A basket of ripe fruit

8 This is what the Sovereign Lord showed me: a basket of ripe fruit. ² ‘What do you see, Amos?’ he asked.

‘A basket of ripe fruit,’ I answered.

Then the Lord said to me, ‘The time is ripe for my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.

³ ‘In that day,’ declares the Sovereign Lord, ‘the songs in the temple will turn to wailing. Many, many bodies – flung everywhere! Silence!’

⁴ Hear this, you who trample the needy
    and do away with the poor of the land,

⁵ saying,

‘When will the New Moon be over
    that we may sell grain,
and the Sabbath be ended
    that we may market wheat?’–
skimping on the measure,
    boosting the price
    and cheating with dishonest scales,
⁶ buying the poor with silver
    and the needy for a pair of sandals,
    selling even the sweepings with the wheat.

⁷ The Lord has sworn by himself, the Pride of Jacob: ‘I will never forget anything they have done.

⁸ ‘Will not the land tremble for this,
    and all who live in it mourn?
The whole land will rise like the Nile;
    it will be stirred up and then sink
    like the river of Egypt.

⁹ ‘In that day,’ declares the Sovereign Lord,

‘I will make the sun go down at noon
    and darken the earth in broad daylight.
¹⁰ I will turn your religious festivals into mourning
    and all your singing into weeping.
I will make all of you wear sackcloth
    and shave your heads.
I will make that time like mourning for an only son
    and the end of it like a bitter day.

¹¹ ‘The days are coming,’ declares the Sovereign Lord,
    ‘when I will send a famine through the land –
not a famine of food or a thirst for water,
    but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.
¹² People will stagger from sea to sea
    and wander from north to east,
searching for the word of the Lord,
    but they will not find it.

¹³ ‘In that day

‘the lovely young women and strong young men
    will faint because of thirst.
¹⁴ Those who swear by the sin of Samaria –
    who say, “As surely as your god lives, Dan”,
    or, “As surely as the god of Beersheba lives”–
    they will fall, never to rise again.’