Amos 5:10

"They hate him that reproveth in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly."

A picture of the rotten judicial system of Israel is in this. The "court" was a type of open forum conducted in the gate of the city, where the wall was expanded to enclose a considerable area where important city business was conducted and affording an outdoor theater large enough for a considerable gathering of people. In the ancient system of justice, men of good will were expected to appear before the city fathers in court proceedings and speak the truth on behalf of the poor or oppressed; but anyone performing such a function in that society was "hated" and "abhored." The indifference and corruption of the whole society were the result.

Smith makes a big "to do" over the fact that " Amos 5:10 is in the third person, and Amos 5:7 is in the second person!"[27] What do the critics expect? That this shepherd should have kept all of his persons in the proper focus? Some of the changes from one person to another are evidently due to Amos' reference to God's law in the Pentateuch, the person of the passage cited, naturally appearing in his address here, whether it matched the person he was using or not. One of the Proverbs (Proverbs 15:12) could have been in Amos' mind here, accounting for the third person. Such quibbles are unimportant, and are certainly no proper basis for postulations about "editors" and "redactors!" The entire concept of "the redactor" so vital to current Biblical criticism is in reality a kind of scholarly Piltdown Man, in short, a hoax widely received and honored, but a hoax nevertheless. This is a second reference we have made to this in this commentary, but it is necessitated by the incessant and reiterated appeal to this monstrosity by the commentaries which we are reading.