Amos heaps image on image to deepen the impression of terror and confusion.  Everything is turned to its opposite.  The solid land reels, rises, and falls, like the Nile in flood (see Revised Version).  The sun sets at midday, and noon is darkness.  Feasts change to mourning, songs to lamentations.  Rich garments are put aside for sackcloth, and flowing locks drop off and leave bald heads.  These are evidently all figures vividly piled together to express the same thought.  The crash that destroyed their national prosperity and existence would shake the most solid things and darken the brightest.  It would come suddenly, as if the sun plunged from the zenith to the west.  It would make joy a stranger, and bring grief as bitter as when a father or a mother mourns the death of an only son.  Besides all this, something darker beyond is dimly hinted in that awful, vague, final threat, ’The end thereof as a bitter day.’

Now all these threats were fulfilled in the fall of the kingdom of Israel; but that ‘day of the Lord’ was in principle a miniature foreshadowing of the great final judgment.  Some of the very features of the description here are repeated with reference to it in the New Testament.  We cannot treat such prophecies as this as if they were exhausted by their historical fulfilment.  They disclose the eternal course of divine judgment, which is to culminate in a future day of judgment.  The oath of God is not yet completely fulfilled.  Assuredly as He lives and is God, so surely will modern sinners have to stand their trial; and, as of old, the chase after riches will bring down crashing ruin.  We need that vision of judgment as much as Samaria did when Amos saw the basket of ripe fruit, craving, as it were, to be plucked.  So do obstinate sinners invite destruction.

The last section specifies one feature of judgment, the deprivation of the despised word of the Lord (vs. 11-14).  Like Saul, whose piteous wail in the witch’s hovel was, ‘God ... answereth me no more,’ they who paid no heed to the word of the Lord shall one day seek far and wearily for a prophet, and seek in vain.  The word rendered ‘wander,’ which is used in the other description of people seeking for water in a literal drought (iv. 8), means ‘reel,’ and gives the picture of men faint and dizzy with thirst, yet staggering on in vain quest for a spring.  They seek everywhere, from the Dead Sea on the east to the Mediterranean on the west, and then up to the north, and so round again to the starting-point.  Is it because Judah was south that that quarter is not visited?  Perhaps, if they had gone where the Temple was, they would have found the stream from under its threshold, which a later prophet saw going forth to heal the marshes and dry places.  Why was the search vain?  Has not God promised to be found of those that seek, however far they have gone away?  The last verse tells why.  They still were idolaters, swearing by the ‘sin of Samaria,’ which is the calf of Beth-el, and by the other at Dan, and going on idolatrous pilgrimages to Beer-sheba, far away in the south, across the whole kingdom of Judah (Amos v. 5).  It was vain to seek for the word of the Lord with such doings and worship.