CIVILIZATION AND JUDGMENT
Amos 3- Amo 4:3
WE now enter the Second Section of the Book of
Amos: chapters 3-6. It is a collection of various oracles of
denunciation, grouped partly by the recurrence of the formula "Hear
this word," which stands at the head of our present chapters 3, 4,
and 5, which are therefore probably due to it; partly by two cries
of "Woe" at Amo 5:18 and Amo 6:1; and also by the fact that each of
the groups thus started leads up to an emphatic, though not at first
detailed, prediction of the nation’s doom. {Amo 3:13-15; Amo 4:3;
Amo 4:12; Amo 5:16-17; Amo 5:26-27; Amo 6:14} Within these divisions
lie a number of short indictments, sentences of judgment, and the
like, which have no further logical connection than is supplied by
their general sameness of subject, and a perceptible increase of
articulateness from beginning to end of the Section. The sins of
Israel are more detailed, and the judgment of war, coming from the
North, advances gradually till we discern the unmistakable ranks of
Assyria. But there are various parentheses and interruptions, which
cause the student of the text no little difficulty. Some of these,
however, may be only apparent: it will always be a question whether
their want of immediate connection with what precedes them is not
due to the loss of several words from the text rather than to their
own intrusion into it. Of others it is true that they are obviously
out of place as they lie; their removal brings together verses which
evidently belong to each other. Even such parentheses, however, may
be from Amos himself. It is only where a verse, besides interrupting
the argument, seems to reflect a historical situation later than the
prophet’s day, that we can be sure it is not his own. And in all
this textual criticism we must keep in mind that the obscurity of
the present text of a verse, so far from being an adequate proof of
its subsequent insertion, may be the very token of its antiquity,
scribes or translators of later date having been unable to
understand it. To reject a verse, only because we do not see the
connection, would surely be as arbitrary as the opposite habit of
those who, missing a connection, invent one, and then exhibit their
artificial joint as evidence of the integrity of the whole passage.
In fact we must avoid all headstrong surgery, for to a great extent
we work in the dark.
The general subject of the Section may be indicated by the title:
Religion and Civilization. A vigorous community, wealthy, cultured,
and honestly religious, are, at a time of settled peace and growing
power, threatened, in the name of the God of justice, with their
complete political overthrow. Their civilization is counted for
nothing; their religion, on which they base their confidence, is
denounced as false and unavailing. These two subjects are not, and
could not have been, separated by the prophet in any one of his
oracles. But in the first, the briefest, and most summary of these,
chapters 3-4:3, it is mainly with the doom of the civil structure of
Israel’s life that Amos deals; ‘and it will be more convenient for
us to take them first, with all due reference to the echoes of them
in later parts of the Section. From Amo 4:4-6. it is the Religion
and its false peace which he assaults; and we shall take that in the
next chapter. First, then, Civilization and Judgment (Amos 3-4:3);
second, The False Peace of Ritual (Amo 4:4-6).
These few brief oracles open upon the same note as that in which the
previous Section closed-that the crimes of Israel are greater than
those of the heathen; and that the people’s peculiar relation to God
means, not their security, but their greater judgment. It is then
affirmed that Israel’s wealth and social life are so sapped by
luxury and injustice that the nation must perish. And, as in every
luxurious community the women deserve especial blame, the last of
the group of oracles is reserved for them. {Amo 4:1-3}
"Hear this word, which Jehovah hath spoken against you, O children
of Israel, against the whole family which I brought up from the land
of Egypt"
- Judah as well as North Israel, so that we see the vanity of a
criticism which would cast out of the Book of Amos as unauthentic
every reference to Judah. "Only you have I known of all the families
of the ground"-not world, but "ground," purposely chosen to stamp
the meanness and mortality of them all-"therefore will I visit upon
you all your iniquities."
This famous text has been called by various writers "the keynote,"
"the license," and "the charter" of prophecy. But the names are too
petty for what is not less than the fulmination of an element. It is
a peal of thunder we hear. It is, in a moment, the explosion and
discharge of the full storm of prophecy. As when from a burst cloud
the streams immediately below rise suddenly and all their banks are
overflowed, so the prophecies that follow surge and rise clear of
the old limits of Israel’s faith by the unconfined, unmeasured flood
of heaven’s justice that breaks forth by this single verse. Now,
once for all, are submerged the lines of custom and tradition within
which the course of religion has hitherto flowed; and, as it were,
the surface of the world is altered. It is a crisis which has
happened more than once again in history: when helpless man has felt
the absolute relentlessness of the moral issues of life; their
renunciation of the past, however much they have helped to form it;
their sacrifice of every development however costly, and of every
hope however pure; their deafness to prayer, their indifference to
penitence; when no faith saves a Church, no courage a people, no
culture or prestige even the most exalted order of men; but at the
bare hands of a judgment, uncouth of voice and often unconscious of
a Divine mission, the results of a great civilization are for its
sins swept remorselessly away.
Before the storm bursts, we learn by its lightnings some truths from
the old life that is to be destroyed. "You only have I known of all
the families of the ground: therefore will I visit your iniquities
upon you." Religion is no insurance against judgment, no mere
atonement and escape from consequences. Escape! Religion is only
opportunity-the greatest moral opportunity which men have, and which
if they violate nothing remains for them but a certain fearful
looking forward unto judgment. You only have I known; and because
you did not take the moral advantage of My intercourse, because you
felt it only as privilege and pride, pardon for the past and
security for the future, therefore doom the more inexorable awaits
you.
Then as if the people had interrupted him with the question, What
sign do you give us that this judgment is near?-Amos goes aside into
that noble digression (Amo 3:3-8) on the harmony between the
prophet’s word and the imminent events of the time, which we have
already studied. From this apologia, Amo 3:9 returns to the note of
Amo 3:1-2 and develops it. Not only is Israel’s responsibility
greater than that of other people’s. Her crimes themselves are more
heinous. "Make proclamation over the palaces in Ashdod"-if we are
not to read Assyria here, then the name of Ashdod has perhaps been
selected from all other heathen names because of its similarity to
the Hebrew word for that "violence" with which Amos is charging the
people-"and over the palaces of the land of Egypt, and say, Gather
upon the Mount of Samaria and see! Confusions manifold in the midst
of her; violence to her very core! Yea, they know not how to do
uprightness, saith Jehovah, who store up wrong and violence in their
palaces."
"To their crimes," said the satirist of the Romans, "they owe their
gardens, palaces, stables, and fine old plate." And William Langland
declared of the rich English of his day:-"For toke thei on trewly
they tymbred not so height Ne boughte non burgages be ye full
certayne."
"Therefore thus saith the Lord Jehovah: Siege and Blockade of the
Land. And they shall bring down from off thee thy fortresses, and
plundered shall be thy palaces." Yet this shall be no ordinary, tide
of Eastern war, to ebb like the Syrian as it flowed, and leave the
nation to rally on their land again. For Assyria devours the
peoples. "Thus saith Jehovah: As the shepherd saveth from the mouth
of the lion a pair of shinbones or a bit of an ear, so shall the
children of Israel be saved-they who sit in Samaria in the corner of
the diwan and on a couch." The description, as will be seen from the
note below, is obscure. Some think it is intended to satirize a
novel and affected fashion of sitting adopted by the rich. Much more
probably it means that carnal security in the luxuries of
civilization which Amos threatens more than once in similar phrases.
The corner of the diwan is in Eastern houses the seat of honor. To
this desert shepherd, with only the hard ground to rest on, the
couches and ivory-mounted diwans of the rich must have seemed the
very symbols of extravagance. But the pampered bodies that loll
their lazy lengths upon them shall be left like the crumbs of a
lion’s meal-"two shin-bones and the bit of an ear!" Their whole
civilization shall perish with them. "Hearken and testify against
the house of Israel-oracle of the Lord Jehovah, God of Hosts"-those
addressed are still the heathen summoned in Amo 3:14-15. "For on the
day when I visit the crimes of Israel upon him, I shall then make
visitation upon the altars of Bethel, and the horns of the altar,"
which men grasp in their last despair, "shall be smitten and fall to
the earth. And I will strike the winter-house upon the summer-house,
and the ivory houses Shall perish, yea, swept away shall be houses
many-oracle of Jehovah."
But the luxury of no civilization can be measured without its women,
and to the women of Samaria Amos now turns with the most scornful of
all his words. "Hear this word"-this for you-"kine of Bashan that
are in the mount of Samaria, that oppress the poor, that crush the
needy, that say to their lords, Bring, and let us drink. Sworn hath
the Lord Jehovah by His holiness, lo, days are coming when there
shall be a taking away of you with hooks, and of the last of you
with fish-hooks." They put hooks in the nostrils of unruly cattle,
and the figure is often applied to human captives; but so many
should these cattle of Samaria be that for the "last of them
fish-hooks" must be used. "Yea, by the breaches" in the wall of the
stormed city "shall ye go out, every one headlong, and ye shall be
cast oracle of Jehovah." It is a cowherd’s rough picture of women: a
troop of kine-heavy, heedless animals, trampling in their anxiety
for food upon every frail and lowly object in the way. But there is
a prophet’s insight into character. Not of Jezebels, or Messalinas,
or Lady Macbeths is it spoken, but of the ordinary matrons of
Samaria. Thoughtlessness and luxury are able to make brutes out of
women of gentle nurture, with homes and a religion.
Such are these three or four short oracles of Amos. They are
probably among his earliest-the first peremptory challenges of
prophecy to, that great stronghold which before forty years she is
to see thrown down in obedience to her word. As yet, however, there
seems to be nothing to justify the menaces of Amos. Fair and stable
rises the structure of Israel’s life. A nation, who know themselves
elect; who in politics are prosperous and in religion proof to every
doubt, build high their palaces, see the skies above them unclouded,
and bask in their pride, heaven’s favorites without an ear. This
man, solitary and sudden from his desert, springs upon them in the
name of God and their poor. Straighter word never came from Deity:
"Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?" The insight of it, the
justice of it, are alike convincing. Yet at first it appears as if
it were sped on the personal and very human passion of its herald.
For Amos not only uses the desert’s cruelties-the lion’s to the
sheep-to figure God’s impending judgment upon His people, but he
enforces the latter with all a desert-bred man’s horror of cities
and civilization. It is their costly furniture, their lavish and
complex building, on which he sees the storm break. We seem to hear
again that frequent phrase of the previous section: "the fire shall
devour the palaces thereof." The palaces, he says, are simply
storehouses of oppression; the palaces will be plundered. Here, as
throughout his book, couches and diwans draw forth the scorn of a
man accustomed to the simple furniture of the tent. But observe his
especial hatred of houses. Four times in one verse he smites them:
"winter-house on summer-house and the ivory houses shall perish-yea,
houses manifold, saith the Lord." So in another oracle of the same
section: "Houses of ashlar ye have built, and ye shall not inhabit
them; vineyards of delight have ye planted, and ye shall not drink
of their wine." {Amo 5:11} And in another: "I loathe the pride of
Jacob, and his palaces I hate; and I will give up a city and all
that is in it For, lo, the Lord is about to command, and He will
smite the great house into ruins and the small house into
splinters." {Amo 6:8; Amo 6:11} No wonder that such a prophet found
war with its breached walls insufficient, and welcomed, as the full
ally of his word, the earthquake itself.
Yet all this is no mere desert razzia in the name of the Lord, a
nomad’s hatred of cities and the culture of settled men. It is not a
temper; it is a vision of history. In the only argument which these
early oracles contain, Amos claims to have events on the side of his
word. "Shall the lion roar and not be catching" something? Neither
does the prophet speak till he knows that God is ready to act.
History accepted this claim. Amos spoke about 755. In 734
Tiglath-Pileser swept Gilead and Galilee; in 724 Shalmaneser overran
the rest of Northern Israel: "siege and blockade of the whole land!"
For three years the Mount of Samaria was invested, and then taken;
the houses overthrown, the rich and the delicate led away captive.
It happened as Amos foretold; for it was not the shepherd’s rage
within him that spoke. He had "seen the Lord standing, and He said,
Smite."
But this assault of a desert nomad upon the structure of a nation’s
life raises many echoes in history and some questions in our own
minds today. Again and again have civilizations far more powerful
than Israel’s been threatened by the desert in the name of God, and
in good faith it has been proclaimed by the prophets of Christianity
and other religions that God’s kingdom cannot come on earth till the
wealth, the culture, the civil order, which men have taken centuries
to build, have been swept away by some great political convulsion.
Today Christianity herself suffers the same assaults, and is told by
many, the high life and honest intention of whom cannot be doubted,
that till the civilization which she has so much helped to create is
destroyed, there is no hope for the purity or the progress of the
race. And Christianity, too, has doubts within herself. What is the
world which our Master refused in the Mount of Temptation, and so
often and so sternly told us that it must perish?-how much of our
wealth, of our culture, of our politics, of the whole fabric of our
society? No thoughtful and religious man, when confronted with
civilization, not in its ideal, but in one of those forms which give
it its very name, the life of a large city, can fail to ask, How
much of this deserves the judgment of God? How much must be
overthrown, before His will is done on earth? All these questions
rise in the ears and the heart of a generation, which more than any
other has been brought face to face with the ruins of empires and
civilizations, which have endured longer, and in their day seemed
more stable, than her own.
In face of the confused thinking and fanatic speech which have risen
on all such topics, it seems to me that the Hebrew prophets supply
us with four cardinal rules.
First, of course, they insist that it is the moral question upon
which the fate of a civilization is, decided. By what means has the
system grown? Is justice observed in essence as well as form? Is
there freedom, or is the prophet silenced? Does luxury or
self-denial prevail? Do the rich make life hard for the poor? Is
childhood sheltered and is innocence respected? By these, claim the
prophets, a nation stands or falls; and history has proved the claim
on wider worlds than they dreamt of.
But by themselves moral reasons are never enough to justify a
prediction of speedy doom upon any system or society. None of the
prophets began to foretell the fall of Israel till they read, with
keener eyes than their contemporaries, the signs of it in current
history. And this, I take it, was the point which made a notable
difference between them, and one who like them scourged the social
wrongs of his civilization, yet never spoke a word of its fall.
Juvenal nowhere calls down judgments, except upon individuals. In
his time there were no signs of the decline of the empire, even
though, as he marks, there was a flight from the capital of the
virtue which was to keep the empire alive. But the prophets had
political proof of the nearness of God’s judgment, and they spoke in
the power of its coincidence with the moral corruption of their
people.
Again, if conscience and history (both of them, to the prophets,
being witnesses of God) thus combine to announce the early doom of a
civilization, neither the religion that may-have helped to build it,
nor any remnant virtue in it, nor its ancient value to God, can
avail to save. We are tempted to judge that the long and costly
development of ages is cruelly thrown away by the convulsion and
collapse of an empire; it feels impious to think that the patience,
the providence, the millennial discipline of the Almighty are to be
in a moment abandoned to some rude and savage force. But we are
wrong. "You only have I known of all the families of the ground,"
yet I must "visit upon you your iniquities." Nothing is too costly
for justice. And God finds some other way of conserving the real
results of the past.
Again, it is a corollary of all this, that the sentence upon
civilization must often seem to come by voices that are insane, and
its execution by means that are criminal. Of course, when
civilization is arraigned as a whole, and its overthrow demanded,
there may be nothing behind the attack but jealousy or greed, the
fanaticism of ignorant men or the madness of disordered lives. But
this is not necessarily the case. For God has often in history
chosen the outsider as the herald of doom, and sent the barbarian as
its instrument. By the statesmen and patriots of Israel, Amos must
have been regarded as a mere savage, with a savage’s hate of
civilization. But we know what he answered when Amaziah called him
rebel. And it was not only for its suddenness that the apostles said
the "day of the Lord should come as a thief," but also because of
its methods. For over and over again has doom been pronounced, and
pronounced truly, by men who in the eyes of civilization were
criminals and monsters.
Now apply these four principles to the question of ourselves. It
will scarcely be denied that our civilization tolerates, and in part
lives by, the existence of vices which, as we all admit, ruined the
ancient empires. Are the political possibilities of overthrow also
present? That there exist among us means of new historic convulsions
is a thing hard for us to admit. But the signs cannot be hid. When
we see the jealousies of the Christian peoples, and their enormous
preparations for battle; the arsenals of Europe which a few sparks,
may blow up; the millions of soldiers one man’s word may mobilize;
when we imagine the opportunities which a general war would furnish
to the discontented masses of the European proletariat-we must
surely acknowledge the existence of forces capable of inflicting
calamities, so severe as to affect not merely this nationality or
that type of culture, but the very vigor and progress of
civilization herself; and all this without our looking beyond
Christendom, or taking into account the rise of the yellow races to
a consciousness of their approach to equality with ourselves. If,
then, in the eyes of the Divine justice Christendom merits judgment,
-if life continue to be left so hard to the poor; if innocence be
still an impossibility for so much of the childhood of the Christian
nations; if with so many of the leaders of civilization prurience be
lifted to the level of an art, and licentiousness followed as a
cult; if we continue to pour the evils of our civilization upon the
barbarian, and "the vices of our young nobles," to paraphrase
Juvenal, "are aped in" Hindustan, -then let us know that the means
of a judgment more awful than any which has yet scourged a
delinquent civilization are extant and actual among us. And if one
should reply, that our Christianity makes all the difference, that
God cannot undo the development of nineteen centuries, or cannot
overthrow the peoples of His Son, -let us remember that God does
justice at whatever cost; that as He did not spare Israel at the
hands of Assyria, so He did not spare Christianity in the East when
the barbarians of the desert found her careless and corrupt. "You
only have I known of all the families of the ground, therefore will
I visit upon you all your iniquities."
THE PROBLEM THAT AMOS LEFT
AMOS was a preacher of righteousness almost
wholly in its judicial and punitive offices. Exposing the moral
conditions of society in his day, emphasizing on the one hand its
obduracy and on the other the intolerableness of it, he asserted
that nothing could avert the inevitable doom-neither Israel’s
devotion to Jehovah nor Jehovah’s interest in Israel. "You alone
have I known of all the families of the ground: therefore will I
visit upon you all your iniquities." The visitation was to take
place in war and in the captivity of the people. This is practically
the whole message of the prophet Amos.
That he added to it the promise of restoration which now closes his
book, we have seen to be extremely improbable. Yet even if that
promise is his own, Amos does not tell us how the restoration is to
be brought about. With Wonderful insight and patience he has traced
the captivity of Israel to moral causes. But he does not show what
moral change in the exiles is to justify their restoration, or by
what means such a moral change is to be effected. We are left to
infer the conditions and the means of redemption from the principles
which Amos enforced while there yet seemed time to pray for the
doomed people: "Seek the Lord and ye shall live." (Amo 5:4)
According to this, the moral renewal of Israel must precede their
restoration; but the prophet seems to make no great effort to effect
the renewal. In short Amos illustrates the easily-forgotten truth
that a preacher to the conscience is not necessarily a preacher of
repentance.
Of the great antitheses between which religion moves, Law and Love,
Amos had therefore been the prophet of Law. But we must not imagine
that the association of Love with the Deity was strange to him. This
could not be to any Israelite who remembered the past of his
people-the romance of their origins and early struggles for freedom.
Israel had always felt the grace of their God; and unless we be
wrong about the date of the great poem in the end of Deuteronomy,
they had lately celebrated that grace in lines of exquisite beauty
and tenderness:-
"He found him in a desert land, In a waste and a howling wilderness.
He compassed him about, cared for him, Kept him as the apple of His
eye. As an eagle stirreth up his nest, Fluttereth over his young,
Spreadeth his wings, taketh them, Beareth them up on his pinions-So
Jehovah alone led him."
The patience of the Lord with their waywardness and their
stubbornness had been the ethical influence on Israel’s life at a
time when they had probably neither code of law nor system of
doctrine. "Thy gentleness," as an early Psalmist says for his
people, "Thy gentleness hath made me great." {Psalms 18} Amos is not
unaware of this ancient grace of Jehovah. But he speaks of it in a
fashion which shows that he feels it to be exhausted and without
hope for his generation "I brought you up out of the land of Egypt,
and 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." {Amo 2:10} But this can now only fill the
cup of the nation’s sin. "You alone have I known of all the families
of the earth: therefore will I visit upon you all your iniquities."
{Amo 3:2} Jehovah’s ancient Love but strengthens now the justice and
the impetus of His Law.
We perceive, then, the problem which Amos left to prophecy. It was
not to discover Love in the Deity whom he had so absolutely
identified with Law. The Love of God needed no discovery among a
people with the Deliverance, the Exodus, the Wilderness, and the
Gift of the Land in their memories. But the problem was to prove in
God so great and new a mercy as was capable of matching that Law,
which the abuse of His millennial gentleness now only the more fully
justified. There was needed a prophet to arise with as keen a
conscience of Law as Amos himself, and yet affirm that Love was
greater still; to admit that Israel were doomed, and yet promise
their redemption by processes as reasonable and as ethical as those
by which the doom had been rendered inevitable. The prophet of
Conscience had to be followed by the prophet of Repentance.
Such a one was found in Hosea, the son of Be’eri, a citizen and
probably a priest of Northern Israel, whose very name, Salvation,
the synonym of Joshua and of Jesus, breathed the larger hope, which
it was his glory to bear to his people. Before we see how for this
task Hosea was equipped with the love and sympathy which Amos
lacked, let us do two things. Let us appreciate the magnitude of the
task itself, set to him first of prophets; and let us remind
ourselves that, greatly as he achieved it, the task was not one
which could be achieved even by him once for all, but that it
presents itself to religion again and again in the course of her
development.
For the first of these duties, it is enough to recall how much all
subsequent prophecy derives from Hosea. We shall not exaggerate if
we say that there is no truth uttered by later prophets about the
Divine Grace, which we do not find in germ in him. Isaiah of
Jerusalem was a greater statesman and a more powerful writer, but he
had not Hosea’s tenderness and insight into motive and character.
Hosea’s marvelous sympathy both with the people and with God is
sufficient to foreshadow every grief, every hope, every gospel,
which make the Books of Jeremiah and the great Prophet of the Exile
exhaustless in their spiritual value for mankind. These others
explored the kingdom of God: it was Hosea who took it by storm. {Mat
11:12} He is the first prophet of Grace, Israel’s earliest
Evangelist; yet with as keen a sense of law, and of the
inevitableness of ethical discipline, as Amos himself.
But the task which Hosea accomplished was not one that could be
accomplished once for all. The interest of his book is not merely
historical. For so often as a generation is shocked out of its old
religious ideals, as Amos shocked Israel, by a realism and a
discovery of law, which have no respect for ideals, however ancient
and however dear to the human heart, but work their own pitiless way
to doom inevitable; so often must the Book of Hosea have a practical
value for living men. At such a crisis we stand today. The older
Evangelical assurance, the older Evangelical ideals have to some
extent been rendered impossible by the realism to which the
sciences, both physical and historical, have most healthily recalled
us, and by their wonderful revelation of Law working through nature
and society without respect to our creeds and pious hopes. The
question presses: Is it still possible to believe in repentance and
conversion, still possible to preach the power of God to save,
whether the individual or society, from the forces of heredity and
of habit? We can at least learn how Hosea mastered the very similar
problem which Amos left to him, and how, with a moral realism no
less stern than his predecessor and a moral standard every whit as
high, he proclaimed Love to be the ultimate element in religion; not
only because it moves man to a repentance and God to a redemption
more sovereign than any law; but because if neglected or abused,
whether as love of man or love of God, it enforces a doom still more
inexorable than that required by violated truth or by outraged
justice. Love our Savior, Love our almighty and unfailing Father,
but, just because of this, Love our most awful Judge-we turn to the
life and the message in which this eternal theme was first unfolded.
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