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 LXX Amos 3:5 and Matthew 10:29

Septuagint · New Testament

Summary

In Matthew 10, Jesus cites the Greek Septuagint translation of Amos 3, where rhetorical questions includes whether a bird falls without a trapper. Jesus is shown repeating this question while replacing the human figure with a reference to God.

Passages

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?

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

Matthew 10:29

New Testament

28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Instead, fear the one who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. 29 Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will. 30 Even all the hairs on your head are numbered. 31 So do not be afraid; you are more valuable than many sparrows. 32 “Whoever, then, acknowledges me before people, I will acknowledge before my Father in heaven. 33 But whoever denies me before people, I will deny him also before my Father in heaven.

70–90 CE (scholarly estimate) Read in Matthew

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 LXX Amos 3:5 and Matthew 10:29

Summary

Passages

LXX Amos 3:5

Matthew 10:29

References

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