James R. Linville, «Visions and Voices: Amos 7–9», Vol. 80 (1999) 22-42

The final chapters of Amos are read synchronically to highlight the relationship between the divine voice, which demands that its hearers prophesy (Amos 3,8), the voice of Amos, and those of other characters. Amos’ intercessions soon give way to entrapping word-plays and these are related to the rhetorical “traps” in Amos 1–2. Divine and prophetic speech defy the wish of human authority that they be silent. The figure of Amos eventually disappears from the reader’s view, but not before the prophet has been used as a focal point for the readers’ projections of themselves into the literary world of the text. As the scenes change from ultimate destruction to restoration, the readers appropriate the prophetic voice themselves, especially in the final verse which ends with a declaration of security uttered by “your God”.

more relents, and the book closes with a dramatic vision of salvation (9,11-15). As I will show below, however, Amos becomes redundant and loses his presence in the text. His identity within a narrative or autobiographical setting fades as a more disembodied voice, resembling that in the bulk of chaps. 1–6, communicates the oracles of God more directly to the reader. But it is in this shift that the text carries its final message, that of salvation, and ironically, finally looks ahead to the fulfilment of Amos’ intercessions. It, too, allows the readers to share something of the immediacy of Amos’ experiences as they imagine them, and hence, something of the "burden" of prophecy itself³. This paper, then, studies the encounter between deity and prophet and inquires into how the relative autonomy of the human and divine voices are merged within the text.

        What is being attempted is a synchronic, reader-based interpretation of the Hebrew text. I will, therefore, not concern myself with the complex and fascinating debate on the historicity of biblical prophets or the compositional and editorial history of the book of Amos⁴ . By regarding Amos as a literary character, we are free within the text’s implicit and explicit references to imagine Amos and his situation as we will: we may even ask questions to which the authors/redactors provide no clear answers⁵ . In any case, the need to look at how the prophets are portrayed in the literature (as opposed to immediately jumping to an examination of what the historical prophets really were) is now appreciated in many quarters⁶. In articulating their conception of Amos (and the other