THE PUNISHMENT OF FAITHLESSNESS 289 Jehovah, Israel's true God, partly the images of the Baalim, the gods of Canaan. By Hosea the corrupt and immoral worship of the people, whether nominally offered to the true God or not, is equally accounted as idolatry. He seems to anticipate (I say 'seems,' for his language is veiled and obscure) that the people will be exiled from their homes. The land of exile is the wilderness. The suffering and want produced by exile are symbolized by the aridity of the desert. By them Israel shall learn to repent her sin, as an individual learns by suffering. Then once more shall the divine Husband betroth himself unto Israel; people and God shall be re-united in bonds of fidelity and love. The opening words seem an appeal to chosen individuals that they should realize the guilt of their community. Contend with your mother, contend: for she is not my wife, neither am I her husband: let her therefore put away her faithlessness out of her sight, lest I strip her naked, and set her as in the day that she was born, and make her as a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and slay her with thirst, and have no mercy upon her children; for they are the children of faithlessness. For their mother hath done shamefully for she saith, I will go after my lovers, that give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink.' : Therefore, behold, I will hedge up her way with thorns, and build a wall against her, that she shall not find her paths. And she shall follow after her lovers, but she shall not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them: then shall she say, 'I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than now.' For she doth not realize that it was I who gave her corn and wine and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold, which they used for the Baal. Therefore will I take away again my corn in its time, and my wine in its season, and will withdraw my wool and my flax. And I will lay bare her disgrace in the sight of her lovers, and none shall deliver her out of mine hand. I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feast days, her new moons, and her sabbaths, and all her festivals. And I will destroy her vines and her fig trees, whereof she hath said, 'These are my rewards that my lovers have given me' and I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall eat them. And I will visit upon her the days of the Baalim, wherein she burned incense to them, and she : decked herself with her earrings and her jewels, and she went after her lovers, and forgat me, saith the Lord. Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak unto her heart. And thence I will give her her vineyards, and I will make the Valley of Trouble to be the Gate of Hope; and she shall respond, as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt. [And it shall be at that day, saith the Lord, that thou shalt call me Ishi (my Husband), and shalt call me no more Baali (my Lord).] And I will take away the names of the Baalim out of her mouth, and they shall no more be mentioned by their name. And in that day will I make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, and with the birds of heaven, and with the creeping things of the ground: and I will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the land, and will make them to lie down safely. And I will betroth thee unto me for ever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me with righteousness, and with justice, and with lovingkindness, and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto me with faithfulness: and thou shalt know the Lord. And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord, I will respond to the heavens, and they shall respond to the earth; and the earth shall respond with corn and wine and oil; and they shall respond to Jezreel. And I will sow her unto me in the land; and I will have pity upon her that was Unpitied; and I will say to Not my people, My people art thou; and they shall say, Thou art my God. "Therefore, behold, I will allure her.' In this third paragraph threats of mere punishment change into words of promise. The exile, or 'wilderness,' is for the purpose of purification and leads up to amendment and restoration. 'The Valley of Trouble.' In the Hebrew, 'the valley of Achor.' It lay near Jericho, and through this valley, of which the name means Trouble, the Israelites shall pass, as through a gate of Hope, on their return to Palestine. 'I will respond to the heavens.' God is the source of all good, whether physical or moral: he gives to the sky what the sky, in light and warmth and rain, gives to the earth. Then the earth gives forth its fruits, and the fruits give themselves to Jezreel (i. e. Israel). TROUBLE AND PURIFICATION 291 The exquisite pleading and promise to which we have just listened seem to have been the result and the application of that sequel to the prophet's own personal story which we are now to hear. Gomer, degraded and forlorn, is Israel in its apostasy and sin; while Gomer restored to her husband's house, but not yet restored to her husband's trust and love, is Israel in exile, gradually becoming worthy by suffering and trial and repentance to be restored to her land and pardoned by her God. And the Lord said unto me, Love yet again a faithless woman, according to the love of the Lord toward the children of Israel, although they turn to other gods and love raisincakes. So I bought her back to me for fifteen pieces of silver, and for an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley and I said unto her, Thou shalt dwell apart many days; and I will dwell apart likewise. For the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without sacrifice, and without pillar, and without ephod and without teraphim. But afterward shall the children of Israel return, and seek the Lord their God, and shall hasten eagerly to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days. 'According to the love.' Though Israel is faithless to her God, God still loves Israel. 'Without a pillar.' Hosea sarcastically enumerates the various items of their semi-idolatrous worship of which the Israelites in exile shall be deprived. 'But afterward.' The verse bears some traces of later phraseology. After the word 'God' the Hebrew has the additional words 'and David their king.' If these words are not a later assertion, the whole verse is most probably post-Hosean. 'David' means here a Judaean king of the Davidic line, a use of the word which is hardly pre-exilic. § 4. The moral and religious condition of Israel.-We now come to the second part of the Book of Hosea, the precipitate, as it has been called, of many spoken orations. Their date, as I have already said, is later than the narrative which precedes them; the sections are usually short, the transitions are sometimes abrupt, the connexion of thought is not always easy to trace. Unfortunately too the Hebrew is frequently very obscure and corrupt; the old versions only rarely give certain help; the translation is therefore often doubtful, and occasionally hopeless. Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel: for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor lovingkindness, nor knowledge of God in the land. They swear and lie, they murder and steal, they commit violence, and blood toucheth blood. Therefore doth the land mourn, and everything that dwelleth therein languisheth, even to the beasts of the field, and to the birds of heaven; yea, even the fishes of the sea are swept away. Yet let none rebuke, nor reprove another: for my people are as their priestlings! Therefore shalt thou, O priest, stumble by day, and the prophet shall stumble with thee by night, and. ... My people are ruined for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the teaching of thy God, I will also forget thy children. As they increased, so they sinned against me: they exchanged their glory for shame. They eat the sin of my people, and they set their heart on their iniquity. And therefore it shall be as with the people, so with the priest: I will punish them for their ways, and requite them their doings. For they shall eat, and not have enough: they shall be faithless, and find no pleasure: because they have abandoned the Lord. Apostasy and wine and new wine take away the mind. My people ask counsel at their stocks, and their staff declareth unto them: for the spirit of apostasy hath caused them to err, and they have gone astray from their God. They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and terebinths, because the shadow thereof is good. [Though thou, Israel, play the apostate, yet let not Judah become guilty; and come not ye unto Gilgal, neither go ye up to Beth-aven, nor swear (in Beer-sheba), As the Lord liveth.] For Israel is stubborn as a stubborn heifer: shall the Lord feed them as a lamb in a large place? Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone. Their shall be put to shame because of their altars! .: they The moral condition of Israel must have been grave indeed if this charge of Hosea was founded on sober facts. Note at once two religious terms characteristic of Hosea: knowledge of God and lovingkindness. To suppose that God cares for sacrifices, or that burnt offerings can undo iniquity—this is a false knowledge RIGHTEOUSNESS AND LOVE 293 of God, which is equivalent to moral guilt. It is a sin. So too to worship God under material forms, to confound him with the Baalim: that, again, is culpable ignorance; moral and religious iniquity. On the other hand, the highest and deepest knowledge of God, based on the fullest spiritual experience, is partly God's own gift. It is the special grace and guerdon of the period of forgiveness and restoration. The same double aspect of the highest religious qualities has repeatedly come before us. Lovingkindness, in Hebrew Chesed, 'includes,' as Professor Cheyne points out, 'in its wide range of meaning,' the love of God to man, the love of man to God, and the love of man to man. Here the context favours the last of these meanings. Hosea is fond both of the word and the idea. In Amos, to whom righteousness is all inclusive and all sufficient, Chesed is wanting. Some people like to emphasize love at the expense, if I may say so, of righteousness; some people, by way of opposition, like to emphasize righteousness at the expense of love. To some extent it is a question of words. The fullest righteousness must be loving; the fullest love must be righteous. Yet there are elements of self-sacrifice, of emotion, of unreckoning and unreserving selfabandonment in the highest human goodness which are more appropriate to the idea of love than to the idea of righteousness. Nevertheless even though God be love as well as righteousness, the conception of self-sacrifice is inapplicable to God. That which is great in man is not necessarily an attribute of God. Selfsacrifice involves struggle, or opposition, or change, or suffering, or death. All these things are utterly incompatible with the supreme idea of God. Every attempt to apply the idea of selfsacrifice to God has only ended in failure. It is inconsistent with the divine unity. It is an exaggerated, if well-meant, application to God of human attributes. It is far better to rest humbly in the adequate assurance and perfect faith that God is wholly good. The precise nature of his goodness is not for us to determine. It is beyond our power. We do not wish to exclude from our conception of the Divine Being the idea that he greatly cares for the souls which he has made.' That he rejoices in our righteousness and grieves for our sin we may still maintain, if we remember that these words are human accommodations, and trench very closely upon the barrier between man and God. We want to ascribe love to God because love implies nearness and personality, whereas mere 'righteousness' seems cold and distant. But we must not use any of these human terms in a hard and fast or dogmatic manner. For directly we use concerning God words which too markedly imply the limitations and. |