The only information the text provides us about the life of Hosea concerns his marriage. Even if we cannot reconstruct what happened exactly, the text as it now stands speaks of three moments in the relationship: first love, separation, reunion. This marriage is a symbol of the covenant between the Lord and Israel. Hosea speaks about the first love, the short period of Israel’s loyalty in the desert, which was then followed by a long history of unfaithfulness lasting until his day. Hosea accuses Israel of three crimes in particular. Instead of putting their trust in the Lord alone, the people break the covenant: (1) by counting on their own military strength, (2) by making treaties with foreign powers (Assyria and Egypt), and (3) by running after the Baals, the gods of fertility. Israel thus forgets that the Lord is its strength, its covenant partner, and giver of fertility. This unfaithful behavior will lead to Israel’s destruction by Assyria, but God’s love will have the last word. The back and forth movement from doom to salvation is typical of the Book of Hosea.

Hosea was a contemporary of the Prophet Amos. Both prophesied in the northern kingdom of Israel during the reign of Jeroboam II (2 Kgs 14:23–29).  Hosea’s text reflects the chaotic, mad, and finally destructive years after Jeroboam II’s death. Hosea was a citizen of the north who (unlike other prophets) stressed the intimate love of God for Israel.  Where his contemporary Amos is remembered as the prophet of divine justice — justice in the strict modern sense of punishment equal to the seriousness of the crime — Hosea is known as the prophet of divine love, love ever willing to suffer in order to win back one’s beloved. Yet, no justice is fiercer than tender love that has been betrayed and attacked, and so Hosea ends up far more certain and definitive about the destruction of Israel: “I will attack them like a bear robbed of its young, and tear their hearts from their breasts” (13:8). “Where are your plagues, O death! … My eyes are closed to compassion” (13:14).

Image credit: The Prophet Hosea |  Transfiguration church, Kizhi monastery, Karelia, north Russia | PD-US