With one hand these sinners tried to push away the evil day, while with the other they drew near to themselves that which made its coming certain—­’the seat of violence,’ or, rather, ‘the sitting,’ or ‘session.’  Violence, or wrongdoing, is enthroned by them, and where men enthrone iniquity, God’s day of vengeance is not far off.

Then follows a graphic picture of the senseless, corrupting luxury of the Samaritan magnates, on which the Tekoan shepherd pours his scorn, but which is simplicity itself, and almost asceticism, before what he would see if he came to London or New York.  To him it seemed effeminate to loll on a divan at meals, and possibly it was a custom imported from abroad.  It is noted that ’the older custom in Israel was to sit while eating.’  The woodwork of the divans, inlaid with ivory, had caught his eye in some of his peeps into the great houses, and he inveighs against them very much as one of the Pilgrim Fathers might do if he could see the furniture in the drawing-rooms of some of his descendants.  There is no harm in pretty things, but the aesthetic craze does sometimes indicate and increase selfish heartlessness as to the poverty and misery, which have not only no ivory on their divans, but no divans at all.  Thus stretched in unmanly indolence on their cushions, they feast on delicacies.  ‘Lambs out of the flock’ and ‘calves out of the stall’ seem to mean animals too young to be used as food.  These gourmands, like their successors, prided themselves on having dainties out of season, because they were more costly then.  And their feasts had the adornment of music, which the shepherd, who knew only the pastoral pipe that gathered his sheep, refers to with contempt.  He uses a very rare word of uncertain meaning, which is probably best rendered in some such way as the Revised Version does:  ‘They sing idle songs.’  To him their elaborate performances seemed like empty babble.  Worse than that, they ‘devise musical instruments like David.’  But how unlike him in the use they make of art!  What a descent from the praises of God to the ’idle songs’ fit for the hot dining-halls and the guests there!  Amos was indignant at the profanation of art, and thought it best used in the service of God.  What would he have said if he had been ’fastened into a front-row box’ and treated to a modern opera?

The revellers ‘drink wine in bowls’ by which larger vessels than generally employed are intended.  They drank to excess, or as we might say, by bucketfuls.  So the dainty feast, with its artistic refinement and music, ends at last in a brutal carouse, and the heads anointed with the most costly unguents drop in drunken slumber.  A similar picture of Samaritan manners is drawn by Isaiah (chap. xxviii.), and obviously drunkenness was one of the besetting sins of the capital.