When the lion roars — Amos for our time
Three millennia separate from us Amos the Hebrew. Not one separates the Samaria of his day from our ivory divans today. A reflection on the barbarism that wears a suit.
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The Eternal Present · Words of Life · 22 min
To read the great spiritual words as living sources.
'The lion has roared — who would not tremble?
Adonai YHWH has spoken — who would not prophesy?'
Amos 3:8
2,800 years ago, in Judea, a smallstock breeder named Amos spoke out against the mighty of his time. This text explores why his words have not aged a single day. The Book of Amos appears in the Hebrew Bible among the Twelve Minor Prophets — read the full text in Hebrew and English.
Hearing or pretending to sleep
Before the text, there is the cry.
Before the word, there is the animal — the lion in the steppe of Teqoa, whose roar crosses the night and silences the crickets. Amos begins there: not in the palaces of thought, not in the corridors of the Temple, but in the body of a man who hears something that others pretend not to hear.
Aryéh sha’ag mi lo yira — “the lion has roared, who would not tremble?” (Amos 3:8). The verb yaré conveys both dread and reverence. To tremble before the lion is to acknowledge a reality that exceeds our will to believe in it or not. The lion does not ask for our consent.
This is the first hermeneutic gesture of the book of Amos: there is a reality that roars, and we must choose between hearing it and pretending to sleep.
Our civilisation is pretending to sleep.
It sleeps on its ivory divans, as in the eighth century before the common era, in Samaria and Jerusalem, whilst the lion circles the camp. It produces alarming reports which it publishes and ignores in the same breath. It holds summits where commitments are made not to exceed thresholds that are then exceeded. It passes laws that legitimise the very exploitation they claim to forbid. It celebrates its democratic, economic, religious, intellectual liturgies with a fervour inversely proportional to their actual efficacy.
This is what Amos teaches us to read. Not as an ancient text with a few contemporary applications, but as a hermeneutic lens, a way of seeing, which deciphers our world with an almost unbearable precision.
In this article:
The man who had not asked to speak
Law without justice — mishpat and tsedaqah
The ivory divans — an anatomy of indifference
Piety as alibi — worship without conversion
The illusory hope that excuses inaction
The earth that remembers — an eco-prophetic dimension
And yet...
Reading to be transformed
Note on transcription: Hebrew terms follow a simplified phonetic transcription, close to that used in prayer books, rather than the academic SBL transliteration.
The man who had not asked to speak
‘The words of Amos, among the nokedim of Teqoa, which he received in vision concerning Israel, in the days of Uzziah king of Judah and in the days of Jeroboam son of Joash king of Israel — two years before the earthquake’ (Amos 1:1).
The opening of the book is already a programme. The word noked, often translated as ‘shepherd’, refers more precisely to a smallstock breeder, perhaps also a dresser of sycamores (7:14: bolés shiqmim), one who incises wild figs to hasten their ripening. A man of manual labour, of dry earth, of the Judaean steppe. Teqoa lies 16 kilometres south of Jerusalem, at the edge of the desert, a frontier between the cultivated world and the void.
And then the stunning formula, unique in the entire prophetic corpus: lo-navi anokhi vélo-ben-navi anokhi — ‘I am not a prophet, and I am not a son of a prophet’ (Amos 7:14). He repudiates the function, the title, the membership of any prophetic school. Amos is not a professional prophet. He is someone whom that Word has seized despite himself.
The verb he uses to describe his vocation is laqakh, ‘to take, to seize’: vayyiqakhéni YHWH mé’akhar hatsso’n — ‘YHWH (the unpronounceable Name of God) took me from behind the flock’ (Amos 7:15). Not a mystical calling in the sanctuary, not a theophany in the Temple. A hand that shoves you from behind, in the midst of the animals, on an ordinary morning. And yet Amos will stand up and speak loud and clear.
But who speaks today about the state of the world? Who dares, in the wake of Amos, to name the collapse for what it truly is?
We live within a paradox that the sociologist Ulrich Beck had called Risikogesellschaft, the risk society, in which dangers are known, measured, published, and yet politically inassimilable. IPCC reports accumulate. Studies on inequality multiply. Demographers, epidemiologists, collapse theorists, humanist thinkers — all the nokedim of our time — cry out in the wilderness. And the wilderness responds: interesting, thank you, let us move on to the next item on the agenda.
For the legitimacy of speech, in our world, belongs to institutional experts, to mandated experts, to experts accredited by the very institutions that are themselves stakeholders in the system it is their task to critique. The man from Teqoa would not have had access to the microphone. He would not have had a doctorate. He would not have had an affiliation. His word would have been disqualified before it could be heard.
And yet, and this is the paradox the book of Amos poses with a quiet rigour, it is precisely the one who does not belong to the system who can see it whole. The noked of Teqoa has no interest to protect. He has no career to manage. He has no partners to avoid offending. His word is freely given because it was given to him despite himself.
This is the first hermeneutic lesson: in a world where every critical word is immediately absorbed, recycled, neutralised by the institution, the prophetic question is that of the provenance of the voice. From where does one speak? For whom? At what risk?
Amaziah, the priest of the royal sanctuary at Bethel, says to Amos: lékh bérakha-lékha él-érets Yéhouda vé’ékhol-sham lékhem outsham titnavé — ‘go, flee to the land of Judah, eat your bread there and prophesy there’ (Amos 7:12). The proposal seems reasonable: go and speak elsewhere. But it means in reality: render your word harmless by removing it to a place where it will not trouble those who hold power.
Amos refuses. He stays. He speaks where it hurts, before those who have an interest in not listening. Prophetic speech is always localised. It does not address humanity in general from a view from nowhere. It addresses these people, in this sanctuary, in the name of these specific victims, in such circumstances. It is dangerous precisely because it names reality, conferring upon it a truth that no one can any longer deny.
Law without justice — mishpat and tsedaqah
Véyigal kamayim mishpat outsdaqa kénahal étan — ‘Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amos 5:24).
This verse is probably the most cited in the book. But its force is often flattened in translation. Two Hebrew terms carry here the full weight of a civilisation:
Mishpat — law, the juridical order, the verdict rendered according to established rules. This is what we call today the rule of law, the legal framework — formal legality in all its cold precision.
Tsédaqah — justice, but in the sense of a relational rectitude, a rightness in the bonds between beings. Tsédaqah is not abstract; it is measured in the concrete quality of relations between the powerful and the weak, the rich and the poor, the landowners and the day labourers.
The image is that of the nahal étan — the ‘perennial stream’, as opposed to the wadis that flow in winter and dry up in summer. What Amos asks for is a justice that is not seasonal, a justice that is embodied each day and for each person.
We live in societies endowed with extensive rights on paper and structural injustices in practice. Our constitutions guarantee equality. Our legal codes protect workers. Our charters proclaim dignity. And meanwhile, tax havens legally shelter fortunes built illegally. Multinationals observe the letter of tax law whilst circumventing its spirit. Trade agreements protect investors and expose populations. The instruments of formal democracy — the vote, the parliament, procedure — are scrupulously observed so as to produce policies that serve the interests of those who finance the parties.
This is the distinction Amos drew three millennia before contemporary jurists: mishpat without tsédaqah — law without justice — is a refined form of barbarism. It is barbarism with good manners. It is violence with a legal signature.
The current triumph of what one might call mishpat without tsédaqah is the true face of the civilisational regression we are living through. It does not resemble barbarism as our imagination represents it — hordes invading cities, flames and destruction. It resembles a properly conducted tribunal, a properly adopted law, a properly signed contract, at the conclusion of which a human being is ground down with all due process.
This barbarism wears a suit. It has judges and lawyers.
What the prophet Amos opposes to this legal barbarism is not a reform of mishpat, but the nahal étan of tsédaqah, that ‘ever-flowing stream’, that force which overflows the channels of formal law because it springs from a deeper source.
Tsédaqah in Hebrew thought is not an abstract value inscribed in a founding text that one contemplates from a respectful distance. It is an embodied practice, oriented towards the la’anayim shé’érit Yosséf — literally ‘the afflicted humble ones, the remnant of Joseph’ (cf. Amos 2:7; 5:15), a permanent attentiveness to the lot of the voiceless. The term shé’érit designates a remnant, what remains after a destructive passage — the grains forgotten after the harvest, the survivors after a catastrophe. Those who matter in the eyes of the prophet are precisely those whom history has left behind: the human debris of the system.
The stream that never runs dry is the attention that never grows weary. Justice is not a state to be attained; it is a practice to be sustained, a current to be kept flowing against the natural tendency of water to stagnate in the fertile valleys.
The ivory divans — an anatomy of indifference
Hoy hashaanannim beTsiyon véhabotkhim béhar Shomron — ‘Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, secure on the mountain of Samaria’ (Amos 6:1). The central word is sha’anan — variously translated as ‘insouciance’, ‘quietude’, ‘tranquillity’. But this Hebrew term carries a darker dimension: it is the security of the replete, the indifference of the satiated, the peace of one whose full stomach prevents him from hearing the cry of his neighbour’s empty one.
The portrait that follows is of clinical precision: they lie on mitot shén — ‘beds of ivory’ — stretched upon their couches, they eat lambs from the flock and calves from the stall (agalim mitok marbéq), they improvise on their musical instruments, they drink wine by the bowlful (bemizreqé yayin), they anoint themselves with the finest oils (réshit shemanim yimshakhou).
And the verdict falls like an axe: vélo nekhalou al-shévèr Yosséf — ‘and they are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph’ (Amos 6:6).
It is not wealth that is condemned. It is the anaesthesia and indifference of the privileged towards the shé’érit — the left-behind, those whom the system has rendered invisible.
There is something hallucinatory in the precision with which this text describes our age.
We live in societies where the upper and upper-middle classes of wealthy nations have reached a level of comfort, leisure, aesthetic and gastronomic consumption without precedent in human history — at the very moment when the indicators of the world’s condition (biodiversity, climatic stability, social cohesion, democratic health, international justice, the return of wars) are collapsing collectively.
It is not that these social classes are unaware of it. They know. They read serious newspapers. They watch documentaries. They express outrage on social media with the appropriate hashtags. And then they have their organic meal delivered in plastic packaging by a courier on a zero-hours contract, whilst the algorithm selects for them the next series to watch on their screens costing several thousand pounds.
The contemporary sha’anan, this comfortable indifference, is not ignorance — it is something more subtle and graver: it is the capacity to hold together the knowledge of disaster and the impermeability to that knowledge. To know that the world is burning and to continue booking one’s holidays. To know the figures on extreme poverty and to find it normal that financial markets set new records every day.
The British-born philosopher Timothy Morton coined the concept of hyperobject to designate those realities so massive and so diffuse — world poverty, the biodiversity crisis, all the modern crises — that the human brain can grasp them only fragmentarily, and therefore tends to treat them as if they did not quite exist. This is the neuroscientific version of sha’anan.
But Amos does not allow us this excuse. He says that the problem is not cognitive — it is ethical. It is not that the elites of Samaria fail to see the ruin of Joseph. It is that they prefer not to see it because seeing would cost them something.
Amos’s diatribe against the ivory divans is structured as a gesture of interruption. He enters the bubble of comfort, he names precisely each element of the décor — the beds, the meat, the music, the wine, the oil — and then he turns the gaze towards what is absent: shévèr Yosséf — ‘the ruin of Joseph’.
The shévèr — a term used elsewhere in the Bible for the fracture of a bone or the breaking of a ship — here designates the social rupture, the collapse of the structures that had held a community together. The ruin of Joseph: the small peasants dispossessed of their lands (Amos 2:6–7: sold for a pair of sandals), the exploited day labourers, the widows who have no one to plead their case at the city gate — the list is too long to name them all. Prophecy brings no programmatic solution. It does something more radical: it unites within the same field of vision the ivory divans and the ruin of Joseph. It makes it impossible not to see both together. And this co-presence is unbearable.
This may be the most essential function of a prophetic hermeneutic act today: before proposing any reforms, to force a simultaneous vision — to place side by side what society organises itself to keep separate, and to let that confrontation work upon us in the depths of our being.
Piety as alibi — worship without conversion
Sanéti ma’asti khaguékhem vélo ariah béatsérotékhem — ‘I hate, I despise your feasts, and I cannot bear your solemn assemblies’ (Amos 5:21).
This is one of the most scandalous texts in the entire Hebrew Bible. Sanéti — I hate — is a strong term, unqualified. And it is YHWH himself who speaks, in the first person, concerning his own feasts, his own sacrifices, the music offered in his own honour.
Ki im-yigal kamayim mishpat — ‘but let justice roll down like waters’ (5:24). The adversative conjunction Ki im is here fundamental: it opposes worship without justice to justice without worship, and decides unhesitatingly in favour of the latter.
Amos is not an iconoclast. He does not say that worship is bad in itself. He says that worship detached from the practice of justice becomes its own contrary: a way of purchasing a clear conscience for next to nothing, of settling one’s account before G-d without settling one’s account before one’s neighbour.
Two readings may be made of this passage, one intra-religious and the other secular, and they are superimposed upon one another.
The intra-religious reading is of burning relevance: to what extent do contemporary religious institutions — churches, mosques, synagogues, Buddhist temples — produce moral comfort rather than ethical conversion? To what extent is liturgical fervour inversely proportional to engagement with humanist, social, political, ecological questions? Amos’s diagnosis strikes the religious where they believe themselves most secure: in their very piety.
But the secular reading is equally pertinent. Our age has its own substitute liturgies: international summits, conferences on sustainable development, prize-giving ceremonies for philanthropists, the grand speeches of world leaders on solidarity. These gatherings have the structure of worship — the sacred venue (Davos, the UN General Assembly), the accredited officiants, the ritual formulae, the music (here: applause). And this worship produces exactly what the worship at Bethel, which Amos condemned, produced: the satisfaction of having performed the required gestures, without having changed anything in reality.
Sanéti ma’asti khaguékhem — I hate your forums, your COPs, your G7 summits. Not because the questions are absent from them, but because they serve to neutralise those questions. The problem is not gathering there. The problem is leaving relieved.
What Amos asks for is not the abolition of worship but its verification — the question posed at the entrance to the sanctuary: does my life outside this place correspond to what I am about to celebrate within?
The Hebrew prophet is not a moralist who proposes rules. He is a tester of coherence — one who measures the gap between discourse and practice, between proclamation and reality, between what one claims to be and what one actually brings into being.
The prophetic question posed to our age is this: what is the gap between what we proclaim ourselves to be — democratic, equal, committed to solidarity, mindful of the environment — and what our collective practices actually do to the world?
The illusory hope that excuses inaction
Hoy hamit’avim ét-yom YHWH lama-zé lakhem yom YHWH hou-khoshékh vélo-or — ‘Woe to those who desire the Day of YHWH! What will this Day of YHWH mean for you? It will be darkness, and not light’ (Amos 5:18).
The Yom YHWH, the Day of G-d, was in the popular imagination of Israel the great moment of national deliverance, the day when YHWH would intervene to save his people and crush their enemies. A triumphalist, eschatological imagination in the sense of a guaranteed happy ending for one’s own.
Amos overturns this expectation. Ka’ashèr yanus ish mipné ha’ari oufga’o hadov — that day will be ‘as if a man fled from a lion and met a bear’ (Amos 5:19). The catastrophe moves but does not disappear. One escapes one predator only to encounter another. On that day, the man who goes into his house and leans his hand against the wall will be bitten by a snake.
Deliverance does not come automatically to those who believe it their due.
Our age is haunted by various forms of this ill-founded expectation of a providential rescue.
There is the technological expectation: geo-engineering will save us, nuclear fusion will save us, artificial intelligence will save us, renewable energy deployed at scale will save us — without requiring any change in the foundations of a way of life that produces the disaster. One flees the lion of climate change by running towards the bear of digital hyperactivism.
There is the political expectation: a great leader, a great election night, a great reform — something from outside that comes to resolve what one lacks the will to resolve from within. This secular messianic expectation is the dominant political pathology of our time, oscillating between hope in a providential saviour and cynical despair when the saviour proves to be made of clay as well — which is always the case.
There is the properly religious expectation: the return of the Messiah, the Parousia, the redemptive Apocalypse — eschatologies which, in their degraded forms, dispense with engagement in present history since everything will in any case be transfigured by divine intervention.
In the face of all these illusions, Amos poses the same question: lama-zé lakhem — ‘what will it mean for you?’ What use is hope that does not pass through conversion, through turning, through what the Hebrew prophetic tradition calls shûv — to return, to change direction, in individual life as in collective life?
For Amos is not a prophet of despair. But he is a prophet of conditional hope — and that hope has nothing to do with an individual salvation deferred in the world to come. It concerns the world, here, now: the real transformation of relations between human beings and with the earth they inhabit. In this sense, it joins all the great hopes, secular as well as religious, that wager on the possibility of a more just world.
But the condition is demanding. It is not meritocratic — Amos does not say that the good shall be saved, nor that human efforts suffice to guarantee anything. He says something more radical and more disturbing: without real turning, without shûv — that turning which engages the body, the will and collective practices — the hope of a better world is merely an empty word, a comfortable expectation that relieves one of the need to act and ends by serving the status quo.
Dirshou oti vikhyou — ‘seek me and you shall live’ (Amos 5:4). The verb darash — to seek, to require, to consult — is not a verb of mystical contemplation. Nor is it a verb of reward. It is the verb of active movement, of investigation, of permanent questioning — an orientation, not a guarantee. Prophetic hope is a hope that rises early in the morning and begins to work towards building another world, without guaranteed results, without certainty of seeing its fruit.
The earth that remembers — an eco-prophetic dimension
In the background of the book, the adamah, the earth — whose intimate bond with the human adam drawn from it Genesis recounts — is a silent but omnipresent character. Amos 4:6–11 describes a cascade of natural catastrophes: famine (niqyon shinayim — ‘cleanness of teeth’, that is, teeth that have nothing to chew), drought (végam anokhi mana’ti mikkhem ét-haguéshem — ‘And I too have withheld the rain from you’), mildew and blight that ravage the harvests, locusts, pestilence, epidemics.
These catastrophes are presented not as arbitrary divine punishments but as responses of the earth to the violence of human relations. It suffers first from what human beings inflict upon one another. There is an ontological solidarity linking social justice among the adam to the health of the adamah.
The formula that recurs like a refrain in the enumeration of catastrophes is vélo-shavtem élay — ‘and you have not returned to Me’ (Amos 4:6, 8, 9, 10, 11). Ecological catastrophe is an invitation to shûv, to turning. But the invitation is refused — five times.
The contemporary ecological crisis is irreducible to a technical question. At its foundations, it is an ethical and anthropological question.
What the earth sciences have been telling us for several decades converges, with troubling precision, with what Hebrew prophecy has been saying for three millennia: there is a deep connection between the way human beings treat one another and the way they treat the earth. Societies that reduce human beings to extractable resources treat ecosystems in the same fashion. This is not a coincidence; it is the same logic operating at different levels of reality.
The economist Jason Hickel and others have shown that the ecological crisis is structurally linked to the global economic system, which is itself structurally linked to global inequalities. What is politely called the ‘environmental crisis’ is in reality the shévèr — the fracture — of a relationship: between human beings, and between human beings and their milieu.
And as in Amos 4, the alarm signals multiply — pandemics, droughts, floods, collapses of biodiversity — and the collective response bears a terrible resemblance to vélo-shavtem élay: we have not changed direction.
What is remarkable in Amos’s thought is that the adamah is not merely an object of human solicitude. She is a subject — a reality that reacts, that responds, that bears the memory of the acts accomplished within her.
This intuition, which the indigenous thought of many cultures has maintained and which Western thought has systematically effaced, now stands at the heart of the new ecological ontologies (Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, the new materialism school) and of the theologies and spiritualities of creation (Laudato Si’, Latin American theologies of the Earth).
The hermeneutic question this text poses for today is radical: what happens when one takes seriously the idea that the earth speaks — not metaphorically but as a subject of right, as an entity to which we are answerable? To integrate this perspective would transform the whole of our legal, economic, and political frameworks.
And yet...
We have built remarkable architectures for not trembling. We have psychologists who help us manage our eco-anxiety — that is to say, to live with the anguish of catastrophe without modifying its causes. We have economists who explain to us that green growth is possible — that is to say, that we can go on consuming more whilst destroying less. We have theologians who assure us that G-d will not allow humanity to disappear — that is to say, that we can act as though someone else were going to deal with the problem.
These are our ivory divans. These are our rites of Bethel. These are our yom YHWH from which we hope for salvation without having had to change.
Sanéti ma’asti — says the Voice. I hate your solutions that resolve nothing. I despise your agreements that commit no one. I cannot bear your conferences where you congratulate one another for having pronounced the right words.
This is what I ask of you: véyigal kamayim mishpat — let justice roll down like waters.
Not a trickle of water administered by committees of experts. Not a rivulet channelled through compliance procedures. A nahal étan — a stream that never runs dry — that is to say, a demand for justice that knows no dead season, that does not suspend its course during elections, that does not pause during economic crises, that does not run dry when the lobbies have drunk their fill.
A demand for justice reborn in each individual movement towards greater consideration for the other, in each daily effort at self-betterment, in each group that begins to embody the first fruits of a new world.
For one must hear also what Amos does not say. He does not say that we are condemned.
The book of Amos ends, after all, with a promise — Véshavti ét-shévout ami Yisraél — ‘I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel’ (Amos 9:14). The vine shall be planted, the wine shall be drunk, the gardens shall be made and their fruits eaten. The final image is that of the adamah reconciled with those who dwell within her.
But between the now and that future, there is one word, just one, on which everything hinges: shûv. To return. To change direction. Not a surface reform, not an optimisation of the existing system, but a turning — what all spiritual traditions name in their own fashion: the Greek metanoia, the Hebrew teshuvah, conversion in its most radical sense — that change of life which engages the body, the will, the practices, the concrete choices of every day.
Dirshou oti vikhyou — seek me and you shall live.
Barbarism is not our destiny. It is our default choice when we relinquish the act of choosing otherwise. And prophecy, in its most precise, most faithful, most Hebraic sense, is not the prediction of the inevitable. It is the name of the Voice that says: it is still possible not to go where you are going.
The lion has roared.
To respond is to begin, here and now.
Reading to be transformed
This way of reading — beginning with the Hebrew text, turning towards today, returning to the text enriched, turning back towards the present transformed — is an existential posture as much as a method. It refuses two symmetrical temptations: fundamentalism, which maps the ancient text onto the present without mediation and crushes the complexity of the real; and complacent projection, which seeks in the prophets sympathetic forerunners of our current preoccupations without allowing the text to disturb our certainties and question us in any depth.
This is, ultimately, the wager of all serious hermeneutics: that understanding is not a neutral act, that reading transforms the reader, and that the transformed reader can transform what he reads — that is to say, the world in which he reads.
Aryéh sha’ag. The lion has roared.
The question that now remains is whether we shall prophesy.
‘YHWH roars from Zion, from Jerusalem he makes his voice heard;
the pastures of the shepherds are in mourning, and the summit of Carmel withers.’
Amos 1:2
© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël
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