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Amos

About this book
Chapter 8

1 The Sovereign Lord showed me this: I saw a basket of summer fruit. 2 He said, “What do you see, Amos?” I replied, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the Lord said to me, “The end has come for my people Israel! I will no longer overlook their sins.⁠ 3 The women singing in the temple will wail in that day.” The Sovereign Lord is speaking. “There will be many corpses littered everywhere! Be quiet!” 4 Listen to this, you who trample the needy and do away with the destitute in the land. 5 You say, “When will the new moon festival be over, so we can sell grain? When will the Sabbath end, so we can open up the grain bins?⁠ We’re eager to sell less for a higher price, and to cheat the buyer with rigged scales!⁠ 6 We’re eager to trade silver for the poor, a pair of sandals for the needy. We want to mix in some chaff with the grain!” 7 The Lord confirms this oath by the arrogance of Jacob: “I swear I will never forget all you have done! 8 Because of this the earth will quake, and all who live in it will mourn. The whole earth will rise like the Nile River; it will surge upward and then grow calm, like the Nile in Egypt. 9 In that day,” says the Sovereign Lord, “I will make the sun set at noon and make the earth dark in the middle of the day. 10 I will turn your festivals into funerals and all your songs into funeral dirges. I will make everyone wear funeral clothes and cause every head to be shaved bald. I will make you mourn as if you had lost your only son; when it ends it will indeed have been a bitter day. 11 Be certain of this, the time is coming,” says the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine through the land—not a shortage of food or water but an end to divine revelation. 12 People will stagger from sea to sea, and from the north around to the east. They will wander about looking for a message from the Lord, but they will not find any.⁠ 13 In that day your beautiful young women and your young men will faint from thirst. 14 These are the ones who now take oaths in the name of the sinful idol goddess of Samaria. They vow, ‘As surely as your god lives, O Dan,’ or, ‘As surely as your beloved one lives, O Beer Sheba!’ But they will fall down and not get up again.”

Texts in conversation

Compare Leviticus 19:36 and Amos 8:5

Hebrew Bible

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Summary

Amos echoes Leviticus 19, condemning dishonest trade, where honest weights and measures were meant to reflect Israel’s identity after freedom from slavery. Amos shows how these standards were being ignored and became a form of oppression.

Passages

Leviticus 19:36

Hebrew Bible
34 The resident foreigner who lives with you must be to you as a native citizen among you; so you must love the foreigner as yourself, because you were foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. 35 You must not do injustice in the regulation of measures, whether of length, weight, or volume. 36 You must have honest balances, honest weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin. I am the Lord your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt. 37 You must be sure to obey all my statutes and regulations. I am the Lord.’”
750–400 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Leviticus

Amos 8:5

Hebrew Bible
4 Listen to this, you who trample the needy and do away with the destitute in the land. 5 You say, “When will the new moon festival be over, so we can sell grain? When will the Sabbath end, so we can open up the grain bins? We’re eager to sell less for a higher price, and to cheat the buyer with rigged scales! 6 We’re eager to trade silver for the poor, a pair of sandals for the needy. We want to mix in some chaff with the grain!” 7 The Lord confirms this oath by the arrogance of Jacob: “I swear I will never forget all you have done!
600–501 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Amos

References

"... Just as Amos criticizes dishonest merchants who make the ephah “small” and the shekel “great” (Amos 8:5), Micah 6:10-11 also cautions them against cheating their customers with a false measure of grain ... A just society was one in which the government standardized and guaranteed honest weights and measures. The prologue to the law code of the Ur III king Ur-Nammu includes a list of the measures he had taken to insure justice and truth throughout his realm. This included the standardization of all the copper and stone weights used in commerce. The Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope warns against tampering with scales or the weights used for buying and selling. In a Babylonian Hymn to Shamash, Shamash as the god of justice will punish the merchant who uses deceptive practices with regard to the scales or the weights. The fact that Micah complains of false weights indicates a lawless period without strong government or a concern for covenant obligation (see Proverbs 11:1; 20:23) ..."
John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews, and Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000), 786.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Leviticus 19:36 and Amos 8:5

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