The Basket of Summer Fruit

¹ This is what the Lord GOD showed me: I saw a basket of summer fruit.

² “Amos, what do you see?” He asked.

“A basket of summer fruit,” I replied.

So the LORD said to me, “The end has come for My people Israel; I will no longer spare them.”

³ “In that day,” declares the Lord GOD, “the songs of the temple^* will turn to wailing. Many will be the corpses, strewn in silence everywhere!”

⁴ Hear this, you who trample^* the needy,

who do away with^* the poor of the land,

⁵ asking, “When will the New Moon be over,

that we may sell grain?

When will the Sabbath end,^*

that we may market wheat?

Let us reduce the ephah and increase the shekel;^*

let us cheat with dishonest scales.

⁶ Let us buy the poor with silver

and the needy for^* a pair of sandals,^*

selling even the chaff with the wheat!”

⁷ The LORD has sworn by the Pride^* of Jacob:

“I will never forget any of their deeds.

⁸ Will not the land quake for this,

and all its dwellers mourn?

All of it will swell like the Nile;

it will surge^* and then subside

like the Nile in Egypt.

⁹ And in that day,

declares the Lord GOD,

I will make the sun go down at noon,

and I will darken the earth in the daytime.

¹⁰ I will turn your feasts into mourning

and all your songs into lamentation.

I will cause everyone to wear sackcloth

and every head to be shaved.

I will make it like a time of mourning for an only son,

and its outcome like a bitter day.

¹¹ Behold, the days are coming,

declares the Lord GOD,

when I will send a famine on the land —

not a famine of bread or a thirst^* for water,

but a famine of hearing^* the words of the LORD.

¹² People will stagger from sea to sea

and roam from north to east,

seeking the word of the LORD,

but they will not find it.

¹³ In that day the lovely young women —

the young men as well —

will faint from thirst.

¹⁴ Those who swear by the guilt^* of Samaria

and say, ‘As surely as your god lives, O Dan,’

or, ‘As surely as the way^* of Beersheba lives’—

they will fall, never to rise again.”