The Message of Hosea

Derek Kidner

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 1984
• ISBN:
  9780830883080
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

"Go and marry a prostitute." These are the first words God spoke to his prophet Hosea. Why would he ask this of one of his special spokesman? Because he wanted to teach Hosea, the nation of Israel and all of us today a lesson we will not forget, a lesson that is painful yet joyous.

Hosea's somber portrait of the human condition is our lesson in pain. All of us have played the harlot by forsaking God and his ways. The picture is not pretty but it's true. Yet Hosea clear illustration of God's love for us brings joy. While we are yet sinners, God comes to us and loves us.

Derek Kidner imaginatively takes us through the unfolding story of Hosea and his wife, Gomer explaining the basic message, pointing out the subtleties and encouraging readers to live lives worthy of the God who loves the loveless.

Part One: a parable from life
A DISTRACTED FAMILY
Hosea 1-3

It is the people you love who can hurt you most. One can almost trace the degree of potential pain along a scale – from the rebuff which you hardly notice from a stranger, to the rather upsetting clash you may have with a friend, right on to the stinging hurt of a jilting, the ache of a parent-child estrangement, or, most wounding of all, the betrayal of a marriage.

Nothing short of the last two of these could really have conveyed to Hosea or to us how deeply God cares about us. Even then, words alone might have failed to bring home the sharpness of it. It needed acting out, and in real life at that.

After the briefest of time-notes, in the opening verse, we are plunged straight into the story.

Introducing Hosea

1:1 The word of the Lord that came to Hosea the son of Beeri, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel.

So we make acquaintance with the prophet and his times. His name has suffered a little in its journey into English via Greek and Latin (where it is called Osee), for it should be Hoshea – the name also of the last king of Israel (2 Ki. 17:1), and the name originally borne by Joshua. Like Joshua/Jesus, it is derived from the verb ‘to save’.1

The kings who are named here span most of the 8th century BC, but they are outshone by the brilliant prophets of that time: Jonah, Amos and Hosea in (mainly) the north, and Micah and Isaiah in the south.2

It had been at first a time of growing affluence, thanks to the brief respite which these little kingdoms found themselves enjoying while their strongest neighbours happened, for once, to be preoccupied and weak. Damascus, their most recent scourge, had been crippled by Assyria in 802; and then Assyria itself, that grim Mesopotamian war-machine, had begun to falter under threats from without and disunity within.

But with Israel’s wealth had come increasing decadence; and then, halfway through the century, their world began to crumble. At home, the two strong kings, Jeroboam II of Israel and his contemporary, Uzziah of Judah, were at or near the end of their long reigns, while in the distance Assyria had roused itself to a new pitch of terrifying strength and militancy. It was soon to march on Palestine. Within a generation the kingdom of Israel would be extinct.

It was to this generation that Hosea was sent to preach repentance.

Hosea 1:2-9
An ominous beginning

1:2 When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, ‘Go, take to yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry, for the land commits great harlotry by forsaking the Lord.’ ^3aSo he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim . . .

A prophet’s call could be agonizing: he would know that almost anything might be asked of him. It would be hard, though, to find a more shattering first demand than was made of Hosea. The Jerusalem Bible (JB) gives it to us with almost the merciless brevity of the original: ‘Go, marry a whore, and get children with a whore, for the country itself has become nothing but a whore by abandoning Yahweh.’

This is strong talk. And as if throwing the word ‘whore’ at us three times in one sentence were not enough, the Hebrew has the root not a mere three times, but four.3

Was it meant literally?

On the face of it, yes: exactly as it reads. Possibly, though, it may foreshorten the picture, leaping ahead to what this woman would become, as God could see. (This way of taking it is not as arbitrary as it may look, since this is evidently how the children are mentioned. They were future, as the unfolding story shows, yet the command of verse 2 runs literally ‘take to yourself a wife of harlotry and children of harlotry’, as though the latter already existed.)

The harsher view, that Gomer was a whore already, seems to me the right one; but whichever view we take, we should not soften it by making her a cult-prostitute, merely deluded and misused; for the Hebrew has a word for this (4:14), and it is not the word used here.4 What Hosea had to do was, in miniature, what God had done in giving His love to a partner with a history and with a roving eye. Hosea was not to leave the matter there, any more than God would; but that belongs to a later part of the story, told in chapter 3.

Meanwhile, in this opening phase, it is the children who must capture our attention. What they are and what they are called will be the embodiment of God’s word to Israel and to us: each of them a living sign and portent.

The first portent: the boy Jezreel

1:3b And she conceived and bore him a son. ⁴And the Lord said to him, ‘Call his name 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. ⁵And on that day, I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.’

The three portents are a crescendo – first of judgment, but in the end a crescendo of grace to round off each of the first two chapters. Grace has a way of interrupting oracles of doom (like the ‘cheerfulness’ which ‘was always breaking in’ when Dr Johnson’s friend began philosophizing5); but for the moment there is no break in the clouds, and the darkness will get deeper with each successive birth.

Jezreel (yizr‘’el) might not seem to be a particularly ominous name. In its form it was the same type of name as Israel (yiśrā’ēl), and although it could yield a hidden meaning, to be brought out in 2:23 (see pp. 38f.), it would speak in the first place of a well-known town and valley of the northern kingdom. That town, though, had seen King Jehu’s bloodbath,6 and God is showing that He has not for a moment forgotten this. For a prophet to give his son such a name was like a politician naming his child Peterloo or Katyn or Soweto. And he would miss no opportunity of explaining it.

The explanation in verse 4, which foretells retribution on the house of Jehu, goes on to include the whole kingdom; and so in fact it came about. The house of Jehu fell in about 752 BC with King Zechariah’s murder (2 Ki. 15:8-12), and after thirty years of coups and counter-coups the kingdom was torn to pieces by Assyria, never to recover.

There is a paradox over Jehu. Here he is a man of blood, storing up disaster for his dynasty and realm; but in 2 Kings 10:30 he has ‘done well’ in carrying out against the house of Ahab ‘all that was in (God’s) heart’. The reason is not far to seek; it lies in Jehu himself, a standing example of a human scourge. As God’s executioner he left nothing undone, and it was in that capacity that he collected his reward: the promise of the throne to four generations of his sons. The Old Testament has several instances of this kind of servant, of whom Sennacherib, whom God calls ‘the rod of my anger’ (‘But he does not so intend, and his mind does not so think’, Is. 10:7), and Nebuchadnezzar ‘my servant’ (Je. 27:6) are prime examples. And they were paid their wages – paid in spoil and conquest, described in exactly these terms of ‘wages’ in Ezekiel 29:18-20; but paid also with the due requital of their pride and cruelty.7

So it was with Jehu – with the difference that he knew of his commission from the Lord. But there was no difference of spirit or method. The events of 2 Kings 10 are a welter of trickery, butchery and hypocrisy, in which the only trace of a religious motive is fanaticism – and even this is suspect in view of Jehu’s charade of sacrificing to Baal (2 Ki. 10:25). Self-interest and bloodlust were his dominant springs of conduct, and it was this that made ‘the blood of Jezreel’ an accusing stain.

If we ask why Israel, a hundred years later, should have to suffer for this, the later chapters of the book will reply that neither Israel nor her royal house ever repudiated this attitude to violence. Jezreel was only one episode of a continuous story,8 and God could be no party to it.

There is a double sting in the tail of this brief oracle. Usually when God promises to ‘break the bow’ of some fighting force, it means that He is coming to His people’s rescue. There is a notable example in 2:18, and another in Psalm 46:9. But here, pointedly, it is the bow of Israel that He will break. As a kingdom, it is no longer a force for God, if it ever has been. To keep it intact would be an unreality. The further sting of this final sentence is the great reversal it implies by the scene of the defeat. Jezreel, the valley of Gideon’s victory,9 had been a name once covered with glory. Now, since the massacres, it could only stand for savagery.

So it turned out. In 733, a decade before the death of the kingdom as a whole, an Assyrian army fought its way into this valley and lopped off the northern territories of Israel, marching their inhabitants off to Assyria. 2 Kings 15:29 lists among these conquests ‘Gilead, and Galilee’. God had broken the bow of Israel, and it lay defenceless.10

The second portent: the girl ‘Not-Pitied’

1:6 She conceived again and bore a daughter. And the Lord said to him, ‘Call her name Not pitied, for I will no more have pity on the house of Israel, to forgive them at all. ⁷But I will have pity on the house of Judah, and I will deliver them by the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Short Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• General preface
• Author’s preface
• Chief abbreviations
• To the reader . . .
• Part One: a parable from life A DISTRACTED FAMILY (Hosea 1-3)
• Part Two: the parable spelt out HOW CAN I GIVE YOU UP? (Hosea 4-14)
• Addenda
• Notes
• BST Old Testament series
• BST New Testament series
• BST Bible Themes series
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright