The Prophet Amos and the Zimbabwean Context
LECTURES ON THE BOOK OF AMOS
The historical background
The prophet Amos is the first on the list of classical prophets, who included Hosea, Isaiah as well as Jeremiah. He is the first among the prophets whose oracles have come down to us in the form of a whole book, according to M.L. Barre, the New Jerome Biblical Commentary. It goes without saying that Amos inaugurated a movement which left an indelible mark on Israelite religious land scape, as seen in the new dimensions of the 8thcentury prophetic movement, where ecstasy, which has been cited by many scholars as illustrating the borrowed phenomenon, has been replaced or fundamentally undermined by a more rationalistic approach to problems bedevilling Israel. Amos, it can be argued, seems to have inaugurated a movement of rationalist who made sense out of the word of Yahweh. It is in this light that a critical analysis of the book of Amos will reveal even the relevance of Amos’ thought patterns to the Africans and Zimbabweans in particular. In Zimbabwean societies, issues regarding dishonest dealings, capitalistic mind-sets and a general moral bankruptcy have become too prevalent, that a revisiting Amos for the benefit of Zimbabwe and Africa as a whole has become more than necessary.
As already noted above, Amos is believed to have operated during the 8thcentury BCE. Various arguments have been raised by scholars to sustain this dating of Amos’ period and some of the arguments are:
The superscription Amos 1:1
The superscription is a redactional introduction, which is inserted at the beginning of a piece of literature and it has two main functions, to introduce the author of the work and to date the piece of the literature. Bythe nature of the aim of the superscription itself, it can then be argued that it is much later in origin than the work it seeks to introduce, yet it is one of the most important aspects we consider in dating different pieces of literature especially prophetic books.
The superscription in the
The historical background
The prophet Amos is the first on the list of classical prophets, who included Hosea, Isaiah as well as Jeremiah. He is the first among the prophets whose oracles have come down to us in the form of a whole book, according to M.L. Barre, the New Jerome Biblical Commentary. It goes without saying that Amos inaugurated a movement which left an indelible mark on Israelite religious land scape, as seen in the new dimensions of the 8thcentury prophetic movement, where ecstasy, which has been cited by many scholars as illustrating the borrowed phenomenon, has been replaced or fundamentally undermined by a more rationalistic approach to problems bedevilling Israel. Amos, it can be argued, seems to have inaugurated a movement of rationalist who made sense out of the word of Yahweh. It is in this light that a critical analysis of the book of Amos will reveal even the relevance of Amos’ thought patterns to the Africans and Zimbabweans in particular. In Zimbabwean societies, issues regarding dishonest dealings, capitalistic mind-sets and a general moral bankruptcy have become too prevalent, that a revisiting Amos for the benefit of Zimbabwe and Africa as a whole has become more than necessary.
As already noted above, Amos is believed to have operated during the 8thcentury BCE. Various arguments have been raised by scholars to sustain this dating of Amos’ period and some of the arguments are:
The superscription Amos 1:1
The superscription is a redactional introduction, which is inserted at the beginning of a piece of literature and it has two main functions, to introduce the author of the work and to date the piece of the literature. Bythe nature of the aim of the superscription itself, it can then be argued that it is much later in origin than the work it seeks to introduce, yet it is one of the most important aspects we consider in dating different pieces of literature especially prophetic books.
The superscription in the