Hosea the Prophet

In the Scriptures

The book that bears his name opens: "The word of the Lord that came unto Hosea, the son of Beeri, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel" (Hosea 1:1). This sets his ministry in the northern kingdom in the middle and later eighth century before Christ — beginning in the prosperous last years of Jeroboam II and continuing through the anarchy of Israel's final kings, down toward the fall of Samaria to Assyria in 722 BC, which he foresaw and lived to see approaching. He was thus a younger contemporary of Amos, and of Isaiah and Micah in the south; the only writing prophet who was himself a northerner addressing the north, mourning "Ephraim" with the grief of a native son. Of his person the Scriptures record nothing more than his father's name; the later tradition assigns him to the tribe of Issachar.

The marriage command and the prophetic sign

The book begins with the hardest command laid on any prophet: "Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the Lord" (Hosea 1:2). Hosea took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim, and her children received names that were themselves prophecies. The first son was called Jezreel, for the blood shed by Jehu's house in the valley of that name, whose kingdom God would bring to an end. The daughter was called Lo-Ruhamah, "Not-pitied" — "for I will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel." The second son was called Lo-Ammi, "Not-my-people" — "for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God" (Hosea 1:4–9). And yet in the same breath the sentence turns: "in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God" (Hosea 1:10).

In the third chapter the sign is completed. The prophet is commanded to love again "a woman beloved of her friend, yet an adulteress, according to the love of the Lord toward the children of Israel" — and he buys her back for fifteen pieces of silver and a measure and a half of barley, and sets her in seclusion "many days," as Israel would abide "many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice" before seeking the Lord again "in the latter days" (Hosea 3:1–5). The marriage is the book's whole theology in act: the covenant is a marriage; idolatry is adultery; and the wronged husband, against all law and custom, refuses to let the marriage die. The Church reads the sign as fulfilled in Christ the Bridegroom, who joined to himself a human nature — and a Gentile church — that had played the harlot, and cleansed it in union with himself; the sticheron of the prophet's feast says precisely this: the Lover of mankind, betrothing to himself our nature that had gone whoring, redeemed its defilement, and his prophet, chastely marrying harlots, became the symbol of it.

The prophecy of divine love

From the eleventh chapter of the book the Church has always heard the words read at Matthew 2:15 as fulfilled in the flight into Egypt and the return of the child Christ: "When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt" (Hosea 11:1). A few verses later comes one of the most daring passages in the Old Testament, God's own heart turning against his own sentence: "How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I deliver thee, Israel?... mine heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled together. I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger... for I am God, and not man; the Holy One in the midst of thee" (Hosea 11:8–9). Judgment in Hosea is real — the swarming oracles of chapters 4–10 spare neither priest, king, nor people, "for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land" (4:1) — but judgment is never God's last word; the last word is "I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely" (14:4).

Twice the Lord himself, in the Gospel of Matthew, sent the Pharisees to school with this prophet: "Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice" (Hosea 6:6; Matthew 9:13, 12:7).

"On the third day he will raise us up"

The text on which Hosea's place in the Church's worship chiefly rests is Hosea 6:1–2: "Come, and let us return unto the Lord: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight." From the earliest centuries the Fathers — Tertullian, Cyprian, and the exegetical tradition after them — counted this among the Scriptures according to which, in Paul's phrase, Christ "rose again the third day" (1 Corinthians 15:4): the Old Testament's plainest naming of the third-day resurrection, and with it of our resurrection in him, since the prophet says "he will raise us up." Alongside it stands Hosea 13:14, taken up almost verbatim by the Apostle in the great resurrection chapter: "I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction" — "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" (1 Corinthians 15:55). The paschal hymnography of the Church sings both texts every year. The reversal of the children's names — "I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy; and I will say to them which were not my people, Thou art my people" (Hosea 2:23) — became for Paul and Peter the charter text of the calling of the Gentiles (Romans 9:25–26; 1 Peter 2:10).

Repose and traditions

Of the prophet's end the Scriptures say nothing. The synaxaria, following the tradition of the pseudo-Epiphanian Lives of the Prophets, record that he was of the tribe of Issachar, from a place given as Belemoth (the manuscripts vary), that he prophesied long — the Russian tradition says his ministry spanned more than sixty years — and that he died in deep old age in peace and was buried in his own land. The Greek synaxarion's distich for the day plays on the marriage-sign: "Thou typifiest God as suitor of the harlot land, thyself joined to a harlot — him, O prophet, thou now beholdest"; and its second line records the burial: "On the seventeenth they gave Hosea's body burial."