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194 happen next time the celestial Lord will return (Psalm 77: 6, 17-19): I shall recall the Lord’s deeds, remember thine wonders in antiquity .. . The waters saw thee, O Lord, and shuddered. Thine splitting sparks went forth, lightnings lit up the world. The sound of thine thunder was rolling, the Earth was agitated and it quaked. The Prophets considered those earlier phenomena as the guide for what to expect. They expected the Day of the Lor (to quote the Prophet Joel) to be a day when “the Earth shal be agitated, Sun and Moon shall be darkened, and the stars shall withhold their shining . . . A day that is great and terri- fying.” The Prophets brought the word of Yahweh to Israel and all nations over a period of about three centuries. The earliest o the fifteen Literary Prophets was Amos; he began to be God’s spokesman (“Nabih’”’) circa 760 B.C.E. His prophecies covered three periods or phases: he predicted the Assyrian assaults in the near future, a coming Day of Judgment, an an Endtime of peace and plenty. Speaking in the name o! “the Lord Yahweh who reveals His secrets to the Prophets,” he described the Day of the Lord as a day when “the Sun shall set at noon and the Earth shall darken in the midst o! daytime.” Addressing those who worship the “planets an star of their gods,” he compared the coming Day to the events of the Deluge, when “the day darkened as night, an the waters of the seas poured upon the earth;” and he warne those worshippers with a rhetorical question (Amos 5: 18): Woe unto you that desire the Day of the Lord! To what end is it for you? For the day of the Lord is darkness and no light. A half-century later, the Prophet Isaiah linked the prophe- cies of the “Day of the Lord” to a specific geographical site, THE END OF DAYS