Amos 1:1-2:8

The book of Amos begins with an introduction to the prophet as a “shepherd” or “sheepbreeder” from Tekoa during the days of King Uzziah of Judah and Jeroboam of Israel (early-mid 8th century BCE). The verse ends with the phrase “two years before the earthquake”, presumably an extremely impactful natural disaster that would have been remembered for quite a time afterwards and for which there is some archaeological evidence. I think we can safely assume that the prophet himself did not write this third person biography, though we do not know whether this alone was a later addition to the text or whether the entire book was the product of someone else recording his words and ideas.

There are a couple interesting things here. The first is that my translation (New Oxford Annotated Bible) identifies Tekoa as located in Judah while Amos himself, as we’ll see, spends most of his time in Israel, the larger and more prosperous kingdom to the north. The second is that the time of Jeroboam - likely Jeroboam II - is often identified as the peak of Israel’s power and wealth before the Neo-Assyrian Empire crushed the entire region.*

*Neo-Assyrian revisionists, please sound off in the comments.

The setup is therefore of a fairly prosperous individual - one with probably enough wealth to own flocks of sheep - traveling from a small, poor, agrarian society to a larger, wealthier, slightly more urban one in order to prophesy. This could be a reflection of the relative importance of the Israelite form of religion throughout the region. Of course, we don't actually really know if Amos was originally from Judah or Israel. After all, every book in the canon made its way through the southern kingdom, which lasted longer and saw its priestly tradition survive exile. It's perfectly possible that his Judahite identity was added by a later editor. Either way, he has a lot more to say about Israel than about Judah.

Verse two then proclaims the supremacy of Zion and Jerusalem - either evidence of Amos’s immigrant status or later redactors - before moving into a series of curses against surrounding nations. The first six, Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, and Moab, follow the same formula: accusations of war crimes and a promise to “send a fire.” Many of these seem to be referring to political events of the 8th century that have been lost to history.

One that stands out as strange is the verse on Tyre, “I will not revoke the punishment; because [Tyre] delivered entire communities over to Edom.” This seems to be a condemnation on Tyre for slave trading. Tyre was a port city on the Mediterranean in modern day Lebanon that almost certainly dealt in slaves. Edom, on the other hand, was an inland kingdom in what is today southern Jordan.* Not natural trading partners, in other words. It would be a long trip through either a desert or Israel itself to get from one to the other. Not impossible, but odd.

*Edom is also the only one of these kingdoms to border Judah and not Israel, so this part could have been added or altered later by a Judahite editor. Edom selling Judahite slaves would make much more sense. Another possibility is that Israel had expanded to the southwest in the time of Jeroboam II, past the kingdom of Judah. As far as I can tell, there is no scholarly consensus that the kingdom of Israel expanded that far in the 8th century. but there is some circumstantial evidence for this in Amos, most notably the mention of a(n Israelite?) shrine at Beersheba, which is to the southwest of Jerusalem near the Negev Desrt. If the Israelite kingdom had expanded that far, then Israelite and Edomite merchants could have clashed on the roads from southern Jordan to ports in Gaza or Sinai. This would also make sense of the Tyre-Edom alliance alluded to earlier.

There is then a curse against Judah which doesn’t really fit. My Bible suggests it’s a later addition and I agree, mainly because the lack of poetic vitriol really stands in stark contrast to every other curse.* Instead of war crimes, we get, “because they have rejected the law of the Lord and have not kept his statutes, but they have been led astray by the same lies after which their ancestors walked.” When you contrast that to the description of the crimes of Israel, “because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals - they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way…” or the nations who came before, you can really feel the difference in the tone of the author. The writer of Amos shows such passion and specificity throughout the meat of the book, except for those verses about Judah.

*This also suggests to me that maybe he wasn’t originally from Tekoa. I’ve never known someone with this temperament who wouldn’t get more riled up about their home than anywhere else. Unless he was a massive nationalist, I suppose. But that doesn’t fit with the tone and ideology of the rest of the book, in my opinion.

The curse against Israel also shows what the prophet really cares about: exploitation of the poor. Now, I should probably say here that I’m in no position to judge the correctness of this critique, but it would be a rare pre-modern society that treated its poor decently, so I’m assuming he has a point.

I can imagine the counter-argument that he’s a member of the equivalent of the landed gentry attacking the growing urban elite. In this case, the concern for the poor would be disingenuous, hiding the true motivation of blocking Israelite economic progress in service of his own parochial economic interests. This scenario has happened of course, though I don’t think it’s occurring in Amos. For one, he doesn’t seem to have the visceral hatred of cities you find in such privileged defenders of rural folkways; for another, he doesn’t focus on taxes and increasing central authority, the two bete noires of landed gentries throughout history.

Anyway, here’s a representative example of the critique.

“because they sell the righteous for silver,

and the needy for a pair of sandals -

they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth,

and push the afflicted out of the way;

father and son go in to the same girl,

so that my holy name is profaned;

they lay themselves down beside every altar on garments taken in pledge;

and in the house of their God they drink wine bought with fines they imposed.”

-Amos 2:6b-8

Amos is really showing himself to be a top notch polemicist there, even in translation. And the moral message at the heart of the curse comes through clearly: unjust behavior towards the poor makes a mockery of religion. This will not be the last time the prophet advances this theme. It also would be a fascinating way to begin the canon. I can see that a series of curses against long-vanished Iron Age kingdoms does not have the same storytelling power as, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth”, but perhaps the morals of such stories may be even more important.

 

Next time, I'll tackle the aspects of the middle of the book that stood out to me.