Amos 8:1–7

A Vision of a Basket of Fruit

8I had another vision from the Sovereign Lord. In it I saw a basket of fruit. ²The Lord asked, “Amos, what do you see?”

“A basket of fruit,” I answered.

The Lord said to me, “The endⁱ has come for my people Israel. I will not change my mind again about punishing them. ³On that day the songs in the palace will become cries of mourning. There will be dead bodies everywhere. They will be thrown out in silence.”^j

Israel’s Doom

⁴Listen to this, you that trample on the needy and try to destroy the poor of the country. ⁵You say to yourselves, “We can hardly wait for the holy days to be over so that we can sell our corn. When will the Sabbath end, so that we can start selling again? Then we can overcharge, use false measures, and tamper with the scales to cheat our customers. ⁶We can sell worthless wheat at a high price. We’ll find a poor person who can’t pay his debts, not even the price of a pair of sandals, and we’ll buy him as a slave.”

⁷The Lord, the God of Israel, has sworn, “I will never forget their evil deeds.