Amos 1:13-2:8 And I will cut off the inhabitant from Ashdod, and him that holds the scepter from Ashkelon, and I will turn my hand against Ekron… The sins Amos condemns in the heathen are at first sight very different from those which he exposes within Israel. Not only are they sins of foreign relations, of treaty and war, while Israel's are all civic and domestic; but they are what we call the atrocities of barbarism — wanton war, massacre and sacrilege; while Israel's are rather the sins of civilisation — the pressure of the rich upon the poor, the bribery of justice, the seduction of the innocent, personal impurity, and other evils of luxury. So great is this difference that a critic more gifted with ingenuity than insight, might plausibly distinguish, in the section before us, two prophets with two very different views of national sin — a ruder prophet, and of course an earlier, who judged nations only by the flagrant drunkenness of their war; and a more subtle prophet, and of course a later, who exposed the masked corruptions of their religion and their peace. Such a theory would be as false as it would be plausible. For not only is the diversity of the objects of the prophet's judgment explained by this, that Amos had no familiarity with the interior life of other nations, and could only arraign their conduct at those points where it broke into light in their foreign relations, while Israel's civic life he knew to the very core. But Amos had besides a strong and a deliberate aim in placing the sins of civilisation as the climax of a list of the atrocities of barbarism. He would recall what men are always forgetting, that the former are really more cruel and criminal than the latter; that luxury, bribery, and intolerance, the oppression of the poor, the corruption of the innocent and the silencing of the prophet — what Christ calls offences against His little ones — are even more awful atrocities than the wanton horrors of barbarian warfare. (Geo. Adam Smith, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And I will cut off the inhabitant from Ashdod, and him that holdeth the sceptre from Ashkelon, and I will turn mine hand against Ekron: and the remnant of the Philistines shall perish, saith the Lord GOD. |
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