Amos 8

The Basket of Fruit

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

“The end^e has come upon my people Israel;

I will spare them no longer.^*

³The songs of the temple^f shall become wailings on that day,”

says the Lord God;

“the dead bodies shall be many,

cast out in every place. Be silent!”^*

⁴Hear this, you who trample on the needy,

and bring to ruin the poor of the land,^*

⁵saying, “When will the new moon be over

so that we may sell grain,

and the Sabbath,

so that we may offer wheat for sale?

We will make the ephah smaller and the shekel heavier

and practice deceit with false balances,^*

⁶buying the poor for silver

and the needy for a pair of sandals

and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”^*

⁷The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob:

Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.^*

⁸Shall 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?^*

⁹On that day, says the Lord God,

I will make the sun go down at noon

and darken the earth in broad daylight.^*

¹⁰I will turn your feasts into mourning

and all your songs into lamentation;

I will bring sackcloth on all loins

and baldness on every head;

I will make it like the mourning for an only son

and the end of it like a bitter day.^*

¹¹The time is surely coming, says the Lord God,

when I will send a famine on the land,

not a famine of bread or a thirst for water,

but of hearing the words of the Lord.^*

¹²They shall wander from sea to sea

and from north to east;

they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord,

but they shall not find it.^*

¹³On that day the beautiful young women and the young men

shall faint for thirst.^*

¹⁴Those who swear by Ashimah of Samaria

and say, “As your god lives, O Dan,”

and, “As the way of Beer-sheba lives”—

they shall fall and never rise again.^*