Amos 7 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.

This is what the Master, Yahweh, showed me: he was shaping a swarm of locusts just as the late crop was coming up, the crop that grows after the king has taken his cut of the mowing.

When they had stripped every green thing off the land, I said, "Master Yahweh, please forgive. How is Jacob supposed to stand? He is so small."

Yahweh changed his mind about this. "It will not happen," Yahweh said.

This is what the Master, Yahweh, showed me: the Master, Yahweh, was calling for a settling of accounts by fire. It ate up the great deep below and was starting in on the farmland.

So I said, "Master Yahweh, please stop. How is Jacob supposed to stand? He is so small."

Yahweh changed his mind about this too. "This will not happen either," the Master, Yahweh, said.

This is what he showed me: the Master was standing on a wall that had been built true, with a plumb line in his hand.

Yahweh said to me, "Amos, what do you see?" I said, "A plumb line." Then the Master said, "Look, I am dropping a plumb line right through the middle of my people Israel. I am not going to pass them by again."

The hilltop shrines of Isaac will be left in ruins, the places Israel keeps for God torn down, and I will come against the house of Jeroboam with a sword.

Then Amaziah, the priest at Bethel, sent word to Jeroboam king of Israel: "Amos is plotting against you right in the middle of Israel. The country cannot absorb everything he is saying."

"Here is what Amos has been saying: Jeroboam will die by the sword, and Israel will be marched off its own land into exile."

Then Amaziah said to Amos, "Get out of here, you seer. Run for Judah. Earn your bread down there, and do your prophesying down there."

"But do not prophesy at Bethel any more. This is the place the king keeps for God. This is the national temple."

Amos answered Amaziah, "I was not a prophet and I was not a prophet's apprentice. I kept cattle, and I looked after sycamore figs."

"Then Yahweh took me away from following the flock, and Yahweh said to me, 'Go and prophesy to my people Israel.'"

"So now hear what Yahweh says. You tell me, 'Do not prophesy against Israel, do not let a word drip against the house of Isaac.'"

So this is what Yahweh says: Your wife will sell herself in the city, your sons and your daughters will fall by the sword, your land will be measured out with a rope and handed to strangers, and you will die on foreign ground. Israel will be marched off its own land into exile.