They hate him who reproves in the gate, And they abhor him who speaks blamelessly.
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.