Old Testament
Amos 8
Overview
The fourth vision is a basket of ripe summer fruit, built on a Hebrew wordplay: the fruit (qayits) sounds like "the end" (qets) — Israel is ripe for judgment, "the end has come upon my people." Amos then exposes the merchants who "trample on the needy," who can't wait for the Sabbath to end so they can cheat with rigged scales, selling chaff as wheat and buying the poor for silver. As punishment, God promises to turn their feasts into mourning and, most chillingly, to send not a famine of bread but "a famine of hearing the words of the LORD" — a silence of heaven for those who silenced the prophets.
1Thus the Lord Yahweh showed me: behold, a basket of summer fruit.
2He said, “Amos, what do you see?” I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then Yahweh said to me, “The end has come on my people Israel. I will not again pass by them any more.
3The songs of the temple will be wailing in that day,” says the Lord Yahweh. “The dead bodies will be many. In every place they will throw them out with silence.
4Hear this, you who desire to swallow up the needy, and cause the poor of the land to fail,
5saying, ‘When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may market wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel large, and dealing falsely with balances of deceit;
6that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals, and sell the sweepings with the wheat?’”
7Yahweh has sworn by the pride of Jacob, “Surely I will never forget any of their works.
8Won’t the land tremble for this, and everyone mourn who dwells in it? Yes, it will rise up wholly like the River; and it will be stirred up and sink again, like the River of Egypt.
9It will happen in that day,” says the Lord Yahweh, “that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day.
10I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; and I will make you wear sackcloth on all your bodies, and baldness on every head. I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and its end like a bitter day.
11Behold, the days come,” says the Lord Yahweh, “that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing Yahweh’s words.
12They will wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east; they will run back and forth to seek Yahweh’s word, and will not find it.
13In that day the beautiful virgins and the young men will faint for thirst.
14Those who swear by the sin of Samaria, and say, ‘As your god, Dan, lives,’ and, ‘As the way of Beersheba lives,’ they will fall, and never rise up again.”