Amos 8

¹ Thus the Lord GOD showed me: behold, a basket of summer fruit.

² He said, “Amos, what do you see?” I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the LORD said to me, “The end has come on my people Israel. I will not again pass by them any more.

³ The songs of the temple will be wailing in that day,” says the Lord GOD. “The dead bodies will be many. In every place they will throw them out with silence.

⁴ Hear this, you who desire to swallow up the needy, and cause the poor of the land to fail,

⁵ saying, ‘When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may market wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel large, and dealing falsely with balances of deceit;

⁶ that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals, and sell the sweepings with the wheat?’”

⁷ The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob, “Surely I will never forget any of their works.

⁸ Won’t the land tremble for this, and everyone mourn who dwells in it? Yes, it will rise up wholly like the River; and it will be stirred up and sink again, like the River of Egypt.

⁹ It will happen in that day,” says the Lord GOD, “that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day.

¹⁰ I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; and I will make you wear sackcloth on all your bodies, and baldness on every head. I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and its end like a bitter day.

¹¹ Behold, the days come,” says the Lord GOD, “that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the LORD’s words.

¹² They will wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east; they will run back and forth to seek the LORD’s word, and will not find it.

¹³ In that day the beautiful virgins and the young men will faint for thirst.

¹⁴ Those who swear by the sin of Samaria, and say, ‘As your god, Dan, lives,’ and, ‘As the way of Beersheba lives,’ they will fall, and never rise up again.”

Around Amos 8

Context

Context for this book is being written. A note appears here only once it names its sources.

AI explanation

About Amos as a whole · Written by an AI model · Not reviewed by a theological reader

This explanation was written by an AI model to help you get started. It names no sources and can contain mistakes. Scripture comes first, and context with sources is shown separately on this page.

What this book is about

He says plainly who he is: “I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet’s son”. Amos is a herdsman and tender of fig trees, sent from Judah to the northern kingdom at the height of its wealth. He announces judgment on the surrounding nations, and the hearers nod along. Then, to their shock, he turns on Israel itself. The rich crush the poor, the courts are corrupt, and worship goes on as if nothing were wrong.

A series of visions shows that the end is near. The book’s last verses promise that the fallen house of David will be raised again. Between the warning and the promise sits one of the most famous lines in the prophets: “let justice roll on like rivers, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Background

Amos was a herdsman and tender of fig trees from Tekoa, south of Jerusalem. He spoke around 760 before Christ, a generation before Assyria ended the northern kingdom. He was an outsider from the south, and what he said was not welcome in the north.

How Christians read it

Amos is the prophet most often quoted on justice; his call for justice to roll on like a river (5:24) was made famous again in the twentieth century. He insists that worship without justice is unacceptable to God. In Acts 15 James quotes the closing promise to show that God always meant to include the nations.

About this explanation

Written by Claude Sonnet 5.5, an AI model, on 20 October 2026. It draws on the WEB text and general knowledge and was not checked against sources by a person. Every quotation from Scripture is checked automatically against the WEB text.

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