Amos 7: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Amos reports three visions from the Lord GOD. In the first two, locusts and fire, Amos begs God to stop, and God relents. In the third, a plumb line set among Israel, God says he will spare them no longer and will rise against the house of Jeroboam. Amaziah, the priest at Bethel, reports Amos to the king and orders him out of the country, and Amos answers with a message about what will happen to Amaziah and his family and to Israel.

Claim by Claim

1. 7:1
   • The Lord GOD showed Amos a vision.
   • In the vision he was forming locusts.
   • The locusts were being formed at the beginning of the sprouting of the late growth.
   • The late growth comes up after the king's mowings.
2. 7:2
   • The locusts finished eating the vegetation of the land.
   • Amos then spoke to the Lord GOD.
   • Amos asked the Lord GOD to forgive.
   • Amos asked how Jacob could stand.
   • Amos said that Jacob is small.
3. 7:3
   • The LORD relented concerning this.
   • The LORD said it would not happen.
4. 7:4
   • The Lord GOD showed Amos a vision.
   • The Lord GOD was summoning a contention by fire.
   • The fire devoured the great deep.
   • The fire consumed the portion of land.
5. 7:5
   • Amos then spoke to the Lord GOD.
   • Amos asked the Lord GOD to stop.
   • Amos asked how Jacob could stand.
   • Amos said that Jacob is small.
6. 7:6
   • The LORD relented concerning this.
   • The Lord GOD said that this also would not happen.
7. 7:7
   • He showed Amos a vision.
   • The Lord was standing on a wall built with a plumb line.
   • The Lord had a plumb line in his hand.
   • The term rendered plumb line is of uncertain meaning and may instead denote tin or lead.
8. 7:8
   • The LORD asked Amos what he saw.
   • The LORD addressed him as Amos.
   • Amos answered that he saw a plumb line.
   • The Lord said he was setting a plumb line in the midst of his people Israel.
   • The Lord called Israel his people.
   • The Lord said he would no longer pass by them.
9. 7:9
   • The high places of Isaac will be made desolate.
   • The sanctuaries of Israel will be laid waste.
   • The LORD will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.
10. 7:10
    • Amaziah was the priest of Bethel.
    • Jeroboam was king of Israel.
    • Amaziah sent word to Jeroboam.
    • Amaziah said that Amos had conspired against Jeroboam.
    • Amaziah said the conspiracy was in the midst of the house of Israel.
    • Amaziah said the land was not able to bear all of Amos's words.
11. 7:11
    • Amaziah said that Amos had said Jeroboam would die by the sword.
    • Amaziah said that Amos had said Israel would surely be taken into exile away from its own land.
12. 7:12
    • Amaziah spoke to Amos.
    • Amaziah called Amos a seer.
    • Amaziah told Amos to flee to the land of Judah.
    • Amaziah told Amos to eat bread there.
    • Amaziah told Amos to prophesy there.
13. 7:13
    • Amaziah told Amos not to prophesy at Bethel any more.
    • Amaziah said Bethel was the king's sanctuary.
    • Amaziah said Bethel was a royal house.
14. 7:14
    • Amos answered Amaziah.
    • Amos said he was not a prophet.
    • Amos said he was not a prophet's son.
    • Amos said he was a herdsman.
    • Amos said he was a tender of sycamore figs.
    • The statement carries no verb, so whether Amos denies being a prophet now or describes what he was before is undetermined.
15. 7:15
    • The LORD took Amos from following the flock.
    • The LORD told Amos to go and prophesy to his people Israel.
    • The LORD called Israel his people.
16. 7:16
    • Amos told Amaziah to hear the word of the LORD.
    • Amos said that Amaziah says not to prophesy against Israel.
    • Amos said that Amaziah says not to preach against the house of Isaac.
17. 7:17
    • The LORD says Amaziah's wife will be a harlot in the city.
    • The LORD says Amaziah's sons and daughters will fall by the sword.
    • The LORD says Amaziah's land will be divided by a measuring line.
    • The LORD says Amaziah will die in an unclean land.
    • The LORD says Israel will surely go into exile away from its land.

Words Worth Explaining

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

7:1

Small capitals in "LORD" stand for the personal name of Israel's God, which the King James translators never spelled out; "Lord GOD" renders a pair of Hebrew words, "master" plus that name. (Locusts swarmed periodically in the ancient Near East and could strip a whole region bare within hours; they were the standard image of total agricultural ruin. "The king's mowings" refers to a tax in kind: the first cutting of the spring grass was owed to the crown, largely to feed its horses and livestock, so an ordinary farmer's own living depended entirely on the second, later growth) precisely the crop the locusts eat here.

7:2

"Jacob" is the nation called by the name of its ancestor. Jacob was renamed Israel, and the two names are used interchangeably for the people descended from him. "He is so small" describes the kingdom's weakness, not its population.

7:3

The King James "repented" does not mean God was sorry for a sin. The Hebrew verb means to relent, to turn back from a course of action already announced; it is regularly used of a ruler withdrawing a sentence.

7:4

"Called to contend by fire" is legal language: to contend is to bring a lawsuit or press a case, so the fire is summoned as a judicial punishment rather than an accident. "The great deep" is the vast body of water that ancient Israelites pictured lying beneath the earth, feeding the seas and springs; fire drinking that dry is a picture of drought beyond anything survivable. The last phrase is genuinely uncertain in Hebrew: the word can mean simply "a portion" or "a share", and may refer to the farmland allotted to the people, so translators divide between "devoured a part" and "devoured the farmland".

7:7

A plumb line is a builder's tool: a cord with a lead weight on the end, hung against a wall to test whether it is truly vertical. A wall out of plumb is unsound and has to be pulled down. The Hebrew word used here occurs nowhere else in the Bible and its meaning is debated; "plumb line" is the traditional guess, while others read it as "tin" or "lead", the metal itself.

7:8

"Pass by" translates a Hebrew idiom for overlooking or letting an offense go unpunished, the same picture as looking the other way.

7:9

"High places" were open-air worship sites, usually on hilltops or raised platforms, with an altar and a stone pillar; they were the ordinary local places of sacrifice outside the Jerusalem temple. "Isaac" here, like "Jacob" earlier, names the nation after an ancestor, an unusual usage found almost only in this chapter. "The house of Jeroboam" means his dynasty, his ruling family line, not his building. This is Jeroboam II, king of the northern kingdom of Israel in the first half of the eighth century BC.

7:10

Bethel was the northern kingdom's chief royal sanctuary, set up so that its people would not travel south to Jerusalem to worship. Amaziah is its senior priest, a royal appointee, which is why he reports to the king rather than acting himself. "Conspired" is a formal accusation of treason, plotting against the crown, the most serious charge available, and a common way of silencing a hostile speaker.

7:11

Deporting a conquered people, moving the population away from its homeland to break its identity and prevent revolt, was standard Assyrian imperial practice and the fate the northern kingdom actually met in 722 BC.

7:12

"Seer" is an older word for a prophet, from the visions such a man saw; in Amaziah's mouth it is probably dismissive, as though naming a trade. Judah is the separate southern kingdom, Amos's home country, so this is an order to leave the country. "Eat bread there" means earn your keep there, and carries the sneer that Amos prophesies for a fee.

7:13

A royal sanctuary was state property, maintained by the king and staffed by his appointees. Amaziah's argument is jurisdictional: this ground belongs to the crown, so speech against the crown is not permitted on it.

7:14

Hebrew of this kind has no tense marker here, so the sentence can equally be read "I am no prophet" or "I was no prophet", and translators genuinely divide over it. Either way Amos is denying that he is a professional. A "prophet's son" means a member of a prophetic guild, organized bands of prophets who trained together and lived on the support of others. The word for herdsman is a rare one used elsewhere of a large-scale sheep owner or manager, not a hired hand. Sycamore figs are a coarse, cheap fruit that has to be nicked or pierced by hand a few days before harvest to ripen properly; the trees grow in the warm lowlands, not in Amos's hill country, so this was seasonal work away from home.

7:16

"Drop not thy word" is literal Hebrew: the verb means to let something fall in drops, and it is used of pouring out prophetic speech. "The house of Isaac" again means the nation, named after an ancestor.

7:17

Each item is a standard consequence of a city being stormed: women taken by the soldiers, children killed, and the conquered farmland re-surveyed with a measuring cord and handed out to new owners. To die "in a polluted land" means on foreign soil, outside Israel and so ritually unclean; for an Israelite priest, dying and being buried away from his own land was the sharpest possible reversal of his position.