Hosea was a contemporary of Amos, also prophesying in the northern kingdom during the reign of Jeroboam II. Like Isaiah, Hosea was a witness to the Syro-Ephraimite war and the coming Assyrian invasion. But Hosea's perspective differs from Isaiah's, as Isaiah was a royal prophet to the king in Judah. Hosea was likely a disenfranchised Levite priest working in the northern Kingdom of Israel (which he most commonly calls Ephraim). Hosea lamented many of the same sins his contemporaries did, but Hosea frames them in a very interesting way, through the lens of an adulterous marriage.
Gomer gives Hosea 3 children (some of which may not have been his). Each child's name is symbolic for the failed marriage between Yahweh and his people.
Gomer goes on to have two more children, daughter Lo-ruhamah and son Lo-ammi, but the text never specifies that these children are actually Hosea's progeny. They very well might be "children of whoredom" as indicated by their names which mean "No compassion/unpitied" and "Not my people". Just as they may not be the children of Hosea, Israel is not Yahweh's people. But though Yahweh will punish Israel for its unfaithfulness, he will also redeem them, which Hosea twice demonstrates by symbolically reversing the names of his children, first at the end of chapter 1 (1:10-2:1) and the end of chapter 2:
At the close of the book, Hosea implores his people to return to their god (14:1-3), and importantly worship him correctly, not as they did before in the manner of the fertility cults, though they claimed to know him (6:1-6, 8:2-3). They must follow his laws, worship him alone, and keep his covenant (8:12). Only then will they be as a faithful wife to Yahweh, Israel, the bride of their god (2:16-20).
Unsurprisingly, the most frequently used words in Hosea (besides common words in every day speech and writing, which I've excluded) are Yahweh/God and Israel/Ephraim. Hosea's prophecies tightly revolve around the relationship between the northern kingdom and its god, evidenced by how often these words appear. For comparison's sake, here are Hosea's favorite topics:
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Well, that's it for this week. This post took me a little longer for a variety of reasons. First, I wasn't home much, second the NBA playoffs have taken some of my time, and third, Hosea was a drag, and I didn't want to split it into two separate posts. Next up: Micah! If you have any thoughts on Hosea, feel free to comment below.
Gomer the Whore
Amsterdam's Red Light District
When Yahweh first spoke through Hosea, Yahweh said to Hosea, "Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking Yahweh." - Hosea 1:2It's hard to know how much of Hosea's metaphorical marriage was truly biographical, but one thing is clear: Hosea believes that just as his wife Gomer has been unfaithful to him, so too has Israel been unfaithful to Yahweh. While Isaiah too stressed the importance of the people's faithfulness to Yahweh, Hosea takes this relationship one step further in saying that not only were the Hebrews the chosen people of Yahweh, they were in fact the wife of Yahweh. It's not unusual for gods to have spouses, but usually those spouses are other gods. (Even Yahweh may have at one point had a wife, Asherah, who he inherited from the high god El and the local storm/fertility god Ba'al Hadad who he was syncretized with at some point in Israelite religious evolution.) But Hosea revolutionizes this concept by wedding not gods, but a god to his people. And it was not a happy marriage.
Gomer gives Hosea 3 children (some of which may not have been his). Each child's name is symbolic for the failed marriage between Yahweh and his people.
And Yahweh said to him, "Name him Jezreel' for in a little while I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel. On that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel." - Hosea 1:4-5First is Jezreel, a name with many meanings including "god sows" and "bounty", but which also refers to the site of a battle where King Jehu (great-grandfather of Jeroboam II) massacred the wife and children of King Ahab during a coup. Hosea indicates that Yahweh will punish Jehu's descendents for this crime (the book of Kings, contradictingly, presents Jehu's coup as being commanded and ordained by Yahweh). Hosea doesn't seem to buy it.
Gomer goes on to have two more children, daughter Lo-ruhamah and son Lo-ammi, but the text never specifies that these children are actually Hosea's progeny. They very well might be "children of whoredom" as indicated by their names which mean "No compassion/unpitied" and "Not my people". Just as they may not be the children of Hosea, Israel is not Yahweh's people. But though Yahweh will punish Israel for its unfaithfulness, he will also redeem them, which Hosea twice demonstrates by symbolically reversing the names of his children, first at the end of chapter 1 (1:10-2:1) and the end of chapter 2:
On that day I will answer, says Yahweh, I will answer the heavens and they shall answer the earth; and the earth shall answer the grain, the wine, and the oil, and they shall answer Jezreel; and I will sow him for myself in the land. And I will have pity on Lo-ruhamah, and I will say to Lo-ammi, "You are my people"; and he shall say, "You are my God." - Hosea 2:21-23Whereas before Jezreel referred to a place of bloodhsed, here the name refers to the bounties of the land: the grain, the wine, and the oil which Yahweh will bless his people with. He will have pity on the unpitied, and the people will return to him as their god. Just as Yahweh will redeem his people, who have been lead astray by their unfaithful kings and corrupt priests, Hosea too redeems his wife Gomer, buying her back from a life of prostitution (Chapter 3).
Whoring About with Other Gods
Bull's Head from the Golden Lyre of Ur, found at the Royal Cemetary of Ur, circa 2500 BCE
Okay, so fidelity to Yahweh was clearly a big deal for Hosea, but what exactly did he mean when he accused Israel of "playing the whore" (2:5, 3:3, 4:10-15, 5:3, 9:1)? Hosea, more so than Isaiah and Amos, is first and foremost concerned with the monolatrist worship of Yahweh and Yahweh alone. In the time of Hosea many Israelites did not exclusively worship Yahweh, and according to Hosea, when they did they worshiped him wrongly, in the same way they would worship Asherah, Ba'al or other regional deities of the time. Hosea is adamant that Yahweh is the sole provider for Israel (2:8, 13:4-6), yet the people continue to sacrifice to "the Baals". The term Ba'al was not only a name for a particular deity, often Ba'al Hadad, but also a generic term for "lord". Sometimes even Yahweh was referred to as a "Ba'al" much as he is usually just called "God" or "Lord" by people today, disregarding his proper name.
So what were the Hebrews doing, cavorting about with other gods? Mostly fertility cult practices, it seems. Hosea laments the adulterous rituals of Israel, as many Israelites were not the good monolatrists which Hosea and his fellow Yahwists wished they were. The golden calves/bulls (oft-condemned by various biblical authors) which very well may have been representative of Yahweh, a symbol he inherited from El/Ba'al, are decried (8:4-6, 10:5-6, 13:1-3). The "threshing floor"of the harvest festival is condemned (9:1-3) as is the pouring out of libations for Yahweh (9:4), a common religious practice in which the first drink of a feast or celebration is ritualistically dedicated to a god. Hosea calls out the priesthood, who benefit from the sins of the people (4:4-11, 6:7-10, 8:11), and the soothsayers and diviners who consult dead objects for guidance (4:12-13 - might also refer to Asherah poles, hard to say). Hosea even attacks the memory of Jacob, Israel himself, for his greed, arrogance, and trickery (12:2-6). No one is safe from Hosea's judgmental glare.
Atrocities Upon Atrocities
So what does Hosea foresee that Yahweh has in store for Israel? The slaughter of children, miscarriages, and infertility (9:12-17)? Infanticide and the disembowelment of pregnant women (13:16)? Slavery in Egypt (8:13, 9:3)? Maybe slavery to Assyria instead of Egypt* (11:5)? The end of the monarchy? (10:7, 13:9-11)? Compassionless destruction?
Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from Death? O Death, where are your plagues? O Sheol, where is your destruction? Compassion is hidden from my eyes. - Hosea 13:14How about all of the above? Hosea isn't kidding around. His Yahweh was a jealous, wrathful, vengeful god. The Christian Apostle Paul would later reverse the above lines to announce victory over the grave (1st Corinthians 15:55), but here Hosea has Yahweh calling on the powers of Death and Sheol to afflict his people. There are reasons why modern Christians have a strained relationship with the Hebrew Bible. Here Yahweh is the opposite of compassionate. Depressing. Depressing enough that it seems in Hosea's day most of the people were pretty sick of Hosea's angry doomsday shit, as evidenced by his bemoaning of his detractors:
The days of punishment have come, the days of recompense have come; Israel cries "The prophet is a fool, the man of the spirit is mad!" Because of your great iniquity, your hostility is great. The prophet is a sentinel for my God over Ephraim, yet a fowler's snare is on all his ways, and hostility in the house of his God. They have deeply corrupted themselves as in the days of Gibeah; he will remember their iniquity, he will punish their sins. - Hosea 9:7-9But Hosea's message isn't entirely doom and gloom. At one point Yahweh seems to second-guess his promises of annihilation, changing his mind, perhaps (11:8-11). Instead of a devouring beast (5:14, 13:7-8) will he act as a lion of protection (11:10-11)? Maybe. He seems a bit fickle.
At the close of the book, Hosea implores his people to return to their god (14:1-3), and importantly worship him correctly, not as they did before in the manner of the fertility cults, though they claimed to know him (6:1-6, 8:2-3). They must follow his laws, worship him alone, and keep his covenant (8:12). Only then will they be as a faithful wife to Yahweh, Israel, the bride of their god (2:16-20).
These Are a Few of My Favorite Words
One of Hosea's favorite words is whore, along with its various derivatives (whoredome, whoring, etc.). I wondered how big "whore" would appear in a word cloud of the book, so I made one:Unsurprisingly, the most frequently used words in Hosea (besides common words in every day speech and writing, which I've excluded) are Yahweh/God and Israel/Ephraim. Hosea's prophecies tightly revolve around the relationship between the northern kingdom and its god, evidenced by how often these words appear. For comparison's sake, here are Hosea's favorite topics:
- Yahweh/God: 79
- Israel/Ephraim: 73
- Whore/Whoredom/Whoring: 18
- People: 18
- Land: 17
- Judah: 15
I honestly expected whore to appear more often than it did, though it easily made the top 3 topics. Fun.
Frankly, Hosea was a bit of a chore to read. While there are some interesting bits where he talks about the polytheistic practices of the people, his rhetoric is pretty repetitive. Hosea was a strict Yahwist, and it appears he spent most of his prophetic career focused on that facet of Hebrew religious life. I can only read about adultery and punishment so many times before it grows dull. I enjoyed reading Amos and Isaiah. But I'm not so sure I can say the same for Hosea. I'm happy to be moving on from all of the whore talk. Hosea's book isn't one to read to your kids.
Frankly, Hosea was a bit of a chore to read. While there are some interesting bits where he talks about the polytheistic practices of the people, his rhetoric is pretty repetitive. Hosea was a strict Yahwist, and it appears he spent most of his prophetic career focused on that facet of Hebrew religious life. I can only read about adultery and punishment so many times before it grows dull. I enjoyed reading Amos and Isaiah. But I'm not so sure I can say the same for Hosea. I'm happy to be moving on from all of the whore talk. Hosea's book isn't one to read to your kids.
* - oops? misread the signs?
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Psalm 6
The sixth psalm is one in which the psalmist calls upon Yahweh from salvation from death or illness. Interestingly, we see in the sixth Psalm evidence of non-belief in life after death:
Turn, O Yahweh, save my life; deliver me for the sake of your steadfast love. For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise? - Psalms 6:4-5The psalmist does not anticipate remembering Yahweh beyond his earthly life. He foresees no ability to praise his god while in Sheol (the grave, or alternatively, the pit). While Sheol would slowly evolve to resemble Hades during the second temple period through extensive contact with the Greek/Roman world (known as Hellenization) and would eventually become conflated with the later orthodox Christian concept of hell, here it is simply the grave. If Yahweh does not rescue the psalmist he will be dead, and cease to exist. He will no longer be able to sing his psalms to Yahweh, and wouldn't that be a shame?
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Well, that's it for this week. This post took me a little longer for a variety of reasons. First, I wasn't home much, second the NBA playoffs have taken some of my time, and third, Hosea was a drag, and I didn't want to split it into two separate posts. Next up: Micah! If you have any thoughts on Hosea, feel free to comment below.
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