The heads of the people are priests and elders; of king and princes there is no word. The Judah and Jerusalem which the prophet addresses are the religious community which assembles in the temple; people and congregation are the same thing. This one observation takes Joel out of the company of Amos and Hosea and puts him by the side of Malachi. All the other features of the book confirm this date. Assyrians or Babylonians, without whom no picture of the Day of the Lord in the pre-exilic prophets would be complete, are not here; Israel has disappeared. The author has read much prophetic literature; reminiscences in thought and phrase meet us at every turn. The heathen in the Valley of Jehoshaphat are Ezekiel's hordes of Gog (Ezek. 38 f.); the fountain that flows from the house of the Lord is a modest counterpart of the river that sweetens the Dead Sea (Ezek. 47). The thumb-prints of editorial hands have been thought to betray themselves in several places, and some students would give a larger range to this observation. The additions, if such they are, are not far remote in time from the original book, and reflect the same religious conceptions. AMOS.--A dramatic scene in Amos vii. 10-17 describes the appearance of Amos at Bethel on a high festival, with his presages of swift and utter ruin for Israel (cf. vii. 1-9). That his hearers greeted the message with incredulity can well be believed, for under Jeroboam II. Israel was at the very culmination of its power and prosperity. The chief priest of Bethel was not minded to let such speech pass in his diocese; as scornfully as Creon dismisses the prophet Teiresias in the Antigone, he bids Amos be gone: "O Seer, be off, flee to the land of Judah; make thy living there, and there do thy prophesying. But prophesy no more at Bethel, for it is a royal temple and a residence city." Spurning the contemptuous insinuation, Amos answers: "No prophet am I, and no member of the prophetic order, but a herdsman am I and a ripener of sycamore figs. Jehovah took me from following the flock, and bade me, Go prophesy against my people Israel." Incidentally we see in how low esteem the professional prophet stood, that the priest should make a taunt of the name and the prophet indignantly repel it. The priest followed up his warning by a report to the king, and we may safely conclude that Amos prophesied no more at Bethel. Perhaps it was the rude end of his mission that prompted him to collect his oracles into a book, the earliest example of such a collection, as a witness to his own generation and to that which should see the fulfilment. The title, this part of which may well be original, describes Amos as a shepherd from Tekoa, in the wilderness of Judah. Beyond the brief scene at Bethel nothing more is told of him in the book or out of it. But the book is his monument.