Hosea 1-5: Adultery, Metaphor, and Raisin Cakes

The Prophet Hosea, detail of a working
sketch Raphael used in preparation for a fresco.

The Book of Hosea, we learn in the first verse of the first Chapter, is “The word of the LORD that came to Hosea son of Beeri during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and during the reign of Jeroboam son of Jehoash king of Israel.”  In the rest of the first chapter, God gives Hosea a series of instructions that seem kind of bitter and cynical in tone: he is supposed to find and marry an adulterous wife (Gomer daughter of Diblaim, in one of scripture’s less flattering walk-on roles), and he is to give his children strange and unpleasant names. I mean, how much therapy did Lo-Ruhamah need to get over being named “not loved”? We are not told.

In the second Chapter, Hosea is told to tell his brothers and sisters that they should rebuke their mother, because she is an adulteress. She has “conceived them in disgrace,” and she has claimed that all of her wealth, all of her food and drink and cloth and oil, were gifts from her lover instead of being provided by her husband. From Verse 9 to Verse 13, he – God, that is, speaking to Hosea – lists various punishments he is going to inflict on the wife, but then Verses 14 to 23 are surprisingly tender promises of reconciliation to come.

Now, the family tree implied by Hosea 2 would be awfully confusing, if the whole thing were not transparently a parable for God’s relationship with the people of Israel. That relationship, here as in the entire Bible hitherto, is a rocky one.  The Israelites are constantly haring off after Baal and assorted other regional deities, and God is constantly raging at their infidelity with threats, actual dire punishments, and occasional promises of wonderful glories to come. The brothers and sisters of Hosea 2 are the Israelites, and the mother is, I guess, also the Israelites. God is the jilted husband, and the illicit lover is the other gods the Israelites go running around with.

This is not the first blog post to wonder about the metaphorical nature of the Book of Hosea.  This scrap from the Dead Sea Scrolls, from the first century BCE, "refers to the relation of God, the husband, to Israel, the unfaithful wife. In the commentary, the unfaithful ones have been led astray by 'the man of the lie.'"

It’s a little unclear how this extended metaphor fits in with Hosea’s actual marriage, but in Chapter 3 he is instructed to make up with the no-good cheatin’ Gomer. He is told to, in a delightfully quirky passage, “Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes” (1).  Raisin cakes must have been, what, sacramental food of a competing faith? Or just a luxury to turn one away from a proper ascetic habit of worship? Either way, the specificity of the phrase rings oddly today.  He seems to go out and buy her back with a bit of silver and barley, and tells her that they need to be faithful to each other... because, Israel and God need to stick together too.  So, this is a strange framing narrative, in which the narrator's troubled marriage is worked on, or possibly in which a prophet's metaphor escapes his preaching and encroaches on his actual life.  This would be an interesting idea for a Borges story. 

With the familiar theme of God's anger with his stiff-neck people established, Chapters 4 and 5 and, indeed, most of the rest of the Book of Hosea, are largely God’s invective against the faithless straying of the Israelites. There is passing attention to general bad behavior – “cursing, lying, and murder” – and occasional callbacks of the adultery metaphor, but mostly it is a general denunciation of the waywardness of the chosen people and a foretelling of the awful things that will happen to them. In this way, Hosea is quite in keeping with the prophetic literature we have seen in the half-dozen Books that precede it.