THE AGES DIGITAL LIBRARY COMMENTARY Barnes’ Notes on the Bible Volume 10 - Amos By E.B. Pusey, D.D. To the Students of the Words, Works and Ways of God: Welcome to the AGES Digital Library. We trust your experience with this and other volumes in the Library fulfills our motto and vision which is our commitment to you: MAKING THE WORDS OF THE WISE AVAILABLE TO ALL — INEXPENSIVELY. AGES Software Rio, WI USA Version 1.0 © 2000 426 INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPHET AMOS Theodoret: “He who made, one by one, the hearts of men, and understands all their works, knowing the hardness and contrariousness of the heart of Israel, reasons with them not through one prophet only, but, employing as His ministers many prophets and wondrous men, admonishes them and foretells the things to come, evidencing through the harmony of many the truthfulness of their predictions.” As the contradiction of false teachers gave occasion to Paul to speak of himself, so the persecution of the priest of Bethel has brought out such knowledge as we have of the life of Amos, before God called him to be a prophet. “I,” he says, “was no prophet, neither was I a prophet’s son” (<300714>Amos 7:14). He had not received any of the training in those schools of the prophets which had been founded by Samuel, and through which, amid the general apostasy and corruption, both religious knowledge and religious life were maintained in the remnant of Israel. He was a “herdsman,” whether (as this word, rq;B;<h1241>, would naturally mean being used always of the “ox” or “herd” in contrast with the “flocks” of sheep or goats, and the name being derived from “plowing”) “a cowherd” or (less obviously) “a shepherd.” He was “among the herdsmen of Tekoah”; among them, and, outwardly, as they, in nothing distinguished from them. The sheep which he tended (because he also kept sheep) may have been his own. There is nothing to prove or to disprove it. Anyhow, he was not like the king of Moab, “a sheep-master” (The term rqenO<h5349> is used of the king of Moab, <120301>2 Kings 3:4), as the Jews, following out their principle, that “prophecy was only bestowed by God upon the rich and noble” (see the note at <290229>Joel 2:29), wish to make him. Like David, he was following the sheep (<300715>Amos 7:15. He took me rj1a1<h310> ˆaox<h6629>,) as their shepherd. But his employment as “a gatherer” (or, more probably, “a cultivator”) “of sycamore fruit” designates him instead as one living by a rural employment for hire. Probably, the word designates the artificial means by which the sycamore fruit was ripened, irritating, scraping, puncturing, wounding it.f119 Amos does not say that these were his food, but that one of his jobs was to perform a gardener’s function in maturing the figs. So he was something of a gardener and a shepherd among other shepherds. The sheep which he fed were also probably a matter of trade. 427 The breed of sheep and goats, in keeping with his special name of shepherd rqenO<h5349>, was derived, is still known by the same name in Arabia; a race, small, thin, short-legged, ugly, and stunted. It furnished a proverb, “viler than a naqad”; yet the wool of the sheep was accounted the very best. The goats were found especially in Bahrein. Among the Arabs also, the shepherd of these sheep was known by a name derived from them. They were called “naqad;” and their shepherd was called a “noqad”.f120 The prophet’s birthplace, Tekoah, was a town which, in the time of Josephus and of Jerome, had dwindled into a “village” (Josephus Vit. Section 75), “a little village” (Jerome on <240601>Jeremiah 6:1), on a high hill, twelve miles from Jerusalem, “which,” Jerome adds, “we see daily.” “It lay” Jerome says (Praef. ad. Amos), “six miles southward from holy Bethlehem where the Saviour of the world was born, and beyond it is no village except some rude huts and movable tents. Such is the wide waste of the desert which stretches to the Red Sea, and the bounds of the Persians, Ethiopians, and Indians. And no grain whatever being grown upon this dry and sandy soil, it is all full of shepherds, in order, by the multitude of the flocks, to make amends for the barrenness of the land.” From Tekoah Joab brought the “wise woman” (<091402>1 Samuel 14:2) to intercede for Absalom; Rehoboam built it (<141106>2 Chronicles 11:6); i.e., whereas it had been before (what it afterward again became) a village, and so was not mentioned in the Book of Joshua, he made it a fortified town toward his southeastern border. The neighboring wilderness was called after it (<142020>2 Chronicles 20:20; 1 Macc. 9:33). Besides its sycamores, its oil was the best in Judah (Menachot viii. 3. in Reland p. 1029). War and desolation have extirpated both from this as well as from other parts of Palestine (See Keith’s Land of Israel c. 3, 4, 5.; Stanley’s Palestine p. 120. Robinson i. 552). Its present remains are Christian (Robinson i. 486), “ruins of 4 or 5 acres.” It, as well as so many other places near the Dead Sea, is identified by the old name, slightly varied in pronunciation, Theku’a, as also by its distance from Jerusalem (Ritter Erdk. xv. p. 629). In the sixth century A.D. we hear of a chapel in memory of the holy Amos at Tekoa (Vita Sabae in Cotelre. Ecc. Graec. Mon. iii. p. 272), where the separated monks of the lesser laura of Saba communicated on the Lord’s day. The wide prospect from Tekoa embraced both the dead and the living — God’s mercies and His judgments. 428 To the Southeast (Robinson, Ibid.) “the view is bounded only by the level mountains of Moab, with frequent bursts of the Dead Sea, seen through openings among the rugged and desolate mountains which intervene.” On the North, the Mount of Olives is visible, at that time dear to sight, as overhanging the place, which God had “chosen to place His Name there.” Tekoah, however, although the birthplace, was not the home of the prophet. He was “among the herdsmen from Tekoah” [1wOqT]<h8620> their employment, as shepherds, leading them away “from Tekoah.” In the wilds of the desert while he was following his sheep, God saw him and revealed Himself to him, as he had to Jacob and to Moses, and said to him, “Go prophesy unto My people Israel.” And, just as the apostles left their nets and their father, and Matthew abandoned the receipt of custom, and followed Jesus, so Amos left his sheep and his cultivation of sycamores, and appeared suddenly in his shepherd’s dress at the royal but idolatrous (<300713>Amos 7:13) sanctuary, the temple of the state, to denounce the idolatry sanctioned by the state, to foretell the extinction of the Royal family, and the captivity of the people. This, like Hosea, he had to do in the reign of the mightiest of the sovereigns of Israel, in the midst of her unclouded prosperity. Bethel was only twelve miles north of Jerusalem (Eusebius, sub. v.), since Tekoah was twelve miles toward the southeast. Six or seven hours would suffice to transport the shepherd from his sheep and the wilderness to that fountain of Israel’s corruption, the high places of Bethel, and for the inspired peasant to confront the priests and the prophets of the state-idolatry. There doubtless he said, “the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste” (<300709>Amos 7:9); and there, like the former “man of God,” while standing opposite “the altar,” he renewed the prophecy against it, and prophesied that in its destruction it should involve its idolatrous worshipers (<300901>Amos 9:1). Yet although he did deliver a part of his prophecy at Bethel, still, like his great predecessors Elijah and Elisha, doubtless he did not confine his ministry there. His summons to the luxurious ladies of Samaria, whose expenses were supported by the oppressions of the poor (<300401>Amos 4:1), was without question delivered in Samaria itself. The call to the pagan to look down into Samaria from the heights which girt in the valley out of which it rose (see the notes at <300309>Amos 3:9), thence to behold its din and its oppressions, to listen to the sound of its revelries and the wailings of its oppressed, and so to judge between God and His people, would also be most effectively given within Samaria. The consciences of the guilty 429 inhabitants to whom he preached would populate the heights around them, their wall of safety, as they deemed, between them and the world, with pagan witnesses of their sins, and pagan avengers. The prophet could only know the coming destruction of the house of Jeroboam and the captivity of Israel by inspiration. The sins which he rebuked, he probably knew from being among them. As Paul’s “spirit was stirred in him” at Athens, “when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry” (<441716>Acts 17:16), so the spirit of Amos must have been stirred to its depths by that grievous contrast of luxury and penury side by side, which he describes in such vividness of detail. The sins which he rebukes are those of the outward prosperity especially of a capital, the extreme luxury (<300312>Amos 3:12,15; 4:1; 5:11; 6:4-6), revelries (<300208>Amos 2:8; 3:9), debauchery (<300207>Amos 2:7), of the rich, who supported their own reckless expenditure by oppression of the poor (<300207>Amos 2:7,8; 3:9; 4:1; 5:11; 6:3; 8:4-6), extortion (<300310>Amos 3:10), hard bargains with their necessities (<300208>Amos 2:8), perversion of justice (<300207>Amos 2:7; 5:7,12), with bribing, (<300206>Amos 2:6; 5:12), false measures (<300805>Amos 8:5), a griping, hard-fisted, and probably usurious sale of grain (<300805>Amos 8:5,6).