Commentary on Hosea, Joel and Amos 3.1.1–3.2.5

Verse 1. — “The words of Amos, who was among the herdsmen of Tekoa, which he saw concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah king of Judah and in the days of Jeroboam son of Joash king of Israel, two years before the earthquake. And he said.” It should be noted first that his times are the same as those of the preceding prophets, Hosea and Joel, when ungodliness raged most among the ten tribes called Israel, and, as if the eyes of discernment had been dug out, the people loved the darkness it had put on, so that it paid no regard at all to saving warnings or severe blows, but, joining impudence to ungodliness, seemed to embrace its faults and its miseries alike. Since our Lord, girding himself for the office of vengeance, foretold this in various ways, because the intention to correct rather than to punish moved him, he foretells what he knew he would bring. “Two years,” he says, “before the earth was shaken by a portentous quake.” Although the history of Kings does not report that this happened, we are content with the prophet himself as authority, and do not doubt that an earthquake went before as a sign of the coming calamity. So by the intervals of time that delayed vengeance, the people are warned to think of amendment, and [a display of] terror is made, lest they begin to experience the very weight of terror. Since this dispensation achieves nothing with them, they are deprived not only of security but of excuse. The modesty of the preacher himself, exalted by the greatness of his revelations, must be noted: although he obtained the dignity in which he shone by the support of his conduct alone, not also of his birth like others (whose forefathers are set in the titles), yet he did not hide the lowly work in which he had been employed, but marked that he had always applied himself to raising cattle at Tekoa. Tekoa is said to be a hamlet where a multitude of shepherds lives, six miles distant from the city of Bethlehem, beyond which a vast wilderness stretches all the way to the Ocean. So he states that he was brought up among shepherds who frequent uncultivated places suitable for flocks, lest on the occasion of his new office he seem puffed up and think somewhat highly of himself. This purpose of serious restraint he also set out in the course of the work, saying: “I was not a prophet, nor a prophet’s son, but I was a herdsman picking fruit from brambles; and the Lord took me and sent me to prophesy.” This is the virtue of modesty that the teacher of the Gentiles also shows when he says: “Lest I should be lifted up by the greatness of the revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, an angel of Satan to buffet me. For this I asked the Lord three times that it might leave me, and he said to me: My grace is sufficient for you; for strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12). It was plain, then, to prophetic eyes that that earthquake served to signify the upheaval of the kingdom; and he calls this the roaring of the angry Lord.

Verse 2. — “And from Jerusalem,” he says, “he will utter his voice”: this voice, namely, which [is said] to have roared in a manner fitting his anger, not his nature. So the trembling of the world declares the eternal judge, and its violence was so great that at once the green of the grasses was taken away and food was withdrawn not only from men but also from flocks. For he called the glad pastures of the shepherds “beautiful,” and wished the dried-up summit of Carmel to have the same meaning, since shepherds are accustomed to seek summer pastures especially on the tops of hills. In announcing that all these would be dried up by that shaking of the earth, he seems to have touched on something of natural opinion too. For many who have been curious in such matters think that drought causes earthquakes, and try to prove it by examples and persuade by arguments. It is not necessary to rehearse these to you now; I have only noted briefly that the shaking, barely begun, brought a double blow. Whether the great shaking created drought by disturbing, as it were, the veins of the springs, it bears on the power of the Creator, whose nod the elements serve; or whether a failure of moisture coming first made the earth dry up and afterward also tremble, so that, as the pastures perished, the troubles of drought appeared, it nonetheless shows the same power of the judge, who, as he holds together by his goodness what he created, so in indignation, when there is need, disturbs it. We could also, by tropology, think that by the name of shepherds the leaders and kings of various nations are indicated, and by the summit of Carmel the power they held while they lived in good fortune, especially since this prophet’s discourse is directed to various nations; but the first explanation is both simpler and more suited to the histories, if we say that various kinds of afflictions pressed on the profane. But let us now see what my angry avenger cries out.

Verses 3–5. — “For three crimes of Damascus, and for four, I will not turn him back, because they threshed Gilead with iron carts. And I will send fire on the house of Hazael, and it shall devour the houses of Ben-hadad. And I will break the bar of Damascus, and destroy the inhabitant from the plain of the idol, and him who holds the scepter from the house of pleasure and luxury; and the people of Syria shall be carried off to Cyrene, says the Lord.” “We know,” says the apostle, “that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law.” Since, then, the prophets had the purpose of rebuking the crimes of the people living under the law, and blessed Amos pressed chiefly on the ten tribes called Israel, our God nonetheless, by a dispensing and many-sided plan, brought in mention of other nations too, to be judged by the reason of equal judgment, as also the Jewish people, which claimed very much for itself, contrary to the merits of its life, from the fact that it lived set apart from the rest. For when they hear that even the neighboring nations are called to account no less than their own tribes, they surely understand that there is one Creator and Lord of all nations. So in the very fact that the grief of the Israelites is avenged on the neighboring nations, their pride is at the same time pressed down, so that they at last feel that he is not the God of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles, since the pursuits of no people are stripped of the rewards of consolation or of vengeance. Finally, he shows how much readier he is to spare, he who rises to anger with such difficulty that one or two faults never move him unless three or four have come together. This number, however, is shown to be taken for an infinite quantity: not to mark exactly four crimes, but many. He also shows that he has the same zeal for forgiving toward other nations too, since he excuses his anger by the likeness of another’s iniquity. “For three crimes,” he says, “of Damascus, and for four, I will not turn him back, because they threshed Gilead with iron carts. Justice, coeternal with my throne, has brought it about that I should at last take up the office of judge, and should show the manifold and shameless cruelty [that] horrified me by turning the state of the guilty to sorrow. For not once or twice but very often the people of Damascus laid waste the fields of Israel; and it so crushed Gilead with iron carts and threshing sledges that it thought it a pleasing spectacle for the limbs of the inhabitants to be ground up everywhere in the fields like ears and stalks. Since, then, I neither could nor ought to bear this savagery unpunished for long, I will send fire on the house of Hazael king of Damascus, and it shall devour the houses of Ben-hadad,” who succeeded his father Hazael in the kingdom; “and I will break the bar of Damascus, and destroy the inhabitant from the plain of the idol, and him who holds the scepter from the house of pleasure”: that is, “the profane inhabitants of the places, or all the leading men or nobles, who spent all their time in pleasures, I will wrap in the evils of captivity. And lest they be ignorant of this captivity, or claim a hope of return when they see their houses collapse into ashes, they themselves will be led to the fields of Cyrene.” In the book of Kings we read again how frequently these kings whom the prophet mentions, Hazael and Ben-hadad, harried the ten tribes by invasion and brought them to the extremity of miseries. Lest that victory should seem to have turned out happily for the Syrians, he there makes it the cause of the calamity and punishments that are described. But let us now proceed to the rest.

Verses 6–8. — “Thus says the Lord: For three crimes of Gaza, and for four, I will not turn him back, because he carried away a complete captivity, to shut it up in Edom. And I will send fire on the wall of Gaza, and it shall devour its houses; and I will destroy the inhabitant from Ashdod, and him who holds the scepter from Ashkelon; and I will turn my hand against Ekron, and the remnant of the Philistines shall perish, says the Lord.” In the same order of narrative that he kept above against Damascus, he lists the crimes and punishments of the city of Gaza too, and takes on, as it were, the form of one asking whether he ought to keep such long patience over men so attached to crimes that they thought they had done nothing cruel unless they had repeated it three and four times, and had kept up a wonderful ambition in sinning, feeding not only on their own but on others’ crimes too. For it made it its business that the Edomites, the descendants of Esau, whom history shows to have been the brother of blessed Jacob, should exact penalties from the Jewish nation. “These, then,” says the prophet, “who were at odds with us in fratricidal hatred though joined by blood, used the help of the men of Gaza; and that savage nation, not for its own gain, gave my blood to the hatreds of others, raging against me as much as the fratricides thought enough.” He shows how he will settle the account for this profession of malice: “And I will send fire on the wall of Gaza, and it shall devour its houses; and I will destroy the inhabitant from Ashdod, and him who holds the scepter from Ashkelon; and I will turn my hand against Ekron, and the remnant of the Philistines shall perish, says the Lord.” On the occasion of one city he ran through the names of other towns too, of which we often read in the history of Kings that they had almost continual conflicts with the Jewish nation. These are the ones who, when the Jewish army had been slaughtered, carried off the ark of the covenant as if captured to the shrine of the idol called Dagon (1 Sam 3 ff.). Yet after its power had shown itself by the shattering of Dagon’s statue and the calamity that followed among the people, when they had sent it back with due honors, they did not take up the worship of God because of such miracles, but persisted in the ways and rites of the Gentiles. So, raging with constant hatred against the people of God, when they could not make war in their own name they mixed their forces and arms with greater enemies; and the prophet we are discussing complains that the people was worn out by them especially at the time when the Assyrians broke into the borders of the Jews, and shows that all the nations by which the Jews were surrounded labored for their ruin as if in competition. “Since, then, in their time of adversity you too added heaps of evils, and their misery stirred in you not the feeling of neighbors, that is, of mercy, but rather of savagery, you will learn the greatness of your crime, which you would not learn by reason, at least when vengeance is exacted. For the fire of conquest sent upon you will devour not only roofs but also groves, consuming ornaments and fortifications alike. So it will destroy your inhabitants by slaughter that no exception will be found even among the nobles who hold the scepter, who were truly supported by power or conspicuous for the delights and pleasure of this life, so that they could even be called kings; but I will so stretch the hand of our punishment over all that even the remnant of the Philistines will be consumed, and one devastation will rage from the highest to the lowest.” This is what the preceding prophet also marked, accusing Tyre and Sidon and all the borders of the Philistines of having carried off silver and gold and all that was precious from the borders of Israel, and of having sold the children of the people, born in freedom, to Greek and barbarian merchants, so that, carried far from their ancestral regions, they suffered exile and servitude together.

Verses 9, 10. — “Thus says the Lord: For three crimes of Tyre, and for four, I will not turn him back, because they shut up a complete captivity in Edom and did not remember the covenant of brothers. And I will send fire on the wall of Tyre, and it shall devour its houses.” He charges Tyre with the crime he had just laid against Gaza: that it hastened to shut up in Edom not some small portion but a complete captivity, so as to satisfy the Edomite nation, with the dangers of the Jews, in the hatred of a hostile brother. “Vengeance will come, then, that will both copy and surpass the form of your crime: for you roused, as it were, burning envy for the ruin of brothers with your props, and did not remember, that is, would not think at all of, that covenant which nature itself established between brothers, whose love would not be as great a praise as their hatred is a crime; but you stirred them up, as if they were the most utter strangers, known to each other neither by speech nor by report, not only to quarrels but to battles. Consequently, then, burning vengeance will seize you, and the great pleasures in which you, famous, had exulted will be changed into horrible squalor; and it will bring such devastation that both the foundations and the tops of the lofty tower and wall will turn to ash.”

Verses 11, 12. — “Thus says the Lord: For three crimes of Edom, and for four, I will not turn him back, because he pursued his brother with the sword, and would not have mercy on him, and kept up his fury, and preserved his indignation to the end. I will send fire on Teman, and it shall devour the houses of Bozrah.” He follows the order of the speech he began, and addresses with rebuke the various nations which he knew clung to the Jews as much by crimes as by borders. In good order he put the Edomites after Tyre, since they too burned with fratricidal ungodliness against the Jews. Since he had announced that Tyre was to be punished for helping the raging Edomites with counsels, so that they might feed the more easily on their brothers’ miseries, he consequently now addresses the sons of Esau themselves for the same crimes and appoints them to vengeance, lest he seem, having announced to their allies that the price of their faults would be paid, to have spared those who were the authors of the crime. He says, then, that this people sinned with a fratricidal mind not once but often, and that, even if a fault might deserve pardon, its persistence demanded deadly vengeance. For pursuing its brother not with a quarrel but with the sword, it forgot the mercy of kinship that brotherhood required. Not content to have raged in an impulse of indignation, he says, it spent a long time on the crime. He added great weight to the accusation by saying, “And he kept up his fury, and preserved his indignation to the end.” For not only did it depart from the ways of brothers by pursuing its brother in battles, but it did not even keep the custom of those whom the torches of indignation drive into bloody struggles. For it raged as if about to stop quickly, yet persisted in hatred as if moved by justice rather than by fury. Justly, then, it will suffer a fire that stays on it to the end, so that its cities and fortresses, as they were filthy with the same crimes, are worn down by the same calamities. By many names, Edom, Teman, and Bozrah, he indicates one people, namely Esau, who had their metropolis named Bozrah. He says, then, that they will be conquered by battle and siege, will suffer cruel things at the will of the conquerors, and will perish by slaughter and burning: all of which is shown to have been inflicted partly by the Chaldeans, partly by the Maccabees.

Verses 13–15. — “Thus says the Lord: For three crimes of the children of Ammon, and for four, I will not turn him back, because he ripped up the pregnant women of Gilead to enlarge his border. And I will kindle a fire on the wall of Rabbah, and it shall devour its houses with shouting in the day of battle and with a whirlwind in the day of upheaval. And Milcom shall go into captivity, he and his princes together, says the Lord.” Nor are these peoples, Ammon and Moab, descended from the stock of Lot, free from fratricidal envy of the Israelites: they are shown to be so near in kinship, yet, unable to bear their former glory, they let pass no occasion of harming Gilead. Then, hastening to invade the region beyond the Jordan bordering on them, which, as Scripture tells, the two and a half tribes had received, the Ammonites, he says, did not refrain even from killing pregnant women, wishing to kill the very offspring of the Jews, so that, the inhabitants consumed, the whole region of the Gileadites might be joined to their borders. “I will repay this people too,” he says, “what it deserves, and I will make the buildings of hostile Rabbah, which was its metropolis, grow old in ruin.” They will be so dismayed by this whirlwind of war that they seem to die before it; and not only its princes but also Milcom, that is, the image by whose divinity they believed themselves defended, will be carried into the mockery of captivity.

Verses 1–3. — “Thus says the Lord: For three crimes of Moab, and for four, I will not turn him back, because he burned the bones of the king of Edom to ashes. And I will send fire on Moab, and it shall devour the houses of Kerioth, and Moab shall die amid noise and the blast of the trumpet. And I will destroy the judge from its midst, and I will kill all its princes with him, says the Lord.” It should be noted that, whereas with all the nations he has listed he charged the insults and dangers they had heaped on Israel, he now charges the people of the Moabites with having been savage against the king of Edom; and he complains that they raged so that, not content to wage war with him living, they showed their hatred even toward his corpse. By this the arrogance of the Jews, who believed that they alone belonged to the Lord, was checked, and to the Gentiles was offered either the comfort of hope or the light of understanding, so that they might feel that they stand under the one providence and government of their Creator, who would avenge the injuries not only of the Jews but of other nations too.

Verses 4–5. — “Thus says the Lord: For three crimes of Judah, and for four, I will not turn him back, because he rejected the law of the Lord and did not keep his commandments. For their idols deceived them, after which their fathers walked. And I will send fire on Judah, and it shall devour the houses of Jerusalem.” Having charged various nations with savage deeds, he comes to Judah and lays to it the crime of a religion feigned, announcing with the same figure of deliberation with which he began the necessary reversal: that those who had obstinately pursued everything shameful and profane would pass from joy to sorrow. We ought not to think, however, that he judged those peoples whose crimes he had just run through to be acceptable as regards religion, so that he thought nothing should be charged against them on that score. But since theirs was a profanity confessed a thousand times, who had always been enslaved to the worship of idols and did not know how to have a competent judgment about the piety of rites, he certainly does not charge them with the crime of feigned religion, but with those wounds of conduct which even those placed outside the true religion could recognize and avoid. To Judah, however, he first charged what was more horrible than the other outrages, and from which stock other crimes too had rightly sprung. “For they rejected,” he says, “the law of the Lord, through which alone they were conspicuous in the whole world; and not content to have rejected it, they passed over to the worship of idols as well. They will receive, then, the wage they deserve, so that a hostile fire consumes Judah and Jerusalem”: which was fulfilled when Babylon conquered.

Verse 6. — “Thus says the Lord: For three crimes of Israel, and for four, I will not turn him back, because they sold the righteous for silver and the poor for sandals.” The ten tribes, which he names Israel, he accuses not as he did Judah, but as he did the other nations, of crimes of conduct, to show that they clung so to profanity that on that point they neither blushed nor feared to be rebuked. He accuses the wounds of conduct, then, not because they were graver than those of rites, but either because they were plainly seen to be the fruits of a foul religion, or because in that portion of acts too they were shown to be worse than the other Gentiles. “Our censure,” he says, “will no longer tolerate that he remain in the state in which, shameless, he never breathes toward better things; but a change from prosperity to adversity will come upon them, so that what they would not learn when warned they may begin to know when condemned: that I take care of the poor, and that those who are deprived of the riches of this world are not deprived of the defense of my providence. Let only the care of uprightness flourish among them, and their very lowliness, in which they were humbler than the rest, will make them acceptable and dear to me.” “I said this because the people of Israel neglected to notice the righteous and the poor, who rest on a double claim with me; but, always hostile to my judgments, it trampled the poor and valued the cheap ornaments of the world as sandals for the feet”: that is, they sinned with such facility in offices and in business that they were not only lured by small gains, but often fed even on the gratuitous punishments of others, thinking it a kind of pleasure if they trampled into the dust the very heads of men lowly in virtue, that is, of those who avoid the evil of pride by the holiness of innocence. What he says, “they turn aside the way of the humble,” can be taken in two ways: either they turn from it and follow a far different road of life, or in judgments they stain the just cause of the needy with fraud; as in the psalm: “If you saw a thief, you ran with him, and you put your portion with adulterers. Sitting, you spoke against your brother, and you craftily laid a stumbling block for your mother’s son.” The guilt of the sinners is heightened in this sense, because, pursuing deadly things with deliberate effort, they are shown not only to neglect but even to hate justice. The prophet goes on to recall various crimes; for after injustice and pride come the sins of lust. “A son and his father,” he says, “went in to one girl, to profane my holy name.” He shows to what heaps the habit of sinners proceeds. “First,” he says, “you denied your fellow citizens justice in judgments and compassion in calamities; it followed at once that not even the rights of nature itself stood among you, but, passing from outrages to incest, sons rushed with fathers to harlots, so that, as before you showed no reverence to citizens, so afterward you showed none to parents. By this crime of yours my holy name too was profaned, as the Gentiles said among themselves: What kind of God is that, whose so-called special people appears so foul?” Verse 8. — “And on garments taken in pledge they lay down beside every altar, and they drank the wine of the condemned in the house of their God.” It certainly followed that worshipers of idols lived in manifold foulness; yet here the prophet, in everything he rebukes, takes care to express how they fought against the divine commands as if deliberately, so as to tear apart every kind of commandment. So, listing everything forbidden in the law, he declares that they also lay on garments taken in pledge. He carefully added “beside every altar,” because ungodliness had multiplied their altars. “And so they drank the wine of the condemned,” that is, they feasted in the temples on the money they had received from the price of the innocent, of whom he said a little before that “they sold the righteous for silver and the poor for sandals.”

Verses 9, 10. — “But I destroyed the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of cedars, and he was strong as an oak; and I crushed his fruit above and his roots below. I am the one who made you come up from the land of Egypt, and led you through the wilderness forty years, to possess the land of the Amorite.” He keeps his custom of recalling earlier benefits to sharpen the crime of the ungrateful. So after running through the wicked and profane pursuits to which they were devoted, he also brought in mention of the good things they had forgotten; as if he said that he had been quite deceived, he who drove out ancient nations, stronger in might and strength, to prepare a dwelling for these, while these think it a glorious contest to imitate and surpass the crimes of those nations. “But I destroyed the Amorite, whose height was like the cedar, and he was strong as an oak; I crushed his fruit above and his roots below. The forest of the nations,” he says, “very strong through long age, threatening with such lofty tops and resting on deep roots, I cut down diligently, like one who measures out a camp, so that they might not feel even slight hindrances to their dwelling. Whatever strength there was, I cut off at the root, so that the forests of the natives, which our sentence removed, might never sprout again, but heaped-up security might follow the joys of the victory granted. Why not, since I had conferred benefits on them in ancient times too? For when they were pressed down by Egyptian servitude, I raised them to the heights of freedom, and led them around for forty years through pathless wildernesses, supplying food and drink by miracles, so that the possession of the happy land that had been decreed might taste all the sweeter the later it came, and at the same time they might learn that man’s life consists not in the fertility of trees but in the governing providence of God. Nor was I content to have given only the means of the present life; I also made you conspicuous by spiritual ornaments, raising up,” he says, “prophets from your sons and Nazirites from your young men,” that is, men strong in special devotion as well as in holy illumination, of whom some had sure knowledge of [future things], others a glorious contest against offenses. “Yet all these things you not only valued cheaply but even spurned with zeal, daring both to command the prophets not to prophesy and to press on the Nazirites wine to make them drunk.”

Verses 13–16. — “See, I will creak under you as a cart loaded with hay creaks. And flight shall perish from the swift, and the strong shall not hold his strength, and the mighty shall not save his life; and he who holds the bow shall not stand, and the swift of foot shall not be saved, and the rider of the horse shall not save his life; and the stout of heart among the mighty shall flee naked in that day, says the Lord.” It is familiar to the holy Scriptures to use images taken even from small things, as chance offers, for what they wish to convey, but in such a way that the sense of mysteries stands in the middle of them. So now, because the just arbiter had long borne a sinning people, he declared that he was loaded like a cart, but one that had a load of cheap material. When he says, “I will creak under you like a cart loaded with hay,” he did not mean it to be understood that a cart full of hay seems to creak one way and one full of silver another; but since he was fitting to himself the likeness of a creaking cart, he skillfully mixed in the sense, as if he said: “If a loaded cart had some power of discernment, it would surely creak more indignantly if it carried cheap things than if it carried precious ones.” So, as the apostle teaches, on the foundation of religion, according to the difference of merits, some build like gold, silver, and precious stones, others like hay, wood, and stubble (1 Cor 3); rightly does our God declare that he experiences a greater burden in bearing the sins of those in whom he can find nothing of precious pursuits, but who have all come to cheap hay, easily consumed by fire. “When I have creaked, that is, roared, your arrogance or confidence will at once perish. For speed will snatch no one from destruction, strength will not protect the fighter, nor, finally, will battle lines of foot soldiers or companies of horsemen delay the divine sentence; but those who were famous for the art of war will wish, having lost their armor, to hide, so that even naked they may use hiding places to save their lives.” That all these evils come from an enemy’s victory we prove by yearly disasters rather than by the writings of annals. In this passage the Jews follow a certain opinion, that the persons of various leaders were marked by various equipment; we, judging this of no great weight, pass on to other things.