Attributed commentary excerpt
Barnes' Notes on Amos 9:11
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Albert Barnes (1798–1870) · 19th-century historical commentary
Source: BibleWord.ai's local reference edition of this named work.
In that day I will raise up - Amos, as the prophets were taught to do, sums up his prophecy of woe with this one full promise of overflowing good. For the ten tribes, in their separate condition, there was no hope, no future. He had pronounced the entire destruction of “the kingdom” of Israel. The ten tribes were, thenceforth, only an aggregate of individuals, good or bad. They had no separate corporate existence. In their spiritual existence, they still belonged to the one family of Israel; and, belonging to it, were heirs of the promises made to it. When no longer separate, individuals out of its tribes were to become Apostles to their whole people and to the Gentiles. Of individuals in it, God had declared His judgment, anticipating the complete exactness of the Judgment of the Great Day. “All the sinners of” His “people” should “die” an untimely death “by the sword;” not one of those who were the true grain should perish with the chaff. He now foretells, how that salvation, of those indeed His own, should be effected through the house of David, in whose line Christ was to come. He speaks of the house of David, not in any terms of royal greatness; he tells, not of its palaces, but of its ruins. Under the word “tabernacle,” he probably blends the ideas, that it should be in a poor condition, and yet that it should be the means whereby God should protect His people. The “succah, tabernacle” (translated “booth” in Jonah) Jonah 4:5; Genesis 33:17, was originally a rude hut, formed of “intertwined” branches. It is used of the cattle-shed Genesis 33:17, and of the rough tents used by soldiers in war 2 Samuel 11:11, or by the watchman in the vineyard Isaiah 1:8; Job 27:18, and of those wherein God “made the children of Israel to dwell, when” He “brought them out of the land of Egypt Leviticus 23:43. The name of the feast of “tabernacles, Succoth,” as well as the rude temporary huts in which they were commanded to dwell, associated the name with a state of outward poverty under God’s protection. Hence, perhaps, the word is employed also of the secret place of the presence of God Psalms 18:11; Job 36:29. Isaiah, as well as Amos, seems, in the use of the same word Isaiah 4:6, to hint that what is poor and mean in man’s sight would be, in the Hands of God, an effectual protection. This “hut of David” was also at that time to be “fallen.” When Amos prophesied, it had been weakened by the schism of the ten tribes, but Azariah, its king, was mighty 2 Chronicles 26:6-15. Amos had already foretold the destruction of the “palaces of Jerusalem by fire” Amos 2:5. Now he adds, that the abiding condition of the house of David should be a state of decay and weakness, and that from that state, not human strength, but God Himself should “raise” it. “I will raise up the hut of David, the fallen.” He does not say, of “that” time, “the hut that is fallen,” as if it were already fallen, but “the hut, the fallen,” that is, the hut of which the character should then be its falling, its caducity. So, under a different figure, Isaiah prophesied, “There shall come forth a rod out of the stump Isaiah 11:1 of Jesse, and a Branch shall put forth from its roots.” When the trunk was hewn down even with the ground, and the rank grass had covered the “stump,” that “rod” and “Branch” should come forth which should rule the earth, and “to” which “the Gentiles should seek” Isaiah 11:10. From these words of Amos, “the Son of the fallen,” became, among the Jews, one of the t…
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