There is added a vision in line with the three which preceded the priest's interruption. We are therefore justified in supposing that Amos spoke it also on this occasion, and in taking it as the close of his address at Bethel. _Then the Lord Jehovah gave me to see: and, behold, a basket of Ḳaits_, that is, _summer fruit. And He said, What art thou seeing, Amos? And I said, A basket of Ḳaits. And Jehovah said unto me, The Ḳets--the End--has come upon My people Israel. I will not again pass them over._ This does not carry the prospect beyond the third vision, but it stamps its finality, and there is therefore added a vivid realisation of the result. By four disjointed lamentations, _howls_ the prophet calls them, we are made to feel the last shocks of the final collapse, and in the utter end an awful silence. _And the songs of the temple shall be changed into howls in that day, saith the Lord Jehovah. Multitude of corpses! In every place! He hath cast out! Hush!_ These then were probably the last words which Amos spoke to Israel. If so, they form a curious echo of what was enforced upon himself, and he may have meant them as such. He was _cast out_; he was _silenced_. They might almost be the verbal repetition of the priest's orders. In any case the silence is appropriate. But Amaziah little knew what power he had given to prophecy the day he forbade it to speak. The gagged prophet began to write; and those accents which, humanly speaking, might have died out with the songs of the temple of Bethel were clothed upon with the immortality of literature. Amos silenced wrote a book--first of prophets to do so--and this is the book we have now to study. FOOTNOTES: [130] Cornill: _Der Israelitische Prophetismus. Five Lectures for the Educated Laity._ 1894. [131] Amos vii. 14. See further pp. 76 f. [132] Khurbet Taḳûa', Hebrew Teḳôa', תְּקֹוע, from תקע, _to blow a trumpet_ (cf. Jer. vi. 1, _Blow the trumpet in Tekoa_) or _to pitch a tent_. The latter seems the more probable derivation of the name, and suggests a nomadic origin, which agrees with the position of Tekoa on the borders of the desert. Tekoa does not occur in the list of the towns taken by Joshua. There are really no reasons for supposing that some other Tekoa is meant. The two that have been alleged are (1) that Amos exclusively refers to the Northern Kingdom, (2) that sycomores do not grow at such levels as Tekoa. These are dealt with on pp. 79 and 77 respectively. [133] 2 Chron. xx. 20. [134] נֹקֵד, nôḳêd, is doubtless the same as the Arabic "naḳḳâd," or keeper of the "naḳad," defined by Freytag as a short-legged and deformed race of sheep in the Bahrein province of Arabia, from which comes the proverb "viler than a naḳad"; yet the wool is very fine. The king of Moab is called נוֹקֵד in 2 Kings iii. 4 (A.V. _sheep-master_). In vii. 14 Amos calls himself בּוֹקֵר, _cattleman_, which there is no reason to alter, as some do, to נֹוקֵד.