The tenth episode of the second season of the Retelling the Bible Podcast is posted today (July 25, 2018). You can listen to the episode and subscribe to the podcast by following one of these links or by searching for the podcast on your favourite platform:

SHOW NOTES

This episode is based on the Book of Hosea, especially the first three chapters, in the Old Testament of the Bible. (Click the references to read the original story). Any direct biblical quotations in the episode are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the episode.

Hosea’s Times and Message

Hosea came from the northern Kingdom of Israel and his prophecies are almost exclusively concerned with the affairs of that kingdom. He dates the beginnings of his career to the reign of King Jeroboam II, a time of prosperity in Israel. After the death of Jeroboam, the kingdom declined rapidly. Jeroboam’s son only reigned for about six months before being killed in a coup. After that, the kingdom seems to have suffered from ongoing civil wars with coups and counter-coups until it was finally destroyed by the invading Assyrian Empire.

Hosea’s prophecies address much of the chaos of his times and predict many of the disasters. This alone must have given him a powerful voice during his life. But that is not necessarily why his book has been so valued in the Biblical tradition. His book has been prized for the way in which it portrays the relationship between God and the people of Israel. In particular, Hosea seems to have been the first to speak of that relationship using the metaphor of a marriage. He pictures God as a wronged husband of an unfaithful wife who nevertheless remains faithful to her and forgives her. When I went to seminary and studied the Old Testament prophets, the importance of the Book of Hosea was particularly stressed because of this idea that went on to inspire other prophets and become a major theme in the Bible. I was taught that it was a beautiful idea and I still believe it is.

Rethinking Hosea

A few years ago, however, I read the book Sacred Witness, Rape in the Hebrew Bible by Susanne Scholz (Fortress Press, 2010). In this excellent book, Scholz goes through every story of rape and sexual abuse in the Bible and reveals much about the underlying patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes that pervade this ancient book. I found her chapter on the Book of Hosea particularly devastating. As I read Scholz’s analysis I wondered how I could have missed the obvious truth, that Hosea was describing, in approving terms, incidents of sexual abuse and that he was even portraying God as the abuser:

Plead with your mother, plead—

for she is not my wife,

and I am not her husband—

that she put away her whoring from her face,

and her adultery from between her breasts,

or I will strip her naked

and expose her as in the day she was born,

and make her like a wilderness,

and turn her into a parched land,

and kill her with thirst. Hosea 2:2-3

There is really nothing subtle about that, and yet I had read the book, for years, as a simple representation of a benevolent God. How had I missed it? That is why I feel that it is so important to retell the story from Gomer’s point of view. We cannot afford to miss important messages like that anymore.

Gomer’s Story

There is considerable discussion among scholars about how we ought to read the autobiographical portions of the Book of Hosea. A simple, straightforward reading of the story would indicate that Hosea is specifically instructed by God to take particular steps in his family relations as a prophetic demonstration of his message. In other words, the marriage is nothing but an object lesson. Other prophets used things like figs and scale models to illustrate their oracles; Hosea used his family in the same way.

I tend to read it just a little bit differently. I prefer to assume that the marriage was fairly typical for its time (that is to say, a marriage arranged by Gomer’s and Hosea’s families and not directly by God) and that is was only on reflecting on his marriage after the fact that Hosea realized that God was guiding the whole affair to illustrate his message.

Nevertheless, and however you read it, I feel that I must protest that Gomer and her children are not mere illustrative objects. They are flesh and blood people with real feelings, not figs! I have a very hard time justifying the ways that Hosea treats Gomer by saying that he had to do it in order to it in order to illustrate his message.

It should be noted that the woman who Hosea purchases out of slavery in chapter 3 is not named. It seems like she could be Gomer because she is described in similar terms and it is conceivable that Gomer could have gone into such a deep decline after being divorced by Hosea that she ended up as a slave. Nevertheless, it is also quite possible that Hosea has here chosen a new woman to be his object lesson. I chose to tell the story with the assumption that this second woman is also Gomer, mostly because it makes a much better story that way and opens the narrative up to a modicum of hope.

Can We Keep Hosea?

Ever since I read Scholz’s book, I have struggled with the Book of Hosea. Yes, Hosea does speak in soaring and beautiful terms of God’s faithfulness to God’s people, but that message seems to come out of what is, at best, a dysfunctional marriage relationship. There are strong indications in the book that Hosea was abusive towards Gomer. The book doesn’t say that Hosea raped Gomer. (Technically, according to the definitions of that time, it was not possible for a man to rape his wife because women did not have the power to consent to sex, it was only her husband who had the right to consent.) Neither does it say that he stripped her naked in public and invited other people to rape her. What the book does say it that Hosea believed that it was perfectly acceptable and even laudable for a man to do such things to a woman that he suspected of adultery and Hosea clearly did suspect Gomer of adultery.

Even worse than the way that Hosea mistreats Gomer is the way in which he imputes his own misogynistic attitudes and actions to God. He affirms that God has exactly the same attitudes in his relationship with the people of Israel. He declares God to be a misogynist, which I see as a particularly insidious kind of blasphemy.

So how are we to deal with that? Is this book so horribly tainted by Hosea’s patriarchal attitudes that we would be better off without it? I am not yet ready to give up on the Book of Hosea. I do recognize that, in his own flawed way, he did realize some profound truths about God and inspired others to see God in new and very helpful ways. We need his contribution to the Biblical tradition to understand where it went from there.

I just think we must recognize that Hosea’s brilliant insights (which were truly inspired by God) were filtered through a very flawed individual. I believe that is how inspiration always works because God only has flawed vessels to work with.

Let us shed tears for Gomer, though, and for all that she suffered at the hands of this flawed vessel. Let her be silenced no more.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

“AhDah” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/