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.

That said, the image from that idiom is an interesting one.  In giving birth to her children, Israel has gone barren.  By bearing children of her promiscuity, the nation has come to a point where it can no longer bear children.  There are several ways we can take this metaphor.

With Wolff, we might clearly distinguish between Israel and her children; in this view, the mother is the land itself, and the children are the inhabitants.  This view fits with the historical facts we know.  The result of Israel's apostasy, according to the historical accounts in scripture, is the nation's defenselessness in the face of Babylonian attack.  The nation is carted off into exile and the land becomes barren:  There are few inhabitants; nobody is left to tend the fields, so they go to seed and stop producing food; Israel ceases to be a trade route crossroads.

The only real problem with Wolff's view is that it's a little too neat and tidy for the passage in which it is situated.  Hosea seems to continually mix his metaphors.  In verse four, he was talking TO the children, and now in verse six he is talking ABOUT the children.  His continual shifting is frustrating to someone who cares a great deal about grammar and consistency.  Hosea is known, though, for his imaginative creativity.  As we continue to read this book, we will be treated to a vast array of metaphors for God and God's people.  It is not so troubling in our society for a creative mind to do away with perfection of speech.

I will admit to being less than excited about this conclusion.  It has always annoyed me a bit when scholars claim that the Biblical authors are lesser in some quality than authors might be today, and then substantiate themselves with the idea that people were lesser in some way "back then" than we are now.  The perfect example can be found in the Gospel of Mark, which was long neglected in scholarship because it seemed that Mark made some foolish literary mistakes.  One of these mistakes is obvious; Mark tells the story of the feeding of the 5,000 in the sixth chapter of his Gospel, and then in chapter eight, he tells the same story, with a few odd details changed (it's four thousand this time, for example).  It seems like shoddy workmanship.  And yet, on close examination, enough of the details are changed that it is likely Mark was trying to do two different things with these stories.  In Mark 6, we have clear allusions to God the Good Shepherd, characterized in Psalm 23.  In Mark 8, we have details that hint at God's appearance to Moses at Sinai.  Mark is not a lousy writer.  He is a master storyteller, working hard to shape his story so that we hear echoes of Israel's God throughout the Jesus narrative.

Whatever the truth is of Hosea's metaphor manipulation, the message comes through pretty quickly.  The land, the people, the whole nation are disgraced, are unloved, are barren, are dry, because they have turned away from God and toward other idols.

We could imagine the slow, unintentional importation of other lands' deities into Israel.  The idea seems plausible, and more in line with the way things works over time.  But Hosea's words speak of a definite volition on Israel's part.  "I will go after my lovers," Israel says.  There are a few notable things about this phrase.

The first is the word for "lovers."  Many weeks ago, when we first encountered the "Not-Loved" name of Hosea's daughter, I noted that Hebrew words are built on three consonants.  In that case, the love spoken of was a word in the "R-CH-M" pattern.  Here, the word for love is different, "'-H-B"  (The ' is the letter aleph, which is not the same as our letter A; rather, it is a soft glottal stop, the sound in the middle of the word "uh-oh.")  In English we have one word for the variety of forms of love we experience.  The word for lovers, here, is never used of God's love for humankind; it is only used for our love of other people, or occasionally of our love for God.  For us, hearing the mother-love in verse 6 followed so quickly with the human-love in verse 7 should startle us a little bit.  At the same time, it is less likely that the native Hebrew-speaker would have heard the connection between the two.

Second is to notice how active this is.  Many translations and commentators take Gomer (and therefore Hosea's metaphor for Israel) as a prostitute; Wolff and other scholars of his generation in fact suggest that Gomer was a cultic prostitute.  That is to say, they believe that as part of the Canaanite (usually Ba'al-worshiping) religion, certain men and women were employed by the religious institution as prostitutes, offering sex as a ritual act, a sort of enacted copulation with the deity.  There is some evidence to support this idea both in the ancient Near East as well as in other religious traditions throughout the world.  Sexual congress with the deity is a common religious trope, and even within Christianity, some mystics throughout history have written about the Eucharist in sexual terms!  The idea of a Canaanite sex cult is still alive in contemporary scholarship, but is starting to fall out of favor.  In any case, I think that even if such practice was well-known in the ancient Near East it doesn't really seem to apply here, and this verse is the proof.  Cultic prostitutes wait in the temple for their clients to come; non-cultic prostitues wait as well, in places like wells and city gates.  But here, Israel is pictured as "going after [her] lovers."  This is not typical prostitute behavior.

No, this is the act of an adulterer who has forgotten everything she loved about her spouse, and has sought out another, seeing in this new lover benefits beyond imagining.  It is not that she has come to despise her husband; instead, she has forgotten him.  She sees the delight in her new lover's eyes, and thinks it is better to dwell there.  Familiarity breeds apathy.  How human this is!  And God remains like a jilted lover, simply forgotten by his beloved Israel.

I recall once going through a dry spell in my prayer life.  I had gotten out of the routine of regular prayer, and just went about my life, not even noticing what was missing.  The first time I sat down and focused on it again, I had an overpowering sense of what I had done--or rather, failed to do--in the preceding months.  Had I been intentionally cutting God out of my life, it might have been more tolerable.  Instead, I had the sense that God had been deeply hurt by my forgetfulness.  This is what happens to us in our relationships with God.  We don't come to hate God; even our angriest moments with God lead finally to deeper faith and deeper joy.  But instead, we simply forget; other things in our lives distract us, pull us in other directions, and without noticing, we forget.  We need something to remind us of what we are missing.  And happily, we have a God who will never tire of chasing after us.

Some questions for thought:

1) How is this metaphor working for you?  God, the jilted lover, and Israel/us as the adulterous spouse?  What metaphors do you use (perhaps in your prayer life) as you imagine your own relationship with God?

2) What is it about the story of scripture that makes it seem so different, so ancient, and so far removed from us?  How might we understand it as beautifully and meticulously crafted by master storytellers instead of as an old and therefore inferior form of writing?

3) How does the idea of sexual congress as a ritual act strike you?  Why do you think this was such a popular religious idea, particularly in antiquity?  Have you ever heard of Holy Communion in those terms before?  How does that make you feel?

4) How does it change Hosea's story to think of Gomer/Israel as an adulterer, rather than a prostitute?  What does your answer tell you about your moral opinion of prostitution or adultery?  Does it matter which metaphor we choose?

5) What distracts you?  What idols make you forget about God?