Chapter VI: The Man and the Prophet (2)

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.[181] 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._[182]... _I abhor the arrogance of Jacob, and hate his palaces._[183]... _The eyes of the Lord Jehovah are upon the sinful kingdom._[184]... _Jehovah sweareth, I will never forget any of their works._[185] Such sentences reveal a Deity who is not only manifest Character, but surgent 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 to-day, 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 some one 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 realise 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 for ever--from the first absolute righteousness in Himself, and absolute righteousness in His demands from men.

3. THE PROPHET AND HIS MINISTRY.

AMOS vii., viii. 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,[186] 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[187]--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.[188] 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 splendour, 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 iv. 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 iv., 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_[189] _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.[190] 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.[191] _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_.[192] 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 into the quarrel._[193] 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 recognised its punishment. _And_ the fire _devoured the Great Deep, yea, it was about to devour the land_.[194] 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.[195] 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_[196] 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,[197] 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.[198] 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 recognises 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 travelled 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.[199]

_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,_[200] _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;[201] 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. Every one 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 Cæsar._[202] 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,_[203] _begone! Get thee off to the land of Judah; and earn_[204] _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._[205] 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 political origin of the Northern Schism, and the erection of the national sanctuaries from motives of mere statecraft.[206] 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 shopkeeping, 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 programmes 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 abjuring of officialism.

_But Amos answered and said unto Amaziah, No prophet I, nor prophet's son. But a herdsman_[207] _I, and a dresser of sycomores; 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,[208] 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 Ḳaits_, that is, _summer fruit. And He said, What art thou seeing, Amos? And I said, A basket of Ḳaits. And Jehovah said unto me, The Ḳets--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 realisation 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[130] Cornill: _Der Israelitische Prophetismus. Five Lectures for the Educated Laity._ 1894.

[131] Amos vii. 14. See further pp. 76 f.

[132] Khurbet Taḳûa', Hebrew Teḳôa', תְּקֹוע, from תקע, _to blow a trumpet_ (cf. Jer. vi. 1, _Blow the trumpet in Tekoa_) or _to pitch a tent_. The latter seems the more probable derivation of the name, and suggests a nomadic origin, which agrees with the position of Tekoa on the borders of the desert. Tekoa does not occur in the list of the towns taken by Joshua. There are really no reasons for supposing that some other Tekoa is meant. The two that have been alleged are (1) that Amos exclusively refers to the Northern Kingdom, (2) that sycomores do not grow at such levels as Tekoa. These are dealt with on pp. 79 and 77 respectively.

[133] 2 Chron. xx. 20.

[134] נֹקֵד, nôḳêd, is doubtless the same as the Arabic "naḳḳâd," or keeper of the "naḳad," defined by Freytag as a short-legged and deformed race of sheep in the Bahrein province of Arabia, from which comes the proverb "viler than a naḳad"; yet the wool is very fine. The king of Moab is called נוֹקֵד in 2 Kings iii. 4 (A.V. _sheep-master_). In vii. 14 Amos calls himself בּוֹקֵר, _cattleman_, which there is no reason to alter, as some do, to נֹוקֵד.

[135] בֹּולֵס, bôlês, probably from a root (found in Æthiopic) balas, _a fig_; hence one who _had to do with figs, handled them, ripened them_.

[136] The Egyptian sycomore, _Ficus sycomorus_, is not found in Syria above one thousand feet above the sea, while Tekoa is more than twice as high as that. Cf. 1 Kings x. 27, _the sycomores that are in the vale_ or _valley land_, עֵמֶק; 1 Chron. xxvii. 28, _the sycomores that are in the low plains_. "The sycamore grows in sand on the edge of the desert as vigorously as in the midst of a well-watered country. Its roots go deep in search of water, which infiltrates as far as the gorges of the hills, and they absorb it freely even where drought seems to reign supreme" (Maspero on the Egyptian sycomore; _The Dawn of Civilization_, translated by McClure, p. 26). "Everywhere on the confines of cultivated ground, and even at some distance from the valley, are fine single sycamores flourishing as though by miracle amid the sand.... They drink from water, which has infiltrated from the Nile, and whose existence is nowise betrayed upon the surface of the soil" (_ib._, 121). Always and still reverenced by Moslem and Christian.

[137] So practically Oort (_Th. Tjidsch._, 1891, 121 ff.), when compelled to abandon his previous conclusion (_ib._, 1880, 122 ff.) that the Tekoa of Amos lay in Northern Israel.

[138] In 1891 we met the Rushaideh, who cultivate Engedi, encamped just below Tekoa. But at other parts of the borders between the hill-country of Judæa and the desert, and between Moab and the desert, we found round most of the herdsmen's central wells a few fig-trees or pomegranates, or even apricots occasionally.

[139] Luke i. 80.

[140] Mark i. 18.

[141] v. 5; viii. 14.

[142] See p. 36.

[143] Prov. xxxi. 24.

[144] vi. 10.

[145] i. 9.

[146] v. 16.

[147] v. 21 ff.

[148] li. 7, 8.

[149] viii. 4 ff.

[150] vi. 1, 4-7.

[151] See pp. 136 f.

[152] i. 2.

[153] שׁופר, as has been pointed out, means in early Israel always the trumpet blown as a summons to war; only in later Israel was the name given to the temple trumpet.

[154] See further on this important passage pp. 89 ff.

[155] _Shall a little bird fall on the snare earthwards and there be no noose about her? Shall a snare rise from the ground and not be taking something?_ On this see p. 82. Its meaning seems to be equivalent to the Scottish proverb: "There's aye some water whan the stirkie droons."

[156] There is thus no reason to alter the words _who shall not prophesy_ to _who shall not tremble_--as Wellhausen does. To do so is to blunt the point of the argument.

[157] See Chap. IV.

[158] See pp. 53 ff.

[159] See pp. 69 f.

[160] viii. 8.

[161] viii. 9.

[162] v. 14.

[163] How far Assyria assisted the development of prophecy we have already seen. But we have been made aware, at the same time, that Assyria's service to Israel in this respect presupposed the possession by the prophets of certain beliefs in the character and will of their God, Jehovah. The prophets' faith could never have risen to the magnitude of the new problems set to it by Assyria if there had not been already inherent in it that belief in the sovereignty of a Righteousness of which all things material were but the instruments.

[164] Compare, for instance, Hosea's condemnation of Jehu's murder of Joram, with Elisha's command to do it; also 2 Kings iii. 19, 25, with Deut. xx. 19.

[165] See above, p. 10.

[166] Isa. xxviii.

[167] Amos ii.

[168] _Ante_, p. 74.

[169] i. 2.

[170] Therefore we see at a glance how utterly inadequate is Renan's brilliant comparison of Amos to a modern revolutionary journalist (_Histoire du Peuple Israel_, II.). Journalist indeed! How all this would-be cosmopolitan and impartial critic's judgments smack of the boulevards!

[171] Exod. xx.; incorporated in the JE book of history, and, according to nearly all critics, complete by 750; the contents must have been familiar in Israel long before that. There is no trace in Amos of any influence peculiar to either the Deuteronomic or the Levitical legislation.

[172] See especially Schultz, _O. T. Theol._, Eng. Trans. by Paterson, I. 214.

[173] ii. 9-11. On this passage see further p. 137.

[174] If iv. 13, v. 8 and ix. 6 be genuine, this remark equally applies to belief in Jehovah as Creator.

[175] Kayser, _Old Testament Theology_.

[176] v. 6, 14.

[177] See above, p. 18.

[178] iii. 2.

[179] v. 21 ff.

[180] Jer. vii. 22 f.

[181] See above, p. 23.

[182] v. 21-23.

[183] vi. 8.

[184] ix. 8

[185] viii. 7.

[186] Chap. V., p. 71.

[187] vii. 11.

[188] On the ministry of eighth-century prophets to the people see the author's _Isaiah_, I., p. 119.

[189] So LXX., followed by Hitzig and Wellhausen, by reading יֵצֶר for יֹוצֵר.

[190] Cf. _Hist. Geography of the Holy Land_, pp. 64 ff. The word translated _spring crop_ above is לקש, and from the same root as the name of the latter rain, מַלְקֹושׁ, which falls in the end of March or beginning of April. Cf. _Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins_, IV. 83; VIII. 62.

[191] Cf. 1 Kings xviii. 5 with 1 Sam. vii. 15, 17; 1 Kings iv. 7 ff. See Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, 228.

[192] LXX.: _Who shall raise up Jacob again?_

[193] So Professor A. B. Davidson. But the grammar might equally well afford the rendering _one calling that the Lord will punish with the fire_, the ל of לריב marking the introduction of indirect speech (cf. Ewald, § 338_a_). But Hitzig for קרא reads קרה (Deut. xxv. 18), to occur, happen. So similarly Wellhausen, _es nahte sich zu strafen mit Feuer der Herr Jahve_. All these renderings yield practically the same meaning.

[194] A. B. Davidson, _Syntax_, § 57, Rem. 1.

[195] i. 19 f.

[196] Cf. Micah ii. 3. חֵלֶק is the word used, and according to the motive given above stands well for the climax of the fire's destructive work. This meets the objection of Wellhausen, who proposes to omit חֵלֶק, because the heat does not dry up first the great deep and then the fields (_Ackerflur_). This is to mistake the obvious point of the sentence. The drought was so great that, after the fountains were exhausted, it seemed as if the solid framework of the land, described with very apt pathos as the _Portion_, would be the next to disappear. Some take הלק as _divided_, therefore cultivated, ground.

[197] So for instance, Von Orelli.

[198] Chap. iv.

[199] See Chap. IV., p. 51.

[200] Literally _of the plummet_, an obscure expression. It cannot mean plumb-straight, for the wall is condemned.

[201] 2 Kings xxi. 13: _I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria and the plummet_ or _weight_ (מִשְׁקֹלֶת) _of the house of Ahab_. Isa. xxxiv. 11: _He shall stretch over it the cord of confusion, and the weights_ (literally _stones_) _of emptiness_.

[202] John xix. 12.

[203] The word _seer_ is here used in a contemptuous sense, and has therefore to be translated by some such word as _visionary_.

[204] Literally _eat_.

[205] מַמְלָכָה בֵּית--that is, a _central_ or _capital sanctuary_. Cf. הַמַּמְלָכָה עִיר (1 Sam. xxvii. 5), _city of the kingdom_, _i.e._ chief or capital town.

[206] 1 Kings xii. 26, 27.

[207] _Prophet_ and _prophet's son_ are equivalent terms, the latter meaning one of the professional guilds of prophets. There is no need to change herdsman, בוקר, as Wellhausen does, into נוקד, shepherd, the word used in i. 1.

[208] Cf. Wellhausen, _Hist._, Eng. Ed., § 6: "Amos was the founder and the purest type of a new order of prophecy."