1Thus the Lord Yahweh showed me, and behold, a basket of summer fruit.
2And he said, “What do you see, Amos?” And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then Yahweh said to me, “The end has come upon my people Israel; I will no longer pass them by.”
3“The songs of the temple will wail on that day,” declares the Lord Yahweh. “The corpses are many; in every place he has thrown them out. Silence!”
4Hear this, you who trample the needy and do away with the afflicted of the land,
5saying, “When will the new moon be over, that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath, that we may open up the wheat—making the ephah small and the shekel great, and cheating with deceitful scales,
6to buy the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and to sell the refuse of the wheat?”
7Yahweh has sworn by the pride of Jacob: “Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.”
8Shall not the land tremble over this, and all who dwell in it mourn, and all of it rise like the Nile, be heaved up and sink down like the Nile of Egypt?
9“And it will come to pass on that day,” declares the Lord Yahweh, “that 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 lament; I will bring sackcloth on all loins and baldness on every head. I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and its end like a bitter day.
11“Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord Yahweh, “when I will send a famine on the land—not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of Yahweh.
12They will stagger from sea to sea and from north to east; they will roam about seeking the word of Yahweh, but they will not find it.
13On that day the beautiful young women and the young men will faint from thirst.
14Those who swear by the guilt of Samaria, and say, “As your god lives, O Dan,” and “As the way of Beersheba lives,” they will fall and never rise again.
Open in the interactive reader →