By the by . . .

  By the by . . . 

from E. A. Childress’ commentary on Amos (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, forthcoming, maybe, p. 38) —

II. 4 Doesn’t the Lord say? –  “The people of Judah – for their three sins and four, surely I will punish them. They have despised my teaching; they have rejected my commandments. They have been led astray by the same false gods their ancestors followed.” 5  So I will send fire upon Judah and burn down the houses of Jerusalem.

 

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Aside

Do you ever get the sense, dear reader, as I do, that these verses are interpolated, or a “later fabrication,” as McKeating puts it? (“The middle of the oracle, specifying Judah’s crimes, is not at all characteristic of Amos, either in what it says or the language in which it says it.” Nowhere else does he show “interest in irregularities of worship.”) Moreover, this is the only reference to Judah in Amos except for in 1:1, which sets the time of the prophecy from when Uzziah was Judah’s king (and Amos came up from Tekoa), and in 7:12, when Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, becomes fed up and tells the prophet to go back to Judah where he came from. Let him prophesy there. Prophesy against that court and that priesthood, that people. Amaziah throws down the gauntlet. Tell them the day of the Lord is for effing everyone. It’s not a challenge Amos takes up, as far as we can tell. He will journey from Montgomery to New York City to tell Wall Street the bottom is about to fall out of the market. He will float down the Ohio and Mississippi from Steubenville to New Orleans to tell Bourbon Street it will be swamped. But he won’t go home to preach in his hometown.

     He is not quite “the triumph of universalism in the history of ethics . . . the beginning of revelation in the history of religion” that Reinhold Niebuhr (The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 2, ch. 1) needs to think he is. IMHO.

    03.22.21

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