Amos the Prophet

Guyette explores how Amos, a herder with no standing among the professional prophets, comes to deliver a radical message of covenantal justice, beginning with his confrontation with Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, who orders him back to Judah. He shows how Amos adapts the “Oracles against the Nations” genre to indict Israel and Judah alongside their neighbors, and catalogs Amos’s vocabulary for the poor — evyonim, anavim, tzadik, dallim — each word drawing out a different facet of their oppression by the wealthy. Five visions of impending judgment mark Amos’s own “education” in the inevitability of the Lord’s justice. Guyette closes by contrasting the Bible’s “thick,” relationally grounded conception of justice, rooted in the memory of the Exodus, with “thin” principled accounts — contractual, retributive, compensatory, and distributive justice — that characterize modern liberal public philosophy.