The Book of Amos by M Daniel Carroll R

Author:M Daniel Carroll R [R, M Daniel Carroll]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802825384
Google: rrQwzQEACAAJ
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Published: 2020-11-15T00:12:47.534530+00:00

d. Behold the Creator (4:13)

13For behold: The one who shapes the mountainsa and creates the wind, who reveals to humanity what is his complaint,b who makes dawn into darkness, and who treads upon the high places of the earth.c Yahweh God of Hosts is his name.

a. LXX continues the first-person sense of the preceding verse and translates, “[It is] I who make the thunder strong” (egō stereōn brontēn). See the exposition.

b. LXX has “his anointed one” or “his messiah” (ton christon autou), for which see Dines, “The Septuagint of Amos,” 154–56; Glenny, Finding Meaning in the Text, 236–40; Amos, 85–86. Syr. reads “how great is his glory”; Tg. reads “what his works are.” A few scholars emend to maʿăsehû (“his works”); cf. Tg. See Marti, Das Dodekapropheton, 186; Sellin, Das Zwölfprophetenbuch, 220, 225; Mays, Amos, 77. NEB translates, “who showers abundant rain on the earth.”

c. Connecting this line to the final blessing of the righteous and the judgment on the wicked, Tg. has “to prepare light for the righteous ones like the light of the morning that gets ever stronger, and to bring darkness upon the wicked of the earth.” See Smolar and Aberbach, Studies in Targum Jonathan, 170–75; R. P. Gordon and Cathcart, The Targum of the Minor Prophets, 84.

This is the first of the hymnic passages in the book of Amos. Almost every component of the verse is disputed.327 The opening For behold (kî hinnēh) follows dramatically on the invitation for Israel to prepare to meet its God in v. 12. These two words appear in 4:2; 6:11, 14; and 9:9 to preface an announcement of judgment.328 Here, five participles, organized into two sets of parallel strophes, introduce Yahweh in all of his transcendent power.329 The five are a counterpart to the fivefold indictment of vv. 6–11. Elsewhere in the book, participial descriptors offer negative portrayals of the characteristic behavior of those who oppress others (e.g., 2:7; 3:12; 4:1; 5:7, 18; 6:1, 3–6, 13; 8:4, 14; 9:10).330 In the doxologies, they depict the activities of the mighty Creator who comes to judge and do battle against the nation.

The first two participles speak of the power of Yahweh. He is the one who fashions the mountains and creates331 the rûaḥ. Mountains appear elsewhere in the book (3:9; 4:1; 6:1; 9:13; cf. 1:2), but scholars debate whether rûaḥ refers to the wind, the human spirit (cf. Zech 12:1),332 or even God’s Spirit. The context of natural disasters in 4:6–11 and the mention of mountains suggest that the first option (wind) is the best. Mountains and wind serve as a merism to express Yahweh’s creation of everything from an imposing material reality to the ephemeral, from the most stable to the most fleeting. There also might be the assumption that the wind, as a powerful force in nature, marks another manifestation of Yahweh’s strength.

The meaning of the next clause, the central piece of the five-participle sequence, has also been debated. What is being revealed to humanity and to whom does his refer? The term śēaḥ (“thought”), a hapax legomenon, is a biform of śîaḥ.

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