Summary: Bible - Book of Hosea

The GIST

Hosea, a book of the Bible, is a love story told as an indictment. It stands first among the twelve Minor Prophets in most Hebrew Bibles and has fourteen chapters. Its opening verse ascribes it to Hosea the son of Beeri, who spoke "in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel", the dark last decades of the northern kingdom before it fell to Assyria. Many scholars think the bulk of the book comes from around that time, though studies since the 1980s have argued that editors gave it its present unity, and they disagree about how much goes back to the prophet himself.

What makes the book unforgettable is its central image. God tells Hosea to marry an unfaithful woman, and the prophet's wrecked household becomes a picture of God's bond with a people who have gone after other gods. The article on the book says this is the first text to describe that bond as a marriage. The charge is severe and the punishment announced is real, yet the last word belongs to a love that will not let go.

What It Says

The marriage and the children (chapter 1). The first command is a shock: "Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the LORD." Hosea marries Gomer the daughter of Diblaim, and each of the three children she bears is given a name that is itself a sermon. The first son is Jezreel, because God will "avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu" and bring the kingdom of Israel to an end. The daughter is Loruhamah, "for I will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel". The second son is Loammi, with the bleakest explanation of all: "for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God." Yet the chapter refuses to stop there. The children of Israel will be as countless as the sand of the sea, and where they were told they were not God's people, "there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God."

The faithless wife and the wooing (chapter 2). The image shifts from Hosea's home to the nation, spoken of as a wife and mother. She has chased her lovers, saying they give her bread and water, wool and flax, oil and drink, when all along "she did not know that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil". So her husband will block her path with thorns, take back the grain and wine, and end her festivals. She will pursue her lovers and not catch them, and will say at last, "I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than now."

Then the tone turns from anger to courtship: "Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her." The valley of Achor becomes "a door of hope", and she will sing as in the days when she came up out of Egypt. She will call God Ishi and no longer Baali; the names of the Baals will leave her mouth. A new covenant takes in the animals, and bow and sword are broken. The promise is spoken as a vow: "And I will betroth thee unto me for ever". The children's names are reversed as well: "I will say to them which were not my people, Thou art my people; and they shall say, Thou art my God."

The woman bought back (chapter 3). Now Hosea speaks in his own voice. He is told to love a woman who is an adulteress, "according to the love of the LORD toward the children of Israel, who look to other gods". He buys her "for fifteen pieces of silver, and for an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley", and tells her she must live with him for many days and belong to no other man. The meaning is drawn at once: Israel will live "many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice", and afterward will return and seek the LORD.

The case against Israel (chapters 4 to 10). The rest of the book is poetry, and it opens like a lawsuit: "the LORD hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land." In their place are "swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery". The priests are singled out: "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge", and things have come to "like people, like priest". The people consult wooden idols and sacrifice on the hilltops. One line gives the verdict on the north, which the prophet often calls Ephraim: "Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone."

Judgment is called down on priests, people and royal house together. God will be to Ephraim "as a moth" and then "as a lion". Sick, the nation ran to Assyria for a cure and found none. Chapter 6 opens with words of return, "Come, and let us return unto the LORD: for he hath torn, and he will heal us", but God answers that such devotion evaporates: "your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the early dew it goeth away." What he wants is stated in one of the most quoted verses of the prophets: "For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings."

The images of chapter 7 are homely and sharp. The plotters at court burn like a baker's oven. "Ephraim is a cake not turned", and he has gray hairs he has not noticed. He is "like a silly dove without heart", fluttering between Egypt and Assyria. Chapter 8 names the political and religious failures together: "They have set up kings, but not by me", and with their silver and gold they have made idols. Of the calf of Samaria the prophet says flatly, "the workman made it; therefore it is not God". Then comes the line that gave English a proverb: "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind".

The consequences are spelled out in chapters 9 and 10. The people will not stay in the LORD's land; "they shall be wanderers among the nations." God remembers finding Israel "like grapes in the wilderness", a delight that was soon spoiled. Israel is "an empty vine" that multiplied altars as its harvests grew. The calf will be carried off to Assyria, Samaria's king will vanish "as the foam upon the water", and thorns will grow over the altars while people beg the mountains to cover them. One invitation stands in the middle of it all: "Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the LORD".

The father's heart (chapter 11). The image changes from husband to parent, and the book reaches its most tender page. "When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt." God taught Ephraim to walk, "taking them by their arms", and drew them "with bands of love". They turned to the Baals all the same, and so Assyria will rule them. Then God seems to argue with himself: "How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I deliver thee, Israel?" His heart turns over within him, and he will not carry out the full heat of his anger, "for I am God, and not man".

Last pleas and last warnings (chapters 12 and 13). Hosea reaches back to the ancestor Jacob, who grasped his brother's heel in the womb, wrestled with the angel and met God at Bethel, and he applies the lesson: "Therefore turn thou to thy God: keep mercy and judgment, and wait on thy God continually." But Ephraim is a merchant with false scales who says he has grown rich and done no wrong. Chapter 13 returns to the molten images and the kissing of calves, and to a people who will pass "as the morning cloud". God recalls the wilderness: "Yet I am the LORD thy God from the land of Egypt, and thou shalt know no god but me: for there is no saviour beside me." Prosperity made them forget, so he will meet them like a lion, a leopard, "a bear that is bereaved of her whelps". The sentence is compressed into nine words: "O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself; but in me is thine help." Samaria will be laid waste.

Return (chapter 14). The final chapter is an invitation, and it even supplies the prayer: "Take with you words, and turn to the LORD: say unto him, Take away all iniquity, and receive us graciously". Israel is to give up trusting Assyria, war horses and the work of its own hands. God's answer is immediate: "I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely". He will be "as the dew unto Israel", who will blossom like the lily, spread like the olive tree and root like Lebanon. A closing verse asks who is wise enough to understand: "for the ways of the LORD are right, and the just shall walk in them".

Why It Matters

Hosea is counted among the first of the writing prophets, and his influence on later ones, Jeremiah among them, is noted. He is credited, with Amos, with raising Israel's religion toward ethical monotheism and with being the first to stress the moral side of God's nature. For him unfaithfulness is the root sin, and against it he sets a love that punishes but does not finally cast off. The northern capital fell in 722 BCE and many of its people were carried away, which is the disaster the book sees coming.

Scholars read the marriage in more than one way. The woman of chapter 2 may be Gomer or the nation. The woman of chapter 3 may be Gomer bought back or possibly someone else. Some scholars stress that the husband and wife imagery reflects marriage as it was understood in its own time and by its first male audience, and one places the book in the genre of the covenant lawsuit, in which God charges Israel with breaking an agreement. Others see behind the sexual language a real turn to Baal worship. The book's mentions of Judah have been treated as later additions, though some scholars now think part of them may show that Hosea went on preaching in the south.

Christians met the book in the New Testament. Matthew cites the line about the son called out of Egypt in connection with the infant Jesus, and Luke records Jesus echoing the cry to the mountains and hills.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who has loved someone who kept walking away, and anyone who wants to see how the Bible speaks of God in the language of the heart. It is short, raw and full of images that stay. Readers who know only the gentler prophets will find here both the hardest warnings and the warmest promise side by side.