"To their crimes," said the satirist of the Romans, "they owe their gardens, palaces, stables and fine old plate."[272] And William Langland declared of the rich English of his day:--
"For toke thei on trewly · they tymbred not so heigh, Ne boughte non burgages · be ye full certayne."[273]
_Therefore thus saith the Lord Jehovah: Siege and Blockade of the Land!_[274] _And they shall bring down from off thee thy fortresses, and plundered shall be thy palaces._ Yet this shall be no ordinary tide of Eastern war, to ebb like the Syrian as it flowed, and leave the nation to rally on their land again. For Assyria devours the peoples. _Thus saith Jehovah: As the shepherd saveth from the mouth of the lion a pair of shin-bones or a bit of an ear, so shall the children of Israel be saved--they who sit in Samaria in the corner of the diwan and ... on a couch._[275] The description, as will be seen from the note below, is obscure. Some think it is intended to satirise a novel and affected fashion of sitting adopted by the rich. Much more probably it means that carnal security in the luxuries of civilisation which Amos threatens more than once in similar phrases.[276] The corner of the diwan is in Eastern houses the seat of honour.[277] To this desert shepherd, with only the hard ground to rest on, the couches and ivory-mounted diwans of the rich must have seemed the very symbols of extravagance. But the pampered bodies that loll their lazy lengths upon them shall be left like the crumbs of a lion's meal--_two shin-bones and the bit of an ear!_ Their whole civilisation shall perish with them. _Hearken and testify against the house of Israel--oracle of the Lord Jehovah, God of Hosts_[278]--those addressed are still the heathen summoned in ver. 9. _For on the day when I visit the crimes of Israel upon him, I shall then make visitation upon the altars of Bethel, and the horns of the altar_, which men grasp in their last despair, _shall be smitten and fall to the earth. And I will strike the winter-house upon the summer-house, and the ivory houses shall perish, yea, swept away shall be houses many--oracle of Jehovah._
But the luxury of no civilisation can be measured without its women, and to the women of Samaria Amos now turns with the most scornful of all his words. _Hear this word_--this for you--_kine of Bashan that are in the mount of Samaria, that oppress the poor, that crush the needy, that say to their lords, Bring, and let us drink. Sworn hath the Lord Jehovah by His holiness, lo, days are coming when there shall be a taking away of you with hooks, and of the last of you with fish-hooks._ They put hooks[279] in the nostrils of unruly cattle, and the figure is often applied to human captives;[280] but so many should these cattle of Samaria be that for the _last of them fish-hooks_ must be used. _Yea, by the breaches_ in the wall of the stormed city _shall ye go out, every one headlong, and ye shall be cast ..._[281] _oracle of Jehovah_. It is a cowherd's rough picture of women: a troop of kine--heavy, heedless animals, trampling in their anxiety for food upon every frail and lowly object in the way. But there is a prophet's insight into character. Not of Jezebels, or Messalinas, or Lady-Macbeths is it spoken, but of the ordinary matrons of Samaria. Thoughtlessness and luxury are able to make brutes out of women of gentle nurture, with homes and a religion.[282]
* * * * *
Such are these three or four short oracles of Amos. They are probably among his earliest--the first peremptory challenges of prophecy to that great stronghold which before forty years she is to see thrown down in obedience to her word. As yet, however, there seems to be nothing to justify the menaces of Amos. Fair and stable rises the structure of Israel's life. A nation, who know themselves elect, who in politics are prosperous and in religion proof to every doubt, build high their palaces, see the skies above them unclouded, and bask in their pride, heaven's favourites without a fear. This man, solitary and sudden from his desert, springs upon them in the name of God and their poor. Straighter word never came from Deity: _Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?_ The insight of it, the justice of it, are alike convincing. Yet at first it appears as if it were sped on the personal and very human passion of its herald. For Amos not only uses the desert's cruelties--the lion's to the sheep--to figure God's impending judgment upon His people, but he enforces the latter with all a desert-bred man's horror of cities and civilisation. It is their costly furniture, their lavish and complex building, on which he sees the storm break. We seem to hear again that frequent phrase of the previous section: _the fire shall devour the palaces thereof_. The palaces, he says, are simply storehouses of oppression; the palaces will be plundered. Here, as throughout his book,[283] couches and diwans draw forth the scorn of a man accustomed to the simple furniture of the tent. But observe his especial hatred of houses. Four times in one verse he smites them: _winter-house on summer-house and the ivory houses shall perish--yea, houses manifold, saith the Lord_. So in another oracle of the same section: _Houses of ashlar ye have built, and ye shall not inhabit them; vineyards of delight have ye planted, and ye shall not drink of their wine_.[284] And in another: _I loathe the pride of Jacob, and his palaces I hate; and I will give up a city and all that is in it.... For, lo, the Lord is about to command, and He will smite the great house into ruins and the small house into splinters._[285] No wonder that such a prophet found war with its breached walls insufficient, and welcomed, as the full ally of his word, the earthquake itself.[286]