ATROCITIES AND ATROCITIES
Amo 1:3 - Amos 2
LIKE all the prophets of Israel, Amos receives
oracles for foreign nations. Unlike them, however, he arranges these
oracles not after, but before, his indictment of his own people, and
so as to lead up to this. His reason is obvious and characteristic.
If his aim be to enforce a religion independent of his people’s
interests and privileges, how can he better do so than by exhibiting
its principles at work outside his people, and then, with the
impetus drained from many areas, sweep in upon the vested iniquities
of Israel herself? This is the course of the first section of his
book-chapters 1 and 2. One by one the neighbors of Israel are cited
and condemned in the name of Jehovah; one by one they are told they
must fall before the still unnamed engine of the Divine Justice. But
when Amos has stirred his people’s conscience and imagination by his
judgment of their neighbors’ sins, he turns with the same formula on
themselves. Are they morally better? Are they more likely to resist
Assyria? With greater detail he shows them worse and their doom the
heavier for all their privileges. Thus is achieved an oratorical
triumph, by tactics in harmony with the principles of prophecy and
remarkably suited to the tempers of that time.
But Amos achieves another feat, which extends far beyond his own
day. The sins he condemns in the heathen are at first sight very
different from those which he exposes within Israel. Not only are
they sins of foreign relations, of treaty and war, while Israel’s
are all civic and domestic; but they are what we call the atrocities
of Barbarism-wanton war, massacre, and sacrilege-while Israel’s are
rather the sins of Civilization-the pressure of the rich upon the
poor, the bribery of justice, the seduction of the innocent,
personal impurity, and other evils of luxury. So great is this
difference that a critic more gifted with ingenuity than with
insight might plausibly distinguish in the section before us two
prophets with two very different views of national sin-a ruder
prophet, and of course an earlier, who judged nations only by the
flagrant drunkenness of their war, and a more subtle prophet, and of
course a later, who exposed the masked corruptions of their religion
and their peace. Such a theory would be as false as it would be
plausible. For not only is the diversity of the objects of the
prophet’s judgment explained by this, that Amos had no familiarity
with the interior life of other nations, and could only arraign
their conduct at those points where it broke into light in their
foreign relations, while Israel’s civic life he knew to the very
core. But Amos had besides a strong and a deliberate aim in placing
the sins of civilization as the climax of a list of the atrocities
of barbarism. He would recall what men are always forgetting, that
the former are really more cruel and criminal than the latter; that
luxury, bribery, and intolerance, the oppression of the poor, the
corruption of the innocent and the silencing of the prophet-what
Christ calls offences against His little ones-are even more awful
atrocities than the wanton horrors of barbarian warfare. If we keep
in mind this moral purpose, we shall study with more interest than
we could otherwise do the somewhat foreign details of this section.
Horrible as the outrages are which Amos describes, they were
repeated only yesterday by Turkey: Many of the crimes with which he
charges Israel blacken the life of Turkey’s chief accuser, Great
Britain.
In his survey Amos includes all the six states of Palestine that
bordered upon Israel, and lay in the way of the advance of Assyria-Aram
of Damascus, Philistia, Tyre (or Phoenicia), Edom, Ammon, and Moab.
They are not arranged in geographical order. The prophet begins with
Aram in the northeast, then leaps to Philistia in the southwest,
comes north again to Tyre, crosses to the southeast and Edom, leaps
Moab to Ammon, and then comes back to Moab. Nor is any other
explanation of his order visible. Damascus heads the list, no doubt,
because her cruelties had been most felt by Israel, and perhaps too
because she lay most open to Assyria. It was also natural to take
next to Aram Philistia, as Israel’s other greatest foe; and nearest
to Philistia lay Tyre. The three southeastern principalities come
together. But there may have been a chronological reason now unknown
to us.
The authenticity of the oracles on Tyre; Edom, and Judah has been
questioned: it will be best to discuss each case as we come to it.
Each of the oracles is introduced by the formula: "Thus saith," or
"hath said, Jehovah: Because of three crimes of yea, because of
four, I will not turn It back." In harmony with the rest of the
book, Jehovah is represented as moving to punishment, not for a
single sin, but for repeated and cumulative guilt. The unnamed "It"
which God will not recall is not the word of judgment, but the anger
and the hand stretched forth to smite. After the formula, an
instance of the nation’s guilt is given, and then in almost
identical terms he decrees the destruction of all by war and
captivity. Assyria is not mentioned, but it is the Assyrian fashion
of dealing with conquered states which is described. Except in the
case of Tyre and Edom, the oracles conclude as they have begun, by
asserting themselves to be the "word of Jehovah," or of "Jehovah the
Lord." It is no abstract righteousness which condemns these foreign
peoples, but the God of Israel, and their evil deeds are described
by the characteristic Hebrew word for sin-"crimes," "revolts," or
"treasons" against Him.
1. ARAM OF DAMASCUS.-"Thus hath Jehovah said: Because of three
crimes of Damascus, yea, because of four, I will not turn It back;
for that they threshed Gilead with iron"-or "basalt
threshing-sledges." The word is "iron," but the Arabs of today call
basalt iron; and the threshing-sledges, curved slabs drawn rapidly
by horses over the heaped corn, are studded with sharp basalt teeth
that not only thresh out the grain, but chop the straw into little
pieces. So cruelly had Gilead been chopped by Hazael and his son
Ben-Hadad some fifty or forty years before Amos prophesied.
Strongholds were burned, soldiers slain without quarter, children
dashed to pieces, and women with child put to a most atrocious end.
But "I shall send fire on the house of Hazael, and it shall devour
the palaces of Ben-Hadad"-these names are chosen, not because they
were typical of the Damascus dynasty, but because they were the very
names of the two heaviest oppressors of Israel. "And I will break
the bolt of Damascus, and cut off the inhabitant from
Bik’ath-Aven"-the Valley of Idolatry, so called, perhaps, by a play
upon Bik’ath On, presumably the valley between the Lebanons, still
called the Beka, in which lay Heliopolis-"and him that holdeth the
scepter from Beth-Eden"-some royal Paradise in that region of
Damascus which is still the Paradise of the Arab world-"and the
people of Aram shall go captive to Kir"-Kir in the unknown north,
from which they had come: (Amo 9:7) "Jehovah hath said" it.
2. PHILISTIA.-"Thus saith Jehovah: For three crimes of Gaza and for
four I will not turn It back, because they led captive a whole
captivity, in order to deliver them up to Edom." It is difficult to
see what this means if not the wholesale depopulation of a district
in contrast to the enslavement of a few captives of war. By all
tribes of the ancient world, the captives of their bow and spear
were regarded as legitimate property: it was no offence to the
public conscience that they should be sold into slavery. But the
Philistines seem, without excuse of war, to have descended upon
certain districts and swept the whole of the population before them,
for purely commercial purposes. It was professional slave-catching.
The Philistines were exactly like the Arabs of today in Africa-not
warriors who win their captives in honorable fight, but
slave-traders, pure and simple. In warfare in Arabia itself it is
still a matter of conscience with the wildest nomads not to
extinguish a hostile tribe, however bitter one be against them. Gaza
is chiefly blamed by Amos, for she was the emporium of the trade on
the border of the desert, with roads and regular caravans to Petra
and Elah on the Gulf of Akaba, both of them places in Edom and
depots for the traffic with Arabia. "But I will cut off the
inhabitant from Ashdod, and the holder of the sceptre from Askalon,
and I will turn My hand upon Ekron"-four of the five great
Philistine towns, Gath being already destroyed, and never again to
be mentioned with the others-"and the last of the Philistines shall
perish: Jehovah hath said it."
3. TYRE.-"Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Tyre and
because of four I will not turn It back; for that they gave up a
whole captivity to Edom"-the same market as in the previous
charge-"and did not remember the covenant of brethren." We do not
know to what this refers. The alternatives are three: that the
captives were Hebrews and the alliance one between Israel and Edom;
that the captives were Hebrews and the alliance one between Israel
and Tyre; that the captives were Phoenicians and the alliance the
natural brotherhood of Tyre and the other Phoenician towns. But of
these three alternatives the first is scarcely possible, for in such
a case the blame would have been rather Edom’s in buying than Tyre’s
in selling. The second is possible, for Israel and Tyre had lived in
close alliance for more than two centuries; but the phrase "covenant
of brethren" is not so well suited to a league between two tribes
who felt themselves to belong to fundamentally different races,
{Genesis 10} as to the close kinship of the Phoenician communities.
And although, in the scrappy records of Phoenician history before
this time, we find no instance of so gross an outrage by Tyre on
other Phoenicians, it is quite possible that such may have occurred.
During next century Tyre twice over basely took sides with Assyria
in suppressing the revolts of her sister cities. Besides, the other
Phoenician towns are not included in the charge. We have every
reason, therefore, to believe that Amos expresses here not
resentment against a betrayal of Israel, but indignation at an
outrage upon natural rights and feelings with which Israel’s own
interests were not in any way concerned. And this also suits the
lofty spirit of the whole prophecy. "But I will send fire upon the
wall of Tyre, and it shall devour her palaces"
This oracle against Tyre has been suspected by Wellhausen, for the
following reasons: that it is of Tyre alone, and silence is kept
regarding the other Phoenician cities, while in the case of
Philistia other towns than Gaza are condemned; that the charge is
the same as against Gaza; and that the usual close to the formula is
wanting. But it would have been strange if from a list of states
threatened by the Assyrian doom we had missed Tyre, Tyre which lay
in the avenger’s very path. Again, that so acute a critic as
Wellhausen should cite the absence of other Phoenician towns from
the charge against Tyre is really amazing, when he has just allowed
that it was probably against some or all of these cities that Tyre’s
crime was committed. How could they be included in the blame of an
outrage done upon themselves? The absence of the usual formula at
the close may perhaps be explained by omission, as indicated above.
4. EDOM.-"Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Edom and
because of four I will not turn It back; for that he pursued with
the sword his brother," who cannot be any other than Israel,
"corrupted his natural feelings"-literally "his bowels of
mercies"-"and kept aye fretting his anger, and his passion he
watched"-like a fire, or "paid heed" to it-"forever." "But I will
send fire upon Teman"-the "South" Region belonging to Edom-"and it
shall devour the palaces of Bosrah"-the Edomite Bosrah, southeast of
Petra. The Assyrians had already compelled Edom to pay tribute.
The objections to the authenticity of this oracle are more serious
than those in the case of the oracle on Tyre. It has been remarked
that before the Jewish Exile so severe a tone could not have been
adopted by a Jew against Edom, who had been mostly under the yoke of
Judah, and not leniently treated. What were the facts? Joab subdued
Edom for David with great cruelty. {2Sa 8:13 with 1Ki 11:16} Jewish
governors were set over the conquered people, and this state of
affairs seems to have lasted, in spite of an Edomite attempt against
Solomon, {1Ki 11:14-25} till 850. In Jehoshaphat’s reign, 873-850,
"there was no king of Edom, a deputy was king," who towards 850
joined the kings of Judah and Israel in an invasion of Moab through
his territory. {2 Kings 3} But, soon after this invasion and perhaps
in consequence of its failure, Edom revolted from Joram of Judah
(849-842), who unsuccessfully attempted to put down the revolt. {2Ki
8:20-22} The Edomites appear to have remained independent for fifty
years at least. Amaziah of Judah (797-779) smote Edom, {2Ki 14:10}
but not, it would seem, into subjection; for, according to the
Chronicler, Uzziah had to win back Elath for the Jews after
Amaziah’s death. {2Ch 26:2} The history, therefore, of the relations
of Judah and Edom before the time of Amos was of such a kind as to
make credible the existence in Judah at that time of the feeling
about Edom which inspires this oracle. Edom had shown just the
vigilant, implacable hatred here described. But was the right to
blame them for it Judah’s, who herself had so persistently waged
war, with confessed cruelty, against Edom? Could a Judaean prophet
be just in blaming Edom and saying nothing of Judah? It is true that
in the fifty years of Edom’s independence-the period, we must
remember, from which Amos seems to draw the materials of all his
other charges-there may have been events to justify this oracle as
spoken by him; and our ignorance of that period is ample reason why
we should pause before rejecting the oracle so dogmatically as
Wellhausen does. But we have at least serious grounds for suspecting
it. To charge Edom, whom Judah has conquered and treated cruelly,
with restless hate towards Judah seems to fall below that high
impartial tone which prevails in the other oracles of this section.
The charge was much more justifiable at the time of the Exile, when
Edom did behave shamefully towards Israel. Wellhausen points out
that Teman and Bosrah are names which do not occur in the Old
Testament before the Exile, but this is uncertain and inconclusive.
The oracle wants the concluding formula of the rest.
5. AMMON.-"Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Ammon and
because of four I will not turn It back; for that they ripped up
Gilead’s women with child-in order to enlarge their borders!" For
such an end they committed such an atrocity! The crime is one that
has been more or less frequent in Semitic warfare. Wellhausen cites
several instances in the feuds of Arab tribes about their frontiers.
The Turks have been guilty of it in our own day. It is the same
charge which the historian of Israel puts into the mouth of Elisha
against Hazael of Aram, {2Ki 8:12} and probably the war was the
same; when Gilead was simultaneously attacked by Arameans from the
north and Ammonites from the south. "But I will set fire to the wall
of Rabbah"-Rabbath-Ammon, literally "chief" or "capital" of Ammon-"and
it shall devour her palaces, with clamor in the day of battle, with
tempest in the day of storm." As we speak of "storming a city," Amos
and Isaiah use the tempest to describe the overwhelming invasion of
Assyria. There follows the characteristic Assyrian conclusion: "And
their king shall go into captivity, he and his princes together,
saith Jehovah."
6. MOAB.-"Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Moab and
because of four I will not turn It back; for that he burned the
bones of the king of Edom to lime." In the great invasion of Moab,
about 850, by Israel, Judah, and Edom conjointly, the rage of Moab
seems to have been directed chiefly against Edom. Whether
opportunity to appease that rage occurred on the withdrawal of
Israel we cannot say. But either then or afterwards, balked of their
attempt to secure the king of Edom alive, Moab wreaked their
vengeance on his corpse, and burnt his bones to lime. It was, in the
religious belief of all antiquity, a sacrilege: yet it does not seem
to have been the desecration of the tomb-or he would have mentioned
it-but the wanton meanness of the deed, which Amos felt. "And I will
send fire on Moab, and it shall devour the palaces of The Cities"-Kerioth,
perhaps the present Kureiyat, on the Moab plateau where Chemosh had
his shrine-"and in tumult shall Moab die"-to Jeremiah (Jer 48:45)
the Moabites were the sons of tumult-"with clamor and with the noise
of the war-trumpet. And I will cut off the ruler"-literally "judge,"
probably the vassal king placed by Jeroboam II "from her midst, and
all his princes will I slay with him: Jehovah hath said" it.
These, then, are the charges which Amos brings against the heathen
neighbors of Israel. If we look as a whole across the details
through which we have been working, what we see is a picture of the
Semitic world so summary and so vivid that we get the like of it
nowhere else-the Semitic world in its characteristic brokenness and
turbulence; its factions and ferocities, its causeless raids and
quarrels, tribal disputes about boundaries flaring up into the most
terrible massacres, vengeance that wreaks itself alike on the embryo
and the corpse-"cutting up women with child in Gilead," and "burning
to lime the bones of the king of Edom." And the one commerce which
binds these ferocious tribes together is the slave-trade in its
wholesale and most odious form.
Amos treats none of the atrocities subjectively. It is not because
they have been inflicted upon Israel that he feels or condemns them.
The appeals of Israel against the tyrant become many as the
centuries go on; the later parts of the Old Testament are full of
the complaints of God’s chosen people, conscious of their mission to
the world against the heathen, who prevented them from it. Here we
find none of these complaints, but a strictly objective and judicial
indictment of the characteristic crimes of heathen men against each
other; and though this is made in the name of Jehovah, it is not in
the interests of His people or of any of His purposes through them,
but solely by the standard of an impartial righteousness which, as
we are soon to hear, must descend in equal judgment on Israel.
Again, for the moral principles which Amos enforces no originality
can be claimed. He condemns neither war as a whole nor slavery as a
whole, but limits his curse to wanton and deliberate aggravations of
them: to the slave-trade in cold blood, in violation of treaties,
and for purely commercial ends; to war for trifling causes, and that
wreaks itself on pregnant women and dead men: to national hatreds,
that never will be still. Now against such things there has always
been in mankind a strong conscience, of which the word "humanity" is
in itself a sufficient proof. We need not here inquire into the
origin of such a common sense-whether it be some native impulse of
tenderness which asserts itself as soon as the duties of
self-defense are exhausted, or some rational notion of the
needlessness of excesses, or whether, in committing these, men are
visited by fear of retaliation from the wrath they have
unnecessarily exasperated. Certain it is that warriors of all races
have hesitated to be wanton in their war, and have foreboded the
special judgment of heaven upon every blind extravagance of hate or
cruelty. It is well known how the Greeks felt the insolence of power
and immoderate anger; they are the fatal element in many a Greek
tragedy. But the Semites themselves, whose racial ferocity is so
notorious, are not without the same feeling. "Even the Beduins" old
cruel rancor’s are often less than the golden piety of the
wilderness. The danger past, they can think of the defeated foemen
with kindness putting only their trust in Ullah to obtain the like
need for themselves. It is contrary to the Arabian conscience to
extinguish a Kabila." Similarly in Israel some of the earliest
ethical movements were revolts of the public conscience against
horrible outrages, like that, for instance, done by the Benjamites
of Gibeah. {Jdg 19:20} Therefore in these oracles on his old Semitic
neighbors Amos discloses no new ideal for either tribe or
individual. Our view is confirmed that he was intent only upon
arousing the natural conscience of his Hebrew hearers in order to
engage this upon other vices to which it was less
impressionable-that he was describing those deeds of war and
slavery, whose atrocity all men admitted, only that he might proceed
to bring under the same condemnation the civic and domestic sins of
Israel.
We turn with him, then, to Israel. But in his book as it now stands
in our Bibles, Israel is not immediately reached. Between her and
the foreign nations two verses are bestowed upon Judah: "Thus saith
Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Judah and because of four I will
not turn it back; for that they despised the Torah of Jehovah, and
His statutes they did not observe, and their false hoods"-false
gods-"led them astray, after which their fathers walked. But I will
send fire on Judah, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem."
These verses have been suspected as a later insertion, on the ground
that every reference to Judah in the Book of Amos must be late, that
the language is very formal, and that the phrases in which the sin
of Judah is described sound like echoes of Deuteronomy. The first of
these reasons may be dismissed as absurd; it would have been far
more strange if Amos had never at all referred to Judah. The
charges, however, are not like those which Amos elsewhere makes, and
though the phrases may be quite as early as his time, the reader of
the original, and even the reader of the English version, is aware
of a certain tameness and vagueness of statement, which contrasts
remarkably with the usual pungency of the prophet’s style. We are
forced to suspect the authenticity of these verses.
We ought to pass, then, straight from the third to the sixth verse
of this chapter, from the oracles on foreign nations to that on
Northern Israel. It is introduced with the same formula as they are:
"Thus saith Jehovah: Because of three crimes of Israel and because
of four I will not turn it back." But there follow a great number of
details, for Amos has come among his own people whom he knows to the
heart, and he applies to them a standard more exact and an
obligation more heavy than any he could lay to the life of the
heathen. Let us run quickly through the items of his charge. "For
that they sell an honest man for silver, and a needy man for a pair
of shoes"-proverbial, as we should say "for an old song"-"who
trample to the dust of the earth the head of the poor"-the least
improbable rendering of a corrupt passage-"and pervert the way of
humble men. And a man and his father will go into, the maid," the
same maid, "to desecrate My Holy Name"-without doubt some public
form of unchastity introduced from the Canaanite worship into the
very sanctuary of Jehovah, the holy place where He reveals His
Name-"and on garments given in pledge they stretch themselves by
every altar, and the wine of those who, have been fined they drink
in the house of their God." A riot of sin: the material of their
revels is the miseries of the poor, its stage the house of God! Such
is religion to the Israel of Amos day-indoors, feverish, sensual. By
one of the sudden contrasts he loves, Amos sweeps out of it into
God’s idea of religion-a great historical movement, told in the
language of the open air: national deliverance, guidance on the
highways of the world, the inspiration of prophecy, and the pure,
ascetic life. "But I, I destroyed the Amorite before you, whose
height was as. the cedars, and he was strong as oaks, and I
destroyed his fruit from above and his roots from below." What a
contrast to the previous picture of the temple filled with fumes of
wine and hot with lust! We are out on open history; God’s, gales
blow and the forests crash before them. "And I brought you up out of
the land of Egypt, and led you through the wilderness forty years,
to inherit the land of the Amorite." Religion is not chambering and
wantonness; it is not selfish comfort or profiting by the miseries
of the poor and the sins of the fallen. But religion is history-the
freedom of the people and their education, the winning of the land
and the defeat of the heathen foe; and then, when the land is firm
and the home secure, it is the raising, upon that stage and shelter,
of spiritual guides and examples. "And I raised up of your sons to
be prophets, and of your young men to be Nazarites"-consecrated and
ascetic lives. "Is it not so, O children of Israel? (oracle of
Jehovah). But ye made the Nazarites drink wine, and the prophets ye
charged, saying, Prophesy not!"
Luxury, then, and a very sensual conception of religion, with all
their vicious offspring in the abuse of justice, the oppression of
the poor, the corrupting of the innocent, and the intolerance of
spiritual forces-these are the sins of an enlightened and civilized
people, which Amos describes as worse than all the atrocities of
barbarism, and as certain of Divine vengeance. How far beyond his
own day are his words stilt warm! Here in the nineteenth century is
Great Britain, destroyer of the slave-traffic, and champion of
oppressed nationalities-yet this great and Christian people, at the
very time they are abolishing slavery, suffer their own children to
work in factories and clay-pits for sixteen hours a day, and in
mines set women to a labor for which horses are deemed too valuable.
Things improve after 1848, but how slowly, and against what
callousness of Christians, Lord Shaftesbury’s long and often
disappointed labors painfully testify. Even yet our religious
public, that curses the Turk, and in an indignation, which can never
be too warm, cries out against the Armenian atrocities, is callous,
nay, by the avarice of some, the haste and passion for enjoyment of
many more, and the thoughtlessness of all, itself contributes, to
conditions of life and fashions of society, which bear with cruelty
upon our poor, taint our literature, needlessly increase the
temptations of our large towns, and render pure child life
impossible among masses of our population. Along some of the
highways of our Christian civilization we are just as cruel and just
as lustful as Kurd or Turk.
Amos closes this prophecy with a vision of immediate judgment.
"Behold, I am about to crush or squeeze down upon you, as a wagon
crushes that is full of sheaves." An alternative reading supplies
the same general impression of a crushing judgment: "I will make the
ground quake under you, as a wagon makes it quake," or "as a wagon"
itself "quakes under its load of sheaves." This shock is to be War.
"Flight shall perish from the swift, and the strong shall not prove
his power, nor the mighty man escape with his life. And he that
graspeth the bow shall not stand, nor shall the swift of foot
escape, nor the horseman escape with his life. And he that thinketh
himself strong among the heroes shall flee away naked in that
day-‘tis the oracle of Jehovah."
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