Chapter 8. Anticipated Judgment. The Eighth Century: Prophetism and Indictment (Part 3. Positive Judgment: Classical Prophetism) (Song of the Vineyard: The Old Testament) (Napier, B.D.)

There are elements in classical prophetism which are distinctly new. There is the new that is external: a new situation which emerges out of pragmatic history, out of the actual course of real events and which could not have been anticipated. It is a new epoch, which develops out of the wide range of possibilities determined by the past. And in eighth-century Israel it was a new epoch charged with tragedy.

There are, of course also the new internal elements, but the internal is inseparable from the external. The classical prophets now see Israel's historical existence, first brought into being out of Egypt, turning back again into that same essential abyss, chaos, and unendurable meaninglessness. For the prophets from Moses to Elijah and Elisha, Egypt lay in the past, however wide of Yahweh's mark Israel's performance might be. But now, Egypt, or what Egypt represented, lay in the future as well. Out of the Egyptian existence of formlessness and void Yahweh had created for Israel a life relatively formed and ordered; certainly in the popular mind this definition of existence continued to be valid and to provide meaning enough for historical consciousness, however strong the opposing judgment from core Yahwism, from prophetic Yahwism.

Here, of course, in Israel's core of Yahweh loyalists, the meaning of the present was not so superficially determined. The present was appraised and its meaning apprehended in terms of Yahweh's participation in Israel's past; and his ultimate purpose in the future. But until the eighth century the future could be seen in continuum with the present, holding in prospect essentially more of the same, or even, in the prophetic view, the restoration of Yahweh's lost order. Now prophetism envisages discontinuity between the present and the future, the catastrophic imposition from without of disorder and chaos, the abrupt and violent termination of Israel past and present.

The new aspects of external history and the related internal prophetic mind were initially produced in the middle of the eighth century simply by the aggressive ambition of Assyria backed, for the first time in several centuries, with the leadership and power to implement ambition. Tiglath-pileser III assumed the throne of Assyria in 745 B.C., "the first of an uninterrupted series of great soldiers on the throne of Assyria, who quickly brought the Neo-Assyrian Empire to the zenith of its power and created an empire in the ancient Orient which for the first time united almost the whole of the ancient Orient under Assyrian rule."¹Indeed, within a single decade of the accession of Tiglath-pileser all of the oriental world that he wanted was clearly either in fact or potentially his. By 721, when the Northern kingdom of Israel fell to Assyria, any hopes of political existence independent of Assyria entertained by smaller neighboring states were simply fatuous. From Tiglath-pileser's days (745-727), through the successive reigns of Shalmaneser V (727-722), Sargon II (to 705), Sennacherib (to 681), and Essarhaddon (to 669), Assyria's position of world domination was beyond serious challenge.

The succeeding reign of Asshurbanipal (669-632), unlike his predecessors a patron of the arts rather than of war, was the beginning of the undoing of Assyrian world rule. Assyria slowly succumbed to the vicious powers of the Chaldeans of Babylon, the Medes of the mountains of Iran, and the bands of Umman-manda (apparently Scythians) from the steppes of Russia; and the long death-agony of Assyria was finally ended in decisive battles of 612 and 610 B.C. But unhappily, Assyria's collapse provided only a brief respite for the barely surviving Israelite kingdom of Judah. For now Assyria's position in the world was appropriated by Neo-Babylonian power. The political center of the ancient Middle East was moved from Nineveh to Babylon. The sentence of political death was imposed on Judah in the first quarter of the sixth century. The cycle was complete. Israel became once more void and without form. She was once more swallowed up in the chaos of captivity. From uncreation to creation, she was now relegated again to the uncreated. The symbolic word of the eighth-century prophet Hosea (11:5) was fulfilled: "They shall return to the land of Egypt!"

Classical prophetism rises, then, first in the consciousness that Israel now stands between Egypts, that what she was she will be again. Heretofore in Israelite Yahwism the meaning of the present was taken primarily from the understanding and interpretation of the past (see Deut. 6:20 ff.; cf. 26:5-9). So it is in the old cultic credos:

We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt; and Yahweh brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand . . . that he might bring us in and give us the land which he swore to give to our fathers.

This confession of faith addresses the future, if at all, only implicitly, for the future is of a piece with the present. "Now" embraces tomorrow and tomorrow.² The appropriate response to the confessional knowledge of meaning in history is, of course, faithful participation in the Yahweh cultus. Such is the sense of Deuteronomy 6:24 (cf. 26:10, the similar conclusion of a variant of the same basic cultic confession):

And Yahweh commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear Yahweh our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as at this day.

Yahwism before the eighth century understood the past and the present chiefly in terms of Yahweh's positive action on behalf of Israel. If the future is addressed, it is in the confident expectation that it will be in predictable conformity with the past. One sees this in the preclassical prophets. Elijah, for example, believes this, even though he knows full well that Israel's unfaith has already reduced to disorder the order which Yahweh purposed in Israel. But the classical prophets, from Amos on, are forced to reinterpret the meaning of the present not only in terms of a heightened sense of Israel's failure to maintain Yahweh's true order in the present, but also in overwhelming awareness of an immediate future charged with tragedy. This imminent tragedy is deemed to be no less Yahweh's doing than the great formative event of redemption from Egypt, or political self-fulfillment under the David-Zion covenant. For the classical prophet the old two-member scheme, "out of Egypt, into this land," has become a three-member scheme - "out of Egypt, into this land, back to Egypt again."

Yahweh who redeemed the nation for his own purposes now finds those purposes thwarted by the unfaith and unrighteousness of Israel. Therefore, he will now commit the nation to its preredeerned status of chaos for the same essential purposes. Why? What lies beyond the second Egypt? Is there, in other words, a fourth member to be added to the three-member scheme. Above all, how does all this qualify the nature of existence under Yahweh in the present time?

These questions and their answers are the essence of classical prophetism. They are the context of Israelite prophetism in the eighth to the sixth centuries.3

The literary-critical problems are few and small. The book is substantially a unit. Some of the woes pronounced upon small neighboring states in chapters 1-2 have commonly been regarded as secondary, particularly the condemnation of Judah, 2:4-5. The superbly articulated doxologies of 4:13, 5:8-10, and 9:5-6 may be later editorial insertions. The ending of Amos, from 9: 8b, has often been regarded as an appendix on the grounds that it represents too radical a change of mood to be a part of the original unit. Now these may be good guesses, but it is important to recognize that this remains a guessing game. We do not even know how the writing first came into existence - whether by the prophet's own hand (unlikely) or at his dictation (possible); or, with greater possibility, from a circle of prophets-disciples among whom the words of Amos were first "recorded" in memory.

The contents of Amos may be surveyed in this fashion:

1-2 A series of oracular indictments (of Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab, Judah, and Israel) climaxed in the final oracle against Israel.

3-6 The condition of Israel's present unsatisfying, rebellious existence.

7 The three visions of locust, fire, and plumbline.

8-9 The vision of summer fruit; the pronouncement of Israel's final and irremediable doom; and (whether secondary or not) the proclamation of hope in Israel's future beyond the catastrophe of historical judgment.

One may interpret the astonishing phenomenon of classical Israelite prophetism in two ways. It emerges among the ancient Israelites, one may insist, as a kind of mechanical achievement wrought by the accidents of history. It is, as such, a product of Interaction between history and human genius. Now, it is a perennial problem in the life of faith that this remains a possible and credible explanation.

The prophets themselves would, of course, resoundingly repudiate this interpretation of prophetism. They would insist, as the Bible insists, as the life of faith continues to insist, that this epoch in Israelite history witnessed an intense series of divine-human encounters, initiated by God himself and effected by his Word. In this view the phrase, the Word of Yahweh, represents no courteous condescension to religion or piety, no innocent lie thoroughly conventionalized to mean in fact the word of man. It means the Word of God, initiated by God, irresistibly breaking into the life and work of men from Moses' time on and with peculiar, sustained potency in the classical prophets. In all of these we cannot fail to note - whatever else is the work of the Word - the sharp, specific references to the throbbing life of contemporary human history.

If King Ahab, more than a century earlier, had characterized Elijah in the phrase, "You troubler of Israel" (1 Kings 18:17), how much more fervently might Jeroboam II have thrown that epithet at Amos. Amos not only condemned the prostitution of Yahwism in Israel and unethical behavior in the king. He heartily damned the whole fabric of society; he repudiated with violence and contempt all of Israel's life and thought and practice, including even its worship of Yahweh (e.g., 5:21-23).

Although a native of the Southern kingdom from the little village of Tekoa, about seven miles southeast of Bethlehem, his one recorded public appearance was at Bethel, the official Southern sanctuary of the Northern kingdom. In appreciation of his efforts here, the local authorities cordially expelled him, with the firm invitation for the future to do his preaching at home - or anywhere but Bethel. "It is," said Amaziah, the presiding priest of Bethel, "the king's sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom" (7:13). Amos' only trouble - it is always the prophets' trouble - was his insistence that sanctuary, temple, and kingdom all are Yahweh's!

It would appear from this same exchange between Amaziah and Amos that the term prophet still commonly denoted a certain official status, or some professional affiliation with organized prophetism. We observe that thus far in Old Testament history, professional prophetism has been both of Yahweh and Baal. The professional prophetism of Yahweh appears neutral in quality as associated with Saul, "good" as associated with Obadiah (1 Kings 18:13; cf. 19:14) and Elisha, and on the whole "had" as associated with Ahab's court as we see the court prophets contrasted with one of their number, Micaiah (2 Kings 22).

Amos denies unequivocally any professional status (7:14): "I am not a prophet, and I am not a son of a prophet" (that is, I belong to no guild, no band, no association of prophets). It is, of course, possible to translate "was" rather than "am." The verb "to be" is commonly supplied in translation since it does not appear in Hebrew. Grammatically the imperfect may even be "equally possible" as some have insisted.⁴But in context it does not appear to be natural. Amos is denying, not necessarily in heat and certainly not necessarily in repudiation of the institution of prophetism, that he does not himself represent what Amaziah has just imputed to him. He has had no contact with the professional, associated prophets: "Yahweh took me from following the flock, and Yahweh said to me, 'Go, prophesy to my people Israel!'" (7:15). His action here at Bethel is inspired by this personal confrontation with Yahweh, not by any group apprehension. Not that institutional prophetism may not and does not have this valid, authentic apprehension; nor that Amos is unwilling to be cast in a prophetic role (3:3-8 indicates the contrary!), but simply and exclusively that neither the group phenomenon nor any other official connection happens to be his origin, as charged by Amaziah. Something new comes into the term prophet with Amos. Even Elijah is recognized from the beginning as fulfilling the role of prophet, man of God. Amos is freshly created and validated a prophet only and directly by the Word.

He speaks in passionate and apparently unrelieved condemnation. He excoriates the social structure and practice of the entire nation, in which increasingly during the reign of Jeroboam II wealth was extorted from the poor, in which deceit and dishonesty were the rule; in which great masses of the poor, the dispossessed, the powerless were crushed under the weight of an easy discrimination, a rank and complacent injustice.

He damns the religious structure in which the fervent hymns of praise and the devout symbols of dedication were matched by a fervent immorality and a devout pursuit of vanity; in which Yahwism was enthusiastically endorsed at the sanctuaries but - as Amos saw the Yahweh faith - blatantly violated in business, domestic, and personal relationships. Yahweh was acknowledged with the lips, but denied in the total performance of Israel's life.

We first learn from Amos of the popularly expected Day of Yahweh. Nothing more brilliantly illustrates the polar disparity between prophetic and popular expectations for the future. Amos declares Israel's certain doom. The jig is up. Time and Yahweh's patience have run out. What Israel calls and anticipates as the Day of Yahweh is imminent, but let no one be so foolish as to long for the Day's coming. It will be darkness and not light. It will be gloom, with no brightness at all (5:18-20).

Israel has brought upon herself the sentence of death which Amos proclaims with bitter fury and passion. He is at pains to let Israel know the magnitude of her rejection of role as Yahweh's people. We read, then, with wonder and appreciation. Here is an incomparably intimate, partisan interpretation of the life of a little Near Eastern state in the second quarter of the eighth century, the words of Amos, who was among the shepherds of Tekoa, which he saw concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah king of Judah and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel. . . (1:1)

The Positive in Amos

It would be woefully wrong to interpret Amos as an exponent of moral law. Israel's doom is for Amos no mechanical, impersonal, and automatically invoked judgment. For Amos, as for all prophetism, justice and righteousness (5:24) are not abstractions or in any sense absolutes. They have no independent meaning. These are terms which have meaning only in specific, familiar relationships, and the particular meaning is determined by the particular relationship. When Amos cries, "Let justice roll along [RSV, roll down] like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream!" (5:24), he means specifically justice and righteousness in the Yahweh-Israel relationship, the justice and righteousness in human relationships which honor Yahweh, by which the life of Yahweh's people is fulfilled, and in adherence to which Yahweh's purposes in Israel may be consummated. Morality and ethics subsist only in theology. Justice and righteousness in prophetism are derivatives of faith. Israel's violation is not of principles but of persons, and ultimately the person of Yahweh. The judgment is not a result of the automatic action of some mechanism built into the moral structure of things, but comes directly and personally from Yahweh himself, whose life and power are thus apprehended primarily in history.

Now, if this is true, it is also wrong to read Amos as a prophet of unqualified, unrelieved negation. Contingency and hope are here. The fierce indictment and the proclamation of cataclysmic judgment are predicated on Israel's persistent repudiation of Yahweh, and are implicitly contingent upon her refusal to turn back again. But Amos knows Yahweh's love and patience (see 4:6-11, with the essentially tender refrain, "Yet you did not return to me"; but especially 7:2,5); and when he speaks the apparently immutable sentence of death upon Israel (4:12; 7:9; 9: l-8a) it is surely motivated (as the articulation of despair is of necessity always motivated) by hope, indomitable hope, that the pronouncement of judgment will effect decisive change in the conditions which invoked the judgment.

The quality of contingency in prophetism is more marked in other prophets, but it is implicit in Amos; and no prophet, not even Amos, can be interpreted as holding Yahweh's judgment upon Israel as the last word. The ending of the book of Amos may be secondary (although this proposition is by no means unassailable), but it remains in a profound sense authentic. The man Amos, the prophet Amos, could not have spoken with such passion on behalf of Yahweh except in the faith that the very historical judgment which he proclaimed was itself ultimately positive and redemptive in divine purpose. If Amos had deemed Israel's sentence of execution to be the end, he would never have spoken at all!

Hosea: The Time and the Book

Hosea's role of prophet is played out some ten to twenty-five years after Amos. From a number of allusions in the text of Hosea, it appears rather certain that the prophet's career began after the reign of Jeroboam 11(786-746) and probably after 740 (despite the reference to Jeroboam in 1:1). Since there is no mention of the fall of Damascus to Assyria in 732, it is possible that his active career ended prior to that date. It is certain that it did not extend beyond the fall of Samaria in 721.

The last generation of the Northern kingdom, to which Hosea belonged, was a period of hectic, brutal confusion. Jeroboam II's reign may have been superficially brilliant but it apparently lacked any fundamental, enduring strength. His son, Zechariah, after a very brief reign (746-745), was assassinated by Shallum, who was himself rather promptly dispatched by Menahem. Menahem (745-738) bought an uneasy security from Assyria in the last year of his reign with the payment of a handsome tribute to Tiglath-pileser, whose annals declare:

As for Menahem I overwhelmed him like a snowstorm and he. . . fled like a bird, alone, and bowed to my feet [?]. I returned him to his place and imposed tribute upon him, to wit: gold, silver, linen garments with multicolored trimmings, . . . great . . . I received from him. Israel [the text reads literally, "Omri-Land," testifying to the power of that reign a century and a half earlier]. . . all its inhabitants and their possessions I led to Assyria. They overthrew their king Pekah and I placed Hoshea as king over them.⁵

Menahem's son, Pekahiah, not mentioned in the Assyrian record, reigned for a couple of years (738-732), to meet a violent end at another assassin's hands, Pekah, who led an anti-Assyrian party in Israel. Pekah (737-732) was rejected by his own people following a pathetic attempt to stop a westward Assyrian advance, and was murdered by Hoshea (2 Kings 15:30), who reigned as a vassal of Assyria. Hoshea (732-724) subsequently revolted and was executed by the Assyrian monarch, Shalmaneser V (727-722). Samaria was besieged for three years, and fell to Shalmaneser's successor, Sargon II, in 721.

The Hebrew text of Hosea is as difficult and confused as the epoch in which it originated. One hesitates to propose anything as definite as an "outline." The present structure does appear to fall into the two divisions:

1-3 The theme, throughout apparent, is Hosea's anguished relationship to Gomer and the tightly analogous relationship of Yahweh and Israel.

4-14 There is nothing here to give form or provide unity. The character of the section is, however, typically prophetic: the broad range of the types of prophetic utterance is embraced, from indictment and judgment to some of the most tender expressions of the compassion in which Yahweh holds Israel.

The more severe textual critics have reduced Hosea largely to a name under which a broad assortment of prophetic oracles from widely varied sources and times has been collected. Preponderant critical opinion has been much more conservative and withholds from Hosea (or the immediate Hosea-circle of prophetism) chiefly two kinds of material (and not all examples of these two kinds): (1) the utterance which favorably contrasts Judah with condemned Israel (e.g., 1:7), and (2) the prediction of an unqualified bright future, usually falling at the end of an oracle of doom. For the rest, the substantial eighth-century figure of the prophet Hosea is directly or indirectly responsible. This is for the most part "the Word of Yahweh that came to Hosea the son of Beeri" (1:1) in the years shortly before the fall of Samaria and the extinction of the political entity of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

The Major Problems of Hosea 1-3

Two problems promise to remain problems and may well be ultimately insoluble. One is the relationship between chapters 1 and 3. The other, not unrelated, has to do with the interpretation of the personality of Hosea.

According to chapter 1, in which Hosea appears in the third person, the prophet is commanded by Yahweh to marry a prostitute and to accept offspring of this union whose paternal status must in fact remain in doubt. This Hosea does; and to the three children now born to Gomer he gives symbolic names, making them living oracles of indictment in the community:

Jezreel - for yet a little while, and I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel (1:4; cf. 2 Kings 9-10)

Lo'-Ruhamah ( Not Pitied ) - for I will no more have pity on the house of Israel, to forgive them at all. (1:6)

Lo'-'Ammi ( Not My People ) - for you are not my people and I am not your God

(1:9, with the Septuagint and the RSV.) Chapter 3 is a narrative in the first person: the prophet is himself the narrator. The Yahweh Word to the prophet is essentially the same: "Go again [a great deal hangs on this word: is it original or secondary?]; love a woman who is beloved of a paramour [anyone who loves or is loved illicitly] and is an adulteress - even as Yahweh loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins [denoting idolatrous rites] ."

The first problem, then, concerns the relationship between the two accounts. There are three possible answers:

1. Since chapter 1 is an account in the third person, and chapter 3 in the first person, the two accounts are parallel - descriptions in different terms of the same thing. The word "again" in 3:1 is an editorial insertion.

2. Chapter 3 preserves Hosea's own view of the matter preceding the actual marriage which is narrated in chapter 1.

3. Chapter 3 is a sequel to chapter 1. It is the same woman in both chapters. After the birth of the children in chapter 1, Gomer leaves Hosea; and he, later, buys her back, he redeems her from the life of prostitution to which she has returned.

The second problem arises out of the repeated statement that Hosea knowingly married a prostitute (1:2 and 3:1). For one whose moral constitution was as acutely sensitive as Hosea's, no undertaking could be more bitter. If in fact, then, Hosea married Gomer in the full knowledge of her previous professional standing either as an independent prostitute or as a sacred prostitute attached to one of the still-flourishing fertility cults (see for example Hosea 4:14), several interpretations are proposed:

1. Some, intrigued with the (dubious) game of fitting ancient figures into compartments of modern psychoanalysis, would see Hosea's act as symptomatic of a profound sickness. Hosea is a masochist: he takes upon himself the fullest possible measure of abuse in committing himself to sexual partnership with a confirmed whore.

This is masochism in its original sense. The term has come into common use for that personality sickness in which one derives perverted pleasure from the endurance of pain. The term originally derives, however, from the title of an Austrian Novel, Masoch, written in the nineteenth century by von Sacher, and describing in detail the case of one whose abnormal sexual appetite and passion find satisfaction in exquisite abuse by his partner.

It is unnecessary to say that this view of a severely psychotic prophet has little to recommend it.

2. Others give a high religious interpretation to the reported fact of Hosea's foreknowledge of Gomer's unchaste status. This act - of all acts most repugnant to him - is one of supreme surrender to divine will. In this view, Hosea conforms to the not uncommon figure in the history of religions of the flagellant who, as a (perverted) act of service to or contrition before the deity, heaps abuse upon himself. But this strictly "hair-shirt" explanation of Hosea is only a variant of, and no more satisfying than, the interpretation of masochism.

3. The simplest view - on the assumption still that Hosea did know the qualities of Gomer before their marriage - is that he loved her; that he believed this marriage to be according to the Word of Yahweh; and that he hoped, at least, that his love, like Yahweh's love for Israel, would ultimately bring a satisfying response and a fulfilled relationship.

It may be, of course, in spite of the statement of 1:2 ( Yahweh said to Hosea, 'Go, take to yourself a wife of harlotry' ), that Hosea did not in fact knowingly marry a prostitute. Someone has suggested that the implication of "And the Lord said to Hosea" is simply that looking back on his life, Hosea realized that God had enabled him to turn his sorrow to the service of truth, and therefore he could feel that the good hand of God had been with him from the start, despite the personal tragedy for Gomer and for him.⁶

On any view of either problem, the central facts are unaltered. Whatever the relationship between chapters 1 and 3, and whatever the interpretation of Hosea's personality, the prophet was in marriage covenant with an unfaithful woman; and in his own anguish and love for his wife, he believed Yahweh had revealed the nature of the relationship between Yahweh and unfaithful Israel, the specific character of the divine compassion, and the precise quality of Israel's violation of covenant.

Hosea-Gomer: Yahweh-Israel

Is it possible that Hosea is fictional allegory? This suggestion has appeared with some persistence in modern interpretations of the book. It seems unlikely on a number of counts, and especially in view of the authentic appeal and the emotional intensity of the central analogy that as Gomer is to Hosea, so Israel is to Yahweh. In 2:2-7, for example, it is improbable, to say the least, that we are reading a theoretical, fictionalized allegory. In this brief section, and in others, the mingled fury, anguish, love, and hope tend to confirm the dual historical, existential reference - Israel and Gomer. In prophetic faith, this is revelation, this is Yahweh's self-disclosure, with double intensity. He makes himself known in the most intimate and bitter relationship of Hosea's private life, in the prophet's personal history; and Hosea, recipient of the Word of Yahweh, is called to be the interpreter of that segment of history in which he is himself the center. His own agony is the key to the meaning of that history.

The intensity of the castigation in 2: 2-5a (cf. 9:10-17) is derived from the same dual historical reference. So, too, is derived the pathos in the portrayal of a lack of knowledge in 2: 5b and 8. >From the same double reference comes the tender hope of a voluntary return in 2:7.

As Gomer is to Hosea, so Israel is to Yahweh. The wife is unfaithful. The husband's love is rejected. The marriage covenant is shattered. The most common Hebrew term for the sex act in marriage is the verb "to know." The phrase occurs again and again in the Old Testament: "and so-and-so knew his wife, and she conceived and bore . . ." The book of Hosea repeatedly sets the appropriate Yahweh-Israel relationship in terms of "knowledge" or "knowing" and of course this conveys implicitly far more than the narrow analogue of contractual obligation. The knowledge of Yahweh embraces also the cognizance that in Israel and Israel's world there is no other; that in her history and the broad history which she shares, Yahweh rules (see 13:4 f.). But in the context of Hosea we cannot escape the inference of the intimate and the particular. The lament that there is no knowledge of God in the land (4:1,6) and the plea for the restoration of that knowledge (6:6; cf. 2:20; 6:3; 8:2) imply so strong a relationship between Israel and Yahweh that the profound effect of its violation can be conveyed only by comparing it to the violation of the marital relationship when a wife wantonly offers a husband's sexual prerogatives to other men (10:11). Incidentally, in all of this Hosea merits a standing ovation for his unqualified assertion of a single standard in sex morality (4:14).

As Hosea is to Gomer, so Yahweh is to Israel. "How can I give you up, O Ephraim!" cries Yahweh (11:8), whose love and compassion are made known in one who has himself cried, night after lonely night, "How can I give you up, O Gomer!" Hosea knows that the unfaithfulness of the covenant partner invokes wrath, discipline, judgment; and that as Gomer must suffer, so also must Israel (see, e.g., 2:10-14; 4:9-10; 7:11-13; 9: 3,10-17; 11:5; 13:16). But Hosea also knows that unfaithfulness, even at its most lewd and shameless, does not stop the flow of love or assuage the anguish of woefully injured affection. His hopes and purposes for his life with Gomer, as Yahweh's with Israel, cannot be permanently frustrated. Compassion is of stronger, more enduring stuff than wrath. Discipline becomes only the necessity by which the relationship may be restored and redeemed.

These comments touch but lightly on this rich product of classical prophetism. Read Hosea again - and again. The theme of impending catastrophe is sounded no less forthrightly than in Amos. But the dominant theme is Yahweh's compassion for Israel and Yahweh's unimpedable purpose to produce out of Israel his own people in a fulfilled covenant relationship.

In that day, says Yahweh.
I will sow him [i.e., Jezreel: this is a play on the name] for myself in the land.
And I will have pity on Not-Pitied
And I will say to Not-My-People, "You are my people!"
And he shall say, "You are my God." (2:21-23)