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!