1   This was what the Lord God showed me: there was a basket of summer fruit, and he said, ‘What are you looking at, Amos?’ 2   I answered, ‘A basket of ripe summer ^note fruit.’ Then the Lord said to me, ‘The time is ripe ^note for my people Israel. 3   Never again will I pass them by. In that day, says the Lord God, the singing women in the palace shall howl, “So many dead men, flung out everywhere! Silence!”’

4   Listen to this, you who grind the destitute and plunder ^note the humble, you who say, 5   ‘When will the new moon be over so that we may sell corn? When will the sabbath be past so that we may open our wheat again, giving short measure in the bushel ^note and taking overweight in the

Visions foretelling doom upon Israel silver, tilting the scales fraudulently, and selling the dust of the wheat; 6    that we may buy the poor for silver and the destitute for a pair of shoes?’ 7   The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: I will never forget any of their doings.

8   Shall not the earth shake for this?
  Shall not all who live on it grieve?
All earth shall surge and seethe like the Nile ^note
  and subside like the river of Egypt.


9   On that day, says the Lord God,
  I will make the sun go down at noon
  and darken the earth in broad daylight.
   10   I will turn your pilgrim-feasts into mourning
  and all your songs into lamentation.
  I will make you all put sackcloth round your waists
  and have all your heads shaved.
  I will make it like mourning for an only son
  and the end of it a bitter day.


11   The time is coming, says the Lord God,
  when I will send famine on the land,
not hunger for bread or thirst for water,
  but for hearing the word of the Lord.
   12   Men shall stagger from north to south, ^note
  they shall range from east to west,
  seeking the word of the Lord,
    but they shall not find it.
13   On that day fair maidens and young men
    shall faint from thirst;
   14   all who take their oath by Ashimah, goddess of Samaria,
  all who swear, ‘By the life of your god, O Dan’,
  and, ‘By the sacred way to ^note Beersheba’,
  shall fall to rise no more.

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