Amos
8
- This is what the Sovereign LORD showed me:
a basket of ripe fruit.
- "What do you see, Amos?" he asked.
"A basket of ripe fruit," I answered. Then the LORD said to me,
"The time is ripe for my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.
- "In that day," declares the Sovereign
LORD, "the songs in the temple will turn to wailing. Many, many bodies
-- flung everywhere! Silence !"
- Hear this, you who trample the needy and
do away with the poor of the land,
- saying, "When will the New Moon be
over that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath be ended that we may market wheat?"
-- skimping the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales,
- buying the poor with silver and the needy
for a pair of sandals, selling even the sweepings with the wheat.
- The LORD has sworn by the Pride of Jacob:
"I will never forget anything they have done.
- "Will not the land tremble for this,
and all who live in it mourn? The whole land will rise like the Nile; it will
be stirred up and then sink like the river of Egypt.
- "In that day," declares the Sovereign
LORD, "I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad
daylight.
- I will turn your religious feasts into mourning
and all your singing into weeping. I will make all of you wear sackcloth and
shave your heads. I will make that time like mourning for an only son and
the end of it like a bitter day.
- "The days are coming," declares
the Sovereign LORD, "when I will send a famine through the land -- not
a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words
of the LORD.
- Men will stagger from sea to sea and wander
from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not
find it.
- "In that day "the lovely young
women and strong young men will faint because of thirst.
- They who swear by the shame of Samaria,
or say, 'As surely as your god lives, O Dan,' or, 'As surely as the god of
Beersheba lives' -- they will fall, never to rise again."
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