Amos: let justice roll down

About the book

Amos's name is usually taken to mean ‘burden-bearer’. The book introduces him as one "among the sheepherders of Tekoa" (Amos 1:1), a village south of Jerusalem in Judah. He did not come from a family of prophets. When Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, told him to go back to Judah, Amos answered, "I was not a prophet … nor was I the son of a prophet; rather, I was a herdsman and a tender of sycamore-fig trees" (Amos 7:14): the LORD took him from the flock and sent him to Israel (Amos 7:15). The English pastor Matthew Henry writes, "the same Divine Spirit influenced Isaiah and Daniel in the court, and Amos in the sheep-folds" Matthew Henry.

He spoke in the days of Uzziah king of Judah and Jeroboam II king of Israel, two years before a great earthquake, about 760 BC. The map under the Jesus tab places the book in the divided monarchy (930–586 BC). The north had widened its borders and grown rich; the rich trampled the poor, and the sacrifices at the shrines of Bethel and Gilgal never stopped.

Jews and Christians have received the book as the words of Amos, and most scholars agree that he is its source. Many, though, think that a few passages, such as the word against Judah (2:4-5), and above all the hopeful close (9:11-15), were added in Judah after Jerusalem fell: David's ‘fallen tent’ sounds like the time after 586, and the turn from judgement to hope is sudden. Others answer that the prophets regularly join judgement and hope, and that David's house had already fallen when the ten tribes broke away. John Wesley, the eighteenth-century leader of the Methodist revival, read it so; on ‘fallen’ he notes, "By the revolt of the ten tribes" Wesley.

How it unfolds

Key passages

"For three transgressions of Damascus, even four" (Amos 1:3): Amos condemns Israel's neighbours one by one, and as his hearers nod, the word turns on them. "They sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals" (Amos 2:6). Being chosen by God was no exemption; it was a weightier charge:

Only you have I known from all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.

Amos 3:2

Israel kept its feasts, brought its offerings and sang its songs. But God will not accept the worship of a people who have turned justice aside in the city gate:

I hate, I despise your feasts! I cannot stand the stench of your solemn assemblies. … But let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Amos 5:21-24

Justice is fair judgement that protects the weak; righteousness is right living before God and neighbour. They are to run like a stream that never dries. The people longed for the day of the LORD, as Joel explains it, but Amos warned, "It will be darkness and not light" (Amos 5:18). A people who told the prophets not to prophesy (Amos 2:12) would know a worse hunger: "not a famine of bread or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD" (Amos 8:11).

The book and Christ

The risen Jesus explained what all the Prophets had written about himself (Luke 24:27). After its judgements, Amos ends with a promise:

In that day I will restore the fallen tent of David. I will repair its gaps, restore its ruins, and rebuild it as in the days of old

Amos 9:11

When the church in Jerusalem met to decide how to receive believers from the Gentiles, James said, "The words of the prophets agree with this" (Acts 15:15), and quoted these verses. In Jesus, David's son, risen and reigning, God has rebuilt David's house, "so that the remnant of men may seek the Lord, and all the Gentiles who are called by My name" (Acts 15:17). James quotes the Greek Old Testament, which reads ‘possess the remnant of Edom’ as people seeking the Lord.

Jesus too rebuked those who tithed their herbs but "disregarded the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness" (Matthew 23:23). Yet he did not tell them to stop tithing: "You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former" (Matthew 23:23). Worship and justice belong together.

Reading it

Nine chapters make one or two sittings: read from Amos 1 to the end, or chapters 1–6 one day and 7–9 the next. In chapters 1–2, watch the circle of judgement close in on Israel. In chapter 7, notice that twice Amos prayed and the LORD relented (Amos 7:2-3). Next comes Obadiah.

Practice