What's Hosea about?

Hosea was written at the time the northern half of Israel had been captured by Assyria. Just as the capture of the southern half, centred on Jerusalem two hundred years later, was explained as the consequence of the people abandoning God’s justice, so the same explanation was used by Hosea to explain why the northern half was captured.

What’s striking about Hosea’s book is that he uses the image of an unfaithful wife to illustrate the unfaithfulness of the nation, as if the nation were married to God and then slept with someone else. Hosea acts this image out literally—he deliberately marries a prostitute and has children with her. The children are given symbolic names which describe the fate of the country: the name of a valley in which a huge military defeat had happened with immense slaughter, another is named “abandonment” since God will abandon the people, and finally a child called “Not my people” because God considers the people foreigners for abandoning God. The imagery continues with graphic descriptions of the shame the country has brought on itself.

However, the book ends with God offering to re-establish the relationship with the people and to marry them as their husband, just as Hosea has married the prostitute.

It’s impossible to know if Hosea literally married a prostitute to protest against the oppression and abuse going on in the land, or if those were dramatic images to get the attention of the leaders and the king.

How Hosea is helpful to us

Hosea provides a challenging corrective to the modern illusion that somehow everything will work out well in the world and that nobody is actually doing anything wrong as the creatures and peoples are threatened with extinction to serve the needs of the most well-off. Hosea makes it clear that this is a profound offence and that there will be consequences if we don’t change our priorities. It’s not a comfortable message, but one that is essential for us to hear in order to have hope of life for all. In no other way can we face the fact that profound change is needed.

God’s proposal to re-marry the nation is a way of saying that there is indeed hope for full life ahead on the planet, but that will require our turning around our present assumptions about what is normal. The fact such hope is offered to us is what keeps us from despair about the state of the world.

We read Hosea to get a more balanced sense of the severity of the current issues, not in order to feel guilt, but to have a foundation of true understanding from which plans for change can be made. Hosea puts this choice clearly so we can see what’s going on and how it could be changed for the very much better.