Amos 8:4

4 Hear this, those who trample on [the] poor and who annihilate the afflicted of [the] land,

Amos 8:4 Meaning and Commentary

Amos 8:4

Hear this, O ye that swallow up the needy
Like a man that pants after a draught of water when thirsty; and, when he has got it, greedily swallows it down at one gulp; so these rich men swallowed up the poor, their labours, gains, and profits, and persons too; got all into their own hands, and made them bondsmen and slaves to them; see ( Amos 2:7 ) ; these are called upon to hear this dreadful calamity threatened, and to consider what then would become of them and their ill gotten riches; and suggesting, that their oppression of the needy was one cause of this destruction of the land: even to make the poor of the land to fail;
or "cease" ^F1; to die for want of the necessaries of life, being obliged to such hard labour; so unmercifully used, their faces ground, and pinched with necessity; and so sadly paid for their work, that they could not live by it.

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FOOTNOTES:

F1 (twbvl) "ad cessare faciendum", Mercerus; "et facitis cessare", Munster, Drusius.

Amos 8:4 In-Context

2 And he said, "What do you see, Amos?" And I said, "A basket of summer fruit." And Yahweh said to me, "The end has come upon my people Israel. I will not pass by them again!"

3 "And the songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day," {declares} my Lord Yahweh. "The corpses are numerous; he throws them in every place. Be quiet!"

4 Hear this, those who trample on [the] poor and who annihilate the afflicted of [the] land,

5 saying, "When will the new moon be over, so that we can sell grain? And the Sabbath, so that we can open the grain bins, that we can make [the] ephah small and make [the] shekel large, and can practice deceit [with] a set of scales of deceit?

6 {That we can} buy [the] powerless with silver and [the] poor for the sake of a pair of sandals, and we can sell the waste of the grain?"