Amos was the first Hebrew prophet we know of who wrote a book. We can even date his work to a particular time—the decade between 760 and 750 BCE. This was a period of great success and prosperity for the sister kingdoms of Israel and Judah, mainly because the dominant imperial powers of the Near East were all in disarray, allowing the two of them (with Israel as the senior partner) to dominate the weaker states around them and garner immense wealth in tribute and trade.

The rich and powerful people of the two kingdoms responded much like the “1%” of the US in the last few decades—amassing great fortunes, spending extravagantly on themselves, and refusing to take any responsibility for the effects of their behavior on the public at large or, more specifically, the poor. Religion was very much bound up with the nation’s prosperity, since people attributed it to the favor of their God (with much the same enthusiasm as Americans attribute ours to the favors of capitalism). The Temples were well endowed, the festivals well attended, the clergy as well satisfied as the plutocrats.

In the midst of this, Amos appeared unexpectedly at Israel’s royal sanctuary in Bethel with a message of judgement and destruction. He insisted that he was not a prophet at all—not, that is, part of one of the regular guilds of prophets at the temples. Some understand him to have been a poor shepherd; others see him as a stockman, owning herds and groves of the sycamore figs used as cattle feed. However he made his living, he was a brilliant poet. And he made a particular point of the tension we’ve already noted in Genesis between God as the universal God and God as the God of a particular nation.

The opening oracle of the book (chaps. 1-2) makes a tour of surrounding nations, denouncing each for its sins and promising due punishment. This implies that God is the God of the whole world, able to punish anyone at all. But the Israelite audience will also have heard Amos as saying that this was the work of their God, the one who favored them. Then, at 2:4, things start going wrong. The seventh nation condemned is not the enemy, but Israel’s sister kingdom and ally, Judah. And rather than quitting, as expected, after the seventh oracle, Amos keeps right on into an eighth, directed now at Israel itself.

Amos denounces the surrounding nations not for their paganism, but for violence and cruelty toward their enemies. He denounces Israel and Judah primarily for cruelty toward their own poor and for betrayal of their relationship with their God. In other words, Amos catches them up short by turning their assumption of religious advantage into a threat. Further on, God will say to Israel, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.” They expected “the day of the Lord” as their time of vindication. Amos says it will be not light and salvation, but darkness, judgement, and destruction (5:18-20). God will punish every nation for its inhumanity—Israel and Judah above all.

Amos’s God is indeed God of the whole world, as he declares in a short, but exalted poem that crashes into the sequence of oracles like a meteor:

The one who made the Pleiades and Orion,

and turns deep darkness into the morning,

and darkens the day into night,

who calls for the waters of the sea,

and pours them out on the surface of the earth,

the Lord is his name,

who makes destruction flash out against the strong,

so that destruction comes upon the fortress. (5:8-9, NRSV)

There is no hint here of a God who is merely Israel’s God.

Amos repeats the point in another short cosmic poem:

The Lord, God of hosts,

he who touches the earth and it melts,

and all who live in it mourn,

and all of it rises like the Nile,

and sinks again, like the Nile of Egypt;

who builds his upper chambers in the heavens,

and founds his vault upon the earth;

who calls for the waters of the sea,

and pours them out upon the surface of the earth—

the Lord is his name. (9:5-6 NRSV)

And then, Amos takes the matter still further as God tells the Israelites that they are no more special than any other nation, even the people furthest from them, even their enemies:

Are you not like the Ethiopians to me,

O people of Israel? says the Lord.

Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt,

and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Aramaeans from Kir? ((9:7 NRSV)

The prophet resolutely adheres to both ends of the impossible tension. God will destroy Israel because God is the universal God of justice and God will destroy them because God is their own God whom they have betrayed by their cruelty to the poor.

Christians, over the centuries, have repeatedly lost our grasp on this necessary tension. This is what has allowed people of faith to be seduced into unquestioning support for violence against enemies and for oppression of people who have been marginalized in our own society. We suppose that God is ours and will judge us more favorably. No. Violence, inhumanity, trampling on the poor and weak—all will be judged wherever they are found. And we who think ourselves particularly favored will be judged, if anything, more severely.

The point is that we can claim the particular love of God for ourselves only insofar as we allow it to be extended to the whole world. It is a hard notion to hang onto and we keep losing our grip on it. The scriptures have no purpose more fundamental or more valuable than this: to hold us to this tension and bring us back to it when we abandon it.