Israel will fall and will not stand up again
1The Lord showed me what He wanted to do. There was a basket with fruit, 2and the Lord asked me: ‘Amos, what do you see?’
I said: ‘I see a basket with fruit. The fruit is ripe and it is time to eat it.’
Then the Lord said to me:
‘The end has come for my people, the Israelites.
I will not forgive their sins again.
3When I come to punish them,
the people in the temple
will not sing anymore. They will cry.
There will be a lot of dead bodies.
The enemies will not say anything.
They will throw the dead bodies everywhere.
4Listen to what I say.
You are doing bad things to the poor people.
You want to kill people who have nothing.
5You ask:
“When will the New-moon-feast be over?
Then we can sell our wheat again.
When will the Sabbath day end?
Then we can start selling wheat
from our stores again, and cheat people.
When we weigh our wheat,
we will tell people to pay more than they should.”
6You also sell the chaff with the wheat
and you sell poor people
for a pair of sandals.
because they owe you money.
And then they become slaves of other people.’
7The Lord has promised
and He Himself is the Witness.
He is God and the descendants of Joseph must honour Him.
He said: ‘I will always remember what you did.
8The people of the land will be shocked
about this and they will tremble.
Everyone living here will cry and mourn.
All the people in the land
will become afraid and flee.
It will be like the water in the full Nile River
that flows away, so the river becomes empty.’
9The Lord says:
‘On that day I will make the sun go down
when it is noon.
I will make it dark on earth while it is day time.
10I will change everything
and you will not celebrate. You will mourn.
You will not sing. You will cry
because all your people have died.
You will put on sack-cloth
and shave your heads.
You will mourn
like someone whose only child has died.
This will be a very sad day for you.’
11The Lord said: ‘The time will come
when I will make everyone in the land hungry.
But they will not be hungry for food
or thirsty for water.
They will be hungry for the words of the Lord.
12They will look from the Dead Sea to the big sea,
and they will look everywhere from the north to the east
to find out what the Lord says,
but they will not find it.
13Beautiful girls and young men
will become very thirsty and faint on that day.
14When they promise something,
they always say:
“The idol of Samaria is the witness,”
or they say to the town of Dan:
“As sure as your god lives,”
or: “As sure as there is a road to the town of Beersheba.”
But they will fall down,
and they will never get up again.’
