Dual Panel1THIS was what the Lord GOD showed me: it was a basket of summer fruit.
2“What is that you are looking at, Amos?” he said. I answered, “A basket of ripe summer fruit.” Then the LORD said to me, “The time is ripe for my people Israel. Never again shall I pardon them.
3On that day, says the Lord GOD, the palace songs will give way to lamentation: ‘So many corpses, flung out everywhere! Silence!’”
4Listen to this, you that grind the poor and suppress the humble in the land
5while you say, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain? When will the sabbath be past so that we may expose our wheat for sale, giving short measure in the bushel and taking overweight in the silver, tilting the scales fraudulently,
6and selling the refuse of the wheat; that we may buy the weak for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals?”
7The LORD has sworn by the arrogance of Jacob: I shall never forget any of those activities of theirs.
8Will not the earth quake on account of this? Will not all who live on it mourn? The whole earth will surge and seethe like the Nile and subside like the river of Egypt.
9On that day, says the Lord GOD, I shall make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight.
10I shall turn your pilgrim-feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation. I shall make you all put sackcloth round your waists and have everyone's head shaved. I shall make it like mourning for an only son and the end of it like a bitter day.
11The time is coming, says the Lord GOD, when I shall send famine on the land, not hunger for bread or thirst for water, but for hearing the word of the LORD.
12People will stagger from sea to sea, they will range from north to east, in search of the word of the LORD, but they will not find it.
13On that day fair maidens and young men will faint from thirst;
14all who take their oath by Ashimah, goddess of Samaria, all who swear, “As your god lives, Dan”, and, “By the sacred way to Beersheba”, they all will fall to rise no more.