The Coming Day of Bitter Mourning

1This is what the Lord GOD showed me: behold, a basket of summer fruit. 2And he said, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the LORD said to me,

“The end8:2 The Hebrew words for end and summer fruit sound alike has come upon my people Israel;

I will never again pass by them.

3The songs of the temple8:3 Or palace shall become wailings8:3 Or The singing women of the palace shall wail in that day,”

declares the Lord GOD.

“So many dead bodies!”

“They are thrown everywhere!”

“Silence!”

4Hear this, you who trample on the needy

and bring the poor of the land to an end,

5saying, “When will the new moon be over,

that we may sell grain?

And the Sabbath,

that we may offer wheat for sale,

that we may make the ephah small and the shekel8:5 An ephah was about 3/5 of a bushel or 22 litres; a shekel was about 2/5 ounce or 11 grams great

and deal deceitfully with false balances,

6that we may buy the poor for silver

and the needy for a pair of sandals

and sell the chaff of the wheat?”

7The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob:

“Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.

8Shall not the land tremble on this account,

and everyone mourn who dwells in it,

and all of it rise like the Nile,

and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt?”

9“And on that day,” declares the Lord GOD,

“I will make the sun go down at noon

and darken the earth in broad daylight.

10I will turn your feasts into mourning

and all your songs into lamentation;

I will bring sackcloth on every waist

and baldness on every head;

I will make it like the mourning for an only son

and the end of it like a bitter day.

11“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord GOD,

“when I will send a famine on the land—

not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water,

but of hearing the words of the LORD.

12They shall wander from sea to sea,

and from north to east;

they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the LORD,

but they shall not find it.

13“In that day the lovely virgins and the young men

shall faint for thirst.

14Those who swear by the Guilt of Samaria,

and say, ‘As your god lives, O Dan’,

and, ‘As the Way of Beersheba lives’,

they shall fall, and never rise again.”