TEXT [Commentary]

  D.   How Terrible for Those Anxious for the Day of the Lord (5:18-27)

18 What sorrow awaits you who say,

“If only the day of the LORD were here!”

You have no idea what you are wishing for.

That day will bring darkness, not light.

19 In that day you will be like a man who runs from a lion—

only to meet a bear.

Escaping from the bear, he leans his hand against a wall in his house—

and he’s bitten by a snake.

20 Yes, the day of the LORD will be dark and hopeless,

without a ray of joy or hope.

21 “I hate all your show and pretense—

the hypocrisy of your religious festivals and solemn assemblies.

22 I will not accept your burnt offerings and grain offerings.

I won’t even notice all your choice peace offerings.

23 Away with your noisy hymns of praise!

I will not listen to the music of your harps.

24 Instead, I want to see a mighty flood of justice,

an endless river of righteous living.

25 “Was it to me you were bringing sacrifices and offerings during the forty years in the wilderness, Israel? 26 No, you served your pagan gods—Sakkuth your king god and Kaiwan your star god—the images you made for yourselves. 27 So I will send you into exile, to a land east of Damascus,[*]” says the LORD, whose name is the God of Heaven’s Armies.

NOTES

5:18 What sorrow. The repetition of the Hebrew interjection hoy [TH1945, ZH2098] (woe) in 5:18 and 6:1 marks 5:18-27 as a distinct rhetorical unit. Three different sources have been suggested as the background for the literary form of the woe oracle: the curse of the prophetic judgment speech, the funeral lament, and the instruction of the Hebrew wisdom tradition (perhaps as a foil to the term “blessed”). The most likely source for the woe oracle is the funeral lament, suggesting that the recipients of the woe oracle(s) are dead already (cf. G. Smith 2001:323). Often the woe oracle signifies a divine curse that precludes any further opportunity for repentance, so it seems best to understand the literary form as a variation of the prophetic judgment-speech (cf. Westermann 1991:189-194). Amos seems to blend the message of doom characterized by the woe oracle with the warning of the judgment-speech calling for repentance by both announcing the certainty of Israel’s destruction (3:12-15; 4:12; 5:16-17) and offering some glimmer of hope for any remnant of Israel who repent and renew covenant relationship with Yahweh in the aftermath of divine judgment (5:4, 6, 15). Jesus used the woe oracle as a form of prophetic judgment-speech against the Pharisees (Matt 23).

day of the LORD. The phrase refers to the “eschatological day” of divine intervention in history that brings both judgment of the wicked and deliverance and restoration of the righteous. It is a day of cosmic upheaval and reversal, a day of theophany (an appearance of the Lord) and holy war against the pagan nations. The “day of the LORD” is an indefinite period of time of divine activity, but always an impending event. Amos is the earliest prophet that the OT records using the expression “day of the LORD” (yom yhwh [TH3117/3068, ZH3427/3378]); see the discussion in S. M. Paul 1971:182-184. He cursed those Hebrews who longed for the day of Yahweh because they assumed it was a day of deliverance and blessing for the people of God (5:18-20). It is clear from the teaching of later Hebrew prophets that the day of the Lord was also one of testing and purification for the righteous as well (cf. Joel 2:1-11; Zech 14:1-3; Mal 3:1-5).

darkness . . . light. The day of the Lord will be the exact opposite of what the people of Israel were wishing would happen. Hubbard (1989:179) notes that here the contrast of light and darkness is not one of righteousness versus wickedness but of safety versus disaster.

5:19 lion . . . bear . . . snake. The prophet’s nightmarish parable conveys the certain fact that coming disaster is inescapable.

5:21 hate. The word sane’ [TH8130, ZH8533] (hate) has the sense of “despise” or “reject” in covenantal contexts such as this. The word is the antonym of the verb “to love” (’ahab [TH157, ZH170]). The two terms are used as a polar word-pair in OT legal and prophetic texts (e.g., 5:15; Deut 7:9-10). The expression “hate” describes the “formal renunciation or severance of a relationship” (Andersen and Freedman 1989:525).

5:22 burnt offerings. This type of sacrifice (‘olah [TH5930, ZH6592]) was a sin offering in which the entire animal was consumed by fire upon the altar (Lev 1). It symbolized total homage to God and was intended to effect atonement for personal sin (Lev 1:3-4).

grain offerings. This type of sacrifice (minkhah [TH4503, ZH4966], “gift”) was a gift of cereal or meal presented as a general thank-offering for the firstfruits of the soil (Lev 2).

peace offerings. This type of sacrifice (shelem [TH8002, ZH8968]) required the offering of an animal, portions of which were shared in a fellowship meal by the priest and the family of the worshiper as a symbol of their devotion to God and communion with one another (Lev 3).

5:23 hymns of praise. Singing was essential to Hebrew worship (see Stuart 1987:354-355). Songs of praise to God sung by worshipers who engaged in various acts of social injustice were only so much “noise” (hamon [TH1995, ZH2162], “acoustic din, dissonance”) to God.

harps. The “harp” (nebel [TH5035A, ZH5575]) was commonly associated with the music that accompanied Hebrew worship (cf. 1 Chr 13:8; 15:16; 25:1). According to Hubbard (1989:182), “the precise size and structure of the harp we cannot tell. It may have had a curved yoke with a bulging, jar-like sound-chamber.”

5:24 justice . . . righteous living. According to Hubbard (1989:168), the terms “justice” (mishpat [TH4941, ZH5477]) and “righteousness” (tsedaqah [TH6666, ZH7407]) “have to do with covenantal responsibilities, and are close to being synonymous . . . justice puts some slight emphasis on establishing and preserving order in society by righting wrongs and punishing wrong-doers, while righteousness emphasizes the relationships that covenantal society entails and insists that each partner in the covenant do all that is necessary to keep the covenant working right.” See notes on 5:7.

5:25 forty years in the wilderness. This is the second reference to the desert experience of the Hebrews following the Exodus (cf. 2:10). The period of Israelite wilderness wanderings after their deliverance from slavery in Egypt is sometimes portrayed as the ideal expression of covenant relationship between Yahweh and Israel (cf. Jer 2:1-3). Smith and Page (1995:114-116) suggest, however, that the idolatry rebuked by Amos was a problem for the Hebrews in the wilderness as well; this is the view the NLT rendering of 5:25-26 indicates.

5:26 Sakkuth . . . Kaiwan. According to Andersen and Freedman (1989:533-534), both names are astral deities and both represent the same celestial body—the planet Saturn. Moses had warned the Israelites against the seductive appeal of such astral worship, prevalent among the people groups of the ancient Near East (Deut 4:19). The passage demonstrates that the idolatry of Mesopotamia had infiltrated the religious life of Israel (cf. Hubbard 1989:185-186).

5:27 exile. See note on 5:5.

Damascus. The Assyrian empire (responsible for the exile of the Hebrew northern kingdom of Israel; cf. 2 Kgs 17:5-23) was located east of Damascus.

COMMENTARY [Text]

The apostle John wrote that “God is love” (1 John 4:16). That God is love implies that he consistently acts with benevolence, goodwill, and compassion in response to his creation. God’s love is supremely demonstrated in the Christ-event: “This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins” (1 John 4:10). “Consequently love is of all terms the one most directly attributable to God as essential to God’s being” (Oden 1998:118).

The word “hate” (5:21) is a harsh term, especially when used of God’s response to the human beings he created. The fact that “God is holy” (Ps 99:9; Isa 6:3), however, means that divine “hate” is the necessary corollary of divine love (cf. TDOT 1.102). E. Jacob (1958:90) discerns that as a result of the unity of the Godhead, both Yahweh’s love and hate issue from his holiness—so much so that “the entire history of Israel is the work of [God’s] holiness.” Both are absolute and unconditional, in the sense that God does not love or hate by degrees—it is a matter of love or no love, hate or no hate. For this reason God hates evil and evildoers (Pss 5:5; 31:6). He has also vowed to punish all who oppose him in their wickedness, whether the nations (Pss 7:8; 94:10; Jer 25:15-16) or his own people Israel (5:15; Zech 7:13-14).

The covenant context of Amos’s message indicates that God’s “hatred” of Israel’s worship (5:21) is to be understood as divine rejection. The word “hate” depicts “the hostility of a broken covenant relationship” (Andersen and Freedman 1989:545). By virtue of their idolatry (5:5-6), Israel’s worship lacked the character and integrity worthy of the Lord who created the stars (5:8). God had no choice but to reject their insincere and duplicitous worship as “hypocrisy” (5:21). The lesson in all this, now as then, is that God is faithful to the relationships he establishes and he expects the same from those bound to him in covenant trust. God hates betrayal of any kind, whether in human relationships like marriage (God hates divorce, Mal 2:16) or in the spiritual relationship of redeemed creatures responding in worship to their Redeemer (5:21-23). The faithlessness of such betrayal is antithetical to the nature and character of God, who is ever faithful to his covenant word (Exod 34:6; Pss 25:10; 40:11).

Yahweh’s rejection of hypocritical worship is not peculiar to the message of Amos. For example, the prophet Isaiah decried the worship of Judah as “meaningless” and “false” (Isa 1:11-17), and Malachi wished that the Temple doors might be boarded up rather than have the people offer their contemptible sacrifices to God (Mal 1:10). Nor is the message of hypocritical worship restricted to the old covenant, given Paul’s stern warning that the Christian “cannot drink from the cup of the Lord and from the cup of demons” (1 Cor 10:21). In light of Amos’s message, then, John’s admonition is all the more germane: “dear children, keep away from anything that might take God’s place in your hearts” (1 John 5:21; cf. TNIV, “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols”). M. J. Dawn (1995:41-56) aptly reminds us that idolatry need not be restricted to carved images of metal or stone or wood, but includes “contemporary idolatries” such as the god of efficiency, the god of choice, the idolatry of money, the idolatry of complacency, the idolatry of famous people, the god of competition, the idolatry of success, and the idolatry of power.