Amos 8

1Thus the Lord Yahweh showed me: behold, a basket of summer fruit.

2He said, "Amos, what do you see?" I said, "A basket of summer fruit." Yahweh said to me, "The end has come upon my people Israel; I will not pass over them again."

3Temple songs will become howlings that day, declares the Lord Yahweh; corpses will abound in every place, hurled out in silence.

4Hear this, you who devour the needy and destroy the afflicted poor of the land.

5Saying, "When will the new moon pass so we may sell grain, and the Sabbath so we may open wheat for trade, by reducing the ephah, increasing the shekel, and perverting deceitful balances?"

6to buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes, and sell the refuse of the wheat?

7Yahweh has sworn by Jacob's majesty, "I will never forget all their deeds."

8Will the land not tremble for this, and all who dwell in it mourn? It will rise up entirely like a river, be driven out and flooded and subside, like the river of Egypt.

9It will happen in that day, says the Lord Yahweh, that I will bring the sun down at midday and darken the land in a day of light.

10I will change your feasts to mourning, all your songs to lamentation; I will bring sackcloth upon all loins, baldness upon every head. I will make it like mourning for an only son, its end like a bitter day.

11Look, days are coming, declares the Lord Yahweh, when I will send a famine across the land—not a famine for bread, nor thirst for water, but for hearing the words of Yahweh.

12They will stagger from sea to sea and from north to east, roaming about to seek the word of Yahweh, and they will not find it.

13In that day the beautiful virgins and the young men will faint from thirst.

14Those who swear by Samaria's guilt and say, "Your God Dan lives, and Beersheba's way lives," will fall and rise no more.