But, as in the rest of the book, judgment again follows hard on sin. _Sworn hath Jehovah by the pride of Jacob, Never shall I forget their deeds._ It is as before. The chief spring of the prophet's inspiration is his burning sense of the personal indignation of God against crimes so abominable. God is the God of the poor, and His anger rises, as we see the anger of Christ arise, heavy against their tyrants and oppressors. Such sins are intolerable to Him. But the feeling of their intolerableness is shared by the land itself, the very fabric of nature; the earthquake is the proof of it. _For all this shall not the land tremble and her every inhabitant mourn? and she shall rise like the Nile in mass, and heave and sink like the Nile of Egypt._[348] To the earthquake is added the eclipse: one had happened in 803, and another in 763, the memory of which probably inspired the form of this passage. _And it shall be in that day--'tis the oracle of the Lord Jehovah--that I shall bring down the sun at noon, and cast darkness on the earth in broad day._[349] _And I will turn your festivals into mourning, and all your songs to a dirge. And I will bring up upon all loins sackcloth and on every head baldness, and I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it as a bitter day._ But the terrors of earthquake and eclipse are not sufficient for doom, and famine is drawn upon. _Lo, days are coming--'tis the oracle of the Lord Jehovah--that I will send famine on the land, not a famine of bread nor a drouth of water, but of hearing the words of Jehovah. And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the dark North to the Sunrise shall they run to and fro, to seek the word of Jehovah, and they shall not find it; ... who swear by Samaria's Guilt_--the golden calf in the house of the kingdom at Bethel[350]--_and say, As liveth thy God, O Dan! and, As liveth the way to Beersheba! and they shall fall and not rise any more_. I have omitted ver. 13: _in that day shall the fair maids faint and the youths for thirst_; and I append my reasons in a note. Some part of the received text must go, for while vv. 11 and 12 speak of a spiritual drought, the drought of 13 is physical. And ver. 14 follows 12 better than it follows 13. The oaths mentioned by Bethel, Dan, Beersheba, are not specially those of young men and maidens, but of the whole nation, that run from one end of the land to the other, Dan to Beersheba, seeking for some word of Jehovah.[351] One of the oaths, _As liveth the way to Beersheba_,[352] is so curious that some have doubted if the text be correct. But strange as it may appear to us to speak of the life of the lifeless, this often happens among the Semites. To-day Arabs "swear _wa hyât_, 'by the life of,' even of things inanimate; 'By the life of this fire, or of this coffee.'"[353] And as Amos here tells us that the Israelite pilgrims swore by the way to Beersheba, so do the Moslems affirm their oaths by the sacred way to Mecca.