Scripture Daily

Context No. 257 of 4322 · Hosea

Context · Reflection

Hosea 2:1-16: in context

1“Say to your brothers, ‘My people!’ and to your sisters, ‘My loved one!’ 2Contend with your mother! Contend, for she is not my wife, neither am I her husband; and let her put away her prostitution from her face, and her adulteries from between her breasts; 3lest I strip her naked, and make her bare as in the day that she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and kill her with thirst. 4Indeed, on her children I will have no mercy, for they are children of unfaithfulness. 5For their mother has played the prostitute. She who conceived them has done shamefully; for she said, ‘I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.’ 6Therefore behold, I will hedge up your way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she can’t find her way. 7She will follow after her lovers, but she won’t overtake them; and she will seek them, but won’t find them. Then she will say, ‘I will go and return to my first husband, for then it was better with me than now.’ 8For she didn’t know that I gave her the grain, the new wine, and the oil, and multiplied to her silver and gold, which they used for Baal. 9Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my new wine in its season, and will pluck away my wool and my flax which should have covered her nakedness. 10Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one will deliver her out of my hand. 11I will also cause all her celebrations to cease: her feasts, her new moons, her Sabbaths, and all her solemn assemblies. 12I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees, about which she has said, ‘These are my wages that my lovers have given me,’ and I will make them a forest, and the animals of the field shall eat them. 13I will visit on her the days of the Baals, to which she burned incense when she decked herself with her earrings and her jewels, and went after her lovers and forgot me,” says the LORD. 14“Therefore behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. 15I will give her vineyards from there, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope; and she will respond there as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt. 16It will be in that day,” says the LORD, “that you will call me ‘my husband,’ and no longer call me ‘my master.’

Hosea's own marriage is the engine of his book. God told him to marry a woman who would be unfaithful, so that his heartbreak could become a living picture of God and Israel. Chapter 2 is that picture drawn out, and it is uncomfortable to read, because it uses the language of a wronged husband against a wife who has gone after other men.

The charge is that Israel chased her lovers, the Baals, believing they were the ones giving her bread and wool and oil, when all of it had come from God. So the passage turns harsh: he will hedge her path with thorns, strip her bare, end her festivals, lay waste her vines. The imagery of stripping and exposure is hard, and it belongs to an ancient way of speaking that a modern reader should not pretend is gentle. But watch where the passage actually goes, because it does not stop there. The turn comes on a single word, therefore. Therefore, God says, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. The wilderness stops being a punishment and becomes a place to begin again, and the valley once called Trouble is renamed a door of hope.

The endpoint is not submission but love. In that day, God says, you will call me my husband, and no longer call me my master. He does not want to be feared as an owner; he wants to be loved as a spouse. The whole difficult chapter is bent toward getting from ownership to tenderness. Where have I been relating to God as a master I must manage, when he is trying to move me toward calling him something closer?

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