In predicting the great disaster and slaughter that were to come upon the people through the Assyrian invasion, made successful by the effeminacy of the people, the prophet discloses not only the dire extremity to which the people were to be reduced, but reveals the feminine ideal among the Hebrews, already alluded to in this volume, namely, that which makes motherhood the aim of every Hebrew woman and the absence of it a calamity. In that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, "We will eat our own bread and wear our own apparel; only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach." Widowhood and celibacy were equally sources of deepest grief among the women of Israel, and both were to be among the results of the luxury and vice of the land. Woman, as well as man, in this era of decay, had fallen into the habit of the most cruel covetousness, and, when occasion offered, the rich and powerful women oppressed the poor. The herdsman-prophet Amos, coming from his home in the rural districts of Judah, was shocked at the corruption into which even the women of Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, had fallen, and so, with a rustic boldness that would not mince matters of such grave concern, he compared the women to the fat cattle of the land of Bashan, saying to the wives and mothers of the corrupt and luxury-loving city: "Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say to their masters, Bring and let us drink!" In the age of decline, it is a noteworthy fact that not a woman appears to have lifted up prophetic voice against the moral and religious decay. Prophets there were, but apparently no prophetesses, except those whom Jeremiah rebukes with scathing earnestness,--women who prophesied according to their own feelings and desires rather than in harmony with the eternal principles as applied to the then present conditions. Indeed, in the entire period of decline which preceded the fall of Samaria in B.C. 722 and of Jerusalem in B.C. 586, no prophetess appears in the record, except that Isaiah speaks of his wife as the prophetess. This involves an entire change in the meaning of the word.