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II
COMMENTARY
1. THE TITLE: 1.1
1 1The word of Yahweh which came to Hosea ben Beeri, in the time of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the time of Jeroboam ben Joash, king of Israel.
The superscription is a title for the entire book. Similar titles appear as the headings of other prophetic books (Zeph. 1.1; Micah 1.1; Joel 1.1; Jonah 1.1; Jer. 1.1f.; Ezek. 1.3); this similarity in form indicates that such titles were the work of the circles who edited the prophetic works during the exilic and post-exilic period.a The heading is more than a mere name for the book; the final redactor states in it his theological understanding of the work so that it will be properly read and understood. The book as a whole is ‘the word of Yahweh’, the message of the God of Israel. The category of ‘word’ (dābār) is extended to include the total tradition deriving from a prophet, all his oracles and the narratives which tell of his activity (cf. 1.2–9 and ch. 3). The reader is to find in the sum and variety of the material the one unified ‘word of the Lord’. That word is not the product of human speculation or wisdom; it ‘came’ (hāyā ’el), happened, as an event of revelation to a particular man, and his proclamation is reflex and expression of that event. The revelation had a setting in the history of Israel; it took place during the reigns of certain kings. The word was an occurrence in the history of Yahweh and Israel, and therefore is relevant to all who live in the ongoing stream of that history. The title furnishes precious little biographical information about the man who was instrument of the word. His name was Hosea, mentioned in the book for the second and last time in the next verse. The name appears also in Num. 13.8; I Chron. 27.20; II Kings 15.30; Neh. 10.23; the first two texts associate the name with Ephraimites, which some have read as a clue to the tribal heritage of Hosea. His father was Beeri, a name found also in Gen. 26.34. Apparently the redactor knew no tradition about the home or occupation of this prophet of the north, as the redactor of the Amos book did about him (Amos 1.1). The list of kings by which the activity of Hosea is dated also indicates the remoteness of the redactor. The Judean kings are given the preferred place by being listed first, a clue to the Judean provenance of the editor. In naming Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, the editor allows for a period which stretches from the accession year of Uzziah in 783 to the death of Hezekiah in 687. Since the reigns of Uzziah (783–742) and Jeroboam ben Joash (786-746) covered roughly the same period, the beginning of Hosea’s ministry can be dated before 746 (cf. 1.4). But what of the lower limits of Hosea’s ministry? The accession year of Hezekiah is hotly debated because the biblical data concerning the reign of Hezekiah given by the Deuteronomistic historian in II Kings are confused and pose one of the worst problems in the chronology of the monarchy.a Apparently the redactor of the book of Hosea shared that confusion. The fact that Jeroboam II is the only king of Israel mentioned raises another question, because a number of the sayings of Hosea are set in the midst of events during the reigns of Menahem, Pekah, and Hoshea. Either the redactor was misinformed on this matter as well, or the tradition mentioning Jeroboam alone originally applied only to the material in chs. 1–3, which seems to belong in large part to this early period in Hosea’s ministry. In any case nothing in Hosea’s sayings hints that he was active after the fall of Samaria in 721.
2. DIVINE WORD AND HUMAN LIFE: 1.2–9
1 2The beginning of Yahweh’s speaking throughb Hosea.
Yahweh said to Hosea, ‘Go take yourself a harlotrous wife and harlotrous children, for the land is surely committing harlotry, turning away from Yahweh.’ 3So he went and took Gomer, daughter of Diblaim. She conceived and bore him a son, 4and Yahweh said to him ‘Name him Jezreel, for it will not be long before I visit the bloodshed of Jezreel upon Jehu’s house and bring the kingdom in Israel’s house to an end. 5It will come to pass on that day that I will break Israel’s bow in the valley of Jezreel.’ 6She conceived again and bore a daughter, and he said to him, ‘Name her Unpitied, for I will not continue to have pity on Israel’s house,a but will surely remove them.a 7But on Judah’s house I will have pity and I will save them by Yahweh their God. I will not save them by bow or sword, by battle or horses or riders.’ 8When she had weaned Unpitied, she conceived and bore a son, 9and he said, ‘Name him Not-my-people, for you are not my people, and bI am not I-AM for you.’b
This narrative of Hosea’s marriage to Gomer and of the three children born to them tells about four separate acts of prophetic symbolism. Occasions on which God commanded a prophet to do something as a dramatic enactment of a divine word are a common feature of prophetic activity (e.g. Isa. 8.1ff.; 20; Jer. 27.1ff., etc.).c Chapter 3 is another story of a symbolic act. The reports typically contain the divine command to perform a specific act, the interpretation of the act’s symbolic significance, and the obedient performance of the act. All three elements are present here only in the case of the marriage itself whose conclusion is reported (v. 3a); but since the next three symbolisms involve a name given to a child already born, the report simply assumes that the divine command is obeyed. The marriage is an indictment against Israel, a way of disclosing their sin. The names of the children, on the other hand, are all sentences of judgment, announcing decisions of Yahweh because of that sin. But, apart from certain expansions (vv. 5 and 7) of the account, the report itself is a literary unity. A basic formal structure, repeated four times, integrates the sequence: Yahweh (or ‘he’) said to Hosea (or ‘him’), ‘Go/name …’ always followed by ‘for’ (kī) introducing the interpretation. The fact of the marriage is obviously presupposed in the account of the births; after v. 4a no proper names are used for God, prophet, or wife, as successive sentences grow more economical in expression. The indictment stated in the marriage’s symbolic meaning creates the context for the verdict announced in the names of the children.a
Disagreement about the nature of this family narrative is as old as the interpretation of the early Church Fathers. Is the story an allegory whose only reality is the meaning, or do marriage and births represent actual episodes in the life of Hosea? The majority of recent commentators agree that the latter is correct. The very character of prophetic symbolism requires that the divine word be actualized in a representative event. The narrative itself gives clues to the factual human history of which it tells. Gomer and Diblaim are personal names, not sign-language for some reality other than a person. The story is laconic and matter-of-fact. The children come in the irregular succession of son-daughter-son. The narrative notes that the third child was conceived just after the second was weaned. The story reports the real. And yet it is not, indeed cannot be, approached as though it were biography. The interest is not in Hosea and the experiences of his life, and perhaps it was the recognition of this which led to the allegorical approach before prophetic symbolism was properly understood. There is a severe concentration on the divine word through the prophet’s family life. The very genius of the formal, repetitive style is that it excludes almost everything which does not serve the pattern of command and interpretation. The narrative is kerygmatic, not biographical. Through it, as well as oracle, the word of Yahweh is known – and that is its sole purpose. The details of Hosea’s family life are hidden behind the word-function of the narrative. Modem questions formed out of legitimate curiosity about just what happened are frustrated and will never be answered with final certainty because the data are missing.
The events in the story belong to the earliest phase of Hosea’s prophetic activity. His public appearance as a spokesman for Yahweh began with his marriage to Gomer (cf. the comment on 2a below). The announcement of judgment against the dynasty of Jehu presupposes that Jeroboam II (died 746) or at least his son Zechariah, who only reigned six months, was king of Israel. The entire sequence of events could have covered as little as five years, though the interval between the first and second children is not stated. The third-person style, in contrast to the first person in which ch. 3 is written, suggests that Hosea did not compose the account himself. But it must have been written by a disciple and contemporary who was adept at the formally appropriate style and knew at first hand the facts of Hosea’s early career. The motive for its composition doubtless lay in the desire to give an account of this crucial part of Hosea’s activity not represented directly by words of his own, and what is equally important, to furnish the setting in Hosea’s life which is an indispensable background to the family metaphors in the oracles of ch. 2 and to the report of another prophetic symbolism in ch. 3.
[2a] ‘The beginning of Yahweh’s speaking through Hosea’ is a title introducing the entire narrative of 1.2–9 rather than a temporal clause connected only with the rest of v. 2. MT carefully separates it from the words which follow it with an emphatic device of punctuation, and its syntax best fits this construction. As such, it is the narrator’s interpretation of what follows. The marriage and the succession of children mark the opening phase of Hosea’s work as a prophet. The story of Hosea and his family is to be told as an instance of Yahweh’s speaking through him. The narrator excludes with this characterization any proleptic interpretation of the marriage as a normal marital contract which Hosea came to regard as revelation in the light of subsequent experience. The marriage was not a way for Yahweh to speak to Hosea but through him; it was from the first an enterprise of declaring the revelation of Yahweh, the God of Israel. Thus, the title requires that any hypothesis about Hosea’s relation to Gomer satisfy the requirements of public kerygmatic act. No story of a call in the strict sense of Isa. 6; Jer. 1; Ezek. 1–2 has been preserved in the Hosea tradition. All that the title implies is that his first public action in the office of a spokesman for Yahweh was his marriage to Gomer.
[2b] The marriage 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! The theme of command and interpretation-word is harlotry (zānā), sexual promiscuity, a theme which is a dominant motif in Hosea’s oracles (verbs in Qal: 2.5; 3.3; 4.12ff.; 9.1; Hiphil: 4.10, 18; 5.3; nouns: 2.2, 4; 4.12; 5.4; 6.10). The key to its power and poignancy in Hosea’s oracles and actions is not his own private life with his wife, but the religious situation of Israel. The foil for Hosea’s use of marriage as a model of Yahweh’s relation to Israel and of sexual promiscuity as the leit-motif of his portrayal of Israel’s sin is to be found in the fertility cult of Canaanite religion.a The ritual of Canaan’s indigenous shrines was devoted to the divinity named Hadad who was customarily called by his epithet Baal (lord, husband, owner). The Baals of the local shrines throughout Canaan were manifestations of this deity. He was the god of the late autumn and winter rain storms upon which the peasant farmer was utterly dependent for water, pasture, and crops. The believer thought of the land as the wife which the god fertilized with rain. The cult was based on sympathetic magic. To anticipate, induce, and participate in Baal’s intercourse with earth, sexual rites were used, the hieros gamos celebrated...
