Amos’s role in history was to elevate the religion of Israel. Israel had ceased to be
religious; it had become a commercial people. Amos had an axe to grind. But we
may be surprised at the vehement force of his attack on the religion of Israel. At
the time, the name “Israel” referred to a region which was traditionally Jewish, but
no longer used that name. Amos was Jewish. He had a religion that he believed;
but why care that way about another country. What made Amos into “Amos?”
Amos, the Lover of Our Lady Wisdom
exploring the metamorphosis of Amos
There may be a reason why a Jewish boy, a young Amos, might have been attracted
to Israel. Amos was personally a wise man, a quality he shared with his Edomite
neighbors. There is nothing territorial about Our Lady Wisdom. She can flourish in any
culture. Amos clearly loved her; and just as clearly had other equally religious needs.
We see him first in a country in which his religious needs went unsatisfied. He was
vulnerable. In the flush of first love, the love of Our Lady Wisdom, he found himself
religiously lacking. The leadership of Judah was religiously weak. The “Law” was not
established in the heart. It was verbalized, but it had no emotional force to it. The name
for this region, the Southern part of the traditional Jewish region, was “Judah.”
Judah had a priesthood; but the priests were too weak to exert social force. Instead of
having a potent religion, they had weak one with tyrants for their leaders. The priests
went through the motions mechanically; they had no social force; they were being used.
Northern Israel, the geographic northernmost part of the Northern Kingdom, would
mean a distant place to Amos. Northern Israel, lying geographically close to Assyria,
was a place of social and religious ferment. The ferment did not travel south. The
southern part was complacent.
The Southern border to the kingdom to the north of Judah, was the nearby Kingdom of
Israel. It was in walking distance from Amos’s home. One may imagine Amos being
able to see the capital city (in his mind’s eye, of course) from his front door on the hill
top where he lived.
What we are driving at here is that in the very furthest Northern part of the Kingdom
of Israel the Levites, a non-priestly order charged explicitly with teaching, like our
Christian order of deacons, had produced a written work of the Jewish Law. This book,
which we may still have today, was the original form of the Book of Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy is the highest book of the Law of Israel; it is the place where it is affirmed
that we are to love our God with our whole heart and our whole soul and our neighbor
as ourself.
Amos would not have read those exact words. The book in his time was a primitive one,
suited to the needs of the teachers whose job it was to draw out the social implications
of the Law. Amos bit and was captured and captivated by it. Nothing in his experience
was anything like this work. It shaped his life; and he became an activist in the Southern
part of the Northern Kingdom. He made it his job to tell them what the Law meant. In
Amos, Our Lady Wisdom meets the force of the Law and wins it over. Through Amos
we learn what it really means to love God. It has its roots in Our Lady Wisdom and for
its sake we put wisdom above the Law.
The book that we call Deuteronomy was written in the Persian period. Many hundreds
of years would pass before the book we have took the shape in which we find it. Amos
become one of the many commentators whose life work turns up in this book of the
Law. But before Amos could impact the book, it had to do its work on him. He had to
become it; to eat it; and to learn to preach it.
The metamorphoses of Amos was a spiritual journey from Wisdom to Law, a new
kind of Law that developed and is governed by Wisdom. Wisdom is like
commonsense. It all took place in the southern region of a kingdom that could
not have cared less. They were a commercial people for whom religion was a
simple duty, something that one performed in a sacred place specially reserved
for worship. Any social impact was only because it is supposed to be good idea
to think like that and to try to live up to one’s social duties in life. Amos’s brand
of faith was foreign to them. He preached it in their temple and they were very
reluctant to silence him because it was apparent that he had the authority to do
so. They asked him to leave; they tried to convince him that he had no realistic
vocation. It only made him try harder. We can perceive the fanaticism that
gripped him. It would be a sad mistake to suppose that he ever really lost his first
love for Our Lady Wisdom.
