Amos 8 King James Version (KJV)
8 Thus hath the Lord God shewed unto me: and behold a basket of summer fruit.
2 And he said, 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; I will not again pass by them any more.
3 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 cast them forth with silence.
4 Hear this, O ye that swallow up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail,
5 Saying, When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? and the sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit?
6 That we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes; yea, and sell the refuse of the wheat?
7 The Lord hath sworn by the excellency of Jacob, Surely I will never forget any of their works.
8 Shall not the land tremble for this, and every one mourn that dwelleth therein? and it shall rise up wholly as a flood; and it shall be cast out and drowned, as by the flood of Egypt.
9 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:
10 And I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; and I will bring up sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness upon every head; and I will make it as the mourning of an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day.
11 Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord:
12 And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it.
13 In that day shall the fair virgins and young men faint for thirst.
14 They that swear by the sin of Samaria, and say, Thy god, O Dan, liveth; and, The manner of Beersheba liveth; even they shall fall, and never rise up again.
Commentary
Israel nears its end (8:1-14)
Just as the harvest comes to an end and the fruit is gathered into baskets, so Israel has come to its end and will be punished. Celebration will be turned to mourning, and hope will be replaced by despair. When the enemy attacks, the slaughter will be so extensive that bodies will lie unburied in the streets and fields for days (8:1-3).
Amos returns to conditions in Israel to indicate that one reason for the nation’s downfall is the upper classes’ exploitation of the lower classes (4). Greedy merchants, annoyed that they must stop work whenever there is a religious holy day, can hardly wait for the holy day to pass, so that they can get back to the job of making money. They have no principles of honesty. When selling grain they use undersized measures, and when weighing the buyer’s money they use extra heavy weights. They also sell leftover grain, which normally would be given to the poor or fed to cattle (5-6).
The coming judgment will smash the sinful people like an earthquake and overthrow them like a flood (7-8). Not merely physical darkness but spiritual darkness will cover the nation, without even the small amount of light at present supplied by the prophets. In their mourning and distress people will suddenly become hungry for God’s word, but they will not find it, no matter how hard they search (9-12). Neither the vigour of the nation’s youth nor the imagined power of its false gods will be able to save Israel when God’s judgment finally falls (13-14).