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I continue.
Jewish tradition’s commentaries on this passage align with all of this. In the Talmud, tractate Shabbat, 32b-a, it says in such a commentary: "The heifers of Bashan are like the women of the city of Mehuza... who only consumed but did not labor." The city of Mehuza, located in Babylon, where Jews lived very richly, was in ancient Hebrew tradition something akin to the fairy-tale lands of luxury, gluttony, and laziness in European folklore—an ordinary place where people lived who drastically surpassed the rest of the world in fatness, spoiledness, luxury, and idleness. Rashi, for instance, comments: the people of Mehuza "were spoiled and fat"; and to the Talmudic phrase, he adds: "they consumed but did not labor—and thus lived off the plunder of their husbands, and worse, since they were accustomed to expecting and demanding the best food and drink, this forced their husbands into dishonest gaining of wealth"
In his seminar, Losch and his students, as well as other commentators, managed to explain the infamous punishments that had caused such difficulty for previous commentators. I will give their explanation in summary.
"They will lift you up on hooks"—meaning, you are accustomed to being lifted by the hands and litters of slaves because you don’t walk due to obesity and laziness, but God will punish you and instead you will be lifted up like meat carcasses, on hooks. This shouldn’t be taken literally, because the subsequent curses make it clear they remain alive; it’s simply a metaphor for some general punishments.
"And the rest/last part of you (i.e., your rear parts, buttocks) will be lifted on fishing hooks"—you are accustomed, when lying on your stomach for sex (because when you’re on your back, access to your female parts is less convenient), to having your buttocks and thighs parted ("raised, lifted") for getting access to your female parts, by hand, but the Lord God will part them for you as if by hooking fishing lines into your buttocks and pulling them apart with those lines. This is indeed the most plausible explanation, because alternative interpretations—taking this text as referring to offspring or the last of these women—make no sense. Why would offspring or the last of these women be lifted specifically on fishing hooks rather than meat hooks—what’s the point of that distinction? But if the first part of the sentence is metaphorically said about lifting the whole body and the second part of the sentence is metaphorically said about parting the buttocks, the difference makes sense: the whole body needs a larger hook, while the buttocks would be parted with several smaller hooks. Of course in reality it would be extremely painful procedure, and this sadistic metaphor is a part of Amos' wrath against these women.
"You will go out through breaches in the walls"—this immediately recalls modern media reports about how an extremely obese person couldn’t be carried out through a door because they simply didn’t fit, and a wall had to be broken to get them out through the opening. Here, it means: you’re used to not leaving the house at all because you can no longer fit through doors on your litters—but you’ll have to leave your homes through breaches in walls destroyed by God’s punishments.
"One woman after another in turn"—because in a house, there are several such women living together: wives of different brothers, women of different generations, and they’ll have to be pulled out through the breach in the wall one by one, because a breach wide enough to drag them out simultaneously won’t be made, and there simply won’t be enough hands for it.
"You will cast out onto a pile of filth." The meaning is also extremely clear: you’re accustomed to relieving yourselves with the help of servants who place you on some containers , or turn and and spread your body parts apart, but no one will do that anymore, so you’ll simply relieve yourselves sitting in your own pile of filth. The active form "you will cast out" is not a textual error—there’s no need to replace it with "you will be cast out"—it’s precisely meant that they will cast out, i.e., relieve themselves.
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