The Historical SETTING

Hosea was tailed by Yahweh to prophesy the destruction and exile of Israel at a time when Israel was
at the height of its prosperity. In the latter years of the reign of Jeroboam 11 (793-753 0.C), probably
not much earlier than 760 B.C. Hosea began his ministry through the enactment prophecy of
marrying a "prostituting" Israelite and starting a family of "prostituting" Israelites, only a few years
helm Tlglath-Pileser III (745 728 8.4) of Assyria changed Israel's attitudes Item complacency to
desperation.

The Jehu dynasty, begun In 842 R.C., tame to an end with the death Of Jeroboam II in 753. It was
Israel's longest dynasty. Thereafter, beginning with the accession of Zechariah to the throne in
Samaria in 753, attempts at dynasty proved futile. The order of the day was usurpation by
assassination. Hosea eventually prophesied during the reigns of more kings than any other OT
prophet. Six kings governed the north during the remaining thirty years until its fall, none of them
notable for his administrative or diplomatic skills. Life in Israel become increasingly precarious; the
nation's fortunes waned progressively. These developments are reflected in the book of Hosea,
which appears to proceed mom or less chronologically from the 750s to the 720s in the ordering of
Hosea's oracles. The complacency of the early days (2:7. 10. IS 12:5. 8, 131) gives way to a
desperation in foreign (7:8-12; 12:1) and domestic (7:3-7; 13:10-11) affairs, evidenced in the latter
chapters. The SyroEphraimite war of 734 B.C.., which ended with the capitulation of the north to
Assyria after Israel was reduced to a rump stale by the Assyrian conquest and by a Judean invasion
(3:9-10), represented the beginning of the end for Hosea's native country.

We have no way of answering with certainty a number of key questions about the setting of Hosea's
prophetic ministry. The book never states the location of any of his preaching. We may guess that he
delivered oracles frequently at Samaria, and—at least prior to 734 when Bethel probably reverted to
Judean control—at Bethel, as did Amos. Bur we have no hard evidence. None of the oracles is dated.
While we may be fairly confident of the dating of some (e.g., 1:2 9; 5:5-10), and of the approximate
chronological ordering of must, our analysis of setting remains ultimately speculative in any given
instance. Might Hosea have had contact with Amos, his somewhat older contemporary in the north,
or with any of the somewhat younger contemporary orthodox Judean prophets? We have no way of
knowing.

With regard to his audience. Hosea may have enjoyed some faithful reception of his oracles among
the small percentage of northerners yet concerned to keep the Mosaic covenant, but he makes no
mention of this, nor do his words even hint at it. And his words surely met with both resentment and
ridicule, when not utterly ignored, by the vast majority of those who heard them.

Onhodox Yahwism had become a small minority religion in Israel by Hosea's time, judging front the
consistently discouraging reports of its status in the historical books and the prophets. While Judah.
Canaan's 'Bible-belt." had perhaps resisted the encroachment of foreign religious practices
somewhat more effectively than had the north (1:7), Israel was no place for Hosea to find a
sympathetic audience. The burgeoning military and economic power at the north in the days of
Jeroboam If (2 Kgs 14:21 28) and the tendency of the north to have greater international contacts
dim the mute isolated Judah resulted undoubtedly in a cosmopolitan, latitudinarian attitude
religiously. Polytheistic syncretism, not monotheistic Yahwism, constituted the dominant faith.

During the many centuries that had passed between the establishment of the Mosaic covenant (on
the chronological priority of the Pentateuchal law to the prophets see below. "Assumptions about
Dates" and Hosea's day, the Sinai law code had fallen into a limbo of neglect. Some potions, such as
the Decalogue, were Popularly known (c.f. Hos 4:2), and most Israelites probably knew about the law
in the same way that most Americans would know about the Sermon on the Mount even though
they would be unable to describe its contents accurately. A prophet such as Hosea had to rely upon a
common ground of awareness of the law, limited as it was, in proclaiming the enforcement of the
divine covenant. The average Israelite surely recognized that the Pentateuchal law forbade Idolatry
and polytheism, insisted upon the worship of Yahweh at a single central sanctuary and a life of basic
ethical righteousness, and provided blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. It is this
common knowledge of a few basic that affects, in part, the frequency of repetition of certain themes
in the prophetic oracles. By reminding the people through his prophets that even these well-known
foundational stipulations of the covenant had been violated, God gave more than sufficient notice of
Justification for the coming Judgment. The prophets, in other words, were not moved to list for their
audience every instance of Israelite infidelity to the various covenant provisions. It was enough to
demonstrate major violations (idolatry. polytheism, disloyalty via foreign entanglements, multiple
sanctuary worship. dishonesty, economic oppression). The presence of these violations proved that
the covenant was broken; any one of them would have sufficed for that purpose (cf. Jas 2:10).
Cumbersome delineations of large numbers of the 613 Pentateuchal commandments were not
warranted; it is no wonder that they are not found in Hosea and the other prophets.

FORM, STRUCTURE, AND STYLE

It is not always possible to know whether or not a given oracle of Hosea was composed for oral
delivery to an audience. Though we have no choice but to operate on the assumption that all of
them were spoken before being written, this assumption remains unproved. The metrical structure
of many of the individual poetic pericopes is either unusual, unique, or composed of mixed types; as
a result, the usual earmarks of oral composition in poetry (lack of enjambment, use of formulae,
thematic arrangement, etc.) are represented scantily. Hosea is not unique in this regard, however;
the same could be said for most of the prophetical books. Old Testament "classical" (eighth century
and later) prophecy seems generally to display certain characteristics associated normally with oral
composition and others associated with a written style. Ultimately this uncertainty presents no great
barrier to the interpretation of Hosea's oracles—if the interpreter is willing to give content
predominance over form in analyzing the various passages of the book.

This approach is essential because "Hosea was not given to following the structures of speech-types"
(J. L. Mays, 5). In other words, typical prophetic formal composition characteristics are either so
subtly combined or so artistically modified in Hosea's oracles that one has to consider each oracle on
an ad hoc basis, i.e., on its own merits. Form criticism, by definition a comparative enterprise, is thus
less often rewarding in the exegesis of passages in Hosea than is the case with other prophetic
collections.

In addition, the editorial arranging of Hosea's oracles, whether done by Hosea himself or someone
else, is either so skillful or so nonchalant (it is technically impossible to tell which) as to result in a
relative absence of sharp delineations between pericopes. In fact, deciding where one passage in
Hosea leaves off and another begins has been a major consideration for every commentator and
critic. The results have hardly been uniform.

It is our contention that the oracles of Hosea must be seen, therefore, in macrocosm rather than
microcosm. That is, one is obliged to ignore to some degree the rather rapid and unpredictable shifts
in person, subject matter, and tone which can occur so often from couplet to couplet and verse to
verse in a given oracle, in favor of seeing these as ultimately fitting neatly into a coherent pericope,
the point and effectiveness of which is no less comprehensible than would have been the case if the
oracle displayed a more obviously systematic pattern.

THE TEXT OF HOSEA

With the possible exception of the book of Job, no other OT book contains as high a proportion of
textual problems as does Hosea. One can only speculate about the reasons for the poor state of the
text. Its northern provenance was probably a factor. Like Job, some psalms, and some poems in the
Pentateuch and former prophets, Hosea reflects the Israelite rather than the Judean dialect, and in
its original form must have reflected typical Israelite orthographic practices as well. Judean copyists,
into whose possession the text surely came after the fall of Samaria in 722, may have found the
manuscript(s) of the book harder to deal with, or may even have given it less careful attention, than
they would have with the corresponding works of a Judean prophet.

Fortunately the Septuagint of Hosea is a quite literal, nonexpansionistic rendering of the unpointed
Hebrew. This allows for helpful reconstruction of the original consonantal texts at many points, even
when the Septuagint translation has failed to interpret its consonantal Hebrew Vorlage sensibly. An
attention to the Septuagint renderings is therefore reflected throughout this commentary. The
Syriac, Latin, and Aramaic versions, in that order of significance, are of occasional minor value in
restoring the original Hebrew text. The few lines of Hosea from chap. 2 that are preserved in the
Qumran scrolls reflect the Masoretic Text in all features essential for reconstructing the autograph
and are therefore helpful primarily in reinforcing the wellestablished observation that chap. 2 is one
of the few relatively trouble-free parts of the book's text.

The single most textually problematic part of the book is perhaps 4:18-19. There, the Hebrew is
exceedingly difficult to understand, and the versions appear to offer little help. In this commentary,
new solutions to textually corrupt passages are proposed with some degree of enthusiasm at 4:2;
5:7; 7:12; 8:13; and 9:13, among others. A recognition that Hosea's oracles reflect often in their very
wording the vocabulary of the Pentateuchal blessings and curses of Lev 26 and Deut 4, 28-32 helps
determine likely original readings in several instances. Frequently the Masoretic consonantal text
proves largely correct, and must simply be revocalized on the evidence of the Septuagint, with regard
for the Mosaic covenant vocabulary.

UNITY AND INTEGRITY

Scholarly conclusions about the unity and/or integrity of biblical books tend to reflect basic
methodological assumptions. The presence or absence of empirical data is often relegated to a
secondary role. This situation is the reverse of what should prevail. In the case of Hosea, the unity of
the book is demonstrable on the basis of its consistency; and its integrity, likewise, on similar
grounds. The book throughout contains prophecies of weal or woe, with evidence of covenant
unfaithfulness accompanying the prophecies of woe. The prophecies of the weal which will depend
solely on grace do not incorporate such descriptions of Israelite behavior. The prophecies
themselves, artfully and novelly composed, reflect the known covenant curse and restoration
blessing types without exception. None of what is contained in present copies of the book can
therefore be challenged easily in terms of authenticity, on any purely empirical grounds. One
consistently finds in Hosea the sorts of things one could only expect to find as transcriptions of the
preaching of an orthodox northern prophet from the latter half of the eighth century B.C.
What then of the frequent references to Judah, some of which have been judged by many scholars to
be intrusive to otherwise self-contained pericopes (especially 1:7 and 6:11)? Here, several
considerations are relevant. First, it must be noted that attention to Judah per se is highly
reasonable, even when that attention is paid in the form of an aside (e.g., 1:7). It makes sense to
conclude that both Hosea and his audience would have keen interest in the fate of Judah precisely in
contrast to and separate from the fate of Israel. God's revelation of coming judgment would virtually
automatically require some independent mention of Judah, however brief, in addition to Israel. Since
the only two records of eighth-century northern prophetic oracles, Hosea and Amos, both contain
such independent references to Judah, it is impossible, on strictly empirical grounds, to excise these
sorts of Judean materials either totally or in part. The only sources for knowing what eighth-century
northern prophets said or did not say are the books of Amos and Hosea. Both mention Judah, and a
theory based on no evidence cannot reasonably be used to question the only evidence that exists.
Theories that the addresses to Judah in Hosea 1:7 and 6:11 are late interpolations cannot, therefore,
be grounded in anything other than assumption.

There are, additionally, a number of references to Judah in Hosea (2:2 [1:11]; 4:15; 5:5, 10, 12, 13,
14; 6:4; 8:14; 10:11; 12:1 [11:12]; 12:3 [2]) so firmly entrenched by reason of the poetic structure
that they cannot be excised without damage to the logic of the text. Most involve the use of "Judah"
as a parallel to "Israel" or "Ephraim" in a synonymous poetic couplet. The presence of these
references demonstrates the legitimacy of "Judean" interest within the book and raises the question:
If these references to Judah are admittedly authentic, can other references to Judah be dismissed as
inauthentic simply because they are not as provably locked into the flow of a passage?

Several other wordings are sometimes conjectured to be late glosses to the book (all or pans of 3:5;
4:5; 4:9; 6:10b; 14:4; 14:5; 14:10). None of these can convincingly be demonstrated as unoriginal,
however (see Comment ad toe) with the possible exception of 14:10.

As a son of benediction to the book, 14:10 could surely be, like 1:1, editorial in origin. Yet even in
this instance a careful argument has been made in favor of authenticity (C. L. Seow, "Hosea 14:10
and the Foolish People Motif," CBQ 44 [1982] 212-24).

The ability to excise a portion of a text can never be considered grounds for identifying that portion
as inauthentic. The situation is a bit like arguing that the ability of an individual to survive the
removal of his or her gall bladder is evidence that the gall bladder is only artificially present in the
human body. Virtually any piece of literature can be abridged; virtually any document has some
clauses, sentences, or paragraphs relatively less crucial to, or relatively less stylistically integral to its
core than others. But the portions seeming easier to excise are merely those portions someone
considers peripheral or awkward. Such value judgments, not being ultimately empirically based, are
always to be suspected. In the case of the book of Hosea, they cannot be sustained precisely because
they are not empirically based. A cautious, non-idealistic approach to the book requires giving the
benefit of the doubt to virtually the entire text, i.e., judging it to have an overall integrity. One may
question various sections; but proof is lacking for a firm identification of any portion as clearly
inauthentic.

ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT DATES

There is no consensus on a great many issues of dating in OT scholarship. A commentary must

nevertheless adopt defensible chronologies for pertinent events, with the recognition that not all
readers will find themselves in agreement.