Theopedia

Book of Hosea

“For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

— Hosea 6:6 (ESV)

Overview

Hosea stands first among the twelve minor prophets in both the Masoretic and Septuagint orderings, and its prophecies are among the earliest of the Hebrew prophetic writings that have come down as separate books.1 The book belongs to the genre of prophecy: a collection of oracles delivered to a specific covenant people at a specific moment in their history, not a narrative or a wisdom book.2 Hosea addressed his message chiefly to the northern kingdom of the ten tribes, though he did not lose sight of Judah, since he regarded the two kingdoms as together constituting the one covenant people of God.2 The book is repeatedly quoted or echoed in the New Testament as part of the oracles of God (Matt. 2:15; 9:13; 12:7; Rom. 9:25-26).3

Author and Date

Of the prophet’s personal history little is known beyond his own identification of himself as “the son of Beeri” (Hos. 1:1).2 Hosea prophesied during the reign of Jeroboam II, and his ministry continued, on the internal evidence of the book, into the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and the early years of Hezekiah, a span of some sixty-two years touching four royal usurpations and three Assyrian invasions.4 He was thus partly contemporary with Isaiah, though called to the prophetic office somewhat earlier.4 The closing reference to Israel’s king seeking help from Egypt while under covenant with Assyria (Hos. 12:1) places the end of his recorded ministry early in Hezekiah’s reign, shortly before Samaria’s fall to Assyria in 722 BC.4

Historical and Literary Context

Hosea’s ministry fell in a calamitous period for the northern kingdom: after Jeroboam II’s death the throne changed hands repeatedly through assassination, and Assyria’s shadow grew from a distant threat into the power that would besiege Samaria for three years and put an end to the kingdom of Israel.4 Against that backdrop of political collapse, the book indicts the nation’s rulers, priests, and people alike for oath-breaking, violence, and idolatry.2 Hosea’s diction is concise and sententious, and a single figure dominates the book throughout: the relation of Israel to the LORD pictured as a marriage-covenant, so that unfaithfulness to God, and especially idolatry and idolatrous foreign alliances, becomes spiritual adultery and whoredom.3 This marriage figure is not unique to Hosea; it stands on the same covenant relationship the other prophets presuppose between Yahweh and Israel, one Amos assumes when he warns that Israel alone of all the families of the earth has been known by God (Amos 3:2), and one Hosea himself grounds in a covenant Israel has broken (Hos. 6:7; 8:1).5

Structure

The book divides into two unequal parts.3

Chapters 1-3 present Hosea’s own marriage to Gomer, “a wife of whoredom” (Hos. 1:2), as an enacted parable of Israel’s unfaithfulness and covenant infidelity.6 The three children born to the marriage are given names that are themselves oracles of judgment: Jezreel, recalling the bloodshed by which Jehu’s dynasty seized the throne; Lo-Ruhamah, “no mercy”; and Lo-Ammi, “not my people,” a formal declaration that Israel would be stripped of its covenant standing.7 The nature of these transactions is best understood as symbolic acts disclosed to the prophet rather than as ordinary domestic history, and this marriage figure supplies the key to the chapters that use it.2

Chapters 4-14 contain a summary, apparently set down by Hosea himself near the close of his ministry, of the discourses he delivered to the people: denunciations of their sin, threats of judgment, exhortations to repentance, and promises of mercy, closing with a view of Israel’s future restoration and peace (Hos. 14).3

Major Themes

Covenant unfaithfulness as spiritual adultery

Hosea casts Israel’s persistent turn to idols, and to the political alliances bound up with idolatrous worship, as adultery against the God who had bound himself to her in covenant.3 God instructs the prophet to marry a “wife of whoredom” as a visible picture of his people’s unfaithfulness, and throughout the book he pronounces judgment against Israel’s spiritual adultery, comparing himself to a lion that devours and a bear robbed of her cubs.6 The charge is covenantal rather than merely moral: Hosea names the specific bond that has been broken, the covenant Israel entered at Sinai (Hos. 6:7; 8:1), so that Israel’s sin is treachery against a husband, not simply a violation of abstract law.5

God’s steadfast love pursuing an unfaithful people

Even as Hosea pronounces judgment, the book turns on God’s own steadfast love, or hesed, for his wayward bride. Though Israel “went after her lovers and forgot me,” God promises that he will himself “allure her” and “speak tenderly to her,” restoring the marriage in righteousness, justice, steadfast love, and mercy (Hos. 2:13-14, 19-20).6 Bavinck traces the ground of this pursuit to God’s own faithfulness rather than Israel’s: the covenant of grace does not depend on human obedience, so that when Israel becomes unfaithful and adulterous, the prophets do not conclude that God changes or that his covenant wavers, but that God cannot and may not break the covenant he has bound himself to by a solemn oath.8

Judgment and the promise of restoration

The book’s structure itself carries this theme: the children’s names that announce judgment in chapters 1-3, Lo-Ruhamah (“no mercy”) and Lo-Ammi (“not my people”), are reversed later in the same section into promises of mercy and renewed covenant standing, and the book as a whole closes not with Israel’s ruin but with a picture of her future prosperity and peace.3 Paul later applies Hosea’s promise that those who were “not my people” would be called “my people” (Hos. 2:23) to God’s calling of the Gentiles into the one people of God (Rom. 9:25-26), a reading the New Testament writers give directly to several such Hosea texts as belonging to the Gospel dispensation.9

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 332-333. ↩

  2. Barrows, 333. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  3. Barrows, 335. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  4. Barrows, 333-334. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩ ↩2

  6. Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 12, “Should God Be Jealous for His Own Glory? Jealousy and Glory.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 2, “Discourse XIV: On God’s Patience,” 510. ↩

  8. Bavinck, chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩

  9. Charles Hodge, “Second Advent,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 797. ↩