ETERNAL, the God of hosts, may be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.

12. Therefore thus saith the ETERNAL, the God of hosts, and our Lord, In all streets wailing, and in all highways let them say Woe, Woe, and call the husbandman to mourning, and for wailing to the skilled in dirges; and in all vineyards let wailing be, for I am passing through thy midst, saith the ETERNAL.

13. Woe to them that desire the day of the ETERNAL. For what end is this to you ?? The day of the ETERNAL is darkness, and not light. As when a man fleeth before the lion, and the bear meets him, and he goeth into the house, and leaneth his hand upon the wall, and the serpent bites him. So is not the day of the ETERNAL darkness, and not light; and it has gloom and no brightness?

14. I hate, I reject your festivals, and breathe not incense in your congregations. Surely, when ye offer me whole burnt-offerings and your oblations, I take no pleasure, and the peace-offering of your fatlings I do not gaze upon.

15. Take away from me the sound of thy chantings, and I will not listen to the melody of thine instruments. 16. But let judgment roll as waters, and righteousness as a perennial stream.

7 Is this to you? Or, For what profit is the day of the Lord to you? It is darkness, and not light.

12. So, instead of preaching, wailing: God sends them judgment, passes, dealing doom through their midst.

13. The undecided and half-hearted who wait for Providence, and wish God to reveal himself, will find his revelation more practically terrible than they think.

14, 15, 16. Their sacrifices of blood, and burning incense, move not the Father of our spirits. Their chanted

17. Did you bring nigh to me sacrifices and oblation in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel, and did you afterwards bear the tent of your false king, and the image of your idols, the star of your god whom you made for yourselves?

18. So do I transport you farther than Damascus, saith the ETERNAL, whose name is the God of hosts.

• Did you offer, &c. Or, You brought nigh to me the sacrifices, &c., and yet love the tent of your Moloch. Or, Did you bring nigh to me sacrifices, &c.? Nay, you bare rather the tent of your Moloch. Tent of your king; or statue of your king, i.e. of your Moloch: and so the strictest Hebraists, refusing to take Siccoth as Succoth, but finding in it the Chaldee Sicetha (p) & rude club-like statue, or Fetich log. Or Siccoth may be imagined a name proper to some idol.—Image of your idols. Or Chiun your idols, joining Chiun with Siccoth, as two idolatrous titles. Those who adopt this view take Chiun as Arabic or Persian for the planet Saturn, and this is the view of perhaps the highest authorities. So the Syriac, and so Aben Ezra ; (but not Jerome's master, as regards the word at least). Granting neither Siccoth the truest Hebrew form for Tent, nor Chiun for Image, I think the deflection not greater than a dialectic variation in an adopted and archaically consecrated term may account for; and I find ample authorities for on the whole the simplest rendering. Why the LXX. (followed in Acts vii. 43), changed Chiun into Remphan or Paipav, seems rather traceable to a mistake than to an Egyptian word, of which no proof is given. I do not doubt the verse begins interrogatively: "Numquid hostias obtulistis ?" The latter half runs in the Vulgate," Portastis tabernaculum Moloch vestro, et imaginem idolorum vestrorum, sidus dei vestri.”—Comp. White's Pocock, H.A., p. 103.

anthems are no melody to him. ness please more the Judge of the

Right dealing and fairwhole earth.

17, 18. They had pleased God without any sacrifices for forty years in the wilderness (whether the so-called Mosaic ritual did not then exist, or could not, in the scarcity of the desert, be obeyed :) and they might please him now by righteousness and mercy more than by a pompous worship, which, if done without practical righteousness, Jehovah counts as so much idolatry of Moloch or Saturn.

So far one way of taking this most doubtful passage. But better perhaps : The Israelites had offered sacrifices

V.

1. Woe to the slumberers in Zion, and to the confident in the mount of Samaria, the men of mark of the chief of the nations, and to whom the house of Israel come, [saying]1

' LXX. Οὐαὶ τοῖς ἐξουθενοῦσι Σιών . . . . ἀπετρύγησαν ἀρχὰς ἐθνῶν καὶ εἰσῆλθον αὐτοί. It is hard to suppose they had our text before them -Το whom the house, &c. Vulg. Ingredientes pompaticè domum Israel.

to Jehovah forty years, &c., and yet strangely inconsistent or forgetful, had forsaken him after all for Moloch or Saturn. So will he forsake them to a farther exile than their occasional losses by prisoners of war to Syria involved.

Or thirdly, but not so probably: The Hebrews had not worshipped Jehovah forty years long as they ought, but rather Moloch and Saturn, being a rebellious seed from the beginning: and ever leaving the ETERNAL SPIRIT, TRUE BEING, GOD WHO IS WISDOM, GOODNESS, TRUTH, for sensuous, and more visibly personal, signs, symbols, stars, the so-called king of heaven, worshipped with blood, &c. This last way suits St. Stephen's quotation in Acts vii. 42, 43, as far as the spirit of his argument goes.

So the passage may mean one of three, if not four, things: (a) it imputes, without blaming, neglect of sacrifice of old: (b) it acknowledges sacrifice offered, but blames subsequent defection: (c) or it imputes as a sin, and as a mode of inherent backsliding, the neglect of sacrifices ordained, and the preference of false, sensual, deities.

If the first is preferred, no certain argument can be drawn from it against the early date of the Mosaic law, though some presumption may; nor if the third is preferred, is the argument very strong in favour of an early date of the law. Jeremiah vii. 22, has been compared: but need not mean more than God's preference of mercy to ritual, as in Hosea, vi. 6. On the whole, it is probable,

2. Pass over to Calneh, and see, and go from thence to the great Hamath ; or go down to Gath of the Philistines, and ask, are they better than these kingdoms, or is their border larger than your border ?2

3. [Woe to them] that move the evil day afar, and ye that bring the seat of violence nigh: that recline upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat lambs out of the flock, and calves out of the fattening stall:

4. Who modulate the mouth of the lute, and like David invent for themselves instruments of song: drinkers with goblets of wine, and who anoint themselves with the prime of unguents, but are not disturbed at the crash of Joseph.

5. Therefore they shall go captive at the head of captives, and the luxury of the recliners shall be removed.

'I consider verse 2, as the flattering confidence of the house of Israel addressing its chieftains. The reply of Jehovah comes below, verse 6. 3 Goblets, or bowls, lit. sprinkling censers. Crash, or wound.

↑ Recliners, the same Hebrew word as stretch themselves, in v. 3.

Mosaic traditions were known to Amos, rather than the complete Pentateuch. In any case, St. Stephen's citation of Damascus as Babylon, Acts vii. 43, is an instructive and valuable instance of the adaptation of prophecies by citation or tradition.

1-3. Alas for those who trusting in Samaria's strength, and perhaps in Zion's (or else mocking at the sanctity and teaching of Zion,) fancy the evil day afar off, while their flatterers say, we are as good as Calneh (whether a little town on the Euphrates, or the same as Ctesiphon and Seleucia on the Tigris,) and as good as Hamath, the great Syrian town now tributary to Israel, and as good as Gath, the Philistines' pride.

3-6. Was it for such insolent men as these that shepherds such as Amos, had fed the lambs of their flock?

6. By his own life hath the Lord, the ETERNAL, sworn, is the saying of the ETERNAL, the God of hosts, I abhor the pride of Jacob, and hate his palaces, and deliver captive the city, and the fulness thereof.

7. And it shall be, if ten men be left in a single house, they shall die; and as one's kinsman or embalmer5 take

him up to carry forth his bones from the house, he shall

say to him that is in the sides of the house, Is there yet any with thee, and it shall be answered, There is an end. And he shall say Hush, for we must not mention the name of the ETERNAL.

8. For behold the ETERNAL commandeth, and he smiteth the great house in shatters, and the small house in cloven pieces.

9.

Do horses run upon the rock, or can one plough there with oxen ? that ye have turned judgment to hemlock, and the fruits of righteousness to wormwood ??

Embalmer, or Burner. The old Hebrews buried, as Abraham at Machpelah. Saul was burnt exceptionally. A great burning is mentioned for Asa (2 Chron. xvi. 14), but whether of his bones, or only of spices and fragrant wood, is doubted. The readings here vary, but preponderate for embalmer, against burner.

• He smiteth, i. e. Jehovah, or rather some one does it, as the result of Jehovah's command.

7 See above note on iv. 4 (A.V. v. 7.) where Archbp. Newcome has introduced a reading from this verse.

Hos illi, quod nec bene vertat, mittimus hædos! Virg. Eclog. ix. 6. Rather their pomp and selfish abundance only mark them as the first victims, and their lounging will change to captive step.

6-8. War, as a scourge from God, will search out each detached dwelling, until scarce a corpse remain for burning or embalming, and despair of mercy or fear of foe silence even prayer to the Eternal Helper.

9-11. Barren as soil of rock, is the seed-ground of