EXEGESIS OF AMOS 1:1-2

An Exegesis of Amos 5:18-27, 2012

E-Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

The book of Amos is among the most studied books in the Bible. The high scholarly interest in Amos is due to the prophet’s emphasis on true religion. Amos’ message cannot be understood without a proper understanding of the context in which it was delivered. Amos ministered in eighth-century Israel when the nation had prospered economically and politically. The nation’s prosperity had yielded a high level of religiosity evident in the payment of tithes, offerings, religious gatherings and singing of hymns. Unfortunately, the religiosity of the people had no positive impact on their social lives. This situation prompted Amos’ prophecy of an impending divine judgment which was to decimate the nation and finally send the people into exile. The purpose of this paper is to explore the contextual issues within which Amos’ message emerged and then compare Amos’ situation with the contemporary Ghanaian socio-religious and political contexts. The paper used literary research methodology as we...

There is certainly no famine for words on the book of Amos. 1 In particular, the religious life of Israel presented in the book continues to be a fertile area of research. This is evident not only in the quantity of works devoted to this issue, but also by the diversity of methodological approaches employed by scholars. Some, for instance, seek to orient Amos visà-vis the development of Israelite religion, bringing diachronic tensions, as well as the material culture to bear on the question. 2 Sociological perspectives, though not necessarily antithetical to this approach, emphasize questions such as the relationship between religion and culture within 1 Certainly, one reason for the scholarly interest in Amos comes from his role as the first of the classical prophets. As Holladay provocatively states, "Like Melchizedek, Amos seems to have been born without benefit of ancestors" (John S. Holladay, "Assyrian Statecraft and the Prophets of Israel," Harvard Theological Review 63, no.

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Cambridge [England]: University Press, 1915. du Preez, Jannie. “‘Let Justice Roll Like....’: Some Explanatory Notes On Amos 5:24.” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 109 (March 2001): 95-98. Elwell, Walter A., and Philip Wesley Comfort. Tyndale Bible Dictionary. Tyndale Reference Library. Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, 2001. Finley, Thomas J. Joel, Amos, Obadiah. Chicago: Moody, 1990. Garrett, Duane A. Amos. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008. Gevirtz, Stanley. “A New Look At An Old Crux: Amos 5:26.” Journal of Biblical Literature 87, no. 3 (1968): 267-76. Gitay, Yehoshua. “A Study of Amos’s Art of Speech: A Rhetorical Analysis of Amos 3:1–15.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 42 (1980): 293-309. Harper, William Rainey. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary On Amos And Hosea. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1905. Hiers, Richard H. “Day of the Lord,” Ed. David Noel Freedman, The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary. New York: Doubleday, 1992. 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2017

The words of Amos still ring out as a challenge thousands of years after first spoken, but it can be hard to hear their power in some English translations. This paper is a first attempt to render first a word-for-word and then a literary approach to a new translation of the first couple of chapters.

This Oxford dissertation offers a fresh redactional analysis of the Book of Amos. It starts with a critical survey of existing approaches and an examination of the methodological issues involved and proceeds with a detailed exegetical analysis of the prophetic text which forms the basis for the redactional conclusions. It steers a middle course between extreme conservative treatments which trace all the material back to the prophet Amos and more radical sceptical approaches which attribute most of the prophetic oracles to the work of later redactors. The composition of the book began with two collections: the Polemical scroll written not long after the end of Amos’ ministry and the Repentance scroll composed shortly before 722 BC. The Repentance scroll was reworked in Judah towards the end of the 8th century BC and the two scrolls were combined to form a single work sometime during the 7th century BC. The Book underwent only one redaction during the exilic period which sought to actualise its message in a new historical context. The study pays special attention to the literary structure, aim and probable historical circumstances of the various collections which gradually evolved into the present Book of Amos and seeks to show how the prophetic message lived on and spoke to the various communities which preserved and transmitted it.

1991

Compares two commentaries on Amos published in the same year and notes among other things their strikingly different reconstructions of the ministry of the historical prophet.