Amos prophesied in the middle of the 8th century BCE. A hundred and fifty years before him, according to the Hebrew Bible, the death of Solomon had precipitated the division of Israel into a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom known as Judah. Judah’s capital was Jerusalem where Solomon had reportedly built his Temple¹. By the time of Amos, the northern kingdom had established its capital in Samaria. Amos was a shepherd in Judah. His prophesy included condemnation of war crimes committed by foreign tribes such as Moab and Ammon and condemnation of Judah for rejecting the Law; but most of his prophecy was a condemnation of the northern kingdom for its treatment of the poor and needy.

At the time Amos prophesied (probably about 760 BCE), King Jeroboam II was halfway through his forty-year reign and his northern kingdom appears to have been secure from invasion. Archaeological finds of ivory ornaments (pictured)² suggest that some people in Samaria had become extremely rich. Olive oil, wine and possibly horses were traded with both Egypt (to the South-East) and Assyria (to the to the North-West)³. It may have been the most densely populated area in the Levant (including Egypt)⁴. Not everyone was rich and Amos was critical of how the poor were being mistreated:
They sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes… Buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals
Amos⁵ 2:6 and 8:6

The Jewish Scholar Yitzchak Etshalom⁶ understands the above passages as relating to slavery. In ancient times, slavery could be a safety net: a guarantee of food and lodgings for the destitute. The Torah (the Jewish law revealed in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) accepted this system and legislated to prevent the abuse of it. Slaves could only work for six years and they had to be freed at the Jubilee (every fifty years).
In ancient Hittite law⁷, if someone returned an escaped slave to his owner, he would receive a pair of shoes as a reward. Under the code of Hammurabi⁸, if someone returned a runaway slave they would receive two shekels of silver. This practice of taking a reward for returning slaves was forbidden in the Torah:
Slaves who have escaped to you from their owners shall not be given back to them. They shall reside with you, in your midst, in any place they choose, in any one of your towns, wherever they please; you shall not oppress them.
Deuteronomy 23:15-16
In the ancient Levant, it was common to seize clothing from the poor as a pledge for a loan. The Torah forbade this:
If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, you shall not deal with them as a creditor; you shall not exact interest from them. If you take your neighbour’s cloak in pawn, you shall restore it before the sun goes down.
Exodus 22:25-26
Amos complained that the rich were taking clothing and money as pledges from the poor and then using the pledges to fund their own luxurious observance of rituals:
They lay themselves down beside every altar on garments taken in pledge; and in the house of their God, they drink wine bought with fines they imposed.
Amos 2:8
Rich people were using their power and privilege to treat the poor unfairly and in a way that was against the spirit and sometimes even the letter of their law.
2 Kings 8 describes a drought in Samaria at this time. Amos notes that the drought affected some parts of the kingdom more than others, but that people in the unaffected parts were not helping those who suffered:
I would send rain on one city […] so two or three towns wandered to one town to drink water and were not satisfied.
Amos 4:7-8
We are told that Amos prophesied that the punishment for mistreatment of the poor and needy would be some kind of natural disaster and a military defeat:
Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again like the Nile of Egypt?
Amos 8:8
An adversary shall surround the land, and strip you of your defence; and your strongholds shall be plundered
Amos 3:11
Amos was right about the natural disaster. Archaeologists have found evidence of an earthquake in Lebanon in the 8th century BCE of a magnitude of between 7.8 and 8.2 on the Richter scale (the largest earthquake ever recorded, in Chile in 1960, was 9.5 on the scale). This would have been devastating for the northern kingdom and it would have affected the southern kingdom, too. In the Book of Amos, we are told that this earthquake occurred two years after Amos prophesied (1:1)⁹
Amos was right about the military defeat. The conquest of the northern kingdom by Assyria took place in 720 BCE, probably forty years after Amos’s prophecy. The people of the northern kingdom were taken into exile.
Amos put his own anger and exasperation into the voice of God and so argued for the righteousness of that anger:
I hate, I despise your festivals […] Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps
Amos 5:21-23
However, Amos saw the people of Israel themselves as the actual cause of their downfall.
It is apparent from reading Amos’s opening prophesies (Chapters 1 & 2) that Israel was divided from like-minded countries that it could have allied with: most notably Judah, but also Moab and Ammon (descendants of Abraham’s nephew Lot) and Edom (descendants of Jacob’s brother Esau). The inability of the northern kingdom to form alliances with their neighbours and to care for those who were in need would have weakened the kingdom and made invasion by Assyria that much easier.
Like Amos, we should feel angry about the inequality in our own nation and the way the rich may be able to oppress the poor, despite our traditions of Christian compassion and the rule of law. Amos may also be able to speak to our current geopolitical situation. Powers that twenty years ago appeared to be of little threat to the United Kingdom now represent a very real danger and there is already a war in Europe. A strategy for peace should be based on offers of mutual support to other countries and on a healthy society that is able to stand up for itself. At the moment we are finding it difficult to even keep our rivers clean. The most oft-quoted words of Amos have never been so pertinent:
But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream
Amos 5:24
A righteous society is a stronger society and one that has returned to God.
Footnotes:
- There is no archaeological evidence for Solomon’s Temple as it is described in the Biblical Book of Kings.
- The “Samaria Ivories” were unearthed during the 1920s and 1930s and have been dated to the ninth or eighth century B.C.E. (the Iron Age).
- Finkelstein, I, and Silberman, N, (2002). The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. Free Press.
- Broshi, M, and Finkelstein, I, (1992). “The Population of Palestine in Iron Age II”, Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research, 287:47–60.
- In this article I quote from The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
- Etshalom, Y, (2025). Amos, The Genius of Prophetic Rhetoric. Maggid.
- By the 8th century BCE the Hittite kingdom had, like Israel, splintered into separate states and would be conquered by the Assyrians.
- The Code of Hammurabi is a Babylonian legal text from the 18th century BCE.
- The earthquake is recorded in Zechariah 14:5 and by the first century Jewish-Roman historian, Josephus.