2. summer’s-end fruit. The Hebrew puns on qayits, “summer” and qeits, “end.” Since many fruits do not ripen until late in the summer, qayits might even actually mean “summer’s end.”

3. songstresses. The Masoretic Text has shirot, “(long) songs,” but most scholars prefer to read, as does this translation, sharot, “songstresses.”

Many the corpses flung everywhere. Hush! These are probably the women’s words. This does not scan as a line of poetry and the Hebrew syntax is ambiguously terse. The received text has hishlikh, “he flung,” but the context requires a passive form, hoshlakh. The Masoretes linked this verb with “hush,” but flinging is an action more appropriate to abandoned corpses.

5. trade. The verb here usually means “open” and probably refers to opening sacks of grain.

a short ephah measure and an oversize shekel-weight. Giving the buyer a short ephah (a dry measure) would be shortchanging him. The oversize weight for the shekel would mean paying more in silver than the actual stipulated silver weight.

6. sell chaff as grain. This loops back to the grain transactions at the beginning of their speech. Obviously, they would not actually have spoken this catalogue of their cheating practices—it is rather the prophet who exposes their intentions, putting the words in their mouths.

7. the Pride of Jacob. Though elsewhere this expression refers to the people of the northern kingdom, here it would have to be God.

8. rise . . . like the Nile. There are tides in the Nile and periods of flooding. The earth in this image will have the instability of water.

9. every head a shaved pate. This is a practice of mourning forbidden in Deuteronomy 14:1, evidently because of its association with paganism. It appears, however, with some frequency in poetry, either as a linguistic fossil or because it was actually common in popular religion.

I will make her. The nearest antecedent for this pronoun is “the earth” at the beginning of this verse, although it is possible that the reference is to Israel, often represented as a woman.

11. from sea to sea. This probably means from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, though from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea is also possible.

12. the lovely virgins / . . . the young men. These are young people in their prime, and the pride and joy of the nation. If even they faint away, one may infer that elders and children will scarcely be able to withstand the distress of this famine for the word of the LORD. Thus the idea of such a famine is made vividly concrete because people grow faint and perish, as if they were deprived of actual food and water.

13. Who swear by the Guilt of Samaria. The received text makes sense as it stands: the worship of the icons of the calves in Dan and Bethel is guilty worship. Some scholars, however, propose emending the Hebrew word for “guilt” so that it reads as the name of a pagan deity.

As the way to Beersheba lives. Here the oath is taken in the name of the way because a long pilgrimage to the south is involved in order to reach the cultic center in Beersheba. This is the second mention of this center—compare 5:5.