upon the value of the cultus he is in opposition to the faith of his time; but if the opinion had been a current one that precisely the cultus was what Jehovah had instituted in Israel, he would not have been able to say, “For so ye like.”  “Ye,” not Jehovah; it is an idle and arbitrary worship.  He expresses himself still more clearly in v.21 seq.  “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I smell not on your holy days; though ye offer me burnt-offerings and your gifts, I will not accept them; neither do I regard your thank-offerings of fatted calves.  Away from me with the noise of thy songs, the melody of thy viols I will not hear; but let judgment roll on like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.  Did ye offer unto me sacrifices and gifts in the wilderness the forty years, O house of Israel?” In asking this last question Amos has not the slightest fear of raising any controversy; on the contrary, he is following the generally received belief.  His polemic is directed against the praxis of his contemporaries, but here he rests it upon a theoretical foundation in which they are at one with him,—­on this, namely, that the sacrificial worship is not of Mosaic origin.  Lastly, if ii.4 be genuine, it teaches the same lesson.  By the Law of Jehovah which the people of Judah have despised it is impossible that Amos can have understood anything in the remotest degree resembling a ritual legislation.  Are we to take it then that he formed his own special private notion of the Torah?  How in that case would it have been possible for him to make himself understood by the people, or to exercise influence over them?  Of all unlikely suppositions, at all events it is the least likely that the herdsman of Tekoah, under the influence of prophetic tradition (which in fact he so earnestly disclaims), should have taken the Torah for something quite different from what it actually was.

Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah are in agreement with Amos.  The first mentioned complains bitterly (iv.6 seq.) that the priests cultivate the system of sacrifices instead of the Torah.  The Torah, committed by Jehovah to their order, lays it on them as their vocation to diffuse the knowledge of God in Israel,—­the knowledge that He seeks truthfulness and love, justice and considerateness, and no gifts; but they, on the contrary, in a spirit of base self-seeking, foster the tendency of the nation towards cultus, in their superstitions over-estimate of which lies their sin and their ruin.  “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; ye yourselves (ye priests!) reject knowledge, and I too will reject you that ye shall not be priests unto me; seeing ye have forgotten the law of your God, so will I also forget you.  The more they are, the more they sin against me; their glory they barter for shame.  They eat the sin of my people, and they set their heart on their iniquity.”  From this we see how idle it is to believe that the prophets opposed “the Law;” they defend the priestly Torah, which,