COMMON SENSE AND THE REIGN
OF LAW
Amo 3:3-8; Amo 4:6-13; Amo 5:8-9; Amo 6:12; Amo 8:8; Amo 9:5; Amo
8:4-6
FOOLS, when they face facts, which is seldom,
face them one by one, and, as a consequence, either in ignorant
contempt or in panic. With this inordinate folly Amos charged the
religion of his day. The superstitious people, careful of every
point of ritual and very greedy of omens, would not ponder real
facts nor set cause-to effect. Amos recalled them to common life.
"Does a bird fall upon a snare, except there be a loop on her? Does
the trap itself rise from the ground, except it be catching
something"-something alive in it that struggles, and so lifts the
trap? "Shall the alarum be blown in a city, and the people not
tremble?" Daily life is impossible without putting two and two
together. But this is just what Israel will not do with the sacred
events of their time. To religion they will not add common-sense.
For Amos himself, all things which happen are in sequence and in
sympathy. He has seen this in the simple life of the desert; he is
sure of it throughout the tangle and hubbub of history. One thing
explains another; one makes another inevitable. When he has
illustrated the truth in common life, Amos claims it for especially
four of the great facts of the time. The sins of society, of which
society is careless; the physical calamities, which they survive and
forget; the approach of Assyria, which they ignore; the word of the
prophet, which they silence, -all these belong to each other.
Drought, Pestilence, Earthquake, Invasion conspire-and the Prophet
holds their secret.
Now it is true that for the most part Amos describes this sequence
of events as the personal action of Jehovah. "Shall evil befall, and
Jehovah not have done it? I have smitten you. I will raise up
against you a Nation Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel!" {Amo 3:6;
Amo 4:9; Amo 6:14; Amo 4:12} Yet even where the personal impulse of
the Deity is thus emphasized, we feel equal stress laid upon the
order and the inevitable certainty of the process Amos nowhere uses
Isaiah’s great phrase: "a God of Mishpat," a "God of Order" or
"Law." But he means almost the same thing: God works by methods
which irresistibly fulfill themselves. Nay more. Sometimes this
sequence sweeps upon the prophet’s mind with such force as to
overwhelm all his sense of the Personal within it. The Will and the
Word of the God who causes the thing are crushed out by the "Must
Be" of the thing itself. Take even the descriptions of those
historical crises, which the prophet most explicitly proclaims as
the visitations of the Almighty. In some of the verses all thought
of God Himself is lost in the roar and foam with which that tide of
necessity bursts up through Chem. The fountains of the great deep
break loose, and while the universe trembles to the shock, it seems
that even the voice of the Deity is overwhelmed. In one passage,
immediately after describing Israel’s ruin as due to Jehovah’s word,
Amos asks how could it "have happened otherwise":-
"Shall horses run up a cliff, or oxen plough the sea? that ye turn
justice into poison, and the fruit of righteousness into wormwood."
{Amo 6:12} A moral order exists, which it is as impossible to break
without disaster as it would be to break the natural order by
driving horses upon a precipice. There is an inherent necessity in
the sinners’ doom. Again, he says of Israel’s sin: "Shall not the
Land tremble for this? Yea, it shall rise up together like the Nile,
and heave and sink like the Nile of Egypt." {Amo 8:8} The crimes of
Israel are so intolerable, that in its own might the natural frame
of things revolts against them. In these great crises, therefore, as
in the simple instances adduced from everyday life, Amos had a sense
of what we call law, distinct from, and for moments even
overwhelming, that sense of the personal purpose of God, admission
to the secrets of which had marked his call to be a prophet.
These instincts we must not exaggerate into a system. There is no
philosophy in Amos, nor need we wish there were. Far more
instructive is what we do find-a virgin sense of the sympathy of all
things, the thrill rather than the theory of a universe. And this
faith, which is not a philosophy, is especially instructive on these
two points: that it springs from the moral sense; and that it
embraces, not history only, but nature.
It springs from the moral sense. Other races have arrived at a
conception of the universe along other lines: some by the
observation of physical laws valid to the recesses of space; some by
logic and the unity of Reason. But Israel found the universe through
the conscience. It is a historical fact that the Unity of God, the
Unity of History, and the Unity of the World, did, in this order,
break upon Israel, through conviction and experience of the
universal sovereignty of righteousness. We see the beginnings of the
process in Amos. To him the sequences which work themselves out
through history and across nature are moral. Righteousness is the
hinge on which the world hangs; loosen it, and history and nature
feel the shock. History punishes the sinful nation. But nature, too,
groans beneath the guilt of man; and in the Drought, the Pestilence,
and the Earthquake provides his scourges. It is a belief which has
stamped itself upon the language of mankind. What else is "plague"
than "blow" or "Scourge?"
This brings us to the second point-our prophet’s treatment of
Nature.
Apart from the disputed passages (which we shall take afterwards by
themselves) we have in the Book of Amos few glimpses of nature, and
these always under a moral light. There is not in any chapter a
landscape visible in its own beauty. Like all desert-dwellers, who
when they would praise the works of God lift their eyes to the
heavens, Amos gives us but the outlines of the earth-a mountain
range, {Amo 1:2; Amo 3:9; Amo 9:3} or the crest of a forest, {Amo
2:9} or the bare back of the land, bent from sea to sea. {Amo 8:12}
Nearly all, his figures are drawn from the desert-the torrent, the
wild beasts, the wormwood (Amo 5:24; Amo 5:19-20; etc.; Amo 7:12).
If he visits the meadows of the shepherds, it is with the terror of
the people’s doom; {Amo 1:2} if the vineyards or orchards, it is
with the mildew and the locust; {Amo 4:9 ff.} if the towns, it is
with drought, eclipse, and earthquake. {Amo 4:6-11; Amo 6:11; Amo
8:8 ff.} To him, unlike his fellows, unlike especially Hosea, the
whole land is one theatre of judgment; but it is a theatre trembling
to its foundations with the drama enacted upon it. Nay, land and
nature are themselves actors in the drama. Physical forces are
inspired with moral purpose, and become the ministers of
righteousness. This is the converse of Elijah’s vision. To the older
prophet the message came that God was not in the fire nor in the
earthquake nor in the tempest, but only in the still small voice.
But to Amos the fire, the earthquake, and the tempest are all in
alliance with the Voice, and execute the doom which it utters. The
difference will be appreciated by us, if we remember the respective
problems set to prophecy in those two periods. To Elijah, prophet of
the elements, wild worker by fire and water, by life and death, the
spiritual had to be asserted and enforced by itself. Ecstatic as he
was, Elijah had to learn that the Word is more Divine than all
physical violence and terror. But Amos understood that for his age
the question was very different. Not only was the God of Israel
dissociated from the powers of nature, which were assigned by the
popular mind to the various Ba’alim of the land, so that there was a
divorce between His government of the people and the influences that
fed the people’s life; but morality itself was conceived as
provincial. It was narrowed to the national interests; it was summed
up in mere rules of police, and these were looked upon as not so
important as the observances of the ritual. Therefore Amos was
driven to show that nature and morality are one. Morality is not a
set of conventions. "Morality is the order of things." Righteousness
is on the scale of the universe. All things tremble to the shock of
sin; all things work together for good to them that fear God.
With this sense of law, of moral necessity, in Amos we must not fail
to connect that absence of all appeal to miracle, which is also
conspicuous in his book.
We come now to the three disputed passages:-
Amo 4:13 :-"For, lo! He Who formed the hills, and createth the wind,
and declareth to man what His mind is; Who maketh the dawn into
darkness, and marcheth on the heights of the land-Jehovah, God of
Hosts, is His Name."
Amo 5:8-9 :-"Maker of the Pleiades and Orion, turning to morning the
murk, and day into night He darkeneth; Who calleth for the waters of
the sea, and poureth them forth on the face of the earth-Jehovah His
Name; Who flasheth ruin on the strong, and destruction cometh down
on the fortress."
Amo 9:5-6 :-"And the Lord Jehovah of the Hosts, Who toucheth the
earth and it rocketh, and all mourn that dwell on it, and it riseth
like the Nile together, and sinketh like the Nile of Egypt; Who hath
builded in the heavens His ascents, and founded His vault upon the
earth; Who calleth to the waters of the sea, and poureth them on the
face of the earth-Jehovah His Name."
These sublime passages it is natural to take as the triple climax of
the doctrine we have traced through the Book of Amos. Are they not
the natural leap of the soul to the stars? The same shepherd’s eye
which has marked sequence and effect unfailing on the desert soil,
does it not now sweep the clear heavens above the desert, and find
there also all things ordered and arrayed? The same mind which
traced the Divine processes down history, which foresaw the hosts of
Assyria marshaled for Israel’s punishment, which felt the overthrow
of justice shock the nation to their ruin, and read the disasters of
the husbandman’s year as the vindication of a law higher than the
physical-does it not now naturally rise beyond such instances of the
Divine order, round which the dust of history rolls, to the lofty,
undimmed outlines of the Universe as a Whole, and, in consummation
of its message, declare that "all is Law," and Law intelligible to
man? But in the way of so attractive a conclusion the literary
criticism of the book has interposed. It is maintained that, while
none of these sublime verses are indispensable to the argument of
Amos, some of them actually interrupt it, so that when they are
removed it becomes consistent; that such ejaculations in praise of
Jehovah’s creative power are not elsewhere met with in Hebrew
prophecy before the time of the Exile; that they sound very like
echoes of the Book of Job; and that in the Septuagint version of
Hosea we actually find a similar doxology, wedged into the middle of
an authentic verse of the prophet. {Hos 13:4} To these arguments
against the genuineness of the three famous passages, other critics,
not less able and not less free, like Robertson Smith and Kuenen,
have replied that such ejaculations at critical points of the
prophet’s discourse "are not surprising under the general conditions
of prophetic oratory"; and that, while one of the doxologies does
appear to break the argument {Amo 5:8-9} of the context, they are
all of them thoroughly in the spirit and the style of Amos. To this
point the discussion has been carried; it seems to need a closer
examination. We may at once dismiss the argument which has been
drawn from that obvious intrusion into the Greek of Hos 13:4. Not
only is this verse not so suited to the doctrine of Hosea as the
doxologies are to the doctrine of Amos; but while they are definite
and sublime, it is formal and flat-"Who made firm the heavens and
founded the earth, Whose hands founded all the host of heaven, and
He did not display them that thou shouldest walk after them." The
passages in Amos are vision; this is a piece of catechism crumbling
into homily. Again-an argument in favor of the authenticity, of
these passages may be drawn from the character of their subjects. We
have seen the part which the desert played in shaping the temper and
the style of Amos. But the works of the Creator, to which these
passages lift their praise, are just those most fondly dwelt upon by
all the poetry, of the desert. The Arabian nomad, when he magnifies
the power of God, finds his subjects not on the bare earth about
him, but in the brilliant heavens and the heavenly processes.
Again, the critic who affirms that the passages in Amos "in every
case sensibly disturb the connection," exaggerates. In the case of
the first of Amo 4:13, the disturbance is not at all "sensible":
though it must be admitted that the oracle closes impressively
enough without it. The last of them, Amo 9:5-6 -which repeats a
clause already found in the book {Cf. Amo 8:8} -is as much in
sympathy with its context as most of the oracles in the somewhat
scattered discourse of that last section of the book. The real
difficulty is the second doxology, Amo 5:8-9, which does break the
connection, and in a sudden and violent way. Remove it, and the
argument is consistent. We cannot read chapter 5 without feeling
that, whether Amos wrote these verses or not, they did not
originally stand where they stand at present. Now, taken with this
dispensableness of two of the passages and this obvious intrusion of
one of them, the following additional fact becomes ominous. "Jehovah
is His Name" (which occurs in two of the passages), or "Jehovah of
Hosts is His Name" (Which occurs at least in one), is a construction
which does not happen elsewhere in the book, except in a verse where
it is awkward and where we have already seen reason to doubt its
genuineness. But still more, the phrase does not occur in any other
prophet, till we come down to the oracles which compose Isa 40-56.
Here it happens thrice-twice in passages dating from the Exile, {Isa
47:4 and Isa 54:5} and once in a passage suspected by some to be of
still later date. In the Book of Jeremiah the phrase is found eight
times; but either in passages already on other grounds judged by
many critics to be later than Jeremiah, or where by itself it is
probably an intrusion into the text. Now is it a mere coincidence
that a phrase, which, outside the Book of Amos, occurs only in
writing of the time of the Exile and in passages considered for
other reasons to be post-exilic insertions-is it a mere coincidence
that within the Book of Amos it should again be found only in
suspected verses? There appears to be in this more than a
coincidence; and the present writer cannot but feel a very strong
case against the traditional belief that these doxologies are
original and integral portions of the Book of Amos. At the same time
a case which has failed to convince critics like Robertson Smith and
Kuenen cannot be considered conclusive, and we are so ignorant of
many of the conditions of prophetic oratory at this period that
dogmatism is impossible. For instance, the use by Amos of the Divine
titles is a matter over which uncertainty still lingers; and any
further argument on the subject must include a fuller discussion
than space here allows of the remarkable distribution of those
titles throughout the various sections of the book.
But if it be not given to us to prove this kind of authenticity-a
question whose data are so obscure, yet whose answer frequently is
of so little significance-let us gladly welcome that greater
Authenticity whose undeniable proofs these verses so splendidly
exhibit. No one questions their right to the place which some great
spirit gave them in this book-their suitableness to its grand and
ordered theme, their pure vision and their eternal truth. That
common-sense, and that conscience, which, moving among the events of
earth and all the tangled processes of history, find everywhere
reason and righteousness at work, in these verses claim the Universe
for the same powers, and see in stars and clouds and the procession
of day and night the One Eternal God Who "declareth to man what His
mind is."
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