Chapter 3

1 Hear this word, house of Israel, which the Lord has spoken concerning you, and against the whole family whom I brought up out of the land of Egypt, saying, 2 I have known you especially out of all the families of the earth: therefore I will take vengeance upon you for all your sins. 3 Shall two walk together at all, if they do not know one another? 4 Will a lion roar out of his thicket if he has no prey? will a lion cub utter his voice at all out of his lair, if he has taken nothing? 5 Will a bird fall on the earth without a fowler? will a snare be taken up from the earth without having taken anything?⁠ 6 Shall the trumpet sound in the city, and the people not be alarmed? shall there be evil in a city which the Lord has not done? 7 For the Lord God will do nothing, without revealing instruction to his servants the prophets. 8 A lion shall roar, and who will not be alarmed? the Lord God has spoken, and who will not prophesy? 9 Proclaim it to the regions among the Assyrians, and to the regions of Egypt, and say, Gather yourselves to the mountain of Samaria, and see many wonderful things in the midst of it, and the oppression that is in it. 10 And she did not know what things would come against her, says the Lord, even those that store up wrong and misery in their countries. 11 Therefore thus says the Lord God; Tyre, your land shall be made desolate all around you; and he shall bring down your strength out of you, and your countries shall be looted. 12 Thus says the Lord; As when a shepherd rescues from the mouth of a lion two legs or a piece of an ear, so shall be drawn forth the children of Israel who dwell in Samaria in the presence of a foreign tribe, and in Damascus, priests. 13 Hear, and testify to the house of Jacob, says the Lord God Almighty. 14 For in the day on which I shall take vengeance of the sins of Israel upon him, I will also take vengeance on the altars of Bethel: and the horns of the altar shall be broken down, and they shall fall upon the ground. 15 I will crush and strike the turreted-house upon the summer-house; and the ivory-houses shall be destroyed, and many other houses also, says the Lord.

Texts in conversation

Compare Amos 3:5 and LXX Amos 3:5

Hebrew Bible · Septuagint

Summary

Amos asks a series of questions about cause and effect, such as whether a bird falls into a trap if there is bait. The Greek Septuagint translation changes this to ask if a bird falls to the ground without a hunter, adding a human cause.

Passages

Amos 3:5

Hebrew Bible

3 Do two walk together without having met? 4 Does a lion roar in the woods if he has not cornered his prey? Does a young lion bellow from his den if he has not caught something? 5 Does a bird swoop down into a trap on the ground if there is no bait? Does a trap spring up from the ground unless it has surely caught something? 6 If an alarm sounds in a city, do people not fear? If disaster overtakes a city, is the Lord not responsible? 7 Certainly the Sovereign Lord does nothing without first revealing his plan to his servants the prophets.

600–501 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Amos

LXX Amos 3:5

Septuagint

3 Shall two walk together at all, if they do not know one another? 4 Will a lion roar out of his thicket if he has no prey? will a lion cub utter his voice at all out of his lair, if he has taken nothing? 5 Will a bird fall on the earth without a fowler? will a snare be taken up from the earth without having taken anything? 6 Shall the trumpet sound in the city, and the people not be alarmed? shall there be evil in a city which the Lord has not done? 7 For the Lord God will do nothing, without revealing instruction to his servants the prophets.

100–1 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in LXX Amos

References

"... There is a famous passage in the New Testament where, in the context of a discussion about persecution, Jesus says that not even one sparrow will fall to the ground “without your Father.” It is Matthew 10:29–31 ... Many translators and commentators have racked their brains over the precise sense of the apparently simple expression ἄνευ τοῦ πατρὸς ὑμῶν. One finds, for instance, the following translations: “without your Father” (King James Version), “apart from the will of your Father” (New International Version), “without your Father’s knowledge” (New American Bible) ... Commentators, who are equally divided over this issue, frequently refer to a couple of passages in early rabbinic literature where one finds a comparable expression, e.g., “Not even a bird is caught without [the assent/will/aid/knowledge of] heaven, how much less the soul of a son of man” (Genesis Rabbah 79:6). But, apart from the fact that this rabbinic material dates from several centuries after Matthew, this is a relatively isolated case (The same applies to a passage in the Rule of the Community from Qumran, although it is pre-Christian) and, moreover, we still have the same problem of interpretation (It is widely agreed that the background of Matthew’s bird imagery is Amos 3:5 LXX “Will a bird fall on the earth without a fowler?”) ..."

Pieter W. van der Horst, ‘Without God’: Some Notes on a Greek Expression (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 230–239.

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

LXX Amos9 chapters

Compare Amos 3:5 and LXX Amos 3:5

Summary

Passages

Amos 3:5

LXX Amos 3:5

References

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