Amos 6 Study Notes

6:1 Judah and Israel believed they were safe in their respective sacred cities. Those guilty of complacency were especially the leaders, those on whom the people depended.

6:2 Calneh (Calno, Is 10:9) was in Syria. It had been destroyed by the Assyrians in the mid-ninth century. Hamath, another Syrian city, was conquered by Jeroboam II, the king of Israel during the ministry of Amos (2Kg 14:28; it may be that Calneh also was subdued by Jeroboam II). Gath, a Philistine city, was destroyed by another contemporary of Amos, King Uzziah of Judah (2Ch 26:6). These fallen cities served as warnings to the people of Samaria, who assumed their city was indestructible.

6:3 The evil day is a reference to the disaster the day of the Lord will be for these people.

6:4-6 The Israelite aristocracy enjoyed what the Greeks would call a “symposium” (lit “drinking together”), in which participants lounged on couches, drank wine, and listened to music.

6:7 Their feasting would end in exile.

6:8 The pride of Israel is described in this verse as its citadels, the walls and towers that seemed to make the city of Samaria impregnable.

6:9-10 The meaning of this difficult text seems to be as follows. Casualties in the city will be so numerous that a household containing ten men will be wiped out. A relative will be designated to retrieve the bodies and conduct funeral rites, and he and his party will look for any survivors. Informed that there are none, he will declare that the Lord’s name must not be invoked. That is, instead of giving the normal funeral dirges and laments—which may have included invocations of Israel’s God (Lm 1:20)—Yahweh’s name will not be mentioned at all (probably because God’s name should not be mentioned in the midst of so much carnage, and also because the dead were evidently under God’s curse). Thus, where there ought to be a lament (Am 5:1-2), the situation will be so bad that even this will be denied to the people.

6:11 The verse begins literally “For behold the Lord is commanding.” The use of behold probably points to the certainty of the Lord’s command. He would fulfill the oath of 6:8.

6:12-13 Verse 12 is a proverb concerning absurd, irrational behavior. The point is that the boasting of v. 13 is equally absurd. Lo-debar was a city east of the Sea of Galilee that the Israelites boasted about capturing, but the name Lo-debar sounds like the Hebrew for the word nothing. Karnaim, another town in Transjordan, means “two horns.” In other words, the people boasted of having conquered “nothing” and “two horns.”

6:14 The entrance of Hamath (also called Lebo-hamath) was the northern limit of Israel’s domain. The Brook of the Arabah is only mentioned here, but it may be the same as the Brook of Egypt, the traditional southern border of Israel (Jos 15:4). The point is that the Israelites will be driven from all the lands that had been allotted to them by the Lord.