Read this if you…
- like prophets who go after the rich for stepping on the poor
- care about where "let justice roll down like waters" comes from
- want a short OT book
Skip this if you…
- don't want to read explicitly religious/Christian texts
Depicted in Art
Amos stands in a vast pastoral landscape with his shepherd's staff, gazing into the distance — the herdsman of Tekoa called to prophesy.
Gustave Doré, 1866
Standing prophet in Middle Eastern robes rendered with Tissot's ethnographic detail, holding a scroll.
James Jacques Joseph Tissot
Intarsia (wood-inlay) portrait of Amos as a robed sage, set into a sacristy wall panel.
Antonio del Pollaiuolo, 1465
Leaded-glass figure of Amos with scroll, set within a Jesse-tree program in the apse of St. Kunibert.
Mosaic figure of Amos in the byzantinizing 13th-century ceiling program of the Florence Baptistery.
Amos among the twelve minor prophets in the concentric circles surrounding the Virgin in Chartres' north rose window.
Recommended Editions
King James Version
Oxford University Press · 1611
The most influential and commonly quoted translation in English. The prose rhythm everyone else is responding to, even modern translations.
Please support us by purchasing through these links, at no extra cost to you!
Notable Quotes
But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
- Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader & Baptist minister, 1929–1968: "Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”?"
- Abraham Joshua Heschel, rabbi, theologian & philosopher, 1907–1972: "Righteousness is not a trickle; it is God’s power in the world, a torrent, an impetuous drive, full of grandeur and majesty."
- Cornel West, philosopher & scholar of religion, b. 1953: When asked to soften his prophetic critique, West reaches for Amos — the prophet who would never tone it down.
- Reinhold Niebuhr, theologian & public intellectual, 1892–1971: Niebuhr loved to evoke Amos's demand that justice roll down like water, and like the prophet he never shrank from an unpopular truth.
- Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament scholar, 1933–2025: Amos exemplifies Brueggemann's prophetic imagination — the voice that cuts through an economics of affluence and a politics of oppression toward justice.