Amos 8

¹This is what the Lord God showed me: He was preparing swarms of locusts just after the king’s harvest, as the late spring crop was coming up.

⁷This is what He showed me: Behold, the Lord was standing by a wall true to plumb, with a plumb line in His hand.

⁴This is what the Lord God showed me: The Lord God was calling for judgment by fire. It consumed the great deep and devoured the land.

⁸“Amos, what do you see?” asked the Lord. “A plumb line,” I replied. “Behold,” said the Lord, “I am setting a plumb line among My people Israel; I will no longer spare them:

¹⁸They stalked our every step, so that we could not walk in our streets. Our end drew near, our time ran out, for our end had come!

¹Woe is me! For I am like one gathering summer fruit at the gleaning of the vineyard; there is no cluster to eat, no early fig that I crave.

¹¹And the word of the Lord came to me, asking, “Jeremiah, what do you see?” “I see a branch of an almond tree,” I replied.

¹²“You have observed correctly,” said the Lord, “for I am watching over My word to accomplish it.”

¹After Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had carried away Jeconiah son of Jehoiakim king of Judah, as well as the officials of Judah and the craftsmen and metalsmiths from Jerusalem, and had brought them to Babylon, the Lord showed me two baskets of figs placed in front of the temple of the Lord.

²One basket had very good figs, like those that ripen early, but the other basket contained very poor figs, so bad they could not be eaten.

⁶The end has come! The end has come! It has roused itself against you. Behold, it has come!

²³Take away from Me the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps.

⁹And if there are ten men left in one house, they too will die.

¹⁰And when the relative who is to burn the bodies picks them up to remove them from the house, he will call to one inside, “Is anyone else with you?” “None,” that person will answer. “Silence,” the relative will retort, “for the name of the Lord must not be invoked.”

²¹For death has climbed in through our windows; it has entered our fortresses to cut off the children from the streets, the young men from the town squares.

²²Declare that this is what the Lord says: “The corpses of men will fall like dung upon the open field, like newly cut grain behind the reaper, with no one to gather it.”

¹⁶Therefore this is what the Lord, the God of Hosts, the Lord, says: “There will be wailing in all the public squares and cries of ‘Alas! Alas!’ in all the streets. The farmer will be summoned to mourn, and the mourners to wail.

³Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what the Lord meant when He said: ‘To those who come near Me I will show My holiness, and in the sight of all the people I will reveal My glory.’” But Aaron remained silent.

¹⁰I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation. I will cause everyone to wear sackcloth and every head to be shaved. I will make it like a time of mourning for an only son, and its outcome like a bitter day.

¹⁴there is a generation whose teeth are swords and whose jaws are knives, devouring the oppressed from the earth and the needy from among men.

¹¹Therefore, because you trample on the poor and exact from him a tax of grain, you will never live in the stone houses you have built; you will never drink the wine from the lush vineyards you have planted.

⁴Will the workers of iniquity never learn? They devour my people like bread; they refuse to call upon the Lord.

⁶For a fool speaks foolishness; his mind plots iniquity. He practices ungodliness and speaks falsely about the Lord; he leaves the hungry empty and deprives the thirsty of drink.

⁷The weapons of the scoundrel are destructive; he hatches plots to destroy the poor with lies, even when the plea of the needy is just.

⁵“For the cause of the oppressed and for the groaning of the needy, I will now arise,” says the Lord. “I will bring safety to him who yearns.”

¹²I know that the Lord upholds justice for the poor and defends the cause of the needy.

¹⁵In those days I saw people in Judah treading winepresses on the Sabbath and bringing in grain and loading it on donkeys, along with wine, grapes, and figs. All kinds of goods were being brought into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. So I warned them against selling food on that day.

¹⁶Additionally, men of Tyre who lived there were importing fish and all kinds of merchandise and selling them on the Sabbath to the people of Judah in Jerusalem.

¹⁰Can I forget any longer, O house of the wicked, the treasures of wickedness and the short ephah, which is accursed?

¹¹Can I excuse dishonest scales or bags of false weights?

⁷A merchant loves to defraud with dishonest scales in his hands.

¹³You shall not have two differing weights in your bag, one heavy and one light.

¹⁴You shall not have two differing measures in your house, one large and one small.

³⁶You shall maintain honest scales and weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.

¹Dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord, but an accurate weight is His delight.

⁶This is what the Lord says: “For three transgressions of Israel, even four, I will not revoke My judgment, because they sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.

⁶You sold the people of Judah and Jerusalem to the Greeks, to send them far from their homeland.

³They cast lots for My people; they bartered a boy for a prostitute and sold a girl for wine to drink.

³⁹If a countryman among you becomes destitute and sells himself to you, then you must not force him into slave labor.

⁴⁰Let him stay with you as a hired worker or temporary resident; he is to work for you until the Year of Jubilee.

⁴Hear this, you who trample the needy, who do away with the poor of the land,

¹About that time there was a great outcry from the people and their wives against their fellow Jews.

²Some were saying, “We and our sons and daughters are numerous. We must get grain in order to eat and stay alive.”

⁸The Lord God has sworn by Himself—the Lord, the God of Hosts, has declared: “I abhor Jacob’s pride and detest his citadels, so I will deliver up the city and everything in it.”

⁹They have deeply corrupted themselves as in the days of Gibeah; He will remember their guilt; He will punish their sins.

¹³Though they offer sacrifices as gifts to Me, and though they eat the meat, the Lord does not accept them. Now He will remember their iniquity and punish their sins: They will return to Egypt.

²But they fail to consider in their hearts that I remember all their evil. Now their deeds are all around them; they are before My face.

⁴He chooses our inheritance for us, the pride of Jacob, whom He loves. Selah

¹¹He says to himself, “God has forgotten; He hides His face and never sees.”

⁵The Lord God of Hosts, He who touches the earth and it melts, and all its dwellers mourn—all the land rises like the Nile, then sinks like the river of Egypt—

⁸Egypt rises like the Nile, and its waters churn like rivers, boasting, ‘I will rise and cover the earth; I will destroy the cities and their people.’

³Therefore the land mourns, and all who dwell in it will waste away with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air; even the fish of the sea disappear.

⁷Then the earth shook and quaked, and the foundations of the mountains trembled; they were shaken because He burned with anger.

²⁵Therefore the anger of the Lord burns against His people; His hand is raised against them to strike them down. The mountains quake, and the corpses lie like refuse in the streets. Despite all this, His anger is not turned away; His hand is still upraised.

⁷the Lord will surely bring against them the mighty floodwaters of the Euphrates—the king of Assyria and all his pomp. It will overflow its channels and overrun its banks.

⁸It will pour into Judah, swirling and sweeping over it, reaching up to the neck; its spreading streams will cover your entire land, O Immanuel!

³³From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land.

⁴⁵From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land.

⁹The mother of seven will grow faint; she will breathe her last breath. Her sun will set while it is still day; she will be disgraced and humiliated. And the rest I will put to the sword in the presence of their enemies,” declares the Lord.

⁴⁴It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over all the land until the ninth hour.

⁶Therefore night will come over you without visions, and darkness without divination. The sun will set on these prophets, and the daylight will turn black over them.

²⁹Immediately after the tribulation of those days: ‘The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.’

²⁶O daughter of my people, dress yourselves in sackcloth and roll in ashes. Mourn with bitter wailing, as you would for an only son, for suddenly the destroyer will come upon us.

¹⁰Then I will pour out on the house of David and on the people of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and prayer, and they will look on Me, the One they have pierced. They will mourn for Him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for Him as one grieves for a firstborn son.

²³When he has filled his stomach, God will vent His fury upon him, raining it down on him as he eats.

³⁷For every head is shaved and every beard is clipped; on every hand is a gash, and around every waist is sackcloth.

¹⁸They will put on sackcloth, and terror will overwhelm them. Shame will cover all their faces, and all their heads will be shaved.

¹¹I will put an end to all her exultation: her feasts, New Moons, and Sabbaths—all her appointed feasts.

¹And the boy Samuel ministered to the Lord before Eli. Now in those days the word of the Lord was rare, and visions were scarce.

⁹There are no signs for us to see. There is no longer any prophet. And none of us knows how long this will last.

³For many years Israel has been without the true God, without a priest to instruct them, and without the law.

⁶He inquired of the Lord, but the Lord did not answer him by dreams or Urim or prophets.

²⁶Disaster upon disaster will come, and rumor after rumor. Then they will seek a vision from a prophet, but instruction from the priests will perish, as will counsel from the elders.

³⁶When He saw the crowds, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

⁷What then? What Israel was seeking, it failed to obtain, but the elect did. The others were hardened,

⁸as it is written: “God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that could not see, and ears that could not hear, to this very day.”

⁶They are the kind who worm their way into households and captivate vulnerable women who are weighed down with sins and led astray by various passions,

⁷who are always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.

⁶A mocker seeks wisdom and finds none, but knowledge comes easily to the discerning.

³⁰He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters.

⁴But you, Daniel, shut up these words and seal the book until the time of the end. Many will roam to and fro, and knowledge will increase.”

²³At that time, if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There He is!’ do not believe it.

²⁴For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive even the elect, if that were possible.

³Otherwise, I will strip her naked and expose her like the day of her birth. I will make her like a desert and turn her into a parched land, and I will let her die of thirst.

²¹Both young and old lie together in the dust of the streets. My young men and maidens have fallen by the sword. You have slain them in the day of Your anger; You have slaughtered them without compassion.

¹⁸The Lord is righteous, yet I rebelled against His command. Listen, all you people; look upon my suffering. My young men and maidens have gone into captivity.

¹⁸Come down from your glory; sit on parched ground, O daughter dwelling in Dibon, for the destroyer of Moab has come against you; he has destroyed your fortresses.

¹⁷How lovely they will be, and how beautiful! Grain will make the young men flourish, and new wine, the young women.

³⁰Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall.

⁵Do not seek Bethel or go to Gilgal; do not journey to Beersheba, for Gilgal will surely go into exile, and Bethel will come to nothing.

²⁸After seeking advice, the king made two golden calves and said to the people, “Going up to Jerusalem is too much for you. Here, O Israel, are your gods, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.”

²⁹One calf he set up in Bethel, and the other in Dan.

²¹And I took that sinful thing, the calf you had made, and burned it in the fire. Then I crushed it and ground it to powder as fine as dust, and I cast it into the stream that came down from the mountain.

²and requested letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any men or women belonging to the Way, he could bring them as prisoners to Jerusalem.

²Now they sin more and more and make for themselves cast images, idols skillfully made from their silver, all of them the work of craftsmen. People say of them, “They offer human sacrifice and kiss the calves!”

²⁴He bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer for two talents of silver and built a city there, calling it Samaria after the name of Shemer, who had owned the hill.