Hosea 1-3

Reading through Hosea is a very different experience than reading through Amos. The book begins with purportedly biographical information about the prophet that is intended as a metaphor about the relationship between the people of Israel and God. And, well, to address the elephant in the room, it’s not great.

The central conceit of these chapters is that Hosea marries a WHORE (representing the people of Israel) who cannot stop WHORING (worshiping other gods) and must be punished (killed by famine and war) before she can be remarried (live in a united theocracy). A variation of the word “whore” is used seven times in these three chapters, and it really sets the tone. Passages like the following, addressed to the prophet’s children, leave a really bad taste in my mouth in a way that Amos fulminating against the elite of Israel for oppressing the poor does not.

“Plead with your mother, plead -

For she is not my wife,

And I am not her husband - 

That she put away her whoring from her face,

And her adultery from between her breasts,

Or I will strip her naked and expose her as in the day she was born,

And make her like a wilderness,

And turn her into a parched land,

And kill her with thirst.

Upon her children also I will have no pity,

Because they are children of whoredom.

For their mother has played the whore;

She who conceived them has acted shamefully.”

-Hosea 2:2-5a

Domestic abuse, premeditated murder, and child abuse. Definitely not the sort of metaphors I would use to convince someone of the righteousness of my cause! It reads more like a fragment of sacred text that was cut from The Handmaid’s Tale for being too unsubtle. 

And while I’m sure there was ample evidence of misdeeds by the people of Israel, as in any society, the choice of metaphor speaks volumes about the prophet’s attitudes. And this metaphor…yikes.

With the elephant in the room now acknowledged and shamed for its whoredom, there are a number of interesting aspects of these first three chapters. One is that the actual word used to describe Hosea’s wife is unclear, as is the sequence of events. Does it refer to a prostitute, adulterous wife, or priestess/temple worker? As far as I know, scholars are divided. The answer to the question of whether the narrative was intended to be biographically accurate or metaphorical is similarly disrupted and, as far as I can tell, unknowable.

It is fairly likely that much of Israel was polytheistic at this time (late 8th century BCE), as chapter 2 speaks disparagingly of “festival days of the Baals” (2:13), promising to “remove the names of the Baals from her [Israel’s] mouth (2:17).” The plural here seems to refer to multiple “masters” or “gods” that people in Israel worshiped. Many historians believe that one of those gods was Asherah, a female god that may have had female priests and prophets. Was that the reason for the extremely gendered metaphor? It’s difficult to say, as there is not enough evidence either way, but the explanation makes a certain amount of sense.

Perhaps the most interesting verse from a historical perspective is 1:4, “And the Lord said to him, ‘Name [your child] 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.” Obviously, much of the history of this time has been lost, but there is a well-known event described elsewhere in the Bible in which the house of Jehu spills blood in Jezreel. That is the murder of King Joram of Israel, his mother Jezebel, and “70 sons” of Ahab that had already surrendered to King Jehu. This gruesome story is related in the book of Kings, a Judahite compilation likely finalized a century or two later. There is a crucial difference in the moral valence of this story in Kings compared to the (possible) reference in Hosea, however!

In the book of Kings, this slaughter is carried out with the approval of God for the sins of Ahab and the other Omride rulers, fulfilling prophecies of the famous Elijah. Here, it’s presented as a sin for which the Nimshide dynasty of Jehu shall be destroyed. This suggests, to me, some serious historical revisionism in the passage of ideas from the 8th century (presumably) monotheistic Israelites such as Hosea to the late 7th/early 6th century Judahite monotheistic Deuteronomists. Was Jezebel seen as a martyr by northern monotheists at one point? That’s certainly going too far based on this one verse, but since we lack sources unmediated by scribes from a rival kingdom from this time and place, this little hint is historically tantalizing.

Another interesting aspect of these chapters is that the first three chapters seem to relate the same story in different ways. The first is a relatively straightforward third person narrative of the prophet marrying “a wife of whoredom,” having three unwanted children, and ending with a promise of redemption. The second chapter is written in the first person, with the prophet (presumably) speaking for God, lamenting the sins of Israel. Again, the chapter finishes on a similar promise of redemption. The third chapter is written in the first person, seemingly from the point of view of the prophet himself, and tells an abbreviated version of the same story with a similar ending.

As the third chapter begins with the phrase, “The Lord said to me again”, it’s often taken as a continuation of the previous story, in which Hosea has divorced his wife from Chapter 1 and is now re-marrying her. I think it’s just as likely that this was a separate re-telling of the same story and the compiler added that word for continuity purposes. I suspect this is a later, possibly Judahite version of Hosea’s prophecies because 3:4-5a reads,

“For the Israelites shall remain many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or teraphim. Afterwards the Israelites shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king”

The specificity of the punishment of Israel makes me think that this possibly could have been from a Judahite tradition about the fall of Israel, and the reference to David - a Judahite monarch - makes it more likely. This is not the only point in the Bible in which we will see different stories about the same event appear back to back - see the creation stories in Genesis - which is another piece of evidence supporting this guess.

We also have a number of similarities to Amos in the description of the religious practices. The writer of Hosea mentions “festivals, new moons, and sabbaths (2:11)” as well as “[coming] out from the land of Egypt (2:15)”, confirming that these were important aspects of 8th century Israelite religion. Though I’ll go into more detail about the religious landscape of Israel at the time as I work through the later part of the book, one major difference in their theology is Hosea’s notion of Israel’s relationship with God as analogous to a formal (legal) covenant. I’ll be interested to see how much that seems to matter to the ideas presented in the rest of the book.