The Background. 

        As is almost universal in the prophetic message, Amos addresses himself to the rich and influential, to the rulers of the people. This is mainly due to the structure of oriental society, and to the fact that earlier Israelite religion, while never losing sight of the individual, did subordinate him to the com­munity as a whole. It is our familiarity with the Psalter (and even here the community plays a larger role than we often realize) that often prevents our recognizing this fact. It is perhaps best demonstrated by Matt. 11:5 where “and the poor have good tidings preached unto them” is given by our Lord as the clinching proof that He is the Messiah.

        The sins he accuses them of group themselves roughly into three types. There are the gross violations of the ordinary decencies of life. Here come the crimes of the surrounding nations (1:3-2:3), gross immorality (2:7b), inhumanity (2:8a, cf. Exod. 22:26f) and fraud (8:5b). Then there are injustice, the perversion of justice and the luxury that leads to them. The only guarantee of justice in Israel was either the integrity of the judge or the power of one’s own family and connexions. That is why the sad plight of the widow, orphan and stranger is so often stressed. God had entrusted the care of the weak and helpless into the hands of them that bore rule and judged (generally synonymous terms), and so injustice and the perversion of justice were peculiarly affronts to God (cf. Exod. 22:21-24, 23:1-3, 6-9). Amos’ attacks on the luxury of the rich held nothing of the fox’s rejection of the grapes beyond his leap as sour. Throughout the Bible period, and especially in the Old Testament, Palestine was an agricultural land with only those artisans that its internal economy needed. In such a society great riches could only be obtained by great wrong. The women’s ornaments (Isa. 3:16-23), the ivory couches and the eating of immature animals (6:4), the drunkenness and indolence had all been made possible only by the grinding of the face of the poor and by gross injustice.

        The third group of sins includes all those acts that imply ignorance of or indifference to God’s character and the privileges He had bestowed. Such were Judah’s sins (2:4), the rejection of prophet and Nazirite (2:11f), a pretentious, hollow worship (4:4f; 5:21ff), and the ignoring of God’s warnings (4:6-11).

        The main reason for Israel’s moral condition was religious. It is dealt with especially by Hosea (see p. 37). Having conceived of Jehovah as merely their Baal, a god of the same type as the Baalim of their neighbours, they attributed to Him the capriciousness and non-moral character of the Baalim and assumed that the sacrificial ritual carried out with ex­treme elaboration and punctiliousness was the matter of prime importance to Him. Amos had the great gift of being able to put first things first. He did not ask whether the Northern sanctuaries were God-willed, whether the golden calf-images were a breach of the Sinai covenant, whether the ritual conformed to the divinely ordained pattern. He knew that reform along these lines would be and would re­main external — examples are the abortive reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah. He knew that all the error came from a false conception of God, and that if the people came to a true conception of God, the other matters would reform them­selves.

        This is one of the chief lessons which Amos has to teach us, for the tendency has at all times been strong to put correct order in the first place. But correct” order is no guarantee of a “correct” knowledge of God, and still less of “correct” living.