Amos 6 Study Notes

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.