3:1 Listen, you Israelites, to this message which the Lord is proclaiming against 1 you! This message is for the entire clan I brought up 2 from the land of Egypt: 3:2 “I have chosen 3 you alone from all the clans of the earth. Therefore I will punish you for all your sins.”
4:3 Each of you will go straight through the gaps in the walls; 4
you will be thrown out 5 toward Harmon.” 6
The Lord is speaking!
4:12 “Therefore this is what I will do to you, Israel.
Because I will do this to you,
prepare to meet your God, Israel! 7
5:25 You did not bring me 8 sacrifices and grain offerings during the forty years you spent in the wilderness, family 9 of Israel.
1 tn Or “about.”
2 tn One might expect a third person verb form (“he brought up”), since the
3 tn Heb “You only have I known.” The Hebrew verb יָדַע (yada’) is used here in its covenantal sense of “recognize in a special way.”
4 tn Heb “and [through the] breaches you will go out, each straight ahead.”
5 tn The Hiphil verb form has no object. It may be intransitive (F. I. Andersen and D. N. Freedman, Amos [AB], 425), though many emend it to a Hophal.
6 tn The meaning of this word is unclear. Many understand it as a place name, though such a location is not known. Some (e.g., H. W. Wolff, Joel and Amos [Hermeneia[, 204) emend to “Hermon” or to similarly written words, such as “the dung heap” (NEB, NJPS), “the garbage dump” (NCV), or “the fortress” (cf. NLT “your fortresses”).
7 tn The
8 tn Heb “Did you bring me…?” This rhetorical question expects a negative answer. The point seems to be this: Since sacrifices did not characterize God’s relationship with Israel during the nation’s formative years, the people should not consider them to be so fundamental. The
sn Like Jer 7:22-23, this passage seems to contradict the Pentateuchal accounts that indicate Israel did offer sacrifices during the wilderness period. It is likely that both Amos and Jeremiah overstate the case to emphasize the relative insignificance of sacrifices in comparison to weightier matters of the covenant. See R. de Vaux, Ancient Israel, 428.
9 tn Heb “house.”