Albert Barnes Commentary Amos 4:11

"I have overthrown [cities] among you, as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and ye were as a brand plucked out of the burning: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith Jehovah." — Amos 4:11 (ASV)

I have overthrown some of you - The earthquake is probably reserved to the last, as being the rarest, and so the most special, visitation. Frequent as earthquakes have been on the borders of Palestine, the greater part of Palestine was not on the line which was especially shaken by them. The line, chiefly visited by earthquakes, was along the coast of the Mediterranean or parallel to it, chiefly from Tyre to Antioch and Aleppo. Here were the great historical earthquakes, which were the scourges of Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Botrys, Tripolis, Laodicea on the sea; which shattered Litho-prosopon, prostrated Baalbek and Hamath, and so often afflicted Antioch and Aleppo, while Damascus was mostly spared.

Eastward it may have reached to Safed, Tiberias, and the Hauran. Ar-Moab perished by an earthquake in the childhood of Jerome. But, at least, the evidence of earthquakes, except perhaps in the ruins of the Hauran, is slighter. Earthquakes there have been (although fewer) at Jerusalem. Yet on the whole, it seems truer to say that the skirts of Palestine were subject to destructive earthquakes, than to affirm this of central Palestine.

The earthquake must have been all the more terrible because it was unprecedented. One or more terrible earthquakes, overthrowing cities, must have been sent before that, at which time Amos collected his prophecies. For his prophecies were uttered two years before that earthquake, and this earthquake had preceded his prophecy. God says, I overthrew among you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. He uses the word especially used by Moses and the prophets for that dread overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, when they were turned, as it were, upside down.

The earthquake is at all times the more mysterious because it is unseen, unannounced, unlooked for, instantaneous, and complete. The ground under one’s feet seems no longer secure: one’s shelter becomes one’s destruction; houses become graves. Whole cities must have been utterly overthrown, for He compares the overthrow worked among them to the overthrow of the cities of the plain. Other visitations have heralds sent before them.

War, pestilence, and famine seldom break in at once. The earthquake, however, at once buries, it may be, thousands or tens of thousands—each stiffened (if it were so) in his last deed of evil; each household with its own form of misery; each in its separate vault, dead, dying, crushed, or imprisoned. The remnant were indeed surviving, because most of those whom they loved were gone. So He says:

And ye, who escaped, were as a firebrand, plucked out of the burning - Once it had been green, fresh, and fragrant, with leaf or flower; now it is scorched, charred, blackened, all but consumed. In itself, it was fit for nothing but to be cast back into the fire from where it had been rescued. Humankind would treat it so. A re-creation alone could restore it. It is a slight emblem of a soul whose freshness sin had withered, and then God’s severe judgment had half-consumed; in itself, fit only for the everlasting fire, from which God nevertheless withdraws it.