What Does Amos 3:6 Mean?
Will a ram's horn be blown in the city, and the people not tremble? Will there be evil in a city, and the LORD not have done it?
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?THE KEY
The Hebrew can call a city’s disaster raʿah, so this verse places even catastrophe within the LORD’s agency.
THE MEANING
A warning sounds before danger becomes undeniable, and the city’s calamity is not outside the LORD’s reach. Here “evil” can name destructive harm as well as moral wrong; the city’s setting makes disaster the live sense. The verse leaves the reader facing the claim that the LORD’s action reaches even what devastates a community.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that catastrophe proves the LORD is absent or that disaster lies beyond the LORD’s agency.
THE ROOT
רָעָה
raʿah
GROWS FROM
רעע
To be bad or harmful; to bring harm.
“evil” in this verse is raʿah. The Hebrew word-family can describe moral badness and material calamity together. In this city-centered question, disaster is the salient sense, placing communal devastation within the LORD’s agency.
ALSO GROWS
raʿ: Bad, harmful, evil.
רַע
This branch shows how the word can name harm broadly, including what happens to a city.
raʿah: Harm, trouble, calamity.
רָעָה
This form makes the destructive event itself visible beneath the English word “evil.”
עָשָׂה
ʿasah
GROWS FROM
עשה
To do, make, or accomplish.
“done” in this verse is ʿasah. The verb is broad enough to encompass doing or making; the question places the city’s calamity under the LORD’s own action. It names the agency directly without specifying the means.
ALSO GROWS
maʿaseh: A deed, work, or act.
מַעֲשֶׂה
The related noun makes the action in “hath done it” concrete as an act or work.
ʿoseh: One who does or makes.
עֹשֶׂה
This form brings the actor into view: the question explicitly names the LORD as the one doing.
THE PATTERN
Scripture places even devastating events within divine agency while naming their real harm.
But he said to her, You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we receive good from the hand of God, and shall we not receive harm? In all this Job did not miss the mark with his lips.I shape the light and create the darkness; I make wholeness and create harm. I, the LORD, do all these things.And I see, and look, a grass-green horse, and the name of the one seated upon it is Death, and Hades follows with him. And power is given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with the sword, with hunger, with death, and by the wild beasts of the earth.THE THREAD
I shape the light and create the darkness; I make wholeness and create harm. I, the LORD, do all these things.Isaiah uses the same root, רָע (raʿ, harm or calamity), when the LORD says, “I create evil.” Both verses place disaster within divine agency, while the Hebrew word can carry the sense of calamity as well as moral wrong.
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