ABSTRACT
In many cases, a special day is predicted in which a violent transformation will take place. A predicted day of battle appears first in Amos 1:14 that will mark the destruction of Ammon. In the rhetorical perspective of the poem against the nations, this day of battle is something good. Perhaps the greatest image of an eschatological event in Amos is 9:2-4 that imagines people hiding in Sheol, ascending even to heaven, and to mountaintops or down to the bottom of the sea. From the very limits of creation, then, God will search them out and take them. Ironically, then, the potential for misunderstanding the day of Yahweh, in 5:18-20, as light and not darkness, is reinforced by the very passage that closes the book. Despite a call to repent and let righteousness well up like rivers and to seek God and the good, there is precious little in Amos that actually calls for relief of the misery of poor.
