Commentary on Hosea, Joel and Amos 3.8.1–3.8.7

Verses 1–3. — “These things the Lord God showed me: and see, a fruit hook. And he said: What do you see, Amos? And I said: A fruit hook. And the Lord said to me: The end has come upon my people Israel; I will no longer pass it by. And the hinges of the temple will creak in that day, says the Lord God; many will die; in every place silence will be cast.” Up to the present passage he had announced the calamities that were owed to crimes, contained in the fixed sentence of the eternal judge, so that the profane would by no means escape unpunished. But since this force of speech had sounded for a long time, he now shows also that the time for bearing the punishments is near, and, according to the custom of the prophets, brought in an image to express this very thing. For as above the mason’s trowel made known the care of providence, and the judge, laying it down from his hand in indignation, taught that he had ceased to protect them, so now, showing the nearness of condemnation, he took up a fruit hook: that is, the one used by those who climb trees to strip the fruit, and who, since they cannot go out to the ends because of the tenderness of the branches, standing on what is solid, bend the tips of the branches toward themselves, gathering the fruit they see to be ripe. So, since the eternal judge now saw vengeance to be timely, he made it understood that the peoples had, as it were, ripened for receiving it, and declares that he has undertaken the office of vengeance, and that Israel can no longer stand unpunished. “I will no longer pass it by,” as fruit gatherers pass by what they see still sour, but pick what is fit to eat. So the form of the hook showed that the time for fulfilling the sentence had come, the hook drawing to due punishments those who seemed to flourish in riches and abound in children. “The hinges of the temple will creak in that day, says the Lord; many will die; in every place silence will be cast.” “Do not think it doubtful, O people, what this form of the hook announces: the hinges of the temple will creak: that is, all the shrines in which you trust will be destroyed along with the cities; their doors will not be opened gently for the services of worshipers, but will burst apart by the force of the conquerors; the profane crowd will die in mixed slaughter; and so the crossroads that resounded with the multitude of citizens will be filled with mournful silence.” By the name of the temple whose hinges he says will creak, he would seem to announce the calamity of Judah too, and the ruin of the temple at Jerusalem, were it not that the whole context fits the ten tribes. So he said that the hinges of that temple would be torn away of which he also said above, “The high places of the idol shall be demolished and the sanctuaries of Israel laid waste,” and a little later he is open: “Those who swore by the sin of Samaria and said, As your God lives, Dan, and the way of Beersheba, shall fall and not rise again.”

Verses 4–6. — “Hear this, you who crush the poor and make the needy of the land fail, saying: When will the month pass, that we may sell goods, and the sabbath, that we may open the grain, to make the measure smaller and the shekel greater, and to set up deceitful scales; that we may buy the needy for silver and the poor for sandals, and sell the refuse of the grain?” The prophetic speech is woven by the same rules on which it was set up: although above all crimes it accuses the worship of idols, by which, deserting God, they became most profane, yet it does not keep silent about the other parts of life, that is, the remaining offenses of conduct; and so it shows either that they despised the teaching of the holy law out of love of vices, or what fruits of conduct ungodliness brings forth, which, though it roams through almost all kinds of wickedness, yet devotes itself above the rest to greed, which the apostle too calls the service of idols. So here too the divine word, having rebuked the sacrilegious and threatening them now with near destruction, suddenly cried out, as one wishing to break the deafness of the profane: that if they neglected to judge the merits of their pursuits, but put shameful things before beautiful ones and virtues, at least now, when things had been brought into straits and the crash of roused vengeance was sounding close by, they might consider for what use they were gathering money, and with what coin they were striving to fill purses that were certain to come at once into the power of the enemy. “Hear this,” he says, “you who crush the poor and make the needy of the land fail. Sons of men, how long will you be heavy of heart? Why do you love vanity and gape shamelessly after lying riches? You will feel no help, indeed no comfort, from these things, which make for you the cause both of faults and of punishments. With what hope did you corrupt the offices of judging entrusted to you, so as to receive bloody spoils from the poor oppressed and killed, and have no kind of industry that was harmless? For you sinned not only by corrupting sentences in judgments, but also, when you went on making money from the produce of the fields, you polluted the very trade that could have been carried on honestly and mixed crimes of greed into permitted industry. For you said: When will the month pass, that we may sell goods, and the sabbath, that we may open the grain, to make the measure smaller and the shekel greater, and set up deceitful scales? Sinning, then, no less by greed than by iniquity, you waited for and wished for public want: although you were most luxurious and therefore most idle, you were tired of the rest of the sabbaths, because by the leisure proclaimed they kept you from frauds for at least one day. So you complained,” he says, “of the slowness of the passing rest, hastening to the busy times in which you might sell to a hungry people at great prices not only grain but also the refuse, which you used to throw away, plotting such things among yourselves in shared iniquity, that you might possess the needy for silver and the poor for sandals. Since you have so conducted yourselves as enemies of humanity that the richer you were than the rest, the crueler the crowd of citizens felt you, and not even your abundance called you to give, you surely deserve to obtain no mercy from the eternal judge, which you denied to your neighbors with such obstinacy and such shamelessness.”

Verse 7. — “The Lord has sworn against the pride of Jacob: I will not forget to the end all their works.” “The indignation of the Creator will make known the greatness of your iniquity, O Israel, who has bound himself even by an oath that he would not become forgetful of so many evils, but would keep up the force of severity until he had ended them in final destruction.” At the same time he uncovered the feelings of the guilty, who confess them: although they seemed to have sinned through greed alone in the fraud of measures and weights, he threatens to rise against their pride, showing that they would never have committed so many crimes except through contempt of the law, and that as they valued money immoderately, so they valued God’s commandments cheaply. “It is not,” he says, “that their arrogance ends with insults to the needy; the unbridled boldness of the ungodly has gone much further: they have drunk in an ungodly contempt for us. Therefore I, who am the inspector of souls, rightly detest their pride, and I swore in my anger, if they shall enter into my rest” (Ps 91). For what pity can temper censure when they rage with such atrocity that their whole region deserves to tremble, longing to be freed from the weight of those it nourished as degenerate?

Verse 8. — “Shall not the earth be moved over this, and every inhabitant of it mourn; and it shall rise up wholly like a river, and be cast out and flow away like the river of Egypt?” What it was for the earth to be moved, which he had declared by a figure of terror, he made plain by the words that follow, saying, “And every inhabitant of it shall mourn. The captivity promised long ago and delayed until now will come; for that hook of our sentence of which I spoke above has now drawn in the business of vengeance. And all that I declared both when despised and under oath will be fulfilled, and the whole people of Israel will flow out with no more difficulty than the river of Egypt, the Nile, and will be forced to pass over to the Assyrians. The face of that time will be so sad and bitter that the sun will seem to have failed at midday and night to have rushed in. For no distinction of ranks, no light of counsel, will remain, as if palpable darkness had taken away earth and heaven alike from the eyes of the wretched.”

Verse 10. — “And I will turn,” he says, “your festivals into mourning and all your songs into lamentation; and I will bring sackcloth on every back of yours, and baldness on every head. And I will make it [or: him] like the mourning for an only son, and its end like a bitter day.” Since the speech he began designates not one person but the people together, there is a change of both number and gender, so that he speaks now in the plural, now in the singular. “I will turn,” he says, “your festivals into mourning and your songs into lamentation: that is, everything opposite to joyful things will follow, and the captivity sent upon you will subject to mourning what you prepared for pleasure when free; and haircloth and rags will clothe the bodies of nobles lately covered with precious ornaments.” Would that we knew that all this happens in the time of captivity only from reading telling of it! But such a condition has become so frequent in our times that we wonder at the boldness of those who hope for anything better. “I will bring,” he says, “sackcloth on every back of yours and baldness on the head: and you will lose the ornaments of your bodies and the supports of your strength, so that the hair begins to fall, consumed either by mockery or by disease. And I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and its end like a bitter day”: that is, the state of the nation of Israel goes down from the citadel of its former happiness to the depths of wretched servitude, so that it deserves as bitter a mourning as that bereavement which usually befalls parents of only sons, when not only the lost child but also extinct posterity is mourned. But let us see the rest.

Verse 11. — “See, the days are coming, says the Lord, and I will send a famine on the land: not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord. And they shall be moved from sea to sea, and from the north to the east they shall go around seeking the word of the Lord, and shall not find it.” He showed that among the extreme calamities of the people that had flourished by the condition of the law must be counted the lack of saving teachers. Why not, since it is the condition that if you do not hear what is to be learned, ignorance comes in, and through it you live in the night of not knowing, and run into manifold miseries as if blinded? For, as another prophet declares, he who has not learned justice will not do truth on the earth, and so those who speak lies will perish. Therefore to the people too, which was reproached through the prophet Hosea because it had rejected knowledge, for which it deserved to be rejected by the almighty Lord, the same crime is charged in the present passage under the announcement of punishment, so that those who in their zeal for profanity had hated the teachers of piety might recognize how much they had labored for their own destruction: who by sinning had done the very thing that the judge threatens them with among, indeed above, the other punishments, namely that amid the hardships of captivity they would be struck with a want of teaching, so that they would be deserted by that distinction by which they had been conspicuous among all nations, and none of the prophets would either instruct them in their ignorance or console them in their affliction. That all this happens under enemy condemnation constant dangers have taught us. Blessed Isaiah too stated this kind of threat, foretelling that prince, elder, counselor, and teacher would be taken from Judah, and boys and effeminate princes put in their place. As for his saying “not a famine of bread nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord” was to be inflicted on those peoples, as far as the course of the reading goes, it seems to have been said in the sense that he said not only a famine of bread, nor only a thirst for water, but such a scarcity of hearing the word of the Lord that they could nowhere find a teacher, even if they sought him most eagerly. For he would not terrify them by the removal of teachers alone, as though they were eager for spiritual teaching and therefore valued its loss heavily. According to the expressions familiar to the Scriptures, then, he certainly did not deny that they would be troubled by hunger and thirst, but left it to be understood that they would be subjected not only to these things, which in the condition of mortal life sometimes befall good and bad alike, but would be punished by another, greater calamity, one that concerns [the ruin] of all and cannot befall the innocent: namely, that divine teaching would not instruct them, but would despise their ear even if they swore they wished to learn; as though that fitted them which we read in another prophet: “But to the sinner God said: Why do you recount my righteous deeds and take my covenant in your mouth?” A sense is formed from all of this: that for the crimes both of its religion and of its conduct the once beloved nation of the Jews would be subjected to barbarian captivity, and would fall so far from the citadel of its ancient honor that it would recognize the crimes of its will in its punishments, and, bearing the commands of savage masters, would nowhere hear the teaching of the holy law sounding, whose illuminating precepts it had despised while still placed in its ancestral borders. But as the context of the reading itself requires the course of this understanding, so we ought also to notice that the same things serve to signify future things too, namely those times in which the Jews, sinning most wickedly, fell most heavily. For after that vine, which was brought out of Egypt and planted in rich regions, and, when the temple had been built, received the winepress of the holy altar, was expected to bear grapes but bore thorns, and not justice but an outcry, so that its tenants, raging against the very son of the householder, believed that they would hold the rest without trouble once they had seized it by the death of the lawful heir: the Lord God swore against the pride of Jacob, “I will not forget to the end all their works,” whose atrocity rose so high that their very land was moved and mournful darkness took away midday. For from the sixth hour there was darkness until the ninth hour, and the earth was moved and the rocks were split; and so their festivals came to mourning and their songs to lamentation, and the backs of the ungodly were covered with sackcloth and their heads felt baldness; and when the nations came to avenge the crime, Jerusalem was surrounded by siege and dashed to the ground so that it can never rise again. That nation, then, which violated the only-begotten Son of God with insults and blows, felt as it were the mourning for an only son and was shut in by a bitter end; and there truly followed a time in which it is consumed by famine of spiritual goods; and we see that those who were stubborn against the word of the Lord experience not a scarcity of bread or a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord. Does not this calamity of theirs shine out in the very witness of events? For since the source of spiritual philosophy, which teaches piety toward the Lord, kindness and uprightness toward neighbors, has departed from them, they have sunk to such poverty of learning and teaching that, scattered from the rising of the sun to its setting, that is, over the whole world, they nowhere hear the word of God by which they might be quickened, nor are they touched by the brightness of the shining Gospel; but like infants, instead of virtues of conduct and life-giving sacraments, they swell with shameful and trivial things, glorying in the cutting of the flesh and the holidays of sabbaths. Consequently there is among them no learned teacher, no prince, no priest by whom they might be reformed: because when Moses is read their eyes are covered with a veil, which is not taken away except when it is abolished in Christ, who redeemed us. “They shall go around,” he says, “seeking the word of the Lord, and shall not find it,” because they denied him who, the Word, became flesh; and so the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not grasp it.

Verses 13, 14. — “In that day the beautiful virgins and the young men shall faint with thirst. Those who swore by the sin of Samaria and said, As your God lives, Dan, and as the way of Beersheba lives: they shall fall and not rise again.” Although the prophetic speech accuses the ways of its own time, yet, as we have shown, it consequently points also to future signs through the heaping up of censure; and therefore, even if the speech as it advances looked to the affairs that seemed imminent, it can nonetheless fit also the condition that now holds the Jews. For it is not absurd if the tribes themselves are named beautiful virgins from their past dignity: as then, by following idols, they are read to have been given over to destruction, so now, when they have denied their Redeemer, they are said to have committed the same as when they worshiped the calves set up in Dan and Beersheba. The sense is: the Jews, not believing in Christ the Lord, think themselves in vain free of ungodliness because they venerate no idols, since nothing of the ancient piety of the patriarchs has remained among them, because by violating the name of Christ with stubborn unbelief they are shown to be sharers and equals of the worshipers of idols. For this reason the inspector of souls also declares in the Gospel: “He who hates me hates my Father also.” So condemnation [follows] those who, by denying the Son, are declared enemies of the Father too. As for his saying, “As your God lives, Dan, and as the way of Beersheba lives,” he noted the custom of the common people, who, slipping into superstition, often swear even by the roads by which one goes to the shrines. “They shall fall,” he says, “and not rise again”: that is, they will no longer be allowed to lean on the comforts of hope, thinking that such threats sound only to frighten and that the joys of liberation will at once meet them, as they are often read to have experienced; but since the hook, laid hold of at last, has drawn in the time of vengeance, let them feel by suffering what they had until now learned by hearing; and so they will fall, crushed by the very events that press them down.