Septuagint: Amos

The Book of Amos is generally considered one of the older surviving books of the Hebrew Scriptures, with most scholars dating it to before the Torah was compiled, or at least heavily redacted in the time of King Josiah. Most scholars accept that Amos was written by a prophet called Amos between 760 and 755 BC, who was most likely from the town of Tuqu, in the Kingdom of Judea, in the southern region of the modern Palestinian West Bank. His world was very different from the later Kingdom of Judea that emerged in the 2nd-century BC, as the Israelites of his time were still polytheistic, worshiping the Canaanite Elohim, as well as statues of Iaw (Masoretic Yahweh), the God the Jews and Samaritans would later worship. While the Book of Amos and the rest of the Twelve Prophets, with the possible exception of Jonah, are accepted by many as dating to the 8th-century BC, the oldest fragments of it to survive to the present are Hebrew fragments of the Twelve found among the Dead Sea Scrolls written in the Assyrian script, dating to the Hasmonean era, and fragments of the Septuagint's Twelve, dating to the same era.

The Book of Amos is believed to have been translated into Greek around 180 BC with other Twelve Prophets, however, there is a significant difference between the Septuagint's and Masoretic version of the Book of Amos. The Masoretic Version is the Book of Amos which copied by a group of Jewish scribes called the Masorites between 400 and 1000 AD. The major difference between the Books of Amos is the god that Amos was the prophet of. The Masoretic version refers to his god as Iaw (Yahweh), or Iaw Sabaoth, or Lord Iaw, however, the Septuagint's version of Amos appears to have only listed Lord Iaw a couple of times, along with Lord El, and most significantly Lord El Shaddai. An obvious example of the Hasmonean redaction of the Pre-Masoretic Amos is the fact that the Lord Sabaoth is missing from the Septuagint's Amos, yet Tzevo'ovs Yahweh is found in the Masoretic Amos. In most places where the Masoretic Texts have Tzevo'ovs Yahweh or some variant, the Greeks translated Lord Sabaoth.

In the Septuagint, Amos' god was repeatedly named as 'Lord God Almighty' in the Septuagint, which translated back into Hebrew would be 'Ba'al El Shaddai.' The term theos ho pantocratôr was the translation used in other books of the Septuagint for El Shaddai. For example, the Book of Job, which was translated into Greek between 190 and 180 BC, the names El Shaddai or Shaddi shows up 33 times in the Masoretic Texts, and is translated as Lord God Almighty in the Septuagint. The differences between the Septuagint and Masoretic Books of Amos is not limited the question of whether Amos' god was Lord El Shaddai or Yahweh Sabaoth, as several other gods were also mentioned in the Greek translation that disappeared during the Hasmonean redaction, including Lord El, Qetesh, and Moloch. The Temple of El in Shiloh, the capital of ancient Samaria is mentioned repeatedly, including a story about Amos being kicked out of the temple and Samaria itself by the high priest Amaziah, for prophesying against the king.