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wanderings, ii. 3, xiii. 5; for Achan (?), ii. 15; for Baal-peor, ix. 10; and for the outrage at Gibeah, ix. 9, x. 9. It was the custom with the older commentators to leap from this to the conclusion that Hosea had before him the canonical books in which the same occurrences are referred to; but we cannot be sure that he did not obtain these facts from oral tradition or from sources earlier than the canonical books in their present form (see commentary on xii. 3, 4). More stress may plausibly be laid on the parallelisms of phraseology and idea in Hosea and the Pentateuch. Almost every commentary on Hosea contains lists of such parallelisms, and for completeness' sake a list is appended here, though the writer must express the hope that students in an early stage will remember the youthful David's reply to king Saul in 1 Sam. xvii. 39. Such a list will only be of any real value to those who have already satisfied themselves on other grounds as to the period of the composition of the books of the Pentateuch. One test of the soundness of such a critical decision will be its relation to the history of the progress of revelation. If it be impossible to write this history with Deuteronomy accepted as a work of the Mosaic or at any rate pre-Hezekian age, of what use is any number of parallelisms between Deuteronomy and the Book of Hosea? All that is certain with regard to Hosea's relation to the Law is what he tells us himself, viz. that laws with a sanction which, though ignored by the N. Israelites, he himself recognized as divine were in course of being written down1 (viii. 12). Our present text makes him even say that the divine precepts might be reckoned by myriads, but this would not apply even to our present Pentateuch, and we should probably correct ribbo 'myriad' into dibhré 'words (of

1 The Targum and Aben Ezra, followed by the Authorized Version, render 'I have written' (better, 'I wrote'). The tense is the imperfect, which is sometimes used in highly poetical passages where past occurrences are referred to; see Driver, Hebrew Tenses, § 27 (1) (B). Such a use of the imperfect would however here be isolated, nor is the passage in a poetical style. We must therefore reject the rendering of Auth. Vers., and with it the theory that the prophet refers simply and solely to a body of Mosaic legislation. In fact, when Moses is referred to by Hosea, it is as a prophet and a leader of the people, not as a legislator (xii. 13).

my law)1. There may of course either have been various small law-books, or one large one; we cannot determine this point from the Book of Hosea. So far as we can infer anything, the laws in question must have been of a simple character, and have related to civil justice rather than to rites and ceremonies. In the centralization of worship, which is so prominent in the Book of Deuteronomy, Hosea takes no interest; he does not even mention Jerusalem, and applies the phrase 'the house of Jehovah' to a temple or temples of Jehovah in the 'schismatic' kingdom (ix. 4). Mr Sharpe has, it is true, revived an opinion of St Jerome that the words

"For Ephraim has multiplied altars in order to sin,

altars are to him for the purpose of sinning' (viii. 11),

refer to the Deuteronomic law of one altar (Deut. xii. 11—14), but the repetition of 'to sin' proves that the emphasis is not on the multiplied altars but on the 'sin' committed at the altars (comp. iv. 13, 14; Am. ii. 8). Indeed, was it likely that a prophet who had already mentioned 'sacred pillars' and even 'teraphim' without a word of remark on their illegality3 (iii. 4) would denounce the Israelites for their hereditary custom of multiplying altars?

With these preliminary cautions, we may proceed to collect parallelisms of phraseology in Hosea and the Pentateuch. Compare

Gen. xxii. 17 with Hos. i. 10 ('as the sand of the sea').

xxxii. 12)

Ex. iv. 22

xxiii. 13

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Deut. xviii. 15

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xxvi. 14

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1 So Grätz and Kuenen; see on viii. 12.

2 Notes and Dissertations on Hosea (1884), p. 83.

3 The writer, of course, does not mean to imply that Hosea attached a religious value either to these pillars or to the sacrifices mentioned in the same passage (iii. 4).

The above is a short list compared with some that have been drawn up1: the more dubious parallelisms, like that of iv. 4 and Deut. xvii. 8-13, have been omitted. After all, is any one of them equal in interest to the striking parallelism of thought between Hosea and Deuteronomy indicated already (see p. 28)?

It only remains to estimate the literary influence of Hosea, putting aside such questions as the chronological relation of his book to that of Deuteronomy. As we have seen already, the prophetic roll must soon have been carried into Judah, where it quickly became a favourite, as we must infer from the more or less distinct allusions to it made by later prophets. There are not many of these in Isaiah, though both Amos and Hosea have contributed elements to his teaching; we can only be sure that Isaiah is alluding to his predecessor in i. 23, where he adopts a paronomasia from Hos. ix. 15. More allusions occur in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the second part of Zechariah: compare Hosea ii. 15 with Jer. ii. 2; Hosea iii. 5 with Jer. xxx. 9, Ezek. xxxiv. 25; Hos. iv. 3 with Jer. xii. 4 (and Zeph. i. 3); Hos. x. 12 with Jer. iv. 3; Hos. i.-iii. with Jer. iii. 8, Isa. 1. 1, Ezek. xvi. and xxiii.; Hos. ii. 18 with Ezek. xxxiv. 25; Hos. ii. 22 with Jer. xxxi. 27, Zech. x. 9; Hos. ii. 17 with Zech. xiii. 2; Hos. xii. 8 with Zech. xi. 5. Some of these allusions relate to Hosea's striking application of the symbol of marriage. In fact, as the great Jewish scholar Dr Zunz has shown from medieval Hebrew poetry, this affecting symbol of their ideal hopes never ceased to attract and delight the poets of Israel. But this is not all. The New Testament, too, as we might expect, contains several expressed or implied references to the Book of Hosea:-compare Hos. i. 10 with Rom. ix. 26; Hos. ii. 1, 23 with Rom. ix. 25, 1 Pet. ii. 10; Hos. vi. 6 with Matt. ix. 13, xii. 7 (quotation by our Lord); Hos. x. 8 with Luke xxiii. 30, Rev. vi. 16, ix. 6; Hos. xi. I with Matt. ii. 15; Hos. xiii. 14 with 1 Cor. xv. 55. With regard to these references it hardly needs to be remarked that, so far as they imply interpretations, they would not all stand the test of a purely Western criticism. Their force was great to

1 For longer lists see Curtiss, The Levitical Priests (1877), pp. 176— 8; Sharpe, Hosea (1884), pp. 72—84.

those for whom the writers meant them, but cannot be equally so to us. It is allowable indeed to trace in the providential history of the people of Israel more than one analogy to that of Israel's Messiah, but to say that ‘out of Israel did I call my son' (Hos. xi. 1) is in a strict sense of the word a prediction of the infant Christ's return from Egypt violates the canons of exegesis. Delitzsch against his will expresses the weakness of this position when he calls this a 'typical prophecy1.' Typical persons and events one can understand, but if there be typical prophecies, what are the anti-typical ones? Surely for us Westerns the true Christian element in the Book of Hosea consists, not in 'typical prophecies', but in that far-reaching intuition of God's forgiving love which took shape as it were in the fulness of time in Jesus Christ.

1 Messianic Prophecies (1880), pp. 61, 62.

*

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.

The chronology of the kings is perplexed and uncertain. From the Assyrian inscriptions the following dates have been obtained (see Schrader, The Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament, German ed., pp. 465—6).

Jehu was alive in 842 (tribute to Shalmaneser).—Azariah or Uzziah 742-740.—Menahem 738 (tribute to Tiglath Pileser). — Pekah 734 (conquered by Tiglath Pileser).-Hoshea 728-722 (fall of Samaria). Hezekiah 701 (invasion of Judah).

Various systems have been framed, partly on the basis of the Assyrian, partly on that of the Biblical data. The table which follows is a fragment of Duncker's (History of Antiquity, vol. ii.).

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