THE MAN AND THE PROPHET
THE Book of Amos opens one of the greatest stages
in the religious development of mankind. Its originality is due to a
few simple ideas, which it propels into religion with an almost
unrelieved abruptness. But, like all ideas which ever broke upon the
world, these also have flesh and blood behind them. Like every other
Reformation this one in Israel began with the conscience and the
protest of an individual. Our review of the book has made this
plain. We have found in it, not only a personal adventure of a
heroic kind, but a progressive series of visions, with some other
proofs of a development both of facts and ideas. In short, behind
the book there beats a life, and our first duty is to attempt to
trace its spiritual history. The attempt is worth the greatest care.
"Amos," says a very critical writer, "is one of the most wonderful
appearances in the history of the human spirit."
1. THE MAN AND HIS DISCIPLINE
Amo 1:1, Amo 3:3-8, Amo 7:14-15
When charged at the crisis of his career with
being but a hireling-prophet, Amos disclaimed the official name and
took his stand upon his work as a man: "No prophet I, nor prophet’s
son; but a herdsman and a dresser of sycamores. Jehovah took me from
behind the flock." We shall enhance our appreciation of this
manhood, and of the new order of prophecy which it asserted, if we
look for a little at the soil on which it was so bravely nourished.
Six miles south from Bethlehem, as Bethlehem is six from Jerusalem,
there rises on the edge of the Judaean plateau, towards the desert,
a commanding hill, the ruins on which are still known by the name of
Tekoa.
In the time of Amos Tekoa was a place without sanctity and almost
without tradition. The name suggests that the site may at first have
been that of a camp. Its fortification by Rehoboam, and the mission
of its wise woman to David, are its only previous appearances in
history. Nor had nature been less grudging to it than fame. The men
of Tekoa looked out upon a desolate and haggard world. South, west,
and north the view is barred by a range of limestone hills, on one
of which directly north the grey towers of Jerusalem are hardly to
be discerned from the grey mountain lines. Eastward the prospect is
still more desolate, but it-is open; the land slopes away for nearly
eighteen miles to a depth of four thousand feet. Of this long
descent the first step, lying immediately below the hill of Tekoa,
is a shelf of stony moorland with the ruins of vineyards. It is the
lowest ledge of the settled life of Judaea. The eastern edge drops
suddenly by broken rocks to-slopes spotted with bushes of "retem,"
the broom of the desert, and with patches of poor wheat. From the
foot of the slopes the land rolls away in a maze of low hills and
shallow dales that flush green in spring, but for the rest of the
year are brown with withered grass and, scrub. This is the
"Wilderness" or "Pasture-land of Tekoa," {2Ch 20:20} across which by
night the wild beasts howl, and by day the blackened sites of
deserted camps, with the loose cairns that mark the nomads’ graves,
reveal a human life almost as vagabond and nameless as that of the
beasts. Beyond the rolling land is Jeshimon, or Devastation-a chaos
of hills, none of whose ragged crests are tossed as high as the
shelf of Tekoa, while their flanks shudder down some further
thousands of feet, by crumbling precipices and corries choked with
debris, to the coast of the Dead Sea. The northern half of this is
visible, bright blue against the red wall of Moab, and. the level
top of the wall, broken only by the valley of the Arnon, constitutes
the horizon. Except for the blue water-which shines in its gap
between the torn hills like a bit of sky through rifted clouds-it is
a very dreary world. Yet the sun breaks over it, perhaps all the
more gloriously; mists, rising from the sea simmering in its great
vat, drape the nakedness of the desert noon; and through the dry
desert night the planets ride with a majesty they cannot assume in
our more troubled atmospheres. It is also a very empty and a very
silent world, yet every stir of life upon it excites, therefore, the
greater vigilance, and man’s faculties, relieved from the rush and
confusion of events, form the instinct of marking, and reflecting
upon, every single phenomenon. And it is a very savage world. Across
it all the towers of Jerusalem give the only signal of the spirit,
the one token that man has a history.
Upon this unmitigated wilderness, where life is reduced to poverty
and danger; where nature starves the imagination, but excites the
faculties. of perception and curiosity; with the mountain tops and
the sunrise in his face, but above all with Jerusalem so near, -Amos
did the work which made him a man, heard the voice of God calling
him to be a prophet, and gathered those symbols and figures in which
his prophet’s message still reaches us with so fresh and so austere
an air.
Amos was "among the shepherds of Tekoa." The word for "shepherd" is
unusual, and means the herdsman of a peculiar breed of desert sheep,
still under the same name prized in Arabia for the excellence of
their wool. And he was "a dresser of sycamores." The tree, which is
not our sycamore, is very easily grown in sandy soil with a little
water. It reaches a great height and mass of foliage. The fruit is
like a small fig, with a sweet but watery taste, and is eaten only
by the poor. Born not of the fresh twigs, but of the trunk and older
branches, the sluggish lumps are provoked to ripen by pinching or
bruising, which seems to be the literal meaning of the term that
Amos uses of himself-"a pincher of sycamores." The sycamore does not
grow at so high a level as Tekoa; and this fact, taken along with
the limitation of the ministry of Amos to the Northern Kingdom, has
been held to prove that he was originally an Ephraimite, a
sycamore-dresser, who had migrated and settled down, as the peculiar
phrase of the title says, "among the shepherds of Tekoa." We shall
presently see, however, that his familiarity with life in Northern
Israel may easily have been won in other ways than through
citizenship in that kingdom; while the very general nature of the
definition, "among the shepherds of Tekoa," does not oblige us to
place either him or his sycamores so high as the village itself. The
most easterly township of Judea, Tekoa commanded the w, hole of the
wilderness beyond, to which indeed it gave its name, "the wilderness
of Tekoa." The shepherds of Tekoa were therefore, in all
probability, scattered across the whole region down to the oases on
the coast of the Dead Sea, which have generally been owned by one or
other of the settled communities in the hill-country above, and may
at that time have belonged to Tekoa, just as in Crusading times they
belonged to the monks of Hebron, or are today cultivated by the
Rushaideh Arabs, who pitch their camps not far from Tekoa itself. As
you will still find everywhere on the borders of the Syrian desert
shepherds nourishing a few fruit-trees round the chief well of their
pasture, in order to vary their milk diet, so in some low oasis in
the wilderness of Judea Amos cultivated the poorest, but the most
easily grown of fruits, the sycamore. All this pushes Amos and his
dwarf sheep deeper into the desert, and emphasizes what has been
said above, and still remains to be illustrated, of the desert’s
influence on his discipline as a men and on his speech as a prophet.
We ought to remember that in the same desert another prophet was
bred, who was also the pioneer of a new dispensation, and whose
ministry, both in its strength and its limitations, is much recalled
by the ministry of Amos. John the son of Zacharias "grew and waxed
strong in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his showing
unto Israel." {Luk 1:80} Here, too, our Lord was "with the wild
beasts." {Mar 1:18} How much Amos had been with them may be seen
from many of his metaphors. "The lion roareth, who shall not fear?
As when the shepherd rescueth from the mouth of the lion two
shinbones or a bit of an ear It shall be as when one is fleeing from
a lion and a bear cometh upon him; and he entereth a house, and
leaneth ‘his hand on the wall, and a serpent biteth him."
As a wool-grower, however, Amos must have had his yearly journeys
among the markets of the land; and to such were probably due his
opportunities of familiarity with Northern Israel, the originals of
his vivid pictures of her town-life, her commerce, and the worship
at her great sanctuaries. One hour westward from Tekoa would bring
him to the highroad between Hebron and the North, with its troops of
pilgrims passing to Beersheba. {Amo 5:5; Amo 8:14} It was but
half-an-hour more to the watershed and an open view of the
Philistine plain. Bethlehem was only six, Jerusalem twelve, miles
from Tekoa. Ten miles farther, across the border of Israel, lay
Bethel with its temple, seven miles farther Gilgal, and twenty miles
farther still Samaria the capital, in all but two days’ journey from
Tekoa. These had markets as well as shrines; their annual festivals
would be also great fairs. It is certain that Amos visited them; it
is even possible that he went to Damascus, in which the Israelites
had at the time their own quarters for trading. By road and market
he would meet with men of other lands. Phoenician peddlers, or
Canaanites as they were called, came up to buy the homespun for
which the housewives of Israel were famed {Pro 31:24}-hard-faced men
who were also willing to purchase slaves, and haunted even the
battle-fields of their neighbors for this sinister purpose. Men of
Moab, at the time subject to Israel; Aramean hostages; Philistines
who held the export trade to Egypt, -these Amos must have met and
may have talked with; their dialects scarcely differed from his own.
It is no distant, desert echo of life which we hear in his pages,
but the thick and noisy rumor of caravan and market-place: how the
plague was marching up from Egypt; {Amo 6:10} ugly stories of the
Phoenician slave-trade; {Amo 1:9} rumors of the advance of the awful
Power, which men were hardly yet accustomed to name, but which had
already twice broken from the North upon Damascus. Or it was the
progress of some national mourning-how lamentation sprang up in the
capital, rolled along the highways, and was re-echoed from the
husbandmen and vinedressers on the hillsides. {Amo 5:16} Or, at
closer quarters, we see and hear the bustle of the great festivals
and fairs-the "solemn assemblies," the reeking holocausts, the
"noise of songs and viols": {Amo 5:21 ff.} the brutish religious
zeal kindling into drunkenness and lust on the very steps of the
altar, {Amo 2:7-8} "the embezzlement of pledges by the priests, the
covetous restlessness of the traders, their false measures, their
entanglement of the poor in debt {Amo 8:4 ff.} the careless luxury
of the rich, their "banquets, buckets of wine, ivory couches,"
pretentious, preposterous music. {Amo 6:1; Amo 6:4-7} These things
are described as by an eyewitness. Amos was not a citizen of the
Northern Kingdom, to which he almost exclusively refers; but it was
because he went up and down in it, using those eyes which the desert
air had sharpened, that he so thoroughly learned the wickedness of
its people, the corruption of Israel’s life in every rank and class
of society. But the convictions which he applied to this life Amos
learned at home. They came to him over the desert, and without
further material signal than was flashed to Tekoa from the towers of
Jerusalem. This is placed beyond doubt by the figures in which he
describes his call from Jehovah. Contrast his story, so far as he
reveals it, with that of another. Some twenty years later, Isaiah of
Jerusalem saw the Lord in the Temple, high and lifted up, and all
the inaugural vision of this greatest of the prophets was conceived
in the figures of the Temple-the altar, the smoke, the burning
coals. But to his predecessor "among the shepherds of Tekoa,"
although revelation also starts from Jerusalem, it reaches him, not
in the sacraments of her sanctuary, but across the bare pastures,
and as it were in the roar of a lion. "Jehovah from Zion roareth,
and uttereth His voice from Jerusalem." {Amo 1:2} We read of no
formal process of consecration for this first of the prophets.
Through his clear desert air the word of God breaks upon him without
medium or sacrament. And the native vigilance of the man is
startled, is convinced by it, beyond all argument or question. "The
lion hath roared, who shall not fear? Jehovah hath spoken, who can
but prophesy?" These words are taken from a passage in which Amos
illustrates prophecy from other instances of his shepherd life. We
have seen what a school of vigilance the desert is. Upon the bare
surface all that stirs is ominous. Every shadow, every noise-the
shepherd must know what is behind and be warned. Such a vigilance
Amos would have Israel apply to his own message, and to the events
of their history. Both of these he compares to certain facts of
desert life, behind which his shepherdly instincts have taught him
to feel an ominous cause. "Do two men walk together except they have
trysted?"-except they have made an appointment. Hardly in the
desert; for there men meet and take the same road by chance as
seldom as ships at sea. "Doth a lion roar in the jungle and have no
prey, or a young lion let out his voice in his den except he be
taking something?" The hunting lion is silent till his quarry be in
sight; when the lonely shepherd hears the roar across the desert he
knows the lion leaps upon his prey, and he shudders as Israel ought
to do when they hear God’s voice by the prophet, for this also is
never loosened but for some grim fact, some leap of doom. Or "doth a
little bird fall on the snare earthwards and there be no noose upon
her?" The reading may be doubtful, but the meaning is obvious: no
one ever saw a bird pulled roughly down to earth when it tried to
fly away without knowing there was the loop of a snare about her. Or
"does the snare itself rise up from the ground, except indeed it be
capturing something?"-except there be in the trap or net something
to flutter, struggle, and so lift it up. Traps do not move without
life in them. Or "is the alarm trumpet "blown in a city"-for
instance, in high Tekoa up there, when some Arab raid sweeps from
the desert on to the fields-"and do the people not tremble?" Or
"shall calamity happen in a city and Jehovah not have done it? Yea,
the Lord Jehovah doeth nothing but He has revealed His purpose to
His servants the prophets." My voice of warning and these events of
evil in your midst have the same cause-Jehovah-behind them. "The
lion hath roared, who shall not fear? Jehovah hath spoken, who can
but prophesy?"
We cannot miss the personal note which rings through this triumph in
the reality of things unseen. Not only does it proclaim a man of
sincerity and conviction: it is resonant with the discipline by
which that conviction was won-were won, too, the freedom from
illusion and the power of looking at facts in the face, which Amos
alone of his contemporaries possessed.
St. Bernard has described the first stage of the Vision of God as
the Vision Distributive, in which the eager mind distributes her
attention upon common things and common duties in themselves. It was
in this elementary school that the earliest of the new prophets
passed his apprenticeship and received his gifts. Others excel Amos
in the powers of the imagination and the intellect. But by the
incorrupt habits of his shepherd’s life, by daily wakefulness to its
alarms and daily faithfulness to its opportunities, he was trained
in that simple power of appreciating facts and causes, which,
applied to the great phenomena of the spirit and of history, forms
his distinction among his peers. In this we find perhaps the reason
why he records of himself no solemn hour of cleansing and
initiation. "Jehovah took me from following the flock, and Jehovah
said unto me, Go, prophesy unto My people Israel." Amos was of them
of whom it is written, "Blessed are those servants whom the Lord
when He cometh shall find watching." Through all his hard life this
shepherd had kept his mind open and his conscience quick, so that
when the word of God came to him he knew it, as fast as he knew the
roar of the lion across the moor. Certainly there is no habit which,
so much as this of watching facts with a single eye and a
responsible mind, is indispensable alike in the ‘humblest duties and
in the highest speculations of life. When Amos gives those naive
illustrations of how real the voice of God is to him, we receive
them as the tokens of a man, honest and awake. Little wonder that he
refuges to be reckoned among the professional prophets of his day
who found their inspiration in excitement and trance. Upon him the
impulses of the Deity come in no artificial and morbid ecstasy,
removed as far as possible from real life. They come upon him, as it
were, in the open air. They appeal to the senses of his healthy and
expert manhood. They convince him of their reality with the same
force as do the most startling events of his lonely shepherd
watches. "The lion hath roared, who shall not fear? Jehovah hath
spoken, who can but prophesy?"
The influence of the same discipline is still visible when Amos
passes from the facts of his own consciousness to the facts of his
people’s life. His day in Israel sweltered with optimism. The glare
of wealth, the fulsome love of country, the rank incense of a
religion that was without morality-these thickened all the air, and
neither the people nor their rulers had any vision. But Amos carried
with him his clear desert atmosphere and his desert eyes. He saw the
raw facts: the poverty, the cruel negligence of the rich, the
injustice of the rulers, the immorality of the priests. The meaning
of these things he questioned with as much persistence as he
questioned every suspicious sound or sight upon those pastures of
Tekoa. He had no illusions: he knew a mirage when he saw one.
Neither the military pride of the people, fostered by recent
successes over Syria, nor the dogmas of their religion, which
asserted Jehovah’s swift triumph upon the heathen, could prevent him
from knowing that the immorality of Israel meant Israel’s political
downfall. He was one of those recruits from common life, by whom
religion and the state have at all times been reformed. Springing
from the laity and very often from among the working classes, their
freedom from dogmas and routine, as well as from the compromising
interests of wealth, rank, and party, renders them experts in life
to a degree that almost no professional priest, statesman, or
journalist, however honest or sympathetic, can hope to rival. Into
politics they bring facts, but into religion they bring vision.
It is of the utmost significance that this reformer, this founder of
the highest order of prophecy in Israel, should not only thus begin
with facts, but to the very end be occupied with almost nothing else
than the vision and record of them. In Amos there is but one
prospect of the Ideal. It does not break till the close of his book,
and then in such contrast to the plain and final indictments, which
constitute nearly all the rest of his prophesying, that many have
not unnaturally denied to him the verses which contain it.
Throughout the other chapters we have but the exposure of present
facts, material and moral, nor the sight of any future more distant
than tomorrow and the immediate consequences of today’s deeds. Let
us mark this. The new prophecy which Amos started in Israel reached
Divine heights of hope, unfolded infinite powers of moral and
political regeneration-dared to blot out all the past, dared to
believe all things possible in the future. But it started from the
truth about the moral situation of the present. Its first prophet
not only denied every popular dogma and ideal, but-appears not to
have substituted for them any others. He spent his gifts of vision
on the discovery and appreciation of facts. Now this is necessary,
not only in great reformations of religion, but at almost every
stage in her development. We are constantly disposed to abuse even
the most just and necessary of religious ideals as substitutes for
experience or as escapes from duty, and to boast about the future
before we have understood or mastered the present. Hence the need of
realists like Amos. Though they are destitute of dogma, of comfort,
of hope, of the ideal, let us not doubt that they also stand in the
succession of the prophets of the Lord.
Nay, this is a stage of prophecy on which may be fulfilled the
prayer of Moses: "Would to God that all the Lord’s people were
prophets!" To see the truth and tell it, to be accurate and brave
about the moral facts of our day-to this extent the Vision and the
Voice are possible for every one of us. Never for us may the doors
of heaven open, as they did for him who stood on the threshold of
the earthly temple, and he saw the Lord enthroned, while the
Seraphim of the Presence sang the glory. Never for us may the skies
fill with that tempest of life which Ezekiel beheld from Shinar, and
above it the sapphire throne, and on the throne the likeness of a
man, the likeness of the glory of the Lord. Yet let us remember that
to see facts as they are and to tell the truth about them-this also
is prophecy. We may inhabit a sphere which does not prompt the
imagination, but is as destitute of the historic and traditional as
was the wilderness of Tekoa. All the more may our unglamoured eyes
be true to the facts about us. Every common day leads forth her
duties as shining as every night leads forth her stars. The deeds
and the fortunes of men are in our sight, and spell, to all who will
honestly read the very Word of the Lord. If only we be loyal, then
by him who made the rude sounds and sights of the desert his
sacraments, and whose vigilance of things seen and temporal became
the vision of things unseen and eternal, we also shall see God, and
be sure of His ways with men.
Before we pass from the desert discipline of the prophet we must
notice one of its effects, which, while it greatly enhanced the
clearness of his vision, undoubtedly disabled Amos for the highest
prophetic rank. He who lives in the desert lives without
patriotism-detached and aloof. He may see the throng of men more
clearly than those who move among it. He cannot possibly so much
feel for them. Unlike Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. Amos was not a
citizen of the kingdom against which he prophesied, and indeed no
proper citizen of any kingdom, but a nomad herdsman, hovering on the
desert borders of Judaea. He saw Israel from the outside. His
message to her is achieved with scarcely one sob in his voice. For
the sake of the poor and the oppressed among the people he is
indignant. But with the erring, staggering nation as a whole he has
no real sympathy. His pity for her is exhausted in one elegy and two
brief intercessions; hardly more than once does he even call her to
repentance.
His sense of justice, in fact, had almost never to contend with his
love. This made Amos the better witness, but the worse prophet. He
did not rise so high as his great successors, because he did not so
feel himself one with the people whom he was forced to condemn,
because he did not bear their fate as his own nor travail for their
new birth. "Ihm fehlt die Liebe." Love is the element lacking in his
prophecy; and therefore the words are true of him which were uttered
of his great follower across this same wilderness of Judea, that
mighty as were his voice and his message to prepare the way of the
Lord, yet "the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he."
2. THE WORD AND ITS ORIGINS
Amo 1:2, Amo 3:3-8 and PASSIM
We have seen the preparation of the Man for the
Word. We are now to ask, Whence came the Word to the Man?-the Word
that made him a prophet. What were its sources and sanctions outside
himself? These involve other questions. How much of his message did
Amos inherit from the previous religion of his people? And how much
did he teach for the first time in Israel? And again, how much of
this new element did he owe to the great events of his day? And how
much demands some other source of inspiration?
To all these inquiries, outlines of the answers ought by this time
to have become visible. We have seen that the contents of the Book
of Amos consist almost entirely of two kinds: facts, actual or
imminent, in the history of his people; and certain moral principles
of the most elementary order. Amos appeals to no dogma nor form of
law, nor to any religious or national institution. Still more
remarkably, he does not rely upon miracle nor any so-called
"supernatural sign." To employ the terms of Mazzini’s famous
formula, Amos draws his materials solely from "conscience and
history." Within himself he hears certain moral principles speak in
the voice of God, and certain events of his day he recognizes as the
judicial acts of God. The principles condemn the living generation
of Israel as morally corrupt; the events threaten the people with
political extinction. From this agreement between inward conviction
and outward event Amos draws his full confidence as a prophet, and
enforces on the people his message of doom as God’s own word.
The passage in which Amos most explicitly illustrates this harmony
between event and conviction is one whose metaphors we have already
quoted in proof of the desert’s influence upon the prophet’s life.
When Amos asks, "Can two walk together except they have made an
appointment?" his figure is drawn, as we have seen, from the
wilderness in which two men will hardly meet except they have
arranged to do so; but the truth he would illustrate by the figure
is that two sets of phenomena which coincide must have sprung from a
common purpose. Their conjunction forbids mere chance. What kind of
phenomena he means, he lets us see in his next instance: "Doth a
lion roar in the jungle and have no prey? Doth a young lion let
forth his voice from his den except he be catching something?" That
is, those ominous sounds never happen without some fell and terrible
deed happening along with them. Amos thus plainly hints that the two
phenomena on whose coincidence he insists are an utterance on one
side, and on the other side a deed fraught with destruction. The
reading of the next metaphor about the bird and the snare is
uncertain; at most what it means is that you never see signs of
distress or a vain struggle to escape without there being, though
out of sight, some real cause for them. But from so general a
principle he returns in his fourth metaphor to the special
coincidence between utterance and deed. "Is the alarum-trumpet blown
in a city and do the people not tremble?" Of course they do; they
know such sound is never made without the approach of calamity. But
who is the author of every calamity? God Himself: "Shall there be
evil in a city and Jehovah not have done it?" Very well then; we
have seen that common life has many instances in which, when an
ominous sound is heard, it is because it is closely linked with a
fatal deed. These happen together, not by mere chance, but because
the one is the expression, the warning, or the explanation of the
other. And we also know that fatal deeds which happen to any
community in Israel are from Jehovah. He is behind them. But they,
too, are accompanied by a warning voice from the same source as
themselves. This is the voice which the prophet hears in his
heart-the moral conviction which he feels as the Word of God. "The
Lord Jehovah doeth nothing but He hath revealed His counsel to His
servants the prophets." Mark the grammar: the revelation comes first
to the prophet’s heart; then he sees and recognizes the event, and
is confident to give his message about it. So Amos, repeating his
metaphor, sums up his argument. "The Lion hath roared, who shall not
fear?"-certain that there is more than sound to happen. "The Lord
Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?"-certain that what
Jehovah has spoken to him inwardly is likewise no mere sound, but
that deeds of judgment are about to happen, as the ominous voice
requires they should.
The prophet then is made sure of his message by the agreement
between the inward convictions of his soul and the outward events of
the day. When these walk together, it proves that they have come of
a common purpose. He who causes the events-it is Jehovah Himself,
"for shall there be evil in a city and Jehovah not have done
it?"-must be author also of the inner voice or conviction which
agrees with them. "Who" then "can but prophesy?" Observe again that
no support is here derived from miracle; nor is any claim made for
the prophet on the ground of his ability to foretell the event. It
is the agreement of the idea with the fact, their evident common
origin in the purpose of Jehovah, which makes a man sure that he has
in him the Word of God. Both are necessary, and together are enough.
Are we then to leave the origin of the Word in this coincidence of
fact and thought-as it were an electric flash produced by the
contact of conviction with event?
Hardly; there are questions behind this coincidence. For instance,
as to how the two react on each other-the event provoking the
conviction, the conviction interpreting the event? The argument of
Amos seems to imply that the ethical principles are experienced by
the prophet prior to the events which justify them. Is this so, or
was the shock of the events required to awaken the principles? And
if the principles were prior, whence did Amos derive them? These are
some questions that will lead us to the very origins of revelation.
The greatest of the events with which Amos and his contemporaries
dealt was the Assyrian invasion. In a previous chapter we have tried
to estimate the intellectual effects of Assyria on prophecy. Assyria
widened the horizon of Israel, put the world to Hebrew eyes into a
new perspective, vastly increased the possibilities of history, and
set to religion a novel order of problems. We can trace the effects
upon Israel’s conceptions of God, of man, and even of nature. Now it
might be plausibly argued that the new prophecy in Israel was first
stirred and quickened by all this mental shock and strain, and that
even the loftier ethics of the prophets were thus due to the advance
of Assyria. For, as the most vigilant watchmen of their day, the
prophets observed the rise of that empire, and felt its fatality for
Israel. Turning then to inquire the Divine reasons for such a
destruction, they found these in Israel’s sinfulness, to the full
extent of which their hearts were at last awakened. According to
such a theory the prophets were politicians first and moralists
afterwards: alarmists to begin with, and preachers of repentance
only second. Or-to recur to the language employed above-the
prophets’ experience of the historical event preceded their
conviction of the moral principle which agreed with it.
In support of such a theory it is pointed out that after all the
most original element in the prophecy of the eighth century was the
announcement of Israel’s fall and exile. The Righteousness of
Jehovah had often previously been enforced in Israel, but never had
any voice drawn from it this awful conclusion that the nation must
perish. The first in Israel to dare this was Amos, and surely what
enabled him to do so was the imminence of Assyria upon his people.
Again, such a theory might plausibly point to the opening verse of
the Book of Amos, with its unprefaced, unexplained pronouncement of
doom upon Israel:-
"The Lord roareth from Zion, And giveth voice from Jerusalem; And
the pastures of the shepherds mourn, And the summit of Carmel is
withered!"
Here, it might be averred, is the earliest prophet’s earliest
utterance. Is it not audibly the voice of a man in a panic-such a
panic as, ever on the eve of historic convulsions, seizes the more
sensitive minds of a doomed people? The distant Assyrian thunder has
reached Amos, on his pastures, unprepared-unable to articulate its
exact meaning, and with only faith enough to hear in it the voice of
his God. He needs reflection to unfold its contents; and the process
of this reflection we find through the rest of his book. There he
details for us, with increasing clear-mess, both the ethical reasons
and the political results of that Assyrian terror, by which he was
at first so wildly shocked into prophecy.
But the panic-born are always the stillborn; and it is simply
impossible that prophecy, in all her ethical and religious vigor,
can have been the daughter of so fatal a birth. If we look again at
the evidence which is quoted from Amos in favor of such a theory, we
shall see how fully it is contradicted by other features of his
book.
To begin with, we are not certain that the terror of the opening
verse of Amos is the Assyrian terror. Even if it were, the opening
of a book does not necessarily represent the writer’s earliest
feelings. The rest of the chapters contain visions and oracles which
obviously date from a time when Amos was not yet startled by
Assyria, but believed that the punishment which Israel required
might be accomplished through a series of physical
calamities-locusts, drought, and pestilence. Nay, it was not even
these earlier judgments, preceding the Assyrian, which stirred the
word of God in the prophet. He introduces them with a "now" and a
"therefore." That is to say, he treats them only as the consequence
of certain facts, the conclusion of certain premises. These facts
and premises are moral-they are exclusively moral. They are the sins
of Israel’s life, regarded without illusion and without pity. They
are certain simple convictions, which fill the prophet’s heart,
about the impossibility of the survival of any state which is so
perverse and so corrupt.
This origin of prophecy in moral facts and moral intuitions, which
are in their beginning independent of political events, may be
illustrated by several other points. For instance, the sins which
Amos marked in Israel were such as required no "red dawn of
judgment" to expose their flagrance and fatality. The abuse of
justice, the cruelty of the rich, the shameless immorality of the
priests, are not sins which we feel only in the cool of the day,
when God Himself draws near to judgment. They are such things as
make men shiver in the sunshine. And so the Book of Amos, and not
less that of Hosea, tremble with the feeling that Israel’s social
corruption is great enough of itself, without the aid of natural
convulsions, to shake the very basis of national life. "Shall not
the land tremble for this," Amos says after reciting some sins, "and
every one that dwelleth therein?" {Amo 8:8} Not drought nor
pestilence nor invasion is needed for Israel’s doom, but the
elemental force of ruin which lies in the people’s own wickedness.
This is enough to create gloom long before the political skies be
overcast-or, as Amos himself puts it, this is enough
"To cause the sun to go down at noon, And to darken the earth in the
clear day." {Amo 8:9}
And once more-in spite of Assyria the ruin may be averted, if only
the people will repent: "Seek good and not evil, and, Jehovah of
hosts will be with you, as you say." {Amo 5:14} Assyria, however
threatening, becomes irrelevant to Israel’s future from the moment
that Israel repents.
Such beliefs, then, are obviously not the results of experience, nor
of a keen observation of history. They are the primal convictions of
the heart, which are deeper than all experience, and themselves
contain the sources of historical foresight. With Amos it was not
the outward event which inspired the inward conviction, but the
conviction which anticipated and interpreted the event, though when
the event came there can be no doubt that it confirmed, deepened,
and articulated the conviction.
But when we have thus tracked the stream of prophecy as far back as
these elementary convictions we have not reached the fountain-head.
Whence did Amos derive his simple and absolute ethics? Were they
original to him? Were they new in Israel? Such questions start an
argument which touches the very origins of revelation.
It is obvious that Amos not only takes for granted the laws of
righteousness which he enforces: he takes for granted also the
people’s conscience of them. New, indeed, is the doom which sinful
Israel deserves, and original to himself is the proclamation of it;
but Amos appeals to the moral principles which justify the doom, as
if they were not new, and as if Israel ought always to have known
them. This attitude of the prophet to his principles has, in our
time, suffered a curious judgment. It has been called an
anachronism. So absolute a morality, some say, had never before been
taught in Israel; nor had righteousness been so exclusively
emphasized as the purpose of Jehovah. Amos and the other prophets of
his century were the virtual "creators of ethical monotheism": it
could only be by a prophetic license or prophetic fiction that he
appealed to his people’s conscience of the standards he promulgated,
or condemned his generation to death for not having lived up to
them.
Let us see how far this criticism is supported by the facts.
To no sane observer can the religious history of Israel appear as
anything but a course of gradual development. Even in the moral
standards, in respect to which it is confessedly often most
difficult to prove growth, the signs of the nation’s progress are
very manifest. Practices come to be forbidden in Israel and tempers
to be mitigated, which in earlier ages were sanctioned to their
extreme by the explicit decrees of religion. In the nation’s
attitude to the outer world sympathies arise, along with ideals of
spiritual service, where previously only war and extermination had
been enforced in the name of the Deity. Now in such an evolution it
is equally indubitable that the longest and most rapid stage was the
prophecy of the eighth century. The prophets of that time condemn
acts which had been inspired by their immediate predecessors; they
abjure, as impeding morality, a ceremonial which the spiritual
leaders of earlier generations had felt to be indispensable to
religion; and they unfold ideals of the nation’s moral destiny, of
which older writings give us only the faintest hints. Yet, while the
fact of a religious evolution in Israel is thus certain, we must not
fall into the vulgar error which interprets evolution as if it were
mere addition, nor forget that even in the most creative periods of
religion nothing is brought forth which has not already been
promised, and, at some earlier stage, placed, so to speak, within
reach of the human mind. After all it is the mind which grows; the
moral ideals which become visible to its more matured vision are so
Divine that, when they present themselves, the mind cannot but think
they were always real and always imperative. If we remember these
commonplaces we shall do justice both to Amos and to his critics.
In the first place it is clear that most of the morality which Amos
enforced is of that fundamental order which can never have been
recognized as the discovery or invention of any prophet. Whatever be
their origin, the conscience of justice, the duty of kindness to the
poor, the horror of wanton cruelty towards one’s enemies, which form
the chief principles of Amos, are discernible in man as far back as
history allows us to search for them. Should a generation have lost
them, they can be brought back to it, never with the thrill of a new
lesson; but only with the shame of an old and an abused memory. To
neither man nor people can the righteousness which Amos preached
appear as a discovery, but always as a recollection and a remorse.
And this is most emphatically true of the people of Moses and of
Samuel, of Nathan, of Elijah, and of the Book of the Covenant.
Ethical elements had been characteristic of Israel’s religion from
the very first. They were not due to a body of written law, but
rather to the character of Israel’s God, appreciated by the nation
in all the great crises of their history. Jehovah had won for Israel
freedom and unity. He had been a spirit of justice to their
lawgivers and magistrates. {Isaiah 28} He had raised up a succession
of consecrated personalities, {Amos 2} who by life and word had
purified the ideals of the whole people. The results had appeared in
the creation of a strong national conscience, which avenged with
horror, as "folly in Israel," the wanton crimes of any person or
section of the commonwealth; in the gradual formation of a legal
code, founded indeed in the common custom of the Semites, but
greatly more moral than that; and even in the attainment of certain
profoundly ethical beliefs about God and His relations, beyond
Israel, to all mankind. Now, let us understand once for all, that in
the ethics of Amos there is nothing which is not rooted in one or
other of these achievements of the previous religion of his people.
To this religion Amos felt himself attached in the closest possible
way. The word of God comes to him across the desert, as we have
seen, yet not out of the air. From the first he hears it rise from
that one monument of his people’s past which we have found visible
on his physical horizon-"from Zion, from Jerusalem," {Amo 1:2} from
the city of David, from the Ark, whose ministers were Moses and
Samuel, from the repository of the main tradition of Israel’s
religion. Amos felt himself in the sacred succession; and his
feeling is confirmed by the contents of his book. The details of
that civic justice which he demands from his generation are found in
the Book of the Covenant-the only one of Israel’s great codes which
appears by this time to have been in existence; or in those popular
proverbs which almost as certainly were found in early Israel.
Nor does Amos go elsewhere for the religious sanctions of his
ethics. It is by the ancient mercies of God towards Israel that he
shames and convicts his generation-by the deeds of grace which made
them a nation, by the organs of doctrine and reproof which have
inspired them, unfailing from age to age. "I destroyed the Amorite
before them Yea, I brought you up out of the land of Egypt, and I
led you forty years in the wilderness, to possess the land of the
Amorites. And I raised up of your sons for prophets, and of your
young men for Nazarites. Was it not even thus, O ye children of
Israel? saith Jehovah." We cannot even say that the belief which
Amos expresses in Jehovah as the supreme Providence of the world was
a new thing in Israel, for a belief as universal inspires those
portions of the Book of Genesis which, like the Book of the
Covenant, were already extant.
We see, therefore, what right Amos had to present his ethical truths
to Israel, as if they were not new, but had been within reach of his
people from of old.
We could not, however, commit a greater mistake than to confine the
inspiration of our prophet to the past, and interpret his doctrines
as mere inferences from the earlier religious ideas of
Israel-inferences forced by his own passionate logic, or more
naturally ripened for him by the progress of events. A recent writer
has thus summarized the work of the prophets of the eighth century:
"In fact they laid hold upon that bias towards the ethical which
dwelt in Jahwism from Moses onwards, and they allowed it alone to
have value as corresponding to the true religion of Jehovah." But
this is too abstract to be an adequate statement of the prophets’
own consciousness. What overcame Amos was a Personal Influence-the
Impression of a Character; and it was this not only as it was
revealed in the past of his people. The God who stands behind Amos
is indeed the ancient Deity of Israel, and the facts which prove Him
God are those which made the nation-the Exodus, the guidance through
the wilderness, the overthrow of the Amorites, the gift of the land.
"Was it not even thus, O ye children of Israel?" But what beats and
burns through the pages of Amos is not the memory of those wonderful
works, so much as a fresh vision and understanding of the Living God
who worked them. Amos has himself met with Jehovah on the conditions
of his own time-on the moral situation provided by the living
generation of Israel. By an intercourse conducted, not through the
distant signals of the past, but here and now, through the events of
the prophet’s own day, Amos has received an original and
overpowering conviction of his people’s God as absolute
righteousness. What prophecy had hitherto felt in part, and applied
to one or other of the departments of Israel’s life, Amos is the
first to feel in its fullness, and to every extreme of its
consequences upon the worship, the conduct, and the fortunes of the
nation. To him Jehovah not only commands this and that righteous law
but Jehovah and righteousness are absolutely identical. "Seek
Jehovah and ye shall live seek good and ye shall live." {Amo 5:6;
Amo 5:14} The absoluteness with which Amos conceived this principle,
the courage with which he applied it, carry him along those two
great lines upon which we most clearly trace his originality as a
prophet. In the strength of this principle he does what is really
new in Israel: he discards the two elements which had hitherto
existed alongside the ethical, and had fettered and warped it.
Up till now the ethical spirit of the religion of Jehovah had to
struggle with two beliefs which we can trace back to the Semitic
origins of the religion-the belief, namely, that, as the national
God, Jehovah would always defend their political interests,
irrespective of morality; and the belief that a ceremonial of rites
and sacrifices was indispensable to religion. These principles were
mutual: as the deity was bound to succor the people, so were the
people bound to supply the deity with gifts, and the more of these
they brought the more they made sure of his favors. Such views were
not absolutely devoid of moral benefit. In the formative period of
the nation they had contributed both discipline and hope. But of
late they had between them engrossed men’s hearts, and crushed out
of religion both conscience and common-sense. By the first of them,
the belief in Jehovah’s predestined protection of Israel, the
people’s eyes were so holden they could not see how threatening were
the times; by the other, the confidence in ceremonial, conscience
was dulled, and that immorality permitted which they mingled so
shamelessly with their religious zeal. Now the conscience of Amos
did not merely protest against the predominance of the two, but was
so exclusive, so spiritual, that it boldly banished both from
religion. Amos denied that Jehovah was bound to save His people; he
affirmed that ritual and sacrifice were no part of the service He
demands from men. This is the measure of originality in our prophet.
The two religious principles which were inherent in the very fiber
of Semitic religion, and which till now had gone unchallenged in
Israel, Amos cast forth from religion in the name of a pure and
absolute righteousness. On the one hand, Jehovah’s peculiar
connection with Israel meant no more than jealousy for their
holiness: "You only have I known of all the families of the earth,
therefore will I visit upon you all your iniquities." {Amo 3:2} And,
on the other hand, all their ceremonial was abhorrent to Him: "I
hate, I despise your festivals. Though ye offer Me burnt offerings
and your meal offerings, I will not accept them Take thou away from
Me the noise of thy songs; I will not hear the music of thy viols.
But let justice run down as waters, and righteousness as a perennial
stream." {Amo 5:21 ff.}
It has just been said that emphasis upon morality as the sum of
religion, to the exclusion of sacrifice, is the most original
element in the prophecies of Amos He himself, however, does not
regard this as proclaimed for the first time in Israel, and the
precedent he quotes is so illustrative of the sources of his
inspiration that we do well to look at it for a little. In the verse
next to the one last quoted he reports these words of God: "Did ye
offer unto Me sacrifices and gifts in the wilderness, for forty
years, O house of Israel?" An extraordinary challenge! From the
present blind routine of sacrifice Jehovah appeals to the beginning
of His relations with the nation: did they then perform such
services to Him? Of course, a negative answer is expected. No other
agrees with the main contention of the passage. In the wilderness
Israel had not offered sacrifices and gifts to Jehovah. Jeremiah
quotes a still more explicit word of Jehovah: "I spake not unto your
fathers in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt
concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices: but this thing I
commanded them, saying, Obey My voice, and I will be your God, and
ye shall be My people." {Jer 7:22 f.}
To these Divine statements we shall not be able to do justice if we
hold by the traditional view that the Levitical legislation was
proclaimed in the wilderness. Discount that legislation, and the
statements become clear. It is true, of course, that Israel must
have had a ritual of some kind from the first; and that both in the
wilderness and in Canaan their spiritual leaders must have performed
sacrifices as if these were acceptable to Jehovah. But even so the
Divine words which Amos and Jeremiah quote are historically correct;
for while the ethical contents of the religion of Jehovah were its
original and essential contents-"I commanded them, saying, Obey My
voice"-the ritual was but a modification of the ritual common to all
Semites; and ever since the occupation of the land, it had, through
the infection of the Canaanite rites on the high places, grown more
and more Pagan, both in its functions and in the ideas which these
were supposed to express. Amos was right. Sacrifice had never been
the Divine, the revealed element in the religion of Jehovah.
Nevertheless, before Amos no prophet in Israel appears to have said
so. And what enabled this man in the eighth century to offer
testimony, so novel but so true, about the far-away beginnings of
his people’s religion in the fourteenth, was plainly neither
tradition nor historical research, but an overwhelming conviction of
the spiritual and moral character of God-of Him who had been
Israel’s God both then and now, and whose righteousness had been,
just as much then as now, exalted above all purely national
interests and all susceptibility to ritual. When we thus see the
prophet’s knowledge of the Living God enabling him, not only to
proclaim an ideal of religion more spiritual than Israel had yet
dreamed, but to perceive that such an ideal had been the essence of
the religion of Jehovah from the first, we understand how thoroughly
Amos was mastered by that knowledge. If we need any further proof of
his "possession" by the character of God, we find it in those
phrases in which his own consciousness disappears, and we have no
longer the herald’s report of the Lord’s words, but the very accents
of the Lord Himself, fraught with personal feeling of the most
intense quality. "I" Jehovah "hate, I despise your feast days Take
thou away from Me the noise of thy songs; I will not hear the music
of thy viols {Amo 5:21-23} I abhor the arrogance of Jacob, and hate
his palaces {Amo 6:8} The eyes of the Lord Jehovah are upon the
sinful kingdom {Amo 9:8} Jehovah sweareth, I will never forget any
of their works." {Amo 8:7} Such sentences reveal a Deity who is not
only manifest Character, but is urgent and importunate Feeling. We
have traced the prophet’s word to its ultimate source. It springs
from the righteousness, the vigilance, the urgency of the Eternal.
The intellect, imagination, and heart of Amos-the convictions he has
inherited from his people’s past, his conscience of their evil life
today, his impressions of current and coming history-are all
enforced and illuminated, all made impetuous and radiant, by the
Spirit, that is to say the Purpose and the Energy, of the Living
God. Therefore, as he says in the title of his book, or as someone
says for him, Amos saw his words. They stood out objective to
himself. And they were not mere sound. They glowed and burned with
God.
When we realize this, we feel how inadequate it is to express
prophecy in the terms of evolution. No doubt, as we have seen, the
ethics and religion of Amos represent a large and measurable advance
upon those of earlier Israel. And yet with Amos we do not seem so
much to have arrived at a new stage in a Process, as to have
penetrated to the Idea which has been behind the Process from the
beginning. The change and growth of Israel’s religion are
realities-their fruits can be seen, defined, catalogued-but a
greater reality is the unseen purpose which impels them. They have
been expressed only now. He has been unchanging from old and
forever-from the first absolute righteousness in Himself, and
absolute righteousness in His demands from men.
3. THE PROPHET AND HIS MINISTRY
Amos 7 - Amo 8:1-4
We have seen the preparation of the Man for the
Word; we have sought to trace to its source the Word which came to
the Man. It now remains for us to follow the Prophet, Man and Word
combined, upon his Ministry to the people.
For reasons given in a previous chapter, there must always be some
doubt as to the actual course of the ministry of Amos before his
appearance at Bethel. Most authorities, however, agree that the
visions recounted in the beginning of the seventh chapter form the
substance of his address at Bethel, which was interrupted by the
priest Amaziah. These visions furnish a probable summary of the
prophet’s experience up to that point. While they follow the same
course, which we trace in the two series of oracles that now precede
them in the book, the ideas in them are less elaborate. At the same
time it is evident that Amos must have already spoken upon other
points than those which he puts into the first three visions. For
instance, Amaziah reports to the king that Amos had explicitly
predicted the exile of the whole people {Amo 7:11} -a conviction
which, as we have seen, the prophet reached only after some length
of experience. It is equally certain that Amos must have already
exposed the sins of the people in the light of the Divine
righteousness. Some of the sections of the book which deal with this
subject appear to have been originally spoken; and it is unnatural
to suppose that the prophet announced the chastisements of God
without having previously justified these to the consciences of men.
If this view be correct, Amos, having preached for some time to
Israel concerning the evil state of society, appeared at a great
religious festival in Bethel, determined to bring matters to a
crisis, and to announce the doom which his preaching threatened and
the people’s continued impenitence made inevitable Mark his choice
of place and of audience. It was no mere king he aimed at. Nathan
had dealt with David, Gad with Solomon, Elijah with Ahab and
Jezebel. But Amos sought the people, them with whom resided the real
forces and responsibilities of life: the wealth, the social
fashions, the treatment of the poor, the spirit of worship, the
ideals of religion. And Amos sought the people upon what was not
only a great popular occasion, but one on which was arrayed, in all
pomp and lavishness, the very system he essayed to overthrow The
religion of his time-religion as mere ritual and sacrifice-was what
God had sent him to beat down, and he faced it at its headquarters,
and upon one of its high days, in the royal and popular sanctuary
where it enjoyed at once the patronage of the crown, the lavish
gifts of the rich, and the thronged devotion of the multitude. As
Savonarola at the Duomo in Florence, as Luther at the Diet of Worms,
as our Lord Himself at the feast in Jerusalem, so was Amos at the
feast in Bethel. Perhaps he was still more lonely. He speaks nowhere
of having made a disciple, and in the sea of faces which turned on
him when he spoke, it is probable that he could not welcome a single
ally. They were officials, or interested traders, or devotees; he
was a foreigner and a wild man, with a word that spared the popular
dogma as little as the royal prerogative. Well for him was it that
over all those serried ranks of authority, those fanatic crowds,
that lavish splendor, another vision commanded his eyes. "I saw the
Lord standing over the altar, and He said, Smite."
Amos told the pilgrims at Bethel that the first events of his time
in which he felt a purpose of God in harmony with his convictions
about Israel’s need of punishment were certain calamities of a
physical kind. Of these, which in chapter 4 he describes as
successively drought, blasting, locusts, pestilence, and earthquake,
he selected at Bethel only two-locusts and drought-and he began with
the locusts. It may have been either the same visitation as he
specifies in chapter 4, or a previous one; for of all the plagues of
Palestine locusts have been the most frequent, occurring every six
or seven years. "Thus the Lord Jehovah caused me to see: and,
behold, a brood of locusts at the beginning of the coming up of the
spring crops." In the Syrian year there are practically two tides of
verdure: one which starts after the early rains of October and
continues through the winter, checked by the cold; and one which
comes away with greater force under the influence of the latter
rains and more genial airs of spring. Of these it was the later and
richer which the locusts had attacked. "And, behold, it was after
the king’s mowings." These seem to have been a tribute which the
kings of Israel levied on the spring herbage, and which the Roman
governors of Syria used annually to impose in the month Nisan.
"After the king’s mowings" would be a phrase to mark the time when
everybody else might turn to reap their green stuff. It was thus the
very crisis of the year when the locusts appeared; the April crops
devoured, there was no hope of further fodder till December. Still,
the calamity had happened before, and had been survived; a nation so
vigorous and wealthy as Israel was under Jeroboam II need not have
been frightened to death. But Amos felt it with a conscience. To him
it was the beginning of that destruction of his people which the
spirit within him knew that their sin had earned. So "it came to
pass when" the locusts "had made an end of devouring the verdure of
the earth, that I said, Remit, I pray Thee," or "pardon"-a proof
that there already weighed on the prophet’s spirit something more
awful than loss of grass-"how shall Jacob rise again? for he is
little." The prayer was heard. "Jehovah repented for this: It shall
not be, said Jehovah." The unnameable "it" must be the same as in
the frequent phrase of the first chapter: "I will not turn it back"
namely, the final execution of doom on the people’s sin. The reserve
with which this is mentioned, both while there is still chance for
the people to repent and after it has become irrevocable, is very
impressive.
The next example which Amos gave at Bethel of his permitted insight
into God’s purpose was a great drought. "Thus the Lord Jehovah made.
me to see: and, behold, the Lord Jehovah was calling fire irate the
quarrel." There was, then, already a quarrel between Jehovah and His
people-another sign that the prophet’s moral conviction of Israel’s
sin preceded the rise of the events in which he recognized its
punishment. "And" the fire "devoureth the Great Deep, yea, it was
about to devour the land." Severe drought in Palestine might well be
described as fire, even when it was not accompanied by the flame and
smoke of those forest and prairie fires which Joel describes as its
consequences. {Amos 1} But to have the full fear of such a drought,
we should need to feel beneath us the curious world which the men of
those days felt. To them the earth rested in a great deep, from
whose stores all her springs and fountains burst. When these failed
it meant that the unfathomed floods below were burnt up. But how
fierce the flame that could effect this! And how certainly able to
devour next the solid land which rested above the deep-the very
"Portion" assigned by God to His people. Again Amos interceded:
"Lord Jehovah, I pray Thee forbear: how shall Jacob rise? for he is
little." And for the second time Jacob was reprieved. "Jehovah
repented for this: It also shall not come to pass, said the Lord
Jehovah."
We have treated these visions, not as the imagination or prospect of
possible disasters, but as insight into the meaning of actual
plagues. Such a treatment is justified, not only by the invariable
habit of Amos to deal with real facts, but also by the occurrence of
these same plagues among the series by which, as we are told, God
had already sought to move the people to repentance. The general
question of sympathy between such purely physical disasters and the
moral evil of a people we may postpone to another chapter, confining
ourselves here to the part played in the events by the prophet
himself.
Surely there is something wonderful in the attitude of this shepherd
to the fires and plagues that Nature sweeps upon his land. He is
ready for them. And he is ready not only by the general feeling of
his time that such things happen of the wrath of God. His sovereign
and predictive conscience recognizes them as her ministers. They are
sent to punish a people whom she has already condemned. Yet, unlike
Elijah, Amos does not summon the drought, nor even welcome its
arrival. How far has prophecy traveled since the violent Tishbite!
With all his conscience of Israel’s sin, Amos yet prays that their
doom may be turned. We have here some evidence of the struggle
through which these later prophets passed, before they accepted
their awful messages to men. Even Amos, desert-bred and living aloof
from Israel, shrank from the judgment which it was his call to
publish. For two moments-they would appear to be the only two in his
ministry-his heart contended with his conscience, and twice he
entreated God to forgive. At Bethel he told the people all this, in
order to show how unwillingly he took up his duty against them, and
how inevitable he found that duty to be. But still more shall we
learn from his tale, if we feel in his words about the smallness of
Jacob, not pity only, but sympathy. We shall learn that prophets are
never made solely by the bare word of God, but that even the most
objective and judicial of them has to earn his title to proclaim
judgment by suffering with men the agony of the judgment he
proclaims. Never to a people came there a true prophet who had not
first prayed for them. To have entreated for men, to have
represented them in the highest courts of Being, is to have deserved
also supreme judicial rights upon them. And thus it is that our
Judge at the Last Day shall be none other than our great Advocate
who continually maketh intercession for us. It is prayer, let us
repeat, which, while it gives us all power with God, endows us at
the same time with moral rights over men. Upon his mission of
judgment we shall follow Amos with the greater sympathy that he thus
comes forth to it from the mercy-seat and the ministry of
intercession.
The first two visions which Amos told at Bethel were of disasters in
the sphere of nature, but his third lay in the sphere of politics.
The two former were, in their completeness at least, averted; and
the language Amos used of them seems to imply that he had not even
then faced the possibility of a final overthrow. He took for granted
Jacob was to rise again: he only feared as to how this should be.
But the third vision is so final that the prophet does not even try
to intercede. Israel is measured, found wanting, and doomed. Assyria
is not named, but is obviously intended; and the fact-that the
prophet arrives at certainty with regard to the doom of Israel, just
when he thus comes within sight of Assyria, is instructive as to the
influence exerted on prophecy by the rise of that empire.
"Thus He gave me to see: and, behold, the Lord had taken His
station"-‘tis a more solemn word than the "stood" of our
versions-"upon a city wall" built to "the plummet, and in His hand a
plummet. And Jehovah said unto me, What art thou seeing, Amos?" The
question surely betrays some astonishment shown by the prophet at
the vision or some difficulty he felt in making it out. He evidently
does not feel it at once, as the natural result of his own thinking:
it is objective and strange to him; he needs time to see into it.
"And I said, A plummet. And the Lord said, Behold, I am setting a
plummet in the midst of My people Israel. I will not again pass them
over." To set a measuring line or a line with weights attached to
any building means to devote it to destruction; but here it is
uncertain whether the plummet threatens destruction, or means that
Jehovah will at last clearly prove to the prophet the insufferable
obliquity of the fabric of the nation’s life, originally set
straight by Himself-originally "a wall of a plummet." For God’s
judgments are never arbitrary: by a standard we men can read He
shows us their necessity. Conscience itself is no mere voice of
authority: it is a convincing plummet, and plainly lets us see why
we should be punished. But whichever interpretation we choose, the
result is the same. "The high places of Israel shall be desolate,
and the sanctuaries of Isaac laid waste; and I will rise against the
house of Jeroboam with the sword." A declaration of war! Israel is
to be invaded, her dynasty overthrown. Everyone who heard the
prophet would know, though he named them not, that the Assyrians
were meant.
It was apparently at this point that Amos was interrupted by Amaziah.
The priest, who was conscious of no spiritual power with which to
oppose the prophet, gladly grasped the opportunity afforded him by
the mention of the king, and fell back on the invariable resource of
a barren and envious sacerdotalism: "He speaketh against Caesar." {Joh
19:12} There follows one of the great scenes of history-the scene
which, however fast the ages and the languages, the ideals and the
deities may change, repeats itself with the same two actors. Priest
and Man face each other-Priest with King behind, Man with God-and
wage that debate in which the whole warfare and progress of religion
consist. But the story is only typical by being real. Many subtle
traits of human nature prove that we have here an exact narrative of
fact. Take Amaziah’s report to Jeroboam. He gives to the words of
the prophet just that exaggeration and innuendo which betray the
wily courtier, who knows how to accentuate a general denunciation
till it feels like a personal attack. And yet, like every Caiaphas
of his tribe, the priest in his exaggerations expresses a deeper
meaning than he is conscious of. "Amos"-note how the mere mention of
the name without description proves that the prophet was already
known in Israel, perhaps was one on whom the authorities had long
kept their eye-"Amos hath conspired against thee"-yet God was his
only fellow-conspirator!-"in the midst of the house of Israel"-this
royal temple at Bethel. "The land is not able to hold his words"-it
must burst; yes, but in another sense than thou meanest, O
Caiaphas-Amaziah! "For thus hath Amos said, By the sword shall
Jeroboam die"-Amos had spoken only of the dynasty, but the twist
which Amaziah lends to the words is calculated-"and Israel going
shall go into captivity from off his own land." This was the one
unvarnished spot in the report.
Having fortified himself, as little men will do, by his duty to the
powers that be, Amaziah dares to turn upon the prophet; and he does
so, it is amusing to observe, with that tone of intellectual and
moral superiority which it is extraordinary to see some men derive
from a merely official station or touch with royalty. "Visionary,
begone! Get thee off to the land of Judah; and earn thy bread there,
and there play the prophet. But at Bethel"-mark the rising accent of
the voice-"thou shalt not again prophesy. The King’s Sanctuary it
is, and the House of the Kingdom." With the official mind this is
more conclusive than that it is the House of God! In fact the speech
of Amaziah justifies the hardest terms which Amos uses of the
religion of his day. In all this priest says there is no trace of
the spiritual-only fear, pride, and privilege. Divine truth is
challenged by human law, and the Word of God silenced in the name of
the king.
We have here a conception of religion, which is not merely due to
the unspiritual character of the priest who utters it, but has its
roots in the far back origins of Israel’s religion. The Pagan Semite
identified absolutely State and Church; and on that identification
was based the religious practice of early Israel. It had many
healthy results: it kept religion in touch with public life; order,
justice, patriotism, self-sacrifice for the common weal, were
devoutly held to be matters of religion. So long, therefore, as the
system was inspired by truly spiritual ideals, nothing for those
times could be better. But we see in it an almost inevitable
tendency to harden to the sheerest officialism. That it was more apt
to do so in Israel than in Judah, is intelligible from the origin of
the Northern Schism, and the erection of the national sanctuaries
from motives of mere statecraft. {1Ki 12:26-27} Erastianism could
hardly be more flagrant or more ludicrous in its opposition to true
religion than at Bethel. And yet how often have the ludicrousness
and the flagrancy been repeated, with far less temptation! Ever
since Christianity became a state religion, she that needed least to
use the weapons of this world has done so again and again in a
thoroughly Pagan fashion. The attempts of Churches by law
established, to stamp out by law all religious dissent; or where
such attempts were no longer possible, the charges now of fanaticism
and now of sordidness and religious shop keeping, which have been so
frequently made against dissent by little men who fancied their
state connection, or their higher social position to mean an
intellectual and moral superiority: the absurd claims which many a
minister of religion makes upon the homes and the souls of a parish,
by virtue not of his calling in Christ, but of his position as
official priest of the parish, -all these are the sins of Amaziah,
priest of Bethel. But they are not confined to an established
Church. The Amaziahs of dissent are also very many. Wherever the
official masters the spiritual; wherever mere dogma or tradition is
made the standard of preaching; wherever new doctrine is silenced,
or programs of reform condemned, as of late years in Free Churches
they have sometimes been, not by spiritual argument, but by the ipse
dixit of the dogmatist, or by ecclesiastical rule or expediency,
-there you have the same spirit. The dissenter who checks the Word
of God in the name of some denominational law or dogma is as
Erastian as the churchman who would crush it, like Amaziah, by
invoking the state. These things in all the Churches are the
beggarly rudiments of Paganism; and religious reform is achieved, as
it was that day at Bethel, by the adjuring of officialism.
"But Amos answered and said unto Amaziah, No prophet I, nor
prophet’s son. But a herdsman I, and a dresser of sycamores; and
Jehovah took me from behind the flock, and Jehovah said unto me, Go,
prophesy unto My people Israel."
On such words we do not comment; we give them homage. The answer of
this shepherd to this priest is no mere claim of personal
disinterestedness. It is the protest of a new order of prophecy, the
charter of a spiritual religion. As we have seen, the "sons of the
prophets" were guilds of men who had taken to prophesying because of
certain gifts of temper and natural disposition, and they earned
their bread by the exercise of these. Among such abstract craftsmen
Amos will not be reckoned. He is a prophet, but not of the kind with
which his generation was familiar. An ordinary member of society, he
has been suddenly called by Jehovah from his civil occupation for a
special purpose and by a call which has not necessarily to do with
either gifts or a profession. This was something new, not only in
itself, but in its consequences upon the general relations of God to
men. What we see in this dialogue at Bethel is, therefore, not
merely the triumph of a character, however heroic, but rather a step
forward and that one of the greatest and most indispensable-in the
history of religion.
There follows a denunciation of the man who sought to silence this
fresh voice of God. "Now therefore hearken to the word of Jehovah
thou that sayest, Prophesy not against Israel, nor let drop thy
words against the house of Israel; therefore thus saith Jehovah
"Thou hast presumed to say; Hear what God will say." Thou hast dared
to set thine office and system against His word and purpose. See how
they must be swept away. In defiance of its own rules the grammar
flings forward to the beginnings of its clauses, each detail of the
priest’s estate along with the scene of its desecration. "Thy wife
in the city-shall play the harlot; and thy sons and thy daughters by
the sword-shall fall; and thy land by the measuring rope-shall be
divided; and thou in an unclean land-shalt die. Do not let us blame
the prophet for a coarse cruelty in the first of these details. He
did not invent it. With all the rest it formed an ordinary
consequence of defeat in the warfare of the times-an inevitable item
of that general overthrow which, with bitter emphasis, the prophet
describes in Amaziah’s own words: "Israel going shall go into
captivity from off his own land."
There is added a vision in line with the three which preceded the
priest’s interruption. We are therefore justified in supposing that
Amos spoke it also on this occasion, and in taking it as the close
of his address at Bethel. "Then the Lord Jehovah gave me to see:
and, behold, a basket of Kaits," that is, "summer fruit. And He
said, What art thou seeing, Amos? And I said, A basket of Kaits. And
Jehovah said unto me, The Kets-the End - has come upon My people
Israel. I will not again pass them over." This does not carry the
prospect beyond the third vision, but it stamps its finality, and
there is therefore added a vivid realization of the result. By four
disjointed lamentations, "howls" the prophet calls them, we are made
to feel the last shocks of the final collapse, and in the utter end
an awful silence. "And the songs of the temple shall be changed into
howls in that day, saith the Lord Jehovah. Multitude of corpses! In
every place! He hath cast out! Hush!"
These then were probably the last words which Amos spoke to Israel.
If so, they form a curious echo of what was enforced upon himself,
and he may have meant them as such. He was "cast out"; he was
"silenced." They might almost be the verbal repetition of the
priest’s orders. In any case the silence is appropriate. But Amaziah
little knew what power he had given to prophecy the day he forbade
it to speak. The gagged prophet began to write; and those accents
which, humanly speaking, might have died out with the songs of the
temple of Bethel were clothed upon with the immortality of
literature. Amos silenced wrote a book-first of prophets to do
so-and this is the book we have now to study.
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