There follows a denunciation of the man who sought to silence this fresh voice of God. _Now therefore hearken to the word of Jehovah thou that sayest, Prophesy not against Israel, nor let drop thy words against the house of Israel; therefore thus saith Jehovah...._ Thou hast presumed to say; _Hear what God will say_. Thou hast dared to set thine office and system against His word and purpose. See how they must be swept away. In defiance of its own rules the grammar flings forward to the beginnings of its clauses, each detail of the priest's estate along with the scene of its desecration. _Thy wife in the city--shall play the harlot; and thy sons and thy daughters by the sword--shall fall; and thy land by the measuring rope--shall be divided; and thou in an unclean land--shalt die._ Do not let us blame the prophet for a coarse cruelty in the first of these details. He did not invent it. With all the rest it formed an ordinary consequence of defeat in the warfare of the times--an inevitable item of that general overthrow which, with bitter emphasis, the prophet describes in Amaziah's own words: _Israel going shall go into captivity from off his own land_.
There is added a vision in line with the three which preceded the priest's interruption. We are therefore justified in supposing that Amos spoke it also on this occasion, and in taking it as the close of his address at Bethel. _Then the Lord Jehovah gave me to see: and, behold, a basket of Ḳaits_, that is, _summer fruit. And He said, What art thou seeing, Amos? And I said, A basket of Ḳaits. And Jehovah said unto me, The Ḳets--the End--has come upon My people Israel. I will not again pass them over._ This does not carry the prospect beyond the third vision, but it stamps its finality, and there is therefore added a vivid realisation of the result. By four disjointed lamentations, _howls_ the prophet calls them, we are made to feel the last shocks of the final collapse, and in the utter end an awful silence. _And the songs of the temple shall be changed into howls in that day, saith the Lord Jehovah. Multitude of corpses! In every place! He hath cast out! Hush!_
These then were probably the last words which Amos spoke to Israel. If so, they form a curious echo of what was enforced upon himself, and he may have meant them as such. He was _cast out_; he was _silenced_. They might almost be the verbal repetition of the priest's orders. In any case the silence is appropriate. But Amaziah little knew what power he had given to prophecy the day he forbade it to speak. The gagged prophet began to write; and those accents which, humanly speaking, might have died out with the songs of the temple of Bethel were clothed upon with the immortality of literature. Amos silenced wrote a book--first of prophets to do so--and this is the book we have now to study.