1. Thus did the Master, the LORD show me. These words, which will be repeated as a formula, initiate a series of four prose prophecies that come in the form of visions (the Hebrew verb for “show” is literally “cause to see”).

And, look. This word, wehineh, is regularly used to introduce what is seen in a dream and thus underscores the generic connection between vision and dream.

after the king’s reaping. Part of the earlier harvest was set aside for fodder for the king’s herds and horses.

4. it consumed the great deep and consumed the fields. This would be a truly catastrophic fire, not only burning the fields (a natural event when a wildfire spreads) but drying out the groundwater beneath the surface of the earth (in effect, an apocalyptic event).

7. plumb line. This is the traditional understanding of ʾanakh, which appears only here. Some have disputed its meaning, claiming it might be a term for “axe” because it becomes here an instrument of destruction. “Plumb line,” however, makes perfectly good sense. The wall is a plumb-line wall (“built” is merely implied) because it is properly constructed as a perfect vertical. God will use a plumb line to measure out inexorable judgment against Israel. Compare 2 Kings 21:13: “I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria and the weight [the “plumb” of the plumb line] of the house of Ahab, and I will wipe out Jerusalem.”

10. And Amaziah the priest of Bethel sent to Jeroboam. This narrative episode interrupts the sequence of four visionary prophecies.

Amos has plotted against you. Given the recent history of court conspiracies and coups in the northern kingdom, Amaziah readily represents the prophet as a political subversive.

11. By the sword Jeroboam shall die, / and Israel shall surely be exiled from its soil. Amaziah steps up the actual words of Amos’s prophecy (verse 9), putting in his mouth an explicit prediction of the death of Jeroboam and of Israel’s exile.

12. there eat bread. Modern translations have often eliminated the concreteness of this idiom by rendering it as “There earn your living” or some equivalent, but English has its own idiomatic use of “bread” as “sustenance” (for example, “breadwinner”). In fact, Rashi may be correct in saying “in language of contempt he spoke to him—there they will give you crusts of bread as payment for prophesying to them.”

14. No prophet am I, nor the son of a prophet. Amos responds directly to the remark about eating bread. He says that he is no professional prophet of the sort that expects payment for prophesying. The expression “son of a prophet” refers to the disciples who constituted the following of such a prophet. What he is invoking is the phenomenon registered in Samuel and Kings of career prophets surrounded by their disciples (who are called “sons of the prophet”) and who cultivate ecstatic states, often with the aid of musical instruments. Amos, by contrast, is a simple herdsman and farmer driven to prophesy by a call from God.

a tender of sycamore fruit. The sycamore yields a figlike fruit, and the unusual verb used here, boles, may refer to a well-attested practice of scratching the surface of the fruit in order to facilitate its ripening.

17. Your wife shall play the whore in the town. Some interpreters want to understand the verb tizneh as “be raped” (or substitute another verb that has this meaning), but that seems questionable. The priest’s shame will be compounded when his wife decides to give herself to the invading troops, either because she simply has her eye on the main chance or because she wants to avert any harm that might come to her.

you shall die on unclean soil. The “unclean soil” is of course the soil of the foreign land to which the exiles will be deported. This carries a special barb for Amaziah because he is a priest, enjoined to preserve ritual purity, and no sacrifices can be offered on unclean soil.