Amos 5:26

"Yea, ye have borne the tabernacle of your king and the shrine of your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves."

This verse is accounted to be very difficult by scholars who have difficulty with any agreement as to the way it should be translated; but, for us, the solution is easy, because this is one of only two verses in Amos quoted in the New Testament; and we are perfectly safe in taking the New Testament rendition of it:

"Did ye offer unto me slain beasts and sacrifices

Forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?

And ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch,

And the star of the god Rephan,

The figures which ye made to worship them:

and I will carry you away beyond Babylon (Acts 7:42,43)."

What is plainly indicated from Stephen's interpretation of this place is that the Israelites in the wilderness, instead of worshipping the true god, were privately passing around the images of Moloch and Rephan, which they made themselves, and perhaps even hiding these forbidden and idolatrous objects in the very tabernacle itself in such a manner as to conceal them from Moses. This is uncertain, to be sure; and scholars have even questioned the rendition in the New Testament; but the meaning expressed there was accepted by the Sanhedrin as such a sufficient indictment of themselves that they murdered Stephen for making it. Thus we are surely safe in declaring that something along this line of thought is most surely included in the meaning.