What Does Amos 8:5 Mean in the King James?
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 analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
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.
Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small. Thou shalt not have in thine house divers measures, a great and a small. But thou shalt have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure shalt thou have: that thy days may be lengthened in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in weight, or in measure. Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall ye have: I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt.Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.THE THREAD
A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight 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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