p. 274; Hammershaimb, Amos, p. 130; Ernst-Joachim Waschke, ‘Die Funfte Vision des Amos Bucher (9,1–4): Ein Nachinterpretation’, ZAW 106 (1994): 434–45 (440–41). 11 Soggin, Amos, pp. 119–20; Jeremias, Amos, p. 153. 12 Jeremias, Amos, pp. 155–6. 13 Szabó, ‘Textual Problems’, pp. 507–8.

THE CAPITAL: AMOS 9:1–6

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vision reports are not susceptible to purely rational interpretation, as in Isa. 6:6–7.14 Andersen and Freedman give no reason for ruling out Amos but maintain that some unnamed agent is being commanded, such as a member of the heavenly court, the mythical serpent of v. 3, or the ‘sword’ (or the supposed angel wielding it) of v. 4.15 Mays holds that the imperatives of v. 1 are simply rhetorical, ‘Let the capitals be smitten’ as in the command of 9:9 that does not specify who is addressed.16 This interpretation makes sense as a good case can be made for seeing Yahweh command Amos directly. The prophet was the intercessor in the ﬁrst two visions while in the second pair he was victim of God’s naming game, tricking him into declaring doom. He represents God on earth; it is ﬁtting that in the ﬁnal vision of the series, he is asked to initiate the divine judgement himself. The shaking thresholds presage that disaster, which some say is an earthquake (cf. Amos 1:1, ‘two years before the earthquake’).17 The idea of an earthquake is itself not implausible in this context, but since the passage seems to have more in view that simply one physical shrine, it is a rather limiting interpretation. Rather, the cosmos themselves should be seen to be rocked to their very foundations. More ambiguity can be found in Amos 9:1–2, especially in the line translated above as ‘sever them, at the head/the ﬁrst of them all’. It is one of the richest parts of Amos for its brilliant manipulation of language with ambiguous terms and difﬁcult syntax masking a whole constellation of mutually supporting meanings and allusions. The initial Hebrew word, from the root , appears to be an imperative, a complement to the previous imperative ‘strike’, but it could also be a third person verb.18 Some think that the line speaks of smashing the column tops over all of the people.19 The meanings of the verb, however, are rather different. Among other things, it is a weaving term, meaning to ‘to cut off’ a piece of thread, and so, by extension, to ‘cut off’ someone’s life (as in Job 6:9; 27:8). Also of uncertain meaning is , a word encounted before, which can mean ‘ﬁrst’, ‘head’ or ‘top’. While severing heads would seem to ﬁt the imagery well, the syntax is quite problematic. The verb itself has a pronoun-sufﬁx attached to it as a direct object. What ‘them’ might refer to is unclear.20 The word  is preceded by the preposition , ‘in’ or ‘with’, so it is not clear that a ‘head’ is ‘cut off’ at all. Despite all the difﬁculties, Paul sees a great artistry at work. For one thing,  might be taken as the ‘ﬁrst’ or ‘former’: that is, the previously mentioned capital, while the ‘last of them’ may be understood as 14

Behrens, Prophetische Visionsschilderunen im Alten Testament, p. 99. Andersen and Freedman, Amos, pp. 835, 839. See too, Achtemeier, Minor Prophets, p. 229; Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 188; Howard Moltz, ‘A Literary Interpretation of the Book of Amos’, Horizons 25 (1998): 58–71 (70). 16 Mays, Amos, p. 153. Watts, Vision and Prophecy, p. 6, writes that God is commanding an earthquake. 17 Smith, Amos, p. 262, but see, too, Hayes, Amos, p. 217; see also Jean Ouellette, ‘The Shaking of the Thresholds in Amos 9:1’, HUCA 43 (1972): 23–7, who argues that the theophanic imagery does not include an earthquake. 18 Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 335, accepts either; Paul, Amos, p. 275, proposes only the imperative, although he admits the vocalization in MT is peculiar. 19 Smith, Amos, p. 262; Hayes, Amos, p. 197; Mays, Amos, p. 151. 20 As usual, an excellent summary of the problem can be found in Paul, Amos, pp. 275–6. 15

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the ‘latter’, the thresholds. ‘First’ and ‘last’ evoke a sense of completeness to the destruction, not only of the temple but of the people, too. The word for ‘capital’ is echoed in v.7, while  is again encountered in v. 3.21 These observations can be expanded. First, it may be possible to ﬁnd a reference to decapitation by taking   as ‘sever them at the head’. This may be rather forced, but when the full scope of polysemy in the verse is investigated, there seems to be a mutually supporting web of various meaning, nuances and allusions and so some compromise in grammar and syntax is to be expected. The web begins at the ‘thresholds’, . This word is derived from the root, , that is quite close to another root, , which means ‘to take away’. Thus, Abraham questions whether Yahweh will eliminate the innocent along with the guilty of Sodom (Gen. 18:23). ‘Threshold’ is also close to another root, , that means ‘end’.22 Ecclesiastes 3:11 speaks of God’s work as being beyond human comprehension, from ‘ﬁrst  to last’. It is interesting that with ‘thresholds’ two other words are suggested that reinforce the sense of the ﬁnality and totality in Amos 9:1. ‘Thresholds’ appears immediately before the difﬁcult verb . In addition to meaning ‘to sever’, it may also mean to ‘accomplish’ or ‘complete’ something, as in Lam. 2:17 and Isa. 10:12. Thus the NJPS (noting that the Hebrew is uncertain) translates the line in question as ‘make an end of the ﬁrst of them all’. This too, reinforces the ‘end’ suggested by the shaking thresholds. So too, with ‘all of them’ , which is made up of two components, a word for ‘all’, and the same  pronoun sufﬁx ‘them’ found at the end of ‘sever’ or ‘ﬁnish’. While ‘all of them’ itself denotes completeness, there is a verb from the root  that mean ‘to come to an end’ or even ‘destroy’. This verb can also take the pronoun sufﬁx ‘them’ and, in some verb forms, the result is the same three consonants as ‘all of them’. Lamentations 2:22, for example, ends with recollection of how Jerusalem weeps for her children and how the city’s enemies ‘annihilated them’, klm. The vowels required to make this word are different from those needed to render ‘all of them’, yet the similarities in consonants are suggestive. We may go further yet. Hebrew  can mean ‘poison’ in addition to ‘head’ or ‘ﬁrst’. Kevin Cathcart, taking up an old idea of F. Horst’s, observes that reading the word as poison makes good sense in view of the preposition  that is preﬁxed to it, as it may easily be understood to have an instrumental sense. He ﬁnds a strong parallelism between the two agents of death, ‘I shall slay them all with poison, and I shall kill their children with the sword.’ While alluding to the ‘heads’ of the nation of Amos 6, the ‘poisonous’ bite anticipates the serpent of 9:3 (cf. v. 4 in which the ‘sword’ is commanded to kill the exiles). The poison of 9:1 also recalls the irony of 5:19, in which the snake bites the one who ﬂees into the house.23 This reading is all the more plausible in view of the similarly unsuccessful escape described in

21

Paul, Amos, p. 276. Amos 3:15 employs either or  to comment on the fate of the ‘great houses’. 23 K.J. Cathcart, ‘ “poison” in Amos ix 1’, VT 44 (1994): 393–6, citing F. Horst, ‘Die Visionsschilderungen der alttestamentliche Propheten’, EvT 20 (1960): 196. 22

THE CAPITAL: AMOS 9:1–6

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9:2–4. There is an added irony; the sinners of Israel have reduced justice to poison in 6:12.24 With this in mind, there are many ways to read the three lines of divine speech Amos 9:1. It is a web; there is no deﬁnitive interpretation but a mass of complementary orders to destroy: Strike the capital, and the thresholds will shake; Sever them at the head, all of them! End them with poison! Annihilate them! End them, the ﬁrst of them all; And the last of them I will slaughter with the sword.

As noted above, a host of other nuances of meaning can also be found. In the second pair of visions, Amos’ naming of objects reveals divine judgement through playing with words. In the ﬁfth vision, the duplicity of language does not reveal a hidden nature to reality but merely the depth of divine violence and the insistence that Amos carry out God’s demands to initiate it. If Amos were to rely on word-games to get out of his mission, he is unlikely to win. As Paul observes, there is a great use of catchwords in Amos 9. The word for ‘capital’ reappears in the name of the place where the Philistines were brought up from, ‘Caphtor’ (9:7). Paul ﬁnds that the tops of the capitals in 9:1 anticipate the top of Carmel in v. 3, an anticipation that still works with any alternative meanings for . Indeed, instead of poison, Paul ﬁnds a judgement in which God will cut off the ‘ﬁrst’ of them, an idea completed by the following verse in which the ‘last’ of the people die by the sword. Likewise, the entire shrine, from the capital to the foundation, will be shaken.25 The ‘last of them’ , who will fall by the sword, may well be those who are carried off in 4:2 or mourned in 8:10. There is at least one more repetition: much of the sound of  in 9:1 is echoed in the shaking, , itself. One can add that the verb and its attached object, ‘and he will smash them’, , evokes the drought that killed Israel’s ﬁnest young men and women ‘with thirst’ , in 8:13. The strategy of 9:1–4 is rhetorical overkill. Buildings will shake and collapse. All will be killed with poison. The remnant will be killed with the sword. No one will escape, regardless of how desperate the attempt. Finally, the sword is commanded to slay the exiles. One must wonder, however, if this is the end of the story, since earlier, at least one warrior escaped naked ‘on that day’ (2:16). The imagery in 9:1–4 oscillates between the heavenly and earthly realms. Certainly heaven and the underworld, Sheol, belong to the world of myth, while the top of Carmel seems – at least superﬁcially – to be a ‘real’ place. Carmel was withered by God’s speech in Amos 1:2, so the escape there is truly doomed. Moreover, mountains are mentioned as God’s creation in 4:13, and he ‘strides’ upon the heights as well. Carmel is imagined in Amos 9:3 as a place where the divine meets the tangible world. As for 24 The objections of both Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 334, and Paul, Amos, p. 276, against Horst’s original proposal, that it is incompatible with the present context, are very weak. In Amos 4:1–3, a bovine metaphor changed into one of hauling dead ﬁsh away. 25 Paul, Amos, p. 276.

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the sea, with its resident serpent, it too is a place of myth.26 Although the passage does not say it explicitly, it describes the ‘day of Yawheh’, when someone ﬂeeing a bear will be bitten by a snake.27 After the ﬂights to the very ends of creation, one arrives back on dry land, in a battle that leads to exile, and then ultimately to death. This strategy of ending the awesome series of imagery with a ‘this-worldly’ image of military deportation and death is highly effective. God ‘commands’ not an army but ‘the sword’, as if Israel remains trapped in the land of myth and symbol. And yet the passage focuses on a terrible fate that is real and believable. The ﬁnal line in 9:4 sums up all the preceding. God’s ‘eye’ is against them for evil, not for good. This divine sight then forms a conceptual inclusio with the prophetic ‘seeing’ of 9:1.28 God has sought Israel, not for good, but for evil (cf. 5:14). The readers’ eyes have surveyed the heavens and earth and have found no place in which to hide from God. Psalm 139 praises the deity for his omniscience, for his knowing every thought in the singer’s mind. There is no place that one can be beyond scrutiny by God, no escape from his eye. In vv. 7–11, the psalmist says escape from God is impossible; there is no hiding in heaven or Sheol. The psalmist concludes the poem with a prayer to be tested by God, as a prelude for God’s guidance. Amos 9:1–4 inverts this kind of positive imagery, and makes divine omniscience and omnipresence a thing of horror. The symbiosis of heaven, nature and the world of humanity is clearly seen at the moment of Yahweh calling for the destruction of the cosmos. All the more ﬁtting, then, that the prophet, the herdsman turned divine spokesman, should be commanded to strike the ﬁrst blow. The order to strike initiates the cataclysm that overtakes the cosmos. The theophanic aspects of the scene have long been recognized. Jean Ouellette relates the shaking of the  (thresholds) to ancient near eastern texts that describe these architectural items being broken during burglaries or other forced entries. In some mythic texts, deities shatter these when they burst into buildings or fortiﬁcations. According to Exod. 21:14, the altar of Yahweh cannot be place of refuge for those accused of murder. Despite this, in 1 Kings, Adonijah and Joab seek sanctuary from the vengeance of King Solomon by the Ark of the Covenant (1 Kgs 1:49, 1 Kgs 2:28). Although they are unsuccessful, it does imply that a belief that sacred places were supposed to be beyond the reach of the law or a monarch bent on settling old scores. With that in mind, Ouellette writes that the search for the targets of divine retribution begins in v. 1 and that Yahweh is depicted as breaking into the temple courtyard to take anyone hiding by the altar in the sanctuary’s courtyard.29 If the deity is outside of the sanctuary itself – his presence usually manifest in the innermost part of the building proper – then the deity is not breaking in but breaking out into the courtyard where the altar would be. Aaron Schart perceptively notices that the command that Amos strike links him to the destruction of the temple and hence the foundation of the universe. He adds that the shaking of the thresholds imply that they can no

26 27 28 29

Andersen and Freedman, Amos, p. 837. Amos 9:2 and 5:19 employ the same word for ‘bite’ and for the ‘snake’/‘serpent’. Wendland, ‘Organization of Amos’, p. 23. Ouellette, ‘The Shaking of the Thresholds’, pp. 26-7.

THE CAPITAL: AMOS 9:1–6

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longer protect the sacred from deﬁlement from the profane world on the outside of the sanctuary:30 As a result, the holy place as such, which is the obligatory foundation on which a temple can be erected, ceases to exist … Since the temple is the center that gives refuge, stability, and prosperity to life to the land, its elimination sets off disorder and death that will reach to its borders. Amos 9:2–4a* spells out this scenario in detail.31

But if the temple walls keep the profane out of sacred places, then they also keep the sacred from invading and overwhelming the profane. Divine power requires containment, or at least distance, from the natural and human realms. The boundaries of sacred space mark the point beyond which people are not normally permitted to go without ritual preparation. To do so is a dangerous undertaking. In 2 Sam. 6:8, Uzzah reaches out to save the Ark of the Covenant from toppling from a cart. For his indiscretion, he is struck dead as Yahweh ‘breaks out’ against him. Exodus 9:22 warns priests to properly sanctify themselves lest the deity ‘break out’ against them. The Hebrew root  does not appear in Amos as a verb, but the ‘cows of Bashan’ will be deported through the ‘breaches’ in their city walls in 4:3, while the breaches of the ‘sukkah’ of David will be repaired in 9:11. In view of this, we can read the ﬁfth vision as Amos being ordered to create a human-made breach in the wall that will unleash divine power against humanity. For as much as Amos represents God on earth (however reluctantly), he also represents humanity to God. As such, Amos’ attack on the temple is symbol of how profane humanity has been assaulting the boundaries of the sacred. Through his order to the prophet, God creates a language of symbolic action to depict what has been happening for centuries. Since Amos is a representative of ideal humanity and the chosen voice for God, he may perhaps survive the terrible violence he sets in motion, but the text is quite clear that no one else will. But what does Amos think about this command? In the vision report itself, the prophet offers no objection or any intercession. Both Landy and Eslinger, however, ﬁnd that Amos does offer a response after the gruesome description of God searching heaven, Earth, and underworld for survivors. It is the third of the doxological hymns: 9:5 Adonai, Yahweh of Hosts, The One who touches the earth, and it quakes.32 All of its inhabitants mourn. It all rises like the Nile, and subsides like the Nile of Egypt. 6 The Builder of his stairs into the heavens establishes his column upon the earth. The Summoner of the sea’s waters pours them upon the face of the earth. Yahweh is his name.

30

Schart, ‘Fifth Vision’, pp. 50–51. Schart, ‘Fifth Vision’, p. 51. 32 Most scholars read ‘quakes’ or ‘totters’ here, but Andersen and Freedman, Amos, p. 844, read ‘melts’. 31

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Eslinger writes of Amos’ allusions to the exodus and the ﬂood and ﬁnds that Amos now agrees whole-heartedly with God’s destructive plans: The intercessor has become the gleeful celebrant who responds to the litany of annihilation with a doxology that gloriﬁes the Destroyer. Amos repeats, almost verbatim, what he has already said in response to the preceding vision (cf. 8:3) and the repetition emphasizes his commitment to the need for a destructive punishment. Here, however, there is a single focus on the omnipotence of God.33

But is Amos celebrating wilfully? Has he found the same joyfulness as 5:9 suggests Yahweh feels when he unleashes destruction on the fortresses? Or is Amos’ response one of grief, as Landy suspects?34 If God is omnipotent, then he does not need Amos’ willing compliance. He can manipulate the prophet as much as he can manipulate the universe. The herdsman was led to interpret omens of doom and to turn fear into prophecy. Whether he wanted to continue his intercession is never stated. The text is also silent about whether Amos obeyed the divine command and struck the capital. The divine speech takes over in vv. 1–4, predicting that Yahweh will leave none behind. Amos, the implied speaker, seems to add vv. 5–6, the last of the doxological passages. Divine speech resumes and continues for the rest of the chapter except for a few comments that these words are, in fact, the words of God. All of this concerns what will be, not with what has come to pass. Persian-era readers would certainly have understood this predicted judgement to have fallen with the destruction of Samaria at the hands of Assyria in 721 BCE and then again when Babylon destroyed Jerusalem almost a century and a half later. Yet there is an immediacy in Amos’ ﬁnal vision and his reported declarations of God that make the reality of that judgement not something merely of antiquarian interest but of contemporary relevance. The absence of any mention of Assyria in the book allows the reader to easily side-step the historical setting of the text and to look to later times for the fulﬁlment of the judgement. The timelessness of the doxology matches the timelessness of the vision itself and the mythic scope of Yahweh’s speech in vv. 2–4. The third evocation of ritual hymns creates a ‘time out of time’, operating not in the linear progression of history but the cycles of heavenly paradigms. The passage both begins and closes with the divine name, framing the hymn, but not setting it off completely from the preceding.35 Not only is there a repetition of the theme of the ‘sword’, but also the cosmic sanctuary is evoked again, as Yahweh is described as the builder of his stairs and column. Verses 1–4 are mostly composed of divine speech, but in its familiar refrain at the end of v. 6, the hymnic doxology reverts to speaking of the deity in the third person.36 In v. 7, however, Yahweh speaks again, but at this point the deity tempers his vehemence with a promise not to totally 33

Eslinger, ‘Education of Amos’, p. 54. Landy, ‘Vision and Poetic Speech’, p. 233. 35 Andersen and Freedman, Amos, p. 717, argue that the ﬁrst appearance of the divine name in v. 5 actually belongs to the preceding passage in 9:2–4. I prefer the interpretation of Paul, Amos, p. 281, who links it with the hymn and identiﬁes the framing inclusio. 36 In Isa. 51:15 and Jer. 31:35, roughly comparable hymnic passages appear with shifts between ﬁrst and third person. 34

THE CAPITAL: AMOS 9:1–6

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destroy his people. The third doxological hymn, then, serves a transitional role in the book. The ﬁrst introduced the deity that Israel was to prepare to meet in 4:12, employing language at home in cultic surroundings. It spoke of revelation and hinted that those who hear Yahweh’s speech must declare his name and attributes. The second evoked the power of ritual to contrast the capacities of humans with that of God. Now, with the prophet in the sacred space of the heavenly temple, the theme of revelation and creation is overturned into one of revelation and destruction. Yet, there is a hint in vv. 5–6 that destruction itself may be overturned. Yahweh touches the earth and makes it tremble. Amos is closely associated with earthquakes as Amos’ experiences are dated to ‘two years before the earthquake’ (Amos 1:1). The earth’s inhabitants ‘mourn’ in 9:5 as did the shepherd’s pastures in 1:2 when Yahweh roared from Zion. Amos 9:5 most closely recalls 8:8: 8:8

‘On account of this, will not the earth shake, and all who dwell on it mourn?37 And everything rise like the Nile, be tossed and subside like the Nile of Egypt?

These questions form something of a trap for the reader. Agreement with the punishment is all but assured, given the tendency for readers to agree, or at least sympathize, with narrators and main characters. But any implicit agreement in Amos 8 is brought out into the open in 9:5–6. Now the audience sings of the power, glory and name of this angry God. The readers, if they are to stay readers, must give voice to the theophany. Again the question is raised: is it a celebration, or song of mourning? It is inappropriate to seek an objective and deﬁnitive decision. How often does the book claim for God the ability to change one thing into another? 9:5 Adonai, Yahweh of Hosts, The One who touches the earth, and it quakes. All of its inhabitants mourn. It all rises like the Nile, and subsides like the Nile of Egypt.

The rhetorical questions of chapter 8 are answered in Amos 9 with similar language. The answer, however, comes in the form of the liturgical hymn. The chaotic power of water is emphasized, but in Amos 9 Yahweh’s role in it is clearly spelled out. As indicated above, the seasonal cycles of the Nile makes allusions to Egyptian creation mythology; the receding waters reveal the primeval mound, the ﬁrst land and the site of the ﬁrst holy place. This is clearly evidenced in v. 6: 6 The Builder of his stairs into the heavens establishes his column upon the earth. The Summoner of the sea’s waters pours them upon the face of the earth.

The ﬁrst line of this verse paints a picture of royal and heavenly throne rooms. Hebrew  is often translated ‘chambers’, but Paas argues that ‘stairs’ is a far more accurate rendering, basing his translation on the stairs to Solomon’s throne in 1 Kgs 10:19 and Isa. 6:1, in which Yahweh’s throne is ‘high and lifted up’. 37

The word ‘shake’ in 8:8 is not the same Hebrew term as ‘quakes’ in 9:5, unlike many of the other words.

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The reference to stairs in Amos suggests he has built a raised dais for his throne upon which he will govern his creation. This is consistent with the iconography of the wider ancient Near East and Egypt.38 The passage also brings to mind the charter myth establishing Bethel as sacred site. Genesis 28 tells of Jacob sleeping with his head on a rock and dreaming of a ladder or stepped ramp between heaven and earth with angelic beings ascending and descending. Yahweh appears beside Jacob and tells him that he can expect divine protection on his journeys. Although the word for ‘ladder’ in Gen. 28:17 and ‘stairs’ in Amos 9:6 are different, the two passages may depict a similar ‘gateway to heaven’ as Jacob declared Bethel to be (Gen. 28:17). The capital that Amos was to strike in 9:1 suggests a column of some symbolic, if not structural, signiﬁcance. That column seems evident in v. 6. The Hebrew term in Amos 9:6 is often translated as ‘vaults [of heaven]’, but Paas again argues for a different understanding. The word sometimes refers to bunches of reeds or other plants. In Egyptian mythology, papyrus stalks bound together form columns that lift the heavens above the newly created earth. In some versions only a single column is mentioned. This cosmology is represented in the so-called sd-festival. A throne was placed on a raised dais between four columns that supported a canopy and the divine king would be enthroned there. The steps leading up to the throne are usually understood as representations of the primeval mound. The ritual, occurring some thirty years after the Pharaoh came to power, revitalized the king’s power by associating him with the divine powers behind creation itself.39 It is easy to see the association between this kind of cosmogony and what may be envisioned in Amos 9:1–6. As Paas says, the column represents the sacred axis linking heaven and earth.40 Yahweh takes his place as king of creation, but at the same time, he enlists his prophet to bring it to an end by striking at the top of the column supporting heaven. In Gen. 1:6–7, the primeval water is separated by the dome of heaven. In v. 8, the waters below the heavens are gathered together to form seas, and dry land emerges. In Amos 9, the deity demands that Amos strike the column supporting the heaven while he gathers the waters to the sea to pour them out over the land. The result is the annihilation of creation. This is just what Amos 8:8 has God predict he will do. Yet, 9:5–6 are not a narrative saying that it has been done, but instead are a hymn whose participles depicts not a bygone event but a persistent reality, an attribute of the divine that is forever coming to pass. The third hymn may be viewed as a ritual of rebirth. By soliciting the involvement of the reader, a sacred space and time is created in which the eternal powers of creation can be accessed. Order can be restored. The eternal struggle with chaos never ends. It is ﬁtting then, that the Nile should appear as a metaphor of the divine. The Nile’s cycle is annual; its ﬂooding brings new life. So too, after the deluge of Genesis 6–9, new life dawns.

38 Paas, ‘He Who Builds’, pp. 319–20, Paas, Creation, p. 294. In Exod. 20:26, however, priests are forbidden to ascend to the altar of Yahweh by stairs, lest they deﬁle it by accidentally exposing themselves. 39 Paas, ‘He Who Builds’, pp. 320–21; Paas, Creation, pp. 294–5. 40 Paas, ‘He Who Builds’, p. 321.

Chapter 13

The Turning: Amos 9:7–15 9:7

‘Are you not like the Sons of Cush to me, O Sons of Israel?’ Oracle of Yahweh. ‘Have I not brought up Israel from the land of Egypt, the Philistines from Caphtor and Aram from Kir? 8 Behold, the eyes of Adonai Yahweh are upon the sinful kingdom, I will destroy it from upon the face of the earth. Except, I will not utterly destroy the House of Jacob.’ Oracle of Yahweh. 9 ‘For behold, I command, and I will shake among all the nations the House of Israel. As one shakes in a sieve, not a stone falls to the ground. 10 With the sword shall all the sinners of my people die1 Those saying, “Evil will not touch or draw near us.” ’

The ultimate reversibility of Amos 1–2’s promise of there being ‘no return’ is revealed here. Israel is but one of a number of nations including Cush, Aram and Philistia. Even Israel’s exodus is comparable to those of Aram and Philistia. Oddly, Aram is said to have come out of Kir, but that is to where 1:5 would have them exiled. Is this oracle against them undoing their exodus, or is the journey of Amos 9 undoing the exile? The exile of Aram is mentioned ﬁrst. The mention of their coming out of Kir may be a foretaste of a happier future that reverses their exilic fate. The Philistines are said to come from Caphtor, which is probably a reference to Crete.2 The similarity between Israel and the nations is evidenced even on the level of spelling. Only here in the Hebrew Bible are the people of Cush called the ‘Sons of Cush’ instead of the shorter ‘Cushites’. This longer spelling provides a better counterpart to ‘Sons of Israel’. There is also a fuller spelling of the word ‘Philistines’, presumably for the same purpose.3 The shift to direct address and the use once more of rhetorical questions in 9:7 bring a renewed sense of immediacy to the book. The immediacy partly undermines the remoteness of the terrible image of God scouring all creation for more victims who are referred to only with pronouns. The whole passage 9:1–6 never speciﬁes who the victims are, as if the writer wishes to negate the appellation, ‘my people 1

Paul R. Noble, ‘Amos’ Absolute “No” ’, VT 47 (1997): 329–40 (337–8), prefers to translate, ‘every one of my exceedingly sinful people shall die’. His linguistic argument is indecisive and his ﬁnal decision is based more on his perception of relevant content and context, which does not include 9:11–15. 2 Paul, Amos, p. 283, Jeremias, Amos, p. 163. Both note that other places, such as Cappadocia and Cyprus, have been proposed. 3 Paul, Amos, p. 282.

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Israel’ or the name of any of the patriarchs. Not until 9:7 are the ‘Sons of Israel’ speciﬁed, but only to equate them to the other nations. Even in vv. 7–8, however, the immediacy of the rhetorical question is not matched with a direct threat. God vows to destroy the ‘sinful kingdom’, not ‘your kingdom’. At this point, however, the disavowal of Israel is in the process of reversing itself. As 9:8 concludes, the implication of only a selective judgement is made explicit. God will not utterly destroy the ‘House of Jacob’. The transition to this name from the ‘Sons of Israel’ is a regressive recollection back to the patriarch and the promise to him at Bethel. It is as if the gate of heaven has indeed been re-established. The God who once vowed to command the sea serpent and the captor’s sword to kill any refugees now commands that Israel be ‘shaken’ amidst the nations. This word is not the same as those used in 9:1 or v. 5, but was found in 4:8 in which two or three towns ‘totter’ for water and 8:12 in which people totter from sea to sea after a word from God. Now, they must wander among other nations, still thirsty, but perhaps seeking the word of God with renewed effort. The text implies that no one in the ‘sinful kingdom’ will escape this fate; the sieve will strain out every pebble, and not one will fall through.4 This is ironic, since the virgin Israel and the virgins and warriors have themselves fallen (5:2; 8:13–14). The exiles that remain part of the ‘sinful kingdom’ are doomed never to return. The straining of the refuse is anticipatory. In the following section (9:11–15), the fallen booth of David will be rebuilt. The earth will give such abundance that farmers will strain to keep up. And God will ‘plant’ his people back in their soil. The turning is evidenced in the restoration of Israel to being God’s people, even as the sinners among them die by the sword (9:10). In a direct recollection of 6:3, the doomed again say that evil will never draw near them. But the evil day has drawn near them on this Sabbath. The deaths of the sinners reafﬁrm a moral basis for God’s actions, against the implications of earlier passages that everyone, rich or poor, will perish. And at that moment, ‘that day’ becomes one of salvation (v. 11). Yet, could the darkness of the day of Yahweh be that discriminating after all? Throughout much of Amos, the moral outrage claimed by God on behalf of the poor and downtrodden is undermined by the military and natural disasters imagined as a ﬁtting punishment due the oppressors. These kinds of events, however, affect the poor as well as the rich, the innocent and the guilty. At least in some circumstances, it would be the powerful and the corrupt who would be better able to survive, while the weak or those unwilling to resort to drastic measures at others’ expense may well suffer the greatest. The book, therefore, offers little to the poor and marginalized in any real sense of advocating programs under which a fair and stable society might function. The crimes of one class of people are visited upon the whole population as the whole cosmic order is shaken to its foundations. It is only when the whole of the population are imagined as destroyed and the cosmos returned to chaos that God reasserts his own morality and shies away from carrying out the full extent of his violence. The ritual of the third hymnic doxology has transformed the deity’s own character. The re-establishment of divine order is the ﬁrst step in the restoration of the world: 4

Paul, Amos, p. 286, explains this as a process by which course pebbles and other refuse is separated from ﬁner grains of wheat.

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9:11 ‘On that day I will raise the fallen sukkah of David and wall up their breaches. His ruins I will raise and I will rebuild her as in the days of old,5 12 So that they may possess the remnant of Edom And all the nations over which my name is called.’ Oracle of Yahweh, who does this. 13 ‘Behold, Days are coming,’ oracle of Yahweh, ‘The ploughman will catch up with the reaper And the one treading grapes with the one sowing seeds The mountains will drip sweet wine, and all the peaks will ﬂow [with it]. 14 I will reverse the reversal of my people Israel.6 They will rebuild ruined cities and settle [them]. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine. They will make gardens and eat their fruit. 15 I will plant them upon their land, And nevermore will they be uprooted from their land that I have given to them,’ Says Yahweh, your God.

‘Blood and iron’ have turned to ‘lavender and roses’.7 This look to the future is profoundly different from what has preceded it, and yet, it is intimately related to it.8 The days that are coming bring a light to what was once imagined only in the darkest terms (Amos 5:18–20). But now the world is free from those who had false hopes. These brighter days will see the earth explode with plenty, a far cry from the days that saw a famine of the word of God (8:11–12). As God raises up the ‘sukkah of David’, the virgin Israel (5:2) ﬁnally ﬁnds the one to help her up from her ground, and so do the virgins and young men who have fainted from thirst (8:13). The patching up of the sukkah’s ‘breaches’ will metaphorically close the gaps or ‘breaches’ in the wall through which the ‘cows of Bashan’ were removed (4:3).9 God strode upon the high-places of the earth (4:13), but now his people will tread grapes. Mountains that will drip with their wine almost make a mockery of Amaziah who, Amos claimed, tried to stop him from ‘dripping’ prophecy. The peaks ‘ﬂow’ with the wine, directly inverting the use of the same verb in v. 5 that described the world quaking. Our mysterious phrase from Amos 1 and 2, , ‘no return’, has been reversed. 5

The possessives in this verse are troublesome; ‘their’ is masculine plural, while a masculine singular and feminine singular follow. James D. Nogalski, ‘The Problematic Sufﬁxes of Amos IX ii’, VT 43 (1993): 411–18, comments on the variant textual readings, but argues that, in the Hebrew, David’s sukkah is actually a collective reference to the destroyed cities of v. 14, especially in view of v. 11’s ‘their breaches’. The masculine singular refers back to David while the feminine singular indicates the grammatically feminine sukkah. 6 Literally, ‘turn the turning’: the formulae refers to more than a simple change in fortune or end to captivity, but a return to a previous state of well-being and an end to divine judgement, see John M. Bracke, ‘sub sebut: A Reappraisal’, ZAW 97, (1985): 233–44. 7 Wellhausen, Die Kleinen Propheten, p. 94. 8 Often recognized, for instance, by Stephen J. Bramer ‘The Structure of Amos 9:7–15’, BSac 156 (1999): 272–81 (277–80). 9 The connection is also reinforced by the feminine plural possessive attached to ‘breaches’.

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God will ‘reverse the reversal’, –,for his people, Israel, and they will ‘dwell’, , in their own cities (9:14). But what should one make of this dream of the future? What is this ‘sukkah of David’?10 Given the context, it appears to name the Israelite empire of David, as many scholars observe.11 It is best to avoid historicizing the reference, however, or restricting its meaning to merely political contexts. It is a loaded expression that recalls some of the foundational myths of Israel’s origins. In Amos 5:25–7, God asks if Israel ever offered sacriﬁces during the exile, and predicts that they will take their ‘gods’, including Sikkuth, to exile. The sukkah of David seems to be an allusion to the true ‘house of their god’. On one level, the modest shelter that is a sukkah is hardly an apt metaphor for the restoration of the glorious Davidic kingdom. Yet, it is a ﬁtting antithesis for the ‘sinful kingdom’ whose destruction is predicted in 9:8. The repaired walls also bring to mind the demolished houses, great and small, Yahweh standing on tin walls, denouncing the ‘house’ of Jeroboam and ordering the destruction of his own temple and universe. The sukkah also evokes an idealized past.12 It provides a clear relationship with traditions of the founding of the Davidic kingdom and its central shrine, the temple of Jerusalem. In 2 Samuel 7, God rejects David’s plans to build a ‘house’ for him but he does promise the king that he would establish for him an everlasting ‘house’ or dynasty. Moreover, God says that David’s heir will build the temple. 2 Samuel 7:6 has God recall that he did not live in a house when he brought Israel out of Egypt, but in a tent and a tabernacle. Although the word ‘sukkah’ is not used in 2 Sam. 7:6, Lev. 23:43 makes it plain that Israel dwelt in sukkoth during the exodus. Like Amos, David was ‘taken’ from the ﬂocks (2 Sam. 7:8, Amos 7:15). Most telling is 2 Sam. 7:10, in which God says ‘I will set a place for my people Israel, and I will plant him’. Amos 9:15 speaks of Israel being planted once again. Amos’ ‘sukkah of David’ collapses into a single expression the memory of the wanderings, the conquest of Canaan, and the establishment of both the ‘house of David’ and the ‘House of Yahweh’. Nehemiah 8:14–17 attests to the importance of the festival of Sukkoth in the post-monarchic period. Zechariah 14:16–19 spells out a future in which all nations will be punished if they fail to keep the festival of Sukkoth. The sukkah of David, therefore, also speaks of social activities that will not only identify Israelite society, but express a longing for international unity as well. Such a uniﬁed world is evoked in the expression, ‘the remnant of Edom and all the nations over whom my name is called’ (Amos 9:12). The temporary shelter carries implications of paradise. In Isa. 1: 8 judgement comes in the form of Zion being abandoned like a sukkah in a vineyard. But in Isa. 4:5–6, the restored Mount Zion will be covered with the clouds of God’s glory. Over the divine 10

H. Niel Richardson, ‘SKT (Amos 9:11): “Booth” or “Sukkoth”?’, JBL 92 (1973): 375–81; Max E. Polley, Amos and the Davidic Empire: A Socio–historical Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 72–4; Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, pp. 399–400, say it is the city of Sukkoth, ostensibly a strategic place for the military reconquest of the Davidic empire, an interpretation that is strained, to say the least. 11 Smith, Amos, pp. 280–81; Paul, Amos, p. 290; Jeremias, Amos, p. 167. 12 Wolff, Joel and Amos, p. 353; Jeremias, Amos, p. 167.

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glory will be hung ‘a canopy’ and a sukkah will protect the site from the desiccating heat and torrential rains. As Amos draws to a close, the name of God, celebrated with such awesome terror in the theophanies, is now a name of blessing. Curiously, the epithet that says so much of Yahweh’s power over the heavens, ‘God of Hosts’, is now nowhere to be found. The words are attributed just to ‘Yahweh’ (9:13, 15), who is not called the creator but is the ruler of many nations. David is God’s chosen king; to establish his sukkah over all the nations is to establish divine rule over the earth. Psalm 89 celebrates the Davidic king as the representative of the creator. In a passage that echoes the mythic conceptions of the wider near eastern world, God sets the king’s hand over the Sea and upon the Rivers, assimilating to the monarch attributes of the divine control over the primeval waters (see v. 26, Eng. v. 25). Although the temple itself does not appear in the closing verses of Amos, the paradise that is described has clear associations with a recreated cosmos; as Amos 9:13 puts it: The ploughman will catch up with the reaper, And the one treading grapes with the one sowing seeds The mountains will drip sweet wine, and all the peaks will ﬂow with it.

At the end of Amos, a basket of summer fruit would hardly mark the end of Israel but its new beginning. There is no temple and no prophets ‘dripping’ oracles, but unending harvests and mountains ﬂowing with wine. God strode upon the highplaces of the earth (4:13), but now his people will tread grapes. The people will plant gardens as God plants his people. They will never be uprooted again. The language again is curious. The last verses speak of how ‘they’ will plant, and be planted, on ‘their land’ given to ‘them’. Yet, the ﬁnal clause says that these were the words of ‘your God.’ With this ending, the book addresses the reader directly, transcending the pretext of Amos’ preaching to Jeroboam’s Israel. The living reader is a testimony to the untruthfulness of Amos – that its meditation on ultimate destruction is but a dream that dares explore the ‘impossibility of absolute death’.13 I think we are privileged to see in Amos the recasting of mythical conceptions as the utterances of prophets whose own status is oriented historically and but preserves their mythic dimensions. But we should ask why Amos brings one so far along a road to total destruction only to step back from the brink at the last moment. Is the ending a secondary addition? That is a question best left up to others to answer, but is it an inappropriate ending? Hardly. As is well known, biblical prophetic books tend to close on a positive note, regardless of the severity of their content. According to Isaac B. Gottlieb, biblical books often end with a cyclical pattern. Lamentations’ second last verse (5:21) prays for a restoration of a bygone state of affairs. The employment of an expression like ‘days are coming’ marks a ‘time shift’ that offers a ﬁtting concluding frame for a book, including Ezek. 48:35; Obad. 1:15; Zeph. 3:20, among others. References to a special day or days yet to come appear in Amos 9:11, 12.14 13

Sherwood and Caputo, ‘Otobiographies’, p. 227. Isaac B. Gottlieb, ‘Sof davar: Biblical Endings’, Prooftexts 11 (1991): 213–24 (215–16), Gottlieb does not include Amos in his list for reasons left unexplained. 14

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Many books ‘break frame’ and attest to their own existence as pieces of literature. Thus Eccl. 12:12 refers to the making of many books, while in Dan. 12:4, 9, and 13, there are references to sealing the book until the end of days.15 In Amos, there is no obvious reference to a book written by Amos or recorded on his behalf. The ﬁnal words of Amos, however, do ‘break frame’ with its enigmatic ‘your god’ (Amos 9:15). Thus, the words of Amos do not have a written presence in the literary world of the Amos-book itself, but rather, the reader, outside of the text, is drawn into the literary world in the ﬁnal instance.16 Gottlieb’s fourth category is of great interest to Amos-studies. This includes books that end with some kind of return to a previous time or place. The keyword ‘return’, , is found in a variety of different formulations, including ‘reverse the reversal’ in 9:14 (cf. Zeph. 3:20, Ps. 14:7; 53:7).17 Amos employs a number of popular motifs at its conclusion and is well integrated into the conventions of Hebrew literature, including that of having prophetic texts end on a positive note. This latter convention is recognized by later Jewish tradition, even to the point of changing the few exceptions.18 Is the thoroughly conventional ending of the book of Amos a product of assimilating the prophet Amos to a later ideology that demanded a hopeful conclusion? Or is it so well integrated into the whole that there never was an Amos-book without at least portions of Amos 9:11–15? It is at least possible that the convention of a ‘happy ending’ is an early development, but this does not preclude the possibility that some of the oracles of judgement are late. Above all, it needs to be asked what a writer means by including a conventional ending to a book. Is it something that carries the heart of the writer’s true message? If all prophetic books include a vision of salvation and restoration after punishment, that vision appears to be a primary thrust of the corpus. But then, why is there so much emphasis on ‘blood and iron’? Just as Ecclesiastes concludes with an appeal to piety and faith (Eccl. 12:13–14), so the positive ending in Amos does not preclude any value in reading the rest of the book. Likewise in Job, God’s tremendous interruption in the closing chapters does not really close off all further discussion. Rather, the ending leads one back to the beginning, to suffer the text all over again. Perhaps it is in the quest for the happy ending that Amos carries meaning, and not in the arrival there. Jennifer Dines comments that for the Judaeans of the second temple period, the monarchic era remained relevant as the history embodied beliefs about past present and future. She writes that with the idea that they had been redeemed from their exilic judgement, the Judaeans still carefully crafted memories of the warnings about that judgement.19 To be sure, the danger of apostasy and corruption is present in any society, regardless of their prevalent beliefs about their reconciliation with the divine. The natural order

15

Gottlieb, ‘Biblical Endings’, p. 217. Linville, ‘Visions and Voices’, pp. 41–2. 17 Gottlieb, ‘Biblical Endings’, pp. 218–21. 18 Gottlieb, ‘Biblical Endings’, pp. 221, 223, nn. 29–30. The ﬁnal verses of Isaiah and of Malachi are quite judgemental. In both these cases, however, Jewish tradition repeats at the very end the more positive second last verse enclosing the parting condemnation of the text proper with a more optimistic context. 19 Dines, ‘Amos’, p. 589. 16

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could always be disrupted by drought while economic and political stability could be dashed by the policies of their Persian overlords or other foreign powers. Indeed, the hope for the new ‘sukkah of David’ and of unsurpassed prosperity suggest that the scribes who put the book of Amos together were still looking for the ﬁnal defeat of chaos. So they ended their book with a promise to the reader that the eternal struggle one day will be over. Yet, that promise is not so much a prize as it is bait. The trap leads to the same over-conﬁdence and self-righteousness to which the book calls heaven and earth to witness and violently respond. The symbiosis of the heavenly, earthly and social realms that seems so fragile in the hands of fallible humanity may be disturbed once again. And so the eternal process of bringing order to chaos continues. Amos is as uncannily true as it is false. It is timeless, despite its historical setting in the reigns of Jeroboam and Uzziah. Its accessing of mythic tropes and its playing out of the notions in the words against ancient Israel and Judah constitute a form of mythology in its own right. Our eponymous prophet Amos, for as much as he is cast as the user of these mythic ideas, weaves a new mythic cycle in the ongoing cosmic drama. The words and experiences ascribed to him reveal that this drama is to be found in the shifting political, economic and natural circumstances. Within the ‘word-world’ of the book, the shifting language produces a landscape whose borders between the sacred and the profane are ﬂuid and ﬁnally withdrawn all together. This is the ultimate symbiosis, as the earth merges with heaven, the ﬁelds with the temple precincts, the house of Israel with the house of God, and the prophet with his deity. The book also produces an impressionistic portrait of Amos, the stockman turned seer, and he is a character of myth himself. He is part of Judah’s legacy of the great prophets of old who God sent to warn the Israelite people. We cannot know how much the writers and editors of the book wanted to be like him, but it is unlikely that the poetry they put in his mouth was meant solely for entertainment value. This is true even if all of the alliterations, puns deliberate ambiguities in the book strike one as some kind of play or even professional ‘fun’. As Shakespeare has Regan say in King Lear, ‘Jesters do oft prove prophets.’20 As much as their book depicts both clashing and intersecting perspectives between God and Amos, the world they created for their ancient prophet would have been different, and yet, in some ways, similar to their own. Further historical research will, no doubt, bring some further illumination to this question while further literary work will show the book of Amos to have even more complexities than scholarship has up to this point been aware. And so with this optimistic look forward I will add my own parting thought. Few, if any scholars would argue that the book of Amos is comparable to the apocalypses produced later in Jewish and Christian history.21 Despite the imagery of human and cosmic death and rebirth, the book’s writers were not so despairing of any joy in life as to long for the complete annihilation of the universe. As I have tried to show, however, these writers saw a world grounded on timeless, cosmic principles of destruction and recreation. But even if their imagination and skill with words knew no bounds, perhaps they did, in the end, step back from the apocalyptic brink. So I 20 21

King Lear, V:3 3203. Coggins, Amos, p. 157, however, does ﬁnd apocalyptic imagery in Amos 9.

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will leave my audience as Amos leaves his: with a comedy and not a cynical tragedy. My hope is that the reader will ﬁnd that, through it all, Amos’ ideals of justice, however imperfect, are still capable of giving hope and, above all, are still meant for this world, and not some other.

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Nissinen, Martti (ed.), Prophecy in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context: Mesopotamian, Biblical, and Arabian Perspectives (Symposium; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000). Nissinen, Martti, ‘How Prophecy Became Literature’, SJOT, 19 (2005): 153–72. Nissinen, Martti, References to Prophecy in Neo–Assyrian Sources (SAAS, 7; Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 1998). Nissinen, Martti, with contributions by C.L. Seow and Robert K. Ritner, Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East (WAW, 12; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003): 97–124. Noble, Paul R., ‘ “I Will Not Bring ‘It’ Back” (Amos 1:3): A Deliberately Ambiguous Oracle?’, ExpTim, 106 (1994–95): 105–109. Noble, Paul R., ‘Amos and Amaziah in Context: Synchronic and Diachronic Approaches to Amos 7–8’, CBQ, 60 (1998): 423–39. Noble, Paul R., ‘Amos’ Absolute “No” ’, VT, 47 (1997): 329–40. Noble, Paul R., ‘Israel Among the Nations’, HBT, 15 (1993): 56–82. Noegel, Scott B., Puns and Pundits: Word Play in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Literature (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2000). Nogalski, James D., ‘The Problematic Sufﬁxes of Amos IX ii’, VT, 43 (1993): 411–18. Olyan, Saul M., ‘The Oaths of Amos 8.14’, in G.A. Anderson and S.M. Olyan (eds), Priesthood and Cult in Ancient Israel (JSOTSup, 125; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1991). Otto, Randal E., ‘The Prophets and their Perspectives’, CBQ, 63 (2001): 219–40. Otto, Rudolph, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non–Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relationship to the Rational (trans. John W. Harvey; 2nd edn; London: Oxford University Press, 1950). Ouellette, Jean, ‘The Shaking of the Thresholds in Amos 9:1’, HUCA, 43 (1972): 23–7. Paas, Stefan, ‘ “He Who Builds His Stairs into Heaven …” (Amos 9:6a)’, UF, 25 (1993): 319–25. Paas, Stefan, ‘Seeing and Singing: Visions and Hymns in the Book of Amos’, VT, 52 (2002): 254–74. Paas, Stefan, Creation and Judgement: Creation Texts in Some Eighth Century Prophets (OTS, 47; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003). Park, Aaron W., The Book of Amos as Composed and Read in Antiquity (StudBL, 37; New York: Peter Lang, 2001). Paul, Shalom M., ‘Amos 1:3–2:3: A Concatenous Literary Pattern’, JBL, 90 (1971): 397–403. Paul, Shalom M., ‘Fishing Imagery in Amos 4:2’, JBL, 97 (1978): 183–95. Paul, Shalom M., ‘Polysemous Polyvalency in Poetic Parallelism’, in M. Fishbane and E. Tov (eds), ‘Sha‘arei Talmon’: Studies in the Bible, Qumran, and the Ancient Near East Presented to Shemaryahu Talmon (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992). Paul, Shalom M., Amos: A Commentary on the Book of Amos (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991). Polley, Max E., Amos and the Davidic Empire: A Socio–historical Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Praetorius, Franz, ‘Bemerkungen zu Amos’, ZAW, 35 (1915): 12–25.

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Pruyser, Paul W., ‘Lessons from Art Theory for the Psychology of Religion’, JSSR, 15 (1976): 1–14. Rabbe, Paul R., ‘Deliberate Ambiguity in the Psalter’, JBL, 110 (1991): 213–27. Redfern, Walter, Puns (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). Rendsburg, Gary A., ‘Word Play in Biblical Hebrew: An Eclectic Collection’, in Scott B. Noegel (ed.), Puns and Pundits: Word Play in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Literature (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2000). Richardson, H. Niel, ‘A Critical Note on Amos 7.14’, JBL, 85 (1966): 89. Richardson, H. Niel, ‘SKT (Amos 9:11): “Booth” or “Sukkoth”?’, JBL, 92 (1973): 375–81. Riedel, W., ‘Bemerkungen zum Buche Amos’, in Altestamentliche Untersuchungen 1 (vol. 1; Leipzig, 1902). Rilett Wood, Joyce, Amos in Song and Book Culture (JSOTSup, 337; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 2002). Rosenbaum, Stanley N., Amos of Israel: A New Interpretation (Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1990). Rottzoll, Dirk U., Studien zur Redaktion und Komposition des Amos Buches (BZAW, 243; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996). Rudolph, Wilhelm, Joel–Amos–Obadja–Jona (KAT, 13.2; Gutersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1971). Sanderson, Judith E., ‘Amos’, in C.A. Newsom and S.H. Ringe (eds), The Women’s Bible Commentary (London: SPCK, 1992). Schart, Aaron, ‘The Fifth Vision of Amos in Context’, in Paul L. Redditt and Aaron Schart (eds), Thematic Threads in the Book of the Twelve (BZAW, 325; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003). Seitz, Christopher R., ‘The Divine Council: Temporal Transition and the New Prophecy in the Book of Isaiah’, JBL, 109 (1990): 229–47. Shakespeare, William, The Illustrated Stratford Shakespeare (London: Chancellor Press, 1982). Sherwood, Yvonne, ‘Of Fruit and Corpses and Wordplay Visions: Picturing Amos 8.1–3’, JSOT, 92 (2001): 5–27. Sherwood, Yvonne and Caputo, John D., ‘Otobiographies, Or How a Torn and Disembodied Ear Hears a Promise of Death (A Prearranged Meeting between Yvonne Sherwood and John D. Caputo and the Book of Amos and Jacques Derrida)’, in Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (eds), Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2005). Simkins, Ronald, Yahweh’s Activity in History and Nature in the Book of Joel (ANETS, 10; Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991). Smelik, K.A.D. ‘The Meaning of Amos V 18–20’, VT, 37 (1986): 246–8. Smith, Gary V., ‘Amos 5.13: The Deadly Silence of the Prosperous’, JBL, 107 (1988): 289–91. Smith, Gary V., Amos: A Commentary (LBI; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989). Smith, Jonathan Z. ‘The Wobbling Pivot’, in Jonathan Z. Smith, Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (SJLA, 23; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978): 88–103. Soggin, J. Alberto, The Prophet Amos: A Translation and Commentary (trans. J. Bowden; London: SCM, 1987).

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Soper, B. Kingston, ‘For Three Transgressions and for Four’, ExpTim, 71 (1959–60): 86–7. Steiner, Richard C., Stockmen from Tekoa, Sycomores from Sheba, (CBQMS, 36; Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2003). Story, Cullen, I.K., ‘Amos – Prophet of Praise’, VT, 30 (1980): 67–80. Strawn, Brent A., What is Stronger than a Lion? Leonine Image and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (OBO, 212; Freibourg: Academic Press, 2005). Stuart, Douglas, Hosea–Jonah (WBC, 31; Dallas: Word Books, 1989). Sundén, Hjalmar, ‘Saint Augustine and the Psalter in the Light of Role–Psychology’, JSSR, 26 (1987): 375–82. Sundén, Hjalmar, ‘What is the Next Step to be Taken in the Study of Religious Life?’, HTR, 58 (1965): 445–51. Szabó, Andor, ‘Textual Problems in Amos and Hosea’, VT, 25 (1975): 500–524. Thompson, Leonard L. ‘The Jordan Crossing: Sidqot Yahweh and World Building’, JBL, 100 (1981): 343–58. Tromp, N.J., ‘Amos 5.1–17: Towards a Stylistic and Rhetorical Analysis’, in A.S. van der Woude (ed.), Prophets, Worship and Theodicy: Studies in Prophetism, Biblical Theology and Structural and Rhetorical Analysis and on the Place of Music in Worship (OTS, 23; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1984). Tsumura, David, Creation and Destruction: A Reappraisal of the Chaoskampf Theory in the Old Testament (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005). Urbrock, William J., ‘The Book of Amos: The Sounds and the Silences’, CurTM, 23 (1996): 245–53. van Leeuwen, Cornelius, ‘The Prophecy of the Yom Yahweh in Amos V 18–20’, in A.S. van der Woude (ed.), Language and Meaning: Studies in Hebrew Language and Biblical Exegesis (OTS, 19; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974). Waard, Jan de., ‘The Chiastic Structure of Amos V 1–17’, VT, 27 (1977): 170–77. Waschke, Ernst–Joachim, ‘Die Funfte Vision des Amos Bucher (9,1–4): Ein Nachinterpretation’, ZAW, 106 (1994): 434–45. Watts, John D.W., Vision and Prophecy in Amos (Macon GA: Mercer University Press, expanded anniversary edn, 1997). Weigle, Michael, ‘Eine “unendliche Geschichte”: Kn) (Am 7,7–8)’, Bib, 76 (1995): 343–87. Weiss, Meir, ‘The Pattern of Numerical Sequence in Amos 1–2: A Re–examination’, JBL, 86 (1967): 416–23. Wellhausen, Julius, Die Kleinen Propheten übersetzt und erklärt (Berlin: Reiner, 1892). Wendland, Ernst R., ‘ “The Word of the Lord” and the Organization of Amos’, OPTAT, 2 (1988): 1–51. Whitelam, Keith W. ‘Representing Minimalism: The Rhetoric and Reality of Revisionism’, in Alastair G. Hunter and Philip R. Davies (eds), Sense and Sensitivity: Essays on Reading the Bible in Memory of Robert Carroll (JSOTSup, 348; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 2002). Williams, A.J., ‘A Further Suggestion About Amos IV 1–3’, VT, 29 (1979): 206–211.

186

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Williamson, H.G.M., ‘The Prophet and the Plumb-line: A Redaction-critical Study of Amos vii’, in A.S. van der Woude (ed.), In Quest of the Past (OTS, 26; Leiden E.J. Brill, 1990). Wolff, Hans Walter, Joel and Amos (trans. W. Janzen, S.D. McBride Jr., C.A. Muenchen; Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977). Write, John, ‘Did Amos Inspect Livers?’, ABR, 23 (1975): 3–11. Wyatt, N., ‘The Mythic Mind’, SJOT, 15 (2001): 3–61. Wyatt, N., Religious Texts from Ugarit: The Words of Ilimilku and his Colleagues (Biblical Seminar, 53; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1998). Zalcman, Lawrence, ‘Laying to Rest’ (Amos III 12)’, VT, 52 (2002): 557–9. Zevit, Ziony, ‘A Misunderstanding at Bethel: Amos VII 12–17’, VT, 25 (1975): 783–90. Zevit, Ziony, ‘Expressing Denial in Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew and in Amos’, VT, 29 (1979): 505–509. Zevit, Ziony, The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches (London: Continuum, 2001). Zogbo, Lynell, ‘Rhetorical Devices and Structure “At the Service” of the Message: The Final Version in the Book of Amos’, JOTT, 16 (2003): 45–66. Zorell, F., ‘Zu Amos 1, 3. 6. usw.’, Bib, 6 (1925): 171–3.

Name Index

Achtemeier, Elizabeth 145, 161 Ackroyd, Peter R. 144, 156 Andersen, Francis I. and David Noel Freedman 14–15, 48, 51, 58, 60, 62, 64, 71, 82, 88–9, 93, 95, 102, 122, 128, 139–40, 145, 152, 155, 161, 164–6 Auld, A. Graeme 76, 138, 144 Barré, Michael L. 52 Barstad, Hans M. 62–3, 84, 86, 113, 124, 156–7 Barton, John 23, 36 Behrens, Achim 160 Beit–Hallahmi, Benjamin 10 Ben Zvi, Ehud 9–10, 17, 22–3, 25, 43 Ben Zvi, Ehud and Michael H. Floyd 23 Bič, Milos 146 Blenkinsopp, Joseph 24, 27 Bracke, John M. 171 Bramer, Stephen J. 171 Bulkeley, Tim 71, 78 Carroll R., M. Daniel 13, 72, 92 Carroll, Robert P. 17, 23, 45 Cathcart, Keven J. 162 Ceresko, Anthony R. 52 Clifford, Richard J. 30, 35, 154, Clines, David J.A. 10, 45, 49–50, 82, 143, Coggins, Richard James 22, 60–61, 63, 82, 137, 160, 175 Cohen, Simon 144 Collins, Terry 43 Conrad, Edgar, W. 23, 44 Cooper, Alan, 127, 139, 140, Coote, Robert B. 15, 48, 52–3, 140 Crenshaw, James L. 22, 25–7, 93, 95, 97, 110, 159,

Dines, Jennifer M. 21–2, 64, 74, 174 Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy 28–32, 35 Dorsey, David A. 49, 101 Eliade, Mircea 29 Eslinger, Lyle 136, 143–4, 148, 165–6 Euhlinger, Christoph 138 Everson, Joseph A. 113, 114 Floyd, Michael H. 22 Freedman, David Noel and Francis I. Andersen 89 García Martinez, Florentino, and Eibert J.C. Tigchelaar 76 García–Treto, Francisco O. 143, 146 Gerstenberger, Erhard S. 24 Gese, Hartmut 138, 139 Geyer, John B. 27, 48, 50–51 Gitay, Yehoshua 71–2 Gottlieb, Isaac B. 173–4 Grabbe, Lester L. 24–5 Graham, William A. 36 Hammershaimb, Erling 62, 71, 95, 107, 124, 160 Harper, William Rainey 96, 101, 161 Hauan, Michael James 110 Hayes, John H. 13, 45, 52, 72, 82, 85, 88–9, 95, 152, 155, 157, 161 Henige, David 17 Hillers, Delbert R. 136 Hoffmann, Yair 113–14, 144–5 Holm, Nils G. 10 Horgan, Maurya P. 76 Isbell, Charles 9

Dadlez, Eva M. 10 Dahood, Mitchell 95 Dalley, Stephanie 57, 64 Davies, Philip R. 17, 22–4, 36 Dempster, Stephen G. 126

Jackson, Jared J. 108 Jacobs, Paul F. 86 Japhet, Sara 111 Jaruzelska, Izabela 15

188

AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION

Jeremias, Jörg 16, 42–3, 45, 47, 56, 62, 66, 72–3, 82, 85, 88, 93, 95, 107–108, 117, 124–7, 136, 139, 141, 145, 152, 155, 157, 159–60, 169, 172 Keel, Othmar 138, 153 Kleven, Terence 84–5, 87–8 Koch, Klaus 86 Landy, Francis 12, 52, 133, 135, 137–9, 143, 146–7, 152, 155, 158, 165–6 Lechtheim, Miriam 21 Levenson, Jon D. 4, 31, 34–5 Levinson, Bernard M. 31 Limburg, James 43, 136–7 Linville, James R. 18, 23, 47–9, 51, 53–4, 64, 71, 74–5, 135, 148, 152, 158–9, 174 Loretz, Oswald 20–21, 127 Maag, Victor 51 Maier, Cristl and Ernst M. Dörfuß 124 Mays, James Luther 28, 43, 70, 72–3, 82, 93, 107, 121–2, 125–7, 135, 142, 144, 146, 155, 159, 161 McGeough, Kevin M. 124 Miall, David S. 10 Möller, Karl 19, 42–6, 48–51, 63, 66, 71, 73–4, 92, 95 Moltz, Howard 161 Moore, Sally F. 30 Morgenstern, Julian 14, 52 Mowvley, Harry 125, 128 Mulder, Martin J. 74 Mullen, E. Theodore 30 Nasuti, Harry P. 36, Niditch, Susan 36, 126, 141, 152, Nissenen, Martti 23–6 Noble, Paul R. 48, 52–3, 64, 123–4, 143, 169 Noegel, Scott B. 5, 33 Nogalski, James D. 171 Olyan, Saul M. 156–7 Otto, Randal E. 13, 19 Otto, Rudolph 17–18 Ouellette, Jean 161, 164

Paas, Stefan 19–21, 27–8, 32–4, 93–5, 106, 167–8 Park, Aaron W. 16–18, 42–3, 118 Paul, Shalom M. 43–4, 47, 49, 51, 54–8, 60–64, 66, 70, 72–3, 77, 82, 84, 86–8, 92, 96, 102–104, 108, 113, 117–18, 121–8, 135–9, 143–4, 151–3, 155, 157, 159–63, 166, 169–70, 172 Polley, Max E. 172 Praetorius, Franz 139 Pruyser, Paul W. 10 Rabbe, Paul R. 109 Redfern, Walter 53 Rendsburg, Gary A. 147 Richardson, H. Niel 144, 172 Rilett Wood, Joyce 36 Rosenbaum, Stanley N. 14–15, 86 Rottzoll, Dirk U. 16, 70 Rudolph, Wilhelm 18, 62–3 122 Sanderson, Judith E. 83 Seitz, Christopher R. 22 Shakespeare, William 3, 7–8, 13, 26, 175 Sherwood, Yvonne 53, 59, 151, Sherwood, Yvonne and John D. Caputo 43, 46, 119, 126, 173 Simkins, Ronald 27 Smelik, K.A.D. 113 Smith, Gary V. 108, 125, 127 161, 172 Smith, Jonathan Z. 35 Soggin, J. Alberto 45, 62, 122, 125, 144, 155, 159, 160 Soper, B. Kingston 49 Steiner, Richard C. 14, 146 Story, Cullen, I.K. 95 Strawn, Brent A. 43 Stuart, Douglas 62, 66, 95, 172 Sundén, Hjalmar 10–11, 35 Szabó, Andor 125, 127, 160 Thompson, Leonard L. 28, 32 Tromp, N.J., 101–102 Tsumura, David 27 Urbrock, William J. 108 van Leeuwen, Cornelius 113–14

NAME INDEX Waard, Jan de. 101 Waschke, Ernst–Joachim 160 Watts, John D.W. 15, 101, 161 Weigle, Michael 138 Weiss, Meir 49 Wellhausen, Julius 15, 171 Wendland, Ernst R. 45, 164 Whitelam, Keith W. 9 Williams, A.J., 85–6, 88–9 Williamson, H.G.M. 138

189

Wolff, Hans Walter 15, 42, 45, 47, 51, 62–3, 66, 70, 82, 84–5, 87–8, 92, 94–5, 107–108, 122, 128, 135–6, 142, 144–5, 152, 155, 159, 161, 163, 172 Write, John 146 Wyatt, N. 4, 27–8 Zalcman, Lawrence 177 Zevit, Ziony 4, 144 Zorell, F. 52

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Scripture Index

Hebrew Bible Genesis 27, 28 1 153 1:1 5 1:14-18 153 1-11 28 1:9-10 106 2-3 47 2:7 92 4:1 69 6-9 168 9:15-16 154 15:17 110 18:12 84 18:23 162 18-19 21 21:32–3 104 22:19 104 25:19-34 56 25:21-8 56 26:16 58 26:23-4 104 27 56 28 79, 168 28:10-15 79 28:14 79 28:17 168 28:10-19 34 28:10-23 79 30:15 66 30:24 105 31:36 136 35:1-7 79 36:6-9 147 37:5-9 135 41:1-7 135 46:1-4 104, 105 Exodus 2:20 147 9:22 165 10:21-3 116 12:10 58

12:12 110 12:23-9 154 14:16 57 14:21 57 15:3 93 15:17 34 16:33 87 29:44 58 19:1 94 19:15 94 20:26 168 21:14 164 31:12-17 4 32 156 33:3-5 110 33:19 110 34:2 94 34:5-6 110 34:8 110 34:14 93 35:1-3 4 Leviticus 2:11 90 4:3 56 4:12 58 4:21 58 5 157 5:4 157 6:10 90 18 62 18:1-5 62 18:25-30 62 19:12 158 19:30 4 20:3 62 21:7 83 21:14 83 23:43 172 26 72 26:2 4 Numbers 6:1-21 64

192

AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION 10:10 111 12:6-8 25 13:21 128 16:47 50 20:18 56 20:18-21 56 21:33 84 23:1 94 23:20 51 27:18 94 Deuteronomy 31 3:11 84 3:17 128 6:13 157 8:17 58 10:20 157 12:29-31 60 12:31 58 16:21 34 17:18 25 22:29 97 30:11-14 155 32 96 32:9 137 32:14 84 33:29 97 Joshua 28, 30, 32, 103 2:10 63 4:15-24 104 4:23 63 5:2-11 104 6 6, 70 13:12 84 17:1 84 23:7-8 157 Judges 3:21 6 5:3 55 6:32 136 13:20 159 19:26 84 20 89 20:1 158 20:45-7 89 21 89 21:15 89 1 Samuel 3:20 158 10-11 103

13:5 47 13:7-14 103 14:23 47 15:10-33 103 2 Samuel 6:8 165 7 172 7:6 172 7:8 146, 172 7:10 34, 172 1 Kings 156 1:49 164 2:28 164 7:21 160 8:65 18 10:19 167 11:41 44 12:25-33 63 12:29-30 156 13:2 58 14:16 156 18 145 19:3 104 22:19-23 74 2 Kings 128, 156 2:9 94 2:12 142 2:15 94 3 59 3:27 59 5:18 89 6:11 58 10:29 156 10:32-2 47 14:25-6 128 15:16 56 16:15 146 17:13-14 27 17:30 156 19:12 47 19:20-34 18 21:6 60 21:9 60 22:15-20 18 23:16 58 23:20 58 Isaiah 36, 50, 174 1:2 32 1:8 172

SCRIPTURE INDEX 2:13 84 4:5-6 172 5 26 6:1 167 6:1-4 34 6:1-8 74 6:6-7 161 6:8-10 96 6:3 34 10:12 162 13:6 59, 106 14:13 35 14:27 52 25:10 89 25:11 155 27 26 27:1 27 27:1 27 28:7-13 96 28:15 155 28:18 155 29:9-14 96 29:15 96 29:16 96 33:9 84 33:21 155 34:5-6 50 37:12 47 42:5 94 43:13 52 47:4 93 48:1 157 48:2 93 51:9-10 137 51:15 166 54:5 93 63:2 97 63:12 63 65:17-18 5 Jeremiah 50 1:1 6, 44 1:11-12 139 1:13-15 139 1:18 138 2:12 32 2:24 86 3:17 33 4:13 57 5:2 157

5:27 151 6:1 6 7:22-3 117 9:22 67 10:16 93 12:4 46 13:14 55 15:20 138 16 124 16:5 124 17:12 5 18:3-6 92 20:9 44 22:1-9 18 22:20 84 23:10 46 23:18 74 23:19 57 23:22 74 25:30 44, 97 26:18-23 18 29:6 57 30:23 57 31:35 93, 167 32:18 93 33:2 93 36 45 36:20-26 18 46:10 50 46:18 93 50:19 86 50:34 93 51:15 93 Ezekiel 50 4:3 138 5:5 35 7:11 123 7:14 6 13:5 114 25 50 27:6 27:8 155 27:23 47, 51 27:26 155 37:11 46 38:12 35 39:18 85, 86 40-48 5 47 5

193

194

AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION 48:35 173 Hosea 12, 103, 147 2:11 122 2:16 64 4:15 47,103 4:16 86 5:8 47, 103 9:15 103 10:5 47, 103 11:1 72 11:5-9 52 11:7 52 11:8-9 52 12:4-5 103 12:6 93 12:11 103 13:15 56, 64 14:5-9 52 Joel 27, 115 1:9-12 45 1:15 59, 106 1:15-2:2 114 2:2 96 2:12-14 114 3:3-5 114 4 114 4:14 114 4:14-15 114 4:16-21 114 4:18 148 Amos 1 53 1-2 15, 27, 43, 50, 52, 59, 77, 78, 89, 107, 125, 133, 169, 171 1-4 19, 41 1-7 124 1:1 41-6, 49, 59, 145, 161, 167 1:1-2 6, 7, 41-46, 50, 134 1:2 7, 29, 41-6, 51, 58, 60, 71, 72, 75, 86, 91, 136, 167 1:3 41, 56, 1:3-5 47, 53 1:3-2:15 48 1:3-2:16 47, 49, 50 1:5 47, 51, 52, 57, 67, 123, 169 1:6 52 1:6-8 54 1:6-9 47 1:8 51, 67, 123

1:9 54 1:9-10 47, 54, 55 1:11 55, 56 1:11-12 47, 55 1:13 57, 83 1:13-15 47, 1:14 57, 78, 115 1:14-15 58 1:15 52, 56, 58 2 41, 48, 64, 77, 91, 133, 157 2-3 56 2:1 59 2:1-3 48, 58 2:2 73, 74 2:3 59 2:4 63, 65 2:4-5 45, 48, 60 2:5 65, 2:6-7 61 2:6-8 60, 81, 83 2:6-9 64 2:7 61, 62, 63, 65, 69, 147,153, 158 2:7-8 124 2:8 15, 62, 63, 65, 70, 79, 83 2:9 77, 90, 91 2:9-10 63-64, 83 2:9-11 83 2:9-12 64 2:10 72, 90, 110, 117 2:10-11 69 2:11 64, 77 2:11-12 65, 77, 156 2:12 27, 27, 65, 90, 91, 107, 108, 117 2:13 65, 66, 67, 90 2:14-15 66 2:14-16 67 2:15, 91 2:16, 67, 78, 115, 163 3 41 3:1 69, 72, 76, 79, 110 3:1-2 60, 64, 69, 71, 79, 154 3:1-3 117 3:1-5 71 3:1-6 70 3:1-8 71 3:1-15 69 3:2 72 3:2-3 72

SCRIPTURE INDEX 3:3 72 3:3-5 71 3:3-6 71 3:3-7 71 3:3-8 70, 73, 76 3:4 71, 72, 73, 97,113 3:5 72 3:6 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 90 3:6-7 73, 77, 92 3:7 14, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 93, 95, 158 3:7-8 32 3:8 12, 70, 71, 75, 76, 95, 97, 108, 113, 139 3:8-9 140, 152 3:9 69, 76, 108, 110 3:9-10 76, 77 3:10 59, 70, 74, 77 3:11 77 3:12 69, 77, 79, 91, 124 3:13 76, 79, 108, 140 3:13-14 83 3:13-15 78 3:14 69, 78, 79, 89, 115, 128 3:15 83, 124, 126 4 70, 81, 83, 85, 90, 91, 105, 135 4:1 62, 65, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 93 4:1-3 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 96, 124 4:1-13 81 4:2 81, 84, 87, 88, 115, 163 4:3 82, 87, 88, 89, 152, 171 4:4 84, 90, 146 4:4-5 89-90, 103, 117 4:5 90 4:6 81 4:6-8 90 4:6-9 86 4:6-10 148 4:6-12 116 4:7 106, 116, 137 4:7-8 65, 90 4:8 81, 170 4:9 81 4:9-10 91 4:10 81 4:11 81, 91, 102, 4:12 18, 81, 92, 92, 97, 106, 117, 118, 140, 146, 167

195

4:13 33, 44, 57, 81, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 101, 106, 113, 118, 135, 141, 157, 163, 171, 173 5 106, 111 5:1 87, 5:1-3 101, 108 5:1-17 101, 105 5:2 102, 148, 170, 171 5:3 102, 110, 125 5:4 102 5:4-5 102 5:4-6 101, 102, 110 5:4-15 109 5:5 102, 103, 104, 117, 122 5:6 105 5:7 105 5:7-8 154 5:7-9 107, 127 5:8 96, 105, 106, 110, 113, 117, 135 5:8-9 33, 59, 93, 94, 101, 106 5:9 59, 74, 106, 107, 166 5:9-10 137 5:10 82, 107, 108, 109 5:10-12 107 5:10-13 101 5:11 65 5:12 61, 70, 107 5:13 101, 107, 108, 109, 110, 152 5:13-14 109 5:14 109, 121, 164 5:14-15 101, 102, 110, 116 5:15 109, 114 5:16 46, 110, 113 5:16-17 101, 102, 107, 109-110, 140 5:17 18, 110, 113, 140 5:18 113 5:18-19 113 5:18-20 57, 73, 79, 113, 114, 115, 116, 121, 171 5:18-27 113, 119, 121 5:19 113, 115, 121, 128, 162 5:21 117 5:21-5 111, 116 5:23 108, 117 5:23-4 117 5:24 116, 117 5:25 117, 122 5:25-7 172

196

AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION 5:26 118, 123 5:26-7 89, 118 5:27 53, 118 6 41, 121, 123, 125, 127, 128 6:1 123, 124, 127 6:1-2 121, 123 6:2 121 6:3 115, 121, 122, 153 6:4-6 123, 124 6:4-7 62, 122, 123 6:5 111, 117, 123, 125 6:6 123, 124 6:6-7 127 6:7 117, 123, 124, 125 6:8 122, 125 6:9-10 125 6:10 125, 127, 128, 152 6:11 125, 126 6:12 127, 146 6:13 121 6:13-14 128 6:14 123, 124, 128 7 15, 53, 133, 147, 148, 158 7-8 33, 110 7-9 133 7:1 97, 134, 135 7:1-6 32, 134 7:1-17 133 7:2 127, 135 7:4 135, 136, 137 7:4-6 7 7:5 127 7:6 136, 156 7:7 7, 138, 139, 159 7:7-8 139, 140 7:7-9 138 7:8 139, 140, 144 7:9 96, 97, 128, 139, 141, 143 7:9-10 148 7:10 144 7:10-11 143, 148 7:10-13 27 7:10-17 14, 15, 32, 34, 82, 103, 141-142, 143,148 8:11-12 171 7:12 42, 143, 144, 145, 147 7:12-13 108, 144 7:13 144, 147 7:14 137, 140, 144, 147

7:14-16 118 7:14-17 144 7:15 145, 172 7:16 147, 7:16-17 147 7:17 147, 148 8 122, 148, 152, 157, 167 8:1 139 8:1-2 67, 139 8:1-3 53, 151 8:1-14 151 8:2 140, 144 8:3 88, 115, 125, 151, 152, 155, 158, 166 8:4 82, 153 8:4-6 122 8:4-7 152-3 8:5 121, 153 8:5-6 153 8:6 122 8:6-8 155 8:7 122 8:7-10 154 8:8 10, 117, 154, 167 8:8-10 115, 154 8:9 115, 154, 158 8:10 46, 115, 121, 154, 155, 163 8:11 115, 134, 155, 158 8:11-12 65, 155 8:11-13 109, 146 8:12 155 8:13 115, 163 8:13-14 156, 170 8:14 62, 104, 105, 156, 157, 159 9 4, 148, 159, 163, 168, 169 9:1 7, 34, 79, 103, 134, 140, 159, 160, 162, 163, 168, 170 9:1-2 32, 33 9:1-4 159, 163, 164, 166 9:1-6 159, 168, 169 9:2 58, 159 9:2-4 7, 115, 163, 165, 166 9:2-6 115 9:3 42, 58, 161, 162, 163 9:3-4 115 9:4 58, 110, 119, 161, 162, 164 9:5 167, 170, 171 9:5-6 7, 33, 93, 115, 116, 165, 166, 167

SCRIPTURE INDEX 9:6 9:7

34, 166, 167, 168 51, 53, 69, 110, 121, 156, 162, 163, 166, 169, 170 9:7-8 170 9:7-10 169 9:7-15 169 9:8 88, 170, 172 9:8-10 14, 116 9:9 161 9:10 73, 121, 170 9:11 95, 115, 118, 165, 170, 171, 173 9:11-15 14, 15, 34, 133, 169, 170, 171, 174 9:12 172, 173 9:13 115, 148, 173 9:14 171, 172 9:15 18, 173, 174 Obadiah 1:15 173 Micah 26, 42 1:3 57, 96, 97 1:4 57 2:6 147 6:2 32 7:14 51, 86 7:18 141 Nahum 1:3 57 1:4 84 Habakkuk 2:2 76 2:20 126 3:3 34 3:15 97 3:19 97 Zephaniah 115 1:2-6 114 1:7 50, 114, 126 1:9 114 1:15-16 114 2:1-3 114 2:3 61, 114 3:5-7 114 3:8 114 3:9 114 3:11 114 3:20 173, 174 Zechariah 145 2:9 138

2:17 126 11:2 84 12:6 67 13:4-5 144 14:16-19 172 Malachi 174 3:5 157 Psalms 4, 5, 11 2:4 4 2:6 4 4:5 108, 109 11:4 33 14:7 174 18:7-8 95 18:11 95 18:12 95 18:16 95 22 85 22:1-19 85 22:13 85 22:16 46 24 34 24:4 157 24:7-9 34 25:8-9 61 25:14 74 32 108, 109 32:8 109 42 108 44 108 45 108 45:8 123 45:12 84 47:5 122 47:8 108 48 4 48:2-3 4 48:3 35 52:10 5 53:7 174 65 5 68 85 68:5 92 68:6-7 85 68:16 85 68:16-17 86 68:18 85 68:23 85, 86 68:30 85

197

198

AMOS AND THE COSMIC IMAGINATION 68:31 85 74 30 74:13-14 27 77 30 77:15-21 154 77:20 97 78:13 57 78:38 55 78:68 33 78:69 33 89 30, 173 89:8 74 89:10-11 27 89:15 32 92:13-15 5 93 4 97:2 32 104:2-4 95 104:3-4 95 114 154 135 154 136 154 139 164 139:7-11 164 147:191 95 Job 5, 8, 174 3:8 27 5:9-10 93 6:9 161 7:7 94 9:8 97 9:12 52 11:10 52 14:11-12 46 15:8 74 23:6 136 23:13 52 26:5-14 35 27:8 161 29:22 147 38:31-34 106 Proverbs 5:3 147 6:26 147 10:19 107 19:11 141 22:17 44 30:1 44 30:20 57

31:1 44 Song of Songs 4:1 82 Ecclesiastes 1:1 44 1:14 94 2:11 94 3:11 162 12:12 174 12:13-14 174 Lamentations 2-2 108 1:1-3 108 1:4 46 1:14 52 2:6 122 2:8 46 2:9-10 108 2:17 162 2:18 108 2:22 174 5:21 185 Ezra 3:4 25 Nehemiah 1:1 44 8:14-17 172 1 Chronicles 11:18 57 16:8-36 111 22:3 94 22:5 94 25:1 111 28:2 94 2 Chronicles 20:19-21 111 21:17 57 29:26-27 111 29:30 111 32:1 57 33:6 60 33:9 60 36:21 122 Apocrypha And New Testament Ben Sira 24:33 26 Hebrews 9:10-14 30 Other Ancient Literature

SCRIPTURE INDEX Prophecy of Neferti 21 CTA 4:vii:29–35 44

1QpHab 7:1–5 76 Damascus Document 118

199