Albert Barnes Commentary Amos 7:1

"Thus the Lord Jehovah showed me: and, behold, he formed locusts in the beginning of the shooting up of the latter growth; and, lo, it was the latter growth after the king`s mowings." — Amos 7:1 (ASV)

And behold He formed - (that is, He was forming.) The very least things, then, are as much in His infinite Mind as what we count the greatest. He has not simply made “laws of nature,” as people speak, to do His work, and continue the generations of the world. He Himself was still framing them, giving them being, as our Lord says, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work (John 5:17). The same power of God is seen in creating the locust as the universe. The creature could as little do the one as the other. But further, God was “framing” them for a special end, not of nature, but of His moral government, in the correction of man. He was “framing” the locust, that it might, at His appointed time, lay waste just those tracts which He had appointed to them.

God, in this vision, opens our eyes and lets us see Himself framing the punishment for the deserts of the sinners, so that when hail, mildew, blight, caterpillars, or some other previously unknown disease (which, because we do not know it, we call by the name of the crop it annihilates) wastes our crops, we may think not of secondary causes but of our Judge. Lapide says: “Fire and hail, snow and vapors, stormy wind, fulfill His word (Psalms 148:8), in striking sinners as He wills. To be indignant with these would be like a dog that bit the stone with which it was hit, instead of the man who threw it.” Gregory, in his work on Job (Book 32, Chapter 4), says: “He who denies that he was stricken for his own fault, what does he do but accuse the justice of Him who smites?”

Grasshoppers - that is, locusts. The name may very possibly be derived from their “creeping” simultaneously, in vast multitudes, from the ground. This characteristic is especially observable in these creatures: when the warmth of spring hatches the eggs, they creep forth at once in myriads. This original meaning of their name must, however, have been obliterated by use (as mostly happens), since the word is also used by Nahum in reference to a flying locust.

The king’s mowings - must have been some royal provision or tax to meet state expenses. A similar custom still lingers here and there among us: the “first mowth” (or “first vesture”), meaning that with which the fields are first covered, belongs to one person, while the pasturage afterward (or “after-grass”) belongs to others. The hay harvest probably took place some time before the grain harvest, and the “latter grass” or “after-grass” (לקשׁ leqesh) probably began to spring up at the time of the “latter rain” (מלקושׁ malqôsh). Had the grass been mown after this rain, it would not, under the burning sun of their rainless summer, have sprung up at all. At this time, then, on which the hope of the year depended, in the beginning of the shooting up of the latter grass, Amos saw in a vision God forming locusts, and the green herb of the land (the word includes all, that which is for the service of man as well as for beasts) destroyed. A striking emblem of a state recovering after it had been mown down, and anew overrun by a numerous enemy!

Yet this need be only a passing desolation. Would they remain, or would they carry their ravages elsewhere? Amos intercedes with God, in words from that first intercession of Moses, forgive now (Numbers 14:19). By whom, he adds, shall Jacob arise? Literally, “Who shall Jacob arise?” That is, who is Jacob that he should arise, being so weakened and half-destroyed? Plainly, the destruction is more than one invasion of locusts in one year. The locusts are a symbol (as in Joel), just as the following visions are symbols.