BIBL 350: Old Testament Prophets and Social Justice – Exegetical Research Paper

Institution: Liberty University, School of Divinity

Course code: BIBL 350

Course title: Old Testament Prophets and Social Justice

Study session: Fall 2026

Assessment type: Exegetical research paper

Word count: 2,000–2,500 words, excluding footnotes, bibliography, and title page

Referencing style: Turabian notes-bibliography, 9th edition

Weighting: 30 percent of the final course grade

Due: Week 11, Friday, 11:59 p.m. (Canvas)

1. Assessment Context

This brief specifies the exegetical research paper for BIBL 350 at Liberty University’s School of Divinity, a Fall 2026 upper-level elective carrying 30 percent of the final grade. The course examines the writing prophets of the Hebrew Bible and their sustained critique of economic exploitation, legal corruption, and religious hypocrisy. The paper asks you to work closely with one prophetic text, reconstruct its historical and rhetorical situation, and argue a thesis about how the prophet’s understanding of justice (mishpat) and righteousness (tsedaqah) addresses a contemporary social question without flattening the ancient text into a modern slogan. The rubric rewards exegetical control and theological reasoning over broad thematic survey. A paper that analyses three passages from Amos in detail will score higher than a paper that touches on Amos, Micah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah without depth.

2. Task Description

Select one of the following prophetic passages as the anchor text for your paper:

1. Amos 5:21–24 (worship rejected because justice is absent).
2. Micah 6:1–8 (the covenant lawsuit and the call to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly).
3. Isaiah 1:10–20 (the critique of empty ritual and the command to seek justice).
4. Jeremiah 22:13–19 (the indictment of a king who builds his house by injustice).

Write a 2,000–2,500-word research paper with the following five sections. Use the subheadings exactly as given.

Historical and Rhetorical Location

Identify the prophet, the audience, the approximate date, and the crisis that occasioned the oracle. Explain what the original hearers would have understood that a modern reader might miss. Attend to the rhetorical form of the passage: is it a lawsuit, an indictment, a woe oracle, or a disputation? Do not summarise the whole book. Concentrate on the verses you will analyse and the social world that makes the prophet’s accusation intelligible.

Exegetical Analysis of the Anchor Text

Work through the passage with attention to key Hebrew terms, especially mishpat (justice) and tsedaqah (righteousness), and to the syntax and structure of the prophet’s argument. Show how the passage moves from accusation to judgement to call. Engage at least two scholarly commentaries or peer-reviewed articles in this section. Demonstrate that you have read the text closely enough to notice repetitions, wordplay, and shifts in address.

Theological Grammar of Prophetic Justice

Explain the theological convictions that make the prophet’s critique coherent. This will involve the covenant, the character of God as one who defends the vulnerable, and the relationship between worship and ethics. Show why the prophet treats social injustice not as a policy failure but as a theological betrayal. This section carries the most weight for theological reasoning.

Hermeneutical Bridge to a Contemporary Issue

Bring the prophetic critique to bear on one specific contemporary social issue, such as systemic poverty, housing displacement, racial injustice, or corruption in public institutions. State the hermeneutical principle you are using to move from the ancient text to the modern context. Acknowledge the risk of anachronism and explain how you are managing it. Do not preach. Argue.

Conclusion

State what the paper has demonstrated about the relationship between prophetic justice and the gospel. Identify one limitation of your argument, such as the difficulty of applying Old Testament covenant norms directly to a pluralistic society, and explain why the limitation does not undermine your thesis.

3. Requirements

• Cite at least six scholarly sources. Peer-reviewed journal articles, academic monographs, and chapters in edited volumes count toward the six. Study Bibles and popular commentaries may be consulted but do not count.
• Engage the anchor text in Hebrew (or in a careful transliteration and translation if Hebrew is not available) at least twice in the exegetical section.
• Use Turabian notes-bibliography style. Footnotes must include page numbers for direct quotations or specific exegetical claims.
• Include a title page and bibliography in the format required by the School of Divinity.
• Write in the third person. The paper is an exercise in exegesis and theological argument, not a sermon or a personal testimony.
• Submit through Canvas. A similarity score above 20 percent, excluding quotations and bibliography, will be reviewed before grading.

4. Marking Rubric

5. Sample Answer Writing Help

The strongest papers on Amos 5:21–24 begin by refusing the assumption that the prophet is simply anti-worship. Amos does not reject the liturgy; he rejects a liturgy that has become a cover for economic predation. The Hebrew terms matter here. Mishpat carries a forensic sense, the giving of right judgement in the gate, while tsedaqah names a relational righteousness that includes generosity toward the vulnerable. The prophet’s accusation is not that Israel has stopped performing the sacrifices but that the wealth funding those sacrifices has been extracted from the poor. A paper that shows this connection between the economic practices condemned earlier in Amos (selling the righteous for silver, trampling the head of the poor) and the worship condemned in 5:21–24 will do the theological work the rubric rewards. The Hartford International University blog on the prophets and social justice makes the point sharply: the sacrifices are “poisoned with injustice,” and God therefore refuses them.

A second marker of quality is the handling of the hermeneutical bridge. The temptation is to move directly from Amos to a contemporary issue without stating how the move is warranted. A stronger paper names the principle: the prophet speaks within a covenant framework in which the community’s treatment of the vulnerable is a condition of its covenant faithfulness. The modern application must then ask what the analogue of that framework is for a church or a nation today. Anyamdoom and Apuuivom’s study of Amos and Nigerian society shows how the prophet’s critique of a wealthy elite that prospers while the masses languish can illuminate a contemporary context, but the paper must also acknowledge that Nigeria is not ancient Israel and that the covenant framework does not transfer without remainder. That acknowledgment is not a weakness; it is evidence of hermeneutical maturity.

Reading Amos against the grain of prosperity

Students often assume that the prophets denounced idolatry first and social injustice second. The order is frequently reversed. Amos opens with oracles against the nations, then turns to Israel with a list of economic crimes before he mentions the shrines at Bethel and Gilgal. The prophet’s logic is that the worship at those shrines has become a way of managing God while continuing to exploit the neighbour. This reading strengthens the theological grammar section. The covenant is not a contract that can be satisfied by ritual performance; it is a relationship that requires the community to reflect God’s own commitment to justice. The paper should show how the prophet’s accusation derives from the character of God, not from a generic humanitarian impulse.

Clarifying the mishpat and tsedaqah distinction

A common misconception in student papers is to treat mishpat and tsedaqah as synonyms. They overlap, but they are not identical. Mishpat often denotes the concrete act of judging rightly, especially in legal settings, while tsedaqah names a broader relational fidelity that includes generosity and equity. A paper that collapses the two terms loses the prophet’s ability to indict both corrupt courts and corrupt economic practices. The rubric’s exegesis criterion rewards papers that distinguish the terms and then show how the prophet holds them together. The best papers will also note that the Hebrew Bible does not separate “social justice” from “righteousness” as modern English sometimes does; the two are aspects of a single covenant obligation.

Common pitfalls in the contemporary application section

Students often end the paper with a list of modern problems that the prophet would condemn, without explaining why or how the prophet’s critique authorises that condemnation. The rubric asks for a hermeneutical principle, not a moral rant. A paper that says “Amos would oppose systemic poverty today” is not making an argument. A paper that says “Amos’s critique of those who ‘buy the poor for silver’ (Amos 8:6) presupposes a covenant obligation to protect the vulnerable; the contemporary analogue is not a direct transfer of Mosaic law but a discernment of what covenant faithfulness requires in a different social order” is making an argument. The difference is the presence of a stated principle and a defense of its application. Papers that skip the principle lose marks on the hermeneutical bridge criterion.

6. Conclusion

Writing this paper well requires resisting two temptations. The first is to treat the prophetic text as a repository of timeless moral slogans that can be applied directly to any modern issue. The second is to retreat into historical criticism and never ask what the text means for a community that reads it as Scripture. The rubric is designed to reward papers that hold exegesis and application together without collapsing one into the other. I would choose an anchor text that gives me enough exegetical texture to work with, then state the hermeneutical principle early and apply it consistently. A paper that knows what it is doing with the text, and says so, will score higher than a paper that performs erudition without a thesis.

7. References

Anyamdoom, M. A., & Apuuivom, D. B. (2025). The message of Amos on justice and righteousness and its relevance to Nigerian society. Nigerian Journal of Religious Studies, 13(1), 45–62. https://doi.org/10.4314/njrcs.v13i1.5

Bukidz, D. P., & Saragih, E. (2026). The theology of justice in the prophets: Hermeneutics and social justice in biblical studies. Journal of Legal and Cultural Analytics, 5(3), 485–504. https://doi.org/10.55927/jlca.v5i3.17272

Houston, W. J. (2020). Contending for justice: Ideologies and theologies of social justice in the Old Testament. T&T Clark.

Irwin, B. P. (2012). Social justice. In M. J. Boda & J. G. McConville (Eds.), Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets (pp. 719–734). InterVarsity Press.

Hartford International University. (2025, August 29). The prophets of the Hebrew Bible and the primacy of social justice. https://blog.hartfordinternational.edu/2025/08/29/the-prophets-of-the-hebrew-bible-and-the-primacy-of-social-justice/

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Amos 5:21–24: Worship, Covenant, and the Demand for Justice

Introduction

Amos 5:21–24 rejects Israel’s worship not because ritual is worthless, but because the people use ritual to conceal economic and legal injustice. The oracle announces that Yahweh hates feasts, offerings, and songs when they are financed and accompanied by the exploitation of the poor. Its climactic command, “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24), therefore presents mishpat and tsedaqah as the covenant practices through which Israel’s worship becomes truthful. This paper argues that Amos treats injustice as a theological betrayal of Yahweh’s covenant character, and that the passage offers a controlled contemporary critique of public corruption and housing displacement when applied through the principle that communities are judged by their treatment of the vulnerable.

Historical and Rhetorical Location

Amos prophesied in the northern kingdom of Israel during the reign of Jeroboam II, likely in the first half of the eighth century BCE. The kingdom enjoyed political stability, territorial expansion, and commercial prosperity, but that prosperity produced sharp inequality between wealthy landowners and indebted peasants. Amos preached at Bethel, a royal sanctuary associated with Israel’s national cult, where religious celebration and royal power reinforced one another.americanbible+1

The immediate crisis is not atheism or the absence of worship. Israel performs festivals, brings sacrifices, and sings songs; Amos’s complaint is that these practices coexist with courts that accept bribes and elites who crush the needy. Earlier in chapter 5, the prophet accuses Israel of turning justice into bitterness and casting righteousness to the ground (Amos 5:7), and later he condemns those who “trample the head of the poor” and “afflict the afflicted” (Amos 5:11). The oracle therefore belongs to a broader indictment in which economic abuse and cultic confidence appear together.bibleodyssey+1

Rhetorically, Amos 5:21–24 functions as a divine disputation or lawsuit speech. Yahweh speaks in the first person, rejects Israel’s cultic claims, and then states the positive demand against which the worship is measured. The repeated first-person verbs, “I hate,” “I despise,” “I will not accept,” and “I will not listen,” create the effect of a covenant partner withdrawing from a relationship that has become fraudulent.oikoumene+1

The original audience would have heard the water imagery differently from many modern readers. In an agricultural society exposed to drought, a wadi or seasonal stream could fail; an “ever-flowing stream” evokes continuous, life-sustaining abundance. Amos therefore does not ask for occasional charitable gestures. He demands that justice become the regular condition of communal life, as reliable as water in a dry land.scielo.org+1

Exegetical Analysis of the Anchor Text

The passage begins with absolute cultic rejection: sane’ti ma’asti (“I hate, I despise”) Israel’s feasts, and Yahweh takes “no delight” in their solemn assemblies (Amos 5:21). The doubled verbs intensify the rejection. The issue is not that Israel worships poorly; it is that worship has become morally empty because it no longer embodies covenant loyalty.

Verse 22 extends the rejection across the sacrificial system. Burnt offerings, grain offerings, peace offerings, and the fat of animals represent the normal vocabulary of Israelite worship. Yahweh will not “look upon” them, a phrase that reverses the expected language of divine acceptance. The point is judicial: the offerings cannot secure favour when the offerers persist in injustice.bibleodyssey+1

Verse 23 removes even the aesthetic and musical dimensions of worship. “Take away from me the noise of your songs,” Yahweh commands, “to the melody of your harps I will not listen.” The Hebrew hamon (“noise”) can describe a loud roar, including the sound of battle. Amos thus reframes praise as clamour: the songs may be beautiful, but they have become noise because they lack ethical truth.oikoumene+1

Verse 24 supplies the positive demand: weyiggal hammishpat kammayim wetsedaqah kenhahal atan. A literal rendering is, “let justice roll like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Mishpat carries a forensic and social sense: right judgement, especially in the gate where disputes were heard. Tsedaqah is broader than private virtue; it names right relationship, fidelity, and conduct that protects the vulnerable.scielo.org+1

The two terms overlap, but they are not identical. Mishpat indicts corrupt courts and unequal legal treatment; tsedaqah indicts the social order that makes such corruption possible. Amos holds them together because a society may maintain formal legal procedures while still practising exploitation. Justice without righteousness can become proceduralism, whereas righteousness without justice can become sentiment. The prophet demands both.scielo.org+1

The movement of the passage is therefore accusation, judgement, and call. Verses 21–22 reject the cult; verse 23 rejects its music; verse 24 names what Yahweh requires instead. The structure matters because it prevents a simplistic reading in which Amos opposes worship as such. He opposes worship detached from covenant obedience. The cult is not abolished; it is judged by the justice it either expresses or betrays.bibleodyssey+1

Scholarly readings support this literary and theological connection. Anyamdoom and Apuuivom argue that Amos attacks a wealthy class that accumulates wealth while the poor languish, and that oppression of the poor, sojourners, and defenceless people constitutes a serious offence before God. Similarly, research on the cult-critical statements in Amos 5:21–24 identifies verse 24 as the positive requirement that gives meaning to the preceding condemnations.scielo.org+2

Theological Grammar of Prophetic Justice

Amos’s critique rests on covenant theology. Israel’s relationship with Yahweh is not a transaction satisfied by sacrifices; it is a covenantal bond requiring communal faithfulness. The prophet assumes that Yahweh’s character establishes the moral shape of Israel’s common life. Because Yahweh defends the weak, Israel must do the same.

The connection between worship and ethics is central. Amos does not separate “religion” from “politics” or “economics.” The sanctuary, marketplace, courtroom, and household belong to one covenantal field. When elites exploit debtors and pervert judgement, their offerings become an attempt to manage Yahweh without obeying him. In that sense, injustice is not merely a policy failure; it is idolatry in social form.bibleodyssey+1

The water image deepens the theological claim. Justice and righteousness are not optional virtues added to faith; they are the conditions under which a community lives. A stream sustains life, whereas a dry wadi cannot. Amos’s metaphor suggests that a society deprived of justice is already dying, whatever its religious vitality appears to be.scielo.org+1

Divine judgement also follows from divine character. Yahweh’s rejection of the cult is not arbitrary anger. It is the covenant response to a people who have made worship a cover for predation. The prophet’s logic moves from the character of God to the obligation of the community: if Yahweh is just, then Israel’s worship must produce just relationships.hts.org+1

This theology resists two reductions. Amos is not merely a social reformer who uses religious language to advance humanitarian concerns. Neither is he a cultic purist concerned only with correct ritual. He holds worship and justice together because covenant faithfulness necessarily appears in both. The gospel reading of the passage likewise refuses to privatise faith: reconciliation with God must be visible in concrete concern for neighbours, especially those without power.bibleodyssey+1

Hermeneutical Bridge to Contemporary Housing Displacement

The contemporary issue addressed here is housing displacement driven by speculative development, insecure tenancy, and public corruption. In many cities, low-income residents are removed from neighbourhoods as land values rise, while public institutions may approve projects that prioritise investor returns over secure housing. The parallel with Amos is not exact, but it is morally significant: both contexts involve powerful actors profiting from arrangements that make vulnerable people precarious.

The hermeneutical principle is as follows: Amos’s covenant critique may be applied today not by transferring ancient Israelite law directly, but by asking whether a community’s economic and legal practices protect or abandon those with the least power. The ancient text presupposes a covenant community bound to Yahweh; a modern pluralistic society does not share that institutional framework. The responsible analogue is therefore ecclesial and public: churches and citizens should evaluate housing policy, zoning decisions, eviction practices, and public contracts according to whether they treat housing as a condition of human dignity rather than merely a commodity.doi+1

Anachronism is a real risk. Amos did not address mortgage markets, municipal planning boards, or real-estate speculation. A direct claim that “Amos would oppose gentrification” would flatten the text into a modern slogan. The stronger claim is that Amos establishes a criterion of judgement: religious, civic, and economic systems lose legitimacy when they enrich the powerful while exposing the poor to dispossession. That criterion can be applied carefully to contemporary housing displacement.doi+1

The application has practical force. A church that hosts worship services while remaining silent about exploitative evictions resembles the Israel Amos condemns. Conversely, a congregation that supports tenant organising, fair housing advocacy, emergency rental assistance, and transparent public procurement embodies the connection between worship and justice. The point is not that churches must replace government. It is that worship becomes credible when a community’s public conduct reflects the justice it professes.workingpreacher+1

Anyamdoom and Apuuivom’s study of Amos in Nigeria illustrates both the value and the limit of this bridge. They show how Amos’s condemnation of elites who prosper while masses suffer can illuminate contemporary inequality, but their context differs from ancient Israel in political structure, religious pluralism, and economic organisation. The difference does not weaken the application; it requires the interpreter to state what transfers and what does not.doi

Conclusion

Amos 5:21–24 demonstrates that prophetic justice begins in the character of Yahweh and becomes visible in a community’s treatment of the vulnerable. The passage rejects worship that masks exploitation, distinguishes mishpat as right judgement from tsedaqah as covenantal right relationship, and demands that both flow continually through public life. Applied to housing displacement, the text does not authorise a simple transfer of ancient law; it provides a theological standard for judging whether contemporary institutions protect or abandon the powerless. The main limitation is that Old Testament covenant norms cannot be imposed directly on a pluralistic society. Even so, the limitation does not undermine the thesis, because Amos’s central claim concerns the moral credibility of worship: a community that claims to honour God must practise justice toward those least able to defend themselves.

Bibliography

Anyamdoom, Manasseh Aasegh, and Daniel Bem Apuuivom. “The Message of Amos on Justice and Righteousness and Its Relevance to Nigerian Society.” Nigerian Journal of Religious Studies 13, no. 1 (2025): 45–62. https://doi.org/10.4314/njrcs.v13i1.5.doi

Bible Odyssey. “Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters.” Accessed November 6, 2026. https://www.bibleodyssey.org/articles/let-justice-roll-down-like-waters/.bibleodyssey

Houston, Walter J. Contending for Justice: Ideologies and Theologies of Social Justice in the Old Testament. London: T&T Clark, 2020.

Irwin, Brian P. “Social Justice.” In Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets, edited by Mark J. Boda and J. Gordon McConville, 719–734. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012.

Snyman, S. D. “Criticism of the Cult in the Book of Amos (5:21–24).” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 75, no. 3 (2019): a5629. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v75i3.5629.hts.org

Van der Merwe, Dirk, et al. “Amos’ Call for Social Justice in Amos 5:21–24.” Old Testament Essays 34, no. 2 (2021). https://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1010-99192021000200005.