and she cherished that belief with all her heart. Yahweh was her God, and she his people; Yahweh had therefore blessed her and would continue to do so. As Yahweh’s own people she might face the future without fear and even look forward with confidence to the Day of Yahweh (5:18), when he would intervene in history to judge his foes and establish his rule upon earth. Why should Israel not be confident? Is not the establishment of God’s rule the establishment of his people? And the Israelite state is the people of God.
In short, the whole notion of covenant and election had been made a mechanical thing, the deeply moral note inherent in it blurred and obscured. It had been forgotten that the covenant was a bilateral obligation, requiring of its people the worship of Yahweh alone and the strictest obedience to his righteous law in all human relationships. Or if the obligation was remembered at all, it was imagined that lavish sacrifice and loyal support of the shrines discharged it. The bond between God and people was thus made into a static, pagan thing based on blood and cult—a total perversion of the covenant idea. And religion was accorded an altogether pagan function: to coerce the favor of God by the sedulous manipulation of the ritual so that protection and material benefit might be secured for individual and nation.
Amos totally rejected this mechanized notion of the covenant. But this did not involve either Amos or any of the other prophets in a rejection of the belief that Israel was a chosen people. On the contrary, they affirmed it again and again. Indeed it seemed to Amos that the whole national past had been no less than a history of God’s grace—a grace repaid by the grossest ingratitude (2:9-12). But to be chosen, said Amos, is not to be pampered; it is to shoulder double responsibility. To sin against the light of grace is felony compounded, nay capital crime. All nations, Israel included, stand equally before the bar of God’s justice (chs. 1–2). There are no pet nations, elite races: “Are you not just like Ethiopia’s sons to me, sons of Israel? . . . Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt—and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Arameans from Kir?” (9:7.) Election is for responsibility. With what logic, and yet a logic so hard for favored people to grasp, Amos reasons (3:2)! He moves from plain premise to unheard-of conclusion. This is the premise: “Only you have I known (i.e., chosen) of all the families of the earth.” And this is the inexorable conclusions: “Wherefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities”!
But in saying this Amos is only harking back from a perverted notion of the covenant to the true one. The people of God is a community knit to one another by its bond with the covenant God. It is a brotherhood, for within it all human relationships are regulated by the righteous law of that God; and all stand equally under that law. The covenant is not mechanical and in the nature of things; it is a bilateral, moral agreement and can be voided. Mistreatment of the brother voids it, for he who crowds his brother spits on the law of God and, in that fact, does not keep covenant with him. In short, Israel is the people of God, but only as she keeps his law and exhibits his righteousness. Because Israel has not done so, but has egregiously violated the covenant brotherhood, Israel is no true people of God!
It is in the light of this theology that we must understand Amos’ ethical preaching. It is important that we note this, for it is too often missed. We take the ethical attack without the idea pattern upon which it was marshaled, and that attack becomes a noisy, angry thing—and Amos something he was not at all. He was no revolutionary summoning the downtrodden masses to the barricades. He was no humanitarian, moved by the plight of the poor, who advanced a program of social reform designed to cure the national malady. He was—let us not mistake it—no teacher of a new ethic which would ultimately, so the handbooks used to tell us, tame the rough-and-ready morality of the people and lift them to the heights of ethical monotheism. Amos was no innovator, but a man of the ancient ways. His ethical protest was drawn from a well five hundred years deep. His were the ethics of the Decalogue; of Nathan, who called David a murderer to his face (II Sam. 12:1-15); of rugged Elijah coming down to Jezreel to meet his enemy Ahab and curse him for his crime against Naboth (I Kings 21). Yet for all his roots in the past, Amos was no Nazirite, no Rechabite, who thought to cure the ills of society by a flight to a past that never was. Amos was plainly and simply a man of the covenant who denounced all greed, immorality, and social iniquity as a sin against the covenant God. He advanced no cure for the schism of society save a restoration of the covenant brotherhood which had created Israelite society in the first place:
Seek good and not evil, that you may live;
And so Yahweh God of Hosts may be with you, as you say he is.
(5:14)
3. Just here is the tremendous contribution of Amos to the notion of the Kingdom of God apparent. With Amos the rejection of that blasphemous identification of the people and the Kingdom of God with the Israelite state had become total. Resistance to that identification, as has been said, was not new. It went back to the ancient feeling that the monarchy was not God’s order and, even if looked upon as a tolerable and necessary order, was to be brought into line with God’s order. It was this feeling that was behind purge after purge, revolution and attempted revolution, which had torn the body politic of Israel for generations. But heretofore the hope had persisted that the state could be made God’s order, or at least driven into some conformity with it, by political action. Amos quite gave up any hope of this. Indeed, after Jehu’s horror any sensible man might. It is true that Amos was taken for a revolutionary, another nābî’ plotter preaching sedition against the state (7:10-13), but his indignant denial (7:14-15) is borne out by the facts. Here is a new thing: never again, so far as we know, did a prophet seek to reform the state by direct political action.
But we certainly cannot see in this any lessening of tension with the state, but rather a heightening of it. There is no attempt to purge the state, because the state is beyond external correction. It is under the judgment of God. The bond between Israel and God has been broken; idolatry, gross immorality, and unbrotherly greed on a nationwide scale have broken it. “Call his name Lo-ammi, for you are not my people and I will not be your God,” said Hosea (1:9). And since Israel has parted company with God, is truly no longer his people, all her exuberant confidence in the future is a false confidence. She has no future but utter and inescapable ruin. Thus it was that Amos leaped upon the popular desire for the Day of Yahweh, the day when Yahweh would intervene in history to establish his rule and to judge his foes. Israel has nothing to hope for from that day—for Israel is herself among Yahweh’s foes:
Ah you that eagerly desire the Day of Yahweh,
What do you want with the Day of Yahweh?
it is darkness, not light;
As if a man were fleeing from a lion,
and a bear attacks him;
Or were to come home and lean his hand on the wall,
and a snake bites him.
Is not the Day of Yahweh darkness and not light,
even black darkness with not a ray of light in it?
(5:18-20)
Here is the most shockingly novel note in all eighth-century prophecy: that God can and will cast off his people. This note runs through Amos’ preaching and rises to a thundering crescendo: “Behold, the eyes of Lord Yahweh are on the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth” (9:8a). God has rejected the Israelite state, and has rejected it totally.
This meant that the hope of the establishment of the Kingdom of God—the hope embodied in the dream of the Day of Yahweh—began to be divorced from the Israelite state and driven beyond it. The northern kingdom is under sentence of death; Israel’s hopes can never be fulfilled in terms of that kingdom. If we had to put Amos’ message in a word, might we not paraphrase it thus? The Kingdom of Israel is
