Holman Old Testament Commentary - Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah

Trent Butler, Trent C. Butler, Max Anders

• Publisher: Holman Reference
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780805494778
• eBook ISBN: 9781433674297
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

One in a series of twenty Old Testament verse-by-verse commentary books edited by Max Anders. Includes discussion starters, teaching plan, and more. Great for lay teachers and pastors alike.

Hosea 1:1–2:1

The Impossible Love Affair

I. INTRODUCTION

The Disaster of Unfaithful Love

II. COMMENTARY

A verse-by-verse explanation of these verses.

III. CONCLUSION

Coping with Family Losses

An overview of the principles and applications from these verses.

IV. LIFE APPLICATION

Loving the Ugliest

Melding these verses to life.

V. PRAYER

Tying these verses to life with God.

VI. DEEPER DISCOVERIES

Historical, geographical, and grammatical enrichment of the commentary.

VII. TEACHING OUTLINE

Suggested step-by-step group study of these verses.

VIII. ISSUES FOR DISCUSSION

Zeroing these verses in on daily life.

“The marriage [of Hosea] is an act of
obedience to Yahweh's command undertaken
to dramatize the divine indictment of Israel.
Hosea is to display the predicament of Yahweh
in his covenant with Israel by wedding a
harlotrous woman!”

James L. Mays

God charged his prophet to enact a drastic prophetic act through his own family. He married a prostitute, representing Israel's unfaithfulness, and named three children unthinkable names to symbolize the place of judgment, the reason for judgment, and the result of judgment. But God pointed to a future where faithfulness and a love relationship would be restored in Hosea's family and in God's relation to Israel.

The Impossible Love Affair

I. INTRODUCTION

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The Disaster of Unfaithful Love

The Vietnam era in world history produced many complex issues that continue to plague modern thinkers. The play Miss Saigon pictures a lonely soldier entering a bar filled with his fellow soldiers. There he meets Kim, a young woman who is just entering the world's oldest profession. Chris, the soldier, begins to live with Kim, but soon leaves Kim behind as he escapes the city before the Vietcong take it. Years later, having returned to the United States, married, and formed a family, Chris learns that Kim has given birth to his son. He returns to Vietnam to meet his child, only to have Kim commit suicide to free her child to return to the United States with his father.

Here is a picture of tragic love begun in a wrong way and leading to ultimate disaster. Some Israelites would have laughed at Hosea and taunted him for marrying a prostitute and seeing her desert him to return to her old ways. Hosea saw his situation differently. God led him into the marriage, so he committed himself to it in faithfulness and deep love. In so doing, he demonstrated God's love for a people who had forsaken him to play the field with other gods. Hosea bared his own soul to tell his story to symbolize for Israel the heartbreak God felt and to assure the people of Israel that unfaithfulness to God would lead to disaster for them.

God's people continue to have a hard time learning Hosea's lesson. We want to play the field with regard to morality and theology. Still, we expect God to take us back and bless us any time we choose. We need to listen carefully as Hosea shares with us his deepest personal experience.

II. COMMENTARY

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The Impossible Love Affair

MAIN IDEA: God's love brings judgment on an unfaithful people, but then he restores a people to complete his plan for the world.

Revelation Received (1:1)

SUPPORTING IDEA: God sends his revelation through his prophet in specific historical circumstances.

1:1. Prophetic books generally have an editorial preface that gives some information about the prophet and places him and his words in an exact historical situation. Hosea's preface does not introduce us to the prophet; it only says that he was the son of an otherwise unknown Beeri. What little we can infer about this northern prophet of God's love is described in the introduction to this book (see above).

The preface to the Book of Hosea focuses on the word that came to Hosea. The same formula introduces the books of Joel, Micah, and Zephaniah. The word of the LORD appears 438 times in the Hebrew Bible from Genesis 15:1 to Malachi 1:1. This is a distinctive of biblical religion: God constantly lets his people know his message. The problem lies in a people who refuse to accept and obey his message.

Hosea delivered God's message during a critical time in Israel's history (see “Deeper Discoveries”). He saw the political and economic fortunes of the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom fall from power and riches to dependency and poverty. In good times and bad times, he preached and lived out God's word before God's unfaithful people.

The Place of Judgment: Jezreel (1:2–5)

SUPPORTING IDEA: God finds his own ways to prepare his people for punishment when they are not faithful to him.

1:2. A unique expression begins the actual message of the prophet: God began to speak through Hosea. What follows is not so much God's speech as it is a brief biography of Hosea's family life lived out in obedience to God's directions. And what a shocking family life God created for the prophet!

God's opening words appear to be words of joy: Go, take to yourself a wife, but then the Hebrew text describes that wife in one unexpected and unbelievable word: adulterous. God gives further disturbing details using the same Hebrew word: children of unfaithfulness. The horror of this term can be seen in the other contexts where it appears (Gen. 38:24; Nah. 3:4). Hosea's wife was in good company: Tamar, Oholah, and Nineveh! How could God possibly ask a man to marry such a woman? Scholars have sought a way out of this theological dilemma, but the biblical text offers no escape route. God chose to let his prophet endure the same hurt and shame that God experienced in his love affair with his own people.

The prophet had not only to preach God's message; he had to illustrate it in his own family. God had only one reason to offer the prophet in explaining why he must do this—because Israel was guilty of adultery in departing from the LORD. Hosea's ministry illustrated how Israel had abandoned God for the fertility cults of the Canaanites.

1:3. The prophet immediately demonstrated his faithfulness to God by marrying Gomer. We know nothing about Gomer's father or about her previous life, except that she met God's qualifications—she was a prostitute. Immediately, Hosea and Gomer fulfilled the rest of God's command as Gomer became pregnant and bore him a son. Here, and only here, the Hebrew text says the son was born “to him.” This leaves the question open about the father of the next two children whom Gomer bore.

Commentators would love to find a way around what the text says. They do not want the Bible to let God speak in this way and cause a prophet to have such a wife. But the text shows the nature of prophetic obedience in its harshest form. God expects the prophet to carry out his message faithfully, so the prophet can in turn demand that the nation carry out God's requirements faithfully. A prophet must be willing to embody God's message, no matter how difficult it is (Isa. 20). His children must also demonstrate the Lord's message in their lives.

As Duane Garrett remarks, “The report of their births should not be passed over as a sad but merely incidental prologue to the actual prophecy; in a real sense, they are the prophecy, and everything else is just exposition” (NAC 19A, 55).

1:4. God not only told Hosea whom to marry and what kind of kids to have; he also named the children for Hosea. This paints a still more difficult task for the prophet. Can you imagine Hosea going into the streets, seeking his children, and having to call out their names? The first name was Jezreel, the name of an important geographical place in Scripture (1 Kgs. 18:45–46). The city served as the winter capital for Israel's kings. It was an important point on the highway leading from Egypt to Damascus through the Valley of Jezreel.

God had one moment in Jezreel's history in mind. King Jeroboam II represented the last strong king in the dynasty begun by Jehu (841–814 B.C.) and ended during the reign of Jeroboam's son, Zechariah (752 B.C.). In the Valley of Jezreel, Jehu had killed King Ahab of Israel and King Ahaziah of Judah. In the city of Jezreel, Jehu ordered Queen Jezebel's servants to throw her out the window, and so they did—to her death. Then Jehu had Ahab's seventy sons killed and their heads brought to him in Jezreel (2 Kgs. 9–10). Thus Jez...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Editorial Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Holman Old Testament Commentary Contributors
• Holman New Testament Commentary Contributors
• Holman Old Testament Commentary
• Introduction to Hosea
• Hosea 1
• Hosea 2
• Hosea 4
• Hosea 6
• Hosea 8
• Hosea 11
• Hosea 14
• Introduction to Joel
• Joel 1
• Joel 2
• Joel 3
• Introduction to Amos
• Amos 1
• Amos 3
• Amos 4
• Amos 5
• Amos 7
• Amos 8
• Introduction to Obadiah
• Obadiah 1
• Introduction to Jonah
• Jonah 1
• Jonah 2
• Jonah 3
• Introduction to Micah
• Micah 1
• Micah 3
• Micah 6
• Glossary
• Bibliography