_But Amos answered and said unto Amaziah, No prophet I, nor prophet's son. But a herdsman_[207] _I, and a dresser of sycomores; and Jehovah took me from behind the flock, and Jehovah said unto me, Go, prophesy unto My people Israel._
On such words we do not comment; we give them homage. The answer of this shepherd to this priest is no mere claim of personal disinterestedness. It is the protest of a new order of prophecy,[208] the charter of a spiritual religion. As we have seen, the _sons of the prophets_ were guilds of men who had taken to prophesying because of certain gifts of temper and natural disposition, and they earned their bread by the exercise of these. Among such abstract craftsmen Amos will not be reckoned. He is a prophet, but not of the kind with which his generation was familiar. An ordinary member of society, he has been suddenly called by Jehovah from his civil occupation for a special purpose and by a call which has not necessarily to do with either gifts or a profession. This was something new, not only in itself, but in its consequences upon the general relations of God to men. What we see in this dialogue at Bethel is, therefore, not merely the triumph of a character, however heroic, but rather a step forward--and that one of the greatest and most indispensable--in the history of religion.
There follows a denunciation of the man who sought to silence this fresh voice of God. _Now therefore hearken to the word of Jehovah thou that sayest, Prophesy not against Israel, nor let drop thy words against the house of Israel; therefore thus saith Jehovah...._ Thou hast presumed to say; _Hear what God will say_. Thou hast dared to set thine office and system against His word and purpose. See how they must be swept away. In defiance of its own rules the grammar flings forward to the beginnings of its clauses, each detail of the priest's estate along with the scene of its desecration. _Thy wife in the city--shall play the harlot; and thy sons and thy daughters by the sword--shall fall; and thy land by the measuring rope--shall be divided; and thou in an unclean land--shalt die._ Do not let us blame the prophet for a coarse cruelty in the first of these details. He did not invent it. With all the rest it formed an ordinary consequence of defeat in the warfare of the times--an inevitable item of that general overthrow which, with bitter emphasis, the prophet describes in Amaziah's own words: _Israel going shall go into captivity from off his own land_.