CHAPTER II

THE BOOK OF HOSEA

§ 1. Amos and Hosea.-The prophet Hosea's message was also addressed almost exclusively to the Northern kingdom. And Hosea himself, unlike Amos, is an undoubted Northerner, deeply attached to his country and his people. It is customary to draw many other contrasts between Hosea and Amos. These contrasts read well on paper, but they are scarcely so marked in fact as some modern writers would have us believe. Hosea's nature does indeed seem cast in a gentler, more tender mould than that of Amos. But to call one the prophet of righteousness, the other of love, or one the preacher of morality, the other of religion, is to make a dangerous antithesis and a misleading anachronism.

The ideal of Hosea is very much the same as the ideal of Amos. To both outward religion, with all its rites and sacrifices, has little worth or sanction. Justice, compassion and the true knowledge of God-these constitute for both the real elements of religion. Nevertheless, Hosea does make valuable additions to the religious vocabulary and conceptions of his predecessor, and these additions must be noticed in their place. Only we must beware of exaggeration.

Of all the commentators it is Professor Driver who most temperately draws out those contrasts between the two prophets which do not perhaps exceed the limits of the scanty materials from which all our judgements must be drawn. I will quote what he has to say. 'There is a note of austerity in the terms in which Amos speaks. It is true, the message which he bears is a hard one: but his younger contemporary Hosea had substantially the same message to bring; and yet there is a marked difference in the tone in which he delivers it. Hosea's whole soul goes out in affection and sympathy for his people; he would give his all to reclaim it, if only it were possible; every line, almost, testifies to the reluctance with which he sadly owns the truth that the prospect of amendment is hopeless. Hosea's own nature is one of

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love; and Jehovah is to him pre-eminently the God of love, who has cherished his "son" with tenderness and affection, who is grieved by the coldness with which his love has been requited, but who still loves his nation even at the time when he finds himself obliged to cast it from him. Hosea has as clear a sense as Amos has both of Israel's shortcomings and of Jehovah's claims; but his recognition of both is tinged throughout by a deep vein of sympathy and emotion. With Amos all this is different. With Amos God is the God of righteousness: he himself is the apostle of righteousness; he is the preacher, whose moral nature is moved by the spectacle of outraged right, but who does not unbend in affection or sympathy: on the contrary, he announces Israel's doom with the austere severity of the judge. Partly this may have been due to the circumstances of Amos' life: for he visited Israel as an outsider, and could not therefore feel the ties of kindred as Hosea felt them; he had, moreover, all his life been breathing the clear air of the moor, in which he had learnt to appreciate the rough honesty of the shepherd, but had discovered no excuse for the vices of the wealthy. But chiefly, no doubt, the strain in which Amos spoke was due to a difference of disposition. Amos' nature was not a sensitive or emotional one; it was not one in which the currents of feeling ran deep: it was one which was instinct simply with a severe sense of right. And so, though he sings his elegy over Israel's fall, and twice intercedes on its behalf, when he becomes conscious that the failing nation is unable to cope effectually with calamity, as a rule he delivers unmoved his message of doom. Amos and Hosea thus supplement each other; and a comparison of their writings furnishes an instructive illustration of the manner in which widely different natural temperaments may be made the organs of the same Divine Spirit, and how each, just in virtue of its difference from the other, may be thereby the better adapted to set forth a different aspect of the truth.'

§ 2. The age of Hosea.-Amos, as we saw, wrote his prophecies during the reign of Jeroboam II. And the first three chapters of Hosea possibly also belong to the end of the same king's reign. But the greater portion of his book must have been written during the first five years of confusion and distress which followed on Jeroboam II's death in 740 B. C. (Compare Part I, chapter xiv. § 3, p. 362.) It will be remembered that the year 738 B. C. was for the kingdom of Israel the 'beginning of the end.' For it was then that King Pul,' Tiglath-pileser III of Assyria, 'came against the land,' and was only bought off by a large tribute. Between 740 and 735 four kings sat on the throne of Israel, three of whom

met violent deaths by the swords of their successors. The dynasty of Jehu was cut off by a usurper, even as Jehu had destroyed the house of Omri.

§3. The true parable of the faithless wife.—The first three chapters of Hosea have given rise to a very great deal of discussion and dispute. I shall only give the most probable explanation of them.

Hosea became conscious of his prophetic mission through a heavy personal sorrow. He had married a woman called Gomer, and he loved her. But Gomer was faithless to him. Yet he continued to love her. He had been mistaken in her character. In fact she had not been a pure, good woman when he married her. But Hosea's love was proof even against faithlessness and falsehood. Though his wife at last deserted him, his love remained, and when Gomer had finally sunk to the position of a slave, he bought her back to him to be his wife anew. But he set her a period of probation. She should not resume at once all the rights and duties of wifehood. There was to be an interval of test and trial. If she remained faithful during that interval of probation, then she should once more become his honoured wife, purified by affliction, grateful for his forgiveness, responsive to his love.

It would seem that while this domestic tragedy was taking place within his own home, Hosea began to feel as though his own individual story was a symbol or allegory of the story of his nation. There too it might be said that a loving husband had been deceived and abandoned by his wife; but the husband was no human bridegroom: for the wife was Israel and the husband was God. God, it might be said, had chosen Israel for his bride: he had taken her away from the bondage of Egypt and given her a home, but in that home Israel had played him false. Wherein lay the national falsity to the eyes of Hosea? In the idolatrous ritual, in the worship of God under gross material forms, in the confusion between the true God and the local godlings, the many 'Baalim' of Canaan. It lay, moreover, in the false substitution of ritual for righteousness, of sacrifice for justice, of burnt offerings for love.

When this parallelism between his wife's conduct and that of Israel had possessed Hosea's mind, not only was his career as prophet determined, but he felt convinced that his marriage with the wayward and faithless Gomer was itself the will of God. It was God's will that he should realize Israel's guilt through the guilt of his wife, and through his own persistent love of Gomer realize God's greater love for Israel. And it was God's will that he should reveal his own sorrows and use them as a parable to convict, if indeed this were still possible, a faithless

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people of their ingratitude and their sin. Hence when he writes down this parable from his own life, he represents it as if from the first God had ordered him to marry a woman who was light of love,' and who would be faithless to her bond and her duty. But this must not be taken as literally accurate. There is a perfect parallel in the prophecies of Jeremiah. Just before the capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar, his cousin Hanamel came to Jeremiah with a proposal that he should purchase some land in his own village of Anathoth. It was a strange request to buy land at such a time when the enemy was at the gate and exile seemed imminent. But even while Hanamel was speaking, Jeremiah 'realized that this was the word of the Lord.' This purchase should also be a parable. So when he writes down the story of it he says, 'And the word of the Lord came unto Jeremiah, saying, Hanamel thy cousin is coming to you to bid you buy the land at Anathoth.' But that Jeremiah did not realize before Hanamel had spoken that his visit was divinely willed, we may certainly infer from what he adds parenthetically after Hanamel had made his proposition: Then I realized that it was the word of the Lord.' (See Part I, p. 435.) It is just the same with Hosea. The divine intention in his marriage, or rather the way in which God uses sorrow for enlightenment, how he teaches by sufferingthis was not realized by Hosea till after his marriage, till after the fickle and faithless character of his wife (unsuspected by him at the time of his marriage) had been unmistakably revealed to him. But in telling the story he describes it as divinely ordered from the first.

He tells us also that of this unhappy marriage there were three children. When these children came, Hosea, it would appear, had already realized his wife's unworthiness, and the parable had already been borne in upon his soul. Hence he feels constrained, as by a divine command, to give to the children symbolical names of dread and terrible significance-names referring to that other wife's history and future of which his own wife was the symbol and the image.

The word of the Lord that came unto Hosea, the son of Beeri, [in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel.]

At the first, when the Lord spoke with Hosea, he said to Hosea, Go, take unto thee a faithless wife, for the land is faithless unto the Lord. So he went and took Gomer the

daughter of Diblaim, and she bare him a son. And the Lord said unto him, Call his name Jezreel: for yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and will cause to cease the kingdom of the house of Israel. And it shall come to pass at that day, that I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.

And she bare a daughter. And God said unto him, Call her name Lo-Ruchamah (Unpitied): for I will no more have pity upon the house of Israel, that I should pardon them. [But I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by the Lord their God, and will not save them by bow, nor by sword, nor by battle, by horses, nor by horsemen.]

Now when Lo-Ruchamah was weaned, she bare another son. And God said, Call his name Lo-ammi (Not my people): for ye are not my people, and I am not your God.

The comforting allusion to Judah is probably a later interpolation. For Jezreel and the crimes of Jehu, compare Part I, chapter xiii. § 13, pp. 343-348.

Upon this narrative there suddenly follows a short passage of an entirely opposite tendency. It seems to be an interpolation of hope and promise dating from the exile of Babylon.

[And the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered; and it shall come to pass, that instead of it being said unto them, Ye are not my people, it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God. Then shall the children of Judah and the children of Israel be gathered together, and appoint themselves one head, and they shall get them up out of the land: for great shall be the day of Jezreel. Say ye unto your brother, My People, and to your sister, Pitied.]

'Get them up out of the land.' The land is here the foreign land; the land of their exile.

'The day of Jezreel.' So the writer calls the day on which Israel is once more settled on its own soil. There shall then be but one head '—an undivided kingdom.

In the next passage full use is made of the true Parable of the faithless Wife. The lovers' are the idols, partly the images of