The Basket of the Ripe Fruit
1 This is the vision the Lord God showed me: a basket of summer fruit.
2 “Amos, what do you see?” He asked.
“A basket of summer fruit,” I said.
Then the Lord said to me, “The end has come on my people Israel. I will not spare them any longer.
3 The songs of the temple will be wailing in that day,” says the Lord God. “Dead bodies will be everywhere. In every place they will silently throw them out.
4 Hear this, you who want to devour the needy,
and cause the poor in the land to fail,
5 saying, ‘When will the new moon be gone,
that we may sell grain?
When will the Sabbath be over,
that we may market wheat?
Let us make the ephah small and the shekel large,
and deal fraudulently with deceitful balances,
6 that we may buy the poor for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals,
and sell the sweepings with the wheat?’ ”
7 The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob,
“Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.
8 Will the land not tremble for this,
and everyone mourn who dwells in it?
Yes, it will rise up wholly like the River,
and it will be stirred up and sink again
like the River of Egypt.
9 It will happen in that day,” says the Lord God,
“that I will cause the sun to go down at noon,
and I will darken the earth in the clear day.
10 I will turn your feasts into mourning
and all your songs into lamentation.
I will make you wear sackcloth on all your bodies,
and baldness will be on every head.
I will make it like mourning for an only son
and its end like a bitter day.
11 The days are coming,” says the Lord God,
“when I will send a famine in the land,
not a famine of bread,
nor a thirst for water,
but of hearing words from the Lord.
12 They will wander from sea to sea
and from the north to the east.
They will run back and forth
to seek the word of the Lord
and will not find it.
13 In that day the beautiful virgins
and the young men will faint for thirst.
14 Those who swear by the sin of Samaria
and say, ‘As your god, Dan, lives,’
and, ‘As the way of Beersheba lives,’
they will fall, and never rise up again.”