Hosea: Grace Abounding

By H. D. Beeby

Centering on the "knowledge of God" and the ultimate painful, paradoxical triumph of God's grace, the book of Hosea is one of ambivalence and redemption. The redemptive message of Hosea is underscored by H. D. Beeby's canonical and Christological interpretation. Beeby stresses that the true context of the book is much wider than the eighth century B.C.; Hosea must continually be heard against the background of and in response to the reader's own time. This commentary makes Hosea's message available today to all who struggle with questions of gospel and culture, contextualization, idolatry, church and state, and interfaith dialogue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Oct 31, 1989
• ISBN: 9781467468473

H. D. Beeby

H. D. Beeby was for many years Professor of Old Testament at Tainan Theological College in Taiwan and, more recently, Lecturer in Old Testament Studies at Selly Oak Colleges in England. 

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INTRODUCTION

One function of an introduction to a prophetic book is to place it in its historical background. For a book like Hosea, this usually means a total concentration on the 8th cent. B.C., as the prophet Hosea belongs to that century. While not quarreling with an 8th cent. date for Hosea or with the provision—to a degree—of this type of context, it is essential to point out that the book of Hosea as we have it cannot and should not be read only in the context of northern Israel in the 8th cent. B.C. Its true context is much wider.

The words of Hosea were heard in Judah a generation after they were uttered in Galilee, and were there modified to meet Judah’s needs at that time. Succeeding generations continued to hear things from his words which only their particular contexts could call forth. So the book which the Jewish community and later the Church has bequeathed to us is one which was preserved, not only for what it said in the context of the 8th cent., but even more for what it said against the background of, for example, the 2nd cent. B.C. and the 4th cent. A.D., the dates when it passed into the canons of the Jewish and Christian Bibles. Yet even these are not the most significant contexts; the book would be a dead word of a dead God if they were. The living word of the living God in the book of Hosea must finally be heard against the background of, and in response to the needs of, the reader’s own time.

HOSEA’S TIME

Hosea was active in the third quarter of the 8th cent. B.C. When he began to prophesy, Jeroboam II (786–746) was still on the throne. When he ceased, the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel was imminent. His career, therefore, stretched from times of prosperity and comparative stability through to the instability of toppling dynasties, social unrest, warfare, vacillating leadership, and partial subjugation to humiliation and the shadow of final disaster. All this is reflected in the contents of the book, arranged roughly in chronological order. The political background of Hosea’s day will be dealt with in the body of the Commentary; the religious situation merits some mention in the Introduction.

Beginning with Gen. 12:6 and especially in the book of Judges, the biblical authors leave us in no doubt that the Canaanites were still in the land. And with the Canaanites there remained the Canaanite religion. This was both a parallel religion with its own cult and also a strong influence on the Yahweh cult, which to a very great extent had suffered from a wrong kind of indigenization. Hosea’s main attack was directed towards this disastrous syncretistic mixture which threatened to distort and possibly engulf the faith once delivered to Moses.

The Canaanite religion was based on nature myths which laid great stress on fertility and little if any on morality. The resulting cult was a technique for ensuring that everything that could be fruitful and multiply did so with the least difficulty and the greatest dispatch. This religion was for the Canaanites (and for most of the Israelites) what scientific humanism and technology are for people of the 20th century: essential to the means of production and for ensuring regular increase in the Gross National Product.

Instead of one God the Canaanites had more like seventy gods. Once El had been the supreme deity, but a celestial palace revolution had replaced El by Baal, and for Hosea Baal symbolized all that was erroneous and corrupt. Most likely the word ba‘al originally meant the one who fructifies—the one capable of making the other fertile. The husband, the bull, and perhaps the rain were therefore ba‘als. The power to fructify carried with it authority, and therefore the word had come to mean the one with authority, or lord or master. Myths about fertility, used to foster fertility, inevitably engendered cultic techniques which gave prominence to sexual acts designed to operate with the powers of imitative magic. Male and female prostitutes thronged the shrines, making sanctuaries indistinguishable from brothels and holiness indistinguishable from harlotry. The faith of Hosea’s fathers had become so debased that in almost every respect it was now the opposite of the great original. So Hosea is called to state the case for the prosecution and eventually to ascend the bench and don the black cap.

HOSEA HIMSELF

We roughly know Hosea’s dates; we are told his father’s name, that he married and had three children, and that his accent (like Peter’s) tells us he is a northerner. Beyond this we rely only on guesswork based upon the material in Hosea’s own preaching; and as this comes to us through the most confused Hebrew text in the OT, the guessing can be hazardous. The prophet’s use of imagery and metaphor have prompted some to compare him with Jesus. The names Hosea and Jesus come from the same Hebrew root. Hosea’s birthplace cannot have been too far from Nazareth; perhaps lyrical imagery flourished in the fair hills of Galilee so that they were but two of a long line of lakeland poets. Hosea was knowledgeable about the tradition of his people and about contemporary history as well. This however does not make him a scholar by profession; the profusion of kitchen metaphors in his book may even point to his having been a cook or baker.

The details of Hosea’s family life are unlikely to be imaginary, but they are given to us as a series of events brought about by God’s commands as a means of manifesting God’s wishes and making the Word of God visible and tangible as well as audible. Biographical or autobiographical details are noticeably absent. Hosea the man is suppressed to clear the stage for Hosea the prophet of Yahweh.

CLUES TO BE FOLLOWED IN THE COMMENTARY

Other clues to Hosea and his prophecy will follow in the Commentary itself. The following points have guided the writer and no doubt will help the reader.

1. Borrowing from the Enemy

Hosea is called to battle against polytheism, sexuality in heavenly places, and debauchery on earth. To the Israelites the idea of Yahweh having a consort was so unthinkable that their language did not even possess a word for goddess. Yet onto this bordello battlefield was propelled no virgin knight in shining armor but a man whom God had married off to a prostitute. And what is even more astounding is that his banner bore the strange device, God has a wife. In the boldest example of cultural borrowing in the OT, Hosea turned the weapons of the enemy against the enemy host. Divine marriage and fertility symbolism were baptized into a crusade against Canaanite religion which was based upon the symbolism of divine marriage and fertility. If Hosea had known the expressions set a thief to catch a thief or a hair of the dog that bit you, he might well have quoted them!

2. Recapitulation of Basic Themes

The Western mind likes its literature to move in steady progression from beginning to middle to end. The logical argument and its historical development are its main tests of unity. Other cultures have other ways of thinking and therefore other ways of writing. Not surprisingly, their sense of unity manifests itself in a variety of ways. The unity of the book of Hosea consists of several contributory unities, one of them satisfying Western norms by beginning with the marriage (or the election of Israel at Sinai) and concluding with the salvation of Israel in the future; the others, however, are less obvious, while two of them merit special mention.

The first of these patterns is that of recapitulation. Hosea has one basic sermon or set of themes, and these themes appear and reappear throughout the book; the book as a whole has thus been fashioned to make its overall structure conform to these same themes. The clearest statement of the themes is to be found in Hos. 11—a good place to begin the study of the book. There in outline is the word of the LORD which came to Hosea. God chose Israel and showered her with grace abounding. Israel’s response was rebellion and more sin. This drew from God the just condemnation and the punishment that such rebellion deserves. Unable to learn from her history, Israel is destined to repeat it; she must go back into bondage. But God is God and therefore gracious. God’s last word is a word of compassion and restoration. The God who reigns is the God who saves. This basic scheme is never far from us; the numerous recapitulations of it will be pointed to in the Commentary.

3. Recapitulation of Experience

In outlining the basic themes, according to Hos. 11, mention has been made of Israel’s history repeating itself. Israel will have to go back to Egypt; there, in another land of bondage, she must repeat the experience of oppression and suffering. However, as the previous bondage was but a preface to exodus and liberation, so the coming exile will lead into salvation. It would therefore appear that the literary recapitulation referred to above was in some sense a reflection of a pattern in God’s working. The recurrence of the bondage/exodus theme (death/life, Cross/Resurrection) in Israel’s history is emphasized by its having a counterpart in the way the themes reoccur in the written record.

4. The Art Gallery

We are not done with recapitulation. At point 2 above we have seen how the basic themes frequently reappear almost totally. The skeleton remains unchanged even if the accompanying flesh and dress alter. In other words, there is recapitulation of the whole story of Israel’s rise and fall and rise again, with variations in detail, but on the whole there is not too much detail in these passages. But then there are passages showing considerable detail, especially where the sins and punishment of Israel are described. Stealing a suggestion from Professor G. B. Caird in his commentary on Revelation, I would suggest that another view of the unity of Hosea is clarified and reinforced if we compare the book with the room in an art gallery in which we are shown panoramas of the same scene from different viewpoints. These are interspersed with other paintings which give us close-ups of some of the detail that of necessity is lacking in the broad canvas. Thus Hos. 11 is a panorama of Hosea’s whole message, whereas 6:1–10 and 7:1–7 are detailed paintings which enlarge upon the nature of Israel’s sins more briefly delineated in ch. 11:2.

5. The Integrity of Hosea

It is right to remember that the OT is not the NT, and that its individual books must not be read in any facile way as though they recorded postresurrection events. Although both Testaments equally belong to the Bible of the Christian Church, the OT centers round the old covenant, and except in latent and prophetic forms does not contain the new covenant. Does this then preclude a Christian interpretation of Hosea? And would such an interpretation deny the integrity of the OT? We are faced with a paradox. The OT is Christian Scripture by confession from the earliest times—in fact it was the only Scripture of the earliest Christians—and yet it is plainly pre-Christian.

The position taken in the following pages is that a Christian interpretation is not only legitimate, it is essential if we are to interpret Hosea as Christian Scripture in a Christian fashion. As the Christian sees it, it is Christ who integrates the OT. He is its integrity, and without him it disintegrates into types of ancient Semitic literature. But this biblical paradox is not unique. Other writings, even nonbiblical ones, possess an integrity dependent on something outside themselves. An historical work can claim integrity partly on the basis that it points back faithfully to events in the distant past and accords with them; or a forecast or prophecy may find integrity not in itself but in future events towards which it leans and from which it takes its meaning. With this understanding we shall not compromise this integrity of the book of Hosea by illuminating it at times with the Light of the World which lightens every person and lightens especially his servants the prophets in the OT.

A CANONICAL WORK

My approach to the text and to the various pericopes within the book can be described by a phrase of Paul Ricoeur’s—the second naiveté. Not unaware of the techniques and priorities of the historical-critical approach, indeed in some ways building upon them, I nevertheless prefer other means and other criteria. There is the feeling, perhaps not wholly justified, that by using other criteria one has come out at the other side but all the wiser for having passed through.

Much of what I mean by the second naiveté is also covered by the word canonical. Here I am using it to refer not so much to the process of canonization as to the end product of that process: the Scripture as we now have it, with the imprimatur of the Church (and the Holy Spirit?) upon it. This, of course, is not to deny the historical approach to the Scriptures; it is merely to give priority to a different period in that Scripture’s history. Rather than absolutize some period in the distant past because it gave us the original deposit and then use the modern critical apparatus along with our imagination to isolate what belongs to that period, is it not more historical and certainly less hazardous to opt for the period when Israel (and later on the Church) said: This, as it is, is the Word of God? Of course the text of Hosea is not all original (whatever that term means), for it has grown and developed and been added to and reinterpreted. Yet we should ask ourselves whether the sperm or the fetus is of more value than the baby or the grown person, because these can lay claim to originality.

One commentator on the book rejects some parts of it on the grounds of unity and elegance and removes the Judah references because they are clearly a later addition. Does he know, however, just how Hosea or the editor viewed unity or elegance? And if he does (which I very much doubt), is he certain that those concepts entered much into the thinking of the editor when he was compiling a book about death and life? This commentary therefore will make no claim to deal with the authentic parts and expunge the inauthentic parts of Hosea. Moreover, it will take very seriously the Judah references, because if our eighth-century Hosea was indeed still speaking to seventh-, sixth-, and fifth century Judah, then there is even greater warrant for believing that he is speaking to us today. And that is what counts.

SECTION I

SETTING THE STAGE

CHAPTER ONE

Hosea 1:1–2:1

1:1 We are told the name of Hosea’s father but nothing more about his background. Was the latter unknown, or did the author consider it unimportant? Perhaps the latter. The book is so dominated by the first words, The word of the LORD, that the specific historical context is passed over rather lightly. The word of the LORD comes to Hosea in time, in history, but it is timeless in its application (it endures forever). It is a word for all seasons and for all sorts and conditions of people. Moreover, the verb and preposition hayah el (become to) imply a movement, in this case, from God to mankind. Thus the book begins in a way which is typical of the OT as a whole. At its center is the coming of God through his word. This word inevitably comes in history because its hearers themselves live in history. It is therefore historical, but it is historical in its own way, not in ours. Such matters as date, precise context and descriptive details are secondary to the fact of God’s coming and to the effect of that intervention not only in its own day but in succeeding generations, as the word spoken continued to claim Israel’s obedience and to maintain the covenant relationship.

The word came to Hosea and appropriated him and all that he said and did. His history, like Israel’s, was a history created by the word of God. He was the opposite of a self-made man. Consequently, this history which was fashioned by the word of God now becomes an expression of that word; the word that came to him is now writ large in Hosea’s own (hi)story. In a frail and minor way the word became flesh and dwelt among us in the domestic tragedy of Hosea and Gomer. Thus the word of v. 1 is not just the cause of what follows, to be identified with certain authentic oracles or the ipsissima verba of Hosea. Rather, it is both cause and effect thereof. All that flowed from the word which came to Hosea is now taken up into that word, and becomes part of it. The word is now not just the word of command but also the response to that command. The word, in other words, is the entire fourteen chapters we are about to study.

Four Judean kings—Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah—are listed, compared with only one king of Israel: Jeroboam II. What is more, these Judean kings are listed first, despite the fact that Hosea prophesied in the north, and despite the almost certainty that their names were added at a later date than Jeroboam’s. The simplest explanation accords with some of what has just been said. The prophecies of Hosea were not limited to his own time, to that of Israel in the time of Jeroboam II and his immediate but unnamed successors. They were more than a tract for the times. They had enduring value, and this is emphasized by the mention of the Judean kings. That then is why they are given priority. Hosea, prophet to the north, in later generations was read in the south, perhaps with greater attention and respect than he ever received in the north, for Judah carefully preserved this foreigner’s teaching as the word of God for their own day.

Much later again, the Church heard the book of Hosea as the word of God and added its own seal to the earlier stamp of canonization accorded by the rabbis. Consequently in our task now of trying to hear what the book of Hosea is saying to the present day, we find encouragement in our search from this very first verse.

THE IMITATION OF GOD: THE GREAT THEME STATED (1:2–2:1)

Some commentaries on Hosea separate this section into 1:2–9 and 1:10–2:1 on the grounds that these were supposedly separate oracles. Further, some translations of Hosea not only distinguish the two oracles but remove 1:10–2:1 from its present setting and relocate it after 3:5. That they were originally separate oracles I do not dispute; neither do I deny that rearranging the text makes good sense. The question, however, is whether separating the oracles makes the best sense in this kind of commentary. I prefer to retain the existing order and treat 1:2–2:1 as a unity. The reasons are hinted at in the heading of this section as well as in the Introduction, but more argument is necessary. In the Introduction reference is made to the recapitulation of central themes throughout the book, and also special mention is made of ch. 11, which can be taken as the classic statement of these themes. Indeed, B. Davie Napier (Prophet, Prophetism, IDB 3:896–919) understands ch. 11 not only as central to Hosea but as expressing the content of faith of classical prophetism. For Napier five themes can be identified here: ‘Out of Egypt I called my son’: Election and Covenant; ‘They went from me’: Rebellion; ‘They shall return to Egypt’: Judgment; ‘How can I give you up?’: Compassion; ‘I will return them to their homes’: Redemption. James M. Ward speaks of the pattern that dominates the Book of Hosea (Hosea: A Theological Commentary, p. 27), though he understands it somewhat differently.

The pattern, no matter how one defines it, is not a new one. Nor is it unique to Hosea, though it certainly manifests itself in Hosea in a remarkable and perhaps unique way. Let us examine the pattern a little more closely.

Besides the five themes that Napier finds in ch. 11, he identifies in Hosea two others which do not occur there. Prefacing the five themes noted above, he adds ‘Thus says Yahweh’: Word and Symbol and concludes with another, ‘A light to the nations’: Consummation. Thus he produces seven prophetic themes in all. Such a pattern can be expanded, as is frequently done throughout the OT, or it can be pared down to essentials. The essentials would appear to be that within the assumed covenant mercies of God (which include creation, the election of Israel on behalf of creation, and the bestowing of God’s gracious word) there lies a schema, that of rebellion by Israel leading first to judgment, then to redemption. It is this schema which dominates the whole book of Hosea; it can be found controlling its major divisions and in individual pericopes or chapters as well. It is as though hope always keeps breaking through. Dire warnings and promised destruction are followed by promises of restoration; fatal sicknesses carry hints of healing; chaos points to new creation; and despair points to hope. The sentence of death is rarely the last word, and the black cap so often donned becomes almost a sign of reprieve.

On theological, canonical, and perhaps literary-critical grounds, then, rather than for historical-critical reasons we shall regard 1:1–2:1 as a unity, as a variation on the great theme. The whole of ch. 1 divides into five subsections indicated by the paragraphs in the RSV translation; the fifth provides the longed for upbeat and is a kind of salvific coda.

1:2–3 Two of the greatest prophets, Moses and Jeremiah, tried to evade their vocation. Even Isaiah allowed himself the gentle protest How long? Hosea, on the other hand, faced with the unthinkable demand that he should marry a harlot, and with the unbelievable message that God has a wife, makes no protest. He marries a harlot and builds his