Discovery BoxAmos 7:17 
Context7:17 “Therefore this is what the Lord says:
‘Your wife will become a prostitute in the streets 1
and your sons and daughters will die violently. 2
Your land will be given to others 3
and you will die in a foreign 4 land.
Israel will certainly be carried into exile 5 away from its land.’”
Amos 8:10
Context8:10 I will turn your festivals into funerals, 6
and all your songs into funeral dirges.
I will make everyone wear funeral clothes 7
and cause every head to be shaved bald. 8
I will make you mourn as if you had lost your only son; 9
when it ends it will indeed have been a bitter day. 10
1 tn Heb “in the city,” that is, “in public.”
2 tn Heb “will fall by the sword.”
3 tn Heb “will be divided up with a [surveyor’s] measuring line.”
4 tn Heb “[an] unclean”; or “[an] impure.” This fate would be especially humiliating for a priest, who was to distinguish between the ritually clean and unclean (see Lev 10:10).
5 tn See the note on the word “exile” in 5:5.
6 tn Heb “mourning.”
7 tn Heb “I will place sackcloth on all waists.”
sn Mourners wore sackcloth (funeral clothes) as an outward expression of grief.
8 tn Heb “and make every head bald.” This could be understood in a variety of ways, while the ritual act of mourning typically involved shaving the head (although occasionally the hair could be torn out as a sign of mourning).
sn Shaving the head or tearing out one’s hair was a ritual act of mourning. See Lev 21:5; Deut 14:1; Isa 3:24; 15:2; Jer 47:5; 48:37; Ezek 7:18; 27:31; Mic 1:16.
9 tn Heb “I will make it like the mourning for an only son.”
10 tn Heb “and its end will be like a bitter day.” The Hebrew preposition כְּ (kaf) sometimes carries the force of “in every respect,” indicating identity rather than mere comparison.
