AMOS V.

THE DIVINE DEMAND.

"Let justice roll on like water, and righteousness as a perennial stream " (v. 24).

A SPEAKER like Amos compels a hearing, and he introduces his next message, as he had introduced two previous ones (iii. 1, iv. 1), with his imperious "Listen." The burden of this message is essentially the same as that of the others—the doom of Israel is imminent and irretrievable—but this time he clothes it in the form of a dirge. The measure customarily adopted by Hebrew poetry for the expression of lamentation is a couplet in which a line of three accents is followed by a line of two, and Amos's dirge would run something like this:

"Fállen is the vírgin of Ísrael,

     She shall ríse up no móre.

Próstrate she liés on the groúnd,

     With nóne to upraíse her."

We must again remind ourselves that Amos is in all probability addressing a large crowd of worshippers gathered at some such famous shrine as Bethel, Gilgal, or Beersheba, to celebrate some festival. They are fresh from their pilgrimage, the holiday mood is upon them, the country is outwardly prosperous, in this prosperity they see the indubitable proofs of Jehovah's favour; they are gathered to express their homage, and to render Him of their best. But their jubilation is rudely broken by the weird and ominous cadences of Amos's dirge. Judge of their surprise when this unknown man in shepherd's dress stands up before them, with the stern countenance and the strange eyes that seem to look into the far away, and opens his melancholy chant with the word Fallen, which would strike a chill to their hearts.

"Fallen—to rise nevermore—

Is the virgin of Israel."

To a happy and prosperous people like Israel in the middle of the eighth century B.C. such an announcement must have seemed nothing short of monstrous; but to Amos, who saw beneath the glittering surface to the inner corruption, it was inevitable. The nation—here compared, as often in the Old Testament, to a virgin—is in his eyes already as good as dead. She may walk yet a little while with her haughty head erect, but Amos sees her already stretched prostrate upon the ground, and the time for lament has come. Therefore " listen to this word which I take up for a dirge over you." Amos is clearly thinking of the doom of war, for he goes on:

"The cíty that márched forth a thoúsand,

     Shall come báck with a húndred;

And the cíty that márched forth a húndred

     Shall come báck with but tén."

The nation is already dying in any case of moral decay, but, besides, she will be shattered in pieces by the shock of war.

Yet Amos, like all true preachers, has a tender and pitiful heart. He cannot bear to think that the doom he has just announced is really irretrievable. He knows that repentance can do much; and in the hope that hearts are not yet hardened beyond the possibility of repentance, he turns to them appealingly with the words, " Seek Me, and ye shall live." So life was still possible for the dying nation, but only on the condition that she should seek God. What does Amos mean by seeking God? That comes out in a later verse of the chapter (v. 14), where, making a very similar promise, he says, " Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live." The evil which Israel must avoid is chiefly, as we have repeatedly seen, the wanton oppression of the poor; the good which she is urged to follow is the establishing of just relations between the members of society. That is the way of life. But for the people, seeking God meant attending the places of worship. Amos found God in a justly ordered society; the people found Him, or thought they did, in the sanctuaries; but He is not there, says Amos, with almost desperate emphasis—He is not there. " Seek Me, but seek not Bethel," for you will not find Him there. The contrast between the true and the false in religion, between God and the greatly venerated places of worship, could not be more strikingly suggested than in that cutting antithesis, which shows us how deep was his hostility to them, not to say his hatred. Gilgal (if it was the Gilgal near Shechem), Beersheba, and Bethel were hoary with memories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; but neither patriarchs nor sanctuaries could shield the wicked people from the wrath of God. In one of those word-plays so frequent in Hebrew prophecy, and so impossible to translate, Amos announces the doom of impending national extinction, through exile, in words which have been rendered thus—hardly too strongly—"Gilgal shall come to the gallows, and Bethel shall be the devil s." How appalling must such a threat have sounded in the ears of worshippers who were giving God, as they supposed, even more than He asked for, serving Him better than the law prescribed!

Again the prophet turns to the people with a similar appeal and a similar threat, " Seek Jehovah, and ye shall live; lest He send upon you the unquenchable, devouring fire " The passion of Amos's soul is for the establishment of social justice; and his denunciations and threats fall upon the heads of those who frustrate that, whether by incidental cruelty or, as here, by deliberate violation of the principles of equity in the courts of justice. The worst offenders were those who poisoned justice at its source, those who by their venal decisions made it a bitter thing for the poor man when it ought to have been sweet, and who laid righteousness prostrate upon the ground when she ought to have been erect and smiling. It is not truth that they and the wealthy litigants care about, it is a legal victory and a financial gain. " Ye trample upon the poor/ that is the charge which Amos brings against the upper classes of his day with melancholy reiteration. The great city lords, who owned the land, seem to have imposed heavy burdens of taxation upon the poor countrymen in the form of exactions of wheat; and they succeeded in grinding them down so completely, as Isaiah (v. 8) informs us, that the land that had once been theirs had slipped from their fingers, and their masters coolly annexed house after house and field after field. But in a world ruled by the God in whom Amos believes, such things cannot go on for ever, so he boldly declares that the spoilers will be spoiled. The day was not far off when they would be dragged by the violent hands of the enemy away from their palatial houses of hewn stone, which had been built and maintained by the proceeds of iniquity, and away from the pleasant vineyards whose wine had proved a curse. Amos's conception of sin and of God rendered such a doom inevitable; and in the Assyrians there was a power capable of effecting it.

Yet Amos hopes against hope that the doom may be turned; and for the third time he delivers his appeal, quivering with earnestness, to " seek good and not evil, that ye may live." "Seek God," he had said before, "and ye shall live": now he says, "Seek good, and ye shall live." What a suggestive collocation! especially when we find the good defined in the next verse as to " establish justice." Goodness has always covered many kinds of excellence: it includes robust and gentle virtues, active and passive qualities of character. But goodness in Hebrew prophecy has almost always a social colour: in Amos particularly it is the doing of justice in society, the securing of fair play between man and man. No man can live to himself,—we are all members of society,—but the man who would even try to live to himself could not be good, in the Old Testament sense of the term, however many of the passive virtues he might possess. The good man is not merely the man who practises prayer, who avoids intemperance and immorality: he is the man who considers the poor, who does what he can to right the wrongs of society, and to bring in the reign of justice. That is " good ": seek that, and ye shall live; ignore that, and there will be chaos and ruin. cc Seek God," said the prophet, " and ye shall live,"; and if the search for God seem to involve some mystical, remote, perhaps unattainable experience, we shall bring ourselves back again to the solid ground of fact by reminding ourselves that he also said, " Seek good, and ye shall live." We shall find, not all indeed, but something, of God in the search for a juster social order.

But it must be an honest and an earnest search. For the prophet does not say, " Shun the evil, and perform the good," but " Hate the evil, and love the good." This is a profound and searching word. The social problem will never be satisfactorily solved by mechanism, arrangement, legislation alone, but by the creation of a just and generous temper, by the diffusion of an unselfish and public-spirited character which considers the things of others as well as its own. It may be hopefully faced if men have a passion for justice and a horror of wrong, if they hate the evil and love the good, as those terms are understood by Amos. The root of the social problem, as some one has said, is not defective social arrangement, but sin; and no fundamental improvement can be effected by a change in the environment, but only by a change in the men. The prophets have no specific proposals to make for the reconstruction of society. Their aim was to reform the men; this could only be accomplished by means of that worthier view of God and religion which they perpetually strove to enforce; and the reformed men—the men thus re-formed in God—could be trusted to reform the situation. No worthy or permanent transformation of society was possible till all its members learned to hate the evil and love the good.

But, so deeply is Amos convinced of the depravity of his people, and of the certainty of the judgment which that depravity has rendered necessary, that he cannot bring himself to believe that even repentance can altogether avert it. He expresses himself with an almost painful hesitation in which we can detect plainly enough the struggle of his heart with his conscience—the heart which bleeds for his people, with the conscience which is under no illusions as to the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and which knows that all this bribery and cruelty, this intemperance and immorality, this worship of money and pleasure, this manifold and rampant wrong, deserves God's wrath and curse. So, half in hope and half in despair, he only permits himself to assure them that if they hate the evil, if they seek and love the good, if they establish once more the justice they had been systematically trampling under foot, it may be that God will be gracious, and even then gracious only to the remnant: for some terrible judgment is coming—he cannot get away from the thought—worse than the earthquake, the locusts, the drought, the famine—which will sweep most of them away. There may be a remnant to whom He will be gracious, but it will be as the remnants of the sheep when it has been torn to pieces by the lion (iii. 12). These are the accents of a bleeding, broken heart. Still there is this faint " perhaps." " Seek good and not evil, and so"—on these moral terms— "Jehovah will be with you, as ye say." A whole world of dark significance lies in these simple words as ye say. They let us see that Amos was addressing a people who were perpetually assuring themselves that Jehovah would be with them, must be with them, was with them, because they faithfully attended the places of worship and paid their dues and more. No! says Amos, a thousand times no! Not on your ceremonial terms, but on His moral terms: that is, if you seek what is good with all your heart, if you carry the spirit of justice into your social and institutional life—so and no otherwise will Jehovah be with you, as you say. But after faintly trusting this larger hope, the stern prophet speedily falls back again upon the certainty of doom. Through those deep-set eyes of his he sees it steadily advancing over all the land, over the crowded streets and squares of the city, over the large spaces of the country, over the vineyards where men and maids were wont to make so merry; for, as once the destroying angel had passed through the land of Egypt, leaving death in his trail, "so will I pass through the midst of thee, saith Jehovah."

It is terrible, yet there is something more terrible to follow. "Woe unto you," he breaks out suddenly, " who desire the day of Jehovah." The day of Jehovah was one of the primary articles in the popular creed. It was the day of Jehovah's triumph; and, as Jehovah and Israel were supposed to be indissolubly associated, that meant the day of Israel's triumph over all her foes—victory for Israel, judgment for them. Yes, says Amos, judgment indeed, but judgment upon Israel. The day of Jehovah shall break in thunder on your head. The people thought of Him as a national God, bound to defend and preserve them for His own reputation's sake, triumphing if they triumphed, perishing if they perished; the prophet thought of Him as a moral God, bound only to vindicate the moral order and those who co-operated with it; so that Israel who defied that order, as Amos sorrowfully complains, was inevitably doomed—doomed by the very God whom she loudly acclaimed as her own. His triumph meant her destruction. That was what would happen in the great day of Jehovah; yet in their stupidity blinded as they were by a false conception of religion, the people longed for it. " What good will it do you? " Amos pointedly asks—"this day of Jehovah. You imagine it will be a day of light; and so it will,—a day when His justice will shine clear,—but it will be night for you." His day would be Israel's night, unilluminated save by the gleam of Assyrian swords.

Then he goes on to describe the certainty and the terrors of this day of Jehovah in simple images of surpassing power. He takes the familiar facts of his shepherd experience and works them up to a terrific climax. It will be a day of lions and bears and serpents—a day when Israel would be pursued by the most powerful and ghastly things—pursued and seized and bitten. It will be as if a man fled from a lion, and a bear met him; or, escaping from the bear, he reaches the kindly shelter of his house, where, thank God! at last he is safe, and wearily he leans his hand upon the wall, when, horror! a serpent bites him. Two wild beasts, the lion and the bear, one on either side, and poor Israel in the midst, ready to be torn in pieces that will be the day of Jehovah. Or, if by any chance she escapes the wild beasts, the serpent finds her at the last, and bites. There is no ultimate escape. That is Amos's fearful way of suggesting the omnipresence of God, the inexorableness of law, the inevitableness of doom. Woe unto you then who desire the day of Jehovah. What good will the day of Jehovah do you? For it will be darkness and not light, yea, thick darkness, without a glimmer; or if there be a flash, it will only show a serpent on the wall.

Is it any wonder that the people were stung into indignation and fury by so implacable a message? We can imagine them shouting, " It's a lie—a blasphemy and a lie. Look at the sacrifices we are offering to our God—at their number and their quality. Look at the crowds that flock to the sanctuaries—at our fidelity and enthusiasm. Look at the beauty and the splendour of our worship. Watch the noble ritual, and listen to the stately music. And yet you tell us that the God to whom we offer all this costly and devoted service will destroy us. Who but a traitor, a blasphemer, a madman could even dream of such a thing? " Then Amos replies in words of amazing audacity: " I hate, I despise your feasts." One wonders that the man who dared to hurl such a challenge should have escaped with his life; little wonder that men who could speak like that were sometimes persecuted and slain (Matt. v. 1 2,xxiii.29~3 1). In the name of God, the prophet goes on, " I reject your offerings, I care nothing for your fat beasts. Away with your vocal and instrumental music; I refuse to listen to it. These were not the things that I demanded from you long ago in the wilderness, in those good old days, at the beginning of your national history, to which you are so fond of looking back. That never has been and never will be my demand upon men. Then and now and evermore my demand is this, that justice should roll on like water, and righteousness like a perennial stream." These are immortal words; they express in imperishable form the essence of religion, the simple demands of God upon men. The justice, the righteousness for which Amos here pleads is, as we have abundantly seen, a social thing: it is tender regard for the poor, hatred of the evil conditions that have dwarfed their lives (v. 15); it is the spirit which yearns and works for the removal of those conditions; it is, in a word, respect for personality, fair play as between man and man. Let justice, in that sense, run through society, unimpeded by avarice or selfishness or cruelty, let it roll on without let or hindrance like the waves of the sea; let it roll on unintermittently, all the year round, whatever be the political weather; let it roll on " like a perennial stream," which even in the fiercest heat of summer never dries up. That is the true service of God—that, and not a gorgeous ritualistic display; that, and not meal-offerings and fat beasts. There can be no doubt as to what the answer of Amos would have been to the question, " Lord, what wouldst Thou have me to do? "

The answer of the modern prophet is the same. Nothing can be accomplished, says Ruskin, in the Crown of Wild Olive, " unless, first of all, both servant and master are resolved that, come what will of it, they will do each other justice. . . . This is the one thing constantly reiterated by our Master—the order of all others that is given oftenest—'Do justice and judgment.' That's your Bible order; that's the 'Service of God' not praying nor psalm-singing. . . . He likes honest servants, not beggars. So when a child loves its father very much, and is very happy, it may sing little songs about him; but it doesn't call that serving its father; neither is singing songs about God serving God. . . . And yet we are impudent enough to call our beggings and chantings 'Divine Service'; we say 'Divine Service will be performed' (that's our word—the form of it gone through) 'at eleven o'clock.' Alas! unless we perform Divine Service in every willing act of our lives, we never perform it at all. The one Divine work—the one ordered sacrifice—is to do justice; and it is the last we are ever inclined to do." That is precisely Amos's charge against his own generation; and because they did not understand that religion is not a matter of rites and ceremonies, but must express itself in social life, and that the true service of God is the service of the needy, he holds before them the sure prospect of political extinction and captivity at the hand of the Assyrians. " I will cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, saith Jehovah, whose name is the God of hosts."

The truth for which Amos has been pleading with such passion finds a striking echo in these words of one of the greatest of our living English poets:

"When all the choric peal shall end,

     That through the fanes hath rung;

When the long lauds no more ascend

     From man's adoring tongue;

 

When whelmed are altar, priest, and creed;

     When all the faiths have passed;

Perhaps, from darkening incense freed,

     God may emerge at last"