The Father Shows the End Is Near
A basket of summer fruit means ripe, and the end has come. Merchants impatient for the Sabbath to end so they can cheat with short measures are named. The coming famine is not of bread but of hearing our Father's words.
8 1This is what the Sovereign Father showed me: a basket of summer fruit.
2He said, "Amos, what do you see?" I said, "A basket of summer fruit." Then our Father told me, "The end has come for my people Israel; I will never again pass them by." a a v2 In the prophet's tongue, "summer fruit" and "the end" sound nearly alike — the ripe fruit of harvest becomes a picture of a people ripe for judgment.
3"The songs of the temple will turn to wailing in that day," declares the Sovereign Father. "So many corpses, flung down everywhere—silence!"
4Hear this, you who trample the needy and do away with the poor of the land, 5saying, "When will the new moon be over, so we can sell grain? When will the Sabbath end, so we can open the wheat market—making the measure small and the weight large, and cheating with dishonest scales, 6buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat?"
7Our Father has sworn by the pride of Jacob: "I will never forget any of their deeds. 8Will not the land tremble for this, and all who live in it mourn? It will all rise like the Nile, be churned up, and sink again like the Nile of Egypt. 9On that day," declares the Sovereign Father, "I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. 10I will turn your festivals into mourning and all your songs into a dirge. I will put mourning clothes on every waist and shave every head. I will make it like mourning for an only son, and its end like a bitter day. 11The days are coming," declares the Sovereign Father, "when I will send a famine on the land—not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing my words. 12They will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of our Father, but they will not find it. 13In that day the beautiful young women and the young men will faint from thirst. 14Those who swear by the Guilt of Samaria, who say, 'As your god lives, Dan,' and, 'As the way of Beersheba lives'—they will fall, never to rise again." b b v14 The Guilt of Samaria is the golden calf idol Jeroboam set up at Bethel.
