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is what the Lord God showed me: a basket of summer fruit. 2 He asked me, “What do you see, Amos?”
“A basket of summer fruit,” I answered.
Then the Lord said to me. “The end has come for My people Israel; I will spare them no longer.
3 “In that day the songs in the temple will turn to wailing,” declares the Lord God. “There will be many dead bodies, strewn everywhere, and only silence!”
4 Hear this, you who trample on the needy
and do away with the poor of the land,
5 saying,
“When will the New Moon be over
so that we may sell grain,
and the Sabbath be ended,
so that we may offer wheat for sale?
We can make the ephah small
and the shekel large,
and cheat with dishonest scales.
6 We can buy the poor with silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals,
and even sell the sweepings with the wheat.
7 The Lord has sworn by the Pride of Jacob:
“I will certainly never forget any of their deeds.
8 “Will not the land tremble for this,
and everyone who lives in it mourn?
The whole land will rise like the Nile;
it will toss and heave and then sink
like the river of Egypt.
9 “On that day,” declares the Lord God,
“I will make the sun go down at noon,
and I will darken the earth in broad daylight.
10 I will turn your religious 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 that time like the mourning for an only son,
and the end of it like a bitter day.
11 “Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord God,
“when I will send a famine through 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 wander from north to east,
searching for the word of the Lord,
but they will not find it.
13 “In that day
“the beautiful young women and strong young men
will faint from thirst.
14 Those who swear by the shame of Samaria,
or say, ‘As surely as your god lives, O Dan’,
or, ‘As the way of Beersheba lives’—
they will fall,
never to rise again.”