Hosea

David Allan Hubbard

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780830893867
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblische Studien

A wanton and adulterous woman repeatedly spurns the love of her youth. Her betrayed and grieving husband offers forgiveness and seeks to restore the intimacy of their first love.Bold imagery indeed for telling the story of God and his people. Bolder still when God calls a prophet to enflesh this divine suffering and redeeming forgiveness in his own marriage. Yet this remarkable story sets the stage for Hosea's message of God's enduring love, his righteous judgement and his persistent offer of reconciliation.This commentary explores the historical, cultural, literary and theological dimensions of the book of Hosea. Distilled from a career of biblical scholarship, theological reflection and masterful teaching, David Hubbard has been studying, teaching and thinking about Hosea for a long time. He frankly admits he can't imagine himself "as a human being, let alone as a believing person, without the deposit of Hosea's political, moral and spiritual insights." Find out why.The original, unrevised text of this volume has been completely retypeset and printed in a larger, more attractive format with the new cover design for the series.

Commentary

The book of Hosea is about judgment and hope. Each of the three major sections of the book begins with the threat of divine judgment of Israel and ends with the promise of divine restoration:

(1) the story of Hosea’s marriage illustrates the sins of Israel and the consequent judgment, 1:2 – 2:13, while the account of the reconciliation of Hosea and his wife in response to Yahweh’s promise to restore Israel, his own bride, exemplifies the hope that Yahweh, as loving husband, offers beyond the judgment, 2:14 – 3:5;

(2) the oracles of judgment – sparked by corrupt worship, savage politics and foolish foreign alliances – spell Israel’s doom, 4:1 – 10:15, while the divine complaint raised by Yahweh, as the offended parent of a delinquent child, culminates in an offer of forgiveness and a call to return, 11:1–11;

(3) the closing speeches of judgment continue to sound the alarm for Israel’s fate, as they depict God’s wrath in virtually unparalleled terms of ferocity, 12:1 – 13:16, while the prophecy reaches its climax in a love-song in which God’s husbandly love triumphs over all of Israel’s unfaithfulness, 14:1–9.

1. Hosea’s experiences (1:1 – 3:5)

To grasp the overall message of this first section, we must catch the significance of its literary structure. These three chapters are a two-part story (1:2–9; 3:1–5) wrapped around a three-part oracle (1:10 – 2:1; 2:2–13; 2:14–23). This structure produces a literary unit that can be described by the scheme A B¹ BB¹ A¹, where A (1:2–9) is the story, whose point is judgment and A¹ (3:1–5) is the story whose point is hope, while B (2:2–13) is the oracle whose announcement is judgment, and the B¹ (1:10 – 2:1; 2:14–23) are the oracles whose proclamation is hope.

The envelope or inclusio formed by the two-part story with which the section opens and closes is not only a graceful literary device but an important theological pointer. This structure – in which Gomer’s waywardness is described before Israel’s sin is denounced, and Yahweh’s restoration of Israel to full covenant privileges is promised before Hosea is commanded to demonstrate that restoration – packages the gist of the section: Gomer’s betrayal of Hosea may foreshadow Israel’s defection from Yahweh, but no human act of forgiveness can take priority over divine forbearance. When it comes to the exercise of grace God is mentor to us all. Four interpretative guidelines underlie our reading of these three chapters.

Guideline one: The account of Hosea’s experiences is literal not allegorical. We seem not to be dealing with a made-up illustration like a par-able, but with actual episodes in the life of the prophet. Granted that the three children are given symbolic names and that Gomer and Hosea represent Israel and Yahweh respectively, however, there are present other details in the story which signal no allegorical meaning, e.g. Gomer’s and Diblaim’s names (1:3) and the price of redemption paid by Hosea in 3:2. Furthermore, the moral problem encased in God’s command that a prophet should marry a harlot (or a woman who would become one) is not eased by an allegorical reading. A divine command that is reprehensible in actual experience is no less so in an illustrative story. Moreover, something of the poignancy, power and pathos is drained from the book, if we are not dealing with an actual story where a suffering prophet learns and teaches volumes about the pain of a God whose people have played false with him.1

Not allegory, then, but enacted prophecy is the proper genre in which to classify these accounts. Not only does Hosea’s account issue from divine directives (1:2; 3:1), but the basic prophetic reason for the command is contained in explanations explicit to the commands (1:2b; 3:1b). Hosea is to act in God’s place as well as to speak for him. Like Isaiah (e.g. ch. 20), Jeremiah (e.g. chs. 27 – 28), and Ezekiel (e.g. chs. 4 – 5; 12:1–16; 24:15–27), Hosea himself is a sign to the people (cf. Isa. 8:18; Ezek. 24:27), a prophetic symbol of God’s wrath in judgment and of his love in restoration. This means the story is not an illustration gleaned from human experience and then applied as a spiritual message, but an actual personal history plotted by Yahweh, in which Hosea executes at exquisite personal cost God’s holy purposes.2 Thus an emphasis on the symbolic role of the story should be complemented by calling attention to the impact of these episodes on Hosea’s appreciation of Yahweh’s dealings with Israel: ‘Only by living through in his own life what the divine Consort of Israel experienced was the prophet able to attain sympathy for the divine situation.’3

Guideline two: The autobiographical account in chapter 3 is the sequel to the biographical account in chapter 1. The reason for the switch from third person (‘so he went and took Gomer’, 1:3) to first person (‘so I bought her’, 3:2) is lost in the dust of antiquity but is probably related to an editorial process that preserved some accounts of a prophet’s life in his own words (autobiography) and others in the words of his followers (biography). (For other examples of these two patterns, compare Isa. 6:1–8 with 7:3–8; Jer. 1:4–19 with 20:1–6; Amos 7:1–9 with 7:10–17.) In any case, the change in person between chapter 1 and chapter 3 is not strong enough evidence on which to build a case, either that chapter 3 describes an event prior to chapter 1, orthat chapter 3 is an alternate record of the events in chapter 1 and is, therefore, simultaneous to it.

The details of chapter 3 seem to argue for a sequential interpretation: (1) the word ‘again’ (Heb. ‘od 3:1) suggests an advance on the previous narrative, whether we attach it to ‘And the Lord said to me’ (Andersen; Mays) or to ‘Go, love’ (LXX; AV; RSV); (2) the absence of the woman’s name implies that the reader ought to be familiar with that detail; (3) the lack of reference to the children points towards a movement in the stories, when the judgment conveyed in their names has run its course and the focus has been placed on the restored relationship of Gomer-Hosea/Israel-Yahweh; (4) Hosea’s purchase of the woman almost certainly builds on the threats of Hosea’s banishment of Gomer (2:3) and her abandonment of him (2:5); and (5) the picture of covenant loyalty in 3:3 (but with implied discipline; see comments below) makes most sense when seen as the prophet’s demonstration of the renewed covenant depicted in the salvation oracle of 2:14–23.

Basic to the sequential interpretation is, of course, the assumption that the unnamed woman of chapter 3 is the well-known Gomer of chapter 1. Any other reading would break the analogy which carries the basic message of this section: the Lord of Israel will judge his idolatrous people and afterwards renew his relationship with them. To introduce a second woman would derail the entire train of thought and make wreck of the hope which the prophet would convey to Israel.

Guideline three: When Gomer married Hosea she was an ordinary Israelite woman who later became an adulteress and a prostitute. This guide-line assumes that the description of Gomer as ‘a wife of harlotry’ (1:2) anticipates what she will later become, just as the reference to the ‘children of harlotry’ describes the three offspring to be born to Gomer after the marriage (1:3–4).

Gomer was probably not a cult prostitute in an official or professional sense (cf. Mays, pp. 25–26 for arguments to the contrary). The technical vocabulary available to describe persons set apart for such religious duties within the fertility cults is not employed to describe Gomer, though it does describe the cultic consorts of Israel’s men in 4:14 (Heb. qědēšâ; cf. Gen. 38:21–22; Deut. 23:18). Moreover, the picture of family life sketched in the accounts of the conception, birth, naming and weaning of the children does not accord well with the lot of one set apart for cultic sexual services. Yet the cult could well have been one setting where Gomer practised her promiscuity, given the general involvement of Israelites of both sexes in such pagan rituals (cf. 4:13–14).

An alternate interpretation, argued by Wolff (p. 14), holds that the harlotry ascribed to Gomer and the children refers to a rite of bridal initiation supposedly practised in Israel, as it was later in the Graeco-Roman world. By this custom, in gross defiance of biblical laws of chastity (Deut. 22:21) all Israelite brides would have been defiled in some sexual rite prior to their marriage to their partners. Gomer would have been an ordinary Israelite woman who had undergone the customary initiation, and thus experienced the sexual and religious defilement which symbolized the nation’s apostasy. Biblical evidence for such an initiation is thin. Beyond that, the graphic descriptions of Gomer’s adulterous escapades in chapter 2 seem out of place if her behaviour was standard practice for all Israelite women. Part of the prophetic symbolism hinges on her situation being unusual not typical (see Andersen, pp. 157–169, on these various theories, including a critique of Wolff’s approach to Gomer’s promiscuity).

Guideline four: The oracles of chapter 2 are an essential comment on and expansion of the two calls to prophetic action described in 1:2 and 3:1. As such they are an integral part of the structure of the first section of the book, drawing light from the prose stories and casting light on them. In a sense the two calls set the theme for the entire book: (1) the call to marry, fortified by the description of the land’s harlotry, shapes the tone of pending judgment – judgment which the prophet seeks to avert (2:2–3, 6–7); and (2) the call to remarry in love, strengthened by the assurance of Yahweh’s love for Israel, keynotes the theme of hope by giving concrete, visible form to the wonder of divine forgiveness–a wonder which the prophet celebrates.

Another way that the oracles comment on the story is in the negative and positive use of the children’s names. The negative force of each name, so clearly a harbinger of judgment in 1:3–9, is alluded to in the threatening speech of 2:4–5; the children, representative of the individual Israelites, partake of the iniquity and therefore of the fate of their mother, who symbolizes the nation as a whole. The positive use of the names is anticipated in the brief promise of 1:10 – 2:1, where Jezreel is reinterpreted to mean not ‘God will scatter in judgment’, as in 1:4–5, but ‘God will sow in resettlement’, and, where the ‘nots’ are removed from the other two names to declare the return of God’s mercy on Israel and his renewal of the covenant with his people. What is anticipated in 1:10 – 2:1 is made the climax of the salvation speech in 2:21–23, when the covenant renewal is described in cosmic terms that stretch from heaven to earth and issue in the specific promises to Jezreel that Israel will be resown in the land; Not-pitied will be pitied and Not-my-people will again be God’s people.

These interpretative guidelines are far from comprehensive and do not resolve all the questions present in the crucial sections with which the book commences. The prose narratives are lean and spare, and what they do not say is as tantalizing as what they do. The cultural, social and religious backgrounds are almost beyond our reach. Any help, therefore, we should welcome. The pointers summarized above do not say everything, and what ...