Hosea 11-14

The next chapter contains a shift in metaphor from Israel as an unfaithful wife to Israel as a wayward child. Verses like “Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love” (Hosea 11:3-4a) are among the most quotable from the book, but are still interspersed with promises of punishment. The shift from a jealous husband to an enraged father still doesn't sit quite right to me.

By this point in the book, I’m not reading the prophecies as following a linear order, but as a series of similar oracles with (largely) the same message, as the cycle of unfaithfulness, punishment, and repentance seems to repeat. I don’t think that the end of Chapter 14, for instance, portrays a meaningfully different redemption than the end of Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 11.

There are some interesting historical tidbits from these chapters I want to mention. The first is the continued references to the Israelites being from Egypt. 

“Out of Egypt I called my son” (11:1)

“return to the land of Egypt” (11:5)

“I am the Lord your God from the land of Egypt;

I will make you live in tents again, as in the days of the appointed festival” (12:9)

“Yet I have been the Lord your God ever since the land of Egypt” (13:4).

It is clear that some sort of memory of having left Egypt is very important to Hosea and likely an effective rhetorical device at the time. This agrees with the importance of Egypt we also saw in the book of Amos, even if they do not necessarily have the same interpretation of the events. We do, unlike Amos, get references to “a prophet” the Lord used to bring Israel from Egypt (12:13) and the Lord feeding the Israelites in the wilderness (13:5), two important aspects of our modern understanding of the exodus.

Another interesting “match” with Amos is the mention of Admah and Zeboiim as cities destroyed by God’s wrath. Amos doesn’t mention these cities, but does refer to Sodom and Gomorrah as similar examples. Later, in Deuteronomy, all four cities will be mentioned together as targets for punishment. Are these two legends that later merged or part of the same story and then later condensed? Either way, it seems the sudden and violent destruction of these cities, possibly up to a thousand years before, was still a powerful cultural reference.

We also get concise summaries of the life of Jacob in Chapter 12. This is the first time we have received specific details about one of the patriarchs, and, unsurprisingly, it is the one most associated with - one might even say identical to - Israel. Interestingly, this occurs in a negative context, in which the crimes of Jacob* seem to be a metaphor for the crimes of Israel. The punishment of Jacob - “[in Aram] Israel served for a wife and for a wife he guarded sheep” - can be metaphorically related to the exile faced by the people of Israel after their defeat by Assyria.

*It’s unclear to me exactly which aspects of the Jacob story the writer of Hosea sees as evidence of wrongdoing and which are redemptive. There are some easy assumptions to make, but I don’t want to merely assume.

Speaking of Assyria, the other complaint the prophet makes in these last few chapters is of a treaty with that empire. 

“Ephraim herds the wind, and pursues the east wind all day long; they multiply falsehood and violence; they make a treaty with Assyria, and oil is carried to Egypt” (12:1)

“Assyria shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses” (14:3)

As in previous chapters, we see the prophet mocking the idea of a political solution to Israel’s problems. Whatever they do is doomed to failure, as they have not been sufficiently devoted to the true God. If they fight, they will lose; if they negotiate, they will lose; if they flee, they will lose.

The book then ends with a couple short oracles of hope, as most prophetic books do. The former uses lots of vegetation symbolism, including repeated references to (the forests of) Lebanon; the latter is written in a very different style (similar to that of Proverbs) and may have been tacked on later.

To me, the historical nuggets are the most interesting parts of this book. Along with the content found in the book of Amos, we can begin to get a picture of which elements of Israelite religion both (1) existed and (2) had rhetorical and theological significance to the earliest documented prophets of Yahweh. The most interesting and concrete theme I can find is that some version of the story of the exodus existed and was foundational to the two prophet’s understanding of the identity of the people of Israel.

The differences are just as interesting. A couple that stand out to me are Hosea’s idea of a contractual relationship between the Lord and Israel and the difference between the universalism expressed in the final chapters of Amos compared to the focus on Israel in Hosea’s book. Unlike in Amos, we never get the notion that God has plans for the people of any other nation or cares about their fate. The focus is solely on Israel, which is actually surprising to me given that Hosea spends much more time fulminating against the worship of other gods. And while there are many similarities between the two books, ultimately the God of Hosea feels much more capricious than the God of Amos.

Next time, on to Micah! What’s happening in Judah around this time?