Amos 8:14

It is a time when God withdraws his word from a people who have refused to listen to it. Bread and water were the two things every Israelite most feared to lose, and Amos names them only to set them aside: “not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD.” The judgment God sends here reaches past the body to the soul. The prophets who had brought his word, Amos among them, would fall silent, and Israel would be left without his guidance, his comfort and the truth it needed to live.

The verse opens with the weight of God’s own authority. “Behold, the days come” points to a time God has already appointed, and “saith the Lord GOD” translates Adonai Yᵉhôvih, the name of the sovereign God of Israel, who gives his word as the pledge that this will happen. He also says plainly who sends the famine: “I will send.” It comes from his own hand as a judgment on “the land,” the nation of Israel that had rebelled against him.

The word for famine, râʻâb, means hunger, a severe lack of food that brought widespread suffering and death. Famine was among the curses Moses had warned would follow disobedience, so the word alone would have filled Amos’s hearers with dread. God now uses it of his word, and in doing so he sets his word beside bread and water as something people need in order to live.

The famine is one “of hearing.” The verb shâmaʻ means to hear, and it reaches as far as listening with attention, understanding what is heard and obeying it. So the famine has two sides. God stops speaking, and a people who had grown deaf to him long before are left unable to take in his word at all. The noun dâbâr means a word or speech, and in another sense a matter or thing. “The words of the LORD” are what he says through his prophets: his commands, his warnings and his promises, the whole of his will made known to his people.

Amos prophesied in the days of Uzziah king of Judah and Jeroboam II king of Israel (Amos 1:1), around 760–750 BC. For the northern kingdom it was a time of peace, success in war and growing wealth, and many took their prosperity as a sign of God’s favour, when it was only a short space before judgment. Beneath it the rich oppressed the poor, justice was perverted, and worship went on as an empty performance. Earlier in Amos 8 the traders are impatient for the Sabbath to be over so that they can get back to their dishonest scales and their exploiting of the poor (Amos 8:4–6).

These verses also come within a series of visions. God showed Amos locusts, fire and a plumb line, and Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, stood against the prophet himself, which showed how Israel treated God’s true messengers. Then God showed him a basket of summer fruit, ripe and ready, with the word “The end is come upon my people of Israel; I will not again pass by them any more” (Amos 8:2). Just before our passage God speaks of darkness over the earth and of mourning throughout the land (Amos 8:9–10).

So the famine fits the sin. Israel had God’s word freely and treated it as a nuisance, and God takes away what they despised. Here, as in Amos 3:2, God shows himself faithful to the warnings of his covenant, which he keeps as surely as he keeps its promises.

Verse 12 shows what the famine looks like. “They shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east.” The seas are most likely the Mediterranean in the west and the Dead Sea, or perhaps the Sea of Galilee, in the east, and with the north and the east added, the search covers the whole land. “Wander” is nûwaʻ, to waver or move up and down, the word for a fugitive or a vagabond, and it pictures people with nothing to steady them. “Run to and fro” is shûwṭ, a hurried, agitated going back and forth.

What they want is “the word of the LORD,” dâbâr Yᵉhôvâh, the same word as in verse 11. The verb “seek,” bâqash, means to search out, seek or require, and it is used for seeking God in worship and prayer. Then come the last words: “and shall not find it.” The verb mâtsâʼ means to find or attain, and all that running ends with empty hands.

That is the sorrow of this verse. The word they ignored and resisted when Amos preached it freely is the very thing they will chase across the country, and it will be gone. Isaiah calls out, “Seek ye the LORD while he may be found” (Isaiah 55:6), and these verses show what lies on the far side of that “while.” The punishment answers the sin exactly: people who refused to hear God when he spoke will long to hear him when he is silent.

“In that day” uses yôwm, the ordinary word for day, and here it means the season God has appointed for judgment, when his warnings are carried out. Verse 13 then names who will faint: “the fair virgins and young men.”

“Fair” is yâpheh, beautiful, pleasing to the eye. bᵉthûwlâh is a virgin, a young unmarried woman, and bâchûwr is a young man or youth, a word Strong’s traces to one meaning “selected.” Together they are the flower of Israel, its beauty, its strength and its future. Of all people they should hold out longest against hunger and thirst. When they collapse, the whole nation has collapsed, and so the young stand here for everyone.

“Faint” is ʻâlaph, from a root meaning to veil or cover, and figuratively to be languid, to grow weak and give way. “Thirst” is tsâmâʼ. Verse 11 has already told us which thirst matters most, the thirst for the words of the LORD, and this verse pictures that thirst with all the weakness of a body without water. A people cut off from God’s word are drained of strength as surely as the young in a drought. The same picture of a nation’s life failing at its heart runs through Lamentations, which mourns the desolation of Jerusalem (Lamentations 1:4).

Verse 14 names those on whom the judgment falls. An oath calls on what a person trusts most, and God had told Israel, “Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God, and serve him, and shalt swear by his name” (Deuteronomy 6:13). To swear by idols is to break the first commandment, which forbids any other god before him and any graven image (Exodus 20:3–5). It is a betrayal of the covenant with the LORD, the living God.

The famine in Amos is a judgment, and the New Testament shows God’s answer to it in his Son. “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). Jesus is the Word who was with God and was God (John 1:1), and “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). He is the full revelation of the Father, so that whoever has seen him has seen the Father (John 14:9).

Amos speaks of hunger and thirst, and Jesus speaks to both. “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). He calls himself the living bread that came down from heaven (John 6:51), and he promised the woman at the well water that becomes “a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:10–14). Amos foresaw people wandering in the dark for a word from God, and Jesus says, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). He calls all who labour and are heavy laden to come to him and find rest (Matthew 11:28–30), and he promises that those who seek shall find (Matthew 7:7–8). In him people find the source of eternal life itself.

Verse 14 also points to Christ. Israel looked for life in gods that could give none, and Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), for “it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell” (Colossians 1:19). The fall of those who cling to idols is a picture of the end that sin deserves, the everlasting punishment Jesus speaks of (Matthew 25:46). Yet the word for the guilt of Samaria is also the word for a sin-offering, and God “hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Christ bore the guilt and condemnation that Amos announced, and by his death and resurrection he gives those who fall a way to rise again. “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

These verses show us a God who speaks to his people and keeps on speaking. He sent Amos and the prophets before him to a nation that mocked them, and the famine came only after years of warnings. His word is his gift, as needful to us as bread and water, and its worth is clearest when it is withdrawn.

We live on the other side of the famine. God has spoken in his Son, and the Scriptures that testify of him are in our hands in every language. The same God who warned Israel through Amos offers in Christ a bread that satisfies and a water that springs up into everlasting life. While he may be found, his word to the hungry and the thirsty stands open: “he that cometh to me shall never hunger.”