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MOS was just a cowboy, or a shepherd. We could even call him a farmer. A few decades before the Assyrians came to wipe Israel off the map, God sent this
man Amos up from Judah to preach to his distant relatives to the north.
Incidentally, He would have been a contemporary of Hosea the prophet (compare
Hosea 1:1 & Amos 1:1).
You should recall that Joel's prophecies came on the heels of a great
"act of God" kind of natural disaster... a plague of locusts. The
beginning of Amos' prophecies was also connected with a disaster, but it was an
earthquake in this case, and this message preceded the disaster (vs. 1). It is
particularly interesting that even though this man was an obscure farmhand, he
preached a big message that had broad regional ramifications for the nations
immediately surrounding Israel.
He began with Damascus of Syria (vs. 3) and moved around in his oration
to address the Philistines of Gaza and Ashkelon (vs. 6-8), the people of Tyre (vs.
9-10), the descendants of Esau (vs. 11), the Ammonites (vs. 13) and the
Moabites (Amos 2:1). But he circled only briefly and the bulk of the rest of
the book is addressed to the northern kingdom of Israel.
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