What Does Amos 5:21 Mean?
I hate, I cast off your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.
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
I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.THE KEY
The LORD refuses even the scent of a sacred gathering when its form carries no welcome.
THE MEANING
The LORD’s refusal reaches both the feast and the assembly: he hates them, despises them, and receives no scent from them. The verse speaks now wherever sacred forms are treated as proof of divine welcome; the gathering’s name alone does not make it pleasing.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a sacred calendar or crowded assembly guarantees divine welcome.
THE ROOT
אָרִיחַ
ʾārîaḥ
GROWS FROM
ריח
To smell or perceive a scent.
The refusal is expressed through the senses: the LORD will not smell within these assemblies. This echoes the language of offerings whose fragrance is received as pleasing, making the verse a refusal of welcome, not merely a rejection of the occasion.
ALSO GROWS
rēaḥ: Scent, fragrance.
רֵיחַ
This noun names what the LORD refuses to receive in the assembly.
rēaḥ nîḥōaḥ: A pleasing aroma, especially of an offering.
רֵיחַ נִיחֹחַ
This familiar offering phrase makes the force of “I will not smell” clear: the expected sign of a received offering is absent.
THE PATTERN
A gathering or offering cannot stand in for the justice and care that give devotion its substance.
But let judgment roll down like waters, and alignment like a stream that never runs dry.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.Clean and unstained service before God and Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widowed in their being pressed, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.THE THREAD
And the LORD smelled the fragrance of rest, and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground for man's sake, for the shaping of man's heart is evil from his youth, and I will not again strike down every living thing, as I have done.Both verses use the same root for smell: here the LORD will not smell within the assemblies, while there he smells the offering’s pleasing fragrance. The shared image can mark reception or refusal; a gathering is not received simply because it is a gathering.
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