1. Of the personal life and history of this great prophet and great man scarcely anything is known. It is almost certain that he was a Judæan by birth: Amo_1:1 is not absolutely decisive, but taken in conjunction with 7:12, it seems to prove that he was a citizen of the Southern Kingdom. The attempts which have been made to prove his Northern origin from the spelling of certain words must be pronounced failures. He owned a small flock of a peculiar breed of sheep, ugly and short-footed, but valuable for their excellent wool. These he pastured in the neighbourhood of Tekoa in the wilderness of Judah. Part of his livelihood was derived from the lightly-esteemed fruit of a few sycomore trees. His own account of himself gives us the impression that, though poor, he was independent, and able, when occasion demanded, to leave his flock for a while. This is more probable than the supposition that he brought his sheep with him from Tekoa to Bethel.
2. How Amos came to be a prophet he tells us himself. He was no prophet by education or profession: he did not belong to one of those prophetic guilds, of which we read especially in the days of Elisha, and to which young Israelites, especially if warmed by religious enthusiasm, were in the habit of attaching themselves. Of the manner of the prophet's life before his call to prophesy, beyond what we can imagine from his occupation, we know nothing; nor of the causes, if any secondary causes there were, that induced him to cross the border, and testify against the Northern Kingdom. He was a simple countryman, a man no doubt of a religious frame of mind, who often in the solitude of the moorland meditated on the things of God, but one whose regular business was with his flocks on the hills, or among the sycomores in the dale. And he was actually following his shepherd's occupation at the moment when he became conscious of the summons to be a prophet-“And the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my people Israel.” In obedience to the summons, Amos left his native country of Judah, and visited the sister kingdom of Israel, then in the height of prosperity, to which it had been raised by the successes of Jeroboam ii.
But though a simple shepherd, Amos was no unlettered clown, as the old commentators supposed. He was familiar with the history of his own nation and the neighbouring States; he had an intimate knowledge of what was going on in Damascus and Tyre, in Moab and Edom; he knew about the movements of the peoples; he knew that the Philistines came from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir, as well as that Israel had been redeemed from Egypt; he thoroughly understood the politics of his age, and he was keenly alive to the social and religious condition not only of his own country, but also of the Northern Kingdom.
3. Like the unnamed prophet from Judah in the days of the first Jeroboam, Amos suddenly appeared at the royal sanctuary of Bethel with the message of a Divine judgment which could no longer be averted. Israel appeared to be at the height of her prosperity. The long war with Syria had been a bitter struggle, and at one time the nation was almost annihilated, but it emerged from the contest victorious and stronger than it had ever been. Success strengthened its confidence in Jehovah. There was no danger of a relapse into idolatry, as in the days of Solomon or Ahab. Every Israelite was an enthusiastic worshipper of Jehovah, for a great religious revival had accompanied the successes of Jeroboam ii. The sanctuaries were thronged, offerings poured in, the festivals were scrupulously observed. A spirit of devotion seems to have prevailed: men eagerly entered the ranks of the prophetic order, or embraced the rigid discipline of the Nazirites. Above all, the Israelites felt that they were the chosen people of Jehovah. They gloried in the name of Israel; they spoke of their country as “the high place of Isaac”; they styled themselves the House of Jacob, and the House of Joseph. The adventures of Jacob and Joseph, and the deliverance from Egypt, were apparently familiar to all.
But the religion of Israel was as hollow as its prosperity was delusive. Amos knew of another side to the case-at first by report, then more fully after he had visited the scene. The poor were oppressed-for all this superabundance of wealth had not extinguished poverty. On the contrary, it had widened the chasm between the very rich and the very poor. Heartless creditors, wrapping themselves in their poor debtors' pledged garments, had the effrontery to lounge in them on the very pavement of the sanctuary. At the feast they gorged in gluttony and drank themselves into a state of intoxication as the performance of a religious ceremonial. The slime of the serpent was over their religion. Grossest immorality mixed itself up with what pretended to be the worship of God.
4. The task which confronted Amos, therefore, was not inviting. His solemn face, his rude attire, and, above all, his accent, which indicated that he was a native of insignificant Judah, must have aroused at once a violent prejudice against him in the minds of that gay throng which streamed up to celebrate a great feast-day at the wealthy and popular shrine at Bethel. His message also was one of uncompromising denunciation; for while, on the barren uplands which extend from Tekoa, his home, eastward toward the Dead Sea, he had watched the patient sheep, and meditated long and deeply upon the evils and dangers of the present situation, Jehovah had revealed to him an ideal of justice which threw into startling relief the injustice rampant in Israel. Simple, straightforward, fearless man that he was, with no attempt at palliation he laid bare all its social and religious corruption, and declared that, as sure as Jehovah was a God of justice, He must and would destroy that corrupt Northern Kingdom.
How much of his prophecy he actually spoke, how far the symbolism which he used was intelligible to the audience, we cannot say, but at least the last words were plain enough: “The sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste; and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.” They were so plain and so menacing that the priest Amaziah took alarm, and sent word to the king, accusing Amos of treason and conspiracy against the Government. Evidently there was reason to fear that the oppressed poor might be stirred up to revolt against their lords and masters. “The land is not able to bear all his words,” was his suggestive confession. Apparently not waiting for an order from Jeroboam, Amaziah forthwith commanded Amos to flee back to Judah, and there gain a living by prophesying, if he could, but never again to open his mouth at the royal sanctuary of Bethel.
5. Then follows the prophet's indignant disclaimer of the priestly insinuation, a solemn repetition of his prediction of judgment, which would fall with special weight upon the family of the priest himself, “and Israel shall surely be led away captive out of his land.” What took place after this we are not told. It is not improbable that that act of tyranny, which brought the mission of Amos to an abrupt end, led him to preach with the pen when his lips were silenced, and thus rendered his words immortal.
In Carlyle the sense of having a mission was the growth of the actual presence in him of the necessary powers. Certain associations, certain aspects of human life and duty, had forced themselves upon him as truths of immeasurable consequence which the world was forgetting. He was a vates, a seer. He perceived things which others did not see, and which it was his business to force them to see. He regarded himself as being charged actually and really with a message which he was to deliver to mankind, and, like other prophets, he was “straitened” till his work was accomplished. For the new matter which he had to utter he had to create a new form corresponding to it. He had no pulpit from which to preach, and through literature alone had he any access to the world which he was to address. Even “a man of letters” must live while he writes, and Carlyle had imposed conditions upon himself which might make the very keeping himself alive impossible; for his function was sacred to him, and he had laid down as a fixed rule that he would never write merely to please, never for money, that he would never write anything save when specially moved to write by an impulse from within; above all, never to set down a sentence which he did not in his heart believe to be true, and to spare no labour till his work to the last fibre was as good as he could possibly make it.1 [Note: J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1835, ii. 475.]
