Amos 9:13

Most of Amos is judgment. Amos was a shepherd and fig-picker from Tekoa in Judah, and he prophesied in the reigns of Uzziah in Judah and Jeroboam II in Israel, around 760 to 750 BC. These were years of peace, prosperity and wide borders for the northern kingdom. Under that prosperity the rich oppressed the poor, worship was mixed with idolatry, and religion had become empty show. Amos condemned Israel and the nations around it, and his visions foretold famine, pestilence, destruction and exile, which came with the Assyrian and later the Babylonian conquests.

At verse 11 the tone turns, and the last five verses of the book are a promise of restoration. God’s judgments were the just consequence of Israel’s sin and his discipline of them, and his purpose through them was to purify and restore. His justice is joined to his mercy and his faithfulness to his covenant, so the book that warned of ruin ends with rebuilding. He is the same God who promised his exiles, through Jeremiah, a future and a hope (Jeremiah 29:11).

The word for tabernacle is çukkâh, a booth or hut, a temporary shelter of the kind that gives the Feast of Tabernacles its name. David’s house was a royal dynasty, and Amos pictures it as a humble, fragile booth that has collapsed. “Fallen” is nâphal, the ordinary verb for falling, used also of being cast down or perishing. By Amos’s day the kingdom of David and Solomon had long since split into two rival nations, Israel and Judah. Even in Judah, where David’s line still reigned, there were seasons of weakness and unfaithfulness. So “the tabernacle of David” stands for David’s dynasty and kingdom, and the picture of a fallen hut shows how far it had come down from its glory.

God promises to repair it with his own hands. He will “close up the breaches thereof”, the perets, the gaps broken in a wall. He will “raise up his ruins”, and he will “build it as in the days of old”. The verb qûwm, “raise up”, comes twice in the verse, and in this form it means to raise, set up, erect or build, the way a fallen thing is stood up again. Every verb in the verse has God as its subject: “will I raise up”, “I will raise up”, “I will build”. “As in the days of old” looks back to the strength and unity of the kingdom under David and Solomon, when God’s favour rested on it.

The New Testament quotes this passage at a turning point for the church. At the council in Jerusalem (Acts 15), the apostles and elders had to decide whether Gentiles who believed in Jesus must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses. James answered from Amos: “After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down; and I will build again the ruins thereof, and I will set it up: That the residue of men might seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles, upon whom my name is called, saith the Lord, who doeth all these things” (Acts 15:16–17).

James read the rebuilding of David’s tabernacle as the raising up of Christ’s kingdom, and the nations called by God’s name as the Gentiles being gathered into it. So Gentiles could come to God as Gentiles, without first becoming Jews. Paul says the same thing in his own words. Christ has broken down the wall that divided Jew from Gentile (Ephesians 2:14), so that Gentiles are fellow citizens and members of God’s household, built together into a holy temple with Christ as the chief cornerstone (Ephesians 2:19–22). In him there is neither Jew nor Gentile, for all are one (Galatians 3:28). Jesus himself said, “I will draw all men unto me” (John 12:32). The church, gathered from every nation, is David’s house rebuilt by David’s Son.

Verse 12 gives the purpose of the rebuilding: “That they may possess the remnant of Edom, and of all the heathen, which are called by my name”. “They” are the people of David’s restored house. Yârash, “possess”, means to inherit, to take possession of, or to dispossess. Edom descended from Esau, Jacob’s brother, and was a long-standing enemy of Israel. Amos names this old enemy first, and then widens the promise to “all the heathen”. The word is gôwy, a nation, and in its plural, goyim, it means the Gentiles, every people outside Israel.

The phrase that governs the verse is “which are called by my name”. The verb qârâʼ means to call, call out, name or proclaim, and here it is passive: these nations are called by the LORD’s name. A name in Scripture stands for the one who bears it, his character and his authority, so a people called by the LORD’s name belong to him and are known as his. In that world each nation was bound to its own gods, and a nation called by the LORD’s name has left its gods and taken him as its God. The verse ends “saith the LORD that doeth this”. The one who makes the promise is the one who will carry it out.

The other prophets share this hope. The LORD tells his Servant, “I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6). Zechariah sees many nations seeking the LORD, so that “ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you” (Zechariah 8:20–23). Paul quotes Hosea for the Gentiles: “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved” (Romans 9:25–26).

Verse 13 opens with “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD”, a solemn word that a sure future is on its way. Then comes a picture every farmer in Israel would understand. The year had its seasons: plowing, then sowing, then the months of growth, then reaping, and the grape harvest with its treading before the grain was sown again. Chârash, the plowman’s verb, means to plow, and it is also the word for engraving. Dârak means to tread, and here it is the treading of grapes in the winepress. In the days to come the harvest is so great that the reapers are still at work when the plowman arrives to break the ground for the next crop. The grape harvest runs on until the time to sow seed, so the treader of grapes overtakes the sower. The law had promised the same overlap to an obedient Israel: “your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time” (Leviticus 26:5).

The second half of the verse turns to the hills themselves. “The mountains shall drop sweet wine”, the new wine fresh from the grapes, so that even rugged and barren places pour out plenty. “All the hills shall melt” uses mûwg, to melt, soften or flow down, a word also used of hearts melting in fear. The hills, gibʻâh, run with their produce as if they were dissolving into it. Joel uses the same picture of mountains dropping new wine (Joel 3:18). Isaiah sees the wilderness blossom (Isaiah 35:1–2), and Hosea joins the land’s abundance to God’s renewed covenant with his people (Hosea 2:21–22).

Amos’s hearers would have heard this as the curses of the covenant undone. The law warned that disobedience would bring drought and famine (Deuteronomy 28:23–24), and Amos himself had foretold famine. The God who sent scarcity as judgment promises a land that overflows with the blessings Deuteronomy promised throughout.

“I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel” joins shûwb, to turn back or return, with shᵉbûwth, captivity, the body of captives, or a people’s former prosperity. The phrase, shuv shevut, is a familiar idiom in the prophets. It includes bringing the exiles home, and it also means restoring a people’s whole well-being and fortunes. Jeremiah uses it for bringing the exiles back (Jeremiah 29:14), and Ezekiel uses it even of the restoring of Sodom and Samaria (Ezekiel 16:53). Here God is the one who turns things back, and he still calls them “my people”.

The rest of the verse is three pairs of work and enjoyment. They will build the waste cities and inhabit them, plant vineyards and drink the wine, make gardens and eat the fruit. Bânâh means to build, literally or figuratively, and building cities to live in means settled life, order and community after war and displacement. A vineyard takes years to bear, so planting one shows confidence in a lasting peace. Each pair ends with the people enjoying what they worked for. The curses of Deuteronomy 28 had warned of enemies taking the harvest of Israel’s labour, and here the people eat it themselves. It is the picture Micah gives of each man under his own vine and fig tree, with none to make him afraid (Micah 4:4).

Moses had already promised that if Israel returned to the LORD from exile, he would gather them and bring them back to the land (Deuteronomy 30:3–5). Isaiah says they will build the old ruins (Isaiah 61:4), and Jeremiah speaks of God’s delight in doing his people good (Jeremiah 32:41). These are the blessings for obedience in Deuteronomy 28:1–14, given at last by grace, and behind them stands God’s promise to Abraham (Genesis 12:1–3).

The book ends with God as the farmer. “I will plant them upon their land” uses nâṭaʻ, to plant, and its opposite follows: “they shall no more be pulled up out of their land”. Nâthash means to tear away or root out, as a plant is pulled up by the roots, and it pictures the violent uprooting of exile. The word for land, ʼădâmâh, is the ground or soil, the farmed earth that feeds a people. The promise of permanence is in the words “no more”. The planting is God’s doing, and so is the keeping.

Exile was the heaviest curse for breaking the covenant, and this verse speaks straight to the fear of it. “Which I have given them” grounds the promise in God’s own gift of the land, first promised to Abraham (Genesis 12:7). The other prophets say the same: Israel will dwell in the land for ever under David his servant (Ezekiel 37:25), and God’s people will be righteous and inherit the land for ever (Isaiah 60:21). Jeremiah says God will plant them in the land with his whole heart (Jeremiah 32:41).

The last words of the book are “saith the LORD thy God”. The LORD who speaks with all authority is “thy God”, bound to his people by covenant, and he stays faithful when they have failed. In its own setting the verse promises a real return to a real land. Its security reaches its fullness in Christ. Believers belong to “a kingdom which cannot be moved” (Hebrews 12:28), Jesus says that no one will pluck his sheep out of his hand (John 10:28), and our inheritance is “incorruptible” (1 Peter 1:4). At the end, God himself dwells with his people in the new creation, where sorrow and death are gone for ever (Revelation 21:1–5).

Amos was sent to a comfortable people with hard news, and God’s last word through him is a promise to rebuild what had fallen. He raises up, he closes the breaches, he builds, he brings back, he plants. He chose a collapsed hut as the place to begin, and from it he raised up the Son of David, whose house now gathers people from every nation who are called by his name. If you belong to Christ, you are part of that rebuilt house.

The passage also shows who God is. He judges sin truly, and his judgment opens the way to mercy. He delights to give his people back their cities, their vineyards and their gardens, and to let them eat what they have planted. And when he plants, he plants for good, “saith the LORD thy God.”