Amos 2: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The LORD announces judgment on Moab for burning the bones of Edom's king, and on Judah for rejecting his law and following the lies their fathers followed. The longest charge falls on Israel: selling honest people for money, trampling the poor, sexual sin that profanes God's name, and using pledged clothing and fine money at the altar. God recalls destroying the Amorites, bringing Israel out of Egypt, and raising up prophets and Nazirites, and says Israel silenced the prophets and made the Nazirites drink wine. The chapter ends with a picture of a coming defeat in which speed, strength, weapons, and courage will not save anyone.

Claim by Claim

1. 2:1
   • The LORD says this.
   • For three transgressions of Moab, and for four, the LORD will not turn back the punishment.
   • Moab burned the bones of the king of Edom to lime.
2. 2:2
   • The LORD will send fire on Moab.
   • The fire will devour the citadels of Kerioth.
   • Moab will die amid uproar.
   • Moab will die with a battle shout.
   • Moab will die with the sound of the ram's horn.
3. 2:3
   • The LORD will cut off the ruler from the midst of Moab.
   • The LORD will kill all of Moab's officials with him.
   • The LORD said this.
4. 2:4
   • The LORD says this.
   • For three transgressions of Judah, and for four, the LORD will not turn back the punishment.
   • Judah rejected the instruction of the LORD.
   • Judah did not keep his statutes.
   • Their lies led them astray.
   • Their fathers walked after those lies.
5. 2:5
   • The LORD will send fire on Judah.
   • The fire will devour the citadels of Jerusalem.
6. 2:6
   • The LORD says this.
   • For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, the LORD will not turn back the punishment.
   • They sold the righteous man for silver.
   • They sold the needy man for a pair of sandals.
7. 2:7
   • They pant after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor.
   • They turn aside the way of the afflicted.
   • A man and his father go in to the same girl.
   • This profanes the LORD's holy name.
8. 2:8
   • They stretch themselves out on garments taken in pledge beside every altar.
   • They drink wine taken as fines in the house of their god.
9. 2:9
   • The LORD destroyed the Amorite before them.
   • The Amorite's height was like the height of the cedars.
   • The Amorite was as strong as the oaks.
   • The LORD destroyed his fruit above.
   • The LORD destroyed his roots beneath.
10. 2:10
    • The LORD brought them up from the land of Egypt.
    • The LORD led them forty years in the wilderness.
    • The purpose was that they possess the land of the Amorite.
11. 2:11
    • The LORD raised up prophets from their sons.
    • The LORD raised up Nazirites from their young men.
    • The LORD asks whether this is not so, children of Israel.
    • The LORD declares this.
12. 2:12
    • They made the Nazirites drink wine.
    • They commanded the prophets not to prophesy.
13. 2:13
    • The LORD says he presses down under them, as a cart full of sheaves presses down.
    • It is ambiguous whether the LORD is weighed down by them or is crushing them in their place.
14. 2:14
    • Flight will perish from the swift.
    • The strong will not hold his strength firm.
    • The mighty man will not save his own life.
15. 2:15
    • The one who handles the bow will not stand.
    • The one swift of foot will not escape.
    • The one who rides the horse will not save his own life.
16. 2:16
    • The stout-hearted among the mighty will flee naked on that day.
    • The LORD declares this.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

2:1

"For three sins, and now a fourth" is a set poetic formula in Hebrew, not a count of specific offenses. Pairing a number with the next number up (three/four, six/seven) was a standard way of saying "more than enough (the limit has been passed." Amos uses the same opening against seven nations in turn before reaching Israel itself. Moab and Edom were small kingdoms east and south-east of Israel, across the Dead Sea; both were long-standing rivals of Israel and of each other. Lime is the white powder left when bone or limestone is burned at high heat; burning a dead king's bones to lime destroyed the body completely, so it could not rest in its tomb. Ancient peoples regarded this as an outrage against the dead rather than an act of war, and note that the victim here is Edom's king, not an Israelite) Moab is condemned for a crime against a foreign nation.

2:2

"Strong buildings" translates a word for the fortified citadels and palace complexes at the center of a walled city, the last place to fall in a siege. Kerioth was a major Moabite town. The ram's horn (shofar) was the standard battlefield signal instrument, sounded to raise the alarm or start an attack; hearing it meant war had arrived.

2:3

The word behind "ruler" is literally "judge," which in this period meant the chief governing figure of a people, not a courtroom official. "Cut off" is the ordinary Hebrew idiom for killing or removing someone permanently.

2:4

Judah is the southern kingdom, with its capital at Jerusalem. Amos was himself from Judah but preached in the northern kingdom, called Israel, which had split from Judah about 150 years earlier. "The teaching of the LORD" translates torah, the body of instruction and law given to Israel. The word rendered "lies" is often used elsewhere for idols or false gods, so the line may mean either false beliefs generally or the worthless gods their ancestors chased after; the Hebrew leaves both open.

2:5

Jerusalem was the main city of Judah. The strong buildings were palaces and thick city walls.

2:6

Israel from here on means the northern kingdom, Amos's audience. "Sell the righteous for silver" refers to debt slavery: a person who could not repay a debt, or the debt itself, could be handed over to a creditor, and a corrupt judge could be paid silver to rule against an innocent man. Coined money did not yet exist; silver was weighed out by the piece. A pair of sandals was the cheapest thing a person owned, so the phrase measures how trivial a debt could cost someone their freedom. Sandals also figured in Israelite property transfers as a token of a completed sale, which may be a second layer of meaning here.

2:7

The first line is difficult in Hebrew and has been read two ways: that the powerful trample the poor into the dust, or that they crave even the dust the poor throw on their heads in mourning. Both senses are of grinding people who are already down. In the second half, the Hebrew word for the girl can mean a young woman, a servant, or a slave in the household; the text does not say who she is or in what setting, and interpreters have proposed everything from abuse of a household slave to a practice connected with a shrine. What the passage does say is that father and son sharing the same woman was forbidden. "Treat my holy name as worthless" uses a word meaning to strip something of its sacredness by common or contemptuous handling.

2:8

Israelite law let a lender hold a borrower's outer cloak as security for a loan, but required it to be returned each evening, because for a poor man the cloak was also his blanket. Keeping such garments overnight, and lounging on them at a shrine, is the offense. "The house of their god" may equally be read "the house of their God": Hebrew makes no distinction, so the wine may be drunk at a pagan shrine or in the LORD's own sanctuary. The wine came from fines levied on the same poor people.

2:9

The Amorites were among the peoples living in Canaan before Israel; biblical tradition remembered them as unusually tall and formidable. Cedars, imported from Lebanon, were the tallest timber known in the region, and oaks the byword for toughness. "Fruit above and roots below" is a stock image for wiping out a people completely, the visible generation and the stock it grew from, leaving nothing to sprout again.

2:10

The exodus from Egypt and the forty years in the desert were the founding story of Israel's national identity, retold constantly as the proof of what God had done for them. Amos's point is the sequence: the same God who removed the Amorites and installed Israel in their land is now the one bringing the charge.

2:11

A Nazirite took a voluntary vow, for a set period or for life, that involved abstaining from wine and anything else made from grapes, leaving the hair uncut, and avoiding contact with dead bodies. It was a visible, public form of dedication that any ordinary Israelite could undertake. Prophets and Nazirites are named together as the two kinds of person God gave the nation as living reminders.

2:12

Forcing wine on a Nazirite broke his vow and made his dedication useless; silencing a prophet cut off the message. Both charges are about destroying the very gifts named in the previous verse.

2:13

The Hebrew verb in this verse occurs nowhere else and its sense is disputed. It may mean that God is weighed down and pressed beneath Israel, as the plain rendering has it, or that God is about to press down and crush them where they stand, as many modern translations read it. The image itself is a farm cart so heavily loaded with cut grain that its frame groans.

2:14

Verses 14 to 16 list the kinds of people who would normally survive a rout (the fast runner, the strong man, the archer, the horseman) and say that none of their advantages will work. It is a stock way of describing a defeat so total that skill and strength make no difference.

2:15

The man with the bow was a soldier. He shot arrows at enemies in battle.

2:16

"Naked" here most likely means stripped of armor and weapons, and possibly of the outer garment as well, in order to run faster, the image of a soldier throwing away everything that identifies him as a fighter.