Amos opens with a thesis statement in the third person: “The words of Amos […] which he saw concerning Israel” (Amos 1:1).
This statement is mixed in with some biographical information, telling us that Amos was among the shepherds of Tekoa, and that he saw the words when Uzziah was king in Judah and Jeroboam son of Joash was king in Israel, two years before an earthquake.
With regards to his profession as a shepherd, the particular word used is only used in one other place: 2 Kgs 3:4, in reference to the king of Moab. The king of Moab, of course, would hardly be some lowly peasant. Given that Amos was apparently literate, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to see him as the same category of shepherd – the owner of a large flock that was tended by employees.
Claude Mariottini discusses Amos’s occupation in more detail in a blog post.
God Roared
The section proper begins with a verse that reads almost like an incantation:
The Lord roars from Zion,
and utters his voice from Jerusalem;
the pastures of the shepherds mourn,
and the top of Carmel withers.
If the verse is original to Amos, the fact that the geographical markers are all from the southern kingdom seems rather odd. There’s something just so Deuteronomistic about Jerusalem as the place from which God is roaring. According to Collins, that’s one reason why this verse is considered by many to be an addition from after the Babylonian exile (A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, p.159).
The use of the term “Zion” is interesting as well, since it’s not a word that’s come up a whole lot in our readings so far. We saw it a fair bit in Lamentations, which is dated to the Babylonian exile. Other than that, we’ve only seen it used a sprinkling of times in Kings and Chronicles, and once in 2 Sam. 5:7, which Wikipedia gives as the earliest use of the word. This seems to be fairly compelling evidence in support of Collins’s assertion.
The Condemnations
The condemnations themselves follow a pattern:
- It begins with the phrase: “Thus says the Lord.” According to Claude Mariottini, this phrase is frequently found in prophetic books, and would have been used by royal messengers speaking on behalf of a king to a designated individual (as in the case with Rabshakeh, envoy from King Sennacherib of Assyria to King Hezekiah of Judah in 2 Kgs 18:19).
- “For three transgressions of [transgressor], and for four, I will not revoke punishment.” The phrase likely means something along the lines of “three transgressions would have been bad enough, but you’ve gone and had four of them!” (Except, of course, with the specific numbers being literally figurative.)
- This is followed by a surprisingly brief explanation of their crimes…
- And a surprisingly brief explanation of the punishment that awaits them. This largely involves a fire that will consume their walls and strongholds (except in the case of Israel).
- Closing each condemnation (except for those of Tyre and Edom), Amos concludes with: “says the Lord God.”
Amos 1:3-5
Target: Damascus, Syria
Transgressions: They threshed Gilead, which we read about in 2 Kgs 10:32-33.
Punishment: God will send fire down on the house of Hazael, and it will devour the strongholds of Benhadad (both Hazael and Behadad were kings of Syria). The people of Syria will be forced into exile to Kir. This will indeed happen when the Assyrians take Damascus in 2 Kgs 16:9. Also of interest is that Amos himself seems to believe that the Syrians originated from Kir (Amos 9:7).

Russian icon of the prophet Amos, from the Iconostasis of Transfiguration Church, Kizhi monastery, in Karelia, Russia, 18th cent.
Amos 1:6-8
Target: Gaza, Philistia
Transgressions: For carrying a whole people into exile, and for selling them to Edom.
Punishment: God will send fire onto the wall of Gaza, destroying her strongholds. The inhabitants will be cut off from Ashdod and the one who holds the scepter of Ashkelon. God will turn his hand against Ekron and the last of the Philistines will die. This all happened when Assyria took over in a series of campaigns (Gaza fell to Tiglath-Pileser in 734BCE, Ashdod to Sargon in 711BCE, and Ashkelon and Ekron to Sennacherib in 701BCE).
Amos 1:9-10
Target: Tyre
Transgressions: For selling people to Edom, and for forgetting the covenant of brotherhood (this latter likely a reference to the close relationship between Tyre and Israel during the reigns of David and Solomon, as per 2 Sam. 5:11 and 1 Kgs 5:1).
Punishment: God will set fire to the wall of Tyre and devour its strongholds. This prophecy also came true, this time when Tyre became a tributary to Assyria and then fell to Nebuchadnezzar 585BCE, after a lengthy siege. It was then destroyed by Alexander the Great in 332BCE.
Amos 1:11-12
Target: Edom
Transgressions: For having pursued his brother with the sword, without pity. Edom was perpetually torn by anger and wrath.
Punishment: God will send fire down on Teman, and it will devour the strongholds of Bozrah. This prophecy also came true, as Edom was destroyed by the Babylonians in the 6th century BCE.
Amos 1:13-15
Target: The Ammonites
Transgressions: For having ripped up pregnant women in Gilead to enlarge their borders. This war against Gilead doesn’t seem to have been recorded anywhere else.
Punishment: God will send fire down to the wall of Rabbah, devouring its strongholds. This will happen with great shouting in the day of battle, and with a tempest in the day of the whirlwind. The Ammonite king and princes will be taken into exile.
Amos 2:1-3
Target: Moab
Transgressions: For having burned to lime the bones of the Edomite king. This is an interesting complaint. While the crimes of the other foreign nations can be read as offenses against Israel (the big Israel, the one that includes Judah), this is a crime against another foreign nation. As Collins puts it, “this is a crime of one Gentile against another and can only be viewed as a crime against humanity. Amos operates with a concept of universal justice, such as we often find in the wisdom literature” (A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, p.156).
Punishment: Fire will rain down upon Moab (though not, at least, it’s walls) and devour the strongholds of Kerioth. Moab will die amid uproar, shouting, and the sound of the trumpet. Its ruler and its princes will be slain.
Amos 2:4-5
Target: Judah
Transgressions: For rejecting the law of God and failing to keep his statutes. For having been led astray by their lies, in the way their fathers walked. This passage is sometimes considered to have been added by a later editor, in large part because of how closely the writing resembles that of the Deuteronomical books.
Punishment: God will bring fire down on Judah devour the strongholds of Jerusalem. Of course, this came to pass in 2 Kgs 24-25.
Turning to Israel
While the authenticity of certain passages is in question, the rhetorical flow works quite well. First, Amos lures his readers/listeners in by raging at the other guy. Then he moves a little closer with the next batch, raging at nations considered ‘cousins’: Edom is mythically descended from Jacob’s brother (Gen. 25:19-34), while the Moabites and Ammonites are descended from Lot (Gen. 19:36-38). Circling ever closer, Amos turns to Judah.
And then Amos pounces, throwing the sins of Israel into their faces.
The sins of Israel are many:
- They sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes. This is likely a reference to bribery in the justice system, rather than a real buyer’s market in the slave trade.
- They trampled the heads of the poor into the dust. This seemed fairly self-evident to me, but the New Bible Commentary made it all about real estate, saying that they were begrudging the poor even the small amount of dust that they put on their heads when mourning (p.731). This could be a translation issue, or perhaps I’m just not getting it, but it’s certainly a powerful image.
- A man and his father have sex with the same woman, thus profaning God’s holy name. This is generally prohibited in Lev. 20:11, but it seems that many commentaries read this as a condemnation of cultic prostitution (which would explain the reference to God’s holy name). The man and the father would therefore not necessarily be literal, but an indication that the whole of the community is involved in this sin. Of course, once interpretation does not exclude the other, and a double meaning may have been intended.
- They lay down beside every altar (clearly, Israel wasn’t quite monotheistic enough), upon garments taken in pledge (likely a reference to the same string of laws that gave us Deut. 24:17, prohibiting the taking of a widow’s clothing in pledge).
- They drink the wine of those who have been fined in the house of their God. The idea that enforcement agencies might profit from greater fines for smaller infractions is certainly still a problem.
Amos breaks the pattern by reminding his audience that God destroyed the Amorites for them – even though the Amorites were as tall as cedars and as strong as oaks. God brought them out of Egypt and led them through the wilderness, then gave them the Amorite lands to call their own. He raised prophets and Nazirites (a person who voluntarily makes a vow, as discussed in Num. 6) from among them, and yet… And yet they have made the Nazirites drink wine and commanded the prophets not to prophecy (a sore point for Amos, I’m sure).
Apparently, the authenticity of this passage about prophets and Nazirites (Amos 2:11-12) is in question, and it’s not hard to see why. It does break the pattern of the condemnations.
In punishment for all of this, God will press them down. Flight will perish from the swift, strength will vanish from the strong, even the mightiest won’t be able to save themselves from the coming punishment. It will be so bad that even the stout of heart will flee naked. Harsh times, indeed.
So, did Amos’s prophecies come true? Well, yes, but given a large enough time frame, foreseeing the doom of just about any nation is a sure bet. One possibility I’m seeing is that of a late authorship – if the book was written during the Deuteronomic reforms or into the exile, the events Amos is predicting would already have been known, and perhaps setting them in the mouth of Amos, or setting Amos in the time of Jeroboam, served a different purpose. Sifting through the arguments for either side is well above my pay grade, but the commentaries I tend to trust the most seem unanimous in the idea that Amos is largely authentic with some possible late additions.
2 Chronicles 24: Joash’s Bildungsroman
December 4, 2015
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This chapter mostly follows 2 Kgs 12, though of course with some important changes. We begin with a summary of Joash’s rule: He made it 40 years, his mother’s name was Zibiah of Beersheba, he had two wives (who were procured for him by Jehoiada), and he was a great king!
… At least as long as Jehoiada was priest. After that, not so much.
So we begin when Joash is seven years old and has just been crowned. We don’t get many details of his reign, except that he decided to start a restoration project on the Temple to replace the stuff Athaliah’s sons had appropriated for their Baal worship. An expensive restoration project.
His first fundraising strategy was to send priests and Levites throughout Judah to collect money from the people. With haste!
Unfortunately, the Levites did not haste, and the funds weren’t flooding in as Joash had hoped. In Kings, it’s implied that the priests are collecting the funds, just not using it for renovations (with a fairly strong indication that there’s some corruption going on). It’s a rather difficult story, since the Chronicler is clearly setting the goodness up as being Jehoiada’s doing (and, as we shall see, Joash will waste no time in disappointing God once Jehoiada is no longer around). And yet we can clearly see that it is Joash who is pushing for the Temple renovations, and he holds Jehoiada responsible for the failure in raising the funds (without any contradiction from the Chronicler).
Incidentally, Joash’s fundraising efforts are referred to as the “tax levied by Moses” (2 Chron. 24:6). This seems to refer to the tax Moses collected in Exodus 30:12-16, which seems to have been a one-time collection for the building of the tent of meeting. It seems that Joash understood this to be, instead, a tax that could be collected at any time for Temple purposes.
Joash then moves on to a second strategy – he commands that the collection chest be placed outside the gate house of the Temple, and for the people to come in and donate directly, without the priests as intermediaries. Judah’s leaders rejoice at the opportunity to pay taxes and fill the coffers with all the haste that the priests had not managed. This chapter may be the product of an IRS worker’s fantasies.
Whenever the chest is full, the Levites have to hand it offer to the king’s secretary and the officer of the chief priest, who would then give it to the people in charge of the renovations. Soon, the Temple is repaired and even improved!
And when the workers had finished, they had enough left over for Joash and Jehoiada to use in making ritual utensils for the Temple.
The Post-Jehoiada Era
But time is master of us all and Jehoiada succumbed at the tender age of 130, and he was buried among the kings of David’s dynasty “because he had done good in Israel” (2 Chron. 24:16).
Murder of Zechariah, by William Brassey Hole
It doesn’t take long for things to go south after that. When the leaders of Judah came to make obeisance to the king, they fail to visit the Temple – choosing instead to visit the Asherim and idols.
God, of course, is mildly miffed. So he sends prophets to Judah to bring them back in line, but of course they won’t listen. Even worse, one of the prophets happens to be Jehoiada’s own son, Zechariah, and the people stone him to death. (We’re told that the people conspire against them, likely meaning that they faked legal charges as Jezebel did of Naboth in 1 Kgs 21:1-16.) As he died, Zechariah called out to God to avenge him.
God doesn’t take long to fulfil that request, and he sends the Syrians to loot Judah before the end of the year. They win, even though their army is small, and kill “all the princes” of Judah (2 Chron. 24:23).
When the Syrians left, they left Joash severely wounded. His own servants – Zabad son of Shimeath the Ammonitess and Jehozabad son of Shimrith the Moabitess – conspired against him out of loyalty to Zechariah, and they murder him in his bed.
I noticed that both of the servants are apparently non-Israelites, and both are identified in relation to their mothers. Both details seem rather surprising, and I can’t help but wonder if they are significant. In 2 Kgs 12:21, the servants are Jozacar son of Shimeath and Jehozabad son of Shomer, who are not identified by their nationality. The spelling differences seem fairly common when foreigners are named.
Though he was buried in the city of David, Joash was not buried in the tomb of the kings, while Jehoiada the priest was! At least, here Joash wasn’t buried with the kings, while he was buried “with his fathers” in 2 Kgs 12:20-21.
James Bradford Pate raises an interesting point: We’ve seen this happen a fair bit in Chronicles – kings are buried, or not, in the tomb of the kings based on their goodness. He rightfully asks who is making these burial decisions?
For more information on Joash’s sons and the oracles against him, as well as the rebuilding of the Temple, the Chronicler sends us to the Commentary on the Book of the Kings.