Albert Barnes Commentary Amos 5:8

"[seek him] that maketh the Pleiades and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth (Jehovah is his name);" — Amos 5:8 (ASV)

Seek Him that maketh the seven stars - Misbelief erases the thought of God as He is. It retains the name God, but means something quite different from the One True God. So people spoke of “the Deity” as a sort of First Cause of all things, and did not perceive that they only meant to acknowledge that this fair harmony of created things was not (at least as it now exists) self-existent, and that they had lost sight of the Personal God who had made His will known to them, whom they were to believe in, obey, fear, and love. “The Deity” was no object of fear or love. It was merely a bold confession that they did not mean to be Atheists, or that they meant intellectually to admire the creation. Such confessions, even when not consciously atheistic, become at least the parents of Atheism or Pantheism, and slide imperceptibly into either.

For a First Cause, conceived of as nothing more than that, is an abstraction, not God. God is the Cause of all causes.

All things are, and have their relations to each other as cause and effect, because He so created them. A “Great First Cause,” who is only thought of as a Cause, is a mere fiction of human imagination, an attempt to appear to account for the mysteries of being, without acknowledging that, since our being is from God, we are responsible creatures whom He created for Himself, and who are to give Him an account of the use of the being He gave us.

In the same way, Israel had probably so mixed up the thought of God with Nature that it had lost sight of God as distinct from the creation.

And so Amos, after appealing to their consciences, presents God to them as the Creator, Disposer of all things, and the Just God, who redresses human violence and injustice. The “seven stars,” literally, “the heap,” are the striking cluster of stars, called by Greeks and Latins the Pleiades, which consist of seven larger stars, and more than forty in all.

Orion, a constellation in one line with the Pleiades, was also conceived by the Arabs and Syrians as a gigantic figure. The Chaldee also renders it as “the violent” or “the rebel.” The Hebrew title “כּסיל Keciyl — fool,” adds the idea of an irreligious man, which is also the meaning of Nimrod, “rebel,” literally, “let us rebel.” Job, when he speaks of “the bands of Orion” (Job 38:31), pictures him as “bound,” the “belt” being the “band.” This aligns with the later tradition that Nimrod, who, as the founder of Babel, was the first rebel against God, was represented by Eastern peoples in their grouping of the stars as a giant chained—the same constellation we call Orion.

And turneth the shadow of death into the morning - This is no mere alternation of night and day, no “kindling” of “each day out of night.” The “shadow of death” is strictly the darkness of death, or of the grave (Job 3:5; Job 10:21–22; Job 34:22; Job 38:17; Psalms 23:4; Jeremiah 13:16). It is used of darkness as intense as the darkness of the grave (Job 28:3), of gloom (Job 24:17), or spiritual darkness (Isaiah 9:2; verse 1 in Hebrew text) which seems to cast “the shadow of death” over the soul, of distress that is like the forerunner of death (Job 16:16; Psalms 44:19; Psalms 107:10, 14; Jeremiah 2:6; Jeremiah 13:16), or of things hidden like the grave, which God alone can bring to light (Job 12:22). The word is associated with darkness—physical, moral, mental—but always as intensifying it beyond any mere darkness.

Amos first presents the power of God, then His goodness. Out of every extremity of ill, God can, will, and does deliver. He who said, “Let there be light, and there was light,” at once changes any depth of darkness into light: the death-darkness of sin into the dawn of grace, the hopeless night of ignorance into “the day-star from on high,” the night of the grave into the eternal morning of the Resurrection which knows no setting. But then for the impenitent, the contrary follows.

And maketh the day dark with night - Literally, “and darkeneth day into night.” As God withdraws “the shadow of death,” so that no trace of it is left but all is filled with His light, so again, when His light is abused or neglected, He withdraws it, at times, so as to leave no trace or gleam of it. Conscience becomes darkened, so that one sins undoubtingly; faith is darkened, so that the soul no longer even suspects the truth. Hell has no light.

That calleth for the waters of the sea - This can be no other than a memory of the flood, “when the waters prevailed over the earth” (Genesis 7:24). The prophet speaks of nothing partial. He speaks of “sea” and “earth,” each as a whole, standing against the other.

“God calleth the waters of the sea and poureth them over the face of the earth.” They seem always threatening the land, but for Him “who hath placed the sand for the bound of the sea, that it cannot pass it” (Jeremiah 5:22). Now God calls them, and “pours them over the face,” that is, the whole surface.

The flood, He promised, should not happen again. But it is the image of that universal destruction which will end humanity’s thousands of years of rebellion against God.

The words of Amos, then, in their simplest sense, speak of a future universal judgment of the inhabitants of the earth, similar in extent to that former judgment, when God “brought in the flood upon the world of the ungodly” (2 Peter 2:5).

The words have also been thought to describe that daily marvel of God’s Providence: how, from the salt, briny sea, which could bring only barrenness, He, by the heat of the sun, draws up the moisture and discharges it again in life-giving showers on the surface of the earth. God’s daily care for us in the workings of His creatures is a witness (Acts 14:17) of His relation to us as our Father; it is also an earnest of our relation, and thus of our accountability, to Him.

The Lord is His name - He is the One Self-existent, Unchangeable God, who revealed Himself to their ancestors and forbade them to worship Him under any form of their own devising.