Past historical-critical research into Amos 1–2 has typically relied on one of two strategies in relating the historical Amos's identity as a prophet to the authority and scriptural status of the book. In the first strategy, many interpreters have detected in these eight stanzas allusions to and descriptions of particular political relations, economic contexts, or military engagements, supposing that such correlations secure the book's roots in the eighth century b.c.e. Such chronological benchmarks, in turn, are implicitly thought to sustain the importance of Amos's prophetic identity—i.e., the Amos of Tekoa named in 1:1—in effect constituting the text's nature as scripture. A second, somewhat related strategy has centered on the reconstructed “original” or “secondary” status of certain passages. In this redaction-critical variation of the historical-critical endeavor, interpreters assume that an understanding of the text's chronological development can help to flesh out the picture of Israel's (and Judah's) developing theology or theologies. Again, this model tacitly accepts that prophetic identity plays an intimate and necessary role in the text's authenticity (and conversely, that redactional composition contributes to a passage's supposed “inauthenticity”) and also, therefore, in its authoritativeness within various temporally-constrained interpretive communities.Footnote 1
The second position has recently (and appropriately) come under fire, however. The argument for the underlying, valorized, and essential importance of the prophet's historical identity is increasingly difficult to make. That the prophet's ipsissima verba lies behind the book accredited to him, and, moreover, that the book's authority depends on the historicity of the superscription, are arguments quickly dwindling in the more sober quarters of academic investigation. Primacy is increasingly placed on the book itself and on what can be detected of its editorial formation and reception in communities of interpretation.Footnote 2 But despite the diminishing importance of the “prophetic author” in current scholarship, one need not consider the book's value for reconstructing the economic and social interactions of Iron Age II Israel with its contemporaries to have been entirely negated. Even if the author or redactor is adjudged to have been working later (and therefore “inauthentically,” in the parlance of earlier treatments), the book may still contain authentic reminiscences of political and economic conditions—both of the putative prophetic author's time as well as of the times of later tradents. Therefore, although I continue to use the terms “authentic” and “inauthentic” here, I do so with the recognition that they are not without problems, and with the caveat that “inauthenticity” does not necessarily impugn historical reliability.Footnote 3 Conversely, although I am interested in probing the historical and economic conditions lying behind the various oracles of Amos 1:3–2:8, this study offers no arguments specifically for or against the theological authority of any single oracle.
Despite recent (and sophisticated) developments in redaction-critical study, the text of Amos continues to invite the investigation of the historical background(s) it presupposes precisely because of its repetitious and literarily uneven nature, but also (and more importantly, perhaps) because of the gritty acknowledgement of awful historical realities made in 1:3–2:8. In the span of twenty-one laconic verses, replete with the reverberations of the opening and closing formulae of each stanza, the text presents the reader with reports of several humanitarian (and some cultic) offenses. The poem associates each transgression (or set of transgressions) with one of the polities surrounding Israel (as well as Judah), culminating with the sins of Israel itself. Altogether, these atrocities entail everything from what might be considered near-universal commonplaces, such as the oppression of society's most vulnerable constituents (2:6–8), to more outright and egregious military assaults on civilians, such as enslavement, mutilation, and murder. Historical investigation into the described events is merited, if only to understand the socio-historical scenario(s) presumed by the book's oracles and the literary form of the book's excoriation of the surrounding nations.
Therefore, I deal first with the individual “oracles against the nations” themselves; although the events alluded to in the first six oracles against Israel's neighbors (Amos 1:3–2:3) are difficult—if not impossible—to relate to specific historical events, their common context in border disputes involving international trade and in exploitative commoditization of human life is evident. In the following section, I address issues of “authenticity” and secondary literary development and what these adjudications have meant for previous scholars’ interpretations of the so-called “oracles against the nations.” Some interpreters have suggested that by excising certain passages from 1:3–2:8 the rhetorical thrust of Amos's oracles becomes more intelligible as a meaningfully structured unit. Conversely, I will argue that, whatever the precise organizing principle governing the shape of Amos 1:3–2:8 and no matter the degree of “authenticity” of certain oracles, the passage as a whole in its final form—including its climax in the oracles against Judah and Israel in 2:4–8 (9–16)—presents us with the hermeneutical key to the resultant compilation of the book. These oracles’ position at the beginning of the book of Amos (rather than the more conventional positioning of collections of oracles against the nations in the middle or towards the end of a book)Footnote 4 and their sometimes perplexing internal literary arrangement can be explained through a more economically attentive reading of 1:3–2:3. In the third section, I provide that reading, noting first the oracles’ coincidence with the prescriptions of the Geneva Conventions (as elaborated by Matthew R. Schlimm). I argue that the apparently random violence wreaked upon Israel, Judah, and their neighbors is not random at all but rather derives from the injustice inherent in the economic structures of the international economy (“international” insofar as it connects Israel and Judah with the world beyond their borders) in the eighth century b.c.e. (and later).Footnote 5 In a fourth section, I make explicit the web of connections tying the crimes described in the oracles against Judah and Israel (2:4–8 and, indeed, the remainder of the book) together with the socio-economic and historical observations arrived at in the third section. I conclude that, although the remainder of the book of Amos sets at Israel's feet the nation's own culpability in the oppression and negligence of the Iron Age II economy, Amos 1:3–2:8 has already anticipated this trajectory, in that it serves to locate Israel inextricably at the crossroads of the international economy as Amos—and the editors who later drew together the collection of oracles attributed to him—knew it. This unit is, thus, not inconsistent with or ancillary to the remainder of the book's imprecations. Rather, regardless of any redactional insertions that may have been added after the initial publication of the text and regardless of any intrusions into or deliberate (re-)arrangements of the opening oracles, Amos 1:3–2:8 comprises a cohesive, coherent opening salvo that leads directly into the book's castigation of Israel.Footnote 6
Literary Structure and Political History in Amos 1:3–2:8
Anyone reading Amos 1:3–2:8 cannot help but recognize the structured repetitions of the eight stanzas comprising these “oracles against the nations.” Each begins with the messenger formula “Thus says the Lord” followed by the formulaic justification of punishment: “For three transgressions of GN, and for four, I will not turn it back” (1:3, 6, 9, 11, 13; 2:1, 4, 6). No matter the precise meaning of this line,Footnote 7 the fact that its recurrence serves as a central structuring device of the passage has been so thoroughly discussed that little further consideration is required here. Even the repeated claim that the nations have committed “transgressions” is almost unanimously interpreted as a claim of yhwh's universal sovereignty.Footnote 8 Through this litany of nations that have “rebelled,” Amos subjugates these nations to the mighty God of Israel: he implicitly claims for them the status of a vassal in a relationship they themselves would have disavowed.
Aram
Within the six stanzas comprising 1:3–2:3, foreign nation after foreign nation comes under the judgment of yhwh, each criticized for grievances against its contemporaries and, thus, against a deity understood as having cosmic jurisdiction. The first to undergo this withering confrontation is the Aramean state of Damascus. Amos cites the Arameans’ “threshing of Gilead with threshing sledges of iron” (1:3) as the act precipitating the harsh condemnation of Damascus. The use of the geographic name “Gilead” here is perhaps misleading; it potentially lulls the reader into the false sense that the prophet indicates only the land itself, since the basic term “thresh” (
) is used of grains, such as wheat (e.g., 1 Chr 21:20; see also Isa 28:28).Footnote 9 But comparison with two other biblical texts suggests that the picture is not so innocuous. In Judg 8:7, Gideon threatens to “trample” (
) the flesh of the recalcitrant inhabitants of Succoth “on the thorns of the wilderness and on the briers”—a threat which he carries through after his defeat of the Midianite kings Zebah and Zalmunna (Judg 8:16). More closely related to the passage at hand is the historical notice in 2 Kgs 13:7, which describes the king of Aram as having “destroyed [the soldiers of Israel] and made them like the dust at threshing (
).”Footnote 10 This datum appears in the summary of the reign of Jehoahaz, son of Jehu (2 Kgs 10:32–33),Footnote 11 occasioning Mays's suggestion that this is the same Aramean offensive recalled by Amos.Footnote 12 However, as other scholars have pointed out, the imagery of destruction in this metaphor can be correlated with numerous attacks on Israel, whether during or after the reign of Jeroboam II;Footnote 13 moreover, nothing prohibits an understanding of Amos 1:3 as the reapplication of the same terminology to an Aramean military operation occurring at a later date.Footnote 14
The act of threshing (
) was performed with a threshing sledge, a contraption comprising large wooden boards with stones (or here, iron blades) embedded in the bottom (cf. Isa 41:15). The agriculturalist would ride on the implement while it was pulled behind a draft animal (e.g., Hos 10:11). This process served to split the husk of the grain (i.e., the chaff; see the parallel use of 
in Isa 41:15), which was then allowed to blow off with the breeze, leaving only the kernel.Footnote 15 Used metaphorically,Footnote 16 the image evoked is one of destruction in which the enemy had so thoroughly ridden roughshod over the Israelite army that their battered and lifeless corpses were left split and cracked, the ephemeral trappings of glory blowing away in the wind. Regardless of whether this devastation was carried out against the civilian inhabitants of the land of Gilead (as in Tg. Jon. and lxxFootnote 17), it was so completely applied to both the Gileadite landscape and the soldiers defending it, claimed Amos, that the military excesses of the Aramean army would be levied against the very city of Damascus itself.
Gaza and Tyre
The second foreign nation to come under judgment is Philistia, represented metonymically in the stanza's opening salvo by the city Gaza. The crime for which the Philistines receive reproach here is “their carrying into exile entire communities, to hand them over to Edom” (1:6).Footnote 18 A nearly identical accusation is leveled at the Phoenician city of Tyre in the following stanza (v. 9bα). The two excoriating indictments differ from one another only in the precise description of the offending actionFootnote 19 and in the addition of the clarifying remark “[they] did not remember the covenant of kinship” in the Tyre oracle (v. 9bβ). The “covenant of kinship” is traditionally taken to refer to the familial bonds established between Tyre, Israel, and Judah by virtue of 1) the parity treaty between Ahiram's Tyre and the Israelite United Monarchy under the Davidic dynasty (2 Sam 5:11; 1 Kgs 5:15–26 [ = Eng. vv. 1–12]; 9:10–14; 1 Chr 14:1; 2 Chr 2:2–17 [ = Eng. vv. 3–18]); 2) Jezebel's marriage into the royal Omride lineage of Israel (1 Kgs 16:31); and 3) the subsequent marriage of Athaliah into the Davidic lineage of Judah (2 Kgs 8:26 = 2 Chr 22:2).Footnote 20 Any historical referent of the accusation against the Philistines, however, is left without explicit mention in the historiographic biblical texts. None of these texts notes the delivery of an “entire community” over to Edom, which is to be expected if one understands this allegation not as a reference to a major geopolitical event but rather as a smaller-scale local event or series of events that happened along the Philistine border with Israel and Judah.Footnote 21 In either case it seems clear enough that the crime was mass kidnapping with the intent to sell the victims into slavery (cf. Exod 21:16).Footnote 22 Some have suggested the Edomites played only the role of brokers in the slave trade, selling the population further south, as may be assumed in the threat in Joel 4:8 (= Eng. 3:8; cf. also vv. 6–7 and Ezek 27:13), which names the Sabeans as the final recipients of the slave population.Footnote 23 However, Edom itself may have been a large consumer of slaves, since it would have needed an enormous number of them to work the copper mines and the associated industrial complexes near Feinān, located in modern Jordan.Footnote 24 Moreover, it seems likely that Gaza and Tyre were major centers of the slave trade,Footnote 25 located on the Mediterranean coast and having access to seaborne trade networks.Footnote 26
In these two oracles, any chance of determining historical specificity breaks down, forcing the reader into an investigation of social rather than historical orientation.Footnote 27 Yet even here, the social elements of the prophet's invective are brought to bear in the theological sphere, regardless of any precise historical events that may be alluded to. Although most commentators have reconstructed the described event as one or more small, local raids on the outlying villages and towns of Israel and Judah, there is no explicit identification of the victims.Footnote 28 This anonymity suggests to Paul that “the prophet is not inveighing here against the incursion into Judean territory per se (if at all) but is rather indicting the inhumanity and cruelty of the forceful traffic of human beings, who are thereby abused and debased to mere numbers and objects of merchandise.”Footnote 29 As for Tyre, given the criticism in v. 9bβ referring to the treaty between the royal dynasties, it seems rather obvious that the depredations were to some extent inflicted on Israelites;Footnote 30 the parallel case of Gaza might be viewed cautiously in this context as well. But Paul's exegesis is correct, in that Amos's omission of any explicit victim suggests the prophet's focus is on the crime itself and not on the ethnic or political identity of the community or communities affected.
Edom
According to the nrsv translation of the fourth oracle (1:11–12), Amos reproaches Edom,
because he pursued his brother with the sword
and cast off all pity;
he maintained his anger perpetually,
and kept his wrath forever.
Although the nrsv gives one possible construal of the Hebrew, the collocation is a difficult one: the sequence *
piel + 
is otherwise unknown in the Bible (the two words appear together in the same verse only in Ps 103:4 but in two different cola).Footnote 31 That the phrase means “cast off (his) compassion” is highly interpretive and seems tenuous in light of lxx, which interprets 
more substantively as the plural of 
“womb,”Footnote 32 rendering καὶ ἐλυμήνατο μήτραν ἐπὶ γῆς “and he destroyed a womb (from) upon (the) land.” Moreover, Paul points to the word 
“young woman” used in Judg 5:30, as well as in Moabite (
; KAI 181:17) and Ugaritic (rḥm; KTU 1.6.ii.27).Footnote 33 The meaning of the term 
“compassion” does come into play, however, in juxtaposition with the second stich of the indictment (v. 11bβγ). Here, the accusation focuses on Edom's continual or repeated anger,Footnote 34 opening the possibility of reading 
as a case of Janus-parallelism, in which the polysemy of a word is highlighted by its position between two poetic lines assuming different meanings of the word.Footnote 35
That the unnamed, victimized population was an ethnically Israelite (or, specifically, Judahite) one is not necessary but is nonetheless suggested by the use of the term 
in conjunction with the many textual indications that these two nations considered themselves to be kin (see the Jacob and Esau narratives in Genesis, especially 25:19–26; 27:40–41; see also Num 20:14; Deut 2:4; 23:8 [ = Eng. v. 7]; Obad 10, 12).Footnote 36 Despite this posited agnatic relationship, the storied history of these peoples’ relationship indicates a significant amount of military conflict between them, including Edom's partial or total subjugation to Judah during the late eighth and early seventh centuries (2 Kgs 14:7; 2 Chr 25:11–12).Footnote 37 The extent of this subordinate position of Edom is a matter of dispute, inspired in part by the impugned “authenticity” of this oracle: if Edom was under complete Judahite domination during the reign of Jeroboam II, it is assumed, the oracle must be dated to a later period.Footnote 38 Conversely, partial Judahite supremacy over Edom, or over only a small portion of traditionally Edomite territory, would render the offense more probable during the reign of Jeroboam II.Footnote 39 In either case, the oracle alludes to a drawn-out animosity between the two nations, attested elsewhere, and mirrored in the following oracle as well.Footnote 40
Ammon
Amos charges the Ammonites with “having ripped open pregnant women in Gilead in order to enlarge their territory” (1:13). The horrific graphicness of this indictment—in juxtaposition to the somewhat ambiguous, though similar, accusation against Edom—conveys the author's repugnance towards the act itself. This barbaric practice of murdering those among the most vulnerable civilians of a city and the consequent deaths of their unborn children was known throughout the ancient world, both in other biblical texts (see below) and in non-biblical texts.Footnote 41 No specific Ammonite campaign can be posited as the exact event to which Amos refers, but the expression *
points to sometime in the mid-ninth to late eighth centuries, if the collocation's other usages in the Hebrew Bible may serve roughly as guides.Footnote 42
The verb 
“to split open,” in its many different stems,Footnote 43 commonly describes the fate of pregnant women (
; 2 Kgs 8:12; 15:16; and Hos 14:1 [ = Eng. 13:6]).Footnote 44 In 2 Kgs 2:24 and Hos 13:8 the pi'el stem of this verb is used to illustrate the mauling of humans by bears or other wild animals.Footnote 45 This beastly imagery parallels the use of the verb 
in the preceding oracle, which itself is used ubiquitously as a depiction of the ways wild animals tear apart their prey (e.g., Gen 37:33; 44:28; 49:27; Exod 22:12 [ = Eng. v. 13]; Deut 33:20; Jer 5:6; Ezek 19:3; etc.; see also the related noun 
). Combining the animalistic imagery of Amos 1:13 with that of v. 11, I would make the following observation: whereas wild animals “tear apart” (
) prey for their own survival and as life-giving sustenance for their own whelps (e.g., Nah 2:13 [= Eng. v. 12]), the Ammonites and the Edomites have done so with no goal but national expansion.Footnote 46 Often, these brutal and excessive tactics were employed specifically “to terrorize and decimate resident populations,”Footnote 47 presumably to encourage the hasty evacuation of neighboring towns, and thus to clear the way for resettlement and repopulation by the invading ethnic group. Instead of partaking in the familial ἀγάπη to be expected from these two close kinsmen,Footnote 48 the Israelites and Judahites were left agape at the atrocities perpetuated as a matter of course in such programmatic efforts at intimidation and dislocation, often dismissed by modern scholarly rhetoric as “mere border skirmishes.”Footnote 49
Moab
The sixth oracle castigates Moab for “burning to lime the bones of the king of Edom” (2:1). The difficulties encountered in this accusation are numerous but seem best explained by reference to the Moabites’ desecration of a human corpse. This desecration may have occurred after the disinterring of the king's corpse,Footnote 50 but if so, that aspect of the crime has gone unmentioned. Here, the reader finds only reference to the actual mode and end of the Moabites’ destruction of these bones: 
, though even these terms are unclear. With many interpreters, the nrsv translates 
as “to,” on the assumption, following the Vulgate's usque ad cinerem, that the degree of the corpse's destruction through fire reached a stage at which the “ashes became as fine and white as powdered chalk.”Footnote 51 But a more likely reading, which takes seriously the meaning of 
, would be “for lime,” that is, for use as a component in whitewash or plaster.Footnote 52 When burned, human skeletons produce a residue that is chalky in texture and substance. Footnote 53 This material would then have been spread on stones (as in Deut 27:2, 4) or on houses (as interpreted by Tg. Jon. Amos 2:1Footnote 54). Apparently, this reuse of the bones was particularly problematic; elsewhere, the burning of bones seems to be considered unproblematic for the morality of the agent, despite its connotations of abuse (2 Kgs 23:16).Footnote 55
This oracle against Moab seems enigmatic among the six discussed here, since it alone does not leave open the possibility that Israel and Judah were the victims of the condemned practice. One wonders whether this impression may be inaccurate,Footnote 56 but in the end, it is safer to understand this incident as an otherwise unrecorded clash between the Moabites and Edomites—a deliberate desecration of a royal grave and the intentionally revolting use of the excavated remains. This abuse of human remains may have been part of an ongoing and concerted effort at frontier intimidation practiced by the Moabites: if the ultimate use of this plaster was to serve as a memorial in which an inscription was committed (cf. Deut 27:2, 4), the desecrated and displayed remains of a human being would have posed a stronger threat of violence than any “no trespassing” sign could have communicated.
The Textual History of Amos 1:3–2:8
Over the course of the past century, scholars have frequently sought to understand the developmental process whereby Amos 1:3–2:8 took shape. Two issues are usually at stake in such discussions. First, interpreters commonly investigate each oracle's date relative to the others, with the result that the oracles against Tyre and Edom (1:9–12), along with that against Judah (2:4–5), are usually deemed secondary.Footnote 57 Second, they investigate the literary order of the oracles, both in the hypothetical original form of the chapters and in the final scriptural form of Amos. Clearly, these two issues are interrelated: the addition of any secondary oracles would naturally change the patterning of the original oracles. Since the first of these concerns directly impinges on the second, these two issues concerning the shape of Amos will be handled in this order. My goal in this section is not to defend the originality of the oracles under investigation or to argue for their secondariness but rather to survey briefly the historical developments that commentators have imputed to the text and to propose a literary rationale for its present structure. In so doing, I will begin to lay the foundation for arguing that the passage as a whole in its final form—along with its climax in the oracles against Judah and Israel in 2:4–8 (9–16)—presents us with the hermeneutical key to the resultant compilation of the book.
The Authenticity of the Oracles against Tyre and Edom
Although the “authenticity” of the oracle against Gath has been impugned,Footnote 58 most commentators agree that only two of these oracles against the nations are later than others, namely, those against Tyre and Edom (1:9–12).Footnote 59 Those making this claim point to a number of features setting these oracles apart from the others. First, they call attention to the omission of any explicit divinely ordained punishment against both Tyre and Edom. Other than the introductory lines of the framework (“For three transgressions and for four . . .”), the oracles against Tyre and Edom hold only the common trope of destructive fire in common with the other oracles (“So I will send/kindle a fire on GN, and it shall devour the strongholds of GN/its strongholds”; [GN or 3.f.s.] 
GN 
; vv. 10, 12; cf. 1:4, 7, 14a; 2:2; see also 2:5).Footnote 60 They do not, however, participate in the same trope wherein yhwh promises to destroy or exile the ruling dynast and his successors (e.g., 1:5, 8, 15; 2:3). According to Jörg Jeremias, this apocopated description of ordained punishment “corresponds to a heightened interest in the sin of the various nations.”Footnote 61 Thus, this posited younger form of the Tyre and Edom oracles serves to “shift the reader's interest from the announcement of punishment to the demonstration of guilt.”Footnote 62 Moreover, Jeremias claims that the sin indicted in each type of oracle is qualitatively different: in contradistinction to the older oracles “attesting soberly brutal cruelty,” the younger oracles “refer to specific historical or political ties, and [serve] to describe ‘motives and subjective attitudes’.”Footnote 63 Scholars have raised a constellation of objections against this conclusion. It is difficult to claim qualitative difference between the accusation against Tyre and that of Gaza since the two are rendered as almost verbatim recollections of one another. The small addition in the Tyre oracle (“they did not remember the covenant of kinship”; v. 9bβ) indeed refers to a “historical or political tie,”Footnote 64 while at the same time imputing a “subjective attitude,” but it remains unclear that this politicization should not be taken as an emotional heightening of the foregoing oracle against Gaza: whereas Gaza was politically unrelated to Israel and Judah, it was all the more dastardly that Tyre should press its advantage on Israel, since the two polities had formerly shared a well-established political bond. Moreover, as Rudolph has pointed out, form-critical investigation can only describe—and cannot prescribe—the conventions of genre taken by individual biblical pericopae. An author's divergence from an established model need not indicate secondariness, especially in the composition of such a formulaic text.Footnote 65
Second, as noted above, the oracle against Tyre repeats the prophet's invective against Gaza—and does so nearly word for word.Footnote 66 Several commentators have sought to apply this datum towards an argument for the oracle's secondary status. However, repetition alone cannot serve as a sure indicator of the oracle's “inauthenticity.” Paul avers, “the literary and contextual similarity is intentional and produced by the mnemonic device of associative reasoning, which lends conclusive weight in favor of its originality. Furthermore, its almost literal repetition of the charge against Philistia is of singular importance; that is, it specifically expresses complicity in a similar crime.”Footnote 67 In a related argument, some have described the indictments against Tyre or Edom as “pale generalizations.”Footnote 68 But here, too, I would counter with the specificity of the Tyre oracle's denunciation, which actually surpasses that of the indictment against Gaza. Generality does not seem to be an issue worth pursuing further.
Third, the prophet's allegations concern wrongdoing mentioned elsewhere in the Bible as having occurred only after the eighth century. For example, some assert that since Tyre's participation in the slave trade appears elsewhere only in Ezek 27:13 and Joel 4:6–7 (= Eng. 3:6–7), the passage from Amos cannot describe a historical reality earlier than the mid-sixth century.Footnote 69 Similarly, doubts surrounding the “authenticity” of the Edom oracle are anchored in the supposition that Amos can only be recounting here the same early sixth-century Edomite depredation of Judah mentioned in other exilic- or post-exilic era texts (e.g., Isa 34:5–17; 63:1–6; Jer 49:7–22; Ezek 25:12–14; 35:2–5; Joel 4:19 [ = Eng. 3:19]; Obad 8–14; Mal 1:4; Ps 137:7; Lam 4:21–22).Footnote 70 The response to these objections is again easy to formulate: as will be discussed in greater detail below, the social situations under indictment in Amos were likely the result of long-standing economic ties between the Levant and polities elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin. The continuation of these social and economic conditions—Tyre's participation in the slave trade and Edom's continual harassment of Judah's southern border—into the sixth century is merely an indication that the conflicts and economies involved were themselves of prolonged duration.Footnote 71
Fourth, the language of each oracle (along with that against Judah; see below) has been analyzed as particularly Deuteronomistic in theme and tone. This datum would itself suggest a date in the late seventh century at the absolute earliest. However, Hans Walter Wolff claims the phrase “to remember the covenant” (
) used in Amos 1:9bβ aligns more closely with the Priestly work than with texts commonly accepted to be pre-exilic, suggesting that the date may be pushed forward somewhat further.Footnote 72 Wolff's argument concerning the date of P may, however, be questioned in light of some Israeli and, more recently, American scholarship asserting a pre-exilic date of the Priestly text. Menahem Haran, for example, advocated a date of composition during the reigns of Ahaz and Hezekiah,Footnote 73 although his limitation of the source's composition to a mere fifty years or so has not been broadly accepted, even by those who espouse an earlier rather than later date for P.Footnote 74 Nonetheless, this disagreement concerning the date of the Priestly source necessitates that we exhibit caution in assigning the passage a late date on the basis of these passages’ lexical and thematic similarities to that Pentateuchal source text. Furthermore, regardless of this phrase's originating school of thought (and its corresponding date), several commentators have pointed out the correspondence between the term “covenant of kinship” (
) and the ancient Near Eastern conventions in which parity treaties are denoted as agreements between “brothers.”Footnote 75 The concept itself would seem to be rather old.
Ultimately, these two oracles may well be late, but none of the rationales used to support this position is decisive on its own; it is, rather, the coincidence of several potential markers of secondariness that is suggestive. To complicate the issue, however, the final sets of argumentation for the lateness of these two oracles are inexorably linked with the ordering of the oracles: many interpreters have attempted to connect the relative youth of the oracles against Tyre, Edom, and Judah with the purportedly schematic organization of the hypothetical “original” list of nations. They claim Amos would naturally have limited himself to five oracles in order to balance with the five vision reports found later in the book (chapters 7–9*),Footnote 76 or they assert the guiding principle always handily provided with recourse to the number seven, the number of perfection.Footnote 77 However, the subjectivity of the various organizational proposals can hardly be denied. Any attempts to apply criteria garnered from such proposals to the debate over the oracles’ relative antiquity must be viewed as highly provisional, for the principle whereby the oracles have received their organization remains elusive.
The Literary Order of the Oracles against the Nations
Typically, commentators on Amos have sought to understand the ordering of the oracles in Amos 1:3–2:3 (and additionally 2:4–8) in relation to their subjects’ geographic positions with respect to Israel (and Judah). One of the first scholars to make overtures in this direction was Karl Marti, who argued for a generally circular organizational principle, beginning with Damascus, moving south through the Transjordanian polities (Ammon and Moab), and then northwards through Cisjordan (Judah, Israel); in this model the oracles against Gaza, Tyre, and Edom are necessarily secondary insertions.Footnote 78 Some time later Aage Bentzen compared Amos's oracles to the fixed order of Egyptian execration texts.Footnote 79 These texts proceed through a stereotyped order of foreign countries and consistently end with Egypt as the final referent. Other such geographical orders have been suggested, yet each has its drawbacks. Working from a standpoint similar to that of Bentzen, Georg Fohrer attempted to corroborate his predecessor's basic thesis, again by eliminating Tyre and Edom from the list, and adducing the pattern as north, west, east, and center.Footnote 80 However, Wolff and Meir Weiss have challenged this attempt to connect the organizational structure of Amos 1–2* with the Egyptian execration texts.Footnote 81 In particular, Weiss was able to show that
(1) the constant order in the execration texts . . . is not unique to these texts but is the conventional sequence in which these nations are listed in all Egyptian documents, magical or otherwise; (2) this fixed order was not due to “any inherent magical design but to the fact that it was the natural expression of the Egyptian outlook,” . . . ; and (3) the directional order of the nations in Amos . . . is entirely different from that in the Execration texts.Footnote 82
Moreover, each of the schemata following Bentzen's argument can be shown to fail for similar reasons. Not only does Fohrer's postulated movement require the omission of some of the oracles, but also the movement itself does not correspond closely to that typical of the Egyptian texts.Footnote 83
While these early interpreters attempted to connect the ordering of Amos's oracles against the nations to cognate textual exemplars, others have attempted to supply a more purely geographic rationale for the oracles’ order. For example, although Mays admits that the omission of the Tyre and Edom oracles “leaves any geographic pattern incomplete,”Footnote 84 he nonetheless attempts to describe the order as though it were drawn from the sheer meaningfulness of the cardinal directions and completely intuitive: after the oracles against Damascus and Gaza, “the shift to the north-west is exactly what one expects if Amos is moving from one point of the compass to another; the next three lie to the south-east.”Footnote 85 And with the move to Edom, “the series moves to the fourth geographical quarter, the south-east.”Footnote 86 Similarly, Joseph Blenkinsopp suggests that the oracles proceed “in a counterclockwise direction from north to east (1:3–2:5),”Footnote 87 although this schema also requires the excision of the Tyre and Edom oracles from the hypothetical “original” order. Finally, Yehezkel Kaufmann also sought to apply a rigid geographical premise to these first oracles of Amos, adducing an ostensibly north-south order of enemy nations in which the author alternated between the enemies of Israel (Aram, Phoenicia, Ammon) and the enemies of Judah (Philistia, Edom, Moab).Footnote 88
All three hypotheses fail to deal with the critical issue of the necessity of such orderings. Nowhere has Mays developed the underlying presupposition that northeast, southwest, northwest, and southeast are the four directions in which the ancient Israelites thought, nor has he mustered an adequate case that this is an intuitive order of those quadrants. Likewise, even with the excision of the oracles against Tyre and Edom, Blenkinsopp's perceived movement of the oracles in the southeast is not perfectly counter-clockwise, since Ammon precedes Moab in 1:13–2:3. Paul counters Kaufmann's analysis with two observations, both of which disturb the precision of the model. First, the proposal “presupposes that all the oracles are of national significance, that is, that the crimes were committed against Israel or Judah, an assumption that is very problematic and that still leaves the final oracle concerning the conflict of Moab against Edom (and not against Judah) difficult to reconcile.” Second, it is not clear that the Philistines are to be understood as having attacked Judah and not Israel in Amos 1:6–8.Footnote 89 In short, the ordering of Amos's oracles against the nations is nearly impossible to decipher from an a priori geographical standpoint.Footnote 90 Accordingly, Barton suggests, “The simplest solution seems to be that the order is more or less arbitrary, or that other considerations than geography have dictated it.”Footnote 91
Over the past few decades, scholars have begun to employ methods more sensitive to the oracles’ literary context in order to come to grips with these chapters’ composition. As many have argued, Aram and Philistia are frequently paired in prophetic oracles (cf. Isa 9:11 [ = Eng. v. 12]; Amos 9:7b),Footnote 92 as are Philistia and Tyre (Jer 47:4; Ezek 25:15–26:21; Joel 4:4–8 [ = Eng. 3:4–8]; Zech 9:3–6; Ps 83:8).Footnote 93 In much the same way, the three remaining nations (Edom, Ammon, and Moab) evidence a number of explicit and implicit interconnections to one another and to Israel and Judah as well. Not only are they all southern Transjordanian polities, but they are also connected to Israel through bonds of filial relation (e.g., Gen 19:37–38). Moreover, these three appear together in a number of contexts (Deut 23:4–8 [ = Eng. vv. 3–7]; Isa 11:14; Jeremiah 48–49; Ezek 25:2–14; and Dan 11:41; cf. the pairing of two of the three in, e.g., Gen 19:37–38; Zeph 2:8–11). Here, too, the observations of interconnectedness may be valid and thus descriptive, but there is simply no prescriptive principle of arrangement whereby one might predict the order of these nations.Footnote 94
Paul has argued cogently for the “concatenation” formed by the intricate interweaving of “catchwords, phrases, or ideas shared only by the two contiguous units.”Footnote 95 Each stanza contains at least one word, and sometimes a whole phrase, derived from the preceding stanza. In the one case where this stricture does not apply—the transition from the Edom oracle to the Ammon oracle—the crime is ostensibly the same (i.e., the slaughter of defenseless women and children), couched in divergent terminology. Paronomasia exists between the two oracles as well: Edom's action with the sword (
) is not only assumed in the description of the Gileadites’ massacre, but the word's consonants are played upon in the rationale behind the Ammonites’ actions as well (
).Footnote 96 Paul summarizes, “whether such a sequential, concatenous pattern is a product of originally independent units welded together by Amos or by a later editor or is explained as a single literary composite, the process of an internal associative patterning provides the key to its correct interrelationship.”Footnote 97
Paul's literary observations cannot be disputed.Footnote 98 However, while historical- and redaction-critical scholarship may be able to diagnose and organize the diachronic development of the text, the resulting judgments calling into question the “originality” or “authenticity” of some oracles do not usually seek to interpret the text in anything other than strictly political and materialist terms: if the authenticity of the oracle is debatable, its historical referent is immediately impugned, unattributable to an eighth-century context, and the rhetorical force of the passage is depleted. Likewise, redaction-critical analysis tends to end its interrogation with the final form of the text, but it does not usually evaluate the book's structural composition and rhetorical thrust as a whole. In short, both modes of analysis have traditionally halted at an arbitrarily selected point, although providing much needed information for a literary analysis along the way. For example, the precision and thoroughness of Paul's historical-literary analysis allow him to suggest not that extant oracles were juxtaposed with those sharing the catchwords, common phrases, etc., but that the oracles were deliberately constructed to interact with one another at a visceral level. This is an important recognition concerning the passion with which the editors continued to imbue the product of their labors. Nonetheless, this resulting proposal for the passage's internal organization continues to avoid the question of a larger, corpus-oriented interpretation of these oracles: why did the editors who collected, organized, and supplemented Amos's work begin the book with these oracles against the nations? In the overarching scope of the book, these nations play a small role, if any. Far more prominent is the ominous omnipresence of Assyria, which, though never explicitly named, lingers belligerently in the shadows of the book of Amos, threatening the Israelites with war, despoliation, deportation, exile, and death.
At the outset of his own exposition of these oracles, John Barton wondered concerning the present arrangement of Amos 1:3–2:3 at the beginning of the prophetic book:
Is it a remnant of an older way of prophecy, the way of Balaam and of the four hundred prophets of Ahab, reinforcing a narrow nationalism with a word of power; is it the expression of a radically new insight, the discovery, made for the first time in the eighth century, that not just Israel but all nations, whatever their prestige and vaunted might, stood under the judgment of Yahweh; or is it a literary device, designed to throw the urbane and comfortable sins of Israel into high relief by seeing them against the background of the apparently grosser outrages perpetuated by barbarian nations, whom the prophet's complacent hearers would be only too ready to condemn, not noticing until too late that in condemning them they were condemning themselves?Footnote 99
Taking a different tack, John Geyer suggested that this entire section of Amos (specifically, 1:3–2:5) was added secondarily in order to provide Amos with one of the (otherwise missing) “integral part[s] of the structure of prophetic books,”Footnote 100 namely, oracles against the nations. But this suggestion is overly reductionist when one considers that three of the minor prophetic books—Obadiah, Jonah, and Nahum—do not overtly concern themselves with Geyer's other posited “integral part” (oracles “against the homeland”).Footnote 101 Subsequent interpreters have usually accepted, to a greater or lesser extent, many of the reasons alluded to by Barton for the fronting of these oracles, even if Barton himself ultimately settled on the overriding importance of “international customary law” governing nations as one of the major principles motivating these oracles’ position at the beginning of Amos.Footnote 102 But if this is the case, what should be made of the gross disconnect between the heinous acts of violence for which the other nations are condemned, and the economic oppression for which Israel is blamed (not to mention the cultic and legal transgressions of Judah)? It would seem that the reader is forced to return to the same basic questions: Why these oracles? Why here?
Amos 1:3–2:3 as Witness to the Ancient Economy
Relating these chapters to economic concerns may be an unexpected departure from the consensus view. Most scholars have anchored their readings of Amos 1:3–2:3 in the sickening depredations committed by the surrounding nations. I do not dispute that the modes of violence enumerated here are the direct actions placed under yhwh's judgment in the text.Footnote 103 Nevertheless, in the remainder of this paper I proceed from the recognition of many previous scholars that a properly situated contextual reading of Amos 1:3–2:3 cannot end with the oracle against Moab but must continue with the oracles against Judah and Israel (2:4–8 and beyond), and, in that light, I argue that a reframing of Amos's excoriating oracles against the nations is warranted which examines humans’ conflicts from an economic perspective.
Amos 1:3–2:3 and “War Crimes”
It is neither uncommon nor irresponsible to turn our focus on the correspondence between the condemned actions of Amos 1:3–2:3 and the category of “war crimes” that has received international codification and legitimation in the wake of the World Wars of the twentieth century. Matthew R. Schlimm has recently compared the six oracles addressed above to international warfare law as encoded in the stipulations of the Geneva Conventions (GC).Footnote 104 Although he correctly recognizes the differences between the prophetic text of Amos 1:3–2:3 and such legal corpora, Schlimm argues for the thematic correspondence between Amos's accusations and the precepts in the GC: the former, he states, “adumbrate international humanitarian law in significant ways.” Although the two literary corpora derive from different genres, comparison can be made between the two documents: “Each of Amos’ six oracles against the nations condemns war crimes broadly understood as inhumane actions committed in times of violence. Each crime that Amos focuses on would be deemed, at least by today's standards, a crime against humanity and a severe human rights violation.”Footnote 105 Schlimm then provides for each indictment levied against the nations an analogous legal prohibition found in the GC.
Reading the crime of Aram as a literal description of the torture of Gileadite civilians (cf. above), Schlimm points to Prot. I, Art. 75, which forbids mutilation “at any time and in any place whatsoever, whether committed by civilians or by military agents.”Footnote 106 Schlimm notes a variety of related prohibitions as well, all forbidding the infliction of torture on civilians and prisoners of war: Conv. I, Arts. 3, 12; Conv. III, Art. 17; Conv. IV, Art. 32; Prot. II, Art. 4, Sect. 2a. In comparison to Gaza's and Tyre's deliveries of “entire populations” into forced labor in the copper mines of Edom, Schlimm cites Conv. IV, Art. 49 and Conv. III, Art. 52, “which specifically forbid the mass forcible transfers of civilians, as well as forced labor that is unhealthy or dangerous. . . . The entire Fourth Convention specifically concerns itself with the protection of civilians, and there are special provisions for the most vulnerable, such as children.”Footnote 107 Similarly, passages of the GC demonstrate concern with such activities as the killing of civilian refugees (Prot. I, Art. 85, Sect. 3; cf. Prot. I, Arts. 57, 73), to which Schlimm likens the indictment against Edom in Amos 1:11;Footnote 108 the despicable wartime atrocities committed against women, including rape, murder, and dismemberment (Conv. IV, Art. 16; cf. Conv. IV, Arts. 27, 38, 89, 132; Prot. I, Art. 76; Prot. II, Art. 6, Sec. 4; cf. Amos 1:13); and the desecration of the dead (Conv. I, Art. 17; cf. Amos 2:1). Schlimm thus argues for a rough correspondence between the transgressions attributed to each nation in Amos's oracles and many of the inhumane acts perpetrated all too often during the course of warfare in the modern era.
Schlimm's reading of Amos 1:3–2:3 is an affirmation of the universality of humanitarian principles, recognized both within the prophet's mediated word of yhwh and within a multi-national (and multi-religious) secular organization. However, Schlimm himself recognizes the variance in these two modes of ethical discernment,Footnote 109 and he proves himself to be aware of the resultant ethical ramifications. In the final major section of the paper, he addresses the challenges posed to readings of Amos 1:3–2:3 as a witness to natural law, including the objection that the category “War Crime” is itself a Western invention, concocted through reliance on culturally-conditioned principles—the same principles, not coincidentally, that pervade Amos.
More problematic for Schlimm's thesis is the omission of any discussion of the oracles against Judah and Israel. Although it is quite tempting to relegate these oracles to a separate literary unit, commentators have long recognized that the oracles against the nations in Amos 1:3–2:3 do not end before the movement to Judah and Israel but rather climax in it.Footnote 110 Formal indicators signal this necessary continuation with 2:4–16, since both oracles take up the formulae with which the preceding oracles are introduced (“For three transgressions of GN, and for four, I will not turn it back”; vv. 4, 6), and since the Judah oracle concludes with the same threat of destruction by fire found ubiquitously as well (“So I will send/kindle a fire on Judah, and it shall devour the strongholds of Jerusalem”; 2:5; cf. 1:4, 7, 10, 12, 14a; 2:2).Footnote 111 Yet Schlimm's analysis has had to omit these oracles, presumably because their content is incommensurate with his thesis.Footnote 112 Amos castigates Judah,
because they have rejected the law of the Lord,
and have not kept his statutes,
but they have been led astray by the same lies
after which their ancestors walked. (2:4b)
The scholarly consensus holding that this passage is Deuteronomistic (and concomitantly secondary) places this oracle in what appears at first to be a different social location. The “crimes” in which Judah is implicated here are commonly described as cultic (esp. 2:4bβ) rather than as “a breach of the moral law.”Footnote 113 As with the oracle against Judah, so too does Amos bring Israel under indictment for crimes that are seemingly much more mundane—at least, in comparison to those of Tyre or Ammon:
because they sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals—
they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth,
and push the afflicted out of the way;
father and son go in to the same girl,
so that my holy name is profaned;
they lay themselves down beside every altar
on garments taken in pledge;
and in the house of their God they drink
wine bought with fines they imposed. (2:6–8)
Although these actions are indeed repugnant, nowhere does the level of violence approach that found in the preceding oracles. Instead, the largely economic concerns of the oracle against Israel reveal a severe difficulty with Schlimm's analysis. Schlimm does not account for the prominence of the economic abuse perpetrated on society's lowest classes in the book Amos. By concentrating so fully on the egregious and horrific modes of violence employed in the Iron Age II, Schlimm misses the socio-economically circumscribed arena in which this violence occurs.
Amos 1:3–2:3 in Geographical, Social-Scientific, and Literary Perspectives
The criticism proposed here is not an effort to dismantle Schlimm's ethical stance; I fully concur that the oracles against the nations condemned such extreme expressions of violence. Nor is this caveat a thinly veiled attempt to return to categories and philosophies familiar from Marxist idealism. What I am arguing, however, is that in focusing so much on the particular modes of violence described in Amos 1:3–2:3, commentators have not yet turned adequate attention to the social and economic conditions in which that violence was manifested. Resituating the modes of violence described in Amos 1:3–2:3 within their historical, geographic, and economic context(s) opens up a new perspective on the text. When properly contextualized, these opening chapters divulge Amos's portrayal of Israel's and Judah's national economies as inextricably connected with those of the surrounding polities. Though neither the prophet himself nor the editors of the biblical book conceptualized their work in strictly economic terms, it is precisely the international economy of the Iron Age II (and Persian Period) southern Levant that lies in the background of these oracles.
The need to attend more closely to the economic context of Israel in the Iron Age II was driven home prominently by the work of Coote and Whitelam.Footnote 114 By adopting a long-term view of the cyclical oscillation of settlement expansion and contraction in the Iron Age southern Levant, Coote and Whitelam were able to isolate a number of variables constraining the socio-economic and political history of the region. One of these, of course, was interregional trade.Footnote 115 Because of its position astride several major trade routes, all constrained to the narrow swath of land comprising Cisjordan and Transjordan by exigencies of topography and climate, the southern Levant—and each of its constituent polities—occupied a prime position along the interregional trade networks: “The strategic position of the overland routes traversing Palestine means that it has often found itself very near the centre of world economies and benefited greatly from its privileged position.”Footnote 116 Although Coote and Whitelam recognize that “the interregional trade economy is interlinked with the local subsistence economy,” they also stress the disjunctures between these two economies:
The subsistence economy is local and rural involving primarily food production for the local workforce. It also involves production for taxes, rents, and other creditors and elites, as well as efforts to produce in return for cash which peasants need for purchasing or bartering what they themselves do not produce. The trade economy is urban, interregional, and involves commodities, strategic military items, and luxuries.Footnote 117
As many studies have demonstrated, the urban elites dominated both economies, although the precise mechanisms of this domination remain somewhat unclear. For example, Coote and Whitelam claim, “It was the ruling family, or ‘house’, whether the imperial or state ruling house, which conducted and benefitted from the commercial activities conducted through the urban centres.”Footnote 118 Stager, complementarily, allows for the action of a slightly more decentralized model. In his “Port Power” model, independent merchants bear the onus of the actual overland transportation of the trade commodities to the various seaports serving as the connective nodes of oversea trade networks, while the small regional polities lying between the production facilities and their eventual markets would each take a cut of the profit.Footnote 119 Regardless of the precise organization of the trade economy, it should be clear that polities had every incentive to extend their territory far enough to control the major routes of trade, each extracting its own share of the total economic value moving through its control. With the increase in international trade during the eighth century b.c.e., the urban elites of the southern Levant would increasingly have been able to leverage their financial and coercive advantages over the local subsistence economies under their control through the imposition of increased taxation,Footnote 120 in order to afford the costly imports both constituting and indicative of higher status in an international economy. Marvin Chaney describes the increasing disparity between the elites and those trapped in a subsistence economy that provided ever-decreasing levels of “subsistence”: “Imports mostly benefited an elite minority, while the exports necessary to procure them cut deeply into the sustenance of the peasant majority.”Footnote 121 And further: “Only a tiny percentage of those populations initiated, benefited from, and favored the process, but they held the reins of power.”Footnote 122 Undoubtedly, this process of economic exploitation by the urban elite was not necessarily limited to the eighth century, but could have continued on into subsequent eras.Footnote 123 Nonetheless, Walter Houston has argued persuasively that the eighth century does provide a suitable context for much of the material in Amos. In part, the political and military rise of Assyria in the northeast around the midpoint of the eighth century brought about the conditions of this social crisis in the southern Levant. Houston points especially to the concomitant economic pressure Assyria exerted on the ruling elites of the entire Levant through the imposition of tribute and the increasing control it levied over trade in commodities and luxury goods, as factors in Israel's deepening crisis.Footnote 124
In short, the bifurcation of the economy of the southern Levant in the Iron Age II into an interregional, urban-based trade economy and a series of local, subsistence-based agricultural economies, along with the consolidation of trade benefits within the elite circles of society who became increasingly subject to the economic and political whims of Assyria, necessitated to a large degree that the interregional trade economy effectively bypass the local subsistence economies, while at the same time extracting more and more value from them. Unsurprisingly, the majority of the encounters enumerated in Amos 1:3–2:3, insofar as they can be identified accurately, seem to have taken place along the borders between various ethnic groups and states. Most commentators have identified this much already. What is not so readily apparent is that in each case, Amos draws ethical connections between these polities; these connections follow precisely the major economic trade routes of antiquity. The vast majority of the international conflicts cited in Amos 1:3–2:3 assume the continual struggle over control of the overland trade route running from the west coast of the Arabian peninsula through the major Judahite port Elath, northwards to Damascus and, beyond it, Syria and Mesopotamia.Footnote 125 This longitudinal trade route—or possibly cluster of trade routesFootnote 126—ran the length of the Transjordanian highlands through Edom, Moab, Ammon, Gilead, and Aram. Along this main north-south artery goods flowed northward from the Hejaz in modern Saudi Arabia, including incense and spices bound for Syria, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor. And, as Holladay points out, equally precious goods from these northern regions would have flowed southward on the merchants’ return trip.Footnote 127 Although the Bible nowhere explicitly attaches the various Transjordanian campaigns of the kings to international competition over the trade routes, there are plenty of indicators that control of trade along the so-called “King's Highway” was a major concern for Cisjordanian royalty.Footnote 128 Furthermore, when Israel or Judah controlled a portion of this eastern escarpment of the Great Rift Valley, the polity was no doubt able to siphon off a greater portion of the trade westward toward its favored Mediterranean port, taking an increased cut of the profits along the way.Footnote 129
Given the international economic background laid out here, it should come as no surprise that the trade route's environs feature as the primary military theater(s) in Amos's oracles against Damascus, Edom, Ammon, and Moab: 1) Damascus is excoriated for its brutality during a southward push against Gilead (1:3). Any such push would have served, at least in part, to extend Damascene control over a greater portion of the longitudinal trade route. 2) Ammon, too, receives castigation for its viciousness in a similar, westward push against Gilead (1:13). Although it is difficult to know where exactly the line of ethnic or political demarcation fell (and it surely did not remain in one place for too long, anyway), economic benefits would no doubt have followed whenever the Ammonites were able to “extend their border” (
). The further Ammon was able to push its boundaries against the Israelite tribal areas in the Transjordan, both north towards Ramoth-gilead and south towards Heshbon, the greater the portion of the King's Highway it would have controlled. 3) If the description of the Edomites’ incursion into Judah in 2 Chr 28:17 is based on historical realities, this short note may give an indication of the degree to which Judah's southern border was beleaguered (compare Amos 1:11). Besides the literary reminiscences of the biblical text, epigraphic markers of Edomite presence in this area may also indicate the long-term presence of tensions surrounding the latitudinal routes between Transjordan and the Mediterranean running through southern Judah: an ostracon dating to the beginning of the sixth century b.c.e. and bearing the divine name Qaus (i.e., the Edomite deity) was discovered in Ḥorvat ‘Uzza, east of Arad.Footnote 130 4) Moab's aggression towards Edom (alluded to in 2:1) would also have had the effect—even if only of secondary concern at the time—of extending the projection of Moabite power southward, thereby claiming a greater swath of the longitudinal trade route and the attendant taxes and transit fees. In short, each one of these oracles presupposes the importance of the economic artery coursing the length of the Transjordanian highlands and of the nodes at which goods may have been siphoned off westward. Bolstering this interpretation, Susan and Andrew Sherratt note in their study of the first-millennium b.c.e. economy that one of the emergent features of the new economy of the Iron Age was that “territorial definition became important both at the boundaries of city states and of larger entities, giving rise to new forms of empires based on direct politico-military control and involving new forms of regional surplus extraction and tribute.”Footnote 131
In addition to the military activities along the longitudinal King's Highway, it is possible to reconstruct the common destination of the enslaved populations in the indictments of Gaza and Tyre and the populations’ respective routes of travel. Jeremias has correctly pointed to the latitudinal trade route from Gaza on the Mediterranean to Edom in the southern Transjordan (Amos 1:6).Footnote 132 The slave populations coming from Phoenicia (v. 9) would presumably have been shipped down the coast to a northern port city such as Dor or Akko, then transported overland through the Esdraelon and Jezreel Valleys, and driven into the Transjordanian highlands to meet the King's Highway. In both cases, the fate of these populations likely ended in the copper mines of Edom, where they were enslaved and in whose rocky soil their bodies were wrecked with toil.
In other words, every one of the oracles in Amos 1–2 other than those against Israel and Judah finds its arena along the King's Highway or culminates in the major cities located along it. Many of these cities are held under judgment in the punishment verses of Amos's oracles—Damascus (1:3, 5), Teman (v. 12), Bozra (v. 12), Rabbath-ammon (v. 14), and Kerioth (= Kir-haresheth;Footnote 133 2:2). In this reading, the text develops its portrayals of two interconnected trade networks, both of which engendered regional disputes employing despicable acts of dehumanizing violence. On the one hand, Amos portrays a large-scale slave-trade network in the southern Levant, with its regional distribution and collection centers on the shore of the Mediterranean and its central market in Edom.Footnote 134 On the other, Amos alludes to the arterial trade route running longitudinally through Transjordan. Attempts to gain control of this route or its tributaries occasioned outright brutality in the treatment of civilians as the bickering polities sought to intimidate, harass, expel, and in some cases exterminate the resident populations.
Situating Amos 2:4–8 (and Beyond) within the Ancient Economy
In the previous section, I described the convergence of the oracles contained in Amos 1:3–2:3 with historical and economic reconstructions of Levantine society. But we should not stop here in our investigation of Amos's oracles against the nations; as noted above, the devastating critique of these polities’ reprehensible acts does not end before but rather culminates in Amos's oracles against Judah and Israel. Also as noted above, the apparently quotidian wrongs committed by Judah and Israel enumerated in Amos 2:4–8 belie a much deeper analysis of the actual iniquities imputed to these two polities. For example, Judah is held accountable for its refusal to adhere to the laws and statutes of the Torah; as mentioned previously, this is recognizably Deuteronomistic languageFootnote 135 and thus correspondingly alludes to a vast repertoire of legal injunctions governing interactions between human individuals. Judah's rejection of the (Deuteronomic) law (
) and its deliberate obliviousness to yhwh's statues (
) may be crimes against the deity,Footnote 136 but if so, they are perpetrated at least in part against one's human peers. This legal corpus features injunctions against such exploitative and destructive behaviors as attacking a city without first offering its inhabitants the terms of surrender (Deut 20:10–12) or wantonly annihilating a city's fruitful orchards during times of siege (vv. 19–21).Footnote 137 We find also prescriptions mandating a periodic remission of debts (
; Deut 15:1–3) and a release of servants—who were, according to Deuteronomy, to be treated as though they had all along been indentured servants rather than permanently acquired slaves (vv. 12–14). Profligate disregard for these stipulations could reasonably be construed as an economically-charged and intentional neglect of many of the same basic “human rights” enumerated above, even if this neglect constitutes operation in a much less overt manner, with the economic benefits accruing to the slave-owner or money-lender proceeding in a correspondingly muted way.Footnote 138
Similarly, the prophetic excoriation of Israel seems at the surface level to depart dramatically from the foregoing oracles against the nations: Israel is placed under indictment for its practices of debt-servitude (Amos 2:6b) and oppression of the economically marginalized (v. 7a), for its sexual deviancy (v. 7b), and for its hypocritical merger of economic exploitation and cultic practice (v. 8). Although portrayed as heinous in their own right, none of these practices rises to the level of raw violence and depredation manifested in the oracles against the foreign nations. In fact, Wolff sharply distinguishes this oracle from those preceding:
The list of accusations in 2:6–9 is clearly distinguished from the reproaches against the foreign nations by the fact that it does not include war crimes, for which the national leadership would primarily be accountable. The announcements of punishment against the foreign nations always name those politically responsible, whereas in the oracle against Israel this is nowhere the case.Footnote 139
Yet at the same time, the exposition of the Iron Age II economy of the Levant given above should provoke a reanalysis of our initial reading of this oracle. On closer examination, we find that the violence lying at the root of Amos's diatribe still festers beneath the surface, masked only by the façade of economic due process.
The people of Israel are criticized in Amos 2:6 for “their selling the innocent for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals” (
). No matter the precise reading of the final prepositional phrase,Footnote 140 the concern here is with the verb *
. Amid a number of possible variations in the interpretation of this verb, the most likely scenario seems to be the one in which “the charge is sale into slavery to pay a real or assumed debt; the party sold is otherwise guiltless.”Footnote 141 A similar castigation is found in 8:6, where the colon 
follows a colon worded similarly to the first stich of 2:6b: 
“(so that we may) purchase the poor for silver.” In effect, 8:6 merely represents the opposite end of the economic transaction portrayed in 2:6, contrasting *
“to sell” with *
“to buy,” and substituting the plural 
(see the use of this word in 2:7) for the singular 
. Couched in a diatribe against unfair business practices (“[so that we may] make the ephah small and make the sheqel great, and skew the unfair scales”; 8:5), there can be no reasonable doubt that this passage portrays the deceitful business practices of Israelite merchants, full of avarice and greed (v. 5), as leading directly to the debt-servitude for which they are condemned in v. 6 (and 2:6). Similarly, the pernicious violence—metaphorical or actual—alluded to in 2:7a finds restatement in 8:4. In both passages, the persons under criticism are accused of being “ones who trample” (
) “on the heads of the poor” (
; 2:7), or simply “(on) the needy” (
; 8:4).Footnote 142 The second hemi-stich in 2:7a describes how the elites of Israel “turn aside the path of the humble” (
). Although this passage has received a judiciary explanation by some commentators,Footnote 143 Paul asserts through reference to a similar passage in Job 24:4 that “The indictment here makes the similar charge that the needy are ‘turned aside’ . . ., that is, pushed off the road. This figuratively expresses the same idea that the underprivileged class is bullied and oppressed by the wealthy, who deprive and block them from obtaining the privileges and prerogatives to which they are naturally entitled.”Footnote 144 A similar accusation is lodged in 5:12, where Amos criticizes the “ones who bind up the innocent [
], take a bribe [
], and turn aside the needy at the gate [
].” Here too, the criticism revolves around the obstinate resolution of those in society vested with social and economic power to maintain their economic advantages at any cost.
Although examples of this sort could be multiplied almost indefinitely from the book of Amos, the preceding synopsis is sufficient to illustrate the interconnections established between the crimes of which the prophet and his tradents accused Israel and the world economy lying in the background of the oracles against Judah and Israel (2:4–8). In perfect symmetry with the preceding oracles, Amos suggests that, underlyingly, the same respect for human dignity at stake in the foreign kingdoms is at stake in Israel as well. It was precisely the upper class's participation in and hegemony over the avenues of international, long-distance trade that permitted their exploitation of the smaller-scale regional subsistence economies embedded in the geographically and topographically confined subregions of the Levant. The participation of the economic elites in the trade of luxury-goods throughout the Levant and beyond effectively constitutes participation in the same economic system driving their increasingly parasitic extraction of subsistence goods from the local economies held under their sway. These elites inhabit the nexus uniting the two levels of the ancient economy: those political players fighting for control of the trade routes at the cost of their subjects’ lives in the international arena are the same loan-sharks gaming the lending system at the local level. Military and financial success in the former context translates to further financial success in the latter economic sphere; the capital gained through military violence from the one is used to sustain and expand the exploitative practices of the other.
In conclusion, the “organizing principle” of Amos 1:3–2:8 is not one that orders polities politely and moves neatly from one to the next. Instead, the organizing principle is the movements themselves between the polities—movements that take place upon a well-established system of trade routes, bringing with them violence and depredation. Each act of violence Amos describes adds a filament connecting two nodes of economic interaction—most likely founded on the exchange of precious commodities—in the Iron Age (and, likely, Persian Period) Levant. These threads are laid down in an interlaced network around and through Israelite and Judahite territory. With the application of each small textual thread, a spider's web of economic interactions slowly takes shape, spreading across the southern Levant. With the culmination of Amos's criticism in Judah and Israel, these gossamer threads are pulled taut. Amos claims thereby that, even if the inhabitants of Israel (and, through reference of its unfaithfulness to the Deuteronomic legislation, Judah) are not guilty of the aforementioned crimes in the strictly legal sense of the term, they remain complicit in any wrongdoing committed in the production and transportation of the luxury goods available for import. Even if they were to buy these items legally, from reputable sources, they are inextricably bound up in the exploitative economies that thrive on the manufactured scarcity to which consumers naturally (and often unwittingly) contribute. In the Iron Age II and the Persian period, eras of increasing “globalization” and economic interdependency, the book of Amos drew out the potential pitfalls of national wealth, of a widening economic disparity between the richest echelons of society and its poorest strata, and of the nations'—or at least their leaders'—collective complicity in others’ barbarism. While Amos's intended audience may have believed itself to be guiltless in this regard, the oracles collected at the beginning of this book claim exactly the opposite: namely, that it was impossible for the people of Israel to escape guilt of some form or another in a world in which economic interaction and oppression went hand in hand. It should be unanimously recognized that the remainder of the book of Amos systematically lays out at Israel's—and, by extension, Judah'sFootnote 145—feet the nations’ own culpability in the oppression and negligence of their respective economies. What is not always recognized is that the opening chapters of Amos already anticipate this trajectory, in that they serve to locate Israel and Judah inextricably at the crossroads of the international economy. These opening chapters are neither inconsistent with nor ancillary to the remainder of the book's imprecations. Rather, regardless of any redactional insertions that may have been added after the initial publication of the text, regardless of any intrusions into or deliberate (re-)arrangements of the opening oracles, Amos 1:3–2:8 comprises a cohesive, coherent opening salvo that leads directly into the book's castigation of Israel and Judah. The book's crucial assessment of Judah's and Israel's respective locations in the international economy—namely, that any attempt on their part to escape complicity in the brutality that derives from economic interaction is impossible—occupies an irrevocably central position in Amos. This assessment fuels the ensuing excoriation leveled upon the northern kingdom of Israel (and, implicitly, upon Persian-period Judah in which the book received its final form), thus providing a hermeneutical key for the remainder of the book and rendering the book all the more powerful a denunciation of those polities’ consumer economies.
