Hosea

Israel is the LORD’s wife, and her worship of Baal is whoredom: she goes after lovers for her bread and oil, though “she did not know that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil” (2:8). The prophet’s marriage puts that charge in a household. The book tells it as done: Hosea took Gomer, she bore three children, and he bought an adulteress for silver and barley (3:2). Jerome read it as a real marriage that did the prophet no harm: it was not the prophet who lost virtue by joining with a prostitute, but rather the latter gained virtue that she never had before. Others have taken it as a sign seen in vision, for the LORD “used similitudes, by the ministry of the prophets” (12:10). Either way, its meaning is “according to the love of the LORD toward the children of Israel” (3:1).

The LORD’s charge is that there is “no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land” (4:1), and he lays it at the priests’ door: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee” (4:6). Israel did not lack sacrifices. Its altars multiplied with its fruit (10:1), and they will go “with their flocks and with their herds to seek the LORD; but they shall not find him” (5:6). He asked for what they lacked: “For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings” (6:6). The word for mercy is the one he uses when he promises to betroth Israel “in lovingkindness” (2:19): the steadfast love owed within a covenant. The sacrifices were his own command; what he refused was sacrifice offered without it.

Chapter 11 sets the LORD’s love beside Israel’s whole history: “When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt” (11:1). He taught Ephraim to walk and “drew them with cords of a man, with bands of love” (11:4), and they sacrificed to Baalim. He could make them as Admah and Zeboim, overthrown with Sodom (Deuteronomy 29:23). Instead: “How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? … mine heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled together” (11:8). The reason given is God’s nature, not Israel’s merit: “for I am God, and not man; the Holy One in the midst of thee” (11:9). This is not God changing his mind. Theodoret explains that he expresses his thought in different ways, in anger and love, in threat and mercy, chastising and persuading.

Israel’s turning is the book’s question. Hedged in, the wife says, “I will go and return to my first husband” (2:7), but “They will not frame their doings to turn unto their God” (5:4), and their goodness passes like the early dew (6:4). So the LORD turns away in judgment, to “go and return to my place” (5:15). Yet the last chapter puts the words in Israel’s mouth: “Take away all iniquity, and receive us graciously” (14:2). The answer rests on the LORD, not on them: “I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely: for mine anger is turned away from him” (14:4). Backsliding there is built on the same root as return, and so is turned away: the LORD heals the turning itself.