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.

Gomer and Hosea

Last week was a good time to take a little break.  We're starting a new big section today.  Here's the next two verses of Hosea 2:

4. Accuse your mother!  Accuse [her]!
    For she is not my wife,
    And I am not her hubsand.
Let her turn her promiscuity away from her face
    And her adultery from between her breasts.
5. Or else I will strip her naked
    And I will make her as on the day of her birth.
And I will set her as in the desert,
    And I will make her like a land of drought,
    And I will kill her with thirst.

Learning Curve

People are slowly catching up this week, which means we're slowly seeing comments appear on old posts.  If you're interested, peek back at a few.  At the bottom of each entry on the main page, you can see how many comments exist for each post, and even jump straight to them.  You can post comments of your own, too; if you don't have (or want to use) one of the accounts suggested, you can choose Name/URL from the drop down list, and just leave URL blank.

In addition his thoughts on a few of our posts, Mark adds this general question:  

Hosea is proving to be complicated.  There's a lot of new stuff to learn to understand the meaning.  It reminds me of Revelation.  Is it intrinsic in Old Testament study that the context and history are so much more involved than the New Testament?  Or is this just a difference in the way we approach them?

It's a good question, so I thought we'd look at that today.  And like Hosea itself, the answer is complicated.

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.

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.

More Children

Running a little late this week! But here's our next lesson, starting with a reminder of verse 3.

3. And she [Gomer] conceived and she gave birth to a son for him [Hosea].
And YHWH said to him, call his name, "Jezreel..."

6. She conceived again, and she gave birth to a daughter.
And he said to him, call her name "Lo-Ruchamah,"
For I will not continue to love the house of Israel anymore, and I surely will not forgive... 

8. And she weaned Lo-Ruchamah,
And she conceived again, and she gave birth to a son.
And he said, call his name "Lo-Ammi,"
For you are not my people, and I am not your God.

We're jumping a bit in this first chapter of Hosea, but the reason is that we want to compare the naming of all three children of Hosea. Their conception and naming is the first of the prophetic work of the prophet Hosea.

Jezreel

Today we continue on from where we left off last week--the middle of verse 1:3:

And she [Gomer] conceived and she gave birth to a son for him [Hosea]. And YHWH said to him, call his name, "Jezreel," for soon I will avenge the blood of Jezreel against the house of Jehu, and I will cause the kingdom of the house of Israel to end. And it will be on that day that I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.

My thoughts last week ended with wondering what it was that Gomer felt about her God-instructed marriage to this prophet. Here, the specifics of Hebrew grammar make this first birth of a son "for him," for Hosea, not for herself, another sign of the writing's place in a patriarchal society. That little "for him" could have been left off, but the author of these verses keeps our focus trained on Hosea and the message he has to deliver. In our minds today, we can acknowledge that, but we need to take a moment to at least recognized that this prophet's message is being articulated through people. What must it mean to Gomer, to their son, Jezreel, and perhaps even to Hosea himself to be treated not like people with all their complexity, but merely as the symbols by which this prophecy is spoken? Or perhaps--though I admit to being less comfortable with this possibility--what a privilege it might be to serve as God's mouthpiece in this way?