AMOS v.
In the next of these groups of oracles Amos continues his attack on the national ritual, and now contrasts it with the service of God in public life--the relief of the poor, the discharge of justice. But he does not begin with this. The group opens with an elegy, which bewails the nation as already fallen. It is always difficult to mark where the style of a prophet passes from rhythmical prose into what we may justly call a metrical form. But in this short wail, we catch the well-known measure of the Hebrew dirge; not so artistic as in later poems, yet with at least the characteristic couplet of a long and a short line.
_Hear this word which I lift up against you--a Dirge, O house of Israel_:--
_Fallen, no more shall she rise,_ _Virgin of Israel!_ _Flung down on her own ground,_ _No one to raise her!_
The _Virgin_, which with Isaiah is a standing title for Jerusalem and occasionally used of other cities, is here probably the whole nation of Northern Israel. The explanation follows. It is War. _For thus saith the Lord Jehovah: The city that goeth forth a thousand shall have an hundred left; and she that goeth forth an hundred shall have left ten for the house of Israel._
But judgment is not yet irrevocable. There break forthwith the only two promises which lighten the lowering darkness of the book. Let the people turn to Jehovah Himself--and that means let them turn from the ritual, and instead of it purge their civic life, restore justice in their courts and help the poor. For God and moral good are one. It is _seek Me and ye shall live_, and _seek good and ye shall live_. Omitting for the present all argument as to whether the interruption of praise to the power of Jehovah be from Amos or another, we read the whole oracle as follows.
_Thus saith Jehovah to the house of Israel: Seek Me and live. But seek not Bethel, and come not to Gilgal, and to Beersheba pass not over_--to come to Beersheba one had to cross all Judah. _For Gilgal shall taste the gall of exile_--it is not possible except in this clumsy way to echo the prophet's play upon words, "Ha-Gilgal galoh yigleh"--_and Bethel_, God's house, _shall become an idolatry_. This rendering, however, scarcely gives the rude force of the original; for the word rendered idolatry, Aven, means also falsehood and perdition, so that we should not exaggerate the antithesis if we employed a phrase which once was not vulgar: _And Bethel, house of God, shall go to the devil!_[301] The epigram was the more natural that near Bethel, on a site now uncertain, but close to the edge of the desert to which it gave its name, there lay from ancient times a village actually called Beth-Aven, however the form may have risen. And we shall find Hosea stereotyping this epigram of Amos, and calling the sanctuary Beth-Aven oftener than he calls it Beth-El.[302] _Seek ye Jehovah and live,_ he begins again, _lest He break forth like fire, O house of Joseph, and it consume and there be none to quench at Bethel._[303] ...[304] _He that made the Seven Stars and Orion,_[305] _that turneth the murk_[306] _into morning, and day He darkeneth to night, that calleth for the waters of the sea and poureth them out on the face of the earth--Jehovah His Name. He it is that flasheth out ruin_[307] _on strength, and bringeth down_[308] _destruction on the fortified._ This rendering of the last verse is uncertain, and rightly suspected, but there is no alternative so probable, and it returns to the keynote from which the passage started, that God should break forth like fire.
Ah, _they that turn justice to wormwood, and abase_[309] _righteousness to the earth! They hate him that reproveth in the gate_--in an Eastern city both the law-court and place of the popular council--_and him that speaketh sincerely they abhor_. So in the English mystic's Vision Peace complains of Wrong:--