{"id":2883,"date":"2020-08-30T03:44:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-30T08:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/?p=2883"},"modified":"2020-08-16T04:33:22","modified_gmt":"2020-08-16T09:33:22","slug":"revelation-a-broccoli-scripture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2020\/08\/revelation-a-broccoli-scripture.html","title":{"rendered":"Hosea: Secretly Delicious"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I talked about Revelation and how much easier it is to enjoy if you can just unlearn all the stuff that people say about it which makes no sense at all for a book written in the time and place it says it was written in for the people it says it was for.<\/p>\n

This week, I want to make the case that Hosea is in very much the same situation.<\/p>\n

Now of course Hosea does not have the same community surrounding it pushing a weird eschatological interpretation. It\u2019s a lot more common for Hosea not to be talked about at all. But when it is, it is only the first three chapters, and they are talked about in a very particular way. Hosea marries the terrible horrible prostitute, and just utterly loves her into submission. Along the way he solves all her problems and all her character defects. Because he is just do incredibly loving. It\u2019s fine. It\u2019s like plain yogurt. It\u2019s not offensive, but it\u2019s not interesting either. One note, flat characters. A story in 1 act.<\/p>\n

\"Hosea<\/a>There is a reason we read it this way. Because we aren\u2019t actually read it. Like it or not. When most of us open Hosea we aren\u2019t experiencing the words there with a fresh eye, and we are instead reading Christian subcultural assumptions into the book. Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers is the most prominent example, where even if you haven;t read it, you probably know someone who has told you the plot (it\u2019s that thing I said above but in like the 50s or whatever) and told you it is a retelling of Hosea. So you go in thinking \u201chere\u2019s the story of a man of God who is going to love a Prostitute\u201d<\/p>\n

This makes sense. Most of us are taught to read the Old Testament mostly with an eye for Christ metaphors. If you manage to find something that reminds you of Jesus in a book that\u2019s not about Jesus, you win the Bible Study for that night. Well unconditional love certainly reminds us all of Jesus, so let\u2019s go with that. And anyway that\u2019s at least fine, plain something, if we didn\u2019t do that, and we somehow read the book with fresh eyes, we wouldn\u2019t walk away with much of anything at all. We would be confused. It would seem like dribble<\/p>\n

See because. Hosea is not the story of a Man of God who loves a prostitute. Hosea opens, on a Man of God, married to someone he calls a prostitute (actually \u201cwhore\u201d is a better rendering of the hebrew) who he doesn\u2019t love, and doesn\u2019t even particularly like. He has children he doesn\u2019t like. He is bitter and angry and he is the narrator of this story By the way he also is the mouthpiece for God to his community. It\u2019s surprising, it\u2019s offensive, it\u2019s explicit, it\u2019s anything but boring. In the second chapter God brings this woman out in the wilderness and speaks tenderly to her. Questions arise in our mind about what her perspective would be in all of this, He returns to Hosea and Instructs him to love her. The actual verse in Hebrew reads like a direct refutation of Hosea\u2019s perspective at the beginning of the book. Where Hosea said \u201cGod said God and take whore wife and have whore children\u201d God says to Hosea(through Hosea\u2019s mouth and against his apparent preferences) \u201cGo again and love your wife though she is loved of another lover\u201d<\/p>\n

And Hosea says \u201cSo I bought her\u201d<\/p>\n

\"HopeWe try to make this sound nice, the redeeming love crowd. \u201cOhhhh he redeemed her, this is what Christ does for us, he pays for our sins\u201d Kay. But\u2026 this is a human woman who is already married and apparently didn\u2019t ask to get bought! Nothing about the story thus far indicates she was in any kind of debt or trouble with anyone but her husband. It\u2019s a jarring thing. And the verse after explains they the two of them won\u2019t be having sex anymore, so the vision of this like, perfect resolution to the story through an incredible act of self sacrificial buying just makes for a real stretch all to salvage a really mediocre Christophany.<\/p>\n

Plus after that, Hosea goes on for 11 more chapters.<\/p>\n

They never do those chapters in the RomCom adaptations.<\/p>\n

Hosea goes on a rant, an angry, sometimes incoherent tirade against the people of the northern kingdom and their adultery against the Lord their God by going after other gods, some of whom are literal fertility Gods with temple prostitutes. His very personal and sensitive experience within his marriage is used as an illustration of a God who would love nothing more than to divorce and abandon the people who he wishes he never married. And yet all through the midst of it, in between Hosea\u2019s unreliable narration, speaking about the justice of god and mixing metaphors as a little angry ragemonster, God shines a light, and refuses to let Hosea say \u201cAnd God is through with you\u201d and instead he says \u201cI desire mercy, not sacrifice, and knowledge of god, rather than burnt offerings\u201d He could have been speaking to Hosea with those words despite the fact that it was Hosea that said them. Hosea is angry that the people aren’t worshipping right. He is angry that his wife is not living up to his marital expectations (I don\u2019t know if she literally committed adultery or not, or if she literally was a sex-worker, Hosea is an unreliable narrator) but God makes his prophet to say \u201cMercy\u201d \u201cLove\u201d \u201cForgiveness\u201d<\/p>\n

He extends that even to the narrator of this book. Even to the angry profit who wants to forgive less than he wants to do anything else. And God uses him. And this message goes out. And the Northern Kingdom misunderstands it. And it travels from the northern kingdom to the southern kingdom, where they interpret to mean they are better than the northerners. And it travels to Babylon. And it comes back from Babylon as a now treasured and familiar message of God\u2019s surprising relationship to his people. And Jesus quotes it to the pharasees and says \u201cGo and Learn what this means: I desire Mercy, not sacrifice, and the knowledge of god, rather than burnt offerings\u201d And it\u2019s been carried to us through all our contexts and narratives and interpretations<\/p>\n

Hosea is not a one-note story about a really nice prophet. Hosea is a challenging, irreverent, ironic story full of suprises, and intrigue, and complex characters, with an even more complex God. It\u2019s narrative structure is advanced. It\u2019s moral, yeah, does end up arriving in pretty much the same place you would expect it to: Goodness is good. But on the way to that conclusion it engages in absolute art. It is, in my opinion, the best quality literature in all of scripture.<\/p>\n

Other books may have Hosea beat for theological insight and clarity (certainly clarity) but nothing beats Hosea for pure poetic imagination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I talked about Revelation and how much easier it is to enjoy if you can just unlearn all the stuff that people say about it which makes no sense at all for a book written in the time and place it says it was written in for the people it says it was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":391,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[660,663,570],"class_list":["post-2883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-broccoli","tag-broccoli-scripture","tag-delicious"],"yoast_head":"\nHosea: Secretly Delicious - A Fear of Whales<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2020\/08\/revelation-a-broccoli-scripture.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hosea: Secretly Delicious - 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