Amos 2:6, commentary and pictures

Amos means burdened, and he was a shepherd of Tekoa in Judea who prophesied at Bethel in the reigns of Uzziah king of Judah and Jeroboam II king of Israel, was accused of treason by priests and expelled from the northern kingdom, to which this verse and many of his prophecies refer. The prophecy to which the verse belongs is full of striking illustrations from shepherd life and has striking coincidences with the predictions of Joel. The verse describes conditions in Israel fifty-seven years before the northern kingdom was carried away and destroyed.

The declaration that God will not turn away punishment means Israel's sins had reached the measure for which deserved punishment would not be averted or withheld. The charge is that the people, including magistrates acting with the approval or example of rulers, would surrender a righteous poor person to merciless oppressors for a bribe as small as the price of a pair of shoes, exposing him to imprisonment, slavery, or death. Selling the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes treats people as commodities and sells them into slavery for profit even for a trivial and meager price, an act of financial oppression involving exploitation, denial of justice to vulnerable people, violence, and robbery.

In one sense, selling the righteous and the poor means taking the products of labor and defrauding workers of what they are owed. The description applies literally to enslaved people, who may be righteous and poor and may be bartered or gambled away for little. Justice between people is a divine foundation of society, and Israel's failure to uphold it brought punishment.

The verse foretells the downfall of apostasy and points forward from that to the last days, when there shall be a famine of the Word. The picture also applies to modern times, where individuals, nations, and corporations exploit laborers and seek to acquire more land and power. God judges those who exploit the righteous and the poor for gain, his judgments are sure, and the cries of the poor are heard and avenged, as seen when the wealthy leaders at Charleston who sold poor men through avarice and killed good men through hatred met defeat.