Albert Barnes Commentary Amos 2:8

"and they lay themselves down beside every altar upon clothes taken in pledge; and in the house of their God they drink the wine of such as have been fined." — Amos 2:8 (ASV)

They lay themselves down - They condensed sin. By a sort of economy in the toil of sinning, they blended many sins in one: idolatry, sensuality, cruelty, and, in all, the express breach of God’s commandments. The “clothes” here are doubtless the same as the “clothing” in the law—the large enfolding cloak, which by day was wrapped over the long loose shirt (the poor man’s only other dress), and by night was his only bedding (Exodus 22:26–27).

God had expressly commanded, “If the man is poor, you shall not sleep with his pledge” (Deuteronomy 24:12–13); in any case, “you shall deliver him the pledge again when the sun goes down, that he may sleep in his own raiment, and bless you; and it shall be righteousness to you before the Lord your God.” Here the “garments laid to pledge” are treated as the entire property of the creditors.

They “stretch” their listless length along upon them in their idol-feasts “by every altar.” Ezekiel speaks of a “stately bed,” upon which they “sat, and a table prepared before it” (Ezekiel 23:41). Isaiah writes: “Upon a lofty and high mountain, have you set up your bed; even there you went up to offer sacrifice; you have enlarged your bed; you have loved their bed; you provided room” (Isaiah 57:7–8).

In luxury and state then, and moreover in a shameless publicity, they “lay on the garments” of the despoiled “by every altar.” The multiplication of altars (Hosea 8:11; Hosea 10:1; Hosea 12:11) was, in itself, sin. By each of these multiplied places of sin, they committed fresh sins of luxury and hard-heartedness (perhaps, from the character of the worship of nature, even grosser sins).

They “drink the wine of the condemned,” or (as the English margin more exactly) “the amerced”—those whom persons in any petty judicial authority had unjustly “amerced,” expending in revelry and debauchery in the idol’s temple what they had unjustly extorted from the oppressed.

No mask is too transparent to hide a person from himself when he does not wish to see himself. Nothing serves so well as religion for that self-deceit, and the less there is of it, or the more one-sided it is, the better it serves.

For the narrower it is, the less risk there is of impinging on the awful reality of God’s truth; and a half-truth about God is mostly a lie that its half-truth makes plausible.

So this dreadful assemblage of cruelty, avarice, malice, mockery of justice, unnatural debauchery, and hard-heartedness was doubtless smoothed over to the conscience of the ten tribes by that most hideous ingredient of all: that “the house of their god” was the place of their ill-purchased revelry.

People do not serve their idols for nothing; this costly service at Bethel was not for nothing.

They did all these things; but they did something for “the Deity,” or “Nature,” or “Ashtoreth”; and so “the Deity” was to be at peace with them.

Amos, with wonderful irony, marks the ghastly mixture of sin and worship: they “drank the wine of the amerced”—where?—“in the house of their God,” condemning in five words their luxury, oppression, perversion of justice, cruelty, profanity, unreal service, and real apostasy.

What hard-heartedness toward the willfully-forgotten poor is compensated by a little church-going!