Amos 8: Summary, Key Verses and Study Questions

The Lord shows Amos a basket of summer fruit and asks what he sees. Amos answers, and the Lord tells him that the end has come for his people Israel and that he will no longer pass them by. In Hebrew, summer fruit and end sound almost the same, and the image says Israel is ripe for judgment. On that day the songs of the palace will turn to wailing, there will be many dead bodies in every place and silence will reign.

Then Amos turns to those who trample the needy and bring the poor of the land to an end. They ask when the new moon will be over so they can sell grain, and the Sabbath so they can open the wheat, to make the ephah small, the shekel great and cheat with dishonest scales. They buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and sell even the chaff of the wheat.

The Lord swears by the pride of Jacob that he will never forget any of their deeds. Therefore the land will tremble and all who dwell in it will mourn; it will rise like the Nile, heave and sink like the river of Egypt. On that day the sun will go down at noon and the earth will darken in broad daylight. Their feasts will turn into mourning and all their songs into lamentation; the Lord will bring sackcloth on every waist and baldness on every head, and it will be like mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day.

Days are coming when the Lord will send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They will wander from sea to sea and from north to east to seek the word of the Lord, but they will not find it. On that day the beautiful young women and the young men will faint for thirst. Those who swear by the guilt of Samaria, who say as your god lives, O Dan, and as the way of Beersheba lives, will fall and never rise again.

Amos 8 unmasks a religiosity that respects holy days but spreads injustice through the rest of the week. In a Sunday school class you can ask whether our honesty at work, in business and in dealing with the poorest looks like what we show on Sunday.

The warning about a famine of God's word reminds us what is a blessing today: having access to the Bible, a church that teaches it and people who pray over it with us. Valuing that abundance leads us to read it hungrily, to share it with those who lack it and not to take it for granted.