Septuagint: Amos

The Book of Amos is generally considered one of the older surviving books of the Israelite Scriptures, with most scholars dating it to before the Torah was compiled, or at least heavily redacted in the time of King Josiah. Most scholars accept that Amos was written by a prophet called Amos between 760 and 755 BC, who was most likely from the town of Tuqu, in the Kingdom of Judea, in the southern region of the modern Palestinian West Bank. His world was very different from the later Kingdom of Judea that emerged in the 2ⁿᵈ century BC, as the Israelites of his time were still polytheistic, worshiping the Canaanite gods, as well as statues of Yahweh, the God the Jews and Samaritans would later worship.

While the Book of Amos is accepted by many as dating to the 8ᵗʰ century BC, the oldest fragments of it to survive to the present are Hebrew fragments of the Sheneim Asar found among the Dead Sea Scrolls written in the Aramaic script, dating to the Hasmonean era, and fragments of the Dôdeka dating to the same era. The Dôdeka’s fragments are quite similar to the later copies of Amos in the Septuagint manuscripts, and the Hebrew fragments found within the Dead Sea Scrolls are generally the same as the Aleppo Codex’s Amos, which shows the surviving texts have been copied accurately since around 100 BC.

In the Septuagint, Amos’ god was repeatedly called “God Omnipotent” in the Septuagint, which would have originally been “El Shaddai”. This god was one of the gods that the prophet Hosea, from the same era, was prophesying against. In addition to using the same term God Omnipotent, Hosea called El Shaddai, the Lord of Peor. Mount Peor was mentioned in the Torah’s Book of Numbers, as the home of a prophet called Balaam who was hired to curse the Israelites, but refused to, because his god refused to. It is a strange story, of a non-Israelite prophet, who was apparently a prophet of their God. This strange prophet is one of the few people in the Torah who has actually been proven to exist by archaeology.

In 1967, an inscription now known as the Deir Alla Inscription (or KAI 312) was found during an excavation at Deir 'Alla, Jordan, which described Balaam as a prophet of the Elohim “Shaddayin,” accepted as the Moabite translation of “Shaddai.” The removal of the term “El Shaddai” makes sense in the late 2ⁿᵈ century BC, as it is stating that El Shaddai was not God, but one of the other gods that Hosea berated the Israelites for worshiping. As Hosea was prophesying in the name of El, meaning “god,” these two prophets appear to have been prophesying against each other’s gods, although Hosea’s main focus was Yhủh, the calf of Samaria, and only mentioned Lord El Shaddai in passing.

The Book of Amos’ date of composition is one of the best documented of any ancient texts because he dated it himself to two years before “the earthquake.” The earthquake in question is known from the geological records as a major earthquake, believed to have been between 7.8 and 8.2 on the Richter scale, that struck Judea and Samaria during the lifetime of King Jeroboam II of Samaria. It is broadly dated to between 760 and 750 BC, and likely between 755 and 750 BC. The earthquake in question would have left major aftershock reoccurring for months, and is believed to have altered the landscape of the Dead Sea area.