📖 Hosea

הוֹשֵׁעַ Hoshea — 'He saves' — from yasha, to save or deliver, the root behind Joshua, Isaiah and Jesus. It is also the name of the LAST king of Israel (2 Kings 17), under whom Samaria fell, and the name Moses changed to Joshua in Numbers 13:16. ⚠ The book plays on it once, at 1:7: the prophet called Salvation announces 'I will SAVE them by Jehovah their God — and not by bow or sword or war.'
Ὡσηέ (Hōsēe) — First of the Twelve in the Greek order as in the Hebrew, though the Septuagint arranges the rest of the Twelve differently (Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah…). ⚠ The Greek of Hosea is unusually rough, which is generally taken as evidence that the Hebrew text the translators had was already difficult — and Hosea's Hebrew is the hardest in the prophets, possibly because it preserves a northern dialect.

A prophet told to marry a promiscuous woman and name his three children after the sentence on his country — and then to buy her back. The book that made marriage the Bible's central image for the covenant, and the book of chesed, loyal love.

Chapters

1 of 14 chapters translated · 7.1%

Gold chapters are published — click one to read it. The rest are still ahead.

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Chapter by chapter

Hosea 1God tells a prophet to marry a promiscuous woman, and then to name their three children after the sentence on his country: JEZREEL, after a massacre; LO-RUCHAMAH, Not-Pitied — and Hebrew builds its word for mercy on the word for a WOMB, so naming a newborn girl Not-Mother-Loved is worse in Hebrew than in English; and LO-AMMI, Not-My-People. The last of them takes the covenant formula apart, and then goes further than any English Bible shows: the Hebrew of verse 9 has no word for ‘God’ in it. What it says is ‘I will not be EHYEH to you’ — the name God gave himself at the burning bush, withdrawn. Note also who dates this book: four kings of JUDAH, for a prophet who preached only to the north. And note that it has nine verses, not eleven.

About the book

Where it sits

First of THE TWELVE (the Minor Prophets), which the Hebrew canon counts as a single book — the Book of the Twelve — placed after Ezekiel among the Latter Prophets. Fragments were found at Qumran, including a commentary (4QpHos) that reads chapter 2 as being about the community's own opponents. Its position first is probably a matter of length rather than date; Amos is generally reckoned slightly earlier.

Genre

PROPHETIC ORACLE, almost entirely in poetry, framed by two prose-and-poetry accounts of the prophet's marriage (chs 1 and 3). The dominant device is the extended metaphor — Israel as an unfaithful wife, as a stubborn heifer, as a silly dove, as a half-baked cake, as morning mist, as a child taught to walk — piled up and abandoned in quick succession. ⚠ Hosea's language is the most difficult in the prophets: compressed, elliptical, full of rare forms and possible northern dialect, and the ancient versions frequently disagree about what it says. Where this translation is uncertain it says so.

Author

HOSEA SON OF BEERI, a northerner — the only writing prophet who was himself from the northern kingdom and preached to it. Nothing is known of him apart from his marriage, and that is known only because it became the message. ⚠ The book was preserved in JUDAH after the north fell, which shows in its editing: the heading dates it by four Judean kings, and a handful of passages (1:7 most obviously) speak warmly of Judah in a way the rest of the book does not. How much of that is Hosea and how much is the hand that saved him is an open question.

Date written

From the last years of JEROBOAM II (died c. 747 BC) into the chaos that followed — four of the next six kings of Israel were assassinated — and up to, or close to, the fall of SAMARIA in 722 BC. The book knows about the Syro-Ephraimite war and about Israel's frantic diplomacy between Assyria and Egypt; it does not describe the city's fall.

Place

THE NORTHERN KINGDOM: Samaria, Bethel (which Hosea calls Beth-Aven, 'house of trouble'), Gilgal, Mizpah, Tabor, Shechem, Gilead, the valley of Jezreel, the plain of Achor. Jerusalem is barely present. This is the fullest picture the Bible gives of the north from inside.

Audience

A prosperous, religious and doomed society — the northern kingdom at its economic peak, with a functioning sanctuary system, a busy priesthood, and (Hosea says) no knowledge of God at all. His charge is not that they had stopped worshipping but that their worship and their politics were both forms of the same infidelity.

How it's laid out

1THE MARRIAGE AND THE CHILDREN — Gomer, and three names that are sentences: Jezreel, Lo-Ruchamah (Not-Pitied), Lo-Ammi (Not-My-People). ⚠ Nine verses in the Hebrew; English Bibles add 1:10-11, which the Hebrew numbers 2:1-2.

2THE LAWSUIT AGAINST THE WIFE — the accusation, the stripping, the hedge of thorns — and then, without transition, 'I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak to her heart,' the valley of Achor as a door of hope, and all three names reversed.

3'GO AGAIN, LOVE A WOMAN' — the prophet buys her for fifteen pieces of silver and a homer and a half of barley, and tells her to wait; so, says the book, Israel will wait many days without king or sacrifice.

4-8THE INDICTMENT — 'there is no truth, no loyal love, and no knowledge of God in the land' (4:1); priests who feed on the people's sin; a nation like a cake not turned; kings made and unmade without God.

9-13THE SENTENCE — Ephraim's glory flying away like a bird, the calf of Samaria broken, 'they sow the wind and reap the whirlwind' (8:7), and Israel as a child God taught to walk who kept walking away.

11THE TURN AT THE CENTRE — 'When Israel was a boy, I loved him… I taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms… How can I give you up, Ephraim? My heart is overturned within me.' The most anguished passage in the prophets.

14'RETURN, ISRAEL, TO JEHOVAH YOUR GOD' — the last chapter is an invitation and a promise: 'I will heal their apostasy; I will love them freely… I will be like the dew to Israel.'

What it's about

MARRIAGE AS THE COVENANT — Hosea is where the image starts. Jeremiah, Ezekiel 16 and 23, Isaiah 54, and eventually the New Testament's bride language all descend from this book, and all of them inherit its ferocity as well as its tenderness.
CHESED — loyal love, covenant-keeping faithfulness; the word this book turns on. 'I delight in chesed and not sacrifice, and in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings' (6:6) — quoted twice by Jesus in Matthew, both times to defend people the religious had written off.
DA'AT ELOHIM, THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD — not information but acquaintance, the knowing of a spouse. 'My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge' (4:6) is not a complaint about ignorance; it is a complaint about estrangement.
THE UNRESOLVED CONFLICT INSIDE GOD — chapter 11 states it outright: 'How can I give you up? … My heart is overturned within me; my compassions are kindled together.' The book does not resolve judgment into mercy or mercy into judgment; it lets both stand in the same voice.
NAMES THAT ARE SENTENCES — three children carrying a verdict through a village for a decade, and then the verdicts reversed. What is done with a name here is done with the nation.
POLITICS AS INFIDELITY — Israel 'hires lovers' (8:9), running between Assyria and Egypt. For Hosea, foreign policy and false worship are the same sin wearing different clothes.

Key words & people

Words this book turns on — each links to its dictionary entry:

zenunimammiot u-mofetchesedyasha

People & places — each links to the encyclopedia:

Hosea Gomer Jezreel Samaria

The source text

Translated from the pointed Hebrew Masoretic Text (as printed by Mechon-Mamre). ⚠ Hosea's Hebrew is widely regarded as the most difficult in the Bible — compressed, elliptical, rich in rare words and forms that may reflect a northern dialect — and the Septuagint's frequent divergences suggest the text was already hard in antiquity. Chapter 1 alone carries a genuinely split clause at verse 6 (naso essa lahem, where the shelf divides between 'forgive' and 'carry away') and a clause at verse 9 where every English version supplies a word ('God') that the Hebrew does not have. This translation prints what is there and flags what is not.

Looking forward

Hosea reaches the New Testament three ways, and they are worth keeping distinct. (1) DIRECTLY QUOTED: 6:6, 'I delight in chesed and not sacrifice,' twice on Jesus' lips in Matthew (9:13; 12:7); 11:1, 'out of Egypt I called my son,' applied to the infant Jesus at Matthew 2:15 — a verse that in Hosea plainly means the exodus, and which Matthew reads as a pattern rather than a prediction, as the library notes rather than smooths over. (2) THE REVERSED NAMES of 1:9 and 2:1, quoted at Romans 9:25-26 and drawn on at 1 Peter 2:10, applying to gentiles a promise made to the northern kingdom. (3) THE IMAGE: every New Testament use of marriage for the relation between God and his people runs back through Hosea, including its hardest edge — that the offended party is the one who goes and pays to get the other back.

Where the debates are

THE MARRIAGE — literal, retrospective, visionary, or cultic, an argument as old as the rabbis and the church fathers and not settled by anything in the text. WHETHER THE WOMAN OF CHAPTER 3 IS GOMER AGAIN or a second woman, on which the Hebrew is silent. HOW MUCH JUDEAN EDITING the book carries, and whether 1:7 in particular is Hosea's. HOW TO READ MATTHEW'S USE OF 11:1, given that Hosea is unmistakably speaking of the exodus. And the recurring question of the text itself: in a book this corrupt-looking, how often should a translator emend, and this one's answer is almost never — print the Hebrew, and say when it is hard.