What Does Amos 4:4 Mean?
Come to Bethel and break away; at Gilgal multiply the breaking away. Bring your slaughtered beasts every morning, and your tenths every three days.
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
Come to Beth-el, and transgress; at Gilgal multiply transgression; and bring your sacrifices every morning, and your tithes after three years:THE KEY
The verse’s biting irony is that sacred attendance and multiplying rebellion appear in the same sentence.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks in a voice of biting irony: its call to worship turns into a call to transgress, showing that religious observance and rebellion can occupy the same life. Offerings and tithes do not erase the rupture named by the repeated word; their abundance sits beside it in plain view.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that abundant religious practice makes rebellion irrelevant.
THE ROOT
וּפִשְׁעוּ
u-fishʿu
GROWS FROM
פשע
To rebel or revolt; a rupture of allegiance.
“break away” in this verse is u-fishʿu. The verse first says “transgress” and then “multiply transgression” with the same פשע root. Hebrew makes the indictment cumulative: rebellion is deepening in the very setting of offerings, not appearing as an accidental slip erased by ritual.
ALSO GROWS
pāshaʿ: To rebel or revolt.
פָּשַׁע
The verb makes the verse’s call a deliberate act of rebellion, not a vague failure.
peshaʿ: Rebellion, revolt, transgression.
פֶּשַׁע
This noun names the same rupture that the verse commands readers to multiply.
THE PATTERN
When worship remains abundant while response to God is absent, the ritual itself exposes the rupture.
And Samuel said, Does the LORD delight in rising offerings and slaughtered offerings as much as in hearing and responding to the voice of the LORD? Behold, hearing and responding is better than a slaughtered offering; to prick the ear is better than the fat of rams.Stop bringing empty gifts. The smoke is sickening to me. The new moons and the sabbath, the calling of assemblies, I cannot bear. It is emptiness, even the restrained assembly.But go and learn what this means, I desire faithful love and not sacrifice, for I have not come to call the aligned, but those who miss the mark to turning.THE THREAD
Thus says the LORD, for three rebellions of Damascus, and for four, I will not turn it back; because they have threshed Gilead with sledges of iron.The same פשע root appears in Amos 1:3 as “transgressions” and in 4:4 as both “transgress” and “transgression.” The link makes rebellion’s accumulation audible, while Amos 4:4 sets it beside daily sacrifices and tithes.
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