Amos 8

¹Thus the Lord GOD showed me: and behold, a basket of summer fruit.

²And he said, 'What do you see, Amos?' And I said, 'A basket of summer fruit.' And the LORD said to me, 'The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass by them.'

³The songs of the temple shall become wailings on that day, / declares the Lord GOD. / Many are the corpses; in every place one throws them out. Hush!

⁴Hear this, you who trample on the needy and put an end to the poor of the land!

⁵saying, 'When will the new moon be over, so that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, so that we may open the wheat — making the ephah small and the shekel great, and falsifying the scales of deceit?'

⁶to buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, / and sell the refuse of the grain.

⁷The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: 'Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.'

⁸Will not the earth tremble because of this, / and all who dwell in it mourn? / It shall rise entirely like the Nile, / and be churned and subside like the Nile of Egypt.

⁹And it will come to pass on that day — the declaration of the Lord GOD — I will cause the sun to go down at noon and darken the earth on a clear day.

¹⁰I will turn your festivals into mourning and all your songs into a dirge. / I will bring sackcloth on every waist and baldness on every head, / and I will make it like mourning for an only son, / and its end like a bitter day.

¹¹Behold, the days are coming — the declaration of the Lord GOD — when I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but for hearing the words of the LORD.

¹²They will wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they will roam to and fro to seek the word of the LORD, but they will not find it.

¹³On that day the beautiful maidens and the young men shall faint with thirst.

¹⁴Those who swear by the guilt of Samaria, and say, 'As your god lives, O Dan!' and 'As the way of Beersheba lives!' — they will fall and rise no more.