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”.

        Another plausible word-play is perhaps the most interesting, that YHWH responds to Amos’ identification of the tin with the statement that he will set himself in the midst of Israel, in which the final use of Kn) is a shortened form of ykn) )anoky, typically meaning "I"²⁷. Alan Cooper defends the reading by observing that a little-recognized feature of biblical Hebrew style solves the grammatical problem of the use of the first-person nominative pronoun as the object of a verb. It is, in fact, not a pronoun, but instead a divine epithet, in a fashion similar to the expression ykn) yx "by the life of I" or better, "by my life". Cooper gives no examples, but one can refer to Num 14,21; Isa 49,18; Jer 22,24; 46,18; Ezek 5,11; Zeph 2,9 among others, all of which feature the shorter, but equivalent form yn)-yx . He does add, however, that treating Kn) as a divine epithet makes for an ironic transformation of the divine presence, from being a positive force to a destructive one²⁸.