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The Basket of Ripe 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^(a) of the temple^(a) will turn to wailing. Many will be the corpses, strewn in silence everywhere!”

⁴ Hear this, you who trample on 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^(a) and increase the shekel^(a); 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.”