In his survey Amos includes all the six states of Palestine that bordered upon Israel, and lay in the way of the advance of Assyria--Aram of Damascus, Philistia, Tyre (for Phœnicia), Edom, Ammon and Moab. They are not arranged in geographical order. The prophet begins with Aram in the north-east, then leaps to Philistia in the south-west, comes north again to Tyre, crosses to the south-east and Edom, leaps Moab to Ammon, and then comes back to Moab. Nor is any other explanation of his order visible. Damascus heads the list, no doubt, because her cruelties had been most felt by Israel, and perhaps too because she lay most open to Assyria. It was also natural to take next to Aram Philistia,[209] as Israel's other greatest foe; and nearest to Philistia lay Tyre. The three south-eastern principalities come together. But there may have been a chronological reason now unknown to us.
The authenticity of the oracles on Tyre, Edom and Judah has been questioned: it will be best to discuss each case as we come to it.
Each of the oracles is introduced by the formula: _Thus saith,_ or _hath said, Jehovah: Because of three crimes of ... yea, because of four, I will not turn It back._ In harmony with the rest of the book,[210] Jehovah is represented as moving to punishment, not for a single sin, but for repeated and cumulative guilt. The unnamed _It_ which God will not recall is not the word of judgment, but the anger and the hand stretched forth to smite.[211] After the formula, an instance of the nation's guilt is given, and then in almost identical terms he decrees the destruction of all by war and captivity. Assyria is not mentioned, but it is the Assyrian fashion of dealing with conquered states which is described. Except in the case of Tyre and Edom, the oracles conclude as they have begun, by asserting themselves to be the _word of Jehovah_, or of _Jehovah the Lord_. It is no abstract righteousness which condemns these foreign peoples, but the God of Israel, and their evil deeds are described by the characteristic Hebrew word for sin--_crimes_, _revolts_ or _treasons_ against Him.[212]
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1. ARAM OF DAMASCUS.--_Thus hath Jehovah said: Because of three crimes of Damascus, yea, because of four, I will not turn It back; for that they threshed Gilead with iron_--or _basalt threshing-sledges._ The word is _iron_, but the Arabs of to-day call basalt iron; and the threshing-sledges, curved slabs[213] drawn rapidly by horses over the heaped corn, are studded with sharp basalt teeth that not only thresh out the grain, but chop the straw into little pieces. So cruelly had Gilead been chopped by Hazael and his son Ben-Hadad some fifty or forty years before Amos prophesied.[214] Strongholds were burned, soldiers slain without quarter, children dashed to pieces, and women with child put to a most atrocious end.[215] But _I shall send fire on the house of Hazael, and it shall devour the palaces of Ben-Hadad_--these names are chosen, not because they were typical of the Damascus dynasty, but because they were the very names of the two heaviest oppressors of Israel.[216] _And I will break the bolt_[217] _of Damascus, and cut off the inhabitant from Biḳ'ath-Aven_--the Valley of Idolatry, so called, perhaps, by a play upon Biḳ'ath On,[218] presumably the valley between the Lebanons, still called the Beḳ'a, in which lay Heliopolis[219]--_and him that holdeth the sceptre from Beth-Eden_--some royal Paradise in that region of Damascus, which is still the Paradise of the Arab world--_and the people of Aram shall go captive to Ḳir_--Kir in the unknown north, from which they had come:[220] _Jehovah hath said_ it.
2. PHILISTIA.--_Thus saith Jehovah: For three crimes of Gaza and for four I will not turn It back, because they led captive a whole captivity, in order to deliver them up to Edom._ It is difficult to see what this means if not the wholesale depopulation of a district in contrast to the enslavement of a few captives of war. By all tribes of the ancient world, the captives of their bow and spear were regarded as legitimate property: it was no offence to the public conscience that they should be sold into slavery. But the Philistines seem, without excuse of war, to have descended upon certain districts and swept the whole of the population before them, for purely commercial purposes. It was professional slave-catching. The Philistines were exactly like the Arabs of to-day in Africa--not warriors who win their captives in honourable fight, but slave-traders, pure and simple. In warfare in Arabia itself it is still a matter of conscience with the wildest nomads not to extinguish a hostile tribe, however bitter one be against them.[221] Gaza is chiefly blamed by Amos, for she was the emporium of the trade on the border of the desert, with roads and regular caravans to Petra and Elah on the Gulf of Akaba, both of them places in Edom and depots for the traffic with Arabia.[222] _But I will cut off the inhabitant from Ashdod, and the holder of the sceptre from Askalon, and I will turn My hand upon Ekron_--four of the five great Philistine towns, Gath being already destroyed, and never again to be mentioned with the others[223]--_and the last of the Philistines shall perish: Jehovah hath said it_.