Albert Barnes Commentary Amos 5:26

"Yea, ye have borne the tabernacle of your king and the shrine of your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves." — Amos 5:26 (ASV)

But you have borne – Literally, And you bore the tabernacle of your Moloch (literally, “your king,” from which the idol Moloch had its name). He assigns the reason why he had denied that they sacrificed to God in the wilderness. Did you offer sacrifices to Me, and you bore? That is, seeing that you bore. The two were incompatible. Since they did “carry about the tabernacle of their king,” they did not really worship God. He whom they chose as “their king” was their god. The “tabernacle” or “tent” was probably a little portable shrine, such as Demetrius the silversmith and those of his craft made for the little statues of their goddess Diana (Acts 19:24). Such are mentioned in Egyptian idolatry. “They carry forth,” we are told, “the image in a small shrine of gilt wood.”

Of your Moloch and Chiun – The two clauses must be read separately: the “tabernacles of Moloch” (strictly, “of your king”) and “Chiun your images.” The two clauses, “the tabernacle of your king, and Chiun your images,” are altogether distinct. They correspond to one another, but they must not be read as one whole, in the sense, “the tabernacle of your king and of Chiun your images.” The rendering of the last clause is uncertain. God has so utterly abolished the idols (Isaiah 2:18), through whom Satan contested with Him the allegiance of His people, that we have no certain knowledge of what they were. There may be some connection between the god whom the Israelites in the wilderness worshiped as “their king,” and him whose worship Solomon, in his decay, brought into Jerusalem—the god whom the Ammonites worshiped as “the king, Hammolech,” or, as he is once called, “Molech,” and three times “Milchom” (1 Kings 11:5; 1 Kings 11:33; 2 Kings 23:13) (perhaps an abstract, as some used to speak of “the Deity”).

He is mostly called “Hammolech,” the Ammonite way of pronouncing what the Hebrews called “Hammelech, the king.”

But since the name designates the god only as “the king,” it may have been given to different gods, whom the pagans worshiped as their chief god. In Jewish idolatry, it became equivalent to Baal (Jeremiah 19:5; Jeremiah 32:35), “lord;” and to avert his displeasure, the Hebrews (as did the Carthaginians, a Phoenician people, down to the time of our Lord) burned their own children, “their sons and their daughters,” alive to him. Yet, even in these dreadful rites, the Carthaginian worship was more cold-blooded and artificial than that of Phoenicia. But whether “the king,” whom the Israelites worshiped in the wilderness, was the same as the Ammonite Molech or not, those dreadful sacrifices were then no part of his worship; otherwise, Amos would not have spoken of the idolatry only “as the carrying about his tabernacle.”

He would have described it by its greatest offensiveness. “The king” was also a title of the Egyptian deity, Osiris, who was identified with the sun, and whose worship Israel may probably have brought with them, as well as that of the calf, his symbol. Again, most of the old translators have retained the Hebrew word Chiyyan, either regarding it as a proper name or unable to translate it. Some later tradition identifies it with the planet Saturn, which under a different name, the Arabs propitiated as a malevolent being. In Ephrem’s time, the pagan Syrians worshiped “the child-devouring Chivan.”

Israel, however, did not learn the idolatry from the neighboring Arabs, since it is not the Arab name of that planet. In Egyptian, the name of Chunsu, one of the 12 gods who severally were thought to preside over the 12 months, appears in an abridged form Chuns or Chon. He was, in their mythology, held to be “the oldest son of Ammon”; “his name is said to signify, “power, might”; and he to be that ideal of might, worshiped as the Egyptian Hercules.” Regarding etymology, see Sir G. Wilkinson in Rawlinson's Herodotus, volume 2, page 78, note. “The Egyptians called Hercules Chon.” L. Giraldus (Opera, volume 2, page 327) attributes this to Xenophon, but Antiochus Drusius notes that the authority given is wrong.

The name Chun extended into Phoenician and Assyrian proper names. Still, Chon is not Chiyyun; and the fact that the name was retained as Chon or Chun in Phoenicia (where the worship was borrowed) as well as in Assyria is a ground for hesitating to identify it with the word Chiyyun, which has only a certain likeness to the abridged name. Jerome’s Hebrew teacher, on the other hand, knew of no such tradition, and Jerome renders it “image.”

And certainly, it is most natural to render it not as a name, but as a common noun. It may probably mean “the pedestal,” the “basis of your images.” The prophet had spoken of their images as covered over with their little “shrines, the shrines of your king.” Here he may, not improbably, speak of them as fastened to a pedestal. Such were the gods whom they chose instead of the One true God—gods “carried about,” covered over, fixed to their place, lest they should fall.

The worship was certainly some form of star-worship, since there follows, “the star of your god.” It took place after the worship of the calf. For Stephen, after having spoken of that idolatry, says, Then God turned and gave them up to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets (Acts 7:42). Upon their rebellions, God at last gave them up to themselves. Stephen calls the god whom they worshiped “Rephan,” quoting the then-existing Greek translation. Jerome says, “having regard to the meaning rather than the words. This is to be observed in all Holy Scripture, that Apostles and apostolic men, in citing testimonies from the Old Testament, regard not the words, but the meaning, nor do they follow the words step by step, provided they do not depart from the meaning.”

Of this special idolatry, there is no mention in Moses, in like manner as the mention of the worship of the “goat” (a second symbol of the Pantheistic worship of Egypt) is contained only incidentally in the prohibition of that worship. After the final rebellion, upon which God rejected that generation, Holy Scripture takes no account of them. They had failed God; they had forfeited the distinction for which God had created, preserved, and taught them, revealed Himself to them, and had by great miracles rescued them from Egypt. From then on, that generation was cast aside unnoticed.

Which you made for yourselves – This was the fundamental fault: that they “made it for themselves.” Instead of the tabernacle, which God, their king, appointed, they “bore about the tabernacle” of him whom they took for their king; and for the service which He gave, they chose new gods (Judges 5:8) for themselves. Whereas God made them for Himself, they made gods for themselves out of their own minds. All idolatry is self-will, first choosing a god, and then being enslaved to it.