Special Dream of a Basket of Fruit

8 This is what the Lord God showed me: There was a basket of summer fruit. ² And the Lord said, “What do you see, Amos?” I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the Lord said to me, “The end has come for My people Israel. I will not change My mind again about punishing them. ³ The songs of the king’s house will become loud cries of sorrow on that day,” says the Lord God. “There will be many dead bodies. In every place they will be thrown out without a word.”

⁴ Hear this, you who crush under foot those who are in need, to put an end to the poor of the land. ⁵ You say, “When will the New Moon be over, so that we may buy grain? When will the Day of Rest be over, so that we may open the store and sell grain? Then we will make the basket smaller and the weight bigger, and we will lie about the weight. ⁶ We will buy the poor for money, and those in need for shoes. And we will sell the part of the grain that is of no worth.”

⁷ The Lord has promised by the pride of Jacob, “For sure I will never forget anything they have done. ⁸ Will not the land shake because of this? Will not everyone who lives in it be filled with sorrow? All of it will rise up like the Nile. It will be troubled, and will fall like the Nile River of Egypt. ⁹ On that day,” says the Lord God, “I will make the sun go down at noon. I will make the earth dark in the daytime. ¹⁰ I will turn your special suppers into times of sorrow, and all your songs into songs of sorrow. I will make all of you wear cloth made from hair, and cut all the hair from your heads. I will fill that time with sorrow, as if an only son had died. And the end of it will be like a bitter day.

¹¹ “The days are coming,” says the Lord God, “when I will send a time upon the land when the people will be very hungry. They will not be hungry for bread or thirsty for water, but they will be hungry to hear the Words of the Lord. ¹² People will go from sea to sea, and from the north to the east. They will go from place to place to look for the Word of the Lord, but they will not find it. ¹³ On that day the beautiful, pure, young women and the young men will lose their strength and fall because of thirst. ¹⁴ As for those who swear by the false gods of Samaria, saying, ‘As your god lives, O Dan,’ and ‘As the way of Beersheba lives,’ they will fall and never rise again.”