=Amos's Home at Tekoa.= It was probably about the time when Tiglath-pileser IV began to institute his aggressive policy that Amos delivered his epoch-making sermon at the royal sanctuary in Bethel.^{(77)} His home was at Tekoa, twelve miles south of Jerusalem, and but twenty-two from Bethel. Tekoa was the eastern outpost of Judah. Broad, rich fields lay on the north and west, but to the east it looked down upon the barren rounded hills that descended to the Dead Sea and toward the bold uplands of Moab in the distance. The town was situated on an elevated plateau which commanded a view of nearly all the places mentioned in the prophet's sermons: Kirioth in Moab, the region about Bethel and Gilgal, and the roads that led to Philistia, Egypt, and Edom. The dominant feature in the landscape was the Dead Sea, with its blue waters, its rising mists, and its gray, purple, and yellow cliffs. It was a grim, rugged, awe-inspiring outlook and clearly made a deep impression upon the thought and life of the prophet. Among the dry, rock-covered pasture lands, that run up to the eastern side of the town of Tekoa, the prophet received his training.^{(103)} To-day, as in the past, it is the land of sheep and goats. The wildness of the region and the proximity to the desert demanded strong, stalwart shepherds, inured to hardship, keen to detect the presence of a foe, quick to repulse the attack of wild beast or lurking Arab robbers, and tender in their care of the young and the injured. Among these silent, treeless hills or beside the occasional spring, the traveller to-day meets this type of shepherd, silent and resourceful, armed with his short, heavy, wooden staff. =Influence of His Environment Upon the Prophet.= Here Amos learned to champion the cause of the oppressed, to scent danger from afar, and faithfully to sound the alarm. His occupation doubtless took him to the annual festivals and market days at Jerusalem and Bethel, where his shepherd training asserted itself. He could not shut his eyes to the cruel oppression of the poor and dependent classes by the rich, greedy nobles. From afar he also noted the approach of the Assyrian lion. Being a faithful shepherd he could not remain silent. As he meditated on the situation in the quiet of his shepherd life among the hills about Tekoa, the conviction deepened into certainty that Jehovah in these varied ways was speaking to him, calling him to sound the note of alarm that the rulers of Israel might see the peril, right the wrongs, and thus save their nation. The influence of his shepherd's life and point of view is present in all his utterances. His message is a clear blast of desert air, sweeping through the corrupt atmosphere of the city, tainted as it was by that degenerate Canaanite civilization which still polluted the centres of Northern Israel's life.