Amos, whose activity is to be dated about 760 B. C, was a native of Tekoa, in southern Judah. He belonged, therefore, to a social order which still remained largely pastoral, and, though he knew the agricultural and commercial life of central Palestine and its cities, he approached it as an outsider. He himself lived the life of the seminomad, accustomed to the wide spaces of the southern hills, where the appearance of two travellers together was a rarity to be explained only on the ground that they had planned to journey together. He knew the habits of the lion, the bear, the birds, the snakes, and of those who hunted them or feared them.... He had the clearness of insight which comes from lonely communion with nature, and he had, too, the intense conviction that it was the word of his God that he had to deliver. Since the days of David, Israel had been growing steadily out of the old nomad social and economic order into that of a commercial and agricultural state. Such a transition is always attended with risks, and these had become most obvious in the century preceding Amos....
Unlike the Rechabites, who stood for a return to the simpler conditions of the nomad stage, Amos had no social programme to offer. Instead, he called men back to the God of their fathers, and insisted that the nation could find safety only in moral and spiritual reform.... To him the God of Israel was the Lord of creation, of history and of universal morality, and His supreme demand was for justice. That alone could save the people from their impending fate, for that alone would admit in practice the rights of human personality. The supreme contribution of Amos to the world's religious thinking was that he insisted that God is good.
—From the Encyclopædia Britannica.
