A Basket of Ripe Fruit
8 My Lord Yahweh showed me this, and there was a basket of summer fruit. 2 And he said, “What do you see, Amos?” And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” And Yahweh said to me, “The end has come upon my people Israel. I will not pass by them again!” 3 “And the songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day,” declares[a] my Lord Yahweh. “The corpses are numerous; he throws them in every place. Be quiet!” 4 Hear this, those who trample on the poor and who annihilate the afflicted of the land, 5 saying, “When will the new moon be over, so that we can sell grain? And the Sabbath, so that we can open the grain bins, that we can make the ephah small and make the shekel large, and can practice deceit with a set of scales of deceit? 6 That we can[b] buy the powerless with silver and the poor for the sake of a pair of sandals, and we can sell the waste of the grain?” 7 Yahweh has sworn by the pride of Jacob, “Surely I will never forget any of their deeds! 8 On account of this, will not the land tremble and will not every living thing in it mourn? And all of it will rise like the Nile and it will be tossed about and subside like the Nile of Egypt. 9 And then in that day,” declares[c] my Lord Yahweh, “I[d] will make the sun go down at noon and I will darken the land on a day of light. 10 And I will turn your feasts into mourning and all of your songs into lament, and I will put sackcloth on all loins and baldness on every head. And I will make it like the mourning for an only child, and its end like a bitter day. 11 Look, the days are coming,” declares[e] my Lord Yahweh, “when I will send a famine in the land, not a famine for bread and not a thirst for water, but of hearing[f] the words of Yahweh! 12 And they will wander from sea to sea and from the north and to the east. They will roam about to seek the word of Yahweh, but they will not find it! 13 In that day the beautiful young women and the young men will faint because of thirst. 14 These are those who swear by the guilt of Samaria and say, ‘By the life of your gods, O Dan,’ and ‘By the life of the way of Beersheba,’ they will fall and they will not rise again.”