Through My Bible Yr 03 – August 03
Amos 8:4 – 9:15
Amos 8
Fraud and Hypocrisy on Holy Days
4 Listen to this, you who trample on the needy
to wipe out the oppressed from the land,
5 who say, “When will the New Moon be over so that we can sell grain?
When will the Sabbath end so that we can open the grain bins?
Then we will make the bushel [1] smaller and make the shekel weight heavier. [2]
We will cheat with dishonest scales.
6 We will buy the poor for silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals.
We will sell the chaff with the grain.”
A Famine of the Lord’s Word
7 The Lord swears by the Pride of Jacob,
“I will never forget any of their deeds!”
8 Because of this, the land will shake,
and everyone living in it will mourn.
The whole land will rise up like the Nile.
It will surge and sink down again like the Nile of Egypt.
9 Here is what will happen on that day, declares the Lord God:
I will make the sun set at noon,
and I will bring darkness on the earth when it should be light.
10 I will turn your festivals into mourning
and all of your songs into a lamentation.
I will put sackcloth on all your waists
and baldness on every head.
I will make that day like the mourning for an only son,
and it will end like a bitter day.
11 Look, the days are coming, declares the Lord God,
when I will send a famine into the land—
not a famine of bread
nor a thirst for water,
but rather a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.
12 People will stumble from sea to sea
and from north to east.
They will roam back and forth seeking the word of the Lord,
but they will not find it.
13 On that day the beautiful virgins will faint,
and the young men will grow weak from thirst.
14 Those who swear by the shameful guilt [3] of Samaria,
those who say, “As your god lives, Dan,”
or, “The way of Beersheba lives”—
they will fall, and they will never rise again.
The Fifth Vision: The Lord Topples the Temple
Amos 9
1 I saw the Lord standing by the altar, and he said:
Strike the capitals on top of the pillars so that the thresholds shake.
Cut them off so that they fall on the heads of all the people,
and those who survive I will kill with the sword.
No one who flees from there will get away,
and not a single fugitive from among them will escape.
2 Even if they dig down to hell, [4]
from there my hand will seize them.
And even if they ascend to heaven,
from there I will bring them down.
3 Even if they hide themselves on the top of Mount Carmel,
from there I will search for them, and I will seize them.
Even if they hide themselves from my sight at the bottom of the sea,
from there I will command the serpent, and it will bite them.
4 Even if they go into captivity in the presence of their enemies,
from there I will command the sword, and it will kill them.
And I will set my eye upon them for disaster and not for good.
The Lord Shakes the Earth
5 The Lord God of Armies is the one who touches the earth, so that it melts.
All who dwell on it mourn.
All of it rises like the Nile,
and like the Nile of Egypt it sinks down again.
6 He is the one who builds his upper chambers in heaven.
He set the foundation for his vault upon the earth.
He is the one who summons the waters of the sea
and pours them out over the face of the earth—
the Lord is his name.
The Final Judgment
7 Are you not like Cushites [5] to me, you children of Israel?
declares the Lord.
Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt
and the Philistines from Caphtor [6]
and the Arameans from Kir? [7]
8 Look, the eyes of the Lord God are on the sinful kingdom,
and I will destroy it from the face of the earth.
But I will never completely destroy the house of Jacob,
declares the Lord.
9 Listen! I am giving a command,
and among all the nations I will shake the house of Israel
as the contents of a sieve are shaken,
and not even one pebble [8] will fall out to the ground. [9]
10 By a sword, all the sinners among my people will die,
those who are saying, “Disaster will not overtake us. It will not confront us.”
The Restoration of David’s Fallen Shelter
11 In that day I will raise up the fallen shelter of David.
I will repair the broken parts of its walls,
and I will raise up its ruins.
I will rebuild it as in days of old,
12 so that they will possess what remains of Edom,
that is, all the nations who are called by my name,
declares the Lord, who is doing this.
13 Look, days are coming, declares the Lord,
when the plowman will catch up with the reaper,
and the one who tramples grapes will catch up with the one sowing the seed.
The mountains will drip sweet wine, [10]
and all the hills will wave with grain. [11]
14 I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel,
and they will rebuild the desolate cities and dwell in them.
They will plant vineyards and drink their wine,
and they will make gardens and eat their fruit.
15 I will plant them in their soil,
and they will never again be uprooted from the soil
that I have given to them,
says the Lord your God.
Footnotes
- Amos 8:5 Literally the ephah
- Amos 8:5 Merchants cheated by measuring out the grain they were selling with an undersized bushel and weighing the silver they received with an overweight shekel.
- Amos 8:14 Possibly a distortion of the name of the goddess Ashima/Asherah
- Amos 9:2 Hebrew sheol
- Amos 9:7 Cushites are black Africans from south of Egypt, from the territory that today is Sudan.
- Amos 9:7 That is, Crete or some other location in the Mediterranean
- Amos 9:7 The location of Kir is unknown. It is probably far to the north.
- Amos 9:9 Or kernel of grain
- Amos 9:9 The people of Israel are being sorted through a sieve. It is not clear whether those kept in the sieve are the pebbles that cannot escape judgment or the grains that are being separated from the chaff, which will be burned. The judgment is the same in either case.
- Amos 9:13 Sweet wine refers to wine that is still sweet because it has not yet been soured by continued fermentation.
- Amos 9:13 Or flow with wine
The Holy Bible, Evangelical Heritage Version®, EHV®, © 2019 Wartburg Project, Inc. All rights reserved.
