“Cleanness of teeth”
I beset all your cities with cleanness of teeth and all your towns with lack of bread, yet you did not return to Me, (Amos 4:6 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A comment about good dental hygiene or clean teeth.
The cultural key
Taken at face value this sounds almost like a compliment about oral cleanliness, which is exactly the trap. It is a bleak, ironic idiom for starvation: when there is no food, the teeth have nothing to work on and stay clean, so 'cleanness of teeth' means empty stomachs and empty mouths. The very next phrase removes all doubt, pairing it with 'lack of bread' in every town. God is listing a series of escalating disciplines he sent to wake Israel up, famine, drought, blight, locusts, plague, each punctuated by the refrain 'yet you did not return to Me.' The clean teeth are the first of these hammer blows: a hunger meant to turn the nation back, which it ignored. Miss the idiom and the line is nonsense; catch it and it is a chilling picture of famine sent in mercy and spurned.
Recovered meaning
'Cleanness of teeth' is an ironic idiom for famine: teeth stay clean when there is no food to eat. Paired with 'lack of bread,' it names a hunger God sent to turn Israel back, which they ignored.