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.

The New Testament is different.  The books of the Greek Bible were written as a single long string of characters; even words weren't delineated by spaces in Greek in the period they were written.  Chapters were added by the great Bible scholar of the early church, St. Jerome--maybe.  Another source I've run into said that the chapter weren't in place until the 13th Century!  In any case, if you look at any of the works of Martin Luther, for example, you'll find he consistently cites chapter numbers, but not verses.  That's because the verse numbers didn't exist until around the mid-1500's.  The Bible was meant to be read as a story, not a whole bunch of little axiomatic expressions.

The reason this comes up today is that we have a versification problem in this part of Hosea.  The Hebrew Bible ends chapter one at verse 9, where we left off last time, and begins chapter two in the next verse.  But the Greek version of the Old Testament, which we call the Septuagint (or LXX for short), is the one that informed the first, oh, fifteen hundred years of the Christian church, and in many ways is still the source of much of our Biblical understanding in the Western world.  Among many of the problems this creates, we find here in Hosea a chapter one that runs on for eleven verses, and chapter two that begins a little late.

So before we can even begin talking about the next couple of verses, we need to know which verses we're talking about!  I am going to follow the Hebrew verses, but if you're following along in an English Bible, you should be aware that today's verses 2:1-3 could be 1:11-2:1 in your edition.  In either case, here they are:

1. And the number of the sons of Israel will be like the sand of the sea which is not measured and is not numbered, and it will be that in the place where it was said to them, "You are Lo-Ammi, not my people," then he will say to them, "Sons of the living God." (2.) And the sons of Judah will be gathered, and the sons of Israel together, and they will name for themselves one head, and they will sprout up from the land, for great is the day of Jezreel.

3. Say to your brothers, "Ammi," and to your sisters, "Ruchamah."

This is a strange little passage from Hosea, and the verse-numbering weirdness probably results from editors not being wholly certain what to do with it.  In a way, all three verses seem to belong to what comes before--certainly more than they belong to what comes after them.  They clearly refer to the prophecy spoken through the naming of Hosea's children.  At the same time, they break pretty solidly from what has come before.  They reverse, and perhaps even go further than, the previous verses.

Verse three is the most obvious in meaning.  Where Hosea was told to name his son, "Lo-Ammi, Not My People," Hosea is now told to say to the brothers, "Ammi, My People."  And where Hosea was told to name his daughter, "Lo-Ruchamah, You Are Not Loved," now he says to the sisters, "Ruchamah, You Are Loved."  The gender of the children matches, but the prophecy against them is reversed.  We don't have a reason why; it is simply told matter-of-factly.

Some scholars wonder who these "brothers" and "sisters" might be.  Hosea's original prophecy was to the northern kingdom of Israel, so perhaps he is now speaking to Judah.  But I don't think this is quite right, even taking into account the mention of Judah in verse 2.  It seems simpler to expect that Hosea is simply talking of his fellow Israelites.

If this is good news for Hosea's audience, verses 1-2 are even better.  Israel, standing at the brink of destruction by the Assyrians, is promised to be as numerous as the sand of the sea.  Where once God called them, "Not My People," now they are not just God's people but God's own children.  And where Judah and Israel are two separate kingdoms, divided after Solomon's reign, God promises they will become one again.

In his commentary, Hans Walter Wolff suggests that this prophecy was made later in Hosea's life, but before the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed.  Israel and Judah actually became enemies in the last throes of the northern kingdom's existence, sending armies to battle against each other even as they were threatened by more powerful adversaries.  It makes sense, in this environment, for Hosea to have spoken of the healing of that rift, even to reunification of the kingdoms.  Of course, this reunification never happened.  Israel was conquered by Assyria, more the half the population was carted away into exile, and with the exception of a hint of continuity in the Samaritan religion which still exists (though in very small part) today, the northern kingdom was wiped off the map forever.  This urges us to take up the same question as last week:  What happens when a prophet's words don't come true?

Many Christians would say that the promise of this prophecy is still to be fulfilled.  That in the fulness of time, Jesus Christ has begun to effect this prophecy, and will ultimately bring all of the Children of Israel and Judah and everywhere else back together into one Heavenly kingdom.  "You will be my witnesses to Jerusalem, and all Judea and Samaria [that's Israel], and to the ends of the earth," says Jesus in Acts 1:8.  The early Christian Church saw itself as the fulfillment of these kinds of words from the prophets, and we do and should continue to do so today.  It is part of our heritage, and part of our theology.  It is dangerous, because it can lead to Christian triumphalism and a theology of glory instead of a theology of the cross.  But we can't ignore this thrust of Christian history.

At the same time, we also need to understand the prophets' words for themselves.  They can have Christological meaning, but they should also have meaning for us as they were spoken in their original Old Testament context.  And for me, this is an even more powerful meaning.  These few verses are jarring.  They could be treated as a later addition to the book of Hosea, because they are so different from what comes before.  But whether they were contemporary or late, the fact is, they show up here in the final version of the book.  And we need to read them here.

Here, right on the heels of the prophecy of doom that comes before them.  Here, where it is such a jarring reversal of the prophetic word that scholars can't agree where the next chapter should start.  Here, in the same breath that God used to condemn his people.  It seems to me that the urgency of this word of hope is in fact exactly its message.  God pronounces judgement on Israel, but can barely stand to let that judgement sit for a moment before he changes his mind and "in the place where it was said to them, 'You are Lo-Ammi, not my people,' then he will say to them, 'Sons of the living God.'"  God is so in love with us that his wrath cannot last even a nanosecond.  God, who is a God of Justice, is also a God of Mercy, and his mercy always trumps his justice.  It is so overwhelming that reading it can cause whiplash.

Hosea may have called his children horrible things like "Not my people" and "Not loved."  But they were still his children.  No matter their names, they were his people, and he loved them.  And as we read on, we'll find the same is true for his "wife of promiscuity."

Questions for Thought

1) Keep thinking about what it means for a prophet's words to fail to come true.  No restoration of Israel here.  What do we do with that?

2) Is it okay to read prophecies of Jesus Christ into the words of the Old Testament prophets?  How do we distort their original meaning if we do so?  How do we understand the Jesus story as a continuation of the Old Testament story of salvation if we don't?

3) What meanings and images come to you as you meditate on the idea that God's love just can't hold back?