rages all around (there is no ground for any such limitation of the words), but also by sword and plague during the siege and conquest of the town. For the reason assigned for the threat in Amo 6:11 points to the latter. כּי links the words to the main thought in Amo 6:11, or even Amo 6:10: “When the Lord delivers up the city and all that fills it, they will all perish; for, behold, He commands, orders the enemy (the nation in Amo 6:14), and it will smite in pieces the houses, great and small.” The singular הבּית is used with indefinite generality: every house, great and small (cf. Amo 3:15).
Verses 12-14
This judgment also, they, with their perversion of all right, will be unable to avert by their foolish trust in their own power. Amo 6:12. “Do horses indeed run upon the rock, or do men plough (there) with oxen, that ye turn justice into poison, and the fruit of the righteousness into wormwood? Amo 6:13. They who rejoice over what is worthless, who say: with our strength we make ourselves horns! Amo 6:14. For, behold, I raise over you, O house of Israel, is the saying of Jehovah, the God of hosts, a nation; and they will oppress you from the territory of Hamath to the brook of the desert.” To explain the threat in Amo 6:11, Amos now calls attention in Amo 6:12, under two different similes, to the perversity with which the haughty magnates of Israel, who turn right into bitter wrong, imagine that they can offer a successful resistance, or bid defiance with their own strength to the enemy, whom the Lord will raise up as the executor of His judgment. The perversion of right into its opposite can no more bring salvation than horses can run upon rocks, or any one plough upon such a soil with oxen. In the second question בּסּלע (on the rock) is to be repeated from the first, as the majority of commentators suppose. But the two questions are not to be taken in connection with the previous verse in the sense of “Ye will no more be able to avert this destruction than horses can run upon rocks,” etc. (Chr. B. Mich.). They belong to what follows, and are meant to expose the moral perversity of the unrighteous conduct of the wicked. For הפכתּם וגו, see Amo 5:7; and for ראשׁ, Hos 10:4. The impartial administration of justice is called the “fruit of righteousness,” on account of the figurative use of the terms darnel and wormwood. These great men, however, rejoice thereby in לא דבר, “a nothing,” or a thing which has no existence. What
