Commenting
on Amos 7:14-15, R.E. Clements offered the following translation of the
passage:
Then Amos answered Amaziah, ‘I was no
prophet, nor a member of a prophetic guild; but I was a herdsman, and a dresser
of sycamore trees, and Yahweh took me from the following the flock, and Yahweh
said to me, Go, prophesy to my people.’
There are
disputes as to how to translate some of the text. As Clements notes:
. . .
the Hebrew text of verse 14a, which is made up of two nominal clauses, can be
translated by a past tense, and be understood to refer to past events. Thus
Amos did not deny that he was a prophet when he spoke to Amaziah, but was referring
back to the circumstances which led to his becoming one. From having no
prophetic task, or association, he was summoned by Yahweh to deliver his message,
and so he had no right to disobey his divinely given orders. Such a translation
of the Hebrew text is permissible, but apart from the grammatical
possibilities, it is the interpretation which does fullest justice to other
statements which Amos made concerning prophecy. 1. In his reply to Amaziah Amos
uses the verb ‘prophecy’ (Heb. hinnābbē’),
which shows that he understood that what he does was doing could only be
described as ‘prophesying’. 2. Amos could not have rejected all the earlier
prophets such as Nathan, Elijah and Micaiah-ben-Imla. 3. In Amos 3.7-8 Amos
values the prophets in a very positive fashion, and this oracle describes very
suitably the divine compulsion to prophesy by which Amos justified his message
to Amaziah.
We can only draw one conclusion from this,
and that is that Amos regarded himself as a nābhī’,
and that in his words to Amaziah he was referring to the remarkable
circumstances of his call to this task. Before this call he had no prophetic
associations, but had earned his living as a shepherd (Heb. bōqēr; cf. 1.1 where the nōqēdh is used), and by looking after a
type of wild fig (sycamore) tree. The attempt on the part of Engnell to find in
the term nōqēdh a reference to a
class of cultic personnel must be termed a failure. It simply denotes a
shepherd, who may, or may not, have been in the employ of a sanctuary, and in
Amos’s case we must conclude that he was not. Such an occupation may not have
been a particularly poor one, so that Amos may have been a person of some
means, and an incidental point in his reply to Amaziah would have been that he
had no necessity to earn his keep by his prophesying. (R.E.
Clements, Prophecy and Covenant [Studies in Biblical Theology 43; London: SCM Press, 1965], 37-38)
