Thursday, August 8, 2019

R.E. Clements on Amos 7:14-15


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)