The Literature of the Old Testament

by George Foot Moore

With all this, Israel is very religious; it acknowledges the success in war and the profit of commerce as the gift of the national God and evidence of his favour, and does not grudge him his share even of ill-gotten gains. Amos's God has a conscience—that was a new idea about gods!—and abhors such religion; he hates their festivals, refuses their sacrifices, spurns their hymns of praise. "But let justice roll down like floods, and right like an unfailing stream." That is the only worship he owns.

The standard of right is not one thing in Israel and another among the heathen: Amos summons the Philistines and the Egyptians to behold with amazement and horror the doings in Samaria. In the oracles with which the book opens, he pronounces the judgment of God on the peoples neighbour to Israel, not solely because they have wronged Israel, as in so many of the prophecies against the nations, but because they have violated the principles of humanity. It is the first assertion in the Old Testament that there is such a thing as an international morality. Amos is the first in the succession of ethical prophets, the author, so far as we know, of a new idea of religion. It is deeply significant that he and Hosea are contemporaries; hardly more than ten years can lie between Amos's appearance at Bethel and the earliest of Hosea's prophecies against the house of Jehu. The God of Amos is the apotheosis of right, the conscience of the world that can neither be corrupted nor sophisticated; the God of Hosea was born in the heart of a man whose love the grossest wrong could not quench. Retribution is the divinity of the one, redemption of the other.

Amos's conception was the first to take hold; the earlier prophecies of Isaiah against Judah are wholly in that mood. Hosea had to wait a century before his greater thought found a fruitful soil in Jeremiah and the Deuteronomists.

The predictions of judgment in Amos are so sweeping and ultimate that later readers found the message incomplete. Especially the last oracle (ix. 1 ff.) was an ill-omened close. Consequently, a messianic pendant was attached to it (ix. 11-15) by a Judæan editor, and an imperfect juncture made by the introduction of vs. 8^b (which flatly contradicts the first half verse) and 9^b (no grain shall fall to the ground) perhaps displacing some words of the original.

It seems that some imitative pieces have been inserted also in c. 1; the prophecy against Judah in ii. 4 f. with its deuteronomic sins, falls out of the scheme and is generally recognized as editorial. Slight retouches elsewhere (e.g. iv. 13; v. 8 f.; ix. 6) need not detain us. In general the book has suffered little from the improvers, and the text is in relatively good preservation.

Obadiah.—The single chapter of Obadiah, the shortest of the Old Testament books, is a prophecy against the Edomites, toward whom, as we have repeatedly seen, the Jews cherished an implacable animosity from the time of the fall of Jerusalem. Obadiah vss. 1-9 has close parallels in Jer. xlix. 7-22 (cf. Obad. vss. 1-4 with Jer. xlix. 14-16; Obad. vs. 5 f., Jer. xlix. 9 f.; Obad. vs. 8, Jer. xlix. 7). The question which is the borrower has been differently answered. Obadiah vss. 15-21, in which Edom gets its judgment in the Day of the Lord on the nations, is probably later than vss. 1-14, but the whole is post-exilic.

Jonah.—The Book of Jonah has already been discussed along with the stories of Esther and Ruth.

Micah.—The prediction of Micah, the Morashtite, that Zion should be plowed as a field and Jerusalem be a heap of ruins and the temple hill become like forest shrines (Mic. iii. 2), is quoted under his name in Jer. xxvi. 18—the only example of such a prophetic quotation in the Old Testament. The author, a resident of Moresheth-Gath in the Judæan Lowland, is said in the title to have prophesied in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, which is the editor's way of saying that he was a younger contemporary of Isaiah. The reign of Hezekiah is attested by the tradition in Jeremiah. It is probable that only cc. 1-3 (with perhaps some dubious possibilities in the following chapters) can be attributed to Micah.

The book opens with an oracle against Samaria (Mic. i. 2-8). Samaria fell in 721 B.C., while the sequel (vs. 9 ff.) portrays the imminent peril of Judah, presumably in the time of Sennacherib (701 B.C.). The case seems to be similar to Isa. xxviii. 1 ff.: the fate of Samaria, though it is already fact, is represented prophetically for a closer parallel to the following. Verses 10-16 are little more than a string of ominous puns on the names of towns in the author's Lowland, which in translation lose what little point they have. The second chapter gives the cause of the woe much as in Amos or Isaiah, but perhaps with local emphasis on the wrongs the capitalists of the great city inflict on the peasant proprietors. His forebodings and censures are not well received, men bid him stop his preaching, it is a different sort of prophet they like (ii. 6-11). "If a man, walking in wind and falsehood, should lie, 'I will preach to thee of wine and drink,' he will be the preacher for this people." Micah has more to say, but not better, about the demagogue prophets in the following oracle (iii. 5-7). The predictions of disaster in ii. 1-11 have their point blunted in vs. 12 f. in the way the editors of the prophetic books so often do it.

Chapter 3 returns to condemnation, which turns at last on the heads of the rulers "who build up Zion with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity," and ends with the prediction of the total destruction of the city which has already been quoted.