AMOS 2:6

I am in the middle of reading a great new commentary on the Book of Amos written by Daniel Carroll. One intriguing verse I came across begins the eighth and final oracle in the book directed against the various nations. This last oracle is directed against Israel herself and is the longest in the series. It begins as follows:

    “Thus says Yahweh:

        For three sins of Israel and for four I will not cause it to return, because

            they sold the innocent for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.” (Amos 2:6)

Concentrating only on the last stanza in this verse, I would like to demonstrate how a very simple statement such as this can be understood on two levels. In the first place, the gist of the text can be readily comprehended at the first reading: the sin is in taking advantage of someone of a lower economic or social status than your own. This is an easily understood concept, but it takes the constant practice of keeping it in the forefront of one's mind and practicing honest self-examination to truly apply it in one's life. And it is not just the repeated message of the OT prophets, but it was also one of the major themes of Jesus' teachings.

I used to have a great deal of trouble understanding how many sincere Christians I knew were so diametrically opposed to helping the poor. Once I got to know some of them a little closer, I realized that their hearts were in the right place regarding the subject. Their only disagreement concerned the best way to go about helping the disadvantaged. Thus, some of those most opposed to government aid to the poor turned out to be the ones who gave most unstintingly of their personal time and resources in that direction. Alternatively, those who were the most vocal in supporting such Federal and state help sometimes shied away from any personal involvement at all. It is a shame that all Christians can't agree that both approaches are really needed.

If there are three aspects to a person's personality (i.e. intellect, heart, and will), then the above general approach seems to deal with the last two. But there is still the mind that needs to be engaged with the Word of God as well. So at the risk of making a mountain out of a molehill, I would like to delve more deeply into just the last line of Amos 2:6. I hope that it serves as a good illustration for those of you who may read a passage of Scripture once and say, “Oh, I get what that is all about” and go on to something else, thinking that you are done with all God may have to communicate to you on the subject. The Bible has endless layers of insight for the person who really wants to dig deeper and deeper into the text.

I have run into Christians for whom the idea of a Bible whose depths can never be fully plumbed is actually disturbing. One very intelligent friend of mine even told me that he liked to understand one biblical passage completely and then go on to the next one to master until he knew it all. He was overestimating his own abilities and underestimating the depths of God's word at the same time. You will probably not be surprised to learn that the church we were both attending at the time bragged that they taught the perfect method of Bible interpretation and possessed the perfect theology.

The first thing one must do in considering an isolated passage such as this one is to place it in its proper context. It is found in the oracle against Israel, the last eighth and last one in the series in Amos 1:2-2:16. Including Israel herself in the context of accusations against the pagan nations would probably have been shocking to Amos' original audience. And it should be shocking to today's people of God as well, who often point the finger of blame anywhere else except at their own hearts.

But which “Israel” is the prophet talking about? “The term is ambiguous, and its meaning must be determined by its context.” (G.V. Smith) Thus, it can refer in some biblical passages to the Jews in general while in other places in Scripture it means the Northern Kingdom only. In this particular case, most commentators go with the second option. Thus, a proper understanding of 2:6b would entail a complete review of what we know regarding the people's practice in that Kingdom. I will not even attempt that exercise except to say that other prophets characterize the upper class there as luxuriating in their wealth.

One of the first things to note about this half verse is that it will probably be written in your Bibles in the form of poetry rather than prose. Thus, NRSV indents it as follows:

    “because they sell the righteous

        for silver,

    and the needy for a pair of

        sandals.”

NIV has: 

    “They sell the innocent for silver,

        and the needy for a pair of sandals.”

The Jerusalem Bible similarly divides the phrase into two separate lines but indents them both equally.

What all of these versions have in common is that they recognize that this is not a prose statement at all. By contrast, although TEV does properly indent those portions of the Bible that are poetry, it does not recognize any of Amos 2 as such. And if you are reading from KJV, you will find that it does not distinguish poetry from prose anywhere in the Bible.

So what is the big deal as to whether this half-verse is prose or poetry? It actually makes a rather large difference in how you properly interpret it. In a prose sentence that says “They did A and B,” one understands it to mean that “they” did two different things, A and B. But if it is written as Hebrew poetic parallelism, then the meaning is, “They did A, which is another way of saying that they did B.” In other words, the “and” connects two thoughts that are very closely related, not entirely different from one another.

Let's apply that principle to the text in question. As prose, it would inform us that “they” do one thing to the innocent and a completely different thing to the needy. But as poetry, the meanings of the two lines must be collapsed together to express the fact that “they” sell the innocent/needy for some material gain. An extra nuance may be read into these two lines as well since the second parallel line of Hebrew poetry often expands a little on the thought in the first line. Thus, we might read it as, “They sell the innocent/needy for silver, and even for as little gain as a mere pair of sandals.”

But one could argue that the two lines of text in question do not really line up with one another in a perfect manner. For one thing, “they sell” is not represented in the second line at all. In technical terms, this only means that this is not an example of identical (or synonymous) parallelism, but of incomplete parallelism instead. Thus, the reader needs to supply the missing words to get the true meaning:

    “They sell” the innocent for silver,

    and (they sell) the needy for a pair of sandals.”

But, in addition, if you look at the actual word order in the original Hebrew, you will note that the above translation has taken some liberties with it in order to make the point that innocent // needy and that silver // sandals. Going with the original instead, we actually pick up another nuance of the meaning. Then, the whole thing can be diagrammed as follows:

    “They sell

                    (A) for silver

                                (B) the innocent, and

(they sell)               (B) the needy

                   (A) for a pair of shoes.”

This reversed word order for the central thought is called a chiastic structure, or a chiasm for short, and it appears literally thousands of times throughout the Bible from short examples such as this one going all the way into chiasms that encompass whole books. In this case, we have a simple ABBA arrangement. Now if there were an additional word or thought in the middle to form an odd-membered chiasm ABCBA, then the intended point of emphasis would be squarely on the central unit. But since it is a four-membered chiasm, there is some controversy among scholars as to where the stress lies. Daniel Carroll expresses the opinion that it lies in the middle two units so that “the chiastic structure focuses the reader's attention on the two terms at its center.”

I would respectively disagree with that assessment since my own rather extensive studies into chiasms in the Bible indicate that the stress in even-membered chiasms usually falls on the first and last unit instead (see any of my posts titled “X: Introduction to the Literary Structure,” in which X is the name of the particular book in question). Thus, I would personally read it as “They sell for silver the innocent, and the needy for a pair of shoes,” arguing that this reading brings out much better the underlying meaning.

Well, at this point in our analysis, we have still not progressed beyond a discussion of the indentation of the half-verse. Now we can start to get into the more difficult questions. But to keep this post down to less that book-length, I will try to move a little faster from this point on, beginning with the translation of the individual words. To do this easily on your own does necessitate access to a variety of different English translations to compare with one another, looking for prominent differences between them.

Often the most glaring differences are found by comparing the older KJV with any of the modern versions such as NRSV. But in this case, the key words “righteous,” “poor/needy,” and “shoes/sandals” are basically the same in both. The only real controversy seems to center around the fact that “righteous” in KJV, NRSV, and Anchor Bible becomes “innocent” in NIV and NEB or the related “virtuous” in Jerusalem Bible. The paraphrases are sometimes helpful in shedding light on the situation. In this case, TEV has “the honest man who cannot pay his debts.” This combines the two parallel nouns “innocent” and “poor”above to express the very common concept in the OT and NT of the “righteous poor,” in contrast to the sinful rich.

    As Stuart says, “The 'righteous' and the 'needy' are mentioned in parallel, not because they are strictly synonymous, but with the effect of associating them.”

    Andersen and Freedman add, “Neither poverty not wealth is in itself good or bad, but there is an inevitable tendency in the Bible to associate wealth with the wicked and poverty with the pious in spite of opposite traditions from earliest times, which saw wealth as a sign of divine blessing.”

This may seem like an unjustified stereotype of people today, at least to those of us who are relatively well-off. But perhaps we should do a little more self-examination before we totally write off what is almost a biblical cliché since that concept is expressed with some frequency in the Scriptures. “Israel's prophets often assert that the wealth of the ruling elite has come at the expense of the poor.” (Downs)

“This kind of shameful accusation does not evoke particular laws but generally pushes against many scriptural legal protections of the poor...Pressing claims on loans against 'relatives' (lit. 'brothers') is found in Lev. 25:35,39; Deut. 15:7-11; Is. 58:7; Amos 2:6 and Matt. 18:25.” (Schnittjer)

And more specifically, Irwin states, “Nowhere in the Old Testament is the issue of social justice a more focused matter of concern than in the book of Amos.”

But rather than taking these teachings further than intended, Birch cautions: “Justice for the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable is not a moral demand to grant privilege. The prophets' call to do justice asks for fair protection, nonexploitation, and granting of full participation in the social order.”

As far as the key word “righteous” (saddiq) is concerned, the Hebrew root appears about 450 times in the Old Testament. Reimer made a 25-page analysis of this word, and here are just a few of his findings:

    “Sdq terminology indicates right behavior or status in relation to some standard of behavior accepted in the community.”

    “Amos consistently relates sedaqa or the saddiq to issues of social justice. The saddiq is aligned with the poor oppressed.” This appears in Amos 5:12 as well.”

    “In Amos, then, sdq operates firmly within a human sphere, although involving norms acceptable to the deity.”

There is also a close correlation between righteousness and justice: “Hosea, Amos and Habakkuk each use the word pair “justice and righteousness,” which emphasizes the right ordering of society within the covenant community.”

Going back to another nuance gained by looking at the literary structure, several commentators have pointed to the close parallel between Amos 2:6 and 8:6. Both of these similarly aligned verses appear in structurally paired sections of the book (see the post “Amos: Introduction to the Literary Structure”), and the latter reads as follows:

    “buying the poor for silver

    and the needy for a pair of sandals”

The main departure from 2:6 is in their key verbs. What was an accusation against selling the poor now becomes one against those who buy them. What does this tell us concerning the specific sin that the wealthy committed?

    Irwin: “The list of abuses catalogued in Amos 2:6-8 shows how the people had enriched themselves by their oppression of the poor. The latter were forced into indentured servitude for miniscule degrees of indebtedness (Amos 2:6b) while at the same time being denied access to the courts (Amos 2:7a).”

    Carroll also delves into the social problem of the time: “Formerly self-sufficient rural peasants increasingly became dependent on urban merchants, money lenders and self-indulgent absentee landowners and were at the mercy of tax demands beyond their means. Many would have lost their land in this web of contrary conditions. Separated from ownership of their land, they fall into debt to pay for seed and sustenance and eventually were sold into debt slavery.”

    And Stuart adds, “What Yahweh denounces through Amos is not benevolent slavery, but some kind of legal impression-indenture in which corrupt courts aided the unethical rich by making slave labor available to them.”

    For the rich who were guilty of such unethical practices, there was also direct fallout in the religious realm since “sacrificial material from wealth gained by dishonesty and economic exploitation was disqualified because it did not legitimately belong to the offerer. So ethics and ritual were integrally related.” (Klawans)

Just looking into our own country's past history, I think of the slave-owning pillars of the church in the South who supported their congregations monetarily and the “righteous” robber barons who did everything they could to keep their workers' wages low and then tried to make up for it by giving huge amounts of money to charity. In God's eyes, they were giving money that was not theirs to give in the first place.

But finally, why in the world does Amos refer to sandals in both 2:6 and 8:6? It turns out that there at least five viable options for understanding this:

    1. The original debt of the poor person may have only amounted to the mere price of a pair of sandals. But the one to whom he owed the money decided to bring the issue to court anyway.

    2. The money that the loan shark got for selling the poor man into slavery was a mere pittance, no more that the price of a pair of shoes.

    3. The sin consisted in the actual sale of someone into slavery. But this is unlikely to be what Amos had in mind since servitude to pay off a debt was a well accepted legal practice at that time.

    4. In light of the Septuagint version of I Samuel 12:3, it may mean a judge improperly accepting a pair of sandals as a bribe. (Andersen and Freedman)

    5. It “may also allude to the symbolic sandal-transfer that sealed property exchanges in early times in Israel (cf. Deut 25:9-10; Ruth 4:8).” (Stuart) Andersen and Freedman reject this “ceremonial and symbolic use of sandals in legalizing contracts” as the sole, or even primary, explanation behind this mention of shoes. However, G.V. Smith feels that #'s 4 and 5 together constitute the best explanation since (a) the words “righteous” and “sandals” appear elsewhere in the Bible in the context of legal transactions and (b) “the law, the prophet and Amos (5:12) speak out against injustice in the courts through bribery.”

No real consensus has been reached concerning which explanation is the one Amos had in mind, so the jury is still out on the question. As Smith summarizes the situation, “Selling the poor for a pair of sandals is one of the best known of Amos' expressions; but when looked at closely, it is hard to work out what exactly is meant.”

Keep in mind that the above is only a small taste of the depth with which it is possible to study a rather simple half-verse of Scripture. And it doesn't even begin to delve into our own proper life application of the principles involved today. God's word is truly inexhaustible!