The following is a record of what Amos prophesied. He was one of the herdsmen from Tekoa. These prophecies about Israel were revealed to him during the time of King Uzziah of Judah and King Jeroboam son of Joash of Israel, two years before the earthquake.
Amos said: “YHWH comes roaring out of Zion; from Jerusalem he comes bellowing! The shepherds’ pastures wilt; the summit of Carmel withers” (Amos 1:1-2).
In the eyes of many Israelites, in the days of Jeroboam ben Joash some “southern hick” came up to Bethel and preached a lot of “madness.” Very little of what he said made sense in terms of the world in which they lived. Nothing they had experienced gave them any indication his warnings should be taken seriously. Everything was normal; one could even say Israel had been made great again. So what was wrong with this guy?
We deem the Book of Amos as the third of the twelve books of the “minor prophets,” deemed “minor” because their recorded messages were shorter than those of the “major prophets” Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. But these prophets were not “minor” in terms of the power or importance of their messages; and Amos prepared the way.
Amos was identified as “one of the herdsmen from Tekoa” in Amos 1:1; he would also identify himself as a dresser of sycamore (fig) trees in Amos 7:14. Amos was therefore not among the “sons of the prophets,” which seemed to have been kind of like a guild of prophets in Israel during the days of the kings (e.g. 2 Kings 2:3). Instead, he was a keeper of sheep and sycamore fig trees, probably of some means. He lived in Tekoa in Judah, a village about fifteen kilometers south of Jerusalem, right on the southern edge of the Judean hill country, between a fertile plain to the west and the Judean desert to the east.
Uzziah (or Azariah) ben Amaziah reigned as king of Judah for fifty-two years, somewhere around 800-750 BCE (2 Kings 15:1-7, 2 Chronicles 26:1-23). Likewise, Jeroboam ben Joash reigned as king of Israel for forty-one years, perhaps something like 793-753 BCE (2 Kings 14:23-29). The unknown inspired prophetic editor specifically dated Amos’ prophetic message to “two years before the earthquake” (Amos 1:1). This earthquake was sufficiently memorable enough to be used as a reference in Zechariah’s prophecy in Zechariah 14:5 around two hundred and thirty years later. Earthquakes are prevalent in the Levant; nevertheless, archaeologists have discovered significant evidence of damaged buildings consistent with an earthquake from around this time at many sites in Israel, and have dated the earthquake to within 30 years before or after 750 BCE. Many generally speak of the earthquake as taking place around 760 BCE, and therefore Amos’ prophecies would have been given in 762 BCE. For convenience’s sake, we will speak of the time of Amos and his prophecy as 760 BCE.
While Jonah ben Amittai was most likely an early contemporary of Amos, living and prophesying to Israel around 775 BCE, the Book of Jonah told a story about Jonah, and not the word of YHWH to Israel through him (cf. 2 Kings 14:25, Jonah 1:1-4:11). Amos, therefore, represents for us the oldest among the “major” and “minor” prophets; the messages of all those prophets would follow his both temporally and thematically. Before we delve into the word of YHWH to Amos, we do well to consider the situation of Israel and its people in 760 BCE so we might better understand how and why YHWH spoke through Amos as He did, and why Amos suffered the kind of responses he received.
It can be very challenging for us to understand the world of 760 BCE because it remains very foreign to us on multiple levels. In Greece, the fifth Olympiad took place in 760 BCE, with the Olympic Games having only been founded sixteen years beforehand. If we are to take the legends and myths with any level of seriousness, Romulus and Remus were young men in central Italy who would only work to found the city of Rome seven years later. While Europe was in the Iron Age, and the Phoenicians would have maintained many ports and trade contacts throughout Mediterranean Europe, the Israelites of Amos’ day would have almost no reason to think about them or give them any regard. They were instead in the middle of their world, the world of the ancient Near East, featuring Egypt to the southwest, a series of small kingdoms in the Levant, Luwian-Aramean states in the northern Levant and eastern Anatolia, Assyria in northern Mesopotamia, and Babylon and Elam in southern Mesopotamia.
We can understand why the Israelites of Amos’ day in 760 BCE would have considered the state of affairs of the ancient Near East at the time as their “normal.” It had been no less than four hundred years since the major empires of what we call the Bronze Age experienced systems collapse and were destroyed or faded significantly. Whereas the Mycenaean palatial civilization and Hittite Empire were destroyed, never to return, and Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt were significantly weakened, conditions in the area of the Levant actually improved. Those who accept a later date for the Exodus would suggest the Israelites themselves had conquered Canaan not much earlier than this period; the Philistines and the Arameans would move in to the Levant at this time as well. Many of the nations and peoples in the city-states which had endured for thousands of years in the Levant went through something like what the Israelites went through, and eventually consolidated into various kingdoms.
By 760 BCE, Israel had existed as a kingdom for two hundred and forty years, having been divided into Israel and Judah for around one hundred and seventy of them. Amos would well capture Israel’s “nearby” world in Amos 1:3-2:16: the Aramean kingdom based in Damascus; four Philistine cities; Tyre, a Phoenician city-state; the kingdoms of Edom, Ammon, and Moab; and finally Judah and Israel themselves. By 760 BCE, all of these kingdoms and powers had existed for as long, if not longer, than Israel and Judah themselves.
In 760 BCE, these nations had little to fear from historically larger and more threatening neighbors to their south and north. Egypt was ruled by at least two pharaohs in 760 BCE, Shoshenq V of the 22nd dynasty, and Takelot III of the 23rd dynasty. Shoshenq’s namesake ancestor Shoshenq I had invaded Judah and the Levant around 925 BCE (cf. 1 Kings 14:25-26, 2 Chronicles 12:1-9): it had been the first incursion into the Levant by Egyptian forces in over two hundred years, and it would be the last until well after the days of Amos. Shalmaneser III of Assyria had faced Hadadezer of Aram, Ahab of Israel, and many other kings at the Battle of Qarqar in 853 BCE and imposed a lot of tribute upon the Arameans and Jehu king of Israel; in 760 BCE Shalmaneser’s great-grandson, Ashur-dan III ruled on the throne, but was so limited by challenges in his court and the power of his nobles that we know very little about him. In Babylon, Nabû-šuma-iškun reigned; the city was embroiled in civil war and he would be later known best for the crimes and sacrileges he supposedly committed.
Therefore, in 760 BCE, things seemed to be going on in Israel just as they had for hundreds of years. Egyptian domination of the Levant was a thing of the distant past; Assyrian incursions perhaps had taken place more recently, but were still infrequent and not a significant concern at this particular moment. All the kingdoms of the Levant would either be allying with or fighting against one another as is manifest throughout the books of the Kings and Chronicles.
760 BCE in particular was a fantastic time for both Israel and Judah. Uzziah and Jeroboam both lived for a long time and oversaw stability and prosperity. Whereas Hazael of Aram had ravaged Israel in a previous generation, Jeroboam had been able to re-conquer all the lost land and to restore Israel to its historic boundaries and beyond, asserting military dominance over Damascus and Hamath (cf. 2 Kings 14:25-28). In 760 BCE, things seemed to be looking up for the Kingdom of Israel. They had come out of a period of weakness and domination at the hands of the Arameans and were now ascendant, perhaps even the most dominant power in the southern Levant.
This is the Israel to which Amos would go and speak the word of YHWH: a people in relative ease and prosperity, not terribly bothered by the oppression and exploitation of the poor and marginalized among them, certainly confessing YHWH as the God of Israel, but not fully dedicated to Him or to His purposes. Everything was continuing as it had been for hundreds of years. Sometimes YHWH had compassion on His people or favored them and gave them victory over their enemies. Sometimes YHWH would be angry with His people and give victory to their enemies instead. And so it went for all of the other local nations and their gods. And we can assume most Israelites expected such things to continue well into the future.
What the Israelites of 760 BCE did not know, but what Amos warned about and what we can understand through historical investigation, was how they were living at the end of the “good old days.” No doubt the earthquake which would take place two years later caused great devastation and destruction. Jeroboam ben Joash would die somewhere around 750 BCE; his son Zechariah would reign only six months before being deposed, and over the next thirty years, Israel would have five kings from four dynasties (2 Kings 14:29-17:6). In 744 BCE, Tiglath-pileser III of Assyria would take over the throne, and he would eliminate Aram as a going concern and reduce Israel to a rump state in 732 BCE (2 Kings 15:29). Ten years later, his sons Shalmaneser V and Sargon II would finish off the Kingdom of Israel, whose inhabitants would be exiled to Assyria, and all according to the word of YHWH delivered by Amos forty years earlier (2 Kings 17:1-6). This means there would have been at least some people who experienced Assyrian domination who had heard Amos warn them about such things in Bethel thirty or forty years earlier. Everything had gone on as usual until it did so no longer. And it all changed within a human generation.
Such was only the beginning. The Assyrians would go on to establish the first great empire worthy of the name, but would be thoroughly destroyed and eliminated as a going concern by the Chaldean Babylonians and Medes by 609 BCE (cf. Nahum 1:1-3:19). Those same Babylonians would exile almost all the inhabitants of Judah and destroy Jerusalem and its Temple by 586 BCE (cf. 2 Kings 25:1-21). The world Israel enjoyed in 760 BCE had existed for approximately two hundred and fifty years; by 510 BCE, two hundred and fifty years after the days of Amos, both Babylon and Egypt had themselves been eliminated as going concerns, with the whole of the ancient Near East subsumed under the Persian Empire. Nations which had existed as independent kingdoms for two thousand years or more, sometimes enjoying great power and prestige as empires, were gone. Empires would dominate the land until within living memory.
Thus Israel in 760 BCE was enjoying the “good old days.” They naively assumed everything would continue the way it had. In human and earthly terms, they would have no basis upon which to expect otherwise or to be prepared for what was about to happen to them. But YHWH was about to roar from Zion, and it would cause great environmental devastation (Amos 1:2). If Israel heeded the word of YHWH, they may have been able to persevere and endure. But they would not, and they would suffer the consequences.
To this end, we can greatly appreciate and prize the word of YHWH to Amos: the Israelites might have held such a “southern hick” in contempt, but every word which he spoke would find its fulfillment, mostly within a generation of its delivery. There was nothing about Assyria or Egypt or anything else in 760 BCE which Amos could have seen in order to declare such things. YHWH’s message through Amos heralded a drastically new and different world for which Israel and Judah had no past experience on which to draw. The prophetic word was confirmed, and we do well to give heed to the voice of God in Christ through the Spirit, and serve Him well so we might obtain the resurrection of life in Him!
Ethan R. Longhenry