Attributed commentary excerpt
Barnes' Notes on Amos 6:14
A historical reference excerpt for this verse. Read it alongside the biblical text and other available sources.
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Albert Barnes (1798–1870) · 19th-century historical commentary
Source: BibleWord.ai's local reference edition of this named work.
But - (For,) - it was a non-thing, a nonexistent thing, a phantom, whereat they rejoiced; “for behold I raise up a nation.” God is said to “raise up,” when, by His Providence or His grace, He calls forth those who had not been called before, for the office for which He designs them. Thus, He raised up judges Judges 2:16-18, delivers Judges 3:9-15, prophets , Nazarites Amos 2:11, priests 1 Samuel 2:35, kings 2 Samuel 7:8, calling each separately to perform what He gave them in charge. So He is said to “raise up” even the evil ministers of His good Will, whom, in the course of His Providence, He allows to raise themselves up aloft to that eminence, so often as, in fulfilling their own bad will, they bring about, or are examples of, His righteous judgment. Thus God “raised up Hadad” as “an adversary” 1 Kings 11:14 to Solomon, and again Rezon 1 Kings 11:23; and the Chaldees Habakkuk 1:6. So again God says to Pharaoh, “For this have I raised thee up Exodus 9:16, to show in thee My power.” So here He says, “I will raise up against you a nation, and they shall afflict you from the entering in of Hamath.” Israel, under Jeroboam II, had recovered a wider extent of territory, than had, in her northern portion, belonged to her since the better days of Solomon. Jeroboam “recovered Damascus and Hamath” 2 Kings 14:28, 2 Kings 14:25, which belonged to “Judah, unto Israel. He restored,” as God promised him by Jonah, “the coast of Israel from the entering of Hamath unto the sea of the plain. The entering of Hamath” expresses the utmost northern boundary promised to Israel Numbers 34:8. But this does not in itself express whether Hamath itself was included. Hamath however, and even Damascus itself, were incorporated in the bounds of Israel. The then great scourge of Israel had become part of its strength. Southward, Ammon and even Moab, had been taken into its borders. All the country on the other side of Jordan was theirs from Hamath and Damascus to the south of the Dead Sea, a space including four degrees of Latitude, as much as from Portsmouth to Durham. Amos describes the extension of the kingdom of Israel in the self-same terms as the Book of Kings; only he names as the southern extremity, “the river of the wilderness,” instead of “the sea of the wilderness.” The sea of the wilderness, that is, the Dead Sea, might in itself be either its northern or its southern extremity. The word used by Amos, defines it to be the southern. For his use of the name, “river of the wilderness,” implies: (1) That it was a well-known boundary, a boundary as well-known to Israel on the south , “as the entering in of Hamath” was on the north. (2) As a boundary-river, it must have been a river on the east of the Jordan, since Benjamin formed their boundary on the west of Jordan, and mountain passes, not rivers, separated them from it. (3) From its name, ‘river of the wilderness, or the Arabah,” it must, in some important part of its course, have flowed in the ‘Arabah. The ‘Arabah, (it is now well known,) is no other than that deep and remarkable depression, now called the Ghor, which extends from the lake of Gennesareth to the Red Sea . The Dead Sea itself is called by Moses too “the sea of the Arabah” Deuteronomy 3:17; Deuteronomy 4:49, lying, as it does, in the middle of that depression, and dividing it into two, the valley of the Jordan above the Dead Sea, and the southern portion which extends uninterrupted from the Dead to the Red Sea; and which also (although Scr…
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