Thus the Lord Yahweh showed me: behold, a basket of summer fruit.
He said, “Amos, what do you see?” I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then Yahweh said to me, “The end has come on my people Israel. I will not again pass by them any more.
The songs of the temple will be wailing in that day,” says the Lord Yahweh. “The dead bodies will be many. In every place they will throw them out with silence.
Hear this, you who desire to swallow up the needy, and cause the poor of the land to fail,
Saying, ‘When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may market wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel large, and dealing falsely with balances of deceit;
that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals, and sell the sweepings with the wheat?’ ”
John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain On vv1–6 By these words or by this vision the Prophet…
By these words or by this vision the Prophet confirms what we have already observed — that paternal chastisements would no longer be exercised towards the people of Israel. God indeed, as it is well known, had so treated that people, that he ever spared them even in their greatest calamities. It was with a suspended hand that God ever struck that people, until after many trials they at length seemed so refractory, as not to be benefited by such remedies. This subject then Amos now pursues: but a vision was shown to him to confirm more fully God’s judgment, or at least to produce a greater impression on the minds of the people.
God showed to him a Basket full of summer-fruit. By summer-fruit, I doubt not, he means a ripe punishment, as though he said, that the vices of the people had ripened, that vengeance could no longer be deferred: for an exposition of the vision immediately follows, when he says, that the end of the people had come, etc.; and this we have already explained in the third vision. But there is a similarity in the Hebrew words, which cannot be expressed either in Greek or Latin. קיץ, kits means a summer-fruit, קץ, kots, signifies an end: one letter only is inserted in the word, summer-fruit, which God showed in a basket; and then he adds that קץ, kots, the end had come. But as to the main point, we see that there is nothing ambiguous. We will now return to the first thing.
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Thus God showed to me. There is no need of repeating what I have already discussed. The Prophet here prefaces, that he adduced nothing without authority, but only faithfully related what had been commanded him from above. And this ought to be carefully observed; for God ever so employed his Prophets, that he yet reserved for himself entire the right of teaching, and never transferred his own office to men, that is, as to the authority. Then he says, The Lord Jehovah showed to me, and, lo, a basket of summer-fruit. We may understand cherries by summer-fruit, and those fruits which have no solid vigor to continue long; but this is too refined. I take the simple meaning, that punishment had now become ripe; for the people had not repented, though they had been so often warned; it was then as it were summer. He showed to me a basket of summer-fruit. But as to God asking his Prophet what he saw, we have already explained the reason why it was done: it behaved the Prophet to be at first filled with astonishment, that the people might be made more attentive; for when we hear of a conference between God and the Prophet, our minds are awakened; inasmuch as it must immediately occur to us, that there is something worthy of being remembered. God then rouses in this manner the minds of his people. So we see there is nothing superfluous in this repetition.
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv2–5 Which signified the ripeness of their sins, and the…
Which signified the ripeness of their sins, and the readiness of God’s judgments.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv1–6 Amo 8:1 Thus hath the Lord GOD shewed unto…
Amo 8:1 Thus hath the Lord GOD shewed unto me: and behold a basket of summer fruit.
Ver. 1. Thus hath the Lord God showed unto me] viz. in this fourth vision, whereby (for better assurance, and to shake them out of their desperate security) Israel’s utter ruin is again foretold by a lively type, which is here, 1. propounded; 2. expounded, Amo 8:3; Amo 8:5, that he may run that readeth it, and none may fall, but with open eyes, Hab 2:2.
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And behold a basket] Made up haply in the form of a dog, as the word Calub seemeth to import.
Of summer fruit] Heb. of summer; that is, of that which the summer affordeth; toward the end of it especially, when fruits ripen, and even fall into the hand of the gatherer. The summer itself hath its denomination from a root that signifieth to awaken; because then the fruits and flowers, that seemed to be asleep all winter long, do awake, as it were, and show themselves.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv1–6 Thus hath the Lord God showed unto me: and…
Thus hath the Lord God showed unto me: and behold: see Amo 7:1,4,7.
A basket; a hook, say some, with which the gatherer might either pull down the bough, or pull off the ripe fruit; or a basket into which the ripe fruit gathered was put to be carried away.
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Summer fruit; not the early ripe fruit, but that which, as it needed, so had the whole summer’s heat to ripen it, and was gathered in at the end of the summer.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On vv1, 4 The great reason why sinners defer their repentance de…
The great reason why sinners defer their repentance de die in diem - from day to day, is because they think God thus defers his judgments, and there is no song wherewith they so effectually sing themselves asleep as that, My Lord delays his coming; and therefore God, by his prophets, frequently represents to Israel the day of his wrath not only as just and certain, but as very near and hastening on apace; so he does in these verses.
I. The approach of the threatened ruin is represented by a basket of summer-fruit which Amos saw in vision; for the Lord showed it to him (Amo 8:1) and obliged him to take notice of it (Amo 8:2): Amos, what seest thou? Note, It concerns us to enquire whether we do indeed see that which God has been pleased to show us, and hear what he has been pleased to say to us; for many a thing God speaks, God shows once, yea twice, and men perceive it not. Are we in the midst of the visions of the Almighty? Let us consider what we see. He saw a basket of summer-fruit gathered and ready to be eaten, which signified, 1. That they were ripe for destruction, rotten ripe, and it was time for God to put in the sickle of his judgments and to cut them off; nay, the thing was in effect done already, and they lay ready to be eaten up. 2. That the year of God's patience was drawing towards a conclusion; it was autumn with them, and their year would quickly have its period in a dismal winter. 3. Those we call summer-fruits that will not keep till winter, but must be used immediately, an emblem of this people, that had nothing solid or consistent in them.
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II. The intent and meaning of this vision is no more than this: It signifies that the end has come upon my people Israel. The word that signifies the end is ketz, which is of near affinity with kitz, the word used for summer-fruit. God has long spared them, and borne with them, but now his patience is tired out; they are indeed his people Israel, but their end, that latter end they have been so often reminded of, but have so long forgotten, has now come. Note, If sinners do not make an end of sin, God will make an end of them, yea though they be his people Israel. What was said Amo 7:8 is here repeated as God's determined resolution, I will not again pass by them any more; they shall not be connived at as they have been, nor the judgment coming turned away.
III. The consequence of this shall be a universal desolation (Amo 8:3): When the end shall come sorrow and death shall ride in triumph; they are accustomed to go together, and shall at length go away together, when in heaven there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, Rev 21:4. But here in a sinful world, in a sinful nation, 1. Sorrow reigns, reigns to such a degree that the songs of the temple shall be howlings - the songs of God's temple at Jerusalem, or rather of their idol-temples, where they used, when, in honour of the golden calves, they had eaten and drunk, to rise up to play. They were perhaps wanton profane songs; and it is certain that sooner or later those will be turned into howlings. Or, if they had a sound and show of piety and religion, yet, not coming from the heart, nor being sung to the glory of God, he valued them not, but would justly turn them into howlings. Note, Mourning will follow sinful mirth, yea, and sacred mirth too, it if be not sincere. And, when God's judgments are abroad, they will soon turn the greatest joy into the greatest heaviness, the temple-songs, which used to sound so pleasantly, not only into sighs and groans, but into loud howlings, which sound dismally. They shall come to the temple, and, finding that in ruins, there they shall howl most bitterly. 2. Death reigns, reigns to such a degree that there shall be dead bodies, many dead bodies in every place (Psa 110:6), slain by sword or pestilence, so many that the survivors shall not bury them with the usual pomp and solemnity of funerals; they shall not so much as have the bell tolled, but they shall cast them forth with silence, shall bury them in the dead of the night, and charge all about them to be silent and to take notice of it, either because they have not wherewithal to bear the charges of a funeral, or because, the killing disease being infectious, none will come near them, or for fear the enemy should be provoked, if they should be known to lament their slain. Or they shall charge themselves and one another silently to submit to the hand of God in these desolating judgments, and not to repine and quarrel with him. Or it may be taken not for a patient, but a sullen silence; their hearts shall be hardened, and all these judgments shall not extort from them one word of acknowledgment either of God's righteousness or their own unrighteousness.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv1–6 Thus hath the Lord God showed unto me,.... Another…
Thus hath the Lord God showed unto me,.... Another vision, which is the fourth, and after the following manner:
and, behold, a basket of summer fruit; not of the first ripe fruit, but of such as were gathered at the close of the summer, when autumn began. So the Targum,
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"the last of the summer fruit;''
such as were fully ripe, and would not keep till winter; or, if kept, would rot; but must be eaten directly, as some sort of apples, grapes, &c. denoting the people of Israel being ripe for destruction, and would be quickly devoured by their enemies; and that, as they had had a summer of prosperity, they would now have a sharp winter of adversity.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv1–6 The vision of a basket of summer fruit, ver.…
The vision of a basket of summer fruit, ver. 1-3. The destruction of the oppressors foretold, ver. 4-10. And a famine of the word of God, ver. 11-14.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv1–6 This chapter begins with a fourth vision denoting the…
CHAPTER VIII
This chapter begins with a fourth vision denoting the certainty
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and nearness of the destruction of Israel, 1-3.
The prophet then proceeds to reprove their oppression and
injustice, 4-7.
Strong and beautiful figures, by which is represented the
complete dissolution of the Israelitish polity, 8-10.
The people threatened with a most awful judgment; a FAMINE of
the word of God, 11-14.
NOTES ON CHAP. VIII
Verse 1. A basket of summer fruit.] As summer fruit was not proper for preserving, but must be eaten as soon as gathered, so the Lord intimates by this symbol that the kingdom of Israel was now ripe for destruction, and that punishment must descend upon it without delay. Some think the prophet means the fruits at the end of autumn. And as after the autumn no fruit could be expected, so Israel's summer is gone by, her autumn is ended, and she shall yield no more fruit. Or, the autumn of her iniquity is come; the measure is filled up, and now she shall gather the fruit of her sin in the abundance of her punishment.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4 Amo 8:1-2. Behold a basket of summer fruit —…
Amo 8:1-2. Behold a basket of summer fruit — This symbolically denoted that Israel’s sins were now ripe for judgment, and that as the fruit, when it is ripe, is taken from the trees, so, their iniquity being now ripe, they should be taken off the land in which they dwelt. The two Hebrew words, קוצ, kaits, summer fruit, and קצ, kets, an end, have an affinity in their sound. Such paronomasias occur in other passages of Scripture: see Isa 24:17; Jer 1:11. Instead of summer fruit, Houbigant reads, “autumnal fruit, or, fruit of the last season of the year; and so in the next verse, where, instead of the end, he reads the last end, in order to keep up the allusion, and the play of the words in the original: whereby is signified, that as after the autumnal fruits, no others are produced from the earth, or gathered from the tree, so should it come to pass, that the kingdom of Israel should no more produce any fruit, nor reflourish in the following years. After Jeroboam II. all things became worse and worse, till the kingdom of Israel was totally destroyed:” see Jeremiah 24.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4, 5, 6 Thus hath the Lord God showed me - The…
Thus hath the Lord God showed me - The sentence of Amaziah pronounced, Amos resumes just where he left off, before Amaziah broke in upon him. His vehement interruption is like a stone cast into the deep waters. They close over it, and it leaves no trace. Amos had authenticated the third vision; “Thus hath the Lord God shewed me.” He resumes in the self-same calm words. The last vision declared that the end was certain; this, that it was at hand.
A basket of summer fruit - The fruit was the latest harvest in Palestine. When it was gathered, the circle of husbandry was come to its close. The sight gives an idea of completeness. The symbol, and the word expressing it, coincide. The fruit-gathering קיץ qayits, like our “crop,” was called from “cutting.” So was the word, “end,” “cutting off,” in (קץ qêts). At harvest-time there is no more to be done for that crop. Good or bad, it has reached its end, and is cut down. So the harvest of Israel was come. The whole course of God’s providences, mercies, chastenings, visitations, instructions, warnings, in spirations, were completed. “What could have been done more to My vineyard, God asks Isa 5:4, that I have not done in it?” “To the works of sin, as of holiness, there is a beginning, progress, completion;” a “sowing of wild oats,” as people speak, and a ripening in wickedness; a maturity of people’s plans, as they deem; a maturity for destruction, in the sight of God. There was no more to be done. heavenly influences can but injure the ripened sinner, as dew, rain, sun, but injure the ripened fruit Israel was ripe, but for destruction.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 5, 6 Hook. Hebrew, "basket of summer fruit." Septuagint, "bird cage…
Hook. Hebrew, "basket of summer fruit." Septuagint, "bird cage or net." (Haydock) --- Israel was ripe for destruction, ver. 2., and chap. vii. 8. (Calmet) --- Not only those who were near, (4 Kings xv. 29.) but the rest also were taken, (4 Kings xvii. 6.) as we pull with a hook the fruit when we cannot reach otherwise. (Worthington)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain On v1 Amos 8
Amos 8
Fourth Vision: Israel ripe for Destruction. Days of Mourning threatened against the Ungodly. Afterwards a Famine of the Word.
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1 Thus the Lord Jehovah showed me,
And behold, a basket with ripe fruit.1
2 And he said, What seest thou, Amos?
And I said, A basket with ripe fruit.
Then said Jehovah to me,
“The end2 is come to my people, Israel;
I will not pass by them any more.
3 And the songs of the palace3 shall howl
In that day, saith the Lord Jehovah;
Corpses in multitude; everywhere has he4 cast them forth; Hush!”5
4 Hear this, ye who pant6 for the poor,
And to destroy the meek7 of the earth,
5 Saying, when will the new moon be over,
That we may sell grain,
And the Sabbath, that we may open wheat?
Making the ephah small and the shekel great,
And falsifying the scales of deceit;
6 Buying the poor for silver,
And the needy for a pair of shoes,
And the refuse of the wheat will we sell.
7 Jehovah hath sworn by the pride of Jacob,
Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.
8 Shall not the earth tremble for this,
And every dweller therein mourn?
And it shall rise up, all of it, like the Nile,8
And shall heave and sink9 like the Nile of Egypt.
9 And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord Jehovah,
That I will cause the sun to go down at noon,
And make it dark to the earth in clear day;
10 And will turn your festivals into mourning,
And all your songs into lamentation;
And will bring sackcloth upon all loins,
And baldness upon every head;
And will make it10 like the mourning for an only son,
And the end of it like11 a bitter day.
11 Behold, days are coming, saith the Lord Jehovah,
When I will send a hunger into the land,
Not a hunger for bread nor a thirst for water,
But to hear the words of Jehovah.
12 And they shall stagger from sea to sea,
And rove about from the north12 even to the east,
To seek the Word of Jehovah, and shall not find it.
13 In that day the fair virgins shall faint,
And the young13 men, for thirst.
14 They who swear by the sin of Samaria,
And say, By the life of thy God, O Dan!
And, By the life of the way of Beersheba!
They shall fall and rise no more.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
1. Amo_8:1-3. Fourth Vision.The basket with ripe fruit. No more forbearance. Amo_8:1. This basket is an image of a people ripe for judgment. The play upon words between the original for ‘ripe fruit” and that for “end,” indicates more, clearly the necessary result of the ripeness, namely, the downfall of the people.
Amo_8:3. Songs become howlings—wherefore? The answer follows: because of the multitude of the dead. The exclamation Hush! is an admonition to bow beneath the tremendous severity of the divine judgment.
Amo_8:4-14. What has been briefly expressed in Amo_8:1-3 is here expanded into a longer discourse, the sinful conduct of the great which makes them ripe for judgment, and the heavy penalty which they must suffer.
(a.) Amo_8:4-6. Hear this, ye who, etc. A description of their wanton course. They pant after the poor and destroy the meek by grasping all property for themselves. Cf. Job_22:8; Isa_5:8. This is further defined in the two following verses, in which the prophet makes the men describe their own feelings and conduct.
Amo_8:5. They cannot even wait for the end of the festival in order to resume their traffic. The new moon was a holiday, like the Sabbath, on which trade and business ceased. To open wheat=to open the granaries; cf. Gen_41:56. What Joseph did for the benefit of the poor, these did for their own advantage, making usurious gains from others’ poverty. With this they united fraud; by diminishing the measure and increasing the shekel=by demanding one of greater weight than the right standard; and by falsifying the scales=using scales arranged so as to cheat.
Amo_8:6. Thus the poor man was made so poor that he was compelled to sell himself either for a piece of silver which be owed, or for a pair of shoes which he had gotten and was unable to pay for. Thus he could not meet the smallest expenditure. To complete the case, only the refuse grain was sold to them, for which yet they had to pay the same as for good grain.
(b.) Amo_8:7-14. Punishment of such wickedness. (1.) Amo_8:7-10. Hath sworn by the pride of Jacob, i.e., by himself who was the pride and glory of Israel. “By leaving such sins unpunished He would deny his glory in Israel.” (Keil.)
Amo_8:8. Therefore or for this, namely, for these deeds. These are Jehovah’s words, and carry out the thought of “not forgetting the deeds,” by a delineation of the impending judgment. The question, Shall not, etc., is intended to forestall the idea that such things could be left unpunished. It is incorrect to refer the “for this,” to the punishment as if it were intended to emphasize that. The form of the speech, i.e., the question, does not suit this view; and besides, in that case the punishment itself would be really indicated only in Amo_8:7, so that this unusual prominence of its impressiveness would be without a motive. The same words recur in Amo_9:5, but there as a description of God’s omnipotence, manifesting itself, however, in judgments. The earth heaves, because the Lord touches it (Amo_9:5). The trembling of the earth as a heaving and sinking is explained by comparison with the rise and fall of the Nile.
Amo_8:9. In that day, i.e., the day of the judgment, in which what has just been mentioned is to take place. In close connection with the trembling of the earth is its becoming dark: the one is not conceivable without the other. At bottom Amo_8:8 describes a return of the earth to its original condition of chaos—the sun go down at midday; not a mere eclipse, but a catastrophe which subverts the order of nature. [An eclipse is not the “going down” of the sun. The minute calculations of Hitzig and Michaelis, repeated and extended by Pusey, are therefore quite aside from the purpose.—C.]
Amo_8:10 describes more minutely the general mourning already touched upon in Amo_8:8. Cf. Amo_5:3; Amo_5:16; Hos_2:13. Baldness upon every head. The shaving of a bald place was a sign of mourning. Cf. Isa_3:24.
(2.) Amo_8:11-14. A new and peculiar trait in the delineation of the judgment, the bitter day. The Word of God, which men now despise, they will then long for, but in vain. Too late! This threat bears obliquely upon the insatiable avarice of those who live in luxury through their oppression of the poor. At the same time they are the persons who now will not listen to the Word of God.
Amo_8:12. They stagger, because plagued by hunger and thirst. From sea to sea, indefinitely, the sea being conceived of as the end of the earth (Psa_72:8). From the north to the east = from north to south, and from east to west, i.e., to every quarter of the globe.
Amo_8:13. So great is the torment of this unsatisfied hunger and thirst that the strongest succumb to it; these are individualized as the young men and the maidens; if they fail, much more the weak.
Amo_8:14. The sin of Samaria = that by which Samaria sins, the golden calf at Bethel. This is the most probable explanation, because of the corresponding expression in the next clause, the god of Dan = the golden calf there. By the life of the way; by the life of, is a customary formula of swearing, here improperly used in reference to a thing. The way of Beersheba = the way by which men go to Beersheba, to the worship there. The swearing by these objects shows that the young men and maidens are worshippers of these idols and make pilgrimages to Beersheba.
DOCTRINAL AND MORAL
1. According to our chapter the ripeness of the people for judgment is due to the violence and injustice practiced by the rich and noble upon the poor. These are peculiarly flagitious sins which call down the judgments of God. As such a statement reveals to us a degree of moral corruption which is frightful, so we learn from the severity with which the sins are rebuked and condemned, not only the spirit of justice but also the compassion which belongs to the religion of the Old Testament. It desires that every one, even the poorest, should have his rights, and even comes forward to protect the poor as such against the violence of the rich. They have a counsellor in God, who, as He protects them by the law, continues to do so by the penalties imposed upon the transgressors of the law. He does indeed bear long with those transgressors who oppress the poor, so that it may appear as if He had forgotten them; but as He owes, so to speak, the duty of sympathy with the poor and their necessities, so does He also that of forbearance with their oppressors, because He desires not the death of the sinner but rather that he would turn and live.
2. The frightful severity of God’s judgments, so far from being opposed to the compassion which cares for the poor and feeble, is rather in full harmony with it. The modern polemical spirit against the Old Testament descriptions of this severity, betrays its origin too plainly; it knows nothing in truth of sin, and therefore nothing of the divine judgment upon sin. It fails to see that the love which it claims for its God, really becomes the greatest harshness, since it denies the possibility of the punishment of sinners and therefore any efficacious opposition to the unrighteousness wrought by them. Only a God who is truly terror malorum can truly be amor bonorum. Moreover we do as a matter of fact continually meet with occurrences, in detail and in gross, which undeniably are judgments upon the sins of men, and that in these there is an execution of a law of moral government, can just as little be denied. So much the more foolish then is the opposition to the so-called ferocious God of the Jews, to the retaliatory spirit of the Old Testament. Now because men do not believe that there is and must be in God, along with, or rather for the sake of, the love which He is, strictness in judgment, He is obliged to show to a race which has lost its faith in the God of the Scriptures, by actual facts, as violent as those of the year 1870, that the storms of divine wrath are not merely outgrowths of a crude, undisciplined view of life, and tokens of a low state of culture, but a reality, planted in the midst of a century claiming to itself the highest culture. When the measure is full, these storms break forth, and a hundred times over put to flight “culture,” “love,” and all similar watchwords of the modern spirit. Then there often comes suddenly a “shaking” of the earth, or gloom falls upon an entire nation so that it becomes dark in bright daylight, or the festivals are turned into mourning and songs into lamentations, or all loins are clothed in sackcloth,—just when men in their blind security held such things to be impossible. Yes, times of war furnish only too striking illustrations of those words of Scripture which a race, strong in the conviction of its own leadership, coolly dismisses as a coarse and antiquated rhetoric, while it passes to the order of the day. Such fearful periods compel even an unbelieving race to forebode that the final judgment may prove a reality compared with which all preceding judgments are trifles. But faith sees in these latter a divine finger-mark pointing to the former, for which reason men of God, like the prophets, continually unite with their descriptions of intermediate judgments a reference to the last great judgment; and this the more when they describe judgments which are at least relatively decisive, inasmuch as they make an end of an entire kingdom.
3. When divine judgments come and give flaming proof of God’s existence to a race which has forsaken and forgotten Him, the once despised and hated word of the Lord is appreciated again. Men “hunger and thirst” for it, but often at first not in the right way. They desire as speedily as possible to hear of promises and consolations, and to these every ear is open. But it is in vain. We now need expect no new revelation from God. We have “his Word” in the Scripture. But when this is a long time despised, it follows at last that there is no one to preach it, and without a living preacher, it is finally lost. Or if it is preached, it has no power to console, and men fail to find what they seek. Thus there ensues a longing which is not satisfied. The result is otherwise only when men bow themselves in penitence under the divine threatenings as deserved, and under the divine Spirit inwardly blame themselves for their previous apostasy. But who knows whether man will find room for repentance? Before he reaches that point, while he is in the midst of his vain longing for comfort, he may be snatched away.
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
[Amo_8:1. Thus the Lord—shewed me. The sentence of Amaziah being pronounced, Amos resumes just where he had left off before. Amaziah’s vehement interruption is like a stone cast into deep waters. They close over it, and it leaves no trace. The last vision declared that the end was certain; this, that it was at hand. (Pusey.)
Amo_8:2. A basket with ripe fruit. At harvest time there is no more to be done for the crop. Good or bad, it has reached its end and is cut down. So the harvest of Israel was come … Heavenly influences can but injure the ripened sinner, as dew, rain, sun, but injure the ripened fruit. Israel was ripe, but for destruction. (Ibid.) Rev_16:18, Gather the clusters of the earth, for her grapes are fully ripe. (Ibid.)
Amo_8:3. The songs shall howl. When sounds of joy are turned into wailing, there must be complete sorrow. They are not merely hushed but turned into their opposite. Just the reverse is promised to the godly: Blessed are ye that weep now, for ye shall laugh (Luk_6:21). (Ibid.)
Amo_8:5. When will the new moon be over? The Psalmist said, When shall I come and appear before God? These said, When will this service be over that we may be our own masters again?
Sin in wrong measures once begun is unbroken. All sin perpetuates itself; it is done again because it has been done before. But sins of a man’s daily occupation are continued of necessity, beyond the simple force of habit and the ever increasing dropsy of covetousness. To interrupt them is to risk detection. How countless then their number! When human law was enforced in a city after a time of negligence, scarcely a weight was found to be honest. Prayer went up to God on the Sabbath, and fraud on the poor went up to God in every transaction on the other six days. (Pusey.)
Amo_8:7. Jehovah hath sworn, etc. God must cease to be God, if He did not do what He sware to do—punish the oppressors of the poor, (lb.) Wo, and a thousand woes, to that man that is cut off by an oath of God from all benefit by pardoning mercy. (M. Henry.)—C.] The evil deeds of the wicked are inscribed in a perpetual memorial before God; but the sins of believers are cast by Him into the depths of the sea so that they never again come into mind. Mic_7:19. (Pf. B. W.)
[Amo_8:8. Shall not the earth tremble for this? Those who will not tremble and mourn as they ought for national sins shall be made to tremble and mourn for national judgments. (M. Henry.)
Amo_8:9. The sun goes down at noon. Sorrow is saddest when it comes upon fearless joy. God commonly in his mercy sends heralds of coming sorrow; very few burst suddenly upon man. Now in the meridian brightness of the day of Israel, the blackness of night should fall upon him. (Pusey.)
Amo_8:10. Turn your feasts into mourning. As to the upright there ariseth light in the darkness which gives them the oil of joy for mourning, so on the wicked there falls darkness in the midst of light which turns their joy into heaviness. The end of it as a bitter day. There is no hope that when things are at the worst, they will mend. No, the state of impenitent sinners grows worse and worse; and the last of all will be the worst of all. (M. Henry.)
Amo_8:11. Not a hunger for bread. In death and dreariness, in exile from the land of their fathers, crushed by oppressors, hearing only of gods more cruel than those who make them, how will they hunger and thirst for any tidings of one who cares for the weary and heavy-laden, one who would have man-servant and maid, the cattle and the stranger within the gates to rest as well as the prince; of one who had fixed the year of jubilee that the debtor might be released and the captive go free, O, what a longing in a land of bondage to hear of such a Being; to believe that all that had been told of Him in former days was not a dream, to have a right to tell their children that it was true for them! (Maurice.)
Amo_8:12. From sea to sea, etc. Even the profane, when they see no help, will have recourse to God. Saul in his extremity inquired of the Lord, and He answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets. (Pusey.) Such is the present condition of the Jews. They roam in restless vagrancy about the world and seek the word of God; but they find it not, because they have killed the incarnate Word revealed in the written word. (Jerome.)—C.]
Footnotes:
[1]Amo_8:1.—קַיִץ, harvest, summer, here=summer-fruit, or gathered fruit, i.e., fully ripe, as 2Sa_16:1; Mic_7:1.
[2]Amo_8:2.—The paronomasia in קַיִץ and קֵץ is marked and forcible. Cf. Eze_7:6]
[3]Amo_8:3.—הֵיְכָל here manifestly is palace, not temple.
[4]Amo_8:3.—הִשְׁלִיךְ has Jehovah for its subject (Keil). Others take it impersonally (Henderson), but Wordsworth supplies “every one” as the subject.
[5]Amo_8:3.—הָס is by some, as E. V., rendered as an adverb=quietly; but always elsewhere it is an interjection, and should be so considered here.
[6]Amo_8:4.—שׁאְַפִים,=pant after [like a dog or wild beast yelping and panting after its prey. Wordsworth]. This sense is clearly required by the second member, where שֹׁאֲפִים is to be supplied before לְהַשׁבִּית.
[7]Amo_8:4.—עְ זֵּי. There seems no reason for departing from the textual reading here.
[8]Amo_8:8.—כָּאֹר is a defective form for כַיאֹר (cf. Amo_9:5), a reading which is found in many of the MSS.
[9]Amo_8:8.—נִשְׁקְהָ is a softened form for נִשְׁקְעָה, which is given in the Keri, and also in many MSS. Cf. שָׁקְעָה, Amo_9:5.
[10]Amo_8:10.—The suffix in שַׂמְתִּיהָ refers to the following אֶבֶל [but Keil makes it refer to all that has previously been mentioned as done upon that day. So Pusey. Henderson refers it to אֶרֶץ, understood.
[11]Amo_8:10.—The כְ in כְיוֹם, is Caph. veritatis.
[12]Amo_8:12.—וְנָעוּ This word is used of the reeling of drunkards, of the swaying to and fro of trees in the wind, of the quivering of lips, and then of the unsteady seeking of persons bewildered, looking for what they know not where to find. Pusey.]
[13]Amo_8:14.—דֶּרֶךְ. Meier’s correction of this into דֹּדְךָ,=thy beloved, is conjectural and needless.
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv2–6 end-- (Eze 7:2, Eze 7:6).
end-- (Eze 7:2, Eze 7:6).
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv1, 4 THE BASKET OF SUMMER FRUIT, Amo_8:1-3.
THE BASKET OF SUMMER FRUIT, Amo_8:1-3.
Under the figure of a basket filled with ripe fruit Jehovah shows the prophet that Israel is ripe for judgment. The picture is chosen (1) because of the similarity in sound between the words translated “summer fruit” — Hebrews kayis — and “end” — Hebrews kes; (2) because of the similarity in the ideas of the two words. The opening formula is the same as in Amo_7:1; Amo_7:4.
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Basket — The word occurs again only in Jer_5:27 “cage”; it is a general term for any receptacle.
Summer fruit — Ripe fruit, ready to be gathered in. On the question see remarks on Amo_7:8. The prophet having replied, Jehovah explains the vision.
The end is come — It is close at hand; the time of mercy is past (Amo_7:8).
Amo_8:3 gives a brief and forceful description of the end. Slaughter and mourning will be everywhere. Harper, without sufficient reason, places Amo_8:3 after Amo_8:9.
Songs — Expressions of joy and happiness (Amo_8:10; Amo_5:23; Amo_6:5).
Temple — If this is the correct rendering the reference must be to the rejoicing accompanying the religious feasts (Amo_5:23). The word may also mean “palace” (so margin R.V.), and the context favors this rendering. If so, comparison should be made with Amo_6:4-5. The above is the common translation of the Hebrew. However, the original presents two peculiarities: (1) A literal translation is, “And the songs of the palace shall howl,” or, wail — songs being the subject; but this is a strange construction. The sense is improved but little if songs is made the object, “They shall howl songs of the palace.” (2) The feminine plural ending with the word song is unusual; ordinarily it has the masculine ending. To remove these peculiarities a slight emendation has been suggested, “The female singers of the palace shall howl” (Amo_5:16), that is, for the dead.
In that day — The day of the end.
Amo_8:3 b is rendered more accurately in R.V., “The dead bodies shall be many; in every place shall they cast them forth with silence.” The original is even more forceful: “Many the corpses! In every place they are cast forth! Hush!” The tenses in 3b are prophetic perfects; the prophet represents the calamity of the future as already present.
Dead bodies — The avenger will do his worst; death and despair will be everywhere (Amo_6:9-10).
They shall cast them forth — Literally, he shall cast them forth — that is, Jehovah. He strikes the blow through the human agent, and dead bodies are scattered everywhere. The construction may be intended, however, to be understood as impersonal, “one shall cast forth” — they shall cast forth — they shall be cast forth (G.-K., 144d) From streets and houses the dead bodies are gathered, but there is no time for honorable burial; they are thrown anywhere.
With silence — Literally, hush. An interjection, as in Amo_6:10, “Hold thy peace.”
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv1–6 Amo_8:1 to Amo_9:11. The visions resumed.
Amo_8:1 to Amo_9:11. The visions resumed.
Amo_8:1-14. The fourth vision (Amo_8:1-3). The basket of summer fruit.
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1. Thus did the Lord Jehovah cause me to see] The same formula as before, Amo_7:1; Amo_7:4.
a basket of summer fruit] Partly the thought of Israel’s ripeness for judgement, but chiefly the Heb. word ḳêtz, “end,” brings up before the prophet’s mental eye in his vision, agreeably with the principles explained on Amo_7:1, the basket of ḳaitz, “summer fruit[189].” Similarly, in Jeremiah’s inaugural vision (Jer_1:11-12), the thought of Jehovah’s watching (shôḳçd) over His word to perform it, produces by association of sounds the image of the almond-tree (shâḳçd), the symbolism of which is afterwards explained, as that of the “summer fruit” is explained here.
[189] The two words, though similar in sound, are not however connected etymologically: in the corresponding Arabic words, the last letter is not the same.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4, 5, 6 (1, 2) The visions are resumed as though the…
(1, 2) The visions are resumed as though the priest at Bethel had trembled at the presence of Amos, and had ceased to persecute him. There is a remarkable play of words, qaits being the Hebrew for “summer fruit,” and qêts for “end.” It is harvest time, the end of the agricultural year. Israel is ripe for his final doom, that shall sweep down like a scythe. For “pass by” see on Amo_7:8.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv1–6 Vers. 1-14. In the fourth vision, the basket of…
Vers. 1-14. In the fourth vision, the basket of summer fruit, the Lord shows that the people is ripe for judgment. Explaining this revelation, Amos denounces the oppression and greed of the chieftains (vers. 4-10), and warns them that those who despise the Word of God shall some day suffer from a famine of the Word (vers. 11-14).
A basket of summer fruit; Septuagint, aggov ijxeutou, "a fowler"s vessel;" Vulgate, uncinus pomorum, which Jerome explains," Sicut uncino rami arborum detrahuntur ad poma carpenda, ita ego proximum captivitatis tempus attraxi." The word chelub is taken to mean "a basket of wickerwork;" it is used for "a cage" in Jer_5:27, but is found nowhere else. The gathering of fruit was the last harvest of the year, and thus fitly typified the final punishment of Israel. This is set forth by the play on the word in the next verse.
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Vers. 1-3.
A nation ripe for ruin.
While immunity lasts iniquity will go on. Men only love it less than they fear suffering. In the actual presence of the penalty the hand of the transgressor is stayed. The murderer will not strike the death blow under a policeman"s eye. The blasphemer will not move a lip when the thunderbolt is crashing through his roof. But by so little does the one feeling master the other that if punishment be not both certain and at hand, the fear of it will fail to deter from sin. "My lord delayeth his coming." Let escape be out of the question, yet even the chance of respite will turn the scale in favour of doing the forbidden thing. Israel, sentenced and to be destroyed some time, sinned with a high hand. Israel, sentenced to be destroyed soon, yet sinned still. Perhaps Israel, sentenced to be destroyed at once, may be brought to bay. Here God tries the experiment.
I THERE IS A TIME WHEN THE VINE OF SODOM RIPENS ITS FRUIT. Sin has its day. It disturbs the harmony of things, and when derangement reaches a climax a catastrophe comes, and arrests the process with a "thus far and no further." Israel"s wicked course had reached this critical point.
1. Idolatry, the archetypal sin against the first table, had practically superseded the worship of God. It was the religion of the king, and court and people. It was established and endowed, by the state. Its rites were observed at Bethel and elsewhere, in profane mimicry of the Levitical worship at Jerusalem. The substitution of it for the worship of Jehovah was part of the royal policy. Short of this the national apostasy could go no further. Interference, if it would be in time to save anything, must take place at once.
2. Oppression, the archetypal sin against the second table, had reduced society to dissolution. The safeguards of property, liberty, and life were alike removed. (Amo_3:9, 10 5:7, 12 6:3) The order of society had been converted into chaos. Incapable of using liberty without perverting it into licorice, it was high time to deprive Israel of the grossly abused trust. As slaves they would be under a regime of the strong arm, which was the only one that suited them in present circumstances. There are chains forging somewhere for the man who can neither consider others nor rule himself.
II SUCH RIPENING FOREBODES AN EARLY GATHERING. (Ver. 2. "The end is come upon my people of Israel.") The sickle is put in assoon as the harvest is ripe. No practical husbandry could delay the operation longer.
1. The crop has then reached the limits of its growth. Like the corn ripe unto harvest, or the grape purple and mellow, the natural life of Israel had fully developed itself. Tastes were matured, habits acquired, and characters settled into crystalline form. Things generally had put on an aspect of finality, and the sickle of judgment that follows the ripening of character need no longer wait. Let the ripe sinner beware the scythe. The fruits of unrighteousness full grown are suggestive of the harvesters on their way.
2. It is then ready to serve its natural purpose. Green grapes are useless in the vat, and green faggots would only put out the fire. It is in the harvest, when both are mature, that the wheat and the tares alike are sent to their ultimate destination. One purpose, a high and noble one, Israel had at last proved their unfitness to serve; their exclusive fitness for another purpose had only now by the same events become apparent. Reward and punishment alike take typical form only when they have reference to lives and characters which have assumed an aspect of finality. The hard grain and the dry faggot are waiting respectively for the mill and for the fire.
3. After this it will be in the way of the next crop. When the reaper goes the ploughman comes. If the harvesting were neglected the ploughing must be postponed. Israel had failed utterly to accomplish its Divine mission, and, left longer alone, would only prevent its accomplishment by other agency. "Take the talent from him, and give it to him that hath ten talents." The unfruitful become in a little while cumberers of the ground, and a necessary measure of practical husbandry is then to cut them off.
4. At this stage it will begin naturally to decay. Overripe fruit will "go bad "at once. If not used or preserved when ripe, it will be lost altogether. National decline waits on the development of national corruption. Israel become utterly dissolute would go to pieces according to a natural law, even if the Assyrian never came. Indeed, it was in the degeneracy already apparent that the invader saw his opportunity and found the occasion of his coming. The disease that stops the career of the sensualist means God"s judgment on one side, and the natural breakdown of his constitution on the other.
III THE DUNGHILL IS THE DESTINATION OF ALL TAINTED PRODUCE. (Ver. 3.) The incorrigible wrong doer is involved at last in overwhelming calamity. God"s judgments must fall, his mercy notwithstanding. Indeed, they are an aspect of it. "A God all mercy is a God unjust." He is leaving the lion to prey on the lamb. The most merciful course is that which offers most effective opposition to the wicked doings of wicked men. Israel"s manners are past reforming, and past enduring. By their intolerable abuse of freedom they showed their fitness only to be slaves. And according to character and capacity they must be treated. What is bad for the table may be good for the dunghill. The life of many had become a curse, and it only remained to stop that, and make their death a warning. That is one crop which even the sluggard"s garden cannot refuse to bear. (Pro_24:30-32)
IV THE OCCASION OF SUCH A HARVEST HOME TOO DEPLORABLE FOR WORDS. (ver. 3, "Hush!") When judgment is overwhelming, silence is fitting.
1. As opposed to songs. These had resounded from the palace. They spoke of mirth and revelry. But they would be turned into yells ere long. In awestruck anticipation of the utterance of pain and horror, the prophet bids the revellers be silent.
2. As opposed to lamentations. You cannot always "give sorrow words." There is a grief that "speaks not the grief of the overwrought heart. "I was dumb, opening not the mouth, because this stroke was thine." Such grief would befit a time like this. Words, however strong, must be beneath the occasion. Let them then remain unspoken, and let the eloquence of silence meet the overwhelming severity of the visitation.
3. As opposed to reproaches. Israel had outlived the period of probation, and therefore of expostulation. Its "great transgression" was committed, its course unchangeably chosen, its doom sealed. The condemned and sentenced murderer is removed to his cell in silence. In sterner measures than abuse of words must his crime be expiated. His very life is to be exacted, and windy denunciation may well be spared. "Let him alone" is of all measures the most sternly significant. It is the preternatural hush of the elemental world, presaging the thunder crash that shall make the very earth to reel.
HOMILIES BY J.R. THOMSON Ver. 1.
Ripeness in iniquity.
The figure here employed by Amos comes very naturally from him who had been a gatherer of the fruit of the sycomore tree. But at the same time, it is somewhat of a shock to the reader of this prophecy to find such a similitude employed for such a purpose. Our associations with "a basket of summer fruit" are all agreeable; but here the ripeness is in iniquity, and is unto condemnation and destruction.
I A PAST PROCESS OF MATURITY IN SIN IS IMPLIED. As the fruit has been ripened during months of growth unto maturity, so the nation of Israel has gradually and progressively come to such a condition as that lamented and censured by the prophet of the Lord.
1. Past privileges have been misused. No nation had been so favoured asthe descendants of Jacob; the greater the privileges, the greater the guilt of neglect and abuse.
2. Past warnings have been despised. If the people could not, in theexercise of their own faculties, foresee the end of all their misdeeds, they had no excuse, for prophet after prophet had arisen to rebuke them for unfaithfulness, and to warn them of impending judgment.
3. Past invitations have been unheeded. Often had the messengers of Godmingled promises with threats, invitations with censure. But in vain. The voice of the charmer had been disregarded; the tenderness of Divine compassion had been despised. Hence the process of deterioration had gone on. And circumstances which should have ripened the national character into heroic virtue, into saintly piety, had only served to mature irreligiousness and rebellion. Thus the sun and the showers which ripen the corn and the wholesome fruit bring also every poisonous growth to perfection.
II A SPEEDY PROSPECT OF CONSEQUENT DESTRUCTION IS REVEALED. The ripe fruit speaks not only of the sunshine of the bygone days, but of the consumption which awaits it. In this passage the figurative language of the prophet is to be interpreted as foreboding approaching ruin. "He that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.
1. Perseverance in irreligiousness issues in deterioration of character. The very years, the very privileges, which make the good man better, make the bad man worse. It was so with Israel as a nation. The operation of the same law may be traced in human society today.
2. Perseverance in irreligiousness will, under the Divine government, involve chastisement and punishment. The captivity foretold was to be accompanied by the desolation of the capital and the cessation, or at least the interruption, of national life. "The end is come," saith God, "to my people Israel; The prosperity and superficial peace of the wicked must be brought to a disgraceful close. T.
HOMILIES BY D. THOMAS Vers. 1-3.
Ripeness for judgment.
hath the Lord God showed unto me: and behold a basket of summer fruit. And he said, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A basket of summer fruit," etc. The text suggests three general truths.
I WICKED NATIONS GROW RIPE FOR JUDGMENT. The "basket of summer fruit," now presented in vision to Amos, was intended to symbolize that his country was ripe for ruin. This symbol suggests:
1. That Israels preset moral corruption was no hasty production. The ripe fruit in that basket did not spring forth at once; it took many months to produce. It came about by a slow and gradual process. Men do not become great sinners at once. The character of a people does not reach its last degree of vileness in a few years; it takes time. The first seed of evil is to be quickened, then it grows, ripens, and multiplies until there is a crop ready for the sickle.
1. That Israels season for improvement was least and gone. The ripened fruit in that basket had reached a stage in which improvement was impossible. The bloom was passing away, and rottenness was setting in. Nations become incorrigible. The time comes when it may be said The harvest is past, all cultivation is impossible. What boots your sowing seed under the burning sun of July or August? The fructifying forces of nature will not cooperate with you.
2. That Israels utter ruin was inevitable. Nothing awaited that "basket of summer fruit" but rottenness. Its decomposition was working, and would soon reduce it to putrescent filth. So it was with Israel.
II TRUE PROPHETS ARE MADE SENSIBLE OF THIS RIPENESS. God gives Amos a vision for the purpose. "Thus hath the Lord God showed unto me: and behold a basket of summer fruit. And he said, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A basket of summer frail Then said the Lord unto me, The end is come upon my people of Israel." God always gives his true ministers a clear vision of the subjects of their discourse. This clearness of vision is in truth their call and qualification for their Divine mission. Men, alas! often assume the work of the ministry whose mental vision is so dim that they are unable to see anything with vivid clearness; hence they always move in a haze, and their language is circumlocutory and ambiguous. Amongst the vulgar, those who should be condemned for their obtuseness get credit for their profundity. To every true teacher God says at the outset, "What seest thou?" Hast thou a clear vision of this basket of summer fruit? Hast thou a clear idea of this subject on which thou art about to discourse? Thus he dealt with Moses, Elijah, Daniel, Paul, John.
III ALMIGHTY GOD MAKES HIS PROPHETS SENSIBLE OF THE RIPENESS OF A PEOPLE"S CORRUPTION IN ORDER THAT THEY MAY SOUND THE ALARM. Why was Amos thus divinely impressed with the wretched moral condition of the people of Israel? Simply that he might be more earnest and emphatical in sounding the alarm. end is come upon my people of Jsrael; I will not again pass by them any more. And the songs of the temple shall be howlings in that day, saith the Lord God: there shall be many dead bodies in every place; they shall cut them forth with silence." What was the calamity he was to proclaim?
1. Universal mourning. "The songs of the temple shall be howlings." Where the shouts of mirth and the songs of joy had been heard, there should be nothing but the howlings of distress. The inevitable tendency of sin is to turn songs of gladness into howlings of distress.
2. Universal death. "And there shall be many dead bodies in every place; and they shall cast them forth with silence." The reference is to sword, pestilence, and famine multiplying the dead so rapidly as to render impossible the ordinary decencies and ceremonies at funerals. "Cast them forth with silence.
CONCLUSION. How stands our country? Is not its moral depravity ripening in every direction? Is it not filling up its measure of iniquities, treasuring up wrath against the last day? Does it not become all true teachers to sound the alarm? The time seems past for crying, "Peace and safety." Destruction is at hand; the fields are white for harvest. D.T.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv1, 4, 5 A basket of summer fruit.
Amo_8:1-2
A basket of summer fruit.
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A basket of summer fruit
As God set before Amos a basket of summer fruit, as a sign or parable concerning Israel; so, at harvest-tide God sets before us a basket of summer fruit, to teach us lessons to our souls health.
1. In preparing the earth for a harvest crop, and our lives for a crop of holiness, we must expect hard labour, and often sorrow. Whether we cultivate the fields or our souls, we must do it in the sweat of our face, with hard labour. Both the ground and our nature need cultivation, and that implies labour, and frequently sorrow. After the great fire of London, a flower called the Golden Rocket appeared, and beautified places wasted by the flame, though it had never been seen in that district before. The seeds were lying in the ground, but it needed the fire to make them live and grow. Some times we need the fire of affliction to bring out the good in us. It is Gods love, not anger, which sends the fire. Our life needs clearing, purging, that it may bring forth new and better fruit. Some of us can only be saved as by fire.
2. We must plough deep. The man who wants a good crop will not just scratch the surface of the earth, he will drive in the ploughshare deep. So we must drive down the ploughshare of self-examination, we must break up the hard ground of pride and self-righteousness, where no good thing can grow.
3. There must be sowing of seed. What we sow we reap. Our good deeds and our evil deeds bear their fruit here. Your words, your acts, your thoughts are seed; you may cast them forth carelessly, but like seed thoughtlessly dropped in the ground, they will grow, and if it be bad seed, you will be terrified at your harvest. Remember this,--You may not have sown bad seed, but if you have sown nothing for God, you will reap nothing from God. If you have no loving fellowship with God here, you will have none hereafter. Neglect of duty is a great sin. If we neglect our souls they degenerate, our spiritual natures grow weak. Let us learn to thank God, not only for bread which strengthens mans heart, but also for the better bread of holy teaching which the harvest provides, bread to strengthen mans soul. (H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, M. A.)
A basket of summer fruit
Is there any similarity between the Gospel and summer fruit? They both, in the first place, mean health. God every summer doctors the ailments of the world by the orchards and groves. The Gospel means health. It makes a man mighty for work, and strong for contest. It cures spiritual ailments. The analogy is also found in the fact that summer fruit is pleasant to the eye and the taste. So the Gospel, when a man rightly sees it and tastes it, is very pleasant. If summer fruit is not taken immediately, it soon fails. First, the speck; then a multiplication of defects; after a while a softening that is offensive; and then it is all flung out. So all religious advantages perish right speedily if you do not take them. I suppose you have noticed how swiftly the days and the years go by. Every day seems to me like a basket of summer fruit, the morning sky is vermilion, the noonday is opaline, the evening cloud is fire-dyed. How soon the days are gone! Notice the perishable nature of all religious surroundings. Christian associations readily fade away from the soul. Every opportunity of salvation seems to be restless until it gets away from us. Going away the sermons; going away the songs; going away the strivings of Gods eternal Spirit. The practical question is now; will you miss your chance? The day of grace will soon be past. (T. De Witt Talmage, D. D.)
Religion in the garden
In our great cities one of the most welcome sights of summer is to be found in the baskets of fruit exposed for sale in the shop windows. Reflect on some of the things God would teach us from a basket of summer fruit.
I. Fruit is the end and reward of labour. Fruit-bearing is the end contemplated in the seed-sowing and cultivation of the husbandman. Jesus said, My Father is the husbandman. We are thus led to think of God working in us and for us by His grace with a constancy and care like that of the owner of a vineyard. And the end contemplated by that gracious work of God is that we should bear fruit, and thus minister to His delight and glory. We are not left ignorant as to the nature of the fruit that God looks for in man. St. Paul says, The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance. These are the results that God works for and waits to see exhibited by those who call themselves by the name of Christ. When our lives bring forth these fruits of the Spirit, we become, in very truth, gardens of the Lord.
II. When the fruit fails there is disappointment and loss. Many things are necessary to bring the work of the garden to a successful issue--good seed and stock, congenial soil and situation, favourable climate and intelligent cultivation. Yet when all has been attended to that wisdom and experience command, there are occasional failures that disappoint and perplex the gardener. Young trees that put forth healthy shoots and vigorous branches, and gave great promise at first, when they have grown are found to be barren and unfruitful. Some trees never blossom at all, some have blossom that never comes to fruit. Whole crops of fruit are sometimes destroyed by the pests of the garden, and are at times stolen by thieves. Over these losses the husbandman sorrows because he has laboured in vain. See the parable of the barren fig-tree. May not some of our lives he equally disappointing to God? He has surrounded us with privileges, opportunities, and helps to the attainment of a holy life, yet the spiritual results may be nowhere visible. There are the leaves of a cold morality, but no blossoms of grace; the flowers of a shallow profession, but none of the fruits of a consistent life. How long shall we continue thus to abuse the blessings of God, and try His patience as cumberers on His holy ground?
III. The glory of the garden is carried away in the fruit basket. The garden has a spent and dreary look after its beauty and treasure have been gathered. But this dreariness is only temporary. The husbandman knows well how to repair the waste. Some of us have a like experience. We can think of a time when duty demanded a great sacrifice, or when duty had to be done in the face of great danger and temptation. But then we were spent in the great effort, almost broken by the severe strain. Then God came and called us to come apart and rest a while. In delightful fellowship with Him strength and inspiration gradually returned, and we were even more ready than before when the next call of duty came. (James Menzies.)
Harvest or summer fruits
God teaches the world in two ways; by symbols and sayings. By this basket of summer fruit He taught Amos that Israel was ripe for judgment. These summer fruits remind us of--
I. The beneficence of God. In the summer fruit He gives us the useful and the beautiful. In these fruits of the earth pro visions are made for our physical wants. They are beautiful as well as useful. How beautiful are these fruits of the earth! Their exquisite forms, in bound less variety; their lovely tints, their bloom and gorgeous hues, how beautiful! Deep within us all is the love for the beautiful. The God who planted within us the sentiment ministers abundantly to it in these baskets of fruit. Gods beneficence in these fruits of the earth is shown to be--
(1) Abundant,
(2) Unremitting,
(3) Undeserved.
II. The maturing forces of divine government. This basket of summer fruit is the outcome of a very long and complicate process. Snow and ice, showers and dews, clouds and sunshine, storm and calm, bleak winds of winter, genial airs of spring, and the hot breath of summer, the constant care and toil of the labourers in the fields and orchards, have all co-operated in bringing out this result. Antecedently, this result would not have been expected. Suppose a man in the depths of winter being told for the first time that those leafless fruit trees, shivering in the winds, and hung with icicles, should, in a few months, be loaded with clusters of apples, and plums, and pears, and grapes, would he have believed it? The thing to him would have been incredible. Things will ever be occurring in Gods universe upon which antecedently no finite being could calculate. Therefore do not argue
(1) Against the conversion of the world, or
(2) Against the resurrection of the dead.
III. THE DESTINED DECADENCE OF ALL ORGANIC LIFE. In that basket of summer fruit there is death. In a few short days it will be reduced to utter corruption. So it is with all material life: no sooner is perfection reached than decay begins. (Homilist.)
A basket of summer fruit
Fruits always seem fairest, freshest, and finest when they are seasonable--that is, when not forced into being before their proper time of ripening or preserved artificially beyond the period of their natural growth in the gardens. And each of the seasons, unless it be winter, seems to have its own peculiar fauna and flora which lend it beauty and distinction. The prophet Amos, who was a herdsman accustomed to the open air and to the nomad life of the free East, and who uses accordingly many rural figures in his writings, speaks of a basket of summer fruit. We may figuratively take his words, now, to represent those traits of nature and those moral results which seem to be particularly characteristic of summer.
1. In the first place we may say that there goes into the basket of summer fruits an innocent joyousness of heart. God does not intend that we should live to be happy, but He does desire that we should be happy while we live. Joy is a Christian grace. If any one has the right to be joyful it is the believer, with countless spiritual blessings at his service in this world, and all the bright, brave, beautiful things of the world to come before him. Rejoice evermore! is a whole Decalogue in itself. And it seems easier to rejoice in the summer time, when all things take on their brightest look, each day seems a gala day, and nature dons her loveliest garments. And we are then out of doors more, which is a condition conducing to greater health and happiness. All this now is natural and right, if the joy be drawn from the right sources and based upon the right things.
2. Very like in nature to this summer fruit of joyousness is that of gratefulness. For who makes it possible for us to be reasonably happy, innocently gleeful? It is God, who is Himself the source and fount of joy.
3. The summer is a good time to cultivate the grace of worship. The spirit of worship is for the whole year. And at no period of the year should the regular services of the sanctuary be neglected, as the manner of many is.
4. Again, there is the summer fruit of generosity, which certainly it would seem should thrive in the expansive out-of-door life of that season. When the restrictions of indoor life have given way to the freedom of the fields, the woods, and the hills, a broadening of the sympathies should certainly be experienced. If we breathe a fresher air and more of it our pulses should quicken at the same time with a more abundant fellow-feeling for mankind about us.
5. The basket of summer fruit also makes room for the grace of good humour. Summer is the cross season, many think, which will excuse bad temper in themselves and perhaps in others when the thermometer goes up into the nineties. The hot weather certainly tries peoples tempers, of what sort they are: and the curious thing is that the individuals who have lost their temper most often seem to have the most temper left. But the summer months should be marked by many little sufferances and patiences, which will come most surely of numerous small prayers and pleadings at the throne of grace. Let us try to be good-humoured and amiable even when circumstances might seem to excuse petulance.
6. And then no basket of summer fruit would be complete without the grace of Christian hopefulness. Hope, we may say, is the joy of the future--that is, the joy which we obtain even now from the anticipation of delights to come. Like faith, it is the substance, or assured impression, of things that are yet to be. And the summer time may be really a continuous jubilee, one prolonged brightsome poem--a lyric of flowers and fruits and spiritual feasting and trustful uplift of heart, as the soul, like a plant touched by a sun in the heavens and blown upon by breezes from off the eternal hills, opens out constantly into the fuller, freer life of God, and grows toward the ideals of saintly living which shall be realised at last somewhere beyond the skies and stars. We may always have summer in our hearts. There are those who have no summer, to whom it is always arctic night, chilling and drear; but the child of God has the spring-tide in his heart now, and looks hopefully forward to entrance sometime into a land where cold blasts never blow and storms never beat, but where all things are surrounded by an atmosphere of genial godliness, of beatific beauty, and perfect love. (C. A. S. Dwight.)
Ripeness for judgment
I. Wicked nations grow ripe for judgment. The basket of summer fruit. This symbol suggests--
1. That Israels present moral corruption was no hasty production. The ripe fruit in that basket did not spring forth at once, it took many months to produce. Men do not become great sinners at once. The character of a people does not reach its last degree of vileness in a few years, it takes time. The first seed of evil is to be germinated, then it grows, ripens, and multiplies until there is a crop ready for the sickle.
2. That Israels season for improvement was past and gone. The ripened fruit in that basket had reached a stage in which improvement was impossible. The bloom was passing away, and rottenness was setting in. Nations become incorrigible.
3. That Israels utter ruin was inevitable. Nothing awaited that basket of summer fruit but rottenness. Its decomposition was working, and would soon reduce it to putrescent filth. So it was with Israel.
II. True prophets are made sensible of this ripeness. God gives Amos a vision for the purpose. To every true teacher God says at the outset, What seest thou? Hast thou a clear vision of this basket of summer fruit? Hast thou a clear idea of this subject on which thou art about to discourse? Thus He dealt with Moses, Elijah, Daniel, Paul, John.
III. Almighty God makes his prophets sensible of the ripeness of a peoples corruption in order that they may sound the alarm. Why was Amos thus Divinely impressed with the wretched moral condition of the people of Israel? Simply that he may be more earnest and emphatical in sounding the alarm. What was the calamity he was to proclaim?
I. Universal mourning. The songs of the temple shall be howlings. The inevitable tendency of sin is to turn songs of gladness into howlings of distress.
2. Universal death. And there shall be many dead bodies in every place, and they shall cast them forth with silence. (Homilist.)
Fully ripe
1. The end of the season of trial under the emblem of a basket of summer fruit (Amo_8:1-3). The emblem meant that a period was approaching when their time of probation would be over, and the result of that would be a great destruction of life, accompanied with gloomy silence on the part of the miserable survivors. The emblem has a general application to all periods of the Churchs history. It suggests the idea of a tree which had been tended, planted, watered with the rain and the dew. It had blossomed, budded, brought forth fruit; its work was done; the fruit was gathered; no pains of the gardener, no change in the season, no influence of the sun could now alter the character of the fruit. They were either apples of Sodom, or pleasant to the eye, and good for food. Now was the time, not to cherish their growth, but to try their quality. As there are means of hastening the growth and ripeness of summer fruit, so do privileges and mercies hasten the maturity of the soul for the inheritance of the saints in light on the one hand, and for the righteous vengeance of God on the other. This consideration shows the fearful character of unrepented sin. Perseverance therein causes ripeness for judgment. It teaches us what our chief aim ought to be; not so much eagerness for outward privilege, as an earnest desire that the heart may be right with God.
2. The close connection between evil imaginations respecting Gods service, and unjust dealings towards men (Amo_8:4-6). Contempt for and abuse of Gods ordinances is here shown to be closely connected with doing wrong to the poor. He who forgets his duty towards his Maker, is sure to be wanting in his duty towards those who bear his Makers image. The best friends of the poor are those who earnestly contend for the rights of God.
3. The universality of Divine knowledge, on the one hand, and the effects of Divine judgments on the other (Amo_8:7-10). Man, in his hurry to become rich, often does many things unrighteously. But all things are at all times naked and open to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do. No lapse of time, nor change of scene, nor combination of circumstances, nor crowding together of different pursuits, veils for one moment the acts of ungodliness and wrong which men have done. Iniquity is never forgotten till it is forgiven.
4. A crowning judgment, which implied the absence of God, the childrens food taken from them (Amo_8:11-14). Among the Jews the absence of prophetical teaching would be a famine of the Word of the Lord. Direction from Him was a part of their peculiar blessedness. The want of that direction left them in a very helpless condition. In a Christian land, where the Word of God is freely circulated, we have the law, the testimony, and direction in all the duties of life. The precepts of the Gospel are so full, and its principles so clear, that we need never be at a loss. And where there is a scriptural ministry, the public mind may be kept as clearly instructed in the will of God as ever the Jews were by the teaching of the prophets. Christian communities, however, have been visited with a famine of the Word of God. Often, in the case of individuals, a famine of the Word of God comes upon the soul. (Vincent W. Ryan, M. A.)
Ripe for gathering
The point of the vision is rather obscured by the rendering summer fruit. Ripe fruit would be better, since the emblem represents the northern kingdom as ripe for the dreadful ingathering of judgment. Just as the mellow ripeness of the fruit fixes the time of gathering it, so there comes a stage in national and individual corruption, when there is nothing to be done but to smite. That period is not reached because God changes, but because men get deeper in sin. Because the harvest is ripe, the sickle is called for. It is a solemn lesson, applying to each soul as well as to communities. By neglect of Gods voice, and persistence in our own evil ways, we can make ourselves such that we are ripe for judgment, and can compel long suffering to strike. The tragedy of that fruit-gathering is described with extraordinary grimness and force in the abrupt language of verse
3. The crimes that ripened men for this terrible harvest are next set forth in Amo_8:4-6. The catalogue of sins is left incomplete, as if holy indignation turned for relief to the thought of the certain juugment. Amos heaps image on image to deepen the impression of terror and confusion. Everything is turned to its opposite these threats were fulfilled in the fall of the kingdom of Israel. But that day of the Lord was, in principle, a miniature foreshadowing of the great final judgment. The last section (verses 11-14) specifies one feature of judgment, the deprivation of the despised Word of the Lord. The truth implied is universal in its application. Gods message neglected is withdrawn. Conscience stops if continually unheeded. The Gospel may still sound in a mans ears, but have long ceased to reach further. There comes a time when men shall wish wasted opportunities back, and find that they can no more return than last summers heat. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
Israels overthrow foretold
At home the nation of Israel appeared to the eye of its citizens to possess every needed element of stability and prosperity, in a strong government, domestic tranquillity, plentiful harvests, and multiplying riches. And looking abroad, there appeared no occasion for anxiety. But along with apparent political and economic prosperity, sad religious and moral corruption prevailed. Apostasy had accompanied revolution when Israel was founded. Other sins followed in the train of apostasy. To this people, victorious, prosperous, wealthy, avaricious, dishonest, luxurious, corrupt, immoral, irreligious, God sent a messenger with a message. Amos Goes from Tekoa to Bethel, the royal sanctuary and abode of Israel. Here he denounces the sins of the nation, proclaims the displeasure of Jehovah, and threatens destruction. Tradition reports that the fearless preacher was mobbed and beaten, scarce escaping with his life. But he had done his work. He had warned the people. The vision and the voice come down to us to-day. Behold, Amos says, a basket of summer fruit. The meaning does not lie on the surface. In Palestine fruit was the last crop to be gathered in. The sight of fruit suggested to Amos that the end of the prosperity of Israel was near. Additional force was given to this suggestion by a play upon words which we can in no way reproduce in English. The word here used for fruit was derived from the same root as the word which commonly signified end. The significance was of course primarily political. No nation could long stand which was so undermined with irreligion, and honeycombed with immorality as was the nation of Israel. Like a summer storm clouding the noon, disaster soon overshadowed the brightness of Israels day. Less than a hundred years after Amos came to Bethel, and was scorned and hunted thence, Shalmanezer came, and Israel was no more. It is to be remembered that the destruction of the national life of Israel was due to itself, its own faults, its own corruptions. No nation was ever destroyed from without. A people that is fit to live cannot be made to die. The Assyrians only made an end of the fruit that was already rotten as well as ripe. It is a lesson for all lands. Our prosperity is no certain token of our permanence. Size is not certain strength; numbers and riches are not certain strength. The empire of Alexander fell to pieces by its own weight. Spain was ruined by its riches. There is special warning in this chapter against one class of corrupting influences--those which grow out of the greed of gain. The dangers which beset the fabric of society in these days link themselves very largely with the production, accumulation, and distribution of wealth. The denunciations of Amos illuminate with wonderful clearness the unjust and dishonest practices which had become prevalent in that day. Greed, dishonesty, haste to be rich, may destroy, the fabric of our society. If the growth of vast fortunes and estates is regarded with popular and legislative favour, and government and society and Church are deaf to the cries and indifferent to the struggles of honest poverty, sinking deeper into abject and hopeless pauperism; and ostentation, luxury, and extravagance replace our old time simplicity, frugality, and economy; if the craze to be immensely rich fevers the blood of the whole people; if fraud, illegal or legalised, if gambling in lotteries and in futures, if corners and stock-watering, if dishonesty, in short, in all its forms continues to increase; if thus such sins as ruined Israel taint our business and social life ever deeper and deeper,--then the basket of summer fruit will become symbol as apt for us as it was for them: the end cannot be far off. The end may not, however, come in a political catastrophe of subjugation by a foreign conqueror. It came not thus to France a century ago. Learn to distrust even the prosperity which seems the greatest, and carefully to scrutinise its cost and its consequences. To seek first to be right, then to seek to prosper,--not first to prosper, regardless of right, is as important for the soul as for the nation. Let us each lay the corner-stone of our life-work in the fear of God and in Christian faith, and rear the edifice in honesty, morality, kindness, service. Then surely ours shall be the blessing of the Lord; it maketh rich, and He addeth no sorrow with it. (D. F. Estes.)
Israel s overthrow foretold
The nation, Gods chosen, is doomed. This is the import of the vision. The rest of the chapter is devoted to justification of this decree and description of its execution.
1. God is just. No man ever felt this truth more deeply than Amos. He betrays its hold upon him by the way in which he constructs his prophecies. He could not endure that they should have the slightest excuse for charging God with injustice. They, however, were not concerned about God s justice, though they might pretend to question it. To them, therefore, his habit of speech must have been extremely annoying. He was like a bad conscience. No wonder that they wanted to get rid of him. The passage before us contains an excellent illustration of the point in question. He shows that the question is not, How could God destroy Israel? but, How could He prevent their destruction? A community of self-seekers is an impossibility.
2. The greater part of this passage is predictive. This is not the most essential part of prophecy. A prediction is a picture of the future. Amos saw the kingdom of Israel over thrown by the Assyrians. Probably he did not expect his conventional details would ever be fulfilled. His claim to inspiration is sufficiently vindicated by the fact that the kingdom of Israel was actually overthrown, and the people carried into captivity by a power which, when Amos prophesied, seemed on the verge of extinction. (Hinckly G. Mitchell.)
A basket of summer fruit
1. The perfection and beauty of summer affords an illustration of the goodness of God. God is the Creator as well as the Redeemer.
2. The beauty and perfection of summer suggest to us some interesting spiritual analogies.
(1) They are the result of growth. So is character. As the nature of the fruit is dependent upon the nature of the seed, so does our character depend upon our principles.
(2) They are the product of culture. And our nature has need of spiritual culture.
(3) The beauty of summer is an emblem of that spiritual transformation which is accomplished in the soul by the grace of God. The same Spirit who renews the face of the earth is able to renew the soul of man.
(4) The perfection of summer reminds us of approaching change. The moment the fruits of summer are ripened, they begin to decay. And the greater portion of our lives is gone. Whatever length of days may await you, the most vigorous and active years are spent--years that can never be recalled. Whatever work you have to do must be done at once--whoever talks of delay, you cannot. Finally, remember that all things here are transitory and uncertain. Lifes changes admonish us to set our affection on things above. There is a covenant that abides--a Saviour who changes not--a world where death never enters. Have we laid hold on that covenant? have we faith in that Saviour? (H. J. Gamble.)
A basket of summer fruit
Amos was a herdsman, a keeper of cattle, and all through his book you find him continually alluding to his peasant life. He is also called a gatherer of sycamore fruit, or better, a bruiser, a trainer or preparer of sycamore fruit. It was believed in the East that this fruit would ever ripen except it was a little bruised, and so some person was employed with an iron comb to scratch and wound the skin. Unwounded, the fruit, even when ripe, was too bitter to be eaten; but after it had been wounded, it ripened rapidly, and became sweet and eatable. Here is a basket of summer fruit which is so ripe that it has been gathered; and it is a sort of fruit--summer fruit--which will not keep, will not lay by for the winter, but must be eaten at once. Amos sees that Gods purposes were now ripe with regard to His people Israel, and that the nation had become ripe in its sin, so ripe that it must be destroyed, We may learn that there is a ripeness of men, as well as of summer fruit; there is a ripening in holiness till we are gathered by the hand of Jesus for heaven, and a ripening in sin till we are swept away with the rough hand of death, and are cast away into the rottenness of destruction.
I. Gods purposes may have a ripeness: God always times His decrees. Many men are wise too late. God proves His wisdom, not only by what He doeth, but by the time when He doeth it. Notice two of Gods greatest acts. The First Advent, and the Second Advent of the Lord Jesus Christ. Apply this great truth of the ripeness of Gods purposes to your own personal affairs. All Gods acts are well-timed.
II. Nations have their ripeness, and when they come to their ripeness they must be destroyed. We may see in this basket of summer fruit a picture of them. It was necessary to eat that ripe fruit at once. And there is need when a nation has become ripe in sin that it should be given up to destruction. There are such things as national sins, and there are consequently such things as national punishments.
III. Here is the picture of what some of us are, and all of us must be.
1. With the righteous man there is a time of ripening. The Christian when converted is, as it were, but a bud upon the tree. There is need that he grow unto perfection, and that fruit should become ripe fruit. Believers are ripened by every providence which passes over them. We are daily ripening in knowledge. In spirituality. As he ripens in spirituality, he ripens in savour.
2. There is a ripeness with which the sinful and ungodly are ripening. You are being ripened from within; the depravity of your own heart is developing itself every hour. And Satan is daily busy with you, to try and make you grow in vice. Sinners ripen in knowledge of sin, in love to sin, and in that hardness of heart which enables them to commit sin with impunity. With some sin has attained such a ripeness that they dare to blaspheme God. They have grown so rotten ripe that they will even dare to say there is no God, or think that He is blind, or ignorant, and will not see and punish sin in the sinner. It is an awful sign of nearness to hell when a man begins to think that he can doubt the existence of God. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
A basket of summer fruit
Fruit was the last sign of harvest in Palestine. When the fruit was gathered the harvest was over. What then is the meaning of this vision of a basket of summer fruit? The meaning is that Amos saw the end. Summer fruit had a mournful suggestion about it in Palestinian times and lands. What seest thou? The end; the gathered harvest, the upmaking of all things, the year in its results: good or bad, there it is. Can this fruit be changed now? No. Will not the sun work some miracle of ripening upon it? Never more. What it is, that it is. There is an end of ministry, of service, of stewardship, of life. Oh that men were wise, that they understood these things, that they would consider their latter end--the basket of summer fruit, the ingathering of the fields and the vintages. How stands it with us this audit day? (Joseph Parker, D. D.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain On vv1, 4 Amos 7 - Amo_8:1-4
5. THE PROPHET AND HIS MINISTRY
Amos 7 - Amo_8:1-4
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We have seen the preparation of the Man for the Word; we have sought to trace to its source the Word which came to the Man. It now remains for us to follow the Prophet, Man and Word combined, upon his Ministry to the people.
For reasons given in a previous chapter, there must always be some doubt as to the actual course of the ministry of Amos before his appearance at Bethel. Most authorities, however, agree that the visions recounted in the beginning of the seventh chapter form the substance of his address at Bethel, which was interrupted by the priest Amaziah. These visions furnish a probable summary of the prophets experience up to that point. While they follow the same course, which we trace in the two series of oracles that now precede them in the book, the ideas in them are less elaborate. At the same time it is evident that Amos must have already spoken upon other points than those which he puts into the first three visions. For instance, Amaziah reports to the king that Amos had explicitly predicted the exile of the whole people {Amo_7:11} -a conviction which, as we have seen, the prophet reached only after some length of experience. It is equally certain that Amos must have already exposed the sins of the people in the light of the Divine righteousness. Some of the sections of the book which deal with this subject appear to have been originally spoken; and it is unnatural to suppose that the prophet announced the chastisements of God without having previously justified these to the consciences of men.
If this view be correct, Amos, having preached for some time to Israel concerning the evil state of society, appeared at a great religious festival in Bethel, determined to bring matters to a crisis, and to announce the doom which his preaching threatened and the peoples continued impenitence made inevitable Mark his choice of place and of audience. It was no mere king he aimed at. Nathan had dealt with David, Gad with Solomon, Elijah with Ahab and Jezebel. But Amos sought the people, them with whom resided the real forces and responsibilities of life: the wealth, the social fashions, the treatment of the poor, the spirit of worship, the ideals of religion. And Amos sought the people upon what was not only a great popular occasion, but one on which was arrayed, in all pomp and lavishness, the very system he essayed to overthrow The religion of his time-religion as mere ritual and sacrifice-was what God had sent him to beat down, and he faced it at its headquarters, and upon one of its high days, in the royal and popular sanctuary where it enjoyed at once the patronage of the crown, the lavish gifts of the rich, and the thronged devotion of the multitude. As Savonarola at the Duomo in Florence, as Luther at the Diet of Worms, as our Lord Himself at the feast in Jerusalem, so was Amos at the feast in Bethel. Perhaps he was still more lonely. He speaks nowhere of having made a disciple, and in the sea of faces which turned on him when he spoke, it is probable that he could not welcome a single ally. They were officials, or interested traders, or devotees; he was a foreigner and a wild man, with a word that spared the popular dogma as little as the royal prerogative. Well for him was it that over all those serried ranks of authority, those fanatic crowds, that lavish splendor, another vision commanded his eyes. "I saw the Lord standing over the altar, and He said, Smite."
Amos told the pilgrims at Bethel that the first events of his time in which he felt a purpose of God in harmony with his convictions about Israels need of punishment were certain calamities of a physical kind. Of these, which in chapter 4 he describes as successively drought, blasting, locusts, pestilence, and earthquake, he selected at Bethel only two-locusts and drought-and he began with the locusts. It may have been either the same visitation as he specifies in chapter 4, or a previous one; for of all the plagues of Palestine locusts have been the most frequent, occurring every six or seven years. "Thus the Lord Jehovah caused me to see: and, behold, a brood of locusts at the beginning of the coming up of the spring crops." In the Syrian year there are practically two tides of verdure: one which starts after the early rains of October and continues through the winter, checked by the cold; and one which comes away with greater force under the influence of the latter rains and more genial airs of spring. Of these it was the later and richer which the locusts had attacked. "And, behold, it was after the kings mowings." These seem to have been a tribute which the kings of Israel levied on the spring herbage, and which the Roman governors of Syria used annually to impose in the month Nisan. "After the kings 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 prophets spirit something more awful than loss of grass-"how shall Jacob rise again? for he is little." The prayer was heard. "Jehovah repented for this: It shall not be, said Jehovah." The unnameable "it" must be the same as in the frequent phrase of the first chapter: "I will not turn it back" namely, the final execution of doom on the peoples 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 Gods purpose was a great drought. "Thus the Lord Jehovah made. me to see: and, behold, the Lord Jehovah was calling fire irate the quarrel." There was, then, already a quarrel between Jehovah and His people-another sign that the prophets moral conviction of Israels sin preceded the rise of the events in which he recognized its punishment. "And" the fire "devoureth the Great Deep, yea, it was about to devour the land." Severe drought in Palestine might well be described as fire, even when it was not accompanied by the flame and smoke of those forest and prairie fires which Joel describes as its consequences. {Amos 1} But to have the full fear of such a drought, we should need to feel beneath us the curious world which the men of those days felt. To them the earth rested in a great deep, from whose stores all her springs and fountains burst. When these failed it meant that the unfathomed floods below were burnt up. But how fierce the flame that could effect this! And how certainly able to devour next the solid land which rested above the deep-the very "Portion" assigned by God to His people. Again Amos interceded: "Lord Jehovah, I pray Thee forbear: how shall Jacob rise? for he is little." And for the second time Jacob was reprieved. "Jehovah repented for this: It also shall not come to pass, said the Lord Jehovah."
We have treated these visions, not as the imagination or prospect of possible disasters, but as insight into the meaning of actual plagues. Such a treatment is justified, not only by the invariable habit of Amos to deal with real facts, but also by the occurrence of these same plagues among the series by which, as we are told, God had already sought to move the people to repentance. The general question of sympathy between such purely physical disasters and the moral evil of a people we may postpone to another chapter, confining ourselves here to the part played in the events by the prophet himself.
Surely there is something wonderful in the attitude of this shepherd to the fires and plagues that Nature sweeps upon his land. He is ready for them. And he is ready not only by the general feeling of his time that such things happen of the wrath of God. His sovereign and predictive conscience recognizes them as her ministers. They are sent to punish a people whom she has already condemned. Yet, unlike Elijah, Amos does not summon the drought, nor even welcome its arrival. How far has prophecy traveled since the violent Tishbite! With all his conscience of Israels sin, Amos yet prays that their doom may be turned. We have here some evidence of the struggle through which these later prophets passed, before they accepted their awful messages to men. Even Amos, desert-bred and living aloof from Israel, shrank from the judgment which it was his call to publish. For two moments-they would appear to be the only two in his ministry-his heart contended with his conscience, and twice he entreated God to forgive. At Bethel he told the people all this, in order to show how unwillingly he took up his duty against them, and how inevitable he found that duty to be. But still more shall we learn from his tale, if we feel in his words about the smallness of Jacob, not pity only, but sympathy. We shall learn that prophets are never made solely by the bare word of God, but that even the most objective and judicial of them has to earn his title to proclaim judgment by suffering with men the agony of the judgment he proclaims. Never to a people came there a true prophet who had not first prayed for them. To have entreated for men, to have represented them in the highest courts of Being, is to have deserved also supreme judicial rights upon them. And thus it is that our Judge at the Last Day shall be none other than our great Advocate who continually maketh intercession for us. It is prayer, let us repeat, which, while it gives us all power with God, endows us at the same time with moral rights over men. Upon his mission of judgment we shall follow Amos with the greater sympathy that he thus comes forth to it from the mercy-seat and the ministry of intercession.
The first two visions which Amos told at Bethel were of disasters in the sphere of nature, but his third lay in the sphere of politics. The two former were, in their completeness at least, averted; and the language Amos used of them seems to imply that he had not even then faced the possibility of a final overthrow. He took for granted Jacob was to rise again: he only feared as to how this should be. But the third vision is so final that the prophet does not even try to intercede. Israel is measured, found wanting, and doomed. Assyria is not named, but is obviously intended; and the fact-that the prophet arrives at certainty with regard to the doom of Israel, just when he thus comes within sight of Assyria, is instructive as to the influence exerted on prophecy by the rise of that empire.
"Thus He gave me to see: and, behold, the Lord had taken His station"-tis a more solemn word than the "stood" of our versions-"upon a city wall" built to "the plummet, and in His hand a plummet. And Jehovah said unto me, What art thou seeing, Amos?" The question surely betrays some astonishment shown by the prophet at the vision or some difficulty he felt in making it out. He evidently does not feel it at once, as the natural result of his own thinking: it is objective and strange to him; he needs time to see into it. "And I said, A plummet. And the Lord said, Behold, I am setting a plummet in the midst of My people Israel. I will not again pass them over." To set a measuring line or a line with weights attached to any building means to devote it to destruction; but here it is uncertain whether the plummet threatens destruction, or means that Jehovah will at last clearly prove to the prophet the insufferable obliquity of the fabric of the nations life, originally set straight by Himself-originally "a wall of a plummet." For Gods judgments are never arbitrary: by a standard we men can read He shows us their necessity. Conscience itself is no mere voice of authority: it is a convincing plummet, and plainly lets us see why we should be punished. But whichever interpretation we choose, the result is the same. "The high places of Israel shall be desolate, and the sanctuaries of Isaac laid waste; and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword." A declaration of war! Israel is to be invaded, her dynasty overthrown. Everyone who heard the prophet would know, though he named them not, that the Assyrians were meant.
It was apparently at this point that Amos was interrupted by Amaziah. The priest, who was conscious of no spiritual power with which to oppose the prophet, gladly grasped the opportunity afforded him by the mention of the king, and fell back on the invariable resource of a barren and envious sacerdotalism: "He speaketh against Caesar." {Joh_19:12} There follows one of the great scenes of history-the scene which, however fast the ages and the languages, the ideals and the deities may change, repeats itself with the same two actors. Priest and Man face each other-Priest with King behind, Man with God-and wage that debate in which the whole warfare and progress of religion consist. But the story is only typical by being real. Many subtle traits of human nature prove that we have here an exact narrative of fact. Take Amaziahs report to Jeroboam. He gives to the words of the prophet just that exaggeration and innuendo which betray the wily courtier, who knows how to accentuate a general denunciation till it feels like a personal attack. And yet, like every Caiaphas of his tribe, the priest in his exaggerations expresses a deeper meaning than he is conscious of. "Amos"-note how the mere mention of the name without description proves that the prophet was already known in Israel, perhaps was one on whom the authorities had long kept their eye-"Amos hath conspired against thee"-yet God was his only fellow-conspirator!-"in the midst of the house of Israel"-this royal temple at Bethel. "The land is not able to hold his words"-it must burst; yes, but in another sense than thou meanest, O Caiaphas-Amaziah! "For thus hath Amos said, By the sword shall Jeroboam die"-Amos had spoken only of the dynasty, but the twist which Amaziah lends to the words is calculated-"and Israel going shall go into captivity from off his own land." This was the one unvarnished spot in the report.
Having fortified himself, as little men will do, by his duty to the powers that be, Amaziah dares to turn upon the prophet; and he does so, it is amusing to observe, with that tone of intellectual and moral superiority which it is extraordinary to see some men derive from a merely official station or touch with royalty. "Visionary, begone! Get thee off to the land of Judah; and earn thy bread there, and there play the prophet. But at Bethel"-mark the rising accent of the voice-"thou shalt not again prophesy. The Kings Sanctuary it is, and the House of the Kingdom." With the official mind this is more conclusive than that it is the House of God! In fact the speech of Amaziah justifies the hardest terms which Amos uses of the religion of his day. In all this priest says there is no trace of the spiritual-only fear, pride, and privilege. Divine truth is challenged by human law, and the Word of God silenced in the name of the king.
We have here a conception of religion, which is not merely due to the unspiritual character of the priest who utters it, but has its roots in the far back origins of Israels religion. The Pagan Semite identified absolutely State and Church; and on that identification was based the religious practice of early Israel. It had many healthy results: it kept religion in touch with public life; order, justice, patriotism, self-sacrifice for the common weal, were devoutly held to be matters of religion. So long, therefore, as the system was inspired by truly spiritual ideals, nothing for those times could be better. But we see in it an almost inevitable tendency to harden to the sheerest officialism. That it was more apt to do so in Israel than in Judah, is intelligible from the origin of the Northern Schism, and the erection of the national sanctuaries from motives of mere statecraft. {1Ki_12:26-27} Erastianism could hardly be more flagrant or more ludicrous in its opposition to true religion than at Bethel. And yet how often have the ludicrousness and the flagrancy been repeated, with far less temptation! Ever since Christianity became a state religion, she that needed least to use the weapons of this world has done so again and again in a thoroughly Pagan fashion. The attempts of Churches by law established, to stamp out by law all religious dissent; or where such attempts were no longer possible, the charges now of fanaticism and now of sordidness and religious shop keeping, which have been so frequently made against dissent by little men who fancied their state connection, or their higher social position to mean an intellectual and moral superiority: the absurd claims which many a minister of religion makes upon the homes and the souls of a parish, by virtue not of his calling in Christ, but of his position as official priest of the parish, -all these are the sins of Amaziah, priest of Bethel. But they are not confined to an established Church. The Amaziahs of dissent are also very many. Wherever the official masters the spiritual; wherever mere dogma or tradition is made the standard of preaching; wherever new doctrine is silenced, or programs of reform condemned, as of late years in Free Churches they have sometimes been, not by spiritual argument, but by the ipse dixit of the dogmatist, or by ecclesiastical rule or expediency, -there you have the same spirit. The dissenter who checks the Word of God in the name of some denominational law or dogma is as Erastian as the churchman who would crush it, like Amaziah, by invoking the state. These things in all the Churches are the beggarly rudiments of Paganism; and religious reform is achieved, as it was that day at Bethel, by the adjuring of officialism.
"But Amos answered and said unto Amaziah, No prophet I, nor prophets son. But a herdsman I, and a dresser of sycamores; and Jehovah took me from behind the flock, and Jehovah said unto me, Go, prophesy unto My people Israel."
On such words we do not comment; we give them homage. The answer of this shepherd to this priest is no mere claim of personal disinterestedness. It is the protest of a new order of prophecy, the charter of a spiritual religion. As we have seen, the "sons of the prophets" were guilds of men who had taken to prophesying because of certain gifts of temper and natural disposition, and they earned their bread by the exercise of these. Among such abstract craftsmen Amos will not be reckoned. He is a prophet, but not of the kind with which his generation was familiar. An ordinary member of society, he has been suddenly called by Jehovah from his civil occupation for a special purpose and by a call which has not necessarily to do with either gifts or a profession. This was something new, not only in itself, but in its consequences upon the general relations of God to men. What we see in this dialogue at Bethel is, therefore, not merely the triumph of a character, however heroic, but rather a step forward and that one of the greatest and most indispensable-in the history of religion.
There follows a denunciation of the man who sought to silence this fresh voice of God. "Now therefore hearken to the word of Jehovah thou that sayest, Prophesy not against Israel, nor let drop thy words against the house of Israel; therefore thus saith Jehovah "Thou hast presumed to say; Hear what God will say." Thou hast dared to set thine office and system against His word and purpose. See how they must be swept away. In defiance of its own rules the grammar flings forward to the beginnings of its clauses, each detail of the priests 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 Amaziahs 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 priests interruption. We are therefore justified in supposing that Amos spoke it also on this occasion, and in taking it as the close of his address at Bethel. "Then the Lord Jehovah gave me to see: and, behold, a basket of Kaits," that is, "summer fruit. And He said, What art thou seeing, Amos? And I said, A basket of Kaits. And Jehovah said unto me, The Kets-the End - has come upon My people Israel. I will not again pass them over." This does not carry the prospect beyond the third vision, but it stamps its finality, and there is therefore added a vivid realization of the result. By four disjointed lamentations, "howls" the prophet calls them, we are made to feel the last shocks of the final collapse, and in the utter end an awful silence. "And the songs of the temple shall be changed into howls in that day, saith the Lord Jehovah. Multitude of corpses! In every place! He hath cast out! Hush!"
These then were probably the last words which Amos spoke to Israel. If so, they form a curious echo of what was enforced upon himself, and he may have meant them as such. He was "cast out"; he was "silenced." They might almost be the verbal repetition of the priests 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.
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On vv1, 4 CRITICAL NOTES.] The visions continued from ch. Amo_7:9
CRITICAL NOTES.] The visions continued from ch. Amo_7:9
Amo_8:2. Summer] Late fruit, fully ripe (2Sa_16:1; Mic_7:1); a symbol of a people ripe for judgment
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Amo_8:3. Howl.] Songs of joy (ch. Amo_6:5; 2Sa_19:36) would be turned into lamentation on account of the dead. Silence] Lit. silently, not with customary rites and professional mourners; the terror of God and dread of the enemy would make them afraid to speak. “An admonition to bow beneath the overwhelming severity of the judgment of God, as in Zep_1:7 (cf. Heb_2:18 and Zec_2:13).”
HOMILETICS
A BASKET OF SUMMER FRUIT.—Amo_8:1-2.
Under a new type the final subversion of the state is represented. As summer fruits portend ripe harvests, so the sins of Israel ripened them for destruction. Taking the basket of fruit as an emblem of ripeness for judgment, notice—
I. A ripeness which is gradual. Nothing is matured at once. There must be seed-time before harvests; buds and flowers before fruits. Individual character is of slow growth. Seeds of national ills ripen secretly. The interval between the spring and the reaping time is defined in nature and religion.
II. A ripeness which is ruinous. Men grow in wickedness as well as in holiness; ripen for destruction as well as for salvation. God’s dealings influence according to moral condition. The sun which melts the wax hardens the clay. The dew and rain water the earth, but injure the fruit. God’s mercies and judgments ripen for glory or for shame. A condition which is spiritually rotten can produce nothing but decay and untimely end. Some people are like stubble laid out to dry in the sun and ripen for the fire. “They shall be devoured as stubble fully dry.”
III. A ripeness which terminates existence. “The end is come upon my people.” In summer nothing more is to be done but reap the crops. Good or bad, the time is come and it must be cut down. God’s dealings with Israel were completed. They had neglected to reform. Their harvest was past and their summer ended. A period comes when God no longer spares a people. The fruit must be gathered and devoured by the enemy. The days are fulfilled and the end is come (Lam_4:18). “An end is come, the end is come; it watcheth for thee; behold, it is come.”
FRUIT FROM THE HEAVENLY ORCHARD
We may derive from these words the following lessons.
1. God gives fruit. “The fruit of the Spirit,” &c. “The tree of Life that beareth all manner of precious fruit.”
2. God’s fruit is ripe. “It is summer fruit.” The fruit of sin is sour; sweet to the taste, but bitter afterwards—“pleasures of sin for a season.” Hence—
3. God’s fruit is wholesome, like all ripe fruit, regulating and adjusting food of other sort. Christianity is a grand controlling and regulating force. The soil that grows the fruits of the Spirit cannot nourish growths of an opposite character.
4. God’s fruit is satisfying. Even ripe fruit is not long satisfying. Lawful pleasures do not bring contentment. The fruit that the soul craves grows not in earthly orchards.
5. God’s fruit is sustaining. Certain kinds of fruit will appease appetite for awhile without any sustentation. The fruit of God imparts strength that is permanent; in care, sickness, bereavement, and death.
6. God’s fruit is stimulating. It is the fruit of the vine, “the true vine,” yielding “the best wine.” It is the stimulus of waning powers; prompts to action where energies would otherwise be dormant.
7. God’s fruit is plentiful. “A basket of fruit,” always replenished, multiplying in the use, like the “twelve baskets” of fragments, &c. The basket always filled. There is no dearth in God’s orchard; no grudging in his supplies; enough for all, everywhere, at all times.
8. God’s fruit is cheap. “Wine and milk, without money and without price,” &c. [The Study].
A DAY OF SADNESS.—Amo_8:3
The prophet now describes the greatness of approaching judgments to rouse attention to a sense of danger—universal mourning and universal death would afflict the land.
1. Temple music would be turned into grief. The songs and sacred solemnities of the temple would cease. Mirthful music would end in grievous misery. Sin turns the greatest joy into the greatest heaviness, the loudest music into the bitterest howlings. If men do not sing in a day of grace, they will howl in a time of wrath. “Those that will not serve God with gladness of heart,” says an old author, “in the abundance of all things, shall serve him in sadness of heart in the want of all things (Deu_28:47-48).”
2. Mortality would be prevalent in every place. Sin brings sword, pestilence, and famine (Eze_14:21); sweeps away its thousands, and fills the land with lamentation and mourning. History tells of populations carried away by Divine judgments like leaves before the wind (Isa_64:6). The picture in Israel is a type of many a fact in providence. Many dead—dead in every place and buried in common pits, without customary rites. Grief could find no vent to relieve itself. The sorrow could not wear away in utterance. The burden was intolerable and the silence universal. The living and the dead were solemn as the grave. How sad that everlasting death which awaits an ungodly race!
“Death loves a shining mark, a signal blow” [Young].
HOMILETIC HINTS AND OUTLINES
Amo_8:1. A basket, &c.
1. A type of God’s goodness in nature. He gives fruit in due season, in rich abundance, &c. He never left himself without a witness (Act_14:17).
2. A type of human diligence in co-operating with God. Beasts eat without industry. Man has to till the ground and cultivate the trees. The fruit must be gathered and the basket made. If we do not work, neither can we eat. “There is a basket of fruit which is so ripe, that it has been gathered, and it is a sort of fruit—summer fruit—which will not keep, which will not lay by until winter, but must be eaten at once. It teaches—
1. That there is a ripeness in God’s purposes. God always times his decrees. In the first and second advent of Jesus Christ. In our own personal affairs God gives deliverance not in thy time, but in his. Trust him for mercy in its time, &c.
2. That nations have their ripeness, and that when they come to their ripeness they must be destroyed. Sceptics may entertain doubts concerning individual transgression and personal punishment, but history proves that national judgments have been sent from God. Take Babylon, Greece, and Rome. We as a people are guilty, and should not be proud and self-righteous.
3. That there is a ripeness of men as well as of summer fruit. With the righteous a time of ripening for heaven, a ripening in knowledge, experience, and spirituality. With the ungodly a ripening in the love of sin and hardness of heart, a ripening for eternal judgment! Take heed! Be renewed in heart and ripened for eternal glory” [Spurgeon].
Amo_8:1-2. The manner in which the truth is conveyed to the prophet’s mind by different representations reminds us of the course pursued towards the apostles by the Lord, and teaches that we should endeavour to answer the purpose of God, and to let the truth sink deeply into our minds, that being clearly understood it may powerfully affect us, and make us ready to impart it to others [Ryan].
First, those nearest destruction are often the most negligent and stupid. They need to be told often of their danger and roused to diligence. God warns them often and leaves them without excuse. Second, the servants of God have need to be instructed that they may warn others. Attention to the revelation must be quickened. Behold. The vision itself must be seen and explained. “What seest thou?” They must declare nothing but what they have received. “Thus hath the Lord God showed unto me.”
Meditate carefully on the object presented to view. It suggests the idea of a tree which had been planted, tended, watered with the rain and dew; it had blossomed, budded, brought forth fruit; its work was done; the fruit was gathered; no pains of the gardener, no change in the season, no influence of the sun, could now alter the character of that fruit. At previous times, when the leaves and blossom came forth, there would be room for anxiety or hope; there would afterwards be room for doubt as to its future size and goodness, according to its progress during the weeks of its growth,—but now all was over. They were either apples of Sodom, or pleasant to the eye and good for food. Now was the time not to cherish their growth, but to try their quality. “The end is come” [Ryan].
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 8
Amo_8:1-2. God hath done more for Britain, or certainly as much, as he did for Abraham’s race, and even if we have not rebelled as often as Israel in the wilderness, yet our little rebellions are great because of the greatness of God’s goodness. Oh, Christians, be in earnest that the land may be filled with grace; that the torrent of our iniquities may be dried up, lest haply that supposition of a great historian should at last become a fact, and the New Zealander should yet sit on the broken arch of London Bridge, wondering that so great a city could have passed away [Spurgeon].
Amo_8:3. Mirth. Many a sigh is heaved amid the loud laughter of folly. Take the fullest cup of earth’s best joys. What is this to satisfy desire, to allay trouble, to meet eternity? Even the present end of this short-lived mirth is heaviness, sometimes so intolerable, that death is fled to as the cure of anguish; and to avoid the fear of hell the wretched sinner leaps into it. At best eternity will change this mirth, when that will remain which would be the most desirable riddance—the sting of conscience, as enduring as the pleasures of sin were momentary [Bridge].
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On v1 Amo 8:1 - Amo 8:14.
Amos
RIPE FOR GATHERING
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Amo 8:1 - Amo 8:14.
There are three visions in the former chapter, each beginning as Amo 8:1. This one is therefore intended to be taken as the continuation of these, and it is in substance a repetition of the third, only with more detail and emphasis. An insolent attempt, by the priest of Beth-el, to silence the Prophet, and the fiery answer which he got for his pains, come between. The stream of Amos’s prophecy flows on, uninterrupted by the boulder which had tried to dam it up. Some courage was needed to treat Amaziah and his blasphemous bluster as a mere parenthesis.
We have first to note the vision and its interpretation. It is such as a countryman, ‘a dresser of sycamore trees’ would naturally have. Experience supplies forms and material for the imagination, and moulds into which God-given revelations run. The point of the vision is rather obscured by the rendering ‘summer fruit.’ ‘Ripe fruit’ would be better, since the emblem represents the Northern Kingdom as ripe for the dreadful ingathering of judgment. The word for this {qayits} and that for ‘the end’ {qets} are alike in sound, but the play of words cannot be reproduced, except by some clumsy device, such as ‘the end ripens’ or ‘the time of ripeness comes.’ The figure is frequent in other prophecies of judgment, as, for instance, in Rev 14:14 - Rev 14:20.
Observe the repetition, from the preceding vision, of ‘I will not pass by them any more.’ The first two visions had threatened judgments, which had been averted by the Prophet’s intercession; but the third, and now the fourth, declare that the time for prolonged impunity is passed. Just as the mellow ripeness of the fruit fixes the time of gathering it, so there comes a stage in national and individual corruption, when there is nothing to be done but to smite. That period is not reached because God changes, but because men get deeper in sin. Because ‘the harvest is ripe,’ the long-delayed command, ‘Put in thy sickle’ is given to the angel of judgment, and the clusters of those black grapes, whose juice in the wine-press of the wrath of God is blood, are cut down and cast in. It is a solemn lesson, applying to each soul as well as to communities. By neglect of God’s voice, and persistence in our own evil ways, we can make ourselves such that we are ripe for judgment, and can compel long-suffering to strike. Which are we ripening for-the harvest when the wheat shall be gathered into Christ’s barns, or that when the tares shall be bound in bundles for burning?
The tragedy of that fruit-gathering is described with extraordinary grimness and force in the abrupt language of Amo 8:3. The merry songs sung in the palace {this rendering seems more appropriate here than ‘temple’} will be broken off, and the singers’ voices will quaver into shrill shrieks, so suddenly will the judgment be. Then comes a picture as abrupt in its condensed terribleness as anything in Tacitus-’Many the corpses; everywhere they fling them; hush!’ We see the ghastly masses of dead {‘corpse’ is in the singular, as if a collective noun}, so numerous that no burial-places could hold them; and no ceremonial attended them, but they were rudely flung anywhere by anybody {no nominative is given}, with no accustomed voice of mourning, but in gloomy silence. It is like Defoe’s picture of the dead-cart in the plague of London. Such is ever the end of departing from God-songs palsied into silence or turned into wailing when the judgment bursts; death stalking supreme, and silence brooding over all.
The crimes that ripened men for this terrible harvest are next set forth, in part, in Amo 8:4 - Amo 8:6. These verses partly coincide verbally with the previous indictment in Amo 2:6, etc., which, however, is more comprehensive. Here only one form of sin is dealt with. And what was the sin that deserved the bad eminence of being thus selected as the chief sign that Israel was ripe and rotten? Precisely the one which gets most indulgence in the Christian Church; namely, eagerness to be rich, and sharp, unkindly dealing. These men, who were only fit to be swept out of the land, were most punctual in their religious duties. They would not on any account do business either on a festival or on Sabbath, but they were very impatient till-shall we say? Monday morning came-that they might get to their beloved work again.
Their lineal descendants are no strangers on the exchanges, or in the churches of London or New York. They were not only outwardly scrupulous and inwardly weary of religious observances, but when they did get to ‘business,’ they gave short measure and took a long price, and knew how to turn the scales always in their own favour. It was the expedient of rude beginners in the sacred art of getting the best of a bargain, to put a false bottom in the ephah, and to stick a piece of lead below the shekel weight, which the purchaser had to make go up in the scale with his silver. There are much neater ways of doing the same thing now; and no doubt some very estimable gentlemen in high repute as Christians, who give respectability to any church or denomination, could have taught these early practitioners a lesson or two.
They were as cruel as they were greedy. They bought their brethren as slaves, and if a poor man had run into their debt for even a pair of shoes, they would sell him up in a very literal sense. Avarice, unbridled by the fear of God, leads by a short cut to harshness and disregard of the claims of others. There are more ways of buying the needy for a pair of shoes than these people practised.
The last touch in the picture is meanness, which turned everything into money. Even what fell through the sieve when wheat was winnowed, which ought to have been given to anybody, was carefully scraped up, and, dirty as it was, sold. Is not ‘nothing for nothing’ an approved maxim to-day? Are not people held up as shining lights of commerce, who have the faculty of turning everything into saleable articles? Some serious reflections ought to be driven home to us who live in great commercial communities, and are in manifold ways tempted to ‘learn their ways, and so get a snare unto our souls,’ by this gibbeting of tempers and customs, very common among ourselves, as the very head and front of the sin of Israel, which determined its ripeness for destruction.
The catalogue of sins is left incomplete {compare with Amo 2:1 - Amo 2:16}, as if holy indignation turned for relief to the thought of the certain judgment. That certainly is strongly affirmed by the representation of the oath of Jehovah. ‘He can swear by no other,’ therefore He ‘swears by Himself’; and the ‘excellency of Jacob’ cannot with propriety mean anything else than Him who is, or ought to be, the sole ground of confidence and occasion of ‘boasting’ to the nation {Hos 5:5}. He gives His own being as the guarantee that judgment shall fall. As surely as God is God, injustice and avarice will ruin a nation. We talk now about necessary consequences and natural laws rendering penalties inevitable. The Bible suggests a deeper foundation for their certain incidence-even the very nature of God Himself. As long as He is what He is, covetousness and its child, harshness to the needy, will be sin against Him, and be avenged sooner or later. God has a long and a wide memory, and the sins which He ‘remembers’ are those which He has not forgiven, and will punish.
Amos heaps image on image to deepen the impression of terror and confusion. Everything is turned to its opposite. The solid land reels, rises, and falls, like the Nile in flood {see Revised Version}. The sun sets at midday, and noon is darkness. Feasts change to mourning, songs to lamentations. Rich garments are put aside for sackcloth, and flowing locks drop off and leave bald heads. These are evidently all figures vividly piled together to express the same thought. The crash that destroyed their national prosperity and existence would shake the most solid things and darken the brightest. It would come suddenly, as if the sun plunged from the zenith to the west. It would make joy a stranger, and bring grief as bitter as when a father or a mother mourns the death of an only son. Besides all this, something darker beyond is dimly hinted in that awful, vague, final threat, ‘The end thereof as a bitter day.’
Now all these threats were fulfilled in the fall of the kingdom of Israel; but that ‘day of the Lord’ was in principle a miniature foreshadowing of the great final judgment. Some of the very features of the description here are repeated with reference to it in the New Testament. We cannot treat such prophecies as this as if they were exhausted by their historical fulfilment. They disclose the eternal course of divine judgment, which is to culminate in a future day of judgment. The oath of God is not yet completely fulfilled. Assuredly as He lives and is God, so surely will modern sinners have to stand their trial; and, as of old, the chase after riches will bring down crashing ruin. We need that vision of judgment as much as Samaria did when Amos saw the basket of ripe fruit, craving, as it were, to be plucked. So do obstinate sinners invite destruction.
The last section specifies one feature of judgment, the deprivation of the despised word of the Lord {Amo 8:11 - Amo 8:14}. Like Saul, whose piteous wail in the witch’s hovel was, ‘God . . . answereth me no more,’ they who paid no heed to the word of the Lord shall one day seek far and wearily for a prophet, and seek in vain. The word rendered ‘wander,’ which is used in the other description of people seeking for water in a literal drought {Amo 4:8}, means ‘reel,’ and gives the picture of men faint and dizzy with thirst, yet staggering on in vain quest for a spring. They seek everywhere, from the Dead Sea on the east to the Mediterranean on the west, and then up to the north, and so round again to the starting-point. Is it because Judah was south that that quarter is not visited? Perhaps, if they had gone where the Temple was, they would have found the stream from under its threshold, which a later prophet saw going forth to heal the marshes and dry places. Why was the search vain? Has not God promised to be found of those that seek, however far they have gone away? The last verse tells why. They still were idolaters, swearing by the ‘sin of Samaria,’ which is the calf of Beth-el, and by the other at Dan, and going on idolatrous pilgrimages to Beer-sheba, far away in the south, across the whole kingdom of Judah {Amo 5:5}. It was vain to seek for the word of the Lord with such doings and worship.
The truth implied is universal in its application. God’s message neglected is withdrawn. Conscience stops if continually unheeded. The Gospel may still sound in a man’s ears, but have long ceased to reach farther. There comes a time when men shall wish wasted opportunities back, and find that they can no more return than last summer’s heat. There may be a wish for the prophet in time of distress, which means no real desire for God’s word, but only for relief from calamity. There may be a sort of seeking for the word, which seeks in the wrong places and in the wrong ways, and without abandoning sins. Such quest is vain. But if, driven by need and sorrow, a poor soul, feeling the thirst after the living God, cries from ever so distant a land of bondage, the cry will be answered. But let us not forget that our Lord has told us to take heed how we hear, on the very ground that ‘to him that hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away.’
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. R. Dummelow 1909 · Public Domain On v1 The Vision of the Ripe Fruit, followed by a…
The Vision of the Ripe Fruit, followed by a Fifth Address
1-3. The vision.
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4-14. The address, denouncing dishonest traders (Amo_8:4-6), threatening earthquakes, eclipse, mourning, a painful sense of abandonment by God, an utter destruction of the superstitious (Amo_8:7-14).
1-3. Notwithstanding the interference of Amaziah, the prophet finishes the recital of his visions.
1, 2. Another play on words—qayits is the word for ripe fruit, and qçts for end. We might represent it by, 'A basket of ripe fruit. My people are ripe for judgment.'
3. The literal translation of this picturesque v. is, 'And the songs of the Temple shall howl in that day—utterance of the Lord Jehovah! Many the corpses! In every place they cast forth! Hush!' Temple] RM 'palace.' The building is regarded as the palace of the Great King; the word came to the Hebrews from Babylonia, and literally signifies 'Great House.' The pestilence is so fatal that men have no time either to burn or bury the dead, and no inclination to talk.
4. To make the poor of the land to fail] i.e. to exterminate those who are in lowly circumstances. 'They make a solitude and call it peace.'
5. The new moon was originally a more important festival than the sabbath. For points in its observance see 1Sa_20:6; 2Ki_4:23; Isa_1:13; Hos_2:13, and cp. the Levitical ritual in Num_28:11.
The ephah] the measure by which they sold, was fraudulently small; the weight by which they tested the money paid them was as dishonestly great. Money was not coined, but was weighed on every business occasion (Gen_23:16). The ephah contained about 65 Imp. pts.; the shekel of 252 grs. would be worth about £21s. of our money.
7. Jehovah Himself is the Excellency, the Pride and Boast of His people.
8. The movements of the land shaken by the earthquake, or whatever other calamity was divinely inflicted, are compared to those of the Nile: 'Yea, it shall rise up wholly like the River; and it shall be troubled and sink again, like the River of Egypt' (RV). The word for 'river' is regularly employed of the Nile.
9. The eclipse of June 15th, 763 b.c., may have impressed his imagination powerfully.
10. Feasts] religious, not secular. The cloth of camel's or goat's hair was bound round the loins with a cord. Shaving the head was a sign of mourning (Lev_21:5; Isa_22:12). This day would end as badly as it began.
11. The word which they craved was not one of spiritual instruction, but of guidance out of trouble: cp. 1Sa_3:1.
12. From sea to sea] i.e. from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea.
14. The sin, or, rather, the 'guilt' of Samaria, is the idolatrous object worshipped by the Samaritans, either the calf at Bethel (1Ki_12:29; Hos_10:5), or the Asherah at Samaria (2Ki_13:6).
The manner] RV 'the way of Beer-sheba' may perhaps mean the pilgrimage thither. Mohammedans swear by the pilgrimage to Mecca. But Amos not improbably wrote, 'By the life of the deity of Beer-sheba.'
J. R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Macmillan, 1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Arno C. Gaebelein 1922 · Public Domain On v1 The Fourth Vision: The Basket With Summer Fruit
CHAPTER 8
The Fourth Vision: The Basket With Summer Fruit
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1. The vision (Amo 8:1-3)
2. Israel ripe for judgment (Amo 8:4-10)
3. The coming days of famine (Amo 8:11-14)
Amo 8:1-3. In his fourth vision the prophet beholds a basket of summer fruit. The Hebrew shows that it was a basket filled with ripe fruit. The ripe fruit is a symbol that Israel was ripe for the harvest of judgment. The message of the Lord to the prophet is, “The end is come upon My people Israel; I will not again pass by them any more.” The songs would be changed into howling lamentations and many should be slain.
Amo 8:4-10. Once more the wealthy and prosperous portion of the nation is addressed, their sinful practices are exposed and it is shown that they were ripe for judgment. The rich oppressed the poor; they took away from the poor what belonged rightfully to them. They cheated by making the measure small and increased the price. They were the profiteers of that time. They also used false balances. Then they sold the refuse of the wheat. All may be compared with Jas 5:1-6 where the same conditions are pictured, prevailing in Christendom, before the Lord comes. For all this they did the land would have to tremble and every one mourn.
“And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord GOD, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day.” Much nonsense has been written on this verse especially from the side of the Adventists, as if there has been a certain time “a dark day” in fulfillment of this prophecy. Some expositors have made of it a mere eclipse of the sun. The verse, while it has a certain application to that generation, whose glory should end like the sun going down at noon, has its final meaning in the coming day of the Lord, which all the prophets announced. It is the same our Lord predicts in Mat 24:29-30. For Israel the bitter day of mounting, lamentation and woe would come.
Amo 8:11-14. A great famine is announced. It is not to be a famine for bread, or thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. His Word and the light of His revelation is to be completely withdrawn from them. The Word of the Lord which they despised they would then desire to seek in vain. They will wander hither and thither from sea to sea, from the north to the east; they shall run to and fro to seek the Word of the Lord and shall not find it. Such was the case with them when the cruel Assyrian power took hold on them and carried them away. Such a judgment too is fast approaching for Christendom which in its apostasy rejects the Word of the Lord, turns to fables, till the day comes when the Spirit will leave and as a result there will be a famine of the Word, no comfort and no help for those who are ripe for judgment.
Arno C. Gaebelein, The Annotated Bible (1913–1922) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On vv1, 4 The Vision of the Basket of Summer-Fruit.
The Vision of the Basket of Summer-Fruit.
v. 1. Thus hath the Lord God showed unto me, in another vision revealing the fate of Israel, and behold a basket of summer-fruit, dead ripe, ready to be consumed.
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v. 2. And he said, again anxious to impress the meaning of the vision upon the prophet, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A basket of summer-fruit. Then said the Lord unto me, The end is come upon My people of Israel, for they were ripe for the punishment which would end their national existence; I will not again pass by them any more, namely, to spare them, that they would not be punished.
v. 3. And the song’s of the Temple, originally intended to convey the spirit of the highest rejoicing, shall be howlings in that day, cries of the deepest grief and mourning over the large number of the slain, saith the Lord God. There shall be many dead bodies in every place; they shall cast them forth with silence, with an admonition to hush, to bow in silence under the terrible severity of the divine judgment. If a sinner acknowledges his sin, he will also be ready to bow in silence and humility under the hand of God when some punishment comes upon him.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 4 Look, a basket of summer fruit!
Look, a basket of summer fruit!
The word "look" here shows that Amos saw something interesting. AT: "I saw a basket of summer fruit!"
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summer fruit
"ripe fruit"
What do you see, Amos?
Yahweh uses a question to teach Amos. AT: "Tell me what you see, Amos." (See: Rhetorical Question)
in that day
"at that time"
this is the declaration of the Lord Yahweh
Yahweh speaks of himself by name to express the certainty of what he is declaring. See how you translated this in Amos 4:5. AT: "this is what the Lord Yahweh declares" or "this is what I, the Lord Yahweh, have declared" (See: First, Second, or Third Person)
Silence!
Possible meanings are 1) Yahweh is to telling the people to be silent as they hear about the severity of his punishment or 2) the people will be silent because of their grief after Yahweh's punishment.
translationWords
Lord Yahweh
basket
people of God
Israel
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 2, 4, 5 8:1 This vision resumes the prophetic sermon begun in…
8:1 This vision resumes the prophetic sermon begun in 7:1 and interrupted by the dialogue with Amaziah.
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.