_Therefore now_--the double initial of judgment--_shall they go into exile at the head of the exiles, and stilled shall be the revelry of the dissolute_--literally _the sprawlers_, as in ver. 4, but used here rather in the moral than in the physical sense. _Sworn hath the Lord Jehovah by Himself--'tis the oracle of Jehovah God of Hosts: I am loathing_[329] _the pride of Jacob, and his palaces do I hate, and I will pack up a city and its fulness._[330]... _For, behold, Jehovah is commanding, and He will smite the great house into ruins and the small house into splinters._ The collapse must come, postpone it as their fancy will, for it has been worked for and is inevitable. How could it be otherwise? _Shall horses run on a cliff, or the sea be ploughed by oxen_[331]--_that ye should turn justice to poison and the fruit of righteousness to wormwood! Ye that exult in Lo-Debar and say, By our own strength have we taken to ourselves Ḳarnaim._ So Grätz rightly reads the verse. The Hebrew text and all the versions take these names as if they were common nouns--Lo-Debar, _a thing of nought_; Ḳarnaim, _a pair of horns_--and doubtless it was just because of this possible play upon their names, that Amos selected these two out of all the recent conquests of Israel. Karnaim, in full Ashteroth Karnaim, _Astarte of Horns_, was that immemorial fortress and sanctuary which lay out upon the great plateau of Bashan towards Damascus; so obvious and cardinal a site that it appears in the sacred history both in the earliest recorded campaign in Abraham's time and in one of the latest under the Maccabees.[332] Lo-Debar was of Gilead, and probably lay on that last rampart of the province northward, overlooking the Yarmuk, a strategical point which must have often been contested by Israel and Aram, and with which no other Old Testament name has been identified.[333] These two fortresses, with many others, Israel had lately taken from Aram; but not, as they boasted, _by their own strength_. It was only Aram's pre-occupation with Assyria now surgent on the northern flank, which allowed Israel these easy victories. And this same northern foe would soon overwhelm themselves. _For, behold, I am to raise up against you, O house of Israel--'tis the oracle of Jehovah God of the hosts_[334]--_a Nation, and they shall oppress you from the Entrance of Hamath to the Torrent of the 'Arabah._ Every one knows the former, the Pass between the Lebanons, at whose mouth stands Dan, northern limit of Israel; but it is hard to identify the latter. If Amos means to include Judah, we should have expected the Torrent of Egypt, the present Wady el 'Arish; but the Wady of the 'Arabah may be a corresponding valley in the eastern watershed issuing in the 'Arabah. If Amos threatens only the Northern Kingdom, he intends some wady running down to that Sea of the 'Arabah, the Dead Sea, which is elsewhere given as the limit of Israel.[335]