Commentary on Hosea, Joel and Amos

Contents

Reading pages: 1.1.1–1.1.4 · 1.1.5 · 1.2.1–1.2.9 · 1.3.1 · 1.4.1–1.4.12 · 1.5.1–1.6.6 · 1.7.1–1.7.8 · 1.8.1–1.8.6 · 1.9.1–1.9.11 · 1.10.1–1.10.6 · 1.11.1–1.11.6 · 1.12.1–1.12.8 · 1.13.1–2.0.1 · 2.1.1–2.2.2 · 2.2.3–2.2.10 · 2.2.11–3.0.1 · 3.1.1–3.2.5 · 3.3.1–3.4.6 · 3.5.1–3.5.12 · 3.5.13–3.6.8 · 3.7.1–3.7.6 · 3.8.1–3.8.7 · 3.9.1–3.9.11

1. 1.1.1Julian explains why the prophets date their books by kings, sketches the fall of the northern kingdom, and argues that Hosea was the first of the writing prophets.
2. 1.1.2Julian sets out the dispute over whether Hosea literally married a prostitute, prefers the view that it was seen in prophetic vision, and explains the name Jezreel and the judgment on Jehu’s house.
3. 1.1.3Julian explains the name Without Mercy, defends God’s ‘forgetting’ of Israel as just judgment on the unrepentant, and reads the promise to save Judah as the deliverance from Sennacherib.
4. 1.1.4Julian reads Hosea’s children as signs of the captivities of Israel and of Judah, with the weaning of the daughter signifying Israel’s longer exile.
5. 1.1.5Julian reads the promise of countless ‘children of the living God’ as both the return from Babylon and, by theoria, the Gospel’s call of the nations, and insists that prophecy does not remove the value of repentance and prayer.
6. 1.2.1God calls the children to judge their unfaithful mother, hoping that the threat of punishment will move some to amend.
7. 1.2.2Julian reads the threat to strip Israel ‘as on the day of her birth’ as a reminder of the wilderness generation, which perished despite its privileges, and calls the children to repentance.
8. 1.2.3Julian explains Israel’s claim that her ‘lovers’ fed her, her shallow return to God under pressure, and God’s withdrawal of the gifts she used for idols.
9. 1.2.4God will expose Israel’s folly before the nations whose ways she followed, and none of them will be able to rescue her.
10. 1.2.5The feasts and sabbaths in which Israel delighted will be turned into mourning and the toil of captivity.
11. 1.2.6The vines and figs Israel credited to her ‘lovers’ will be ruined and the land left to wild beasts, because she ascribed God’s gifts to idols.
12. 1.2.7God will punish Israel’s long service of the Baals; Julian reads her earrings as the sign of the obedience she once owed to the law.
13. 1.2.8Julian reads God’s promise to lead Israel into the wilderness and give her the valley of Achor as a door of hope as the joyful return from exile modeled on the Exodus, and, by extension, the Gospel’s call of the nations.
14. 1.2.9Julian reads God’s renewed betrothal of Israel and the restored harmony of creation as the return from exile and, more fully, the Church, Christ’s bride, in which the first believers held all things in common.
15. 1.3.1Julian reads Hosea’s purchase of an adulterous woman who must wait ‘many days’ as Judah’s Babylonian exile, rejecting the Jewish reading that applies it to the present dispersion.
16. 1.4.1Julian explains why Hosea turns from future hope back to Israel’s present crimes: God gives an account of his judgment, and the land is full of lying, murder, and the slaughter of the godly, as in Elijah’s day.
17. 1.4.2Because of Israel’s crimes, the land, its cattle, its birds, and even its fish will fail.
18. 1.4.3Julian explains that when a whole people is corrupt, rebuke and judgment cease and only destruction remains; Israel, having rejected the true priesthood, will fall together with its false prophets.
19. 1.4.4Julian explains the silencing of Israel’s ‘mother’ and God’s rejection of a people that kept sacrifices while discarding the justice the law required.
20. 1.4.5As Israel grew in numbers it multiplied its sins, so God will reduce it to a remnant.
21. 1.4.6Julian explains ‘eating the sins of my people’ as priests and soothsayers who profited from sin offerings and promised impunity, so that priest and people will perish together.
22. 1.4.7Israel will be repaid for its ways, eating without being satisfied; its ‘immorality’ is the abandonment of God for drunken folly and divination by staffs.
23. 1.4.8Israel worshiped on hilltops and under shady trees, thinking divinity was wherever there was pleasantness.
24. 1.4.9Julian reads God’s refusal to punish Israel’s daughters as a sentence of captivity, in which husbands and fathers will see their women violated by conquerors and be unable to seek justice.
25. 1.4.10Julian reads the warning that Judah should not sin as a rebuke of Israel for drawing Judah into the calf worship at Gilgal and Beth-aven, where oaths by the true God were mixed with idolatry.
26. 1.4.11Israel, once proud as a heifer, will be reduced to a lone lamb in the wilderness, yet still fed by God so that it may learn from its punishment.
27. 1.4.12Judah is told to leave idolatrous Ephraim alone and avoid all fellowship with it, since Samaria will soon be swept away; Julian notes how the true prophets were despised as madmen.
28. 1.5.1Priests, people, and king are summoned to judgment for leading Israel into idolatry; their worst sin is that the ‘spirit of immorality’ in their midst keeps them from any thought of returning to God.
29. 1.5.2Israel’s arrogance will ‘answer’ it with the harvest of calamity, and Judah will fall with it.
30. 1.5.3Judah seeks God with sacrifices but without virtue and so does not find him; Ephraim’s mixed marriages with the nations show its long contempt for the law, and a ‘harvest’ of destruction will consume it.
31. 1.5.4The alarm is sounded in the border towns near Judah as Ephraim falls; Judah, instead of learning from it, sins the more.
32. 1.5.5Judah’s princes rejoiced at Israel’s exile and seized its land instead of repenting, so God will pour out his wrath on them like water.
33. 1.5.6Judah’s glee at Israel’s fall makes its guilt so much greater that Israel seems wronged by comparison; God will strike both like a lion until, worn down, they seek his face.
34. 1.6.1Julian reads the people’s words ‘after two days he will revive us’ as a facile prayer without amendment, which God rejects: their mercy has vanished like morning dew because they did not change.
35. 1.6.2God struck Israel with prophetic threats in vain; now his judgment will shine out to show that he desired mercy and the knowledge of God rather than sacrifices.
36. 1.6.3Julian explains that Israel transgressed ‘like Adam’ not by the same crimes but by the same ingratitude: both, given every good, preferred the seducer to the Creator and were sent into exile.
37. 1.6.4Gilead and Shechem were centers of idolatry whose people, urged on by their priests, waylaid and even killed those going up to God’s temple.
38. 1.6.5The whole of Israel is defiled; the prophet turns to warn Judah that it will suffer the same unless it amends.
39. 1.6.6Judah should not think itself safe because Israel went first into captivity; it too will reap a harvest of sorrow.
40. 1.7.1God’s wish to heal Israel was blocked by its idolatry, which the prophet calls ‘working a lie’; so the enemy enters like a thief and robber to plunder it.
41. 1.7.2God has recalled only part of Israel’s guilt, so that it may know its punishment is less than it deserves; its own schemes now surround it.
42. 1.7.3Julian reads the burning oven of Hos 7 as Jeroboam’s establishment of the calf cult and its feast at Bethel, in which king and nobles vied in drunken ungodliness.
43. 1.7.4All Ephraim mingled with the nations; like a cake left unturned in the ashes, burnt on one side and raw on the other, it stayed unteachable though worn down by affliction.
44. 1.7.5Israel did not notice the enemies devouring it and stayed foolish into its ‘old age,’ the captivity, from which it would later be renewed like the eagle.
45. 1.7.6Humbled Israel still did not seek God; it was like a silly dove, a likeness Scripture can use for blame here and for praise in the Gospel.
46. 1.7.7Israel’s appeals to Egypt failed and the Assyrians carried it off to Media, where God’s judgment would still follow it like a fowler’s net.
47. 1.7.8Israel repaid God’s deliverance with lies and drunken ‘howling’ instead of heartfelt prayer, turned the strength he gave against him like a treacherous bow, and will see its princes fall.
48. 1.8.1Julian applies the trumpet warning of an eagle over God’s house to Judah’s later captivity: neither the temple nor the boast of knowing God will protect a people whose works deny him.
49. 1.8.2Israel chose kings without God and turned the silver and gold he gave into idols; ‘that they might perish’ states the consequence, not their purpose.
50. 1.8.3Samaria’s calf, made by a craftsman, could not save itself from the conqueror; Israel should at least have learned from its destruction that it was no god.
51. 1.8.4Because Israel would not abandon its idols even after their destruction, its labors will bring nothing but wind and whirlwind, and whatever grows will go to its enemies.
52. 1.8.5Swallowed up and held in contempt among the nations like an unclean vessel, Israel, which once lived free like a wild ass under God alone, sought Egypt’s help against Assyria and will instead be gathered into captivity.
53. 1.8.6Israel’s many altars became its sin, and Judah trusted sacrifices and fortresses instead of justice; God will write against them the curses of Deuteronomy, refuse their offerings, and burn their cities.
54. 1.9.1Israel should not rejoice in mixing with the nations, since this brings not freedom but punishment.
55. 1.9.2Israel loved the wages of the land above God, so its harvests will fail and it will be driven out to eat unclean food in Assyria and Egypt, the lands it longed for.
56. 1.9.3In captivity Israel will have no sacrifices to please God; its offerings will be like mourners’ bread, defiling those who eat it.
57. 1.9.4Exiles will spend the Lord’s feast days in servitude; Julian applies the flight to Egypt to the Jews who fled there after Nebuchadnezzar, and notes from experience how abandoned houses and hidden treasure are lost.
58. 1.9.5Israel’s punishment has come because it treated God’s prophets as fools and madmen, as Jehu’s officers did; Julian calls this a multiplied madness.
59. 1.9.6Julian reports a reading that takes ‘Ephraim the watchman’ as Jeroboam, once zealous and then a snare, but prefers to read the verse as the people’s mockery of the prophets as snares and madmen.
60. 1.9.7Julian retells the outrage at Gibeah and the near destruction of Benjamin, and says Hosea ranks the mockery of the prophets as a crime of equal gravity.
61. 1.9.8God found the patriarchs like grapes in the desert, but their descendants defiled themselves with Baal-peor, as at Peor in Numbers; Julian sets the present generation’s sins beside that ancient fall.
62. 1.9.9Ephraim will fly into captivity like a bird, and the families in which it gloried will be struck with childlessness.
63. 1.9.10Ephraim, once beautiful and festive like Tyre, will hand over its children to the slayer; the prophet’s hesitant prayer asks for barren wombs and dry breasts.
64. 1.9.11God will cast Israel out of his land for the idolatry of Gilgal and its rebellious princes; Julian notes a reading linking Gilgal to Saul’s kingship but prefers the plainer one.
65. 1.10.1Israel, a fruitful vine, multiplied altars as it prospered; its divided heart will bring its fall, and its boast that it needs neither king nor God will yield a harvest of bitter judgment.
66. 1.10.2Julian reports a Jewish story that the calf idols, secretly replaced with bronze by their keepers, were sent to Assyria as tribute, but explains the verse more simply: Samaria will be shamed when its gods are carried off as mere metal.
67. 1.10.3Samaria’s kingdom will vanish like foam, its shrines will be overgrown, and survivors will beg the mountains to cover them, words the Lord later used in the Gospel.
68. 1.10.4Israel’s sin, compared with Gibeah’s, is graver, for Israel could not even resist its enemies; its ‘two iniquities’ are despising the true prophets and honoring the false.
69. 1.10.5Ephraim, a heifer proud of the threshing floor, will be broken, while Judah plows in righteousness; Julian applies the ‘teacher of righteousness’ first to Hezekiah and more fully to Christ.
70. 1.10.6Samaria trusted in its armies rather than God and will be destroyed as Gideon destroyed Zalmunna; its own idolatry at Bethel has brought this on it.
71. 1.11.1Israel’s kingdom vanished like the dawn; Julian contrasts this with God’s love in calling Israel his son out of Egypt, a verse Matthew rightly applied to Christ, and with Israel’s ready lapse into idolatry.
72. 1.11.2God fed Israel in the wilderness as Adam was fed in paradise and led it with bonds of love, lifting the yoke from it, yet it resisted him until it came to ruin.
73. 1.11.3Israel’s hope of serving Egypt rather than Assyria will fail; the sword will consume its cities, and its belated prayers will not lift the yoke God has decreed.
74. 1.11.4God refuses to destroy Ephraim like Sodom’s neighbors because his gifts and calling are irrevocable; Julian rejects Jerome’s reading of ‘I will not enter the city’ as a disdain for cities, explaining it as a refusal to enter Israel’s cities to destroy them as he entered Sodom.
75. 1.11.5God will roar like a lion against the nations and bring his people back from Egypt and Assyria like doves to their nests.
76. 1.11.6Ephraim deceived God like a dishonest trader and paid Assyria and Egypt for help, ‘feeding on wind,’ while Judah under Hezekiah remained a faithful witness and was delivered.
77. 1.12.1God judges Judah for its deliverance but visits Jacob, the ten tribes, with punishment according to their ways.
78. 1.12.2Julian recounts Jacob’s struggle with Esau in the womb, his exile, and his wrestling with the angel at Bethel as models of virtue and humble faith that his degenerate descendants had abandoned.
79. 1.12.3Julian explains why Hosea calls Israel ‘Canaan’: like a merchant with false scales, it deliberately chose evil, credited idols with God’s gifts, and trusted its wealth to shield it from judgment.
80. 1.12.4God, who brought Israel out of Egypt, will make it dwell again in tents: Julian takes this as a fixed term of captivity followed by freedom, confirming that the captivity is certain.
81. 1.12.5God spoke through the prophets and condescended to appear in forms unworthy of his majesty, such as the wrestler with Jacob and the burning bush, to care for his people.
82. 1.12.6Israel, after all God’s benefits, sacrificed in vain to images of oxen at Gilgal and built altars everywhere like heaps of stones in a field.
83. 1.12.7Julian recalls how Jacob, a penniless exile, served Laban for his wives and grew into a great people whom God saved from Egypt through the prophet Moses, a heritage his descendants have disgraced.
84. 1.12.8Ephraim provoked God to bitter anger and will bear its own blood-guilt, having brought its ruin on itself.
85. 1.13.1Julian traces Israel’s idolatry from Jeroboam’s calves through Ahab’s Baal worship, noting that even after punishment they went on making silver images and urging men to worship calves.
86. 1.13.2Because Israel gave God’s honor to images of cattle, it will vanish like morning cloud, dew, dust, and smoke.
87. 1.13.3God, who freed Israel from Egypt, commanded it to know no other God, for there is no other savior.
88. 1.13.4God knew Israel’s ingratitude already in the wilderness, where it sinned without any bad example to follow.
89. 1.13.5Fed and satisfied, Israel grew proud and forgot God, as the Song of Moses foretold, so that God’s coming vengeance is just.
90. 1.13.6God will fall on Israel like a lion, a leopard, and a bear robbed of her cubs, for Israel had robbed him of the children he had formed.
91. 1.13.7Julian explains ‘your help is only in me’ as a sign of hopeless ruin rather than a rebuke of faith, mocks Israel’s reliance on kings it demanded, and reads the king given and taken away as Israel’s king replaced by the Assyrian.
92. 1.13.8Julian contrasts foolish Israel with Judah, which under Hezekiah was rescued from ‘death,’ the Assyrian army struck down by the angel, and explains how Judah can both mourn and rejoice at Israel’s exile.
93. 1.14.1After the Assyrian’s fall, the prophet wishes ruin on Samaria for forfeiting God’s protection, yet at once calls Israel to return to God in repentance.
94. 1.14.2Israel is to return to God with words of confession, offering the ‘calves of its lips,’ the sacrifice of praise that pleases God more than animals.
95. 1.14.3Israel is to renounce trust in Assyria, horses, and idols, following Judah’s example under Hezekiah, when Jerusalem trusted God against Rabshakeh’s boasts.
96. 1.14.4God promises to heal Israel and make it bloom like the lily and the vine of Lebanon after captivity, as Judah’s deliverance from Assyria already showed.
97. 1.14.5Hosea ends by calling Ephraim from idols to the God who gives life and asking who is wise enough to understand; Julian adds that the promises fulfilled under Hezekiah also signify Christ’s victory over death and the Church’s flourishing.
98. 2.0.1In his preface to Joel, Julian explains that he follows the translation ‘according to the Hebrew,’ whose order of the Twelve Prophets differs from the common edition, and that Joel, having no title, is taken to belong to Hosea’s time.
99. 2.1.1Introduction to the opening of Joel.
100. 2.1.2Julian explains why Joel’s father is named and dismisses the etymologies of names given by some commentators as childish.
101. 2.1.3Joel summons old and young to witness a calamity without precedent; Julian notes that ‘elders’ and ‘inhabitants’ simply mean all who are called to hear.
102. 2.1.4Julian takes Joel’s locusts literally as successive plagues of insects and rejects the reading that makes them the Assyrians, Chaldeans, Macedonians, and Romans.
103. 2.1.5Joel first summons the drunkards, who will feel the famine most, to weep; Julian treats their wailing as the bestial cry of those who never heeded reason or warning.
104. 2.1.6Julian explains Joel’s description of the locusts as a ‘nation’ with lions’ teeth stripping vines and figs bare, a vivid picture meant to rouse saving fear, and the call to mourn like a young widow.
105. 2.1.7The land is to mourn like a widow because the famine has ended the offerings by which the people believed they were joined to God, their husband.
106. 2.1.8Priests mourn because the famine has cut off the offerings, and the whole people grieve as grain, wine, oil, and every fruit tree fail.
107. 2.1.9Joel calls priests and people to a sanctified fast and lament; Julian distinguishes voluntary fasting from the hunger of famine, explains the ‘day of the Lord’ and the burning of the wilderness as the locust plague, and notes that even the beasts look to God for food.
108. 2.2.1Julian explains Joel’s day of darkness and the matchless ‘people’ as images of the vast locust plague, compared now to night, now to dawn spreading over the mountains, and argues that the army is a comparison, not literal soldiers.
109. 2.2.2The locusts consume the land like fire before and behind, turning a garden of delight into a desert.
110. 2.2.3Julian explains the locusts’ likeness to an army as an elaborate comparison, then offers a moral reading in which the four insects stand for the passions of hope, joy, fear, and grief, and applies Joel’s lament to Christians and clergy of his own day who neglect virtue.
111. 2.2.4God calls the people to return with fasting and a torn heart rather than torn garments, since he is merciful and may relent and leave enough for the offerings to continue.
112. 2.2.5Joel orders a solemn fast of the whole people and the priests’ prayer ‘Spare your people,’ and promises that their prayers will be heard.
113. 2.2.6God, zealous for his own honor, spared his people.
114. 2.2.7God promises grain, wine, and oil and the removal of ‘the northerner,’ which Julian again takes as the locusts, driven to die in the desert so that their stench would not harm the people.
115. 2.2.8The land and its animals need fear no longer as fruitfulness returns, but Zion’s chief joy is that God has given it a teacher of righteousness.
116. 2.2.9God will send rain and restore the years the locusts ate; Julian discusses the Septuagint’s ‘as at the beginning,’ explains the locusts as God’s ‘strength’ in judgment, and reads the ‘teacher of righteousness’ as Hezekiah and, more fully, Christ.
117. 2.2.10Peter applied the outpouring of the Spirit to the apostles’ gift of tongues at Pentecost, taking from the prophecy what fitted his own time.
118. 2.2.11Julian holds that Peter used Joel only for the Gospel and that the prophecy also has its historical sense: the outpouring of the Spirit, dreams, and darkened sun and moon describe Judah’s terror and deliverance under Hezekiah, and are fulfilled more fully at Christ’s passion and the end of the world.
119. 2.3.1Returning to his own times, Joel announces that God will judge the nations besieging Jerusalem in the valley of Jehoshaphat and repay those who sold his people.
120. 2.3.2God rebukes Tyre, Sidon, and the Philistines for joining Assyria against Judah and selling its children, and promises a like recompense; Julian insists that such passages are to be read historically and not forced into a spiritual sense.
121. 2.3.3The nations are summoned in mockery to arm themselves for war against Jerusalem, only to be struck down in a single night by the angel.
122. 2.3.4The ‘valley of cutting down,’ where the enemies expected to destroy Judah, becomes the place of their own destruction, as the terror that darkened Jerusalem passes to the Assyrians.
123. 2.3.5Joel’s picture of a holy Jerusalem with mountains dripping sweetness describes the joy of deliverance, and Julian applies it to the Church, kept holy by Christ, and to the apostles, from whom saving teaching flowed like honey, before closing with the judgment on Egypt and Edom and the promise fulfilled in Christ.
124. 3.0.1Introducing Amos, Julian praises a prophet of humble birth who won his place among the prophets, the foundation of the Church, by virtue alone.
125. 3.1.1Julian dates Amos with Hosea and Joel, takes the earthquake two years before as a warning sign, and praises Amos’s humility in naming his work as a herdsman of Tekoa, like Paul’s humility about his revelations.
126. 3.1.2The Lord’s ‘roar’ from Jerusalem is the earthquake, which dried up the pastures and the top of Carmel; Julian mentions the natural theory linking drought and earthquakes but sees God’s power in either case, preferring the literal reading to a tropological one.
127. 3.1.3Julian explains that Amos judges the nations too, to humble Israel’s pride and show that God is Lord of all, that ‘three and four crimes’ means many, and that Damascus will be punished for crushing Gilead.
128. 3.1.4Gaza and the Philistine cities, longtime enemies of Israel who once captured the ark, will be destroyed for handing over whole populations of captives to Edom.
129. 3.1.5Tyre, like Gaza, delivered captives to Edom and forgot the ‘covenant of brothers,’ and will be burned.
130. 3.1.6Edom is condemned for pursuing its brother Israel with the sword and unending hatred, and will be burned, as happened under the Chaldeans and the Maccabees.
131. 3.1.7Ammon, kin to Israel through Lot, is condemned for ripping open pregnant women in Gilead to seize land; its capital Rabbah will burn and its god Milcom go into captivity.
132. 3.2.1Moab is condemned for burning the bones of Edom’s king, showing that God avenges wrongs done to other nations too, not only to Israel.
133. 3.2.2Judah is condemned for rejecting God’s law for idols; the Gentile nations are judged only for crimes against conscience, Judah for betraying the true religion, and Jerusalem was burned by Babylon.
134. 3.2.3Israel is condemned for selling the righteous and the poor, perverting justice, father and son going in to the same girl, and feasting at its altars on garments taken in pledge and wine bought with the price of the innocent.
135. 3.2.4God recalls how he uprooted the giant Amorites, brought Israel through the wilderness, and gave it prophets and Nazirites, whom Israel silenced and corrupted.
136. 3.2.5God, burdened by Israel’s worthless sins like a cart groaning under hay, will roar in judgment, and neither speed, strength, nor arms will save its warriors.
137. 3.3.1Because God chose and taught Israel alone among the nations, he will punish its sins the more strictly: privilege calls for obedience, not impunity.
138. 3.3.2Julian explains Amos’s chain of questions: Israel walked apart from God and lost his company; God now roars like a lion over his prey; the calamities, like a fowler’s snare, come from God, who reveals them first to the prophets, whose nature is the same as others’ but whose conduct sets them apart.
139. 3.3.3The Philistines and Egyptians are summoned as witnesses to Samaria’s oppression and corrupt judges, so that the justice of God’s patience and judgment may be seen.
140. 3.3.4The sentence is pronounced: the land will be besieged and its strength and houses plundered, though not wholly destroyed.
141. 3.3.5As a shepherd snatches a few remnants from a lion’s mouth, God, though judging Israel, will still rescue a remnant from Damascus, as he did when Elisha foretold the lifting of the Syrian siege.
142. 3.3.6God will punish Israel and break the horns of Jeroboam’s altar at Bethel, as the man of God had foretold to Jeroboam, a prophecy fulfilled through Josiah.
143. 3.3.7Israel’s luxurious winter and summer houses and ivory palaces will be destroyed.
144. 3.4.1The ‘fat cows of Samaria,’ the rich who crush the poor to fund their feasts, will be carried off like meat on spits and dragged through breaches in the walls into captivity.
145. 3.4.2God ironically bids Israel go on sacrificing at Bethel and Gilgal, where it has turned the law’s rites to idols, and recalls the famine he sent to correct it, in vain.
146. 3.4.3God sent rain on one city and not another so that Israel would recognize the drought as his judgment, yet Israel did not return.
147. 3.4.4God multiplied plagues of blight, mildew, and caterpillars on Israel’s gardens and orchards, but it still did not return.
148. 3.4.5Julian reads ‘death on the way of Egypt’ either as the wilderness generation’s fate or, better, as the failure of Egypt’s help against Assyria, which brought siege, slaughter, and captivity.
149. 3.4.6Israel was overthrown almost like Sodom yet survived as a brand snatched from the fire; God’s further judgment is meant to bring it to meet its Creator in repentance, since he does not desire the sinner’s death.
150. 3.5.1Before lamenting Israel’s fall, the prophet recalls the Creator’s majesty to show who judges; Julian explains that ‘she will not rise again’ is the language of grief, or refers to those whom captivity destroyed, since restoration is promised elsewhere.
151. 3.5.2Israel’s cities will be reduced to a tenth; Julian explains that the prophets’ threats and promises refer to different stages of a long chastisement and do not contradict one another.
152. 3.5.3God urges Israel to seek him and live rather than the idol shrines of Bethel, Gilgal, and Beersheba, which are doomed; he is ready to be found by those who seek.
153. 3.5.4Israel turned God’s judgment into wormwood and abandoned ‘justice,’ which Julian takes as God himself, the Creator of the stars, of day and night, and of the rain drawn from the sea; he notes that the prophet uses pagan star names without endorsing their myths.
154. 3.5.5The Creator ‘smiles’ destruction on proud Israel, crushing with ease those who boasted of their strength.
155. 3.5.6Israel hated those who rebuked injustice in the gates and plundered the poor, as Ahab seized Naboth’s vineyard; so it will build fine houses and plant vineyards it will never enjoy.
156. 3.5.7Israel’s judges took bribes and crushed the poor; Julian explains ‘enemies of the just’ either as haters of justice or as ‘regular’ enemies of God.
157. 3.5.8Julian explains when a teacher should keep silent: while a people still wishes to learn, he must teach in season and out of season; but when it rejects instruction altogether, silence becomes prudent.
158. 3.5.9The prophet pleads with Israel even now to seek good and do justice, in case God may spare its remnant.
159. 3.5.10Lamentation will fill city and countryside, with professional mourners called in, when God ‘passes through’ Israel in judgment as he passed through Egypt and Sodom.
160. 3.5.11Those who mockingly ‘desire the day of the Lord’ to prove the prophets false will find it a day of darkness in which every escape leads to worse danger, like fleeing a lion only to meet a bear and a serpent.
161. 3.5.12God rejects the feasts, sacrifices, and songs of both Israel and Judah because they are offered without good conduct; his judgment will sweep over them like a torrent.
162. 3.5.13Julian notes Stephen’s use of this passage, rejects Jerome’s view that Israel served idols throughout the forty years in the wilderness, and explains that God’s long delay of punishment, as in the wilderness, is a time for repentance, not a sign that judgment will not come.
163. 3.6.1Julian denounces the wealthy leaders of Zion and Samaria, whose pride is the fruit of ungodliness and who keep up their luxury even as the nation collapses, for ‘the mighty will be mightily tormented.’
164. 3.6.2The leaders are told to compare themselves with neighboring kingdoms content with their lands, for Israel and especially Judah rejoiced to enlarge their estates at the expense of their exiled brothers.
165. 3.6.3The rich feast on ivory couches with choice meat, wine, and music, claiming David’s instruments, yet, unlike David who wept for his people’s future, they feel nothing at Joseph’s ruin and even profit from it.
166. 3.6.4The luxurious who thought themselves safe will be the first led into exile.
167. 3.6.5God swears by ‘his soul,’ an expression suited to human hearers, that he will destroy the proud houses of Jacob so completely that neighbors must come to burn the dead.
168. 3.6.6When the day they mocked arrives, the survivors will fear even to name the Lord; Israel, the greater house, and Judah, the lesser, will both collapse.
169. 3.6.7Israel, which thought itself free and strong like unbridled horses and wild oxen, will be driven over rocks and yoked by its enemies.
170. 3.6.8Israel boasted of horns gained by its own strength, but God will raise a nation to crush it from Hamath to the desert, with Judah soon to follow.
171. 3.7.1Amos’s vision of locusts devouring the late crop is explained as a prophetic image; at Amos’s plea for little Jacob, God relents.
172. 3.7.2The fire that follows the locusts is a passing flame that leaves a remnant; Julian rejects the reading of locusts and fire as Assyrians and Babylonians, since Amos says both were averted.
173. 3.7.3In the vision of the trowel, God will cease ‘plastering’ Israel, withdrawing the protection that held it together; Julian explains that God’s ‘roaring’ is a figure, since passion is foreign to his nature, and that he punishes chiefly by leaving people to their enemies.
174. 3.7.4Amaziah reports Amos’s words to the king; Julian observes that, then as in his own day, common people heed God’s messengers more readily than priests and nobles, who persecute them.
175. 3.7.5Amaziah politely urges Amos to leave Bethel, the king’s sanctuary, and prophesy safely in Judah.
176. 3.7.6Amos replies that he was no prophet by birth but a herdsman called by God, like Paul who sought no human authority, and foretells disgrace, bereavement, and death in exile for Amaziah.
177. 3.8.1The vision of the fruit hook shows that Israel is ripe for judgment: God will no longer pass it by, and its shrines will be broken open amid slaughter and silence.
178. 3.8.2Amos condemns merchants who resent the sabbath’s interruption of their cheating, rig their measures, and exploit famine to buy the poor; those who denied mercy will receive none.
179. 3.8.3God swears never to forget Israel’s deeds, since its frauds spring from proud contempt of his law.
180. 3.8.4The land will tremble and Israel will flow away into Assyria like the Nile, in a time so dark that noon will seem like night.
181. 3.8.5Israel’s feasts and songs will turn to mourning, sackcloth, and baldness, a grief like that for an only son; Julian remarks that captivity is all too familiar in his own times.
182. 3.8.6Julian explains the ‘famine of hearing the word of the Lord’ first as the loss of prophets and teachers in exile, and then as foreshadowing the fate of the Jews after rejecting Christ, which he describes in harsh polemical terms.
183. 3.8.7Those who swore by the idols of Samaria, Dan, and Beersheba will fall and not rise; Julian applies the verse also to the Jews of his time who rejected Christ, whom he likens to the idolaters.
184. 3.9.1Julian takes the altar of Amos’s last vision to be Bethel’s, not Jerusalem’s, explains that greed heads Israel’s sins, and that none of the guilty will escape by flight.
185. 3.9.2There is no escape from God, whether in heaven, the depths, the sea, or captivity, as the psalmist also confessed in praise; God will fix his eyes on the guilty for evil.
186. 3.9.3The God who can melt the whole earth with a touch will make Israel ebb away into captivity like the Nile after its flood.
187. 3.9.4God, enthroned in heaven, chose Israel as his ‘bundle’ or portion on earth, yet provides for all creatures, sending rain from clouds filled at the sea.
188. 3.9.5God reminds Israel that he is God of all nations, who brought the Philistines and Syrians to their lands as he brought Israel from Egypt, and that its privileges do not exempt it from judgment.
189. 3.9.6God will crush the sinful kingdom, yet for the sake of the fathers he will not destroy Israel’s name: Israel will be chastised, the other nations destroyed.
190. 3.9.7God will sift Israel like grain in a sieve so that no righteous ‘pebble’ is lost; only the sinners who denied the prophets’ warnings will die.
191. 3.9.8The promise to raise David’s fallen tent refers historically to the restoration after exile, foreshadowed under Hezekiah, and, as James taught in Acts, to Christ’s body raised from death and the resurrection of the faithful.
192. 3.9.9God promises such abundance that harvest, vintage, and sowing will overlap and even the hills will be farmed.
193. 3.9.10Restored from captivity, Israel will rebuild its cities and enjoy its own vineyards and gardens in peace.
194. 3.9.11God promises to plant Israel in its land for good; Julian explains that the promise depended on Israel’s conduct, which later failed, and is fully realized in the Church at the resurrection.