Of Fruit and Corpses and Wordplay Visions: Picturing Amos 8.1–3

Abstract

This paper was never designed to be read but ideally to be heard and seen: in this silent format the words can be looked at alongside the images that are meant to do much more than passively ‘serve’ as illustration. The paper is a consideration of the relationship between the ear and the eye and an exploration of Amos 8.1–3 as audio-vision. The passage, which is usually read as a ‘wordplay vision’ (a term that is oxymoronically revealing in itself), can also be imagined as a still life with fruit with the caption ‘women wailing, corpses lying everywhere’. By comparing Yhwh's bizarre vision-works with similar (in fact, obligingly similar) artworks by René Magritte, I explore the vision as a way into both the convulsive poetics of Amos (the book set over the earthquake) and, on an even larger scale, the whole poetics of prophetic/divine speech.