Then follows the remarkable appeal from the habits of this age to those of the times of Israel's simplicity. Was it flesh- or meal-offerings that ye brought Me in the wilderness, forty years, O house of Israel?[319] That is to say, at the very time when God made Israel His people, and led them safely to the promised land—the time when of all others He did most for them—He was not moved to such love and deliverance by the propitiatory bribes, which this generation imagine to be so availing and indispensable. Nay, those still shall not avail, for exile from the land shall now as surely come in spite of them, as the possession of the land in old times came without them. This at least seems to be the drift of the very obscure verse which follows, and is the unmistakable statement of the close of the oracle. But ye shall lift up ... your king and ... your god, images which you have made for yourselves;[320] and I will carry you away into exile far beyond Damascus, saith Jehovah—God of Hosts is His Name![321] So this chapter closes like the previous, with the marshalling of God's armies. But as there His hosts were the movements of Nature and the Great Stars, so here they are the nations of the world. By His rule of both He is the God of Hosts.
3. "At Ease in Zion."
Amos vi.
The evil of the national worship was the false political confidence which it engendered. Leaving the ritual alone, Amos now proceeds to assault this confidence. We are taken from the public worship of the people to the private banquets of the rich, but again only in order to have their security and extravagance contrasted with the pestilence, the war and the captivity, that are rapidly approaching.
Woe unto them that are at ease in Zion[322]—it is a proud and overweening ease which the word expresses—and that trust in the mount of Samaria! Men of mark of the first of the peoples—ironically, for that is Israel's opinion of itself—and to them do the house of Israel resort!...[323] Ye that put off the day of calamity[324] and draw near the sessions of injustice[325]—an epigram and proverb, for it is the universal way of men to wish and fancy far away the very crisis that their sins are hastening on. Isaiah described this same generation as drawing iniquity with cords of hypocrisy, and sin as it were with a cart-rope! That lie on ivory diwans and sprawl on their couches—another luxurious custom, which filled this rude shepherd with contempt—and eat lambs from the flock and calves from the midst of the stall[326]—that is, only the most delicate of meats—who prate or purr or babble to the sound of the viol, and as if they were David himself invent for them instruments of song;[327] who drink wine by ewerfuls—waterpotfuls—and anoint with the finest of oil—yet never do they grieve at the havoc of Joseph! The havoc is the moral havoc, for the social structure of Israel is obviously still secure.[328] The rich are indifferent to it; they have wealth, art, patriotism, religion, but neither heart for the poverty nor conscience for the sin of their people. We know their kind! They are always with us, who live well and imagine they are proportionally clever and refined. They have their political zeal, will rally to an election when the interests of their class or their trade is in danger. They have a robust and exuberant patriotism, talk grandly of commerce, empire and the national destiny; but for the real woes and sores of the people, the poverty, the overwork, the drunkenness, the dissoluteness, which more affect a nation's life than anything else, they have no pity and no care.
Therefore now—the double initial of judgment—shall they go into exile at the head of the exiles, and stilled shall be the revelry of the dissolute—literally the sprawlers, as in ver. 4, but used here rather in the moral than in the physical sense. Sworn hath the Lord Jehovah by Himself—'tis the oracle of Jehovah God of Hosts: I am loathing[329] the pride of Jacob, and his palaces do I hate, and I will pack up a city and its fulness.[330]... For, behold, Jehovah is commanding, and He will smite the great house into ruins and the small house into splinters. The collapse must come, postpone it as their fancy will, for it has been worked for and is inevitable. How could it be otherwise? Shall horses run on a cliff, or the sea be ploughed by oxen[331]—that ye should turn justice to poison and the fruit of righteousness to wormwood! Ye that exult in Lo-Debar and say, By our own strength have we taken to ourselves Ḳarnaim. So Grätz rightly reads the verse. The Hebrew text and all the versions take these names as if they were common nouns—Lo-Debar, a thing of nought; Ḳarnaim, a pair of horns—and doubtless it was just because of this possible play upon their names, that Amos selected these two out of all the recent conquests of Israel. Karnaim, in full Ashteroth Karnaim, Astarte of Horns, was that immemorial fortress and sanctuary which lay out upon the great plateau of Bashan towards Damascus; so obvious and cardinal a site that it appears in the sacred history both in the earliest recorded campaign in Abraham's time and in one of the latest under the Maccabees.[332] Lo-Debar was of Gilead, and probably lay on that last rampart of the province northward, overlooking the Yarmuk, a strategical point which must have often been contested by Israel and Aram, and with which no other Old Testament name has been identified.[333] These two fortresses, with many others, Israel had lately taken from Aram; but not, as they boasted, by their own strength. It was only Aram's pre-occupation with Assyria now surgent on the northern flank, which allowed Israel these easy victories. And this same northern foe would soon overwhelm themselves. For, behold, I am to raise up against you, O house of Israel—'tis the oracle of Jehovah God of the hosts[334]—a Nation, and they shall oppress you from the Entrance of Hamath to the Torrent of the 'Arabah. Every one knows the former, the Pass between the Lebanons, at whose mouth stands Dan, northern limit of Israel; but it is hard to identify the latter. If Amos means to include Judah, we should have expected the Torrent of Egypt, the present Wady el 'Arish; but the Wady of the 'Arabah may be a corresponding valley in the eastern watershed issuing in the 'Arabah. If Amos threatens only the Northern Kingdom, he intends some wady running down to that Sea of the 'Arabah, the Dead Sea, which is elsewhere given as the limit of Israel.[335]
The Assyrian flood, then, was about to break, and the oracles close with the hopeless prospect of the whole land submerged beneath it.
4. A Fragment from the Plague.
In the above exposition we have omitted two very curious verses, 9 and 10, which are held by some critics to interrupt the current of the chapter, and to reflect an entirely different kind of calamity from that which it predicts. I do not think these critics right, for reasons I am about to give; but the verses are so remarkable that it is most convenient to treat them by themselves apart from the rest of the chapter. Here they are, with the verse immediately in front of them.