Amos 8

The Vision of Ripe Fruit

8This is what the Lord God showed me: a basket of summer fruit. ²He said to me, “Amos, what do you see?”

I said, “A basket of summer fruit.”

Then the Lord said to me, “An end ⁿ has come for my people Israel, because I will not overlook their sins anymore.

³“On that day the palace songs will become funeral songs,” says the Lord God. “There will be dead bodies thrown everywhere! Silence!”

⁴Listen to me, you who walk on helpless people,

you who are trying to destroy the poor people of this country, saying,

⁵“When will the New Moon festival be over

so we can sell grain?

When will the Sabbath be over

so we can bring out wheat to sell?

We can charge them more

and give them less,

and we can change the scales to cheat the people.

⁶We will buy poor people for silver,

and needy people for the price of a pair of sandals.

We will even sell the wheat that was swept up from the floor.”

⁷The Lord has sworn by his name, the Pride of Jacob, “I will never forget everything that these people did.

⁸The whole land will shake because of it,

and everyone who lives in the land will cry for those who died.

The whole land will rise like the Nile;

it will be shaken, and then it will fall

like the Nile River in Egypt.”

⁹The Lord God says:

“At that time I will cause the sun to go down at noon

and make the earth dark on a bright day.

¹⁰I will change your festivals into days of crying for the dead,

and all your songs will become songs of sadness.

I will make all of you wear rough cloth to show your sadness;

I will make you shave your heads as well.

I will make it like a time of crying for the death of an only son,

and its end like the end of an awful day.”

¹¹The Lord God says: “The days are coming

when I will cause a time of hunger in the land.

The people will not be hungry for bread or thirsty for water,

but they will be hungry for words from the Lord.

¹²They will wander from the Mediterranean Sea to the Dead Sea,

from the north to the east.

They will search for the word of the Lord,

but they won’t find it.

¹³At that time the beautiful young women and the young men

will become weak from thirst.

¹⁴They make promises by the idol in Samaria

and say, ‘As surely as the god of Dan lives …’

and, ‘As surely as the god of Beersheba ⁿ lives, we promise …’

So they will fall

and never get up again.”