Amos and the Cosmic Imagination

James R. Linville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351162982
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Said to contain the words of the earliest of the biblical prophets (8th century BCE), the book of Amos is reinterpreted by the author in light of new and sometimes controversial historical approaches to the Bible. Amos is read as the literary product of the Persian-era community in Judah. Its representations of divine-human communication are investigated in the context of the ancient writers' own role as transmitters and shapers of religious traditions. Amos's extraordinary poetry expresses mythical conceptions of divine manifestation and a process of destruction and recreation of the cosmos which reveals that behind the appearances of the natural world is a heavenly, cosmic temple.

PART I
Imagining Amos

Chapter 1
Landscaping Amos' Cosmic Temple

The bay-trees in our country are all witherer’d
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-fac’d moon looks bloody on the earth,
And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful change.

Richard II, II.iv.8–11¹

Shakespeare must have had a deep appreciation for the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. The Welsh Captain in Richard II abandons his post, speaking of withered trees, frightened stars, and a moon both pale and bloody: ominous portents of the fall of a king. But the Captain does not actually quote his whispering prophets. They and their unheard whispers do not so much predict fearful change as they are its omens, symbols and embodiments. The biblical prophets, however, are not remembered for their hushed tones. Many are given speech after deafening speech, but they, too, find withered trees and darkened moons to be portents and symbols of the destruction of many a king and country. And still, when looking at the biblical prophets, we would do well to consider the ominous image painted by the Bard. The world of Amos, like that depicted in any literary text or play, is an imaginary one. Perhaps something might be said of the historical Amos but the real man is hidden. Yet, ancient Judah’s scribes have left a masterpiece of Hebrew literature in his name. We must only be careful not to mistake the portrait for the person, the landscape for any real time and place.

The book of Amos is all about transformations. Amos was a herdsman. Now he wears the prophet’s mantle and in so doing is accused of plotting the fall of a king. The world has corrupted itself. It will die and be reborn. Yet this transformation is timeless. All the political and military upheavals that the book gives as the backdrop of Amos’ preaching follow an eternal model of creation, destruction and recreation. The contingencies of time and place become subservient to the trans-historical processes of cosmic realities. This is the mythic world of our imaginary, literary Amos. It oscillates between heaven and earth, the past and the future.

It has long been realized that the Bible’s prophetic texts employ a wide selection of mythic motifs and images, and I will demonstrate something of this range in the book of Amos. I also will demonstrate how these are not mere literary figures or survivals from earlier religious conceptions, but are also fundamental to the book which is itself an articulation of paradigmatic cosmic themes. In this sense, it is a mythic text in its own right. Equally important, however, is that the book of Amos, like the rest of prophetic literature, embeds these mythic themes and progressions in a new plot: that of the ancient (and often ignored) prophet of God. The cosmic myth articulated in Amos’ message is cast as words of a prophet who is himself an instantiation of a mythical prototypical messenger. Beyond the actual message of judgement, destruction and rebirth is an exploration of an idealized interaction between human and God; it is a model for the experience of producing the text itself.

In the final vision in Amos 9, God is seen standing on an altar issuing an order to strike the capital of the temple’s columns and shake its thresholds, bringing it all down on the heads of the people. Here, a glimpse of a common mythic motif in the ancient Near East emerges, the macrocosmic temple in heaven. There, one sees the throne room of the god, the model upon which earthly temples are made, and the foundation of creation. Many ancient myths tell of the establishment of a divine hierarchy only to culminate in the building of a palace for the god or a temple-city on earth. The Israelites had their own versions of this. Jon D. Levenson, for instance, has written on the ancient israelite temple’s cosmic dimensions. The orders to construct the tabernacle in Exodus have lengthy references to the requirement to keep the Sabbath, the festival of imitating the divine rest at the end of the world’s creation (see Exod. 31:12–17, 35:1–3). Leviticus twice associates an order to revere the sanctuary with keeping the s abbath (Lev. 19:30, 26:2).² The exodus in the Hebrew Bible is deeply mythic, linking the creation of Israel as a distinct people to a particular way of life and religion and ultimately to the creation of the world itself.

The Psalms are rich in such imagery; the elevated language of poetry links heaven and earth. Psalm 2 celebrates God who is ‘seated in heaven’ and has installed his King ‘on Zion’, his ‘holy mountain’ (vv. 4, 6). Ps. 48:2–3 (Eng. vv. 1–2), sings of Yahweh, ‘who is acclaimed in the city of our God, his holy mountain’.³ The mountain is called beautiful, the joy of all the earth. But here, idealizations of the real Jerusalem give way to mythic conceptions although they are sometimes mishandled in English translations. Many translations, including the New Revised Standard Version, read the word ṣapon in v. 3 as indicating that Zion is in the ‘far north’ but this produces a geographical anomaly. Zion is an intrinsic part of the Jerusalem environs. It is better to see ṣapon not as the direction towards Zion, but as a claim that Zion is none other than mount Zaphon, roughly the Syrian equivalent to Greece’s Mount Olympus, the abode of the gods.⁴ In Psalm 48, heaven and earth are linked through Zion. Yahweh, the divine king, robed in majesty, is celebrated in Psalm 93. The permanence of the earth is equated with the permanence of his throne. The eternal deity’s majesty exceeds that of the thundering seas, which is a clear reference to primeval waters. Psalm 65 is directed towards god in Zion, commenting on the blessings of the divine house. God is credited with providing all the bounty of nature.

The prophetic writings, themselves the poetic equals of the Psalms, are familiar with such ideas, too. A new earthly temple is often associated with Jewish utopias such as in Ezekiel 40–48. There are clear echoes of paradise in some of these temple images. Ezekiel in chapter 47 sees water flow from the temple that provides for every living thing. All forms of trees will be nourished by it, and their fruit will be food and medicine for all (cf. Ps 46:5, eng. v. 4).⁵ Jeremiah 17:12 calls god’s eternal throne of glory his ‘sacred shrine’. Isaiah 65:17–18 employs language that echoes gen. 1:1, and tells of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth. It reads:

See! I am creating new heavens and a new earth
And the first will not be remembered; they will not come to mind.
But delight and rejoice for evermore over what I am creating!
see! I am creating Jerusalem – a joy, and her people – a delight!⁶

Of course, the heavenly archetype can have many earthy manifestations. In the book of Amos, Zion figures as does the shrine at Bethel and a few other places. All such shrines were meant as representations of the cosmic prototype (I will have more to say about the details of this in the next chapter). This prototype is the conceptual landscape in which the action of the book of Amos takes place. Or, more accurately, Amos uncovers the cosmic reality as hidden bedrock beneath the shifting fortunes of the human and natural world, and, once uncovered, reduces it to chaos. This is what the present study is concerned with: the way Amos imagines the dissolution of the cosmos through a poetic attack on this ephemeral cosmic structure and the resulting paradise that ensues when God restores the universe. Yet, the structure of that universe, at least as it manifests itself in our imaginations, is itself built of the very words that doom it to chaos.

To explore this ‘word-world’ requires something of a long journey with many twists and turns of phrase. Language in Amos is not a neutral quantity. The use of ambiguity, double meanings, alliteration and the like was widespread in the literature of the ancient Near East. Playful etymologies could be used to link deities with particular natural forces and could be used as an operative element in magic. To manipulate the name of an object into another word was to have control over it. The Hebrew scribes had a similar creative bent. Behind the superficial levels of meaning there are allusions to alternative meanings. There are aural and visual puns, words with similar sounds and spellings that allow the reader to relate ideas and concepts not otherwise linked by grammar and syntax. Recent academic literature is full of newly discovered examples of such creativity. From the poetry of the Psalms and Job to prose in books like samuel, the scribes loaded their texts with dense webs of allusion, patterned sounds and layers of meaning.⁷ In this volume, I will follow the shifting linguistic landscape as it translates its own depiction of the natural world into the cosmic temple before ordering it destroyed, only to rebuild the world anew as a paradise.

So let us return to Amos’ opening lines, and sacrifice a bit of English word order to show the Hebrew patterning of words:

¹ The words of Amos, who was among the stockmen from Tekoa, who prophesied
concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah, King of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam, son
of Joash, King of Israel, two years before the earthquake.
² And he said,
‘Yahweh from Zion roars,
And from Jerusalem he gives his voice.
Mourn [do] the pastures of the shepherds
Dry up [does] the top of Carmel.’

The phrase, ‘the words of Amos’, is an odd way to begin a book of divine oracles; only Jeremiah has a similar opening. There is an implied tension between the prophet and God that will come to the surface later in word games of compulsion and coercion. The narrator’s dating of Amos to the reigns of two kings sets the text historically, and yet the added reference to the earthquake casts an ominous shadow. There is a pronounced geographical disjunction in these two verses. Amos is from Tekoa, south of Jerusalem, and his visions concern the kingdom of israel to the north. Yet, the centre of divine speech is Zion and Jerusalem. There is a symbiosis between the human and the natural. The pastures express the emotions of their shepherds. There is irony: the top of Carmel, the mountain whose name suggests a ‘Garden Land’, withers away. More ironic is how such a view of chaos in v. 2 comes from such a finely structured example of Hebrew poetry. It opens with God’s mountain, Zion, and closes with the desiccated Mount Carmel. Between these two mountains stand Jerusalem and the shepherd’s pastures. Verbs close the first two lines in the quoted speech, while in the second pair the verbs come first, as if to hasten the terrible effect of the roaring. Order and symmetry bring to life chaos and destruction. The inhabitants of the city and the shepherds themselves are noticeable for their absence. The effect of the desiccating voice on Amos’ fellow herdsmen is left up to the reader’s imagination. This is the poetic landscape of Amos. And the reader would do well to remember how Yahweh ‘roars’ and ‘gives his voice’; such words have an uncanny way of echoing in this mysterious landscape between the mountain of the garden land and the mountain of God.

Yahweh roars from Zion, Amos in Tekoa hears, and Carmel withers. Tekoa has its own ominous portents, the name being based on a Hebrew root that can mean ‘to thrust (a weapon)’ or ‘to blow a horn’.⁸ So we can imagine our prophet going north to initiate that violent sound by confronting a corrupt king. But let us now jump ahead to the start of Amos’ ninth and final chapter and the book’s last of five chilling visions:

^9:1 I saw Adonai standing on the altar, and he said,
‘strike the capital, and the thresholds will shake.
Cut them off, the first/head of them all.⁹
And the last of them I will slaughter with the sword.
No refugee of theirs shall flee.
No fugitive of theirs shall take flight.’

In the third vision, God was first seen standing on a wall (Amos 7:7), but now he stands on the altar itself. Amos has entered the world of the divine as much as god has imposed himself on the natural and human order in Amos 1:1–2. This is the divine roar; the withering of Carmel and the mourning of the pastures are implicit in the destruction of the temple. This temple is not the one in Jerusalem, Bethel or anywhere else. It is God’s heavenly temple; it is the cosmos. Intimations of this will surface in the following passage. After witnessing how God vows that no refugee will escape, we read how the people will be cut off or even crushed with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Transliteration Scheme
• Preface
• Part I Imagining Amos
• Part II Speech and Theophany
• Part III Speech and Silence
• Part IV Who Will Not Prophesy?
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Scripture Index