Surely I will never forget any of their works. 8.  Shall not the land tremble for this, and every one mourn that dwelleth therein? and it shall rise up wholly as a flood; and it shall be cast out and drowned, as by the flood of Egypt. 9.  And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day:  10.  And I w ill turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; and I will bring up sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness upon every head; and I will make it as the mourning of an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day. 11.  Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord:  12.  And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it. 13.  In that day shall the fair virgins and young men faint for thirst. 14.  They that swear by the sin of Samaria, and say, Thy God, O Dan, liveth:  and, The manner of Beer-sheba liveth; even they shall fall, and never rise up again.’—­AMOS viii. 1-14.

There are three visions in the former chapter, each beginning as verse 1.  This one is therefore intended to be taken as the continuation of these, and it is in substance a repetition of the third, only with more detail and emphasis.  An insolent attempt, by the priest of Beth-el, to silence the Prophet, and the fiery answer which he got for his pains, come between.  The stream of Amos’s prophecy flows on, uninterrupted by the boulder which had tried to dam it up.  Some courage was needed to treat Amaziah and his blasphemous bluster as a mere parenthesis.

We have first to note the vision and its interpretation.  It is such as a countryman, ‘a dresser of sycamore trees’ would naturally have.  Experience supplies forms and material for the imagination, and moulds into which God-given revelations run.  The point of the vision is rather obscured by the rendering ‘summer fruit.’  ‘Ripe fruit’ would be better, since the emblem represents the Northern Kingdom as ripe for the dreadful ingathering of judgment.  The word for this (qayits) and that for ‘the end’ (qets) are alike in sound, but the play of words cannot be reproduced, except by some clumsy device, such as ‘the end ripens’ or ‘the time of ripeness comes.’  The figure is frequent in other prophecies of judgment, as, for instance, in Revelation xiv. 14-20.

Observe the repetition, from the preceding vision, of ’I will not pass by them any more.’  The first two visions had threatened judgments, which had been averted by the Prophet’s intercession; but the third, and now the fourth, declare that the time for prolonged impunity is passed.  Just as the mellow ripeness of the fruit fixes the time of gathering it, so there comes a stage in national and