[197] So for instance, Von Orelli.
[198] Chap. iv.
[199] See Chap. IV., p. 51.
[200] Literally _of the plummet_, an obscure expression. It cannot mean plumb-straight, for the wall is condemned.
[201] 2 Kings xxi. 13: _I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria and the plummet_ or _weight_ (מִשְׁקֹלֶת) _of the house of Ahab_. Isa. xxxiv. 11: _He shall stretch over it the cord of confusion, and the weights_ (literally _stones_) _of emptiness_.
[202] John xix. 12.
[203] The word _seer_ is here used in a contemptuous sense, and has therefore to be translated by some such word as _visionary_.
[204] Literally _eat_.
[205] מַמְלָכָה בֵּית--that is, a _central_ or _capital sanctuary_. Cf. הַמַּמְלָכָה עִיר (1 Sam. xxvii. 5), _city of the kingdom_, _i.e._ chief or capital town.
[206] 1 Kings xii. 26, 27.
[207] _Prophet_ and _prophet's son_ are equivalent terms, the latter meaning one of the professional guilds of prophets. There is no need to change herdsman, בוקר, as Wellhausen does, into נוקד, shepherd, the word used in i. 1.
[208] Cf. Wellhausen, _Hist._, Eng. Ed., § 6: "Amos was the founder and the purest type of a new order of prophecy."
AMOS i. 3-ii.
Like all the prophets of Israel, Amos receives oracles for foreign nations. Unlike them, however, he arranges these oracles not after, but before, his indictment of his own people, and so as to lead up to this. His reason is obvious and characteristic. If his aim be to enforce a religion independent of his people's interests and privileges, how can he better do so than by exhibiting its principles at work outside his people, and then, with the impetus drained from many areas, sweep in upon the vested iniquities of Israel herself? This is the course of the first section of his book--chapters i. and ii. One by one the neighbours of Israel are cited and condemned in the name of Jehovah; one by one they are told they must fall before the still unnamed engine of the Divine Justice. But when Amos has stirred his people's conscience and imagination by his judgment of their neighbours' sins, he turns with the same formula on themselves. Are they morally better? Are they more likely to resist Assyria? With greater detail he shows them worse and their doom the heavier for all their privileges. Thus is achieved an oratorical triumph, by tactics in harmony with the principles of prophecy and remarkably suited to the tempers of that time.
But Amos achieves another feat, which extends far beyond his own day. The sins he condemns in the heathen are at first sight very different from those which he exposes within Israel. Not only are they sins of foreign relations, of treaty and war, while Israel's are all civic and domestic; but they are what we call the atrocities of Barbarism--wanton war, massacre and sacrilege--while Israel's are rather the sins of Civilisation--the pressure of the rich upon the poor, the bribery of justice, the seduction of the innocent, personal impurity, and other evils of luxury. So great is this difference that a critic more gifted with ingenuity than with insight might plausibly distinguish in the section before us two prophets with two very different views of national sin--a ruder prophet, and of course an earlier, who judged nations only by the flagrant drunkenness of their war, and a more subtle prophet, and of course a later, who exposed the masked corruptions of their religion and their peace. Such a theory would be as false as it would be plausible. For not only is the diversity of the objects of the prophet's judgment explained by this, that Amos had no familiarity with the interior life of other nations, and could only arraign their conduct at those points where it broke into light in their foreign relations, while Israel's civic life he knew to the very core. But Amos had besides a strong and a deliberate aim in placing the sins of civilisation as the climax of a list of the atrocities of barbarism. He would recall what men are always forgetting, that the former are really more cruel and criminal than the latter; that luxury, bribery and intolerance, the oppression of the poor, the corruption of the innocent and the silencing of the prophet--what Christ calls offences against His little ones--are even more awful atrocities than the wanton horrors of barbarian warfare. If we keep in mind this moral purpose, we shall study with more interest than we could otherwise do the somewhat foreign details of this section. Horrible as the outrages are which Amos describes, they were repeated only yesterday by Turkey: many of the crimes with which he charges Israel blacken the life of Turkey's chief accuser, Great Britain.