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.

Hosea seems to weave in and out of allegorical language throughout this chapter.  Sometimes, the words are metaphorical, describing a husband and his unfaithful wife as a symbol for God and Israel.  At other times, the words are more literal, speaking clearly about God's relationship with his unfaithful people.  Here we have, mostly, the latter.  Gomer (Hosea's wife) does not have feasts, new moons, sabbaths, and festivals; Israel does.  Gomer does not have vines and fig trees; Israel does.

The removal of feasts, new moons, sabbaths, and festivals in verse 13 is odd.  Aren't these the ways that Israel shows its devotion to YHWH in the first place?  Getting rid of them means less opportunity to return to the Lord, not more.  Or does Hosea understand these as gifts from God, rather than gifts to God?  What if we understood our worship that way?  Sunday mornings are not the time we come together to direct ourselves to God; rather, they are the time we come together to explicitly receive what God is always offering to us.  This fits well with Lutheran theology:  Worship is not about what we must do, but all about what God is doing.  God offers us new life in the waters of Baptism.  God speaks Good News to us in the Words of scripture.  God offers himself to us in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.  And in a way, even those things we do in worship that seem like are about our volition--giving offering, for example--are really about what God has already given us.

In verse 13, God threatens to take all that away from his unfaithful people.  There are a few hints about God's motivation in the language used here.  The first is the surprising word that begins the verse.  Although the causative form in English forces it to the end of the phrase, the first word in the Hebrew is actually "cease."  Chadal would be an appropriate word choice here, but that's not the word Hosea uses.  Instead, the verb he chooses is shabbat, meaning to rest, or to stop.  It is the same word that, in noun form, is the holy day of rest, the Sabbath--which will be mentioned again later in the verse.  While this is hardly enough to reinterpret the meaning of the verse in some "good news" sort of way, it does help fix God's intention.  Yes, the regular celebration of the Sabbath will cease; that is the threat.  But by saying, literally, "I will Sabbath it," suggests that perhaps it is no longer serving its purpose.

The other interesting language feature of this verse is in the way the list of festivals is formed.  As in English, Hebrew could simply say, "Her feasts, new moons, sabbaths, and festivals."  Instead, notice the difference:  "Her feasts, her new moons, her sabbaths, and all her festivals."  The scholar Hans Walter Wolff points this oddity out, and I can't say I'm fully convinced by it, but I do rather like the idea.  These religious observances are no longer about God.  They are all about Israel.

There are times in the past when Americans were accused of going to church just to be seen in their finest.  These days, we might say the opposite.  But if God's action in worship is to offer himself to us, perhaps we get in the habit of going to church simply because we think we should, or because we feel like it (and only when we feel like it), or because of what we get out of it.  Do we even care if God is present there?  Could we do away with it, and get our needs met elsewhere?

Whatever the case, it seems that Israel is celebrating its religious rituals out of habit.  And this is shown because of its devotion to other gods instead.  (Or, a good, God-fearing Israelite in this time might say, "also.")

A quick note about verse 14 first.  The desolation of grapevines and fig trees goes along with the rest of the oracle so far.  But it also gives us another poetic turn of phrase.  The word for prostitute's wages, 'etnah is very like the word for fig tree, te'enah.  If you don't really see it, pay attention to the consonants, and note that ' is a consonant in Hebrew.

    'TNH.

    T'NH.

Clever, eh?

There's some question about the identity of the Ba'als in verse 15.  On the one hand, Ba'al was the specific personal name of a specific deity in ancient Canaanite religion.  Ba'al was a god who appeared in the form of a bull.  He was king of the gods, and provided fertility to the earth in the form of his semen, which was what rain was understood to be.  He was also involved in an ongoing, cyclical cycle where the god of death, Mot, would devour him (presumably in the late autumn), and then his wife, Anath, would destroy Mot and release Ba'al (in the spring).  (Sometimes, I'm grateful for the somewhat simpler religion of modern Christianity.  We have our weirdnesses, but the struggle between different deities, or, you know, fertility-sperm, is noticeably lacking.)

The identity of Ba'al with a bull helps make some sense of a number of interesting details throughout the Old Testament.  For now, it's enough to notice that the form of the golden idol fashioned by Aaron and the Israelites while awaiting Moses' return from Mount Sinai was a calf.  "It just came out of the fire like this," Aaron claimed.  Some scholars also claim that the earrings tossed into the Exodus fire in the first place--which we also see here in verse 15--were part of the Ba'al fertility cult.

And yet, Hosea doesn't say Ba'al.  He says Ba'als.  The word ba'al in Hebrew means "master" or--sorry, ladies--"husband."  It's possible that Hosea is simply referring to all the other gods, the deities that the Israelites called "master."

A third possibility is that different geographical areas may have each had their own version of the Ba'al cult, or else their own "master" deity.  We certainly have recorded in scripture the names of different gods which are qualified by the name of a city:  Ba'al-Berith, Ba'al of Smaria, Ba'al of Carmel, Ba'al-Zebub, Ba'al-Pe'or, and so on.  In any case, it seems mostly impossible to reconstruct exactly what the Canaanite religious tradition became in eighth-century Israel.

What is most striking to me, is that last phrase.  "And as for me, she forgot me."  The "as for me" is completely unnecessary here, grammatically--or at the very least, it's in the wrong place.  Like in English, Hebrew follows the form Verb - Object.  In this verse, we get Object - Verb instead.  It places extra emphasis on the "me," distinguishing it from what has come before, and weighing this final phrase down heavily.  It's followed by the "saying of YHWH" which is common in most prophets as a way to indicate when the words belong to God himself, but which is very uncommon in Hosea (only four times in the whole book, and half of them are used atypically).  You can almost hear God's sadness in this final line.

The oracle will continue, but shift gears, in the verses ahead.  This is supposed to feel like an ending.  Where God began the oracle as an angry, jilted lover back in verse 4, we might see him now finally heartbroken, in tears.

Questions for Thought:

1) We used specific features of the language a lot in today's reading.  How does a peek into the Hebrew change the way you understand and experience scripture?  Or to put it another way, what do we lose when we read the Bible only in English (or even more, in only one English version)?  How might we make up for that lack if we don't know the original language?

2) What do you think about the purpose of worship?  How much of it is God-oriented?  How much of it is people-oriented?  Why do we do it, and does it matter what we do in it?

3) What is it like to think of God as sad, broken-hearted?  How is that different than thinking of God as angry, wrathful?  How is the picture more complete when we consider both?

4) These are the ending verses of an oracle describing Israel's infidelity and resulting punishment.  Is it still fair to call such a painful text "beautiful?"  How?