Ethan Schwartz
Review of Yitzchak Etshalom, Amos: The Genius of Prophetic Rhetoric, Maggid Studies in Tanakh (Jerusalem: Maggid, 2025).
If you were looking for a single figure to encapsulate the biblical prophets, you could do worse than Amos of Tekoa, who inveighed against the northern kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BCE. Not for nothing is his book among the Bible’s most quotable. Jews know well his withering clarification that Israel’s chosenness is precisely why God “will hold [them] to account for all of [their] iniquities” (Amos 3:2).[1] On Sukkot, we effortlessly recite his assurance that God “will raise up David’s fallen sukkah” (Amos 9:11) during birkat ha-mazon. For American Jews in particular, his demand (in God’s voice) that “justice roll down like water, righteousness like a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24) reverberates in Martin Luther King Jr’s legendary 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. Indeed, King’s friend Abraham Joshua Heschel deployed Amos as a paradigm at the beginning of his magnum opus, The Prophets: “The things that horrified the prophets are even now daily occurrences all over the world. There is no society to which Amos’ words would not apply.”[2]
Yet if Amos comes down to us as a central, iconic figure, what is remarkable is how assiduously he himself renounces any such importance. In fact, he famously denies being a prophet (navi) at all. In the only third-person narrative scene in the book, he responds to threats from Amaziah, priest of Bethel, by declaring, “I am no navi, nor am I a ben navi [literally ‘son of a navi’—probably a disciple of a prophetic guild]. Rather, I herd cattle; I pick figs. But Hashem took me from the flock and said to me, ‘Prophesy [hinnavei] to my people Israel’” (Amos 7:14–15). Indeed, the very opening line of the book identifies him as “one of the shepherds [nokedim] of Tekoa” (Amos 1:1). Many of the prophets who boldly challenged the powers that be were themselves members of powerful groups—the court (e.g., Isaiah), clerical circles (e.g., Jeremiah and Ezekiel), etc. Amos was a farmer. Somehow, that farmer has come to embody biblical prophecy itself.
What should we make of this figure who is central yet marginal, this prophet who is not a prophet? This question drives the newest entry in the Maggid Studies in Tanakh series, Amos: The Genius of Prophetic Rhetoric, by Yitzchak Etshalom, a rabbi and educator based in Los Angeles. Etshalom argues that the key to reading the book of Amos is to recognize that reading is the wrong category. The name “Amos” refers most fundamentally not to a text but to a person, and that person’s defining feature is that he spoke—in God’s own voice, no less. This is signaled right from the opening: “He said [va-yyomar], “Hashem roars [sha’ag] from Zion, sounds His voice [yittein kolo] from Jerusalem” (Amos 1:2). Although Etshalom unconvincingly strains the syntax of va-yyomar to argue that Amos would say this regularly, his characterization of the line as an “anthem” (1–6)[3] accurately captures how it establishes not only the medium of the book but also a central part of its message: prophecy is speech. For this reason, Etshalom urges, the goal is not to read Amos. One does not read a roar. The goal is to hear Amos.
How does one hear what is now preserved only as writing? According to Etshalom, we must strive to read in such a way that transports us into the position of Amos’s contemporaries. “In order to capture the impact of the prophet’s words and to understand his lexical choice,” he writes in the preface, “we have to put ourselves in the place of the ‘primary audience,’ that group of citizens, royalty, or aristocracy who were privy to the ‘live’ version of the speech” (x). As such, the task will be to leverage the full range of the Jewish tradition in order to achieve a kind of time travel: “Welcome to a stimulating journey to eighth-century BCE Samaria,” Etshalom announces at the beginning of the book, “traveling the roads of the text-study approaches developed by the rabbis of the classic period, with frequent visits to the academies of France, Spain, and Provence, and occasional pit-stops in the halls of modern academia” (ix).
Etshalom’s reference to “occasional pit-stops in the halls of modern academia” undersells things significantly. True, he cites contemporary, historical-critical scholarship less frequently than classical midrash or medieval peshat. Nevertheless, the very terms of his inquiry are deeply indebted to modern biblical studies and, indeed, would be unthinkable without it. While premodern commentators (especially the medievals) were somewhat attentive to speech and voice, the idea of recovering the spoken environment is a legacy of nineteenth-century European Romanticism. This movement prioritized the recovery of pristine origins and celebrated spontaneous creative genius—sentiments that profoundly influenced early biblical studies, which took shape later that same century. Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), the German Protestant scholar whose name is synonymous with the study of orality in ancient Israel, wrote,
The prophets were not originally writers but speakers. Anyone who thinks of ink and paper while reading their writings is in error from the outset. “Hear!” is the way they begin their works, not “Read!” Above all, however, if contemporary readers wish to understand the prophets, they must entirely forget that the writings were collected in a sacred book centuries after the prophets’ work. The contemporary reader must not read their words as portions of the Bible but must attempt to place them in the context of the life of the people of Israel in which they were first spoken.[4]
The affinities with Etshalom’s orientation are obvious. Regardless of whether he himself is aware of this intellectual trajectory, he is playing by rules set only a century ago by scholars such as Gunkel. In fact, he seems to allow this when he (rightly) notes that, in some ways, “the twenty-first century student may be in a better position to fully appreciate the import of the biblical text than his or her forebears” (ix–x). Despite Etshalom’s rootedness in the tradition, his project is characteristically modern.
For Gunkel and others like him, the goal of studying biblical orality was to separate the oldest kernels of speech from later redactional supplementation. This involved a value-laden (and frequently antisemitic) characterization of the former as authentic and inspired, the latter as inauthentic and derivative. It should be obvious that, as an Orthodox rabbi writing for an Orthodox readership, Etshalom does not share this goal or its underlying premises. While he acknowledges that Amos’s oracles might not have been recorded in precise chronological order (e.g., 127), he assumes that there really was a shepherd from Tekoa who said all of these things at God’s command in eighth-century Israel. The book of Amos as a whole, not just individual passages deemed “authentic,” is a faithful record of this prophet’s words.
As it turns out, Etshalom is less remote from contemporary critical scholarship here than one might imagine. True, basically no Bible scholars, including me, seriously think that the historical Amos of Tekoa (if he existed) said everything attributed to him. However, we also typically reject the approach represented by Gunkel, whose methodological premises are unsustainable in view of new historical evidence. While I, for my part, understand the book of Amos to be a compilation of oracles with long, complex histories, I do not separate them into “authentic” versus “inauthentic.” Rather, I see their integration as a creative scribal process that produced an emergent portrait of the prophet named Amos—one that is remarkably consistent even as the book still shows signs of authorial disunity. In the end, this is not so different from Etshalom. Both of us are interested in hearing Amos. When he says “Amos,” he means a historical individual who spoke in the world; when I say “Amos,” I mean a literary character who speaks in the text. But we might well hear the same things nonetheless.
Like many entries in Maggid Studies in Tanakh, Etshalom’s Amos follows the order of the biblical text rather than proceeding thematically or synthetically. What is somewhat unusual against the backdrop of the series is the level of detail here. While the book of Amos itself is a mere 146 verses, Etshalom’s study is over 400 pages. This works out to about three pages per verse. (Incredibly, in the acknowledgments, Etshalom states that an earlier draft was twice as long [xiii].) Contrast this with, for example, Tova Ganzel’s (outstanding) recent Maggid volume on Ezekiel, which is one hundred pages shorter for nearly ten times as many verses—about a quarter of a page per verse.[5] As a result, Etshalom’s book functions more as a commentary than a monograph. Unlike some other volumes in the series, this one is probably best read while sitting in the beit midrash with a Tanakh open in front of you, not while kicking back on the couch during a long Shabbat afternoon.
To get a sense of Etshalom’s detailed exegesis, we can consider a few brief case studies. For each, I will provide Etshalom’s own translation. The first is one of Amos’s most stirring condemnations of Israel’s socioeconomic injustice:
For their selling a tzaddik [i.e., innocent person] for silver, and the needy for (a pair of) shoes [na‘alayim] (Amos 2:6b).
While the basic thrust here is clear enough, its precise meaning is not. Etshalom rightly dwells on it, devoting nearly five pages (65–70) to what is actually just half a verse. Drawing on a 2012 article by Avi Shveka in one of the leading journals of historical-critical biblical studies, Etshalom explains the unintuitive parallelism of silver and shoes with reference to ancient Near Eastern laws regarding the extradition of runaway slaves to their masters.[6] Amos, he argues, rejects this practice as unjust (cf. Deut 23:16–17).
Etshalom gives little attention to the main alternative interpretation proposed in the scholarly literature: that the oracle refers to judicial corruption. This involves reading the word na‘alayim not as “shoes” but as a misvocalization of a term for bribery derived from “hide,” “avert” (alam). This notion is perhaps supported by Samuel’s insistence that he never took bribes (I Sam 12:3). Personally, I think it deserves more of a hearing. Yet even if we grant that Etshalom is correct to follow Shveka, I was surprised that he says nothing about what strikes me as the latter’s most interesting conclusion: that Amos’s engagement with the ancient extradition laws serves to condemn the whole society for enabling the institution of debt slavery in the first place.[7] This would be about as close as a biblical prophet comes to what we would today call a “systemic” critique. Given Etshalom’s interest in rhetoric, this omission is a missed opportunity. If Shveka is right, his reading has obvious and important ramifications for just how subversive this oracle would have sounded to Amos’s audience, implicating all of them.
Such quibbles notwithstanding, Etshalom’s discussion of this passage is a good model of what constructive Orthodox engagement with historical-critical biblical studies might look like. He has meaningfully learned from an interesting, important study and “translated” it effectively for Maggid readers. He states without apology or fanfare that “the solution [to the exegetical problems] may lie in ancient Near Eastern texts” (67) and then cites these texts directly. Moreover, he does so (mostly) without falling into the common trap of focusing only on the Bible’s differences from—and alleged superiority over—the cognate texts.
For a second case study, let us turn to what is perhaps the single most famous oracle in Amos: his condemnation of worship in the absence of social justice, featuring the line that King so powerfully quoted. God screams,
I hate, I despise your feasts [saneiti ma’asti hageikhem], and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies [ve-lo ariah be-atzroteikhem]. Even though you offer Me [li] your burnt offerings and cereal offerings [u-minhoteikhem], I will not accept them [lo ertzeh], and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts [meri’eikhem] I will not look upon [lo abit]. Take away from Me [mei-alai] the noise of your songs [shirekha]; to the melody of your harps [nevalekha] I will not listen [lo eshma]. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Did you bring to Me [li] sacrifices and offerings the forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? You shall take up Sikkut your king [malkekhem], and Kiyun your star-gods [eloheikhem], your images [tzalmeikhem], which you made for yourselves [asitem la-khem]; therefore I will take you into exile [ve-higleiti] beyond Damascus, says the Lord, whose name is the God of Hosts (Amos 5:21–27).
Etshalom begins by distinguishing between “hate” (san’ei) and “despise” (ma’as) in the first verse: the former is relative, the latter absolute (235). This is philologically questionable and, in any case, misses the point. The repetition poetically conveys how God is overcome with fury, as if searching (in vain) for a word that might fully capture the extent. “The opening pair of words seems repetitive,” as Etshalom puts it, because it is repetitive. That is its function. Again, in a study that centers rhetoric, it is strange that Etshalom obscures such an important rhetorical effect.
Although Etshalom gets off to a rocky start, he emphatically sticks the landing. Considering the passage as a whole, he notes how it juxtaposes (a) first-person singular verbs with God as the subject; and (b) second-person plural possessive suffixes, referring to Israel, on words relating to various aspects of worship (sacrifices, songs, etc.). He explains,
This interplay between “Me” and “you” (or “you all”) may hold the key to understanding the oracle’s structural wisdom and underlying historical message. … God’s rejection of the people’s offerings means that they have been worshipping Him; He cannot reject an offering that was not offered up to Him. Even so, these offerings are considered your offerings; God wants nothing to do with them because they are meaningless. … God is rejecting Samaria’s legitimate worship because their society is corrupted with moral depravity that poisons the core of true “devotion” (249).
Few interpreters would dispute the theological point that Etshalom capably summarizes in the last line. His real contribution, however, is in observing how this point is rhetorically conveyed. The juxtaposition of first-person singular and second-person plural endows the oracle with a discernible rhythm, alternating between the sounds associated with these forms (especially ti for the former and khem for the latter). The result is that, on the very level of style, apart from the direct substance, it conveys the distance between Israel’s worship and the God to which that worship is ostensibly devoted. This truly is “the genius of prophetic rhetoric” in action, and it is one of Etshalom’s most astute readings in the book.
As a final case study, we may look at the passage that I mentioned by way of introduction: Amos’s account of his prophetic status (or lack thereof) in his confrontation with Amaziah. As I noted, this is the book’s only third-person narrative. It reads,
Then Amaziah the priest of Beit El sent to Jeroboam king of Israel, saying: Amos has conspired against you in the midst of the house of Israel; the land is unable to bear all his words. For thus Amos has said [koh amar Amos]: Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel shall surely be led away captive out of his land. Then Amaziah said to Amos: Go, you seer, flee to the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Beit El, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a royal house. Then Amos answered, and said to Amaziah: I am not a prophet, neither am I a prophet’s son; but I was a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees; and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me: Go, prophesy to My people Israel. Now therefore hear the word of the Lord: You say: Do not prophesy against Israel, and do not preach against the house of Isaac. Therefore, ko[h] amar Hashem: Your wife will be a harlot in the city, and your sons and your daughters will fall by the sword, and your land will be divided by the survey line. And you yourself will die in an unclean land, and Israel will surely be led away captive out of his land (Amos 7:10–17).
Etshalom correctly and lucidly draws the important connection between Amos’s counterintuitive denial to be a prophet and his insistence that he has a far more mundane occupation:
He is not part of a professional guild of prophets, nor is he a prophet by vocation. … He is not part of the scholastic or ascetic class, but rather a “regular person.” … Amos’s words are not his own—they are God’s words, a divine message, ignored at one’s own peril. … Amos was sent; he did not go of his own volition. When Amaziah tells him to “go,” this assumes that Amos chose to come and may now choose to go. This is not the case (327–28).
Amos’s humble origins are not in tension with his emergence as the quintessential prophet. They are the key to the whole thing: it is precisely because Amos is, sociologically speaking, such an unexpected vessel of the divine word that he may deliver it so effectively. How could we understand such brilliant and devastating oratory from a “regular person” if not as an authentic expression of the divine roar? This is why prophecy is so subversive: God’s voice is not constrained by social class.
Etshalom nicely calls attention to Amaziah’s characterization of the prophet’s speech as “thus has Amos said” (koh amar Amos). Given the stereotypical use of this phrase to introduce divine speech—a formula inherited from ancient Near Eastern epistolary convention—he is surely right that this is a subtle but significant charge of inauthenticity: “Amos said this, not God.” Etshalom’s observation would have been even stronger had he connected it with the prophet’s subsequent use of the expected formula, “thus has Hashem said” (koh amar Hashem). Etshalom rightly notes its superfluousness midway through the oracle (332) but does not mention that it directly inverts the priest’s implicit accusation. This inversion carries rhetorical force, asserting authenticity by reclaiming the oratorical convention that has been deployed against him.
Something that limits Etshalom’s analysis here is his inattention to ancient Near Eastern evidence regarding the complex political dynamics between prophecy and other authority structures. He starts off promisingly, intuiting that there might be some distance between priest and king: “Perhaps Amaziah’s message to the king is tinged with hysteria and exaggerated in order to spur the king to action against Amos” (323). Amaziah does not simply represent authority; he is also himself beholden to it. But Etshalom drops this theme, with consequences for his discussion of the rhetoric: he misses that Amaziah is also deploying rhetorical strategy, emphasizing how a challenge to the cult at Bethel is, more fundamentally, a challenge to the king himself (Amos 7:13). To be clear, Amos is targeting both. “Church” and “state” were not sharply distinct in his world—but neither were they identical, and Amaziah’s blurring of the differences is a power play that is central to what this passage is about. The ancient Near Eastern evidence helps to clarify these dynamics.[8]
These three case studies are, I trust, sufficient to give a sense of Etshalom’s approach. While I disagree with this or that claim, his interpretation is careful, insightful, deeply grounded in tradition, and admirably open to contemporary scholarship. That said, I do have questions about whether this ultimately accomplishes his stated goal of, as cited above, “fully appreciat[ing] the import of the biblical text.” At times, his impressively detailed exegesis actually seems to be at cross-purposes with that goal. While I would not go so far as to say that Etshalom has missed the forest for the trees, his line-by-line analysis does not zoom out as often or as clearly as would have been necessary to keep the prophet’s overall message in view. As a result, I reached the end of his book feeling like I had certainly read Amos but unsure of whether I had heard him.
One way that Etshalom might have avoided this problem would have been to write a more substantive introduction (his is less than ten pages) or to include an integrative essay at the end of each chapter. If length was an obstacle—as, per Etshalom’s acknowledgments, it apparently was—then I believe that it would have been worth it to trim some of the exegetical detail in exchange for the space necessary to offer more of a bird’s eye view. The book would have greater potential impact if it more evenly integrated the commentary and monograph genres rather than leaning so heavily toward the former.
Something else that could have helped Etshalom would be engagement with Heschel’s aforementioned discussion of Amos in The Prophets. In a mere fifteen pages, Heschel offers what is, in my opinion, the only scholarly analysis that comes close to channeling Amos’s voice.[9] He does so in part because he takes the opposite approach to Etshalom, eschewing fine-tuned, sequential exegesis in favor of sweeping, thematic synthesis. While I am certainly not saying that Etshalom should have rewritten Heschel’s book, I do think that he would benefitted from engaging it. As it stands, however, he does not cite it even once (as far as I can tell). One might defend this by noting that Heschel is outside the Orthodox fold. Yet this is unconvincing, as we are currently witnessing a remarkable Modern Orthodox “discovery” of Heschel.[10] Indeed, his magisterial Torah Min Ha-Shamayim was recently reissued by none other than Maggid.[11] A twenty-first-century Jewish study of Amos simply must draw on Heschel’s The Prophets. It is the modern foundation for the entire conversation.
Despite my criticisms, Yitzchak Etshalom’s Amos: The Genius of Prophetic Rhetoric is, in the final analysis, a learned study and a strong new entry in the Maggid Studies in Tanakh series. I recommend it to readers who hope to pursue deeper learning in Amos (or the Trei Asar in general) and are seeking a companion volume that incorporates a broad range of interpretive tools within an Orthodox framework. I think they will find that even if Etshalom does not ultimately recreate the divine roar itself, his analysis may still attune their ears to the whisper of what he aptly calls “the eternal messages of this time-bound yet timeless prophetic text” (xxiii).
[1] Translations of Amos are my own until midway through the review, at which point I begin using the translations offered in the volume under discussion.
[2] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (1955; repr., New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 3.
[3] All page numbers cited parenthetically refer to Etshalom’s volume.
[4] Hermann Gunkel, “The Prophets as Writers and Poets,” in Prophecy in Israel, ed. David L. Petersen (Philadelphia and London: Fortress and SPCK, 1987), 24.
[5] Tova Ganzel, Ezekiel: From Destruction to Restoration, trans. Kaeren Fish, Maggid Studies in Tanakh (Jerusalem: Maggid, 2020).
[6] Avi Shveka, “‘For a Pair of Shoes’: A New Light on an Obscure Verse in Amos’ Prophecy,” Vetus Testamentum 62 (2012): 95–114.
[7] Shveka, “Pair of Shoes,” 109.
[8] See, e.g., J. Blake Couey, “Amos vii 10–17 and Royal Attitudes toward Prophecy in the Ancient Near East,” Vetus Testamentum 58 (2008): 300–14.
[9] Heschel, Prophets, 32–46.
[10] See especially Dr. Dror Bondi’s work.
[11] Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted Through the Generations, 2 vols., Heb. (1973; repr., Jerusalem: Maggid, 2021).
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