Imperatives and Jussives

On our last reading, Mark pointed out something interesting in verse 18.  (Well, a few things, actually.)  He noted that "you will call me 'my man'" could be either a command or a description of the future.  English uses "you will verb" generally as a future tense, and usually forms a command by simply offering the commanded verb--in this case, "call me 'my man'" without "you will."  However, to intensify the command, those future-tense words can go back in there:  "You WILL call me 'my man.'"

My Husband

Scholars seem to disagree on whether verses 18-25 go with what comes before.  Hans Walter Wolff, who I'm using for the detail-oriented view, says there's a break before verse 18, and that we begin a new (and much later) oracle today--but he quotes others who say it's a continuation.  I'll let you be the judge:

18. And on that day

        -- This is a saying of YHWH --

                    you will call me "my man."

    And you will not call me "my Ba'al" anymore.

19. And I will remove the name of the Ba'als from her mouth,

    And they will not be remembered by their names anymore.

A strict translation of verse 18 would really begin, "And it shall be on that day..."  This is a common Hebrew expression that doesn't really belong in English, so accordingly most translations dispense with it.  But if you're peeking at a King James version, you'll find it there.  In any case, it's a way the prophets proclaim something that will happen in the future.

Good News!

It's good news today, which is a nice change of pace!

16. Therefore, look:  I myself will seduce her
    And cause her to go into the wilderness
    And I will speak to her heart.
17. And I will give her vineyards to her from there,
    And the Valley of Achor for a door of hope
And she will answer [there] as in the days of her youth
    As in the day she came up from the land of Egypt.

So far, in this long oracle, we've had lots of accusations (She said, "I will go after my lovers;" As for me, she forgot me) and dire consequences (I will strip her naked; I will take away her grain...and her new wine) for unfaithful Israel.  We've also had the word "therefore" twice in this prophetic speech, which is a little odd.  Usually, we'd only have one, but Hosea doesn't seem to be able to draw things to a close.  Instead, we now have a third "therefore."  It is to prove the final one in this oracle, as well.

Brokenhearted

Maybe I'm just in a poetic sort of mood, but there's something oddly beautiful about today's verses, despite their continued topic of divine punishment on Israel.

13. And I will cause all her joy to cease:

    Her feasts, her new moons, and her sabbaths,

    And all her festivals

14. And I will make her vines desolate,

    And her figs, about which she said,

"These are my prostitute's wages,

    Which my lovers gave me"

And I will make them a wilderness,

    And the wild animals of the field will eat them.

15. And I will visit on her the days of the Ba'als

    When she burned incense to them,

And she adorned [them] with her earrings and her jewels,

    And she went after her lovers

And as for me, she forgot me.

                --This is a saying of YHWH.

Vacillating

Last week, we talked about God as if he were a jilted lover who keeps providing for his beloved anyway.  He walled off his beloved's paths so she could not get to her lovers, but kept offering her the new wine, and fresh oil, and grain that provided for her life.  Such is God's grace-filled providence.  And then we get this:

11. Therefore I will return

    And I will take back my grain at its time,

    And my new wine at its appointed time,

And I will snatch away my wool and my flax

    That cover her nakedness.    

Ever Faithful

Sorry for the silence on this end.  Between some illness and some computer problems, this has gotten away from me.  I'm going to try to be more regular going forward.  (Though I will mention casually that it would be helpful to me to justify the time I spend working on this if I knew there were people actually reading it!  :)  )

We continue at Hosea 2:8.  As we do, I'll note along with Jed's comment that, since we are reading (very) slowly, looking at individual verses and even words in detail, we're missing important parts of the message that we might get if we read the whole of Hosea, or at least read in the context of more of Hosea, rather than just two verses.

Metaphors and Prostitution

Today's reading continues with God's (Hosea's) lawsuit against Israel (Gomer).

6. And her children, I will not love,
    For they are children of promiscuity.
7. For their mother was promiscuous.
    When she conceived them, she made herself wither.
For she said, "I will go after my lovers,
    Who give my bread and my water,
    My wool and my flax,
    My oil and my drink."

To start with, I need to note a translation challenge in verse 7.  The phrase, "She made herself wither," appears to be translated regularly instead by something like, "She acted shamefully" or "She behaved disgracefully."  I have no doubt that this is a Hebrew idiomatic expression--one that I don't know.  For the moment, I'm going to leave it as is; the literal translation has to do with withering or drying up.  I tend to like these sorts of idioms, where the words themselves are far more colorful and imaginative than their meaning.  When I get a chance to swing by the library, I may update it.  The commentaries at my personal disposal don't mention it.

Gomer and Hosea

Last week was a good time to take a little break.  We're starting a new big section today.  Here's the next two verses of Hosea 2:

4. Accuse your mother!  Accuse [her]!
    For she is not my wife,
    And I am not her hubsand.
Let her turn her promiscuity away from her face
    And her adultery from between her breasts.
5. Or else I will strip her naked
    And I will make her as on the day of her birth.
And I will set her as in the desert,
    And I will make her like a land of drought,
    And I will kill her with thirst.

Learning Curve

People are slowly catching up this week, which means we're slowly seeing comments appear on old posts.  If you're interested, peek back at a few.  At the bottom of each entry on the main page, you can see how many comments exist for each post, and even jump straight to them.  You can post comments of your own, too; if you don't have (or want to use) one of the accounts suggested, you can choose Name/URL from the drop down list, and just leave URL blank.

In addition his thoughts on a few of our posts, Mark adds this general question:  

Hosea is proving to be complicated.  There's a lot of new stuff to learn to understand the meaning.  It reminds me of Revelation.  Is it intrinsic in Old Testament study that the context and history are so much more involved than the New Testament?  Or is this just a difference in the way we approach them?

It's a good question, so I thought we'd look at that today.  And like Hosea itself, the answer is complicated.

Prophetic Whiplash

I was reading a book recently which included in one of its appendices a bunch of notes about how that book quotes from the Bible.  In one of these notes, we are told that the author won't always quote whole verses, as if this should be a surprise to us.  But it occurs to me that there are some people in some traditions that would expect Bible verses to be whole units, always used in their entirety, never divided.

So it is worth pointing out here that the versification of our Bible was not passed down from antiquity.  I know less about the way that the Hebrew text was broken into verses.  In any Hebrew Bible, you'll find a large symbol that looks rather like a colon called a "Sof Pasuq."  This symbol is roughly equivalent to an English period, symbolizing the end of the phrase.  (Hebrew is actually a lot more complicated than that in its phrasing, but this will suffice for today.)  The verses of the Hebrew Bible match these Sof Pasuq, and as they've been passed down from antiquity, the division into verses is probably quite old.

Doom and Hope

We've gotten a look at the whole of chapter 1 of Hosea, except for verse seven. Here it is:

But I will love the house of Judah, and I will save them by YHWH their God, and I will not save them by bow, or by sword, or by battle, by horses, or by horsemen.

Can you guess why we've left this until last? It's because it's out of context, in its way. It doesn't fit with the rest of the chapter. There are some links to the rest of Hosea, to be sure; the "love" in the beginning of the verse is "arachem" in Hebrew, and you can see in it the "R-CH-M" pattern we talked about last time in the name "Lo-Ruchamah." And Hans Walter Wolff, the great German commentator on the twelve minor prophets, says that the second half of the verse is full of words, "bow, sword, battle, horses, horsemen," that are part of Hosea's vocabulary in the rest of the book. But the tone of verse seven is remarkably different than the rest of the chapter.

More Children

Running a little late this week! But here's our next lesson, starting with a reminder of verse 3.

3. And she [Gomer] conceived and she gave birth to a son for him [Hosea].
And YHWH said to him, call his name, "Jezreel..."

6. She conceived again, and she gave birth to a daughter.
And he said to him, call her name "Lo-Ruchamah,"
For I will not continue to love the house of Israel anymore, and I surely will not forgive... 

8. And she weaned Lo-Ruchamah,
And she conceived again, and she gave birth to a son.
And he said, call his name "Lo-Ammi,"
For you are not my people, and I am not your God.

We're jumping a bit in this first chapter of Hosea, but the reason is that we want to compare the naming of all three children of Hosea. Their conception and naming is the first of the prophetic work of the prophet Hosea.

Jezreel

Today we continue on from where we left off last week--the middle of verse 1:3:

And she [Gomer] conceived and she gave birth to a son for him [Hosea]. And YHWH said to him, call his name, "Jezreel," for soon I will avenge the blood of Jezreel against the house of Jehu, and I will cause the kingdom of the house of Israel to end. And it will be on that day that I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.

My thoughts last week ended with wondering what it was that Gomer felt about her God-instructed marriage to this prophet. Here, the specifics of Hebrew grammar make this first birth of a son "for him," for Hosea, not for herself, another sign of the writing's place in a patriarchal society. That little "for him" could have been left off, but the author of these verses keeps our focus trained on Hosea and the message he has to deliver. In our minds today, we can acknowledge that, but we need to take a moment to at least recognized that this prophet's message is being articulated through people. What must it mean to Gomer, to their son, Jezreel, and perhaps even to Hosea himself to be treated not like people with all their complexity, but merely as the symbols by which this prophecy is spoken? Or perhaps--though I admit to being less comfortable with this possibility--what a privilege it might be to serve as God's mouthpiece in this way?

A Promiscuous Wife

Last week, we were talking a bit about the historical context of Hosea, a context that was split between a short 30 years in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, but spanned 75 or more years in the Southern Kingdom of Judah. That's one prophet with two different lifetimes. I invited you to think about how this could be, and now I'd like to consider the possible answer.

Most of the scholarship is agreed that Hosea was a prophet of the Northern Kingdom. Worth saying is that we don't have a lot like him. The Bible was recorded and preserved by the people of the south, in Judah, just before and during the exile in Babylonia. (A few books, like Daniel, were written after this time.) The northern kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians generations earlier, and any writings unique to their context would have been lost. That is to say, if Hosea was a prophet of the north, his prophecies must have passed to the south before they could have been preserved by the southerners.

Hosea and Context

Today we begin to read the prophecy of Hosea, the first of the minor prophets. We won't get very far; just through the first verse. But before we even do that, we ought to take a peek at the order of the prophets.

There are actually two orders that the twelve prophets are situated in, in different eras of the Bible. As Protestant Christians, we follow the same order that the Jewish Bible does, starting with Hosea and finishing with Malachi. At first glance, the ordering seems to be haphazard, inconsistent with the rest of the Bible. From Genesis to Nehemiah, the scriptures are told in historical order, starting at the creation of the world (the "Primeval history"), following through the exodus out of Egypt and the history of the nations of Israel and Judah, ending up with the reestablishment of the kingdom of Judah after the Babylonian exile. While the books themselves don't read quite like histories, they at least seem to follow historical order.

Introduction to the Twelve

Congratulations! You've found the first entry in our new Online Bible Study!

For our first topic, we're going to be reading our way through the twelve minor prophets, those little books that come all in a row at the end of the Old Testament. Most of us haven't spent a great deal of time meditating on the words of Haggai or Habakkuk. These little books can sometimes be strange and foreign-seeming. But they are valuable for our encounter with God and His Word and vision for our world. Hopefully, this will be a fun journey!