The Lord, GOD of hosts/The Sovereign LORD Almighty. See 3.13.

He who touches the earth and it melts, and all who dwell in it mourn/touches the earth, and it quakes; all who live there mourn. Various English translations say that the earth melts (also Smith-Goodspeed, The Translator’s Old Testament, New American Bible), but in many languages this is impossible even in poetry! Verse 5 describes the effects of an earthquake, and the Hebrew should be translated “tremble” (Moffatt) or quakes (compare also the more literary “heave” of the New English Bible).

In the Hebrew God does only one thing: he touches the earth. This causes the earth to quake, and the earthquake causes deaths for which the inhabitants of the earth mourn. In some cases it may be possible to say something like “when he touches the earth, it trembles so that people mourn for those who die.”

And all of it rises like the Nile, and sinks again, like the Nile of Egypt/The whole world rises and falls like the Nile River. See 8.8, where much the same wording is used. The relationship between this Hebrew line and the preceding lines is not too clear, except for the balanced parallelism (Appendix, Section 3.9). If this is a picture of the earthquake, balancing it and separated from it by the effect on people, it may be necessary to change the order in translation, putting the mourning after the earth moving like the Nile.

Quoted with permission from de Waard, Jan & Smalley, William A. A Handbook on Amos. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1979. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .