Reflections on Amos 8

 Amos 08  (Contemporary English Version)

1. The LORD God showed me a basket of ripe fruit
   
2. and asked, "Amos, what do you see?" "A basket of ripe fruit," I replied. Then he said, "This is the end for my people Israel. I won't forgive them again.
   
3. Instead of singing in the temple, they will cry and weep. Dead bodies will be everywhere. So keep silent! I, the LORD, have spoken!"
   
4. You people crush those in need and wipe out the poor.
   
5. You say to yourselves, "How much longer before the end of the New Moon Festival? When will the Sabbath be over? Our wheat is ready, and we want to sell it now. We can't wait to cheat and charge high prices for the grain we sell. We will use dishonest scales
   
6. and mix dust in the grain. Those who are needy and poor don't have any money. We will make them our slaves for the price of a pair of sandals."
   
7. I, the LORD, won't forget any of this, though you take great pride in your ancestor Jacob.
   
8. Your country will tremble, and you will mourn. It will be like the Nile River that rises and overflows, then sinks back down.
   
9. On that day, I, the LORD God, will make the sun go down at noon, and I will turn daylight into darkness.
   
10. Your festivals and joyful singing will turn into sorrow. You will wear sackcloth and shave your heads, as you would at the death of your only son. It will be a horrible day.
    
11. I, the LORD, also promise you a terrible shortage, but not of food and water. You will hunger and thirst to hear my message.
    
12. You will search everywhere-- from north to south, from east to west. You will go all over the earth, seeking a message from me, the LORD. But you won't find one.
    
13. Your beautiful young women and your young men will faint from thirst.
    
14. You made promises in the name of Ashimah, the goddess of Samaria. And you made vows in my name at the shrines of Dan and Beersheba. But you will fall and never get up.

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Amos' vision of the summer fruit provides both a word picture and a play on words. With the word picture we imagine fruit that is ripe and will soon spoil and become rotten. For years the Lord had been telling the nation that judgment was coming if the people did not repent. That judgment was now ripe and ready for picking. As for the play on words, the Hebrew word for "summer fruit" looks and sounds like the word for "end." Amos used the word for "summer fruit" (hayitz) to lead to saying "the end is come." (hatz) "Israel, like summer fruit, has ripened for judgment.

Though the passage does not go further with the comparison, verse 3 lends itself to taking the word picture a step further. If we imagine the fruit trees with ripe fruit hanging on them and the fruit ripening and dropping to the ground, lying there to rot, we have a picture of the "Many dead bodies, thrown everywhere."

While Israel's bent toward worshiping other gods was often the focus of God's wrath, in this case it was their gross injustice with their fellow Israelites. The rich became rich dishonestly and had no qualms about the suffering they caused as a result. They used dishonest weights and inferior products to increase their profits and decrease the ability of the poor to purchase what they needed. When the poor could no longer pay, the rich bought them up into slavery for almost nothing or took their land, or both.

When the end came it would be a day of terror. The land would quake, rising and falling in waves like the Nile, and there would be an eclipse of the sun, darkening the land in the middle of the day. Death would come on the land in droves, though we are not told how it would come. Every family would grieve the death of a family member. No one who survived that day would go without mourning. Everyone would be wearing sackcloth and have their head shaved in mourning. The bitterness of that day would be like the bitterness of losing an only son.

Having been brought to their knees from the grief and terror of that day, the people would finally seek God. But then they would be faced with a famine. Not a famine of food and water, but of hearing God's word. God would have gone silent and now they would be alone in their grief. They shunned the word of the Lord when it was available to them and now when they wanted to hear it, it was no longer available to them.