Discovery BoxAmos 8:9-12 
Context8:9 In that day,” says the sovereign Lord, “I will make the sun set at noon,
and make the earth dark in the middle of the day. 1
8:10 I will turn your festivals into funerals, 2
and all your songs into funeral dirges.
I will make everyone wear funeral clothes 3
and cause every head to be shaved bald. 4
I will make you mourn as if you had lost your only son; 5
when it ends it will indeed have been a bitter day. 6
8:11 Be certain of this, 7 the time is 8 coming,” says the sovereign Lord,
“when I will send a famine through the land –
not a shortage of food or water
but an end to divine revelation! 9
8:12 People 10 will stagger from sea to sea, 11
and from the north around to the east.
They will wander about looking for a revelation from 12 the Lord,
but they will not find any. 13
1 tn Heb “in a day of light.”
2 tn Heb “mourning.”
3 tn Heb “I will place sackcloth on all waists.”
sn Mourners wore sackcloth (funeral clothes) as an outward expression of grief.
4 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.
5 tn Heb “I will make it like the mourning for an only son.”
6 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.
7 tn Heb “behold” or “look.”
8 tn Heb “the days are.”
9 tn Heb “not a hunger for food or a thirst for water, but for hearing the words of the
10 tn Heb “they”; the referent (people) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
11 tn That is, from the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Dead Sea in the east – that is, across the whole land.
12 tn Heb “looking for the word of.”
13 tn It is not clear whether the speaker in this verse is the
