Hosea Names the Misleaders

Having sketched the overview of Israel's failure in the opening chapters, using an embodied comparison to adultery through Hosea and Gomer, the prophecy turns in chapters 4 and 5 toward additional explanation of what has gone wrong and how it has gone wrong.  The opening chapters highlighted the bloodthirstiness of the regime and its desire for power to be maintained through military might.  The wealthy families and courtiers lusted after luxuries, demonstrating their sense of upward mobility and class-consciousness.

What has been the centrifugal effect of the ways of this ruling elite?  How did their immorality trickle down to the people?

There is no faithfulness or loyalty,
and no knowledge of God in the land.
Swearing, lying, and murder,
and stealing and adultery break out;
bloodshed follows bloodshed.

The broader society displayed the ways of the rulers.  The commandments are broken:  swearing and lying, murder, stealing, and adultery.  The cycle of violence spirals out of control, as an unbroken chain of bloodshed following bloodshed.  Such behavior results from the people having no knowledge of God.  But why do they lack any knowledge?

My contention is with you, O Priest.

The priests have failed to fulfill their calling.  They have gone after wealth, power, and comfort.  They have allowed or even promoted the practices of worshiping other gods.  They have no faithfulness and loyalty to God, and it is no surprise that faithfulness and loyalty are lacking from the land.  Priests and prophets have rejected the teachings of the Torah.  They have rejected God's ways, which provide a clear path by which to walk, a light to the feet.  Now both priests and prophets will stumble.  God has rejected them.

Hosea says that the priests and prophets "feed on the sins of my people; they are greedy for their iniquity."  How can they feed on the sins of the people?  Why would they want more sinning?  If the sins are idolatrous worship, the priests and prophets may have a financial interest in the idolatrous worship.  Later in the chapter it discusses temple prostitution, to ritual sexual acts with prostitutes according to the religions of the land.  Priests may be connected to this religious pimping.  They may also get funds from the sale of idols.  As Isaiah said, the idolatry is part and parcel of robbing the poor.  Do they charge fees to do priestly duties or deliver private prophetic oracles?  Down to the days of Jesus, such practices made the temple into "a den of thieves."  Hosea speaks of getting a prophecy from a piece of wood or a divining rod.  It would be no surprise that people who ask for such guidance would have to "grease the palms" of the diviners.  And why should we limit our questions to the realm of religion?  Could the priests be organizing other criminal activity?  Is there an underground economy in which they have found a way to profit "on the side?"   

Perhaps another form of their "gain" has to do with encouraging the perception of a gulf between them and the common people (thanks to Dr. Annie Tinsley for helping me think through this one).  As noted above, the elites promoted their status by conspicuous consumption of imported goods, feeding class-consciousness of their own superiority.  Priests also elevate themselves by allowing the debasement of the common people.  In our day, I sometimes describe a certain ecclesial persona:  the "Imperial Pastor," who encourages the image of being above the sins of the commoners, closer to God than most people, more "spiritual" in speech and behavior.  Such a pastor may directly or indirectly claim to be a "covering" over the congregation, elevated in a hierarchy such that the lowly parishioners depend on the pastor for protection from evil.  That does not sound much like a "kingdom of priests" to me.

I am not attempting to diminish the importance of a good leader to bless and benefit the people whom the leader is called to serve.  But it is not by some mystical power or spiritual aura.  It is, as Hosea said, by doing the leader's job of teaching and guiding people in the ways of God.  Hosea says the priests left the people without knowledge of God.  This is not unlike the Imperial Pastor, who cares little whether the people can know God for themselves, but relishes being the expert and the dispenser of spiritual nuggets of wisdom. 

My people are destroyed by a lack of knowledge.

The priests are failing to teach and guide.  Many of them also ignore this learning for themselves.  The priesthood and the role of prophet have become one more path to wealth and prosperity among the elite rather than a service to the people.  So the whole nation is going astray, worshiping anything and everything, anywhere and everywhere, doing whatever seems pleasing, whether drunken orgies or empty sacrifices, ritual sexual acts or building altars to false gods.  And the priests and prophets are the ones on whom this sin rests.  They have been a snare, a net, a pit, to catch up the people and cause them to stumble.  The judgment will come to them. 

Hosea's Story Hammers Home the Main Idea

The prophet Hosea's story is filled with tragedy, betrayal, steadfast love, and hope.  It is a story readers find themselves caught up in.  Foreshadowing Jesus' parable of the lost sheep, Hosea goes to unexpected lengths to find and recover his wife.  He demonstrates a love deep and wide enough to keep seeking and drawing her back even with repeated unfaithfulness.  It is a story we could retell about a husband or a wife in our day, but the social stigma assigned to sex workers in Gomer's time and in our time entrenches this particular set of circumstances with moral and emotional power.  Readers seeking to know God find ourselves opened to a kind of wonderment about whether our God's love might pursue us as far into degradation as we might go.  Whether we paint it as personal immorality or becoming caught in the deadly structures of evil in the world, Gomer's path into the abyss strikes the reader as an extreme devolution of a life.

It is also a story that gets too uncomfortable for the straightlaced and proper church people.  What kind of fool takes a prostitute for his wife?  Who would expect a prostitute to become a life partner and a mother?  We don't know what demons pursue Gomer into self-destructive behavior.  We don't know if there is a hidden history of abuse in her family of origin.  We don't know if her "friends" conspired to get her alone and vulnerable, then rape her, destroying her trust in human relationships.  We don't know if her desire for excitement and risk kept her from settling into habits of a good life and created a downward spiral and cycle she could not seem to escape.  And "respectable" people may not want to know those things.  They are satisfied to know what she is:  a "whore," which they believe is what she will always be.  They don't really like to think about this story because it implies that people who made such terrible choices, choices they never made, might be as valuable to God as respectable people are.  It implies God might be a fool like Hosea.  It implies that some fool God or preacher might expect them to be in the same church with someone like Gomer.

This powerful story, punctuated by the allegorical naming of the children, dominates the opening chapters of Hosea's prophecy.  This narration of a family's struggles, this brief narrative, stands in as an embodied sign of the grand narrative of God's calling to Israel, and through Israel to all creation.  It speaks of a certain circumstance within that grand narrative.  It tells of a certain plot turning within the life of God.  That particular moment in the grand narrative addresses a particular situation in the history of Israel.

Thus intermixed with the narrative of Hosea, Gomer, and their children are clues to the particular crisis of God's people.  The first such clue appears in the opening statement.  It addresses when Hosea prophesied.  It was during the reign of Jereboam II.  The verses which follow, naming the firstborn son Jezreel, expand on this problem.  Jereboam II, of the dynasty of Jehu, is from a bloody, violent dynasty, and what went around with Jehu will now come around with Jehu's descendents.   Just as Jehu gained power through double regicide in Jezreel, Jezreel will be the sign of his dynasty's downfall.

Jehu committed regicide against the son of Ahab and Jezebel, then led a revolt that included assassination of all the living relatives of Ahab's Omride clan.  Jezebel was killed by her courtiers.  Jehu showed signs of trying to bring Israel back to God's purposes, but neither he nor his descendents eliminated the syncretistic worship of the Northern Kingdom.  Moreover, having also killed the king of Judah and severed the cooperative relationship with the Southern Kingdom, Jehu forged an alliance with Assyria, offering tribute, as a way to play the balance of power game against Syria and Judah.  The reigning dynasty was built on violence, ambition for royal power, and strategic military alliances.  It was far from the kind of social existence God intended for humanity.  Israel was no emblem of Yahweh.

In the continuation of Jehu's dynasty, Jereboam II's reign was long and prosperous, under the protection of Assyria.  His father, Jehoash, invaded Jerusalem and stole the Temple vessels and palace treasures, carrying them to Samaria, not exactly a sign of respect for the heritage of God's people.  Jereboam II's Assyrian protection from his neighbors to the north (Syria) and south (Judah) allowed the economy to prosper through trade.  This obsession with luxurious goods of trade shows up in 2:5, where the association with the Assyrian empire becomes tied to ready supplies of wool and flax, oil and wine.  Since Israel also exported olive oil and wine, the demand for imported oils and wines must have been focused among the wealthy looking for exotic and premium goods.  Further down in the same chapter, God reminds Israel that it is divine provision that gives them grain, oil, and wine.  The coming judgment will take away the imported flax and wool, signs of how they have become so enamored with the ways, the power, and the gods of the Assyrians.  Bedecked with gold and silver, they pursued the Assyrian imperial blessing, and turned away from God and their own people.

In this context of self-satisfied prosperity, of believing it is Assyria who blesses them, Hosea names his other two children.  A daughter receives the name "No Pity," and a son receives the name "Not My People."  These words deny any love remains.  These names break the covenant.  As Hosea's story continues, Gomer who has gone away becomes a sign of the eventual dispersement of the people into the nations, the extended and diasporic exile of the Northern Kingdom.  From this disappearance, this utter dissolution, God will come after Israel, as Hosea went to find Gomer who was lost to him and their children.  And Hosea promises that the children's names will change:  the daughter will be called "Pitied" and the son, "My People," even "Children of the Living God."

This prophetic family's story breaks open a view of what is happening in Israel in a certain moment in time.  This dynasty, reaching its greatest wealth under Jereboam II, is also reaching its greatest unfaithfulness to God.  They may be blind to how they have sought after other gods, but Hosea is driving home the main idea through this story.  A few of the specifics get hinted at in the opening chapters.  As the prophetic oracle continues, Hosea will make it plain where and why Israel has gone wrong and become unfaithful.