Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Amos · About this commentary
Seek Me and Live
Amos 5:1-6
1 Listen to this word which I take up for a lamentation over you, O house of Israel: · WEB
A funeral song is sung over a nation still standing, and then the offer of life comes with a list of places not to look.
Verse 1 announces its own genre: a lamentation — the song sung over a body. And verse 2 sings it in the past tense. The virgin of Israel has fallen; she will not rise again; she lies on her ground with no one to lift her.
The kingdom Amos said this to was at its territorial peak. He is holding a funeral for a nation that had not yet lost a battle, and the tense is the argument.
Verse 3 puts numbers to it: a city that marches out a thousand keeps a hundred, and a hundred keeps ten. A tenth survives, twice over.
Then, against all of that, verse 4: seek me, and live. The imperative arrives inside a dirge, and nothing in the surrounding verses withdraws it.
What follows would have stung. Do not seek Bethel , do not enter Gilgal , do not cross to Beersheba — three working sanctuaries ruled out, and Beersheba lay deep in Judah, so pilgrims were crossing the length of the land to worship. The Hebrew wordplay is sharp: Gilgal will surely go into exile, and Bethel, the house of God, will come to nothing.
Verse 6 states the alternative plainly: seek Yahweh, and live. The distinction the passage insists on is not between religion and irreligion. It is between seeking the shrines and seeking the one they were built for.
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