What must one do to deserve God’s judgment and wrath? I can almost guarantee you answer this question, “Well, sin, of course.” Let’s assume someone stole five dollars from you yesterday. What will happen to that person? My mother always said, “Your sin will find you out.” A chill runs down my spine hearing those words in my memories. We call this concept retributive justice or, more specific to theology, divine retribution. But let’s add some detail to the scenario I have described. Assume that a five-dollar bill fell out of your pocket during a trip to the grocery store. Now assume that I am unemployed, with a young child to feed, and I locate the five dollars in the parking lot. I see you drop it, but seeing that you are in a hurry, I grab it. Will I still face the same divine punishment? Is it a sin to find five dollars on the ground and claim it? And what if I have never heard of God, the Ten Commandments, or even sin?
The point of this example is to raise yet another question for you: how do you define sin? Or better yet, how does the Bible define sin? A foundational resource in the field of systematic theology, Louis Berkhof’s fourth edition of Systematic Theology provides a few details for viewing sin as it occurs in the Bible: “Sin is a specific kind of evil… not all evil is sin… Sin is a moral evil.”1 So what does this have to do with Amos? It depends on the translation you are reading.
Amos begins with a literary device common to the prophets: the Oracles Against the Nations. These oracles indicate that a nation is faltering and is soon to be subjugated to the pyre of God’s wrath. God reveals to the prophet that because these nations are guilty of wrongdoing, they will be decimated. Let’s take the translation I normally use as a prime example. The New International Version translates Amos 1:3 as,
“This is what the Lord says:
‘For three sins of Damascus,
Even for four, I will not relent.”
Now, consider the rendering of the same verse in the Complete Jewish Bible:
“Here is what Adonai says:
‘For Dammesek’s three crimes,
no, four — I will not reverse it —’”
Notice the difference? What separates crime and sin? It is easy to push this to the side and say “So what? They did a bad thing.” Of course they did. But there is something deeper at stake here. These nations have not violated God’s law; they were not under it! These nations do not suffer because they have rejected God, but because of how they treat each other. As one scholar notes, “…even those nations who have not had the opportunity to ‘know God’ firsthand are judged.”2 Is this what happens to those who make it through life without hearing the Good News?
These nations have not sinned, at least in the sense that you and I understand sin. They have not intentionally acted against God, his will, or even his people as many scholars argue. A leading expert on the book of Amos, John Barton, argues that these nations are guilty of violating self-evident “moral norms.”3 He continues that these war customs are not God given, but the product of humans.4 While this is certainly problematic, we need to consider parallels. Especially those found within the traditional biblical canon.
I am in no way arguing that these foreign nations are blameless. These crimes are certainly abhorrent, and I believe they deserve punishment of some form. Yet, we must consider that these “crimes” are viewed differently elsewhere in the Bible. Additionally, the crimes were committed in a different time, place, and culture. While Gaza and Tyre’s offenses of selling civilians to Edom is absolutely inhumane, Edom’s crime of neglecting an oath of kinship would have been decried by Amos’ contemporaries to a much greater extreme. Kings may have been glorified for violence and bloodshed, but never for breaking treaties, especially those bound by blood, in the ancient world.
Let’s quickly examine the first oracle. The nation of Aram (represented by the city Damascus) is judged because it “threshed Gil‘ad with an iron-spiked threshing-sledge.” Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, however, the act of threshing is viewed as neutral or even positive. What is threshing? It is a method of separating the edible grain from a plant, such as wheat. This action is performed with a threshing sledge, a wooden board with stones or iron blades attached to the bottom.5 Using this as an illustration of violence is rather unnerving, is it not?
In Judges 8:7, Gideon threatens the officials of Sukkoth for not giving his men bread. He urges, “I will thresh your flesh on the thorns of the wilderness and on briers.” And he is not condemned by God. Consider also what Yahweh promises Israel in Isaiah:
“I will make you into a threshing-sledge,
new, with sharp, pointed teeth,
to thresh the mountains and crush them to dust,
to reduce the hills to chaff.” Isaiah 41:15
Finally, consider the following line of Habakkuk’s prayer: “In fury you trod the earth, in anger you threshed nations” (Hab. 3:12). The individual is addressing God! Are we not made in his image and/or likeness? Is he not our source of morality?
I want to return to the beginning of the discussion here. How do you define sin? Let’s consider a conservative definition: “Sin may then be defined ultimately as anything in the creature which does not express, or which is contrary to, the holy character of the Creator.”6 Is “threshing” another nation a crime in this sense? Not only has God advocated for his chosen to partake in this act in another area of the Bible, he himself is guilty of it.
Personal reflection
If we are made in the image of God, as the Judeo-Christian worldview stresses, then we need to consider the full picture of who God is. Is he abounding in infinite love and mercy as your Bible study group tells you? Maybe so. Is he a God of anger? Well, that’s obvious. But what the prophets tell us is that God acts out of this anger. He acts by inflicting nations with suffering whether he is the direct recipient of their offenses or not. Whether they know him or his laws or not. Here, I must stress how the prophets view the problem of suffering: suffering comes from God. Do the entire nations deserve to suffer because of the crimes committed by their military or leaders? In closing, I have included a plea from the father of Israel concerning the imminent destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. You are familiar with the story.
“Then Abraham approached him and said: ‘Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?’” Genesis 18:23-25.
What of the nations in Amos? And what of God’s morality?
1 Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1941), 4th edition, 231.
2 Rav Yitzchak Etshalom, “Before the Earthquake: Prophecies of Hoshea and Amos,” Eshivat Har Etzion Israel Koschitzky Virtual Beit Midrash (VBM) https://www.hatanakh.com/sites/herzog/files/herzog/03-78AH%20final.pdf, 6.
3 Barton, John. The Theology of the Book of Amos (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 59.
4 Ibid.
5 Jeremy M. Hutton, “Amos 1:3–2:8 and the International Economy of Iron Age II Israel.” The Harvard Theological Review 107, no. 1 (2014): 81-113, Gale In Context.
6 Zondervan Pictorial Bible Dictionary, Sin, edited by Merrill C Tenney and Steven Barabas.1967 (printed 1982?) Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing Home, 796.