Amos 5:3

Amos sings Israel’s funeral while the nation is still alive because, in God’s sight, its end was so certain that it was as good as dead. The word for “lamentation” is qîynâh, a dirge or song of mourning, sung at a funeral or when death was near. Everyone in Israel knew this kind of song. To hear it sung over themselves, in the middle of their good years, was a shock meant to wake a complacent people.

And those were good years. Amos prophesied while Uzziah reigned in Judah and Jeroboam II in Israel, in the middle of the eighth century BC, and the northern kingdom enjoyed wealth and political calm. Amos himself was a shepherd from Tekoa in Judah, sent north with this message. Beneath the surface the nation was decaying. Its worship mixed the LORD with idols at Bethel and Dan, where the calves set up by the first Jeroboam still stood (1 Kings 12:28–30). Its rich oppressed the poor and its courts were corrupt, and the rest of this chapter names those who turn justice to wormwood and grind down the poor (Amos 5:7–13).

That is the irony at the heart of the passage. A nation that looked alive, prosperous and safe was already being mourned by the God who saw it truly. The lament also shows us the heart of the LORD. A dirge is a song of grief, and God grieves over his people’s sin even as he judges it. Ezekiel was later told in the same way to “take up a lamentation for the princes of Israel” (Ezekiel 19:1–14), and the book of Lamentations opens by mourning a city left desolate (Lamentations 1:1).

The chapter begins with a command. shâmaʻ, “hear”, is the ordinary word for hearing, and it often carries the sense of paying attention and obeying. Amos calls the whole house of Israel to listen and take the message to heart. The message is a dâbâr, a word or speech, a noun that can also mean a matter or thing. Here it is the word of the LORD, and it carries his authority.

“Which I take up against you” uses nâsâʼ, to lift or raise, the verb for raising a song or a charge. This word is raised against Israel, so it comes as an indictment. “O house of Israel” names the northern kingdom, distinct from Judah and from the nations, the people bound to God by covenant and now addressed as the accused. That covenant had set before them its blessings and its curses (Deuteronomy 28).

Amos speaks, and the word he takes up is God’s. Verse 3 makes this plain with “thus saith the Lord GOD”. The LORD spoke through all his prophets in this way, as he did when he put his words in Jeremiah’s mouth (Jeremiah 1:9). He warned his people again and again, and in Jeremiah’s day too the warnings were ignored (Jeremiah 7:13).

The verse also turns a page in the book. Amos 1–2 carry oracles against the surrounding nations and Judah, and chapters 3 and 4 bring judgment on Israel itself (Amos 4). Chapter 5 opens with this lament and moves at once to the call to seek the LORD, then to the charges of injustice and empty worship that fill the rest of the chapter.

Verse 2 is the lament itself. The word for virgin, bᵉthûwlâh, means a young unmarried woman who has not known a man, and here it is used of the nation, as Scripture can picture a city or people as a woman. The image makes the loss grievous. Israel is mourned as a young woman with her life still before her, and she has fallen.

“Is fallen” uses nâphal, to fall, a verb used for collapse, ruin and overthrow. The funeral song speaks of the fall as already done, though it was still to come, and that is how certain it was. “She shall no more rise” and “none to raise her up” both use qûwm. In the first it means to rise or stand up again, and in the second its causative form means to raise or set up. Israel will not get up by her own strength, and no one will come to lift her.

“She is forsaken upon her land” adds the picture of a nation left alone on its own soil, without God’s protection and without allies among the nations. A people who forsook the LORD find themselves forsaken. The prophets speak of the same end for a people destroyed for lack of knowledge (Hosea 4:6) and for a people broken beyond repair (Jeremiah 19:11).

The lament came true. The Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom and carried its people into exile, and Samaria fell in 722 BC (2 Kings 17). That was the end of Israel as a kingdom.

Verse 3 puts the lament into numbers. It opens “For thus saith the Lord GOD”, the formula a messenger used to deliver his master’s words, and it marks what follows as God’s own decree. The title ʼĂdônây Yᵉhôvih joins ʼĂdônây, Lord or master, with Yᵉhôvih, the covenant name of God, which the KJV prints here as GOD. The one who speaks is Israel’s sovereign Master and the God of the covenant.

A city that “went out by a thousand” sent out a thousand men. yâtsâʼ means to go or come out, and here it most likely describes a city’s fighting men going out to war, or else the whole number a city could muster. That city “shall leave an hundred”. The verb shâʼar means to remain or be left, or to leave over, and it describes what stays after the rest is gone. A town that sent out a hundred will keep ten. The second half repeats the first on a smaller scale, so that nine in every ten are lost in great city and small town alike. The verse ends by naming who will bear it: “the house of Israel”.

Israel’s privilege made its accountability greater. Amos had already brought this word: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities” (Amos 3:2). The losses of verse 3 are the curses the covenant had named for disobedience (Deuteronomy 28:15–68), and they came after the LORD had sent warning after warning and Israel had still not returned to him (Amos 4:6–11).

The LORD is merciful and long-suffering, and he is holy. When his people persist in idolatry and injustice, his patience reaches its limit and he acts against their sin. Israel trusted in its wealth and its strength, and this lament shows where a people’s security truly lies, in a right relationship with God and faithfulness to his covenant. It also shows what true prophecy is like. It is often uncomfortable and confronting, because it exposes sin in order to call people back to God.

The God who spoke through Amos has spoken at last by his Son (Hebrews 1:1–2), the Word who was with God and was God (John 1:1). When Jesus came to his own people and they did not receive him, he wept over Jerusalem and foretold its destruction (Luke 19:41–44). Like Amos, he mourned over a city that had turned away from the source of its life and peace.

The fallen virgin of Israel is also a picture of us. All have sinned (Romans 3:23), and we were dead in trespasses and sins, with no power to raise ourselves (Ephesians 2:1–5). Where Israel had none to raise her up, God has raised his people with Christ. We are buried with him and raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4, Colossians 2:12). Christ himself was forsaken on the cross, crying “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), so that those who trust him would be raised with him to eternal life.

Jesus is the faithful Son, the true Israel, and in him God gathers a people saved by grace through faith and not by their own merit (Ephesians 2:8–9), the great multitude who stand before the throne (Revelation 7:9–10). The call to hear runs through to him as well. Whoever hears his word and believes has everlasting life and has passed from death to life (John 5:24), and the lament remains over those who refuse to hear. The call to seek the LORD and live is answered in the one who said he is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

These three verses give us a God who tells the truth about sin, even to a nation enjoying its best years, and who grieves as he does it. His word of judgment is certain, and it came to pass. He also left a remnant, and the very next words he spoke to the house of Israel were “Seek ye me, and ye shall live” and “Seek the LORD, and ye shall live” (Amos 5:4–6). The funeral song was sung so that the living would hear it while they could still turn. The God who sang it is the God who in Christ raises the fallen, and whoever hears his word in him passes from death to life.