Amos 5King James Version
Seek ye me, and ye shall live. Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate. Then one of the most famous verses in the prophets: 'But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.' A line Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Amos sings a funeral lament over Israel before it has died. 'The virgin of Israel is fallen; she shall no more rise.' He calls Israel to seek God rather than the corrupt shrines at Bethel and Gilgal, denounces their rigged courts and crushed poor, and then delivers the most famous line in the book: 'Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.' The Day of the LORD, which Israel eagerly anticipates, will be darkness and not light.
God does not want more religious activity from people who practice injustice. He wants justice to flow like water, constant and unstoppable, not performed in ceremonies and then switched off.
"But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." (5:24) Set against the backdrop of Israel's elaborate worship that God says he despises, this verse names the one thing he actually wants: not festivals, not offerings, but a society where justice is as pervasive as a flooding river.
Bethel and Gilgal were the major shrine sites of the northern kingdom, places of active pilgrimage and sacrifice. The city gate was where courts convened and legal disputes were settled. In Israel's corrupt economy, both the religious establishment and the legal system had been captured by wealth. A poor man had no fair hearing at the gate and no honest oracle at the shrine. The society Amos is describing is not godless on the surface: it is religiously active and ethically rotten, which Amos finds worse.
Amos speaks and God speaks in close alternation here. The unnamed bribe-takers in the gate, the men who hate anyone who 'rebukes in the gate' (meaning judges who rule honestly), and the builders of stone houses they will never inhabit are the targets. The prudent man in verse 13 who keeps silence in an evil time is a cameo of what integrity costs in a corrupt society.
Chapter 5 contains the defining theological statement of the book and arguably of the entire prophetic tradition. God's rejection of Israel's feasts, offerings, and music in verses 21 through 23 is not a rejection of worship in principle. It is a rejection of worship as a substitute for ethics. The sequence matters: God lists their religious performances and then says he hates them precisely because they are being used to launder injustice. The Day of the LORD passage shows Israel's theology had drifted into entitlement: they expected divine intervention to vindicate them. Amos reverses it.
The lament in verse 2, 'The virgin of Israel is fallen; she shall no more rise,' is a funeral song sung over a nation that is still alive and still celebrating. The dissonance is deliberate and devastating. Amos is conducting a eulogy for the present tense.
1Hear ye this word which I take up against you, even a lamentation, O house of Israel.
2The virgin of Israel is fallen; she shall no more rise: she is forsaken upon her land; there is none to raise her up.
3For thus saith the Lord GOD; The city that went out by a thousand shall leave an hundred, and that which went forth by an hundred shall leave ten, to the house of Israel.
4For thus saith the LORD unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live:
5But seek not Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not to Beersheba: for Gilgal shall surely go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to nought.
6Seek the LORD, and ye shall live; lest he break out like fire in the house of Joseph, and devour it, and there be none to quench it in Bethel.
7Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth,
8Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The LORD is his name:
9That strengtheneth the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress.
10They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly.
11Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.
12For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.
13Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time.
14Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the LORD, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken.
15Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the LORD God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.
16Therefore the LORD, the God of hosts, the Lord, saith thus; Wailing shall be in all streets; and they shall say in all the highways, Alas! alas! and they shall call the husbandman to mourning, and such as are skilful of lamentation to wailing.
17And in all vineyards shall be wailing: for I will pass through thee, saith the LORD.
18Woe unto you that desire the day of the LORD! to what end is it for you? the day of the LORD is darkness, and not light.
19As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.
20Shall not the day of the LORD be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?
21I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.
22Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts.
23Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.
24But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
25Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?
26But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves.
27Therefore will I cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, saith the LORD, whose name is The God of hosts.