1. you cows of Bashan who are on Mount Samaria. The region of Bashan was famous for its cattle, but these well-fed cows are in Samaria. The prophet addresses the women with this vitriolic epithet not because they are fat but because all they do is indolently satisfy their appetite, like cows grazing in a pasture. It should be noted that because Hebrew verbs are conjugated according to gender, all the verbs that follow remind us of the female identity of those excoriated.

Bring, that we may drink. The pampered wives of Samaria are worse than cows because they have an appetite not only for nutrients, like their bovine counterparts, but for wine.

2. baskets / . . . fishhooks. Both Hebrew words occur only here. Some scholars think both are terms for baskets used by fishermen; others think both are kinds of hooks.

3. through the breaches. The use of this noun implies that the walls of the city have been broken through by invaders.

the refuse heap. The meaning of the Hebrew harmon is uncertain, and it could even be a place-name. This translation adopts one scholarly conjecture.

4. Come to Bethel and trespass. This verse and the next are strongly sarcastic. None of the ritual acts mentioned, to be performed at the two principal cult centers of the northern kingdom, is in itself illegitimate, but the offense is in going through the steps of ritual when the worshippers have been exploiting the poor, perverting justice, and wallowing in ill-gotten gains. Amos is not expressing a principle of opposition to the cult but, like Isaiah after him, is objecting to the conjunction of what Isaiah calls “crime and convocation,” of approaching the altar with hands stained with blood.

6. cleanness of teeth. This is an original coinage of Amos’s. It of course does not have anything to do with dental hygiene but evokes a mouth in which there is no food, as “want of bread” in the next verset makes clear. The line reverses the usual pattern, in which the standard term appears in the first verset and a metaphorical or poetic equivalent in the second, because the prophet means to confront his audience with a small enigma at the beginning of the line that is spelled out at the end.

7. with still three months till the harvest. Lack of rain three months before the harvest would be devastating for the crops.

I rained on one town / but on another town did not rain. It is unclear whether such selective distribution of rainfall could have actually occurred, but the prophet’s statement of it is meant to convey the idea that God exercises absolute power to bless or blight human populations according to His will.

9. Ruins were your gardens. The Masoretic Text reads harbot, “to multiply,” which does not make much sense. This translation is based on an emendation of that word to ḥorvot, “ruins.”

10. with your captured horses. This phrase suggests that the “young men” are fighters who have been defeated in battle, their mounts taken by the victors and they themselves put to the sword.

11. overthrew. This is a set verb beginning with the account in Genesis 19 of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah for the total devastation of a town or a nation.

13. For, look, He fashions the mountains and creates the wind. The doxology of this concluding verse is continuous with what precedes: the powerful God that Israel must prepare to meet is the cosmic Creator Who controls all the forces of the earth. This verset makes strategic use of the verbs for creation that appear, respectively, in Genesis 2 and 1: for the solid mountains the potter’s concrete word “fashion,” yotser, is used; for the wind, the more spiritual boreiʾ, “create.”