What Does Amos 8:5 Mean?
Saying, When will the new moon cross over, that we may sell the grain? And the Sabbath, that we may open out the wheat? Making the measure small and the shekel great, and tilting the scales of deceit?
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
Saying, When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? and the sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit?THE KEY
The measure is the crime: the sellers shrink the grain while making its price heavier.
THE MEANING
Profit has become the measure: the pause feels like an obstacle, the grain measure shrinks, the price weight swells, and the balance is bent. This is a deliberate arrangement in which the buyer receives less and pays more.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that religious observance and dishonest trade belong to separate moral worlds.
THE ROOT
שֶׁקֶל
sheqel
GROWS FROM
שקל
To weigh or weigh out.
The unit called a shekel is itself a weight; making the shekel great means enlarging what the buyer must pay. Beside the reduced ephah, the exchange is rigged in both directions: less grain leaves the seller, and more weight is demanded from the buyer.
ALSO GROWS
shaqal: To weigh.
שָׁקַל
The verb exposes the weight inside the price: the shekel is not an abstract number but something weighed out.
mishqal: Weight; weighing.
מִשְׁקָל
This branch makes the manipulation concrete: the measure of payment itself is enlarged.
שַׁבָּת
shabbat
GROWS FROM
שבת
To cease or stop.
Sabbath carries cessation within its root, while the sellers experience the pause as a delay before profit can resume. Their impatience reveals how completely the pursuit of gain governs the exchange.
ALSO GROWS
shavat: To cease; to stop.
שָׁבַת
The verb gives the Sabbath its underlying action: work and trade come to a halt.
shabbaton: A Sabbath rest; a solemn cessation.
שַׁבָּתוֹן
This related form reinforces the pause the merchants resent and want to end.
לְעַוֵּת
le'avvet
GROWS FROM
עות
To bend, twist, or make crooked.
“falsifying” in this verse is le'avvet. The verb names the act of bending something out of true. Beside a shrunken ephah and an enlarged shekel, the crooked balance completes an exchange deliberately warped at every point.
ALSO GROWS
ivvet: To twist or distort.
עִוֵּת
This form makes the wrongdoing an active alteration of what should be straight and true.
me'uvat: Crooked; distorted.
מְעֻוָּת
The related adjective describes the resulting condition of a measure bent away from fairness.
THE PATTERN
When profit controls the measure, exchange becomes a tool for taking more while giving less.
You shall not have in your bag a stone and a stone, a great and a small. You shall not have in your house a measure and a measure, a great and a small. But you shall have a whole and aligned stone, and a whole and aligned measure, that your days may be lengthened in the land which the LORD your God gives you.You shall do no crookedness in judgment, in the rod, in the weighing, or in the measure. Scales and stones of alignment, an ephah and a hin of alignment, you shall have; I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.Look, the wages of the workers who mowed your fields, stripped away by your fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have gone into the ears of the LORD of hosts.THE THREAD
Scales of deceit are an abomination to the LORD, but a whole stone is his delight.The Hebrew phrase מאזני מרמה (moznei mirmah), “balances of deceit,” appears in both verses. Amos shows how those balances are manipulated; Proverbs names the false measure for what it is.
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