CHAPTER 8
The Lord God showed to me these things; and lo! an hook of apples.
And the Lord said, What seest thou, Amos? And I said, An hook of apples or summer fruit*. And the Lord said to me, The end is come on my people Israel; I shall no more put to, that I pass by him.
And the hinges, either twists, of the temple shall greatly sound in that day, saith the Lord God. Many men shall die, silence shall be cast forth in each place.
Hear ye this thing, which all-break a poor man, and make needy men of the land for to fail;
and ye say, When shall harvest pass, and we shall sell merchandises? and the sabbath, and we shall open our wheat again? that we make less the measure, and increase the shekel, and that we set privily guileful balances;
that we wield for silver needy men, and poor men for shoes, and we sell out-castings of wheat?
The Lord swore against the pride of Jacob, I shall not forget till to the end all the works of them.
Whether on this thing, the earth shall not be moved altogether, and each dweller thereof shall mourn? And it shall go up as all the flood, and shall be cast out, and shall float away, as the strand of Egypt.
And it shall be, saith the Lord, in that day the sun shall go down in midday, and I shall make the earth to be dark in the day of light.
10 And I shall convert your feast days into mourning, and all your songs into wailing; and I shall bring in on each back of you a sackcloth, and on each head of you baldness; and I shall put it as the mourning of [an] one begotten son, and the last things thereof as a bitter day.
11 Lo! the days come, saith the Lord [God], and I shall send out hunger into earth; not hunger of bread, neither thirst of water, but of hearing the word of God.
12 And they shall be moved altogether from the sea till to the sea, and from the north till to the east they shall compass about, seeking the word of the Lord, and they shall not find.
13 In that day fair maidens shall fail, and young men, in thirst,
14 which swear in the trespass of Samaria, and say, Dan, thy god liveth, and the way of Beersheba liveth; and they shall fall, and they shall no more rise again.
* CHAPTER 8:2 A play on the Hebrew words for ‘summer (fruit)’ and ‘end’, which sound similar.