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.

One of the ongoing scholarly debates about the prophets is whether they were "prophets of hope" or "prophets of doom." Do they proclaim God's judgment against his people, or do they ultimately promise good news and salvation? You'd think such a fundamental question would have a pretty obvious answer, but the battle rages on. Even in my own seminary education, I had one professor (Dr. Klaus Peter Adam) who insisted that there was a lot more doom among the prophets than hope, while another professor (Dr. Ralph Klein) suggested that a prophet who doesn't proclaim hope is not, in fact, a prophet, but is merely a troublemaker. In my opinion, both are exactly right.

The thrust of the first chapter of Hosea's prophecy is that Israel has turned away from God and begun worshiping other idols, like a prostitute has sex with people other than her own husband. God is behaving like a jilted lover. He is angry, and he has decided to cast off his love. First the royal house of Israel is denounced, then the whole of the nation. Hosea's prophecy is bad news.

And yet, as we continue to read through the book of Hosea, we'll see a reversal of God's judgment. It will get worse before it gets better, but it will get better.

Here, though, we get one little verse of good news in the middle of bad. Good news perhaps belongs later in the book of Hosea, but not here. Stranger than that, the prophet speaks throughout chapter one of the kingdom of Israel, the northern kingdom. But verse seven is directed at the kingdom of Judah, the south. The third hint--though one I can't speak to in detail due to lack of personal knowledge--is that God usually speaks in poetic language in the prophets, but this verse is marked in most editions of the Hebrew Bible as prose. As one more bit of evidence, the naming of Hosea's children Jezreel and Lo-Ammi don't have an additional bit of exposition like this; only Lo-Ruchamah does. In at least four ways, the verse doesn't belong to all the verses around it.

The simplest explanation, and probably the accurate one, is that this verse was added in later. Hosea wouldn't have been interested in Judah; he was a prophet of Israel. But our Bible is the legacy of Judah. When Israel was destroyed in 720 BCE, all of the religious writings of the northern kingdom disappeared--except for a few which had passed into and were preserved by the southern kingdom. Somehow, Hosea's words had been saved from the capture and destruction by the Assyrians. It's easy to imagine a Judahite copyist (or even prophet) picking up Hosea's words, seeing the prophecy that God will withdraw from the northern kingdom, and feeling uncomfortable enough with those words that he felt compelled to add a sentence about the salvation of the southern kingdom.

And perhaps, just perhaps, these words were added to Hosea's prophecy as the southern kingdom looked out at the Babylonian armies surrounding them in the 590's, worried about what might happen next. Would they be destroyed, like Israel was?

Imagine that in detail. The Babylonians, standing at Jerusalem's gate, were a formidable army. The Judean army was rather paltry in comparison. The king is panicked, and even goes as far as to ask their great old enemy, the Egyptians, for help. It never comes. What are they to do?

And the 6th century prophet, picking up the old words of long-gone 8th century Hosea, says this: "We won't be saved by bow or sword or battle or horses or cavalry. We will be saved by God."

And tradition tells us that the nation trusted in the Egyptians to come to their aid, instead. And were therefore captured and carted off into exile. God did not save them.

Whose fault was it? God's, whose promise in Hosea 1:7 didn't come true? Or Judah's, for not trusting God's promise in the first place, preventing it from coming true?

Or might we still hear that promise being fulfilled, even today, as God finds ways to continue to "arachem," to love us, in the midst of the destruction that we create, in the midst of our attempts to trust in things other than God, in the midst of our failure to trust the promises God has made with us? Maybe this verse belongs here after all. Maybe, in the middle of God's judgment, God still promises that his love for us will not let us go.

Questions for Thought:

1) From what you know of Hebrew prophecy, what do you think? Do the prophets speak doom, or hope? Why?

2) How do we deal with a Bible that seems to have changed from one generation to the next in its very beginnings? With a Bible that can have "additions" to the words of the prophets, things that didn't belong to the prophets themselves but were tucked in by a copyist later? What theological problems does that raise? What theological possibilities does that allow?

3) What happens when a prophet's words don't come true?