Amos: Let Justice Roll On

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Amos, a herdsman and a tender of fig trees from Tekoa, a village in Judah, who went north to preach. His words were collected by others, and the hopeful ending may have been added later.

When: About 760 to 750 BC, under King Jeroboam II, two years before the earthquake (Amos 1:1). He is the earliest prophet whose words survive as a book.

Where it fits: Amos preached in the northern kingdom under King Jeroboam II (2 Kings 14:23–29), less than forty years before Assyria destroyed it in 722 BC.

Where I quote it: Never directly. James, my brother, quoted it to argue that foreigners should be welcomed into my movement (Acts 15:16–17).

If you only read three chapters: Amos 2, Amos 5 and Amos 8.

Words to Know

Bethel — the royal sanctuary of the northern kingdom, where Amos preached.

Ephah and shekel — a measure of grain and a weight for silver. Cheating merchants made the ephah small and the shekel heavy.

Clothes taken in pledge — cloaks the poor handed over as security for loans.

Cows of Bashan — Amos’s name for the rich women of Samaria. Bashan was famous for fat cattle.

The Book in Brief

The book opens with a heading. These are the words of Amos, one of the herdsmen of Tekoa, from the days of King Uzziah of Judah and King Jeroboam of Israel, two years before the earthquake.

Chapters 1 and 2 are a chain of judgments. Amos condemns Israel’s neighbors one by one for their crimes in war: Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon and Moab. Then he condemns Judah. Then, at the greatest length, Israel itself, for selling the poor and trampling on the weak.

Chapters 3 to 6 are speeches against the northern kingdom and its capital, Samaria. Amos attacks the rich women he calls the cows of Bashan, the crowds bringing sacrifices to the shrines at Bethel and Gilgal, the judges who take bribes, and the men who lie on beds of ivory and drink wine by the bowl. God has sent hunger, drought, blight and plague, and still they have not come back. The day of the LORD they long for will be darkness, not light. God hates their feasts and wants justice instead.

Chapters 7 to 9 tell of five visions. In the first two, a swarm of locusts and a fire, Amos begs God to spare the people, and God relents. In the third, God holds a plumb line against a wall, and this time there is no reprieve. Between the visions comes the only story in the book. Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, reports Amos to the king and orders him back to Judah. Amos answers that he is no prophet, only a herdsman God took from the flock. In the fourth vision, a basket of summer fruit means the end has come, and Amos turns on the merchants who cannot wait for the Sabbath to be over. In the fifth, he sees the Lord beside the altar, ordering the pillars struck so the building falls on the people.

The last verses turn to hope. God will raise up the fallen tent of David, bring the people home from captivity, and plant them in their land for good.

Amos was not a professional prophet. When the king’s priest told him to go home and earn his living somewhere else, he said, I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet’s son; but I was a herdsman, and a farmer of sycamore figs; and the LORD took me from following the flock (Amos 7:14–15).

He came from the south, from Judah, and preached in the north, at the king’s own sanctuary at Bethel, while the northern kingdom was rich and at peace. It was the wrong place and the wrong time to say what he said.

Go deeperThe earthquake that dates the book

The heading of Amos dates his preaching in an unusual way: two years before the earthquake (Amos 1:1). It must have been a quake that everyone remembered. Long afterward, another prophet could still say, you shall flee, just like you fled from before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah (Zechariah 14:5).

Later tradition told a story about it. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing near the end of the first century, says that when King Uzziah went into the Temple to burn incense, a duty kept for the priests, a great earthquake split the Temple open, a beam of sunlight fell on the king’s face, and leprosy struck him on the spot.¹ The book of Chronicles tells of Uzziah’s incense and his leprosy, but it says nothing about an earthquake (2 Chronicles 26:16–21).

The ground may remember it too. In the 1950s the Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin dug at Hazor, in the far north of Israel. In a layer from the first half of the 700s BC he found walls tilted over, pillars leaning and roofs fallen in, damage he put down to an earthquake.² The mud on the floor of the Dead Sea keeps a record of the shaking of the land over thousands of years. A study published in 2011 found earthquake-disturbed layers there from around the middle of the 700s BC.³ Not everyone is convinced. Some experts think the damage at the dig sites has been read too eagerly as the work of one great quake.⁴

Why date a prophet by an earthquake? Many scholars think the people who collected his words saw it as the first sign that Amos had been right. His last vision begins with the Lord ordering a sanctuary struck that the thresholds may shake (Amos 9:1).⁵

The trap

Amos begins with a trick. He condemns the nations around Israel one by one: Damascus for its cruelty, Gaza for selling whole populations as slaves, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab (Amos 1:3–2:3). You can imagine the crowd at Bethel nodding along.

Then he condemns Judah. Still fine, for a northern crowd.

Then he turns on Israel:

They have sold the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals; they trample on the dust of the earth on the head of the poor, and deny justice to the oppressed … they lay themselves down beside every altar on clothes taken in pledge (Amos 2:6–8).

Clothes taken in pledge. The Law said a poor man’s cloak, taken as security, had to be returned before sunset, because it was his blanket (Exodus 22:26–27). In Amos’s day, the rich were keeping those cloaks and spreading them out to lie on at the altar while they worshiped.

The cows of Bashan

Listen to this word, you cows of Bashan, who are on the mountain of Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who tell their husbands, “Bring us drinks!” (Amos 4:1).

Amos attacks the rich of Samaria for their houses of ivory and their beds of ivory (Amos 3:15; 6:4). When archaeologists excavated the royal quarter of Samaria, they found hundreds of carved ivory pieces that had once decorated furniture.⁶

You have built houses of cut stone, but you will not dwell in them. You have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine (Amos 5:11). Forty years later, Assyria destroyed Samaria.

Go deeperWhat the diggers found at Samaria

Samaria was the capital of the northern kingdom, a city King Omri built on a hill he bought (1 Kings 16:24). It has been dug on a large scale twice: by an expedition from Harvard University from 1908 to 1910, and by a joint expedition led by the British archaeologist John Crowfoot from 1931 to 1935.⁶

The Harvard team found something that brings Amos’s world very close. In 1910, under the floor of a building on the royal hill, they found more than a hundred pieces of broken pottery used as scrap paper, called ostraca. Sixty-three can still be read. They are delivery notes. Each gives a year of the king’s reign, a village near the capital, the names of the men involved, and what was sent: a jar of aged wine, or a jar of fine oil. The king is not named, but most scholars think he was Jeroboam II, the king of Amos’s day.⁷

Scholars argue about what the notes record. Some read them as taxes. Others think they record the produce of country estates, sent to officials who lived in the capital. Either way, the goods go one way, from the villages up to the hill of Samaria. Now read Amos: who drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the best oils; but they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph (Amos 6:6).

The ivories from the second dig are mostly small carved panels that were once fixed to beds, chairs and boxes. Some were inlaid with colored glass or covered with gold. Many show figures from Egyptian religion, such as the infant god Horus. They were the luxury goods of their day.⁸

I hate your feasts

Then Amos says the thing that made him unforgettable.

I hate, I despise your feasts, and I can’t stand your solemn assemblies … Take away from me the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like rivers, and righteousness like a mighty stream (Amos 5:21–24).

God does not want the worship of people who are crushing the poor. God wants justice, not as a trickle, but rolling on like rivers.

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. used this verse in Washington, in front of a quarter of a million people, in an older translation’s wording: “let justice roll down like waters.” His words are carved on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, with water running over them.⁹

Waiting for the Sabbath to end

Amos 8 describes the merchants of his day. They are impatient for the holy days to be over so they can get back to business.

When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may market wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel large, and dealing falsely with balances of deceit; that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals, and sell the sweepings with the wheat? (Amos 8:5–6).

They kept the Sabbath. They just could not wait for it to be over. They rigged the scales, sold the floor sweepings as grain and bought people as slaves for the price of a pair of shoes.

The king’s sanctuary

The priest of Bethel, Amaziah, reported Amos to the king: Amos has conspired against you … The land is not able to bear all his words (Amos 7:10). Then he told Amos to get out. Don’t prophesy again any more at Bethel; for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a royal house! (Amos 7:13).

There it is in one sentence. The king’s religion, in the king’s building, serving the king. Not God’s. And the man paid to run it wanted the prophet gone.

I preached in a temple run by priests who answered to Rome. They had a word for me too.

Like the Ethiopians

One more verse, because it is astonishing.

Are you not like the children of the Ethiopians to me, children of Israel? says the LORD. Haven’t I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir? (Amos 9:7).

Israel’s great story was the exodus. Amos says God gave other peoples their exoduses too, even Israel’s enemies. Being chosen did not mean other nations did not matter to God.

The fallen tent

The book ends with hope: God will raise up the tent of David who is fallen (Amos 9:11). Some scholars think this ending was added after Jerusalem fell.¹⁰

When my followers argued over whether foreigners who joined us had to become Jews first, my brother James stood up and quoted this passage, in its Greek form, which says that the rest of humanity will seek the Lord, all the Gentiles who are called by my name (Acts 15:16–17). Amos, the prophet who said God cared about the Ethiopians, helped open the door.

Go deeperHow Edom turned into the rest of humanity

Put Amos 9:12 next to Acts 15:17 and they do not say the same thing. In the Hebrew, Amos promises that the restored house of David will possess the remnant of Edom, and all the nations who are called by my name (Amos 9:12). It is a promise of conquest. When James quotes it, it reads that the rest of men may seek after the Lord (Acts 15:17). It is a promise of welcome.¹⁰

The difference comes from the Greek translation of the scriptures that most of my followers used. In those days Hebrew was written with few or no vowels, and the reader supplied the rest. Edom could be spelled without its vowel letter, and then it looked exactly like the word adam, which means humanity. The Hebrew verbs for possess and seek differ by a single small letter. Somewhere along the way, they will possess Edom was read as humanity will seek. Nobody knows for certain whether the translators misread their Hebrew, had a different copy in front of them, or chose the reading on purpose.¹¹

James was not the only one in that age to find a promise about the future in this verse. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of passages from scripture with explanations, quotes the line about raising up the fallen tent of David and explains that it means a descendant of David who will rise up to save Israel. Another scroll, the Damascus Document, quotes the same verse.¹²

So the same old promise was read in two ways in my time. One copy said the house of David would rule over Edom. The other said the nations would come looking for God. My followers built on the second.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Amos 5:21–24.

You will find: God rejecting worship without justice, and “let justice roll on like rivers.”

Then read Amos 8:4–6 and Exodus 22:26–27, then Amos 2:8.

The Short Version

• Amos was a farmer from Judah who preached at the king’s sanctuary in the north. He is the earliest prophet with a book.
• He condemned those who sell the needy for a pair of sandals and lie on cloaks taken from the poor.
• “Let justice roll on like rivers”: God rejects worship from people crushing the poor.
• He exposed rigged scales and merchants waiting for the Sabbath to end.
• The king’s priest told him to leave, because Bethel was the king’s sanctuary.