Sickness and death

The land upon which the Hebrews lived had its convulsions of nature as it also had its catastrophes and afflictions of a milder sort. Most of these indirectly, if not directly, entailed loss of life. Destructive earthquakes, however, were infrequent, yet seismic convulsions were known to have occurred at long intervals which brought death to the inhabitants and caused great damage to property. ¹ An earthquake of sufficient destructiveness to give its name to an age, so that it formed a point of departure in fixing the date of an incident, as was the case in Amos' day, should here be mentioned. He tells us he had his visions “two years before the earthquake.” This same convulsion of nature appears to have been alluded to by other prophets. It occurred in the reign of Uzziah and made a great impression upon the generation to which Amos belonged, and was apparently remembered long afterward. Farther on in his prophesies Amos, it is thought, alludes to it when he says: “I have overthrown some among you, as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and ye were as a brand plucked out of the burning.” A leading biblical scholar is probably not far out of the way in thinking he can discover in the third division of this prophet's book, “A constant sense of instability, of the liftableness and breakableness of the very ground of life.” ¹ Surely such an affliction would at the least furnish a man with Amos' sensitiveness to nature the basal part of his imagery as a prophet of doom. The common name for an earthquake, “a shake,” is of such a character as to render it difficult to decide always when a writer had the more violent phenomena of nature in mind; but that some do refer to these in using the term is extremely probable in certain instances and indubitable in others. Still it is not the frequency of these earthquakes and the loss entailed by them that are to be noticed so much as the effects upon life in the way of unsettling it.