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?

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!