Hosea: A Textual Commentary 9780567671745, 9780567671769, 9780567671752

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LIBRARY OF HEBREW BIBLE/ OLD TESTAMENT STUDIES

653 Formerly Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series

Editors Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University Andrew Mein, Westcott House, Cambridge

Founding Editors David J. A. Clines, Philip R. Davies and David M. Gunn

Editorial Board Alan Cooper, Susan E. Gillingham, John Goldingay, Robert P. Gordon, Norman K. Gottwald, James E. Harding, John Jarick, Carol Meyers, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, James W. Watts

HOSEA

A Textual Commentary

Mayer I. Gruber

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition first published in 2019 © Mayer I. Gruber, 2017 Mayer I. Gruber has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-7174-5 PB: 978-0-5676-8644-2 ePDF: 978-0-5676-7175-2 Series: Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, volume 653 Typeset by Forthcoming Publications (www.forthpub.com) To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is dedicated with love and admiration to my sons-in-law Yehuda Granot Eliyahu Nachman Glick

C on t en t s

Preface and Acknowledgments Abbreviations List of Illustrations Introduction

ix xv xvii 1

Hosea: A New Translation A New Translation

43 Hosea: A New Commentary

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapters 5 and 6 Chapters 7 and 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14

67 101 163 184 241 304 367 401 457 492 522 557

Appendix: Kings of Israel, Judah, and Assyria Mentioned or Alluded to in the Book of Hosea

600

Bibliography 601 Index of References 622 Index of Authors 653

P r efa ce a n d A ck n owle dgme nt s

Around the year 2000, when I had published a number of studies touching upon issues in the book of Hosea, my esteemed colleague Victor Avigdor Hurowitz, of blessed memory, suggested to me and to others that I write a complete modern commentary on the book of Hosea. In the course of my discussions concerning this idea, David Clines, Founder and Editor of Sheffield Phoenix Press, suggested that I write such a commentary for the series Text of the Hebrew Bible. As life would have it, on the very day, January 2, 2016, that I decided that I had written everything that I wanted to write about the book of Hosea, and I was about to send the final version to David, I received notice from David that he was closing Sheffield Phoenix Press, and that he had arranged for books that had not yet reached him in final form to be published by Bloomsbury T&T Clark. I consider myself extremely lucky that this decision put me in the very good hands of Biblical Studies Editor at Bloomsbury T&T Clark, Dominic Mattos, who got this project moving with lightning speed, Commissioning Editor Miriam Cantwell, Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies Series Editors Andrew Mein and Claudia Camp, Production Editor Beth Williams, and especially the gifted, wise, careful and sensitive Copy-editor, Duncan Burns of Forthcoming Publications, who typeset and edited the pages, and also prepared the indices. I record my sincere thanks to the wonderful people who supplied illustrations, which, I believe, make the commentary significantly more comprehensible. My esteemed colleague, the archaeologist Professor Gunnar Lehmann, prepared the map of ancient Israel and Judah, which should enable readers to have a more precise understanding of many places named and alluded to in the book of Hosea. My son-in-law Eliyahu Nachman Glick provided me with a picture of himself wearing tallit (prayer shawl) and tefillin (phylacteries), to illustrate the strap of the arm–hand tefilla (phylactery) wound around the fingers while reciting Hos. 2:21–22 (illustration #2). Professor Amihai Mazar, Head of the Tel Rehov Expedition, provided me with the beautiful picture of an Iron Age Israelite oven (for Hos. 7:4) from the sixth occupation level (tenth century BCE) at Tel Rehov in the Beth She’an Valley (illustration #4).

x

Preface and Acknowledgments

I thank Yitzhak Feliks for permission to reproduce from the book by his father of blessed memory, Jehuda Feliks, Plant World of the Bible (Ramat-Gan: Masada, 1957), pp. 209 and 211, respectively the illustrations of the weed [Heb. qimmōš] (for Hos. 9:6) and thorn [Heb. ḥōăḥ] (for Hos. 9:6) [illustrations #5 and #6]. I thank my son Rabbi Jehiel Benjamin Gruber for the picture of a grapevine from Kibbutz Yahel in the Arava Region of Israel (illustration #9). All the other illustrations employed in this book are taken from old books, now in the public domain, which I inherited from my late and beloved father, Rabbi David Samuel Gruber. I express my sincere gratitude to Patrice Kaminski, Graphic Artist in the Archaeological Division of the Department of Bible, Archaeology, and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel, for editing for publication all of the nine illustrations that appear in this book. I record my sincere thanks to the Zalman Aranne Central Library of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem, the Elias Sourasky Central Library at the University of Tel Aviv, the British Library at London, the Maughan Library and the Foyles Special Collections Library at King’s College in London, and the central library of the University of Portland in Portland, Oregon for access to their respective resources, which were indispensable to the research presented in the following pages. The Committee on Research Leave at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev granted me sabbatical leave during the academic years 2007–2008 and 2008–2009 and the fall semester of the 20012–20013 academic year. These periods of research leave enabled me to accept visiting scholar appointments at the University of Manchester in Manchester in the UK (spring 2008), Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas (fall–winter 2008–2009), and the Departamento de Ciências Sociais Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil (spring and summer 2012–2013; in Brazil October and November are fall, and summer falls in December–February). It was at these three institutions that I completed a significant part of the work on the commentary on the book of Hosea. I record my sincere thanks to my sponsors at these institutions—Professor Philip Alexander and Professor Bernard Jackson, then co-directors of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester and the subject leader for biblical studies at the University of Manchester, Professor George J. Brooke; Professor Claudia Camp, Professor Toni Craven, Professor David Gunn, and Professor Leo G. Perdue—my sponsors at Texas Christian University; and Professor Caesar Malta Sobreira, my sponsor at the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco.



Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

For his counsel almost daily on all kinds of matters pertaining to biblical philology and stylistics, I thank my esteemed colleague and good friend of many, many years, Professor Shamir Yona, Head of the Bible and Ancient Near East Division of the Department of Bible, Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. I alone am responsible for any and all misinterpretations of anything I have attributed in the present volume to Professor Yona or any other scholar. I express my sincere thanks to Professor Haim Goldfus, Chair of the Department of Bible, Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev for his unstinting support and encouragement of my scholarship, and particularly for his sage counsel with issues related to reception history. Special thanks are due Former Chair of the Department of Bible Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel Prize Laureate Shmuel Aḥituv, for helping me locate the copyright holder for illustrations nos. 5 and 6, and for encouragement and advice during the course of the last 32 years. I am especially grateful to the encouragement I have received from my sons and daughters and from my daughters-in-law and sons-in law, and it is to my sons-in-law, Yehuda Granot and Eliyahu Nachman Glick, that I am pleased to dedicate this publication. To my wife, Judith Esther Weissman Cohen, I owe more than words can express for her daily words of enthusiasm and encouragement concerning this project ever since we met in January 2011. And finally, I thank the Source of all Blessing for having enabled me to bring to fruition this project, with the help of all the wonderful people singled out in this preface and with the help and encouragement of others, whom I mention in the introduction and in the body of this commentary. It is my hope that my new translation and commentary will inspire many people to espouse the virtues taught by the prophets named and unnamed, who were responsible for the biblical book of Hosea. Mayer Irwin Gruber Professor Emeritus, Department of Bible, Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev First Day of Hanukkah (25 Kislev) 5777 corresponding to 25 December 2016 [I sincerely pray that the fortuitous circumstance of Hanukkah and Christmas coinciding may be the harbinger of happy times of peace on earth and good will to all people] Beer Sheva, Israel, the city of the matriarchs and patriarchs

A b b r ev i at i ons

Technical Abbreviations in Biblical and Judaic Studies—Ancient and Medieval Versions of Hebrew Scripture Septuagint (Old Greek) Translations of Hebrew Scripture LXX Masoretic Text MT Rabbinic Works b. Bavli or Babylonian Talmud followed by name of Tractate m. Mishnah followed by name of Tractate t. Tosefta followed by name of Tractate Abbreviations of Titles of Books, Encyclopedias, Journals, and Series in Biblical Research and Cognate Disciplines Anchor Bible AB ABD David Noel Freedman, ed. The Anchor Bible Dictionary (6 vols.; New York, 1992) AJS Review Association for Jewish Studies Review American Journal of Semitic Languages AJSL ANET James B. Pritchard, ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (3rd ed.; Princeton, 1969) AOAT Alter Orient und Altes Testament Das Alte Testament Deutsch ATD Authorised Version of the Bible, commonly called King James AV Version (KJV) [1911] Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research BASOR Francis Brown, Samuel Rolles Driver, and Charles Augustus BDB Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1907) R. Kittel, ed. Biblica Hebraica (3rd ed.; Stuttgart, 1937) BHK Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia BHS Brown Judaic Studies BJS BKAT Biblischer Kommentar: Altes Testament BN Biblische Notizen Biblical Theology Bulletin BTB BZ Biblische Zeitschrift Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentlische Wissenschaft BZAW

xiv Abbreviations Martha T. Roth et al., eds. [Chicago Assyrian Dictionary] The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (26 vols.; Chicago, 1956–2011) CB Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly DCH David J. A. Clines, Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (8 vols.; Sheffield, 1993–2011) DDD Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter van der Horst (eds.), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (2nd ed.; Leiden, 1999) EI Eretz-Israel EncJud Encyclopaedia Judaica ETL Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses FAT Forschungen zum Alten Testament Gesenius-Buhl, 17th ed. Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, ed. Frants Buhl (Leipzig, 1905) GKB Wilhelm Gesenius, E. Kautzsch, and Gotthelf Bergsträsser, Hebräische Grammatik (28th ed.; Hildesheim, 1962) GKC Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar (ed. E. Kautzsch; rev. and trans. A. E. Cowley; Oxford, 1910) Gruber, ANCANE Mayer I. Gruber, Aspects of Nonverbal Communication in the Ancient Near East (2 vols.; Rome, 1980) Ludwig Koehler and Walther Baumgartner, Hebräisches und HALAT Aramäisches Lexikon zum Alten Testament (5 vols.; Leiden, 1967–95) HALOT Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (trans. M. E. J. Richardson; 5 vols.; Leiden, 2000) HAT Handbuch zum Alten Testament HKAT Handkommentar zum Alten Testament HTR Harvard Theological Review Hebrew Union College Annual HUCA ICC International Critical Commentary IDB George Arthur Buttrick (ed.), The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (4 vols.; Nashville, 1962) IDBSup IDB, Supplementary Volume IVP InterVarsity Press JANESCU Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of Biblical Literature JBL JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies Joüon and Muraoka Paul Joüon, Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, translated into English and revised by T. Muraoka (Rome, 2006) JPOS Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society Jewish Publication Society JPS JPSV Jewish Publication Society Version of the Bible (1917) JQR Jewish Quarterly Review CAD

Abbreviations JSOT JSOTSup JTS KAI

xv

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series Journal of Theological Studies H. Donner and W. Röllig, Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften (3 vols.; 3rd ed.; Wiesbaden, 2002) KAT Kommentar zum Alten Testament Kaufmann, HIR Y. Kaufmann, History of the Israelite Religion (8 vols. in 4; Jerusalem, 1964) [in Hebrew] KJV King James Version of the Bible (1611), also called AV KTU Keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit, 3rd ed.: The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places (ed. M. Dietrich, O. Loretz, and J. Sanmartín; Münster, 2013) NedTTs Nederlands theologisch tijdschrift NJPS New Jewish Publication Society English Version of the Bible (1985) NKZ Neue kirchliche Zeitschrift OBO Orbis Biblicus et Orientalias OTL Old Testament Library OTS Oudtestamentische Studien PEQ Palestine Exploration Quarterly POT De Prediking van het Oude Testament RB Revue Biblique RHPhR Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuse SBL Society of Biblical Literature SBLDS Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series TDOT G. J. Botterweck and H. Ringgren (eds.), Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (8 vols.; Grand Rapids, 1974–2006) UF Ugarit Forschungen VT Vetus Testamentum VTSup Vetus Testamentum, Supplements WBC Word Biblical Commentary ZAW Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft ZDPV Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins

L i s t of I l l u s t r at i ons

1.

Map of Israel and Judah

xix

2.

Eliyahu Nachman Glick wearing tefillin (phylacteries) and illustrating the strap of the arm-hand tefilla (phylactery) wound around the fingers while reciting Hos. 2:21–22

157

3

Net or snare for trapping birds

244

4. Iron Age Israelite oven from the sixth occupation level (tenth century BCE) at Tel Rehov in the Beth She’an Valley, Israel

316

5.

Weed [Heb. qimmōš] 383

6.

Thorn [Heb. ḥōăḥ] 383

7.

Yoke [Heb. ol]: two pairs of oxen, each pair tied together with a wooden yoke

468

8.

Sodom apple

586

9.

Grapevine from Kibbutz Yahel in the Arava Region of Israel

587

Illustration 1. Map of Israel and Judah (provided by Professor Gunnar Lehmann)

I n t rod uct i on

1. Why Another Commentary on Hosea? a. My Mentors and My Own Previous Work My first transformative encounter with the biblical book of Hosea was as a student in the confirmation class at the Tree of Life Congregation in Columbia, South Carolina in 1960. In that class my father, Rabbi David S. Gruber, of blessed memory, taught us that Hosea learned about God’s abiding love for the people of Israel against all odds from his own experience of being betrayed by his wife Gomer.1 My next transformative encounter with the book of Hosea came about as a result of my involvement with my revered teacher H. L. Ginsberg (1903–1990). During my freshman year of college at Duke University in the 1961–62 academic year the instructor in Religion 101x, ‘Introduction to the Old Testament’, Professor O. S. Wintermute, began to encourage me to study for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City where he hoped I would encounter H. L. Ginsberg, ‘with whom’, Wintermute said, ‘you will want to disagree; but just remember that he is right’. In fact, I took Professor Wintermute’s advice. As luck would have it, I had the privilege during my first two years of study toward rabbinic ordination at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (hereinafter JTS) to serve as typist for Professor Ginsberg, who was then preparing a commentary, never completed, on Isa. 1–39 for the Anchor Bible commentary series. Later I had the privilege of studying Biblical History and Second Isaiah with Ginsberg. In the course in biblical history Ginsberg introduced us to H. Tadmor’s ‘The Historical Background of the Prophecies of Hosea’.2 It was Ginsberg’s classes on Second Isaiah, in which Isa. 40–66 was treated as a unit from the pen of a single post-exilic prophet, that I learned about the influence of Hos. 2:17 upon Isa. 65:10. During my five years of study 1.  See my discussion and rejection of this widely held interpretation of Hos. 1–2 in my commentary on Hos. 1–2, below. 2.  H. Tadmor, ‘The Historical Background of the Prophecies of Hosea’, in Yehezkel Kaufmann Jubilee Volume (ed. Menahem M. Haran; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1961), pp. 84–88 (in Hebrew).

2

Hosea: A Textual Commentary

at JTS Ginsberg gave me offprints of some of his important articles, including ‘Lexicographical Notes’.3 From the latter study I learned all kinds of important insights into the meaning of words and phrases in the book of Hosea, including the suggestion that the noun qĕdēšâ may well not be a cultic prostitute.4 From my late and revered father I learned also about his mentor Shalom Spiegel, who wrote an important study on the influence of the Ten Commandments upon the book of Hosea. Probably more important than Spiegel’s clever and intriguing insights into Hos. 6:5 is Spiegel’s penetrating discussion of the history of research on the influence of the Decalogue upon the book of Hosea.5 No less important is what I learned from the writings of U. Cassuto and others and from my own creative imagination concerning possible influences of Pentateuchal narrative and law upon the book of Hosea.6 At the JTS I was privileged to encounter Robert Gordis and to hear his model lessons on the book of Job. It was here that I learned of his major contributions to understanding the book of Hosea and saw how a master teacher can win over to the study of biblical philology a class of young people who wanted nothing more nor less than to be certified to minister to the religious and spiritual needs of middle-class American Jews. There also I met another master teacher, Shalom M. Paul, whose brilliant insights into a variety of issues in the book of Hosea, especially in chs. 5, 7–8, 10, are elaborated upon in my commentary below. From Ginsberg’s class in biblical history and from his laconic notes on the book of Hosea in the Encyclopaedia Judaica7 I absorbed the 3.  H. L. Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, in Hebräische Wortforschung (Festschrift zum 80. Geburtstag von Walter Baumgartner; VTSup, 16; Leiden: Brill, 1971), pp. 71–82 4.  See the extensive discussion below in this introduction and especially in my commentary on Hos. 4. 5.  S. Spiegel, ‘A Prophetic Attestation of the Decalogue: Hosea 6:5’, Harvard Theological Review 27 (1934), pp. 105–44. 6.  U. Cassuto, ‘The Prophet Hosea and the Books of the Pentateuch’, in Abhand­ lungen zur Erinnerung an Hirsch Perez Chajes (ed. V. Aptowitzer and A. Z. Schwarz; Vienna: Alexander Kohut Foundation, 1933), pp. 262–78 (in Hebrew); republished in English translation in U. Cassuto, Biblical and Oriental Studies (trans I. Abrahams; 2 vols.; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1973), vol. 1, pp. 79–100; and U. Cassuto, ‘The Second Chapter of the Book of Hosea’, in Livre d’hommage à la mémoire du Dr. Samuel Poznánski (ed. the Committee of the Great Synagogue in Warsaw; Warsaw: Harrassowitz, 1927), pp. 115–35 (in Hebrew); republished in English translation in Cassuto, Biblical and Oriental Studies, vol. 1, pp. 101–40. 7.  H. L. Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, EncJud (1972), vol. 8, pp. 1010–25; reprinted in EncJud, 2nd ed. (2007), vol. 9, pp. 547–58.

 Introduction

3

arguments for dividing the book of Hosea into two distinct documents, the first from the ninth century BCE (Hos. 1–3), and the second from the reign of King Menahem son of Gadi of Israel (747–737 BCE), and for understanding the background of Hos. 5:10 and the appeal of the king of Israel for help from Tiglath-pileser referred to in Hos. 5:13 and 10:6. The main justification for a new commentary on Hosea is the opportunity to utilize recent insights into (1) the historical background of Hosea; and (2) biblical poetics and rhetoric. With the help of Ginsberg’s understanding that the worship of deities other than Yhwh in the eighth century BCE is almost totally absent from the concerns of Hos. 4–14, and going beyond Ginsberg to see that opposition to worship of other deities is not the only issue in Hos. 1–3, and with the help of a very few necessary emendations (I prefer to call them restorations) of the received Hebrew text of the book of Hosea, I was able to produce a coherent interpretation of the several sections within the two larger units of Hos. 1–3 and Hos. 4–14, which I truly believe comes close to understanding more than 95% of the book of Hosea as the human author and the deity in whose name he spoke had intended. In so doing, I have eschewed the common approach of listing ad nauseum what many learned people from antiquity had to say about a given word or phrase or passage and what different ancient and medieval translations inform us. I have, however, frequently cited the Septuagint, Targum Jonathan, and the Peshitta where these ancient translations shed important light. In many instances the light shed by ancient, medieval, and modern exegetes and translators is not in what they themselves tell us but in the way in which their errors lead us to unravel the conundrums which they confronted. The result of encountering ancient, medieval, and modern exegesis is often to find a new path to rediscover the intent of the ancient author. I truly believe that aside from the many other insights into the book of Hosea, which I discovered, inter alia, from sitting with Ginsberg’s usually laconic remarks, Shalom Paul’s focusing on part of a pericope, the attempts of Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–c. 1167) and Yefet Ben Eli (tenth-century CE Jerusalem), and the often idiosyncratic but highly useful lexicography of Kaddari,8 Zorrell,9 Morag,10 and G. R. Driver, the commentary presented here would have been worth it had I done nothing more than to present a 8.  M.-Z. Kaddari, A Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2006) (in Hebrew). 9.  F. Zorell, Lexicon Hebraicum et Aramaicum Veteris Testamenti (Rome: Pontificium Istitutum Biblicum, 1962). 10.  S. Morag, ‘On Semantic and Lexical Features in the Language of Hosea’, Tarbiz 53 (1984), pp. 484–511 (in Hebrew).

4

Hosea: A Textual Commentary

coherent commentary, which read Hos. 4 following the story line of that chapter and of the texts in Hosea related to it, eschewing and demolishing the scholarly myth of cultic prostitution. However, I am so bold as to say that in the course of the ten years that I have written and rewritten and thought over the translation and the commentary presented here, I have arrived at new and totally convincing interpretations of every chapter of the book of Hosea. Consequently, while coming to understand correctly the references to sexual relations in chs. 1–7 and 9 led me to examine the entire book, I was able to stand on the shoulders of teachers and colleagues and to offer what I hope will be judged as a very significantly improved understanding of the entire book of Hosea. Early in my academic career I was privileged to see my thesis declaring that cultic prostitution was a scholarly myth rather than a datum of ancient Israelite religion embraced by distinguished critical commentators on the Pentateuch, including J. Milgrom in his commentary on the book of Numbers,11 and J. H. Tigay in his commentary on the book of Deuteronomy.12 Recently, my arguments were accepted also in a monograph on Hos. 2.13 Until now, however, Macintosh is almost unique among authors of full-length commentaries on the book of Hosea to refer to my arguments that cultic prostitution is not referred to in Hos. 4 or anywhere else in the book of Hosea. However, in the end Macintosh is reluctant to admit that cultic prostitution would be so frequently referred to in biblical scholarship had it not been a reality in ancient Israel.14 While until now not a single running commentary on the book of Hosea in either Modern Hebrew or a modern European language has totally abandoned the scholarly myth of cultic prostitution, many commentaries have also read this myth into Jer. 3:2 and Ezek. 16 and 23. In fact, in both of the latter chapters, under the influence of Hos. 1–3, prostitution is employed metaphorically to refer to the disloyalty of personified Lady Judah to her metaphoric husband, Yhwh. Moreover, while many biblical scholars have accepted my arguments concerning qĕdēšâ/ōt in Gen. 38, Deut. 23, and Hos. 4, almost every annual and international meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature features at least one paper that attempts 11.  Jacob Milgrom, Numbers (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), p. 479. 12.  J. H. Tigay, Deuteronomy (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), pp. 215–16, 480–81, 540–41. 13.  B. E. Kelle, Hosea 2: Metaphor and Rhetoric in Historical Perspective (Society of Biblical Literature: Academia Biblica, 20; Leiden: Brill, 2005). 14.  A. A. Macintosh, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Hosea (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1997), pp. 156–59.

 Introduction

5

to argue anew what I had already demonstrated in my various studies on the subject.15 On the other hand, when they reluctantly accepted for the program of the annual meeting my discussion of sex tourism reflected in Hos. 9 (see below in my commentary), I was threatened that I had better prove that sexual prostitution was a myth, something I had proven to the satisfaction of outstanding commentators on Numbers and Deuteronomy more than thirty years ago. Consequently, there can be no question but that had I done no more in this commentary than to make available to a wider audience my debunking of the myth of sacred prostitution, I would have made a major contribution to the continuing education of prominent biblical scholars. Indeed, the commentary found in this volume contributes first and foremost the following: First, I present a running commentary on Hosea, which in order to follow the story line of Hos. 4 has no choice but to eliminate the myth of cultic prostitution and highlight the condemnation of male marital infidelity, which is the major subject of Hos. 4:10–18. Second, I successfully exegete the story line of each of the subdivisions of Hos. 1–3 and their allusions to idolatry employing sexual metaphors, without invoking the scholarly myths of sacred prostitution/fertility cult. Third, I provide a commentary, which successfully correlates with Hos. 4:10–18 the further references to married men who cheat on their wives and patronize prostitutes in Hos. 5:3–4; 6:10; 7:14; 9:1–2, and enters into fruitful dialogue with the relatively new social science discipline of sex tourism. In light of my revered teacher Shalom M. Paul’s demonstration that melek śārîm in Hos. 8:10 corresponds to Akk. šar šarîm ‘king of kings’, or king par excellence, referring to the emperor of Assyria who ruled over numerous vassal kings, I was able not only to produce a coherent interpretation of Hos. 8 but also to make sense of all the other references and allusions to singular śār and plural śārîm in the book of Hosea. Thus, for example, I was able to make sense of the parallelism of incrementally increasing numbers in Hos. 7:3 melek/śārîm ‘king/rulers’ referring to the succession of kings who assassinated and usurped one another as described in 2 Kgs 15:9–14. I was likewise able to make sense of the use of the pair of delocutive verbs himlîkû//hēśîrû, meaning ‘they appointed kings//they appointed rulers’, in Hos. 8:4. In addition, I showed that Paul’s interpretation of the pericope concerning the assassination of a king// rulers in Hos. 7:3–7 corroborates the Ginsberg–Tadmor dating of Hos. 4–14 to the reign of King Menahem son of Gadi.

15.  See the extensive discussion and bibliography in my commentary on Hos. 4.

6

Hosea: A Textual Commentary

b. The Book of Hosea and Biblical Rhetoric In the fall of 1980 I had the rare privilege of succeeding as instructor in ancient Northwest Semitic languages and literatures in the Department of Bible and Ancient Near East, as it was then called, the distinguished Yitzhak Avishur, who later taught this subject at the University of Haifa. From Avishur’s seminal studies on the varieties of parallelism in both biblical and Ugaritic poetry and from the important studies of Avishur’s students, Meir Paran of blessed memory, and may he be distinguished for long and healthy life, Shamir Yona, as also from the encyclopedic studies by W. G. E. Watson, I was able to show how the author of Hos. 2:21–24 had strung together a series of distinct rhetorical devices to convey the profound and powerful message that Israel might be given the opportunity to turn the city of Jezreel from a fortress city, which it had been for half a century, back into its proper role as the bread basket of ancient Israel. Indeed, in its larger immediate context Hos. 2:21–24 is part and parcel of the central message of Hos. 1–2, namely, that ancient Israel and the modern reader have the power, by changing their behaviour, to become worthy of being God’s beloved spouse. Unquestionably, had I not spent a number of years exploring the nuances of the homonymous roots ny, one of which means ‘to fructify’,16 it is highly unlikely that I would have been able to utilize Watson’s ‘extended terrace’, Paran’s climactic conclusion, Yona’s researches on anaphora, combined with Aster’s monumental study of Hos. 1–2 in light of the archaeology of the city of Jezreel to understand and to expound the architecture and the artistry and the story line of Hos. 2:21–25. The above comments are just a taster of the many highlights that came to me as I worked each and every day for many years to prepare a coherent commentary on what, ultimately, is a series of highly coherent prophetic speeches composed in the ninth (Hos. 1–3) and eighth centuries (Hos. 4–14) BCE. The key to unravelling the mysteries of what is commonly regarded as one of the three most incomprehensible books of the Hebrew Bible (the other two are Habakkuk and Job) is the use in combination of innovative lexicography, the study of Hebrew and Ugaritic stylistics, and the history and archaeology of ancient Israel. The outcome is to encounter anew a series of powerful and timeless messages about issues which are only rarely discussed in biblical studies in the post-modern era, among them the sanctity of monogamy and the dispensability of religious services from the point of view of real 16.  See, inter alia, M. Gruber, ‘Nuances of the Verb ny—To Fructify’, Studies in Bible and Exegesis 7 (2005), pp. 233–44 (in Hebrew).

 Introduction

7

or imagined messengers of God.17 These prophets seem to have seen themselves as commanded to call for fair play in interpersonal relations as a higher religion than services of worship (see, inter alia, Hos. 3 and Hos. 6:6). In other words, we have here a book that suggests that, with all due respect to liturgical renewal, evangelical renewal, Jewish renewal, and the like, all of which often enable their adherents to replace sadness with happiness, what the God in whose name the two prophets of the book of Hosea speak their sublime messages of rebuke and consolation seems to demand is primarily a renewal of our humanity toward others. I invite the reader to determine whether I have provided a small taste of what can be sought and found in the book of Hosea if the reader will read on in the new translation and in the commentary, which is meant to justify and explain and expound that translation. 2. The Divisions of the Book of Hosea and their Provenance a. Hosea 1–3 and Hosea 4–14 The index volume (vol. 6) of the English condensed version of Heinrich Graetz’s monumental Geschichte der Juden18 distinguishes between ‘Hosea (1), prophet under Jeroboam II, prophecies of, 1, 240–2’ and ‘Hosea (II), prophet, under Hosea, 1, 251’.19 In fact, Graetz discusses in considerable detail the ideas found in Hos. 1–3.20 Graetz assigns these chapters to ‘Hosea, son of Beeri, the third prophet of Jeroboam’s and Uzziah’s times’.21 Assuming that the command–action sequences described in Hos. 1 and Hos. 3 are accounts of prophetic visions and have nothing to do with the prophet’s biography, Graetz declares, ‘Nothing is known of his [i.e., Hosea son of Beeri’s] life and actions; we are not even

17.  I am inclined to believe that the prophets under consideration were indeed real messengers of a real Yhwh. However, in the scientific community in which I am honoured to work and play, what I cannot show in the laboratory I cannot fully know. Hence I leave it to the reader to draw her/his conclusions as to the reality of the prophetic claim and the reality of the God in whose name the prophets of ancient Israel spoke to their own time and to our time as well. 18.  Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews (6 vols.; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891–96), vol. 6, p. 325. 19.  I.e. the king, who is commonly designated in English as Hoshea, to distinguish him from the prophet(s) mentioned by name three times in Hos. 1:1–2. See the discussion in my commentary at Hos. 1:1. 20.  Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 1, pp. 240–42. 21.  Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 1, p. 240.

8

Hosea: A Textual Commentary

told in which kingdom he delivered his speeches. It is, however, probable that the scene of his activity was Bethel or Samaria.’22 Concerning the other prophet Hosea, whom Graetz calls ‘Hosea II’,23 and whom the index volume to Graetz assigns to the reign of the last king of the Northern Kingdom,24 Hoshea son of Elah [732–722 BCE], Graetz is able to tell us only the following: In [eighth-century BCE] Israel, injustice could never pass as public justice. Here there were men who loudly declaimed against the mockery of justice, and the degradation of the poor; men who defended justice and morality as the only right course; men who supported the weak against the mighty. Just at this period of degradation, while Jotham ruled in Judah and Pekah in Israel, several God-inspired men arose, who spoke with words of fire against the vices of the nobility. These men were the third generation of great prophets who succeeded Amos, Joel, and Hosea,25 as these had followed Elijah and Elisha. The most important amongst them was Isaiah, son of Amoz, from Jerusalem. With his contemporary prophets, Zechariah,26 Hosea II,27 and Micah II,28 he shared the 22.  Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 1, pp. 240–42. 23.  Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 1, p. 251. 24.  Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 6, p. 325. 25.  I.e. Hosea (I) the son of Beeri, whom Graetz dated to the reign of Jeroboam II; see above. 26.  I.e., Zechariah son of Jeberechiah, to whom Graetz assigns Zech. 9–14. Cf. Kaufmann, HIR 6–7:322–34. As pointed out by Kaufmann (p. 322), it was Archbishop William Newcome in his An Attempt toward an Improved Version of the Twelve Minor Prophets (rev. ed.; London: Richard Baines, 1819), pp. 303–17, who first argued that Zech. 9–14 are from the period of the First Temple period, while it was L. Bertholdt, in his Einleitung in sämmtliche kanonische und apokryphische Schriften des alten und neun Testaments )part 4; Erlangen: Johann Jakob Palm, 1814), pp. 1711–28, who first assigned Zech. 9–14 to the pen of Zechariah son of Jeberechiah, who is mentioned in Isa. 8:2. Interestingly, Graetz here, later to be followed by Kaufmann, accepts Bertholdt’s viewpoint although it was challenged already by J. G. Eichhorn, who argued for the dependence of Zech. 9–14 on Zech. 1–8 in his Einleitung in das alte Testament (3rd ed.; 3 vols.; Leipzig: Weidmannischen Buchhandlung, 1803), pp. 362–67. It was the view of Eichhorn, which ultimately prevailed in biblical scholarship. 27.  I.e., the prophetic voice heard in Hos. 4–14. 28.  The division of the book of Micah into two major divisions, namely, Mic. 1–5 containing the speeches of Micah of Moresheth, a Judean prophet contemporary with Isaiah son of Amoz, and Mic. 6–7 containing the speeches of an unnamed from the Northern Kingdom was taken up, without any reference to Graetz, inter alia, by the following: F. C. Burkitt, ‘Micah 6 and 7: A Northern Prophecy’, JBL 45 (1926), pp. 159–61; A. S. Van der Woude, ‘Deutero-Micha: Ein Prophet aus Nord-Israel’, NedTTs

 Introduction

9

courage, which calls vice and crime by their right names, and which mercilessly brands the guilty.29

Tadmor dates Hos. 4–14 to the reign of Menahem son of Gadi (747–737 BCE), and specifically prior to the reign of Pekah son of Ramaliahu (735–732 BCE), at which time Aram was conquered by King Tiglathpileser III of Assyria (732 BCE; see 2 Kgs 16:9), and when the Galilee and the Transjordan territories of Israel (Gilead) [see 2 Kgs 15:29] were annexed by King Tiglath-pileser III of Assyria.30 As Tadmor argues, it is unthinkable that our prophet, who refers to the Assyrian king as a possible ally of Israel in its war of defence against Judah (Hos. 5:10, 13; 7:11; 14:4), spoke at a time when Assyria had become Israel’s enemy.31 Indeed, Tadmor goes further in suggesting that Hos. 4–14 must be dated prior to King Uzziah of Judah’s war against Assyria in 738 BCE. In fact, Tadmor argues, Israel’s sending a delegation to request help from far-away Assyria makes perfect sense during the years 743–738 BCE when Tiglath-pileser III was occupied with campaigns in northern Syria.32 75 (1971), pp. 365–78; A. S. Van der Woude, Micha (POT; Nijkerk: Callenbach, 1976); and J. G. Strydom, ‘Micah of Samaria: Amos’s and Hosea’s Forgotten Partner’, Old Testament Essays 6 (1993), pp. 19–32. In my study ‘Women’s Voices in the Book of Micah’, Lectio Difficilior, no. 1 (2007), 12 pp., as well as my ‘Is the Principal Human Speaker in Micah 6–7 a Woman?’, Shnaton Leheqer HaMiqra 18 (2008), pp. 13–23 (in Hebrew), I argued that the principal prophetic voice in Mic. 6–7 is not Micah of Moresheth but, in fact, an eighth century BCE prophetess from the Northern Kingdom. I inspired a whole series of studies by other scholars in the pages of Lectio Difficilior to discover additional heretofore unnoticed contributions of prophetesses to the prophetic corpus of Hebrew Scripture. H. L. Ginsberg, The Israelian Heritage of Judaism (Texts and Studies of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 24; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1982), pp. 25–227 divides the book of Micah into three divisions, which he calls Micah A (Mic. 1–3, from the pen of the Judean Micah of Moresheth); Micah B (also Judean); and Micah C (i.e. Mic. 6–7, whose provenance is the Northern Kingdom in the eighth century BCE. 29.  Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 1, p. 251. 30.  Tadmor, ‘Historical Background’, pp. 84–88. 31.  Tadmor, ‘Historical Background’, p. 86. 32.  Tadmor, ‘Historical Background’, p. 87; but see also H. Tadmor, The Inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III, King of Assyria: Critical Edition, with Introductions, Translations and Commentary (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994), pp. 232–37 (‘Historical Synopsis of Tiglath-pileser’s Campaigns According to the Chronologically Arranged Sources’), pp. 273–78 (in collaboration with M. Cogan, ‘The Bearing of the Present Work on Biblical History and Chronology’), and pp. 279–82 (‘Tiglath-pileser’s Campaign Against Israel 733–732—The Textual Evidence’). See also below.

10

Hosea: A Textual Commentary

The recognition, again without any indication of having been influenced by Graetz, of two distinct books within the biblical book of Hosea was stumbled upon by T. K. Cheyne, who states, ‘Chaps. iv –xiv have a unity of their own; we might almost call them the second Book of Hosea’.33 However, at the end of the day, Cheyne assigns both parts of the biblical book of Hosea to a single prophet. Moreover, he there dates Hos. 1–3 to the reign of Jeroboam II and Hos. 4–14 to the reigns of Zechariah, Shallum, Menahem, Pekahiah, and possibly to the first two years of the reign of Pekah.34 More recently a clear distinction between the provenance of Hos. 1–3 vis-à-vis Hos. 4–14 was stressed by W. Rudolph.35 In fact, Rudolph divides the book of Hosea into two main parts, namely (a) chs. 1–3; and (b) chs. 4–14.36 He holds that the former division originated in Judah. D. R. Daniels, on the other hand, argues that ‘the book of Hosea itself falls naturally into three sections: chapters 1–3; 4–11 and 12–14’. Daniels continues, ‘It has long been recognized that Hos. 1–3 belong together. Here and only here does Hosea’s family life play an explicit, indeed dominating role. Hosea 4–11 likewise form a separate collection of oracles, as indicated by the new beginning in 4:1–3, an oracle with superscript character for the ensuing chapters, and the concluding formula nĕum YHWH “utterance of Yahweh” at the end of Hos. 11. The chapters 12–14 are then left and may be taken as a third collection.’37 As I noted, Ginsberg and Kaufmann date Hos. 1–3 to ninth-century BCE Israel (the Northern Kingdom) and Hos. 4–14 to the reigns of Menahem (747–737 BCE) and Hoshea (732–722 BCE) of the Northern Kingdom, respectively. Rudolph, on the other hand, sees the origin of Hos. 1–3 in Judah prior to the siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib in 701 BCE,38 33.  T. K. Cheyne, Hosea (CB; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889), p. 19. 34.  Cheyne, Hosea, pp. 12–13. 35.  W. Rudolph, Hosea (KAT; Gutersloh: Gutersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1966), pp. 25–27. 36.  Rudolph, Hosea, p. 25. 37.  D. R. Daniels, Hosea and Salvation History: The Early Traditions of Israel in the Prophecy of Hosea (BZAW, 191; Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1990), p. 24. In n. 7 Daniels notes, ‘E. M. Good (“Composition,” 27, 48–49) fails to ascribe sufficient importance to this formula and so considers Hos. 4–14 to be a single composition (cf. also Andersen and Freedman, 57–59). His view that in Hos. 2 this formula never marks the conclusion of an oracle is mistaken…’. Daniels is here making reference to E. M. Good, ‘The Composition of Hosea’, SEA 31 (1966), pp. 21–63. 38.  Rudolph, Hosea, p. 25.

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and assigns Hos. 4–9 to Israel in the reign of Jeroboam II 788–747 BCE (precisely as stated in the book title at Hos. 1:1), and Hos. 10–14 to Israel in the reign of Hoshea. However, most scholars in the nineteenth–twenty-first centuries have more or less taken it for granted that virtually all of the book of Hosea is to be dated to the reign of Jeroboam II, notwithstanding the suspicious nature of the repetition of the almost identical series of dates for four different prophetic books: Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, and Micah. J. M. Bos, on the other hand, reflects a tendency in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century scholarship to date as much as possible of Hebrew Scripture to the post-exilic era, when, according to a notion promoted by Wellhausen, the age of divine revelation had ceased, and the era of fraudulent prophecies that purported to refer to pre-exilic Israel and Judah had been inaugurated.39 Throughout the commentary, I take most seriously the arguments of my late and revered teacher, H. L. Ginsberg, for dating Hos. 4–14 to the reign of Menahem son of Gadi and no less seriously the evidence of Hos. 1–3 itself for dating those three chapters to the reign of King Jehu of Israel (842–814 BCE) rather than adopting Ginsberg’s dating. (See below in the commentary for details.) Briefly, with respect to the dating of Hos. 4–14 in the reign of Menahem son of Gadi (747–737 BCE), and more precisely, between 747 and 734 BCE (see below for the now necessary correction of this terminus ad quem to 738 BCE), Ginsberg argues as follows: ‘Hosea already knows of the assassinations of the two ephemeral kings Zechariah and Shallum in the year 747.40 …Hosea regards Assyria as a useless luxury but not as a potential enemy,41 which is inconceivable after 734.’42 As for the year 734 BCE, the evidence from the annals of Tiglath-pileser III (745–727 BCE) and parallel Neo-Assyrian historical sources led H. Tadmor to conclude that prior to 743 BCE Assyria and her emperor Tiglath-pileser III were looked upon by the king of Israel as a possible source of support against the aggressive (toward Israel) policies of Judah to the south.43 In 743 BCE, however, the situation changed radically. In that year King Menahem son of Gadi of Israel

39.  J. M. Bos, Reconsidering the Date and Provenance of the Book of Hosea: The Case for Persian-Period Yehud (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013). 40.  The proof is Hos. 7:3–7. 41.  The proofs include Hos. 5:13; 7:11; and 10:6. 42.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, p. 1017; 2nd ed., vol. 9, p. 553. 43.  Tadmor, ‘Historical Background’.

12

Hosea: A Textual Commentary

along with King Rezin of Damascus and other western kings paid tribute to King Tiglath-pileser III at Arpad and thereby acknowledged Israel’s having become a vassal of Assyria. This dating is based upon Thiele’s reading of the Assyrian Eponym Chronicle.44 However, in the interim, H. Tadmor,45 M. Cogan,46 and again Tadmor in a later study47 move the date of Menahem’s submission to the Assyrian yoke from the beginning of the Assyrian campaign at Arpad in 743 to the fall of Arpad in 738 BCE. In any case, Tadmor’s and Ginsberg’s arguments that Hos. 4–14 give no inkling of any knowledge that Assyria and her king had become or were about to become the overlord of Israel rather than a possible ally of Israel still stand. Consequently, the improved understanding of the events of 743–738 BCE provided by Tadmor and Cogan in the studies cited here do not in any way undermine Ginsberg’s arguments for the provenance of Hos. 4–14. b. Chapters of the Book in Greek, English, and Hebrew Codex Vaticanus (fourth century CE; the oldest extant complete manuscript of LXX) attests to two distinct divisions of the book of Hosea. An older arrangement indicates twenty-one divisions. Interestingly, two of these twenty-one divisions, namely, division #9 (= Heb. Hos. 3:1–5 and division # 17 (= Heb. Hos. 9:1–7), correspond precisely to chapter divisions in both the standard editions of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew and the English Bible. In addition, as we shall see, the twenty-first and last of the twenty-one older divisions of the book of Hosea attested in Codex Vaticanus corresponds, it seems, to the original and natural treatment of Hos. 14:2–10 as a unit. The latter unit, in fact, is the eleventh and last of the eleven larger divisions of the book of Hosea in Codex Vaticanus. Interesting­ ly enough, the English Bible follows the major medieval Hebrew manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible as well as the two systems of enumeration of units in Codex Vaticanus in treating Hos. 14:2 as the beginning of a new unit. Standard editions of the Bible in Hebrew, on the other hand, treat Hos. 14:1 as the beginning of a chapter notwithstanding that it neither corresponds to a division marked in the Masoretic manuscripts nor to an otherwise sensible division of the text.

44.  E. R. Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (3rd ed.; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), pp. 139–62. 45.  H. Tadmor, ‘Introductory Remarks to a New Edition of the Annals of Tiglathpileser III’, Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 2, no. 9 (1967), pp. 168–87 (175). 46. M. Cogan, ‘Tyre and Tiglath-pileser III’, JCS 25 (1973), pp. 96–99. 47.  Tadmor, The Inscriptions, pp. 268, 276.

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The first instance where the English Bible differs in its chapter divisions from the standard printings of the Hebrew text is in respect to the division between ch. 1 and ch. 2. In the English Bible, ch. 1 ends with the words of consolation (English Hos. 1:10–11), ‘The number of the people of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea…for great shall be the day of Jezreel’. However, the continuation of the words of consolation, ‘Call your brothers “My people” and your sisters “Beloved” ’, which should be the natural conclusion of the words of consolation, are placed in the English Bible at the beginning of ch. 2. Unfortunately, the division found in the standard Hebrew editions of the book of Hosea offers nothing better than the division of chs. 1 and 2 in the English Bible. The Hebrew editions begin ch. 2 (Hos. 2:1–3) with the words of consolation that correspond to English Hos. 1:11–2:11, and they continue the chapter with the words of rebuke found in Heb. Hos. 2:4–15 (= Eng. Hos. 2:2–13), which in turn are followed by the ironic words of consolation that are found in Heb. Hos. 2:16–25 = Eng. Hos. 2:14–23. For the problems connected with both the Hebrew and the English Hos. 2 see below in the commentary on Hos. 2. In Jewish editions of the Bible in English ch. 2 begins, ‘The number of the people of Israel shall be like that of the sands of the sea…’. The second instance where the Hebrew and English divisions of the book of Hosea into chapters differ is in respect to Hos. 6–7. In Hebrew editions Hos. 7:1 begins ‘When I would heal Israel…’, while in English editions 7:1 begins ‘When I would restore the fortunes of My people’, which is treated as Hos. 6:11b in Jewish editions of the Bible. Interestingly enough, just as LXX recognizes a division into poetic units that divides in half MT’s Hos. 7:14 (see above concerning the larger unit 7 in LXX and the smaller units 15 and 16), so does the English Bible’s Hos. 7:1 correspond to MT’s Hos. 6:11b. The latter verset is also marked in Hebrew manuscripts and printed editions as the end of a paragraph. No less fascinating is the fact that NJPS follows the English Bible in treating Hos. 6:11b as the beginning of a new literary unit. Moreover, without any marginal comment, NJPS creates a graphic division between Hos. 6:11a and Hos. 6:11b, and it treats Hos. 6:11b graphically as the beginning of Hos. 7. The third instance where the Hebrew and English divisions of the book of Hosea differ is in respect to the end of Hos. 11 and the beginning of Hos. 12. Significantly, the Masoretic codices such as Ms. Leningrad and Ms. Aleppo recognize a closed paragraph corresponding to the end of Hos. 11 (i.e. Hos. 11:11 in the printed Hebrew Bible). In addition, the text of the latter pericope ends with the phrase nĕum Yhwh ‘word of Yhwh’, which can indicate the end of a unit of prophetic speech as in Jer. 1:8. However, the latter phrase can also appear in the middle of a biblical verse as in Jer. 1:15, 19; 42:11; Hos. 2:18, 23, and many other instances.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary

The fourth and final instance where the Hebrew and English divisions of the book of Hosea differ is in respect of Hos. 13–14. Eng. Hos. 13:16 corresponds to Hos. 14:1 in Jewish editions of the Bible. In my discussion of this discrepancy in my commentary on Hos. 14, below, I account for the differing chapter and verse numbers used in the Hebrew editions (and English translations produced under Jewish auspices) and in the English translations produced under Christian auspices on the basis of an observation by D. Marcus.48 Marcus points out that when the chapter numbers were first introduced from the Latin Bible into the printed Hebrew Bible in the first quarter of the sixteenth century CE, these numbers were placed in the margin. Since the enumeration of the verses was introduced into the printed Hebrew Bible only in 1595, it was not always clear at which verse the chapter numbered in the margin actually should begin. Thus with reference to Heb. Hos. 14:1 = Eng. Hos. 13:16 the chapter division indicated by the chapter numbers in Hebrew editions and in Jewish translations is simply an error. The other two discrepancies between chapter divisions in the Hebrew and English Hosea are considerably more complicated, as indicated above, and as will be elaborated upon in the commentary to Hos. 1–2 and Hos. 6–7. c. Subdivisions of the Greek Text of Hosea according to Codex Vaticanus In his 2013 commentary on Hosea, W. E. Glenny writes as follows: The scribes used two main methods to indicate the divisions of the text of the Minor Prophets in Vaticanus. The most basic and earliest divisions were denoted clearly by the first scribe, who began each new section on a new line, which he extended slightly into the left margin. He also marked the end of a section by leaving blank the unused balance of the final line in a section. Twenty-one different paragraphs are so marked in Hosea. The length of these twenty-one paragraphs varies greatly; some are only one verse, and the longest extends thirty-four verses from 11:10–14:1. These twenty-one paragraphs are the basic divisions of the text of this commentary. The one exception to this is in the original paragraph 6:4–7:12, which I have divided into three sections (6:4–10; 7:2; 7:3–12) because there are changes of topic that naturally break up this long section (See the discussion at 5:8 and 6:4).49

48.  D. Marcus, ‘Alternate Chapter Divisions in the Pentateuch in the Light of the Masoretic Sections’, Hebrew Studies 44 (2003), pp. 119–28 (121). 49.  W. E. Glenny, Hosea: A Commentary on Hosea in Codex Vaticanus (Septuagint Commentary Series; Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013), p. 25.

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The first three of the twenty-one original divisions of LXX Hosea according to the first scribe of Codex Vaticanus correspond to the following three divisions indicated by the verse division in MT: 1:1, which is the title that assigns the entire book of Hosea to Hosea son of Beeri in the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah, and the reign of King Jeroboam son of Joash of Israel. 1:2, which as we shall see, designates the command to marry a woman of harlotry and to adopt children of harlotry to symbolize Israel’s turning away from Yhwh, as the prophet’s inaugural vision. 1:3, which as we shall see, has the appearance of the action portion of a command–action sequence. In this section it is reported that Hosea married Gomer, who conceived and bore him (the prophet) a son. The fourth of the twenty-one divisions into which the first scribe of LXX Codex Vaticanus divided the book of Hosea corresponds to Heb. Hos. 1:4–5, i.e., the following two verses: 1:4, in which Yhwh commands the prophet to name the aforementioned son Jezreel ‘for yet a little while and I will avenge the blood of Iezrael on the house of Iouda [Gk. Ιούδα; on this see my commentary on Hos. 1:4], and I will bring to an end the kingdom of the house of Israel’. 1:5: ‘And it shall be in that day that I will destroy the bow of Israel in the valley of Iezrael’. The fifth of the twenty-one divisions into which the first scribe of LXX Codex Vaticanus divided the book of Hosea corresponds to Heb. Hos. 1:6–7: 1:6: ‘And she conceived again and bore a daughter; and he said to him, “Call her name Not Pitied, for I will no more have pity on the house of Israel, but rather opposing I will oppose them” ’. 1:7, which appears in MT in the form of a Judahite gloss, which is set apart in NJPS by parentheses, is given an altogether different sense in LXX, whose reading makes the verse fit into the context (specifically division 5 of the twenty-one original divisions of the book of Hosea in Codex Vaticanus) rather than stand out as though it were, as suggested in modern scholarship, either a sore thumb or a Judahite addition. Glenny renders as follows: ‘But I will have pity on the sons, and I will save them by the Lord their God, and I will

16

Hosea: A Textual Commentary

not save them by bow, nor by sword, nor by war, nor by horses, nor by horsemen’. See below in my commentary for the possible relationship or lack of it between the text translated here by LXX and the standard Hebrew text. The sixth of the twenty-one divisions into which the first scribe of Codex Vaticanus divided the book of Hosea corresponds to English versions Hos. 1:8–11. 1:8: ‘And she weaned Not Pitied, and she conceived again and bore a son’. 1:9: ‘And he said, “Call his name Not My People, for you are not my people, and I am not your “I am” ’. Here LXX attempts to cope with the Hebrew Vorlage, which, like MT, ends abruptly where we would have expected to find, as in brackets in NJPS, ‘your God’; see the discussion in the commentary, below. 1:10 (= standard Hebrew text Hos. 2:1), about which Macintosh notes, ‘The English Versions add verses 2.1–2 to chapter 1’.50 Elsewhere in the commentary the difference is noted, but not in the commentary on ch. 2. Strangely, neither in his running commentary on ch. 2 (p. 30) nor in his section ‘Texts and Versions’ (p. 38) does Macintosh give the slightest hint that the obvious reason that English versions add MT’s Hos. 2:1–2 to ch. 1 is that this tradition is carried over from LXX and the Vulgate. Contrast C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch: ‘The division adopted in the Hebrew text, where these verses are separated from the preceding ones, and joined to the next verse [i.e., MT Hos. 2:3; the joining of MT’s Hos. 2:1–3 is indicated graphically in NJPS—clarification by Gruber], is opposed to the general arrangement of the prophetic proclamations, which always begin with reproving the sins, then describe the punishment or judgment, and close with the announcement of salvation [similarly, my suggestion in my commentary on Hos. 2, below, that Hos. 2:1–3 were originally located at the end of Hos. 2 rather than at its beginning]’.51

50.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 30. 51.  C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, The Twelve Minor Prophets (trans. J. Martin; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), p. 45 n. 1.

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17

Moreover, Keil and Delitzsch (and their English translator J. Martin) indicate explicitly that LXX and Vulgate, followed by Luther and the English versions, place MT’s Hos. 2:1–2 at the end of what Hebrew editions designate as Hos. 1. Interestingly, LXX at Hos. 1:10 (= MT Hos. 2:1) misconstrues Heb. wĕhāyâ not as perfect with waw consecutive but as perfect with waw conjunctive indicating past time, which is contrary to the notion of a prophecy of consolation announcing a better day yet to be, which seems to be common to virtually all interpretations of Hos. 1–2, ancient and modern. Thus LXX Vaticanus reads as follows in Hos. 1:10: Καὶ ἦν ὁ ἀριθμὸς τῶν υἱῶν Ἰσραὴλ ὡς ἡ ἄμμος τῆς θαλάσσης ‘And the number of the sons of Israel was like the sand of the sea…’. The first of the eleven divisions or chapters into which the second scribe of LXX Vaticanus divides the book of Hosea ends triumphantly with v. 11, which is also the final verse of the sixth of the twenty-one sections into which the first scribe of LXX Vaticanus divides the book of Hosea. If the sense of the Hebrew version is quite ambiguous (see below in my commentary on ch. 2), the sense of the Greek of Hos. 1:11a is quite clear. There we read as follows: καὶ συναχθήσονται υἱοὶ Ὶουδα καὶ οἱ υἱοὶ Ὶσραὴλ ἐπὶ τὸ αὐτό And the sons of Judah and the sons of Israel shall be gathered into one place.

The clarification in the Greek version ‘into one place’ responds to the exegetical question which arises from the use in the Hebrew text of the expression yaḥdāw ‘together’. However, in the context of my ninthcentury BCE dating of Hos. 1–3 (see below in my commentary on Hos. 1–3) the interpretation ‘into one place’ is anachronistic. The latter interpretation assumes, with Isa. 27:13—‘It shall come to pass at that time that a great ram’s horn shall be sounded and they who had been lost in the land of Assyria and they who had been thrown out [of the land of Israel] into the land of Egypt shall come and prostrate themselves to Yhwh in the holy mountain at Jerusalem’—that people of both North Israelite origin and Judean origin will be restored to the land of Israel; similarly, in Jer. 3:18 we read as follows: ‘In those [future] days the House of Judah shall come together with the House of Israel, and they shall come together [Heb. yaḥdāw] from the land of the north to the land I gave your ancestors for an inheritance’. Contrary to LXX, which anticipates many modern and post-modern interpreters in seeing references in the book of Hosea to the exilic and post-exilic periods, the original intent of Heb. Hos. 2:2 [= LXX Hos. 1:11] was that the once (before the death of King

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary

Solomon) united nation of Israel will be reunited under the leadership of the Davidic dynasty (see also Hos. 3:5). For this hope see also Ezek. 37:15–22; cf. also Amos 9:11. Note that Glenny’s translation of LXX Hos. 1:11 has inadvertently reversed the order of the proper names ‘Israel and Judah’. In fact, LXX and MT both have the order ‘Judah and Israel’, probably based on the stylistic convention short word before long word, which is ubiquitous in biblical poetry. Turning now to 1:11b, which reads, καὶ θήσονται ἑαθτοῖς ἀρχὴ μίαν ‘And they shall establish one authority over them’ (so Glenny).

we note that this reading eliminates the ambiguity of MT’s rōš ‘head’ and clearly points to interpreting the verse at hand as a reference to the renewal of the sovereignty of the Davidic dynasty over all the people of Israel. The second of the eleven major divisions of Hosea in Vaticanus is designated by the second scribe as B. This major division corresponds to Hos. 2:3–23 in MT, and it corresponds to divisions 7 and 8 of the twentyone divisions of LXX Hosea according to the first scribe of Vaticanus. These two smaller divisions of MT’s Hos. 2:3–33 correspond respectively to MT Hos. 2:3–17 and 2:18–25, and they are numbered in LXX as Hos. 2:1–15 and 2:16–23 respectively. As noted by Keil and Delitzsch (see above), LXX, which treats MT’s Hos. 2:3 as part of the prophecy of rebuke that actually begins with MT Hos. 2:4, ‘Take your mother to court’, makes no sense because, in fact, MT Hos. 2:3, ‘Call your brothers My People and your sisters Loved’, refers to the new symbolic names given to the men and women of Israel, respectively, in the prophecy of comfort, which appears (as I argue in my commentary on ch. 2) in Hos. 2:1–3, which should be appended to Hos. 2:25. Notwithstanding the infelicitous assignment of MT’s Hos. 2:1 to the prophecy of rebuke that commences in MT’s Hos. 2:4, Vaticanus’s original division of the book of Hosea into twenty-one parts almost gets right the natural division of ch. 2 into a prophecy of rebuke followed by a prophecy of comfort and consolation. LXX accomplishes this first by assigning most but unfortunately not all of the opening words of consolation (LXX Hos. 1:10–11 = MT Hos. 2:1–2) to ch. 1. Correctly, LXX treats MT’s Hos. 2:18–25 [LXX Hos. 2:16–23] as a distinct unit, which is indeed a prophecy of consolation. In fact, as I show, following Clines, in

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my commentary on Hos. 2, the prophecy of consolation actually begins in MT Hos. 2:16 with the ironic use of the particle lākēn meaning literally ‘therefore’, but here employed to introduce a bold decision upon the part of God, pictured as the imaginative spouse, not to follow the logic of retaliation but to follow the path of reconciliation; see below in my commentary there. LXX interprets the meaning of a group of key words in MT’s Hos. 2:16–17 (LXX 2:14–15) so as to make these two verses more compatible with assigning these verses to the rebuke rather than to the consolation and reconciliation. The Greek version of 2:14a διὰ τοῦτο ἰδοὺ ‘Therefore’, corresponds to the usual meaning of Heb. lākēn, whose inappropriateness in the context of MT Hos. 2:16 was referred to above and is discussed in detail below in my commentary on Hos. 2. Quite appropriate to the assumption that lākēn ‘therefore’ introduces an account of the punishment of Israel for her sins described in MT Hos. 2:4–15 (LXX Hos. 2:2–13) is LXX’s interpretation of Heb. hinnēh ānōkî mēpatteyāh ‘How about I entice her’ as follows: ἐγὼ πλανῶ αὐτὴν ‘Behold, I will deceive her’.52 Indeed, Macintosh argues that in 1 Kgs 22:20; Jer. 20:7; and Ezek. 14:9 where the him–her metaphor is absent the Hebrew verb means ‘deceive’.53 DCH (6:798–99) regards ‘entice’, ‘allure’, and ‘deceive’ as all valid meanings of the Heb. verb pth, while HALOT (3:984–85) regards ‘beguile’ as a no longer acceptable translation. The source of HALOT’s view is D. J. A. Clines and D. Gunn’s 1978 article,54 where the authors argue, most convincingly, that the Hebrew verb pth never means ‘deceive’ or even ‘persuade’ but rather ‘attempt to persuade’. They show, for example, that in 1 Kgs 21:20 (= 2 Chron. 18:19) if the verb in question meant simply ‘persuade’ rather than ‘attempt to persuade’ there would be no point in pairing this verb with the verb ykl ‘succeed’ in 1 Kgs 21:20; 2 Chron. 18:19; and Jer. 20:7. Slightly less important than the demonstration by Clines and Gunn that Heb. pth usually means ‘attempt to persuade’ and probably never means ‘deceive’, is the recognition that the mistranslation ‘deceive’ in Hos. 2:16 (LXX Hos. 2:14) goes back to LXX. No less important for reinforcing the false notion that Hos. 2:16–17 (LXX Hos. 2:14–15) belong to the rebuke rather than to the consolation is LXX’s understanding of the verb wĕānĕtâ as meaning ‘she shall be brought low’ (so Glenny), reflected in LXX’s translating by means of the 52.  So Glenny, Hosea, p. 37. 53.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 69. 54.  D. J. A. Clines and D. Gunn, ‘ “You Tried to Persuade Me” and “Violence! Outrage!” in Jeremiah XX 7–8’, VT 28 (1978), pp. 20–27.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary

verb ταπεινωθήσεται. In fact, as I show in my commentary below, at Hos. 2:17, the Heb. verb nh represents a homonym of the verb nh ‘be low’ and in the piel ‘degrade’ and of the verb ‘fructify’ in Hos. 2:23–24 (five times). This homonym attested here means ‘cry out’ (in sexual ecstasy) and is part of the metaphoric use of the second honeymoon of the previously estranged couple to refer to the reconciliation between God and his erstwhile unfaithful life-partner, the people of Israel. In the division of the book of Hosea into twenty-one parts by the first scribe of Vaticanus, the eighth division is LXX Hos. 2:16–23, which corresponds to MT Hos. 2:18–25, which, unequivocally, is a prophecy of consolation. Here again LXX seems to be responsible for the still widely held misconception that the verb ny repeated five times in MT Hos. 2:23–24 = LXX Hos. 2:21–22 is the common Heb. verb meaning ‘answer’ rather than the rare verb meaning ‘fructify’, a clear extension of which is the use of the same verbal root to mean ‘engage in sexual intercourse’ consensually or without consent; the subject is always male, and the direct object is always female. In the division of the book of Hosea into twenty-one parts by the first scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus, the ninth division corresponds precisely to ch. 3 in MT and in the English Bible. (For the cogency of treating Hos. 3 as a distinct unit with a distinct message, see below in my commentary on Hos. 3.) In the division of the book of Hosea into twenty-one parts by the first scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus, divisions 10 and 11 correspond respectively to Hos. 4:1–14 and Hos. 4:15–19 while division 4 of the eleven divisions of the book of Hosea by the later scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus corresponds precisely to Hos. 4 in MT and in the English Bible. The fifth of the eleven divisions of the book of Hosea recognized by the later scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus corresponds to Hos. 5:1–7 in MT and in the English Bible. This division is unit 12 of the older division of Gk. Hosea into twenty-one units. The beginning of the sixth of the eleven divisions of the book of Hosea recognized by the later scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus is preceded with the Greek numeral called digamma, which looks like capital F in the Latin alphabet and corresponds historically to the Hebrew letter waw. Both the Greek letter qopa (corresponding to Heb. q) and the Greek letter digamma (corresponding to Heb. w) were discarded from Greek alphabetic writing but retained as numerals.55 55.  See S. Gandz, ‘Hebrew Numerals’, American Academy for Jewish Research Proceedings 4 (1932–33), pp. 53–112 (table IV).

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The sixth of the eleven larger divisions of the book of Hosea recognized by the later scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus corresponds to MT Hos. 5:8–7:12, and it likewise corresponds to divisions 13 and 14 of the twenty-one divisions of the book of Hosea recognized by the first scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus. The seventh of the eleven larger divisions of the book of Hosea recognized by the later scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus corresponds to MT Hos. 7:13–8:14. In the division of the book of Hosea into twenty-one parts recognized by the first scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus, the larger division 7 corresponds to two smaller divisions, and the dividing line between these smaller units, i.e., units 15 and 16, is in the middle of MT Hos. 7:14. Thus unit 15 corresponds to MT Hos. 7:13–14a while unit 16 corresponds to MT Hos. 7:14b–8:14. The eighth of the eleven larger divisions of the book of Hosea recognized by the later scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus corresponds precisely to MT (and English Bible) Hos. 9, which also corresponds to unit 17 of the twenty-one divisions of the book of Hosea delineated by the first scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus. The ninth of the eleven larger divisions of the book of Hosea recognized by the later scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus corresponds to MT (and English Bible) Hos. 10:1–11:4. The tenth of the eleven larger divisions of the book of Hosea recognized by the later scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus corresponds to MT (and English Bible) 11:5–14:1. In the earlier division of Gk. Hosea into twentyone units this larger unit corresponds to units 19 (MT Hos. 11:5–9) and 20 (MT Hos. 11:10–14:1). The eleventh and last of the larger divisions of the book of Hosea recognized by the later scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus corresponds precisely to the last of the twenty-one smaller units and to MT Hos. 14:2–10. d. Divisions Recognized in Masoretic Codices The division of the book of Hosea into paragraphs in the Aleppo Codex is as follows: 1:1–2a (on which see the extensive discussion in my commentary at 1:2); 1:2b–9; 2:1–15; 2:16–22; 2:23–25; 3:1–5; 4:1–19; 5:1–7 (this division corresponds precisely to unit 5 of the eleven larger units recognized by the later scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus and to unit 12 of the twenty-one larger units of Gk. Hosea); 5:8–6:11; 7:1–12; 7:13–8:14 (this unit corresponds precisely to division 7 of the 11 units recognized by the later scribe of LXX Ms. Vaticanus); 9:1–9; 9:10–17 (in both of the divisions recognized in LXX Ms. Vaticanus and in the chapter divisions common to modern editions of the Bible this is a single unit, and it corresponds to division 8 of the eleven larger divisions of LXX); 10:1–8;

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary

10:9–11:11; 12:1–13:11; 13:12–14:1; 14:2–10. Thus while according to the older system preserved in LXX Ms. Vaticanus the book of Hosea consists of twenty-one units, according to the division into paragraphs attested in Heb. Codex Aleppo there are 18 divisions. Interestingly, none of these medieval traditions in Hebrew and Greek Bibles attest to any division at Hos. 6:1; 8:1; or 11:1. The Leningrad manuscript recognizes 21 subdivisions of the text of the book of Hosea, the end of each of which corresponds to the following chapter and verse numbers in modern editions of the Bible in Hebrew: 1:2a, 9; 2:15, 17, 22, 25; 3:5; 4:19; 5:7; 6:11; 7:12; 8:14; 9:9, 16, 17; 10:8; 11:11; 13:10; 14:1, 8 and 10. Thus the three systems of dividing the book of Hosea into 21 (the Old Greek); 21 (Leningrad Ms.); and 18 (Aleppo Codex) may be compared as follows: Greek 1:1 1:2 1:3 1:4–5 1:6–7 1:8–11 2:1–15 2:16–23 3 4:1–14 4:15–19 5:1–7 5:8–6:3 6:4–7:12 7:13–14a 7:14–8:14 9 10:1–11:4 11:5–9 11:10–14:1 11:10–14:1

Leningrad 1:1–2a

Aleppo 1:1–2a

1:2b–9 2:1–15 2:16–17

1:2b–9 2:1–15 2:16–22

2:18–22 2:23–25 3 4:1–19 5:1–7

2:23–25

5:8–6:11 7:1–12 7:13–8:14 9:1–9 9:10–16 9:17 10:1–8 10:9–11:11

5:8–6:11 7:1–12 7:13–8:14 9:1–9 9:10–17

12:1–13:10 13:11–14:1 14:2–8 14:9–10

12:1–13:10 13:11–14:1 14:2–10

3 4:1–19 5:1–7

10:1–8 10:9–11:11

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e. Comparing the Divisions in the Greek and the Latin Bibles It is equally important to compare the division of the Old Greek into eleven larger units with the late medieval Christian division of the book of Hosea in Latin into fourteen chapters as follows

Old Greek Latin Bibles of c. 1228 A 1:1–11 B 2:1–23 G 3:1–5 D 4:1–19 E 5:1–7 F 5:8–7:12 Z 7:13–8:14 H 9:1–17 10:1–11:4 Θ I 11:5–14:1 IA 14:2–10

The similarities between the various medieval traditions in Hebrew and Greek Bibles foster the impression that by-and-large the recognition of eleven major divisions within the book of Hosea is relatively obvious. In the three cases where modern Bibles insert a chapter division where the Greek and Hebrew tradition had not recognized one, the division created by the Latin Bible in the thirteenth century CE seems to be altogether unnecessary. At the same time, as I have noted above, in the four cases where the English and the Hebrew Bibles are one verse off in their chapter divisions, I conclude the following: (1) both traditions are wrong with respect to the division between Hos. 1 and Hos. 2; (2) the English Bible has the better division between Hos. 6 and Hos. 7; (3) the printed Hebrew Bible has the better division between Hos. 11 and Hos. 12; (4) the English Bible has the better division between Hos. 13 and Hos. 14, which, in fact, corresponds to the division between unit 10 and unit 11 of the 11 larger units recognized in LXX Ms. Vaticanus. The division of the Hebrew book of Psalms into 149 or 150 distinct poems, depending upon whether Pss. 9–10 are regarded as one or two poems, is as old as the book of Psalms itself. With the exception of the book of Psalms, however, the division of biblical books into numbered chapters as is now common in the printed editions of the Bible in all languages is said to be the work of Stephen Langton c. 1220 CE.56 It is 56.  See G. F. Moore, ‘The Vulgate Chapters and Numbered Verses in the Hebrew Bible’, JBL 12 (1893), pp. 73–78 (73 n. 1).

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also commonly accepted that the division into chapters of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament in Hebrew for use by Jewish audiences was taken over from the Latin Bible in order to facilitate communication in the context of public oral debates between Jews and Christians as to whether Judaism or Christianity is the true and authentic continuation of the religion of ancient Israel. Obviously, therefore, deviation between the Christian and the Jewish enumeration of chapters would impede rather than facilitate carrying on such public debates. Consequently, one finds no difference between the Jewish and the Christian editions in the division of the first two chapters of the book of Genesis, although the present chapter division separates the establishment of the Sabbath from its original context within the story of the seven days of Creation. D. Marcus accounts for occasional deviations between the enumeration of chapters in the Latin and English Old Testament and the enumeration of chapters in editions of Hebrew Scripture in Hebrew as follows: when the chapter divisions of the Latin Bible were first introduced into printed editions of the Bible in Hebrew beginning in the year 1517 the chapter numbers were printed in the margin so that it was less than obvious at which verse (numbers for all verses were introduced into a Bible printed in Hebrew only in 1595) a given chapter ended and the following chapter began.57 Thus the few discrepancies between the numbering of chapters in English and Hebrew editions of the Bible represent not two distinct confessional readings but rather mistakes of Hebrew printers (regardless of whether they were Jewish or Christian) in their innocent attempt to apply Langton’s division of the Latin Bible into chapters to Hebrew printed Bibles. Hence to this day the chapter division that treats English Bible Hos. 13:16 as Hebrew Bible (so-called Masoretic text) Hos. 14:1 is nothing more than a mistake that arose in the sixteenth century. In any case, it should be noted that the insertion of chapter divisions at Hos. 6:1; 8:1; 11:1; 13:1; and 14:1 has no basis either in the medieval division of the Hebrew book of Hosea into 18 or 21 units or in the division of the Greek Codex Vaticanus into eleven units. Four of these chapter divisions in modern Bibles, namely at Hos. 6:1; 8:1; 11:1; and 13:1, may be attributed to Stephen Langton̕ s dividing the Latin translation of the Bible into chapters. The discrepancy between the Hebrew editions and the English Bible at Hos. 14:1, where, as I show in my commentary below, the English Bible̕ s division makes perfect sense and the Hebrew editions make no sense, is to be accounted for most likely by means of Marcus’s observation. However, the following caveat must be observed: in the 57.  Marcus, ‘Alternate Chapter Divisions’, p. 121.

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Second Rabbinic Bible in the books of the prophets there is no indication of chapter divisions. Hence a Jewish printer’s erroneous placement of the chapter indication from its proper place at what is called in modern Bibles in English Hos. 14:1 to what is in English Bibles Hos. 13:16, can certainly be explained by a miscopying of the number in the wrong place, though it cannot be blamed in this instance upon the Second Rabbinic Bible. f. The Division of the Book of Hosea into Four Sedarim My discussion of the various divisions into larger and smaller units in MT, LXX, and the English Bible would not be complete were we not to mention also the division of the book of Hosea into four divisions in the authoritative medieval Hebrew codices. Here, significantly, the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex agree in their division of the book of Hosea into four sedarim. Both of these famous manuscripts indicate the beginning of a new seder by means of a large letter samekh placed in the outer margin at each of the following three places: Hos. 6:2; 10:12; 14:6. It follows, therefore, that according to the Masoretes the book of Hosea consists of four large units corresponding to the following four units in our modern Bibles with their division into numbered chapters and numbered verses: 1:1–6:1; 6:2–10:11; 10:12–14:5; 14:6–10. The division of the Pentateuch into 154 or 167 sedarim corresponds to the thought units that constitute the weekly synagogue lection according to the triennial cycle of the public reading of Scripture, which was still practiced in Egypt and in Palestine at the time of Maimonides. As for the division of Hosea into four sedarim, none of which corresponds to any of the other thought units recognized by Hebrew, Greek, and English Bibles, Yeivin suggests that it reveals no logic or wisdom.58 Indeed, this may be true with respect to the delineation of thought units or composition units within the biblical book of Hosea. However, Ofer’s thorough survey of various theories and hypotheses led him to an amazing and most convincing explanation for the division of not only the book of Hosea and the larger unit called ‘The Twelve Prophets’, of which the book of Hosea is the first and largest subdivision, but also of the entire corpus of the eight books of the Former and the Latter Prophets into a total of 205 sedarim. According to the evidence, which Ofer assembles from late antiquity well into the Middle Ages, it was customary to read 58.  I. Yeivin, The Biblical Masorah (Jerusalem: Academy of the Hebrew Language, 2003), p. 39 (in Hebrew). See, however, M. Ben-Yashar, ‘The Division into sedarim in the Books of the Prophets and the Hagiographa’ (MA thesis, Bar-Ilan University, 1976) (in Hebrew); Y. Ofer, ‘The sedarim of the Prophets and the Hagiographa’, Tarbiz 58 (1989), pp. 155–89 (in Hebrew).

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consecutively each day at the morning service (shaharit) a section from the books of the prophets, the average length of which was 2.4 pages of a medieval Masoretic codex or a modern printed edition of the Hebrew Bible. This daily lection was followed by the recitation of the so-called qĕdûšâ dĕsidrā, which designates the recitation of a prayer that includes the angelic liturgy (one group of angelic beings calling out ‘Holy Holy Holy is Yhwh of Hosts’, and another group of angelic beings answering, ‘Blessed be Yhwh from his abode’).59 That section of the liturgy is called qĕdûšâ dĕsidrā because it is the form of the recitation of the angelic liturgy, which follows the reading of the seder, i.e, pericope, from the books of the prophets. In the same vein, Ofer demonstrates, the reading in sequence from the cycle of 77 sedarim of the books of the Hagiographa took place at the beginning of the afternoon service (minḥâ) on Sabbath and Festivals where it was followed by the qĕdûšâ dĕsidrā. In addition, to this day the reading of the book of Esther on the eve of the festival of Purim and the reading of the Scroll of Lamentations on the eve of the fast of the ninth of Ab is followed by qĕdûšâ dĕsidrā.60 It may be said that the cycles of reading from the books of the Prophets in their entirety and from the books of the Hagiographa in their entirety, with the exception of the Five Scrolls, the annual reading of which was accomplished elsewhere in the liturgical cycle, corresponds to the attempt of the Israel Society for Biblical Research some two generations ago to foster the reading of 59.  For this prayer toward the end of the morning service for weekdays see N. Scherman, The Complete ArtScroll Siddur: Weekday/Sabbath/Festival: Nusach Ashkenaz (3rd ed.; Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah, 1990), pp. 154–57; for this prayer at the beginning of the afternoon service for Sabbaths and Festivals see there, pp. 504–507. The angelic liturgy in which one group of heavenly beings recites ‘Holy, holy, holy is Yhwh of hosts; all the earth is full of his glory’ from Isa. 6:3 and another group of heavenly beings responds with ‘Blessed is the presence of Yhwh from his abode’ from Ezek. 3:12 is found in the benediction thanking God for the morning light in the morning service every day of the year; see Scherman, ArtScroll Siddur, pp. 86–89; in the third section of the Reader’s repetition of the so-called Eighteen Benedictions in all services except the evening service where there is no Reader’s repetition; see Scherman, ArtScroll Siddur, pp. 100–101. M. I. Gruber, ‘Contextual Interpretation of the Bible in the Babylonian Talmud: Rava on the Problem of Isaiah 6’, in Shefa Tal: Studies in Jewish Thought and Culture Presented to Bracha Sack (ed. Z. Gries, H. Kreisel, and B. Hus; Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2004), pp. 53–58 (in Hebrew), argues that the angelic liturgy recited repeatedly in Jewish worship originated in the attempt to account for Isaiah’s and Ezekiel’s apparent disagreement as to what is the text that the heavenly beings sing in their worship of God. 60.  Ofer, ‘The sedarim’, p. 14.

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a chapter of the Hebrew Bible each day.61 Moreover, recognition of the customs, which Ofer has illuminated in the course of accounting for the role of the division of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible into 205 sedarim and the Hagiographa with the exception of the Five Scrolls into 77 sedarim, solve a heretofore perplexing problem in the Rabbinic liturgy. The question is as follows: Why is the qĕdûšâ dĕsidrā not recited in the morning service on Sabbath and Festivals, and why is it recited instead at the afternoon service but only on Sabbath and Festivals? The answer is that the reading of the successive sedarim of the prophetic books took place only on weekday mornings, while the reading of the 77 successive sedarim of the Hagiographa took place only on Sabbath and Festival afternoons. 3. Judahite Glosses in the Book of Hosea It has frequently been suggested that after the fall of Samaria, the book of Hosea was brought from Israel to Judah.62 Recognizing in this document a source of timeless inspiration, unnamed Judean prophets made the book relevant to the time and place of their own audiences by adding references to Judah, many of which suggest that Judah can learn from the lessons of the Northern Kingdom’s demise by eschewing the public and private immorality, which had been condemned by the Northern prophets, of the ninth and eighth centuries respectively, whose writings are preserved in chs. 1–3 and 4–14 respectively. Concerning Hos. 5:10, we shall see below in the discussion of Hos. 5 that this is not an addition by a later Judean prophet but rather a reference to a territorial dispute between Israel and Judah in the eighth century BCE, in reference to which our prophet, speaking in the name of God, finds the Judeans collectively guilty of a felony. See below. Ginsberg accounts for the mention of Judah in the book title in Hos. 1:1 in the following manner:

61.  In 2014 a similar Jewish initiative to get people to know the Hebrew Bible is named Project 929, based on the number of chapters in the printed Hebrew Bible. This project, initiated by former deputy Minister of Education, Avi Wortzman, together with Israel Chief Rabbi David Lau, and Rabbi Benny Lau, seeks to encourage every Jew to read one chapter of the Hebrew Bible every day from Sunday to Thursday. 62.  So, for example, Rudolph, Hosea, p. 25; similarly, Daniels, Hosea and Salva­ tion History, pp. 23–31; H. L. Ginsberg, The Israelian Heritage of Judaism (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1982), pp. 97–99.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary Whereas the beginning of 1:1, ‘The word of YHWH that came to Hosea son of Beeri’, is doubtless old and reliable (cf. ‘Hosea’—twice in verse 2), the rest of it is a late combination of the datings in Isaiah 1:1 and Amos 1:1. The former was probably suggested by the fact that the book of Hosea contains (from Hos. 5:13 on), like the book of Isaiah (from 7:17 on), numerous references to Assyria; the latter by the fact that the book of Hosea, like the book of Amos, is addressed primarily in Israel to Israel. The resulting synchronism is very imperfect: a prophetic activity which extended beyond the reign of Uzziah through those of Jotham and Ahaz into that of Hezekiah, would also have extended beyond the reign of Jeroboam son of Joash through those of Zechariah, Shallum, Menahem, Pekahiah and Pekah into that of Hoshea. Hosea, c. 870–865 [Ginsberg dates Hos. 1–3 to the reign of Ahab; now commonly dated to the years 873–852 BCE; for reasons explained above and again in my commentary on Hosea 1:4, I date the first three chapters of the book of Hosea to the reign of King Jehu (842–814 BCE] had no occasion to add 1:7 after 1:6… The disintegration of the House of Israel, which took place in the second half of the eighth century, lay beyond his horizon. To the author of verse 7 [which adds, ‘But I shall love the House of Judah…’], on the other hand, it was a historical fact: to his contemporaries, an assurance that the same fate would not befall the House of Judah was a vital necessity.63

The other thirteen Judahite glosses in the book of Hosea belong to four categories. The first of these categories consists of the instances where apparently an original pair of proper names in synonymous parallelism ‘Ephraim’//‘Israel’ was used.64 Indeed, in five places in the book of Hosea we find the pair ‘Ephraim’//‘Judah’: Hos. 5:12, 13, 14 (here only it is ‘House of Judah’); 6:4; 10:11 (see my discussion in the commentary below at Hos. 5:12). Ginsberg assumes that originally the name ‘Israel’ was represented in all ten instances by the abbreviation ‘Y’, which the eighth-century Northern prophet of the reign of Menahem son of Gadi (747–737 BCE) employed to refer specifically to the Northern Kingdom and its inhabitants. Later on, when the book of Hosea was utilized as inspired canonical literature by anonymous prophets in Judah, they made the book relevant to their own time and place by interpreting the abbreviation as Yehudah—Judah—in exactly half of the instances of the original pair ‘Ephraim’/‘Israel’, where we now read in the standard Hebrew text ‘Ephraim’//‘Judah’. 63.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, p. 1016; 2nd ed., vol. 9, p. 552. 64.  In the standard Hebrew text this pair is preserved precisely in that original form in Hos. 5:3; 6:10; 10:6; 11:8; 12:1; only in that last case do we find ‘House of Israel’ rather than ‘Israel’.

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A second category of Judahite gloss in the book of Hosea consists of the two instances in Hos. 12:1c, 3a where in the middle of a diatribe clearly addressed to the people of the Northern Kingdom who venerated an angel named variously El and Bethel (see commentary below) we find the following, ‘Yhwh arraigns Judah’. H. L. Ginsberg argues that the original text again used the abbreviation Y to stand for Israel and that a later scribe misconstrued this Y as referring to Judah.65 I treat this gloss separately from the five instances of the pair ‘Ephraim’//‘Judah’, because I regard the latter category as a deliberate attempt of later Judean prophets to make an older inspired canonical text relevant to the people of another place in another time. In Hos. 12:1c, likewise, the pair im-ēl//im qĕdošîm ‘with respect to El//with respect to angels’ refers not to an alleged virtue of Judah but to the crime of disloyalty to the one God of Israel, for which Israel and not Judah is arraigned in Hos. 12:1–15. One must, therefore, agree with Ginsberg that the mention of Judah in Hos. 12:3 is not another instance of deliberate up-dating (for six instances of this, see below), but rather a simple error on the part of a scribe who saw Y and wrongly spelled out what he/she thought was the intent of the abbreviation—as ‘Judah’, rather than as it had to have been, ‘Israel’. In addition, inspired by Rofé’s in-depth analysis of the impact of the belief in angels upon the people condemned in Hos. 12, I go beyond Ginsberg in seeing also Hos. 12:1c as belonging to the category of the abbreviation Y for Israel later misconstrued as Judah in the standard Hebrew text. The third category of Judahite glosses attested in Hos. 2:2–12:1 consists of five instances where a phrase or clause, which clearly interrupts the train of thought of the original prophet in Hos. 4–12, suggests that Judah can learn from the unfortunate demise of the Northern Kingdom to behave differently than did the Northern Israelites//Ephraimites so that punishment can be avoided. These five Judahite glosses are as follows: 1. 4:15: ‘Let not Judah incur guilt’ interrupts the prophet’s castigation of Northern Israelite men for being unfaithful to their wives and suggests that if Judean men are faithful to their wives they might avoid the tragic fate of the Northern Kingdom whose inhabitants were carried away captive.

65.  H. L. Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim, More Fool Than Knave’, JBL 80 (1961), pp. 341–42.

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2. 5:5: ‘And Judah falls with them’ suggests that the lecherous behaviour of the men of the fallen Northern Kingdom is shared at a later date by the men of Judah but that it is not too late for the men of Judah to reform their behaviour and avert disaster. 3. 6:11: ‘Even Judah has reaped a harvest of you’. Macintosh states that this is ‘An addition which extends Hosea’s condemnation to include Judah’.66 4. 8:14: ‘And Judah has made many fortified cities’. This clause, which interrupts Hosea’s castigation of the Northern Israelites for building many temples to offer many sacrifices rather than concentrating on the cultivation of private and public morality as the highest form of worship of God, asserts that Judah was preparing for war, clearly a non sequitur. (See below, in my commentary on Hos. 8:11–14.) 5. 12:1: ‘But Judah stands firm with God and is faithful to the Holy One’. Hosea 12, on which see below in the commentary, castigates the Northern Israelites for, among other things, relying upon an angel called ‘the angel of Bethel’, who is said to be the same angel, whom Jacob, the progenitor of Israel, had defeated. The clause added at the end of Hos. 12:1 suggests that the disaster which befell the Northern Kingdom because of, among other things, the veneration of the angel of Bethel (Jer. 48:13 concurs) will not befall Judah so long as she remains faithful to the One God of Israel. Perhaps this is an implicit warning not to be enticed by the priests and prophets of other deities, who are always ready to bring one more Jew to change her/his religion. A fourth and final category of texts in the book of Hosea, which are regarded as glosses by many commentators, including both Ginsberg and Macintosh, consists of two verses, one of which explicitly names Judah and one of which may refer to the Kingdom of Judah. The two verses in this category are Hos. 2:2 and 3:5. In Hos. 2:2 the prophet, speaking in the name of God, asserts: ‘The people of Judah and the people of Israel shall assemble together and appoint one head over them; and they shall arise from the ground’ (so NJV). Now if the editor-in-chief of NJV was aware of the literary allusion to Pentateuchal traditions contained here (see below in the commentary), both his translation and the notes keep all such knowledge well hidden. In any case, there is no reason in the world to assume that Hosea, as a Northern prophet who penned his speeches in a peculiarly Northern Hebrew, did not regard Judah and Israel as closely 66.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. lxxi.

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related entities that had once been united. Nor is there any reason to believe that the hope that they would again be reunited, which is shared by Jeremiah (e.g., Jer. 3:18) and Ezekiel (Ezek. 37:15–23), was invented in the Southern Kingdom after the demise of the Northern Kingdom. Indeed, this hope may be part of the legacy, which both Jeremiah and Ezekiel inherited from the book of Hosea. In the same vein, just as Ezekiel in Ezek. 37:24–28 looks forward to not only the reuniting of the descendants of Joseph and the descendants of Judah but also to their being ruled by a Davidic king, so does Hos. 3:5 express such a hope: ‘Afterward, the Israelites will turn back and seek Yhwh their God and David their king…’. Common to both Hos. 3 and Ezek. 37:24 is the expression of the hope that it is not simply a scion of David but literally ‘David’ who will rule over them. Obviously, one might argue that both Hos. 2:2 and 3:5 are additions inspired by Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Since, in fact, Jeremiah and Ezekiel are both well known (see below) for their penchant for elaborating upon ideas first found in the book of Hosea, there is no reason for taking either Hos. 2:2 or 3:5 as later interpolations in the book of Hosea. In my view, which cannot now (if ever) be proven, ideology shared by Hos. 1–3 and by Amos 9 (whether this is the Prophet Amos or a later addition is beyond the purview of this commentary) and later found in Jeremiah and Ezekiel holds that in the past when King David ruled, Israel and Judah were a single people with a single human sovereign and that this idyllic situation would one day be restored. 4. Influences of the Book of Hosea a. Influences of the Book of Hosea Upon Subsequent Prophets Hosea 1–3 compares the relationship of God and the people of Israel to the relationship between a husband and a wife. These chapters also introduce into biblical literature the idea that the disloyalty of Israel to God, especially the veneration of other deities instead of or in addition to Yhwh, can be compared to a married woman’s engaging in an intimate relationship with any man other than her lawfully wedded husband. This idea is taken up and elaborated upon by the Prophet Jeremiah (see especially Jer. 2–3). Moreover, Hos. 2:16, where Yhwh suggests that a reconciliation between Yhwh and Lady Israel might take place if he took her back to the wilderness where the couple had shared their honeymoon, is echoed in Jer. 2:2–5, which also speaks of the wilderness period before the arrival of Israel in the Land of Canaan as the honeymoon of God and Israel. The comparison of the people of Israel’s idolatry to a married woman’s committing adultery is taken up also and elaborated upon in

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Ezek. 16 and 23, while the reconciliation referred to in Hos. 2:16 is taken up in Jer. 2:2 and Ezek. 16:60.67 In addition, in the book of Hosea the Northern Kingdom and its inhabitants are continually referred to as Ephraim, primarily because the dominant tribe in the Northern Kingdom was Ephraim. When Jer. 31:19 has God address to the people of Judah a triple rhetorical question beginning with ‘Is Ephraim a dear child of mine?’, Jeremiah echoes the book of Hosea. Likewise, Jer. 31:9, ‘For I am ever a father to Israel// Ephraim is my first-born’, echoes Hosea’s repeated use of the pair Israel// Ephraim (see the discussion in the commentary at Hos. 5:3). As noted in the commentary to Hos. 2:16, Ginsberg regards the latter verse as having inspired Isa. 65:10. Consequently, he uses the received text of Isa. 65:10 to restore what he regards as a corrupt text in Hos. 2:16. Moreover, as noted in the commentary on Hos. 8:1–2, Ginsberg argues that Hos. 8:1–2, along with 7:14, seems to have inspired Isa. 58:1–5. (For influences of the book of Hosea reflected in the New Testament, see below.) b. Influences in Life in General from Chapter 2 to Chapter 14 Recent years have seen an increased interest in the afterlife of words, phrases, verses, and chapters of both Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament, as reflected in music, art, creative writing, and other diverse testimonies to the influence (not always immediately recognized by audiences in modern and post-modern times) of the Bible far beyond the historical context, to which biblical writers and singers addressed themselves.68 Outstanding examples of the afterlife of words and phrases 67.  Cf. the extensive discussion in Ginsberg, Israelian Heritage, pp. 97–99. Moreover, Ginsberg (p. 99) following G. D. Cohen, suggests that the interpretation of Canticles as an allegory concerning the love between God and Israel was inspired by the husband–wife metaphor introduced by Hos. 1–3 and elaborated upon by Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isa. 49:17–21. See G. D. Cohen, ‘The Song of Songs and the Jewish Religious Mentality’, in Samuel Friedland Lectures 1960–1966 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1966), pp. 1–21. 68.  With respect to the treatment of Hosea in ancient Rabbinic literature, see J. Neusner, Hosea in Talmud and Midrash (Studies in Judaism; Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007). M. Ben-Yashar, I. B. Gottlieb, and J. S. Penkower, The Bible in Rabbinic Interpretation: Rabbinic Derashot on Prophets and Writings in Talmudic and Midrashic Literature, Volume 1: Hosea (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2003) (in Hebrew), analyze 652 exegetical units touching upon phrases from the book of Hosea in ancient and medieval Rabbinic literature. They seek to determine both the messages that each unit finds or reads into Hosea and the exegetical strategies reflected in each unit. Max Stern, Bible & Music: Influences of the Old Testament on

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from the book of Hosea are listed here according to (1) their sources in the book of Hosea from ch. 2 to ch. 14; and (2) their role in the prophetic lection of the synagogue. 2:10: The symbolic name Ruhama meaning ‘beloved’. According to Hos. 1:6, when Hosea’s wife bore a second child, a daughter, Yhwh commanded the prophet: ‘Name her Unloved Woman (Lō-Ruḥāmâ)’. This was intended to express God’s antipathy toward the people of Israel. At a later stage, in the prophecy of reconciliation contained in

Western Music (Jersey City: Ktav, 2011), p. 347, lists five vocal compositions, all from the twentieth century, three in Hebrew and two in English, which treat passages from the book of Hosea; see below, ‘Hosea in Music and Art’. The reader should also take note of J. A. Laster, Catalogue of Choral Music Arranged in Biblical Order (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1999), p. 347. T. Krier, ‘[Hosea in] Literature’, in Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, 12 (ed. D. C. Allison et al.; Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2016), pp. 442–43, calls attention to the influences of the motif of man marrying a harlot (Hos. 1–2), inter alia, upon the following works of classic English literature: Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene; William Shakespeare, King Lear; William Blake, Milton; William Blake, Jerusalem; William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion; Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd; Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. In addition, Krier calls attention to influences of the prophet Hosea’s critique of private and public immorality the sixteenth-century English play, A Looking Glass for London and England (c. 1589–90), the seventeenth-century devotional lyric ‘Disorder and Frailty’ by Henry Vauhn and the nineteenth-century transcendentalist lyric, ‘My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge’ [Hos. 4:6] by Jones Very. Among twentiethcentury American fiction inspired by the marriage of the prophet to a prostitute in Hos. 1, Krier cites Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story ‘Gimpel the Fool’ (1953) [first written and published in Yiddish!] and the following twentieth-century novels: Francis River, Redeeming Love (2005); Lutheran pastor and novelist Larry Christenson, Hosea: A Novel (2013) and the uncompleted novel, The Prophet’s Wife by Rabbi Milton Steinberg (1903–1950). The latter work was completed by Columbia University Professor of Journalism, Ari L. Goldman and published with commentaries by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, and Norma Rosen in 2010 (New York: Behrmann House). With respect to the depiction of Hosea and Gomer in motion pictures, see P. T. Chattaway, ‘[Hosea in] Film’, in Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, vol. 12, pp. 444–45 and the literature cited there. For allusions to Hosea in Modern Hebrew Literature the reader is referred to G. Elkoshi, Biblical Anthology of Modern Hebrew Literature (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1999) (in Hebrew); and M. Rabinowitz and Z. Yardeni, Biblical Anthology (3 vols.; Tel Aviv: Masada, 1962–63) (in Hebrew). To avoid using the same Hebrew title as had been used by Rabinowitz and Yardeni, Elkoshi used the Modern Hebrew adjective miqrait where Rabinowitz had used the Modern Hebrew adjective tanakhit, both meaning ‘biblical’.

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Hos. 2:16–25 and Hos. 2:1–3, God removes the negative particle and transforms Lō-Ruḥāmâ ‘Unloved Woman’ into Ruḥāmâ ‘Loved Woman’ to commemorate his renewed love of Israel. In modern times Ruhama is a personal name given to girls of both Jewish background and English and Scottish background because of the importance of the Bible in both Jewish and Anglo-Saxon cultures. 2:17: ‘Door of hope’. This phrase is the source for a name frequently given to homes for unwed mothers throughout the English-speaking world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries CE. In addition, the Modern Hebrew form of the phrase, Petaḥ Tikvah, is the name of the first agricultural settlements set up by Zionist Jews from Eastern Europe in 1878. (See the extensive discussion in the commentary on Hos. 2:17.) 2:21–22: ‘I shall betroth you unto me…’. The metaphorical marriage formula is employed in many Jewish communities since the sixteenth century CE at the very end of the rite of donning the tefillin (phylacteries) on weekday mornings and the afternoon of the ninth of Av. (See the extensive discussion in the commentary on Hos. 2:21–22.) 6:5: ûmišpātêkā ôr yēṣē. In modern times, N. H. Tur-Sinai is one of many who have suggested that the correct word division in the final clause of Hos. 6:5 is not MT’s wmšptyk wr yṣ but rather wmšpty kwr yṣ, which results in a verbal sentence consisting of the subject ‘my judicial decision’, the predicate ‘will come forth’, and the adverbial prepositional phrase ‘like light’.69 Interestingly enough, the redivision of the words of Hos. 6:3 advocated by Tur-Sinai seems to have been anticipated in the liturgical poem hayyôm hărat ōlām ‘Today is the birthday of the world’, which is sung after each of the three soundings of the shofar in the Additional Service on the Jewish New Year. The latter poem includes the following supplication, ‘Our eyes depend upon you [God] until you show us favour and publish [wětôṣî kěôr, lit., “you bring forth as light”] mišpāṭēnû [“our sentence/verdict”]’.70

69.  N. H. Tur-Sinai, ‘Gilead is a City of Evildoers (Hos. 6.7–9)’, in Hallashon WeHassepher, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1950), p. 331 (in Hebrew). 70.  See M. Silverman, ed., High Holiday Prayer Book (Hartford: Prayer Book Press, 1939), pp. 161, 166, 170.

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9:7: ‘A great hatred’. Hosea 9:7 is the source of the expression wĕrabbâ maśṭēmâ ‘a great hatred’. In its original context the expression referred to the antipathy held by many Israelites of the eighth century BCE toward the prophet of doom, whose call to repentance is sounded again and again in Hos. 4–14. The Great Hatred, a classic analysis of anti-Semitism by Maurice Samuel published by Alfred A. Knopf (New York) in 1940 derives its title from Hos. 9:7. 10:8: ‘They [unspecified Israelites of the eighth century BCE] shall say to the mountains, “Bury us” and to the hills, “Fall on us” ’. These words are adapted by Jesus in Lk. 23:31. There it is related that Jesus tells the Daughters of Jerusalem who follow him and weep for him on the way to Calvary, ‘Then shall they [the people of Jerusalem] begin to say to the mountains, “Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us” ’. Likewise, in Rev. 6:15–16 we see the following secondary use of Hos. 10:10e–f, which is reminiscent of the one found in the Lukan Jesus quoted above: ‘And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains. And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?’ 11:1: ‘From Egypt have I called my son’. These words are interpreted in the New Testament in Matt. 2:15 as an Old Testament prophecy fulfilled in the New Testament and specifically as a reference to the narrative concerning the flight to Egypt on the part of the Holy Family (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph) in order to escape Herod’s attempt to kill all newborn Jewish boys and thereby eliminate the threat that the baby Jesus would take away from Herod the role of king of the Jews. 11:7: el al. The Hebrew phrase el al, found at the beginning of the clause Hos. 11:7b, ‘when it (the people of Ephraim/Israel) is summoned upward [Heb. el al, meaning literally “to above”]’, is the name of the State of Israel’s national airline. The name was suggested by Shmuel Szupak and was adopted on the initiative of David Remez (1886–1951), who was the first minister of transportation of the modern State of Israel.71 71.  Concerning David Remez, see S. H. Rolef, ‘Remez (Drabkin), Moshe David’, EncJud, 2nd ed., vol. 17, p. 217.

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14:3: ‘Instead of bulls we will pay [the offering of] our lips’ (so NJPS). This understanding of an obscure clause in the book of Hosea is received into the traditional Jewish liturgy for the Day of Atonement as a biblical proof that prayer is or can be an acceptable substitute for sacrifice of animals, birds, flour, semolina, oil, and wine. (See my commentary there.) c. Hosea in Music and Art Hosea in Music. Music inspired by various passages in the book of Hosea include the following: A cantata by J. S. Bach (1685–1750), ‘Was sol lich aus dir machen’ based upon Hos. 11:8; Villardy Alce, Hosea’s Soap Opera; Gregory Norbet (founder of the Hosea Foundation, a not-for-profit ministry dedicated to the renewal of the church and spiritual development in individuals) ‘Hosea—Come Back to Me’, based upon Hos. 14; Andrew Peterson, ‘Hosea’, in his album of religion songs, Resurrection Letters, vol. 2; “When Israel was a child, I loved him” (Hos. 11) by Cyprian Consiglio, OSB Cam; “Return to the Lord your God” (inspired by Hos. 10; 11; 14; Joel 2) by Bob Dufford, SJ; the musical play, Hosea, by John Gowans and John Larson (1969); and an oratorio, Hosea’s Love Story by Esther Upham-Aluoch (pianist and Co-Director/Founder of Call to Holiness International Ministry), which was first performed in Jerusalem in 2010. Stern lists only five musical works inspired by passages in the book of Hosea.72 These five works include two musical settings for the Hebrew text of Hos. 2:21, ‘And I shall betroth thee unto me forever’, the first by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895–1968), and the second by the contemporary Israeli composer Yonatan Razel. The third work cited by Stern is David Harris’s anthem first published in 1976 for four voices and organ, ‘Come Let us Return unto the Lord’, which is based upon Hos. 6:1–2. Another setting of that same text is Kevin Norris’s composition, which is also cited by Stern.73 The final work cited by Stern is a musical setting for voice and piano of the text ‘And I spoke through the agency of the prophets’, which quotes Hos. 12:11. Hosea in Art. The prophet Hosea was depicted, inter alia, by Raphael (1483–1520) in a drawing (pen and brown ink with brown wash over black chalk, heightened with white and squared for transfer on laid paper) entitled The Prophets Hosea and Jonah, now housed in the National

72.  Stern, Bible in Music, p. 347. 73.  Stern, Bible and Music, p. 347.

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Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; in a watercolor by James Tasso (1836–1902); in an oil painting by John Singer Sargent (1856–1926) in the Boston Public Library; a quatrefoil relief sculpture dated 1220–1240 on the western wall of the Cathedral d’Amiens in France, part of a set of 12 soapstone sculptures depicting each of the twelve so-called minor prophets by Aleijadinho74 in the churchyard of the Basilica of Bom Jesus Matosinhos at Congonhas (in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais; the church is a UNESCO world heritage site); a giant abstract steel sculpture made from a railroad gear, executed by Carole Eisner (b. 1937), on public display at the Tramway Plaza in Manhattan (2009). Insofar as the subject ‘Hosea in Art’ is almost never alluded to in encyclopedia entries concerning Hosea or in biblical commentaries, perhaps this brief listing may inspire undergraduate and graduate students to explore this unploughed field of culture.75 d. Prophetic Lection or haftarot In the Jewish annual cycle of reading of the Pentateuch on successive Sabbaths, beginning with Gen. 1:1–6:8 (bĕrēšît) on the First Sabbath after the end of the autumn festivals and ending with Deut. 33:1–34:12 (wĕzōt habbĕrākâ), the haphtarah or prophetic lection read at the conclusion of the Pentateuchal lection is on as many as five occasions taken from the book of Hosea. The occasions are as follows: the haftarah in the Ashkenazic tradition for the reading from Gen. 28:10–32:3 (wayyēṣē), which belongs to the Jacob cycle of narratives, is Hos. 12:13–14:10 while in the Sephardic tradition the corresponding haftarah is Hos. 11:7–12:12. The haftarah in the Ashkenazic tradition for the following week’s Pentateuchal reading, namely Gen. 32:4–36:3 (wayyišlaḥ), also part of the Jacob cycle of narratives, is, interestingly enough, Hos. 11:7–12:12. The treatment of the latter passage as a unit in both haftarah traditions suggests that the unit in question, no less than the various other Greek, Hebrew, and English chapter divisions, is worthy of consideration as a traditional designation of a thought unit within the book of Hosea.

74.  The epithet Aleijadinho means ‘the little cripple’ and refers to his alleged suffering from a debilitating disease; his real name was Antônio Francisco Lisboa (1730–1814). 75.  For a comprehensive study of the depiction of Hosea in medieval European Christian Bibles, unfortunately without pictorial illustrations, see M. Vasselin, ‘Les prophètes hébreux dans les Bibles européennes (c. 1150–1425): des images pour contribuer à l’edification morale des lecteurs chrétiens’, Perspectives: Revue de l’Université Hébraïque de Jérusalem 20 (2013), pp. 159–79.

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In the Sephardic tradition Hos. 12:13–14:10 does not appear as a haftarah. When, however, the Pentateuchal lection is Gen. 32:4–36:3 (wayyišlaḥ), the Sephardic haftarah consists of the book of Obadiah. The third (in the Sephardic tradition; fourth in the Ashkenazic tradition) and penultimate haftarah from the book of Hosea is Hos. 2:1–22, which is the prophetic lection that follows the Pentateuchal reading from Num. 1:1–4:20 (bĕmidbar). The connection between the latter Pentateuchal reading and Hos. 2:1–22 is as follows: Num. 21:2–44 records a census of the Israelites while Hos. 2:1 promises, ‘The number of the people of Israel shall be like that of the sands of the sea, which cannot be measured or counted…’. The final haftarah taken from the book of Hosea is the first of the two or three units of the haftarah for the Sabbath that falls between the New Year and the Day of Atonement. That Sabbath is designated šabbat šubâ, i.e., the Sabbath on which the haftarah begins with Hos. 14:2, which opens with the long imperative šubâ, ‘Return, Israel, to Yhwh, your God’. The first unit of the haftarah in question is Hos. 14:2–10, while the second is Mic. 7:18–20, and the Sephardic tradition adds a third unit, Joel 2:15–27. According to the triennial cycle of reading the Pentateuch (which was practiced in the land of Israel and in Egypt until the twelfth century CE), the prophetic lection, which follows the reading from the Pentateuch of the unit beginning with Exod. 27:20 and concluding with Exod. 28:43, begins with Hos. 14:7 and concludes with either Joel 1:14 or Joel 2:14.76 In this case the verbal link between the Pentateuchal and the prophetic lection is the appearance of the word zayit ‘olive tree’ in both Exod. 27:20 and Hos. 14:7. Far more interesting is the pairing in the triennial cycle of Num. 5:11–6:21 with Hos. 4:14–5:2 (or is it 6:2?).77 As Mann and Sonne indicate in the second volume of The Bible as Read and Preached in the Old Synagogue, which neither of them lived to complete, the link between Num. 5 and Hos. 14 is to be found in m. Soṭ. 9:9: ‘When habitually adulterous men became abundant, the bitter waters [to test wives suspected of adultery] ceased to be operative, and it was Rabbi Johanan son of Zakkai who abolished their use in accord with the principle stated in Scripture [in Hos. 4:14], “I shall not punish your daughters when they commit adultery, nor your daughters-in-law when they engage in extra-marital affairs for they themselves [i.e., your sons-in-law and your sons] bed down with 76.  See the discussion in J. Mann, The Bible as Read and Preached in the Old Synagogue, vol. 1 (Cincinnati, Ohio: Self-published, 1940), pp. 495–96. 77.  See the extensive discussion in J. Mann and I. Sonne, The Bible as Read and Preached in the Old Synagogue, vol. 2 (Cincinnati, Ohio: Mann-Sonne Publication Committee, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 1966), pp. 223–24.

 Introduction

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prostitutes and engage in sacrificial worship with whores…” ’.78 As will be noted in my commentary on Hos. 4, so long as the now debunked myth of sacred prostitution (see below for extensive literature and discussion) was read into Hos. 4:14, as it still is in virtually every critical commentary on the book of Hosea, our prophet’s revolutionary teaching concerning open marriage and its adoption by the Mishnah was rarely noticed. However, this teaching and its utmost relevance to a Pentateuchal passage, which seems to deal only with the faithlessness of the female partner in marriage, appears not to have been lost upon the Rabbinic sages of the late Roman and early Byzantine period, who brought to bear R. Johanan son of Zakkai’s liberating message upon the choice of the prophetic lection to accompany the reading from the Torah of Num. 5. I can think of no more profound and powerful message with which to conclude this introduction to a new commentary on the book of Hosea, which regards Hos. 4 and its immortal legacy to mankind in his treatment of womankind as one of the peak moments of Holy Scripture.

78.  See Mann and Sonne, The Bible as Read and Preached in the Old Synagogue, vol. 2, p. 223.

H os ea : A N ew T ra n s l at i on

A N ew T ra n s l at i on

Chapter 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The word of Yhwh which was unto Hosea son of Beeri in the reigns of Uzziah, Jothan, Ahaz, and Jehezekiah, kings of Judah and in the reign of Jeroboam son of Joash, king of Israel. Yhwh spoke first with Hosea/When Yhwh began to speak with Hosea,1 Yhwh said to Hosea, ‘Go, marry an adulterous woman, and adopt adulterous children. For the land has certainly committed adultery against Yhwh.’ Hosea went and married Gomer daughter of Diblaim. Then she conceived, and she bore him a son. Yhwh said to him, ‘Name him Jezreel for in a little while I shall punish the dynasty of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I shall put an end to the king of the house of Israel. It will happen: On that day I will break the bow of Israel in the Valley of Jezreel’. She conceived again, and she bore a daughter. And he (Yhwh) said to him (Hosea the prophet), ‘Name her Unloved Woman, for I shall not continue to exhibit love toward the house of Israel so that I would certainly pardon them’. (But I shall display love to the house of Judah, and I shall give them victory through Yhwh their God. I shall not give them victory by means of bow and sword and battle, by means of horses and cavalry.) She (Gomer) weaned Unloved Woman, and she (Gomer) conceived, and she gave birth to a son. And he (Yhwh) said (to him, the prophet), ‘Name him Not-my-people, For you (the people of Israel) are not my people, and I am not yours’.

1.  Each of the two alternative translations of v. 2a reflects one of two alternative divisions of the Hebrew text attested in ancient and medieval sources; see the commentary.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

It shall come to pass: The number of the people of Israel shall be like that of the (grains of) sand of the sea, which cannot be measured and cannot be counted. And it shall come to pass that in place of it being said to them, ‘You are not my people’, it shall be said to them, ‘the people who belong to the living God’. The people of Judah and the people of Israel will gather together. And they will appoint one leader over them. And they will ascend from the land. For great will be the day of Jezreel. Call your brothers My people and your sisters Beloved. Rebuke your mother, rebuke her. For she is not my wife, and I am not her husband. May she remove her habitual harlotry from her face, And her habitual adultery from between her breasts. Lest I strip her naked//and exhibit her as on the day of her birth. I shall make her into a wilderness, And I shall turn her into an arid land, And I will cause her to die of thirst. And I will not love her children Because they are children of adultery. For their mother committed adultery [metaphor for idolatry], Their female parent acted disgracefully. Because she said (to herself), ‘Let me follow after my paramours [metaphor for other gods], Those, who provide my bread and my water, My wool and my linen My oil and my drink’. Therefore, I hereby hedge up your path with thorns, And I shall erect a fence around her So that she will not find her paths [to continue to attach herself to her paramours; see next verse]. Consequently, she will run after her lovers, But she will not locate them She will seek them, but she will not find them. Then she will say, ‘Let me go, and let me return to my first husband For I was better off then than now’. She (personified Lady Israel) did not know that I (Yhwh) had given her the grain and the wine and the oil// And silver I multiplied for her//And gold they consecrated to Baal.

 A New Translation 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Therefore, I shall take back my grain at its appropriate season And my wine at its appointed time. I shall withhold my wool and my linen [which she used] to clothe her nakedness. And now, therefore, I shall uncover her nakedness In the sight of her paramours, And no one will be able to save her from me. I shall put an end to all of her rejoicing Her holiday, her new moon, and her Sabbath, And all of her periodic festivals. I shall destroy her grapevine and her fig tree, Of which she said/thought, ‘They are my fee for sexual services rendered, Which my paramours gave me’. I shall turn them (her vineyards and orchards) into a forest So that the beast of the field will eat them (the grapes and the figs). And I shall punish her for the festivals for the Baals, To whom she presents offerings. She wore her ring and her necklace, And she went after her paramours, But me she forgot—word of Yhwh. Therefore (ironically), I hereby entice her, And I shall take her walking into the wilderness And I shall speak tenderly to her. And I shall give her her vineyards from there, And turn the Valley of Achor into a door of hope. And there she will call out in ecstasy as in the days of her youth// And as at the time when she came up [to the land of Israel] from the land of Egypt. And it shall come to pass on that day—word of Yhwh You shall call (me) Ishi ‘my man’// And you will no longer call me Baali. I shall remove the names of the Baals from her [Lady Israel’s] mouth So that they shall no longer be mentioned by their name. I shall make a covenant with them on that day with the beast of the field, and the bird of the sky and the creeping creatures, and I shall remove bow and sword from the land, and I will enable them to lie down in safety. And I shall betroth you unto me forever. And I shall betroth you unto me in exchange for righteousness and justice and lovingkindness and love, And I shall betroth you unto me in exchange for faithfulness, And then you shall be devoted to Yhwh’.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary 23 And it shall come to pass on that day, I shall fructify—word of Yhwh— I shall fructify the heavens And they [the heavens, sky] will fructify the earth. 24 And the earth will fructify the grain and the wine and the oil, And they [the grain and the wine and the oil] will fructify Jezreel. And I shall plant her [Jezreel] for me in the land 25 And I shall love Unloved And I shall say to Not-my-people, ‘You are my people’, And he will respond, ‘[You are] my God’.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5

Yhwh said to me further: Go, love a woman who although loved by a companion is continually unfaithful on the analogy of Yhwh’s loving the people of Israel while they [the people of Israel] turn to other gods. and people who are lovers of/devotees of cakes made of raisins/ So I loved a lustful woman,2 And I hired her for me in exchange for fifteen [shekels of] silver and a ḥomer of barley and a lethech of barley And I said to her, ‘You will cease and desist a long time for me. You will neither commit adultery nor marry a man, and I also shall not be intimate with you.’ Because for a long time the people of Israel will cease and desist. Without a king And without a ruler And without sacrifice And without a pillar And without ephod and teraphim. Afterward the people of Israel will again seek Yhwh their God And David their king, And they will thrill over Yhwh and his bounty in the days to come.

2.  The first of the two lines offers alternative English renderings of the standard Hebrew text while the second line offers a translation of the text as emended by Ginsberg; see the commentary.

 A New Translation

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Chapter 4 1 Hear the word of Yhwh, people of Israel! For Yhwh has a legal case [Heb. rîb] Against the inhabitants of the land Because There is no honesty, And there is no kindness, And there is no obedience to God in the land. Swearing (falsely), and dishonesty and murder, 2 And theft and adultery run like water. Blood of diverse crimes runs together. Consequently, the earth will dry up. 3 Everyone who dwells on it will languish Including the beast of the field and the bird of the sky And even the fish of the sea will die. 4 However, Let no person summon (Israel) to a lawsuit, Let no person summon (Israel) to litigation. But against you, is my lawsuit, Mr. Priest.3 5 You stumbled by day, And the prophet also stumbled with you by night. I shall kill your mother. 6 My people is going to die because of a lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge I shall reject you from serving as priest to me, And because you have forgotten the teaching of your God, I also shall forget your sons. 7 The more they increased in numbers the more they sinned against me. I will change their dignity to dishonour. 8 They (the priests) feed on my people’s sin offerings. And so they (the priests) desire their iniquity. 9 And the people will be (punished) like the priest. And I will punish it for its misbehaviour. And for its wicked deeds I will requite it. 10 They will eat, but they will not be sated, They will swill, but their thirst will not be slaked.

3.  The literal meaning of the received text is ‘Your people are like persons who are litigating with a priest’.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary 10c–11 12 13 14 15 16

Because they have forsaken Yhwh to practice adultery4 and wine. New wine takes away the heart of my people. As for my people, It inquires of its stick [male sexual organ], And its rod [synonym for stick in the preceding clause] replies. Because a lecherous impulse has misguided him5 (collective Israel), So that they (the people of Israel) strayed from submission to their God. On mountaintops they offer sacrifices, And on hills they make offerings Under oak, poplar, and terebinth Because its shade [i.e., the shade of each of these kinds of trees] is pleasant. That is why your daughters engage in extra-marital sex, And your daughters-in-law engage in adultery. I shall not punish your daughters when they engage in extramarital sex, Nor your daughters-in-law when they engage in adultery. For they themselves [the Israelite men] bed down with whores, And engage in sacrifice with prostitutes, And a people that is without sense must come to ruin. If you are an unfaithful husband, Israelite male,

Do not come to Gilgal, And do not make pilgrimages to Beth-aven, And do not swear by Yhwh. Indeed, like a stubborn cow Israel has acted stubbornly. Consequently, Yhwh will make them graze Like a sheep on the open range.

Verses 17–18 according to MT 17 Ephraim is addicted to images—Let him be. 18 Their liquor turned against them. They drank liquor excessively. They ‘love’ beyond measure— Disgrace is the ‘gift’.6

4.  Here I adopt the division into clauses found in LXX, based on the assumption discussed in my commentary that in this instance LXX preserves the original intent of the prophet while the clause division found here in the standard Hebrew text is errant. 5.  Here I translate assuming that the original and correct reading was hitâhû wayyiznû, which became hitĕâ wayyiznû ‘he has misled and they strayed’ because of haplography; see the commentary. 6.  NJPS following the Masoretic Text.

 A New Translation

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Verses 17–18 according to Ginsberg’s restorations 17a Ephraim is a band of lechers, a company of topers. Tippling is rampant, fornication is rife. 18d Shame is their portion, not glory.7 19 The wind has bound her up in the hems of her garment, And they will be ashamed because of their sacrifices.

Chapters 5 and 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Hear this, priests, And pay attention, house of Israel, And royal house, give ear. For against you is the lawsuit. For you have been a snare to Mizpeh And a net spread over Mount Tabor. At Shittim they were exceedingly perverse. And I (Yhwh) am the one who reproves all of them. I am knowledgeable concerning Ephraim// and Israel is not hidden from me. For indeed, you have committed adultery, Ephraim// Israel has defiled himself. Their wicked deeds will not let them return to their God For a lecherous spirit is in them, And they do not obey Yhwh. The pride of Israel shall be humbled before his very eyes. Israel and Ephraim will stumble as a consequence of their iniquity. (Judah also will stumble with them.) They will go with their flocks and their herds To seek Yhwh, but they will not find him. He has abandoned them. They have broken faith with Yhwh Because they have begotten Alien children. Therefore, the new moon will devour their portion.

Hosea 5:8–6:11a: A separate and distinct speech8 8 Sound a ram’s horn in Gibeah. A trumpet in Ramah. Sound the alarm in Beth-aven. After you, Benjamin. 7.  H. L. Ginsberg’s translation of what he believes was the original text before it was miscopied in antiquity so that MT of Hos. 4:17–18 resulted. See the discussion in my commentary below. 8.  See the commentary.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Ephraim will be stricken with horror On a day of chastisement. With respect to the tribes of Israel I have uttered faithfulness. The kings of Judah have been like trespassers. Upon them I shall pour out my wrath like water. Ephraim was defrauded Robbed of redress Because he has been a fool; he has followed delusion. It is I who am like rot to Ephraim Like decay to the house of Israel.9 When Ephraim became aware of his sickness// Israel10 of his disease, Ephraim went to Assyria//He sent (envoys) to a king who might champion (his cause), But he [the king] was not able to heal you, Nor can he cure you of disease. Now I shall be like a big lion to Ephraim, Like a great lion to the house of Israel.11 I, I shall attack, and I shall stride away. I shall carry away (the prey), and no one can rescue. I shall stride away, let me return to my (heavenly) abode (temple) Until they feel guilty so that they will seek my face. In their distress they will search for me.

Chapter 6 1 2 3

[Israel will say]: ‘Come, let us turn back to Yhwh. Indeed, he attacked, but he can heal us. He wounded, but he can cure us. At the end of two days he will revive us. On the third day he will make us rise up, And we shall live in his presence. And let us know. Let us pursue knowledge of Yhwh. His appearance is certain as daybreak, He will come to us like rain, Like latter rain that waters the earth.’

9.  Following NJPS marginal note, I restore Israel where MT reads Judah; see the commentary; this verse is the first of five instances in the book of Hosea where an original Y., an abbreviation for Israel, was reinterpreted in the standard Hebrew text as Judah; see the commentary, and see in the introduction, ‘Judahite Glosses’. 10.  Cf. n. 9. 11.  Cf. n. 9.

 A New Translation 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11a [11b

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[God, however, will respond]: ‘What can I do for you, Ephraim?//What can I do for you, Israel?12 Insofar as your reliability is like a morning cloud, And like dew, which departs early in the morning, Therefore, I shall hew down some of the prophets, I shall slay them by means of the word of my mouth, So that my judicial decision will come to light.13 Indeed, I delight in kindness rather than sacrifice And in knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. But they [Hosea’s contemporaries] are like [the Israelites who in times past at] Adam violated an agreement. There they dealt treacherously with me. Gilead is a city of evildoers Tracked up with blood. Like the ambuscade of bandits, Who committed murder on the road to Shechem Is the gang of priests.14 For they have encouraged depravity. In the house of Israel I have seen a scandal. There is Ephraim’s adultery. Israel has defiled himself. Indeed, Judah reaped a harvest of you. When I would restore the fortune of my people…15]

Chapter 7 6:11b 7:1 7:1b 2

When I would restore the fortune of my people, When I sought to heal Israel, The iniquity of Ephraim was exposed, And the evils perpetrated by Samaria. They behave treacherously, thieves break in; raiding bands Are in the street. However, they [the people of Samaria] do not say to themselves, ‘I (God) recalled all of their wickedness’. Now their wicked deeds have surrounded them. They [their wicked deeds] were before my face.

12.  Cf. n. 9. 13.  Following the word division found in LXX; see the commentary. 14.  Referring to the Israelite priests of the eighth century BCE condemned in Chapters 4–5, above. 15.  With NJPS I reassign the second half of Hos. 6:11 to the beginning of ch. 7; see below in the translation and commentary.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

In their malice they made a party for a king// And in their treachery (for) rulers. All of them are raging like a blazing oven fired by a baker,16 Who desists from stoking From the kneading of the dough until its leavening. The day(s) on which they made our king sick// (successive) rulers by means of poison instead of wine. He (one or more of the assassinated kings) stretched out his hand to mocking persons (who handed him the poison in a wine goblet). Indeed, when they (the assassins) came near In their ambush, their (collective) heart was like an oven. All night long their baker sleeps. In the morning he flares up like a blazing fire. All of them (the assassins and their helpers) heat up like an oven. And they devour their rulers. All of their kings have fallen. None of them (the assassins) calls to me. As for Ephraim, among the nations shall he be kneaded. Ephraim has become an unturned cake. Strangers have devoured his [Ephraim’s] strength, But he (Ephraim) did not notice. Also mould has appeared in him [Ephraim the metaphorical cake]. But he (Ephraim) did not notice. Israel’s pride has been humbled before his very eyes17 Because they did not return to Yhwh, their God, Nor did they seek him despite all of this. Ephraim was like a silly dove with no mind. They called to Egypt//they went to Assyria. When they (the ambassadors of King Menahem son of Gadi of Israel/Ephraim) go (to Assyria), I shall spread my net over them. I shall bring them down like a bird of the sky. I shall punish them when I hear the report concerning their negotiations. Woe to them For they wandered away from me. (I wish/decree) destruction to them For they rebelled against me. Indeed, I redeemed them, But they spoke treacherously about me.

16.  Here I translate this half of the verse as restored by my revered teacher, S. M. Paul; see the commentary. 17.  An equally plausible rendering of this clause is ‘Israel’s arrogance has testified against him’; so also at Hos. 5:5a; see the commentary.

 A New Translation 14 15 16

They did not cry to me with their throats While they were making noises upon their beds. They committed adultery over grain and wine (Thereby), they turned away from me (God). But as for me, I braced, I strengthened their arms, But they plotted evil against me. They (the messengers the king sent to Egypt) have returned. He (Israel) did not succeed. They (the members of the Israelite diplomatic mission to Egypt) were like a bow unprepared for battle. Their kings will fall by the sword Because of their unintelligible foreign speech. This is their jabbering in the land of Egypt.

Chapter 8 1 (Put) a ram’s horn to your mouth. Like an eagle over the temple of Yhwh. Because they transgressed my covenant, And they rebelled against my teaching. 2 Israel cries out to me, ‘My God, we are devoted to you’. 3 Israel has rejected goodness. May an enemy pursue him. 4 They have installed kings, But not with my sanction. They have installed rulers, But I did not consent. Of their silver and gold they made themselves images In order that they (Israel) may be cut off (from Yhwh). 5 He (Yhwh) has rejected your calf, Samaria. I (Yhwh) became angry at them. It is enough That they (Israel) are incapable of purity. 6 For it was at Israel’s initiative. And as for it (the calf of Samaria), a smith made it, And it is not God. Indeed, the calf of Samaria Will become splinters. 7 Indeed, they sow wind, And they will reap whirlwind.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Grain with no head Produces no bread.18 Perhaps, it (the grain) will (in fact) yield (produce), (but) strangers will devour it. Israel is bewildered. They (Israel) have now become among the nations Like an unwanted vessel. Indeed, they went up to Assyria, A lonely wild ass in relationship to him (Assyria), Ephraim sought to forge an alliance. Even while they negotiate among the nations Now I shall gather them, And they shall begin to diminish Under the burden of tribute imposed by the emperor (of Assyria). When Ephraim multiplied altars (it was) to incur guilt. He had altars to incur guilt. I wrote out for him (Israel) the abundance of my instruction. They (the many precepts) were regarded by him as alien. When they present to me generous sacrifices/sacrifices, which they burn before me,19 Let them eat meat. Yhwh does not want them. Consequently, he (Yhwh) will recall their iniquity, And he will keep in mind their sins. They (Israel), in turn, will return to Egypt. Israel forgot his maker, So he built temples, (and Judah has made many fortified cities).20 So I shall send fire into his cities, And it will consume their palaces/temples.

18.  Translation here follows H. W. Wolff’s bold attempt to imitate a rare instance where biblical poetry employs rhyme; see the commentary. 19.  See in the commentary for the basis for each of these alternative possibilities for understanding the word habhābay. 20.  This verse, separated from the rest of the chapter by parentheses, is the fourth of five instances where, after the Northern Israelite book of Hosea was brought to the Kingdom of Judah after the fall of Samaria in 722 BCE, unnamed Judean prophets added material to make the old book relevant to their time and place; see the commentary.

 A New Translation

Chapter 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Do not rejoice, Israel As other peoples exult. For you have turned away from your God. You (masculine singular) love a harlot’s fee Upon every threshing floor for grain. Threshing floor and wine press will not shepherd them, And wine will betray her. They will not abide in Yhwh’s land, But Ephraim will return to Egypt, And in Assyria they will eat unclean food. They will not libate wine to Yhwh, And their sacrifices will not be pleasing to him. [On the contrary, their offerings shall be regarded] for them as the food of mourning [which is to say, lest it not be self-understood], all who eat it will be defiled. Indeed, their bread [shall be only] for their [collective] throat. It shall not come into the temple of Yhwh. What will you do for a festival day And for a feast of Yhwh? Look, indeed, they have gone away [to an unclean place] in the aftermath of destruction. Egypt will gather them, Memphis will bury them with the silver they treasure. Weed will inherit them [i.e., the lands hey abandoned when they will have fled to Egypt]. Thorns [will be found] in their [erstwhile] homes. The days of punishment have come. The days of recompense have come. Let Israel know [this]. The prophet is a fool, The inspired person is a madman. Because of your great iniquity And great hatred. The seer of Ephraim is with his God. The prophet is a fowler’s trap on all of his paths, An embodiment of hatred in the temple of his God. They have been exceedingly perverse As in the days of Gibeah. He (Yhwh) will recall their iniquity. He will remember/punish their sins.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary 10 Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel// Like the first ripe fig on a fig tree at its first bearing of fruit I perceived your ancestors. They came to Baal-peor, and they devoted themselves to Shamefulness, And they became abominations Just like the object of their devotion. 11 Ephraim’s glory shall be like a bird that flies away. [There will be] neither birth, nor womb, nor pregnancy. 12 Even if they should raise their children, I will make them bereft [of their] adult [children]. Indeed, alas, woe is them When I turn away from them. 13 As for Ephraim, As I saw with respect to Tyre, which was planted in a meadow Also Ephraim must bring out His children for slaying. 14 Give them, Yhwh. What will you give? Give them womb that miscarries and breasts that are dried up. 15 All their evil [was already] at Gilgal. For there I showed antipathy toward them Because of their wicked deeds. I shall drive them out of my house. I shall not continue showing them favour. All their rulers habitually act perversely. 16 Ephraim has been struck. Their root has dried up. They do not produce fruit. Even when they give birth, I shall slay their cherished offspring. 17 My God rejects them Because they did not obey him. And they shall wander among the nations.

Chapter 10 1

Israel is a ravaged vine, And its fruit will be like it. When his fruit was plentiful, He made many altars. When his land was fertile They multiplied cultic pillars.

 A New Translation 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

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Now that their (collective) boughs are broken up Now they (the people of Israel) feel guilty. He (collective Israel) tears apart their (the people’s) altars, He destroys their cultic pillars. For now (when they will have become repentant) they will say, ‘We have no king. For we did not obey Yhwh. So what can a king do for us?’ They vow vows (which are) vain oaths, Concluding treaties (while at the very same time) (miscarriage of) justice produces Poison weeds all over the ploughed fields. For the calves of Beth-aven The inhabitants of Samaria fear. Indeed, its people and its priests Mourn over it (Beth-aven) for its glory, That (the calf) will have departed from it. That (the calf) also will be brought to Assyria As tribute to a king who (so they thought) might champion their cause. Ephraim will receive chagrin, And Israel will be embarrassed as a result of his (the Assyrian king’s) counsel. As for Samaria, her king is finished Like foam on the surface of water. The shrines of Aven, the sin of Israel, will be destroyed. Thorn and thistle will grow upon their altars. They will call to the mountains, ‘Bury us’, And to the hills, ‘Fall upon us’.21 From the days of Gibeah You have sinned, Israel. There they stood. It will not overtake them upon the hill, (in the) war against scoundrels. When I chose (them, the people of Israel), then I harnessed them, When peoples were gathered against them, When they had been harnessed to two furrows. Indeed, Ephraim is a trained heifer Who loves to thresh. Now, as for me, I passed by her beautiful neck. I make Ephraim break up the ground.

21.  In Aleppo Codex and Leningrad Codex there is a break between 10:8 and 10:9, but there is no break between 10:15 and 11:1.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary 12 13 14 15

Israel22 must plough (to cover the seed). Jacob must harrow for himself. Plant for yourselves generously. Harvest in abundance. Break up your fallow ground. It is the appointed time for seeking Yhwh Until he comes and generously provides you with rain. You ploughed wickedness// Iniquity you harvested// You have eaten the fruit of treachery. For you relied upon your ways// Upon your many warriors. And there shall occur a disaster with respect to your people, And all your fortresses will be plundered As plundered was Shalman(eser III) at Beth-arbel On the day of battle When a mother and her children were smashed to death. This is what Bethel has done to you because of your Unmitigated wickedness. At dawn the (Israelite) monarchy will certainly perish.

Chapter 11 1 2 3 4 5

When Israel was still a child, I fell in love with him, And out of Egypt I called my son. They were called (to the service of Yhwh). In the very same measure (in which they had been summoned) They went away from me.23 They sacrificed to the Baals, And they made offerings to idols. It was I who taught Ephraim how to walk Taking him (Ephraim/Israel) in his (God’s) arms. Yet (they acted as though) they did not know that I healed them. With human ties I draw them with cords of love. I was to them like people who raise up a yoke on their jaws, And (in fact) I turned toward him (Ephraim/Israel, saving), ‘I shall feed (you)’. ‘No!’ He (Ephraim/Israel) returns to Egypt, And Assyria is his (Ephraim’s/Israel’s) king. Indeed, they (the people of Ephraim/Israel) refuse to repent.

22.  With NJPS I accept MT’s reading Judah as an ancient misreading of an original Y., originally meant to stand for Israel; see the commentary. 23.  Following LXX rather than MT; see the commentary.

 A New Translation 6 7 8 9 10 11

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A sword will descend upon their skins, And it will consume their limbs, And it will devour their bones.24 My people depends upon my turning back, When he (the people of Ephraim/Israel) is summoned upward, He does not rise at all. How can I give you, Eprahim? (How) can I surrender you, Israel? How can I make you like Admah? (How) can I render you like Zeboiim? I had a change of heart. I experienced a feeling of empathy. I shall not activate my anger. I shall not turn to destroy Ephraim, For I am God, and not a human. (I am) the Holy One among you, I shall not come with hatred. Then they will follow Yhwh When he roars like a lion. When he roars, His children will come hurrying from the west. They will fly away like a bird from Egypt, And like a dove from Assyria, And I will resettle them in their homes —word of Yhwh.

Chapter 12 1 Ephraim surrounded me with treachery// And Israel with guile. And Israel25 is devoted with respect to El// and with respect to angels is loyal. 2 Ephraim shepherds the wind, And he pursues the east wind. Every day he multiplies treachery and plunder. They (the Kingdom of Israel) make a treaty with Assyria// And oil is brought to Egypt. 24.  This rendering reflects the emendations/restorations suggested in NJPS margin; see the commentary. 25.  On the basis of the context, which appears to employ synonymous parallelism, I treat this reference to Judah in MT as one of the instances where an original abbreviation Y., standing for Israel, was misconstrued in antiquity as standing for Judah; see the commentary.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

And so Yhwh is now engaged in a lawsuit against Israel.26 That is, to punish Jacob for his misbehaviour, And to requite him for his wicked deeds. In the womb he cheated his brother, And in his manhood he strove with a divine being. He (Jacob) strove with an angel, and he (Jacob) prevailed. He (the angel) cried, and he (the angel) pleaded with him (Jacob). At Bethel he (Jacob) would meet him (the angel), And there he (the angel) would speak with us. But as for Yhwh, the God of hosts, Yhwh is his name. But you must return by means of the help of your God. You must practice kindness and justice, And pray always to your God. (Israel is) a trader who employs false scales, Who loves to overreach. Ephraim said (or thought) ‘Ah! I have become rich, I have achieved power/wealth for myself’. All the fruits of his toil will be unavailable to him27 Because of the iniquity by which he sinned. But as for me, Yhwh your God, since (you left) the land of Egypt, I shall settle you in your tents as in times past. I spoke through the agency of the prophets, And as for me, prophetic revelation I multiplied, And through the agency of the prophets I communicated. If Gilead is evil/vanity, Ultimately, they (stones of testimony set up there) were of no value,28 (that) they sacrifice bulls in Gilgal. Indeed, their altars will be29 Like stone heaps upon furrows in a ploughed field.

26.  See the previous note. 27.  In employing 3rd person pronominal suffixes rather than 1st person pronominal suffixes I follow LXX; see the commentary. 28.  The clause ‘they were of no value’ is construed as a pivot expression referring both to the literal meaning of Gilead in v. 12a and to the sacrificing of bulls in v. 12c; see the commentary. 29.  Normally a nominal sentence in an ancient Semitic language is translated into European languages employing the present tense of the verb ‘to be’ as the link between the subject and the predicate nominative/adjective. Since here the implied verb ‘to be’ (KJV prints the implied are in italics to indicate its absence in the Hebrew text) refers not to things as they are in the present but rather as the prophet foresees them, I employ the future; see the commentary.

 A New Translation 13 14 15

Jacob fled to the land of Aram. Israel served in exchange for a wife, And in exchange for a wife he kept (sheep). By the agency of a prophet Yhwh brought up Israel from Egypt, And by the agency of a prophet was he (Israel) kept. Ephraim angered (God) bitterly, So he (God) cast his (Ephraim’s) guilt upon him, And his Lord requited him for his despicable behaviour.

Chapter 13 1 When Ephraim spoke piety, he was exalted in Israel. When, however, he (Ephraim/Israel) became guilty with respect to Baal, he died. 2 But now they continue to sin. They have made for themselves molten images from their silver. According to their skill (they have produced) images, Entirely the work of craftspersons. They say, ‘People who sacrifice must kiss calves’. 3 Therefore, They will be like morning clouds, Like dew that departs early in the morning, Like chaff hurled away from the threshing floor, And like smoke from an aperture in the roof. I am Yhwh your God since the land of Egypt. 4 You have never known a God other than me. There is no helper other than me. 5 I knew you in the wilderness, In a parched land. 6 When they grazed, they were satisfied, When they were satisfied, they became arrogant. Consequently, they forgot me. 7 Thus I became like a lion toward them, Like a leopard on the road to Assyria. I shall attack them as does a she-bear bereft of her young, 8 And I shall rip open their (collective) rib cage. I will devour them as does a lion. A wild beast will rip them to pieces. 9 The destruction is of your own doing, Israel, For your help is to be found in me.

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I shall be your king, then, who will save you in all your cities// And your judges of whom you said, ‘Give me a king and rulers’.30 I shall give you a king in my anger, And I shall take away (your king) in my ire.

Hosea 13:12–14:131 12 The iniquity of Ephraim is bundled up//his sin is stored away. 13 He will experience pangs of childbirth. He is not a wise child. Indeed, this is not an appropriate time to survive The birthing process. 14 I shall ransom them from Sheol. I shall redeem them from Death. I shall be your Pestilence, Death. I shall be your Scourge, Sheol. Pity will be hidden from my eyes. 15 If he (Ephraim named in v. 12a), a son of brothers, will behave Like a wild ass There will come an east wind//a mighty wind from the wilderness will ascend. And his (Ephraim’s) fountain will dry up//and his spring will be dried up. And he (that wind) will plunder treasure, every object of delight. Chapter 14, verse 132 1 Samaria should feel guilty because she rebelled. They (the people of Samaria) will fall by the sword. Their babies will be dashed to death, And his (Samaria’s) pregnant women will be ripped open.

30.  See 1 Sam. 8:4, and see the commentary. 31.  MT, exemplified by the Aleppo Codex, separates 13:12 from 13:11 by a blank space; see the commentary. 32.  Medieval Hebrew manuscripts, and Christian editions of the Bible treat this verse as belonging to ch. 13. In KJV it is numbered, as it should be as Hos. 13:16. However, because since the age of printing this verse has wrongly been treated as the beginning of ch. 14, it has been assumed that Hebrew tradition actually regarded this verse as 14:1; see the commentary to the next chapter.

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Chapter 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Samaria should feel guilty because she rebelled. They (the people of Samaria) will fall by the sword. Their babies will be dashed to death, And his (Samaria’s) pregnant women will be ripped open.33 Return, Israel, to Yhwh, your God, For you have fallen because of your iniquity. Take with you words, And return to Yhwh. Say to him, ‘Forgive all iniquity, And accept (our) goodness, And let us pay with our lips instead of (offering) bulls. Assyria cannot save us. We shall not ride upon a horse. And we shall no longer venerate our handiwork. Insofar as in you (Yhwh) an orphan is loved. I shall heal their backsliding. I shall love them (Israel) generously For my anger has turned away from him (Israel). I shall be like dew to Israel He (Israel) will blossom like the lily. He will strike roots like (the roots of the trees of) Lebanon. His boughs will spread out. And his beauty shall be like that of the olive tree, And his fragrance like that of the (trees of) Lebanon. And those who abide in his shade shall again thrive, And they will blossom like the grapevine. His fragrance will be like that of the wine of Lebanon. Ephraim (will ask): ‘For what more do I need images? I will respond to him (God), and I shall look upon him I shall be like a verdant cypress’. (God will respond): ‘From me is your fruit’. Whoever is wise will understand these words, (whoever is) sagacious will comprehend them, For the ways of Yhwh are straight. Virtuous people will walk in them While transgressors will stumble in them.

33.  In the formatting of Masoretic manuscripts and in the English Bible this verse belongs to the previous speech. However, I repeat it here because it is attached to ch. 14 in printed editions of the Hebrew Bible since the sixteenth century. Consequently, modern biblical scholars take it for granted that this verse belongs to the speech that really begins with 14:2.

H os ea : A N ew C om m entary

C h a p t er 1

1:1 dĕbar- Yhwh ăšēr hāyâ el ‘The word of Yhwh which was unto…’ This fixed formula serves as the title of four of the smaller books within the larger biblical book of the Twelve Prophets: Hosea, Joel, Micah, and Zephaniah. This formula constitutes a claim that the book derives in part from a dialogue between, or, in modern language, a close encounter of the third kind, between God, on the one hand, and the prophet by whose name the individual book within the book of the Twelve Prophets is called, on the other hand. The fixed formula in question is synonymous with the formula wayhî dĕbar Yhwh el, found in Jer. 28:12; 29:30; 32:26; 33:1, 19, 23; 34:12; 35:12; 36:27; 37:6; 42:7; 43:8. In each of those twelve instances the formula indicates that the speech which follows was inspired by a dialogue that took place between God and Jeremiah. The formula ‘the word of Yhwh which was unto’ is found in the entire book of Isaiah only in Isa. 38:4; in the books of Samuel only in 1 Sam. 15:10 and 2 Sam. 7:4; in the books of Kings only in 1 Kings (6:11; 12:22; 13:20; 16:1; 17:2, 8; 21:17, 28) in the book of the Twelve Prophets outside of the book titles mentioned above only in the unequivocally post-exilic prophetic books as follows: Jon. 1:1; 3:1; Hag. 1:3; 2:20; and in Chronicles only in verbatim quotations from Samuel and Kings (1 Chron. 17:3 quoting 2 Sam. 7:4; and 2 Chron. 11:2 quoting 1 Kgs 12:22). hôšēa ‘Hosea’ Hosea 1:2 indicates that this was the personal name of the mid-ninth century prophet (see my Introduction above, pp. 3–10), whose deeds and words are recorded in Hos. 1:3. If one accepts the division of the book of Hosea into at least two books, the first of them (Hos. 1–3) from the ninth century BCE and the second of them (Hos. 4–14) from the eighth century BCE, it is possible that the two distinct prophets were both called Hosea. It is equally possible that only the first of the two prophetic figures was called Hosea. It is no less plausible that only the second of the two prophetic figures was called Hosea.

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Another five persons are designated by the personal name Hôšēa in Hebrew Scripture. These are (1) Joshua son of Nun, whose original name was Hosea according to Num. 13:8; (2) a leader of the tribe of Ephraim in the time of King David according to 1 Chron. 27:20; (3) the mid-ninthcentury BCE prophet, whose name is mentioned three times in Hos. 1:1–2; (4) the last monarch to rule over the Kingdom of Israel (also called the Northern Kingdom or Samaria), namely Hoshea son of Elah [see 2 Kgs 15:30; 17:6]; and (5) one of the leaders who signed (Neh. 10:24) the famous pledge by which the signatories in Yehud of the fifth century BCE undertook ‘to walk according to the Law of God which was given through Moses’ (Neh. 10:30). Standard English translations reserve the form Hosea for the prophet named in Hos. 1:1–2 (twice). LXX refers to all of these persons by the name Ὠσηε (the omega marked with smooth breathing!) while the Vulgate refers to all of them by the name Osee. Apparently, the English versions produced under Protestant auspices sought to follow the Hebrew with respect to the five other biblical Hosheas. However, with respect to the prophet named in the title of our book of Hosea, the English versions chose a form which appears to be a compromise between Heb. Hôšēa and the Greek and Latin Ὠσηε/Osee. The Apostle Paul in Rom. 9:25–26 refers to the book of Hosea using the words, ‘As indeed he says in Hosea’, which introduces a quote from Hos. 2:1. Standard English translations of the Bible (from KJV through NJPS), which reserve the form Hosea for the prophet named in Hos. 1–2 and the Book that includes Hos. 2:1, employ the form Hoshea to represent all the other 4 biblical Hosheas. ‘son of Beeri’ According to the Rabbinic sages, Beeri was also a prophet, and the two surviving lines of his literary legacy were preserved in Isa. 8:19–20. See Leviticus Rabbah 6:6 (sixth century CE) and the commentary of Rashi (1040–1105) on Isa. 8:19. In the midrash preserved there in Leviticus Rabbah, Rabbi Simon argues that the literary productivity of Beeri was so small that it was appended to the book of Isaiah so that it would not be lost. In the mss. and printed editions of Leviticus Rabbah the name appears in the form Be’erah, perhaps meaning ‘well (of water)’. This idea of the Rabbinic sages that the prophetic corpus of Hebrew Scripture contains materials that are not necessarily the work of the prophets for whom the books are named dovetails with the famous assertion of the Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 16a, according to which the book of Isaiah was ‘written’ by Hezekiah and his staff while the book of the Twelve Prophets was ‘written’ by the people of the Great Assembly. In both cases,

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reference is made to a royal and/or a prophetic institution, which took upon itself to edit the literary legacy, which the prophets of an earlier time had bequeathed to posterity. This Rabbinic view of how, when, and by whom books of the prophetic corpus were edited dovetails with modern views (especially Y. Kaufmann and H. L. Ginsberg), according to which the book of Hosea contains (a) the speeches of two prophets—one from the middle of the ninth century BCE (Hos. 1–3) and one from the middle of the eighth century BCE (Hos. 4–14)—both delivered in Samaria; and (b) later additions made by one or more editors in Judah after the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE (see above in the introduction; and see below concerning the present and the original structure of ch. 2); and see passim in references to Judah in the book of Hosea, below); see in the introduction above, the extended discussion of the issue of Judahite glosses in the book of Hosea. ‘In the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Jehezekiah, kings of Judah’ This time-frame designation appears also in Isa. 1:1; Amos 1:1; and Mic. 1:1. The mid-eighth-century BCE date is thoroughly appropriate to significant parts of Isa. 1–39 and to Amos and to Micah. However, as we shall see, it is totally inappropriate both to Hos. 1–3 and to Hos. 4–14; see our introduction; and see below. ‘And in the reign of Jeroboam son of Joash, King of Israel’ This part of the title appears also in the title of the book of Amos at Amos 1:1. There the date is totally plausible. As we shall see (see also in my introduction), the date is totally inappropriate in the context of either Hos. 1–3 or Hos. 4–14. For the dates of the aforementioned kings of Judah and Israel see the table of the dates of the kings of Judah and Israel in Appendix A (p. 600, below). 1:2 Yhwh spoke first with Hosea//When Yhwh began to speak with Hosea In his Torah Prophets and Writings according to the Text and the Massorah of Keter Aram Zova, Mordechai Breuer leaves a blank space at the end of the third line on the page following the fourth word of Hos. 1:2 běhôšēa, under which we find the Masoretic accent called etnaḥtā or in Latin caesura, indicating the longest pause within a verse.1 Graphically more 1.  Mordechai Breuer, Torah Prophets and Writings according to the Text and the Massorah of Keter Aram Zova (2nd printing; Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1992).

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accurate in its representation of the text of the Aleppo Codex is Breuer’s Jerusalem Crown,2 where we have the following arrangement of Hos. 1:2: lines 1–4 of column 1 of the three columns on the page contain Hos. 1:1 up to and including the penultimate word of Hos. 1:1, melek ‘king’, while line 5 begins with the final word of Hos. 1:1, namely ‘[of] Israel’, and continues with the first three words of Hos. 1:2, těḥillat dibbēr-Yhwh ‘when Yhwh began to speak’. Line 6 in the first column on our page contains only the expression běhôšēa ‘with Hosea’. The remainder of line 6 is left blank, as is the entire line 7. The Jerusalem Crown edition of the Hebrew Bible also leaves a blank space at the end of Num. 26:1 after the three Hebrew words corresponding to ‘And it came to pass after the plague’, exactly as in Sephardic Torah Scrolls where the blank line is followed by the remainder of Num. 26:1 spread over two lines of text. Since, as I noted, in the Aleppo Codex at Hos. 1:2 the word běhôšēa ‘with Hosea’ is followed by a blank line, followed by the remainder of the verse, on a separate line, we have here exactly the same phenomenon that is found in Num. 26:1–2, where Num. 26:1 terminates in etnaḥtā or caesura followed by a blank space to the end of the line while Num. 26:2 begins on a new line. The so-called Rabbinic Bible and many other printed editions note at Num. 26:1 pisqā běemṣā pāsûq, which E. Tov calls ‘a section division in the middle of a verse’.3 Tov points out there that according to the marginal Massorah of the Leningrad Codex of the Bible at Gen. 35:22 there are 35 instances of this phenomenon in MT. In fact, Avigdor Uri enumerates 72 instances of the phenomenon in question based on a variety of witnesses to the Masoretic text.4 H. Graetz argued that all instances of the phenomenon point to traditions according to which the break in the middle of the biblical verse indicates text that had fallen out or been censored.5 Such a view of the 2.  Mordechai Breuer’s Jerusalem Crown: The Bible of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Printing Enterprises/Basel: Karger Family Fund, 2000). 3.  E. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (2nd ed.; translated by the author; Minneapolis: Fortress; Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 1992), p. 53. 4.  Avigdor Uri, ‘What Is “a section division in the middle of a verse”?’, in Studies in Biblical Research in Honor of Eliyahu Urbach (ed. A. Biram; Jerusalem: Kiryat Sepher for the Israel Society of Biblical Research, 1955), pp. 31–42. 5.  H. Graetz, ‘Ueber die Bedeutung der masoretischen Bezeichnung: “Unterbrechung in der Mitte des Verses” ’, Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 27 (1878), pp. 481–503, and ‘Nachtrag zu den lückenhaften Versen in der Bibel pisqā běemṣā pāsûq’, Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 36 (1887), pp. 193–200.

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phenomenon was supported by the fact that in a number of instances of the phenomenon in the books of Samuel ancient translations reflect a version of the biblical text before the text had fallen out. Uri argues that at least six different phenomena in the composition and transmission of the biblical text may be alluded to by means of ‘a section division in the middle of a verse’.6 The six categories are as follows: (1) omissions, some of which can be restored by reference to ancient translations and some of which cannot be so restored; (2) a scribal warning to the effect that the text has suffered in transmission; (3) a break in the biblical text, with respect to which it is difficult to determine the precise relationship between what precedes and what follows the break; (4) the break serves as a warning that two consecutive texts, which are similar, should be read carefully so as not to engage in oral haplography when reading the text; (5) the break comes before a quotation of the word of God; (6) the break indicates a change in subject matter. In light of Uri’s categories 5 and 6, I would suggest that the break found in the authoritative manuscripts of Hos. 1:2 alludes to the validity of two alternative interpretations of the text. The first of these interpretations, which is a reasonable interpretation of Hos. 1:2a, is the following, ‘First God spoke with Hosea’. This interpretation of Hos. 1:2a as an independent statement is reflected in the following statement in b. Bava Batra 15a, ‘…Hosea came first [of all the prophets] for it is written [in Hos. 1:2a], “Yhwh spoke first with Hosea”. But did he speak first with Hosea? Were there not many prophets between Moses and Hosea? So Rabbi Johanan [b. Napha] said, “[It means] that he [Hosea] was the first of four prophets who spoke [the word of God] during the same historical period: Hosea, Isaiah, Amos, and Micah”.’ Here Rabbi Johanan and the Talmud allude to the fact that four books of the Bible, namely Hosea, Isaiah, Amos, and Micah, all begin with the words ‘The word of Yhwh that was unto PN in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah the kings of Judah’. The alternative interpretation, which is reflected in the division into verses in the standard Hebrew text and which was adopted by Rashi (1040–1105) in his almost canonical commentary at both Gen. 1:1 and Hos. 1:2, is that Hos. 1:2 is to be read without a break in the middle as follows, ‘When Yhwh began to speak with Hosea, Yhwh said to Hosea, “Go acquire for yourself a wife of harlotry and children of harlotry…” ’.

6.  Uri, ‘What Is “a section division in the middle of a verse”?’, pp. 37–38

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It is indeed incredible that the standard critical commentaries7 failed to note the Masoretes’ attempt to alert us to two problems at the caesura in Hos. 1:2, one a historical problem referred to anonymously in the Babylonian Talmud, and the other a grammatical/syntactical problem, which is the focus of Rashi’s ingenious comment. What the Masoretes seem to have done here [and it is ignored in the Koren Bible so commonly used by Israeli scholars and students because of its highly readable type-face] is to set up a warning sign indicating ‘Beware of an exegetical land-mine ahead; commentators prepare to comment’. Following Rashi and NJPS, and either ignoring the graphic break in the middle of the verse or relying on a tradition of printing (such as Koren) or writing out the biblical text without the graphic break, 1:2 reads: ‘When Yhwh began to communicate with Hosea’. Both in his commentary at Hos. 1:2 and in his commentary at Gen. 1:1, Rashi (1040–1105) explains that Gen. 1:1 and Hos. 1:2 both open with temporal adverbial clauses in which (1) a finite verb is employed instead of an infinitive as a genitive in a construct genitive chain introduced by a phrase ‘in the beginning of’ (tĕḥillat in Hos. 1:2; bĕrēšît in Gen. 1:1); and (2) the phrase ‘in the beginning of’ means in context, ‘when…began’. In Rashi’s understanding,8 Gen. 1–3 is one long sentence, meaning, ‘When God began to create the cosmos…he said, “Let there be light” ’. Similarly, in Rashi’s understanding, Hos. 1:2 means ‘When Yhwh began to communicate with Hosea, he said to Hosea, “Please marry an adulterous woman…” ’. Similarly, already, TJ šērāyût pitgāmā dĕYhwh bĕHôšēa, ‘the beginning of the word of Yhwh with Hosea’. TJ’s wording presents the beginning of the close encounter of the third kind between Yhwh and Hosea, i.e., ‘the inaugural vision of Hosea the prophet was as follows’, which means that TJ anticipates Rashi in construing Hos. 1:2a as a temporal clause modifying the verb ‘he [Yhwh] said’ in Hos. 1:2b. Even more interesting is the fact that LXX already has αρχὴ λόγυ Κυρίου ἐν Ώσῆε ‘The beginning of the word of the Lord with/by Hosea [was as

7.  W. R. Harper, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Amos and Hosea (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1905), p. 207; Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 7–8; D. Stuart, Hosea–Jonah (WBC, 31; Waco: Word, 1987) p. 26; Rudolph, Hosea, p. 37; H. W. Wolff, A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Hosea (trans. Gary Stansell; ed. Paul D. Hanson; Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1965), p. 8; F. I. Andersen and D. N. Freedman, Hosea (AB, 24; Garden City: Doubleday, 1980), pp. 155–56. 8.  Followed by E. A. Speiser, Genesis (AB, 1; Garden City: Doubleday, 1965); see also Harry M. Orlinsky, Notes on the New Translation of the Torah (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1969), pp. 5–51 at Gen. 1:1.

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follows]’. W. Edward Glenny indicates ‘as follows’ simply by the use of the colon after the name Hosea in Hos. 1:2a.9 Similarly, C. Thomson, ‘The beginning of the word of the Lord, by Hosea’,10 which is followed by a colon, indicating as in Glenny’s translation and as in TJ that the inaugural vision of Hosea begins with ‘Yhwh said to Hosea, Go take…’. W. R. Harper notes that the same syntactical phenomenon, i.e., a construct genitive chain in which the genitive is a finite verb,11 observed by Rashi in Gen. 1:1 and Hos. 1:2, is found also in Pss. 4:8 and 9:15. In the former verse we read as follows: mēēt dĕgānām wĕtîrôšām rābû ‘From the time when their grain and their wine became abundant’. In the latter verse we read as follows: šĕnôt rāînû rāâ ‘according to the number of years that we have experienced misfortune’. The alternative understanding of tĕḥillat dibbēr Yhwh ‘First Yhwh spoke with Hosea’, which corresponds to LXX’s and Targum Onkelos’s understanding of Gen. 1:1, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’, inspires the Rabbinic view (b. Pesaim 87a; Bava Batra 14b) that the clause in question means that Hosea was the first of the four prophets Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, and Micah. The headings of all these books date these prophets to the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Jehezekiah, kings of Judah. The rabbis’ ingenious answer to the exegetical question posed by Hos. 1:2, ‘the beginning of what?’ is untenable historically because the content of the biblical books in question points to the order of composition of three of the four books in the order Amos, Isaiah, Micah, while part of Hosea (chs. 1–3) must predate all those prophets by a century (see my Introduction, above, pp. 3–12). In addition, as demonstrated by H. Tadmor,12 Hos. 4–14 reflects the conditions in Samaria during the period 743–739 BCE. The latter period is the era of the military campaigns of Tilgeth-pileser III (745–727 BCE). This time-frame coincides with part of the reign of King Menahem son of Gadi of Israel (747–737 BCE). Consequently, both of the two major divisions of the book of Hosea fall outside of the time-frame indicated in the title of the book of Hosea found in Hos. 1:1. Notwithstanding the fact that the majority of critical commentaries on the book of Hosea produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries CE treat that title as historically accurate, that title is 9.  W. Edward Glenny, Hosea: A Commentary Based on Hosea in Codex Vaticanus (Septuagint Commentary Series; Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013), p. 33. 10.  C. Thomson, The Septuagint Bible: The Oldest Text of the Old Testament (rev. C. A. Muses; 2nd ed.; New York: Falcon’s Wing, 1960), p. 1350. 11.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 213. 12.  Tadmor, ‘Historical Background’, pp. 84–88.

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best accounted for as (1) appropriate to the book of Amos and to Isa. 1–33; and (2) having been copied from Amos and Isaiah to Hosea and Micah by scribal error. lēk qaḥ-lĕkā ēšet zĕnûnîm wĕyaldê zĕnûnîm ‘Go, marry an adulterous woman, and adopt adulterous children’ KJV renders literally, ‘Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms’. The first imperative in Hos. 1:2c, ‘go’, is an auxiliary verb that calls one to begin an activity. The same usage is found in Exod. 3:16, ‘Go and gather’; 4:19, ‘Go, return’; 33:1, ‘Go, ascend’; etc. Other common auxiliary verbs employed in the same manner include qûm ‘arise’, as in Gen. 13:17, ‘Arise, walk about in the land’; Gen. 28:2, ‘Arise, go’; Gen. 3:13, ‘Arise, leave’, and hābâ, lit., ‘give’, but used idiomatically to mean ‘come, how about I/we, you’, as in Gen. 11:3, ‘Come, let us build for ourselves a city’; Gen. 11:7, ‘Come, let us go down’; Exod. 1:10, ‘Come let us deal wisely’.13 As for the command itself in Hos. 1:2b, which follows the auxiliary imperative ‘go’ indicating a call to action, the double command here in Hos. 1:2b constitutes a zeugma, a literary phenomenon in which a single verb is employed in two distinct meanings, which are determined by the two distinct and disparate direct objects.14 For another example of zeugma in Hos. 1–3 see below at Hos. 2:17 where the verb ntn has the two distinct meanings of ‘give’ and ‘turn into’. Unconvinced that a biblical author could have thought and written zeugmatically, Heinrich Graetz supplies the verb tôlîd ‘beget thou’ between the conjunctive waw and the object ‘children of harlotry’ in Hos. 1:2c.15 As we know from Gen. 4:19; 11:29; 24:67; 25:1; 26:34; Exod. 2:1; 6:20, 23; Deut. 22:13; 23:1; 24:1, 5; 1 Sam. 12:9; and 1 Kgs 3:1; 16:31, and probably Gen. 34:2 as well as Gen. 19:14, where the husbands of Lot’s daughters are called lōqĕḥê bĕnôtāyw ‘the men who married his daughters’, in standard Biblical Hebrew when the noun ‘woman’ or a specific named woman

13.  On such auxiliary verbs in Biblical Hebrew, see H. M. Orlinsky, Notes on the New Torah Translation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1969), pp. 34–35, 99. 14.  So already S. L. Brown, The Book of Hosea (Westminster Commentaries; London: Methuen & Co., 1932), p. 5. 15.  Heinrich Graetz, Emendationes in Plerosque Sacrae Scripturae Veteris Testamenti Libros (ed. G. Bacher; 3 fascicles; Breslau: Schlesische Buchdruckerei, 1893), fascicle 2, p. 12.

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or a pronoun referring to a woman is employed as the direct object of the verb lqḥ, the latter verb normally means ‘marry’ and corresponds to the synonymous verb aḫāzu in Akkadian, the synonymous verb nsb in Aramaic, and the similar usage of the verb nś in Rabbinic Hebrew as well as in Biblical Hebrew in Judg. 21:23; Ruth 1:4; Ezra 10:44; Neh. 13:25; 2 Chron. 11:21; 13:21; 24:3. When, however, the object of the verb lqḥ is son(s) or daughter(s), the verb means not ‘marry’ but ‘adopt’ as in Esth. 2:7, ‘…when her father and her mother had died, Mordecai adopted her [Esther] as a daughter’. It follows from the recognition that in Hos. 1:2b the imperative qaḥ is employed as a zeugma, that taken by itself, apart from what looks on the face of it as a command–action sequence in Hos. 1:2–3, would well support the suggestion of Kaufmann, HIR, 6:102–3 that what is described in Hos. 1:2 is prophetic theatre in which, as it were, the prophet stood before an audience in a public square or palace or temple court with four actors: the prophet himself, a woman who represented the woman of chronic adultery as a metaphor for idolatry, and her three children who represented the children of adultery as a metaphor for idolatry. However, the action portion of the command–action sequence portrays not the socio-drama just described but rather the prophet’s having actually married a woman named Gomer, who bore three children, named respectively Jezreel, Unloved, and Not-my-people. The consequence of the prophet’s actually having married the aforementioned Gomer, who actually bore him three children, who are supposed to be the required ‘children of chronic adultery as a metaphor for idolatry’, is the moral dilemma confronted by Ginsberg16 and also by Ibn Ezra and Kimchi in his commentary at Hos. 1:2. U. Cassuto has discussed the command–action sequence, which he shows to be characteristic of both Ugaritic epic poetry and the prose narratives of Hebrew Scripture.17 One may compare the frequent ‘And Moses did as Yhwh commanded’ (Num. 17:26; 20:27; etc.). However, the supposed moral dilemma of Hosea’s having been commanded to marry a woman who committed adultery and who gave birth to children who were not Hosea’s children is absent both from Hos. 1:2c and from Hos. 1:3. It is, in fact, created by the imagination of anonymous Rabbinic sages in b. Pesaim 87a. There we read as follows:

16.  H. L. Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, in Haran, ed., Yehezkel Kaufmann Jubilee Volume, pp. 50–69. 17.  U. Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Exodus (trans. Israel Abrahams; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1967), pp. 452–53.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary ‘The Holy One Blessed be He said to Hosea, “Your children have sinned”, and he [the prophet] should have said, “Your children are the descendants of the people to whom you showed compassion; they are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Extend to them Your love”. It is not bad enough that he [the prophet] did not say that. On the contrary, he [the prophet] said before the Holy One Blessed be He, “The whole world is yours. Replace them [the people of Israel] with another people” [exactly what God proposed to do in Exod. 32:10; there God proposed to annihilate Israel and replace them with a new people to be fathered by Moses; Moses, however, refused the offer, and he convinced God to renounce this plan (Exod. 32:11–14)]. The Holy One Blessed be He said [to himself], “What shall I do with this old man?” [Having thought the matter over God said to himself], “I shall say to him [the prophet], ‘Go and marry a prostitute [iššâ zônâ; with Gordis, cited below, note that this is not the term employed in Hos. 1:2] and father habitually adulterous children’ and afterwards I [God] shall say to him [the prophet], ‘Please send her away from your presence’. If he [the prophet] is capable of divorcing [the prostitute], I too shall divorce [my spouse] Israel.” Thus it is stated in Scripture (Hos. 1:2), “Yhwh said to Hosea, ‘Go take [marry or adopt depending on the direct object] a woman of habitual adultery and children of habitual adultery’ ”. And it is written in Scripture (Hos. 1:3), “And he went and he married Gomer daughter of Diblaim”.’

The moral dilemma of God’s having commanded Hosea to marry an idolatrous woman whom he loved so much that he could not divorce her, and of her having given birth to children born of adulterous liaisons whom the prophet adopted as his own and whom he loved as his own is not found in the biblical text of Hos. 1:2, which indeed seems to speak as per Kaufmann of prophetic theatre, in which simultaneously the prophet marries an adulterous woman and adopts adulterous children. The moral dilemma begins with the Rabbinic tale, which attempts to bridge the gap between the command concerning prophetic theatre (Hos. 1:2) and what seems on the face of it to be the action portion of a command–action sequence, in which the prophet marries Gomer daughter of Diblaim. However, as noted already by Ginsberg, it is nowhere stated in Hos. 1:3–9 either that Gomer committed adultery after her marriage to Hosea or that her children who are given symbolic names were conceived in the course of Gomer’s having carried on adulterous liaisons after her marriage to the prophet.18

18.  Cf. Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, pp. 64–65.

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The idea that the prophet carried out a divine command to marry a woman who would be unfaithful is found neither in the biblical text nor even in the Rabbinic tale, which suggests that a prophet less sensitive than Moses to the plight of the people of Israel might be persuaded to assume the proper prophetic role of advocate of Israel before God,19 if this person might learn from the life experience of having, like God, as it were, a less than perfect spouse and less than perfect children. The moral dilemma, which has obsessed commentaries on the book of Hosea for several centuries, was born of the attempt to bridge the gap between the prophetic theatre of Hos. 1:2, and Hos. 1:3, which tells of Hosea’s marriage to Gomer and the birth of three children, each of whom, like Isaiah’s son Maher-shall-hash-baz (Isa. 8:3), is given a symbolic name concerned with the fate of the people of Israel.20 Ginsberg suggests that it was the wrong assumption that Gomer is the very woman to whom reference is made in Hos. 3:1, ‘Yhwh said to me again, “Go love a woman who is habitually adulterous when loved by a companion” ’, that led to the assumption that Gomer is also the woman actually intended in Hos. 1:2. As we shall see below, the force of ôd as a temporal adverb modifying the verb ‘He said’ in Hos. 3:1 is to introduce another but distinct symbolic vision in which a woman’s disloyalty to her partner is a metaphor for Israel’s and Judah’s disloyalty to God, which is expressed by worshipping other gods. Unquestionably, the appearance of the two symbolic usages in Hos. 1:2 and Hos. 3:1 of adultery as a metaphor for idolatry inspired the extensive use of the same metaphor in Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Unfortunately, the inability of many scholars to distinguish between the metaphorical use of adultery to express idolatry and concrete expressions of sexual license fostered the scholarly myth of sacred prostitution as an element in the religions of the ancient Near East. On the debunking of this myth by the author of this commentary and many other scholars in the twentieth century CE, see the discussion in my Introduction above and in my commentary at Hos. 4:13–15. Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1164) followed by David Kimchi (c. 1160– 1235) pointed to the moral dilemma of assuming with the midrash quoted from b. Pesaim 87a that indeed God could have asked the prophet to marry an adulterous woman who would bear him children of adultery. These commentators insisted that in fact God never really asked the prophet to do such a thing and that in fact Hosea never did such a thing. 19.  See Y. Muffs, Love and Joy: Law, Language and Religion in Ancient Israel (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), pp. 9–48. 20.  Cf. Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, p. 64 n. 32.

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On the contrary, argued Ibn Ezra, it was in a dream that the prophet imagined that he had been asked to marry a prostitute. As Ibn Ezra points out in his commentary at Hos. 1:2, Ibn Ezra understood on the basis of Num. 12:6, ‘If you should have a prophet of Yhwh I shall converse with him in vision//I shall speak with him in dreams. Not so is my servant Moses. He is trustworthy in all my estate. I speak with him mouth to mouth neither in vision nor in riddles, and he sees an apparition of Yhwh.’ Ibn Ezra and Kimchi, like Maimonides, restrict direct communication of God with the prophet when the latter is fully awake to the case of Moses. On the other hand, A. J. Heschel holds that, contrary to the view presented in Num. 12:6–8, direct communication of God with the prophets of ancient Israel and Judah is normative.21 Having adopted the view of Ibn Ezra and Maimonides that prophetic visions in general took place in dreams, Kimchi was able to elaborate further, beyond anything suggested in Hos. 1, Hos. 3, or the Rabbinic midrash quoted from b. Pesaim 87a, and to suggest that Hos. 1:2b actually meant the following: ‘GO MARRY AN ADULTEROUS WOMAN and give birth through her to ADULTEROUS CHILDREN… After there were born to him from her two sons and one daughter, the Holy One Blessed be He said to Hosea, “Should you not have learned from the behaviour of Moses your teacher? As soon as I spoke with him prophetically, he separated himself from his wife [cf. Ex. 18:2, ‘Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, took Zipporah Moses’ wife after her divorce (deriving the Heb. substantive šillûḥeyâ from the verb šlḥ ‘divorce’ found in Deut. 24:2)]. Go and separate yourself from her.” He [Hosea] said to him [God], “Master of the world, I have children from her, and I cannot divorce her!” Said the Holy One Blessed be He to him, “Now just as you whose wife is an adulteress and your children are the children of adultery [and you cannot think of parting with them] so I, whose children are Israel, and they are my own children [not children of the adulterous liaisons of a wife with some other men], the children of my tested children Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and they are one of my three possessions in this world, and you said, ‘Replace them with another nation’?!” As soon as he [the prophet] knew that he had sinned, he pleaded for mercy for himself. The Holy One blessed be He said to him, “Before you ask for mercy for yourself, ask for mercy for Israel”. Immediately he [the prophet] began [to recite] a series of blessings to be bestowed on Israel, “May the number of the children of Israel be like the [number of] the grains of sand at the sea [shore]” (Hos. 2:1)’.

21.  A. J. Heschel, The Prophets (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962), passim.

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In Kimchi’s retelling of the Rabbinic tale it is hinted but not fully stated that one or more of Gomer’s children whom the prophet loved was the child of one of Gomer’s adulterous liaisons. However, as noted by Ginsberg in his ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, this is nowhere stated in Hos. 1:2–3, and we must add, nor is it stated in the Rabbinic tale. Consequently, following Ginsberg, I shall treat Hos. 3 as a vision distinct from Hos. 1:2b, and I shall treat Hos. 1:2b as a prophetic speechact distinct from Hos. 1:3. According to Hos. 1:2b, the purpose of Hosea’s having been commanded in prophetic theatre to marry a woman of adultery and to adopt children of adultery is to convey the message spelled out in the justifying clause, which follows in 1:2c, ‘For the land has surely turned away [Heb. zanōh tizneh; a play on the word zĕnûnîm “adultery” as a metaphor for idolatry] from after Yhwh’. In order to demonstrate that this is what Hos. 1:2b–c actually say, we must now deal with the following questions: (1) what is the meaning of ēšet zěnûnîm, which the Rabbinic tale in b. Pesaim 87b equates with iššâ zōnâ ‘harlot’? (2) What is the meaning of yaldê zěnûnîm ‘children of harlotry’? (3) What is the meaning of ‘the land’ in the context at hand? (4) And what is the tense of the imperfect verb tizneh ‘commit adultery’ as a metaphor for committing idolatry in the context of Hos. 1:2c? Fortunately, largely inspired by the mistaken belief, for which there is no evidence whatsoever in the biblical text, that Gomer was a prostitute, a vast scholarly literature has provided much material that can be brought to bear upon these four questions. As for the first question, what precisely is the meaning of ēšet zěnûnîm, R. Gordis argues that while iššâ zōnâ would mean ‘harlot’ and would suggest that the prophet was to marry an habitual prostitute, who could not help but prove disloyal to her husband, the term that actually appears in Hos. 1:2b is ēšet zěnûnîm, which refers to a woman who is habitually engaged in idolatry, which is referred to metaphorically as adultery.22 The point of this metaphor would be to bring home, especially to the men of ancient Israel, the idea that for Israelites to venerate deities other than the God of Israel commonly designated by the proper name Yhwh is analogous to women engaging in sexual liaisons with men other than their lawfully wedded husbands. The latter offense was known in the ancient Near East as ‘the great sin’.23 What Gordis only hints at in ‘Hosea’s 22.  R. Gordis, ‘Hosea’s Marriage and Message: A New Approach’, HUCA 25 (1954), pp. 9–35 (14–15). 23.  See W. L. Moran, ‘The Scandal of the “Great Sin” at Ugarit’, JNES 18 (1959), pp. 280–81.

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Marriage and Message’, namely that the adultery referred to in the symbolic act prescribed in Hos. 1:2b is metaphoric adultery, i.e., worship of other deities by Israel who is pictured as the wife of God, is spelled out by D. Stuart as follows: Gomer, as a citizen of that thoroughly wayward nation, is described, just as any Israelite woman could be, as an ēšet zěnûnîm precisely because she is a typical Israelite, and this is an indictment in itself. God has commanded Hosea to marry a woman who by reason of being involved in the endemic Israelite national unfaithfulness is ‘prostituting’. To marry any Israelite woman was to marry a ‘prostituting woman’, so rife was the religious promiscuity of Hosea’s day.24

Moreover, Stuart argues, Hosea’s ‘prostituting children’ were so called because, like their mother, they would be part of the corrupt, faithless nation. No suggestion is made that the children were (1) born in adultery to Gomer before she married Hosea; (2) automatically inclined to inherit their mother’s tendency to promiscuity; (3) not Hosea’s natural offspring. Rather, precisely because the ‘whole land has gone into prostitution away from Yahweh’ they are here linked with znh ‘prostitution’.25

In addition, Stuart there demonstrates that ‘prostitution’ is employed as a metaphor for disloyalty to God in Pentateuchal sources that may well antedate Hos. 1–3. He cites Exod. 34:15–16 and Deut. 31:16 and, regardless of whether we date Hos. 1–3 to the eighth or the ninth century BCE, the same metaphor altogether independent of Hos. 1–3 is found also in Lev. 17:17; 20:5–6; and Num. 15:39. Jeremiah’s and Ezekiel’s highly graphic use of the metaphor of adultery for idolatry (Jer. 2–3; Ezek. 16; 23) appear to be influenced by Hos. 1–3, while Ezek. 6:9 may well be inspired by sources in the Holiness Code in Lev. 17 and 20 and the Holiness Law in Num. 15:39. Y. Sherwood translates the term ēšet zěnûnîm, which occurs in the Hebrew Bible only once, namely here in Hos. 1:2b, in three distinct ways, namely: ‘promiscuous woman’, ‘prostitute’, and ‘wife of harlotry’.26

24.  Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, pp. 26–27. 25.  Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, p. 27. 26.  Y. Sherwood, The Prostitute and the Prophet: Hosea’s Marriage in LiteraryTheoretical Perspective (Gender, Culture, Theory, 2; JSOTSup, 212; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996), p. 19 n. 4

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Since, however, her highly erudite book deals more with the history of exegesis and eisegesis of Hos. 1–3 and less with an attempt to determine what the texts of those chapters actually say, she does not even touch upon the realization, discussed below, that ultimately Hos. 1:2–3 constitutes an imagined rather than a true command–action sequence. The consequence of that realization (see below) is that nowhere in Hebrew Scripture is it asserted that Gomer was a prostitute or that Gomer engaged in sexual relations with anyone other than her husband, the prophet. Gordis’s claim that the term zěnûnîm denotes adultery as a metaphor for idolatry rather than actual adultery committed by a married woman and her paramour can be substantiated by reference to Hos. 1:2; 2:4, 6, as well as by the following texts, which appear to have adopted the adultery metaphor for idolatry metaphor from Hos. 1–2: Ezek. 23:11, 29 and Nah. 3:4 (twice). However, in Gen. 38:24 the same word refers to Tamar’s illicit sexual liaison (it turns out with her father-in-law, Judah) with a man other than her designated levir, Shelah. It is likely that in 2 Kgs 9:22 when King Jehu asks Joram, ‘What kind of well-being can there be so long as the zěnûnê “adultery as a metaphor for idolatryˮ sponsored by Jezebel your mother and her acts of sorcery are many?’ Note that the two terms zěnûnêâ and kĕšāpêâ ‘her acts of adultery’ and ‘her acts of sorcery’ are juxtaposed both in 2 Kgs 9:22 and in Nah. 3:4. In 2 Kings both terms refer to Jezebel’s patronage of the worship of Baal, which Jehu opposes, while in Nah. 3:4 both terms refer to personified Nineveh’s employing every means at her disposal to create an empire, which God opposes in the book of Nahum. Thus in light of its use elsewhere usually but not always27 to refer primarily to adultery as a metaphor for idolatry, and in light of the larger context of Hos. 1–2, it would appear that indeed Hos. 1:2 can refer only to adultery as a metaphor for idolatry. Moreover, outside of the vivid imagination of ancient Rabbinic sages and medieval and modern exegetes there is no reason to assume that Gomer the daughter of Diblaim was a prostitute either before or during her marriage to Hosea or that her children were conceived in the course of adulterous liaisons. The apparently plural noun form zěnûnîm belongs to a small group of nouns referring to abstract ideas, which look like masculine plural forms because they terminate in the suffix îm. Other nouns belonging to this 27.  One exception is Gen. 38:24; two more are found in Hos. 4:12 and 5:4 where the term rûăḥ zěnûnîm ‘spirit of promiscuity’ refers to the lecherous spirit of the married men of the Northern Kingdom who cheated on their wives; see below in my commentary on those verses.

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class include zĕqûnîm ‘old age’, nĕûrîm ‘youth’, bĕtûlîm ‘virginity’, and pĕtāîm (Prov. 9:6) ‘foolishness’.28 Joüon and Muraoka (JM #136g–h) classify these nouns as ‘plural of abstraction’. With all due respect to the erudition of Joüon and Muraoka, it seems that referring to the class of nouns in question as ‘plural of abstraction’, rather than as abstraction that appears to elementary students of Biblical Hebrew as masculine plural, is akin to finding an elaborate explanation as to why the English words ‘pen’ designating both an enclosure and a writing implement are not in fact homographic homonyms but etymologically and semantically related terms.29 Assuming that the root of the noun zěnûnîm ‘fornication, adultery’ is zny, which is also the root of the noun zōnâ ‘harlot, prostitute’, it should be noted that the abstract noun zěnûnîm ‘fornication, adultery’ is not only an abstract noun ending in the suffix îm, but also, it might appear, a noun formed by reduplication of the second of the three root consonants zny, yielding the noun zěnûnîm. D. Label argues that there is no reduplication in the noun zěnûnîm.30 On the contrary, he argues, the second n in the latter word is a connecting consonant between two vowels, namely the û and the vowel at the beginning of the abstract noun suffix îm. He posits the derivation of the form zěnûnîm from a hypothetical zěnû, to which he compares the hypothetical form malkû, a short form of the noun malkût ‘kingship’, to which Hebrew adds first y and then the plural suffix ôt; the combination yields the plural form malkûyôt; similarly HALOT (1:275), following Brockelmann and Gulkowitsch, takes zěnûnîm as deriving from a hypothetic *zenu + im. Label’s view is accepted by Kaddari.31 Other examples of such a consonant between two vowels are found in the adjectives Giloni (Eng. Gilonite) and Shiloni (Eng. Shilonite) connecting the final vowel of the place name (Giloh and Shiloh respectively) with the gentilic ending î. Moreover, Label argues, the noun naăpûpîm ‘adultery’ with reduplicated

28.  Concerning this class of nouns in Biblical Hebrew, see Hans Bauer and Pontus Leander, Historische Grammatik der hebräischen Sprache des Alten Testamentes (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1922), p. 472. 29.  See the extensive and fascinating discussion in L. Gulkowitsch, Die Bilding von Abstrakbegriffen in der hebräischen Sprachgeschichte (Leipzig: Eduard Pfeiffer, 1931), pp. 16–29, and with specific reference to zěnûnîm and naăpûpîm, there, p. 22. With respect to the noun zěnûnîm, see also Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 157. 30.  D. Label, ‘Concerning the Derivation of the Word zěnûnîm’, Leshonenu 20 (1956), p. 153 (in Hebrew). 31.  Kaddari, Dictionary, p. 256b

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p was created by our prophet on the analogy of zěnûnîm, which, Label suggests, the prophet already perceived, wrongly of course, as a noun with a reduplicated n. I shall return to consider additional nuances of the noun zěnûnîm in my commentary at Hos. 2:4. kî-zānōh tizneh haāreṣ mē aḥărê Yhwh ‘For the land has certainly committed adultery against Yhwh’ The symbolic meaning of the marriage and adoption metaphors to be acted out in prophetic theatre according to the command in Hos. 1:2b is spelled out in this purpose clause, which answers the question as to why the prophetic theatre or socio-drama had to be acted out. The clause could also be translated ‘the land has certainly strayed from following Yhwh’. However, the latter translation would obscure both (1) the attempt of Hos. 1–2 to compare Israel’s disloyalty to God to an adulterous wife’s disloyalty to her husband; and (2) the fact that in Hos. 1–2 (unlike, for example, Isa. 1:21, where Jerusalem’s ceasing to cultivate justice and charity turns the once faithful city into the disloyal/adulterous city), the turning away from God consists of not abandoning God’s rules for interpersonal relations (as, for example, in Hos. 4:1–2; Amos 2:6–8). On the contrary, in Hos. 1–2 the turning away from God consists of Israel’s cavorting with other deities. It is here in Hos. 1 that the idea is born that the relationship between God and Israel is to be compared to the relationship between a husband and wife. Thus the metaphoric wife’s disloyalty to God expressed by Israel’s worship of other deities is to be compared to adultery. The ninth-century BCE Hosea’s use of the marriage metaphor and adultery metaphor to refer to relationship of God and Israel seems to have inspired both Jeremiah (especially Jer. 2–3) [late seventh century BCE] and Ezekiel (especially Ezek. 16 and 23) [early sixth century BCE]. Hosea’s use of the marriage metaphor for the relationship between God and Israel also seems to have inspired Rabbinic and Patristic interpretations of the Song of Songs as referring to the loving relationship or romance between God and the Community of Israel or the Church in Rabbinic and Patristic exegesis of the Song of Songs, respectively. zānōh tizneh ‘She has certainly committed adultery’ The infinitive absolute zānōh preceding the finite verb tizneh is employed for emphasis, which is conveyed by Eng. ‘surely’. Similarly in Gen. 15:13 yādōa tēda also with infinitive absolute preceding a finite verb in the imperfect means ‘you shall surely know’ while in Deut. 11:13 im šāmōa

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tišmĕû means ‘if you diligently pay attention’. The verb tizneh in the so-called imperfect form is employed here to refer to completed action. So already KJV. TJ, NEB, and NRSV, on the other hand, construe the verb as a present, while NJPS follows LXX (διότι ἐκπορνεύουσα ἐκπορνεύσει ἡ γῆ ἀπο ὄπισθεν τοῦ Κυρίου ‘For the land, having fornicated, will fornicate [and cease from] following faithfully the Lord’)32 in treating it as a future. Other examples of the so-called imperfect form of the verb employed to express the past tense include the verbs yaănû ‘they oppressed’, yirbeh ‘he multiplied’, yiprōṣ ‘spread out’ in Exod. 1:12 and the numerous cases in which qaṭal (so-called perfect forms) and yaqṭul (so-called imperfect forms) are employed in synonymous parallelism.33 haāreṣ ‘the land’ Here ‘the land’ would seem to be employed as a metonymy for the Israelite people living there. However, J. J. Schmitt notes that the land of Israel and cities in the land of Israel such as Jerusalem can be treated as feminine because of the simple fact that both Heb. ereṣ and Heb. îr are feminine in gender.34 In fact, when our prophetic author in Hos. 1:3 refers to the land of Israel’s committing adultery (a metaphor for idolatry) and similarly when Jeremiah and Ezekiel refer to the metaphoric adultery (i.e., concrete idolatry) of Jerusalem (e.g., Ezek. 16; 23) and Judah (e.g., Jer. 2:17–28) personified as women, they actually refer not to the inanimate land or city but to the people thereof.35 This is not to say that ‘the land’ necessarily means the people dwelling therein in every instance. Each instance must be examined on its own merits. M. Friedmann argues that ‘the land’ here refers to the capital of the [Northern] kingdom, i.e., Samaria, which the prophet compared to an adulterous woman because of her disloyalty to God, analogous to the disloyalty of an adulterous woman toward her husband and the people of that place to adulterous children because they did not behave as ‘children of Yhwh their God’ (alluding by that expression to ‘You are children of 32.  Cf. Glenny, Hosea, p. 33: ‘for the land, having played the prostitute, will prostitute itself and cease from closely following the Lord’. 33.  See, inter alia, M. Held, ‘The YQTL–QTL (QTL–YQTL) Sequence of Identical Verbs in Biblical Hebrew and in Ugaritic’, in Studies and Essays in Honor of Abraham A. Neuman (ed. M. Ben-Horin, B.D. Weinryb, and S. Zeitlin; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1962), pp. 281–90. 34.  J. J. Schmitt, ‘The Motherhood of God and Zion as Mother’, RB 92 (1985), pp. 557–69. 35.  Cf. Wolff, Hosea, p. 15, with respect to Hos. 1:3, ‘The land represents the nation…’.

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Yhwh your God’ [Deut. 14:1]).36 Apparently inspired by Schmitt, B.E. Kelle adopts this identification.37 Interestingly, the expression wĕlō-tizneh hāāreṣ ‘so that the land not commit adultery’ is found as a motive clause in Lev. 19:29 to discourage Israelites from letting their daughters commit adultery. It is possible that in the context of Lev. 19:29 as in Gen. 34 the verb zānâ refers simply to fornication, specifically pre-marital sexual activity on the part of unattached women, which Lev. 19:29 discourages but does not punish. Adultery, on the other hand, which is frequently referred to in Biblical Hebrew by the identical verb zānâ, refers to a capital offense (see, e.g., Lev. 20:10; Deut. 22:22). As to whether or not Deut. 22:21, which employs the verb zānâ and endorses capital punishment for the offense, refers to adultery or simply to premarital sex, see the fascinating discussion of the rabbinic view (that it must refer to adultery) which is countered by Alexander Rofé in his Introduction to Deuteronomy.38 mēaḥărê Yhwh ‘against Yhwh’ The expression hālak aḥărê ‘walk after’ may denote being devoted to/in a relationship with a person of the opposite sex. Thus in Jer. 2:2 (concerning whose embodiment of an ancient exegesis of Hos. 2:16 see below), Yhwh says, ‘I give you [Israel personified as God’s wife] credit for your devotion [to me] in your youth, your love [for me] as a bride, how you followed me [or, showed your devotion to me] in the wilderness, in a land not sown’. If in Jer. 2:2 the expression hālak aḥărê denotes devotion of a woman to her husband as a metaphor for Israel’s erstwhile devotion to God, in Deut. 11:28 it refers simply and directly to apostasy: ‘if you follow [i.e., worship] other gods’. Not surprisingly, therefore, the expression mēaḥărê ‘away from’ is employed with various verbs of motion refers to abandoning the erstwhile object [person or deity] of one’s devotion. See, inter alia, Num. 14:43: ‘Insofar as you have abandoned Yhwh, Yhwh will not accompany you…’. Similarly, Zeph. 1:6, ‘And those who have abandoned Yhwh…’; and 2 Chron. 25:7, ‘From the moment when Amaziah abandoned Yhwh, people conspired against him in Jerusalem…’.

36.  M. Friedmann, ‘Kommentar zum Buch Hosea’, in Festschrift zu Ehre des Dr. A. Harkavy aus Anlass seines am 20. November 1905 vollendeten Siebzigsten Lebensjahres (ed. Baron D. v. Günzburg and I. Markon; St. Petersburg: Itzkowski, 1908), pp. 17–34 (18) (in Hebrew). 37.  Kelle, Hosea 2, pp. 89–90. 38.  Alexander Rofé, Introduction to Deuteronomy (Jerusalem: Akademon, 1988), pp. 147–48 (in Hebrew).

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The Relationship between the Symbolic Vision in Hosea 1:2b–c and 1:3 The relationship would seem to be that of a command–action sequence. After all, in the command the prophet is told lēk qaḥ-lĕkā ‘go marry you’ (Hos. 1:2b) while in the action section of what seems to be formally, at least, a command–action sequence we find wayyēlek wayyiqaḥ ‘he went and he married’. Indeed, the auxiliary verb wayyēlek, lit. ‘he went’, like the frequent wayyaqom ‘he arose’ is frequently employed in Biblical Hebrew to mean ‘thereupon’.39 Generations of Bible readers and Bible commentaries have concluded, therefore, that Gomer, the woman whom the prophet married according to Hos. 1:3, must have been a prostitute before the marriage and that one or more of her children was conceived as a result of the mother’s infidelity. Strange as it may seem, even G. A. Yee, in her highly atomistic analysis of the book of Hosea,40 does not touch upon the disparity between the symbolic acts called for in Hos. 1:2b and the meaning that is given them in the adverbial purpose clause, on the one hand, and the next described behaviour of the prophet, which is to marry Gomer, who will bear three children, who will bear symbolic names that refer to negative feelings on the part of God toward the people of Israel, and whose symbolic names will be transformed in ch. 2 into symbolic names that refer to positive feelings on the part of God toward the people of Israel. D. A. Garrett supplies the heading ‘the command to marry Gomer’ to the unit Hos. 1:2–3a, and then surveys and analyzes seven different interpretive strategies for explaining the command to marry a prostitute named Gomer.41 In fact, once we have properly confronted three details— (1) the probability that in Hos. 1:2 (twice) and 2:6 the abstract noun zĕnûnîm denotes adultery as a metaphor for idolatry (see below at Hos. 2:6); (2) it is never once suggested in the biblical text that Gomer was sexually promiscuous either before or during her marriage to Hosea; and (3) Kaufmann’s brilliant suggestion that Hos. 1:2b refers to prophetic theatre and not to the biography of the prophet Hosea—we are compelled to adopt the following conclusion: the formal relationship of command– action between Hos. 1:2 and Hos. 1:3 is contradicted by the content of the 39.  This usage of the verb and other auxiliary verbs, whose primary meaning is ‘go’, ‘come’, ‘arise’ to mean thereupon is discussed in Orlinsky, Notes on the New Translation of the Torah, pp. 34–35, 99 and passim. 40.  G. A. Yee, Composition and Tradition in the Book of Hosea: A Redaction Critical Investigation (SBLDS, 102; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987). 41.  D. A. Garrett, Hosea–Joel (New American Commentary, 19a; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1997), pp. 43–52.

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two sections. Thus, other than the formal relationship, which enables the redactor, whoever she/he may be, to employ the standard narrative form of the verbs in imperfect with waw consecutive, wayyēlek wayyiqaḥ, nothing in the context supports a logical connection between Hos. 1:3 and the divine command concerning a socio-drama in Hos. 1:2b. The message that is conveyed by the content that does not conform to the formal structure of command–action is that we have here, as in the series of visions reported in Jer. 1:4–19, a series of accounts concerning the interaction between God, the prophet, and the prophet’s environment (two accounts in Hos. 1:2–9; four in Jer. 1:4–19) which have no logical order whatsoever other than the artificial command–action in Hos. 1:2–3 and the formal notice ‘a second time’ in Jer. 1:13, where the expression introduces not the second of a series of four visions but the third (in the same way that the etymologically equivalent Akkadian šānītam ‘additionally’ not ‘secondly’ may be repeated more than once in the body of an Akkadian letter in the Amarna archives). In fact, both the symbolic vision of prophetic theatre in Hos. 1:2b and the tale of the symbolic names given to Hosea’s and Gomer’s children in Hos. 1:3–9 deal with the same theme, the dire state of the people of Israel, which is a consequence of idolatry, which in ch. 2 as in Hos. 1:2b is portrayed by the metaphor of adultery. The only reason for thinking that Gomer was a prostitute before her marriage or an adulteress after her marriage was the errant reading of the non sequitur of Hos. 1:2–3 as though there were a causal relationship between the two. As for the idea that the God of Hebrew Scripture would ask the prophet to engage in morally reprehensible behaviour and that the prophet would actually fulfil a command to engage in morally reprehensible behaviour, we should recall first and foremost Ezek. 4:12, where Yhwh commands the prophet to prepare barley cakes baked over a fire, the fuel for which is human excrement. As Yhwh explains in Ezek. 4:13, the disgusting idea of baking bread over human excrement (although it is frequently practiced in modern times all over the world out of necessity) is meant to dramatize the fact that by virtue of their imminent exile from the Holy Land everything that the Israelites will eat outside of the Holy Land is unclean. The point is to make the Israelites aware that they can avoid the horrible fate of leaving the Holy Land by changing their behaviour for the better. In Ezek. 4:14 the prophet responds to the divine suggestion that the prophet eat something disgusting to symbolize eating outside of the Holy Land with the word ăhāh, an exclamation which appears three times in the book of Jeremiah (Jer. 1:6; 4:10; 32:17) and four times in the book of Ezekiel (Ezek. 4:14; 9:8; 11:13; 21:5), always with the meaning ‘No. I will not do

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what You are asking me to do’, and expressing the idea elaborated on at length by Heschel that the prophets of ancient Israel and Judah were free agents who fully distinguished between what they wanted and what they heard God asking them to do or say.42 It is, therefore, reasonable to suggest that if our prophet actually believed that God had literally commanded him to marry a prostitute and through her to give birth to adulterous children, the prophet would have objected no less strongly than many modern exegetes that such behaviour is totally repugnant. Indeed, no less plausible than the many tales that have been weaved to bridge the gap between the command found in Hos. 1:2b and the third person account in Hos. 1:3 of the prophet’s having immediately married Gomer the daughter of Diblaim, is the suggestion that there intervened between the command (which in any case I would prefer to see with Kaufmann as a command to engage in prophetic theatre) and the prophet’s marrying Gomer, a dialogue in which, just as in Ezek. 4:12–15, Yhwh suggests a much less repugnant symbolic act than the actual command that the prophet marry an adulterous woman. The Actual Relationship of Hosea 1:2b to Both Hosea 1:3–6 and to Chapter 2 What actually happens in Hos. 1:3–2:25 is the following: (1) Nowhere is it suggested that the prophet actually married a prostitute as apparently commanded in Hos. 1:2b. (2) It is stated that Hosea married a named woman, Gomer, who gave birth to three children, in the order boy–girl– boy, and that each of them was given a symbolic name to convey negative feelings on the part of God toward the people of Israel, who had (as it is indicated clearly in Hos. 2:6–15) abandoned the worship of the God of Israel in favour of the worship of other gods known as Baals (Hos. 2:15, 19). (3) It is stated in Hos. 2:16–25 and in 2:1–3 that the three symbolic names of the people of Israel, which expressed Yhwh’s antipathy to the disloyalty of Israel, individually and collectively, will be altered to express God’s renewed love of his erstwhile beloved spouse, i.e., the people of Israel, and that God and his spouse will share a glorious future, recalling their honeymoon in the wilderness of Sinai on their way to the Promised Land. Both the words of rebuke in Hos. 2:4–15 and the words of comfort and consolation in Hos. 2:16–22 + Hos. 2:1–3 take for granted two distinct messages found in Hos. 1. The first of these messages is God’s antipathy to the People of Israel, expressed by the symbolic names given to the three children born to Gomer. The second of these messages 42.  Heschel, The Prophets.

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is that the cause of that antipathy is Israel’s having surely turned away (Heb. zanōh tizneh) from Yhwh, much as an adulterous wife might turn away from her husband. Indeed, the latter message is spelled out in detail in Hos. 2:4, 7, 15. The purpose of Hosea’s marriage to Gomer, on the other hand, as it plays itself out in Hos. 1:3–9, is for the wife to bear three children, who will be given symbolic names, which initially convey God’s antipathy to the disloyal people of Israel and later (Hos. 2:1–3, 24–25) God’s renewed hope for the people of Israel, who are pictured as the loving spouse of God (Hos. 2:21–22). Thus, in fact, it is nowhere stated that either Hosea married a prostitute or that Gomer was a prostitute. Gomer Anticipating and possibly encouraging the plethora of modern scholars who observed that Hosea’s marriage to Gomer was meant to fulfil the divine command to marry an adulterous/whoring woman/a prostitute, the rabbinic sages (b. Pesaim 87b) took Gomer to be a symbolic name derived from the Rabbinic Hebrew verb gāmar ‘experience orgasm, ejaculate’. They saw in this symbolic name a reference to the fact that ‘everyone ejaculated inside her’. However, W. Nowack seems to have been vindicated in his contention that the name was simply a proper name with no symbolic significance.43 In the Samaria Ostraca #50, dated 778–760 BCE, Gomer appears as the personal name of a male. However, as noted by Macintosh and Qyl,44 it is not unusual in biblical times for a particular personal name to be borne both by men and women. Examples include Abijah son of Samuel in 1 Sam. 8:2 and Abijah the mother of Hezekiah in 2 Chron. 29:1, and Noadiah, which appears as the name of a prophetess in Neh. 6:14 and as the name of a male, Noadiah the son of Binnui the Levite, in Ezra 8:33. bat-Diblāyim ‘daughter of Diblaim’ The vocalization of the proper name Diblaim, apparently the name of Gomer’s father, is with long a, indicating the pausal form of the proper name appropriate to the appearance of the name at the end of the biblical verse. Similarly, the place name Jerusalem, which normally appears in MT as Yĕrûšālayim, appears in the pausal form Yĕrûšālāyim in Josh. 15:8; Judg. 19:10; 2 Sam. 8:7; and frequently elsewhere. 43.  W. Nowack, Die kleinen Propheten (3rd ed.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1922). 44.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 11, and Y. Qyl, Hosea (Jerusalem: Mossad HaRav Kook, 1973), p. 31 (in Hebrew), p. 4.

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In LXX the name of Gomer’s father has the form Δεβηλαΐμ, which Brenton’s edition transliterates—Debelaim.45 Just as Gomer was taken to be a symbolic name referring to the alleged promiscuity of Hosea’s wife, so was Diblaim taken to be a symbolic name derived from Aram. dĕbēlâ ‘cake made of pressed figs’; thus in b. Pesaim 87b the following two obscene explanations are offered for the supposedly symbolic name bat-Diblāyim: (1) she was sweet in the mouth of everyone like a cake of pressed figs; (2) everyone penetrated her sexually as one might press a cake of pressed figs. In addition to these the Talmud there offers also ‘diblayim [means] wicked calumny [dibbâ] the daughter of wicked calumny’. With Harper and Macintosh I prefer to understand the proper name in its biblical context as simply the proper name of Gomer’s father, with no symbolic significance. As noted by Macintosh, the suggestion that bat-Diblāyim means that Gomer was born in a place called Diblaim, is to be rejected because nowhere else in Hebrew Scripture does the singular bn/bt ‘son/daughter of’ as against bĕnê/bĕnōt ‘sons/daughters of’ refer to a person’s place of birth or residence.46 wattahar ‘Then she conceived’ This expression is attested 28 times in all of Hebrew Scripture, 24 times in the narratives of Genesis (17 times), Exodus, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, three times here in Hos. 1:3–8 and once in the similar narrative concerning the birth to the prophet and his wife of a son, who was to be given a symbolic name, in Isa. 8:3. wattēled-lȏ bēn ‘and she bore him a son’ This phraseology intimates that the first of the three children born to the prophet by Gomer was also the biological son of the prophet. The absence of the dative pronoun lȏ ‘to him’ in three medieval mss. of the Hebrew text, two mss. of LXX, and all witnesses to the Vulgate has been accounted for by Rudolph and Macintosh as an attempt to harmonize Hos. 1:3 with Hos. 1:6 and 1:8, where the pronoun is absent from all ancient witnesses to the text. For the many exegetes who believe that Hosea carried out the divine command to marry an habitually adulterous woman the absence of the pronoun lȏ ‘to him’ in at least Hos. 1:6 and Hos. 1:8 if not also in Hos. 1:3 points to the idea that Gomer indeed gave birth to children conceived in the course of her adulterous liaisons. 45.  L. C. L. Brenton, The Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and English (London: Samuel Bagster & Sons, 1851). 46.  See Macintosh, Hosea, p. 12, and Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 211.

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1:4 Jezreel This proper name functions in Hebrew Scripture also as a place name, which can refer to the Valley of Jezreel (see Hos. 1:5) as well as to either of two cities. The first of these two cities was located in Judah, while the second was located on the eastern side of the Valley of Jezreel (see the map appearing on p. xix). The literal meaning of the proper name, ‘God will sow’ will be exploited in the prophecy of consolation in Hos. 1:1–3, 16–25. See the extensive discussion in the commentary below at Hos. 2:2c concerning the significance in the context of Hos. 1–2 of the city Jezreel located on the eastern side of the Valley of Jezreel. kî-ôd mĕaṭ ‘For in a little while’ The Hebrew expression employed here to mean ‘in a little while’ is employed altogether five times in all of Hebrew Scripture. In addition to Hos. 1:4, the expression appears in Exod. 17:4; Isa. 10:25; 29:17; and Jer. 51:33, always referring to the speedy arrival of bad news. ûpāqadĕtî ‘And I shall punish’. The expression ûpāqadĕtî ‘And I shall punish’ employing the first person singular perfect consecutive of the verb pqd, traditionally rendered ‘visit’, is employed twenty times in all of Hebrew Scripture: Exod. 32:34; Isa. 13:11; Jer. 9:24; 15:3; 21:14; 23:34; 30:20; 36:31; 44:13; 51:44, 47, 52; Hos. 1:4; 2:15; 4:9; Amos 3:14; Zeph. 1:8, 9, 12; and Ps. 89:33. With the exception of Ps. 89:33, the person(s) being punished is/are always introduced by the preposition al, which here in MT at Hos. 1:4 introduces the dynasty of Jehu. In six cases (Isa. 10:2; Jer. 25:12; 27:8; 29:10; Amos 3:2; Zech. 10:3) the threat or promise is stated employing the imperfect. In three cases God is portrayed as asking the rhetorical question, ‘Shall I not punish…’ (Jer. 5:9, 29; 9:8), and in one case, Hos. 4:14, God states, ‘I shall not punish’. (Cf. also the participial phrase pōqēd ăwôn ābōt al bānîm ‘punishes children for the iniquity of the parents’ in Exod. 20:5 = Deut. 5:9 [the Decalogue] and Exod. 34:7.) English syntax requires ‘I shall punish the House of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel’. In Biblical Hebrew syntax, in which the recipient of the punishment is introduced by the preposition al, the crime is treated as a grammatical direct object. Hence, where the English word order is ‘punish the House of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel’, the Hebrew word order is ‘punish upon the House of Jehu the blood of Jezreel’; and similarly in each of the attestations of pqd ‘punish’ referred to above.

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For bêt ‘house’ designating ‘dynasty’ see, inter alia, House of Eli (1 Sam. 3:14); House of Saul and House of David (2 Sam. 3:1, 6), House of David (1 Kgs 17:21); House of Jeroboam I (1 Kgs 13:34; 14:10, 14; 15:29); House of Jeroboam II (Amos 7:9). Many mss. of LXX, including Codex Vaticanus, read, rather than ‘House of Jehu’, οἶκον Ἰoύδα ‘House of Judah’ (and so, Brenton’s edition). Indeed, Ginsberg rightly invokes the MT reading ‘House of Jehu’, which he regards as an error for an original ‘House of Israel’, in support of the contention that the Hebrew letter yod, originally employed as an abbreviation for Israel, was later misunderstood and read as Judah.47 (See my discussion of Judahite glosses in the Introduction, and see my discussion of the pair Ephraim//Judah in place of an original Ephraim//Israel in Hos. 5:12, 13, 14 [here alone it is House of Judah]; 6:4; 10:11 [see my discussion in the commentary below at Hos. 5:12.) Here at Hos. 1:4 it should be noted, with Ginsberg, that the reading Ἰoύδα in some mss. of LXX is, in fact, an inner-Septuagintal corruption of Gk. Ἰου, i.e., Jehu. Indeed, Bons, Joosten, and Kessler translate ‘la maison de Jéhu’,48 while A. Pietersma and B. G. Wright translate similarly, ‘house of Jehu’.49 For the significance of the reading ‘House of Jehu’, which now seems to be supported both by the Hebrew and the better Greek witnesses to Hos. 1:4, see immediately below in my discussion of ‘the blood of Jezreel’. dĕmê Yizrĕel ‘the blood of Jezreel’ With Macintosh,50 I take this as a reference to the blood that was shed by King Jehu at Jezreel, as described in 2 Kgs 10:1–11, where we read: ‘Ahab had seventy sons in Samaria. Jehu wrote letters, and he sent them to Samaria, to the elders and officials of Jezreel and the male child-care deliverers of [the family of] Ahab… He wrote them a letter a second time: “If you are on my side and are ready to obey me, take the heads of the attendants of your master’s sons and come to me to Jezreel tomorrow at this time”… When the letter reached them [the addressees], they took the princes and slaughtered all seventy of them. They put their heads in baskets, and they sent them to him in Jezreel… Jehu killed all who were left of the dynasty of Ahab in Jezreel, and all his notables, intimates, and priests until he left him no survivor.’ 47.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, p. 1015; 2nd ed., vol. 9, pp. 551–52. 48.  E. Bons, J. Joosten, and S. Kessler, Les douze Prophètes: Osée (La Bible d’Alexandrie; Paris: Cerf, 2002), 65. 49.  A. Pietersma and B. G. Wright, eds., A New English Translation of the Septuagint (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 50.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 17.

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My late and revered teacher, H. L. Ginsberg, in his article on the book of Hosea in the Encyclopedia Judaica, could not possibly imagine ‘that any biblical prophet ever thought of the liquidation of the House of Ahab as a sin’.51 Indeed, Ginsberg argues there, it is hard to believe ‘that this prophet harbored a view of Jehu’s liquidation of the House of Ahab that is the diametrical opposite of the one implied, or, for the most part, even expressed in 1 Kgs 18.40; 19.16–18; 21.17–26; 2 Kgs 9.6–10, 24–26, 36–37; 10.10–30’. Ginsberg’s assumption that Hos. 1–2 could not possibly have a different view of Jehu’s annihilation of the family of the dynasty that preceded him than did the author or authors of the aforementioned texts in 1–2 Kings requires Ginsberg (and NJPS) to emend Jehu to Israel and the blood of Jezreel to ‘the Baal days’. With all due respect to my revered teacher, who fully understood without the benefit of the recent archaeological excavations of the City Jezreel that the setting of Hos. 1–3 is the ninth century BCE and not the eighth century BCE, the fatal flaw in Ginsberg’s interpretation of Hos. 1–2 is not only in his emendation of the text but also in his assumption that a prophet canonized in the book of the Twelve Prophets would hold a different view than is expressed in the book of Kings. It is, in fact, of the very essence of critical biblical studies that we recognize that Hebrew Scripture is not a book with a single ideology, but rather a library, which expressed a multiplicity of views within what I (modifying M. Smith’s famous expression, ‘Yahweh-alone Party’52) call the Yahweh-alone coalition of parties, who disagreed on all kinds of things. Part of the very greatness of the book of Hosea is the anticipation of Mahatma Gandhi’s realization that you cannot accomplish revolution leading to freedom by engaging in atrocities, for the very weapons of violence that are first turned against the oppressor will before very long be turned against rival parties in the post-colonial world. wĕhišbattî mamlĕkût bêt Yiśrāēl ‘I shall put an end to the king of the house of Israel’ NJPS and virtually all translations render ‘and I shall put an end to the monarchy of Israel’, which could be taken as a prediction of the demise of the Northern Kingdom, which took place in 722 BCE. However, my esteemed colleague Dr. Daniel Vainshtub has argued in various papers presented at international conferences in biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies that frequently in Phoenician and also not infrequently in Biblical Hebrew the noun mamlĕkût denotes not ‘kingdom’ but simply ‘king’, 51.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, p. 1015; 2nd ed., vol. 9, p. 551. 52.  Morton Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), passim.

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just like the more familiar noun melek. Thus, for example, in KAI 14 (Eshmunazor II of Sidon):20 we read qnmy t kl mmlkt wkl dm ‘whoever you (masculine singular) are: any king [mmlkt] and any person’; and there, line 22: hmmlkt h whdmm hmt ‘that king and those men’; and likewise in KAI 10 (Yehimilk of Byblos):11 we have the phrase kl mmlkt wkl dm ‘any king and any man’. Thus Hos. 1:4e refers not to the demise of the Northern Kingdom but to the demise of the dynasty of King Jehu. The idea that the God of Israel through the agency of his prophets replaces one dynasty with another is found elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, inter alia, with respect to replacing the priestly dynasty of Eli-Abiathar with the dynasty of Zadok (1 Sam. 3–4; 1 Kgs 2:26–27); the replacement of the dynasty of Jeroboam son of Nebat with the dynasty of Basha (1 Kgs 14:10); the replacement of the dynasty of Omri with the dynasty of Jehu (1 Kgs 19:16). Note that in 2 Kgs 10:17–30 the annihilation by Jehu and his supporters of all the members of the dynasty of Ahab and their supporters is interpreted as the fulfilment of the divine will that had been revealed to Elijah the Prophet in 1 Kgs 21:17–24. Frequently, however, distinct prophetic voices recorded in Hebrew Scripture interpret the same events from diverse points of view. For example, Gen. 11:31 suggests that Abram’s journey from Ur was undertaken at the initiative of his father Terah while according to Gen. 12 Abram undertook that same journey in response to a divine imperative. Similarly, according to the book of Jeremiah and the book of Second Kings, the Babylonian Exile was the just punishment which the Judeans received after they had ignored many warnings. The author of Lam. 2:14, on the other hand, seems not to have heard of Jeremiah’s claim that God had persistently warned the Judeans of impending disaster (Jer. 7:13, 25; 25:4; 26:5; 29:19; 35:14; 44:4; etc.). Consequently, Lam. 2:14 says to Jerusalem: ‘Your prophets prophesied to you delusion and folly, and they did reveal your iniquity so as to restore your fortunes…’. Indeed, no small part of the greatness of the pluralistic library commonly called the Old Testament is its presentation and interpretation of events from a variety of different points of view. 1:5 wĕhāyâ ‘It will happen’ A 3rd person singular perfect with waw consecutive, this form is attested 396 times in Hebrew Scripture, and it means, in the words of KJV, ‘It shall come to pass’, which is to say that the prophet, speaking in the name of God, tells us that what he is about to describe will happen at some undesignated time in the future.

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bayyōm hahû ‘on that day’ That is, at some undesignated time in the future. The expression appears 206 times in all of Hebrew Scripture, in the book of Hosea, four times, all in Hos. 1–3 as follows: 1:5; 2:18, 20, 23. The irony expressed here in Hos. 1:5 with respect to Jezreel is that this place, whose name should mean ‘God will plant’, which is to say that this place should be made into the breadbasket of the nation of Israel, will continue to be a place of death and destruction, as it had been first during the atrocity perpetrated by Jezebel against Naboth the Jezreelite (1 Kgs 21:15), later during the violent death of Jezebel herself and the desecration of her remains at Jezreel (1 Kgs 21:23; 2 Kgs 9:10, 36–37), still later during the atrocities committed by King Jehu as discussed above, and in the future predicted by the prophet, when King Jehu’s atrocities will be avenged. The two expressions wĕhāyâ bayyōm and hahû ‘It will come to pass on that day’ are joined together altogether 28 times in all of Hebrew Scripture, most frequently in Isa. 7–27 (13 times) and in Zech. 12–14 (six times). The two occurrences in the book of Hosea are symmetrical, for the first declares, here in Hos. 1:5, that Jezreel will be a site of defeat and destruction, while the second, in Hos. 2:23–25, declares that Jezreel will assume its etymological meaning, namely, ‘God will plant seed’. 1:6 wattahar ôd wattēled ‘she conceived again and bore’ This stereotypic expression appears altogether six times in the entire Hebrew Bible. In three cases the subject of the two verbs is Leah (Gen. 29:33–35); in one case (Gen. 30:7) the subject is Bilhah, the handmaiden of Rachel (Gen. 30:7), and in one case the subject is Tamar (Gen. 38:4). In all the other five cases the object of the verb wattēled ‘and she bore’ is bēn ‘son’, while here it is bat ‘a daughter’. wayyōmer lô ‘He [Yhwh] said to him [Hosea the prophet]’ Here in Hos. 1:6b, as again in Hos. 1:9, we seem to have an elliptical repetition of what we read in Hos. 1:4, wayyōmer Yhwh ēlāyw ‘Yhwh said to him [Hosea]’. Hence NJPS renders ‘Then He said’, where capitalization of the 3rd person singular personal pronoun indicates that the subject must be Yhwh, as in Hos. 1:4. LXX, it should be noted, simply translates literally καὶ εἶπεν ‘and he said’, leaving it to the reader to surmise who the subject of that verb might be. Likewise, TJ at both Hos. 1:6 and 1:8 renders waămar ‘and he said’, leaving it to the reader to draw the conclusion that it is God who said.

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qĕrā šĕmāh ‘Name her…’ The imperative qĕrā šĕmô ‘name him’ addressed by God to a prophet is attested only three times in Hebrew Scripture, once in Isa. 8:3 with respect to the symbolic name Maher-shalal-hash-baz to be given to the son of Isaiah and his wife the prophetess, and twice in Hos. 1:4, 9 with respect to the symbolic names to be given to each of the two sons born to Hosea and Gomer. The only occurrence of the expression referring to a female child is here in Hos. 1:6. Unquestionably the limited number of occurrences, just four, of a divine command to give the prophet’s newborn child a symbolic name, all in either Hos. 1 or Isa. 8, suggests that we have in Isa. 8:1 and Hos. 1 a specific genre, which we should call, ‘bestowing a symbolic name’, symbolic of the fate of the nation, upon the prophet’s newborn child. Lō-Ruḥāmā ‘Unloved Woman’ LXX, however, renders Οὐκ ἠλεημένη ‘Not-Pitied Woman’. Interestingly enough, neither Glenny nor Thomson saw fit to indicate in their translations of LXX that LXX, like the Standard Hebrew text, employs a feminine singular adjectival noun for the name of the daughter born to Gomer and Hosea. LXX and many modern versions assume that the verbal root rḥm means ‘pity’ or ‘be merciful’. If so, the Hebrew verbal root corresponds to Akk. rêmu ‘pity, be merciful’. I prefer to see in this instance of Heb. rḥm the Hebrew verbal root that corresponds to Akk. raāmu ‘love’.53 Certainly, the point of the contrasting verses, Hos. 1:6 on the one hand, and Hos. 2:3 (‘Call your sisters Ruḥāmâ “Loved woman” ’) and Hos. 2:25 (wĕriḥamtî et-lō ruḥāmâ ‘I shall love Not-Loved’), on the other hand, is that at one stage God expresses antipathy (dislike, the opposite of ‘love’) toward the people of Israel while at a later stage, in a prophecy of reconciliation, he expresses love toward the people of Israel. The first stage is expressed in the prophecy of rebuke contained in Hos. 1:3–9 and 53.  Concerning the conflation of the two roots in Biblical Hebrew and the exegetical necessity to sort out the intended meaning in biblical texts, see S. D. Sperling, ‘Biblical rḥm I and rḥm II’, JANESCU 19 (1986), pp. 149–59 (155); M. I. Gruber, The Motherhood of God and Other Studies (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), pp. 5–6, and the extensive literature cited there. Note especially the assertion of Jonah Ibn Janaḥ, Sefer Haschoraschim (ed. W. Bacher; Berlin: Mekize Nirdamim, 1896), p. 477, that erḥomĕkā ‘I love you’ in Ps. 182:2 is a cognate of Targumic rḥm, which is employed to render Heb. hb ‘love’, as, for example, in Deut. 6:5, ‘You shall love Yhwh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might’.

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Hos. 2:4–16. God expresses antipathy to the people of Israel by means of the symbolic names given to the children of Gomer and Hosea. At a later stage, in the prophecy of reconciliation contained in Hos. 2:16–25 and Hos. 2:1–3, God removes the negative particle and transforms LōRuḥāmâ ‘Unloved Woman’ into Ruḥāmâ ‘Loved Woman’. Quite possibly, the contrast between the erstwhile unloved and the later loved was lost because older generations of translators and exegetes did not pay close enough attention to the use of feminine gender specific language in Hos. 1–2. Sperling, ‘Biblical rḥm I and rḥm II’ argues that the prophecy of consolation in Hos. 2:25, ‘which’, in Sperling’s words, ‘constitutes the happy ending of [Hos.] 1:6’, proves that in Hos. 1:6, as in Hos. 2:25, the verb root rḥm connotes love rather than compassion. kî lō ôsîp ôd araḥēm et-bêt Yiśrāēl ‘For I shall not continue to exhibit love toward the House of Israel’ For my arguments as to why the verb rḥm in Hos. 1–2 means ‘love’ rather than ‘pity, exhibit compassion’ see above in my comment on Hos. 1:6c. This clause begins with the emphatic particle kî, which in the present context means ‘because’ and indicates that Hos. 1:6d is an explanatory clause, which accounts for the meaning in the life of the people of Israel of the symbolic name given to Gomer’s second child and only daughter. (See DCH 4:384.) For the use of the verb hôsîp ‘continue’ followed by another finite verb rather than an infinitive see also Gen. 38:5; Isa. 47:1; 52:1; Prov. 23:35; Job 36:1; Dan. 10:18; Esth. 8:3.54 kî nāśō eśśā lāhem ‘so that I would certainly pardon them’ This clause is introduced by the emphatic particle kî meaning ‘so that’ (see DCH 4:386b). The point of this clause is as follows: were God, contrary to what God declares in Hos. 1:6d, to continue to exhibit love toward the House of Israel, then, of course, he would certainly pardon them. Insofar as God has decided, for the time being at least, to suspend his love for the House of Israel, he will not pardon them. In this clause as in Hos. 1:2, discussed above, the finite verb in the imperfect is preceded by the infinitive absolute to convey certainty; hence the English versions employ the adverb ‘certainly’ to convey the same certainty that the ancient Hebrew authors conveyed by use of the infinitive absolute preceding the finite verb in both the perfect and the imperfect. 54.  See also the discussion in GKC #120c, and T. E. McComiskey, The Minor Prophets. Vol. 1, Hosea, Joel, and Amos (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1992), p. 24.

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For the verb nāśā, the basic meaning of which ‘lift, carry’, means ‘forgive’ when the object is one or another kind of crime or misdemeanour, see Exod. 34:7, nōśē āwōn wāpeša wĕḥaṭṭāâ ‘forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin’; similarly Num. 14:18, nōśē āwōn wāpeša ‘forgiving iniquity and transgression’; see also Mic. 7:18, ‘Who is a God like you, forgiving iniquity and remitting [Heb.wĕōbēr al peša] transgression’. Elsewhere, as, for example, in Abraham’s dialogue with God about the fate of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, the object of the verb nś is the people or the city rather than the crime or the misdemeanour (see Gen. 18:24, 26). For the idea expressed here in Hos. 1:6 that things have gone too far for God to forgive, see Amos 8:1, ‘I will not continue to forgive him’. In the latter clause the Hebrew verb ābar expresses ‘forgive’, while in Hos. 1:6 it is the verb nāśā. In Mic. 7:18 the two verbs are juxtaposed and employed as synonyms. 1:7 wĕet-bêt Yĕhûdâ arraḥēm ‘However, I shall display love to the House of Judah’ As I explained above in my Introduction (see above, pp. 27–31), I follow the view of Ginsberg and many other scholars that after the fall of Samaria to the army of King Shalmaneser V of Assyria in 722 BCE some of the literary legacy of the Northern Kingdom, including the entire book of Hosea and Mic. 6–7, was brought to Judah. Moreover, it appears that anonymous prophets added words of encouragement in Hos. 1:7 and elsewhere (see the complete list of fourteen Judahite glosses in my Introduction, above), which virtually transformed the prophecies of doom spoken by the prophet of Hos. 1–3 in the ninth century BCE and the prophecies of doom spoken by the prophet(s) of Hos. 4–14 in the eighth century BCE into prophecies of consolation for Judah, if, with God’s help, they should succeed in avoiding the mistakes of the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom, which brought about the demise of their state and the exile of its inhabitants. For the idea that the final redaction of the book of the Twelve Prophets was accomplished not by the twelve individually named prophets whose names appear at the head of each of the twelve major divisions of the book of the Twelve Prophets in modern printings, but by a post-exilic synod called ‘the people of the Great Assembly’, see b. Bava Batra 15a; there it is asserted that that august body included several prophets. The books of the Bible edited by that body were, according to that Rabbinic source, Ezekiel, the book of the Twelve Prophets, Daniel, and the scroll of Esther.

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Thus the first of the three clauses of the post-721 Judahite addition, which is Hos. 1:7, intimates that with respect to the Northern Kingdom God had stated through the agency of the prophet, lō ôsîp ôd araḥēm et-bêt Yiśrāēl ‘I shall NOT continue to love the House of Israel’, wĕet-bêt Yĕhûdâ arraḥēm ‘but the House of Judah I shall love’. Moreover, if in Hos. 1:5 God had promised, ‘I shall break the bow of Israel in the Valley of Jezreel’, the later anonymous inspired prophets of Judah added in Hos. 1:7b–d what they believed they had heard from God in words of consolation to the faithful people of Judah, ‘I will give them victory through Yhwh their God. I will not give them victory by means of bow and sword and battle, by means of horses and cavalry.’ In suggesting that victory should be achieved by divine intervention rather than by military might, the unnamed Judean prophet who added Hos. 1:7 may well have been inspired by Hos. 14:4, ‘Assyria will not save us//we shall not ride on steeds’, concerning which a marginal note in NJPS explains, ‘I.e., we will no longer depend on an alliance with Egypt’, from which the Israelites imported the horses for their cavalry; see the discussion in my commentary below at Hos. 14:4. 1:8 After the interrupting Judahite gloss in Hos. 1:7 we return now to the original continuation and conclusion of the chapter, which originally followed Hos. 1:6: wattigmol et-lō ruḥāmâ wattahar wattēled bēn ‘She [Gomer] weaned Lo-Ruhama, and she became pregnant, and she gave birth to a son’ As I pointed out in The Motherhood of God and Other Studies, ‘Since lactational anovulation is…a fact rather than a modern invention, it should not be surprising that the author of the book of Hosea should suggest a causal or at least a sequential relationship between Gomer’s weaning her daughter Lo-Ruhama and her conceiving her son Lo-Ammi’.55 Indeed, C. J. Brim suggested that Gomer ‘weaned her daughter in order to become pregnant’.56 Indeed, as I pointed out in The Motherhood of God, controlled studies indicate that natural nursing without solid food supplements may, on average, delay ovulation for as long as thirty-six weeks, as against the average of eleven weeks for bottle-feeding women.57 55.  Gruber, The Motherhood of God, p. 78. 56.  C. J. Brim, Medicine in the Bible (New York: Froben, 1936), p. 189. 57.  Gruber, The Motherhood of God, p. 73.

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1:9 wayyōmer ‘And he (Yhwh) said’ As noted above at Hos. 1:6, we seem to have here in Hos. 1:9 as in Hos. 1:6, an elliptical repetition of what we read in Hos. 1:4, wayyōmer Yhwh ēlāyw ‘Yhwh said to him [Hosea]’. Hence NJPS renders, ‘Then He said’ where capitalization of the 3rd person singular personal pronoun indicates that the subject must be Yhwh as in Hos. 1:4. LXX, it should be noted, simply translates literally καὶ εἶπεν ‘and he said’, leaving it to the reader to surmise who the subject of that verb might be. Likewise, TJ at both Hos. 1:6 and Hos. 1:9 renders waămar ‘and he said’, leaving it to the reader to draw the conclusion that it is God who said. ‘Name him “Not-my-people” ’ ‘For you [plural, the people of Israel] are not my people’ As discussed below, in my commentary on Hos. 2:4, it has frequently been suggested that the declaration, ‘For you are not my people, and I am not yours’ here in Hos. 1:9 is a take-off on an ancient Near Eastern divorce formula, which may be quoted in Hos. 2:4, ‘She is not my wife, and I am not her husband’. Note that here in Hos. 1:9 the formula seems to be deliberately truncated, ‘For you are not my people, and I am not yours…’ rather than the full formula which would be either, ‘For you are not my people, and I am not your God’, which would be a take-off on the formula, wěhāyîtî lākem lēlōhîm wěattem tihyû-lî lěam ‘I shall be your you as a god, and you shall be for me as a people’ found in Lev. 26:12 and Jer. 7:23, and, in the reverse sequence, wihěyîtem lî lěam wěānōkî eyeh lākem lēlōhîm attested in Jer. 4:11; 30:22; and Ezek. 36:28. The truncation at the end of Hos. 1:9, which leaves out the final word of the formula lēlōhîm, seems to be required because God, as understood by our prophet, does not plan on resigning from his role as God of Israel and leaving this role to the rival Canaanite Baal. In other words, Hos. 1:9c is meant to be more of a threat than a promise. Consequently, it is easy enough for God to do a quick turn-about and reward the threat of bad tidings with a promise of good tidings in Hos. 2:3, 25. However, contrast the complete divorce formula in Hos. 2:4.

C h a p t er 2

Hosea 2 consists of two parts. The first part is a prophecy of rebuke, contained in vv. 4–15, which identifies the people of the Northern Kingdom of Israel during the reign of King Jehu (842–814 BCE) collectively with the symbolic names of the three children born to the prophet and his wife Gomer according to Hos. 1:3–9, q.v. The second part of Hos. 2 is the prophecy of consolation, a promise of better times yet to be, when God will have found the way to forge a new and positive relationship between God and the people of Israel. This prophecy of consolation begins with a change of behaviour upon the part of God in the role of the forgiving husband of the disloyal wife, Israel, in 2:16–25, and concludes with what are now the first three verses of the received Hebrew text of ch. 2, namely, 2:1–3, in which the symbolic names referring to God’s antipathy to Israel are replaced with symbolic names referring to God’s love for Israel. To be precise, the second and third names introduced by the negative particle lō are replaced with names devoid of the negative particle and its negative meaning. In the prophecy of consolation the first symbolic name Jezreel assumes its literal and positive meaning; see below in the commentary. As to how what we understand to be the original order of the sections of Hos. 2 came to be rearranged so that part of the prophecy of consolation (2:1–3) was placed before the beginning of the speech of rebuke, see below in the commentary. No better than the illogical arrangement of the respective sections of consolation and rebuke in the printed Hebrew Bible (recalling that the chapter divisions therein were established in the sixteenth century CE; see the Introduction, p. 14) is the arrangement in the English Bible, in which the consoling words of Hos. 2:1a (Heb. Hos. 2:3), ‘Say ye unto your brethren, Ammi; and to your sisters, Ruhamah’ (KJV), is prefixed to the rebuke, ‘Plead with your mother…’, which is Hos. 2:2b in the English Bible and Hos. 2:4 in Hebrew printings. No better is LXX, which ends Hos. 1 with ‘for great shall be the day of Jezreel’ but begins Hos. 2 with ‘Say to your brother, My people, and to your sister Pitied’,1 which in Hebrew printings is Hos. 2:3. 1.  Translation from Glenny, Hosea, p. 35.

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2:1 ‘It shall come to pass: The number of the people of Israel will be like that of the grains of sand of the sea, which cannot be measured and cannot be numbered. And it shall come to pass that in place of it being said to them, “You are not my people”, it will be said to them, “the people who belong to the living God” ’ ‘It shall come to pass’ So does KJV translate the opening clause (a single lexeme, which includes waw consecutive, third masculine singular subject and the simple predicate ‘will be’). As I noted above with respect to Hos. 1:3, biblical narrative frequently begins and not only continues with the so-called imperfect with waw consecutive referring to events that happened in the past. Similarly, here, as in Isa. 2:2 = Mic. 4:1, a narrative or prophecy can begin with a perfect with waw consecutive referring to events that will take place in the future. NJPS and other translations of the Bible into Modern English simply ignore the expression ‘and it came to pass’ as superfluous because it does not have an equivalent in spoken or literary or academic English of the latter half of the twentieth century CE. The point of Hos. 2:1b is to nullify the prophecy of doom pronounced against Israel and associated with the symbolic name of the prophet and Gomer’s third son, Lō-ammî ‘Not-my-people’, by declaring that at some undesignated time in the future when Israel will have repented of her disloyalty to Yhwh and Yhwh will have repented of his temporary rejection of the people of Israel, God will re-experience and reaffirm his love of Israel and no longer call Israel ‘Not-my-people’ but rather ‘the people who belong to the living God’. Immediately after the introductory lexeme (a whole clause in English), ‘It shall come to pass’, we are told that the immediate reward of God’s future renewed love for his people Israel is that they shall be as numerous as the grains of sand of the sea. The same simile indicating abundant progeny is found in Gen. 32:13. There Jacob, fearing that Esau may annihilate him and his family in retaliation for Jacob’s having stolen the blessing of his father Isaac (Gen. 27), prays to God and reminds God that he had promised Jacob in Gen. 28:14, ‘Your progeny will be as the dust of the earth’. In Gen. 32:13, as here in Hos. 2:1, we find ‘as the sand of the sea’ instead of ‘as the dust of the earth’. The same expression ‘as the sand of the sea’ with reference to the future progeny of Israel is found also in Isa. 10:22, while in Gen. 41:49 the same simile is employed with reference to the abundance of grain that

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Joseph collected during the seven years of plenty. The similar simile ‘like the sand which is at the seashore’ is found in God’s blessing of Abraham in the happy ending of the narrative of the binding of Isaac in Gen. 22:17: ‘Indeed, I will certainly bless you and certainly multiply your progeny like the stars of the sky and like the sand which is upon the seashore…’. The simile ‘like the stars of the sky’ is found also in Neh. 9:23 where it refers to the promise contained in Gen. 15:5, ‘He [God] said [to him, Abram], “Please look at the sky and count the stars if you are able to count them”. And he [God] said to him [Abram], “So shall be your progeny”.’ In Gen. 15:5 God indicates that what makes so apt the comparison between the stars of the sky and the future progeny of Israel is the fact that mortals are not expected to be able to count them. Likewise, Hos. 2:1 explains that the basis of the comparison between the future population of the people of Israel and the sand of the sea is that the latter cannot be measured or counted. The twin expressions lō yimmad wĕlō yissāpēr appear in reverse order in parallel clauses in Jer. 33:22: ‘Like the host of heaven [i.e., the sun, moon, and stars] which cannot be counted and the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured, so shall I multiply the progeny of my servant David and the Levites who serve me’. Outside of Hos. 2:1 the epithet ēl ḥay ‘the living God’ is found also in Josh. 3:10 and in Pss. 42:3 and 84:3. The synonymous ĕlohîm ḥay appears only four times, and it is found only in the response of the Prophet Isaiah to the speech of the Rabshakeh in 2 Kgs 19:4, 16; Isa. 37:4, 17. 2:2 wĕniqbēṣû bĕnê-Yĕhûdâ ûbĕnê-Yiśrāēl yaḥdāyw ‘The people of Judah and the people of Israel will gather together’ As I argued in the Introduction in the section ‘Judahite Glosses’, I regard Hos. 2:2a and 3:5 as important exceptions to the rule that most of the references to Judah in the book of Hosea are either errant or deliberate misreading of an abbreviation Y., which stood for Israel, but was either errantly or deliberately misread by unnamed Judean prophets (after the fall of the Northern Kingdom) as a reference to the Kingdom of Judah. These unnamed prophets made use of the writings of the Northern prophets contained in Hos. 1–14 and made them relevant to their own time and place both by means of glosses, which always interrupt both the syntax and the rhythm of the original text (Hos. 4:15; 5:5; 6:11; 8:14; 12:1) and by reading the original pair Israel//Ephraim as Judah// Ephraim.

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As I argued in the Introduction in the section ‘Judahite Glosses’, First Hosea here in Hos. 2:2 and again in 3:5 anticipates and adumbrates the hope later expressed by Jeremiah (Jer. 3:5) and Ezekiel (Ezek. 37:15–23) that the two peoples of the two kingdoms, who were politically divided after the death of King Solomon, would one day be reunited. In order to make his point even stronger, our prophet deliberately refers to the idyllic united Israel about to be rescued from Egyptian bondage, as described by Pharaoh in Exod. 1:10: ‘Come [lit., give] let us deal wisely with him [collective Israel] lest he multiply so that when war occurs, he also will join with our enemies and fight against us and ascend from the land’. In its original context the threat expressed by the words ‘and he will ascend from the land’ refers to the anticipated escape of the Israelites from Egypt and their ceasing to be Pharaoh’s slaves. In its original context in Exod. 1:10 the anticipation of the Israelites’ leaving Egypt to the chagrin of Pharaoh is a fitting introduction to the account of the enslavement of the Israelites and their mass Exodus after Pharaoh and his nation are afflicted with ten plagues (Exod. 1–15).2 A second allusion in Hos. 2:2 to Pentateuchal traditions is the clause (Exod. 2:2b) wĕśāmû lāhem rōš eḥād ‘and they shall appoint one leader over them’, which is an ironic allusion to Num. 14:4 where the Israelites were disgruntled with the leadership of Moses after hearing the pessimistic account of ten of the twelve spies concerning their visit to the Promised Land: ‘And they said one to another, “Let us appoint a leader, and let us return to Egypt” ’. The double irony in Hos. 2:2 is that in the context of Exod. 1:10 ‘ascend from the land’ means literally to depart from Egypt and ascend to the Land of Israel while ‘let us appoint a leader’ in Num. 14:4 means to reject the leadership of Moses who brought the Israelites out of Egypt and liberated them from bondage to Pharaoh and to find a substitute leader who will bring them back to Egypt, come what may. However, Hos. 2:2 suggests that at some time in the future when Israel will have repented of its flirting with deities other than the God of Israel and when God will have repented of his antipathy to Israel because of their disloyalty, all branches of the people of Israel—both the Northern branch whose state was called Israel and the Southern branch whose state was called Judah—will reunite under a new leader like unto Moses and will re-live the Exodus without, God forbid, having to go into exile. Thus realized eschatology will be relived salvation history. Having alluded 2.  For the idea that Hos. 2:2c is an allusion to Exod. 1:10 see U. Cassuto, ‘The Second Chapter of the Book of Hosea’, in U. Cassuto, Biblical and Oriental Studies (trans. Israel Abrahams; 2 vols.; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1973), pp. 101–49 (119). A marginal note in NJPS at Exod. 1:10 also compares the latter verse with Hos. 2:2c.

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ironically both to Pharaoh’s disparagement of the ascent from Egypt to the Land of Israel and to the now idealized Israelite forbears’ wanting to replace Moses with a leader who will take them back to Egypt, our prophet brings us back to the world of King Jehu, in which Jezreel is the place where King Jehu [see also Hos. 1:4 and my discussion there] ‘executed all that were left of the dynasty of Ahab in Jezreel and his notables, intimates, and priests until he left no survivor of him’ (2 Kgs 10:11; and see also 2 Kgs 10:1–10). Here again there is irony, this time totally positive: the place name that had previously been associated with bloodshed (in both 2 Kgs 10 as well as 1 Kgs 21, the story of Naboth the Jezreelite who was wrongly executed through the initiative of Jezebel, and 2 Kgs 9, the account of how Jehu sought to avenge the blood of Naboth) is now associated with virtue: ‘for marvellous shall be the day of Jezreel’ (Hos. 2:2d according to NJPS). The marginal note in NJPS explains, ‘I.e. the day when the name Jezreel will convey a promise ([Hos.] 2:23–25) instead of a threat ([Hos.] 1:4–5)’. kî gādōl yōm Yizrĕēl ‘For great will be the day of Jezreel’ S. Z. Aster points out ‘The syntax yom + GN in the Hebrew Bible refers to the day on which the location designated by the geographic name was defeated or destroyed’.3 Examples that Aster cites to prove the latter point are ‘the day of Midian’ in Isa. 9:3 and ‘the day of Jerusalem’ in Ps. 137:7.4 Aster, therefore, argues that the prophecy of encouragement (my term not Aster’s) in Hos. 2 that refers to ‘great will be the day of Jezreel’, i.e., glorious will be the day on which the city Jezreel will be destroyed, constitutes a vision of change in the function of Jezreel. Indeed, as Aster points out,5 with the destruction of Jezreel, which, as Aster notes repeatedly in his article, took place at the end of the ninth century BCE, and which, in my reading is anticipated in Hos. 2:2 in a vision of prophetic certitude, ‘Jezreel shifted back from a military headquarters to an agricultural breadbasket’. Aster shows, largely on the basis of the archaeological excavations at Tel Jezreel, site of the ancient city called Jezreel, that this city was first constructed early in the period of the Omride dynasty, i.e., in the middle of the ninth century BCE, and was destroyed at the very end of the ninth century BCE.6 Moreover, this dating of the existence of the Jezreel 3.  S. Z. Aster, ‘The Function of the City of Jezreel and the Symbolism of Jezreel in Hosea 1–2’, JNES 71 (2012), pp. 31–46 (35–36). 4.  Aster, ‘The Function of the City of Jezreel’, p. 36. 5.  Aster, ‘The Function of the City of Jezreel’, p. 41. 6.  Aster, ‘The Function of the City of Jezreel’, p. 31–46 and especially p. 45.

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referred to in Hos. 1–2 is supported by all the references to that place in the biblical book of Second Kings (2 Kgs 8:29; 9:15 [and 2 Chron. 22:6], 17, 30; 10:6–7, 11). Consequently, what Y. Kaufmann (HIR 6:93–107) and my late and revered teacher H. L. Ginsberg7 sensed concerning the ninth-century BCE origin of Hos. 1–2, without fully understanding the significance in context of the name Jehu, has now been confirmed by the archaeological evidence concerning Tel Jezreel and Aster’s detailed and painstaking analysis of the military role of the city Jezreel during its brief period of existence from the beginning of the Omride dynasty to the time of King Jehu. The latter king’s treatment of the family of Ahab, is treated as a recently committed abomination by our ninth-century prophet in Hos. 1–2, long before Jehu’s atrocities were treated as acts of virtue by the author of 2 Kgs 10.8 2:3 imĕrû laăḥêkem ammî ûlaăḥōtêkem ruḥāmâ ‘Call your brothers “My people” and your sisters “Beloved” ’ The point of this verse taken together with what is stated in the previous verset, ‘For marvellous shall be the day of Jezreel’, and the conclusion of the words of consolation and encouragement in Hos. 2:24–25, ‘…And they shall fructify Jezreel, and I will sow her in the land as my own, and I shall love Unloved and I shall say to Not-my-people, “You are my people”…’, is to cancel and reverse the previous condemnation of the People of Israel alluded to in the negative denotations of the three symbolic names that were given to the three children born to the prophet’s wife Gomer according to Hos. 1:4–9. However, it should never be forgotten that in biblical poetry, as in all great poetry, the subtle stylistic features are as much a part of what a poem means as they are of how a poem conveys its meaning. Hosea 2:3 includes a classic example of the relatively rare phenomenon in Biblical Hebrew poetry called gender-matched synonymous parallelism in which normally nearly synonymous terms are found in the parallel clauses, the first of them masculine and the second feminine. A relatively simple and straightforward example of gender-matched synonymous parallelism is Jer. 48:46c–d: ‘For your sons are about to be taken into captivity [Heb. šebî; masculine] and your daughters into captivity [šibyâ, feminine]’. Similarly 7.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, pp. 1014–16; 2nd ed., vol. 9, pp. 550–52. 8.  Contrast Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, pp. 1014–16; 2nd ed., vol. 9, pp. 550–52.

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straightforward are Prov. 1:8, ‘Hear, my son, the instruction of your father//and do not forsake the teaching of your mother’, and Prov. 6:20, ‘Keep, my son, the commandment of your father//and do not forsake the teaching of your mother’. The latter proverbs remind us, notwithstanding the gallons of ink that have been poured out to prove the opposite, that education of the child (of both sexes, both called in Prov. 1:8 and 6:20 bĕnî, commonly translated ‘my son’) was the responsibility of both father and mother, both of whom had to have been educated in order to be educators.9 Similarly, the versets quoted from Jer. 48 show that Jeremiah, one of the greatest masters of the art of writing biblical poetry, has fully anticipated the modern politically correct she/he and her/him. Hosea 2:3 goes far beyond the politically correct Jeremiah and the matter-of-fact sages of Prov. 1:8 and 6:20 in utilizing gender-matched synonymous parallelism to force the modern reader (and the prophet’s original target audience, which heard the prophetic address orally) to read and listen between the lines to see much more than was revealed in the context of the granting of the symbolic names in Hos. 1:6–9. There the second child of Gomer, a daughter, is named ‘Unloved’ to indicate that, for a time at least, God will stop loving the House of Israel. In other words, a feminine name of a female child, refers to the House of Israel, which is grammatically masculine, enough to give aid and comfort to Bible-bashers who utilize apparent misogyny to attack Scripture. Further on in that same passage, Gomer’s third child, a boy, is to be named ‘Not-my-people’ to indicate that the people of Israel has ceased, at least for a time, to be God’s people. This people is referred to in Hos. 1:6–9 either as a collective or in the masculine plural. However, in Hos. 2:3 the two terms ‘your brothers’ and ‘your sisters’ are meant to refer to the totality of the people of Israel so that the separation of the two terms in separate clauses constitutes a veritable merism like the expression ‘man and woman’ in Exod. 35:29; 36:6; Judg. 9:49; 16:27; Jer. 44:7; 51:22; Esth. 4:11. Moreover, while in Hos. 1:6, 9 the feminine personal name ‘Unloved’ refers to the House of Israel as a collectivity and the masculine personal name ‘Not-my-people’ refers to the plurality (attem; second person masculine plural pronoun) of the people of Israel (where are the women people?), in Hos. 2:3, which looks forward to a better day yet to be, it is clear that Israel consists of both brothers and sisters and that the brothers will be called by the masculine name ammî ‘My people’ and the sisters by the feminine name ruḥāmâ ‘Beloved’. 9.  Families of parents both of the same sex will surely be discovered also in Holy Scripture with the advances yet to be made in Queer Interpretation of the Bible.

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The marginal note in NJPS concerning Hos. 2:1–3, all of which verses speak of happy times yet to be, in contrast to the words of rebuke spoken by God in 2:4–15, reads as follows: ‘Vv. 1–3 anticipate the conclusion of the chapter’. Consequently, I would suggest that in its original form as a speech, in which the prophet, speaking in the name of God, chastised the people of the Northern Kingdom early in the reign of King Jehu [842–814 BCE], the speech began with Hos. 2:4–14. Further on, I shall follow D. J. A. Clines in noting that again with great irony (apparently a major feature of Hos. 1–3) the speech of rebuke continues in a total about-face from Hos. 2:16 to the end of the chapter.10 In vv. 16–24 God suddenly decides that the proper treatment of Israel depicted as an unfaithful wife (the metaphor introduced in Hos. 1:2b) and individual Israelites as emulating their unfaithful mother in their disloyalty to the God of Israel, is to display an abundance of love and kindness. The mood of kindness and love, found in Hos. 2:16–23, is, indeed, anticipated in Hos. 2:1–3. I would suggest, therefore, that in its original context as a speech of rebuke that turns unexpectedly into a speech of love and reconciliation at Hos. 2:16, Hos. 2:1–3 formed the fitting conclusion to the speech of love and reconciliation, which turns on their heads the symbolic names of Hosea and Gomer’s three children. However, when the book of Hosea was brought to Judah after the fall of Samaria in 722 BCE, the prophecies of rebuke of the Northern Kingdom were utilized as prophecies of consolation to the Southern Kingdom conditional upon Judah’s not following in the footsteps of the Northern Kingdom, which brought disaster upon itself by a combination of moral turpitude and religious heterodoxy. It was fitting, therefore, to place the original conclusion of Hos. 2, namely vv. 1–3, at the head of the chapter so that the verses of rebuke, vv. 4–16, are now bracketed in the middle as a description of how things might have been had Judah not been a repentant nation and the God of Israel not a loving husband of that nation. 2:4 rîbû bĕimmĕkem rîbû ‘Rebuke your mother, rebuke her’ In light of the use of the verbal root ryb and its noun derivatives to refer to a summoning of the people of Israel or the people of the world to a court case in which God is the plaintiff (Jer. 11:20; 20:12; 25:31; 10.  D. J. A. Clines, ‘Hosea 2: Structure and Interpretation’, in D. J. A. Clines, On the Way to the Postmodern I (JSOTSup, 292; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998), pp. 293–313 (294).

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Hos. 4:1; 12:3; Mic. 6:1–2), it is reasonable to suggest that chronologically speaking the oldest reference to such a court case in Hebrew Scripture is here in Hos. 2:4a and that it should be translated, ‘Summon to the court your mother, summon her to court’. We shall see immediately in Hos. 2:4b–c that the mother in question is the people of Israel collectively, who are the collective female spouse of the God of Israel, precisely as in the opening vision of our prophet in Hos. 1:2b-d, ‘Speedily marry a woman associated with adultery [as a metaphor for idolatry] and adopt children associated with adultery [as a metaphor for idolatry] for the land has committed adultery against me’. It is indeed plausible to think that because of the intervening story about the marriage of the prophet to Gomer and the birth of her three children, all of whom are given symbolic names referring to God’s antipathy to the People of Israel, Bible readers would have to be reminded that indeed the mother of whom God, speaking through the prophet, declares in Hos. 2:4b–c, ‘she is not my wife, and I am not her husband’, is indeed the people of Israel collectively, as indicated, albeit a bit too subtly, in 1:2b–d. Consequently, NJPS, which is rather sparing in its footnotes, makes the point in a footnote to Hos. 2:4 that the mother is the nation [the Northern Kingdom]; her children the individual North Israelites [who are called your brothers and your sisters in Hos. 2:3].11 kî-hî lō ištî wĕānōkî lō îšāh ‘For she is not my wife//and I am not her husband’ It has been pointed out repeatedly that Hosea here reflects a formula of divorce which is known far and wide over very many centuries in the ancient Near East.12

11.  With respect to the summoning of Israel/Judah to a court case, which modern scholarship calls now ‘the rîb pattern’ because the summons is always associated with the Heb. imperative rîb see, inter alia, H. B. Huffmon, ‘The Covenant Lawsuit in the Prophets’, JBL 78 (1959), pp. 285–95; B. Gemser, ‘The Rib- or Controversy Pattern in Hebrew Mentality’, in Wisdom in Israel and in the Ancient Near East Presented to Professor Harold Henry Rowley (ed. M. Noth and D. W. Thomas; VTSup, 3; Leiden: Brill, 1960), pp. 120–37; see also the discussion in the commentary at Hos. 4:1, 4; 12:3. 12.  For the secondary literature see Cassuto, ‘The Second Chapter of Hosea’ [originally published in Hebrew in 1927], p. 122 where he cites B. Meissner, Beiträge zum altbabylonische Privatrecht (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1893), pp. 70–71, nos. 89–90; J. Kohler and A. Ungnad, Hammurabis Gesetz III (Leipzig: E. Pfeiffer, 1909), pp. 4–6; IV (Leipzig: E. Pfeiffer, 1910), pp. 1–2; V (Leipzig: E. Pfeiffer, 1911), p. 1;

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B. Porten cites the formula found in Aramaic documents from fifth-century BCE Elephantine where the bridegroom declares to the bride, ‘She is my wife, and I am her husband from this day and forever’.13 Moreover, Porten observes, ‘The latter declaration was a traditional one (cf. Hos. 2:4)’, which implies that the negative formulation in Hos. 2:4 is a formula of divorce, which was precisely the reverse of the formula of marriage. R. Yaron notes that the marriage formula found in the Elephantine papyri is hy ntty wnh blh ‘she is my wife, and I am her husband’, which, in Yaron’s words, is the converse of the expression we find in Hos. 2:4. Yaron holds that the Elephantine Aramaic formula must be of Jewish origin because of its echoing Hos. 2:4.14 M. Malul compares the Sumerian formula by which an adopted son denies being the adopted son of his adopted parents and the similar formula by which adoptive parents deny being the adoptive parents of their adopted child.15 No less important, Malul there compares the formula, ‘You are not My people, and I shall not be unto you’ in Hos. 1:9, which indeed must be a take-off on the divorce formula quoted in Hos. 2:4.

A. Jeremias, Handbuch der orientalischen Geisteskultur (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1913), p. 335. Moreover, Cassuto notes, there, p. 122 n. 42, that the formula is attested in b. Qiddushin 5b: ênî îšēk ‘I am not your husband’; see also P. Humbert, ‘La logique de la perspective nomade chez Osée’, in Vom alten Testament: Karl Marti zum siebzigsten Geburtstage gewidmet, ed. Karl Budde (Giessen: A. Töpelmann, 1925), pp. 158–66 (162–63); L. Blau, ‘Bekämfung altorientalischer Rechtsformeln durch die Rabbinen des Talmuds’, MGWJ 69 (1925), pp. 139–41 (140–41); and L. Blau, Jüdische Ehescheidung, fasc. 1 (Budapest: A. Alkalay, 1911), p. 25; fasc. 2 (Budapest: A. Alkalay, 1912), p. 15. Moreover, Cassuto indicates there that S. Funck, ‘Die Sprache des Scheidebriefes’, Jahrbuch der Jüdisch-Literarischen Gesselschaft 16 (1924), pp. 123–35 had pointed out that Hos. 2:4 is cited in a Karaite divorce text. See also literature which appeared after Cassuto’s 1927 essay, including the following: C. Kuhl, ‘Neue Dokumente zum Verständnis von Hosea 2.4–15’, ZAW 52 (1934), pp. 102-09; C. H. Gordon, ‘Hosea 2.4–5 in the Light of New Semitic Inscriptions’, ZAW 54 (1936), pp. 277–80; Gordis, ‘Hosea’s Marriage and Message’, 20–21, and the extensive literature cited there. The Akkadian form of the formula is ul aššatī attī ‘You are not my wife’. 13.  B. Porten, Archives from Elephantine (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), p. 206. 14.  R. Yaron, ‘Aramaic Marriage Contracts from Elephantine’, JSS 3 (1958), pp. 1–39 (30). 15.  M. Malul, Law Collections and Other Legal Compilations from the Ancient Near East (Haifa: Pardes, 2010), p. 318 n. 14 [in Hebrew].

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wĕtāsēr zĕnûnêāh mippānêāh//wĕnaăpûpêāh mibbên šādêāh ‘May she remove her habitual harlotry from her face//And her habitual adultery from between her breasts’ As I noted in my commentary at Hos. 1:2b, D. Label argues that there is no reduplication in the noun zěnûnîm.16 Nevertheless, he continues there, ‘our prophetic author in both Hos. 1:2b and again in Hos. 2:4d, 6, already perceived the form zěnûnîm as representing a noun formed by reduplication of the second root letter’. Consequently, Label argues, our prophet created the reduplicated form naăpûpêāh ‘her habitual adultery’ on the analogy of his misunderstanding of the grammatical origin of the form zěnûnîm. Again, as stressed in my commentary at Hos. 1:2b, the harlotry/adultery in the present context refers to adultery on the part of the metaphoric wife of God, namely, the people of Israel individually and collectively, which is a metaphor for Israelites’ worshipping other deities alongside of the God of Israel. In Hos. 2:4 we seem to have a classic example of synonymous parallelism in which two nouns, the first of which, zěnûnîm, which occurs with some degree of frequency (12 times: Gen. 38:24; 2 Kgs 9:22; Ezek. 23:11, 29; Hos. 1:2 [twice]; 2:4, 6; 4:12; 5:4; Nah. 3:4 [twice]), is found in the first of the two clauses, while the second of the two nouns, which is rarely attested (naăpûpîm, found only in Hos. 2:4) is employed as the b-word or ballast variant in the second of the two parallel clauses.17 H. Bauer and P. Leander classify the noun naăpûp as a noun formed by reduplication of the third of the three root letters of the triradical root (in this case np ‘commit adultery’).18 Furthermore, they assign the noun naăpûp to the subclass qatlūl in which the vowel u intervenes between the first and the second appearance of the third root letter. Other nouns belonging to this same subclass include the noun naăṣûṣ ‘thorn bush’ attested in Isa. 7:19 and 55:13 and pārûr ‘paleness’ attested only in Joel 2:6 and Nah. 2:11. Andersen and Freedman speculate that the once-only attested noun naăpûpîm might have been coined by Hosea.19 They further speculate that rather than naăpûpîm being an abstract noun meaning ‘adultery’, the term is a plural noun referring to dress and ornaments, which would identify 16.  Label, ‘Concerning the Derivation of the Word zěnûnîm’, p. 153. 17.  Concerning the word order common word before rare word, see, inter alia, W. G. E. Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guided to its Techniques (JSOTSup, 26; Sheffield: JSOT, 1984), p. 129. 18.  Bauer and Leander, Historische Grammatik, p. 483. 19.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 224.

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the prostitute as such; hence DCH (5:581) suggests ‘tokens of adultery’. S. Kaatz regards the juxtaposition of mippānêâ//wĕnaăpûpêâ in Hos. 2:4 as a deliberate instance of assonance.20 The expression mbyn šdyh, literally ‘from between her breasts’, employed in Hos. 2:4 as a ballast variant to mippānêâ ‘from her face’, should be compared to other anatomical expressions that have the form of prepositional phrases beginning with the preposition byn. The two most famous such expressions, which are found in both Ugaritic and Biblical Hebrew are ‘between the eyes’, which appears as a ballast variant for ‘head’ in Ugaritic poetry, and bn ydm ‘between the hands/arms’, which is employed in Ugaritic poetry as a ballast variant for ‘back’ and once only in Biblical Hebrew in Zech. 13:6. A variant in Hebrew, namely bên zêroāyw, literally ‘between his arms’, also referring to ‘his back’, is found in 2 Kgs 9:24. My late and revered teacher, M. Held, was fond of mentioning in connection with the Ugaritic expression bn ydm that its use as a synonym for ‘head’ confirmed the authenticity of the Rabbinic tradition that placing a tefillah (singular of tefillin ‘phylacteries’) on the head is what is called for in Exod. 13:9, 16; Deut. 6:8, all of which employ the expression bên ênêkā ‘between thine eyes’; bên ênêkem ‘between your (plural) eyes,’ only in Deut. 11:18. Both in Hos. 2:4, where the word-pair zĕnûnêāh//naăpûpêāh refers to adultery as a metaphor for idolatry, and in Hos. 4:14, where the etymologically related pair of verbs tiznênâ//tināapnâ ‘they (feminine plural) engage in extra-marital sex//they (feminine plural) commit adultery’, the word order seems strange. One would expect that since the verbal root np refers only to adultery, whether metaphoric or concrete, while the verbal root zny has a variety of meanings, not all of them connected with unfaithfulness to a spouse and not all of them connected with sexual activity, the word order should have been reversed in both Hos. 2:4 and in Hos. 4. The most likely explanation for this apparent anomaly is the probability that biblical poets perceived the verbal root zny as the more common verbal root and np as the relatively less frequently attested

20.  S. Kaatz, ‘Wortspiel, Assonanz und Notarikon bei Hosea’, Jeschurun 11 (1924), pp. 434–37 (434). Concerning reduplicated nouns in the Semitic languages, see N. Rhodokanakis, Reduplikation und Vokaldehnung, Druch und Ton in der semitischen Nominalbildung (Vienna: n.s., 1915). Concerning reduplication in linguistics, in general, see more recently S. Inkelas and C. Zoll, Reduplication: Doubling in Morphology (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially, pp. 59–65, concerning the use of reduplication to created synonyms.

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verbal root. Indeed, in Mandelkern’s Concordantiae, znh and its cognates occupy slightly more than four columns while np and its cognates occupy slightly less than one and one half columns.21 Hosea 2:4d–e is, in its elliptical structure, rather typical of biblical poetry in that the verb appears only in the first of the two parallel clauses while the second clause balances the first in the number of words and stresses by employing in the second clause the longer expression mibbên šādêāh in parallelism with the shorter expression mippānêāh in the first clause. Other typical examples of ellipsis in which the verb is found only in the first of two parallel clauses are the following: ‘Light is sown for the righteous//and for the upright in heart gladness’ (Ps. 97:11); ‘When Israel exited from Egypt//the House of Jacob from a people of strange language’ (Ps. 114:1); ‘For Yhwh chose Jacob for Himself//Israel as His treasured possession’ (Ps. 135:4). In Hos. 2:5 God threatens to punish Israel personified as an adulterous woman by embarrassing her publicly. Interestingly, J. C. Exum, in her chapter ‘Prophetic Pornography’ in her Plotted, Shot, and Painted, only alludes to this verse twice (on pp. 115 and 127), perhaps because quoting this verse in question might be overstating two of the basic points that Exum makes in that chapter, namely, (1) ‘because God is the subject, we—that is, female as well as male readers—are expected to sympathize with the divine perspective against the (personified woman)’ (p. 102); and (2) ‘various ways of dealing with gender-biased prophetic rhetoric overlap, and…they constitute not a solution to the ethical problem of biblical violence against women but an important rhetorical counterstrategy for dealing with it’.22 As Exum explained in her oral presentation at the Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting in Budapest in July 1995 of the materials published in that chapter, when scholars, teachers, preachers, and Bible readers pass over passages like Hos. 2:5 without comment, they, much more than the biblical text in its historical context, constitute an ethical dilemma, to which one must respond

21.  See S. Mandelkern, Veteris Testamnetii Concordantiae (ed. F. Mrgolin and M. Goshen-Gottstein; 8th ed.; Jerusalem & Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1969), pp. 358–59 and 710–11. Concerning the principle that in Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Biblical poetry the more frequently attested root or word should appear before the longer word in both juxtaposition and in parallel clauses see M. Held, ‘Studies in Ugaritic Lexicography and Poetic Style’ (PhD dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 1957), p. 7. 22.  J. C. Exum, ‘Prophetic Pornography’, in Plotted, Shot, and Painted (JSOTSup, 5; Gender, Culture, Theory, 3; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996), pp. 101–28 (128).

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with ethical criticism. In a highly incisive study, L. Day argues that the tendency of modern commentators to play down the verbal violence against the female in Hos. 1–3; Jer. 2–5; Ezek. 16 (and we should add Ezek. 23) reminds one of the tendency of a battered woman ‘to see only the positive side of her abuser. She chooses to believe that the loving, caring behaviour before and after a physically abusive incident shows the man’s true character. Abused women will state that they love their men and that they believe that their men, deep down, really do love them.’23 On the other hand, P. L. Day argues no less convincingly that ‘scholars’ contention that the punishment depicted in Ezek. 16 [and we would add Hos. 2:5] is modelled upon the real life punishment for adultery in ancient Israel is simply unsupportable’.24 Moreover, she explains that the passage’s rhetorical strategy was designed to infuse apostasy (and other offenses against God) with the emotionally loaded language of sexual betrayal.25 In fact, this point was made already in Hos. 1:2c: kî-zānōh tizneh haāreṣ mēaḥărê Yhw ‘The land has certainly committed adultery against Yhwh’. Moreover, as I shall explain below in my discussion of Hos. 2:16, God, as perceived by our prophet, has in that verse already turned on its head Hos. 2:5’s description of God’s taking Israel out into the wilderness in order that she may die of thirst into a description of God’s returning personified Israel to the place where God and Israel had celebrated their honeymoon. However, before we get to Hos. 2:16 we are obligated to understand fully the exposition in Hos. 2:5–15 of the metaphor of adultery and possible punishment for that metaphoric adultery, all of which is taken for granted in the reversal spelled out in detail with numerous allusions to Hos. 2:5–15 in the prophecy of reconciliation found in Hos. 2:16–24 and its original and proper conclusion, which was Hos. 2:1–3; see below for details. 2:5 pen-apšîṭennāh ărummâ//wĕhiṣṣagtîāh keyôm hiwwāldāh ‘Lest I strip her naked//and exhibit her as on the day of her birth’ Significantly, this unpleasant image is borrowed and elaborated upon in Ezek. 16:37–39, where we read as follows: ‘Therefore I shall assemble all the paramours to whom you gave your [metaphorically sexual] favours…, 23.  L. Day, ‘Rhetoric and Domestic Violence in Ezekiel 16’, Biblical Interpretation 8 (2000), pp. 205–30 (228–29). 24.  P. L. Day, ‘The Bitch Had It Coming to Her: Rhetoric and Interpretation in Ezekiel 16’, Biblical Interpretation 8 (2000), pp. 231–54 (231–32). 25.  P. L. Day, ‘The Bitch Had It Coming to Her’, pp. 252–53.

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and I shall assemble them against you from all over, and I shall show them your nakedness so that they will see your nakedness. I shall afflict upon you [i.e., personified Jerusalem, which includes both the men and the women of that city] the punishments appropriate to women who commit adultery and women who commit murder, and I shall give you blood, anger, and jealousy. I shall hand you over to them so that they will turn down your [personified Jerusalem’s] height, and destroy your towers, and so that they will strip you of your clothing and your beautiful jewellery leaving you naked and bare.’ P. L. Day demonstrates that personified Jerusalem and her guilty inhabitants, both male and female, are here described as being punished for the three crimes of worshipping other deities, committing murder (see Ezek. 18:10; 22:3; 23:45; 24:7; 36:18), and forging alliances with foreign nations (for references to this crime in the book of Hosea see below in Hos. 5:13; 7:11–16; 8:8–14).26 Understood correctly, the redeeming feature of prophetic pornography is the fact that it demonstrates that Hebrew prophets not only used the grammatical masculine singular and plural to refer to activities performed by females (and hermaphrodites and false hermaphrodites as well) but also employed the grammatical feminine singular and plural to refer to activities performed by the inhabitants of Jerusalem, which city had to be portrayed as a woman because, after all, ‘city’ is feminine in Biblical Hebrew just as most plural words for ‘people’ are feminine plural in Akkadian. It should not be surprising that Ezekiel elaborates extensively upon the problematic idea that God the husband would contemplate stripping naked his spouse as punishment for her adultery, even if, as I, following P. L. Day, insist that it is adultery as a metaphor for idolatry, for which sin both the men and women of ancient Israel (in Hos. 1–2) and Jerusalem (in Ezekiel) are culpable. Ezekiel is well known for his penchant for elaborating extensively on subjects that are treated almost telegraphically in the writings of other prophets of ancient Israel and Judah. Thus, for example, Isaiah is known for his very short description of the heavenly temple in Isa. 6:1–2 compared with the extensive description found in Ezek. 1 (28 verses). Likewise, while according to Jer. 1:9 God placed his prophetic word directly into the mouth of Jeremiah, according to Ezek. 2:9–33 Ezekiel was commanded to eat a scroll (presumably of papyrus) and to digest the words of lamentations, dirges, and woes, and to proclaim them to the House of Israel.

26.  P. L. Day, ‘The Bitch Had It Coming to Her’, pp. 236–53.

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wĕśamtîāh kammidbār wĕšattiāh kĕereṣ ṣiyyâ wahămitttîāh baṣṣāmā ‘I shall make her into a wilderness, and I shall turn her into an arid land, and I will cause her to die of thirst’ Each of the three lines of this unit begins with a verb in the perfect consecutive denoting future time, and each of these verbs has a first person singular subject referring to God and a third person feminine singular direct object referring to Israel personified as a woman. The pair of verbal roots śym/šyt referring to turning an object from one form to another is attested outside of Hos. 2:5 only in Jer. 13:16, ‘Give honour to Yhwh your God before he brings darkness and before your feet stumble on the mountain in shadow—when you hope for light, and he has turned it into deep darkness//he has turned it into deep gloom’. According to the kethib, there the second verb is yšt, an imperfect which is normally construed as a past tense after the expression ṭerem ‘before’ earlier in the verse (cf. Gen. 2:5; Exod. 1:19), while according to the qere the form is wšyt, which should be construed as waw conjunctive followed by an infinitive consecutive, which means that the tense is to be construed precisely as in the same tense as the previous verb. We also find the idea of turning a fertile place into a wilderness or desert with the use of the verbal root šyt in Isa. 5:6–7, ‘Now I am going to tell you what I will do to my vineyard [which symbolizes the people of Israel]: I will remove its hedge that it may be ravaged; I will break down its wall that it may be trampled. And I will make it a desolation [assuming that bth is short for bĕtohû and that the element tohû is the word used to refer to the primeval chaos in Gen. 1:2; see also Deut. 32:10 where the latter term also refers to a desert].’ The other instances where the verb šyt refers to turning a fertile place into a desert are Jer. 2:15, ‘Lions have roared over him, have raised their howls, and they have turned his land into a desolation…’; Jer. 22:6, ‘I shall turn you [the royal house of the King of Judah] into a desert//uninhabited towns’; and Jer. 50:3, ‘For a nation from the north [will have; perfect of prophetic certitude] attacked her [Babylon], and he will turn her land into a desolation, and there shall be no dweller therein; from person unto beast they will have wandered away’.27

27.  Other instances of the verbal root śym/śwm referring to turning a fertile place into a desert include Isa. 13:9; Jer. 4:7; 6:8; 10:22; 12:11; 18:16; 19:8; 25:9, 12; 51:29; Mic. 1:6. Cf. also Hos. 2:14; Isa. 25:2; Ezek. 21:32; 35:4; Mic. 1:7; Mal. 1:3; Pss. 46:9; 79:1; and for the idea cf. also Mic. 3:12 = Jer. 26:18.

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Exum’s aforementioned study should encourage us to be shocked at the threat of physical violence to be perpetrated against Lady Israel according to Hos. 2:5c–e and the various parallels we have just now cited. However, we should by now have learned from P. L. Day that Hos. 2:5 is not misogynic, for Lady Israel is throughout Hos. 1–2 a personification of the entire people of Israel. Moreover, the threat of infertility as a punishment creates the background for the promise of abundant fertility in the parallel and concluding prophecy of reconciliation contained, as we shall see in Hos. 2:16–25 + Hos. 2:1–3. 2:6 wĕet-bānêāh lō ăraḥēm//kî-bĕnê zěnûnîm hēmmâ ‘And I will not love her children because they are children of adultery’ In this rather short verse our prophet has brought together themes from Hos. 1:2b, 1:6b; and Hos. 2:4. Following Stuart,28 in our comment on Hos. 1:2b we noted that Israel collectively was represented by the woman of adultery, whose adultery was a metaphor for the nation of Israel’s flirting with deities other than Yhwh and that the children to have been adopted by the prophet according to Hos. 1:2b were called children of adultery because they represented the typically idolatrous Israelites of the time of our prophet in the second half of the ninth century BCE. Thus they were accused by our prophet of engaging, like their mother, who is Israel collectively, in adultery, which is a metaphor for idolatry. Having moved on in Hos. 1:3–9 to endowing each of his children, two sons and one daughter, with symbolic names indicating God’s antipathy to the idolatrous people of Israel, our prophet then informs us most explicitly in Hos. 2:4 that the people of Israel collectively is the adulterous (again metaphor for idolatrous) wife of God. Alluding back to Hos. 1:6 where God promised, ‘I shall no longer love the House of Israel’, he repeats that idea and applies it in Hos. 2:6 to the individual Israelites, who are the adulterous children of the adulterous wife precisely as we were told in Hos. 1:2b. Our prophet will spell out further in Hos. 2:7–15 his contention that the people of Israel, individually and collectively, are an adulterous (metaphor for idolatrous) woman and adulterous (again metaphor for idolatrous) children, and that they must so be treated.

28.  Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, pp. 26–27.

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2:7 In this verse the prophet explains to his audience precisely what is the meaning of the series of metaphors and symbolic acts found in Hos. 1:2b–9 and Hos. 2:4–5. In turn this is a summary of where the prophet, speaking in the name of God, stands with respect to idolatrous Israel pictured as an adulterous woman collectively and adulterous (again metaphor for idolatrous) sons and daughters. In turn this summary will prepare the ground for the declaration in Hos. 2:8–15 for the prophet, again speaking in the name of God, spelling out in far greater detail than in Hos. 2:5 what he proposes to do in order to change the behaviour of Israel, collectively and individually, toward the God of Israel. kî zānĕtâ immām//hôbîšâ hôrātām ‘For their mother committed adultery [metaphor for idolatry], their female parent acted disgrace­­ fully’ Interestingly, we find that while here as also in one other place in Biblical Hebrew we find a synonym for ēm ‘mother’, namely hôrâ ‘female parent’, there is no such word in English. The other instance of Heb. hôrâ is found in Cant. 3:4: ‘Scarcely had I passed them [the police] when I found the person whom I love. I grabbed hold of him, and I would not let go of him until I brought him to my mother’s house, to the room of my female parent’. hôbîšâ ‘she acted disgracefully’ The masculine form hôbîš, assumed to be the non-causative hiphil (concerning this phenomenon and especially with respect to verbs such as hôbîš, which in both of its meanings expresses entering into a certain condition and, further, being in the same, see GKC #53d) of the root bwš (so DCH 2:130–32, but see also DCH 3:77) means ‘was embarrassed’ in Jer. 10:14; 48:20; 50:2; 51:17; and Zech. 9:5; the feminine form hôbîšâ has the meaning ‘was embarrassed’ in Jer. 46:24 and 48:1 while here in Hos. 2:7b it seems to mean ‘acted disgracefully’. However, in Joel 1:12, 17 the masculine form hôbîš seems to be a non-causative hiphil of the root ybš ‘dry up’ and refers primarily to the drying up of grain, grapevine, and olive trees in the time of drought, and secondarily (Joel 1:12) to the ensuing unhappiness of people who are about to starve to death in the wake of drought. The feminine form hôbîšâ likewise has the meaning ‘dry up’ with respect to the grapevine in Joel 1:12. For the masculine/common plural hôbîšû ‘they acted disgracefully’ see Jer. 6:15; 8:9, 12; 50:2 and cf. with waw consecutive wĕhôbîšû ‘they will be ashamed’ in Zech. 10:5.

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A homonym of hôbîš ‘was embarrassed, behaved disgracefully’, namely, hôbîš ‘he dried up’, is attested in Josh. 2:10; 4:3; 5:1, where God is the subject and the objects are the Red Sea and the Jordan River. In Hos. 2:7c–g God explains why it is that Lady Israel committed metaphoric adultery with respect to God her husband, i.e., idolatry by being disloyal to the God of Israel. kî āmĕrâ ‘Because she said (to herself)’ NJPS reads ‘she thought’. ēlĕkâ ‘Let me follow after my paramours [metaphor for other gods; the key metaphor is the adultery of Lady Israel which stands for the idolatry by the people of Israel]’ Note the cohortative form of the verb ēlĕkâ with final long a (see GKC #48b–e). aḥărê ‘after’ Contrast mēaḥărê-Yhwh ‘from (following) after Yhwh’ in Hos. 1:2b and my discussion there. mĕahăbay ‘my paramours’ See above concerning the metaphor; the term itself is attested with one exception only in the metaphoric sense referring to Lady Israel’s other gods. The source of the metaphor in the Bible is clearly in Hos. 2 where it is employed four times (Hos. 2:7, 9, 12, 15). Jeremiah (Jer. 22:20, 22; 30:14) and Ezekiel (Ezek. 16:33, 36, 37; 23:5, 9, 22) adopt the metaphoric usage from Hos. 2, and it is likely that Lam. 1:19 also was influenced by Hosea. However, the reason for thinking that Jeremiah and Ezekiel took over this metaphoric usage from Hos. 2 is the presence in both Jeremiah and Ezekiel of numerous usages of this metaphoric usage, many of which clearly are expanded from usages found in Hosea (see, e.g., my discussion above of Hos. 2:5 and its elaboration in Ezek. 16). The one instance where the noun mĕahăbay ‘my friends’ appears to have no sexual connotations is Zech. 13:6. nōtĕnê laḥmî ûmêmî ṣamrî ûpištî šamnî wĕšiqqûyāy ‘Those [gods, metaphorically, lovers] who provide my bread and my water, my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink’ In the reversal of the contemplated punishment in the prophecy of reconciliation in Hos. 2:23–25 God reasserts that he will happily provide the fertility of the land in general and specifically the gifts of grain (bread)

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and wine (here in Hos. 2:7g referred to as šiqqûyāy ‘my drink’). D. N. Freedman notes that in the last six words of Hos. 2:7 we have a series of direct objects ending in the first person singular pronominal suffix and that in this series the first noun in each of the three pairs is singular while the second noun is plural with the exception of ûpištî.29 Consequently, Freedman argues, the form wpšty should be revocalized as ûpištay, i.e., the plural pištîm ‘flax’ preceded by conjunctive waw and followed by the first person singular pronominal suffix. The consequence of this revocalization is that in the literary unit of Hos. 2:7e–g the penultimate word in each line ends in the suffix î while the ultimate word in each line ends in ay. Note that throughout Hebrew Scripture pištîm ‘flax’ appears everywhere else either in the singular pištâ (Exod. 9:31; Isa. 42:3; 43:17) or in the plural form pištîm (12 occurrences) and once in the plural construct (Josh. 2:6). With Freedman,30 I note that singular ending in â and plural in îm is found with respect to the Hebrew terms for wheat (ḥiṭṭâ/ḥiṭṭîm); barley (śěorâ/śěorîm); and sycamore (šiqmâ/šiqmîm). See also below at Hos. 2:11. 2:8 The Subordinate Conjunction lāken in Hos. 2:8, 11, 16 The subordinate conjunction lāken ‘therefore’ is attested 197 times in Hebrew Scripture. Especially in the speeches of the writing prophets in the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea (Hos. 2:8, 11; 13:3; concerning Hos. 2:16 see below), Amos (Amos 3:11; 4:12; 5:11, 13, 16; 6:7; 7:17), Micah (Mic. 1:14; 2:3, 5; 3:6, 12; 5:2), Zephaniah (Zeph. 2:9; 3:8), Zechariah (Zech. 1:16; 11:7), the particle introduces the logical consequences of the misbehaviour described in verses that precede the word lāken. C. Westermann prefers the expression ‘sins’.31 Westermann attempts to show that normative prophetic speeches of the literary prophets of ancient Israel and Judah contained six major divisions, which are introduction, accusation, development, messenger formula, intervention of God, and results of the intervention.32 In fact, Westermann provides nine examples of prophecies that exhibit this structure. However, Hos. 2:5–7 is one of five of the examples that does not contain all six divisions. What 29.  D. N. Freedman, ‘pšty in Hosea 2’, JBL 74 (1955), p. 275. 30.  Freedman, ‘pšty in Hosea 2’, p. 275 n. 1. 31.  C. Westermann, The Forms of Prophetic Speech (trans. H. C. White; London: Lutterworth, 1967), p. 49. 32.  Westermann, The Forms of Prophetic Speech, pp. 174–75.

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is significant is the fact that in seven (Isa. 8:6–8; 30:12–14; Jer. 5:10–14; 7:16–18:20; Hos. 2:5–7; Mic. 2:1–4; 3:9–12) of the nine paradigmatic examples of prophetic speech the punishment for misdeeds is introduced by the formulaic lāken ‘therefore’. Indeed, in Hos. 2:8 and Hos. 2:11 the formulaic lāken would also seem to introduce the threatened punishment for misdeeds as follows: 2:8: lākēn hinĕnî śāk et-darkēk bassîrîm wĕgādartî et-gĕdērāh ûnĕtîbôtêāh lō timṣā ‘Therefore (LXX διὰ τοῦτο), I hereby hedge up your path with thorns, and I shall erect a fence around her, so that she shall not find her paths [to continue to attach herself to her paramours; see Hos. 2:9]’

2:11: lākēn āšûb wĕlāqaḥtî dĕgānî bĕittô//wĕtîrôšî bĕmôădô wĕhiṣṣaltî ṣamrî ûpištî lĕkassôt et-erwātāh ‘Therefore (again LXX translates διὰ τοῦτο with precisely this meaning), I shall take back my grain in its appropriate season//and my wine at its appropriate time of the year, and I shall take away my wool and my linen for covering her nakedness’

It would seem that the three times stated ‘therefore’ (Hos. 2:8, 11, 16) is employed by our prophet in Hos. 2:4–25 to convey two distinct and contrary messages, the first of which is that misbehaviour will have its logical and reciprocal consequences; the second of which is that God will decide not to punish misbehaviour but to change it by showering Israel with love (Hos. 2:16–25). For the likelihood that the third lākēn, which appears in Hos. 2:16, is a very ancient scribal error, see below. In an earlier study33 I suggested that God, as it were, had undergone a transformation between his initial attitude of vindictiveness expressed in Hos. 2:4–15 and his attitude of reconciliation, which reaches its climax in Hos. 2:16–17, where God says, ‘I shall entice her, and I shall take her out into the wilderness, and I shall speak tenderly to her [the same expression that is employed in Isa. 40:2 and also, mirabile dictu, in Gen. 34:3]… 33.  M. I. Gruber, ‘A Reevaluation of Hosea 1–2: Philology Informed by Life Experience’, in The Personal Voice in Biblical Interpretation (ed. Ingrid Rosa Kitzberger; London & New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 170–82.

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There she shall call out [Hebrew verbal root ny in the same sense as in Ps. 119:172a: taan lĕšônî imrātekā ‘my tongue shall sing your promise’] as in the days of her youth when she ascended from Egypt’. While indeed the wilderness/desert can be a dangerous, life-threatening place for persons who go there without sufficient water, Hosea’s referring to the wilderness as the location of the initial honeymoon between God the husband and Israel the wife and as the place to which the once loving couple would return to renew their relationship seems to be reflected in the words of one of the two prophets (Jeremiah and Ezekiel), who were especially influenced by the use of the marriage metaphor for the relationship of God and Israel. In Jer. 2:2 we read as follows: ‘I [God] give you [Israel personified as God’s wife] credit for your devotion [to me] in your youth, your love [for me] as a bride, how you followed after me in the wilderness, in a land not sown’. As I suggested elsewhere,34 God, in Hos. 2:16–17, does what many a reasonable husband might do after some marital counselling, namely, he takes his wife away for a weekend, a kind of second honeymoon in the very place where they celebrated their first honeymoon. Seen in this light, the third and seemingly incongruous lākēn ‘therefore’ in Hos. 2:16, rather than introducing another series of logical consequences of Israel’s misbehaviour (as in Hos. 2:8 and 2:11), here present’s God’s own about-face or rethinking. On the other hand, Clines suggests the following: ‘The lākēn “therefore” sentences [in Hos. 2:8–16] introduce the three movements in Yhwh’s treatment of Israel: first, he will prevent her harlotry from occurring again (by barring her way, v. 8); secondly, he will remove his gifts of grain, wine, and oil (so that Israel may recognize that she is dependent on him, not on the Baalim); thirdly, he will resume his exclusive relationship with her, and restore his gifts to her. In the first judgment she is deprived of access to what she believes to be the source of her well-being; in the second, she is deprived of the well-being itself; and in the third (remarkably) she has her well-being restored by the one who is its true source’.35 As Clines explains further on, ‘Two major exegetical decisions hang upon a recognition of the sequential structure of the poem: The first of these decisions is the recognition that the third lākēn “therefore” is entirely out of character: it is not a judgment speech at all, and must be seen as a delightful reversal of the expected, a bold rejection of the causal nexus between sin and punishment. Indeed, some have seen in the reference to Israel’s being taken into the wilderness (weholaktîāh 34.  Gruber, ‘Reevaluation’, p. 176. 35.  Clines, ‘Hosea 2: Structure and Interpretation’, p. 296.

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hammidbār, v. 16) a punishment, specifically of exile.’36 Clines rejects the interpretation of wilderness here as a reference to exile as punishment but rather as (following Mays37) an indication of ‘a time and situation in which the pristine relation between God and people was untarnished and Israel depended utterly on Yahweh (cf. 13.4f)’. Clines explains what happens in the following manner: ‘It is a theologically creative and profound move that in effect negates the validity or effectiveness of punishment as a response to sin. In this non-judgmental “judgment” speech (i.e. judgment in form but not in content) Yahweh announces that he will love Israel out of her unfaithfulness, and in response to her harlotry will woo her to himself and renew his gifts to her’. Just as in an earlier work I saw the third ‘therefore’ as an indication of God’s sudden change of heart,38 so Clines suggests that the three ‘therefores’ introduce ‘a set of options he [God] opened himself up to’.39 Clines further suggests that the mood of Hos. 2:4–17 is ‘one of divine indecision—which issues in an unexpected and unconditional act of grace’.40 Clines finds support in Hos. 6:4 and 11:8.41 Cassuto, on the other hand, sees in the original design of the second chapter of the book of Hosea, Hos. 2:1–3 as ‘a prologue, which sets before the audience the goal towards which the prophetic utterance is directed… He [the prophet] wished to announce to his brethren the good tidings of the nation’s return to its God after it had suffered retributions, of its resurgence after exile, and of its resuscitation to new life in its own land; this thought he states at the beginning of his address.’42 Interestingly, NJPS seems to leave all the options open in translating all three of the occurrences of lākēn in Hos. 2:8–16 as ‘Assuredly’. There is another possibility, which, however, is not reflected in the ancient versions and that is that originally there was no anomalous lākēn ‘therefore’ in Hos. 2:16. After all, the latter particle, as noted by Westermann and Clines, normally introduces the punishment which should rightly be meted out to the person or persons who have committed

36.  Clines, ‘Hosea 2: Structure and Interpretation’, p. 297. In his n. 14, Clines cites the commentaries of Cheyne, Hosea, p. 53 and Edmond Jacob, Osée (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1982), p. 30. 37.  J. L. Mays, Hosea: A Commentary (London: SCM, 1969), p. 44. 38.  Gruber, ‘A Re-Evaluation of Hosea 1–2’, pp. 170–82. 39.  Clines, ‘Hosea 2: Structure and Interpretation’, p. 297. 40.  Clines, ‘Hosea 2: Structure and Interpretation’, pp. 297–98. 41.  Clines, ‘Hosea 2: Structure and Interpretation’, pp. 297–98. 42.  Cassuto, ‘The Second Chapter of the Book of Hosea’, p. 118.

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the offense(s) mentioned just before the particle lākēn, exactly as we find in Hos. 2:8, 11. The other possibility is that originally the about-face on the part of God, in which he offers not punishment but reconciliation, was originally introduced not by lākēn but rather by the particle ākēn, whose meaning, ‘the very opposite of what I had previously thought’, was noted by Rabbi Samuel son of Meir (1085–1158 CE) in his commentary at Exod. 2:14. This meaning of Heb. ākēn was rediscovered independently by K. Budde.43 It is not unlikely that a copyist errantly wrote lākēn rather than ākēn in Hos. 2:16 because this copyist had seen lākēn twice before within Hos. 2:4–25, namely at Hos. 2:8 and Hos. 2:11. If, indeed, we adopt the suggestion that the third lākēn in Hos. 2:8–16 reflects an ancient miscopying of an original ākēn, we can still accept the suggestions of Cassuto, Clines, and the present writer that God, as portrayed in Hos. 2, prefers reconciliation to punishment without necessarily assuming that Hos. 2:16 uses the particle lākēn in an ironic sense, which, mirabile dictu, would mean that here and here alone the word lākēn is, in fact, a synonym of ākēn. The suggested emendation was already proposed by Graetz,44 and it is cited by Harper45 in his list of proposed emendations and variant readings for Hos. 2:16–17. Harper, however, insists that there is no difference in meaning between lākēn ‘therefore’ in 2:16 and its wholly appropriate meaning ‘therefore’ in Hos. 2:8, 11. For my interpretation, inspired by Clines, see below at 2:16. 2:9 wĕriddĕpâ et-mĕahăbêha wĕlō-taśśîg ōtām ȗbiqšātam wĕlō timṣā ‘Consequently, she will run after her lovers, but she will not locate them//she will seek them, but she will not find them’ Orlinsky points out that English versions prior to NJPS should be called ‘and Bibles’ because they consistently translate the so-called conjunctive waw and the so-called waw consecutive by the English coordinate conjunction ‘and’ when, in fact, the Hebrew conjunctive waw and waw consecutive frequently mark the beginning of clauses whose relationship to the previous or following clause is subordinate rather than coordinate.46 Here in Hos. 2:9 the point is that errant Israel, having thought that she was sustained by gods other than the God of Israel (Hos. 2:7), will 43.  K. Budde, ‘Brief Communications’, JBL 40 (1921), pp. 39–41. 44.  Graetz, Emendationes, p. 12. 45.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 239. 46.  Orlinsky, Notes, p. 19.

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assuredly respond to the decision of the God of Israel, who is the real and only source of the sustenance of all living things on this earth, to withhold from Israel all the things that were essential for her food, drink, and clothing and general well-being in the only way that a misinformed metaphoric spouse could possibly respond. Her response is to seek the metaphoric paramours, i.e., the deities, whom Lady Israel believed had until recently supplied her with her every need. However, the prophet, speaking in the name of God, tells us that her search for these paramours/ deities is in vain. The literal meaning of the text in Hos. 2:9d, ‘but she will not find them’, suggests that already in the ninth century BCE during the reign of King Jehu (842–814 BCE) our prophet adumbrates the belief found later in 1 Chron. 16:26, ‘All the gods of the [other] peoples are mere idols, but Yhwh made the heavens’ (cf. Hos. 13:4, ‘There is no deliverer besides me’). If the first anticipated consequence of God the husband’s withholding from Lady Israel, the wife, the essentials for her sustenance and wellbeing is that Lady Israel will go in search of her non-existent paramours, whom she only imagined had been supplying her with the essentials for her sustenance and well-being, the next anticipated consequence, which is the one desired by her loving husband, who is God, is the one spelled out in Hos. 2:9e–g. wĕāmĕrâ ‘Then she will say’ Here we have the feminine singular third person perfect with waw consecutive to convey the future, and here, as in Hos. 2:9a the waw at the head of the clause conveys not coordination, i.e., ‘and’, but rather subordination expressed here in my translation by the English subordinate conjunction ‘then’ marking Hos. 2:9e as a temporal clause. In other words, the point made here by our prophet, speaking in the name of the God of Israel, is that when Lady Israel will have realized that for whatever reason the gods whom she has been venerating cannot supply her most basic needs, she will give up her vain pursuit of these metaphoric paramours and return to her metaphoric husband, the God of Israel. Here in Hos. 2:9e the verb ‘to say’ can be construed either as meaning ‘she will say (to herself)’ or ‘she will think’ (see the discussion in DCH 1:324).

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ēlĕkâ wĕāšȗbâ el-îšî hārīšōn ‘Let me go, and let me return to my first husband’ Andersen and Freedman note that normally an auxiliary verb such as ‘let me go’ is followed by an infinitive as, for example, in Hos. 11:9 (see below).47 However, the use of two finite verbs in sequence can have the same effect, by means of hendiadys.48 Here as in only eight instances in the entire Hebrew Bible ‘my husband’ is expressed by the Hebrew îšî, which may mean either ‘my man’, in which case îš in those contexts is masculine not only in grammatical gender but also in social gender.49 The other seven instances in the Hebrew Bible where îšî means ‘my husband’ include Hos. 2:18 (see the extensive discussion there), four instances where the matriarch Leah refers to the patriarch Jacob as îšî ‘my husband’ (Gen. 29:32, 34; 30:15, 20), the speech of the wise woman of Tekoah in 2 Sam. 14:5, and the words of the Shunamite woman to Elisha in 2 Kgs 4:1. While it is possible that îšî meaning ‘my man (i.e., the man to whom I am married)’ is the masculine counterpart of ištî ‘my woman (i.e., the woman to whom I am married)’ without the slightest suggestion of the wife’s being subordinate to that man, the use of the identical term îšî seven times in the Mishnah in the expression îšî kōhēn gādōl ‘my lordship, high priest’ (m. Yoma 1:3, 5, 7; 4:1 [twice]; m. Tamid 6:3; m. Parah 3:8) may, perhaps, cast some doubt as to whether or not îšî in Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew is a more egalitarian expression for ‘my husband’ than baălî. Wolff contends, ‘ “My husband” (îšî) is apparently an endearing expression; it addresses the husband as one who belongs to and who even enjoys a deep personal relationship with the “wife” (iššâ). On the other hand, the address “my lord”, “my Baal” (baălî) emphasizes the legal position of the husband as lord and “owner” of the wife. There is not necessarily a correspondingly genuine and personal devotion to her as his wife. Hence, this saying announces that Israel will not just respect Yahweh somewhat reluctantly, since he is its legal lord, but it knows itself to be placed completely in a completely new, living relationship with him.’50 Thus Wolff suggests that the interpretation given to a Modern Hebrew-speaking woman’s referring 47.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 244. 48.  For other examples of such hendiadys see Hos. 1:6 and my discussion there; see also below at Hos. 2:11; and see also Hos. 3:5; 14:8. See also GKC #120c. 49.  For the distinction between these two kinds of gender two, see D. E. S. Stein, ‘The Grammar of Social Gender in Biblical Hebrew’, Hebrew Studies 49 (2009), pp. 7–26. 50.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 49.

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to her male spouse as îšî rather than baălî (see the discussion below at Hos. 2:18) reflects a distinction, which has its roots in Hos. 2:9, 18. Macintosh, on the other hand, argues, ‘It seems unlikely that in everyday speech there was no practical difference between îšî and baălî’.51 I would argue, on the other hand, that there is a distinction but not on the level of the husband and wife as objects of comparison but rather on the level of the metaphor, which refers to the people of Israel in its relationship to the God of Israel and the Canaanite Hadad respectively. A careful look at the rhetorical structure of Hos. 2:9–18 reveals that our prophet/poet creates an envelope or inclusio that sets apart Hos. 2:9–18 from the rest of the chapter by means of his placing at the beginning of the unit the pair îšî–baăl and at the end of the unit that same pair îšî–baălî. Now in referring to God, who was the real source of all the bounty that she had wrongly attributed to Baal, as îšî hārīšōn ‘my first husband’, our prophet reminds us of the use of the same expression (without the personal pronominal suffix) for a first husband in Deut. 24:3. If indeed, îšî hārīšōn in Hos. 2:9 can only mean ‘my first husband’, the term corresponds to hāîš hārīšōn ‘the first husband’ in Deut. 24:3. There, the term designates a husband, who had divorced a wife who subsequently married another man. It is possible, therefore, that Hos. 2:9 may have inspired Jer. 3:1–4:2. Deuteronomy 24:1–4 forbids the first husband who divorced the wife who subsequently married another man from remarrying her. However, in Hos. 2:9 God allows himself, as it were, to remarry Lady Israel whom God had divorced and who had been married to another deity designated as Baal. Thus it is not unlikely that Hos. 2:9 inspired Jer. 3:1–4:2 in which Jeremiah, speaking in the name of God, asserts that God takes the liberty with respect to the people of Judah in the late seventh century BCE–early sixth century BCE, of violating the provisions of Deut. 24:1–4 that forbid a husband from remarrying a divorced spouse, who had in the interval between divorce and remarriage been legally married to someone else.52 Unlike Jeremiah, the prophetic author of Hos. 2:9–18 does not in any way suggest that he was aware that God’s taking back Lady Israel was a violation of a canonical law.

51.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 78. 52.  See the extensive discussion in M. I. Gruber, ‘Jeremiah 3:1–4:2 between Deuteronomy 24 and Matthew 5: Jeremiah’s Exercise in Ethical Criticism’, in Birkat Shalom: Studies in the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern Literature, and Postbiblical Judaism Presented to Shalom M. Paul on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (ed. Ch. Cohen et al.; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), pp. 233–49.

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kî ṭōb lî āz mēattâ ‘For I was better off then than now’ In this clause the prophet, speaking in the name of God, describes what Lady Israel is likely to say when she realizes that she should return to her first husband, i.e., the loving husband who took care of her before she attached herself to various paramours (metaphors for deities other than the God of Israel), who have now, she believes, disappointed her. At this point our prophet, speaking in the name of God, explains that Israel’s devotion to other deities, whose existence our prophet speaking in the name of God denies (see above at Hos. 2:9a–d), was the result of Israel’s ignorance of reality. The same idea that idolatry is the consequence of ignorance while devotion to the God of Israel who made heaven and earth is the result of a proper education is found in Isa. 40:17–26; 43:6–20; 44:18; 46:3–7. 2:10 wĕhî lō yādĕâ kî ānōkî nātattî lāh haddāgān wĕhattîrōš wĕhayiṣhār ‘She (personified Lady Israel) did not know that I (Yhwh) had given her the grain and the wine and the oil’ The expression ‘the grain and the wine and the oil’ precisely in that order with the definite article before each of the three elements and the coordinate waw preceding both the second and the third element is found only three times in all of the Hebrew Bible, namely here at Hos. 2:10a and again in Joel 2:19 and Neh. 13:12. The expression ‘grain, wine, and oil’, without the definite article and with the coordinate waw only before the third element, is found only in Deut. 28:51 and 2 Chron. 31:5. The expression ‘your grain and your wine and your oil’ is found three times, in Deut. 7:13; 11:14; and 12:17, while the expression ‘your grain, your wine, and your oil’ with the coordinate waw only before the last of the three elements is found only in Deut. 14:23 and 18:4. These seemingly trivial details should be sufficient to put to rest the contention of B. A. Levine that Hos. 1–3 and Deuteronomy share dictional correspondence with respect to the trilogy at hand and that this dictional correspondence points to a ninth-century BCE origin of Deuteronomy in the Northern Kingdom.53 In fact, as we shall see, while grain, wine, and oil do occur together in all of the texts I have just cited, in each instance these three items are juxtaposed with other items that are not common to the aforementioned texts. Indeed, in Hos. 2:10 and only in Hos. 2:10 we have a rather interesting parallelism, which has no parallels in the aforementioned texts. Here in Hos. 2:10c–d the parallelism is as follows: 53.  B. A. Levine, Review of H. Louis Ginsberg, The Israelian Heritage of Judaism, AJS Review 12 (1987), pp. 143–57 (149–50).

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kî ānokî nātattî lāh haddāgān wĕhattîrôš wĕhayyiṣhār wĕkesep hirbêtî lāh wĕzāhāb āśȗ labbāal ‘That I gave her the grain, and the wine, and the oil//And silver I multiplied for her//And gold they consecrated to Baal’ The vocalization of labbāal with long a in the first syllable of the epithet Baal, a segholate noun, is occasioned by the latter epithet’s occurring at the end of the verse, where a pausal form is required by the grammar rules of MT. Note that the received text of b. Ber. 32b has wĕkesep hirbêtî lāhem wĕzāhāb āśȗ ‘And silver I multiplied for them [i.e. the Israelites who are then understood to constitute the antecedent of the third person common plural pronoun presupposed by the third person common plural verb āśȗ “they consecrated”]’. Hosea 1:10b–c exhibits a chiastic structure of ab–b′a′ followed by a surprise ending, which fits in (notwithstanding the tendency of many modern commentators to see here a later gloss) because the surprise ending conforms to the standard word pair silver//gold precisely in that order (e.g., Gen. 24:35; Num. 22:18; 24:3; Deut. 7:25; 8:13; and altogether 20 instances). In the first of the two clauses we have the verb, which, as is typical in Biblical Hebrew, combines both subject and simple predicate ‘I gave’ followed by the direct object, which consists of a listing of the three agricultural products we encountered also in Deuteronomy, Joel, and Nehemiah. In the second of the two clauses we have the direct object followed by the verb ‘I multiplied’. That object, strange to relate, is not a synonym of grain, wine, and oil but another staple of the good life, namely silver. Indeed, the verb hrbyty, meaning either ‘I multiplied’ (Hos. 2:10; 12:11) or ‘you (feminine singular) multiplied’ (Jer. 46:11), is extremely rare, being found only in those two places in the book of Hosea and possibly in the kethib at Jer. 46:11. So here God says, ‘I gave you, Lady Israel, agricultural products and I gave you a lot of silver and gold, and instead of acknowledging that I God, your devoted husband, endowed you with all of these things, you gave all of these things as gifts to another deity, known by his epithet Baal’. Our prophet conveys this message by his most creative use, first of all, of the chiastic structure which indicates that just as ‘I gave’ corresponds to ‘I multiplied’, so do the three agricultural products correspond to silver as gifts of God’s beneficence. Unexpectedly, our prophet throws in a third element at the end of Hos. 2:10e. Now it is well known that silver and gold are often juxtaposed and often appear in synonymous parallelism. Consequently, one would have expected the prophet to make use of a third verb meaning ‘give, bestow’ before the direct object ‘gold’. Instead, the prophet provides a surprise ending to the verse. He indicates that the silver, which God had given

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to Israel, was given instead to a rival deity as it were, or, if, you will, a rival husband, and it goes without saying that the Hebrew noun baal, as we shall be reminded in Hos. 2:18, can both serve as a noun meaning ‘husband’ and as the most common epithet of the Canaanite deity Hadad, the deity in charge, inter alia, of storms and rain. The parallel structure within Hos. 2:10 intimates that just as God had provided and multiplied grain, wine, oil, and silver (and gold that often appears with silver in both the Bible and in daily life throughout the world), so did Israel take gold and by implication also silver and grain, and wine and oil and dedicate them to Hadad. It is fundamental to the understanding of Hos. 2:10–18 to recall that the name Baal, which is treated in the standard English translations of Hebrew Scripture as a proper name (so it seems to be treated in numerous biblical texts including Judg. 6:25, 28, 30, 32; 1 Kgs 16:31, 32; 18:25, 26, 40; 22:54; Jer. 2:8; 12:16; 19:5; 23:13, 17; Hos. 13:1; on the plural form see below), was originally an epithet. Originally the word Baal meaning literally ‘lord, master’, was construed in texts that came to be included in Hebrew Scripture primarily as an epithet for the Northwest Semitic god responsible for storm and rain, whose proper name was Hadad just as the proper name of the God of Israel was in most books of what came to be the Hebrew Bible, Yhwh. It is well known that in Second Temple times and in Rabbinic tradition it became common to restrict the pronunciation of the name Yhwh to liturgical prayer in the Temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem and to substitute the epithet ădōnāy, commonly translated ‘the LORD’, although like other Hebrew and Phoenician names and epithets the form itself is a plural majestatis and means literally ‘my sovereigns’. Reading Yhwh as ădōnāy ‘the LORD’ is reflected also in editions of LXX, which employ the epithet κύριος, and it is reflected also in the Vulgate, which substitutes dominus ‘Lord’ for Heb. Yhwh. However, it should be recognized that the basis for equating Yhwh and ădōnāy is to be found in biblical texts, some of them possibly dating from the First Temple period, which employ the epithet ădōnāy as a substitute for the proper name Yhwh (e.g., Gen. 18:3, 27, 31; 19:18; Exod. 4:10, 13; 5:22; 15:17; 34:9; Isa. 4:4; 6:1; 7:14) and the epithet ădōnāy in synonymous parallelism with the proper name Yhwh in Isa. 3:17; 49:14. The plural majestatis in names and epithets of God is reflected not only in the common ĕlōhîm, which is generally employed with singular verbs and singular adjectives. It is also employed to this day with grammatically plural adjectives in the speech of monotheistic Jews of all denominations in the expressions ĕlōhîm addîrîm ‘mighty God’ (literally ‘mighty gods’; derived from hāĕlōhîm hāaddîrîm in 1 Sam. 4:18) and ĕlōhîm ḥayyîm ‘living God’ (Deut. 5:23; 1 Sam. 17:26, 36; Jer. 23:36). Similarly,

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in Phoenician, since the term ēlîm ‘god’ referring, inter alia, to a deity called El, although grammatically plural, came to be construed as a singular noun, a plural form, alōnîm ‘gods’, had to be created. Mutatis mutandi, as a consequence of the fact that Modern English is the only European language lacking the familiar form of the second person singular personal pronoun, ‘thou, thee’, whose place has been taken by the familiar form ‘you’, which is also the plural form of the second person personal pronoun, speakers of English in the southern states of the United States of America devised an unequivocally plural form ya’ll (a contraction of ‘you all’). Subsequently, when ya’ll was used indiscriminately for both singular and plural, speakers of English in the southern states of the USA added the unequivocal ‘all ya’ll’. It has long been argued that originally LXX did not translate Yhwh as κύριος ‘Lord’ but simply inserted the Hebrew name Yhwh in Hebrew characters into the translation.54 In the Ugaritic tablets that record the epic of Baal, the epithet bl is found more frequently than either the proper name of the god of storm and rain Hadad or another epithet dn, which is the singular form of the most common epithet for Yhwh in Rabbinic Judaism, and which is pronounced in place of Yhwh in both the liturgical reading of Scripture and in liturgical prayers, which write or print either the divine name Yhwh or an abbreviation for it such as yy but expect the person praying to say ădōnāy. In my ‘The Qadesh in the Book of Kings and in Other Sources’,55 I pointed out that just as the title khn could designate ‘priest’ both among adherents of the Yhwh-alone coalition and among devotees of other deities include the Canaanite–Phoenician Hadad, while the titles kmr and qdš were construed as typically Canaanite and not to be used with reference to Yahwistic clergy, so did the epithet dn continue to designate both the Canaanite– Phoenician Hadad, and the Israelite Yhwh. Mutatis mutandi, while Jews and Christians of all denominations pray sitting and standing, prostration was banned from Jewish worship except for one occasion in the liturgy of the New Year and four in the liturgy of the Day of Atonement, in the early centuries of the Christian Era as a typically Christian posture of worship. The process of declaring the epithet bl inappropriate with reference to the God of Israel is reflected here in Hos. 2:10–19, which I have dated to the ninth century BCE. Earlier and later stages of that process and the 54.  See the discussion and extensive literature cited in Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 132; contrast M. Rösel, ‘The Reading and Translation of the Divine Name in the Masoretic Tradition and the Greek Pentateuch’, JSOT 31 (2007), pp. 411–28 (414–19). 55.  M. I. Gruber, ‘The Qadesh in the Book of Kings and in Other Sources’, Tarbiz 52 (1982), pp. 167–76 (172) (in Hebrew).

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completion of that process are reflected respectively in the names that King Saul and King David (tenth century BCE) gave to their sons and in the eradication of some of the names employing the theophoric name Baal from the standard Hebrew text at 2 Sam. 2–4. There one finds that one of King Saul’s sons was called Ish-Boshet, meaning ‘man of Shame’, a dysphemism for the original Ish-Baal ‘man of Baal’ retained in 1 Chron. 8:33; 9:39. Similarly, in 2 Sam. 4; 9; 16; 19; 21, where one of King Saul’s sons and one of Jonathan’s sons are both named Mephibosheth, which is commonly understood to be a dysphemism for Mephi-Baal.56 The deity Hadad in the religions of the peoples of Syria-Palestine in the second and first millennia BCE has been discussed extensively.57 The idea that Baal is the epithet of the deity responsible for rain is reflected in Rabbinic Hebrew in the second century CE, which refers to a rain-watered field (as against an irrigated field) as śĕdeh bêt habbaal ‘a field [which derives its water] from the house of the lord [of the heavens]’, i.e., Yhwh, the God of Israel (see t. Moed Qaṭan 1:1). On the basis of 2 Chron. 24:7, ‘…and had even used the sacred things of the Temple of Yhwh for the Baals’, it has been suggested that wēzāhāb āśû labbāal in Hos. 2:10 may refer to gold which is consecrated to the worship of Baal while on the basis of Hos. 8:4, ‘[from] their silver and their gold they made for themselves idols’, it has been argued that Hos. 2:10 may refer to the Israelites’ having made cult statues of Baal from the silver and gold that God had given to the Israelites.58 TJ renders wĕdahbā minnēh ăbadȗ lĕṭāăwātā ‘…and gold from which they made idols’. No less important than TJ’s supporting the interpretation of the clause āśȗ labbāal to mean ‘they (the people of Israel) made gold into cultic statues for the worship of gods other than the god of Israel’ is TJ’s penetrating insight into the meaning of the surprise ending of Hos. 2:10 in which the phrase ‘silver and gold’ serves as an instance of the poetic device called gapping. In the case at hand the two terms ‘silver and gold’ serve both as the compound direct objects of the verb ‘I multiplied’ and as compound direct objects of the verb ‘they made’. This interpretation of Hos. 2:10 is found already in LXX (where the verse numbering is 2:8), which reads as follows: καὶ ἀργύριον ἐπλήθυνα αὐτῇ. αὕτη δὲ ἀργυρᾶ καὶ χρυσᾶ ἐποίσε τῇ Βάαλ, which means ‘and silver I multiplied for her. However she made 56.  See H. P. Smith, Samuel (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1899), pp. 127, 269, 285, For an alternative interpretation of the names in question see M. Tsevat, ‘Ish­ bosheth and Congeners: The Names and Their Study’, HUCA 46 (1975), pp. 71–87. 57.  See J. C. Greenfield, ‘Hadad’, in DDD2, pp. 377–82. 58.  For the two alternative interpretations see Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 244; Macintosh, Hosea, p. 55.

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silver and gold for Baal.’ LXX leaves open the question as to whether what Lady Israel made for Baal was statues or other objects devoted to the worship of Baal. L. C. L. Brenton uses the word images (in italics) to indicate that this word is not found in the Greek text.59 2:11 lākēn ‘Therefore’ Here, as in Hos. 2:8 and in numerous other cases in Hebrew Scripture cited in my commentary at Hos. 2:8, the particle lākēn ‘therefore’ introduces the account of the punishment, which should serve as the logical consequences of Lady Israel’s misbehaviour. āšȗb wĕlāqaḥṭî (literally) ‘I shall go back and I shall take’ In fact, the pair of verbs is idiomatically a hendiadys meaning ‘I shall take back’. Aside from being the third instance encountered in Hos. 1–2 of two finite verbs joined by either conjunctive waw or waw consecutive where one might have expected an auxiliary verb followed by infinitive (see the discussion at Hos. 1:6; 2:9), the pair of verbs here in Hos. 2:11 expresses a reciprocal relationship with respect to the similar pair of verbs, ‘let me go, and let me return’, in Hos. 2:9, also a hendiadys meaning ‘let me resolve to repent’. Hosea 2:9 tells us quite clearly that when God had decided to withhold from Lady Israel all of the material goods that Lady Israel had through error believed to be gifts from Baal, Israel decided to return to her first husband, namely Yhwh. Consequently, Hos. 2:9–14 constitutes a flashback in which the prophet speaking in the name of God describes in detail the process, which God had initiated, leading to Lady Israel’s saying to herself, ‘Let me go and let me return’. The process of withholding from Lady Israel all the earthly goods that any knowledgeable person should know come from Yhwh, the God of Israel, begins with God’s saying to himself, ‘Let me go back, and let me take’, or, as I suggested above, ‘Let me take back’. dĕgānî bĕittô//wĕtîrōšî bĕmōădô ‘My grain [from which people make bread] at its season//and my wine [which people make from grapes] at its appointed time’ The pair of synonymous nouns et//môēd both designating a point in time established in advance is attested only here in Hos. 2:11. The Hebrew pair meaning grain and wine in that order appears also (albeit without the possessive pronominal suffixes) also in Gen. 27:28; Deut. 33:28; 59.  Brenton, The Septuagint with Apocrypha.

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2 Kgs 18:32; Isa. 36:17; Hos. 7:14; 2 Chron. 32:28. Probably, in the present context it is meant to be a shorthand reference to the three items cited in Hos. 2:10c, namely ‘the grain, and the wine, and the oil’. However, rather than referring back to the silver and the gold mentioned by God in Hos. 2:10d, God explains in Hos. 2:11c how it is that he is going to carry out, as spelled out in Hos. 2:11d, the threat mentioned in Hos. 2:5 of stripping Lady Israel naked (concerning which see my commentary at Hos. 2:5). In Hos. 2:11c–d God tell us that just as he had planned to withhold the grain and the wine, which Israel had wrongly attributed to Baal (Hos. 2:10), so also: wĕhiṣṣaltî ṣamrî ȗpištî ‘I shall withhold my wool and my linen’ According to Hos. 2:7, Lady Israel had wrongly attributed her wool and her linen to her paramours, who are a metaphor there for other deities. (See above at Hos. 2:7.) It is important to note that the pair ṣamrî ȗpištî ‘my wool and my linen’ occurs in Hebrew Scripture only twice, specifically in Hos. 2:7, where the pronominal suffix meaning ‘my’ refers to Lady Israel, and Hos. 2:11c, where the same pronominal suffix refers to the God of Israel. The verbal root nṣl is very frequently attested in the hiphil conjugation in the sense ‘deliver, save, rescue, recover’ (see DCH 5:742–44) and rarely in the sense ‘take away, snatch away, withhold’. Aside from Hos. 2:11, the verb hiṣṣîl ‘rescue, recover, take away’ is attested in Gen. 31:9 (‘God took away your father’s flock, and he gave it to me’); Gen. 31:16 (‘All the wealth, which God took away/recovered/rescued from our father belongs to us and to our children’); and Ps. 119:43 (‘Do not withhold a word of truth from my mouth…’). With Freedman, one should probably revocalize pištî as pištay; see the discussion above at Hos. 2:7g.60 lĕkassōt et-erwātāh ‘to clothe her nakedness’ Hosea 2:11d tells us what is the function of wool and linen, in case we forgot. Lady Israel has out of ignorance venerated not Yhwh, who is the real provider of sheep, who provide wool, and of flax plants that provide linen; she has, in fact, venerated other deities, to whom she wrongly attributed her wool and her flax. Thus, it should be understandable that Yhwh will punish Lady Israel by withholding his wool and his linen. That is, indeed, the meaning of lākēn ‘therefore, consequently’ introducing logical consequences//punishment in Hos. 2:8, 11. Rightly, it has been remarked 60.  See Freedman, ‘pšty in Hosea 2’, p. 275.

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(see my commentary at Hos. 2:5) that the description of Yhwh stripping naked his unfaithful wife portrays Yhwh as an abusive husband. Rightly, therefore, has it been noted already that the third lāken in Hos. 2, i.e., the one at Hos. 2:16, may be a very ancient scribal error for an original ākēn meaning ‘the very opposite of what one might have thought previously’, namely that the timeless message of Hos. 1–3 justifies physical abuse and degrading and demeaning a spouse, but rather that the proper solution not only for wayward Israel but for any couple experiencing difficulties in communication is to engage in a regimen of reconciliation as spelled out in Hos. 2:16–25 + Hos. 2:1–3 (see above and below for discussion). In other words, it turns out that everything that was described in Hos. 2:8–9c and in Hos. 2:11–15 was a very tentative and tendentious solution of a misunderstanding between an ignorant Lady Israel and an all-knowing husband, Yhwh. The key to solving the misunderstanding is provided, it turns out, in Hos. 2:10 where it is stated in defence of Lady Israel, ‘However, she (Lady Israel) did not know that I had given her the grain and the wine and the oil…’. If she did not know, then the task of the prophet is to educate Israel in both good behaviour and repentance as spelled out in detail in Ezek. 3:16–21 and 33:1–20 and as hinted at in Hos. 2:9, 16–24 + Hos. 2:1–3. As a consequence of God’s withholding from Lady Israel wool and linen, Lady Israel would have no means to clothe herself. Consequently, God can indeed be portrayed as saying precisely what is attributed to him in Hos. 2:12. See the next lemma. 2:12 wĕattâ ăgalleh et-nablutāh lĕênê mĕahăbêhā ‘And now, therefore, I shall uncover her nakedness in the sight of her paramours’ ‘And now, therefore’ For this nuance of wĕattâ see DCH 6:635. ‘I shall uncover her nakedness’ DCH 5:596 suggests a meaning for the noun nablût in this passage and this passage alone in Hebrew Scripture, along with two cases from Qumran, namely 1QS 10:22; and 4QShirb 18:25, namely ‘lewdness’. ‘In the sight of her paramours’ This idea of publicly disgracing the adulterous female spouse was already stated in different words in Hos. 2:5 where such punishment was conditional upon the failure of the metaphoric unfaithful wife to repent of her

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metaphoric adultery, which is the idolatry practiced by the people of Israel. Here in Hos. 2:11 the nakedness of the metaphoric lady, who stands for the nation of Israel, is the direct consequence of God’s withholding the wool and the linen without which Lady Israel cannot make her clothing to cover her nakedness. The small rhetorical unit in Hos. 2:11–12, which treats of the possibility of withholding not only grain and wine but also wool and linen so that the erstwhile sinner will now be the victim of logical consequences, specifically nakedness, concludes with an ironic use of partial chiasmus, i.e., a structure built upon the model a–b//c–a. In Hos. 2:11c God promised ‘I will take away’, employing the verb hiṣṣîl, which can mean both ‘take away’ and ‘rescue’ while in Hos. 2:12b God tells us, as it were, that there is no escape from God’s taking away the wool and the linen and the consequent nakedness because ‘no person (Heb. îš, which, we saw can also mean ‘husband’ and if God is referred to in Hos. 2:9 as Israel’s first husband, then the second husband, who cannot save, must be Baal) can save (again a form of the verb hiṣṣîl) Lady Israel from me’. There is, however, a way out, and that is God’s change of heart based on the idea that while God is all-knowing in both biblical prophecy and biblical narrative, Israel cannot really be blamed for not knowing that God was the real source of grain, wine, oil, wool, flax, and everything, for that matter. Thus, God’s change of heart is appropriately introduced in Hos. 2:16 by the original ākēn. Contrary to what we might have thought about ancient Israel, Hosea, and the Bible, and the God of Israel, God intends to undertake a program to rehabilitate the metaphoric marriage by taking his spouse, who was apparently neglected and therefore unfaithful out of desperation, on a second honeymoon. (For a highly attractive alternative to emending MT’s lākēn to ākēn in Hos. 2:16, see below.) 2:13–15 In this short passage that follows the announcement that Israel’s devotion to Baal was the consequence of ignorance (Hos. 2:10) and the beginning of the second series of announcements of logical consequences of deliberate misbehaviour introduced by lākēn ‘therefore’ in 2:11–12, which has just now been considered, the prophet, speaking in the name of God, tells us how he would (if ignorant Israel could really be punished for a misunderstanding; 2:10, 16 seem to make that quite clear) have punished Israel and in so doing put an end to the worship of Baal and everything associated with that worship. Modern scholars and their scholarly myth of a Baal cult that involved random sexual encounters as promoting fertility

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of the land notwithstanding, there is no mention of such a practice in the detailed list of practices enumerated in 2:13–15 nor in any text from the ancient Near East (see my discussion of this scholarly myth in the commentary at 4:13–15 and the literature cited there). 2:13 wĕhišbattî kol-meśôśāh ḥaggāh ḥodšāh wĕšabbatāh ‘I shall put an end to all of her rejoicing her holiday, her new moon, and her Sabbath’ There is a near chiasmus in these two clauses, which begin with a form of the verb šbt ‘cease, rest’ and concludes with mention of a festival we now know to have been unique to the religion of ancient Israel, namely the weekly Sabbath (from the very same root) at the end of a seven-day week.61 Thus Hos. 2:13 does not castigate Israel for observing pagan festivals but promises that so long as she flirts with the veneration of other gods she will not be allowed to observe any of her festivals as well as the famous pair ‘new moon and sabbath’ which are referred to in 2 Kgs 4:23; Isa. 1:13–14; 66:23; and Amos 8:5. Since Sabbath, new moons, and festivals were occasions when according to Pentateuchal law and the evidence provided by biblical narrative and prophetic chastisement, even chattel slaves were given a vacation from work, to put an end to these rare occasions when persons not belonging to the nobility could enjoy rest and recreation constitutes a serious threat, far more real than the undressing of a metaphoric woman. wĕkol môădāh ‘and all of her periodic festivals’ Each of the four Hebrew terms for holy days, namely, ‘holiday’, ‘new moon’, ‘Sabbath’, and ‘festival’ appears in Hos. 2:13 in the grammatical singular and functions as a collective noun. I have therefore translated the first three of these nouns using the English singular and the fourth noun using the English plural. My reason for so doing is that the English singular of each of the first three nouns seems to convey the precise sense of the Hebrew equivalent. The final phrase of Hos. 2:13 does not seem to lend itself to a literal translation as a singular denoting a collective noun. This final phrase of Hos. 2:13 may be construed as a climactic conclusion to the small unit threatening Israel with the loss of her leisure time and the associated family gatherings if Israel does not cease and desist from venerating Baal. 61.  See M. I. Gruber, ‘The Source of the Biblical Sabbath’, JANESCU 1, no. 2 (1969), pp. 14–20; reprinted in Gruber, The Motherhood of God and Other Studies, pp. 111–19.

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2:14 wahăššimōtî gapnāh ȗtĕnātāh ăšēr āmĕrâ etnâ hēmmâ lî ăšēr nātĕnȗ-lî mĕahăbāy ‘I shall destroy her grapevine and her fig tree of which she said (thought), “They are my fee for sexual services rendered which my paramours gave me” ’ Here our prophet returns to the metaphor of adultery, with which Hos. 1–3 opened in Hos. 1:2b and which was taken up again in Hos. 2:4–15. Yhwh is portrayed as Israel’s metaphoric husband and Israel as the metaphoric unfaithful wife. Likewise, the other gods are her paramours. It should follow, therefore, that the gifts, which out of ignorance she wrongly (see again Hos. 2:10) regarded as gifts given to her by her paramours, may designate fees paid to her for her metaphorical sexual services. However, see below. The precise term etnâ, usually understood to denote ‘fee paid to a harlot for sexual services rendered’, is attested only here in Hos. 2:14 while the longer form etnan appears altogether eleven times in the Bible (Deut. 23:19; Isa. 23:17, 19; Ezek. 16:31, 34 [twice], 41; Hos. 9:1; Mic. 1:7 [three times]) including metaphoric contexts in Ezek. 16:31, 34, 41, where, apparently inspired by Hos. 2, Ezekiel compares personified Jerusalem to a prostitute whose metaphoric paramours are gods other than Yhwh. In fact, Y. Avishur argues that the noun etnâ is to be distinguished from the noun etnan in that etnan denotes ‘fee paid to a harlot for sexual services rendered’ while etnâ denotes ‘gift given by a paramour’.62 In Isa. 23:17–18 we find a distinctly different use of the metaphoric prostitute and her metaphoric fee for services rendered. The latter text refers to the personified city of Tyre and her allegedly unfair trading practices, and it refers to her exorbitant profits as etnan ‘harlot’s fee for services rendered’. In Deut. 23:19 the term refers literally to the fee for sexual services paid to prostitutes. The latter text forbids contributing such fees to the temple of Yhwh. In Hos. 9:1 and Mic. 1:7 this same term also denotes the prostitutes’ fees for services rendered, which enriched also hoteliers and ultimately a large part of the economy of the Northern Kingdom in the eighth century BCE (see Hos. 9:1 and Mic. 1:7 and the discussion in my commentary at Hos. 9:1).

62.  Y. Avishur, Review of W. Kuhnigk, Nordwestsemitische Studien zum Hoseabuch, Kiryath Sefer 50 (1975), pp. 476–89 (475) (in Hebrew). See also Y. Avishur, ‘The Stylistic and Linguistic Relationship of Hosea to Ugaritic Literature’, Beit Mikra 17 (1972), pp. 36–50 (46–47); and S. D. Loewenstamm, ‘Concerning Newly Published Ugaritic Texts’, Leshonenu 29 (1965), pp. 6–8 (6) (in Hebrew).

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Wolff regards the form etnâ found only here as a deliberate neologism created by the prophet to create a play on words with the noun tĕēnātāh ‘her fig tree’;63 and so many other commentaries following Wolff. wěśamtîm ‘I shall turn them into’ The form is first person singular perfect consecutive qal from the root śym/śwm. This verb in the very same sense of ‘turn (a place in one given state) into (a place with another given state)’ is found also in Hos. 2:5, and its semantic equivalent wěnātattî ‘And I shall turn’ is implied by the combination of ellipsis and zeugma below in Hos. 2:15b. While in Hos. 2:5a wěśamtîhā ‘I shall make/turn her’ (and its synonym wěšattîhā) and wěśamtîm ‘I shall turn them into’ here in Hos. 2:14b refer to turning something positive into something negative, in 2:17 in the prophecy of reconciliation the verb wěnātattî refers to turning something negative into something positive. 2:15 ûpāqadětî ālêhā (literally) ‘I shall visit upon her’ or (idiomatically) ‘I shall punish her’ The verb in precisely this form (with Yhwh the speaker), the entity to be punished introduced by the preposition al and the crime for which the entity is to be punished treated as the grammatical direct object of the verb, is found also in Hos. 1:4 and 4:9 (and see also ‘I shall not punish’ in Hos. 4:14). In my translation, as required by English usage, the person punished, in this case Lady Israel, becomes the direct object of the verb ‘I shall punish’, and the offense becomes the object of the preposition ‘for’. et-yěmê habběălîm ‘the days of (festivals devoted to) the Baals’ Here as in Hos. 2:19 and 11:2 the plural form in reference to Baal, ‘lord, sovereign’, which is an epithet for the Canaanite deity Hadad (see in my commentary at Hos. 2:10) seems to reflect the Israelite perception that what distinguishes Israelite religion from Canaanite religion is that Israelites, when they behave properly, have only one deity, while other peoples as well as many misbehaving Israelites revere more than one deity. ‘The days of the Baals’ denotes religious festivals celebrated in honour of a Canaanite deity or deities. In Hos. 2:15b–d our prophet will inform us as to who precisely was Baal or who precisely were Baals in relationship to Israel personified as a woman, who was disloyal to Yhwh and carried on an adulterous love affair with Baal or Baals. 63.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 38.

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ăšer taqtîr lāhem ‘to whom she (Lady Israel, pictured as the disloyal wife of Yhwh) presents sacrifices’ As noted in my commentary below, at Hos. 11:2 the verb qiṭṭēr ‘sacrifice’ in the piel generally refers in the Hebrew Bible to worship of which the biblical writers do not approve. Here in Hos. 2:15b the verbal root qṭr appears in the hiphil, and it also refers clearly to Israelites worshipping a deity, of whose worship the prophet and his deity, Yhwh, do not approve. However, it should be noted that in general the verb hiqṭîr ‘sacrifice’ in the hiphil refers to worship which is endorsed in the Hebrew Bible. (See, inter alia, Lev. 1:9, 13, 15, 17; 2:2, 9,16; 4:19, 31, 35; 5:12.) wattaad nizmāh wěḥelyātāh ‘She wore her ring and her necklace’ It is totally unclear from the context what is the precise train of thought that connects this clause with the preceding and/or following clause. NJPS renders this and the following clause, ‘When, decked with earrings and jewels, she would go after her lovers’. In other words, according to NJPS, it was in the course of celebrating festivals for the worship of Baal that Lady Israel went after her lovers. More likely, the import of Hos. 2:15c is that Lady Israel wore jewellery that Lady Israel had received from her lovers, whom she followed around while she forgot Yhwh, who, as stated in Hos. 2:10–11, was the true source of everything she owned. NJPS assumes, quite plausibly, that the conversive waw at the beginning of the clause functions here as a temporal subordinate conjunction meaning ‘when’. The noun nezem can refer to either a nose ring (Gen. 24:47; Isa. 3:21; Ezek. 16:12) or an ear ring (Exod. 32:2–3). Since the context provides no basis for determining which of these items of jewellery was intended, I leave the matter undecided. The form ḥelyātāh indicates that without the pronominal suffix the base form would be the feminine noun ḥelyâ, which DCH (3:231) renders ‘jewellery’. Ibn Ezra suggests that the two items of jewellery mentioned in Hos. 2:15 are respectfully a nose ring and a necklace, which Lady Israel wears to please her paramour; similarly, TJ and Kimchi. wattēlek aḥărê měahăbêhā ‘And she went after her paramours’ As explained in my commentary on Hos. 1:2b, hālak aḥărê ‘walk after’ may denote being devoted to/in a relationship with a person of the opposite sex. This is certainly the sense here in Hos. 2:15d as also in Jer. 2:2. While in Jer. 2:2 God reminds Israel of Israel’s devotion to God in the wilderness, here in Hos. 2:15d the expression refers to Israel’s more recent devotion to Baal. Here in Hos. 2:15d–e, as previously intimated in

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Hos. 2:9–14, the devotion to Baal came about because, according to our prophet speaking in the name of Yhwh, Lady Israel simply forgot that her husband, who provided all her needs, was Yhwh. ‘But me she forgot, word of Yhwh’ It should follow logically, that Yhwh would respond with a threat of punishment. However, there is no threat of punishment. There is, instead, a promise of reconciliation. Consequently, as we shall immediately below, the particle lākēn, which normally means ‘therefore’, can have that meaning only if irony is intended. See more on this, below. 2:16 ‘Therefore (ironically), I hereby entice her, and I shall take her walking into the wilderness and I shall speak tenderly to her’ In general the Hebrew particle lāken introduces the threat of punishment as the logical consequence or deserved recompense for misbehaviour. As I discussed in the commentary at Hos. 2:8, it has frequently been suggested that lāken in Hos. 2:16, which introduces words of reconciliation addressed by Yhwh both with reference to (vv. 16–17, 25b) and in direct speech (vv. 18–25a) to Lady Israel, must be either highly ironic, a special usage, or an ancient scribal error. The interpretation, which I prefer, is that having threatened Israel and having seen that threats produce no good, God, as it were, decides to perform an about-face. Instead of threatening the disloyal wife Israel with dire consequences for her disloyalty, God here suggests reconciliation. Consequently, what he does here is invite the wife Israel on a second honeymoon in the place where they had celebrated their first, in the wilderness. For the expression wedibbartî al libbāh, literally, ‘I shall speak upon her heart’, we should compare Isa. 40:2, dabběrû al lēb ‘Speak tenderly’ (so NJPS), and we may also compare Gen. 34:3, where it is stated concerning Shechem son of Hamor, ‘Being strongly drawn to Dinah daughter of Jacob, and in love with the maiden, he spoke to the maiden tenderly’.64 For the elaboration of my arguments that in Hos. 2:16–17 Yhwh celebrates a second honeymoon of reconciliation with Israel, see below in the commentary on 2:17b.

64.  For my many arguments that Gen. 34 is not a rape narrative, see Gruber, ‘A Reexamination’, pp. 119–27; ‘Nuances of the Verb ny’, pp. 501–509.

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2:17 wĕnātattî lāh et-kĕrāmêhā miššām wĕet-ēmeq ākôr lĕpetaḥ tiqwā ‘And I shall give her her vineyards from there, (and I shall turn) the Valley of Achor into a door of hope’ Here, as in Hos. 2:4d–e (see the extensive discussion above) we have a classic instance of ellipsis in which the verb—functioning here as frequently as both subject and simple predicate—which is found only in the first of two parallel clauses, governs both clauses. Here, in Hos. 2:4 each of the two parallel clauses contains a direct object of the verb only found in the first of the two parallel clauses. In Hos. 2:4d–e and the examples I cited in my discussion of that verse, the single verb has precisely the same meaning with respect to each of the two synonymous direct objects. In Hos. 2:17a–b, on the other hand, we have an instance of the stylistic device known as zeugma, which denotes the use of a single verb in two distinct meanings, each of which is appropriate to one of the two distinct and non-synonymous direct objects. Another instance of this phenomenon has been frequently noted with respect to Hos. 1:2b where the single imperative verb qḥ (primary meaning ‘take’) has the meaning ‘marry’ with respect to ‘a woman of adultery’ and the meaning ‘adopt’ with respect to the second direct object, ‘children of adultery’. Here in Hos. 2:17a–b the perfect consecutive verb wĕnātattî means ‘I shall give’ with respect to the first direct object ‘her vineyards’ found in v. 17a and ‘I shall turn into’ found in v. 17b with respect to the second direct object ‘the Valley of Achor’. While the verb ntn has the primary meaning ‘give’, it also has the secondary meaning ‘make into, turn into’ (see DCH 3:807–10). Examples of this usage of the verb ntn with respect to places include: Jer. 9:10, ‘I shall turn Jerusalem into rubble, into dens for jackals, and I shall turn the towns of Judah into an uninhabited desolation’ (in this verse the verb is repeated twice, in the first clause in the perfect consecutive form and in the second clause in the synonymous imperfect form—i.e., qtl-yqtl parallelism); Jer. 51:25, ‘I shall turn you [Babylon] into a burnt-out mountain’; and Ezek. 25:5, ‘I shall turn Rabbah into a pasture for camels and Ammon into a place for sheep to lie down…’. The Valley of Achor is mentioned five times in Hebrew Scripture. It is explained in Josh. 7 that the reason for the defeat of the Israelite armies, who sought to capture the Canaanite city of Ai, is that one of the Israelite soldiers violated the prohibition of appropriating for himself anything from the spoils of war. It was found that the culprit was Achan son of Carmi, son of Zabdi, son of Zerah, and he confessed. He had taken ‘a fine Shinar cloak, two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold

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weighing fifty shekels’ (Josh. 7:21). Joshua declared, ‘Just as you have brought calamity upon us (meh ăkartānû) so will Yhwh bring calamity upon you (yakŏrkā)’ (Josh. 7:25). Consequently, it is reported in Josh. 7:24–26 that they stoned Achan and his sons and daughters and his ox, his ass, and his flock and the items he had taken from the booty and burnt them and erected a huge mound of stones over him. According to Josh. 7:26, this mound of stones was named the Valley of Achor. The name Valley of Achor, it is explained in Josh. 7:26, reminds us that Joshua said to Achan, ăkartānû ‘you brought a calamity upon us’. Aside from two mentions of the place name Valley of Achor in Josh. 7:24, 26, the place name is mentioned again in Josh. 15:7 as a site on the northern boundary line of the territory of the tribe of Judah [see the map appearing on p. xix]. The place name Achor is mentioned outside of Hos. 2:17 and the book of Joshua also in a prophecy of reconciliation in Isa. 65:10, where it is stated, ‘Sharon shall become a pasture for flocks//and the Valley of Achor a place for cattle to lie down for my people who seek me’. Ironically, while in Ezek. 25:5 turning a location into a place for sheep to lie down seems to be a curse, in Isa. 65:10 turning the Valley of Achor/Calamity into a place for cattle to lie down seems to be a blessing. It is not unlikely that Isa. 65:10 was inspired by Hos. 2:16. Ginsberg, having sensed this and having noted that ‘being reduced to sheep pasture would be a first class calamity for the agriculture district of Sharon’ [for the location of Sharon see map on p. xix] (and, I would add, precisely as Ezek. 25:25 would lead us to think), follows Arnold Ehrlich in restoring hyš(y)m(w)n, i.e., Jeshimon, in place of Sharon found in the received text at Isa. 65:10.65 Ginsberg points out that the place name Jeshimon designates either (1) the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea (Num. 21:20; 23:28), arid except for the river banks and patches of oasis; or (2) a locality in the wilderness of Judah (1 Sam. 23:19, 24; 26:1, 3), to which we would add also the following, all of them designating desert areas: Deut. 32:10; Isa. 43:19, 20; Pss. 68:8; 78:40; 106:14; 107:4.66 Realizing that here as in many other places the unnamed prophet of the Babylon Exile and the Return (Isa. 40–66), commonly called Deutero-Isaiah, has been inspired by the book of Hosea, Ginsberg asserts, and I concur, ‘The Isaiah passage is surely dependent upon the Hosea one’, and so Ginsberg restores in place of the enigmatic, wĕnātattî lāh et-kĕrāmêhā miššām ‘And I shall give her her vineyards from there’, 65.  See Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, p. 69, following Arnold Ehrlich, Randglossen zur Hebräischen Bibel, vol. 4 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1912), p. 228. So also Ernst Sellin, Das Zwölprophetenbuch (part one: Hosea–Micah; 2nd ed.; Leipzig: Werner Scholl, 1929), p. 41 66.  Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, p. 69 n. 41.

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the following: wĕnātattî et hayĕšîmôn lĕkarmel (lĕkerem) ‘I will turn Jeshimon into farm land (or, vine land)’. Ginsberg explains that the last five letters of the received text of Hos. 2:17a, yhmšm, ‘are clearly nothing but a garbled hšyîmn’, i.e., the Jeshimon. Ginsberg’s understanding of the two clauses of Hos. 2:17a–b with his restoration of Hos. 2:17a based upon Ehrlich’s restoration of Isa. 65:10 is as follows: ‘I will turn Jeshimon into farm land (or, vine land), and the Valley of Achor into promising plough land’. Ginsberg further explains that karmel ‘farm land’ is the opposite of midbar ‘wilderness’ (Jer. 2:6–7; 4:26) and yaar ‘forest, scrub’ (Isa. 29:17; 32:15; Mic. 7:14). Ginsberg further explains that the original contextual meaning of lĕpetaḥ tiqwā, which KJV renders ‘into a door of hope’ actually meant ‘into promising plough land’. Ginsberg follows Sellin in understanding the lexeme petaḥ in the present context in the light of Isa. 28:24 where the root refers to ploughing a field in preparation for planting: ‘Does one who ploughs to sow, plough all the time, breaking up (yĕpattaḥ) and furrowing one’s land?’67 Interestingly, because LXX construes Hos. 2:17 (in LXX the numbering is Hos. 2:15) as part of a prophecy of rebuke rather than as part of a prophecy of reconciliation, it renders Heb. Hos. 2:17b (= LXX Hos. 2:15b) as follows: καὶ κοιλὰδα Ἀχὼρ διαωοῖξαι συνεσιν αὐτῆς, which Glenny renders ‘and the Valley of Achor to open her understanding’. Bons, Joosten, and Kessler ingeniously trace the route which leads from a Hebrew Vorlage identical to the consonantal text of MT with respect to Heb. 2:17b (= LXX Hos. 2:15b).68 First of all the lexeme lptḥ, which was understood by exegetes of MT prior to Sellin as meaning ‘into a door’, was read by the Greek translators not as prefixed preposition l meaning ‘into’ but as the prefixed lamedh followed by the infinitive construct yielding liptoăḥ ‘to open’. The following lexeme tiqwâ, which exegetes of MT understand as meaning ‘hope’ from the root qwy I, meaning ‘wait, hope’ (see, e.g., DCH 7:211–12), the translators of LXX took as a derivative of qwy II, meaning ‘gather’ (see DCH 7:212b). As explained by Bons et al., the Greek noun σύνεσις, employed by LXX to render Heb. lptḥ, has a secondary meaning of ‘wisdom, intelligence’ in Hellenistic Greek.69 All of the above, beginning with their construing Hos. 2:16 as part of a prophecy of rebuke and ending with their interesting treatment 67.  Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, p. 76, following Sellin, Zwölprophetenbuch, p. 41. 68.  Bons, Joosten, and Kessler, La Bible d’Alexandrie, p. 77. 69.  Bons, Joosten, and Kessler, La Bible d’Alexandrie, pp. 75–76.

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of the Hebrew phrase lptḥ tqwh add up to construing the purpose of the Valley of Achor in Hos. 2:16 not as part of the hope of a better time yet to be but rather as a chastening lesson from the past calling Israel to selfevaluation that might enable her to avoid disaster. Petaḥ Tikvah ‘Gateway of Hope’ in Modern Jewish Reception History In 1878 a group of Orthodox Jews from Jerusalem decided to become farmers, and they purchased from a Greek owner an area of 3,400 dunams adjoining the Arab village of Mullabis, and they established the first Jewish agricultural village in modern Palestine. Inspired by Hos. 2:17, they named their village Petaḥ Tikvah. The founders were Joel Moses Salomon, David Guttmann, and Yehoshua Stampfer. This settlement was known as ēm hammoshavot ‘the mother (first) of the Jewish rural settlements’. Although the original settlers left the site because of the threat of malaria, other Jewish settlers from the movement called Bilu founded at Kharkov by Israel Belkind on January 21, 1882, renewed settlement at the site, 12 km east of Tel Aviv in 1883.70 Door of Hope in Modern Christian Reception History Early in the twentieth century CE the name ‘Door of Hope’ was chosen most aptly as the name for homes for unwed pregnant teenagers, whose having become pregnant out of wedlock was definitely in their culture almost as much a valley of reproach as the biblical valley of reproach mentioned as the opposite of the door of hope in Hos. 2:17a. Again in the second decade of the 21st century ‘Door of Hope’ is frequently used throughout the English-speaking world as the name of institutions where unwed pregnant women can live, give birth, and choose options such as adoption for their child. wĕanĕtâ sammâ kîmê nĕȗrêhā//ȗkĕyôm ălotāh mēereṣ miṣrāyim And there she will call out in ecstasy as in the days of her youth//‘And as at the time when she came up [to the land of Israel] from the land of Egypt’ The two parallel clauses are joined together, as were the two earlier clauses of Hos. 2:17(a–b), to each other, by the ellipsis, in which the single verb governs both clauses. Here the verb ‘she shall call out’ is modified by two adverbial phrases. The first refers quite obviously to the woman, who, as we know from the larger context of Hos. 1–2, is a personification of the people of Israel, who are collectively the wife of God. As I noted before, 70.  Cf. S. Hasson, ‘Petah Tikvah’, EncJud, vol. 13, pp. 336–38; S. Hasson and S. Gilboa, ‘Petah Tikvah’, EncJud, 2nd ed., vol. 16, pp. 14–15.

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this woman is described as having been taken by her distraught husband to enjoy a second honeymoon in the place where they had celebrated their first. The second adverbial phrase, which modifies the verb ‘she shall call out’, adds the information that the metaphoric first honeymoon was the exodus from Egypt and the glorious time spent by God and Israel together in the desert, to which God in Hos. 2:16 wants to take his wife back for a second honeymoon. As I noted above, the idea that the time spent by God and Israel in the wilderness was, indeed, a honeymoon, is taken over from the book of Hosea by Jeremiah. In Jer. 2:2 we read, ‘I recall in your favour your devotion when you were young//your love when you were a bride// your following after me [an expression of loyalty; cf. the expression ‘away from after me’ in Hos. 1:2] in a land that had not been planted’. Cf. also Ezek. 16:43 where the prophet, speaking in the name of God, argues that all the troubles came upon Lady Jerusalem ‘because you did not recall the days when you were young’. However, Ezekiel, again speaking in the name of God, reminds us of the formula in Jer. 2:2 and of its inspiration by Hos. 2:17 when he declares in Ezek. 16:60, ‘I [the independent personal pronoun is unnecessary since the subject is indicated in the verb form; it is employed for emphasis, and here to convey the sense of “notwithstanding your wicked behaviour”] shall recall my covenant with you when you were young, and I shall establish for you an everlasting covenant’. Significantly, Jer. 2:2 and Ezek. 16:60 are juxtaposed in the litany called ‘Remembrance Verses’ in the traditional Jewish liturgy for the New Year. The remembrance verses are a series of quotations from Scripture, which illustrate the point that God remembers, i.e., shows continuous and continual loving concern for the people of Israel. Moreover, Hos. 2:17; Jer. 2:2; and Ezek. 16:60 share the memory of Israel personified as a bride celebrating her honeymoon with God during the sojourn in the wilderness. The book of Numbers, on the other hand, describes the sojourn in the wilderness as a series of disastrous backslidings on the part of the people of Israel. With respect to the verb wěānětâ ‘she shall call out’, I have explained elsewhere that ‘The verbal root ny is a homonym of the verbal root ny rendered “fructify” five times in vv. 23–24 and also a homonym of the verbal root ny meaning “oppress, subjugate” attested in Gen. 15:13; 16:6, 9; Deut. 26:6; etc. The verbal root ny “declaim, declare, sing aloud” is exemplified in Deut. 21:7; 26:5; 27:14.’71 Typical is Deut. 27:14: wěānû halěwiyyîm wěāměrû ‘The Levites shall then proclaim in a loud voice’. It might well be argued that a comparison can be made between the single verb wěānětâ ‘she will call out’ in Hos. 2:17b and the pair of 71.  Gruber, ‘A Re-Evaluation of Hosea 1–2’.

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verbs wěānû…wěāměrû ‘and they will call out in a loud voice’ attested in Deut. 21; 26; 27. Therefore, I suggest also comparing Exod. 15:21a, wattaan lāhem Miryām ‘Miriam sang to them’. Another clear example of the root ny meaning ‘cry, sing’ is Exod. 32:18: wayyōmer ên qōl ănōt gěbûrâ wě ên qōl ănōt ḥălûšâ qōl annōt ānokî šōmēa, which probably means ‘But he [Moses] answered [Joshua], “It is not the sound of singing about victory, and it is not the sound of singing about defeat; it is the sound of engaging in a sexual orgy that I hear” ’. The rendering of annōt ‘engaging in a sexual orgy’ in the final clause of Exod. 32:18 not only confirms my understanding of the root ny in both Hos. 2:17 and 2:23–24 but also corroborates the description of the outcome of the worship of the golden calf at the end of Exod. 32:6: ‘The people sat down to eat and to drink, and they went on to engage in a sexual orgy [lěṣahēq]’.72 Ironically, it seems, in light of my adducing support from Exod. 32:18 for my understanding of wěānětâ ‘she shall call out (at the moment of orgasm)’, Propp writes, ‘it is not clear that sex would make that much noise’.73 When Propp wrote that, he may have forgotten momentarily that according to Exod. 12:37 there should have been present at least 600,000 men on foot at the orgy alleged to have taken place next to the golden calf. With respect to the verb wĕanĕtâ, which I render ‘she will call out in ecstasy’, A. Frisch suggests that in the present context the verb ny is meant to convey simultaneously the distinct meanings of ‘respond’ (indeed a common meaning of one of the roots ny; see dictionaries) and ‘become pregnant’ (cf. my treatment of the root ny in Hos. 2:23–24).74 wĕhāyâ bayyôm-hahû ‘And it shall come to pass on that day’ Concerning the Hebrew expression wēhāyâ see the discussion in the commen­tary at Hos. 1:5; likewise, concerning the expression bayyôm hahȗ ‘on that day’ see my commentary at Hos. 1:5; and likewise concerning the combined formula ‘it shall come to pass in that day’ see my commentary at Hos. 1:5. As I note above in my commentary at Hos. 1:5 and again in my commentary below at Hos. 2:23, the two usages of the combined expression ‘and it shall come to pass in that day’ in Hos. 1:5 72.  Concerning my interpretation of the verbal roots ny and ṣhq in the texts cited from Exod. 32, cf. N. H. Sarna, Exodus (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), pp. 204, 207; G. Beer, Exodus (HAT; Tübingen: Mohr, 1939), pp. 152, 154; W. C. Propp, Exodus 19–40 (AB, 2A; New York: Doubleday, 2006), pp. 553–57. 73.  Propp, Exodus 19–40, p. 537. 74.  A. Frisch, ‘wěānětâ (Hos. 2:17)—An Ambiguity’, Tarbiz 6 (1990), pp. 445– 47 (in Hebrew).

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and 2:23–24 are symmetrical because the first promises punishment in the form of the defeat of the armies of Israel at Jezreel while the second promises that Jezreel will be the place where reconciliation between God and Israel is effected by means of the name Jezreel once again being a place of agricultural fertility, in which the name assumes its etymological and literal meaning ‘God will plant seed’. In Hos. 2:18–19 our prophet, speaking in the name of God, presents as though it were part of the prophecy of reconciliation what is actually the statement of a condition for that reconciliation, which God, as it were, offers to effect on behalf of the people of Israel. I cannot help but recall an incident that happened in my fourth grade class at Sunday School when the teacher appeared just after the First of January with the announcement, ‘I have made a New Year’s resolution. The resolution is that in this New Year there will be no talking during this class. Children will talk only when the teacher has given them permission to speak.’ That was at about 10:00 a.m. The immediate reaction of several of the pupils was that the teacher had no right to make a New Year’s resolution on behalf of other people. Bedlam ensued, and by 5:00 that afternoon the teacher had resigned, and my father, who as rabbi of the synagogue was also principal of the Sunday School, had to find a new teacher. In many other places in Hos. 1–2 I am very hesitant to accept the view frequently expressed by modern commentators on Hosea that we have expressions of verbal violence by God pictured as husband against Israel pictured as wife (see above in my commentary at Hos. 2:4). However, in light of my childhood encounter with the perfectly normal reaction of children to a teacher who co-opted their sense of their right to make or not to make a New Year’s resolution, I am willing to concede that in Hos. 2:19–20 ancient Israel is personified and modern commentators speaking on behalf of personified ancient Israel would have every right to feel and express umbrage at God’s offering the total loyalty of Israel to God as a gift of consolation rather than as a self-serving demand. In the light of the real possibility that Hos. 1:18 offers as consolation a self-serving demand on the part of the deity, it is quite ironic that many Hebrew-speaking couples who see themselves as liberated/feminist have adopted and adapted from Hos. 2:18 the habit as did, for example, the late and revered Rabbi Pinchas Peli and his late and revered wife Penina, that the wife refers to the husband as îšî ‘my man’ rather than baălî ‘my husband’. In the modern context, which may be regarded as a form of modern Jewish reception history of Hos. 2:18, it is understood, rightly or wrongly that the epithet baălî ‘my husband’ denotes lordship and even ownership and suggests that the wife accepts being the man’s chattel by virtue of her so referring to him. Presumably, couples who have chosen to

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have the wife refer to the husband as îšî ‘my man’ assume that no connotation of lordship is associated with the Hebrew epithet îšî. Concerning the questionable nature of this assumption see the discussion above at Hos. 2:9. nĕum Yhwh ‘word of Yhwh’ This Hebrew expression, which indicates that the prophet here speaks not in her/his own name but in the name of Yhwh, who sent the prophet as a messenger, occurs a total of 361 times in Hebrew Scripture. The phrase can appear either at the end of or the beginning of an utterance, the content of which the prophet attributes to God. The expression nĕum PN can also refer to the speech of a named mortal (Num. 24:3, 15; 1 Sam. 23:1; Prov. 30:1). The word corresponds to Akk. umma, which likewise introduces the account of a speech act. (See HALOT 2:657–58; DCH 5:579–80.) tiqrĕî îšî wĕlō-tiqrĕî-lî ōd balî ‘You will call (me) Ishi “my man”//‘And you will no longer call me Baali’ As hinted already in my discussion at Hos. 2:9–10, we have in both Hos. 2:9–10 and in Hos. 2:18–19 and in the entire pericope from Hos. 2:9 through Hos. 2:19 the intersection of two issues, both of great importance to the prophet who speaks in Hos. 1–3. The first of these issues is the use of the metaphor of husband–wife to describe the relationship of God to the people of Israel. In the context of such a relationship it would be perfectly reasonable for Israel to refer to God as baălî or îšî (see above at Hos. 2:9). However, the second issue at stake in Hos. 1–3 is God’s insistence that Israel venerate and rely upon only the God of Israel and that Israel not venerate and rely upon other deities. The principal threat to Israel’s loyalty to Yhwh alone in the ninth century BCE was the tendency, at least since the time of King Ahab (873–852 BCE) and Queen Jezebel for many Israelites, for a time under the patronage of Queen Jezebel (see 1 Kgs 18), to revere Hadad, who is referred to in Hebrew Scripture always by the epithet Baal (with the possible exception of Zech. 12:11). As I noted above, it seems to have been customary for some Israelites to apply the epithet bl ‘lord’ to Yhwh, just as originally the now characteristically Israelite and Jewish epithet of Yhwh dn was once used by Canaanites and Phoenicians to refer to Hadad. Thus, our ninth-century prophet, speaking in the name of God, has God declare that from now on the epithet balî ‘my sovereign/my husband’ will no longer be applied to Yhwh. This idea, which ultimately led to MT’s changing the proper names Mephi-Baal and Ish-Baal into Mephibosheth and Ishbosheth (see above at Hos. 2:10) is meant to lead to what, from the point of view of the

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Yhwh-alone party, of whom the prophet of Hos. 1–3 is an early and most eminent spokesperson, should be a most wholesome result of removing any reference to the word baal from Israelite worship (see Hos. 2:19). 2:19 wĕhasirōtî et-šĕmōt habbĕālîm mippîhā//wĕlō-yizzākĕrȗ ōd bišĕmām ‘I shall remove the names of the Baals from her [Lady Israel’s] mouth so that they shall no longer be mentioned by their name’ Our prophet’s referring to Baals in the plural reflects a convention in the Hebrew Bible, reflected, inter alia, in Exod. 32:7, where it is alleged that the Israelite devotees of the one golden calf created by Aaron declared, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought [the verb also is plural] you up from the land of Egypt’ (see the discussion in my commentary at Hos. 8:4b). According to this convention a major distinction between Israel and other peoples of the biblical world is that Israel is required to venerate and rely upon only one deity, who is sometimes called Yhwh, while other peoples, in whose worship it is forbidden to Israelites to take part, venerate and rely upon more than one deity. Hence the golden calf, whose worship is forbidden, is called ‘these’ in defiance of both grammar and common sense, and Hadad is referred to both in the singular as baal and in the plural as baalim, to reflect the convention that Israel is supposed to know only one deity while other peoples have many deities. The latter convention is to this day known all over the world. Consequently, one of the first things that a person in the Far East who is not Christian or Muslim will tell a Jewish visitor is the following: ‘I understand that you have only one god, and you cannot see him; now I will show you our gods’. The expression ‘the Baals’ occurs twice in Hos. 2, in vv. 15 and 19 (see above concerning Hos. 2:15) and an additional eleven times in all of Hebrew Scripture (Judg. 2:11; 3:7; 8:33; 10:6, 10; 1 Sam. 7:4; 12:10; 1 Kgs 18:18; Jer. 2:23; 9:13; 2 Chron. 34:4), while the expression ‘for the Baals’ occurs in the Bible at Hos. 11:2; 2 Chron. 24:7; 28:2; and 33:3. 2:20 ‘I shall make a covenant with them on that day with the beast of the field, and the bird of the sky and the creeping creatures, and I shall remove bow and sword from the land, and I will enable them to lie down in safety’ In the first of these three clauses God promises to rescind his threat uttered in Hos. 2:14 to turn all the vineyards and orchards into forests and to have all the figs and the grapes devoured by wild animals. In the second clause

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God promises to rescind the threat uttered in Hos. 1:5. In Hos. 1:5 God promised to break the bow of Israel in the Valley of Jezreel, presumably through the agency of a nation or nations with more powerful bows. In the Judahite gloss (see in my Introduction concerning Judahite glosses in the book of Hosea) in Hos. 1:7 God promises that victory can be achieved without armaments and without war but by Yhwh your God. Here in Hos. 2:20b God promises to abolish war altogether. Finally, as I suggest below in my comment on Hos. 2:21–24, Hos. 2:20 possibly ends with a promise of undisturbed marital bliss as quite as important as an end to starvation and war. 2:21–24 Throughout Hos. 1–3 our prophet, speaking in the name of God, compares the relationship of God and Israel to that of a husband and wife, whose marriage has its ups and downs. I suggested previously and again here in the commentary at Hos. 2:16 that the previously angry God-husband does an about-face at 2:16 and decides that the female spouse’s unfaithfulness can be remedied by the husband’s paying more attention to the wife, showing her more consideration and literally speaking to her heart (Hos. 2:16). This is precisely what God asks unnamed messengers to do with respect to destroyed Jerusalem personified as a woman in Isa. 40:2 and precisely as does Shechem son of Hamor with respect to Dinah the daughter of Jacob. Shechem loves her, and he would like to spend the rest of his life with her. However, her xenophobic brothers carry out an unspeakable atrocity against the inhabitants of Shechem (Gen. 34). Keeping in mind the use of sexual innuendos both in a positive sense, referring to the love of God for Israel (pictured as a woman taken on a second honeymoon in Hos. 2:16 screaming out at the moment of orgasm), and in a negative sense, in which adultery committed by the wife is a metaphor for idolatry committed by Israel, one should not be surprised to find that by virtue of its location between the depiction of the second honeymoon in Hos. 2:16–19 and the depiction of the renewal of God’s vow of marriage to his spouse, the people of Israel in Hos. 2:21–22, Hos. 2:20 also appears to turn an expression possibly but not necessarily devoid of sexual innuendos derived from Lev. 26:6 into a promise of undisturbed marital bliss. At the end of Lev. 26:5 it is stated, ‘and you shall dwell securely (lābeṭaḥ) in your land’. In the next verse (Lev. 26:6) of the promise found in Lev. 26:1–11, it is asserted, wĕnātattî šālōm bāāreṣ ûšĕkabtem wĕên maḥărîd ‘I shall provide peace in the land, and you shall lie down and no one will disturb (you)’. The use of the conjunctive waw followed by

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the present active participle ‘disturb’ expresses simultaneity (see GKC #141e) and assures audiences of all generations that couples may engage in physical intimacy undisturbed, the opposite of the curse that awaits those who are disobedient, of whom it is said in Deut. 28:30, iššâ tĕārēś wĕîš aḥēr yišgālennāh ‘You will marry a woman, and another man will have sex with her’, where the consonantal text employs the rare verb šgl employed in the Bible only with reference to illicit sex75 and the qer follows the instructions of the Rabbinic sages in t. Meg. 3:39 that wherever it is written in the Bible yišgālennāh (probably perceived as an obscene word such as the f-word in English) we read yiškābennāh. Similarly, the editor of an encyclopedia for which I wrote about the sex habits of persons in Ugaritic mythology changed my ‘had intercourse with’ to ‘slept with’. This comparison is particularly apt, for while the rare Hebrew verb šgl can only refer to sexual intercourse, the verb škb can also mean sleep, recline, and spend an undetermined amount of time in a family tomb with one’s ancestors who have predeceased her or him. In the case at hand in Hos. 2:20 the juxtaposition with the honeymoon scene in Hos. 2:17, where the bride cries out in ecstasy at the moment of orgasm, and the juxtaposition with Hos. 2:21, which, like Deut. 28:30, refers to contracting a marriage, makes it not unlikely that our poet speaking in the name of God meant to promise in Hos. 2:20 precisely the opposite of the curse found in Deut. 28:30, namely, that God will grant that men and women can engage in physical intimacy without being disturbed; cf. Deut. 20:7: ‘And who is the man who has contracted a marriage with a woman and has not yet consummated the marriage to her, let him go and let him return to his home lest he die in the war and another man will consummate marriage to her’. Thus Hos. 2:18–20 conveys the idea that when personified Israel pictured as the metaphoric wife of God will have resolved to be faithful to God and eschew all association with other deities (Hos. 2:19), God will reward all Israelite couples with the assurance that they can engage undisturbed in marital intimacy (Hos. 2:20). This promise, in turn, is followed by God’s reaffirmation of his marriage bond to Israel personified as spouse in Hos. 2:21–22. The structure of this unit is bound together by the use of the poetic device called anaphora in which a single word is repeated two or more times at the head of a series of clauses.76 In this case, the word, 75.  See M. I. Gruber, ‘Forbidden Sexual Relations in Biblical Hebrew’, in Studies in Bible and Exegesis 10 (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2011), pp. 501–508 [in Hebrew]. 76.  Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry, p. 276, notes that the usual number of lines in which the initial word is repeated is ‘two or three; more rarely four, seven, or even nine’ Additional examples of anaphora featuring the repetition of a word

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whose repetition creates the anaphora, is grammatically an entire clause. The reason that this single word constitutes an entire clause is that it is in the nature of Biblical Hebrew that a single word can include conjunctive (or consecutive) waw, subject, predicate, and direct object. In this case the repeated word is wĕēraśtîk, meaning ‘I shall acquire you as a bride’. In two passages I quoted above, from Deut. 20:7 and Deut. 28:30, respectively, reference is made to the idea common throughout ancient Western Asia, that marriage took place in two stages. The first phase, which Assyriologists call inchoate marriage, involved the bridegroom’s granting the bride an object of value (or granting it to her father if she were a minor). As indicated in the two verses from Deuteronomy, the couple did not yet consummate the marriage and waited some months before they were fully married. In the interim it was forbidden for the bride to engage in intimate relations either with her future husband or with anyone else. All of this is still spelled out in detail in the text of the wedding ceremony observed in Orthodox and Conservative Judaism to this day: ‘Praised are You, O LORD our God, King of the world who has commanded us concerning relationships whose penalty is extirpation and forbidden us to have intimate relations with women to whom we are engaged in inchoate marriage and permitted to us the women who are fully married to us by the two separate ceremonies of consummation and inchoate marriage. Praised are You O LORD who sanctifies His people Israel by the twin rites of consummation and inchoate marriage.’ In his brilliant article ‘Whatever Is Shorter Comes First’,77 S. Friedman showed that in this benediction inchoate marriage (Heb. qiddushin) is twice mentioned second although in practice it precedes full marriage (Heb. huppaḥ) because of the literary principle of short word before long word. Now follows the anaphora in Hos. 2:21–22 illustrated graphically: or phrase three times at the beginning of successive clauses include Jer. 15:5: ‘For who will pity you, Jerusalem; who will console you; who will turn aside to inquire of your well-being?’; Obad. 18: ‘The House of Jacob will be fire; and the House of Joseph flame; and the House of Esau straw’; see also Hos. 4:1 and the discussion in my commentary, below. Among the instances where the initial word or phrase is repeated four times, Watson cites Prov. 30:4: Who has ascended to the heavens and descended? Who has gathered the wind in his fists? Who has wrapped up the water in his robe? Who has lifted up all the ends of the earth?’ (the translation is Gruber’s and not Watson’s). Meir Paran, Forms of the Priestly Style in the Pentateuch (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1989), p. 214 (in Hebrew) cites also Jer. 31:12: ‘They shall come, and they shall shout upon the peak of Zion, and they shall smile because of the bounty of Yhwh’s bounty—over grain, and over wine, and over oil, and over sheep and cattle’. 77.  S. Friedman, ‘Whatever Is Shorter Comes First’, Leshonenu 31 (1971), pp. 117–29; 192–206 (in Hebrew).

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2:21–22 wĕēraśtîk lî lĕōlām wĕēraśtîk lî bĕṣedeq ûbĕmišpāṭ ûbĕḥesed ûbĕraḥămîm wĕēraśtîk lî beĕmûnâ wĕyādaattĕ et-Yhwh ‘And I shall betroth you unto me forever. And I shall betroth you unto me in exchange for righteousness and justice and lovingkindness and love. And I shall betroth you unto me in exchange for faithfulness and then you shall be devoted to Yhwh’ The first three clauses that constitute the anaphora emphasize God’s sincere and uncompromising desire to enter into a marital relationship with Lady Israel in exchange for five monetary gifts, each introduced by the bet of price or exchange, just as in the traditional Jewish wedding ceremony the bridegroom states, ‘Behold, you are consecrated unto me in exchange for this ring according to the Law of Moses and (the Law of) Israel’. As explained in marginal notes in NJPS here in Hos. 2:21–22, God assures the continued loyalty of Lady Israel by granting her instead of a ring or bride-price the five virtuous qualities that will ensure her continued loyalty. God, in turn, introduces the literary unit of plighting the troth with the assurance ‘I shall betroth you unto me forever’, which means that while Hebrew Scripture in Deut. 24 takes for granted the possibility of divorce, God announces that he commits himself not to a Protestant or a Jewish marriage with the perpetual assurance that if either party gets tired of the other divorce is always a possibility. Rather, says God, he commits himself here to a Roman Catholic marriage, which cannot be dissolved. Apparently not familiar with the phenomenon of anaphora but unable to avoid noticing it, Andersen and Freedman (the latter was, mirabile dictu, an expert on biblical poetry) remark, ‘The repetition of the same verb for the same act is unusual for consecutive clauses and has an almost incantational effect; the design is poetic’.78 In fact, in addition to the anaphora, which fosters the structure of the poetic unit and is spread over the first three of the four clauses, the first, third, and fourth clauses share the same structure of three words each while the middle clause contains double the amount of words, namely six.79 They prefer to count syllables rather than words, as do most of the contributors to the Anchor Bible series. No less important than the phenomenon of anaphora found in the first three clauses of the unit of five clauses that constitutes Hos. 2:21–22 is the phenomenon of climactic conclusion presented by the final clause of

78.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 282. 79.  Contrast Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 283.

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Hos. 2:22.80 In the instance at hand in Hos. 2:22–23, the fourth and final clause replicates the structure of the first and third clauses, each of which consists of three lexemes and three stressed syllables. The deviation in both style and content expresses the idea that the bride having been acquired with the mohar, which consists of the five virtues of righteousness, justice, lovingkindness, love, and faithfulness, will respond by having a highly intimate relationship with God: ‘And you shall know Yhwh’. This, of course, is the ultimate aim of Hos. 1–2, namely, that Israel personified as a woman who is disloyal to her husband, who is God, will become devoted only and solely to God. Throughout Hos. 1–2 and, again in Hos. 3, the relationship of God and Israel is compared to that of a husband and wife with the unfortunate ups and downs of many marital relationships. Moreover, idolatry is compared to adultery and monogamy to loyalty to the one God of Israel. It should not be surprising or disturbing, therefore, that the concluding deviation at the end of Hos. 2:21–22 has God telling Israel personified as a woman/wife of God, ‘You shall be intimate with Yhwh’, employing the perfect consecutive form of the verb yd ‘know’, which is frequently employed in the Bible with respect to a woman having sexual relations with a man, as in Gen. 19:8, ‘Look, now, I have two daughters who have not had intercourse with a man’; Judg. 11:39, ‘And she had never had intercourse with a man’; Judg. 31:12, ‘…four hundred maidens who had not had sexual intercourse with a man’.81 It is abundantly clear that the verb yd can be employed both in the feminine and the masculine (e.g., Gen. 4:1, 17, 25; 24:16; 38:26; Judg. 19:25; 1 Sam. 1:19; 1 Kgs 1:4) to mean ‘engage in intimate sexual relations’. Notwithstanding that datum and notwithstanding the fact that the central common metaphor to describe the relationship between God and Israel throughout Hos. 1–3 is the metaphor of marriage combined with the two secondary metaphors of faithfulness in marriage and adultery respectively, some modern commentators are reluctant to admit that the final clause of Hos. 2:23 refers to the hope and promise that, God willing, Israel will be intimate only with Yhwh and eschew the worship of other deities.

80.  For a detailed explanation of the phenomenon see Paran, Forms of the Priestly Style, pp. 179–237; see also S. Yona, ‘Rhetorical Features in Talmudic Literature’, HUCA 77 (2006), pp. 67–101 (95–98). 81.  Apparently because of the ambiguity of the expression yādâ îš, which could mean literally ‘knew a person’, not necessarily a male, and not necessarily in a sexual sense, the narrator in Judg. 31:12 supplies the clarifying clause lĕmiškab zākār ‘with respect to laying with a man’.

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Consequently, Herbert B. Huffmon invokes a usage of the verb ‘know’ in the specific sense of recognizing the suzerain and his authority in Hittite and Akkadian international treaties and international diplomatic correspondence of the second and first millennia BCE to conclude that in Hos. 2:22 the final clause actually means ‘recognize as suzerain’.82 Stuart refers respectfully to Huffmon, but he also acknowledges that the clause in question means ‘Yhwh and the new Israel will this time live together as man and wife’.83 In the light of Hos. 4:1–2, where it is intimated that daat ělohîm ‘knowledge of God’ is expressed by obedience to the moral precepts of the Decalogue, the literary unit constituted by Hos. 2:2–22 and ending with ‘and you shall be devoted to Yhwh’, it may be concluded that Hos. 2 shares with Hos. 4 the view that a loving, intimate relationship of a person or group of persons with God/Yhwh is achieved when the person or group of persons observes the moral precepts of the Decalogue. Hosea 2:21–22 in Jewish Reception History Traditional Jewish prayer books in modern times indicate that when a person has donned the tefillin or phylacteries, which are worn at morning prayer except on Sabbath and Festivals (with respect to days 3 to 6 of Passover and 3 to 7 of Sukkot or Tabernacles outside of the Land of Israel, non-Hasidic Jews of Ashkenazi origin wear them at the morning prayer also on these days) and only at the afternoon service on the Ninth of Av, she/he winds the strap of the hand tefillah around the middle finger of the left hand (the right hand for left-handed people) and recites Hos. 2:21–22.84 By so doing, the individual Jew sees her-/himself as the bride of God just as mutatis mutandi a Roman Catholic nun wearing a wedding band sees herself as the bride of Christ. A. Z. Idelsohn points out that the custom of reciting the betrothal formula from Hos. 2:21–22 as part of the ceremony of donning the tefillin was introduced by Nathan Neta Shapiro (1585–1633), who was the Chief Rabbi of Cracow.85 Qyl cites Baer as the authority for attributing the custom to Nathan Shapiro.86 Nulman notes 82.  Herbert B. Huffmon, ‘The Treaty Background of Hebrew yāda’, BASOR 131 (1966), pp. 31–37 (36). 83.  Stuart, Hosea, p. 60, citing Huffmon, ‘The Treaty Background of Hebrew yāda’, p. 36. 84.  For additional details, see M. Nulman, Encyclopedia of Jewish Prayer (Northvale, NJ & London: Jason Aronson, 1993), p. 219. 85.  A. Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Liturgy and Its Development (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1932), p. 80. Apparently, Idelsohn copied this tradition from S. Baer, Avodat Yisrael (Roedelheim: J. Lehrberger, 1868), p. 57. 86.  Qyl, Hosea, p. 18.

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that the tradition has been attributed to Rabbi Elijah di Vidas of Saphed (1518–1592), Reshit Hokma [The Beginning of Wisdom] (Amsterdam: Nathaniel Poe, 1648), Gate of Holiness, Chapter 5.87 For a picture of the strap of the tefillah wound around the middle finger see Illustration 2.

Illustration 2. Eliyahu Nachman Glick wearing tefillin (phylacteries) and illustrating the strap of the arm-hand tefilla (phylactery) wound around the fingers while reciting Hos. 2:21–22

12:23–25 What is no less interesting than the anaphora presented in Hos. 2:21–22, which serves to emphasize God’s commitment to Israel as his veritable wife, is the even more elaborate poetic structure presented in Hos. 2:23–25. The first six clauses (vv. 23–24) are characterized by the repetition of forms of the verbal root ny which, as I have shown elsewhere, means ‘to fructify’ and is therefore the same verbal root as is attested in Gen. 34:2; Deut. 21:14; 22:24; and 2 Sam. 13:12, 14 to refer to a man engaging in sexual intercourse with a woman, whether consensual (Deut. 22:4) or 87.  Nulman, Encyclopedia of Jewish Prayer, p. 218.

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against her will (2 Sam. 13:12, 14).88 It may well be deliberate that the prophet employs in close proximity in Hos. 2:17 an homonymous root ny meaning ‘cry out/sing’ also in a context of sexual activity. Here in 2:23–25, as in Hos. 2:21–22, a series of sophisticated poetic devices binds together a series of clauses to convey an especially powerful message. First of all, in v. 23 we have staircase parallelism in which there first appears the verb without the direct object (v. 23b), followed thereafter by the same verb followed by the direct object as in such famous passages as Ps. 92:10 and Ps. 93:3. The latter two passages read as follows: Indeed, look, your enemies, Yhwh Indeed, look, your enemies shall perish Scattered will be all the doers of evil. Rivers of Yhwh lift up Rivers of Yhwh lift up their voices Rivers lift up their sound.

As explained by Rabbi Samuel son of Meir (1085–1174 CE) in his commentary on Exod. 15:6 with respect to Exod. 15:6; Pss. 92:10; 93:3; and 94:3, ‘[In all of these cases] the first phrase makes an incomplete statement; then the second phrase comes and repeats and completes the statement…’.89 The staircase parallelism in Hos. 2:23a–b reads as follows: 2:23 wĕhāyâ bayyôm hahû eĕneh nĕum Yhwh eĕneh et-haššāmāyim ‘And it shall come to pass90 on that day91 I shall fructify—word of Yhwh—I shall fructify the sky’ The noun haššāmāyim ‘the sky’ is pointed with qameṣ, i.e., long a, because the noun in question is found in the middle of the verse marked with the Masoretic accent etnaḥta or caesura. What follows immediately after the caesura in vv. 23a–24 is a rhetorical device common to Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Biblical Hebrew poetry, which Watson calls ‘the 88.  See Gruber, ‘Nuances of the Verb ny—To Fructify’. 89.  This translation of the commentary of R. Samuel son of Meir is taken from M. I. Lockshin, Rashbam’s Commentary on Exodus: An Annotated Translation (BJS, 310; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), p. 155. 90.  For this expression see my discussion in the commentary on Hos. 2:1. 91.  See my discussion in the commentary at Hos. 1:5 for more on this expression.

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extended terrace’, in which each colon repeats the final elements of the previous colon.92 Especially worthy of comparison to Hos. 2:23–24 is the following passage from an Akkadian text commonly called ‘The Worm and the Toothache’: ‘After Anu had created sky, sky had created earth, earth created rivers, rivers had created canals, canals had created mire, mire had created Worm, Worm went…’

Almost in the very same manner as in the latter Akkadian text, we find that in Hos. 2:23b–24 the final element of each of the cola, which served as the direct object in the colon in which it was the final word, becomes the subject of the following colon. Unlike the Akkadian text just cited, Hos. 2:23b–24 twice substitutes at the beginning of a new colon a third person masculine plural pronoun for the noun that appears at the end of the preceding colon. Thus Hos. 2:23c substitutes wĕhēm ‘and they’ for ‘the sky’ at the end of Hos. 2:22b, and Hos. 2:23e substitutes wĕhēm ‘and they’ for ‘the grain, and the wine, and the oil’ at the end of Hos. 2:23d. Finally, just as the theme of fructification expressed by the rare verb ny, which elsewhere refers to sexual intercourse, links the vv. 23–24 with the climactic conclusion of the previous literary unit, v. 21, which alludes to metaphorical sexual intimacy, so does the anadiplosis created by the juxtaposition both verbal and contextual of the words Jezreel meaning ‘God sows seed’ at the end of Hos. 2:24 and the verbal form ûzĕratîâ ‘and I shall sow her’ at the beginning of Hos. 2:25 link the final verse of Hos. 2 with the previous verse. Anadiplosis, which is also called concatenation and which Watson also calls ‘the terrace pattern’,93 serves here, as in many other cases, to link what might otherwise be separate textual units, each with its own theme. Indeed, three factors are crucial for appreciating the coherence of Hos. 2:21–25. These three factors are (1) the references to metaphorical sexual intercourse referring to the intimate relationship between God and Israel; (2) the fact that the verbal root ny can only refer to granting of fertility in Hos. 2:23–24; and (3) the fact that the proper name Jezreel ‘God will sow’ at the end of v. 24 is grammatically the third person form of the 92. Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry, pp. 211–12. 93.  Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry, p. 208.

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verb ûzĕratîâ ‘and I shall sow her’, with God as the unnamed subject at the beginning of the final verse of ch. 2. Finally, by means of the stylistic device of anadiplosis, which links the final verse of ch. 2 to the previous verse, which names Jezreel, the name of the first of the sons of Gomer first mentioned and first given a symbolic name in Hos. 1:4, the final verse of ch. 2 thus alludes not only to the second and the third child of Gomer, who were originally given symbolic names with negative associations, but to the granting of symbolic names to all three of them in keeping with the fact that Hos. 2:16–25 is a prophecy of reconciliation meant to cancel the prophecy of doom spelled out in Hos. 2:4–15. No more fitting conclusion could be found to the prophecy of reconciliation with its emphasis on fructification in vv. 23–25 than Hos. 2:1–3, which I, following many others, suggested in my comment at Hos. 2:1–3, must have been the original triumphant conclusion to the prophecy of reconciliation, which could not have been understood without the three distinct prophecies of doom contained in Hos. 1:2b; 1:4–9; and 2:4–15. The key to making sense out of the first two chapters of the book of Hosea, which are linked both thematically and by the sophisticated employment in the following order in Hos. 2:21–25 of the ancient Semitic rhetorical devices of staircase parallelism, the extended terrace, and anadiplosis, is the recognition of the verb ny, a transitive verb meaning ‘fructify’, which was commonly mistranslated ‘answer’. It appears to me that Shlomo Morag almost had it right when he suggested that we find in Hos. 2:23–24 two distinct homonymous verbal roots ny, the first of which is attested in v. 23b and which means ‘cause water to descend’ and the second of which is attested in vv. 23c–24 and means ‘cause to sprout’.94 However, as I demonstrated in an earlier study,95 ‘fructify’ is the single and common meaning of the verbal root ny in all of its five occurrences in Hos. 2:23–24, and this is the root meaning of the very same verb whether in the qal or the piel in Gen. 34:2; Deut. 22:24; and 2 Sam. 13:14, where it refers not to the fructification of land by rain and grain and wine and oil by land, nor to the fructification of Jezreel so that once again it might be the breadbasket of Israel, but to the fructification of women by virtue of a man’s engaging with them in coitus. My suggestion that in all the instances in Hos. 2:23–24 the verb ny in the qal is a transitive verb which means ‘fructify’ eliminates the need for verbal acrobatics required by the usual misunderstanding of the verb as 94.  Morag, ‘On Semantic and Lexical Features’, pp. 494–96. 95.  Gruber, ‘Nuances of the Verb ny—To Fructify’.

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meaning ‘answer/respond’. The latter misunderstanding requires NJPS to mistranslate et, which appears six times in Hos. 2:23–24 as the untranslatable marker of the definite direct object, three times as ‘to’ (vv. 23b, 24a, 24b), and once as ‘with’ (v. 24a where two instances are ignored in NJPS). It is indeed surprising that the necessity to invent ad hoc translations of the marker of the definite direct object where the Hebrew appears to read smoothly with et as the marker of the definite direct object might have led scholars to abandon the attempt to have the sky, the earth, the grain, and the wine, and the oil answer when in fact, a careful reading of Hos. 2:23–24 will show that no one had summoned any of them, and no one expected any other response than fertility as the reasonable response to God’s promise to make them fruitful. 2:23–24 ‘And it shall come to pass in that day…Jezreel’ As noted above in the commentary at Hos. 1:5, the two usages of the combined expression ‘and it shall come to pass in that day’ in Hos. 1:5 and 23–24 are symmetrical because the first promises punishment in the form of the defeat of the armies of Israel at Jezreel while the second promises that Jezreel will be the place where reconciliation between God and Israel is effected by means of the name Jezreel once again being a place of agricultural fertility, in which the name assumes its etymological and literal meaning ‘God will plant seed’. 2:25 ‘And I shall plant her [Jezreel] for me in the land and I shall love Unloved and I shall say to Not-my-people, “You are my people”, and he will respond, “[You are] my God” ’ The central message of this concluding verse of Hos. 2 is that, in keeping with God’s decision recorded in Hos. 2:16 to move from retribution to reconciliation for all of the three symbolic names, Unloved, Jezreel, and Not-my-people, which were symbolic of God’s erstwhile antipathy to Israel (see Hos. 1:4–9), there will be substituted names that refer to love and prosperity. The one name that need not be changed is Jezreel, which now, as noted in the comment at Hos. 2:24, will be associated with its etymological meaning, ‘God will plant seed’, rather than with unhappy events that had taken place there and associated it with bloodshed. As noted in my commentary at Hos. 2:1–3, the proper and fitting and original conclusion of Hos. 2 is not Hos. 2:25 but Hos. 2:1–3. In that context what is now the concluding clause of Hos. 2, namely ‘And he

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will respond “You are] my God” ’, is fully understood to be a paraphrase of the stereotypic ‘You will be my people, and I will be your God’ (Jer. 11:4; 30:22; Ezek. 36:28; in the third person in Jer. 24:7; 32:38; Ezek. 14:11; Zech. 2:15). In all of its forms the stereotyped utterance looks like a formula of marriage between God and Israel, which is the main subject of Hos. 1–2.

C h a p t er 3

Introduction: How Many Women in Hosea’s Life? In my commentary on Hos. 1, I argued that the two passages, Hos. 1:2 and Hos. 1:3–9, should be treated as two distinct symbolic visions. The first concerns an instance of prophetic theatre in which an unnamed woman is identified as a ‘woman of adultery’ and unnamed children are identified as ‘children of adultery’. It is explained there in Hos. 1:2b by means of a purpose clause introduced by the subordinate conjunction kî, that the wife of adultery and the children of adultery are metaphors for the people of Israel, who have been unfaithful to the God of Israel by relying on other deities. This idea is taken up again in Hos. 2 where the people of Israel collectively are the ‘woman of adultery’ and the individual men and women of Israel are the ‘children of adultery’. Hosea 1:3–6 is, as I argued in the commentary on Hos. 1, a distinct and separate symbolic vision in which the prophet marries a woman named Gomer who bears three children. Like the child whom the unnamed female prophet bore to her husband, Isaiah son of Amoz, in Isa. 8:3, each of the three children, a son, a daughter, and a son, is given a symbolic name, which points to God’s antipathy to the disloyal people of Israel. In the reconciliation sections of Hos. 2 (vv. 1–3, 16–25) the meaning of the name of the first child Jezreel, which bore negative associations in Hos. 1, is given its etymological meaning of ‘God will sow grain’, while the two other children are given new names, which reflect the return of God’s favour to the people of Israel. So far we have encountered in the opening chapter of the book of Hosea two women of flesh and blood, the first of whom symbolizes Israel’s disloyalty (Hos. 1:2) and the second of whom gives birth to the three children with symbolic names, who are the main subject of Hos. 1–2. A third woman encountered in Hos. 2:4 is the mother of Israel, who represents collective Israel whom God wants to divorce. We shall now encounter a fourth woman in Hos. 3. As in Hos. 1:2, where the prophet is asked to marry a ‘woman of adultery’ and to adopt ‘children of adultery’, so again in Hos. 3 the prophet employs the metaphors of marriage and adultery to refer respectively to the relationship between God (the husband) and Israel (the wife).

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Just as it was commonly assumed from antiquity to the present day that Gomer, the wife who bore the three children with symbolic names according to Hos. 1:3–9, was the prostitute referred to in Hos. 1:2 (see above in the commentary at Hos. 1), so was it likewise assumed that this same Gomer the prostitute was the woman referred to in Hos. 3. In recent times, however, a number of scholars1 have argued that ch. 3 is a distinct symbolic vision referring to a woman distinct from Gomer, and, as I would add, distinct also from the other two unnamed adult women referred to in Hos. 1–2.2 On the other hand, several scholars hold the view that the woman whom Hosea is commanded to marry in Hos. 3:1 is Gomer, whom we met in Hos. 1:3.3 Gordis argues that Hos. 1:2 and Hos. 3 are two distinct accounts of the same experience, namely, the prophet’s marriage to a prostitute named Gomer.4 In Gordis’s view, ‘The two accounts represent two interpretations of the same experience, but at different periods in his career and from varying viewpoints. In other words, the two accounts are the records of two revelations to the prophet, and the opening clause in 3:1 refers to the second revelation: “The Lord spoke to me again” i.e. on the same theme.’5 Since, unquestionably, both Hos. 1:2 and Hos. 3:1 introduce symbolic visions, Gordis was altogether correct in suggesting that one compare Exod. 4:6 as a syntactic parallel to Hos. 3:1.6 In Exod. 4:2–6 Yhwh shows Moses two signs (so they are called in Exod. 4:9). The first sign is introduced in Exod. 4:1, ‘Yhwh said to him, “What is this in your hand?” And he [Moses] said, “A staff”.’ Further on in Exod. 4:6 it is reported, ‘Yhwh said to him again, “Put your hand close to your chest”. He put his hand close to his chest, and when he removed it, indeed his hand was leprous like snow…’. The comparison of Hos. 1:2 and Hos. 3:1

1.  Including Rudolph, Hosea, pp. 83–94; Stuart, Hosea, pp. 62–69; and Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, pp. 51–58. 2.  See also the especially insightful study by J. Moon, ‘A Short Note on Hos 3:12’, VT 65 (2015), pp. 474–79. 3.  Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 93–126; Brown, Hosea, pp. 27–37; J. A. Dearman, The Book of Hosea (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), pp. 131–45; Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, pp. 291–309; Harper, Amos and Hosea, pp. 216–25. 4.  Gordis, ‘Hosea’s Marriage and Message’, pp. 24–35. 5.  Gordis, ‘Hosea’s Marriage and Message’, p. 30. For an extensive discussion and literature concerning the possible significance of the adverb ôd in Hos. 3:1, see pp. 29–30. 6.  Gordis, ‘Hosea’s Marriage and Message’, p. 29.

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with Exod. 4:6 certainly supports the idea that Hos. 1:2 and Hos. 3:1 are distinct symbolic visions with related themes. In Exodus 4 the purpose of a series of three signs is to convince the Israelites in Egypt that Moses is a miracle worker, who can be trusted to rescue them from slavery. In Hos. 1:2 and Hos. 3:1 the common theme is that the relationship of God and Israel can be compared to the relationship between a husband and wife, specifically God the loyal husband and Israel the unfaithful wife. More apt a comparison with Hos. 3:1 than Exod. 4:6, the only instance in the entire Hebrew Bible of the words wayyōmer Yhwh lô ôd ‘Yhwh said to him again’ would be the comparison with Zech. 11:15. Following upon a previous symbolic vision in Zech. 11:13–14, Zech. 11:15 states, wayyōmer Yhwh ēlāy ôd, corresponding closely but not exactly to Hos. 3:1. In both Hos. 3:1 and Zech. 11:15, MT punctuates the dative pronoun with a disjunctive accent, rebiî in Hos. 3:1 and etnaḥtā in Zech. 11:15. The adverb ôd is punctuated with the disjunctive accent yĕtîb, which suggests that the adverb can be read independently of both the verb wayyōmer ‘he said’ and what follows, ‘Go; love a woman…’. So already Gordis, who adds, ‘Evidently the Masoretes preferred to leave the problem of construing the adverb to the reader!’7 While in Hos. 3:1 the dative pronoun is vocalized with pataḥ (ēlay) indicating that it is not a pausal form, the very same pronoun is vocalized as a pausal form with qameṣ (ēlāy) in Zech. 11:15. The comparison yields the following conclusion: the formula, twice attested in all of Hebrew Scripture, ‘Yhwh said to me again go take//love’ means, ‘There was another symbolic vision on a theme related to that of the previous symbolic vision’. In the case of Zech. 11 the common theme is the worthless shepherd while in Hos. 1–3 the common theme is the relationship between God and Israel imagined as that between a loving husband and a disloyal wife. 3:1 wayyōmer Yhwh ēlay ôd (literally) ‘Yhwh said to me further’ This literal reading of the opening words of 3:1 is in agreement with Ginsberg.8 Functionally, the meaning of this first part of Hos. 3:1 is ‘I [the prophet] had another close encounter of the third kind with the God of Israel, in which he conveyed to me the following message…’.

7.  Gordis, ‘Hosea’s Marriage and Message’, p. 29, 8.  Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, p. 50.

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lēk ĕhab-iššâ ahubat rēa ûmĕnāāpet ‘Go, love a woman who although loved by a companion is continually unfaithful’ Here as in Hos. 1:2 the command is introduced by the auxiliary imperative lēk ‘go’. For the use of the verb ‘go’ as an auxiliary verb calling for one to begin an activity symbolic or otherwise, see my discussion at Hos. 1:2. Ginsberg argues on the basis of Jer. 3:20 that the noun rēa must mean ‘companion’ and not husband.9 In Jer. 3:20 we read, ‘Contrary to what I had thought (ākēn), you have broken faith with me, as a woman breaks faith with a paramour [so NJPS], House of Israel—word of Yhwh’. Ginsberg’s arguments are as follows: First, it is taken for granted that wives and husbands should be loyal to each other even if they are not always reliable in real life. Second, Jer. 3:19, which leads directly into Jer. 3:20, argues as follows: ‘I had resolved to adopt you as my child, and I gave you a desirable land—the fairest heritage of all the nations; and I thought you would surely call me “Father” and never cease to be loyal to me. Contrary to what I thought (ākēn), which shows that a woman is assumed to have a penchant for disloyalty to a rēa (“paramour”), which she would not have toward a husband.’ Third, Jer. 3:1b–2 employs the noun rēa to mean a harlot’s client. See Jer. 3:1b–2: ‘Now you [feminine singular referring to the personified people of Judah engaging in metaphoric fornication which is a metaphor for idolatry] have fornicated with many reîm [i.e., clients of prostitutes]… Look up to the bare heights, and see: Where have you not engaged in sexual relations…?’ As I pointed out in earlier studies,10 the substitution in the qere of the verb škb for the rare verb šgl and its vocalization in the passive are meant to mitigate the charges against personified Judah transforming her from perpetrator to passive victim while the substitution of the common verb škb in the qere for the rare verb šgl, which refers in Hebrew Scripture only to illicit sex, may also be meant to mitigate the unhappy portrayal of personified Judah found in Jer. 3. However, Ginsberg’s arguments that the woman referred to in Hos. 3:1 is not a wife but a paramour is contradicted by the story line in vv. 1b–3; see below. ûmĕnāāpet ‘who is continually unfaithful’ The verb np ‘commit adultery’ is used to refer to a man who engages in sexual intimacy with a woman married to someone else and to a married woman who engages in sexual intimacy with someone other than her 9.  Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, p. 51. 10.  Gruber, ‘Jeremiah 3:1–4:2 between Deuteronomy 24 and Matthew 5’ and ‘Forbidden Sexual Relations in Biblical Hebrew’.

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husband. According to Lev. 20:10, persons who have engaged in either of these offenses are to be punished by death. See, however, the discussion below in my commentary at Hos. 4:13–14. Outside of Hos. 1–3 adultery serves as a metaphor for idolatry also in Jer. 3:8–9; Ezek. 16; 23. When the verbal root np is employed in the piel conjugation, as here at Hos. 3:1 and also in Isa. 57:3; Jer. 9:1; 23:10; 29:23; Ezek. 16:32; Hos. 4:13–14 Mal. 3:5; Ps. 50:18; Prov. 30:20 (altogether 12 instances in the entire Hebrew Bible if we include Hos. 7:4, concerning which see below in my commentary there), it refers to a person who habitually commits adultery either literally or as a metaphor for idolatry. Concerning the use of the piel conjugation to refer to habitual activity see GKC #52f. For the masculine plural participle hammĕnāāpîm ‘habitually adulterous men’ in m. Soṭah 9:9 see my discussion in the commentary below at Hos. 4:14. kěahăbat Yhwh et-běnê Yiśrāēl ‘on the analogy of Yhwh’s loving the people of Israel’ wěhēm pōnîm el-ělōhîm ăḥērîm ‘while they [the people of Israel] turn to other gods’ Here the prophet employs the syntactical convention of conjunctive waw followed by a noun or personal pronoun (here the third person plural personal pronoun) followed by a present participle to indicate simultaneity, in this case the simultaneity of God’s love of Israel and Israel’s disloyal behaviour. Other instances of the syntactical convention of conjunctive waw followed by noun or pronoun followed by an active participle to convey simultaneity include Gen. 18:1 (‘while he is sitting at the entrance of the tent’); Gen. 19:1 (‘while Lot is sitting at the gate of Sodom’); Judg. 13:9 (‘while she is sitting in the field’); see GKC §14e; 164a. weōhăbê ăšîšê ănābîm (literally) ‘people who are lovers of/devotees of cakes made of raisins’ The participial phrase found in MT is supported by LXX, καὶ φιλοῦσιν πέμματα μετὰ σταφίδος ‘and they love cakes stuffed with raisins’,11 although the Greek is actually closer to the Hebrew and means literally ‘cakes of raisin’, i.e., ‘raisin cakes’, and may imply the eating of some repast, which was associated with the worship of some deity or deities other than Yhwh, just as the eating of the bread and wine of the Eucharist 11.  So Glenny, Hosea, p. 39.

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is a quintessentially Christian act of worship and just as the eating of unleavened bread and bitter herbs on Passover night is a quintessentially Jewish act of worship. Thomson renders the Greek as follows: ‘and love cakes with dried grapes’.12 Interestingly, NJPS translates the traditional Hebrew text not ‘and lovers of raisin cakes’ but ‘and love the cups of the grape’. In fact, the interpretation of the noun *āšîš as a noun meaning ‘cup, drinking receptacle’ is found in Mandelkern’s Concordantiae.13 Mandelkern notes that this definition is found in the medieval dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, Mahberet Menahem by Menahem b. Jacob Ibn Saruq, which is the dictionary of Biblical Hebrew most frequently cited by Rashi in his biblical commentaries. Menahem’s view, now canonized in NJPS at Hos. 3:1, assumes that Rabbinic Hebrew ăšîšiyōt in the phrase ăšîšiyōt šel zěkûkît ‘glass drinking vessels’ is related to Biblical Hebrew by interchange of aleph in the Biblical Hebrew form with ayin in the Rabbinic Hebrew form. Given the fact that interchange of aleph and ayin is attested within the standard text of Hebrew Scripture, the assumed interchange in the case at hand is not altogether unlikely. The masculine plural construct form of the noun ăšîšê ‘raisin cakes of’ is attested also in MT of Isa. 16:7, where, however, the parallel recension of the lament over the fate of Moab in Jer. 48:36 reads more plausibly anšê ‘the men of’, q.v. The feminine singular form of the noun *āšîš, i.e., ăšîšâ meaning ‘cake’ is attested in 2 Sam. 6:19 (and the parallel text in 1 Chron. 16:3) as one of the three comestibles that King David distributed to every man and woman in Israel in celebration of his bringing the Ark of Yhwh to Jerusalem: ‘a loaf of bread, a cake made in a pan, and one raisin cake’ (so NJPS). The feminine form ăšîšōt ‘cakes’ is attested only in Song 2:5: ‘Sustain me with raisin cakes//refresh me with apples//for I am lovesick’. HALOT prefers to derive all of the aforementioned forms of āšîš from Arab. aṯiṯ ‘lush vegetation, inflorescence of the palmtree, of the vine’ while acknowledging the fact that many commentators prefer ‘raisin cake’, which, as I noted, is found already in LXX. DCH (1:413) follows LXX in interpreting the noun in question to mean ‘raisin cake’. A number of modern exegetes sensed that what is called for in Hos. 3:1 is a command–action sequence, in which the command to love found in Hos. 3:1b should be followed in Hos. 3:1e with an announcement by the prophet that indeed he obeyed the command. Consequently, 12.  Thomson, The Septuagint Bible, p. 1352. 13.  Mandelkern, Concordantiae, p. 159.

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Ginsberg14 assumes that the phrase ‘and men who are lovers of cakes made of raisins’ is a scribal error for an original description of the prophet’s fulfilment of the command as follows: wāōhab ēšet ăgābîm (with restoration) ‘So I loved a lustful woman’ For the abstract noun ăgābîm meaning ‘lust’ see Ezek. 33:31–32: ‘For lust is in their mouths…and indeed you are for them indeed a singer of lust, who has a sweet voice and plays skilfully; they hear your words, but will not obey them. But when it [the predicted punishment] arrives, and it will surely arrive, they will know that a prophet was among them.’ Given the fact that Ezekiel, exemplified by Ezek. 16 and 23, is the most pornographic poet in the entire Hebrew Bible, it is not surprising that all but one of the ten attestations in the Hebrew Bible of the root gb meaning ‘to lust’ are found in the book of Ezekiel (Ezek. 23:5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 16, 20; 33:31–32). The additional instance is found in Jer. 4:30. Interestingly, Ginsberg twice emends texts in the book of Hosea so as to add two more instances of the root gb ‘lust’ to Biblical Hebrew. The other instance is at Hos. 4:17. If we follow Ginsberg’s emendation and change the final three words of Hos. 3:1 into a clause in which the prophet describes in three words his having obeyed the command stated in Hos. 3:1, ‘Go, love a woman, who, when loved by a male sexual partner, is continually unfaithful’, we shall find that the action portion of the command–action sequence thus restored in Hos. 3:1–2 is divided into two sections. The first section describes in just three words the prophet’s first-person account of his having acceded to the divine command found in Hos. 3:1. What follows in Hos. 3:2 is the prophet’s account to his contemporary audience and to posterity of how precisely he carried out what he understood to be a command to enter into a contract with a woman who had a penchant for adultery, who, as we shall see, was meant to symbolize Israel in its faithlessness to God, as was the woman of harlotry referred to in Hos. 1:2. What follows in Hos. 3:3 is the description of what it is that the unnamed lustful woman is expected to do in exchange for the price in silver and barley, which the prophet agreed to pay in Hos. 3:2, while 3:4 explains what precisely is the symbolic significance in the life of the people of Israel of the very strange contractual arrangement which the prophet offered the erstwhile lustful woman. 14.  Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, p. 52, following Ehrlich, Randglossen, vol. 5, p. 171 (whom Ginsberg does not cite) and N. H. Tur-Sinai, Hallashon Wehassefer 2 (2nd ed.; Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1959), p. 313 (in Hebrew).

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3:2 wāekkěrehā lî ‘And I hired her for me’ In Biblical Hebrew we find three homonymous verbs kārâ, namely kārâ I ‘dig’ (Gen. 26:25; Exod. 21:33; Num. 21:18; Jer. 18:20, 22; Pss. 7:16; 57:7; 94:13; 119:85; Prov. 16:27; 26:27); kārâ II ‘acquire’ (Gen. 50:5; Deut. 2:6; Job 6:27; 40:30; 2 Chron. 16:14); and kārâ III ‘give a feast’, which is attested only in 2 Kgs 6:23.15 I have listed two references to family sepulchres under kārâ II ‘acquire’ because, as Gen. 50:5 and 2 Chron. 16:14 indicate, and as was demonstrated by V. A. Hurowitz,16 the burials there referred to were in caves that had been acquired for burial rather than graves that were dug in the ground, as in the modern practice and frequently in Hebrew Scripture with respect to the burial of kings. ‘I hired her’, which terminates in the third person feminine singular accusative suffix referring to the woman who although loved by her regular sexual partner has a penchant for disloyalty, is another instance of kārâ II ‘acquire’. However, Gordis,17 following Ibn Ezra in his commentary here at Hos. 3:2, argues that the verb here attested is not an instance of what we called kārâ II ‘acquire’ but rather that the daghesh forte in the letter k indicates that the verb here employed is a derivative of the root nkr meaning ‘marry, pay a bride price’. Indeed, DCH (5:694) lists this verb as nkr III, and he suggests (here also anticipated by Gordis) that the piel nikkar attested in 1 Sam. 23:7 may mean ‘sell’. For the use of the same root in the senses ‘acquire, sell’ in the qal and piel respectively Gordis compares Aram. zbn, which means ‘acquire’ in the peal and ‘sell’ in the pael, and the Hebrew verb qanâ, which means ‘acquire’, but which can mean ‘sell, transfer ownership’ in the hiphil in Rabbinic Hebrew. However, as Clines has noted (DCH 5:694 and 4:459a), the more commonly accepted view is that the verb wāekkěrehā in Hos. 3:1 and the verb nikkar in 1 Sam. 23:7 are forms of the verb kārâ II ‘buy’ attested in Deut. 2:6 and Job 6:27.18 LXX at Hos. 3:2a reads καὶ ἐμισθωσάμην ἐμαυτῷ ‘And I hired [her] for myself’, which supports Ginsberg’s interpretation as against Abronin’s fascinating explanation of the daghesh forte in the k in the form wāekkěrehā. 15.  See, inter alia, Gesenius–Buhl, 17th ed., vol. 3, pp. 569–60. 16.  V. A. Hurowitz, ‘Burial in the Bible’, Beit Mikra 45 (2000), pp. 121–45 (in Hebrew). 17.  Gordis, ‘Hosea’s Marriage and Message’, p. 25 n. 37. 18.  For a variety of other explanations as to the origin and precise meaning of the form wāekkěrehā, see, inter alia, Kaddari, Dictionary, p. 531b; A. Abronin, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, Leshonenu 1 (1928–29), pp. 357–58 (in Hebrew); Morag, ‘On Semantic and Lexical Features’, pp. 498–99.

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3:2b baḥămiššâ āśār kesep ‘in exchange for fifteen [shekels] of silver’ Similarly LXX: πεντε καὶ δέκα ἀργθρίου ‘fifteen pieces of silver’. NJPS assumes that the standard unit of payment in ancient Israel was called the shekel. The problem is that the weight of silver or gold and any other commodity designated by the term shekel differed over time and from one location to another; consequently, Amos 8:5 noted that many merchants took advantage of there being neither a universally recognized metric system nor a governmental bureau of weights and measures as in the USA, Great Britain, and other countries which have yet to adopt the metric system, to prevent merchants from taking advantage of the loophole in reality and law. These unscrupulous merchants would habitually employ an unusually large shekel weight on their scales and an unusually small ephah container when selling produce to their already impoverished customers. Archaeological evidence indicates that the average weight of a shekel in ancient Israel was 11.3 grams and that the ephah as a dry measure of capacity could vary from anything between 10 and 20 dry litres. M. A. Powell explains the figures given in Hos. 3:2 as follows: ‘One expects the slave girl [i.e., the woman who is the object of the verb “love” in Hos. 3:1] to cost 30 shekels (as per the price scale in Lev. 27:1–8), which suggests that the underlying homer had 10 parts and letech 5, i.e. 15 ephah, and that 1 ephah [= costs] 1 shekel’.19 Put simply, assuming that Powell, a world-famous authority on labour and slavery in the ancient Near East, got it right, our prophet paid the women with whom he made an agreement the following sums: 15 shekels of silver + 1 homer (= 10 shekels) of barley and 1 letech of barley (half a homer according to the Mishnah), or a total of 1 shekel of silver and 15 shekels of barley for a total of 15 shekels in weight, half in silver and half in barley, corresponding to the cost of a female, who chose to give her value in payment of a vow, according to Lev. 27:4. LXX gives the sums to be paid for the woman whom the prophet was commanded to love as follows: πεντε καὶ δέκα ἀργυρίου καὶ γόμορ κριθῶν καὶ νεβελ οἴνου ‘fifteen pieces of silver and a homer of barley and an amphora of wine’. LXX seems to have been at a loss as to how to translate the Hebrew terms homer and nebel; consequently LXX simply transliterates both of these terms. It is equally clear that Glenny,20 who

19.  M. A. Powell, ‘Weights and Measures’, ABD, vol. 6, pp. 897–908 (904). 20.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 39.

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translated the Greek transliteration from Hebrew as ‘goatskin bottle of wine’, did not bother to check the best dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew concerning the lexeme nebel. It is equally important to note that if in Hos. 3:2 LXX simply transliterates both homer and nebel, LXX bears witness here to a Hebrew Vorlage of LXX, which read instead of MT’s ‘letech of barley’, nebel yayin ‘amphora of wine’, a phrase which is attested also in the Hebrew Bible in 1 Sam. 1:24; 10:3; and 2 Sam. 16:1; in the plural in 1 Sam. 25:18 (niblê yayin). Reference to nebel ‘amphora (for wine)’ without the construct genitive construction nebel yayin is found twice in Jer. 13:12: kol-nēbel yimmālēyayin ‘every amphora shall be filled with wine’.21 Note that Isa. 30:14 refers specifically to nēbel yōṣěrîm ‘jar [made] by potters’, i.e., ‘clay jar’ and Lam. 4:2 to niblê ḥereś ‘jars of clay’ while in Jer. 48:12 it is threatened that ‘their [Moab’s] jars [Heb. niblêhem] will be shattered’. LXX’s transliterating bears witness to an old version of Hosea in Hebrew, which LXX did not fully understand. On the other hand, T. Muraoka writes as follows concerning LXX’s reading καὶ γόμορ κριθῶν καὶ νεβελ οἴνου where MT reads ‘a homer of barley and a letch of barley’: ‘However, if our translator was ignorant of letek, he could have been tempted to substitute another commodity by using a phrase which occurs twice elsewhere, 1 Ki 1:24 and 2 Ki 16:1’.22 Sadly, the latter two verses have nothing to do with either letek or nebel yayin. 3:3 wāōmar ēlêhā yāmîm rabbîm tēšĕbî lî lō tiznî wĕlō tihyî lĕîš wĕgam-ănî ēlāyik ‘And I said to her, “You will cease and desist a long time. You will neither commit adultery nor marry a man, and I also shall not be intimate with you” ’ Here we have another surprise ending such as we noticed first in Hos. 1:3, where what seems to be the action section of a command–action sequence does not have the prophet actually marry an adulterous woman and adopt children of adultery but instead has the prophet marry a woman who bears him three children who bear symbolic names that tell us about the misfortune of a sinful Israel and later about the good 21.  Concerning the meaning of the noun nēbel, see DCH 5:594–95: ‘normally an amphora, i.e. with two or four handles and a narrow neck, probably not leather bottle; usu. for storing wine or oil’. 22.  T. Muraoka, ‘Hebrew Hapax Legomena and Septuagint Lexicography’, in VII Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies Leuven 1989 (ed. C. E. Cox; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), pp. 205–22 (214–15).

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fortune of a repentant Israel. Again in Hos. 2:16, where we expected the prophet speaking in the name of God to describe in further detail the punishment of disloyal Lady Israel, we have the prophet speaking in the name of God about solving the problem by God the husband’s undertaking an initiative to bring about reconciliation by showering the metaphoric unfaithful spouse with love. Here again we would have expected that the woman with a predilection for adulterous liaisons whom the prophet was commanded to marry would engage in more adulterous liaisons in order to dramatize Lady Israel’s disloyalty to God her husband. Instead the prophet surprises us by telling us that in fact he asked the woman with whom he contracted in exchange for the sums spelled out in Hos. 3:2 to engage in ‘time out’, to spend a period of time neither in an adulterous relationship nor in a stable marriage or even to engage in intimacy with the prophet. Having now for at least the third time in Hos. 1–3 surprised his audience, this time with a totally unexpected outcome of his entering into a contractual relationship with woman who has a predilection for adultery, the prophet moves on immediately in the last two verses (Hos. 3:4–5) to explain the meaning in the life of the people of Israel of the socio-drama enacted in Hos. 3:1–3. tēšĕbî ‘You will cease and desist’ Similarly, Ginsberg renders ‘you will remain’.23 As Ginsberg indicates, he is inspired to understand this verb, whose basic meaning is ‘you will sit’, as meaning here ‘you will refrain’, from the usage of the verb yšb in the sense ‘refrain’ in Mishnaic Hebrew in kol-hayyōšēb wĕlō ōbēr ăbērâ ‘whoever refrains from committing a sin’ in m. Makkot 3:15 and b. Qiddushin 39b, and šēb wĕal taăśeh ‘sit still and do nothing’ in b. Berakot 20a; b. Erubin 100a (and additional sources cited by Ginsberg).24 However, as Ginsberg indicates, we find ample precedents for the use of the verb yšb meaning ‘remain, refrain’ also in Biblical Hebrew. Examples include Gen. 38:11, ‘Remain a widow in your father’s house…and she remained in her father’s house’; Isa. 47:8, hayyōšebet lābeṭaḥ ‘who remains secure’. In addition, Ginsberg compares ‘You shall wait/remain/ cease and desist on my account/for me’ here in Hos. 3:3 to Jer. 3:2, yāšabtĕ lāhem ‘you (second person feminine singular) waited for them’.

23.  Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, p. 53. 24.  Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, p. 53 n. 9.

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lō tizěnî ‘You will not commit adultery’ I have previously pointed out that the issue at stake in Hos. 1:3 is Israel’s violation of the prohibition against Israel’s venerating any deity other than the God of Israel and that throughout Hos. 1–3 the violation of this prohibition is compared to a married woman’s engaging in intimate relations with a man other than her husband. What the woman who joins Hosea here in Hos. 3 in a socio-drama is asked not to do in exchange for the contractual agreement for which she is paid the sum spelled out in Hos. 3:2 is to commit adultery. Thus NJPS’s ‘without fornicating’ is an inaccurate translation as fornication designates ‘voluntary sexual intercourse between two unmarried persons’. In order for the misbehaviour of any of the two women actors in the socio-dramas in Hos. 1:2b and Hos. 3 to represent symbolically the misbehaviour of Lady Israel vis-à-vis her husband, the God of Israel, that behaviour must be adultery, i.e., a married woman’s engaging in intimate relations with a man other than her husband or a man’s engaging in intimate relations with a woman married to someone else. Contrast Ginsberg. Significantly, in Hos. 4:13–15, Second Hosea (see below) will extend the definition of adultery to include a married man’s engaging in intimate relations with a woman other than his wife without reference to the marital status of the paramour. wĕlō tihyî lĕîš ‘Nor marry a man’ We might assume that our prophet here contradicts himself. After all, in Hos. 3:2 our prophet reported that he paid out what looks like a great deal of mohar or bride-price in order to marry the woman in question. However, careful attention to Hos. 3:1 shows that our prophet and the God who commanded him to engage in the socio-drama described in Hos. 3 were careful to indicate that the command was not to marry a woman of adultery as in Hos. 1:2b but rather to love a faithless woman. Indeed, if we accept the Tur-Sinai–Ginsberg emendation at the end of Hos. 3:1,25 then, indeed, the prophet loved a woman of lust. In addition, as we saw, with reference to the peculiar verb form wāekkěrehā followed by the prepositional phrase lî, together meaning ‘And I hired her for myself’, this means that the relationship between the prophet and this woman was not a marriage but an agreement to engage for fees paid in advance in a sociodrama such as an undergraduate or graduate student might engage in for the advancement of someone else’s social science research project and for which the student in need of funds to buy school books or what-have-you will be paid a fee. 25.  See above, p. 169 n. 14.

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Precisely because the woman in the Hos. 3 experiment is not married either to the prophet or anyone else the prophet can indeed stipulate in Hos. 3:3, ‘And you will not marry’. The expression ‘she was unto a man’ meaning ‘she got married’ is employed in precisely that sense in Lev. 21:3; 22:12; Num. 30:7; Deut. 24:2; 25:5; Jer. 3:1.26 wĕgam-ănî ēlāyik ‘and I also shall not be intimate with you’ Similarly, NJPS: ‘even I [shall not cohabit] with you’. Ginsberg renders as follows: ‘and without my coming to you’.27 Abraham Ibn Ezra in his commentary on this clause points out that we have in Hos. 3:3 another instance of the phenomenon, now widely called ‘gapping’, in which a word, in this case the negative particle lō, found in one of a series of clauses also serves (precisely Ibn Ezra’s term here) another clause. I took note of this stylistic device already in the commentary at Hos. 2:10, where my interpretation was, as I noted, found already in LXX. Here at Hos. 3:3, however, LXX interprets, καὶ ἐγὼ ἐπὶ σοί ‘and I will remain beside you’. According to this later, literal interpretation of the Hebrew text shared by MT, the prophet promises the woman with whom he contracts to engage in a socio-drama that he will remain at her side until the completion of the social science project. Many modern commentaries assume that the negative particle originally was repeated in the final clause of Hos. 3:3 but that it fell out.28 While Hos. 3:1–3 describes the socio-drama that the prophet is to act out together with the unnamed woman who has a penchant for being disloyal to her lover, Hos. 3:4–5 explains the symbolic meaning of the socio-drama in the life of the people of Israel. 3:4 kî yāmîm rabbîm yēšěbû běnê Yiśrāēl ‘For a long time the people of Israel will cease and desist’ In the socio-drama in Hos. 3:1–3 the woman is said to have a penchant for engaging in intimate relations outside of the relationship with her steady lover, precisely as is frequently reported in episodes of the television series ‘Cheaters’, which does not limit the notion of disloyalty in a relationship 26.  See Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, p. 53 n. 11, and the extensive discussion there. Note also that the expression ‘was/will be unto an îš’ supports the view discussed above at Hos. 2:9, 18 that îš in those verses may simply mean ‘husband’. 27.  Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, p. 53. 28.  See Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 220.

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to couples bound in holy matrimony. Likewise, in the explication of the lesson for the life of the people of Israel, the female companion of the God of Israel is required to spend a long time without any of the aspects of day-to-day life that functionally correspond in the life of the nation of Israel to intimacy in the life of humans. ên melek wĕên śār wĕên zebaḥ wĕên maṣṣēbâ wĕên ēpōd ûtěrāpîm The precise meaning of each of the six nouns listed here will be discussed below. It cannot be overemphasized that we have here another example of the rhetorical device called anaphora, which I discussed above with reference to Hos. 2:21. Here at Hos. 3:4 the repetition of the negative particle ên at the head of each of five nominal sentences magnifies the dramatic effect of the promise that for a considerable time Israel will be made to suffer from a series of deprivations. It is possible that the six aspects of day-to-day-life, of which Israel is to be deprived for a long time according to Hos. 3:4, are meant to correspond incrementally to the three forms of depravation with which the woman who has a predilection for disloyalty is made to suffer, namely, no adultery, no marriage, and no intimate relationship with the prophet, who is meant to represent God vis-à-vis Israel just as the woman in question is meant to represent the people of Israel. Whether or not Hos. 1–3 is from the pen of the eighth-century BCE prophet who is responsible for Hos. 7:3, 5; 8:10; 13:10, it is likely that in the present context, as in those verses in Hosea as also in Isa. 49:7; Jer. 17:25; 49:38; Prov. 8:14–16, the terms melek and śār both denote ‘king’. The unexpected message is that for a people to be punished by being deprived of a king is analogous to punishing a woman who is so obsessed with sexual relations that one man will not suffice the fulfilment of her physical and emotional needs. My inclination to understand the two terms melek and śār as synonyms meaning ‘king’ is supported by LXX at Hos. 3:5, which states: διότι ἡμέρας πολλὰς καθήσονται οἱ υἱοὶ Ἰσραὴλ οὐκ ὄντος βασιλέυς οὐδε ὄντος ἂρχοντος οὐδὲ oὔσης θυσίας οὐδὲ ὄντος θυσαστηρίου οὐδὲ ἱερατίας οὐδὲ δῆλων ‘Because many days the children of Israel will remain without there being a king and without there being a ruler and without sacrifice and without altar and without priesthood and without divine revelation’. The phraseology οὐκ ὄντος βασιλέυς οὐδε ὄντος ἂρχοντος in LXX supports my interpretation of MT’s Hebrew pair ên melek wĕên śār to represent a poetic repetition or redundancy referring to a period of time in the near future when Israel will not have a king (here not as the restoration of an ideal past prior to the anointing of King Saul such as is idealized

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by M. Buber29), until she will have repented of her misbehaviour and will be rewarded with the return of the kingship and the appurtenances of sacrificial worship, which she will be temporarily denied during an unspecified period of ‘time out’ such as parents and teachers now give children who have been creating havoc at home, at school, or on the playground. No less important than LXX’s support of my interpretation of Heb. ên melek wĕên śār as a repetition in different and synonymous words of the promise that for an unspecified time Israel will find itself without a monarch is LXX’s deviation from the list of additional features of normal life that will be denied Israel during the period of time out. The Septuagintal list of features of normal life that will be denied Israel includes, in addition to two terms for king (as in the Hebrew version), the following four: sacrifice and altar, priesthood, and manifestations from God. Thus LXX’s list and MT’s list share four features in common: (1) a pair of terms meaning monarch; (2) a term meaning sacrifice; (3) another term for a cultic installation, the precise form of which is an instance of disparity between LXX and MT; and (4) a total of six terms for features of daily life that will be denied for an unspecified period. The precise meaning of the terms in LXX’s list is abundantly clearer to the modern reader than is the meaning of the terms in MT’s list. The three terms found in LXX are ‘sacrifice’, ‘priesthood’, and ‘divine revelation’. The denial of the first two of these three features of everyday life is congruent with the threat found in Lev. 26:31: ‘I will make your sanctuaries desolate, and I will not savour your pleasing odours’. Similarly, the eighth-century BCE prophet Amos declares, speaking in the name of God in Amos 7:9: ‘The shrines of Isaac shall be laid waste//and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be destroyed’. Likewise we read in Hos. 12:12 where the eighth-century prophet of the Northern Kingdom, speaking in the name of God declares in a present of prophetic certitude, ‘Their [Gilead’s and Gilgal’s] altars are like stone heaps upon a ploughed field’. The Hebrew Vorlage of LXX’s οὐδὲ οὔσης θυσίας οὐδὲ ὄντος, namely wĕên zebaḥ wĕên mizbēăḥ, features a beautiful assonance, while MT’s wĕên zebaḥ wĕên maṣṣēbâ ‘and there shall be neither sacrifice nor cultpillar’, leaves readers with the exegetical challenge of defining a maṣṣēbâ ‘cult pillar’ in the historical context to which the reader/exegete will have assigned Hos. 3. The singular noun maṣṣēbâ is attested altogether nine times in the entire Hebrew Bible. 29.  M. Buber, Kingship of God (3rd ed.; trans. Richard Scheiman; London: International Humanities Press, 1967).

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In Deut. 16:21–22 both ăšērâ and maṣṣēbâ represent cultic objects which it is forbidden for Israelites to erect, the latter because it belongs to the category of objects ‘which Yhwh your God detests’. Since there seems not to be the slightest hint in Hos. 3 or anywhere else in the book of Hosea that a maṣṣēbâ is something that the God of Israel intrinsically detests, it should be assumed that Hos. 3 shares with the Jacob cycle of stories in the book of Genesis, specifically Gen. 28:18, 22; 31:13, 45; 35:14, the notion that a maṣṣēbâ is a piece of stone standing upright upon which one pours oil as an expression of devotion to God. Genesis 28:22 informs us that the pillar Jacob set up at Bethel and upon which Jacob poured oil on two separate occasions (Gen. 28:22; 35:14) would be the site of a temple devoted to the God of Jacob. In Gen. 35:20, on the other hand, the term maṣṣēbâ denotes the stone which Jacob erected to mark the burial place of Rachel, while in Exod. 24:4 twelve stones designated by the term maṣṣēbâ seem to correspond functionally to the stone, which Jacob and Laban set up as eternal testimony to their peace agreement (Gen. 31:45–92) and to the stones which were set up by Joshua both within the Jordan River and at Gilgal as eternal testimony to the miraculous crossing of the Jordan River on dry land (Josh. 4:4–9, 20–24). The collective noun maṣṣēbâ ‘stone/pillar’, referring to twelve ‘stones’ to be set up at the foot of Mt. Sinai (Exod. 24:4), would seem likely to serve as testimony to the covenant established there between God and the twelve tribes of Israel. Aside from Deut. 16:22 there is no hint in the Hebrew Bible that maṣṣēbâ in the singular is ever associated with a form of worship forbidden to Israelites. The plural form maṣṣēbōt ‘cult pillars’ is attested only four times in all of Hebrew Scripture (2 Kgs 10:26; 17:10; Jer. 43:13; Hos. 10:6). It refers three times to an instrument of forbidden worship (in 2 Kgs 10:26 to the worship of Baal, which was eliminated by King Jehu) and once to an instrument of worship found in the Northern Kingdom in the time of the eighth-century prophet, whose writings are found in Hos. 4–14 (see my commentary on Hos. 10:6; see also maṣṣēbōtām ‘their cult pillars’ in Hos. 10:2). On the other hand, in the following texts the Israelites are commanded to destroy their (i.e., the non-Israelite devotees of other deities) cult pillars: Exod. 23:24 (the form maṣṣēbōtēhem only here; in all the other cases maṣṣēbōtām); 34:13; Deut. 7:5; 12:3. According to 1 Kgs 14:23, the erection by the people of Judah during the reign of Rehoboam of maṣṣēbōt was one of the symptoms of the apostasy which the Deuteronomic author of that chapter attributes to the people of Judah of that time. Likewise, 2 Chron. 14:2; 2 Kgs 18:4; 2 Chron. 14:2; 2 Kgs 23:14; 2 Chron. 31:1 attribute to King Asa, King Hezekiah, and King Josiah respectively the removal of the characteristically non-Yahwistic maṣṣēbōt from the Temple of Yhwh at Jerusalem.

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Careful consideration of all of these data appears to indicate that the standard Hebrew text of Hos. 3:4 shares with the Jacob cycle of the book of Genesis a totally sanguine view of the cult pillar as an appurtenance of Israelite worship. Kinship with Deut. 16:22 or any of the negative views of the term maṣṣēbōt found in the books of Kings and Chronicles cannot be found in Hos. 3:4.30 Ephod This term in MT of Hos. 3:4 has no obvious counterpart in LXX; but see below. The noun ephod is attested 49 times in the Hebrew Bible, most frequently in reference to one of the four garments, which set apart the high priest from the subordinate priests. This garment, a kind of apron, was attached to the breastplate, which bore twelve precious stones, each representing one of the twelve tribes of Israel. See Exod. 28:4, 6, 12, 25–28, 31; 29:5; 39:2, 7, 18, 19, 20–22; Lev. 8:7. Other persons who wore a ceremonial garment called an ephod include the young Samuel (1 Sam. 2:18), Gideon (Judg. 8:27), the Levite whom Micah installed in his private sanctuary (Judg. 17:5; 18:14, 17, 18, 20), and David (2 Sam. 6:14; 1 Chron. 15:27). LXX’s reading ἱερατίας ‘priesthood’ may result from LXX’s interpreting Heb. ephod ‘an apron worn by a priest’ as a metonymy for ‘priesthood’. For the juxtaposition of the pair ephod and teraphim, always in that order, see, in addition to Hos. 3:4, Judg. 17:5; 18:14, 20. In Gen. 31:19, 34, 35 the term teraphim seems to designate idols, that is to say statues of household gods. Likewise, in 1 Sam. 19:13–16 teraphim were anthropoid statues, which Michal was able to place in David’s bed to create the impression that he was still in his bed sleeping rather than absent, having already fled from the threat of being killed by King Saul. In Zech. 10:2 the declaration, ‘For the teraphim spoke delusion, the augurs predicted unreliably; and dreamers spoke untruth; and console with nonsense. That is why my people have strayed like a flock; they suffer for lack of a shepherd’ (similarly, NJPS), indicates that teraphim can designate a device for ascertaining what the future holds in store like the Urim and Thummim. Likewise, Ezek. 21:26 declares concerning Nebuchad­ nezzar II, ‘he inquired of the teraphim and he engaged in heptascopy’, i.e., divining by means of studying the significance of the physical features of the liver of a sacrificial animal. If, as I suggested, LXX’s rendering Hebrew ephod by means of the abstract noun ‘priesthood’ indicates 30.  Concerning attempts to identify with Heb. maṣṣēbâ various artefacts recovered from excavations at Bronze Age and Iron Age sites in ancient Palestine see D. W. Manor, ‘Massebah’, ABD, vol. 4, p. 602 and the literature cited there.

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taking ephod meaning priestly ephod as a metonomy for priesthood, so it appears most likely that LXX’s expression οὐδὲ δῆλων ‘and no divine revelation’ is a reasonable translation of the sense in context of the Heb. Vorlage wĕên…těrāpîm, assuming that here in Hos. 3:4 as in Zech. 10:2 and Ezek. 21:26 teraphim designate neither idols nor mannequins but an instrument for gaining knowledge of future events, serving the same purpose as mantic prophecy, dreams, and liver divination. In other words, just as Amos, speaking in the name of God, warns in Amos 8:11 (‘A time is coming—speech of my Lord Yhwh—when I will send a famine upon the land; not a hunger for bread or a thirst for water, but for hearing the words of Yhwh. People will wander from sea to sea and from north to south to seek the word of Yhwh, but they will not find it’), so does our prophet speaking in the name of God in Hos. 3:4 suggest that God’s and Israel’s necessary period of time out from each other means not only no sacrifices and no altars//cultic pillars (depending on whether we follow the Greek or the Hebrew version) but also neither priesthood nor prophecy. (Cf. the juxtaposition of priest and prophet in Hos. 4:4 and the juxtaposition of king, priest, and prophet in the delineation of the roles of each in Deut. 17–18.) 3:5 aḥar yāšûbû bĕnê Yiśrāēl ûbiqqĕšû et-Yhwh wĕēt Dāwīd malkām ‘Afterward the people of Israel will again seek Yhwh and David their king’ This verse suggests that from the point of our prophet speaking, as I am convinced he believed, in the name of the God of Israel, the people of the Northern Kingdom in the ninth century were guilty of both disloyalty to the God of Israel expressed by their veneration of other deities, most notably Hadad (see above in my commentary on Hos. 2:10) and disloyalty to the dynasty of David that had been chosen by God to rule Israel forever (2 Sam. 7; Ps. 89:36–38). After having, as it were, time out from God and from all the earthly realities that connect Israel with God (Hos. 3:4), Israel will, God promises, be given a new opportunity to renew its connection with both God and the Davidic dynasty. Hosea 3:9 shares with Amos 9:11 the conviction that at least some of God’s prophets in the ninth and eighth centuries respectively believed that they had been commanded to tell the people of the Northern Kingdom that in the better time to come (sooner or later) not only would Israel venerate only one God but also Israel would acknowledge only one dynasty, the house of David, over all Israel, North and South.

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Hosea 3:5 shares with Hos. 1:6 (see my commentary there) and Hos. 2:9 (see my commentary there), 11; and 14:8, the rare but not uncommon syntactic feature of two finite verbs (the first of them an auxiliary verb such as ‘continue’, ‘go’ ‘go back, return’ [the latter verb in three of the five instances cited here]) joined as a hendiadys where one would have expected an auxiliary verb followed by an infinitive finalis (see GKC §120c; see also the similar hendiadys in Hos. 9:9). ûpāḥădû el-Yhwh ‘and they will thrill over Yhwh’ Here I follow the NJPS translation. The verb pāḥad and its derived noun paḥad usually denote ‘fear’. Typical are Job 3:25: ‘For I feared a fear, and it came upon me//and what I dreaded reached me’; Ps. 14:5: ‘There they will fear a fear; for God is present in the company of the virtuous’; Prov. 3:24: ‘When you lie down you should not fear for you will lie down and your sleep will be sweet’. Just as many anatomical expressions that literally describe gestures, postures, or facial expressions have come to be employed in ancient Semitic languages to express idiomatically the emotion or attitude conveyed by the gesture, posture, or facial expression, so also does the verbal root pḥd, which commonly expresses the abstract notion of fear, also often express the physical sensation of trembling, regardless of whether that trembling expresses devotion, joy, or fright.31 (See DCH 6:673–75.) Examples of Heb. pḥd referring to trembling from excitement about a positive experience such as a close encounter with God or the sense of being the beneficiary of his love include, aside from Hos. 3:4, are Jer. 33:9, ûpāḥădû wĕrāgĕzû al kol-haṭṭōbââ wĕ-al kol-haššālōm ăšēr ānōkî ōśeh lāh ‘They will thrill and quiver because of all the kindness and the well-being that I provide for her [personified Jerusalem]’; Isa. 60:5, ‘When you see [the ingathering of the exiles to the land of Israel] you will glow [i.e., smile] and your chest will throb and thrill for the wealth of the [lands around the] sea will be turned over to you, and the wealth of the nations will come to you’. It is also not unlikely that Hos. 3:4 has inspired Jer. 33:9 and that the latter has inspired Isa. 60:5. Ginsberg would prefer to see in Hos. 3:4 and Isa. 60:5 a verb distinct from pḥd meaning ‘fear’ and possibly scribal errors for ‘paḥar, which would be a metathetic cognate of the Arabic fariḥa, “to be glad” ’.32

31.  See M. I. Gruber, Aspects of Nonverbal Communication in the Ancient Near East (Stadia Pohl, Series Minor, 12; 2 vols.; Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1980). 32.  Ginsberg, ‘Studies in Hosea 1–3’, p. 53 n. 13.

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bĕaḥărît hayyāmîm ‘in the days to come’ LXX here renders the expression bĕaḥărît hayyāmîm by means of the Greek expression ἐπ’ ἐσχάτον τῶν ἡμερῶν, meaning literally ‘at the end of the days’. It is from the Old Greek versions of the books of Hebrew Scripture typified by LXX here at the end of Hos. 3:5 that we derive both (1) the notion that the Pentateuch and the Prophets speak of the end of days in the sense of a post-historical era that would form a symmetry with our notion of a pre-historical era; and (2) the convention in theology and biblical studies that the study of what will happen in that latter end-time and what scholars, theologians, and ordinary people have believed will happen at that time or meta-time is referred to as eschatology, which is derived from the use of the Greek term eschaton ‘end’ in translating the Hebrew bĕaḥărît hayyāmîm in Gen. 49:1; Num. 24:14; Deut. 4:30; 31:22; Isa. 2:2; Jer. 23:20, 24; 48:47; 49:39; Ezek. 38:8, 16; Hos. 3:5; Mic. 4:1; Dan. 10:14. Most likely Biblical Hebrew bĕaḥărît hayyāmîm corresponds to Akk. ina arkiāt ūmī, which is employed, for example, in the epilogue to the Code of Hammurapi to mean ‘in the days to come’ referring to the not distant time when someone may dare to erase all or part of the stele on which is inscribed the Code of Hammurapi in order to write an inscription glorifying himself rather than Hammurapi. In fact, when King ShutrukNahhunte of Elam (c. 1185–1155) conquered Babylonia and carried away the stele to Susa, the capital of Elam, the latter king̕ s scribes erased seven columns of text on the stele from the end of Law §65 to the middle of Law §100 in order to add an inscription honouring Shutruk-Nahhunte. However, the latter king̕ s scribes did not manage to add the inscription honouring the Elamite king.33 With reference to the expression bĕaḥărît hayyāmîm, note that H. G. M. Williamson translates without comment ‘And in a future time’.34 D. B. Hillers translates the identical expression ‘The time will come’ in Mic. 4:1.35 W. McKane, commenting on Mic. 4:1, attempts to defend the Messianic interpretation, but he provides an extensive discussion of the various views and their history.36 However, in his Jeremiah commentary he points out that the (generally accepted) view of modern scholars is that the expression in question is not eschatological, although Kimchi thought 33.  See M. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (2nd ed.; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1997), p. 74. 34.  H. G. M. Williamson, Isaiah 1–27. Vol. 1, Commentary on Isaiah 1–5 (ICC; London: T&T Clark International, 2006), p. 166. 35.  D. B. Hillers, Micah (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), p. 49. 36.  W. McKane, Micah (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998), p. 125.

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otherwise.37 Macintosh regards the expression as having an eschatological meaning here in Hos. 3:5, and he regards it as ‘likely to have been added by the Judean redactor’.38 This is doubtful for the simple reason that the expression has no eschatological meaning in the famous texts of Judahite prophets such as Isa. 2:2 and Mic. 4:1 and only assumed such a meaning in later times because the LXX translators did not know how to treat the construct genitive chain bĕaḥărît hayyāmîm idiomatically, and they translated it in a hyperliteral manner as did TJ which renders bĕsōp yōmayyā, which means ‘at the end of days’. Interestingly enough, the Vulgate consistently renders in novissimo dierum ‘in the newest of days’.

37.  W. McKane, Jeremiah 1 (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986), p. 583. 38.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 109.

C h a p t er 4

The fourth chapter of the book of Hosea is the first of the sections of the second major division of the book. The previous chapters, according to the observation of Kaufmann and Ginsberg followed by the present commentary, stem from the ninth century BCE, while the chapters that now follow stem from the reign of King Menahem son of Gadi (747–737 BCE). The treatment of the fourth chapter of the book of Hosea as a unit, which is reflected in the chapter divisions found in standard editions of the Bible in both Hebrew and English, is shared also by Codex Vaticanus of LXX, in which our fourth chapter of Hosea is also the fourth of the eleven larger divisions recognized in that manuscript. In the older division indicated in Codex Vaticanus, which recognizes twenty-one divisions within the book of Hosea (see the discussion in the Introduction and also in the commentary on Hos. 1 and Hos. 2), our ch. 4 is subdivided into two parts, namely, Hos. 4:1–14 and Hos. 4:15–19. In fact, the division of the fourth chapter of the book of Hosea into two parts makes sense only if we adopt LXX’s understanding of Hos. 4:15–19, which justifies Glenny,1 who supplies the following heading to Hos. 4:15–19: ‘The Lord Charges Israel to Stop Their Infatuation with Idolatry’. As we shall see below, my understanding of Hos. 4, inspired by Ginsberg and Kaufmann, does not find any references to idolatry in Hos. 4 and hence no increase in emphasis on idolatry, which, indeed, is characteristic of Hos. 4:15–19 in LXX. Hosea 4 begins with the ‘proclamation formula’ šiměû děbar-Yhwh ‘Hear (second person masculine/common plural imperative) the word of Yhwh’, which is found altogether only 24 times in the entire prophetic corpus of the Hebrew Bible. In 2 Kgs 7:1 this formula is attributed to Elisha, while in Isa. 1:10 it is found in the mouth of Isaiah son of Amoz. The other 21 occurrences of the formula are found in Isa. 28:14; 66:5; Jer. 2:4; 7:2; 17:20; 19:3; 21:11; 29:9; 31:9 (10); 42:15; 44:24, 26; Ezek. 6:3; 13:2; 25:3; 34:7, 9; 36:1, 4; 37:4; 2 Chron. 18:18. In the last instance the formula is attributed to Micaiah son of Imlah, where the parallel 1.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 98.

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passage in 2 Kgs 22:1 employs the singular imperative šěma. To be more precise, it seems that the summons, ‘Hear (plural imperative) the word of Yhwh’, should only be called a proclamation formula, which introduces a prophet’s speech, when it appears at the beginning of a speech and not following the subordinate conjunction lākēn. In fact, in four cases, namely, Isa. 28:14; Jer. 44:26; Ezek. 34:9; and 2 Chron. 18:18, the formula ‘hear the word of Yhwh’ follows the particle lākēn, and it does not introduce a new prophetic speech. One of the many questions of greater and lesser importance that biblical philology cannot possibly answer at this juncture is whether or not the eighth-century BCE prophet who speaks to us from the pages of Hos. 4–14 was the first to have employed the formula ‘Hear (you plural) the word of Yhwh’ to open a speech to the people of Israel. In some circles it is now fashionable to suggest that the entire book of Hosea, with its ostensible settings in the ninth century BCE (Hos. 1–3) and the eighth century BCE (Hos. 4–14), was fabricated in the fifth-century BCE Persian province of Yehud.2 Likewise, it has long been fashionable to 2.  See especially, Bos, Reconsidering the Date. There, pp. 38–39, Bos explains, ‘In contrast to the monarchic periods of both Israel and Judah in which anti-monarchical literature was unlikely to have been composed (and if preserved, then by implication, subsequently archived, copied etc.), the socio-political context of Persian-period Yehud, in which a high priest was sharing power with a provincial governor appointed by the Persians in which no local king existed, provides a more suitable social setting for anti-monarchical literature to have been composed’. Were one to accept the implications of Bos’s argument, namely, that anti-monarchical sentiments can only have been recorded at a time when the Jews had no monarchy, we should have to conclude, by analogy that anti-priestly sentiments can only have been recorded at a time when there was no established priesthood. The conclusion would have to be that Hos. 4:1–9, in which the prophet of Hos. 4–14, speaking in the name of God, condemns the priesthood, could only have been composed at a time when there was no Judean priesthood under the patronage of the King of Persia. The consequence is that employing Bos’s own arguments that ancient Israelite and Judean literature that criticized persons in power could not possibly have been composed and transmitted, must lead us to the conclusion that Hos. 4, which castigates an established priesthood and includes a God-given threat to replace that priesthood with a different priestly dynasty, cannot possibly have been composed in the Achaemenid period. In fact, the consequence of Bos’s attempt to present the literature of ancient Israelite and Judean prophecy, with its timeless critique of reigning kings, officiating priests, and rival prophets into pseudepigraphic literature produced after the disappearance of Zerubbabel is to turn on its head the words of Jesus of Nazareth in Matt. 5:17: ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil’. Unlike the founder of Christianity, Bos indeed seeks to abolish the veracity of the records of the prophets and their timely and timeless critique of

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assume that 2 Kgs 7:1 and Isa. 1:10 are not authentic records of the words of Elisha (ninth century BCE) and Isaiah son of Amoz (ninth century BCE), respectively. 4:1 šimĕû dĕbar-Yhwh bĕnê Yiśrāēl kî rîb laYhwh im-yōšĕbê hāāreṣ kî ên ĕmet wĕên-ḥesed wĕên-daat ĕlōhîm bāāreṣ ‘Hear the word of Yhwh, people of Israel! For Yhwh has a legal case [Heb. rîb] against the inhabitants of the land, because there is no honesty and there is no kindness and there is no obedience to God in the land’ Note should be taken here of the literary device called anaphora, which I discussed with reference to Hos. 2:21–22, which is the repetition of a single expression at the beginning of a series of lines of poetry to emphasize the repetition of a single idea, which is highlighted. The idea highlighted here is the absence of virtue. The expression repeated here three times is the negative particle ên ‘there is no’. Note should also be taken of the fact that the third of the three clauses of the anaphora is considerably longer than the other two clauses. It constitutes a classic example of the rhetorical device called climactic conclusion (see the discussion in my commentary at Hos. 2:21–22). The purpose of the prophetic harangue is to encourage the audience to return to virtuous behaviour. The main reason for recognizing Hos. 4 as an example of the so-called covenant lawsuit in the prophetic writings is the appearance of the keyword rîb, which means ‘lawsuit, legal case’. human power structures in the eighth century BCE and later. What Bos does not spell out is the underlying assumption in modern biblical studies for dating originally much of the Pentateuch and now, in the hands of Bos, and others whom he cites as sources of inspiration, to the Achaemenid period. This assumption was already spelled out by Julius Wellhausen in his famous Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (trans. J. S. Black and A. Menzies; Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1883), pp. 419–25, 499–501. According to Wellhausen’s view, what distinguished Judaism from ancient Israel was the written Torah (see there, p. 410), which is to say a fabricated list of minutiae. The consequence of Bos’s treating the speeches of prophetic harangue of ancient Israel and Judah as no less than the priestly legislation a post-exilic fabrication is to turn the words of Jesus on their head and, as it were, to destroy ancient Israelite prophecy and make it no longer a model for human liberation from established states and established priesthoods. Quite different from Bos’s reconstruction of the origins of the book of Hosea is the impression one gets from letting the harangue directed against the priesthood of Bethel in eighth-century BCE Samaria speak for itself. See below, in my commentary.

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H. B. Huffmon almost reluctantly includes Hos. 4:1–3 in the category of ‘lawsuit oracles’ in which God announces that he is summoning Israel to judgment for breach of covenant.3 Ultimately, Huffmon notes that by including in the indictment here (in vv. 1–2) ‘a catalogue of violations of the decalogue’ this oracle qualifies as a covenant lawsuit. Moreover, it should be noted that here, as in Hos. 5:1; Isa. 1:2; Mic. 6:2; Jer. 2:4, the lawsuit oracle begins with the opening formula ‘Hear’.4 4:2 ālōh wĕkaḥēš wĕrāṣōăḥ wĕgānōb wĕnāōp pārāṣû wĕdāmîm bĕdāmîm nāgāû ‘Swearing (falsely), and dishonesty, and murder, and theft and adultery run like water. Blood of diverse crimes runs together’ NJPS renders: ‘[False] swearing, dishonesty, and murder, And theft and adultery are rife; Crime follows upon crime!’

Commenting on Hos. 4:2, S. L. Brown remarks, ‘It is to be noted that these sins [enumerated in Hos. 4:2] are breaches of the ninth, sixth, eighth, and seventh Commandments (Exod. 22; Deut. 5), respectively—a fact which supports the view that the Decalogue in its original terse form was already in existence (see New Commentary, pp. 84ff.)’.5 Andersen and Freedman compare three lists as follows:6 Exod. 20 rṣḥ np gnb

Jer. 7 Hos. 4 gnb rṣḥ rṣḥ gnb np np

3.  Huffmon, ‘The Covenant Lawsuit in the Prophets’, p. 294. 4.  For the opening formula with ‘Hear’, usually addressing heaven and earth as witnesses as characteristic of the covenant lawsuit, see also F. M. Cross, Jr., ‘The Council of Yahweh in Second Isaiah’, JNES 12 (1953), pp. 274–77 (274 n. 3); A. Bentzen, Introduction to the Old Testament (2nd ed.; Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gad, 1952), pp. 199–200. As for Hosea’s use of anaphora, see my commentary at Hos. 2:21–22 and Hos. 3:4. See also Hos. 4:15. 5.  Brown, Hosea, p. 39, referring to S. L. Brown, ‘Exodus’, in A New Commentary on Holy Scripture (ed. C. Gore, H. L. Gouge, and A. Guillaume; New York: Macmillan, 1888–1928), pp. 64–99 (p. 86); see also, in the same volume, L. E. Binns, ‘Hosea’, pp. 556–64 (559). 6.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 337.

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They comment as follows, ‘The use of the same verbs for robbery (or kidnapping, in the first instance), murder, and adultery point to a common tradition. The variable selection and sequence, and the different ways of talking about false oaths and deception suggest that the tradition, although partly fixed, nevertheless could be expanded and adapted by the prophet as occasion required ([cf.] Cazelle 1969:14–19).’7 As for damîm, which Stewart wanted to render as ‘idols’, Andersen and Freedman write, ‘The term damîm…probably refers to the shedding of innocent blood by official action, and the crime charged against the nation here, as elsewhere, is the formal sacrifice of human beings, in particular children who are innocent and unblemished, so as to meet sacrificial requirements. The combination of verbs may suggest that armed parties under the authority of the priesthood broke into households to seize victims for sacrifice, leaving a trail of blood from the beginning of the process until its end.’8 The source for Stewart’s equating dāmîm with idols is Dahood’s commentary on Psalms.9 In addition to Dahood’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Hos. 4:2, Dahood there reads his distinctive approach to the noun dāmîm ‘blood’, which he understands to mean ‘idols’ based on a derivation from the verb dāmâ ‘resemble’ and the noun děmût ‘likeness, image’ (e.g., Gen. 1:26), into the following texts from the book of Psalms: Ps. 5:7, where Dahood understands îš dāmîm, commonly understood to mean ‘a person prone to bloodshed’, to mean ‘a man of idols’; Ps. 26:9 (the same expression); Ps. 55:24, where Dahood takes anšê dāmîm ûmirmâ, commonly rendered ‘people prone to bloodshed and deceit’ to mean ‘men of idols and figurines’; and Ps. 139:19, where Dahood renders anšê dāmîm ‘persons prone to bloodshed’ by the expression ‘men of idols’. It should now be obvious that there is no basis in etymology, comparative Semitic lexicography, or ancient and medieval exegetical traditions for seeing in Hos. 4:2 any reference to idols and idolatry. The interpretation, which led Stewart and Andersen and Freedman astray, is typical of Dahood’s many idiosyncratic interpretations of Hebrew and Ugaritic texts. However, the canonization of Dahood’s commentary on Psalms by its publication in the Anchor Bible Series has lent Dahood’s baseless interpretations an undeserved measure of authority. Moreover,

7.  I.e., H. Cazelles, ‘Les origine du décalogue’, Eretz Israel 9 (1969), pp. 14–19. 8.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 338. 9.  M. Dahood, Psalms 1–3 (AB, 16–17a; Garden City: Doubleday, 1966–70), vol. 1, pp. 31–32, 163; vol. 2, p. 39; vol. 3, p. 297.

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there is a tendency in mainstream scholarship on the book of Hosea to assume that chs. 4–14 must be speaking about religion in the narrow sense of the debate between those who worship only Yahweh the God of Israel and those who venerate also other entities and objects far beyond the number of actual references in Hos. 4–14 to that issue, which, admittedly, is a central issue in Hos. 1–3. The five sins of commission, all of which correspond to acts, which are interdicted by the Decalogue, namely, swearing [falsely], dishonesty, murder, theft, and adultery, are all phrased in the infinitive absolute, and all except the first employ roots found in reference to the very same offenses in the Decalogue. Note the use of the pausal forms of the verbs pārāṣû, nāgāû, yēāsēpû, which together foster a sense of assonance when Hos. 4:2–3 are read in sequence. This assonance fosters the impression that the first two of these verbs meaning respectively ‘burst forth’ and ‘touched’ are complimentary.10 Moreover, the repetition of the same sound at the end of the three clauses points to a reciprocal relationship between the crime and the punishment. With respect to the verb pārāṣû ‘they [the aforementioned five transgressions] have burst forth’. Macintosh notes that the verb pāraṣ is employed of wine vats bursting with wine in Prov. 3:10, although not exclusively with reference to liquids.11 However, later in Hos. 4, specifically in v. 10, this verb, which is not otherwise attested in the book of Hosea, does refer to liquids: ‘Truly, they shall eat but not be sated; they shall drink to excess but not have their thirst quenched…’. Consequently, the verb pāraṣ, which refers to liquid flowing in abundance in both Prov. 3:10 and in Hos. 4:10, is probably deliberately employed with the connotation of liquids flowing in abundance at the end of Hos. 4:2b, which refers to the collectivity of the five transgressions mentioned in Hos. 4:2a–b. For the same verb pāraṣ ‘spread forth, flow’ not with respect to liquids, see Exod. 1:12, ‘As much as they [the Egyptians] oppressed him [collective Israel in pre-Exodus Egypt], so did he multiply and spread out’; similarly, Gen. 28:14, ‘You shall spread forth westward and eastward’. Thus the third and final clause of Hos. 4:2 summarizes the effect of this flowing forth of abundant sin: ‘sins touch sins’. Here, as in Isa. 1:15, ‘…your hands are full of crimes’, the term dāmîm appears to mean severe transgressions in general and not necessarily the shedding of blood. Thus the final clause of Hos. 4:2 refers to the entire list of sins and repeats the idea that sins have

10.  So Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 337. 11.  Cf. Macintosh, Hosea, p. 129.

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been running like water and have created a moral puddle, which, like an alcoholic, needs literally to be dried out. Indeed, that is the logical consequence of Israel’s misbehaviour, which is spelled out in the following verse, Hos. 4:3. 4:3 al-kēn teěbal hāāreṣ wěumělal kol-yōšēb-bāh běḥayyat haśśādeh ûbĕôp haššāmāyim wěgam-děgê hayyām yēāsēpû ‘Consequently, the earth shall dry up. Everyone who dwells on it will languish including the beast of the field and the bird of the sky. And even the fish of the sea will die’ Indeed, if in the primordial flood the virtuous Noah and his family and at least one pair of every kind of land animal and bird sought refuge in the ark from the water while the fish (apparently sea creatures were innocent of the crimes that had been perpetuated by the terrestrial fauna and flora) were unaffected by the divine punishment, this time around the sins of Israel are to be punished by an extensive global warming, in which the seas dry up bringing death to all aquatic fauna.12

12.  The pair ‘beast of the field//bird of the sky’, in that order, is attested also in Zeph. 1:3; Job 12:7, 8; for the same pair in reversed order see Gen. 1:26; Ezek. 38:20. (For the comparison, see Avishur, ‘The Stylistic and Linguistic Relationship’, p. 40; with Avishur, there cf. also the Ugaritic text, KTU 1.23, 62–63, in which the pair of nouns ṣr šmm//dg bym ‘bird of the sky//fish in the sea’ is an imprecise lexical parallel to the Hebrew pair ôp haššāmayim dĕgê hayyām ‘bird of the sky//fish of the sea’ found here in Hos. 4:3; with Avishur (p. 40 n. 27), see also Ps. 8:9.) For the Heb. verb bl meaning ‘dry up’ and referring to drought conceived as punishment for the sins of humankind or Israel see also Isa. 24:4; 33:9; Jer. 4:28; 12:4. For the two verbs bl//mll (the latter almost always in the pual conjugation) in synonymous parallelism, both referring to drought and its consequences see Isa. 24:4, 7; 33:9; Joel 1:10, 12; for the same pair of verbs referring to the impoverishment of fishermen when, as a consequence of the drying up of the Nile, there are no fish to be caught, see Isa. 19:8. If in Isa. 24:7 it is the two verbs bl//mll in synonymous parallelism that refer respectively to the drying up of the grapevine, which is the source of grape juice and wine, in Joel 1:12 the intransitive hiphil stative verb hôbîs and the pual stative verb umlal likewise appear in synonymous parallelism as follows: hôbîs tîrôš//umlal yiṣhār ‘wine has dried up//oil has dried up’, referring to the sad reality that the grapevine and the olive tree have died because of drought, and the consequence for human beings that there is a shortage of both wine and olive oil. (For the meaning(s) of Heb. tîrôš in the book of Hosea, see the extensive discussion in my commentary at Hos. 4:11, below.)

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yēāsēpû ‘will die’ NJPS renders ‘will perish’. In fact this verb, whose basic meaning is ‘gather’, is here employed in the niphal passive, and here it means ‘die’. This meaning of the passive of the verb sp is reflected in the expression ‘he was gathered unto his people’, meaning ‘he died’ in Gen. 25:8, 17; 35:29; 49:33; Deut. 32:50; etc. 4:4 ak ‘However’ NJPS simply ignores this particle, which is meant to tell us something about the intended relationship between Hos. 4:1–3 and 4:4–10. îš al-yārēb//wĕal yôkaḥ îš ‘Let no person summon (Israel) to a lawsuit; let no person summon (Israel) to litigation’ Note the chiastic synonymous parallelism in which the two verbs refer to an impending lawsuit, which the prophet, speaking in the name of God, entreats mortals not to initiate. The repetition of the same subject in each of the two parallel clauses reinforces the impression that the two verbs yārîb and yôkaḥ are to be understood as synonymous. Older translations, including NJPS, rendered Heb. îš as ‘man’. D. E. S. Stein demonstrated that in contexts such as the present one the term refers to an individual human being regardless of gender.13 Indeed, here the term refers to humans as opposed to God, who, in vv. 4b–8, will summon the priests of Israel, individually and collectively to a lawsuit. The import of v. 4a is that the crimes of the priests, even if some of them were perpetrated against other persons, are primarily sins against God, who wishes to summon them to the heavenly court of justice and asks that lower jurisdictions recognize the right of the heavenly court to put aside all other claims against the priests. Interestingly, there is a principle in Rabbinic halakah to the effect that when a single sin of commission involves both a crime against persons and a crime against God, prosecution for the lesser crime is to be waived (see b. Giṭṭin 53a). The concept which is hinted at here in Hosea and spelled out in the aforementioned principle of Talmudic justice is the opposite of the common practice in modern systems of justice to enable a person to plead guilty to a lesser crime while the state agrees not to prosecute the alleged perpetrator for the greater crime.

13.  D. E. S. Stein, ‘The Noun îš in Biblical Hebrew: A Term of Affiliation’, Perspectives on Hebrew Scriptures 5 (2009), pp. 1–28.

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wĕammĕkā kimĕrîbê kōhēn (literally) ‘Your people are like persons who are litigating with a priest’ The restored Hebrew text should be translated, ‘But against you, is my lawsuit, Mr. Priest’. LXX reads as follows: ὁ δὲ λαός μου ὡς ἀντιλεγόμενος ἱερεύς, which Glenny renders as follows: ‘But my people are as an impeached priest’.14 This understanding of Hos. 4:4b is most ironic given the fact that in Hos. 4:6, according to both MT and LXX, our prophet, speaking in the name of God, promises to remove the current priesthood from office because this priesthood has been derelict in its duty to teach the people of Israel proper behaviour. The most plausible explanation of what happened to this clause in MT is the following: the first two letters of the second word kmryby are to be eliminated as constituting dittography of the last two letters of the first word of the clause wmk. Note that the two letters k and m are highly similar in the Old Hebrew script in which the difference between ! and m is a single stroke. The remaining letters of the word ‘like persons who are litigating’ would then constitute the word rîbî ‘my lawsuit’. In addition, the first word of the phrase is not to be vocalized to mean ‘and your people’, as in the traditional Hebrew text, but to be vocalized wĕimmĕkā meaning ‘but against you’. Thus the restored original text would have read wĕimmĕkā rîbî kōhēn, which means ‘But against you is my lawsuit, Mr. Priest’.15 Indeed, A. Ehrlich refers to such an emendation, but he rejects it.16 Indeed, this emendation seems first to have been proposed by H. Oort,17 and it is also accepted verbatim by Wolff, H. Guthe, K. Budde, and A. Weiser.18 J. J. P. Valeton Jr. reads wĕimmĕkā rîbî hakkōhēn with the same sense.19 Similarly, E. Sellin, W. Rudolph, and Stuart20 all complicate

14.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 41. 15.  So most recently, Wolff, Hosea, pp. 70, 77. 16.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, p. 367. 17.  H. Oort, ‘Hosea’, Theologisch Tijdschrift 24 (1890), pp. 345–64, 480–505. 18.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 70, H. Guthe, Hosea bis Chronik (HSAT; 2nd ed.; ed. A. Bertholet; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1923), pp. 7–8; K. Budde, ‘Zu Text und Auslegung des Buches Hosea (4:1–19)’, JBL 45 (1926), pp. 280–97 (284); and A. Weiser, Das Buch der zwölf kleinen Propheten 1 (5th ed.; Das Alte Testament Deutsch; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967), p. 43. 19.  J. J. P Valeton Jr., Amos und Hosea (trans. from Dutch into German by Karl Echternacht; Giessen: J. Ricker, 1898), p. 215. 20.  Sellin, Das Zwölfprophetenbuch, part 1, pp. 52, 54; Rudolph, Hosea, p. 96; Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, pp. 70–72. See also Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 135–36.

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matters beyond the simple suggestion offered by Oort and rejected by Ehrlich.21 The reason for accepting Oort’s restoration is that it takes a group of Hebrew letters which make no sense either by themselves or in the context of Hos. 4:4–8 and provides a most appropriate introduction to a pericope in which indeed God summons to judgment first and foremost the priests of Israel, individually and collectively. In fact, as we shall see, our prophet, speaking in the name of God, holds that the priests are especially to be blamed for the decline in public and private morality. However, as we shall see, our prophet blames other kinds of leaders along with the priests, and he will move on to deal with the restoration of morality among the common people while suggesting that the currently corrupt priesthood needs to be replaced with a virtuous priesthood. 4:5 wĕkāšaltā hayyōm//wĕkāšal gam-nābî immĕkā lāylâ ‘You stumbled by day, and the prophet also stumbled with you by night’ These two parallel clauses suggest that just as night is the counterpart of day in every cycle of 24 hours so is the fall of the failed priest to be followed by the fall of the failed prophet, which is to say that at least two kinds of spiritual and religious and intellectual leaders of Hosea’s era have failed in their task to inculcate moral instruction among the people of Israel, and that both kinds of personnel are to be removed from office.22 wĕdāmîtî immekā ‘I shall kill your mother’ The verb dāmâ ‘kill, destroy’ is one of a group of homonymous roots, whose three root letters are now understood to be dmy.23 The same verb appears in the niphal passive at the end of the first clause of v. 6, below. Apparently, the sin of the mother was to give birth to corrupt priests and prophets. For ‘your mother’ as an epithet for the collective people of Israel that has given birth to the individual Israelites who are brothers and sisters, cf. Hos. 2:4, 6.

21.  For other suggestions, which fail to reckon with the immediate context in which the prophet speaking in the name of God attacks first and foremost the priests of Israel, see J. A. Bewer, ‘Text-critical Suggestions on Hosea xii. 1, iv. 4, iv. 8; Isaiah xiv. 12; Psalm xi. 1’, JBL 21 (1902), pp. 110–11. 22.  For the parallelism day/night see also Ps. 19:3; Job 3:3. With reference to the juxtaposition of priest and prophet cf. our comment on LXX of Hos. 3:4. 23.  See, inter alia, BDB, p. 198b, s.v., dmh II; K-B, p. 216, s.v., dmh II.

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4:6 nidĕmû ammî mibbĕlî haddāat kî-attâ haddaat māastā wĕemāsĕkā mikkāhēn lî wattiškaḥ tôrat ĕlōhêkā eškaḥ bānêkā gam-ānî ‘My people is going to die because of a lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge I shall reject you from serving as priest to me, and because you have forgotten the teaching of your God I also shall forget your sons’ The first clause of this verse exemplifies the literary device of concatenation in that it begins with a form of the verbal root dmy found in the previous clause. The goal of v. 6 is to explain fully why it is that the people of Israel has come to ruin. The answer is that the priests have not been doing their job of educating the people in proper behaviour. Concerning this function of the priesthood see Lev. 10:10: ‘You [the priests] must distinguish between the sacred and the profane, and between the unclean and the clean; and you must teach the Israelites all the laws which Yhwh has imparted to them through Moses’; see also Mal. 2:7: ‘For the lips of a priest guard knowledge (Heb. dāat), and people seek instruction (Heb. tôrâ) from his mouth; for he is a messenger of Yhwh of hosts’. nidĕmû ‘they will die’, a perfect niphal, is here understood as the perfect of prophetic certitude, which is to say a perfect form of the verb without conversive waw but nevertheless with future meaning. Because the biblical poet construes the singular collective noun as a plural he employs a plural verb as the predicate. As noted above, our prophet Hosea shares with Lev. 10:10 and Mal. 2:7 the idea that a primary responsibility of the priest is to impart knowledge of right and wrong in every sphere of life to the masses of Israelite women and men, girls and boys. The people, however, have come to a bad end; they have become culpable of death because the priests did not do their job of educating the people. Therefore, says the prophet speaking in the name of God, since you have spurned knowledge, which is to say the task of educating the people of Israel, I shall spurn you from serving me as priests. The prophet seeks to drive home the reciprocal relationship between the sin of omission and the punishment by means of chiastic parallelism, which employs the same verb first in the second person perfect to assert what it is that the priests did (spurn) and then in the first person imperfect to assert what it is that God is going to do to bring about logical consequences of misbehaviour or, in this case, lack of initiative in organizing what moderns, depending on their background, might call ‘Bible Study’ or ‘Torah Classes’. Likewise, in the final clauses of v. 6 our prophet, again speaking in the name of God, employs the same verb ‘forget’ twice, first in the past (so-called imperfect conversive) and

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then in the future. The first clause refers to the possibility that the priests forgot the teaching of God, which is to say that they may have forgotten that one of their primary tasks is to disseminate the teaching of God or, perhaps, that they did not forget that they should do it but they forgot to get around to engage in this task. Consequently, God will forget this group of priests just as, according to the opening chapters of 1 Samuel, God had to forget the priests of the House of Eli and find another priestly house that would behave properly. There it is the sons of Eli who sin and whose descendants are banished from the priesthood. Here it is the entire priesthood of the Northern Kingdom who are to be replaced with a new priesthood. We should note also that our eighth-century BCE prophet, anticipating Mal. 2:7, treats the two terms haddaat (Hos. 4:6a–b)24 and tôrâ (Hos. 4:6d) as synonyms, both referring simultaneously to the body of knowledge which the priest is to convey and the people are to learn and apply in daily life in both the cultic sphere and in interpersonal relations as well as to the process of instruction by which priests and prophets and God Almighty pass on that body of knowledge. For tôrâ referring to the process of instruction see, e.g., Deut. 17:11: ‘You shall act according to the instruction [Heb. hattôrâ] with which they instruct you’; Isa. 2:3 (= Mic. 4:2): ‘For from Zion shall come forth instruction [Heb. tôrâ]’. For the idea that behaviour that is not based upon proper knowledge and discernment leads to ruin see also Hos. 4:14e and 14:10. māastā…wĕemāsĕkā ‘You rejected…so I shall reject you’ Here we have another instance of concatenation in which the fourth stich of Hos. 4:6 begins with a form of the same verb with which the third and previous stich of Hos. 4:6 ends. In the present instance the repetition of the same verb, once in the second person singular perfect and a second time in the first person imperfect singular with a second person singular direct object, underscores the reciprocity of the relationship between the priestly dynasty’s rejection of its responsibility’s and God’s consequent rejection of that dynasty. With the Masoretic note in medieval codices of the Hebrew Bible note that the verb wĕemāsĕkā contains an extra and seemingly superfluous aleph between the final root letter and the pronominal direct object suffix.

24.  In the first of the two instances we find the pausal form with long ā in the first syllable, while in the second instance we find the initial/medial form of the noun with short a in the first syllable.

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wattiškaḥ…eškaḥ ‘You have forgotten…I shall forget’ While in Hos. 4:6b–c the reciprocal relationship between the priest’s rejection of his responsibilities and God’s rejection of the priest is conveyed by the rhetorical device of concatenation, here in Hos. 4:6d–e the reciprocal relation between crime and punishment is conveyed by the appearance at the head of each of the respective stichs of the appropriate form of the imperfect of the verb škḥ ‘forget’. At the head of Hos. 4:6d we find the imperfect consecutive of the second person masculine singular while at the head of Hos. 4:6e we find the imperfect first person singular. The first of the two forms refers to completed action, while the second of the two forms refers to action yet to take place if the priest does not change his behaviour just in time so as to avoid culpability and punishment. 4:7 kĕrubbām kēn ḥāṭĕû lî ‘The more they increased in numbers the more they sinned against me’ The first lexeme in this verset is the prefixed preposition kĕ, meaning ‘as’ followed by the infinitive construct rwb from the root rbb ‘multiply, increase’.25 As for the idea that the more Israel prospered the more they violated God’s rules, note that in Hos. 10:1–2 our prophet will say the opposite (see Hos. 10:1–2 and my commentary there). kĕbōdām bĕqālōn āmîr ‘I will change their dignity to dishonour’ (so NJPS) Perhaps, anticipating the question as to why God promises to eliminate the children and the mother, the prophet, speaking in the name of God, tells us that in direct proportion to the extent that the present priestly class has multiplied so have they increasingly violated God’s rules. The logical consequence is to treat them with the contempt they have meted out to God’s law by reducing them from their position of honour in society to a position of dishonour. It is worth noting the parallel to what is stated 25.  So BDB, p. 912a; DCH 7:394a; the latter regards the root rbb as a byform of the verb rbh (i.e. the root rby) followed by the third person plural pronominal suffix. Concerning the syntax of the comparative see Joüon and Muraoka, Grammar, #174, s.v., ‘comparative clause’. For prefixed preposition k ‘as’ followed by infinitive see also (with BDB, p. 454b, s.v., k, Judg. 14:6; 2 Sam. 3:34; Isa. 5:24; Pss. 66:10; 68:3 (two examples); Job 2:10. For other examples of the syntactic construction kĕ…kēn see the examples given by Joüon and Muraoka, as well as Pss. 48:11; 123:2; Prov. 26:1, 8, 18, 19.

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of the aforementioned wicked children of Eli the priest in 1 Sam. 2:30: ‘For I [God] honour those who honour me, but those who spurn me will be dishonoured’. Moreover, it is reported there that the son born to Eli’s daughter-in-law during one of Israel’s darkest hours when the ark had been captured by the Philistines was named ‘Ichabod’, which means ‘Dishonour’. For qālōn ‘dishonour’ as the opposite of kābōd ‘honour’ see also Isa. 22:18; Hab. 2:16; Prov. 3:35. The noun qālōn ‘dishonour’ appears once more in the book of Hosea. (See below at Hos. 4:18.) 4:8 ḥaṭṭat ammî yōkēlû wĕel-ăwwōnām yiśśĕû napšô ‘They (the priests) feed on my people’s sin offerings. And so they (the priests) desire their iniquity’ Hosea 4:8 reflects the idea spelled out in Lev. 6:17–22; 7:6 that males of the priestly line eat portions of the sin offering and the guilt offering. Thus, the prophet suggests, the priests may not always be motivated to teach the people what activities ought to be eschewed since the priests get to enjoy the offerings brought by sinners. Similarly, in some countries to this day, physicians are not rewarded for engaging in health education and health maintenance but only for treating the infirm. J. Halévy points out that the Hebrew term ḥaṭṭāt in the meaning ‘sin offering’ in Hos. 4:8 is an example of the use within the prophetic corpus of terminology that is characteristic of the priestly literature of the Tetrateuch.26 He cites the frequent use of the term in question in Leviticus, specifically Lev. 4:19. In fact, the lexeme in question does not appear in Lev. 4:19 but rather in Lev. 4:24; 5:9, 11, 12; 6:23 (all of these texts commonly assigned to P), and many more times in Leviticus as also in Exod. 29:14, 36 (H). The term ḥaṭṭāt occurs only once more in the book of Hosea, in Hos. 10:8, where, as in Gen. 4:7 (J), the term means ‘sin’ rather than ‘sin offering’. Other instances of the noun ḥaṭṭāt meaning ‘sin’ rather than ‘sin offering’ include Gen. 31:36; 50:17; Num. 5:6; 12:11; Amos 5:12; and many more. Halévy stresses the fact that Hos. 4 shares with Lev. 4 the idea that priests officiate at the offering of a sin offering.27 Rashi suggests that the reason why the plural pronominal suffix appears on the word ‘sin’, while the singular pronominal suffix appears on the 26.  J. Halévy, ‘Recherches Bibliques: Influence du Code sacerdotal sur les prophétes’, Revue Sémitique 9 (1901), pp. 1–6 (3). 27.  Halévy, ‘Recherches Bibliques’, p. 5.

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word ‘desire’, is that the former expression refers to all the people while the latter expression refers to the desire of each and every individual priest. A Masoretic note in the category of sebirin umaṭṭîn in the margin of many editions of the Hebrew Bible indicates that one might wrongly assume that the reading should be napšām ‘their desire’, referring to the desire of more than one priest in eighth-century BCE Israel and that therefore one might be likely to emend/restore the reading napšām on the basis of a reasonable conjecture. The designation of the latter reading as sebirin umaṭṭîn means that one should resist the temptation to emend/ restore and that one should preserve the reading napšô. It is the latter, anomalous reading, which inspires Rashi’s rather incisive remark. 4:9 wēhāyâ kāām kakkōhēn ûpāqadĕtî ālāyw dĕrākāyw ûmaălālāyw āšîb lô ‘And the people will be (punished) like the priest. And I will punish it for its misbehaviour. And for its wicked deeds I will requite it’ Joüon and Muraoka explain that when two successive clauses (and one should add phrases) are both preceded by the comparative particle k, ‘the two terms are declared identical in some regard’.28 More specifically, in Hos. 4:9a, as in Gen. 18:25; Isa. 24:2; and Qoh. 9:2, the two compared entities will have the same lot/fate. Joüon and Muraoka’s explanation of the syntactic convention k…k appears significantly more convincing than the explanation offered in BDB (p. 454), according to which the repeated preposition is meant to ‘signify the completeness of the correspondence between two objects’. The chiastic parallelism in Hos. 4:9b–c reinforces the authorial desire to employ symmetry to convey the notion of reciprocity throughout Hos. 4:6–9. The expression maălālāyw denoting ‘wicked deeds’ is attested also in Hos. 5:4, where it is stated, ‘Their wicked deeds will not let them return to their God’. For the term maălālîm ‘wicked deeds’ see also Hos. 7:2; 9:15. Moreover, there in Hos. 5:4, as here in Hos. 4:9–10, the wicked deeds of Israel are associated with an inclination to lechery. In Hos. 12:3, as here in Hos. 4:9, Israel’s evil conduct is the occasion for an indictment or lawsuit (Heb. rîb) on the part of God with respect to Israel. In addition, both in Hos. 4:9 and in Hos. 12:3 the terms dĕrākāyw ‘its misbehaviour’ and maălālāyw ‘its/his wicked deeds’ are employed in precisely the same order in chiastic parallelism, while in both verses the two verbs employed 28.  Joüon and Muraoka, Grammar, #174, s.v., ‘comparative clause’.

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in the synonymous parallelism are pqd ‘punish’ and hēšîb ‘requite’ precisely in the same order. However, while in Hos. 4:4 it is God who is speaking in the first person singular, in Hos. 12:3 the prophet speaks about God, as follows: ‘And so Yhwh is now engaged in a lawsuit against Judah [or is the original reading Israel? See below at Hos. 12:3] That is, to punish Jacob for his misbehaviour// And to requite him for his wicked deeds’.

The pair of nouns in parallelism dĕrākāyw//maălālāyw ‘its mis­ behaviour’//‘its wicked deeds’ is found also in Jer. 17:10, where we read as follows: ‘I, Yhwh, am prober of lēb//examiner of kělāyōt To repay to each person according to that person’s misbehaviour According to the fruit [metaphor for consequences] of that person’s wicked deeds’.

The literal rendering, ‘I, Yhwh, probe the heart, search the kidneys’ (NJPS renders the second of the two nouns in parallelism ‘mind’), ignores the two facts that in biblical psychology and physiology the heart and the kidneys are both seats of feelings and thoughts while in modern psychology and physiology heart and kidneys have both been replaced by something called the mind, except in the psychology of B. F. Skinner, who holds that ‘the mind’ is an imaginary construct.29 As for ‘To repay every person according to one’s misbehaviour [Heb. dĕrākāyw]//According to the fruit of his wicked deeds [Heb. maălālāyw]’, the same pair of parallel clauses is attested again in Jer. 32:19, where the entire verse reads as follows: ‘Wondrous in purpose and mighty in deed, whose eyes observe all the ways of humans. To repay every person according to one’s misbehaviour [Heb. dĕrākāyw] according to the fruit of one’s wicked deeds [Heb. maălālāyw].’ Jeremiah, whose choice of the word pair ‘misbehaviour’//‘wicked deeds’ in Jer. 17:10 and 32:19 may have been influenced by Hos. 4:9 and Hos. 12:3, also juxtaposes the two nouns ‘conduct’ and ‘deeds’ in Jer. 7:5: ‘Now, if you really mend your misbehaviour [Heb. darĕkēkem] and your wicked deeds [Heb. maălalēkem]…’. See also Jer. 7:3; 26:13; 18:11; and cf. also Ezek. 36:31; and see also Zech. 1:4: ‘Do not be like your parents! For when the earlier prophets [i.e., the pre-exilic prophets, especially Jeremiah] called to them, 29.  See B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Bantam, 1971).

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“Thus said Yhwh of Hosts: Come, turn back from your evil behaviour [middarĕkēkem hārāîm] and your evil misdeeds [maălalēkem hārāîm]” they did not obey or give heed to me—word of Yhwh’. Cf. also Neh. 9:35: ‘…they did not turn back from their evil misdeeds [Heb. maălalēhem hārāîm]’. With respect to Zechariah’s charge that the warnings of the pre-exilic prophets had been ignored, cf. Jer. 25:4–5: ‘Moreover, Yhwh constantly sent all his servants the prophets to you, but you would not listen or incline your ears to hear when they said, “Turn back, everyone, from one’s evil misbehaviour [middarkô hā-rāâ] and from your wicked misdeeds [ûmērōa maalĕlēkem] that you may dwell upon the land which Yhwh gave to you and to your ancestors forever…” ’. 4:10 wĕākĕlû wĕlō yiśbāû hiznû wĕlōyiprōṣû ‘They will eat, but they shall not be sated, they will swill, but their thirst will not be slaked’ As noted in NJPS margin, the verb hiznû is attested in the meaning ‘swill, drink wine or other intoxicating beverages to excess’. So in Hos. 4:18a–b where we read as follows: sār sobĕām haznēh hiznû ‘Their liquor turned against them. They drank liquor excessively.’ In the latter passage the first of the two clauses describes the logical consequence or deserved punishment of what is described in the second clause, namely, drinking liquor in excess. Unquestionably, our prophet employs the homonymous expressions hiznû ‘drink to excess’ (4:10, 18), zĕnût ‘fornication/adultery’ (4:10), zĕnûnîm ‘lechery’ (4:12; 5:4), zōnōt ‘whores’ (4:14), and wayyiznû ‘they strayed’ (from God) as a leitmotif, which suggests that alcohol abuse, lechery, adultery, and ultimately abandoning God are all part of one unfortunate reality, which must be dealt with as a whole. Moreover, the link between 4:10a–b and 4:4–8, which is forged by 4:9a, ‘The people are like the priest’, suggests that the entire cycle of misbehaviour began when the priests developed a craving for the meat of sin-offerings. This craving made the priests less than anxious to instruct their flock properly so that they might avoid sin in the first place. Hosea 4:10a–b suggests that the proper punishment for a person who over-indulges in eating or drinking is to increase her/his hunger/thirst threshold so that no matter how much she/he eats or drinks, she/he will still be hungry and thirsty. hiznû ‘They will swill’ The peculiar interpretation of Heb. hiznû ‘they will swill’ (perfect form of the verb with future meaning without the waw conversive) is inspired by NJPS, the chief translator of which was Ginsberg, who

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presented this meaning in his mimeographed glosses on Hosea and also in his ‘Lexicographical Notes’.30 It must be emphasized, however, that Ginsberg’s insistence that Hos. 4:10a–b ‘can only mean, “They shall eat and not be satisfied, guzzle and not be slaked” ’ has to date not even been mentioned in any of the dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew. DCH (3:123) renders the relevant clause in Hos. 4:18 ‘they continuously fornicated’. Kaddari deduces from the parallelism in Hos. 4:18 that the verb means ‘make love’.31 (For more on the verb under discussion in Hos. 4:18 see below.) wělōyiprōṣû ‘but their thirst will not be slaked’ Similarly, NJPS renders ‘but not be satisfied’. The basis for the interpretation of this verb as meaning ‘filled up with liquid’ is to be found in Prov. 3:10, where we read as follows: wĕyimmālĕû ăsāmêkā śābā//wĕtîrōš yĕkābêkā yiprōṣû. NJPS renders the latter verse as follows: ‘And your barns will be filled with grain//Your vats will burst with new wine’.32 Significantly, by virtue of having been produced by people who knew both Biblical Hebrew and Phoenician as living languages, LXX renders Prov. 3:10 as follows: ἵνα πίμπληται τὰ ταμίειά σου πλησμονῆς σίτου, οἴνῳ δὲ αἱ ληνοί σου ἐκβλύζωσιν ‘so that your barns may be filled plenteously with grain//and that your vats may overflow with wine’, without having recourse to the evidence of the Karatepe inscriptions of Azitawwada. In Prov. 3:10, as here in Hos. 4:10, parallel clauses refer respectively and in the same order to entities being filled up with solid food and to other entities being filled up with potable liquids. Moreover, in both Hos. 4:10 and in Prov. 3:10 the liquid referred to in the second clause is wine. It should be observed that the interpretation of the noun śābā in Prov. 3:10 to mean ‘grain’ is based upon the ninth-century BCE Phoenician royal inscription of Azitawwada from Karatepe in which the noun in question clearly means ‘grain’ because it is juxtaposed with tīrōš meaning ‘wine’ (see KAI 26, B, line 7; C, line 7). Concerning the meaning and origin of the latter noun in Hebrew and Phoenician, see immediately below. 30.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, pp. 73–74. 31.  Kaddari, A Dictionary, p. 256. 32.  So already M. Dahood, Proverbs and Northwest Semitic Philology (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1963), p. 9; V. A. Hurowitz, Proverbs (2 vols.; Mikra LeYisra’el; Tel Aviv: Am Oved/Jerusalem: Magnes, 2012), vol. 1, pp. 176–77 (in Hebrew). Contrast M. V. Fox, Proverbs 1–9 (AB, 18A; New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 151. Fox accepts the Phoenician evidence cited below but nevertheless translates ‘abundance’.

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Above, I suggested that the reason that the people at large will eat and not be satisfied, will drink and not have their thirst slaked, is that the people are like their leaders, the priests, who coveted endless sin offerings rather than devoting themselves to preventive religion (a Gruber neologism based on the analogy of preventive medicine). Practicing preventive religion would have meant that the priests devoted themselves to teaching people how to avoid sin. Here in Hos. 4:10, however, the prophet, speaking in the name of God, suggests an additional reason why it is that the generality of Israelites must be punished by their eating and not being satisfied, by their drinking and not having their thirst slaked. 4:10c–11a kî et-Yhwh āzĕbû lišmor zĕnût ‘Because they have forsaken Yhwh to practice adultery’ See below for why I translate ‘practice adultery’ rather than, as NJPS, ‘practice lechery’, although I accept NJPS’s division of the passage at hand into clauses. Similar also is the division into clauses in LXX, where we read as follows at Hos. 4:10e–11a: διότι τὸν κύριον ἐγκατέλιπον τοῦ φυλάξαι πορνείαν, which means, ‘For they have forsaken the Lord to cherish fornication’.33 The latter interpretation, which is close to my own interpretation, assumes that the verbal root šmr in the present context is the common Hebrew transitive verb meaning ‘keep, practice, observe’, on the basis of which in English in post-modern times a Jew or Jewess who is meticulous with respect to the rules of the Sabbath, festivals, kosher food, and the like is said to be ‘observant’, reflecting a common rendering of the verb in question as ‘observe’. Typical of the latter is NJPS at Deut. 16:1, ‘Observe the month of Abib…’. The same understanding of the transitive verb šāmar is reflected also in Deut. 4:2, ‘…to observe the commandments of Yhwh’; Deut. 6:2, ‘…to follow all his laws and commandments’; see also Deut. 10:13; 13:19; etc. Forty years ago my late friend and colleague at Spertus College of Judaica, Monford Harris, challenged the manner in which Bible readers seem to follow blindly the traditional rendering of this transitive verb as ‘keep/observe’ with the following rhetorical question, ‘I know what it means to keep/watch sheep (e.g., Gen. 30:1), but I am not certain what it means to keep/watch the Sabbath’. Indeed, Isa. 57:2 seems to respond precisely to this exegetical question when it states, ‘Praiseworthy is the person who does this and the human who holds fast 33.  Cf. Glenny, Hosea, p. 41, and see below.

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to it: who takes care of [šōmēr] the Sabbath so as not to profane it and who keeps [šōmēr] his hand from doing any evil’. In other words, Second Isaiah suggests that keeping the Sabbath means to guard the Sabbath so that it is not profaned. The homonymous intransitive verb šāmar ‘to rage’, cognate of Akk. šamāru ‘rage’, is attested only in Jer. 3:5 (where a marginal note in NJPS indicates that the verb šāmar found there is the intransitive verb with the Akkadian cognate). Elsewhere, in Biblical Hebrew the verb šāmar is transitive and usually means ‘keep, practice, observe’ and the like, and only rarely refers to sheep. Consequently, since there is clearly no reference to anger in Hos. 4:10–11, NJPS follows Ehrlich34 in assuming that MT wrongly ends v. 10 with the infinitive lišmor, which should be followed immediately by the direct object zĕnût meaning ‘lechery’. The correct understanding of the division into clauses is reflected in LXX at Hos. 4:10–11, quoted above. Glenny places the period at the end of the clause after the noun direct object in the accusative, namely πορνείαν, which means ‘lechery’ (Glenny renders ‘whoredom’).35 However, he divides the verse according to MT, so that the latter noun is placed at the beginning of the verse numbered as 11.36 Graetz suggests that the division into verses should be after the noun wĕyayin, so that Hos. 4:10b would read as follows: ‘For they have abandoned Yhwh to devote themselves to lechery and wine’.37 Moreover, Graetz notes there that he was anticipated with respect to this division of Hos. 4:10–11 by Saadia Gaon (892–942 CE). He does not inform us as to the source of his knowledge of Saadia’s treatment of our passage. It is generally accepted that the only extant commentaries of Saadia on biblical books are on the following biblical books: Pentateuch, Isaiah, the Five Scrolls, Psalms, Proverbs, and Job. However, the likely source for the verse division which Graetz attributes to Saadia is the attribution to Saadia found in the commentary by David Kimchi found in the Rabbinic Bible at Hos. 4:10.38 According to NJPS the following clause, i.e., Hos. 4:11b–c (assigning the Hebrew word zĕnût = Gk. πορνεία ‘lechery’ to the end of the previous clause, i.e., Hos. 4:10), which elaborates upon what is stated in v. 10, should be understood as follows: wĕyayin wĕtîrōš yiqqaḥ lēb ‘Wine and new wine destroy the mind’. In fact, NJPS prefers to see the noun lēb 34.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, p. 367. 35.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 41. 36.  See the discussion in the commentary in Glenny, Hosea, p. 94. 37.  Graetz, Emendationes, p. 12. 38.  See T. Muraoka, ʻHosea IV in the Septuagint Version’, Annual of the Japanese Biblical Institute 9 (1983), pp. 24–64 (62 n. 17).

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rendered ‘mind’ as a construct noun in a construct genitive phrase lēb ammi ‘the mind of My people’. However, as we shall see, this suggestion does not solve the syntactical problem created by NJPS’s treatment of the verse division between Hos. 4:10 and 4:11. Ehrlich prefers to see the words of v. 11 beginning with the noun zenût ‘lechery’ (I prefer the translation ‘adultery’; see below) and ending with the noun lēb ‘mind, heart, seat of feelings and thoughts’ as the direct object of the infinitive lišmor ‘keep/practice’ as follows: ‘Because they have forsaken the Yhwh to lay hold of fornication and wine and new wine [which] take away the heart’.39 Ehrlich’s suggestion is to be rejected because it requires the reader to supply the relative pronoun ‘which’. NJPS’s rendering is to be rejected because it treats the singular verb yiqqaḥ ‘takes away’ as the simple predicate of the compound subject wĕyayin wĕtîrōš ‘and wine and new wine’. Consequently, NJPS does not solve the grammatical problem presented by the appearance in the verse division in MT of a compound subject zĕnût wĕyayin wĕtîrōš governing a singular verb yiqqaḥ ‘takes away’. As a result, I wholeheartedly embrace the verse division suggested by Graetz and attributed by him to Saadia Gaon and attributed by Muraoka and others to LXX (see below). Thus I prefer to understand Hos. 4:10c–11a as follows: ‘Because they have forsaken Yhwh to practice adultery and wine’. The following clause, which consists of v. 11 with the exception of the first two words zenût wĕyayin, then summarizes the idea expressed in v. 10, namely, that overindulging in consumption of wine leads to husbands engaging in extra-marital sexual relations, an idea alluded to already by the use of the leitmotif, which consists of the use of homonymous roots that refer respectively to imbibing alcoholic beverages and engaging in adultery. Indeed, v. 11, stripped of the nouns zenût wĕyayin ‘adultery and wine’, which I regard as the compound objects of the infinitive lišmor at the end of v. 10, then summarizes the idea expressed in v. 10, namely, that overindulging in alcoholic beverages takes away the lēb. In the present context the latter noun lēb, traditionally translated ‘heart’, denotes the seat within the human being of control over both emotions and attitudes (so also Rashi’s understanding of this noun in his commentary on the phrase ‘with all your heart’ in Deut. 6:5). The consequence of this is spelled out in the following verse, Hos. 4:12, which also summarizes the ideas expressed in vv. 10–11; see below. Thus Hos. 4:10b–12a may be construed as follows without leaving any grammatical or syntactical difficulties:

39.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, p. 367.

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‘For they have forsaken Yhwh to cherish/cultivate/practice adultery and wine//new wine takes away the heart of my people’ In English translation ending the first of the two clauses with yayin ‘wine’ and beginning the next clause with tîrōš ‘new wine’ creates the impression of concatenation. In Biblical Hebrew, however, while the substances are related and similar, the lexemes are distinct. tîrôš This noun appears 38 times in Hebrew Scripture. In the book of Hosea it appears a total of six times: Hos. 2:10, 11, 24; 4:11; 7:14; 9:2. On the basis of its appearance as a b-word for the more common word yayin ‘wine’ in Hos. 4:11, and in juxtaposition with the noun yayin ‘wine’ in Mic. 6:15, as well as the appearance of the etymologically identical pair of a–b words, albeit in reverse order trṯ//yn and albeit in a broken tablet in KTU 1.17, col. 6 (lines 7–8), my late and revered teacher, M. Held, sought to draw the conclusion that the two terms yayin//tîrôš in Hebrew and the Ugaritic cognates yn//trṯ represent synonyms.40 Later, Y. Avishur pointed out that the very same word pair appears also in a text now designated as KTU 1.114, which was first published only in 1968.41 In lines 3–4 of the latter text, now commonly designated ‘The Feast of the Deities’, we read as follows: tštn [y]n d šb//trš d šb ‘They drink wine until they are satiated//new wine until they are drunk’. Ch. Rabin asserts that Heb. tîrôš and Ugaritic trṯ, both denoting ‘wine’, are loanwords from Hittite related to Hieroglyphic Hittite tuwarsa, which denotes ‘vine’.42 Similarly, C. H. Gordon refers to the attestation of Ugaritic trṯ ‘wine’, in the Epic of Danilu cited above, and he declares, ‘Hier. Hit. tuwarsa “vine” indicates an E. Mediterranean distribution & perhaps non-Sem. origin’.43 G. del Olmo Lete and J. Sanmartín cite additional scholars who compare Hieroglyphic Hittite tuwarsa ‘vine’, and they define Ugaritic trṯ as meaning ‘new wine’, which designation, it appears, is taken over from KJV’s rendering of the Hebrew cognate tîrôš.44 J. P. Brown argues most convincingly that Heb. 40.  M. Held, ‘Additional Pairs of Words in Synonymous Parallelism in the Bible and in the Ugaritic Texts’, Leshonenu 18 (1952–53), pp. 144–60 (146, 154 nn. 70–76) (in Hebrew). 41.  Avishur, ‘The Stylistic and Linguistic Relationship’, p. 38. 42.  Ch. Rabin, ‘Hittite Words in Hebrew’, Orientalia ns 32 (1963), pp. 113–39 (137). 43.  C. H. Gordon, Ugaritic Textbook (Analecta Orientalia, 38; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute Press, 1965), p. 499. 44.  G. del Olmo Lete and J. Sanmartín, Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition (trans. W. G. E. Watson; 2 vols.; Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003), vol. 2, p. 880.

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tîrôš and Ugaritic trṯ, the Hieroglyphic Hittite cognate tuwarsa, meaning ‘vine, vine-stem’, as well as Gk. θύρος and Latin thyrsus, both meaning ‘branch’, belong, in Brown’s words, to a thick cluster of lexemes denoting wine that are shared throughout the Mediterranean world.45 Significantly, TO and TJ almost always translate both of the Kulturwörte yayin and tîrôš by the local Aramaic noun ḥămar ‘wine’, whose Hebrew cognate ḥemer appears only twice in Hebrew Scripture, once in the latter form at Isa. 27:2 and once in the pausal form ḥāmer at Deut. 32:14. Likewise, LXX almost always translates both Heb. yayin and Heb. tîrôš by means of Gk. οἶνος ‘wine’. S. Naeh and M. P. Weitzman make the following important observations: (1) in earliest Hebrew, tīrôš simply meant the product of the vine in general, embracing both grapes and wine; (2) in the Hebrew Bible, one or other of these senses is usually clear, while some passages are still ambiguous.46 They argue that Num. 18:12, which calls for giving the ḥēleb of the oil and the ḥēleb of the tîrôš to the Levites would seem to refer to gifts from the raw products since one cannot speak of the ‘fat’ of a finished product like wine.47 Moreover, they point out, ‘The principle in the rabbinic sources is that the tithe dues should be given from durable products (m. Ma’aserot 1:1), and tithe dues of wine are frequently mentioned’.48 All of this having been said, it should be noted that both LXX and TJ found ingenious ways to get around the twofold problem presented in Hos. 4:11. In that text both yayin and tîrôš designate intoxicating beverages that are likely to impair one’s judgment. However, both the Aramaic vocabulary of TJ and the Greek vocabulary of LXX on the Twelve Prophets lack readily available synonyms for Aram. ḥămar and Gk. οἶνος, respectively. So what do they do? LXX at the relevant section of Hos. 4:11 reads καί οἶνον καί μέθυσμα ἐδέξατο καρδία λαοῦ μου, which Glenny renders as follows: ‘And the heart of my people has welcomed both wine and strong drink’.49 Here the Greek noun μέθυσμα, designating ‘strong drink’, is an ad hoc solution to the dilemma that Septuagintal 45.  J. P. Brown, ‘The Mediterranean Vocabulary of the Vine’, VT 19 (1969), pp. 146–70 (146, 166, 168–70). See also M. Görg, ‘Ein semitisch-ostmediterranes Kulturwort im AT’, BN 8 (1975), pp. 7–10. An excellent summary of the various views as to the meaning of Biblical Hebrew tîrôš, its Ugaritic cognate, and possible etymologies is found in G. Fleischer, tîrôš, in TDOT, vol. 15, pp. 653–62; see also HALOT 4:1727–28; DCH 8:629–30, 759. 46.  S. Naeh and M. P. Weitzman, ‘Tīrōš—Wine or Grape? A Case of Metonymy’, VT 44 (1994), pp. 115–20. 47.  Naeh and Weitzman, ‘Tīrōš—Wine or Grape?’, p. 116. 48.  Naeh and Weitzman, ‘Tīrōš—Wine or Grape?’, p. 119 n. 1. 49.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 41.

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Greek does not normally have to find two words to translate the two distinct Hebrew terms for ‘wine’, namely, yayin and tîrôš. Similarly, TJ at Hos. 4:11 uses the noun wĕḥamrā ‘and the wine’ to translate Heb. wĕyayin ‘and wine’ and the noun wĕrawyûtā ‘and the intoxicating drink’ to translate tîrôš. Precisely because TJ at Hos. 2:11; 7:14 translates tîrôš by means of Aram. wĕḥamrā, it should be clear that the unusual translation wĕrawyûtā ‘and the intoxicating drink’ here at Hos. 4:11 is an ad hoc solution to the problem presented by the translator’s target language’s not having a synonym for ‘wine’.50 On the other hand, LXX interprets tîrôš at Hos. 7:14 as meaning ‘wine’ but as meaning ‘grapevine’ at LXX Hos. 2:12 (= MT Hos. 2:11). Thus LXX anticipates Naeh and Weitzman in their recognition of the ambiguity of the Hebrew term. The notion that Heb. tîrôš and its rare Ugaritic cognate trṯ designates ‘grape juice’ or ‘new wine’ derives primarily from KJV, but it is in some cases justified by the context in the Hebrew Bible as in Hos. 9:2; Mic. 6:15; Joel 2:24; Prov. 3:10, as noted in HALOT (4:1728b). Interestingly, in Modern Hebrew the term tîrôš designates ‘grape juice’. DCH (8:629) gives the basic meaning of tîrôš as ‘new wine’, and suggests that ‘[grape] juice’ might be the intended meaning at Isa. 65:8. Rabin went a bit too far in attributing both to J. M. Grintz and to the Jerusalem Talmud the assertion that in Biblical Hebrew the noun tîrôš designates ‘wine’ while in Mishnaic Hebrew it designates ‘grape juice’.51 4:12 ammî bĕēṣô yišāl ûmaqlô yaggîd lô kî rûaḥ zĕnûnîm hitâh wayyiznû mittaḥat ĕlōhêhem ‘As for my people, it inquires of its stick [male sexual organ], and its rod [synonym for stick in the previous clause, again meaning male sexual organ] replies. Because a lecherous impulse has misguided… [see commentary for clarification] him, so that they (the people of Israel) strayed from submission to their God’ ammî ‘my people’ Equally acceptable syntactically and grammatically is, with all due respect to Graetz and Saadia, to leave the word ammî at its location in MT at the head of Hos. 4:12a–b and to end Hos. 4:11 with heart referring unequivocally to the individual hearts of many human individuals rather than possibly to the collective heart of the people of Israel. 50.  Similarly, Muraoka, ‘Hosea IV’, p. 44. 51.  Rabin, ‘Hittite Words in Hebrew’, p. 137 n. 3.

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Before moving on to consider further the MT of Hos. 4:12, we should note how LXX’s treatment of Hos. 4:10–11 avoids all of the syntactic problems that arise from the commonly accepted verse division within MT of Hos. 4:10–11. LXX of Hos. 4:10–11a reads as follows: Καὶ φάγονται, καὶ οὐ μὴ ἐμπλησθῶσιν. ἐπόρνευσαν, καὶ οὐ μὴ κατευθύνωσι. διότι τὸν Κύριον ἐγκατέλθπον τοῦ φυλάξαι. Πορνείαν καὶ οῖνον καὶ μέθυσνα ἐδέξατο καρδία λαοῦ. Brenton’s edition of the Septuagint renders this verse and one half as follows: ‘And they shall eat, and shall not be satisfied: they have gone a-whoring, and shall by no means prosper; because they have left off to take heed to the Lord. The heart of my people has gladly engaged in fornication and wine and strong drink.’ ‘Thus’, as noted by T. Muraoka, ‘the Gk. has reversed the subject–object relation [with respect to heart on the one hand and fornication, wine, and new wine]’.52 We have seen that the consonantal text of MT does not require one to construe Hos. 4:10–11a in violation of the rules of Hebrew grammar and syntax. However, interestingly enough, LXX appears to follow in this case almost the same division of Hos. 4:10–11 into verses that is found in standard editions of the book of Hosea in Hebrew without violating the rules of Hebrew grammar and syntax. LXX accomplishes this task by construing the three Hebrew nouns zĕnût wĕyayin wĕtîrōš as the compound direct objects of the verb yiqqaḥ construed as a preterite meaning ‘they received’,53 whose grammatical subject is lēb ammî ‘the heart of my people’ (Hos. 4:11b–12a). No less interesting is the way in which LXX, at least in Brenton’s English translation thereof and in the understanding of a number of patristic exegetes of LXX,54 eliminates the difficulty presented by MT’s ending Hos. 4:10 with the transitive infinitive lišmor ‘to keep’. LXX eliminates this difficulty by translating this Hebrew transitive infinitive by means of the Greek infinitive φυλάξαι meaning ‘cherishing, heeding (the Lord)’ and the verb ἐγκατέλθπον ‘and they have abandoned/left off’ as followed by the genitive phrase ‘of cherishing/heeding the Lord’; contrast Muraoka;55 and contrast also E. Bons, J. Joosten, and S. Kessler, who understand

52.  Muraoka, ‘Hosea IV in the Septuagint Version’, p. 44. 53.  See T. Muraoka, A Greek–English Lexicon of the Septuagint (Louvain: Peeters, 2009), p. 145, s.v., δέχομαι; thus the aorist middle ἐδέξατο is an appropriate semantic parallel to a Hebrew imperfect employed to refer to action that took place in the past. 54.  See Muraoka, ‘Hosea IV in the Septuagint Version’, p. 43. 55.  See the previous note.

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LXX to mean ‘they have abandoned the Lord to observe prostitution, and the heart of My people accepts wine and intoxicating drink’.56 Thus their understanding of LXX parallels my own restoration of the Hebrew of Hos. 4:10–11. In the first two clauses of Hos. 4:12 we have synthetic parallelism, which should remind us of Ps. 62:12, ‘God spoke one thing, of which I heard two…’. Just as in Ps. 62:12 ‘speak’ and ‘heard’ are not synonymous, so in Hos. 4:11 ‘ask’ and ‘reply’ are not synonymous. In fact, the prophet refers to a well-known technique recommended by therapists for patients who are suffering from sexual dysfunction, namely, to engage in a conversation with one’s sexual organs. Hosea 4:10–12 suggests that it is overindulging in the imbibing of alcoholic beverages that leads men (and women) to obsess on sexual thoughts and sexual activities and thereby to engage in illicit sexual activities, which are tantamount to abandoning God, who desires only licit sexual activities. My late and revered teacher, H. L. Ginsberg, supplied analogies from Arabic, German, French, Latin, and Syriac for referring to the penis as a stick or rod.57 In that study Ginsberg interprets Hos. 4:12 as a description of a typical Israelite man of the eighth century BCE obsessing about sex, with the result that, as described in Hos. 4:13–14, Israelite men committed adultery even while participating in a religious pilgrimage.58 Walter and Greenberg’s recent translation of the Peshitta into English, however, interprets as follows: ‘My people has asked its opinion, its rod has declared it’.59 There, the translators explain, ‘The people have sought guidance from a piece of wood in a ritual of rhabdomancy’.60 The latter term was first employed in English in 1646. Interestingly, in the ‘Addendum I: Mistranslation’ (p. xx) to that same edition of the Peshitta, it is noted that instead of translating Heb. ēṣô ‘his stick’, Peshitta translates Heb. ēṣâ ‘counsel’. My esteemed colleague Professor S. Yona suggests to me that the latter understanding of Heb. ēṣô may very well reflect the ancient translators’ determination that the Hebrew text was an instance of the phenomenon in ancient biblical rhetoric, called ‘ambiguity’, which

56.  Bons, Joosten, and Kessler, Les Douze Prophètes: Osée, p. 87. 57.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, p. 74 n. 1. 58.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, p. 74 n. 5. 59.  So D. M. Walter and G. Greenberg, The Syriac Peshiṭta Bible with English Translation: The Twelve Prophets (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2012), p. 17. 60.  Walter and Greenberg, The Syriac Peshiṭta Bible with English Translation: The Twelve Prophets, p. 17 n. 1.

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is to say the deliberate use of a lexeme, which may be interpreted in two distinct ways.61 However, Walter and Greenberg suggest that the Peshitta has been influenced by LXX, which reads here, ἐν συμβόλοις ἐπηρώτων, καὶ ἐν ῥάβδοις αὐτοῦ ἀπήγγελλον αὐτοῦ. πνεύματι πορνείας ἐπλανήθησαν καὶ ἐξεπόρνεσαν ἀπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ αὐτῶν,62 which Glenny translates as follows: ‘They were inquiring by means of tokens, and they were interpreting by means of his divining rods; they were misled by a spirit of fornication, and they have gone whoring from their God’.63 As we shall see, the particular issue raised in Hos. 4:10–15 is faithfulness to one’s spouse, which Hosea demands of both men and women. Indeed, one of the unique and original contributions of Hos. 4:10–15 to human thought is the idea that just as it is forbidden throughout the ancient Middle East for a married woman to engage in intimate relations with a man other than her husband and for a man to engage in intimate relations with a woman married to someone else so also, according to Hos. 4:10–15, is it forbidden for a married man to engage in intimate relations with anyone other than his wife. Indeed, it is asserted in m. Soṭah 9:9: ‘When habitually adulterous men became abundant, the bitter waters [to test wives suspected of adultery] ceased to be operative, and it was Rabbi Johanan son of Zakkai who abolished their use in accord with the principle stated in Scripture [in Hos. 4:14], “I shall not punish your daughters when they engage in extra-marital sex, nor your daughters-inlaw when they commit adultery for they themselves [i.e., your sons-in-law and your sons] bed down with whores and engage in sacrifice with prostitutes…” ’. So long as the now debunked myth of sacred prostitution (see below for extensive literature and discussion) was read into Hos. 4:14, as it still is in virtually every critical commentary on the book of Hosea, our prophet’s revolutionary teaching concerning open marriage and its adoption by the Mishnah was rarely noticed. hitĕâ wayyiznû ‘…has misguided, and they strayed’ Following Ehrlich, who, in turn, is followed by NJPS, I suggest that MT’s reading, hitâh wayyiznû, is the result of haplography (in this case that 61.  See in the appended bibliography the studies concerning this phenomenon by D. Yellin from the first half of the twentieth century and the study by my late and esteemed colleague M. Paran from the second half of the twentieth century. 62.  Walter and Greenberg, The Syriac Peshiṭta Bible with English Translation: The Twelve Prophets, p. xx. 63.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 41.

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the final waw representing the accusative pronominal suffix at the end of the verb hitâhû was at some stage not copied because it was followed immediately by the conversive waw at the beginning of the following lexeme wayyiznû). Thus I assume that the original reading was hitâhû wayyiznû, which means, ‘It [a lecherous impulse] has misguided him [the Israelite man, who will be addressed in v. 15 below, q.v.] so that they [Israelite men collectively] strayed from submission to their God’. Graetz suggests emending MT’s hth to either hthw or hthm without any further explanation.64 Graetz consistently seems to assume that for the most part the grammatical, syntactic, and lexicographical necessity of his restorations is self-understood by anyone who would bother to study his Emendationes. As we shall see below, our prophet is very partial to Israelite women, who are treated as victims, who ought to be free to retaliate by adulterous liaisons, which would constitute acts of disloyalty to their husbands. 4:13 al-rāšê hehārîm yĕzabbēḥû wĕal-haggĕbāōt yĕqaṭṭērû taḥat allōn wĕlibneh wĕēlâ kî ṭōb ṣillāh ‘On mountaintops they offer sacrifices, and on hills they make offerings under oak, poplar, and terrebinth because its shade [i.e., the shade of each and every one of these kinds of trees] is pleasant’ This verse describes the circumstances under which the men of Israel engaged in adultery and thereby strayed from submission to their God. Hosea 4:13 shares with Deut. 12 (followed by Jer. 3:6 and 2 Kgs 17:10–11) the idea that mountains and hills and especially leafy trees (Deut. 12:1; 1 Kgs 14:23; 2 Kgs 16:4; 17:10; Jer. 2:20; Ezek. 6:13; 2 Chron. 28:4) are likely locations for illicit worship. Significantly, and this has hardly been noticed in the standard critical commentaries on the book of Hosea, while in Jer. 11:13, 17; 44:3, 8, 17, 18, 25 the verb qiṭṭēr ‘offer’ is associated particularly with the worship of ‘other gods’, particularly Baal and the Queen of Heaven (probably Akkadian Ishtar, whose Sumerian name, Inanna means literally, Queen of Heaven), here in Hosea what disturbs the prophet is not the deity who is worshipped (worship of other gods is not an issue in Hos. 4–14; see my Introduction) but the fact that the men who have gone away to celebrate a religious festival while their wives are home taking care of the children, yield to the temptation to engage in extra-marital sex; see below. 64.  Graetz, Emendationes, p. 12.

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Indeed, the prophet suggests in the following verses, vv. 13b–14, that if the men had gone to worship God near home rather than at rural shrines far away from home, the acts of adultery committed by both the women and the men of Israel might not have taken place. Consequently, any resemblance between Hos. 4:13 and the centralization of Yahwistic worship at a single location far away from most other locations in the land of Israel called for in Deut. 12 and echoed in the books of Kings, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, is purely coincidental.65 al-kēn tiznênâ běnōtêkem wěkallōtêkem těnāapěnâ ‘That is why your daughters engage in extra-marital sex, and your daughters-in-law engage in adultery’ Here, as in Hos. 4:9b–c, chiastic parallelism is employed to convey the impression of symmetry. Here the two verbs znh and np are employed as synonyms referring to married women who engage in intimate relations with men other than their respective husbands. The same pair of roots with the same meaning, albeit, as a metaphor for disloyalty to God on the part of God’s spouse, the people of Israel, is found in Hos. 2:4. Now the prophet, speaking in the name of God, explains in Hos. 4:14 precisely what he meant when he said that there is a very good reason why the women of Israel engage in adultery and an even better reason why they should not be punished for such behaviour: 4:14 lō-epqōd al-bĕnōtêkem kî tiznênâ wĕal-kallōtêkem kî tināapnâ kî-hēm im hazzōnōt yĕpārēdû wĕim haqqĕdēšōt yĕzabbēḥû wĕam lō yābîn yillābēṭ ‘I shall not punish your daughters when they engage in extra-marital sex, nor your daughters-in-law when they engage in adultery. For they themselves [the Israelite men] bed down with whores, and engage in sacrifice with prostitutes, and a people that is without sense must come to ruin’ Here as in Hos. 2:4 the verbal root zny appears in the first clause and the verbal root np in the second clause. The elliptical structure of the first two clauses of Hos. 4:14 indicates that the divine promise, ‘I shall not punish’, applies to daughters and daughters-in-law alike, reinforcing the impression that the two verbs znh and np both refer in the present context to a married woman’s engaging in intimate relations with someone other than her lawful husband. The same impression is achieved in Hos. 4:13 by the use of chiastic parallelism; see there. 65.  Contrast Levine, Review of Ginsberg, pp. 143–57.

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As I have argued in a series of studies, in the context of Hos. 4:14 as also in Gen. 38:15, 21–22 (there in the singular; here in the plural), the terms zōnōt and qĕdēšōt are simply synonyms denoting whores, prostitutes. Rashi in his commentary both at Gen. 35:21 and Hos. 4:14 suggests that the association of zōnōt with the root qdš denoting dedication or devotion refers to women who have devoted themselves to prostitution. Rendering Heb. qĕdēšōt by means of the plural noun τετελεσμένων (from the verb τελέω ‘consecrate, dedicate’), literally, ‘persons who have been dedicated’, LXX at Hos. 4:14 attempts to provide a semantic equivalent for Heb. qĕdēšōt. Writing prior to the appearance of the series of studies referred to below that demolished the scholarly myth of cultic prostitution in ancient Israel, Muraoka explains Heb. qĕdēšōt as ‘the Heb. technical term for “temple prostitute” ’.66 My translation treats the two verbs yĕpārēdû and yĕzabbēḥû not as semantic parallels referring to Israelite men, who, having left their wives and children at home, went off to worship Yhwh by means of sacrificial worship at a sanctuary and there encountered women described as whores//prostitutes in whose company the men engage in worship of Yhwh. Rather, adopting a brilliant suggestion tossed out by Tur-Sinai and rescued from the dustbin to which Tur-Sinai would have assigned it, I am able to make sense of the verb yĕpārēdû precisely as it is vocalized in MT. It was long ago recognized that our prophet implies but does not state that in the course of the stay at the sanctuary and the consumption of meat and wine, the inebriated men engaged in sexual intimacy with the aforementioned whores//prostitutes and thereby exhibited infidelity vis-à-vis their wives. It had been suggested almost convincingly by A. A. Wieder that indeed the two verbs yĕpārēdû and yĕzabbēḥû are semantic parallels.67 Wieder notes that the common rendering of the verb yĕpārēdû in Hos. 4:14 ignores the Masoretic pointing and treats the verb as a niphal reflexive meaning ‘they turn aside’. So, e.g., NJPS, albeit with a marginal note, ‘Meaning of Heb. uncertain’. This ad hoc rendering of the verb assumes that the verb derives from the root prd ‘separate’, which is attested 25 times in Hebrew Scripture. Wieder suggests that in Hos. 4:14, however, we are dealing with an hapax legomenon in Biblical Hebrew, a 66.  Muraoka, ‘Hosea IV’, p. 52. Concerning the fact that the Old Greek versions of the books of the Hebrew Bible have no consistent way of rendering Heb. qĕdēšōt because, inter alia, they were not heirs to a tradition that equated these women with cultic prostitution, see M. I. Gruber, ‘Hebrew qĕdēšāh, and her Canaanite and Akkadian Cognates’, Ugarit Forschungen 18 (1987), pp. 133–48 (133 n. 1, 134 n. 8). 67.  A. A. Wieder, ‘Ugaritic–Hebrew Lexicographical Notes’, JBL 84 (1965), pp. 160–64.

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homonymous root, which has a cognate in Ugaritic in the text now designated as KTU 1.3, I lines 5–7 where we read as follows: qm ytr w yšlḥmnh ybrd ṯd l pnwh b ḥrb mlḥt qṣ mri ndd ‘He rises, arranges, and offers him [Baal] food, Offers a breast [of a sacrificial animal] before him. With a salted knife a piece of a fatling.’

However, M. S. Smith derives the verb brd not from a root meaning ‘offer, present’ but rather from the common Hebrew root ‘separate’, and he renders ‘slices’.68 In other words, the problematic passage in the Ugaritic text commonly called ‘The Goddess Anat’ does not offer an answer to the question as to whether the possibly cognate verb prd in Hos. 4:14 means ‘separate’ (a piece of meat from a sacrificial animal), ‘separate oneself’ (with a woman to engage in sexual intercourse), or simply ‘sacrifice’. Fortunately, N. H. Tur-Sinai cites, though without acceptance, the proposal that the verb yprd in Hos. 4:14c, im hazzōnōt yĕpārēdû, constitutes an example of metathesis and that the text originally read im hazzōnōt yĕrapēdû, which would mean, ‘they go to bed with whores’.69 The basis of Tur-Sinai’s interpretation is the observation that in Job 17:13b baḥōšek rippadĕtî yêṣûî means ‘…I made my bed in the darkness’. The verb rpd, meaning ‘prepare one’s bed for sleeping or whatever else one normally does in bed’, is found also in Job 41:22b, yirpad ḥārûṣălê-ṭîṭ ‘…he [Leviathan, the sea-monster] lay a threshing-roller, on the mire’. M. H. Pope follows and summarizes a long-standing tradition in modern biblical exegesis according to which the root rpd, meaning ‘to spread out a bed or bedding’, is reflected in Cant. 3:10b, rĕpîdātô zāhāb, which suggests that the back of a bed might be covered with gold.70 Pope, in his inimitable way, also follows a tendentious interpretation of Tur-Sinai and manages to understand the verb rpd to mean ‘make a bed’ in Cant. 2:5b, which they then render, ‘Bed me at the (apple) trees’. Moreover, both Pope and Fox understand the noun marbaddîm ‘bed covers’ as a cognate of the verb rpd 68.  See M. S. Smith’s translation of the passage in S. B. Parker, ed., Ugaritic Narrative Poetry (SBL Writings from the Ancient World, 9; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1997), p. 106. 69.  N. H. Tur-Sinai, The Book of Job: A New Commentary (rev. ed.; Jerusalem: Kiryath Sepher, 1967), p. 283. 70.  M. H. Pope, Song of Songs (AB, 7C; Garden City: Doubleday, 1977), p. 380.

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‘make a bed’;71 note that the same noun is attested in Prov. 31:22. There it is asserted that the proverbially virtuous woman also makes for herself marbaddîm ‘(bed) covers’. Tur-Sinai himself in his commentary on Job prefers to see the verb yĕpārēdû in Hos. 14:4c as a cognate of the verb rpd ‘dwell’, which he finds in Lachish Letters 4.5, where byt hrpd means ‘lodging house’.72 Tur-Sinai also calls attention to the expression byt mrpd ‘dwelling house’ (of God), a designation of the Jerusalem Temple found in b. Megillah 10b according to the reading of Munich Ms. 95. We learn from Job 41:22b that the verb rpd meaning ‘make/prepare a bed’ can be employed in the qal as well as the piel, which we found in Job 17:13. The appearance of the two non-synonymous verbs ‘prepare a bed’//‘engage in sacrifice’ indicates that the two parallel clauses, Hos. 4:14c–d, constitute not what the medieval Hebrew exegete David Kimchi calls ‘repetition of the same idea in different words’, but rather an instance of what J. Kugel calls A (the first of two stichs or versets) and what is more, B (the second of two stichs or versets).73 In the instance at hand, the two parallel clauses inform us that the sons and sons-in-law of many an eighth-century BCE resident of the Northern Kingdom engaged in both intimate relations with prostitutes//whores and in sacrificial worship of the God of Israel during the course of a pilgrimage to a sanctuary while their wives were at home taking care of the household and the children. The prophet thus pairs distinct activities of engaging in extra-marital relations and engaging in divine worship. Thereby, the prophet conveys the notion that the sons and sons-in-law under consideration here have turned the sacred into sacrilege and aroused the ire of God. Our prophet has here adumbrated the Rabbinic notion of miṣwâ habbāâ bĕăbêrâ ‘[attempting to perform] a precept/good deed by means of a sin’, of which the classic example in Rabbinic literature is one who attempts to fulfil the precept of rejoicing before God with the festival bouquet (described in Lev. 23:40) by means of a bouquet that includes one or more stolen objects or one who attempts to fulfil the precept of dwelling in a booth during the Festival of Booths (Lev. 23:42) by dwelling in a booth, whose roof is made of stolen property. See the discussion in m. Sukka 3:1–3 and in the two Talmuds ad loc. The highly profound message that the disloyalty of husband to wife is an abomination no less than is the disloyalty of wife to husband and the 71.  Fox, Proverbs 1–9, p. 247. 72.  Tur-Sinai, Job, p. 283. 73.  J. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 13 and passim.

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equally profound message that the disloyalty of husband to wife in the context of prayer, worship, and other expressions of veneration of the deity is a super-abomination were both overshadowed for all too long by a scholarly myth that was read into Hos. 4:13–15. According to this scholarly myth, what was attacked by the prophet speaking in the name of God was the Canaanite and later Israelite practice of engaging in sexual relations with priestesses called qedeshot as a means of ensuring, by means of the principle of sympathetic magic, the fertility of the land of Canaan. (See below.) Classical examples of metathesis in Biblical Hebrew include the pairs of nouns kebeś and keśeb, both meaning ‘sheep’ and śimlâ and śalmâ, both denoting ‘garment’. A classic example of metathesis with respect to a verb in Biblical Hebrew is Ps. 22:2, ăzabtānî ‘You have abandoned me’, which is transcribed in the New Testament in the words of Jesus to God the Father on the cross in Matt. 27:46; Mk 15:34 as σαβαχθανι, where initial sigma corresponds to medial zayin in the Hebrew Ps. 22:2 and medial chi corresponds to initial ayin in the Hebrew Ps. 22:2. In m. Soṭah 9:9 we read as follows: ‘When habitually adulterous men multiplied in numbers, the bitter water [ordeal of Num. 5 meant to test the integrity of a woman whose husband suspected her of adultery although there was no admissible evidence] ceased [to be administered]. And R. Johanan b. Zakkai abolished [the rite] for it is written [in Scripture in Hos. 4:14]: “I will not punish your daughters when they engage in extra-marital sex//Nor your daughters-in-law when they engage in adultery. For they themselves [the Israelite men] worship God in the company of whores…” ’. Thus while the Mishnah does not outlaw polygamy as does the earlier Damascus Covenant Document (see there col. 4, line 20 through col. 5, line 6) first known to us from medieval copies in the Cairo Geniza and more recently from fragments found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, the Mishnah here does canonize Hos. 4’s view that fidelity to one’s spouse is incumbent upon both husbands and wives and that the testing of women’s fidelity can be tolerated only when husbands can be presumed to be faithful to their wives. The idea is spelled out in b. Soṭah 47b: ‘R. Eliezer [b. Pedath] stated, “A prophet told Israel, ‘If you [Israelite men] are scrupulous about yourselves [with respect to marital fidelity], the water may test your wives, but if you are not scrupulous about yourselves, the water will not test your wives’ ” ’. These Rabbinic texts reveal both (1) that Rabbinic Judaism canonized Hos. 4’s insistence on a single standard of fidelity for both husbands and wives; and (2) that Rabbinic literature anticipated Ginsberg and the writer of this commentary in understanding Hos. 4:14 to refer to sexual immorality and not to an idolatrous fertility cult imagined by modern biblical scholarship until recently.

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qědēšōt The term means ‘prostitutes’ and nothing more. This simple fact is demonstrated clearly by the interchange of the two terms zōnâ and qědēšâ in the Judah–Tamar narrative in Gen. 38. Neither Gen. 38 nor Hos. 4 refers to women who engaged in sexual acts as part of a religious rite meant to promote the fertility of the land by means of sympathetic magic. No evidence for such a rite has ever been found in any text from the ancient Near East. As noted by a number of scholars during the latter half of the twentieth century CE, including the author of this commentary on Hosea, such a rite is simply a scholarly myth. (See below for details.) In a series of four articles published between 1982 and 2005,74 I demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that there is no basis in Hebrew Scripture, or in any text from ancient Western Asia, for the commonly repeated notion that in ancient Israel men met women at holy places and elsewhere for the purpose of engaging in extra-marital relations as part of a Canaanite, Israel, or syncretistic Canaanite–Israelite religious rite, which was meant to effect, by means of Frazer’s principle of sympathetic magic, the fertility of the land. See below concerning these studies, the findings I presented therein, and the estimation by not a few scholars that I put an end to the scholarly myth of sacred prostitution in ancient Western Asia, and in ancient Israel in particular, long ago. Indeed, P. Bird has shown that the idea that extra-marital encounters between ordinary individuals in the course of the celebration of an Israelite festival were meant to bring about the fertility of the land was an innovation of Frazer.75 In a 2011 study, Bird demonstrated the following: The oldest source for the ‘sacred prostitution’ that biblical textbooks have made a characteristic feature of ‘Canaanite fertility religion’ is a second century CE travelogue known as The Syrian Goddess (De Syria Dea), attributed to the satirist and rhetorician Lucian of Samosata. Lucian prefaces his account of the cult of Hierapolis with a report on the other ‘Syrian’ temples that he has visited or learned of in his travels, imitating Herodotus in tone and dialect. His most elaborate account is of the Adonis rites performed at the great sanctuary of Aphrodite in Byblos. As part of the mourning rituals, he reports, the Byblians shaved their heads. But the women who refused 74.  See, in addition to ‘Hebrew qĕdēšāh, and her Canaanite and Akkadian Cognates’, cited above, the following: ‘The qadesh in the Book of Kings and in Other Sources’; ‘The qedeshah—What Was her Function?’, Beer Sheva 3 (1988), pp. 45–51 (in Hebrew); and ‘Prostitutes and Prostitution in the Bible’, Zemanim 90 (2005), pp. 22–29 (in Hebrew). 75.  The precise source is J. G. Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion (London: Macmillan, 1907), p. 62.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary to shave were required to stand for a day offering themselves to strangers for payment that became an offering to Aphrodite. This sole reference from Byblos, and sole evidence for Phoenicia prior to Eusebius’ fourthcentury report on Heliopolis, established ‘sacred prostitution’ in its assumed homeland—and provided its only link to the cult of a dying-and-rising-god, lacking in all other references. This paper sets Lucian’s account in the context of other accounts of Adonis rites, prostitution in honor of Aphrodite, and Lucian’s own report on the Ashtart temple of Sidon, to argue that Lucian, in parody of Herodotus, made Byblos ‘Babylon West’.76

The following is the account from Herodotus, Histories 1.199, which in Bird’s view Lucian was parodying in his account of Byblos in The Syrian Goddess: There is one custom among these people [the Babylonians] which is wholly shameful: every woman who is a native of the country must once in her life go and sit in the temple of Aphrodite and there give herself to a strange man. Many of the rich women, who are too proud to mix with the rest, drive to the temple in covered carriages with a whole host of servants following behind, and there wait; most, however, sit in the precinct of the temple with a band of plaited string round their heads—and a great crowd they are, and with some sitting there, others arriving, others going away—and through them all gangways are marked off running in every direction for the men to pass along and make their choice. Once a woman has taken her seat she is not allowed to go home until a man has thrown a silver coin into her lap and taken her outside to lay with her. As he throws the coin, the man has to say, ‘In the name of the goddess Mylitta’—that being the Assyrian name for Aphrodite. The value of the coin is of no consequence; once thrown it becomes sacred, and the law forbids that it should ever be refused. The woman has no privilege of choice—she must go with the first man who throws her the money. When she has lain with him, her duty to the goddess is discharged, and she may go home, after which it will be impossible to seduce her by any offer, however large. Tall, handsome women soon manage to get home again, but the ugly ones stay a long time before they can fulfil the condition which the law demands, some of them, indeed, as much as three or four years. There is a custom similar to this in parts of Cyprus.77

76.  P. L. Bird, ‘Lucian’s Last Laugh: The Origins of Sacred Prostitution at Byblos’, in Collected Communications of the XXth Congress of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament, Helsinki 2010 (ed. Hermann Michael Niemann and Matthias Augustin; Frankfurt: Lang, 2011), pp. 203–12. 77.  The translation is taken from Herodotus, Histories (trans. Aubrey de Selincourt; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), pp. 94–95.

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On the very first page of her massive tome, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity, Stephanie Lynn Budin writes, ‘Sacred prostitution never existed in the ancient Near East or Mediterranean. This book presents the evidence that leads to that conclusion.’78 In fact, I had already debunked the myth of sacred prostitution in my Hebrew article, ‘The qadesh in the Book of Kings and in Other Sources’, and my English article, ‘Hebrew qedeshah and her Canaanite and Akkadian Cognates’. Consequently, my initial reaction to Budin’s debunking of the myth of sacred prostitution in ancient Canaan and ancient Israel was, as I wrote in my review of Budin’s book in RBL 2009, ‘Mahatma Gandhi is alleged to have stated, “First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they fight you; then you win” ’. With the appearance of Budin’s book my initial reaction was and remains that I had indeed spoken the truth and I had won. Indeed, J. Milgrom canonized my arguments in his JSP Torah Commentary on Numbers,79 as did J. H. Tigay in his Deuteronomy commentary in the same series.80 In addition, D. T. Stewart wrote as follows: ‘As early as 1941 Beatrice Brooks cast doubt on this heterosexual fantasy, and Mayer Gruber dealt it the death blow (1983; 1986; 1988)’.81 M. T. Roth attributes the demonstration that there is no evidence for sacred prostitution in ancient Mesopotamia to Westenholz and FrymerKensky.82 The latter scholar offers a summary of the arguments by me and several other scholars that sacred prostitution is a scholarly myth.83 P. Bird does acknowledge my contribution to the subject and the contributions 78.  Stephanie Lynn Budin, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 79.  Milgrom, Numbers. 80.  Tigay, Deuteronomy. In the middle of reading the proofs of the present volume I received J. H. Tigay’s Deuteronomy: Introduction and Commentary (trans. from English into Hebrew by David Louvish and Dalya Amara; Mikra LeYisrael; Tel Aviv: Am Oved; Jerusalem: Magnes, 2016). In this new volume (pp. 580–83) my views concerning qedeshot are enthusiastically adopted and canonized. 81.  D. T. Stewart, ‘Leviticus’, in The Queer Bible Commentary (ed. Deryn Guest, Robert E. Goss, Mona West, and Thomas Bohache; London: SCM, 2006), p. 88. 82.  M. T. Roth, ‘Marriage, Divorce, and the Prostitute in Ancient Mesopotamia’, in Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World (ed. C. A. Faraone and L. K. McClure; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), pp. 21–39 (23), citing J. Goodnick Westenholz, ‘Tamar, Qĕdēša, Qadištu, and Sacred Prostitution in Mesopotamia’, HTR 82 (1989), pp. 245–65, and Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women Culture, and the Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York: Free Press, 1992). 83.  Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, pp. 192–202.

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of many others including Westenholz.84 However, contrary to what we do here in this commentary, namely, to understand the prostitutes and whores of Hos. 4:14 in the context of a rebuke of adult men who cheat on their wives, Bird’s interpretation of Hos. 4:14 reads into the prostitutes of Hos. 4 the metaphor of prostitution to refer to idolatry, which we found in Hos. 1–2.85 However, the issue of idolatry is totally absent from the text of Hos. 4, which refers to events that took place a century after the events referred to in Hos. 1–2. Tragically, the interpretation of prostitution in Hos. 4 as a metaphor employed to condemn idolatrous worship serves to obscure the highly important message delivered in Hos. 4, demanding a single standard of marital faithfulness from both men and women.86 I have repeatedly shown that there is no evidence whatsoever that Akk. qadištu was a prostitute of any kind or that Heb. qĕdēšâ was a kind of priest. The Hebrew term denotes ‘prostitute’ while the Akkadian term denotes a woman who has been dedicated to the service of a deity, usually Adad (East Semitic equivalent of the Canaanite god of the storm and rain, Hadad; see above in my commentary at Hos. 2:10). She functions as a cultic singer, wet-nurse, and midwife. There is not a shred of evidence for a Canaanite cultic prostitute called qdšt. However, the latter term, meaning literally ‘holy female’, is attested as an epithet of several deities in Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Neo-Punic. I have shown previously that the Hebrew term qĕdēšâ appears four times in the Hebrew Bible. In Gen. 38:21–22 in the narrative of Judah and Tamar the term qĕdēšâ functions as a rare synonym for the much more common noun zōnâ ‘prostitute’, designating a woman who engages in sexual relations with perfect strangers in exchange for a fee. The term qĕdēšâ appears to be employed precisely in this same sense in Hos. 4:14, ‘I will not punish your daughters when they engage in extra-marital sex//Nor your daughters-in-law when they engage in adultery. For they themselves [the Israelite men] bed down with whores//And engage in sacrifice with prostitutes//And a people that is without sense must come to ruin.’ My interpretation of the noun qĕdēšâ 84.  P. Bird, ‘Prostitution in the Social World and the Religious Rhetoric of Ancient Israel’, in Faraone and McClure, eds., Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World, pp. 40–58 (56 n. 1). 85.  Bird, ‘Prostitution’, pp. 51–52. 86.  For the debunking of the myth of cultic prostitution in ancient Israel, see also Eugene A. Fisher, ‘Cultic Prostitution in the Ancient Near East: A Reassessment’, Biblical Theology Bulletin 6 (1976), pp. 299–36; Gerda Lerner, ‘The Origins of Prostitution in Ancient Mesopotamia’, SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 11 (1986), pp. 236–54; Elaine Adler Goodfriend, ‘Prostitution’, ABD, vol. 5, pp. 505–10.

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in this context as simply a synonym of zōnâ was inspired by my late and revered teacher, H. L. Ginsberg,87 and it was already suggested in the tenth century CE by the Karaite biblical exegete Daniel al-Kumisi,88 by Rashi (1040–1105) in his commentaries on Gen. 38:21 and Deut. 23:18, and recently by Yehuda Qyl.89 I also showed in ‘The Hebrew qĕdēšâ and her Canaanite and Akkadian Cognates’ that the notion that qĕdēšâ denotes a cultic prostitute and the notion that Hos. 4 attacks the institution of cultic prostitution is unknown to the Old Greek version of Gen. 38, which translates both of the two terms zōnâ and qĕdēšâ by the single noun πορνή, which means simply ‘prostitute’. Peshitta in Gen. 38, like LXX, recognizes no distinction between zōnâ and qĕdēšâ and translates both of them as zānîtā ‘prostitute’. TJ at Hos. 4:14 attempts to reproduce the parallelism of the Hebrew by rendering the two terms zanyātā// napqāt bārā, respectively, employing two synonymous expressions both denoting ‘prostitutes’. The latter Aramaic term is found in the version of TJ published by Alexander Sperber,90 while the synonymous reading napqāt šûqā is found in the standard editions of the so-called Rabbinic Bible. Both terms designate prostitutes as gadabouts. In keeping with the point made by Bird in her article ‘Lucian’s Last Laugh’, Herodotus’s assertion in Histories 1.199 that among the Babylonians every woman had to offer herself to a stranger in the name of the goddess Mylitta has never been corroborated by Assyriological research. Moreover, as I pointed out already in ‘The Hebrew qĕdēšâ and her Canaanite and Akkadian Cognates’, such a practice as is described in Herodotus, Histories 1.199 has nothing to do with the sacred marriage, i.e., the marriage of a god and a goddess or of a mortal to a god or goddess, to which Herodotus refers in Histories 1.181. Most important, neither of those two texts from Herodotus bears the slightest resemblance to what is described in Gen. 38 (the chance encounter between Judah and a woman whom he assumes to be a professional prostitute) or to what is attacked in Hos. 4:14, namely, the disloyalty of Israelite men to their wives. Strangely, notwithstanding all the ink that has been used by the many scholars cited in their respective studies by Bird, Frymer-Kensky, Roth, Westenholz, and others, the scholarly myth according to which Hosea refers to cultic prostitution, i.e., engaging in casual sex near an open-air sanctuary as a means of effecting 87.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, p. 75 n. 2. 88.  See Daniel al-Kumisi, Commentarius in Librum Duodecim Prophetarum (ed. I. D. Markon: Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1957), p. 7. 89.  Qyl, Hosea, p. 31 (in Hebrew). 90.  Alexander Sperber, ed., The Bible in Aramaic. Vol. 3, The Latter Prophets According to Targum Jonathan (Leiden: Brill, 1962).

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by sympathetic magic the fertility of the land, persists. A careful reading of Hos. 4:14 should demonstrate to any unbiased reader that what is under attack is married men’s disloyalty to their wives expressed by engaging in extra-marital intimacy. Hosea, speaking in the name of God, argues that men who commit this moral outrage deserve to have their daughters and daughters-in-law engage in extra-marital intimacy with impunity. Similarly, in Job 31:9, the self-styled paragon of virtue (whose virtue is confirmed by God at the book’s beginning and end) tells God, ‘If I were attracted to a wife [of someone else] so that I stood in wait at the door of my neighbour [waiting to catch a glimpse of his wife], then let my wife [in retaliation for my disloyalty to her] grind for another [man than Job] and may other men have sex with her’. B. A. Kelle accepted all of my arguments.91 The issue at stake in Hos. 4:10–15 is the castigation of married Israelite men who in the course of festival pilgrimages cheat on their wives by engaging in extra-marital sex. Our prophet seems to treat these women with whom these men engage in extra-marital sex as innocent victims. To bring home to the Israelite men the idea that their having sexual relations with women other than their lawfully wedded wives is just as bad as a lawfully wedded woman’s engaging in intimate relations with a man other than her husband, our prophet, speaking in the name of God, advocates a kind of open marriage in which the same standards of charity and faithfulness are exacted from both married men and married women. Moreover, as the prophet makes clear in Hos. 4:15, engaging in immoral behaviour in the course of a religious pilgrimage is especially abominable. Frymer-Kensky argues that if qādēš is not a male prostitute but rather a kind of acolyte, then qědēšâ must be not a female prostitute but a priestess.92 The basis of her argument is that masculine and feminine forms of the same lexeme must be identical in meaning except for their grammatical gender. Westenholz goes so far as to declare, ‘It is contrary to reason to separate the male and female counterparts of the same office in order to deduce that the male was a Canaanite cultic functionary and the female was a irreligious prostitute on the basis that it is a synonym of zōnâ’.93 With all due respect to the late Frymer-Kensky’s and the late Goodnick Westenholz’s phenomenal erudition in Sumerian and Akkadian languages and literatures, the likelihood that grammatically masculine 91.  Kelle, Hosea 2, passim and especially pp. 128–29. 92.  Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, p. 201. 93.  Westenholz, ‘Tamar’, p. 248.

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and grammatically feminine forms of the same noun in Biblical Hebrew may refer to distinct objects is not a matter of Gruber’s faulty reasoning but rather of his acquaintance with Biblical Hebrew lexicography. For example, the masculine noun ṭerep denotes ‘food’ in Prov. 31:15, ‘She arose when it was still night, and she provided food [Heb. ṭerep] for her household and a daily portion [of food; Heb. ḥōq] for her servant girls’. However, the grammatically feminine counterpart of ṭerep, namely ṭěrēpâ designates ‘the remains of a domestic animal torn to shreds by a predatory carnivore’ as in Gen. 31:39: ‘That which was torn by beasts I never brought to you…’; see also Exod. 22:30: ‘You must not eat flesh torn by beasts in the field; you shall cast it to the dogs’. Were we to apply the Goodnick Westenholz form of logic to Biblical Hebrew lexicography we would have to conclude that in Prov. 31:15 the woman of valor is praised for providing her household with non-kosher food. Likewise, we would have to assume that Ps. 111:5a, ṭerep nātan liyrēāyw//yizkor lěōlām běrîtô, means ‘He provided non-kosher food for His devotees//He keeps in mind his covenant forever’, and that it adumbrates a nineteenthcentury CE radical antinomian form of Reform Judaism. Indeed, were we to follow the logic of Goodnick Westenholz we would indeed find another adumbration of nineteenth-century radical antinomian Reform Judaism in Prov. 30:8, where we find a denominative verb hiṭrîp ‘provide food’ derived from the noun ṭerep ‘food’: ‘Provide me with my daily bread’ (cf. the Lord’s prayer in Matt. 6:1; Luke 11:3). If we were to follow the logic of Goodnick Westenholz and Frymer-Kensky, both of blessed memory, and insist that the noun ṭerep must have the same meaning as the noun ṭěrēpâ ‘non-kosher food’, we would have to assume that Prov. 30:8 contains a petition that God provide the suppliant with non-kosher food. In light of Acts 10, which makes it clear that the permission granted Christians to eat non-kosher food was an innovation of the revelation to Peter just outside of Joppa, such a translation, while following the logic of some modern-day scholars, would clearly be anachronistic. Another clear example of a single noun having totally different meanings in each of the two grammatical genders found in Biblical Hebrew is the common word sēper, whose masculine form meaning ‘document’ is attested, inter alia, in Exod. 24:1, ‘Then he took the document of the covenant and read it to the people’; Num. 5:23, ‘The priest shall write these curses in a document and wipe [them] off into the bitter potion’; Deut. 24:1, 3, ‘And he writes for her a document of divorce’. However, the less common feminine form *siprâ is attested with second person masculine singular pronominal suffix yielding siprātěkā ‘your bottle’ in Ps. 56:9: ‘You count [sāpartāh] my wanderings [nōdî]. You put my tears

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into your flask [běnōděkā]//indeed into your bottle [běsiprātěkā]’. This most creative combination of chiasm and paronomasia relies upon the logic of homonymous usages of the masculine and feminine forms of a single lexeme, a logic which defies the logic of Goodnick Westenholz and even the logic of Mitchell Dahood.94 The latter provides the totally logical but lexicographically inept ‘Write down my lament yourself, list my tears on your parchment, my hardships on your scroll’.95 The latter points out that the interpretation of the noun siprâ in the second clause as a vessel for liquids makes the parallelism complete. In fact, in Modern Hebrew the respective grammatically masculine and grammatically feminine forms of the same noun are commonly employed to refer to distinct objects. Typical examples are the following: zebed ‘fertilizer’–zibdâ ‘yogurt’; šemeš ‘sun’–šimšâ ‘window’; sēper ‘book’–siprâ ‘number’; miqrā ‘the Hebrew Bible’–miqrāâ ‘literary anthology’. On the other hand, some pairs of grammatically masculine and grammatically feminine nouns in Biblical Hebrew share many of the same meanings. A parade example of the latter phenomenon is ḥōq and ḥuqqâ both meaning ‘prescribed law’. For the masculine form see, e.g., Exod. 18:16: ‘And I shall declare God’s statutes [ḥuqqê hāělōhîm] and his instructions’ [tôrōtāyw], and for the feminine form see, e.g., Exod. 12:43: ‘This is the ordinance of the Passover’ [huqqat happāsaḥ]. Another example of masculine and feminine forms of the same lexeme, which share meanings are the masculine and feminine forms of the noun nāqām, něqāmâ ‘vengeance’ attested, inter alia, in Isa. 34:8; 61:2; 63:4 on the one hand and Ps. 149:9 respectively. It is understandable that two late and deeply lamented Assyriologists attempting to work in biblical studies would have taken it for granted that the pair qādēš–qědēšâ behaves like the pair nāqām–něqāmâ and the pair ḥōq– ḥuqqâ rather than like the pair ṭerep–ṭěrēpâ. It should also be mentioned in passing that the meaning ‘daily portion of food’ attested for the masculine noun ḥōq in Prov. 30:8 and 31:15, both quoted above, is nowhere attested for the feminine form of the noun ḥuqqâ. Finally, it should be pointed out that contrary to the assertion by Goodnick Westenholz,96 I did indeed take into consideration the masculine gender counterpart qādēš of the feminine gender noun qědēšâ and dealt meticulously both in my 1983 study and my longer 1987 study, with reference to the question as to how it came about that the former designates a kind of priest in both Ugaritic and Biblical 94.  Dahood, Psalms II, p. 40. 95.  Contrast S. Gelander in his commentary on Ps. 56:9 in The Book of Psalms (Olam ha-Tanakh; 2 vols.; Tel Aviv: Davidson-Ittai, 1995), vol. 1, p. 244 (in Hebrew). 96.  Goodnick Westenholz, ‘Tamar’, p. 248.

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Hebrew while the latter term, unattested in Ugaritic, occurs four times in the Hebrew Bible and means simply ‘prostitute’.97 In fact, Heb. qědēšâ is the semantic equivalent of Akk. ḫarimtu ‘prostitute’. The two roots qdš and ḫrm (in Heb. ḥrm) both mean ‘set apart’ whether for devotion to God or for abomination. Such an understanding of Heb. qědēšâ is found already in the commentary of Rashi on both Gen. 38 and Hos. 4. For Heb. ḥrm meaning ‘abominate’ see, e.g., Deut. 7:26, ‘Do not bring an abhorrent thing [tōēbâ] into your house lest you become an abomination [ḥērem]; see also Josh. 6:17; 7:13. With respect to ḥrm meaning ‘dedicate to God’ see Lev. 27:28: ‘However, any dedicated object which a person dedicates [yaḥrim] to God…is totally consecrated [qōdeš-qodāšîm] to Yhwh’.98 Notwithstanding an occasional back-lash, there is an ever-growing consensus that the two terms zônōt and qědēšōt are synonyms and that both terms both in Hos. 4 and in Gen. 38 denote women who are or who are perceived to be professional prostitutes. It is increasingly recognized that their acts of extra-marital sex were not meant to constitute acts of worship of either Yhwh or any other deity. For the back-lash see, as an example, the highly erudite 2004 study by J. Day.99 There, Day reiterates the idea demolished above that qādēš and qědēšâ ought to denote male and female versions of the same occupation.100 Likewise, he asserts that my assertion on the basis of the Ugaritic text KTU 1.112, line 21, which states clearly wqdš yšr ‘the qadesh will sing’, that the qadesh may well have been a cultic singer,101 ‘is extremely forced’. Indeed, if Professor Day could prove to us that the Ugaritic verb šyr and its well-known Hebrew cognate šyr actually meant ‘engage in coitus’ rather than ‘sing’, I would be forced to recant. For better or for worse, at the present state of our 97.  Gruber, ‘The Hebrew qādēš in the Book of Kings and Other Sources’, and ‘The Hebrew qĕdēšâ and Her Canaanite and Akkadian Cognates’. Interestingly, Tigay, Deuteronomy (2016), p. 581, adopts my idea that the appearance of feminine and masculine forms, qĕdēšâ and qādēš in that order, in which the marked gender (feminine) precedes the unmarked gender, is highly significant. However, he differs from me in the conclusions he draws. 98.  I wish to express my special thanks to my esteemed colleague, Professor Shamir Yona, for his advice and counsel with respect to the subject of lexemes that appear in masculine and feminine forms in distinct meanings in both Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew. 99.  J. Day, ‘Does the Old Testament Refer to Sacred Prostitution and Did it Actually Exist in Ancient Israel?’, in Biblical and Near Eastern Studies: Studies in Honor of Kevin J. Cathcart (ed. C. McCarthy and J. F. Healey; London/New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), pp. 2–21. 100.  Day, ‘Does the Old Testament Refer to Sacred Prostitution?’, p. 5. 101.  Gruber, ‘The Hebrew qādēš in the Book of Kings and Other Sources’, p. 171.

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knowledge of ancient Semitic languages I am forced not to give up my sanity and propose the idea that šyr means ‘engage in coitus’ for the sake of turning Hos. 4:14 from a profound and timeless castigation of men who cheat on their wives into a polemic against extra-marital intercourse as a religious rite, which it clearly is not if read without bias in the larger context of Hos. 4:10–15. If Day’s attempt to demolish my demonstration that Hos. 4:14 has nothing to do with sexual intercourse as a religious rite can be called a back-lash, I would call the 2008 study by K. Adams a mid-lash.102 Adams holds that indeed there was no fertility cult, as has frequently been imagined, to which Hosea refers in the passage in question. On the contrary, holds Adams, ‘Hos. 4:13–14 accuses female Israelites of engaging in cultic apostasy through highly rhetorical, metaphorical sexual language… The qedeshot are deliberately named alongside metaphorical zonot (i.e., female apostates) to characterize their cultic office as utterly contemptible.’ Sadly, Adams ignores the story-line in both Gen. 38:15–21 and Hos. 4:10–15 in order to erase Hosea’s eloquent sermon calling for the fidelity of husbands to their wives. Even more pathetic is the commentary on Deuteronomy by J. P. McConville.103 The translation and the commentary on Deut. 23:18–19 betrays total ignorance of the advances made in the twentieth century with respect to the scholarly myth of cultic prostitution in ancient Israel. 4:13–14 in LXX Hosea 4:13 in LXX: ἐπὶ τάς κορυφάς τῶν ὀρέων ἐθυσίαζον, καὶ ἐπὶ τοὺς βοθνοὺς ἔθυον ὑποκάτω δρυὸς καὶ λεύκης καὶ δένδρου συσκιάζοντος, ὅτι καλὸν σκέπη. διὰ τοῦτο ἐκπορεύσουσιν αἱ θυγατέρες ὑμῶν, καὶ αἱ νύμφαι ὑμῶν μοιχεύσοθσιν. Glenny’s translation of LXX of Hos. 4:13 reads as follows: ‘They were sacrificing on the tops of the mountains, and they were offering sacrifices at the high places under the oak and white poplar and shady tree, for the shade was good; therefore, your daughters will prostitute themselves, and your daughters-in-law will commit adultery’.104

102.  K. Adams, ‘Metaphor and Dissonance: A Reinterpretation of Hosea 4:13–14’, JBL 127 (2008), pp. 291–305. 103.  J. P. McConville, Deuteronomy (Apollos Old Testament Commentary, 5; Nottingham: Apollos; Downers Grove: IVP, 2002), p. 346. 104.  Glenny, Hosea, pp. 41–42.

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Hosea 4:14 in LXX reads as follows: καὶ οὐ μὴ ἐπισκέψωμαι ἐπὶ τάς θυγατέρας ὑμῶν ὅταν πορνεύωσιν, καὶ ἐπὶ τάς νύμφας ὑμῶν μοιχεύωσιν. ὅτι αὐτοὶ μετὰ τῶν πορνῶν συνεφύροντο, καὶ μετὰ τῶν τετελεσμένων ἔθυον, καὶ ὁ λαὸς ὁ συνείων συνεπλέκετο μετὰ πόρνης. Glenny’s translation of LXX of Hos. 4:14 reads as follows: ‘And I will never consider helping your daughters when they play the prostitute nor your daughters-in-law when they commit adultery, for the men themselves were associating with harlots and sacrificing with the initiates. And the people who had understanding were embracing a harlot.’105

In Hos. 4:13 LXX understands both of the Hebrew verbs employed in parallel clauses, yĕzabbēḥû and yĕqaṭṭērû, as meaning ‘they sacrifice/they present offerings’, while in Hos. 4:14 LXX understands Heb. yĕpārēdû and yĕzabbēḥû as having the distinct meanings of ‘they are associated’ and ‘they sacrifice’, respectively. MT makes perfect sense in its argument in Hos. 4:13–14 that God will not punish either daughters or daughters-in-law for infidelity so long as the men in their respective families philander. LXX, on the other hand, has Hosea, speaking in the name of God, contend that so long as the men associate with prostitutes and offer sacrifices in the company of members of a religious sorority, God will not help out the daughters and the daughters-in-law. MT suggests that the appropriate punishment for men who insist on a double standard of morality, in which women must be faithful to their spouses but men need not be so is to let their daughters and daughters-in-law engage in adultery with impunity. LXX, on the other hand, has God declaring that so long as men are unfaithful to their wives in the course of a religious pilgrimage, God will add insult to injury by not doing anything to help the daughters and daughters-in-law, whose husbands have been unfaithful to them. 4:15 im zōneh attâ Yiśrāēl wĕal-tābōû haggilgāl wĕal-taălû bêt āwen wĕal-tiššābû ḥay-Yhwh ‘If you are an unfaithful husband, Israelite male, do not come to Gilgal, and do not make pilgrimages to Beth-aven, and do not swear by Yhwh’ In Amos 5:21–22 the prophet, speaking in the name of God, declares, ‘I loathe, I spurn your festivals, I am not appeased by your solemn 105.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 43.

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assemblies. If you offer me burnt offerings—or your meal offerings—I will not accept them; I will pay no heed to your gifts of fatlings’. Indeed, the same prophet, speaking in the name of God, disparages attendance at places of worship which is not accompanied by moral behaviour, when he says, in Amos 5:4: ‘Thus said Yhwh to the House of Israel: “Seek me, and you will live. Do not seek Bethel, Nor go to Gilgal, Nor cross over to Beer-sheba”.’ Similarly, in Isa. 1:14, Isaiah son of Amoz, speaking in the name of God, declares, ‘Your new moons and fixed seasons fill me with loathing. They are become a burden to me, I cannot endure them. And when you spread open your palms [in a gesture of supplication] I will turn my eyes away from you. Though you pray at length, I will not listen. Your hands are stained with crime [so do not pray to me with dirty hands].’ Just as in Amos 5 and Isa. 1, the prophets, speaking in the name of God, ask Israel/Judah to refrain from participating in worship so long as they do not desist from public immorality, which is described as lack of economic and social justice, so in Hos. 4 our prophet tells us that God would prefer that people desist from going on pilgrimage to sanctuaries such as Gilgal and Beth-aven and that people desist from invoking God’s name so long as people do not desist from betraying their trust to their wives by engaging in extra-marital liaisons. Both Amos 5 and Hos. 4 mention pilgrimages to Gilgal. Moreover, according to medieval Hebrew biblical exegesis, reflected in the commentaries of Rashi and Ibn Ezra at Hos. 4:15 and elsewhere, Beth-aven, literally, ‘House/Place of Evil’, is a dysphemism for Bethel ‘House of God’.106 This is to say that both Amos and Hosea take for granted that Israelites habitually go on religious pilgrimages to worship God by prayer and sacrifice and vocal and instrumental music and vowing of vows at a number of famous sanctuaries, prominent among which are Gilgal and Bethel. The use of the name Beth-aven as a possible dysphemism for the place name Bethel in Hos. 4:15; 5:8; 10:5 should be distinguished from the name Beth-aven referring to another place altogether in Josh. 7:2; 18:12; 1 Sam. 13:5; 14:23. It is likely that the final clause of the small self-contained literary unit, which is Hos. 4:15, refers, like Amos 5:5, to the three sanctuaries of Gilgal, Bethel, and Beer-sheba. Just as Hos. 4:15 refers to Bethel by means of the dysphemism Beth-aven so does Hos. 4:15 refer by circumlocution to Beer-sheba, whose name means literally ‘well of an oath’. See Gen. 21:31: ‘The place was named Beer-sheba [well of an 106.  So also J. F. T. Gomes, The Sanctuary of Bethel and the Configuration of Israelite Identity (BZAW, 368; Berlin/New York: W. de Gruyter, 2006), pp. 160–61.

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oath] because the two of them [King Abimelech of Gerar and Abraham] swore there’. Interestingly, D. A. Garrett writes, ‘Hosea substitutes the warning about swearing “as Yahweh lives” for an injunction against going to Beer-sheba. The warning about oath taking is appropriate since the name Beer-sheba means “well of the oath”.’107 I have bracketed the second clause of Hos. 4:15, ‘Let Judah not incur guilt’, assuming that this clause is a gloss, which was added to the book of Hosea when the latter book had been brought to Judah after the fall of Samaria in 722 BCE and the book had been revered as a sacred text. The assumption is that post-722 anonymous Judahite prophets attempted to make the more than century-old text relevant by turning the fulfilled prophecies of doom, the failure to heed which had resulted in the destruction of Samaria and the exile of its inhabitants, into prophecies of conditional consolation. The import of the conditional consolation is as follows: ‘If you, Judah, do not misbehave as did your northern cousins prior to 722 BCE, your story will have a much happier ending then theirs’.108 Typically of Judahite glosses (see my Introduction, pp. 27–31), the added three words (in Hebrew) ‘Let not Judah bear her guilt’ in Hos. 4:15b interrupt the smooth reading of the conditional sentence, the protasis of which is, ‘If you are an unfaithful husband, Israelite male’, and the apodasis of which is ‘do not come to Gilgal…’. While in Hos. 4:15, as in Isa. 1:15 and Amos 5:22–23, God’s rejection of sacrificial worship seems to be conditional upon the Israelites’ public and private immorality,109 in Hos. 6:6, q.v., God’s rejection of sacrificial worship seems to be categorical. The term zōnâ commonly designates a woman who engages in nonmarital sex. If she is married, the non-marital sex in which she engages is adultery, for which, according to Lev. 20:10 and Deut. 22:23–24, both partners are to be executed. The innovation of Hos. 4:15 is to declare that an Israelite man, who engages in sexual relations outside of marriage is a zōneh and that if he be married, his act of infidelity should be treated as we would treat an act of infidelity on the part of a married woman. This idea is reinforced by the declaration, in the previous verse, v. 14, that so long as men are unfaithful to their wives, their daughters and their daughters-in-law should be able to emulate their behaviour with impunity. In his confession 107.  Garrett, Hosea–Joel, p. 137. 108.  So also Gomes, The Sanctuary of Bethel, p. 160. 109.  So also Gomes, The Sanctuary of Bethel, pp. 161–62, with reference to Hos. 4:15.

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of innocence in Job 31:1, 9–11, Job echoes Hosea’s single standard of morality for both husbands and wives when he declares in Job 31:1, ‘I made a covenant with my eyes that I would not even look at a woman of marriageable age’. Note that in both Job 2:9 and 19:17 Job is portrayed as a married man! Consequently, when Job declares in Job 31:9, ‘If my heart was ravaged by a[nother] woman so that I lay in wait at the entrance to the house of my neighbour [hoping to get a glimpse of his beautiful wife], then let my wife engage in sexual intercourse with another man, and let other men lay with her’ [the just punishment for my own thoughts of having sex with a woman other than Mrs. Job, Dinah the daughter of Jacob in Rabbinic tradition]. The gap between Job 31:1, ‘that I would not even look at a woman’ and Job 31:9–10, which echoes the assertion in Hos. 4:13–14 that the just punishment of an unfaithful man is that his wife should bestow sexual favours on other men is filled in in the Gospel of Matthew, at 5:27–28, ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery” [Exod. 20; Deut. 5]. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’ Indeed, E. Hamilton suggested that Jesus was inspired not only by Job but also by Hosea.110 Moreover, assuming with most scholars that the same prophet was responsible for Hos. 1–3 and for Hos. 4–14, and also assuming that the famous Rabbinic midrash concerning Hosea’s having been married to an adulterous wife whom he forgave (see above at Hos. 1:2–3) is a literal interpretation of Hos. 1, and further assuming with many biblical scholars that the woman spoken about in Hos. 3 is the adulterous woman referred to in Hos. 1:2, Hamilton argued that Hosea was able to anticipate Jesus because of his own personal experience with unconditional love for a woman who cheated on him.111 This is what Edith Hamilton writes: Hosea makes God say that he will not mark out unchaste and faithless women for punishment because the men are equally guilty: ‘I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom nor your wives when they commit adultery, for the men themselves consort with lewd women and they sacrifice with harlots’ [Hos. 4:14]. This is an astonishing point of view to be found seven hundred and fifty years before Christ… ‘Moses in the law commanded that such should be stoned’,112 the men said who brought 110.  E. Hamilton, Spokesmen for God: The Great Teachers of the Old Testament (New York: W. W. Norton, 1949), p. 14. 111.  Hamilton, Spokesmen for God, pp. 114–16. 112.  See John 8:5, where the scribes and the Pharisees refer to Deut. 22:22–24; cf. Lev. 20:10.

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to Christ the woman taken in adultery. He looked at the angry crowd and the crouching woman and there came to his mind how Hosea had acted toward another such and what he had said in her defense. He knew Hosea’s book well; it is one of the prophetic books He directly quoted from. And He answered in words most beautifully and accurately expressive of Hosea’s thought: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’.113 And yet something may be felt in Hosea’s plea which is absent from Christ’s sorrowful insight; there is a suggestion of a passionate challenge flung to people who had sat in judgment and condemned his wife and himself. The verse is like a ray of light thrown upon what he had to endure from those around him.114

One of the great lights of classical studies with no professional training in Hebrew Scripture, Semitic languages, or the history of critical biblical studies, E. Hamilton seems, like m. Soṭah 9:9, to have apprehended clearly the central message of Hos. 4:14, which has all too often been obscured by the reading into Hos. 4:14 of the scholarly myth of sacred prostitution. Labelling a husband who cheats on his wife as a zōneh ‘a male whore’ indicates that a husband’s cheating on his wife is simply intolerable. The label that our prophet assigns should put an end to any thought that a husband is not culpable for such an offense against both his wife and his God. Moreover, says our prophet, again speaking in the name of God, it is abominable that a man who thinks that way and acts on that assumption should appear in any of God’s sanctuaries. Our prophet emphasizes this idea, which men in the most advanced countries still find hard to internalize, by expressing it in a literary unit characterized by the combination of the two rhetorical devices of highlighted introduction (a mirror of the climactic conclusion I pointed out in Hos. 3:4 and Hos. 2:21). Here in Hos. 4:15, as in Hos. 3:4 and Hos. 2:21, an idea is repeated three or more times with the same introductory phrase, the technical term for which is anaphora. In 3:4 the anaphora is the repeated negative particle ên meaning ‘without’. In 2:21 it is the clause wĕarēśtîk lî ‘I shall betroth you unto me’. Here in 4:15 the anaphora is the repetition of the negative particle al followed in each of the three instances by a verb in the imperfect masculine plural, t…û. In Hos. 3:4 and 2:21 the anaphora is followed by a climactic conclusion. The climactic conclusion in Hos. 2:21 is the clause ‘And you shall know Yhwh’, while in Hos. 3:4 the climactic conclusion is effected by ending the literary unit not by supplying different content but by means of lengthening the 113.  John 8:7. 114.  Hamilton, Spokesmen for God, pp. 114–16.

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final clause so that unlike the previous four clauses which consist of two lexemes each, the fifth and final clause consists of three lexemes. In Hos. 4:15, on the other hand, the three clauses featuring the anaphora wĕal t…û is preceded by an emphatic introduction. Just as the climactic conclusion in Hos. 2:21, ‘You shall know Yhwh’, expresses the central idea of Hos. 1–2, so does Hos. 4:15a, ‘And if you are an adulterous man…[stay at home; and do not trample My courts]’, express the central idea of Hos. 4:10–18, namely that the men of Israel should cease and desist from being unfaithful to their wives. Scholars who have almost grasped the point of the rhetorical device of emphatic introduction followed by anaphora in Hos. 4:15 include G. I. Emmerson,115 whose graphic arrangement of the text without the Judahite gloss anticipates my own observations. In light of our demonstration that Hos. 4:15 consists of an emphatic introduction, a Judahite gloss typified as are all Judahite glosses in the book of Hosea, by an assault upon the otherwise smooth syntax in the surrounding context, and a three-part anaphora, it is quite amazing to read the words of Andersen and Freedman: ‘In spite of the changes in person and number, v 15 does display some coherence, in the parallelism of the nations and of the cities’.116 Macintosh regards Hos. 4:15 in its entirety as a gloss because, inter alia, Macintosh claims that ‘the condemnation of the Israelite people for their cultic corruption reaches a natural climax at the end of v. 14’.117 Since, however, we have seen that, contrary to Macintosh, who sees the qědēšōt of Hos. 4 as ‘cult women’, the central issue in Hos. 4:1–18 is men cheating on their wives, Hos. 4:15 is, indeed, the fitting climax to the prophetic condemnation of men who combine extra-marital liaisons with attendance at a religious festival.118 4:16 kî kĕpārâ sōrērâ sārar Yiśrāēl attâ yirēm Yhwh kĕkebeś bammerḥāb ‘Indeed, like a stubborn cow Israel has acted stubbornly. Consequently, Yhwh will make them graze like a sheep on the open range’ We should note the obvious assonance and alliteration (the consonant r is repeated six times in the course of five words; we cannot necessarily 115.  G. I. Emmerson, Hosea: An Israelite Prophet in Judean Perspective (JSOTSup, 28; Sheffield: University of Sheffield Department of Biblical Studies, 1984), p. 80. 116.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 371. 117.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 162. 118.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 158.

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assume that the consonant s found in sōrērâ and sārar sounded like the ś in the proper name Yiśrāēl) in the first two clauses of this verse.119 As in Hos. 4:5–6, where the clauses ‘I will destroy’ and ‘they are destroyed’ appear at the end and the beginning of successive verses, respectively, so here in Hos. 4:16 the parallel clauses, the first concluding with the feminine sōrērâ and the second beginning with the masculine form sārar, constitute an instance of concatenation, which is to say the repetition of the same verb or noun in successive clauses. The purpose of concatenation is not only aesthetic. It also serves as a rhetorical strategy to indicate that the two clauses, which seemingly speak of totally different subjects, actually constitute a valid comparison. The form sōrērâ is a feminine singular qal participle of the root srr ‘be stubborn’. See Deut. 21:18–21, which discusses what to do with bēn sôrēr ûmôreh ‘a child who is stubborn and rebellious’. Possibly inspired by Deut. 21:18, 20, Jer. 5:22 refers to the people of Israel as having ‘a heart which is stubborn and rebellious’. Likewise, Ps. 78:8 asserts that the purpose of the giving of the verbal revelation called the Torah was that the people of Israel ‘will not be like their ancestors, a stubborn and rebellious generation’. Concerning the masculine (and common) plural participle sōrĕrîm ‘perverse’, see below at Hos. 9:15. The comparison of stubborn and rebellious Israel to a stubborn cow is found only in Hos. 4:16. However, Jer. 2:24 compares the idolatrous nation of Judah of the late sixth century BCE to ‘a wild ass [pere] used to the desert’ (so NJPS). In the context of Hos. 4:10–18, which speaks continually of lechery, one should compare the description of a licentious woman, to whom uneducated young men may fall prey in Prov. 7:8–27. She is said to be sōreret, which may mean that, like the man who is castigated in Prov. 4:1–18, she rebels against the rules of chastity and fidelity. In fact, it is pointed out in Prov. 7:19 that indeed the licentious woman is married, and her husband has gone on a journey. ‘Like a sheep on the open range’ Rashi explains that the anticipated punishment compares rebellious Israel to a sheep that has to find its own food foraging rather than having food provided in a grain trough such as one provides for cattle. Similarly, also Ibn Ezra.120 (See below for an explication of the laconic notes in NJPS margin.) 119.  See Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 266; Rudolph, Hosea, p. 114; Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, p. 85; interestingly Kaatz, ‘Wortspiel’, p. 435, has no comment on the repetition of the consonant r in the first two clauses of Hos. 4:16. 120.  So also Macintosh, Hosea, p. 165.

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The main point of Hos. 4:16 is that the Israelite man, whose behaviour disturbs our prophet, who speaks in the name of God, is a sōrēr ‘a rebellious man’. This term is applied in Deut. 21:18–21 where we read as follows: ‘If a person has a stubborn and rebellious son, who does not heed his father or his mother and does not obey them even after they discipline him, his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders of his town at the public place of his community. They shall say to the elders of his town, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious; he does not heed us. He is a glutton and a drunkard”. Thereupon, the people of his town shall stone him to death. Thus you will remove evil from your midst: all Israel will hear and be afraid.’ From this latter passage and from Hos. 4 in its entirety we may infer that the hallmark of a wayward and defiant individual is that he/she is a glutton and a drunkard. Just as Hos. 4:15 condemns men who associate with whores/prostitutes but not the whores and prostitutes, so does Hos. 4:16 condemn not the undisciplined cow, the pārâ sōrērâ, but rather the man who acts like an undisciplined cow by over-indulging in wine to the point that, totally inebriated, he is tempted to engage in extra-marital sex. The note in NJPS’s margin explains that ordinarily cows are given fodder as payment for their work while sheep [and goats] are sent away from the farm each morning to graze in the open fields. The NJPS notes also call attention to the distinction spelled out in Isa. 30:25–26: ‘He [God] will provide rain for your seed with which you sow the ground and the bread, which is the produce of the ground, and it shall be rich and fat, and your flocks shall graze in broad pastures. And the kine and the asses that work the soil shall partake of salted fodder that has been winnowed with shovel and fan’ (my translation, which is more precise than NJPS). Indeed, the idea that the metaphoric wayward cow, which is Israel, is to be sent away from home to forage for food is reminiscent of the threat of exile found in Deut. 11:17: ‘For Yhwh will be angry with you, and he will shut up the sky so that there will be no rain, and the land will not yield its produce, and you will quickly depart from the good land that Yhwh gives you’. 4:17 ḥăbûr āṣabbîm Eprāyim hannaḥ-lô (NJPS renders) ‘Ephraim is addicted to images—Let him be’ When Ginsberg reconstructs Hos. 4:18d as follows (see below), nāḥălû qālôn miggāôn ‘They shall inherit disgrace rather than glory’ the verb restored in this clause, nāḥălû, taken as a prophetic perfect (perfect with future meaning without conversive waw), is assumed to have been both

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misplaced and miscopied in MT, so that we get in MT at Hos. 4:17b hannaḥ-lô ‘leave him alone’, which contains all the consonants of the verb nāḥălû with the addition of the first consonant of hannaḥ-lô, namely, h. It is possible that the prophet in Hos. 4:17a refers to the veneration of golden and silver calves as appurtenances to worship, to which the prophet refers in Hos. 8:4; 13:2, and 14:9 employing the Hebrew term ăṣābîm ‘images’. See below at Hos. 8:4; 13:2; and 14:9. Ginsberg regards the sudden mention of ăṣābîm ‘images’ as incongruent in a chapter which has spoken repeatedly about overindulging in food and drink, leading to sexual license.121 Consequently, he suggests that the term ăṣābîm ‘images’ in the present context is a scribal error and that the original text employed the term ogĕbîm ‘lechers’. Indeed the latter plural noun is attested once in all of Hebrew Scripture, in Jer. 4:30, where Jerusalem, who has been unfaithful to God and to God’s teaching is addressed as follows: ‘And you who are doomed to ruin, what do you accomplish by wearing crimson, by decking yourself in jewels of gold, by enlarging your eyes with kohl? You beautify yourself in vain: Lovers [Heb. ogĕbîm] despise you, they seek your life!’ For Ginsberg’s restoration of the very same consonants, however, with the vocalization ăgābîm, which gives us the abstract noun meaning ‘lust’, see above at Hos. 3:1e. In addition, Ginsberg assumes that MT’s ḥăbûr ‘joined to’ represents a scribal error for an original ḥeber ‘band’, which is attested precisely in that sense in Hos. 6:9, q.v. Ginsberg goes further in his restoration of the original text of Hos. 4:18b. Indeed, if Ephraim can be called ‘a band of lechers’ in consideration of the aforementioned tendency of men to engage in extra-marital sex, it should not be surprising that Ginsberg would suggest a convincing parallel to ‘a band of lechers’ based upon the association both in Hos. 4:10–14 and Hos. 4:18 of drunkenness and sexual license. Semantic parallels in Biblical Hebrew to the noun ḥeber ‘band’ include the nouns sōd ‘council’ and qāhāl ‘assembly’, which are attested in parallel clauses in Gen. 49:6: ‘Let my person not be included in their council; let my being not be counted in their assembly’. Ephraim The proper name Ephraim designating the people of the Northern Kingdom occurs 35 times in Hos. 4–14: 4:17; 5:3, 5, 9, 11, 12, 13 (twice), 14; 6:4, 10; 7:1, 8 (twice), 11; 8:9, 11; 9:3, 8, 11, 13 (twice), 16; 10:6, 11; 11:3, 8, 9; 12:1, 2, 9, 15; 13:1, 12; 14:9. Tadmor argues that the equation of Israel with Ephraim refers not to the political domination of Ephraim over all the territory of the Northern Kingdom but more likely to the 121.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, pp. 73–74.

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likelihood that the territory of the hill country of Ephraim was the area which King Menahem son of Gadi actually controlled while his rival Pekah son of Remaliahu ruled independently in Gilead while awaiting the opportunity to seize the throne of Israel.122 Indeed, it is reported in 2 Kgs 15:25 that in 735 BCE Pekah assassinated Menahem’s son Pekahiah and ruled in his stead. Be that as it may, in 5 places in the standard Hebrew text of Hos. 4–14 we find the two designations of the nation of the Northern Kingdom designated in synonymous parallelism as ‘Ephraim’//‘Israel’ in that order: Hos. 5:3; 6:10; 10:6; 11:8; 12:1 (only in that last instance do we find ‘House of Israel’ rather than simply ‘Israel’). As I discuss in my Introduction in connection with Judahite glosses in the book of Hosea, in an additional five places in the standard Hebrew text of Hos. 4–14 we find the pair ‘Ephraim’//‘Judah’: Hos. 5:12, 13, 14 [here alone it is House of Judah]; 6:4; 10:11, where, following Ginsberg, I hold that the text originally employed the pair ‘Ephraim’//‘Israel’. In all of these cases the proper name Ephraim refers to the Northern Kingdom and its inhabitants. Most likely, Hosea’s use of the name Ephraim as a synonym for the name Israel has inspired Jer. 31:9b: ‘For I am ever a Father to Israel//Ephraim is my first-born’.123 4:18 sār soběām ‘Their drink has turned sour’ (KJV), literally ‘their drink has turned’ Ginsberg emends MT’s sār soběām ‘their liquor turns against them’ in Hos. 4:18a to read sōd sōběîm ‘a band of tipplers’.124 The emendation is supported by the obvious truth that in all stages of Hebrew script the letters daleth at the end of the word sōd ‘band, company’ and the resh at the end of MT’s sār ‘turned against’ can be presumed to be interchanged in the course of copying texts.125 The emendation of ḥăbûr ăṣābîm ‘a person/group that is associated with images’ to ḥeber ogĕbîm ‘a band of lechers’ is totally congruent within the context in Hos. 4:10–18, which speaks repeatedly about lechery. While the MT reading sār soběām ‘their 122.  Tadmor, ‘Historical Background’, p. 88 n. 20. 123.  Concerning the influence of the book of Hosea upon Jeremiah see Ginsberg, Israelian Heritage, pp. 97–99. 124.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, p. 74. 125.  See F. Delitzsch, Die Lese- und Schreibfehler im alten Testament (Berlin & Leipzig: W. de Gruyter, 1920), pp. 105–107.

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liquor turns against them’ in Hos. 4:18a is totally congruent in the context of Hos. 4:10–18, which speaks repeatedly about drunkenness as rampant in eighth-century BCE Israel, Ginsberg’s pair of emendations, sr ‘turned away’ to sōd ‘band/association’ in Hos. 4:17–18 and ḥăbûr ‘joined to’ to ḥeber ‘band/company’, recreates the synonymous parallelism, which Ginsberg assumes that the author had in mind and which was lost for centuries because an ancient scribe miscopied it. hazneh hiznû ‘They drank liquor excessively’ Here the prophet repeats what he stated in Hos. 4:10, namely, that the people of Israel in his time have been over-indulging in imbibing alcoholic beverages. Recognizing a root zny which denotes ‘imbibe alcoholic beverages’ is another of Ginsberg’s innovations.126 In Hos. 4:18b we have the hiphil infinitive absolute preceding the third person masculine plural verb for emphasis; hence my translation adds the adverb ‘excessively’ to express what Biblical Hebrew indicates by placing an infinitive absolute before the finite verb. NJPS turns that emphasis into English ‘to excess’ while Ginsberg paraphrases ‘is rampant’.127 āhăbû hēbû (literally, perhaps) ‘They loved; give’ My translation, ‘They love beyond measure’, reflects Morag’s view; see below. The first of the two verb forms is the frequently attested third person perfect plural form of the verb ‘love’ while the consonants of the second of the two forms looks like the masculine plural imperative of the verb yhb ‘give’, which is common in Aramaic but also attested in Biblical Hebrew (18 times altogether; see, e.g., Deut. 32:3; Pss. 29:1 [twice]; 96:7 [twice], 8). However, the pointing hēbû where we would expect hābû suggests that the Masoretes wanted to alert us to something unexpected. Ginsberg, consistent with what he has done with earlier clauses in Hos. 4:17–18, assumes that here as in the previous segment there was originally an infinitive absolute followed by a finite verb. If the previous clauses spoke of excessive drinking, the present clause must speak of its consequence, namely, excessive lovemaking, which is to say, frequently engaging in extra-marital sex as mentioned above. Thus Ginsberg restores āhōb āhăbû, meaning literally ‘they continually made love’, which he

126.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, p. 73. 127.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, p. 74.

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paraphrases, ‘Fornication is rife’.128 S. Morag suggests that the received text is a miscopying of an original āhabhăbû, which was an emphatic form of the verb hb in which the second and third root letters are reduplicated to make a five-consonant root as in the forms ḥmrmrw ‘they were very embittered’ in Lam. 2:11 and ypypyt ‘you are very beautiful’ in Ps. 45:3.129 No less plausible is the assumption that the lexeme hbw in the middle of Hos. 4:18c is simply a dittography of the last three letters of the verb āhăbû and that the latter functions in Hos. 4:18b as a transitive verb, whose direct object is the noun qālôn ‘disgrace’.130 Both Ehrlich and Cheyne construe Hos. 4:18c–d as follows: āhăbû qālôn miggěônāh ‘They loved disgrace more than her [Samaria̕ s] Glory’.131 For God’s being called ‘the Glory of Israel’, see Amos 8:7. Cheyne is inspired especially by LXX, which reads here ἠγάπησαν ἀτιμίαν ἐκ φρυάγματος αὐτῆς ‘they love dishonour more than her glory’.132 See below for Ginsberg̕ s similar treatment of Hos. 4:18d. qālôn māginnêāh (NJPS renders) ‘Disgrace is the gift’ The first of the two words in this nominal clause is the noun qālôn ‘disgrace’, which is attested 17 times in Hebrew Scripture, including Hos. 4:7, q.v.; see also, inter alia, Prov. 9:7; 11:2; 12:16; 13:18; etc. NJPS’s rendering the noun māginnêāh as ‘the gift’ assumes derivation of the noun from the verb mgn, which means ‘give’ in Gen. 14:20, ‘who gave your enemies into your hand’; see also Hos. 11:8, q.v., and Prov. 4:9. Alternatively, the noun here attested has been taken as a form of the noun māgēn ‘shield’ derived from the root gnn ‘protect’. So Andersen and Freedman: ‘He has constrained the ignominy with its shields’.133 Ginsberg reconstructs the entire clause as follows: nāḥălû qālôn miggāôn ‘They shall inherit disgrace rather than glory’, which he paraphrases, ‘Disgrace is their portion, not glory’.134 Clearly Ginsberg follows Cheyne and Ehrlich in assuming that the LXX reading cited above was original and that MT’s māginnêāh is a scribal error.

128.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, p. 74. 129.  Morag, ‘Concerning the Unique Language of Hosea’, p. 499. 130.  So Graetz, Emendationes, p. 12; Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, pp. 368–69; and Cheyne, Hosea, p. 70. 131.  See the previous note. 132.  Cf. Glenny, Hosea, p. 100, and the extensive discussion there. 133.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 344. 134.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, p. 74.

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4:19 ṣārar rûăḥ ôtāh biknāpêāh wĕyēbōšû mizzibĕḥōtām ‘The wind has bound her up in the hems of her garment, and they will be ashamed because of their sacrifices’ The note in NJPS’s margin explains that Heb. ṣārar biknāpêāh means literally, ‘he has bound up in the corner of her garments’. This literal translation shows that the biblical text in Hos. 4:19 treats the epicene noun rûăḥ first as a masculine noun governing the masculine singular third person perfect verb ṣārar and then immediately thereafter as a feminine referred to by the third person feminine singular pronominal suffix at the end of the expression biknāpêāh. NJPS’s marginal note compares Mal. 3:20, where another NJPS note explains that the literal meaning of ûmarpeh biknāpêāh is ‘with healing in the folds of its [the sun’s] garments’. Moreover NJPS’s marginal note at Hos. 4:19 refers us for comparison to Mal. 3:20, where we read, wĕzārĕḥâ lākem yirĕê šĕmî šemeš ṣĕdāqâ ûmarpeh biknāpêāh, which NJPS renders as follows: ‘But for you who revere My name a sun of victory shall rise to bring healing’, accompanied by an explanation: ‘Lit. “with healing in the folds of its garments” ’. Interestingly, in Mal. 3:20 the Hebrew word for sun, which can be either masculine, like the Akkadian cognate šamšu, or feminine, like the Ugaritic cognate šapšu, is treated as a feminine noun both at the beginning and the middle of the verse, where the noun in question is, respectively, the subject of the feminine verb ‘rise’ and antecedent of the pronominal suffix ‘her’ in the noun ‘her garments’. In Hos. 4:19, on the other hand, the noun rûăḥ ‘wind’, which can be either masculine or feminine, is treated as the masculine subject of the verb ‘gather’ and the feminine noun antecedent of the pronominal suffix ‘her’ in the noun ‘folds of her garments’. The change of gender of a noun in the middle of a verse is found also in Jer. 2:24, where we read as follows: pere limmud midbār bĕawwat napšô (qere: napšāh) šāăpâ rûăḥ taănātāh mî yĕšîbennâ kol-mĕbaqšêâ lō yîāpû bĕḥodĕšāh yimṣāûnĕâ ‘A wild ass used to the desert snuffing the wind in his/her eagerness, whose passion none can restrain. None that seek her can go weary. In her season [i.e., when she is in heat] they will find her.’ Here the apparent sex-change operation in the wild ass, which turns into an ātōn ‘she-ass’ is marked by the ketib–qere tradition of variant readings with respect to the noun nepeš ‘breath’, which NJPS takes to be a metaphor for ‘eagerness’. The well-known Hebrew epicene nouns (i.e., nouns which are treated as either masculine or feminine) are rûăḥ ‘spirit, wind’, šemeš ‘sun’, and maḥaneh ‘camp’. Ehrlich notes with respect to

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the expression im…el-hammaḥaneh hāaḥat wĕhikkāhû ‘If Esau comes to the one [feminine] camp and attacks him [masculine]…’ in Gen. 32:9, the treatment of epicene nouns as both masculine and feminine in a single breath is well attested in Hebrew Scripture.135 Examples cited by Ehrlich include 1 Kgs 19:11, wĕrûăḥ gĕdōlâ wĕḥāzāq ‘a great [feminine] and strong [masculine] wind’; Isa. 14:9, Šĕōl…rāgĕzâ wĕhēqîm ‘Netherworld was astir [feminine]…raised up [masculine]’; Isa. 35:8, wĕderek haqqodeš yiqqārē lāh lō yaăbĕrennû ‘She shall be called the holy path; no unclean person shall pass along him’; and Ezek. 2:9, wāereh wĕhinnēh-yād šĕlûḥâ ēlāy wĕhinnēh-bô mĕgillat-sēper ‘As I looked there was a hand stretched out [feminine] and in him [the hand, this time masculine] was a document in the form of a scroll’; see also Ehrlich’s other examples, which include Prov. 14:12; 18:14; Job 1:19; and 2 Chron. 3:11–13. wĕyēbōšû mizzibĕḥōtām ‘and they will be ashamed because of their sacrifices’ The final clause of Hos. 4:19 summarizes the principal idea expounded in Hos. 4:9–19, namely, that the religious exercises (prayer, sacrifices and other behaviour which has to do with what was called in medieval Judaism ‘between human and deity’ and among spiritually inclined persons in post-modern times, ‘the inner life’) of persons who are not scrupulous about their personal morality are unacceptable. They are tantamount to what the Rabbinic sages call ‘a precept performed by means of a sin’, which in Rabbinic halakah or law is simply unacceptable. Classic examples are the person who steals from someone else the palm frond to wave before the Lord on the Festival of Tabernacles and the person who provides the roof of the ceremonial booth for the Festival of Tabernacles from stolen materials. See m. Sukkah 3:1 and the discussion thereof in the two Talmuds. Contrary to modern notions of the end justifying the means, the Rabbinic sages hold that a good deed accomplished by means of a transgression is simply not recognized. The prophets of Israel and Judah exemplified, inter alia, by Hos. 4; Amos 5:4–6; Isa. 1:11–17, had already declared repeatedly that religious activities (prayers, sacrifices, and rites) performed by persons whose personal or public morality is flawed are simply unacceptable. If Amos, Micah, and Isaiah son of Amoz emphasized primarily public morality and spoke less of private morality, Hosea here in Hos. 4 and again in Hos. 9 emphasizes private morality, while in Hos. 7 he will speak at length about corruption in the political sphere.

135.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 1, p. 9.

C h a p t er s 5 a nd 6

Hosea 5:1–7 and its Neighbours in MT and LXX In MT as represented by its best exemplar, the Aleppo Codex, the chapters designated in the standard printed editions of the Hebrew Bible as chs. 5 and 6 consist of the following distinct units marked by spaces between the units: 1. 5:1–7 followed by a blank space separating Hos. 5:7 from 5:8 2. 5:8–6:11 In LXX Vaticanus Heb. Hos. 5:1–7 corresponds to the fifth of the eleven major divisions of the book of Hosea indicated by the Greek letter-numerals A [i.e., 1, not indicated in the manuscript just as page 1 of modern books is often not numbered] through IA [i.e., 11]. In LXX Vaticanus’s earlier division of the book of Hosea into 21 units, our Hos. 5:1–7 corresponds to division no. 12, while the next unit, no. 13, corresponds to our Hos. 5:8–6:3; no. 14 to Hos. 6:4–7:12. Significantly, the division between 6:3 and 6:4, i.e., between LXX’s older unit 12 and unit 13, has no parallel in MT. However, the break between Hos. 7:12 and 7:13, which corresponds to the later division between larger units 6 and 7 in the LXX according to Codex Vaticanus, corresponds exactly to a break in MT before Hos. 7:13, while the treatment of Hos. 7:13–8:14 as a unit in MT corresponds precisely to division no. 7 of the 11 units of the book of Hosea recognized in LXX Vaticanus. However, the older system recognized in LXX Vaticanus of dividing the book of Hosea into 21 paragraphs treats Heb. Hos. 7:13–14a and 7:14b–8:14 as two distinct units, i.e., nos. 15 and 16. Hosea 5:1–7, one of two units into which our ch. 5 is divided in the standard Hebrew text, returns to the two principal themes with which ch. 4 opened, namely the corruption of the priestly house, and the corruption of the entire House of Israel, which resulted from the failure of the priests to teach the people how to behave. In addition, Hos. 5:1 introduces an additional entity, which is scolded, namely, the royal house, the problematics of which will be addressed at length in Hos. 7–8.

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Indeed, the scolding of three separate groups—priests, house of Israel, and royal house—in Hos. 5:1.is paralleled in Hos. 4:4–5, which refers also to three groups or entities, namely, the priest, the prophet, and the people (of Israel) at large. Like ch. 4, Hos. 5:1–7 begins with an opening formula introduced by ‘Hear’ (imperative common plural). Opening formulae of this type are found in the pre-exilic prophets in Amos 3:1, 13; 4:1; 5:1; 8:4; Mic. 1:2; 3:1, 9; 6:1–2, 9; Joel 1:2; Isa. 1:2, 10; 28:14; Jer. 2:4; 7:2; 44:24, 26. 5:1 In Hos. 5:1a–c we have three parallel clauses addressing three distinct groups, namely, the priesthood, the house of Israel, and the royal house (of Israel/Samaria/Ephraim). The pair of plural imperative verbs šimĕû//haăzînû ‘…hear//give ear’ precisely in that expected order of common/shorter verb followed by longer/rarer verb is found in Isa. 1:2 and in the Song of Deborah in Judg. 5:3. The synonymous pair of plural imperative verbs šimĕû//haqšîbû ‘hear//pay attention’ is found in Mic. 1:2 and Isa. 49:1. Unique to Hos. 5:1 is the triplet šimĕû-zōt hakkōhănîm wĕhaqšîbû bēt Yiśrāēl ûbêt hammelek haăzînû ‘Hear this, priests, And pay attention, house of Israel, And royal house, give ear’.

The triplet, which also constitutes an instance of chiastic parallelism, is created by opening and closing the verse with the parallel pair known from the Song of Deborah, ‘hear//give ear’, and sandwiching in the middle the imperative haqšîbû ‘pay attention’, which, as we noted, appears as b-word or poetic parallel to the imperative ‘hear’ in Mic. 1:2 and Isa. 49:1. Stuart compares the triple summons in Hos. 5 to the triple summons in Gen. 49:1–2: ‘Come together so that I may tell you what will happen to you in the future. Assemble and hearken, sons of Jacob; hearken to Israel your father.’1 In fact, Gen. 49:1–2 represents a rhetorical pattern quite different from the trilogy of imperatives in synonymous and chiastic parallelism found in Hos. 5:1. Indeed, triplets are quite rare in the poetry 1.  Stuart, Hosea, p. 91.

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of the Hebrew Bible. However, while not noted even by commentators especially concerned with prophetic rhetoric such as Wolff and Andersen and Freedman, Huffmon notes that the opening formula ‘Hear…give ear’ is especially characteristic of the so-called lawsuit oracles,2 of which, as we shall see, Hos. 5:1–7 is, as will be noted later by Gemser (see below), a classic example. kî lākem hammišpāṭ ‘For against you is the lawsuit’ NJPS renders ‘For right conduct is your responsibility’, which is a totally reasonable rendition of the literal meaning of Hos. 5:1d. However, in light of Hos. 4:1, where Yhwh announces that he is about to engage in a lawsuit (Heb. rîb), and Hos. 4:4, which we understood to mean ‘Against you, is my lawsuit, Mr. Priest’, it is more reasonable to understand Hos. 5:1 as expanding upon Hos. 4, in which God first proposes to summon the priests to judgment (vv. 4–6) and then subsequently to take to task the entire people of Israel: ‘And the people have acted just like the priest’ (Hos. 4:9; indeed the verse can also mean ‘And the people will be [punished] like the priests’, as in my running translation, q.v.). Thus, as in Hos. 4:4–6, God first summons the priests to judgment and then summons the entire people of Israel for judgment, so also in Hos. 5:10 God says that his lawsuit (now expressed by the noun mišpāṭ rather than the noun rîb) is with you, plural, referring to all three groups addressed in 5:1a–c, the priests, the house of Israel, and the royal house. In Hos. 6:1 the same noun mišpāṭ denotes the sentence that the House of Israel will receive if found guilty as charged in chs. 4–5. B. Gemser, in his classic study, ‘The Rib-Pattern in Hebrew Mentality’, notes that ‘Hosea [he refers specifically to Hos. 4:1, 4; in fact, the same term in precisely the same sense is found already in Hos. 2:4; see above]…is the first [prophet] to proclaim emphatically a rîb [“legal controversy”] between Yahweh and his people and its leaders, religious as well as political…’.3 He further notes that in Hos. 5:1 the noun mišpāṭ is synonymous with rîb in the sense of a lawsuit.4 Interestingly, H. B. Huffmon does not cite Hos. 5:1–7 as an instance of the ‘covenant lawsuit’, although he does cite Hos. 4:1–2, which, however, he notes, ‘lacks the appeal to the covenant witnesses and omits the historical prologue’.5 2.  Huffmon, ‘Covenant Lawsuit’, p. 285. 3.  Gemser, ‘The Rib-Pattern in Hebrew Mentality’, p. 129. 4.  For the history of research concerning the rîb-pattern in modern biblical research with numerous interesting parallels from ancient Mesopotamian literature, see J. Harvey, ‘Le “rib-Pattern”, Réquisitoire prophétique sur la rupture de l’alliance’, Biblica 43 (1962), pp. 172–96. 5.  Huffmon, ‘The Covenant Lawsuit in the Prophets’.

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kî-paḥ hĕyîtem lĕMiṣpeh wĕrešet pĕrûśâ al-Tābōr ‘For you have been a snare to Mizpeh and a net spread over Mount Tabor’ Characteristic of Hos. 4–14 are references to various locations in the Land of Israel and to historical events, which are not necessarily known to us from other books of Hebrew Scripture. In Judg. 11:34 Mizpeh in Gilead is the home of Jephthah. Since, however, the background of Hos. 4–14 is the truncated Israel, which is confined to the territory of Ephraim in Cis-Jordan, it is more likely that here the reference is to Mizpeh in the Land of Benjamin where all Israel assembled twenty years after the Ark had been brought to Kiriath-jearim according to 1 Sam. 7. Mount Tabor is cited in Judg. 4:6, 12, 14 as the place where Deborah the prophetess commands Barak to lead an army and to confront and defeat Sisera. In Ps. 89:13 Tabor and Hermon are cited as two mountains, who will sing God’s praises. The term paḥ ‘snare’ refers to a net for trapping birds. For an graphic representation see illustration #3. The noun rešet is a relatively common word for ‘net’. The noun occurs twice in the book of Hosea, here in Hos. 5:1 and again in Hos. 7:1.

Illustration 3. Net or snare for trapping birds (taken from S. R. Driver, The Books of Joel and Amos [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915], copied from the drawing in J. Gardiner Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians [2 vols.; London: John Murray, 1878], vol. 2, p. 103)

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5:2 wĕšaḥăṭâ Šēṭîm heĕmîqû ‘At Shittim they were exceedingly perverse’ S. Morag notes that Hos. 5:2a has a close parallel in Hos. 9:9a–b,6 where it is stated, heĕmîqû-šiḥētû kîmê haggibĕâ, which means, ‘They have been exceedingly perverse as in the days of Gibeah’. Hosea 5:2a is a simple declarative sentence referring to past behaviour of Israel, specifically at Shittim during the forty-year sojourn of Israel in the wilderness of Sinai, where, according to Num. 25:1, ‘the people began to fornicate with the Moabite women’. Hosea 9:9a–b, on the other hand, compares the perverse behaviour of the people of Israel in his own time to the perverse behaviour of the people of Israel in past times, specifically to the event recorded in Judg. 19 concerning the Levite and his concubine who were initially refused hospitality by the people of Gibeah. Ultimately, the people of Gibeah gang-rape the concubine until apparently she loses consciousness and dies, and the people of Israel wage war against Benjamin, the tribe to which Gibeah belonged, to avenge the outrage committed by the people of Gibeah. In both passages in Hosea—5:2a and 9:9a–b—the verb heĕmîqû ‘they went deep’ is employed as an adverbial modifier of another verbal form, the infinitive šaḥăṭâ in Hos. 5:2a, the perfect plural verb šiḥētû in Hos. 9:9a–b. The verb heĕmîqû ‘they went deep’ is similarly employed in Isa. 31:6 where we read as follows: ‘Return, Israel, to him to whom the people of Israel have been exceedingly unfaithful’. Morag in the study cited above pointed out that the infinitive šaḥăṭâ in Hos. 5:2a is not a form of the commonly attested root š-ḥ-ṭ, which refers to killing an animal or a bird by slitting its throat (Lev. 1:5, 11; 3:8 and many other occurrences).7 Morag argues that the infinitive šaḥăṭâ in Hos. 5:2a is derived from the same root as the perfect verb šiḥētû in Hos. 9:9a and that the appearance of the non-emphatic consonant t in the infinitive form in Hos. 5:2 and the

6.  Morag in his study, ‘On Semantic and Lexical Features’, pp. 484–511 (in Hebrew). 7.  For the meaning of the latter verb see Milgrom, Leviticus, vol. 1, p. 154. Milgrom presents three lines of evidence for the meaning of the verb šḥṭ ‘slaughter by slitting the throat’. These are (1) the Arabic cognate śht, which has precisely that meaning; (2) Rabbinic tradition recorded in b. Hullin 27a; and (3) 2 Kgs 10:10, which informs us that when the act of šĕḥîṭâ ‘slaughtering’ had been performed upon seventy princes, the heads of the latter were placed in baskets, indicating that by means of šĕḥîṭâ the heads had been severed from the bodies of the princes.

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appearance of the emphatic consonant ṭ in the perfect plural verb in Hos. 9:9 can be accounted for as follows: frequently the emphatic consonant ṭ replaces the non-emphatic t when the consonant ḥ appears in the same word. Examples include the verb ḥṭp ‘grab’, attested once in Judg. 21:21 and twice in Ps. 10:9, where the verb in question is a by-form form of the verb ḥtp ‘grab’, which is attested in Job 9:12, hēn yaḥtōp mî yĕšîbennû ‘If He [God] snatches, who can stop Him?’ From the same root is derived the noun ḥetep ‘prey, that which is grabbed by the predator’ in Prov. 23:28: ap-hî kĕḥetep teĕrōb ‘In addition, she [the strange woman] lies in wait [for her potential victim] as for prey’. The interchange of ṭ and t is reflected also in the use of the verb wayyiṣboṭ ‘he snatched’ in Ruth 2:14 alongside the noun ṣebatîm ‘heaps’ two verses later in Ruth 2:16. Note that Hosea refers to the debauchery at Shittim (Num. 25:1–5), again in Hos. 9:10, ‘They came to Baal-peor, they became devoted to shamefulness, and they became detestable through their love-making’. Note the assonance created by the sequence of Hebrew lexemes wĕšaḥăṭâ Šēṭîm in Hos. 5:2a. waănî mûsār lĕkullām ‘And I (Yahweh) am the one who teaches/ reproves/punishes all of them [the house of Israel, the royal house, and the priests addressed in 5:1a–c]’ The speaker is God, and he informs us that he is the one who reproves the priests, the house of Israel, and the royal house for their improper behaviour. The noun mûsār ‘teaching, reproof, punishment’ is derived from the verbal root ysr, which can denote ‘teach, reprove, and punish’. For the root ysr meaning ‘teach’ see Ps. 94:10: hayyōsēr gôyîm hălō yôkîăḥ hammĕlammēd ādām daat ‘Will not he who punishes nations, he who teaches humanity knowledge, not rebuke?’ This phrase is reminiscent of Gen. 18:25, ‘Shall not the Judge/Ruler of all the world deal justly?’ Psalm 94:10 plays with the ambiguity of the verb ysr which can mean both ‘teach’ and ‘punish’. The first two clauses of Ps. 94:10 taken together and without the addition of the third clause can be taken to mean ‘Will not the punisher of nations not rebuke?’ The first and final of the three clauses can be understood as synonymous and meaning, ‘Will not the one who instructs nations…the one who teaches knowledge to humankind?’ The middle clause suggests that just as he who implants [in people] an ear will surely himself hear (Ps. 94:9a) and just as he who fashions an eye [in people] will surely see (Ps. 94:9b), so is it reasonable that he who is characterized as yōsēr meaning both teacher and reprover—just as šōpēṭ

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in Gen. 18:25 means both ruler and judge—will not only teach but will also reprove (yôkîăḥ).8 For the verb ysr in the unequivocal sense of ‘punish’ see Ps. 6:2: Yhwh al-bĕappĕkā tôkîkēnî wĕal-baḥămātĕkā tĕyassĕrēnî ‘Yhwh, do not chastise me by means of your (foaming) mouth And do not punish me by means of your venom’.9

In this and in many other contexts, the two terms, which derive from descriptions of the physical manifestations of what is perceived to be anger in humans and animals, are employed secondarily to denote anger. For ysr meaning ‘punish’ see also Lev. 26:28: wĕyissartî etĕkem ap-ānî šeba al-ḥaṭṭōtêkem ‘I, for my part, will punish you sevenfold for your sins’.

Cf. also Deut. 8:5: kî kaăšēr yĕyassēr îš et-bĕnô Yhwh ĕlōhêkā mĕyassĕrekā ‘For as a person punishes her/his child, Yhwh your God punishes you’.

See also Deut. 22:18: wĕlāqĕḥû ziqnê hāîr-hahî et-hāîš wĕyissĕrû ōtô ‘The elders of that city will take that man, and they will punish him’.

David Kimchi pointed out that the expression waănî mûsār, literally, ‘and I am instruction/reproval/punishment’, but commonly understood to mean ‘I instruct, reprove, punish’, is reminiscent of Ps. 109:4, where waănî tĕpillâ is commonly understood to mean not ‘I am prayer’ but ‘I pray’. Thus the essential meaning of Hos. 5:2b, waănî mûsār lĕkullām 8.  See also Ps. 94:12: ašrê haggeber ăšer-tĕyassĕrennû Yāh ûmittôrātĕkā tĕlammĕdennû ‘Fortunate is the person whom you, Yhwh, reprove/instruct//And whom you teach out of your Instruction/Torah’. Cf. Prov. 31:1: dibĕrê Lĕmûēl melek Maśśā ăšer-yissĕrattû immô ‘The words of King Lemuel of Massa, which his mother taught him’. 9.  This rendering of the latter verse, which reflects the primary meaning of the nouns in the two adverbial phrases, is taken from Gruber, ANCANE, p. 549, where it is discussed in detail.

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is as follows: ‘I am he who teaches, reproves, and, in the end, punishes first of all the priests who [as spelled out in my commentary at Hos. 4:6] were supposed to teach the people how to behave, the royal house, who should have set an example for exemplary behaviour, and the entire house of Israel, who followed in the footsteps of the negligent and corrupt leaders—priests and kings [here in Hos. 5; in Hos. 4 it is priests and prophets]’. 5:3 ănî yādaĕtî Eprayim//wĕYiśrāēl lō nikḥad mimmennî ‘I am knowledgeable concerning Ephraim//and Israel is not hidden from me’ As pointed out by Tadmor (see my Introduction), the fixed pair of epithets for the Samarian State in Hos. 4–14 ‘Israel//Ephraim’ reflects the fact that in the time of Second Hosea’s prophetic and poetic career (749–739 BCE) the territory of the Samarian State had been reduced to the hill country of Ephraim. The pair ‘Ephraim//Israel’ first appears in the book of Hosea here in 5:3 and again in 5:9; 7:1; 10:6; 11:8; 12:1; 13:1. As we shall see, below, as argued convincingly by Ginsberg, the fixed pair ‘Ephraim// Israel’ also lies behind the pair ‘Ephraim//Judah’ in the traditional Hebrew text at Hos. 5:12, 13. (See ‘Judahite Glosses’ in the introduction above, and see also below in my discussion of Hos. 5:12, 13, 14 [only in this verse do we find ‘House of Judah’]; 6:4; 10:11.) In the parallel pair yādaĕtî//lō nikḥad mimmennî ‘I know/am knowledgeable//it is not hidden’ there is found a special form of synonymous parallelism, called negative parallelism, in which a particular identical idea (in this case knowledge/awareness) is found in the first clause in a positive formulation and that same idea (in this case knowledge/ awareness) is expressed by negation of the opposite of the idea in question in the second clause.10 Concerning lō nikḥad ‘it is not hidden’, which is to say ‘it is known, I know it’, note the following: for the verb kiḥēd meaning ‘hide’ see 1 Sam. 3:18: wayyaggēd-lō Šĕmûēl et-kol-haddĕbārîm//wĕlō kiḥēd mimmennû ‘Samuel then told him everything, and he did not hide from him [anything]’. Similarly, we read in Isa. 3:9: wĕḥaṭṭātām kiSĕdōm higgîdû//lō kiḥēdû ‘They avowed their sins like Sodom//they did not conceal [them]’. Thus Job declares in Job 6:10: ‘And this will be my 10.  Concerning negative parallelism in Hebrew Scripture, see Ch. Cohen, ‘The Phenomenon of Negative Parallelism and its Ramifications for the Study of Biblical Poetry’, Beer-Sheva 3 (1988), pp. 69–107 (in Hebrew).

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consolation as I writhe in unmitigated pain, that I did not conceal the words of the holy being [the figure who appeared to me in a dream and spoke to me the words found in Job 4:12–21]’.11 kî attâ hiznêtā Eprayim niṭmā Yiśrāēl ‘For indeed, you have committed adultery, Ephraim//Israel has defiled himself’ Here the prophet speaking in the name of God repeats the charge made in ch. 4, that in Israel men have been unfaithful to their wives. They have received sexual favours from prostitutes. Here as in Gen. 34:5, 13 extra-marital sexual relations are referred to as defilement. In Gen. 34:4 the narrator reports, ‘And Jacob heard that he [Shechem son of Hamor] had defiled his daughter Dinah…’. Likewise, the narrator in Gen. 34:13 refers to Shechem as ‘the one who had defiled their sister’. Numbers 5:13 refers to a woman suspected of infidelity as follows: ‘in that a man has had carnal relations with her unbeknown to her husband, and she keeps secret that she has defiled herself without being forced…’. See also Ezek. 18:11, where ‘he has defiled another man’s wife’ means ‘he committed adultery with another man’s wife’. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that in biblical law, according to Lev. 15:18, whenever any man has sexual relations with any woman they are both defiled and must bathe in water and remain unclean until the evening. Moreover, the juxtaposition of Lev. 15:17 and 15:18 indicates that it is the man’s semen that defiles both man and woman. Moreover, these legal texts do not distinguish between marital and non-marital intercourse, or, for that matter, the ethnic or religious affiliation of the man and the woman.12 On the contrary, Lev. 15:17–18 does not distinguish between licit and illicit intercourse, and it asserts that it is male semen and not marital status or lack of it that causes defilement. Sadly to say, Rofé simply ignores Lev. 15:17–18 notwithstanding the fact that when he presented his thesis 11.  See M. I. Gruber, ‘Job’, in Jewish Study Bible (ed. A. Berlin and M. Z. Brettler; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 1513 and 1510–11; H. L. Ginsberg, ‘Job the Patient and Job the Impatient’, in Congress Volume: Rome 1968 (VTSup, 17; Leiden: Brill, 1969), pp. 88–111 (99 and passim). For the parallel pair higgîd//lo kīḥēd ‘told//did not conceal’ see also Job 15:18, ‘which wise people have told//have not withheld’; and cf. also Job 27:11: ôreh etĕkem bĕyad-ēl//ăšēr im-šadday lō ăkaḥēd ‘I will teach you what is in the power of God//What is going on with the Almighty I shall not hide’. 12.  Contrast A. Rofé, ‘Defilement of Virgins in Biblical Law and in the Case of Dinah (Genesis 34)’, Biblica 86 (2005), pp. 369–75. Mirabile dictu, Rofé there proceeds from the assertion (p. 369), that in biblical law ‘a virgin, or for that matter, any woman who is not married or betrothed cannot be defiled by illicit sexual intercourse’.

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at the Congress of the IOSOT in Leiden August 2, 2004, I politely asked him how he could reconcile his thesis with Lev. 15:17–18. Had Rofé chosen to date Gen. 34 to the pre-exilic period, he could, of course, have argued that Lev. 15:17–18, which is commonly assigned by European scholars to P, which, in turn, is assigned by most European scholars to the post-exilic period, is not relevant. He might even have argued that Lev. 15:17–18 was inspired by Gen. 34. Instead Rofé responded, ‘Well, there are different kinds of defilement’, which confirms the impression one gets from a close reading of the article in Biblica 86, that Rofé has simply ignored Lev. 15. It appears that in the narrative in Gen. 34, the law of Num. 5, and the prophetic texts cited from Hosea and Ezekiel, a simple fact of life, namely, the fact that male ejaculate evokes a sense of disgust, is made into an innuendo. Consequently, in the course of time ‘to defile oneself’ means specifically to engage in forbidden sexual relations. It is Hosea who adds to the list of forbidden sexual relations consensual relations between a married man and another woman regardless of her marital status.13 In light of Hos. 4 there is every reason to believe that also here in Hos. 5 our prophet singles out the proverbial Israelite man (as in Hos. 4:15), who is pictured as an unfaithful husband. I follow NJPS in understanding the hiphil of the root zny to mean ‘commit adultery’, as does the same root in the qal in Hos. 4:13–14 where the qal of that root is employed in synonymous parallelism with the qal of the verb np, which can never mean anything except ‘commit adultery’. However, in Hos. 4:10, 18, I follow Ginsberg in understanding the hiphil of the root zny there as denoting imbibing alcoholic beverages excessively.14 As I suggested above at Hos. 4:10, 18, the use of the homonymous roots together in Hos. 4 may well constitute a deliberate leitmotif, which underscores what is explicitly stated in Hos. 4:10–11, 18, namely, that excessive drinking of wine in the course of religious pilgrimages led directly to a loss of good judgment, which resulted in married men on religious pilgrimage engaging in extra-marital sexual liaisons. If in ch. 4 the prophet thought it necessary to make the point that if men insist on being unfaithful to their wives (something not forbidden in any of the biblical codes of law), then their wives should be able to commit 13.  Concerning the semantic development of the Hebrew root ṭm from the primary meaning ‘to be disgusting’ to the secondary meaning ‘engage in forbidden sexual relations’, see the extensive discussion in R. M. Galatzer-Levy and M. Gruber, ‘What an Affect Means: A Quasi-Experiment About Disgust’, Annual of Psychoanalysis 20 (1992), pp. 69–92 (84–85). 14.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, p. 73.

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adultery (a capital offense in the biblical law codes and the codes of the ancient Near East) with impunity, here in ch. 5, this argument is absent. Perhaps the prophet now assumes that having once made that argument it should be sufficient to assume that from now on Israelite married men understand that infidelity on their part is indeed as heinous a crime as infidelity on the part of a married woman or on the part of any man other than her husband with a married woman. It is indeed noteworthy that while the castigation of men who are unfaithful to their wives is taken up again by Hosea here in Hos. 5, and again in Hos. 9, and yet again by Jeremiah in Jer. 5:7–8, the argument of reciprocity is never again repeated in biblical literature, although it is emphasized in the Mishnah and the Babylonian Talmud (see above in our discussion of Hos. 4:13–14). 5:4 lō yittĕnû maalĕlēhem lāšûb el-ĕlōhêhem kî rûăḥ zĕnûnîm bĕqirbām wĕet-Yhwh lō yādāû ‘Their wicked deeds will not let them return to their God for a lecherous spirit is in them, and they do not obey Yhwh’ Here, as in Hos. 4:10; 7:2; 9:15 and Hos. 12:4, the expression maalĕlîm, literally, ‘deeds’, is used for wicked deeds, which defy morality. Here as in Hos. 4:10–12 it is explained that the wicked deeds were brought about by a lecherous spirit. In 4:11 it is furthermore asserted that the lecherous spirit was brought about by indulging in wine. On the basis of the association of daat ĕlōhîm, literally, ‘knowledge of God’, with observance of the Decalogue in Hos. 4:1–2, NJPS translates daat ĕlōhîm there as ‘obedience to God’. I follow the lead of NJPS in Hos. 4:2 in rendering the final clause of Hos. 5:4, ‘And they do not obey Yhwh’. The literal meaning is, ‘They do not know Yhwh’. 5:5 wĕānâ gĕōn Yiśrāēl bĕpānāyw wĕYiśrāēl wĕEprayim yikkāšĕlû baăwônām kāšal gam-Yĕhûdâ immām ‘The pride of Israel shall be humbled before his very eyes. Israel and Ephraim will stumble as a consequence of their iniquity. (Judah also will stumble with them)’ The initial clause of this verse, namely, wĕānâ gĕōn Yiśrāēl bĕpānāyw, reappears again in Hos. 7:10. As for the subject of these two identical clauses, ‘the pride of Israel’, the latter has been taken to mean ‘arrogance’, as does the word gĕōnô ‘his pride/arrogance’ in Isa. 2:10, where the larger context of Isa. 2:8–4:6 repeatedly refers to the humbling of the pride of the arrogant. Thus NJPS renders in Hos. 5:5, ‘Israel’s pride shall be humbled

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before his very eyes’, and in Hos. 7:10, ‘Israel’s pride has been humbled before his very eyes’. For the verb nh in the meanings ‘be humbled/be humiliated’ and (in the piel) ‘to humiliate’ see, for example, Gen. 16:6, ‘Then Sarai humiliated her [Hagar], and she [Hagar] went away from her [Sarai]’, and Gen. 16:9, where the angel of Yhwh instructs Hagar, ‘Go back to your mistress and let her humiliate you’. See also Gen. 15:13: ‘…And they [the Israelites] shall serve them [the Egyptians], and they [the Egyptians] shall humiliate them [the Israelites] for four hundred years’. Similarly in Exod. 1:12, ‘And as much as they [the Egyptians] humiliated him [Israel] so did he [Israel]…increase and spread out’. The interpretation of the ambiguous verb weānâ to mean ‘will be humiliated, humbled’ is reflected in LXX, Peshitta, and TJ, and it is supported by Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Kimchi, and now also by NJPS. Alternatively, also taking the phrase ‘pride of Israel’ to mean the arrogance of the people of Israel, collectively, many interpreters including the Vulgate, Dunash Ibn Labrat, KJV, Andersen and Freedman, and Macintosh see here one of the many homonyms of ānâ ‘be humiliated’, specifically ānâ ‘testify’ as in Isa. 3:9, ‘Their partiality in judgment testifies against them’; see also Job 16:8: ‘You have shrivelled me; My gauntness serves as a witness, and testifies against me’. The final clause in the latter verse, wĕānâ bĕpānāy ‘and it testifies against me’ is almost verbatim what we have in Hos. 5:5a and Hos. 7:10a, namely, wĕānâ bĕpānāyw ‘and he/it testifies against him’. It should be noted, however, that in Amos 6:8 the expression ‘the pride of Jacob’ is widely taken to be an epithet of the Jerusalem Temple and that indeed the Jerusalem Temple is called gĕōn uzzĕkem ‘your pride, which is the source of your strength’ in Ezek. 24:21, which in turn was likely inspired by Lev. 26:19, which probably referred to any of the many legitimate Israelite sanctuaries, which Lev. 26 envisaged. Consequently, some modern interpreters of Hosea have suggested that here Hosea refers disparagingly to the Temple at Bethel.15 Interpreting the verb wĕānâ in Hos. 5:5 and 7:10 to mean ‘testify (against)’, a number of modern interpreters including C. F. Keil and F. Hitzig,16 understand ‘the pride of Israel’ in these two clauses as an 15.  So, e.g., G. A. Danell, Studies in the Name Israel in the Old Testament (Uppsala: Appelbergs boktrykeri, 1946), pp. 117–18, cited by Macintosh, Hosea, p. 186. 16.  Keil and Delitzsch, Twelve Minor Prophets, 1:88, and F. Hitzig, Die zwölf kleinen Propheten (2nd ed.; Kurzgefasstes Exegetisches Handbuch zum Alten Testament; Leipzig: Weidmann, 1852), pp. 24 and 33.

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epithet for God who testifies against Israel with respect to Israel’s not having behaved properly. Whether Hos. 5:5a refers to Israel’s arrogance having been turned to humility or to Israel’s arrogance testifying against Israel or to the glory of Israel, meaning either the Temple or God, testifying against Israel, the main point of Hos. 5:5 is that as stated clearly in Hos. 5:5b: Yiśrāēl wĕEprayim yikkāšĕlû bĕăbônām ‘Israel and Ephraim will stumble as a consequence of their iniquity’ Here Israel and Ephraim are synonymous terms for both the people of the state whose capital is Samaria and the geopolitical entity commonly called ‘the Northern Kingdom (of Israel)’. For stumbling as a punishment see also Hos. 4:5; 14:2, 10. Here, as in Hos. 4:15, we have a Judahite gloss in which a later unnamed prophet in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, after the fall of Samaria to Assyrian forces led by Sargon II of Assyria (722–705 BCE), has recycled the book of Hosea to make it serve as a prophecy of consolation and hope for the people of the Southern Kingdom if only they can learn from the horrible fate of disobedient Northern Israel who were led away in exile and humiliation because they did not obey Yhwh. The gloss reads kāšal gam-Yĕhûdâ immām. This clause should be taken as a prophetic perfect, meaning, ‘Judah also will stumble with them’ unless, God forbid, Judah may yet learn before it is too late not to follow Israel’s negative example. Characteristic of our prophet is his numerous allusions to the events of Israel’s early history. Thus he suggests that when Israel has so badly behaved that God has decided either to humiliate Israel or to testify against Israel (depending on the precise nuance of the verb nh in Hos. 5:5a), then: 5:6 bĕṣōnām ûbibĕqārām yēlĕkû lĕbaqqēš et-Yhwh wĕlō yimṣāû ‘They will go with their flocks and their herds to seek Yhwh, but they will not find him’ Here we have a clear allusion to Exod. 10:8–9. There it is reported that after the plague of hail (the seventh of the ten plagues), Pharaoh is willing to consider letting the Israelites go into the wilderness to worship Yhwh, and he asks Moses, ‘Who are the people who are supposed to go?’ and Moses replies, ‘We will all go, young and old: we will go with our sons and daughters, our flocks and herds; for we must observe Yhwh’s festival’. Cassuto argues most convincingly, ‘Now since the words are

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used figuratively in Hosea and literally in Exodus, it may be assumed that Hosea referred to the verse in Exodus and not that the author of that verse alluded to the words of Hosea’.17 Moreover, Hos. 5:6 seems to be a deliberate parody upon Exod. 10:8–9. Here in Hos. 5:6, our prophet, speaking in the name of Yhwh, suggests that the people of Israel will have responded to God’s chastising them and that they will be about to relive the zealousness of their forefathers and foremothers in Egypt. However, this time, just as God hardens the heart of Pharaoh in Egypt, unwilling to let him escape from the punishment due him for his long record of misbehaviour, so does God here suggest that Israel has gone just a bit too far to deserve to be forgiven so easily and so quickly, and so God adds the following in Hos. 5:7 with respect to Israel’s sudden willingness to seek Yhwh (like Pharaoh’s sudden willingness to let the Israelites go into the wilderness to observe a religious festival after the plague of hail): wĕlō yimṣāû ḥālaṣ lāhem ‘But they will not find (him). He has abandoned them.’

5:7 baYhwh bāgādû kî-bānîm zārîm yālādû attâ yōkĕlēm ḥōdeš etḥelqêhem ‘They have broken faith with Yhwh because they have begotten alien children. Therefore, the new moon will devour their portion’ NJPS inserts in brackets ‘[Because]’ at the head of v. 7 as follows: ‘[Because] they have broken faith with the LORD, Because they have begotten Alien children. Therefore, the new moon shall devour their portion.’

By adding the subordinate conjunction ‘because’, NJPS responds to the exegetical question, ‘What is the syntactical and ideational connection between v. 6a, the final clause of which states that God will have abandoned Israel if she should attempt belatedly to repent, and the assertion at the beginning of v. 7, ‘They have broken faith with Yhwh’. Indeed, Ibn Ezra spells out the exegetical question and the answer as follows: ‘And why 17.  See Cassuto, ‘The Prophet Hosea and the Books of the Pentateuch’, p. 88.

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has he abandoned them? (v. 6) Because they abandoned Yhwh’ (v. 7a). In fact, Ibn Ezra’s exegesis was long ago anticipated by LXX, which prefaces each of the two clauses, Hos. 5:7a and Hos. 5:7b, with ὅτι ‘because’. Indeed, P. G. Borbone suggests that LXX reflects the original reading of the Hebrew while the standard Hebrew text reflects the loss by haplography of the particle kî ‘because’ at the beginning of Hos. 5:7.18 Contrast Rudolph, followed by Macintosh, who hold that the omission of the subordinate conjunction in the standard Hebrew text is a deliberate literary device.19 Indeed, LXX’s reading, which is reduplicated by both Ibn Ezra and NJPS, suggests that our verse provides two justifications for God’s not wanting to respond to Israel’s belated repentance. The first of these is their having broken faith with Yhwh with respect to all of the violations cited in Hos. 4:1–5:6. The second reason is their having given birth to alien children. The probable meanings of the latter assertion will be examined below. It should be remembered that in both Hos. 5:1 and 4:4–8 Hosea, speaking in the name of God, rebukes first and foremost the priests while in 4:6 God indicates that he is disgusted with the priests and that he intends to withdraw his recognition of the right of succession to their sons. Moreover, in Hos. 4:8, God indicates that one of the primary offenses of the Israelite priests, whom he seeks to replace, is their hunger for the sin offerings presented by the people, who have not been instructed properly to avoid sin altogether. Thus the otherwise ambiguous ‘for they have begotten alien children’ and the equally ambiguous ‘the new moon shall devour their portion’ can be properly understood against the background of the juxtaposition of the rejection of the sons of the current priests in 4:6 and the priests’ having offended God by their enjoying the meat of sin offerings. It should be recalled that one of the meanings of zār ‘stranger’ in Hebrew Scripture is non-priest. This usage of the term zār is attested in Exod. 29:33; 30:33; Lev. 22:10, 12, 13; Num. 1:51; 3:10, 38; 17:5; 18:7. Typical is Lev. 22:10a: wĕkol-zār lō-yōkal qōdeš ‘No non-priest shall eat sanctified food’.

18.  P. G. Borbone, Il libro del Profeta Osea (Quaderni di Henoch, 2; Turin: S. Zamorani, 1987), p. 149. 19.  Rudolph, Hosea, p. 117, followed by Macintosh, Hosea, p. 189.

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Consequently, when God declares through the prophet in Hos. 4:6 that he will forget, i.e., not take account of the sons of the current priests, he has thereby promised to remove them from the priesthood, just as, according to 1 Sam. 2–4, God removed the descendants of Eli from the priesthood. Now, if the sons of the current priests are no longer to be reckoned as clergy, they are laypersons, who, in the language of the aforementioned passages from the Pentateuch, are called zārîm ‘laypersons’. Should there be any doubt about the matter, Hos. 5:7 asserts that it is the misbehaviour of the current priests that has led to this unfortunate situation with respect to the priests. The idea that one group of priests would be replaced by another is found also in Ezek. 44, where the subordinate position of the Levites vis-à-vis the descendants of Zadok (the high priest under Solomon who replaced Abiathar, the scion of Eli, who was high priest under David—see 1 Kgs 2:26–27) is accounted for by the assertion that the non-Zadokite Levites had engaged in idolatrous worship. Similarly, m. Zebahim 14:4 asserts that prior to the inauguration of the Tabernacle (on the first day of Nisan in the second year after the Exodus from Egypt; see Num. 7:1 and Rashi’s commentary ad loc.), the first-born sons of every family served as priests; thereafter a new priesthood (the sons of Aaron according to Leviticus and Numbers; the Levitical priests according to Deuteronomy) was installed. attâ yōkĕlēm ḥōdeš et-ḥelqêhem ‘Therefore, the new moon will devour their portion’ NJPS renders similarly, ‘Therefore, the new moon shall devour their portion’, with a marginal note that reads, ‘Meaning of Heb. uncertain’. First, we should note that in Biblical Hebrew and cognate languages the New Moon is commonly called ḥōdeš (cf. the Akkadian cognate eššešu). (See Exod. 23:15; 34:18; Deut. 16:1; 1 Sam. 20:5, 18; 2 Kgs 4:23; Isa. 1:13; 66:23.) In the priestly strata of the Pentateuch wherein months are designated by numbers rather than names, the term ḥōdeš refers to a month of thirty days duration. This same system appears, inter alia, in the biblical books of Kings, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. In the early calendar in which the lunar months have names, the term for the lunar month is yeraḥ.20 The distinction between ḥōdeš I meaning ‘new moon’ and ḥōdeš II meaning ‘month’ is recognized also in HALOT (1:294–95). However, neither the classical Hebrew exegetes such as Rashi nor the standard modern critical commentaries have taken into consideration that 20.  See M. I. Gruber, ‘Year’, EncJud, 2nd ed. (2007), vol. 21, pp. 291–92 (= M. I. Gruber, ‘Year and Calendar’, EncJud [1972], vol. 16, pp. 724–26).

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in pre-exilic, Northern Israelite Hos. 5:7 the noun ḥōdeš should mean ‘New Moon’ rather than ‘(non-lunar) month (of thirty days duration)’. Now, if it be recalled that the sin of the priests according to Hos. 4:8 was the priests’ hunger for the people’s sin offerings, the key to understanding Hos. 5:7c is to be found in a biblical reference to a priest’s lawful portion of the prescribed sacrifice for the New Moon. Indeed, according to Num. 28:11–14 the prescribed offering for the New Moon includes two bulls, one ram, and seven sheep, all of which are designated as ôlâ, commonly translated ‘burnt offering’, which is to say a sacrifice which is totally handed over to God, as it were, by being burnt. However, Num. 28:15 adds the following: ‘And there shall be one goat as a sin offering to Yhwh, to be offered in addition to the regular burnt offering and its libation’. Now, according to Lev. 6:9 the flesh of a sin offering is normally eaten in the court of the Tent of Meeting by the officiating priest. This rule is the cause of the priests’ benefiting from sin offerings and their hunger for sin offerings referred to in Hos. 4:8. Having seen how Hebrew lexicography enables us to link the ‘alien children’ of Hos. 5:7 with the forgotten children of Hos. 4:6, we should not be surprised to find that the eating, which is punishment in Hos. 5:7, should be the proper recompense of the priests’ ravenous appetite for sin offerings condemned in Hos. 4:8. In Hos. 4:8, as we saw above, the priests are condemned for benefitting from the meat of sin offerings, which the people of Israel presented when they had erred by sinning. Hosea, speaking in the name of God, asserts that not only had the priests failed to teach proper behaviour, which would have enabled the Israelites to avoid sinning but which might have resulted in the priests’ not having benefited from the meat of abundant sin offerings, but also that the priests actually coveted the sin offerings. Thus our prophet suggests that there was indeed a conflict of interests between the priests’ hunger and their obligation to help people avoid sin. Hosea 5:7 therefore says that the logical consequence and just punishment of the priests’ excessive appetite for sin offerings is that the priests’ portion of sacrifices shall be consumed by someone else. This is the meaning of Hos. 5:7c: From now on at the New Moon they [other persons who will have replaced the present corrupt priests] will eat them, sc., their portions, i.e., the portions that would have been eaten by the soon to be replaced priests had they not been so greedy for sin offerings that they did not teach the people how to avoid sin altogether.

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For ḥēleq referring to the portion of offerings to be eaten by clergy, see Lev. 6:7–11: ‘And this is the rule [Heb. tôrâ] of the meal offering… what is left of it shall be eaten by Aaron and his sons… I have given it as their portion [Heb. ḥelqām] from my offerings by fire; it is most holy, like the sin offering and the guilt offering. Only the males among Aaron’s descendants may eat of it, as their due for all time throughout the ages from Yhwh’s offerings by fire…’. Similarly, in Deut. 18:6–8 we are informed that Levites who live far away from the single sanctuary envisioned in Deuteronomy but who decide on occasion to go to the chosen sanctuary and to participate with the officiating Levites, ‘shall be allowed to eat equal portions…’. Strangely, none of the standard critical commentators—Andersen and Freedman, Macintosh, Wolff, Harper—noticed the association of ḥēleq ‘a portion of the sacrifice to be eaten by the priests at the New Moon’. Consequently, each of these commentators offered a variety of interpretations, all of which failed to reckon with Hosea’s teaching concerning the logical consequences and just punishment of the priests’ greediness. For the adverbial use of the noun ḥōdeš to mean ‘at/on the New Moon’, cf. the adverbial use of the noun yôm ‘day’ to mean ‘at the time when’ in Ps. 56:4: yôm îrā ănî ēlêkā ebṭāḥ ‘When [lit., on the day when] I am fearful, I trust in You’. Similar is the adverbial use of the noun laylâ ‘night’ to mean ‘at night’ in 2 Kgs 25:4: wĕkol-anšê hammilḥāmâ hallaylâ ‘…all the soldiers [left the city] by night’ (so NJPS); similarly in 1 Sam. 14:34 the noun hallaylâ is employed to mean ‘on that night’. Muraoka suggests that the reason that LXX reads ἐρυσίβη ‘rust in corn’21 where the standard Hebrew texts reads ḥōdeš is that the translators of the Old Greek of Hosea simply did not know what to do with that Hebrew noun in the present context.22 It should be added that these translators are now found in the very good company of the Rabbanite and Karaite exegetes of the Middle Ages and the modern critical commentators. Hosea 5:8–6:11a: A Separate and Distinct Speech This is a new speech. Hosea 5:8–15 castigates Israel for her mismanaged international relations. Hosea 6:1–3 quotes the people of Israel as offering, as they have already in Hos. 5:6, to repent while Hos. 6:4–11a 21.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 44, has the reading ἐρυσείβη, which is a misprint; see the correct reading on p. 105, where he translates ‘mildew’. 22.  T. Muraoka, ‘Hosea V in the Septuagint Version’, Abr-Naharain 24 (1986), pp. 120–38 (127).

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has God responding that Israel has gone too far in disobedience to merit God’s immediate forgiveness. It is commonly accepted that Hos. 6:11b belongs with Hos. 7. So NJPS, NEB, NRSV, and Ehrlich, to name a few. See below. Following A. Alt’s classic article, ‘Ein Krieg und seine Folgen in prophetischer Beleuchtung’,23 it is commonly accepted that the background of Hos. 5:8–6:11a is the Syro-Ephraimite war, which took place from spring 733 BCE until after May or June of 732 BCE, events referred to also in Isa. 7.24 Ginsberg, following Tadmor, dates the career of our prophet to the reign of Menahem son of Gadi (747–737 BCE).25 Following the reservations of Z. Kallai26 with respect to Alt’s thesis, Tadmor argues that Alt’s understanding of Hos. 5:8–6:11 as a reflection of the events of 733–732 not only requires extensive and radical emendations of Hos. 5:8–6:11 but also fails to reckon with the following data: (1) Hos. 4–14 reflects a geopolitical situation in which Israel could look to Assyria not as a menace but as a possible ally (Hos. 5:13; 7:11; 13:7); (2) Hos. 5:10–11 depicts Judah as an aggressor and Ephraim as a nation defeated and powerless; (3) Hos. 4–14 contains no reflection of Tiglathpileser III’s annexing a large part of the Samarian state ruled by Pekah son of Remaljahu (735–732 BCE) and exiling Israelites to Assyria in 733–732 as related in 2 Kgs 15:29. Characteristic of Hos. 5:8–6:11a is a series of quotations of the words of various parties. In Hos. 5:8 the prophet quotes the battle cry of the people of Judah going to war to wrest Israelite territory and to annex it to Judah. In Hos. 5:9a–b our prophet narrates the response of Israel/ Ephraim to the attack by Judah, while in Hos. 5:9c–15 the prophet, speaking in the name of God, declares that he will punish Judah for his aggression and Israel/Ephraim for appealing to the Assyrians for help against Judah. Just as 5:8 quotes the battle cry of Judah, so does 6:1–3 quote the Israelites’ call for repentance, which, they believe, will

23.  A. Alt, ‘Ein Krieg und seine Folgen in prophetischer Beleuchtung’, Neue kirchliche Zeitschrift 30 (1919), pp. 537–68, republished in A. Alt, Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte Volkes Israel (3 vols.; Munich: Beck, 1959), vol. 2, pp. 163–87. 24.  See also E. M. Good, ‘Hosea 5:8–6:6: An Alternative to Alt’, JBL 85 (1966), pp. 273–86. 25.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, pp. 1017–18; 2nd ed., vol. 5, p. 554. See H. Tadmor, ‘Azriyahu of Yaudi’, Scripta Hierosolymitana 8 (1961), pp. 232–70, and the extensive discussion in our Introduction, above. 26.  Z. Kallai, The Northern Boundaries of Judah (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1960), pp. 67–68.

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result in God’s coming to their aid in the midst of the dire consequences of a disastrous handling of Israel’s foreign relations. In Hos. 6:4–10 God responds that the extent of Israel’s crimes does not make possible God’s immediate acceptance of their call to repentance. In vv. 7–10 the prophet, speaking in the name of God, alludes to specific crimes which Israel has committed. See below. 5:8 ‘Sound a ram’s horn in Gibeah’ For the sounding of a ram’s horn as a summons to battle see also Judg. 3:27: ‘When he [Ehud] arrived there, he sounded the ram’s horn through the hill country of Ephraim, and all the Israelites descended with him from the hill country…’; similarly Judg. 6:34, ‘The spirit of Yhwh having enveloped Gideon, he sounded the ram’s horn, and the Abiezrites rallied behind him’; see also Judg. 7:18; 1 Sam. 13:3; 2 Sam. 2:28; 18:16; etc. Gibeah…Ramah…Beth-aven For the precise location of these three cities see the map on p. xix. Note that they lie on a straight line going from south to north. Gibeah and Ramah were within the boundaries of the State of Judah at the time of the invasion referred to here, while Bethel (here referred to as Beth-aven) was part of the Northern State of Israel. The Hebrew meaning of the place name Beth-aven is, literally, ‘house of crime’. It is commonly accepted (see above at Hos. 4:15 and below at Hos. 10:5) that in Hos. 4:15; 5:8; and 10:5 the place name Beth-aven is a dysphemism referring to Bethel, which, according to both Rashi and Ibn Ezra, earned the uncomplimentary epithet because of the golden calf that was placed there by Jeroboam I (1 Kgs 12:29). However, it is widely held that in Josh. 7:2; 18:12; 1 Sam. 13:5; 14:23 Beth-aven refers to an actual place distinct from Bethel.27 As Gomes notes, ‘That there was a place called “Beth-aven” is clear from earlier narrative texts as well as from Hos. 5:8. There is no basis for claiming that a place would not have been originally assigned a derogatory name.’ Moreover, Gomes argues there, ‘ “House of Nothingness” would surely be an apt name for the desert area “east of Bethel” ’.28

27.  See T. C. Butler, Joshua (WBC, 7; Waco, TX: Word, 1983), p. 77, and the literature cited there. 28.  Gomes, The Sanctuary of Bethel, p. 161.

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Ram’s horn//trumpet Just as the two terms kōs/qubbaat, both referring to two kinds of drinking vessels, form a fixed pair of words in synonymous parallelism in Isa. 51:17, 22 (and also in Ugaritic poetry), in which the shorter word appears in the first clause and the longer word in the second clause, so does the fixed word pair shofar ‘ram’s horn’ and haṣōṣěrâ ‘trumpet’ display the stylistic principle in ancient Semitic poetry according to which the shorter word appears in the first clause and the longer word appears in the second. In addition, in both pairs the shorter word appears to refer to a relatively simple and primitive object, while the second and longer word refers to a more elaborate object. In Ugaritic poetry the kōs ‘cup’ is invariably made of silver while the qubbaat ‘flagon’ is invariably made of gold. Similarly, in our verse the first of the two pairs of horns is an object made of a ram’s horn while the second horn, the trumpet, is made of precious or semi-precious metal. Numbers 10:2 specifically commands Moses to have available for ceremonial purposes two trumpets made of silver. Just as in Hos. 5:1, where we have a triplet ‘hear//pay attention//give ear’, so here in Hos. 5:8 we have a triplet expressed by ‘sound the shofar// [sound] the trumpet//give the alarm’, in which the two verbs tq and rw are employed in synonymous parallelism. In 5:1 we have three verbs in the imperative, one in each clause. In 5:8, on the other hand, we have only two verbs. In addition, the second clause of 5:8 is a typical second clause in biblical poetry. As such, this second clause constitutes an ellipsis, in which the verb of the first clause is understood as the predicate also of the second clause For the verb rw ‘make a noise’ with reference to trumpets see Num. 10:9: wahărēōtem baḥăṣōṣěrōt ‘Then you shall sound trumpets’. For the same verb with reference to a ram’s horn or shofar see Joel 2:1: tiqěû šōpār běṣiyyōn//wěhārîû běhar qoděšî ‘Blow a ram’s horn in Zion// sound [a ram’s horn] in my holy mountain’. The parallelism, in which ‘Zion’ and my holy mountain are synonyms and the name of the horn is missing from the second of the two clauses so that the two clauses each have three stresses, suggests that here the two verbs tiqěû and hārîû are meant to be employed as synonyms and that both verbs refer to sounding the shofar or ram’s horn rather than some other instrument. In many other cases, however, the very same forms of the verb rw, which I have cited with reference to sounding either trumpet(s) or ram’s horn(s), can also be employed to refer to shouting or singing in both the context of the worship of God and in other contexts. For the verb hērîa referring to singing, a form of making a joyful noise in praise of God, see Ps. 95:1–2: ‘Come, let us sing joyously to Yhwh, raise a shout for our

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rock and deliverer; let us come into his presence with praise; let us raise a shout for him in song’. For the latter usage see also Pss. 47:2; 81:2; 98:4; 100:1; etc. 5:9 Eprayim lěšammâ tihyeh běyôm tôkēkâ ‘Ephraim will be stricken with horror on a day of chastisement’ Similarly, NJPS renders as follows: ‘Ephraim is stricken with horror on a day of chastisement’. For šammâ meaning a sense of horror in the face of calamity, see Jer. 8:21: ‘Because my beloved people is shattered I am shattered…horror has taken hold of me’. See also Deut. 28:37: ‘You shall be a source of a sense of horror, a proverb, and a byword among all the peoples to which Yhwh will drive you’ (cf. 2 Kgs 22:19). In fact, the noun šammâ, which can mean both a sense of horror in response to disaster and ‘destruction’, itself is a by-form of the word šěmāmâ meaning ‘destruction’ found in Isa. 1:7: ‘a destruction wreaked by strangers’. ‘On a day of chastisement’ By referring to Judah’s aggression against the Northern Kingdom as ‘chastisement’, Hosea, speaking in the name of God, suggests both that the aggression was a well-deserved punishment for the low state of public and private morality that has been described in Hos. 4:1–5:4 and that the military disaster might yet serve the purpose of having the Israelites reconsider their previous behaviour and resolve to behave better from now on. Cf. Job 4:17–19, where Eliphaz advises Job that the series of disasters that have befallen him should be looked upon as chastisements that should lead him to improve his behaviour, knowing that improved behaviour will, in the end, be rewarded: ‘See how happy is the person whom God reproves. Do not reject the discipline of the Almighty. He injures, but he binds up; he wounds, but his hands heal. He will deliver you from six troubles; in seven no harm will reach you.’ běšiběṭê Yiśrāēl hôda’ětî neěmānâ ‘With respect to the tribes of Israel, I have uttered faithfulness’ NJPS renders as follows: ‘Against the tribes of Israel I proclaim certainties’. Assuming that Hosea, here speaking in the name of God, refers to the people of Israel and Judah in his own time (in the reign of King Menahem son of Gadi of Israel) as ‘tribes of Israel’, NJPS margin responds to the obvious question as to whom does the term ‘tribes of Israel’ refer in the

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present context. NJPS’s marginal note responds to its unstated exegetical question in these words: ‘The kingdoms of Judah and Israel (Ephraim)’. In fact, while there are many references to the tribes of Israel in Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and 1 Kings, with the exception of 2 Kgs 17 and 21, the term is virtually absent from biblical literature from the end of the reign of Solomon until the eschatological prophecies of Ezek. 47–48. Responding to the anomalous reference to the tribes of Israel in a pre-exilic prophetic text, Kimchi remarks, ‘When I exhorted them [the tribes of Israel] in the wilderness when all the tribes were as one people I proclaimed to them certainty, i.e., word of truth (Pss. 45:5; 119:43), “If you follow my laws faithfully” (Lev. 26:3), if you hearken, “but if you do not hearken” (Lev. 26:14), and since they did not hearken, I destroyed their land and I exiled them from it, for thus I truly proclaimed’. Rashi, not surprisingly says the same thing but in fewer words: ‘I proclaimed a reliable Torah, but they transgressed it’. Both Rashi and Kimchi also quote the following midrash from Lamentations Rabbah Prolegomenon #7: Rabbi Abbahu quoting R. Jose son of Hanina said, ‘When the Holy One Blessed be He will argue with them [the tribes of Israel] in a legal setting, they [the tribes of Israel] will have no defense. The reason is that AMONG THE TRIBES OF ISRAEL I PROCLAIMED that the justice I mete out is fair. You find that when the ten [Northern] tribes went into exile and Judah and Benjamin did not go into exile, the ten tribes said that the Southern tribes did not go into exile because they were his [God’s] favourites and he did not let them go into exile. You might think that favouritism was involved. God forbid. No favouritism was involved. However their [Judah’s and Benjamin’s] quota of sins had not yet been fulfilled. As soon as they had sinned [sufficiently], then they [too] went into exile. Then the ten tribes were horrified because they had no defense available to them. And they said, This God is reliable and he is truthful for he does not show favouritism even to those who live in his house [the Holy City of Jerusalem and its environs]. And this truthfulness and reliability fulfils what is stated (in Hos. 5:9b), “With respect to the tribes of Israel, I have uttered faithfulness”.’

5:10 hāyû śārê Yěhûdâ kěmassîgê gěbûl ‘The kings of Judah have been like trespassers’ Contrast NJPS, which renders as follows: ‘The officers of Judah have acted like shifters of field boundaries’.

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Inspired by S. Paul29 I understand the noun śār (singular) and the plural śārîm throughout the book of Hosea (Hos. 3:4; 7:3, 5; 8:10; 13:10) as a synonym of melek ‘king’. See my commentary on those verses. Consequently, also here in Hos. 5:10, in light of what we have learned elsewhere about the use of the noun śārîm in the book of Hosea, we should assume until proven wrong that reference is made to kings of Judah in the plural, among them Azariah, who is also called Uzziah.30 The plural construct form śārê Yěhûdâ should reasonably refer, then, to King Azariah and the three kings with whom he shared coregencies. Thus the seemingly anomalous expression, śārê Yěhûdâ ‘kings of Judah’, may well mean historically exactly what grammar makes it mean.31 Proverbs 22:28 offers the sage advice that when a person is impoverished, ‘Do not remove the ancient boundary stone that your ancestors set up’. In the latter context the sage advises the disciple not to be enticed to sell the land he inherited to developers who are in the habit of, as Isaiah son of Amoz says, ‘adding house to house and joining field to field till there is no room for none but you [the rich developers] to dwell in the land’ (Isa. 5:8). Proverbs 23:10 goes further and advises the greedy land-developer not to attempt to take over land belonging to the disadvantaged because it may well turn out that the poor orphan has a rich relative who will make the greedy individual regret his greedy behaviour: ‘Do not remove ancient boundary stones. Do not encroach upon the field of orphans. For they have a mighty kinsman, and he will surely take up their cause with you.’ Deuteronomy 19:14 goes further and makes encroachment upon the land inherited by the less powerful individuals a violation of God’s covenant with Israel: ‘You shall not move your countryman’s landmarks, set up by 29.  S. Paul, ‘Hosea 8:8–10: maśśā melek śārîm and Ancient Near Eastern Royal Epithets’, in Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East Presented to Samuel E. Loewenstamm on his Seventieth Birthday (ed. Y. Avishur and L. Blau; Jerusalem: Rubenstein, 1978), pp. 309–17 (in Hebrew), and ‘maśśā melek śārîm: Hosea 8:8–10 and Ancient Near Eastern Royal Epithets’, in Studies in Bible 1986 (ed. S. Japhet; Scripta Hierosolymitana, 31; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1986), pp. 193–204. 30.  For the dating of the events described in Hos. 5:10a to the reign of King Azariah (Uzziah) of Judah, see Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, p. 1020; 2nd ed., vol. 9, p. 554. 31.  Concerning these coregencies see M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings (AB, 11; New York: Doubleday, 1988), pp. 164–68, 181–83, and see especially, there, p. 166 in the comment on 2 Kgs 15:2: ‘He [Azariah] reigned fifty-two years. Azariah’s reign, 785–733 [BCE] includes the thirteen-year coregency with his father Amaziah (cf. 14:17), the entire reign of his son Jotham (cf. below, v. 33), and part of that of his grandson Ahaz (cf. 16:2)’.

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previous generations, in the property that will be allotted to you in the land that Yhwh your God is giving you to possess’. Deuteronomy 27:17 goes one step further, declaring that attempting to encroach upon someone else’s ancestral homestead is a cardinal sin for which Israel may be exiled from the land of Israel: ‘Cursed be one who removes a fellow citizen’s landmark.—And all the people shall say, Amen’. In Hos. 5:10, the prophet, whose other thoughts about war will be considered later, declares that an aggressive war by a state is no less than a violation of a basic principle of Israelite law and ethics according to which land is apportioned by God, not by market forces or the strength of armies. ălêhem ešpōk kammayim ebrātî ‘Upon them [the Judeans who have attempted to acquire Samarian land by force of arms] I shall pour out my wrath like water’ Unquestionably, the comparison of anger, here expressed by the noun ebrātî ‘my wrath’ to water derives from the fact that anger is often expressed by the noun ḥēmâ whose basic meaning is ‘venom’.32 5:11 āšûq Eprayim ‘Ephraim was defrauded’ Similarly, NJPS: ‘Ephraim is defrauded’. For the verb šq ‘to defraud’ see Lev. 5:21: ‘…or if one has defrauded another person’; see also Lev. 5:23: ‘…and he shall restore…which he acquired by defrauding another’. rĕṣûṣ mišpāṭ ‘Robbed of redress’ (so NJPS) As noted in HALOT (3:1285), it is commonly understood, primarily on the basis of the use of the verbal root r-ṣ-ṣ in Mishnaic Hebrew, that the verbal root in question means ‘oppress, crush, suppress’. However, the juxtaposition of the qal passive participle rāṣûṣ ‘robbed’ with the qal passive participle āšûq ‘defrauded’, which is found here in Hos. 5:11, is attested also in Deut. 28:33 where we read as follows: ‘A people whom you do not know shall eat up the produce of your soil and all your gains; you shall be defrauded and robbed continually’. Moreover, the two verbs refer to ill-gotten gain also in 1 Sam. 12:3, where the Prophet Samuel asks, ‘Whom have I defrauded, and whom have I robbed?’ And there in v. 4 the people respond, ‘You have not defrauded us, and you have 32.  Concerning the latter noun see the extensive discussion in Gruber, ANCANE, pp. 513–50; see also Ch. Cohen, ‘Foam in Hos. 10:7’, JANESCU 2, no. 1 (1969), pp. 25–29. Concerning the noun ḥēmâ ‘poison’ in Hos. 7:5 see there (below).

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not robbed us’. Likewise in Amos 4:1 the same pair of verbal roots is employed in the accusation that the rich Israelite women dwelling in Bashan ‘defraud the poor//rob the needy’. The rendering ‘redress’ in NJPS’s translation of Hos. 5:11b might suggest that here, as in Amos 2:6, ‘They have sold for silver a person whose cause was just’, and in Mic. 3:11, ‘her rulers judge for gifts’, the prophet inveighs against the fact that persons cannot get a fair hearing in civil and criminal cases in court because the judges take bribes. In its immediate context, Hos. 5:11 suggests something else entirely, namely, that now that Ephraim is under threat from a foreign power, in this case Judah, he cannot expect to receive redress from the Divine Judge/Public Defender because the Divine Judge/Public Defender is not interested in taking up Israel’s case for reasons that will be detailed in the following clauses: kî hôîl hālak aḥărê-ṣāw ‘Because he (Israel/Ephraim) has been a fool; he has followed delusion’ Similarly, Ginsberg renders the entire verse as follows: ‘Ephraim is wronged, defrauded of his rights, because he has been a fool, has followed delusions’.33 Ginsberg explains that the hiphil verb hôîl from the verbal root yl ‘be foolish’ means the same thing as the niphal form nôălû ‘they were foolish’ in Isa. 19:13, where we read as follows: nôălû śārê Ṣōan niššěû śārê Nōp hitěûet-Miṣrayim pinnat šěbāṭêhā ‘The rulers of Tanis have been foolish. The rulers of Memphis have been deluded. The chiefs of her tribes have led Egypt astray.’

DCH (4:71) recognizes the verb in question as yl II, meaning ‘be foolish’, and calls attention to its occurrence in Isa. 19:13 as well as in Num. 12:11 and Ezek. 19:5 while assigning the hiphil form found in Hos. 5:11 to the root yl I, which means ‘be pleased’. As for the noun ṣāw, medieval Hebrew exegetes such as Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Kimchi, R. Eliezer of Beaugency, all follow b. Sanhedrin 56b in understanding this lexeme to be a noun meaning ‘commandment’. Indeed, while in Rabbinic Hebrew and in Modern Hebrew there is a noun ṣāw meaning ‘commandment’ derived from the root ṣwy ‘command’ and therefore a cognate of the commonly attested Biblical Hebrew noun miṣwâ ‘commandment’, in Biblical Hebrew no such noun is attested. Indeed, Ibn Ezra follows the Karaite exegete Jephet Ben Ali in declaring that Hosea 33.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, p. 77.

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refers to people who, like King Jeroboam I of Israel, substituted human commandments for God’s commandments.34 Ginsberg assumes that the Hebrew text upon which the Old Greek translation was based read šw or šw meaning ‘vanity’.35 It is no less likely that the original Hebrew text, which is reflected both in the current standard Hebrew text and in the Old Greek and in other ancient versions cited below, contains an otherwise unattested synonym or by-form of the noun šw or šw meaning ‘vanity’, namely the noun ṣāw. This noun ṣāw in Hos. 5:11 can have nothing to do with the verbal root ṣwy ‘command’. Rather, it must be a by-form of the noun šāw ‘vanity’. Such an understanding is fully anticipated by many ancient versions, including the Old Greek (ὀπίςω τῶν ματαίων), Peshitta (batar seriqta), and Targum Jonathan (bātar mammôn dišqar), all of whom supply expressions denoting ‘vanity’. (Cf. HALAT, 1008–1009.) Vulgate’s rendering post sordem ‘after filth’ probably support’s the reading ṣāw found in the standard Hebrew text, construing the noun ṣāw as a short form of the noun ṣōâ ‘refuse, excrement’, which is attested in 2 Kgs 18:27 (qere only); Isa. 4:4; 28:8; 36:12 (qere only); Prov. 30:12. As for the historical background of Hos. 5:8–10, Ginsberg notes, ‘the passage implies a military thrust from a point south of Gibeah’. Moreover, in answer to the question as to when the Northern Kingdom’s borders had been pushed beyond Gibeah, Ginsberg argues: ‘It happened when Joash of Israel punished Amaziah of Judah [2 Kgs 14:12–14; Gruber’s clarification]. Hos. v: 8–10 must then reflect a northward thrust by Uzziah, who, taking advantage of Israel’s internal weakness after the death of Jeroboam II—when Menahem controlled little more than the hill country south of the Valley of Esdraelon (what the Bible calls Har Ephraim) and Pekah b. Remaliah ruled over the rest of the country—must have moved to retake what Amaziah had lost.’36 Ginsberg dates this attack of King Uzziah upon Israel to the year 743 BCE.37

34.  See the extensive discussion in U. Simon, Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Two Commentaries on the Minor Prophets: An Annotated Critical Edition. Vol. 1, Hosea– Joel–Amos (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1989), p. 68 (in Hebrew), on the anti-Rabbanite polemic expressed in Jephet Ben-Ali’s exegesis, which here invokes Isa. 29:13, ‘A commandment of men learned by rote’, in support of the idea of commandments devised by human authority. 35.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, p. 77. 36.  H. L. Ginsberg, ‘The Omrid–Davidid Alliance and its Consequences’, in Fourth World Congress of Jewish Studies Papers (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 91–93 (92b). 37.  Contrast Macintosh, Hosea, p. 198.

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5:12 waănî kāāš lěEphrayim//wěkārāqāb lěbêt Yěhûdâ ‘It is I who am like rot to Ephraim//Like decay to the house of Judah’ With NJPS’s marginal note I restore a presumed original Israel for Judah in the received text. The basis of this emendation is to restore the original intent of our prophet who employs the pair of proper nouns Ephraim// Israel in precisely that order in synonymous parallelism five times in the standard Hebrew text in Hos. 5:3; 6:10; 10:6; 11:8; 12:1 (here the second element in the pair is House of Israel rather than Israel). As pointed out by Tadmor (see above, pp. 235–36), the background for the equation of Ephraim and Israel is the fact that in the time of the prophetic author of Hos. 4–14, which is the reign of Menahem son of Gadi (747–737 BCE), the territory of the Northern State of Israel had been reduced to the hill country of Ephraim so that Ephraim and Israel were synonymous geographically. Ginsberg holds that the only authentic reference to Judah in all of the book of Hosea is in Hos. 5:10. Consequently, he asserts that all of the instances in the standard Hebrew text of the book of Hosea where we find the parallel pair Ephraim//Judah rather than Ephraim// Israel reflect an original Hebrew text which read Ephraim//Israel. The five cases in which the standard Hebrew text attests to the pair Ephraim// Judah are as follows: 5:12, 13, 14 (here it is the House of Judah rather than Judah); 6:4; 10:11. Ginsberg38 explains the five cases where we have the pair Ephraim//Judah rather than Ephraim//Israel in light of G. R. Driver’s observation that variants between MT and LXX are the result of divergent interpretations of an abbreviation.39 Among others, mention should be made of 2 Chron. 21:2, where MT interprets an original y as an abbreviation of Israel while LXX interprets it as an abbreviation for Judah. Likewise an original y in 2 Chron. 28:27 is interpreted as Israel in MT but as Judah in the Peshitta according to the testimony of Codex Ambrosiano. Ginsberg regarded all of the above-cited five instances in the book of Hosea where, according to his view, which I share, an original Israel has been transmitted in the standard Hebrew text as Judah as reflecting scribal errors. I prefer to suggest that anonymous prophets residing in Judah after the destruction of Samaria in 722 BCE not only revered the book of Hosea but also regarded its message as timeless. Consequently, these anonymous prophets may have felt themselves divinely inspired to make 38.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’, vol. 8, p. 1015; 2nd ed., vol. 9, p. 551. 39.  G. R. Driver, ‘Abbreviations in the Massoretic Text’, Textus 1 (1960), pp. 112–31, and ‘Once Again Abbreviations’, Textus 4 (1964), pp. 76–94.

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the old prophecies relevant to their own community in Judah by deliberately reading Ephraim//Judah into half of the ten instances of the original pair Ephraim//Israel. 5:12–13 Ginsberg explains the significance in both its immediate context and in the wider context of Hos. 5–7 of the restored text of Hos. 5:12–13: ‘For it is I who am like corrosion to Ephraim//like rot to the House of Israel. Yet when Ephraim saw his sickness, Israel his sore, Ephraim went to Assyria, and sent missions to a patron king.’40 Contrast my own rendering of melek yārēb in v. 13; see below. Following Tadmor, Ginsberg holds that the historical background of Israel’s appeal to Assyria must belong to the years 743–739 BCE because in 738 BCE Israel is no longer in a position to seek the help of Assyria. On the contrary, according to the Annals of King Tiglath-pileser III of Assyria (who is referred to in 2 Kgs 15:19 as Pul), in 738 BCE the Assyrian king attacked Israel and exacted extensive tribute.41 Ginsberg holds that Hos. 5:13 refers to Menahem’s appeal to the Assyrian king for help and that this appeal antedates the Assyrian invasion of Israel and levying of tribute. Consequently, Ginsberg (and NJPS margin at Hos. 5:13) interprets Hos. 5:13d to mean ‘He sent envoys to a patron king’. The Hebrew verb yārēb in the expression melek yārēb is understood to be a short form of the imperfect verb yārîb meaning ‘champion, uphold the cause of’ as in Isa. 1:17: šipĕṭû yātōm rîbû almānâ ‘Uphold the rights of the orphan//defend the cause of the widow’ (NJPS); Isa. 3:13: niṣṣāb lārîb Yhwh wĕōmēd lādîn ammîm ‘Yhwh stands up to plead a cause, He rises to champion peoples’; Isa. 19:20: wĕyišlaḥ lāhem môšîa wārāb wĕhiṣṣîlām ‘He will send them a saviour and a champion, and he will deliver them’. In the latter verse the participle rāb is derived from the verbal root ryb ‘champion, uphold the cause of’. And finally see, with Ginsberg (and NJPS margin at Hos. 5:13), Isa. 51:22: wēlōhayik yārîb ammô ‘and your God, who champions his people’. On the other hand, S. Paul points out that it has long been accepted that the expression melek yārēb ‘a king who will champion’ reflects our prophet’s familiarity with the Akkadian expression šarrum rabum ‘the great king’, one of the epithets applied to Tiglath-pileser III in his royal inscriptions and 40.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’, vol. 8, pp. 1019–20; 2nd ed., vol. 9, p. 554. 41.  For the Assyrian source see Pritchard, ANET, 3rd ed., pp. 283–84. The parallel biblical source is 2 Kgs 15:19–21. For the extensive literature concerning the correlation of these texts, see Cogan and Tadmor, II Kings, pp. 171–73.

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to numerous other Mesopotamian and later Persian kings in their royal inscriptions.42 Moreover, as Paul argues, the Hebrew form yrb is perfectly acceptable as an Aramaizing form of the Akkadian rābu, and the Hebrew text at Hos. 5:13 and 10:6 need not be emended to mlk rb or mlky rb.43 I prefer to suggest that Hosea employs the expression mlk yrb to mean ‘a king who might champion (his cause)’ and that he deliberately meant this expression as a play on words alluding to Tiglath-pileser, who was known in Akkadian as šarrum rabum ‘the great king’ and in Aramaic by the synonymous mlk yrb. 5:13 wayyarĕ Eprayim et-ḥolyô wĕYiśrāēl et-mĕzorô wayyēlek Eprayim el-Aššur wayyišlaḥ el-melek yārēb wĕhû lō yûkal lirpō lākem wĕlōyigheh mikkem māzôr ‘When Ephraim became aware of his sickness// Israel [the restoration is discussed in the notes to the running translation] of his disease, Ephraim went to Assyria//He sent (envoys) to a king who might champion (his cause), but he [the king] was not able to heal you, nor can he cure you of disease’ In the Introduction (pp. 11–12, 27–31) I have discussed the most likely historical background for Israel’s appeal for help from the king of Assyria, most likely Tiglath-pileser III, and I have dealt with the likely background of the substitution of Judah for Israel in the standard Hebrew text of Hos. 5:12–13 and elsewhere in the book of Hosea. In the immediately preceding pages I have summarized these discussions, and I have discussed also the background of the expression ‘a king who might champion (his cause)’. I have also discussed in the previous pages the import of the metaphors of disease and healing in the context of Hos. 5:13. What remains to be addressed here is the precise meaning of the lexemes here translated ‘disease’, ‘heal’, and ‘cure’. The sore or sickness of Ephraim is, as noted by Ginsberg, a combination of immorality in the private sphere exemplified by the men who engage in extra-marital liaisons during the celebration of religious festivals (see above, ch. 4) and attempt to secure the help of Assyria in the face of Judah’s encroachment upon Israelite territory while attempting to assuage God’s anger by offering animal sacrifices (Hos. 5:5–6). The noun māzôr, meaning ‘disease’, is attested a total of four times in Hebrew Scripture, twice here in Hos. 5:13 where its employment in 42.  Paul, ‘maśśā melek śārîm’, p. 199, and ‘Hosea 8:8–10’, p. 313. 43.  Paul, ‘maśśā melek śārîm’, p. 199 n. 24, and ‘Hosea 8:8–10’, p. 313 n. 34.

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synonymous parallelism with the more common noun ḥolî ‘sickness’ (attested 23 times in Hebrew Scripture) should alone make certain that the noun means ‘disease’. In Obad. 7 the adjectival noun māzôr means ‘spoiled (food)’, as does the adjective māzôr ‘spoiled’ in the phrase ‘spoiled eggs’ in m. Hullin 12:3.44 The understanding of the final clause of Hos. 5:13 as meaning ‘nor can he cure you of disease’ is reflected in the seventh-century CE Jewish liturgical poem ĕnōš êk yiṣdaq ‘How can a human be proved innocent’, composed by Eleazar ha-Qallir and inserted into the Reader’s repetition of the second of the seven divisions of the amîdâ of the Additional Service for the Day of Atonement.45 In the second of the 22 lines of Eleazar ha-Qallir’s alphabetical acrostic we read as follows: ‘In the following manner a person’s iniquity may be forgiven and he [God] will cure his disease [metaphor for iniquity]: if one will repent before one’s light [metaphor for life] goes out’. The clause based upon Hos. 5:13b, f reads wĕyigheh mĕzorô ‘and he will heal one’s disease’. Another allusion to Hos. 5:13 in the liturgical poetry of the Jewish Day of Atonement is found in the seventh and penultimate stanza of the hymn ‘For behold as the clay in the hand of the potter’.46 There we read, ‘[God] who finds healing for disease (māzor)’. In Jer. 30:13 the parallelism proves that the term māzôr employed there means ‘disease’ and is the same noun twice attested in Hos. 5:13. In Jer. 30:12–13 we read as follows: kî kōh āmar Yhwh ānûš lĕšibrēk naḥlâ makkātēk ên dān dînēk lĕmāzôr ripuôt tĕālâ ên lāk ‘For thus said Yhwh: “Your injury is severe Your wound is acute No one pleads your cause with respect to the disease You have no healing or remedy” ’.

In Jer. 30:12–13, as in Hos. 5:13, terms denoting disease are employed metaphorically to refer to a nation state in distress, and in both passages 44.  For details see J. D. Wynkoop, ‘Commentary on Obadiah’, in Biblica Hebraica with Commentary on the Twelve Prophets (ed. A. Kahana; Kiev: A. Kahana, 1906), p. 55 (in Hebrew). 45.  See Silverman, High Holiday Prayer Book, pp. 349–50. 46.  See Silverman, High Holiday Prayer Book, p. 234.

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the would-be healer is compared to an ombudsman, attorney, or judge who will take up the cause of the victim and bring about metaphoric healing. S.-H. Hong contends that illness in Hos. 5–7 is a metaphor for foreign influences, to which the prophet is opposed.47 I find much more convincing the idea that disease in these chapters refers to unrest brought about by moral turpitude.48 In Hos. 5:13e–f the common verbal root ‘to heal/cure’ rp appears in synonymous parallelism with the less common verbal root ghy. The latter root appears only once more in the standard Hebrew text of the Bible, in Prov. 17:22. There we read as follows: lēb śāmēaḥ yēṭîb gĕhâ wĕrûaḥ nĕkēâ tĕyabbēš-gārem ‘A happy disposition will improve healing A depressed attitude will bring on osteoporosis’.

This interpretation of Prov. 17:22 finds support in LXX, which renders the verse as follows: Καρδία εὐφπαινομένη εὐκτεῖν ποιεῖ, ἀνδρὸς δὲ λυπηροῦ ξηραίνεται τὰ ὀστᾱ, which Brenton, Septuagint with Apocrypha, renders as follows: ‘A glad heart promotes health; but the bones of a sorrowful man dry up’. It may be obvious that the ancient Israelite sage here anticipates the thinking of so-called New Age people at the beginning of the twenty-first century CE that disease can be cured by happy thoughts and that insidious physical conditions can be brought about by negative attitudes. NJPS margin at Prov. 17:22 suggests that the noun gĕhâ in that verse may mean ‘cheerful face’. However, that interpretation of the noun is based not on the assumption, justified by the context within Prov. 17:22, that the noun is not derived from a verbal root meaning ‘heal, cure’, but rather on the assumption that the noun in question is an hapax legomenon in Biblical Hebrew and that it is related to an Arabic noun jiha meaning ‘face’.49 Another cognate of the verbal root ghy, which is attested in Biblical Hebrew, is the noun kehâ ‘healing’ attested in Nah. 3:19a–b:

47.  S.-H. Hong, The Metaphor of Illness and Healing in Hosea and its Significance in the Socio-Economic Context of Eighth-Century Israel and Judah (Studies in Biblical Literature, 95; New York: Lang, 2005), especially pp. 140–53. 48.  For the history of this interpretation see DCH 1:618; see also HALOT 1:181. 49.  See the extensive discussion in M. V. Fox, Proverbs 10–31 (AB, 18B; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 635.

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ên kehâ lĕšibrekā naḥlâ makkātekā ‘There is no healing for your injury Your wound is grievous’.

LXX renders the latter couplet as follows: Οὐκ ἔστιν ἴασις τῇ συντπβῇ σου, ἐφλέγμανεν ἡ πκηγή σου, which Brenton, Septuagint with Apocrypha, renders as follows: ‘There is no healing for thy bruise; thy wound has rankled’. A marginal note in NJPS at Nah. 3:19 clearly reflects the view of Ginsberg, editor-in-chief of NJPS on the Prophets, that the noun kehâ is a (dialectical) variant of gĕhâ attested in Prov. 17:22. Both in Jer. 30:12 and in Nah. 3:19b we find the identical expression naḥlâ makkātekā, literally, ‘your wound is sick’, to convey the idea that the wound or disease is severe. We should compare the expression rāâ ḥôlâ, literally, ‘a sick evil’, used to express the idea of ‘extreme evil’ in Qoh. 5:12, 15. The exegetical tradition reflected in LXX’s treating the verb yigheh in Hos. 5:13, the noun kehâ in Nah. 3:19, and the noun gĕhâ in Prov. 17:22 as derivatives of a common root denoting ‘healing’ would seem to presuppose the interchange of the consonants k and g in Biblical Hebrew. Interestingly, modern grammars and dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew by-and-large do not assume such an interchange.50 The idea that k and g, both being palatal consonants, may be interchanged in Biblical Hebrew is suggested, however, by Rashi (1040–1105 CE) in his commentary at Lev. 19:16 with reference to the noun rākîl ‘talebearer, gossip’. Rashi presents both his interpretation of the origin of the noun rākîl and his observations concerning homorganic consonants in general and the interchange of k and g in particular as his own discoveries identified by the technical term ănî ōmēr ‘I say/claim’, which sets apart Rashi’s highly infrequent expression of his own views from the majority of Rashi’s comments, which quote or paraphrase Rabbinic sources. Rashi’s important observation, which enables one to establish the basis in biblical philology for the relationship between the three forms yigheh in Hos. 5:13, the noun kehâ in Nah. 3:19, and the noun gĕhâ in Prov. 17:22, reads as follows: ‘I contend that because all persons who foster discord and all who repeat slander go into their neighbours’ houses to engage in espionage [lěraggēl] with respect to what evil they may see or what evil they may hear in order to repeat it in the street, they are called hōlěkê rākîl “persons who go about gossiping”, hōlěkê rěgîlâ “persons who go about engaging in espionage”; espiement 50.  A notable exception is F. Zorell, Lexicon Hebraicum et Aramaicum Veteris Testamenti (Rome: Pontificioum Institutum Biblicum, 1962), p. 347, s.v. kehâ.

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“espionage” in Old Northern French. Proof of my contention is the fact that we do not find any reference [in Biblical Hebrew] to rěkîlût “gossip” [i.e., the root rkl] that does not refer to hălîkâ “walking/going in”: lōtēlēk rākîl “do not go about as a talebearer” (Lev. 19:16); hōlěkê rākîl něḥošet ûbarzel “They walk as a talebearer; [they are] brass and iron” (Jer. 6:28).’ Rashi’s argument that the noun rākîl is consistently associated in Biblical Hebrew with the verb hlk ‘go about’ is supported also by Jer. 9:3; Prov. 11:13, and Prov. 20:19. Only in one of the six attestations of the noun rākîl in the Hebrew Bible, namely, Ezek. 22:9, is the verbal root hlk not present in the context. However, based on the fact that indeed with one exception the noun rākîl ‘gossip’ is associated in the Bible with walking about, Rashi came to the following conclusion, which sheds important light on the relationship between the verb yigheh in Hos. 5:13, the noun kehâ in Nah. 3:19, and the noun gĕhâ in Prov. 17:22: ‘[The word rākîl in the expression] hōlēk rākîl is related etymologically to hōlēk ûměraggēl “go about engaging in espionage” because kap interchanges with gimel. The reason for this is that all homorganic consonants interchange: bet with pe and waw; gimel with kap and qup; nun with lamed and reš; and zayin with ṣadi.’ It is now widely held that the root ghy referring to healing is found also hiding in Jer. 8:18a, where the standard Hebrew text begins with the expression mablîgîtî. LXX translates the latter lexeme as follows: οὐκ ἔστιν ἐπᾴσαι, which means, ‘There is no healing’, which presupposes a Hebrew text which read mibbělî gěhôt ‘without healing’. Textual evidence for such a reading is found in a number of medieval Hebrew manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza, which read mbly gyty.51 5:14 kî ānōkî kaššaḥal lěEprayim wěkakkěpîr lěbêt Yěhûdâ ănî ănî eṭrōp wěēlēk eśśā wěên maṣṣîl ‘Now I shall be like a big lion to Ephraim, like a great lion to the House of Israel.52 I, I shall attack, and I shall stride away. I shall carry away (the prey), and no one can rescue’ My rendering the particle ki at the head of v. 14 by means of the temporal adverb ‘now’ follows Ibn Ezra, who explains that the two pairs of clauses, 51.  See P. C. Craigie, P. H. Kelley, and J. F. Drinkard, Jr., Jeremiah 1–25 (WBC, 26; Dallas, TX: Word, 1991), p. 137; see also Yair Hoffman, Jeremiah (2 vols.; Mikra LeYisrael; Tel Aviv: Am Oved/Jerusalem: Magnes, 2001), vol. 1, p. 279 (in Hebrew). 52.  Here again I restore an original Israel for Judah in the received text; see the extensive discussion in my commentary at v. 12 above.

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5:12, ‘I am like rot to Ephraim//like decay to the House of Israel’, and 5:14a, ‘Now I will be like a lion to Ephraim//like a great lion to the House of Israel’, are meant to be a set of contrasting clauses comparing the former situation with the present situation. Ibn Ezra amplifies and suggests that the earlier pair of clauses (5:12) refers to the sick state of the internal affairs of the Israelite State while the later pair of clauses (5:14a–b) refers to the difficult position of Israel on the international scene when he seeks the help of Assyria to defend himself against incursions by Judah.53 With reference to the pair of nouns šaḥal//kěpîr both denoting ‘large lion’, cf. b. Sanhedrin 95a: ‘Rabbi Johanan [b. Nappaḥa c. 240–279 CE] stated, “There are six names for lion [aryeh] (in Hebrew), and these are they ărî, kěpîr, lābî, layiš, šaḥal, and šaḥaṣ” ’. One might get the impression from Rabbi Johanan’s phraseology that the common term for lion in Rabbinic Hebrew is aryeh while the first of a series of six biblical terms, which he lists in alphabetical order, is ărî. In fact, both terms are abundantly attested in both Biblical Hebrew and Rabbinic Hebrew. Moreover, Torah Or ‘The Torah Is a Lamp’ (the book title is taken from Prov. 6:23), the marginal notes in the printed editions of the Babylonian Talmud, which list the biblical sources by chapters in the Bible, compiled by Rabbi Joshua Boaz (sixteenth-century CE Italy), cites as a source for the term ărî Gen. 49, presumably referring to Gen. 49:9. In fact, the term ărî is attested in the Pentateuch only in Num. 23:24 and 24:9, although it is amply attested in Proverbs (Prov. 22:17, 19; 26:13; 28:15) and elsewhere in the Early and Later Prophets and the Hagiographa. It is the term aryeh that is attested twice in Gen. 49:9. The term kĕpîr, for which Torah Or cites Judg. 14 [i.e., Judg. 14:5] is attested altogether 17 times in Hebrew Scripture. The term lābî, for which Torah Or cites Gen. 49 [i.e., Gen. 49:9] is attested altogether eleven times in Hebrew Scripture, once more in the feminine singular lěbîyā in Ezek. 19:2 and once in the feminine plural with prefixed preposition l and masculine singular pronominal suffix lělibotāwy ‘for his lionesses’ in Nah. 2:13. The term layiš is attested in Hebrew Scripture only in Isa. 30:6; Prov. 30:30; and Job 4:11. It is well known that the Aramaic cognate is lêtā. The common origin of taw in the Aramaic form and shin in the Hebrew form is proto-Semitic tha. The common word for lion in Akkadian is nēšu, which is related to Hebrew layiš by the contraction of the original diphthong ay to ē and the interchange of the consonants l and n, which is found in many languages all over the world. (Concerning the interchange 53.  Concerning the multiple nuances of the particle kî in Biblical Hebrew see A. Aejmelaeus, ‘Function and Interpretation of kî in Biblical Hebrew’, JBL 105 (1986), pp. 193–209; A. Schoors, ‘The Particle kî’, OTS 21 (1981), pp. 240–76.

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of the consonants l and n see Rashi in his commentary at Lev. 19:16 cited above.) The term šaḥal is attested in Hebrew Scripture seven times, including Hos. 5:14; 13:7; and Ps. 91:13, while the term šaḥaṣ is attested in Hebrew Scripture only in Job 28:8 and 41:26. Possibly inspired by R. Johanan’s important lexicographical observation that, in fact, Biblical Hebrew attests to at least six distinct terms for lion, Rabbi David Kimchi (1160–1235) in his commentary on the book of Judges at Judg. 14:5, sought to turn the Talmudic sage’s alphabetical list into a classification based upon size (age) of the lion as follows: ‘The kěpîr is bigger than the gûr ‘cub’, and the aryeh is bigger than the kěpîr, and the lābî is bigger than the aryeh, and the layiš is bigger than the lābî. As it gets older it gets stronger.’ Unfortunately, Kimchi’s totally artificial attempt to turn Rabbi Johanan’s alphabetical list into a list of the stages of development from the smaller to the greatest of lions has had an enduring and deleterious impact upon biblical lexicography, Bible translations, translations of Jewish liturgy, and Bible commentaries, which commonly repeat the lesson learned from Kimchi that kěpîr means ‘young lion’ while lābî means ‘an older lion’. As a result, a small Israeli fighter plane is called kepir ‘young lion’ while a planned larger fighter plane was to have been called lābî, misunderstood to mean ‘big lion’. N. H. Tur-Sinai, in his essay ‘kěpîr ărāyōt: “a grown lion from among the lions” (Judg. 14:5)’ in his collection of lexicographical studies, Hallashon Wehasefer, attempts to put an end to the scholarly myth, fostered by Kimchi’s commentary on Judg. 14:5, according to which kěpîr is ‘a young lion’.54 Unfortunately, this myth continues to travel from book to book like a computer virus from computer to computer. Thus, for example, Harper writes, ‘kěpîr denotes the young lion, but one old enough to hunt prey’.55 Andersen and Freedman, on the other hand, write as follows: ‘Hebrew has at least six words for “lion”; five of them occur in Job 4:10–11. The precise denotation of each is not known.’56 Macintosh notes that kĕpîr in Hos. 5:14 has traditionally been rendered ‘young lion’.57 However, he rejects that view and cites, inter alia, Rabbi Johanan and Tur-Sinai. In fact, in Hos. 5:14 both šaḥal and kĕpîr denote ‘big/great lion’; hence my translation of Hos. 5:14. I hold that here in v. 14, as in vv. 12–13, the pair Ephraim//Judah in the received text of Scripture replaces an original pair of synonyms, ‘Ephraim//Israel’, which must be restored in order to understand the text 54.  Tur-Sinai, Hallashon Wehasefer, vol. 1, pp. 406–408. 55.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 279. 56.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 414. 57.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 212.

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in its original context in the reign of King Menahem son of Gadi (747–737 BCE). (See the discussion in the Introduction, pp. 28–29, and see also in the commentary above at v. 12.) For the simile ‘I am/will be like a lion’ it is worthwhile to compare the use of the same epithet by the Neo-Assyrian kings.58 The repetition for emphasis of the first person singular pronoun ănî ănî ‘I, I’ is attested only here in the pre-exilic prophetic corpus. However, the usage may well have inspired Deutero-Isaiah to use precisely this form of repetition for emphasis in Isa. 48:15: ‘I, I predicted’ and the similar usage of the alternative form of the first person singular pronoun ānokî ‘I, I’ in Isa. 43:11, 25, and 51:12. Hagit Taragan, who has examined the repetition of these personal pronouns in Deutero-Isaiah,59 does not suggest that Deutero-Isaiah might have borrowed the rhetorical device from Hosea. Neither does Ginsberg in his citation of possible influences of the book of Hosea upon Second Isaiah.60 Francis Landy61 suggests that it is Hos. 5:14 that has inspired Deut. 32:39, where we read as follows: rěû attâ kî ănî ănî hû wěên ělohîm immādî āmît waăḥayye wěên miyyādî maṣṣîl ‘See, then, that I, I am he; There is no god beside me. I deal death and I resurrect.62 None can deliver from my hand.’ 58.  See D. Marcus, ‘Animal Similes in Assyrian Royal Inscriptions’, Orientalia ns 46 (1977), pp. 86–108 (87). 59.  Hagit Taragan, ‘Rhetoric and Prophecy: Rhetorical, Stylistic and Linguistic Aspects in Isaiah 40–66’ (PhD diss., Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, 2006), pp. 35–38. 60.  Ginsberg, Israelian Heritage, pp. 97–99. 61.  Francis Landy, Hosea (2nd ed.; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011), p. 84. 62.  Cf. 1 Sam. 2:6 where Hannah declares, Yhwh mēmît ûměḥayyeh môrîd šěôl wayyaal ‘Yhwh deals death and resurrects, lowers [people] into the realm of the dead and resurrects’. The latter pre-exilic affirmation of the belief in the resurrection of the dead was directly challenged by Job in Job 7:9–10: ‘Just as a cloud is spent of its water and vanishes so does one who descends to the realm of the dead not arise. He will not return again to his home nor does his [erstwhile] place recognize him anymore.’ Precisely because Job here seems to respond negatively to Hannah’s affirmation of the belief in the resurrection of the dead, the rabbinic sage Rava (d. 352 CE) most aptly concluded, ‘From here [Job 7:9–10] it is evident that Job denied the belief in the resurrection of the dead’ (b. Bava Batra 16a). Significantly, it is Hannah’s

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Indeed, the clause which follows in Deut. 32:40, kî-eśśā el-šāmayim yādî wěāmartî ḥay ānokî lěōlām ‘Indeed, I [God] raise my hand to heaven [oath gesture], And I say, “as I live forever” [God swears by himself]’, surely confirms the impression that the affinity between Hos. 5:14 and Deut. 32:39 is not fortuitous. After all, Hos. 5:14 concludes with ănî ănî eṭrop wěēlēk eśśā wěên maṣṣîl ‘I, I shall attack and I shall stride away. I shall carry away (eśśā) [the prey], and no one can rescue’ while Deut. 32:39 concludes with wěên miyyādî maṣṣîl ‘And no one can save [prey] from my hand’. At this juncture in the history of biblical research, regardless of whether one assumes that Hosea has influenced Deuteronomy or that Deuteronomy has influenced Hosea, Deut. 32 may yet be independent of Deuteronomy. Consequently, the influence of Hosea upon Deut. 32 or the influence of Deut. 32 upon Hosea should be considered separately from one’s position concerning the relationship of D (the law-code contained in Deut. 12–26) to Hosea. It is altogether possible that Deut. 32:29–40 has reworked Hos. 5:14 and created a pun by attaching the verb eśśā ‘I will lift/take’ to an anatomical expression denoting a gesture of oath-taking in which the person about to testify points to the heavenly abode of the deity as in Gen. 14:22 where Abram swears by the Yhwh, God most high, creator of sky and earth and, as in Ezek. 20:6, 15, 23, 28, 42 etc., where God tells us that he swore to himself that he would do this, that, and the other. It is no less likely that Hos. 5:14 may be a deliberate reworking of Deut. 32:29–30, in which God’s swearing to save has been changed into God’s punishing persons who have worn out the divine patience. Obviously, not everyone among our biblical writers’ original audiences may have appreciated the way in which these writers brilliantly reworked older sacred texts with a clear sense of irony (as in Hos. 5:7, which seems to rework Exod. 10:9). However, it is likely that the prophets, most of whom failed to move the people of Israel and Judah to repentance, may have derived some small consolation from the brilliance with which they translated God’s word into highly sophisticated poetry, whose brilliance perhaps only the prophet and his closest intimates fully appreciated at affirmation mēmît ûměḥayyeh ‘deals death and resurrects’ that is incorporated in the second benediction of the so-called Eighteen Benedictions recited three times every day, four times every day on Sabbath, New Moons, and festivals, and five times on the Day of Atonement in the Rabbinic liturgy. See Scherman, The Complete ArtScroll Siddur, pp. 100–101 and passim. Concerning some of the pre-exilic texts of the Hebrew Bible which affirm or take for granted the belief in the resurrection of the dead, see J. D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), especially, pp. 23–107.

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the time. In recent times the prophets’ brilliant use of rhetoric has been analyzed in great detail by, inter alia, Yehoshua Gitay, Hagit Taragan, and Francis Landy (see the Bibliography). In connection with Hos. 4:5–6 I called attention to the poetic device called concatenation in which a phrase or word at the end of a given clause is deliberately repeated at the beginning of the following clause. A similar usage is attested here in Hos. 5:14–15. The penultimate clause of v. 14 states wěēlēk ‘I shall stride away’ (like a lion after attacking its prey) while the first clause of v. 15 begins ēlēk ‘I shall stride away’. Here we are no longer dealing with a simile comparing God’s punishing Israel to a victim’s being devoured by lions. Instead, we are dealing with a highly sophisticated theological concept, which in Samaritan theology is called fanuta ‘the turning away of God/God’s grace/God’s immanence’, in Rabbinic theology hastarat pānîm ‘the hiding of the divine face’, or in the theology of Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God.63 Indeed, in Rabbinic theology, reflected in the Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Ha-Shanah 31a, Hos. 5:15 is treated as describing the last of the ten stages or phases of the exile of the divine presence, which culminated in the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE. 5:15 ēlēk āšûbâ ek-měqōmî ‘I shall stride away, let me return to my (heavenly) abode (temple)’ The nuance ‘let me’ is expressed in Biblical Hebrew by means of the long imperfect or cohortative form of the first person singular ending in â. (See GKC #48a–e.) ad ăšer-yeěšmû ‘Until they feel guilty’ Similarly, NJPS renders, ‘Until they realize their guilt’. The latter rendering reflects the important observation made by J. Milgrom: ‘The verb āšam is a stative. When it is followed by the preposition l and a personal object it means “to incur liability to” someone for reparation; without any object, it refers to the inner experience of this liability, meaning “to feel guilt”.’64 NJPS’s rendering of Hos. 5:15b (first published in 1978) clearly reflects Milgrom’s understanding of the verb āšam, which he expounded already in his Cult and Conscience.65 63.  Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God (New York: Harper, 1952). 64.  Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, p. 339 65.  Jacob Milgrom, Cult and Conscience: The Asham and the Priestly Doctrine of Repentance (Leiden: Brill, 1976).

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The clear import of the first two sections of Hos. 5:15 is that God’s temporary turning away from involvement with Israel is meant to evoke from Israel pangs of guilt that might bring about a change of behaviour as is recorded in Judg. 2:18–19: ‘When Yhwh raised up chieftains for them, Yhwh would be with the chieftain and would save them from their enemies during the chieftain’s lifetime; for Yhwh would be moved to pity by their moanings because of those who oppressed and crushed them. But when the chieftain died, they would again act basely, even more than the preceding generation…’ (based upon NJPS). If, according to Judg. 2, God repeatedly went out of his way to help Israel overcome her enemies even though Israel repeatedly exhibited recidivism, here in Hos. 5:15c–6:11a, God suggests that an expression of contrition when one is in dire straits will, at the present juncture, not influence God to turn back from his own turning away: ûbiqěšû pānāy baṣṣar lāhem yěšaḥăruněnî ‘So that they will seek my face//In their distress they will search for me’ The expression ‘seek my face’, referring to seeking out God for help in times of trouble, when one might imagine that God has, at it were, abandoned his people, would seem to presuppose the expression bqš pny Yhwh ‘seek the face (of Yhwh)’. In fact, the latter expression is attested only in 2 Sam. 21:1, where we read as follows: ‘There was a famine during the reign of David, year after year for three years. David sought the face of Yhwh, and Yhwh replied, “It is because of the bloodguilt of Saul and [his] dynasty, for he put some Gibeonites to death”.’ The expression ‘seek the face of Yhwh’ found in 2 Sam. 21:1 and alluded to in Hos. 5:15 is alluded to also in Isa. 65:1–2, where we read as follows: ‘I let myself be inquired of by those who did not ask, I was available to those who did not seek me. I said, “Here I am, here I am”, to a nation that did not invoke my name. I constantly spread out my hands to a disloyal people, who walk the way that is not good, following their own designs.’ The latter passage expresses the very opposite of the idea expressed in Hos. 5:15, in which God promises to be unavailable. The opposite, God’s availability, is expressed in Isa. 56:6: ‘Seek Yhwh while he is available, call to him while he is near’. Hosea 5:15c–d cannot help but remind us of Prov. 1:28, where personi­ fied wisdom declares, ‘Then they shall call me, but I will not answer; they shall search for me, but they shall not find me’. Here as in Hos. 5:15d ‘seek’ is expressed by the relatively rare verb šḥr ‘seek, search for’.66 66.  Cf. also Prov. 7:15 where the adulterous woman declares to the young man who has not yet acquired wisdom, al-kēn yāṣātî liqrātekā lěšaḥēr pānêkā wāemṣāekkā ‘Therefore I have come out to you, seeking you, and have found you’.

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Similar to the renewed attempt of Israel to seek out God in time of distress, described in Hos. 5:15, is Ps. 78:34, which, like Hos. 5:15, also employs the relatively rare verb šḥr. In Ps. 78:34 we read as follows: im-hārāgām ûdērāšāhû wěšābû wěšiḥărû-ēl ‘When he killed them, they turned to him and sought God once again’. The latter verse refers to what is related in Num. 11, that God provided quails for the Israelites who could no longer abide eating only manna. However, while the Israelites were eating the flesh of the quails, God killed many of them. According to Ps. 78:34, but not according to Num. 11, some of the Israelites who survived the punishment of their fellow Israelites by death, indeed repented. The verbal form yĕšaḥărunĕnî found in Hos. 5:15 and only once more in the Bible, in Prov. 1:28, where it is written yĕšaḥărûnĕnî, belongs to a category of thirteen verbal forms in the entire Hebrew Bible where paragogic nun intervenes between the plural suffix of the verb û and the accusative pronominal suffix. The eleven other instances are as follows: Isa. 60:7, 10; Jer. 2:24; 5:22; Pss. 63:4; 91:12; Prov. 1:28 (two more instances; altogether three instances including the second instance of yĕšaḥărûnĕnî); 5:22; 8:17; Job 19:2. Cf. GKC, #60e. If in Hos. 5:6 and 5:14–15 God expresses his reluctance to let Israel entreat him after they have so long misbehaved, Hos. 6:1–3 expresses the certainty of collective Israel, encouraging each other, that if only they will repent of their immoral behaviour, which is tantamount to turning away from Yhwh (cf. above at Hos. 4:1, where knowledge of Yhwh is equated with obedience to the ethical components of the Decalogue), God will immediately come to their rescue: 6:1–3 lěkû wěnāšûbâ el-Yhwh kî hû ṭārāp wěyirpāēnû yak wěyaḥběšēnû yěḥayyēnû miyyomāyim bayyôm haššělîšî yěqîmēnû wěniḥyeh lěpānāyw wěnēděâ nirděpâ lādaat et-Yhwh kěšaḥar nākôn môṣāô wěyābô kaggešem lānû kěmalqōš yōreh āreṣ [Israel will say]: ‘Come, let us turn back to Yhwh. Indeed, he attacked, but he can heal us. He wounded, but he can cure us. At the end of two days he will revive us. On the third day he will make us rise up, and we shall live in his presence. And let us know. Let us pursue knowledge of Yhwh. His appearance is certain as daybreak, he will come to us like rain, like latter rain that waters the earth’

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6:1 ‘Come, let us turn back to Yhwh’ The expression ‘turn back to Yhwh’ refers to what we call ‘repentance’. The Biblical Hebrew equivalent employing the verbal root šwb ‘return’, is the etymon of the Mishnaic Hebrew noun těšûbâ ‘repentance’. If in Hos. 6:1 it is the people who take the initiative in speaking about a return to God’s ways, in Hos. 12:7 it is the prophet who urges Israel, ‘You must return to your God!’ Likewise, in Hos. 14:2–3 the prophet calls out, ‘Return, Israel, to Yhwh your God…and return to Yhwh’. The call to repentance employing the verb šwb is, like many other elements characteristic of Hosea, taken up by Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Typical of the call to repentance in Jeremiah is Jer. 3:12, where, as in Hos. 14:2, the long masculine singular imperative šûbâ is employed: šûbâ měšubâ Yiśrāēl ‘Turn back, Rebel Israel’. The long masculine singular imperative šûbâ is employed again to refer to repentance in Isa. 44:22, where we read: ‘I wipe away your sins like a cloud, Your transgressions like a mist, Come back to me, for I redeem you.’ The call to repentance is expressed in the masculine plural šûbû in Jer. 3:14, 22; 18:11; 25:5; 35:15; Ezek. 14:6; 18:30; 33:1; Joel 2:12–13; Zech. 1:3–4; and Mal. 3:7. In addition, 2 Kgs 17:13 declares, ‘Yhwh warned Israel and Judah by every prophet [and] every seer, saying “Turn back from your wicked ways, and observe my commandments and my laws, according to all the Torah that I commanded your ancestors and that I transmitted through my servants the prophets” ’. The latter text appears to be based in part on the phraseology of Jer. 18:11; 25:5; 35:15 and is clearly addressed not to Israel before the tragedy of 722 but to Judah before the tragedy of 586 BCE.67 kî hû ṭārap wĕyirpāēnû ‘Indeed, he attacked, but he can heal us’ Echoing both God’s complaint in Hos. 5:13 that Israel should not have sought help from the king of Assyria, who cannot ‘heal’, and God’s assertion in Hos. 5:14 that, like a lion attacking its prey, God will attack Israel, the people of Israel here assert that the very God who attacked like a lion, can indeed provide healing. yak wěyaḥběšēnû ‘He wounded, but he can cure us’ The second and third sections of Hos. 6:1 constitute a classic instance of synonymous parallelism. The first of the two sets of synonymous verbs

67.  Contrast Cogan and Tadmor, II Kings, pp. 204–207.

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employed in parallel clauses is the perfect form of the verb ṭārap ‘attack’ whose synonym in the parallel clause is the hiphil imperfect of the verb hikkâ ‘wound’ from the root nky. The short imperfect of this verb, yak, without conjunctive or conversive waw, is found only here in Hos. 6:1c, while the same form with conjunctive waw is found in Hos. 14:6 (see below). However, the same short imperfect with conversive waw meaning ‘he attacked’ is ubiquitous in Biblical Hebrew prose. 6:2 yěḥayyēnû miyyomāyim bayyôm haššělîšî yěqimēnû wěniḥyeh lěpānāyw ‘At the end of two days he will revive us. On the third day he will make us rise up and we shall live in his presence’ In this verse we have three clauses, the first two of which exhibit an exquisite combination of three rhetorical devices. The first of these rhetorical devices is synonymous chiastic parallelism in which the two verbs, the piel yěḥayyēnû at the head of v. 2a and the hiphil yěqimēnû at the end of v. 2b, both convey the sense ‘he will revive us’. Significantly, this pair of verbs referring to healing is found in the Bible only here in Hos. 6:2. In fact, nowhere else in Hebrew Scripture does the hiphil of the verbal root qwm refer to either healing the sick from disease or reviving the dead, while the piel of the verbal root hyh referring to healing and resurrection is ubiquitous. (See, e.g., Deut. 32:39; 1 Sam. 2:6; Pss. 30:4; 119:25, 37, 40, 88, 107, 149, 154, 156, 159.) It is likely, therefore, that the Rabbinic blessing on the hearing of good tidings, ‘Blessed are You, O LORD, our God, King of the world, who has revived us and made us rise up and enabled us to reach this moment’ (m. Berakot 9:3), is inspired by Hos. 6:2. It is obvious that revival on the third day referred to here in Hos. 6:2 serves as Old Testament typology for the Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus on the third day (Sunday) after the crucifixion on Good [euphemism?] Friday. In fact, as pointed out by Stuart, two important New Testament references to the resurrection of Jesus, 1 Cor. 15:4 and Lk. 24:7, share the reading of the Old Greek Version of Hos. 6:2: ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ τρίτη καὶ ὰναστησόμεθα καὶ ζησόμεθα ἐνώπιον αὐτοῦ ‘on the third day we will be resurrected and will live in his presence’.68 Thus, Hos. 6:2 both adumbrates the later Jewish and Christian belief in resurrection of the dead and reflects the influence of a similar belief in the ancient Near East reflected, inter alia, in the Sumerian (and later 68.  Stuart, Hosea–Joel, p. 108.

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Babylonian and Assyrian) tale of the death and resurrection of the Sumerian goddess Inanna (Akkadian Ishtar).69 It is generally almost taken for granted that the parallel pair of adverbial phrases ‘after two days’//‘on the third day’ constitute a typical case of what scholars, following M. M. Haran, refer to as the graded numerical sequence, a form of synonymous parallelism.70 Watson explains the common understanding of the graded numerical sequence in parallel clauses as follows: ‘Since no number can have a synonym the only way to provide a corresponding component is to use a digit which is higher in value than the original’.71 In fact, a closer reading of Hos. 6:2 should reveal that the two parallel numerical terms are not ‘in two days time’//‘in three days time’, but rather ‘after two days’ and ‘on the third day’.72 It follows, therefore, that in Hos. 6:2 we find one of the instances of synonymous parallelism in the most literal sense, which means that ‘after two days’ and ‘on the third day’ are literally synonymous adverbial phrases fully adumbrating the literal usage reflected in the two New Testament citations quoted by Stuart. Having established that indeed the first two clauses of Hos. 6:2 constitute synonymous chiastic parallelism indicating that healing is to be expected on the third day following the contrite appeal of the Israelites for divine mercy, what remains is to establish the relationship between the two synonymous chiastic clauses and the third clause of Hos. 6:2, i.e., 69.  See Holt, Prophesying the Past, pp. 84–85; contrast Levenson, Resurrection, pp. 205–206; see also J. Day, ‘The Development of Belief in Life After Death in Ancient Israel’, in After the Exile: Essays in Honour of Rex Mason (ed. J. Barton and D. J. Reimer; Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996), pp. 248–57. 70.  M. M. Haran, ‘The Graded Numerical Sequence and the Phenomenon of “Automatism” in Biblical Poetry’, in Congress Volume: Uppsala 1971 (VTSup, 22; Leiden: Brill, 1972), pp. 238–67. See also W. M. W. Roth, ‘The Numerical Sequence x/x +1 in the Old Testament’, VT 12 (1962), pp. 300–311.With reference to Hos. 6:2, see Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry, p. 145; Stuart, Hosea–Joel, p. 108. 71.  Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry, p. 144. M. I. Gruber, ‘How Can True Prophets Disagree’, Moed 13 (2003), pp. 31–37 (35) (in Hebrew) demonstrates that Watson’s blanket assertion that no Hebrew number can have a synonym must be qualified. 72.  For the prefixed preposition m(n), meaning ‘after’, see DCH 5:339a. There Clines shows that in Judg. 14:8 miyyāmîm means ‘after some days’; likewise in Josh. 23:1 miyyāmîm rabbîm means ‘after many days’. Similarly, in Isa. 24:22 ûmērob yāmîm means ‘and after many days’. In Hos. 6:2 miyyomāyim means, in fact, ‘after two days’, just as in Gen. 38:24 kěmišěloš ḥodāšîm means ‘at the end of about three months’. Likewise in Deut. 15:1 miqqēṣ šeba šānîm means ‘at the end of seven years’. So also HALOT 2:598.

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‘And we shall live in his presence’. Technically, the relationship between the predicates of the first and the third clause of Hos. 6:2 is an example of the phenomenon which M. Held called ‘the action–result sequence’.73 The obvious examples cited by Held are Jer. 17:14, ‘Heal me, Yhwh, and I shall be healed’; Jer. 31:18, ‘You have chastised me, and I am chastised… bring me back, and I shall come back’; Ps. 24:7, ‘Lift up your towers, your gates, and be lifted up your everlasting entrances’; and Ps. 69:15, ‘Deliver me…let me be delivered’. An equally obvious example is Lam. 5:21: ‘Take us back…and let us come back’. If in most of the examples cited by Held we have an imperative followed by a passive form of the same verb, Hos. 6:2 presents us with a jussive followed by a verb in the qal imperfect. The jussive, as everyone knows, is a third person imperative. Consequently, the conceptual distance between the usage in Hos. 6:2 and the usage in the middle of Jer. 31:18 and Lam. 5:21, in both of which we have imperative followed by cohortative, is not great at all. Thus the basic message of Hos. 6:2 is confidence that if God will indeed deign to make Israel live (by reviving Israel, expressed by two synonymous verbs in chiastic parallelism), Israel will indeed live before God. Collective Israel, in voicing this hope, intimates that if God is willing to heal Israel of his moral turpitude, the consequence is that Israel can stand before God without shame. Lest it be assumed that Israel is less than totally honest in the desire to be healed and to stand before God, Hos. 6:3 informs us that Israel takes upon himself to repent totally of the crime of disobeying God, with which our eighth-century BCE prophet opens his condemnation of Israel in Hos. 4:1: wēên-daat ĕlohîm bāāreṣ ‘There is no obedience to God in the land’. The lack of obedience, it was explained in Hos. 4:2, was manifest by the violation of the major crimes of verbal and physical violence spelled out on the second tablet of the Decalogue. Thus, in attempting to turn themselves and their behaviour around in Hos. 6:1–3, the Israelites employ the cohortative form of the verb ‘know’, wĕnēdĕâ ‘And let us know’, which appears to be employed as ellipsis for ‘and let us know Yhwh’, which is to say, ‘Let us obey Yhwh by observing the moral laws of the Decalogue’. In the same vein, Jer. 31:34 looks forward to a better day yet to be when, ‘They will not teach each other…saying, “Know Yhwh”, for all of them from the least of them to the greatest of them will know me…’. Now the Israelites in Hos. 6:3b–e offer a program designed to achieve that goal when they declare, 73.  M. Held, ‘The Action–Result (Factitive–Passive) Sequence of Identical Verbs in Biblical Hebrew and Ugaritic’, JBL 84 (1965), pp. 272–82.

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‘Let us pursue knowledge of Yhwh. His appearance is as certain as daybreak. He will come to us like rain, like latter rain that waters the earth’ The second clause of Hos. 6:3 indicates that a renewed national commitment to obedience to the moral precepts of Yhwh, which is to say, scrupulous avoidance of the crimes listed in Hos. 4:2—perjury, dishonesty, murder, embezzlement, and adultery—is to be achieved by undertaking, as it were, a military campaign. Hence the use of the verb rdp ‘pursue’, usually associated with an army as in Josh. 2:7, 16, 22; Judg. 4:22; 8:5 etc. One is reminded of the late United States President Lyndon Baines Johnson who launched a veritable ‘war on poverty’. Cultivation of virtuous behaviour as a form of religious devotion is reflected also in the work of the Salvation Army, a Protestant Christian organization, which literally entered the dens of iniquity to bring people back to proper attitudes, faith, and behaviour. The expression ‘know Yhwh’ appears to refer to an intimate relationship not only with the moral dos and don’ts of the Decalogue but also with the divine law-giver. Indeed, a close reading of Hos. 6:3 cannot allow us to escape from the recognition that Israel, in Hos. 6:3a and 6:3b, is talking about a resolve to know Yhwh and to pursue knowing Yhwh. Israel thus anticipates Yhwh’s appearance as God who answers the prayers of the repentant Israelites. After all, in Hos. 6:3c–d it is God, not the laws God enacted, whose appearance is enthusiastically anticipated. Here the Israelites assert that just as experience has taught people to expect the light of the planet Venus and later of the sun at daybreak, so does the repentant sinner expect the appearance of Yhwh: ‘His appearance is certain as daybreak’. The next clause, Hos. 6:3b, ‘He (Yhwh) will come to us like rain’, compares the appearance of the loving God when he is beseeched by truly repentant sinners to the appearance (sooner or later every fall) of the seasonal rain in the land of Israel. The final clause of Hos. 6:3, i.e. v. 3e, creates synonymous parallelism vis-à-vis the previous clause. The first clause refers to the seasonal rain (see Deut. 11:14) in general while the latter clause refers specifically to the final phase of the seasonal rain called in Hebrew malqōš and mentioned a total of eight times in all of Hebrew Scripture: Deut. 11:14; Jer. 3:3; 5:24; Hos. 6:3; Joel 2:23; Zech. 10:1; Prov. 6:15; and Job 29:23. Tigay explains as follows: ‘In Israel, the first showers, known as the yoreh, fall intermittently in October and November. They soften the soil, which is hardened and cracked from the summer, and permit farmers to begin ploughing and sowing. The rain increases from December through February, with about seventy percent of the year’s rain normally falling

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in these months. The final showers, or malkosh (“late rain”), come in April or early May, right before the final burst of growth of the grain and are crucial for its maturation.’74 As for the verb yôreh employed in Hos. 6:3e, there are three possibilities. To understand properly these possibilities and to choose between them, it is important to know that the expression yôreh appears only three times in all of Hebrew Scripture. The first occurrence is in Deut. 11:14, where, as we have seen, the noun yôreh refers to the first of the three stages of the seasonal rain in Israel. The same usage is reflected in Jer. 5:24, which may well have been inspired by Deut. 11:14. In the latter verse in Deuteronomy, God promises to grant the rain for the land at its appropriate time, the former rain (yôreh) and the latter rain (malqōš). Jeremiah 5:24 includes the phrase ‘the former rain and the latter rain [each] in its season’. Mandelkern suggests that also in Hos. 6:3 the lexeme yôreh may be a noun referring to the former rain and that Hos. 6:3e means ‘like the latter rain (and) the former rain on the earth’.75 Another possibility is that in Hos. 6:3 the lexeme yôreh is the verbal predicate of the subject malqōš and that the clause should be translated ‘like the latter rain that waters the earth’. The final possibility, which was favoured by H. L. Ginsberg in his lecture notes, is to emend yôreh to yarweh, the hiphil imperfect of the verbal root rwy, which means unequivocally ‘to water’ as in Isa. 55:10: ‘For as the rain or snow drops from heaven and returns not there but waters the earth and makes it bring forth vegetation…’. In Hos. 6:1–3 Israel was the speaker. In vv. 4–11 God responds directly to collective Israel’s suggestion that all that is required to overcome God’s having abandoned Israel because of the latter’s moral corruption is for Israel to resolve that he will turn toward God and away from his previous misbehaviour. Indeed, Israel has suggested that God’s beneficence can be compared to the dawn, which appears without fail every morning, and the rain, which appears without fail during the rainy season in the Land of Israel. Chiding collective Israel that repentance is not as simple as saying, ‘I am sorry that I behaved badly’, God indicates that comparing good or bad behaviour to precipitation can be applied by God to Israel just as, in v. 3, it has been applied by Israel to God. Thus does God respond to Israel as follows in Hos. 6:4:

74.  Tigay, Deuteronomy, pp. 113–14; see also the sources cited at p. 364 n. 34. 75.  Mandelkern, Concordance, p. 509a.

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māh eĕśeh-lĕkā Eprayim//māh eĕśeh-lĕkā Yĕhûdâ ‘What can I do for you, Ephraim?//What can I do for you, Judah?’ As noted above, this is one of five cases in the book of Hosea where, following Ginsberg, I hold that the pair Ephraim//Judah in the standard Hebrew text reflects an original Ephraim//Israel (see above, p. 28). The point of the double rhetorical question is to intimate that God, like a parent at her/his wits end after a long day with naughty children, says, ‘I just do not know what do with you anymore’. Moving from the general to the specific, in Hos. 6:4b God tells Ephraim//Israel that to the very same degree that God, when not provoked to the point of exasperation, can be relied upon to make him/herself manifest like the dawn and to provide the seasonal rain in the Land of Israel, the unreliable people of Israel can be rightly compared to a morning cloud and to the dew, both of which disappear in the heat of the morning sun. God thus intimates that God has yet to be convinced that Israel will abide by its commitment to change his behaviour for the better. The text of Hos. 6:4b reads as follows: wĕḥasdĕkem kaănan-bōqer//wĕkaṭṭal maškîm ‘Insofar as your reliabil­ ity is like a morning cloud // And like dew which departs early in the morning’ The so-called conjunctive waw at the head of these two clauses is, in fact, a subordinate conjunction meaning ‘since, seeing, insofar as’, for which BDB (p. 253b) provides numerous examples, including ‘Seeing she is married’ (Gen. 18:3; 20:3); ‘seeing you hate me’ (Gen. 26:7); ‘insofar as she was sitting’ (Judg. 13:9). The point made by the use of this not frequently unrecognized subordinate conjunction is that God does not trust Israel’s ability to carry through on his promise to mend his ways. The term ḥasdĕkem, which NJPS renders simply ‘your goodness’, is a form (with second person plural nominal suffix) of the famous noun ḥesed, subject of numerous important studies.76 The basic meanings of the noun include both ‘kindness’ and ‘loyalty’. Indeed, according to BDB (p. 338b) the basic meaning of the noun is ‘goodness, kindness’, while according to DCH (3:277) the basic meaning of the noun is ‘loyalty’. In the present context, where the point is that Israel cannot be counted on 76.  N. Glueck, Hesed in the Bible (trans. A. Gottschalk; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1967); F. Asensio, Misericordia et Veritas (Rome: Universitas Gregorianae, 1949); and K. D. Sakenfeld, The Meaning of ḥesed in the Hebrew Bible: A New Inquiry (HSM, 17; Missoula: Scholars Press, 1978); and see the extensive list of important studies in DCH 3:397.

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to deliver on his promise of repentance the meaning is ‘reliability’, an extension of the meaning ‘loyalty’. In Hos. 6:4b the unreliability of a repentant Israel is compared by means of two similes to two deceptive meteorological phenomena. ‘Like a morning cloud’ Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Kimhi, and Joseph Qara all explain that the comparison of Israel’s unreliability to a morning cloud is based upon the fact that morning clouds disappear quickly and cannot be relied upon for rain. Harper rightly thought it worthwhile to explain the reality that inspires the metaphor as follows: ‘The morning clouds disappear very early during the hot season in Palestine, the sky being usually perfectly clear by 9 A.M.’.77 ‘And like dew’ In the Jewish liturgy it is taken for granted that dew comes from the sky and enables vegetation not to wither during the summer when no rain falls in the Land of Israel. Thus, in most but not all versions of the Jewish liturgy the second of the sections of the long prayer commonly called ‘Eighteen Benedictions’ includes during the winter months the sentence ‘who causes the wind to blow and brings down the rain’ and during the summer months the sentence ‘who makes the dew fall’. Early in the twentieth century some Jewish scholars were disturbed by the possibility that positing an extra-terrestrial source for dew might be a belief contrary to fact or at best one of two theoretical possibilities.78 Fortunate for both members of the Jewish faith who would find it difficult to recite a liturgy which contradicts scientific data, and for members of the Jewish faith who would find it just as difficult to adjust their liturgy to new facts, the state of the question in the scientific community has been summarized as follows in the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: ‘[The term dew designates] deposit of water drops formed at night by the condensation of water vapour from the air onto the surfaces of objects freely exposed to the sky’.79 Should there be any room for doubt, that same encyclopedia entry explains that dew is ‘formed when water vapour diffuses downward in the air’. Indeed, the entry goes on to explain that dew formed in this

77.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 285. Harper rightly thought it worthwhile to provide evidence for this claim, referring the reader to T. Chaplin, ‘Das Klima von Jerusalem’, ZDPV 14 (1891), pp. 93–112 (110–12). 78.  See, e.g., D. Ashbel, “On the Importance of Dew in Palestine’, Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 16 (1936), pp. 316–21. 79.  Encyclopaedia Britannica, Micropedia, vol. 4, p. 50, s.v., ‘Dew’.

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way may properly be called ‘dewfall’, a term which coincides with the Jewish liturgy’s assertion that God makes dew fall from the sky. However, that entry also notes that a layer of moisture may also be ‘produced by distillation from the soil’, and that such a layer might properly be called not ‘dewfall’ but ‘distillation’. What seems to have occupied both Medieval Hebrew biblical exegetes and modern critical exegetes is the syntax of the words ṭal maškîm hōlēk. Harper renders ‘the dew which early goes away’, treating both of the participles as verbal predicates of the noun ṭal ‘dew’.80 If that be the case, we may rightly compare Gen. 22:3, where it is reported that ‘Abraham arose early in the morning (wayyaškēm) and got up and went [wayyelek]…[to sacrifice Isaac]’. Ibn Ezra and Kimchi, on the other hand, both insist that in Hos. 6:4 the lexeme maškîm does not function as a verb. If not, then the participle in question must serve as an attributive adjective modifying the noun ṭal ‘dew’. If we follow the latter interpretation, then the pair of lexemes ṭal maškîm would refer to the dew which appears to arrive at its place (on the ground on plants; wherever) early in the morning but then departs all too quickly as this distilled water vapor evaporates and turns back into water vapor. In either case, the point made by the prophet speaking in the name of God is that dew does not stay around for long and cannot be counted on as a useful source for keeping plants alive during the dry season. In fact, as pointed out by Ashbel, ‘Dewy localities, which excel in dew nights and in the amount of water formed, yield in summer nights about 20–40 mm water in one month. The total amount of dew-water yielded on plants during the entire dry period of 7 months would thus amount to 200 mm. and more.’81 As for the reality behind the expression ṭal maškîm hōlēlk, it seems to be described as follows by Ashbel: ‘At sunrise, everything glistens with dew-drops. In localities exposed to sun-rays these drops evaporate rapidly. In the fields, on the other hand, the moisture stays among the plants for several hours after sunrise. In shady places, the dew keeps till noon or even later.’82 Indeed, Ashbel adds, ‘When plucking oranges, one must wait till the dew dries out (in the winter) so that it is sometimes necessary to wait until 3:00 p.m. to begin plucking’.83 As suggested by my esteemed colleague Shamir Yona, the pair of expressions ‘clouds/dew’ referring to sources of water found in the sky and on the earth, respectively, constitute a merism, i.e., a pair of polar 80.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 285. 81.  Ashbel, ‘On the Importance’, p. 319. 82.  Ashbel, ‘On the Importance’, p. 319. 83.  Ashbel, ‘On the Importance’, p. 319 n. 1.

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opposites such as ‘sky and earth’, ‘east and west’, ‘north and south’, ‘male and female’, ‘young and old’, which taken together mean ‘everything’. In the context of Hos. 6:4c–d the merism constituted by the pair of similes ‘like morning clouds’//‘like dew’ underscores the total unreliability of the would-be repentant Israel until he shall prove otherwise. 6:5 al-kēn ḥāṣabtî bannĕbîîm hāragtîm bĕimrê pî ‘Therefore, I shall hew down some of the prophets, I shall slay them by means of the word of my mouth’ NJPS renders the verse literally, as follows: ‘That is why I have hewn down the prophets Have slain them with the words of My mouth’.

The marginal note in NJPS proposes to emend Heb. bannĕbîîm, which consists of the prefixed preposition b followed by the definite article followed by the plural ‘prophets’ as object of the preposition, with the form bĕbānêkā, which would constitute the prefixed preposition b followed by the noun ‘your children’. NJPS margin justifies the emendation on the basis of Hos. 9:13, where indeed we find the expression wĕEprayim lĕhôṣî el-hōrēg bānāyw ‘Ephraim too must bring out his children to slayers’ (so NJPS), on which see the commentary below at Hos. 9:13. NJPS’s assumption that ‘the prophets’ constitute the object of the hewing down goes back to LXX and the Peshitta. Ibn Ezra holds that the prefixed preposition b here means ‘among’ and that the idea is that God declares that he slew some of the prophets because those prophets were derelict with respect to their responsibility to warn the people to improve their behaviour. For the idea that prophets who fail to warn the people to change their behaviour so as to escape punishment will themselves be subject to the death penalty, see Ezek. 3:16–19; 33:1–9. TJ, on the other hand, understands the prepositional phrase bannĕbîîm to constitute an adverbial phrase referring to the means by which God proposed to hew down. In addition, TJ holds that the direct object of the hewing down is ‘the words of my [God’s] mouth’ found at the end of Hos. 6:5b. Rashi in his commentary, ad loc., follows TJ and explicates the meaning of the entire verse as follows: ‘Because I warned you through the agency of the prophets and you did not repent, I brought upon you death because they [Israel] transgressed the word which expressed my will and my judicial punishment comes forth as light’.

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David Kimchi attempts to bridge the gap between the Targum’s understanding that the prophets were the means by which God hewed down and the view that the prophets were the object of the hewing as understood already by LXX and the Peshitta and now also by NJPS. He explains the verse as follows: ‘Because your reliability is like the morning cloud I troubled the prophets daily to warn you that you should behave properly but you would not obey. And because of my greatly having troubled them in my service, it is as though I had killed them. And I did all of this so that my judicial punishment would come forth like light… .’ Kimchi then adds that his father (Moshe Kimchi) interpreted ‘I hewed down the prophets’ [to mean] ‘I killed them’ [which is to say], ‘they died in my service’ as in the case of Zechariah and Uriah’. The latter comment refers to the murder of Zechariah the son of Jehoiada at the hand of King Joash as recorded in 2 Chron. 24:17–22. In both Christian (Matt. 23:35) and Rabbinic tradition (b. Giṭṭin 57b; b. Sanhedrin 96b; Lamentations Rabbah, Proem 23; etc.) the latter Zechariah is identified with one or another of the prophets named Zechariah in Zech. 1:1; Ezek. 5:1 and Isa. 8:19. Uriah is the prophet whose murder by agents of King Jehoiakim is reported in Jer. 26:20–23.84 According to Matt. 23:39, the Jews of the Second Temple period declared, ‘If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have joined them in shedding the blood of the prophets’. My late and revered teacher H. L. Ginsberg went further in his 1961 study, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim, More Fool than Knave’, when he denied the historicity of the account of the murder of Zechariah found in 2 Chron. 24.85 Ginsberg, as editor of NJPS, seems to have gone one step further in eradicating from Hos. 6:5 the text which Moshe Kimchi saw, inter alia, as an allusion to 2 Chron. 24. In the immediate context of Hos. 4–7 that includes Hos. 4:5, in which God condemns both priest and prophet and threatens both of these officials with severe punishment, there is no rational reason to remove from Hos. 6:5 the assertion that God intends to hew down some of the prophets. The brilliant suggestion of Ibn Ezra that the prefixed preposition b means ‘among’, and that the phrase bannĕbîîm therefore denotes ‘some of the prophets’, aligns Hosea with other prophets such as Amos, Micah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, who distinguished between ‘reliable prophets’ such as the latter persons saw themselves as being, and ‘unreliable prophets’, whom the latter prophets condemned. 84.  Concerning the alleged murder of a prophet named Zechariah in Jewish and Christian tradition, see I. Kalimi, ‘Murder in the Jerusalem Temple: The Chronicler’s Story of Zechariah: Literary and Theological Features, Historical Credibility and Impact’, Revue Biblique 117 (2010), pp. 200–209 85.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim, More Fool than Knave’, p. 347.

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At 6:5c MT reads as follows: ûmišpāṭêkā ôr yēṣē, which NJPS renders literally: ‘And the day that dawned [brought on] your punishment’. The literal meaning of the received text is reflected in KJV, which renders as follows: ‘and thy judgments are as the light that goes forth’. KJV transforms MT’s nominal sentence metaphor into a simile. N. H. Tur-Sinai is one of many who have suggested that the correct word division in the final clause of Hos. 6:5 is not MT’s wmšptyk wr yṣ but rather wmšpty kwr yṣ, which results in a verbal sentence consisting of the subject ‘my judicial decision’, the predicate ‘will come forth’, and the adverbial prepositional phrase ‘like light’ (see below in the discussion of Spiegel’s proposal).86 In the emended word division, as sensed by KJV, we have not a metaphor but a simile. Emendation of MT’s word division was proposed already by Graetz.87 Graetz notes that the proposed restoration is supported by LXX, Peshitta, TJ, and the Vulgate. The simile created by the word division found in LXX and advocated, inter alia, by Tur-Sinai, is especially appropriate in the context of Hos. 6:3, where the people of Israel compare God’s appearance to the light of dawn. Interestingly, the short liturgical composition hayyôm hărat ōlām ‘Today is the birthday of the world’, which is sung after each of the three soundings of the shofar in the Additional Service on the Jewish New Year, includes the following supplication, ‘Our eyes depend upon you [God] until you show us favour and publish [wětôṣî kěôr, lit., “you bring forth as light”] mišpāṭēnû [“our sentence/verdict”]’. Not infrequently, ancient Jewish liturgical texts are important not only for the reception history of biblical texts to which they allude or which they quote, but also for the textual criticism of biblical texts, better readings of which are often attested in Jewish liturgical texts. In the case at hand, Hos. 6:3, the medieval Jewish liturgical composition confirms the word division proposed by Graetz and Tur-Sinai in modern times and attested also in LXX. LXX reads καὶ τὸ κρίμα μου ὡς φῶς ἐξελεύσεται, which Glenny renders as follows: ‘and my judgment will go forth like light’.88 S. Spiegel, after surveying the history of interpretation of Hos. 6:5 and after likewise surveying the history of modern biblical research, which slowly and reluctantly admitted that Hosea may have been familiar with the Decalogue (see above at Hos. 4:2; and below at Hos. 12:10; 13:4), notes that in the paleo-Hebrew script n and p are similar and can be 86.  N. H. Tur-Sinai, ‘Gilead is a City of Evildoers (Hos. 6. 7–9)’, in Hallashon WeHassepher, vol. 2, pp. 324–34 (331) (in Hebrew). 87.  Graetz, Emendationes, p. 13. So also Ehrlich, Mikrâ ki-Pheschutô, vol. 3, p. 371; Ehrlich, Randglossen, vol. 5, p. 179. 88.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 4.

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confused.89 Consequently, Spiegel seeks to restore al-kēp ‘on a rock’ in place of the received text’s al-kēn ‘therefore’ so that Hos. 6:5a will then read as follows: al-kēp ḥāṣabtî//bannĕbîîm h[iggadĕ]tî ‘On a rock have I hewn//By prophets made it known’. Indeed the idea, which Spiegel restores in Hos. 6:5, that God has spoken through the prophets (just as according to Spiegel’s restoration God has conveyed his teaching through a text inscribed upon stone tablets), is found in Hos. 12:11, which I render as follows in my commentary below: ‘I spoke through the agency of the prophets, and as for me, prophetic revelation I multiplied, and through the agency of the prophets I communicated’. Spiegel tentatively assumes that the verb that needs to be restored at the beginning of MT’s Hos. 6:5b is higgadĕtî, which, he suggests, was miscopied in antiquity by metathesis and the not uncommon confusion of d and r as hāragtî ‘I slew’, from which we get in the received text hĕragtîm ‘I slew them’. According to Spiegel’s brilliant reading, Hos. 6:6 contains the declaration, which, our prophet would have us believe, is the central message both hewn on the tablets handed over at Sinai/Horeb and conveyed by the prophets of Israel: kî ḥesed ḥāpaṣtî wĕlō zebaḥ// wĕdaat ĕlōhîm mēōlōt ‘That I delight in kindness And not in sacrifice, In the knowledge of God More than in burnt offerings’.90

Significantly, also in Hos. 12:11–12 a diatribe against sacrificial worship is juxtaposed with God’s declaration (reiterated there three times) that he has spoken through the agency of prophets. For the disparagement of sacrifice in the prophecies of Hosea see also Hos. 14:3 and my extensive discussion there. For the idea that ‘knowledge of God’ means obedience to the ethical precepts of the Decalogue see my discussion at Hos. 4:1–2. For the disparagement of sacrifice see also Jeremiah’s assertion, speaking in the name of God, in Jer. 7:22: ‘For when I liberated your ancestors from the land of Egypt I neither spoke with them nor commanded them concerning burnt offering and sacrifice’. This is the most explicit and unequivocal and unconditional disparagement of sacrificial worship in 89.  Spiegel, ‘A Prophetic Attestation of the Decalogue’, p. 136. 90.  So Spiegel, ‘A Prophetic Attestation of the Decalogue’, p. 138.

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the entire prophetic corpus, which Hebrew Scripture inherited from ancient Israel and Judah. Hosea appears to have anticipated Jeremiah, and here, as in other respects, Hosea may have inspired Jeremiah. (Cf. also Amos 5:21–25; Isa. 1:10–17.) Sacrifice also appears to be disparaged in 1 Sam. 15:22–24. However, the context, in which the Prophet Samuel rebukes King Saul for not having annihilated the Amalekites, undermines what would otherwise have been a classic statement of what early twentieth-century Reform rabbis and their teachers (these teachers included S. Spiegel, Professor of Bible at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City at the time when he penned the above-quoted article in honour of the sixty-fifth birthday of that institution’s president, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise) would call ‘prophetic Judaism’ as against the ‘priestly Judaism’ of burnt offering and sacrifice set forth in great detail, inter alia, in Lev. 1–16; Num. 28–29. 6:7–11a These verses, which form the end of the prophecy of rebuke, which began in Hos. 5:1 with the formal opening, ‘Hear this, priests, and pay attention, house of Israel’, are meant to justify God’s reluctance to accept the sincerity and viability of Israel’s commitment to repent in the aftermath of the attack upon Israel’s sovereignty by the armies of Judah, c. 738 BCE.91 Thus in Hos. 6:7–11a our prophet, speaking in the name of God, cites three places where in the past the people of Israel had proved themselves faithless with respect to obedience to the moral code of the Decalogue alluded to in Hos. 4:1–2 (see above). 6:7 wĕhēmmâ kĕādām ābĕrû bĕrît šām bāgĕdû bî Below I explain why this verse is to be understood as follows: ‘But they [Hosea’s contemporaries] are like [the Israelites who in times past at] Adam violated an agreement’. However, the literal meaning of MT is as follows: ‘And they are like Adam. They have violated a covenant. There they committed treachery against me.’ Such an interpretation is anticipated by the Latin Vulgate, which reads as follows: Ipsi autem sicut Adam transgressi sunt pactum ibi praevaricati sunt in me.

91.  See Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, p. 1018; 2nd ed., vol. 9, p. 554.

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Similarly, Rashi (1040–1105) suggests that Heb. kĕādām means kĕādām hārīšōn ‘like the first human’, which is the designation in Rabbinic Hebrew of the biblical character who is known in the Englishspeaking world by the proper name Adam. The source of Rashi’s interpretation is Genesis Rabbah 19:9. Succinctly summarizing a long and involved text in Genesis Rabbah, Rashi is able to account for the locative adverbial expression ‘there’ in Hos. 6:7b as follows: ‘THERE THEY COMMITTED TREACHERY. In the excellent land in which I caused them to dwell [i.e., the land of Israel], THERE THEY COMMITTED TREACHERY AGAINST ME just like the [first] human, whom I caused to enter into the Garden of Eden and who transgressed my commandments.’ With all due respect to the ingenious midrash and with all due respect to Rashi’s ingenious attempt to utilize this midrash to explicate a highly enigmatic text in Hos. 6:7, the interpretation of Rashi glosses over rather than answers the question as to what place is designated as ‘there’ in Hos. 6:7. In light of (1) the fact that the following two verses (8 and 9) each mention a place name where Israel had acted treacherously in violation of the moral precepts of the Decalogue; (2) the fact that the interpretation proposed by the Vulgate and later by Rashi does not adequately account for the expression ‘there’ in the context of Hos. 6:7; and (3) the fact that there is in Palestine a place name Adam, which is mentioned in Josh. 3:16, albeit without reference to any act of treachery, S. L. Brown suggests that we read in Hos. 6:7b, ‘And they in Adam violated a covenant. There they dealt treacherously against Me.’92 Brown assumes that the expression kĕādām in Hos. 6:7 is an instance where MT reads mistakenly b instead of k because the two letters are graphically similar in the square Hebrew script introduced in the Achaemenid period.93 In Josh. 3:15–16 we read as follows with respect to the Israelites’ miraculous crossing of the Jordan River on dry land: ‘Now the Jordan keeps flowing over its entire bed throughout the harvest season. But as soon as the bearers of the Ark reached the Jordan, and the feet of the priests bearing the Ark dipped into the water at its edge, the waters coming down from upstream piled up in a single heap a great way off, at [Heb. bĕ, which is the kethib while the qere is mē “from”] Adam.’ If we follow the qere, it would appear that the piling up of the waters took place 92.  Brown, Hosea, p. 61. 93.  For examples of this interchange in parallel texts in 1 Kgs 22:20 and 2 Chron. 18:19 and in qere and kethib at 2 Kgs 3:14, see Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, p. 231; see also B. J. Roberts, The Old Testament Text and Versions (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1951), p. 93.

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some distance away from Adam. In fact, Brown’s emending the Hebrew prefixed preposition in Hos. 6:7 from kĕ to bĕ suggests that in order to solve the problem of the unidentified ‘there’ we become aware of another problem in the Hebrew text, namely the use of the preposition kĕ ‘like’ where Brown would have preferred the graphically similar bĕ ‘in, at’. However, I would suggest that we adopt Brown’s understanding without changing the prefixed preposition and that we then understand the verse as follows: ‘But they [Hosea’s contemporaries] are like [the Israelites who in times past at] Adam violated an agreement’. Brown suggests also that another reference to the place name Adam between Succoth on the east and Zarethan on the west may lie behind the word hāădāmâ ‘of the earth’ in 1 Kgs 7:46. It appears, therefore, that we can identify the place referred to in v. 7. However, we cannot yet identify the past event, to which Hosea refers in this verse. LXX reflects a Hebrew Vorlage, which read with MT kdm. LXX renders αὐτοὶ δέ εἰσιν ὡς ἄνθρωπος παραβαίνων διαθήκη. ἐκεῖ κατεφρόνησεν μου, which Glenny translates as follows: ‘But they are like a person transgressing a covenant; they despised me’.94 Glenny argues that the scribe responsible for LXX Vaticanus understood the words Γαλααδ πόλις ‘the city of Galaad [Gilead in translations of MT]’ at the beginning of Hos. 6:8 to be the grammatical subject of the predicate κατεφρόνησεν μου ‘they despised me’ at the end of Hos. 6:7.95 Alternatively, Glenny suggests that the implied subject of the verb κατεφρόνησεν ‘they despised’ is ἄνθρωπος ‘the man/person’ in the simile at the beginning of v. 7: Gilĕād qiryat pōălê āwen ăqubbâ middām ‘Gilead is a city of evildoers tracked up with blood’ Apart from this verse and Hos. 12:12 (see below) the place name Gilead refers to a region, specifically the region in Transjordan, which the Israelites acquired in the course of their defensive war against King Og of Bashan and King Sihon of the Amorites, and which was settled by the Israelite tribes of Gad, Reuben, and Manasseh (Num. 32). Here in Hos. 6:8, however, reference is to a city named Gilead. Indeed, M. Noth identifies Gilead the city mentioned in the Bible only here in Hos. 6:8 with the archaeological site of Khirbet Jal‘ad.96 It may well be that the identification of the city of Gilead with evildoing established here in Hos. 6:8 is reflected also in Hos. 12:12; q.v. 94.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 47. 95.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 115. 96.  M. Noth, ‘Gilead und Gad’, ZDPV 75 (1959), pp. 14–73.

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On the other hand, there is a city called Ramoth-gilead mentioned six times in 1 Kgs 22 as a city that properly belonged to Israel but which had been occupied by the kingdom of Aram. It is related there that King Ahab of Israel was killed on the field of battle in an attempt to recover Ramoth-gilead from Aram. It was at that same Ramoth-gilead that the prophet Elisha anointed Jehu son of Jehoshaphat the son of Nimshi as king of Israel. Ironically, it was Jehu whose massacre of the children of the dynasty of Ahab is lauded in 2 Kgs 9–10 but loudly condemned in Hos. 1:4; see my commentary there. The noun form qiryat is the construct of the noun qiryâ denoting ‘city’. The detached form is found in Deut. 2:36; 3:4; Isa. 1:24, 26; 22:2; 25:2; 26:5; 32:13; Hab. 2:8, 12, 17; Prov. 11:10; 29:8; Job 39:7; Lam. 2:11, while the construct form is found in Isa. 24:10; 25:3; 29:1; 33:20; Ps. 48:3; Prov. 10:15, as well as here in Hos. 6:8. The form miqqiryat ‘from the city of’ is found in Num. 21:28 and Prov. 18:19. The form haqqiryâ denoting ‘the city’ is found in 1 Kgs 1:41, 45, and miqqiryâ ‘from the city’ only in Mic. 4:10. The expression pōălê āwen, literally ‘doers of evil’ (only in the plural), is attested altogether 24 times in the entire Bible, mostly in the book of Psalms. (See, e.g., Pss. 14:4; 28:3; 36:13; 53:5.) An expression with the opposite meaning, pōēl ṣedeq ‘doer of good’, is attested only once, in Ps. 15:2. There this singular expression appears in the grammatical singular. Insofar as there is no other biblical reference to the city of Gilead as a city tracked up with blood, Macintosh suggests that the prophet here alludes to the fifty Gileadites who joined with Pekah son of Remaliahu in conspiring to murder King Pekah son of King Menahem and to usurp the throne on behalf of Pekah son of Remaliahu.97 (See 2 Kgs 15:25.) The date assigned by Cogan and Tadmor is 735 BCE. 6:9 ûkĕḥakkê îš gĕdûdîm ḥeber kōhănîm derek yĕrṣṣĕḥû-Šekmâ kî zimmâ āśû ‘Like the ambuscade of bandits, who committed murder on the road to Shechem is the gang of priests. For they have encouraged depravity’ Undoubtedly, the gang of priests referred to here is the same gang of priests that Hosea has been castigating since Hos. 4:4 and with renewed zeal in Hos. 5:5 and by implication in Hos. 6:6, where the prophet, 97.  Macintosh Hosea, p. 240.

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speaking in the name of God, says, ‘Indeed, I delight in kindness rather than sacrifice, and in knowledge of God (i.e., obedience to the moral precepts of the Decalogue) rather than burnt offerings’. In his classic work, The Prophets, A. J. Heschel writes, ‘Man’s sense of injustice is a poor analogy to God’s sense of injustice. The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanour; to God, it is a disaster. Our reaction is disapproval; God’s reaction is something no language can convey.’98 From the beginning of Hos. 4, our prophet has been charging the priests with failure to fulfil their responsibility to teach the people to know the difference between right and wrong. He blames the priests, therefore, for the rampant violation of the Ten Commandments referred to in Hos. 4:1–2 and following. Since the priests are held directly responsible for rampant murder it is indeed fitting to compare them to a gang of bandits who murder on the road to Shechem. Qyl notes that in the medieval collection of Rabbinic midrashim on the book of the Twelve Prophets there appears what would seem to be the more than obvious suggestion that Hosea might be referring to the massacre of the people of Shechem by Jacob’s treacherous children, Simeon and Levi, as recorded in Gen. 34:25–29 and as condemned by Jacob in his deathbed charge to his twelve sons in Gen. 49:5: ‘Simeon and Levi are a pair; their weapons are tools of lawlessness, let not my person be counted in their assembly, for when angry they slay men, and when pleased they maim oxen. Cursed be their anger so fierce, and their wrath so relentless. I will divide them in Jacob, scatter them in Israel.’99 Alternatively, Qyl suggests that Hosea may be referring to Judg. 9:25, 43–56, where it is recorded that the people of Shechem engaged in violent crimes including but not limited to planting ambuscades on hilltops and attacking passers-by (v. 25 there). As noted by Qyl, referring to the behaviour of both the persons who committed murder on the road to Shechem and the priests in the prophet’s own time who seem not to chastise the men of Israel who cheat on their wives while supposedly away from home to celebrate a religious festival (Hos. 4:10–15) as zimmâ ‘depravity’, is totally ironic and totally appropriate. Indeed, this term is often a synonym for specifically sexual depravity, which is precisely the crime which the brothers of Dinah had imputed to Shechem son of Hamor. They actually used the synonymous term nĕbālâ. It is probably not an accident that the classical medieval Hebrew commentators on Hos. 6:9 have rather consistently avoided 98.  Heschel, The Prophets, pp. 284–85. 99.  Qyl, Hosea, p. 49.

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seeing there a reference to either Gen. 34 or Judg. 9, probably because these commentators found those two passages to be rather embarrassing to the Jewish people. One may compare the instructions provided in Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Rosh ha-Shanah, not to include in the liturgical recitation in the service for the New Year of biblical verses concerning God’s kingship, God’s memory, and the sounding of the shofar any verse that refers to the sins of Israel and punishment thereof. (See b. Roš Haš. 32b.) 6:10a bĕbêt Yiśrāēl rāîtî šaărîriyyâ This is the reading of the kethib or consonantal text, which is found in the handwritten synagogue scrolls of the book of the Twelve Prophets from which the prophetic lection is read in affluent synagogues, especially those practicing the Lithuanian rite. The consonantal text is also referred to in Rabbinic Literature as the masoret. The marginal reading or qere in printed editions of the Bible and in pointed codices from the Middle Ages substitutes šaărûriyyâ for šaărîriyyâ. In Rabbinic Literature the variant which is read aloud and which is not found in the synagogue scrolls is called also miqra, meaning ‘what is read’. (On these terms see the discussion in the Introduction.) The form šaărûriyyâ is widely employed in Modern Hebrew to mean ‘scandal’. Neither that form nor the kethib šaărîriyyâ appears elsewhere in Hebrew Scripture. The related form šaărûrâ ‘scandal’ appears twice in the book of Jeremiah, at Jer. 5:30 and 23:14. The first of these two contexts reminds us of Hosea’s charges against the spiritual leadership (truly an oxymoron in both contexts) in Hos. 4:4–5 and 5:1. Jeremiah 5:30 reads as follows: ‘An appalling thing, a scandal has happened in the land: The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests are in league with them, and my people like it so, but what will you do at the end of it?’.100 Jeremiah 23:13–14 reads as follows: ‘In the prophets of Samaria I saw something repulsive. They prophesied in the name of Baal, and they misled my people Israel. And in the prophets of Israel I have seen a scandal. Adultery, and engaging in falsehood, and encouraging evil doers not to turn back from their wickedness. To me all of them are like Sodom, and her [Jerusalem’s] inhabitants are like Gomorrah.’ In both of these Jeremian passages, as in Hos. 6:10a, the term šaărîriyyâ ‘scandal’ and its related forms all refer to the phenomenon of clergy-persons who appear not only 100.  See the discussion in McKane, Jeremiah, vol. 1, pp. 136–37; and cf. NJPS.

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not to discourage violation of the moral precepts of the Decalogue but also to participate in and to encourage immoral behaviour. The third and final instance in Hebrew Scripture of a noun cognate of šaărîriyyâ is the form šaărurit found in Jer. 18:13, where we read as follows (following NJPS): ‘Assuredly, thus said Yhwh: Inquire among the nations: Who has heard anything like this? Maiden Israel has done a very scandalous thing.’ Jeremiah then explains in Jer. 18:14–15 that the scandal committed by the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem is worship of gods other than Yhwh, the God of Israel. The only other Hebrew cognate of the series of nouns denoting scandalous behaviour, one in Hos. 6:10 and three in the book of Jeremiah, is the plural adjective šōărîm ‘loathsome’, attested only in Jer. 29:17, where we read as follows: ‘…and I shall treat them as loathsome figs that cannot be eaten because they are so sour’. As for Hos. 6:10a, the clause should be rendered as follows: ‘In the house of Israel I have seen a scandal’. The two following clauses seem to repeat two of the major charges made by Hosea, speaking in the name of God, in 4:2, 10–18; 5:3–5 (and see also below in 7:14; 9:1–3), namely that sexual license is rampant in the Northern Kingdom during the reign of King Menahem son of Gadi (747–737 BCE) and that the culprits are the men of Israel. The clauses, Hos. 6:10b–c, which specify the nature of the scandal referred to in Hos. 6:10a, read as follows: šām zĕnût lĕEprayim niṭmā Yiśrāēl ‘There is Ephraim’s adultery. Israel has defiled himself’ It should be obvious that in this context, as in Hos. 5:3, where we also have Ephraim and Israel in parallel clauses and where the verb hiznêtā means ‘you have committed adultery’, we have two parallel predicates referring to men engaging in extra-marital sexual affairs. In Hos. 5:3, as in Hos. 6:10b, we have the identical clause nitmā Yiśrāēl ‘Israel has defiled himself’, a classic example of the reflexive use of the niphal conjugation (see GKC #51c). While in Hos. 5:3 the preceding clause states, ‘For indeed, you have committed adultery, Ephraim’, here in Hos. 6:10b the first of the two parallel clauses referring to the licentious behaviour of Ephraim//Israel consists of a nominal sentence, which Macintosh translates, ‘There is Ephraim’s promiscuity’.101 101.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 245. Concerning noun/verb parallelism in biblical poetry, see D. Grossberg, ‘Noun/Verb Parallelism: Syntactic or Asyntactic’, JBL 99 (1980), pp. 481–88; Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry, pp. 156–58, 346, 377. Neither of these authorities mentions Hos. 6:10.

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Modern commentators widely agree that the standard Hebrew text does not provide an explanation of the place referred to as ‘there’ in Hos. 6:10b. Just as the appearance of the expression ‘there’ in Hos. 5:7b inspires many commentators to understand the noun ādām in Hos. 5:7a as a place name, Adam, so do many modern commentators emend ‘House of Israel’ in Hos. 6:10a to Bethel.102 6:11 gam-Yĕhûdâ šāt qāṣîr lāk ‘Indeed, Judah reaped a harvest of you’ It is commonly understood that this clause represents one of the five instances where Judean prophets have added clauses which interfere with the metric structure of the original Northern Israelite speeches and which attempt to draw out moral lessons for the future well-being of Judah from the immoral behaviour of the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom, which led to its demise in 722 BCE. (See ‘Judahite Glosses’ in my Introduction, above.) However, with all due respect to the scores of scholars who have treated Hos. 6:11a as a post-722 BCE Judahite gloss, the assertion that Judah reaped a harvest at the expense of Israel’s moral decay, which left Israel unprepared to deal with the military assault by Judah upon Israel, is totally congruent with the assertion in Hos. 5:8–9 that, in fact, Judah had attacked Israel and annexed Israelite territory. Thus Hos. 6:11a, which describes Judah’s victory over Israel in 743 BCE, would constitute a fitting conclusion to the speech that begins in Hos. 5:1 and ends in Hos. 6:11a, a speech in which it is asserted that it was the moral depravity of Israel that led to Judah’s incursion and in turn to the appeal to King Tiglath-pileser III of Assyria for help and, in turn, to Israel’s avowed attempt to repent, to which Hosea, speaking in the name of God, replies in Hos. 6:4–10 that in consideration of Israel’s scandalous behaviour, the immediate acceptance of Israel’s commitment to change his behaviour is, to say the least, questionable. I follow NJPS in dividing in half what is designated as Hos. 6:11 in Hebrew editions of the Hebrew Scripture since the sixteenth century CE and assigning Hos. 6:11a, gam-Yĕhûdâ šāt qāṣîr lāk ‘Also Judah reaped a harvest of you’, which ends with the Masoretic accent etnaḥtā or caesura (hence the pausal form of the word ‘to you’ [masculine] lāk, rather than the medial form lĕkā) to ch. 6 and the second half of that verse, bĕšûbî 102.  So also BHS; and so also Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, p. 1020; 2nd ed., vol. 9, p. 554. NJPS prefers the emendation Beth-shean.

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šĕbût ammî ‘When I would restore the fortune of my people’, to ch. 7. For the justification of this deviation from the division into units found in the reliable medieval manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, see immediately below in my commentary on Hos. 7.

C h a p t er s 7 a n d 8

The end of the unit that concludes with Hos. 7:12 is marked in the standard Hebrew text with a blank space the length of 11 letters (seven blank spaces at the end of the line in the middle of which v. 12 terminates and another four blank spaces at the beginning of the line where v. 13 begins). The speech begins not with Hos. 7:1, as suggested both by the Chapter Division #7 and the long space (a blank line in the Aleppo Codex) at the end of ch. 6. In fact, this unit, which is numbered 7:1–12 in printed editions of the Bible in Hebrew, must begin immediately after Hos. 6:11a, which is commonly treated as a post-722 BCE Judahite gloss. However, LXX and the Vulgate concur with MT in treating Hos. 6:11b as belonging to the previous chapter. Moreover, the division between Hos. 6, ending with ‘when I would restore the fortune of my people’, and Hos. 7, beginning with ‘When I sought to heal Israel’, is followed also by KJV and Jerusalem Bible (ed. Jones, 1966). Modern scholars who assign Hos. 6:11b to ch. 7 include Ehrlich,1 Harper,2 and so RSV, NEB, NJPS, and NRSV. Wolff, like NJPS, treats Hos. 6:11b–7:1 as a unit without explaining why he deviates from the chapter division and its roots in ancient Jewish tradition as transmitted in the division into pericopes in the famous medieval codices.3 NJPS leaves a space equivalent to two lines of text after Hos. 6:11a, and it attaches Hos. 6:11b to ch. 7, indicating that this division deviates from MT in two subtle ways. The first of the two subtle indications that this division deviates from MT is the Hebrew–English version of NJPS’s printing the letter pe, found in Masoretic manuscripts such as the Leningrad Manuscript, which is the basis of the Hebrew text of the bilingual NJPS as also of Biblia Hebraica3, BHS, and Biblia Hebraica Quinta. As explained by Tov,4 this abbreviation p stands for ‘open paragraph’, which is to say the beginning of a new topic highlighted by leaving a space at the end of 1.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, p. 372; and Randglossen, vol. 5, p. 181. 2.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 292. 3.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 123; see also Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 48. 4.  Tov, Textual Criticism, pp. 48–49.

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the final verse of the previous topic. The second subtle way in which NJPS indicates that its treating Hos. 6:11b as the beginning of a new speech by the prophet Hosea deviates from MT is by means of the numbering of the verses so that Hos. 7:1 begins after the verse with which the speech seems to begin by the joining of Hos. 6:11b to the chapter marked as 7 on the English side and the corresponding Hebrew numeral zayin on the Hebrew side. The reasons for attaching Hos. 6:11b to ch. 7 are as follows: If, as is commonly argued, 6:11a is a Judahite gloss which interferes with the meter, then either 6:11b follows naturally upon 6:10, where it would have appeared before the Judahite interpolation, or it belongs to ch. 7. The reason that it could not have followed upon Hos. 6:10 is as follows: If that were the case, the original Hos. 6:10 + Hos. 6:11b would read as follows: ‘In the House of Israel [or Bethel] I have seen a scandal. There is Ephraim’s fornication. Israel has defiled himself when I restored the fortunes of my people.’ Now, let us assume that I am right in treating Hos. 6:11a not as a Judahite gloss but rather a flashback to the description of Judah’s military assault upon Israel referred to in Hos. 5:8–10. In that case Hos. 6:11a–b would read as follows: ‘Indeed, Judah reaped a harvest from you when I restored the fortunes of my people’. What kind of fortune can have been restored to my people, i.e., the people of the Northern Kingdom, who are referred to throughout Hos. 4–14, either as a people that engages in fornication or by that people’s having been attacked by Judah as described in Hos. 5:8–10? Ehrlich states matter-of-factly that Hos. 6:11b has by scribal error been detached from the beginning of ch. 7.5 He does not supply a rationale. Neither does NJPS. The reason for attaching Hos. 6:11b to ch. 7 is that the clause ‘When I would restore the fortune of my people’ suggests that after the long diatribe in Hos. 6:4–10, in which the prophet, speaking in the name of God, explained that God is not quite ready to accede to Israel’s professed desire to repent and to be forgiven, God does indeed contemplate restoring the fortunes of Israel. The same idea is expressed in Hos. 7:1, ‘When I would heal Israel’, which refers back to the metaphor of disease in reference to Israel’s moral corruption that led to his vulnerability in the face of a Judean attack described in Hos. 5:13–6:2. For the expression šāb šĕbût ‘restore the fortunes of’ see also Deut. 30:3; Jer. 29:14; 30:3, 18; 31:23; 32:44; 33:7, 11, 26; 48:47; 49:6, 39; Ezek. 16:53; 29:14; 39:25; Amos 9:14; Zeph. 2:7; 3:20; Pss. 14:7; 53:7; 85:2; Job 42:10. The expression also appears in precisely the same 5.  Ehrlich, Mikdra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, p. 372.

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meaning in Old Aramaic in the eighth-century BCE treaties from Sefire. With all due respect to our argument that the clause ‘When I would restore the fortune of my people’ (6:11b) is totally in harmony with and congruent with 7:1, ‘When I would heal Israel’, Macintosh raises the reasonable objection that the two temporal clauses (6:11b and 7:1), which are thus joined together, seem not to be congruent with Hosea’s usually terse style.6 The reasonable answer is that Hosea’s style is not always terse, as we have seen repeatedly in Hos. 4–6. As for Macintosh’s further objection that the expression šāb šĕbût is a distinctively eschatological expression, it would seem that the appearance of the expression in Job and in the Sefire Treaties should have long ago put to rest the wrong assumption found in some English versions of Ps. 126:1 that the expression denotes restoring from exile. Ultimately, there is no escape from the fact that Hos. 6:11b makes no sense at the end of ch. 6 and makes perfect sense at the beginning of ch. 7. 7:1 kĕropî lĕYiśrāēl wĕniglâ ăwōn Eprayim wĕrāōt Šomrōn ‘When I sought to heal Israel, the iniquity of Ephraim was exposed and the evils perpetrated by Samaria’ Here, as in Hos. 5:3; 6:10; 10:6; and 11:8, we have the names Israel// Ephraim employed in parallel clauses where both names refer to the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom. However, in the four other cases cited here the word order is Ephraim//Israel, and the respective verses exhibit the rhetorical device of synonymous parallelism. In Hos. 7:1a, on the other hand, the order is Israel//Ephraim, and the parallelism is synthetic. In addition, instead of a pair of names for the Northern Kingdom and its inhabitants we have three names: Israel, Ephraim, Samaria. To Hosea’s unexpected use of a triplet where we would have expected a pair, we should compare Hos. 5:1, where, instead of šiměû děbar-Yhwh ‘Hear (second person masculine/common plural imperative) the word of Yhwh’ found in Hos. 4:1 and 23 other times in the prophetic corpus (see my commentary at Hos. 4:1), we find the following triplet: ‘Hear this, priests, pay attention, house of Israel, and royal house, give ear’. For the use in the book of Hosea and elsewhere in Hebrew Scripture of a nation’s land to refer to the inhabitants of that land, see Hos. 1:2c and my commentary there.

6.  Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 249–50.

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In 7:1b we find corresponding in number to the three names of the Northern Kingdom referred to in 7:1a a list of three crimes perpetrated by Israel//Ephraim//Samaria: kî pāălû šāqer wĕgannāb yābô pāšaṭ gĕdûd baḥûṣ ‘They behaved treacherously; thieves break in; raiding bands are in the street’ In this translation, heavily influenced by NJPS, I have paraphrased as plurals most of the nouns and verbs in the second and third clauses. In the Hebrew original the prophet employs singular nouns and verbs as collectives to express the ubiquity of crime in eighth-century BCE Samaria. TJ, followed by Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Kimhi, takes it for granted that the singular nouns and verbs in the second and third clauses of Hos. 7:1b refer to the proliferation of thieves who break into private homes by night and marauding bands of criminals who threaten public tranquillity during the daylight hours. Dearman translates literally, ‘They indeed [= kî, understood as an emphatic particle] deal falsely, the thief enters in and a band marauds in the street’.7 Andersen and Freedman note that the chiastic structure of the Hebrew word order, which is verb direct object, subject verb, verb subject, is typical of the poetry of Hosea.8 7:2 ûbal-yōmērû lilĕbābām kol-rāātām zākartî attâ sĕbābûm maalĕlêhem neged pānay hāyû ‘However, they [the people of Israel/Ephraim/ Samaria] do not say to themselves, “I (God) recalled all of their wickedness”. Now their evil deeds have surrounded them. They [their evil deeds] were before my face’ This verse reiterates with greater clarity what the prophet, speaking in the name of God, had declared in v. 1, wĕniglâ ăwōn Eprayim wĕrāōt Šomrōn ‘the iniquity of Ephraim was exposed, and the evils perpetrated by Samaria’. 7:3–7: Hosea’s Castigation of Political Anarchy in Israel Neither MT according to Codex Aleppo nor LXX according to Codex Vaticanus recognize a new literary unit at Hos. 7:3. However, Macintosh, Andersen and Freedman, and Rudolph all concur in treating Hos. 7:3–7

7.  Dearman, Hosea, p. 200. 8.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 445.

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as a unit, whose theme is the political murder of several kings of Israel.9 As suggested by S. Paul,10 the background of the unit Hos. 7:3–7 is ‘the vortex of political anarchy which led to the accession of six kings within a little more than fourteen years’. The period of time in question is 747–724 BCE. I follow Tadmor in dating the speeches contained in Hos. 4–14 to the reign of Menahem son of Gadi (747–737 BCE) and more precisely to the period prior to King Uzziah’s war with Assyria (738 BCE). Consequently, one cannot avoid the conclusion that the parallelism of incrementally increasing numbers in Hos. 7:3, melek//śārîm ‘king// rulers’ refers specifically to the three kings—Zechariah//Shallum and Menahem), who reigned in Israel from 747–737 BCE—two of whom, Shallum and Menahem, gained the throne following the murder of the previous king. Thus it is recorded in 2 Kgs 15:29: ‘Jeroboam [son of Joash, i.e., Jeroboam II (788–747)] slept with his ancestors, with the kings of Israel, and his son Zechariah reigned in his stead’. The latter verse means that Jeroboam II died of a natural death and was succeeded by his son Zechariah in 747 BCE. The unhappy continuation of the story alluded to in Hos. 7:3–5 is found in 2 Kgs 15:8–10: ‘In the thirty-eighth year of King Azariah of Judah, Zechariah son of Jeroboam became king over Israel in Samaria for six months. He did what was displeasing to Yhwh, as his ancestors had done. He did not deviate from the sins which Jeroboam [i.e., Jeroboam I] son of Nebat [928–907 BCE; the first of the kings of Israel after the division of King Solomon’s kingdom into Israel in the north and Judah in the south], made Israel commit. Shallum son of Jabesh conspired against him [Zechariah], and he attacked him publically, and he killed him, and he reigned in his stead.’ The unhappy story of three kings succeeding one another, two of them as the result of assassination by a usurper, continues in 2 Kgs 15:13–14, where we read as follows: ‘Shallum son of Jabesh began to reign in the thirty-ninth year of King Uzziah of Judah. He reigned for one month in Samaria. Then Menahem son of Gadi left Tirzah and arrived in Samaria. He attacked Shallum son of Jabesh in Samaria, and he killed him, and he [Menahem] reigned in his stead.’

9.  See Macintosh, Hosea, p. 255; Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 447; and Rudolph, Hosea, p. 146. 10.  S. Paul, ‘The Image of the Oven and the Cake in Hosea VII 4–10’, VT 18 (1968), pp. 114–20 (114).

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7:3–5 bĕrāātām yĕśammĕḥû melek//ûbĕkḥăšêhem śārîm ‘In their malice they made a party for a king//and in their treachery (for) rulers’ T. H. Gaster notes that modern scholars commonly emend yĕśammĕḥû ‘they made (the king) rejoice, they made a party for (the king)’ to yimšĕḥû ‘they anointed, consecrated (a king)’.11 As we shall see below in Hos. 7:5, what is alluded to in Hos. 7:3 and spelled out in all of its gory details in Hos. 7:5 is the fact that at least one of the two kings, Zechariah or Shallum, who was assassinated by his successor, was, in turn, assassinated by the perpetrator’s or his agents’ having put poison into the wine the king was given to drink either at a birthday party or at the ceremony of his installation as king. Since the first of those two kings is said to have reigned for sixth months and the second for one month (2 Kgs 15:8–14), it is more likely that the assassination took place at a birthday party rather than at an inaugural banquet. Hence Gaster’s emendation is fortuitous. I discuss Hos. 7:5 at this point because the two verses 7:3 and 7:5 elucidate each other. Following my analysis of 7:5, I return to discuss 7:4. 7:5 yôm malkēnû heḥĕlû śārîm ḥămat miyyāyin māšak yādô et-lōṣĕṣîm ‘The day(s) on which they made our king sick//(successive) rulers by means of poison instead of wine. He (one or more of the two assassinated kings) stretched out his hand to mocking persons (who handed him the poison in a wine goblet)’ This interpretation of the phrase et-lōṣĕṣîm ‘to mocking persons’ assumes of necessity that just as in at least two cases (Exod. 23:17 and Jer. 25:9) the standard Hebrew text of the Bible employs the preposition el ‘to’ where we would expect the sign of the accusative et, and in one case employs the preposition el ‘to’ where we would expect the preposition et meaning ‘with’ (Hos. 12:5; see below in this commentary),12 so here is the apparently accusative particle et an anomalous substitute/variant for the ubiquitous preposition el? The necessity to extrapolate from the infrequent and generally unnoticed use of el to mean et and to suggest that here in Hos. 7:5 we have a rare instance of et meaning el is underscored by the fact that two 11.  T. H. Gaster, ‘Short Notes’, VT 4 (1954), p. 78. 12.  See M. I. Gruber, ‘el = et: An Unrecognized Lexeme in Biblical Hebrew’, in Marbeh Hokma: Studies in Memory of Victor Avigdor Hurowitz (ed. Shamir Yona et al.; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2015), pp. 269–81.

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of the most important sources for Hebrew lexicography produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have virtually thrown up their hands in despair of making sense of Hos. 7:5. NJPS translates ‘He gave his hand to traitors’, which assumes with my own rendering above that here in Hos. 7:5 the particle et has the meaning of the preposition el. The marginal note in NJPS reads as follows: ‘he trusted traitors; but meaning of verse uncertain’. DCH (4:545) notes that the clause māšak yādô et-lōṣĕṣîm means ‘he stretched out his hand with scoffers’. However, seeing that this makes no sense in the context which refers to the king’s having been deluded into drinking a poison draught at a feast given in his honour, DCH suggests that the best solution would be to emend māšak yādô ‘he stretched out his hand’ to read māśak yênô ‘he mixed his wine’. With this emendation, which involves understanding the second radical of the verb as ś rather than š and substituting the object yênô for the object yādô, the final clause of Hos. 7:5 means that the king, who was assassinated by means of his usurper enemy’s having substituted poison or wine laced with poison for pure wine diluted his wine with water, as was the custom in antiquity,13 and that he did so in the company of the mocking persons who made fun of the king by poisoning him at his birthday party or inauguration banquet. The advantage of my own interpretation is that it requires neither revocalization of the consonantal text nor emendation of MT. In either case, the form lōṣĕṣîm is understood to be a polel conjugation present participle of the root lyṣ meaning ‘scorn, mock’. The polel participle is found primarily in verbal roots whose middle radical is y or w. In general, Biblical Hebrew prefers to double the final radical of such roots and to create polel forms rather than to double the middle radical and create piel forms. The purpose of both strategies is to create a transitive verb/participle from a root whose meaning in the qal is intransitive. In an earlier study, I explained my interpretation of the phrase ḥămat miyāyin to mean ‘poison instead of wine’.14 There it is explained that the noun form ḥămat is the characteristically Phoenician (and Northern Israelite Hebrew) form of the noun, whose unattached form in Standard (Jerusalem dialect) Biblical Hebrew is ḥēmâ ‘poison’, while the construct state form in Standard Biblical Hebrew is ḥămat. The form ḥēmâ in the meaning ‘poison’ is attested in Jer. 25:15: ‘Take from me this wine-cup containing poison [Heb. kōs hayyayin haḥēmâ], and make all the nations 13.  Cf. Prov. 9:2 and the extensive discussion in Gruber, ANCANE, vol. 2, p. 529 n. 1. 14.  Gruber, ANCANE, vol. 2, p. 527.

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to whom I send you drink of it’. For the construct form ḥămat designating ‘poison’ in Biblical Hebrew, see Job 21:19–20: ‘[You say], “God stores up punishment for one’s children”, but [I say], Let him (God) pay it back to him so that he may know. Let his own eyes see his cup [Heb. kyd], and let him drink of the Almighty’s poison’;15 see also 2 Chron. 36:16: ‘They were mocking God’s messengers and despising his words and scoffing at his prophets Yhwh’s poison/venom [Heb. ḥămat], which penetrated his people to the point that there was no antidote’. As for my interpretation of the preposition mi(n) meaning ‘instead of’ in Hos. 7:5a, cf. Ps. 52:5: ‘You delight in evil instead of good, in falsehood instead of speaking truth’; Ps. 45:8: ‘You love what is right and you despise wickedness. Consequently, God, your God, anointed you with oil of gladness instead of anyone of your peers [mēḥăbērêkā].’ Other unattached noun forms in Biblical Hebrew with final t rather than final â include ḥēmōt in Ps. 76:11, denoting ‘poison/venom’, and ḥēmôt in Prov. 22:24, denoting ‘anger’, as well as ḥokmōt, denoting ‘wisdom’ in Ps. 49:4; Prov. 1:20; 9:1; and 24:7.16 LXX reads as follows at Hos. 7:5: Ἡμέραι τῶν βασιλέον ὑμῶν, ἢρξαντο οἱ ἄρχοντες θυμοῦσθαι ἐξέτεινε τὴν χεῖρα αὐτοῦ μετὰ λοιμῶν, which means ‘In the days of our kings the rulers began to become inflamed with wine. He stretched out his hand with pestilent people.’ It is abundantly clear that while LXX understood every word of the Hebrew text that we have and that the Hebrew Vorlage of LXX was virtually verbatim the Hebrew text we now call MT, LXX interprets yôm malkēnû heḥĕlû not as I did, ‘the day they made our king sick’, which takes the noun yôm ‘day’ as an adverbial expression telling us when they (unnamed persons) made the king sick. In MT the noun malkēnû ‘our king’, appears to be the direct object of the verb heḥĕlû ‘they made sick’, which is construed as a causative hiphil from a root ḥly meaning ‘be sick’. LXX, on the other hand, construes the verb heḥĕlû as a hiphil referring to a person, place, or thing entering into a certain condition (GKC #53e), in this case the condition of beginning as in Gen. 4:26 where the huphal, i.e., the passive of the hiphil, of the verbal root ḥll appears as follows: ‘Then it was begun to call upon the name of Yhwh’. Similarly the hiphil construct infinitive of that same root in Gen. 11:6: ‘And this is what they have begun to do’. Thus LXX at Hos. 7:5 construes the verb heḥĕlû as a third person plural perfect hiphil of the root ḥll, meaning ‘they began’, and yôm malkēnû as a temporal adverbial modifier of ‘they began’, informing us that whatever 15.  See the discussion in Gruber, ANCANE, vol. 2, pp. 528–29. 16.  See the extensive discussion in Gruber, ANCANE, vol. 2, p. 527 n. 1.

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the unnamed persons began to do happened ‘in the days of our kings’, construing the Hebrew consonantal text mlknw not as meaning malkēnû ‘our king’ but as meaning mĕlākênû ‘our kings’ and expressing the perspective of the LXX translator of the book of Hosea that ‘the era of our kings’, i.e., the First Temple period, was a long time ago. In addition, LXX construes Heb. śārîm not as a plural synonym of melek ‘king’ and another direct object of a transitive verb meaning ‘poison’, but rather as referring to the otherwise unnamed persons who perpetrated whatever it is that was perpetrated in 7:5. Quite as reasonably as everything else that LXX has done so far with respect to 7:5, the translator of the Old Greek version of Hosea misconstrues the expression ḥămat miyāyin not as I construed it as meaning ‘poison instead of wine’, but rather ‘heat/being inflamed by means of wine’. Just as according to the Hebrew text of Hos. 4:11 becoming inebriated from drinking wine led men to commit adultery, so according to LXX at Hos. 7:5 becoming inebriated from drinking wine led officials in the government of the Northern Kingdom to get rowdy. What follows at the end of Hos. 7:5 in LXX is that a typical member of the group of persons called archontes ‘leaders’, joined in lending a hand to the basest of persons. By a series of judgments concerning the meaning of ambiguous expressions in 7:5, LXX has, albeit not by any design, completely eliminated from 7:5 the allusion to the accounts of political assassinations found in 1 Kgs 15, which form a most plausible background to what is described in MT at Hos. 7:5.17 As I demonstrate in my commentary below at Hos. 8:4, in the pair of nouns melek//śārîm, which appears twice in Hos. 7 (vv. 3, 5) and once in Hos. 8 (v. 10), both of the nouns designate ‘king, monarch, ruler’. Specifically, Hosea refers here in 7:3 to the two kings who were assassinated in 747 BCE. It is reported in 2 Kgs 15:10 that Zechariah son of Jeroboam II ruled for six months until he was assassinated by Shallum son of Jabesh, who made himself king of Israel. The latter king ruled for only one lunar month (yeraḥ yāmîm), at the end of which time he in turn was assassinated by Menahem son of Gadi (747–734 BCE).18 17.  Concerning the question as to when and under what circumstances the noun ḥēmâ and its cognates refer to ‘heat’ and when to ‘poison’, see the extensive discussion in Gruber, ANCANE, pp. 513–50. 18.  Concerning the assassination first of Zechariah and later of Shallum see Ilan Abecassis, ‘ “And smote him, and slew him, and reigned in his stead” (2 Kings 15,30): Political Assassinations in the Ancient Near East’ (PhD diss., Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2009), pp. 83–85. See also a forthcoming monograph promised by Christopher A. Rollston, Royal Assassination in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (forthcoming).

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In Hos. 7:3 the parallel pair melek//śārîm, in which the first member of the pair is singular and the second is plural, is not fortuitous. What we have here is, in fact, an instance of the rhetorical device called parallelism of the ascending numbers one/two. The first clause refers to the first assassination (Zechariah), while the second clause refers to two assassinations (Zechariah and Shallum). In general, in Hebrew Scripture where we have parallelism of ascending numbers the numbers are mentioned. However, m. Soṭah 7:1–2 juxtaposes a list of seven and a list of eight, suggesting that the two lists constitute a graded numerical sequence.19 Having made perfect sense of Hos. 7:3 and 7:5 we can now appreciate the ingenious exegesis of the seemingly enigmatical 7:4 offered by S. M. Paul.20 Here MT reads as follows: kullām mĕnāăpîm kĕmô tānûr bōērāh mēōpeh yišbōt mēîr millûš bāṣēq ad-ḥumṣātô

which should be translated as follows: ‘All of them are continually engaged in adultery Like a stove fired by a baker Who desists from stoking only From the kneading of the dough until its leavening’.

Similarly, NJPS, which, however, does not take note of the fact that masculine piel of the verb np refers to habitual adultery committed by males, as noted in my commentary at Hos. 4:14, where I cited the use of the participle in question in m. Soṭah 9:9. In any case, NJPS’s marginal note (first published in 1978) already alludes to Paul’s emendation of MT’s mĕnāăpîm to ănēpîm ‘they are raging’. It is quite understandable that given the frequent references in the book of Hosea to adultery, both metaphorical (Hos. 1–3) and real (Hos. 4:10–15; 5:3; 6:10; 7:14; 19.  Concerning the graded numerical sequence in Hebrew Scripture see, inter alia, Roth, ‘The Numerical Sequence s/x+1’, pp. 300–311; M. M. Haran, ‘Biblical Studies’, Tarbiz 39 (1969), pp. 109–36 (in Hebrew); concerning the graded numerical sequence in the Mishnah, see M. I. Gruber, ‘Rewritten Deuteronomy in 1QS and in m. Soṭah 7:5’, in Mishneh Todah: Studies in Deuteronomy and Itsw Cultural Environment in Honor of J. H. Tigay (ed. N. S. Fox, D. A. Glatt-Gilad, and M. J. Williams; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009), pp 233–49 (141). 20.  Paul, ‘The Image of the Oven and the Cake’, p. 115.

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9:1), ancient copyists might well have miscopied an original klm npym meaning ‘all of them are enraged’ as klm mnpym meaning ‘all of them habitually commit adultery’. The transformation of the hypothetical original text now restored by Paul to the received text required only one instance of dittography, i.e., repeating the m at the end of kûlām at the beginning of the next word and one instance of metathesis by means of which the positions of  and n in the second word of Hos. 7:4a were reversed. Paul supplies an extensive list of commentaries and studies by outstanding biblical scholars of the first half of the twentieth century, who suggested emending mĕnāăpîm to one or another form of the root np ‘rage, be furious’.21 Indeed, the verb occurs in the qal perfect in 1 Kgs 8:46 (= 2 Chron. 6:36); Isa. 12:1; Ps. 60:3; in the qal imperfect in Pss. 2:12; 79:5; 85:6; Ezra 9:14; and in the hitpael in Deut. 1:27; 4:21; 9:8, 20; 1 Kgs 11:9; and 2 Kgs 17:18, while the plural stative participle form, which Paul proposes on the analogy of the stative participle ḥănēpîm ‘faithless, ungodly’, is attested only in Isa. 33:14 (but compare ḥănĕpê-lēb; NJPS ‘the impious in heart’ in Job 36:13). With Paul22 and with Ibn Ezra, Kimchi, and Abarbanel, note that the Masoretic accent placed on the second syllable of the noun bōērâ means that the final syllable â is not the sign of the feminine singular participle. On the contrary, like the final syllable â in the word laylâ ‘night’, it is a paragogic suffix.23 Thus, with Paul, I would restore Hos. 7:4a–b as follows: kullāmănēpîm kĕmô tānûr bōērâ ‘All of them are raging Like a blazing oven’.

The lexeme bōērâ ‘blazing’, the masculine singular participle with paragogic â, is followed in MT by the word mēōpeh (marked with Masoretic etnaḥta, indicating the end of a clause and the middle of Hos. 7:4), which NJPS translates ‘by a baker’ so that NJPS is able to render the 21.  Paul, ‘The Image of the Oven and the Cake’, p. 115 n. 4. 22.  Paul, ‘The Image of the Oven and the Cake’, p. 115 n. 5. 23.  So Macintosh, Hosea, p. 257. Cf., albeit reluctantly, GKC #80f and #90f. Joüon and Muraoka, Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, #90g, express reluctance to acknowledge paragogic â, i.e., a superfluous vowel suffix, which has no meaning whatsoever in the grammar of Biblical Hebrew, even in the word laylâ, and they do not even mention bōērâ.

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entire clause ‘like an oven fired by a baker’. The latter rendering assumes that the prefixed preposition mi(n) can mean ‘by’ followed by the person or entity by which the activity is performed or instigated. Indeed, such a usage is cited in DCH (5:338). In fact, while DCH does not cite the case at hand in Hos. 7:4b, it does cite Hos. 8:4, ‘they make kings, but not with my sanction’ (on which see below in the commentary). Consequently, there is no need whatsoever to follow Paul,24 who follows numerous scholars of the early twentieth century in emending MT’s brh mph so as to read br hm ph.25 First, as we have seen, there is no reason to question the authenticity of the form brh. Secondly, there is no reason to question the form mēōpeh ‘by a baker’. Finally, while a nominal sentence ending in the third person masculine plural hēm employed as a copula joining together the subject and the predicate nominative is plausible in Biblical Hebrew (e.g., Exod. 29:33; Lev. 16:4; Num. 1:16; Judg. 8:24 and many more) and commonplace in Rabbinic Hebrew, the emendation is totally unnecessary. The text makes perfect sense as written in MT if we accept only the reading ănēpîm ‘are enraged’ instead of MT’s mĕnāăpîm ‘continually commit adultery’ in the first clause of Hos. 7:4. 7:4 yišbōt mēîr ‘Who desists from stoking’ (so NJPS) Paul, who anticipates and probably inspires this rendering, albeit with a different and to our thinking unnecessary redivision of the consonants and the clauses, points out that the verbal root here attested means ‘enflame’.26 DCH (6:368) treats with all due caution the form in question as either qal or hiphil of a root designated as yr VI, which DCH finds not only here in Hos. 7:4 but also possibly in Isa. 42:13: ‘Like a fighter he enflames’ (or is it stir up, the hiphil of wr I), and in Ps. 78:33, ‘He will not enflame his anger’ (unless the verb yāîr there is hiphil of wr I ‘stir up’).

24.  Paul, ‘The Image of the Oven and the Cake’, p. 115. 25.  Roberts, Old Testament Texts and Versions, p. 93, alludes telegraphically to the matter at hand in the following words: ‘Three words [are rendered] as two in Hos. 7.4’, leaving it to the student’s imagination how this might be accomplished. I thank my colleague, Shamir Yona, for pointing out to me this telegraphic anticipation of what becomes an elaborate and exciting discussion complete with the history of research in Paul, ‘The Image of the Oven and the Cake’, pp. 115–16. 26.  Paul, ‘The Image of the Oven and the Cake’, p. 116.

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Illustration 4. Iron Age Israelite oven from the sixth occupation level (tenth century BCE) at Tel Rehov in the Beth She’an Valley, Israel (courtesy of Professor Amihai Mazar, Head of the Tel Rehov Expedition)

millûš bāṣēq ad-ḥumṣātô ‘From the kneading of the dough until its leavening’ What is described here is the brief interval of 18 minutes from the time that wheat or barley flour is mixed with water and kneaded until the bacteria present in the wet dough begins the natural process of fermentation, which makes all the difference between the unleavened bread used by Jews and Samaritans to this very day to fulfil their holy obligation on the eve of Passover and normal bread, which rises as the result of the fermentation of the dough brought about by the bacteria in the wet flour. ḥumṣātô ‘its leavening’ Andersen and Freedman point out that this form, which is attested only here in Hos. 7:4d, seems to be a stative infinitive (with the addition of the third person singular masculine pronominal suffix).27 As for the meaning of the simile, ‘like an oven fired by a baker who desists from stoking only from the kneading of the dough until its becoming leavened’, in the larger context of Hos. 7:3–7, Stuart explains, ‘The passion…is likened to a baker’s oven so hot that the baker need not tend the fire during the entire 27.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 457. Similarly, DCH 3:257; and Kaddari, Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, p. 319.

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baking process’.28 Moreover, Stuart explains there, ‘The bake-oven…was a round, domed, beehive structure made from fired clay with floor-level apertures and a large door on top. It usually had a stone floor. A roaring fire was built inside and allowed to burn until the interior was glowing hot. The coals were left, not swept out as with more modern brick ovens. The bread loaves were then pressed onto the oven walls, or laid among the coals. The door at the top of the oven was sealed, and the bread was left to bake in the retained heat, which would not dissipate for hours, providing that the oven had been adequately fired.’ Moreover, Stuart continues there, ‘The figure of v. 4 depicts a super-heated oven, built with a great fire that would continue from the time the dough was kneaded with yeast until it had risen (an hour or two depending on the amount of dough prepared) to be put into the oven later when the coals were red hot and the walls were glowing’. Moreover, Andersen and Freedman point out, ‘The fire is actually in the oven, and is removed, to be replaced by the loaves, once the walls of the oven are hot’.29 Hosea 7:3 and 7:5 describe rather matter-of-factly how unnamed persons, whom we know from 2 Kgs 15:8–14 to be King Shallum and King Menahem, respectively, directly or through their agents assassinated King Zechariah and King Shallum respectively. The intervening Hos. 7:4 compares the toxic personalities of the assassins to the heat of an oven used to prepare bread. The simile that begins in Hos. 7:4 is resumed and elaborated upon in 7:6–7. 7:6 kî-qērĕbû kattanûr libbām bĕorbām ‘Indeed, when they (the assassins) came near in their ambush, their (collective) heart was like an oven’ Paul30 prefers to follow numerous critical scholars of the early twentieth century and to emend the biblical text as follows: kî qirbām kattanûr libbām kāûr bām ‘Truly their inwards are like an oven Their hearts are like a blazing fire within them’.

28.  Stuart, Hosea, p. 119. 29.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 457. See also G. Dalman, Arbeit und Sitte in Palästina (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1935), vol. 4, pp. 35–37, 48, 96–97, 107, all cited by Paul, ‘The Image of the Oven and the Cake’, p. 116 n. 6. 30.  Paul, ‘The Image of the Oven and the Cake’, p. 116.

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This intriguing suggestion might commend itself if we had evidence in Hebrew Scripture that qirbām//libbām constitute a fixed pair of words in synonymous parallelism. In fact, no such word pair is attested in Hebrew Scripture. However, we should point out that the pair bĕqirbām//wĕallibbām is found in Jer. 31:33 where we read as follows: ‘…I will put my Teaching into their inward part, and I shall inscribe it upon their heart’. Similarly, in Ezek. 11:19 we read as follows: ‘I shall give them one heart and I shall place a new spirit within you [bĕqirbĕkem], and I shall remove the stone heart from their body, and I shall give them a heart of flesh’. However, the clarity of Hos. 7:6a–b as it appears in MT is sufficient so as not to require emendation/restoration. In addition, the closest that we come in Hebrew Scripture to a pair of synonymous nouns qereb//lēb meaning the inner parts of the human, which are the seat of emotions and thoughts, namely Jer. 31:33, hardly seems to warrant emending Hos. 7:6a–b. 7:6c–d kol-halaylâ yāšēn ōpēhem bōqer hû bōēr kĕēš lehābâ ‘All night long their baker sleeps. In the morning he flares up like a blazing fire’ NJPS renders the independent personal pronoun hû by means of the English third person singular neuter pronoun ‘it’. The latter rendering is questionable because the proximate noun antecedent of that pronoun is ōpēhem ‘their baker’, a personality whom we already encountered in the very middle of Hos. 7:4. Paul follows numerous critical commentators of the first half of the twentieth century in emending MT’s ōpēhem ‘their baker’ to aphem ‘their anger’, which may be supported also by TJ which translates rugzĕhōn ‘their anger’.31 However, it is worthy of note that while the form apām ‘their anger’ is attested in Gen. 49:6–7 and the same form in related meanings in Ps. 124:3 and 2 Chron. 25:10, apām meaning ‘their face’ is found in Ezek. 8:17. The form aphem ‘their anger’ is nowhere attested in the Bible. Hence Paul’s clever revocalization is hardly convincing. For the parallel pair night//morning in Hebrew Scripture, cf. Isa. 21:12: ‘Morning came and also night’; Ps. 92:3: ‘to declare your lovingkindness in the morning and your faithfulness in the nights’. Y. Avishur notes that in Isa. 21:12 the relationship of the pair of words constitutes syndetic parataxis. Note that in Hos. 7:6 alone the order is night–morning.32 31.  Paul, ‘The Image of the Oven and the Cake’, p. 116. 32.  Y. Avishur, Stylistic Studies of Word-Pairs in Biblical and Ancient Semitic Literatures (AOAT, 210; Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1984), p. 121.

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7:7 kullām yēḥĕmû kattanûr wĕākĕlû et-šōpĕṭêhem kol-malĕkêhem nāpālû ên-qōrē bāhem ēlāy ‘All of them (the assassins and their helpers) heat up like an oven. And they devour their rulers. All of their kings have fallen. None of them (the assassins) calls to me’ It is probably best to understand Hos. 7:7d as an instance of inversion, i.e., an instance in which the word order does not follow the intended syntax and which requires that we change the word order in order to understand the authorial intent. If so, the authorial intent is probably, ‘Among them there is none who calls to me’. That is to say that the hallmark of the political assassin is that he is not a devotee of God. On the contrary, the hallmark of the political assassin is that he removes himself as far as possible from devotion to God. Thus it is stated in Ps. 145:18: ‘Yhwh is near to all who call him//to all who call him with sincerity’. Similarly, Ps. 86:5 states, ‘For you, my Lord, are good and constantly forgiving and abundant in lovingkindness to all who call upon you’. Alternatively, Kimchi suggests that the reason that God allowed the assassinated kings to be murdered is that they did not seek divine help in repenting of their evil ways. Classic instances of inversion in Hebrew Scripture include Hab. 1:2c, in which ‘in order that the one who reads it may run’ means that the text should be written sufficiently large (like road signs on a superhighway!) so that anyone running past would be able to read the text. Another famous example is Gen. 39:14, where Potiphar’s wife complains, ‘Look, he brought us a Hebrew man to treat us with disrespect. He approached me to have sex with me, but I screamed aloud’, which is commonly understood to be inversion for an intended meaning of ‘Look, he brought us a Hebrew man. He approached me to have sex with me to treat us with disrespect, but I screamed aloud.’ Another famous example of inversion is Exod. 2:5, ‘Pharaoh’s daughter went down to bathe in the Nile’, which Rashi ad loc. explains as inversion for ‘Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe’. (For inversion in the book of Hosea see also below, at Hos. 14:3d.) 7:8 Eprayim bāammîm hû yitbōlāl ‘As for Ephraim, among the nations shall he be kneaded’ Paul points out that most commentators associate the otherwise unattested verb form yitbōlāl with the frequently attested Hebrew qal passive participle bālûl/bĕlûlâ ‘mixed’ referring to ‘the mixing of flour with oil in the

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preparation of sacrificial cakes’, attested, inter alia, in Exod. 29:40; Lev. 2:5; 7:10; 14:21; 23:13; Num. 28:5, 9, 12, 13.33 Paul prefers, however, to understand the root bll here in Hos. 7:8 in light of Akk. balālu ‘knead’, which he finds in an Akkadian ritual text published in F. Thureau-Dangin’s Rituels accadiens. The text in question reads: nuḫatimmu ina muḫḫi ba(!) lāla ša kirṣi naqibta iqabbi ‘The baker will recite the incantation while kneading pieces of dough’.34 Consequently, following my revered teacher S. M. Paul, I translate Hos. 7:8 as follows: ‘Ephraim shall be kneaded among the nations’. As we shall see, just as in Hos. 1–3, where we found an entire series of images related to adultery as a metaphor for idolatry, so here in Hos. 7:3–9 we have an entire series of images related to baking, ovens, and cakes. Moreover, our prophet has employed a combination of a twice-used refrain, wĕhû lō yādā ‘but he (Ephraim) did not notice’, and internal anaphora, the threefold repetition of a word or expression, in this case the third person masculine singular personal pronoun hû at the beginning of the second half of each of three consecutive versets within the larger unit of Hos. 7:8–9, specifically at the beginning of 7:8b, 7:9b, and 7:9d. Consequently, the assertion by Paul that the personal pronoun hû in the middle of Hos. 7:8a is superfluous (as certainly is the addition of a third person masculine plural pronoun hēm in Hos. 8:4) is indeed grammatically correct.35 However, back in 1968 when Paul published his insightful article, the modern study of biblical poetics was barely in its infancy. Without the constant inspiration of my esteemed colleague Shamir Yona, one of the great experts in biblical poetics, I certainly would not have noticed the internal anaphora in Hos. 7:8–9 and I certainly would not have arrived at the correct and precise terminology to describe it once it had glared at me off the page of the Bible and said, ‘Interpret me’. Moreover, it should be observed that the use of the independent third person masculine singular pronoun hû, where it might seem to be superfluous, is especially characteristic of the book of Hosea. It is attested without conjunctive waw in Hos. 6:1; 7:6, 8; 8:6; 10:2; 11:5, 10; 13:1, 13, 15, while wĕhû with conjunctive waw is attested in Hos. 2:25; 5:13; 7:9 (twice); and 8:6.

33.  Paul, ‘The Image of the Oven and the Cake’, pp. 116–17. 34.  F. Thureau-Dangin, Rituels accadiens (Paris: Presses Universitaires des France, 1921), p. 63, text #45, line 77. Paul’s correction of the Akkadian text indicated by exclamation mark follows A. L. Oppenheim, ‘Studies in Akkadian Lexicography II’, Orientalia 11 (1942), pp. 119–33 (128), and CAD, B, p. 41. 35.  Paul, ‘The Image of the Oven and The Cake’, p. 118 n. 1.

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The second image relating to cakes appears immediately after ‘Ephraim shall be kneaded among the nations’ in Hos. 7:8a, i.e., in Hos. 7:8b, where we read as follows: Eprayim hāyâ uggâ bĕlî hăpûkâ ‘Eprhaim has become an unturned cake’ This metaphor, which employs the verb ‘to be’ in the prophetic perfect, suggests that Ephraim, i.e., the people of the Northern Kingdom, are about to be devoured hastily by the peoples around about them. What could be more hasty than consuming baked goods that have not been fully baked, the sort of thing that impatient children do when their mother has been labouring hard to prepare one of their favourite treats? Not infrequently, the correct interpretation of obscure expressions in the Bible can be determined by examining how they were understood in quotations and allusions in ancient and medieval Jewish liturgy. The expression uggâ bĕlî hăpûkâ is employed in the Jewish liturgy of the Day of Atonement in the penitential narrative concerning the ten Rabbinic sages martyred by Hadrian. In the second hemistich of the opening line of that poem we read as follows: ‘Wicked persons devoured me like an unturned cake’. Daniel Goldschmidt explains: ‘I.e., eaten before the conclusion of the baking process’.36 7:9 ākĕlû zārîm kōḥô wĕhû lō yādā ‘Strangers have devoured his [Ephraim’s] strength, but he (Ephraim) did not notice’ Whether the baker of the metaphorical unfinished pastry did or did not notice that someone in his/her bakery had made off with an unfinished product and whether or not the mother of the proverbial children who made off with an unfinished pastry took note so as to scold the naughty children, the point made here is that in the course of Israel/Ephraim’s attempt to enter into entangling alliances with Egypt and Assyria against Judah (see below in Hos. 7:11–13, 15–16; 9; 8:7–10; and see also above at Hos. 5:13; 10:6), Israel did not become stronger but rather weaker. The prophet responsible for Hos. 4–14 believed with perfect faith that he was instructed by the God of Israel to inform the people of Israel that seeking security in alliances with Egypt and Assyria rather than by means of

36.  Daniel Goldschmidt, High Holy Day Liturgy: Part II: The Day of Atonement (Jerusalem: Koren, 1970), p. 568.

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devotion to the God of Israel expressed through proper public and private morality, was treason against God, which is to say apostasy. We find the very same idea in Isa. 7; 10:24–26; 36–39. gam-śêbâ zārĕqâ bô wĕhû lō yādā ‘Also mould has appeared in him. But he did not notice’ As I noted above, each of the second and the third metaphors concerning cakes is followed by the refrain ‘And he [Ephraim/Israel] did not notice [that he is about to come to a bad end if he does not abandon foreign alliances and rely on Yhwh, God of Israel]’. The first metaphor (Hos. 7:8) describing Israel’s attempt to seek help from Assyria and Egypt can be compared to a cake, which is transformed by means of the various kinds of flour that are added to it in the course of the kneading process. As Paul must admit, the upshot of the comparison of Heb. yitbōlāl with Akk. balālu ‘knead’ is that we return to the traditional understanding of Hos. 7:8 as referring to Israel’s losing its identity.37 In the very middle of the first metaphor we find the pronoun hû, which initiates the internal anaphora carried forward from Hos. 7:8b through 7:9b. The second metaphor compares Ephraim to a cake, which is devoured before it is fully baked, and is followed by the second of the three elements of the anaphora and the first instance of the refrain combined as wĕhû lō yādā. The third and last metaphor comparing Israel’s gradual demise to something that went wrong with a cake suggests that the cake is about to be eaten up by mould. Paul reminds us that in the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic, where Utnapishtim puts Gilgamesh to the test of staying awake for six days and seven nights, the proof that Gilgamesh has failed the test is found not in the pudding but in the seven cakes prepared by Mrs. Utnapishtim.38 Concerning the fifth of the seven cakes it is written šiba ittadi ‘mould appeared’, which is the semantic equivalent of Heb. śêbâ zārĕqâ, literally, ‘grey hair was thrown’. The Hebrew verb zāraq ‘throw’ is the semantic equivalent of Akk. nadû reflected in the form ittadi found in Gilgamesh, Tablet 11, line 227. Likewise, Heb. śêbâ and Akk. šiba are both semantic and etymological equivalents in that they can refer to grey hairs, mould, and old age. The twice-stated refrain ‘But he did not notice’ suggests that the problem of Israel was not malice aforethought but ignorance which, the prophet and the God in the name of whom he spoke believed, could be overcome by prophetic warning, which could lead to a change of behaviour that 37.  Paul, ‘The Image of the Oven and the Cake’, p. 118. 38.  Paul, ‘The Image of the Oven and the Cake’, p. 119.

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could avert the disaster of Israel’s demise. We may compare Hos. 4:14, ‘And a people that does not discern will come to ruin’, whose corollary is that when a people has been led to discern by a prophet sent by God, that people can avoid disaster. 7:10 wĕānâ gĕôn-Yiśrāēl bĕpānāyw ‘Israel’s pride has been humbled before his very eyes’ NJPS renders: ‘Though Israel’s pride has been humbled Before his very eyes’.

This translation assumes that the first half of Hos. 7:10 concluding with the caesura or etnaḥta marking the pause at the end of Hos. 7:10a is an adverbial clause modifying the main clause, which follows in Hos. 7:10b: wĕlō-šābû el-Yhwh ĕlōhêhem wĕlō biqĕšuhû bĕkol-zōt ‘Because they did not return to Yhwh, their God, nor did they seek him despite all of this’ I noted in my commentary above at Hos. 5:5 that the identical clause wĕānâ gĕôn-Yiśrāēl bĕpānāyw appears verbatim in both Hos. 5:5a and 7:10a. I also noted there that the interpretation of the ambiguous verb wĕānâ to mean ‘will be humiliated’, which I analyzed in my commentary at Hos. 5:5, is reflected in LXX, Peshitta, and TJ, and is supported by Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Kimhi, and now also by NJPS. Alternatively, also taking the phrase ‘pride of Israel’ to mean the arrogance of the people of Israel, collectively, many interpreters including the Vulgate, Dunash Ibn Labrat, KJV, Andersen and Freedman, and Macintosh see in both Hos. 5:5a and 7:10a one of the many homonyms of anâ ‘be humiliated’, specifically anâ ‘testify’, as in Isa. 3:9, ‘Their partiality in judgment testifies against them’; see also Job 16:8: ‘You have shrivelled me; my gauntness serves as a witness, and testifies against me’. Regardless of whether one interprets the first half of Hos. 7:10 (= Hos. 5:5a) to mean ‘Israel’s pride has been humbled before his very eyes’ or ‘Israel’s arrogance has testified against him’, in either case 7:10a functions in context as an adverbial clause modifying 7:10b. Consequently, in either case the waw consecutive at the beginning of 7:10a is one of many instances where what appears to be coordination in Biblical Hebrew is, in fact, subordination, and the apparently coordinate conjunction w, is, in fact, a subordinate conjunction, here meaning ‘because’. Moreover, the

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pair of adverbial expressions at the beginning and end of 7:10 create an inclusio or envelope around 7:10, lending emphasis to the single idea that is repeated twice in 7:10, namely ‘they did not return to Yhwh their God’ (10a) and ‘nor did they seek him’. For the association of returning (šwb) to Yhwh with seeking (bqš) Yhwh in successive clauses, see Hos. 3:5; 5:4–5; for the same association without the verb šwb, see also Jer. 50:4. Also in Amos 4:6–11 changing one’s behaviour for the better is referred to as ‘returning to God’. Having asserted in Hos. 7:10 that Israel’s arrogance testified against Israel (or alternatively, that Israel’s pride had been humbled), but that this unfortunate circumstance had not yet led Israel to change its behaviour for the better, 7:11–13, 15 spells out how precisely Israel’s misbehaviour in the field of international relations demonstrates Israel’s failure to return to God. Likewise, 7:14 inserts a complaint concerning Israel’s failure to return to God also in the field of private morality. 7:11 wayĕhî Eprayim kĕyōnâ pōtâ ên lēb ‘Ephraim was like a silly dove with no mind’ Joseph Qara (c. 1065 CE–c. 1135 CE), in his commentary on Hos. 7:11a, writes, ‘There is no bird more foolish than the dove. If someone takes the chicks from the nest of any other kinds of birds, they will not return to their nest [seeing that it has been staked out by chick-eating predators]. The dove, on the other hand, is not suspicious, and she returns to her nest. So is Israel who are silly and foolish “with no mind”.’ Kimchi goes further when he writes,39 ‘She is incapable of sensing danger from the fowler’s snare when it alights to feed on the grain laid out as bait’.40 The expression ên lēb ‘mindless’ may refer to Ephraim who is here compared to a silly dove or to the silly dove to whom Ephraim is compared. The expression ên lēb meaning ‘mindless’ is applied to Israel here in Hos. 7:11a and also in Jer. 5:20. For the idea that Israel’s failings result from her not making proper use of her leb in the sense of the seat of intelligence and discernment, see also Hos. 4:11, ‘Wine takes away leb “judgment” ’, on which see above at 4:11. For the idea that Israel’s mistakes in the field of international diplomacy result from a failure to exercise the people’s collective intellect/judgment, see the refrain repeated in Hos. 7:9a–9b, wĕhû lō yādā ‘but he (Ephraim) did not notice’. 39.  As paraphrased by Macintosh, Hosea, p. 274. 40.  So also Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 304; Brown, Hosea, p. 68; Dearman, Hosea, p. 210.

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Hosea 7:11–13, 15–16 spells out how it is that Israel sought help against the Kingdom of Judah from both Egypt and Assyria. (Cf. also Hos. 5:9c–15 [with respect to Assyria] and Hos. 11:5.) 7:11 Miṣrayim qārāû Aššûr hālākû ‘They called to Egypt//they went to Assyria’ Assonance is fostered by the juxtaposition of two parallel verbal clauses, each of which begins with the name of one of the two nations to whom Israel/Ephraim sought help in meeting the military challenge posed by Judah, and each of which ends in a verb in the third person plural perfect. The assonance is brought out especially in MT, whose accents and vowel points indicate that both verbs are to be treated as pausal forms with three syllables, all containing long vowels. Thus the two clauses contain five stressed syllables each. There appears to be a chiastic arrangement between the Egypt//Assyria pair in Hos. 7:11 and the details of what happened with Assyria and Egypt respectively. Hosea 7:12–13 has God declaring how he will make certain that no good will come of the ‘having gone’, which, as we saw, was to Assyria, while Hos. 7:15–16, as we shall see below, refers to the failure of the delegation that was sent to call to Egypt for help. 7:12 kaăšēr yēlēkû eprōś ălêhem rištî kĕôp haššāmayim ôrîdēm ‘When they (the ambassadors of King Menahem son of Gadi of Israel/ Ephraim) go (to Assyria), I shall spread my net over them. I shall bring them down like a bird of the sky’ Since, as Hosea, speaking in the name of God, compared Ephraim to a foolish dove, who, we learned, is easily captured by the fowler’s net because he goes for the bait spread out upon the net, it is totally appropriate that the punishment for wise humans who act like foolish doves and like cognitively challenged humans who lack intelligence is that God should spread over them a net, metaphoric or otherwise. ayĕsirēm kĕšēma laădātām ‘I shall punish them when I hear the report concerning their negotiations’ The verb ayĕsirēm is the first person singular imperfect hiphil of the common verbal root ysr ‘punish’, which usually appears in the piel (Lev. 26:28; Deut. 21:18; 22:18; Ps. 118:18; Prov. 19:18; 29:17) but also in the qal as in Hos. 10:10 (q.v.); Ps. 94:10; and Prov. 9:7.

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kĕšēma ‘when I hear the report’, literally means ‘at the report’. For the noun šēma ‘report’, see also, inter alia, Gen. 29:13; Exod. 23:1; 1 Kgs 10:1; Isa. 23:5; Job 42:5. Regarding laădātām ‘concerning their negotiations’, Macintosh draws inspiration from Ibn Barūn in suggesting that the noun here employed is derived from a Semitic verbal root wd meaning ‘make mutual promises’, i.e., ‘negotiate’, which Macintosh finds also in Josh. 11:5.41 In fact, Josh. 11:5 and Job 2:11 attest to the verb wayyiwwāădû, which is the imperfect consecutive form of the niphal of the West Semitic root yd. This can mean ‘agree upon a plan’, usually in reference to a plan to have a meeting, as in Josh. 11:5 where the kings of Canaan agree upon a plan to join forces to fight Israel, or as in Job 2:11 where Job’s three friends (there the verb appears in the niphal perfect) agree to go together to visit Job on the occasion of the death of his sons and daughters and Job’s catastrophic illness. See also Amos 3:3, ‘Can two walk together without having agreed to a plan [to do so]?’ The implied answer to that rhetorical question is supposed to be ‘Of course not’. However, the alternative answer, ‘Not necessarily’, is equally plausible. As for the noun with prefixed preposition in Hos. 7:12, laădātām ‘concerning their negotiations’, the consensus of the critical commentators of the twentieth century is that the meaning of this lexeme is totally obscure. Ehrlich finds the reading of MT incomprehensible and suggests that the Vorlage of LXX read lĕrāătām ‘for their wickedness’ and that the Vorlage of TJ read lĕăṣātām ‘for their counsel’.42 In fact, in another publication43 Ehrlich decided that this was the original reading in the Hebrew Hosea and that the reading in MT is a scribal error. I dare to suggest that MT’s laădātām ‘with respect to their assembly’ refers to the meeting of Israelite and Assyrian officials, of which our prophet, believing that he spoke in the name of God, disapproved. For Heb. ēdâ ‘assembly’ referring specifically to an assembly, of whose deliberations God, as portrayed in Hebrew Scripture, did not approve, see Num. 14:27; 16:11, 16; 17:5. For ēdâ ‘assembly’ referring to a body of whose deliberations God, as portrayed in Hebrew Scripture, did approve, see, inter alia, Num. 10:2–3.

41.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 276. 42.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschto, vol. 3, p. 374. 43.  Ehrlich, Randglossen, vol. 5, p. 185.

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7:13 ôy lāhem kî-nādĕdû-mimmenî ‘Woe to them for they wandered away from me’ Were there any doubt as to the meaning of this first third of Hos. 7:13, the following clause, Hos. 7:13b, which repeats the same idea in much less ambiguous form, confirms the meaning we have assigned to the first third of the verse. šōd lāhem ki-pāšĕû bî ‘(I wish/decree) destruction to them for they rebelled against me’ wĕānōkî epdēm wĕhēmmâ dibbĕrû ālay kĕzābîm ‘Indeed, I redeemed them, but they spoke treacherously about me’ NJPS renders as follows: ‘For I was their Redeemer; yet they have plotted treason against Me’. This paraphrase is reminiscent of LXX’s translation of the clause: ἐγὼ δὲ ἐλυτρωσάμην αὐτούς, αὐτοὶ δὲ κατελάλησαν κατ’ ἐμοῦ ψευδῆ, which corresponds in meaning to KJV’s ‘Though I have redeemed them, yet they have spoken lies against me’. According to LXX’s and KJV’s understanding of the Hebrew original, the first verb in the verset, epdēm ‘I redeemed them’, is an instance of the so-called imperfect form of the verb without either waw consecutive or a temporal adverb such as āz ‘then’ (Exod. 15:1; Num. 21:17; Josh. 8:30; etc.) or ṭerem ‘before’ (Gen. 2:5; Josh. 2:8), which serves to convey the past tense. See my discussion at Hos. 1:2 concerning the imperfect verb tizneh, meaning ‘she [the land of Israel] strayed/committed adultery’. It appears that a number of medieval Hebrew commentators, who did not have access to LXX, namely Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Kimchi, followed now by Macintosh, were convinced that the so-called imperfect form of the verb must refer to the future rather than to the past.44 Consequently, Macintosh, following the aforementioned, renders ‘I wished to redeem them’. In fact, here as elsewhere in the book of Hosea, the prophet speaking in the name of God refers to God’s having redeemed Israel from Egyptian bondage and Israel’s repaying evil for good.

44.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 279.

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7:14 wĕlō zāăqû ēlay bĕlibbām kî yĕyēlîlû al-miškĕbōtām ‘They did not cry to me with their throats while they were making noises upon their beds’ With Ginsberg45 we should first of all understand that Hos. 7:15c refers again to Israelite men who engage in extra-marital intercourse in the course of leaving home without their spouses to participate in a pilgrimage to a temple of Yhwh. We have seen this subject discussed at great length with respect to Hos. 4:10–15, and we shall encounter it again below with respect to Hos. 9:2. Eschewing Ginsberg’s penchant for moving verses around within the book of Hosea as also in the book of Job, we shall be able to show that Hos. 7:14a–b fits in perfectly with Ginsberg’s understanding of Hos. 7:15a. First of all, with respect to bĕlibbām, which NJPS renders ‘sincerely’, assuming that the noun lēb in the prepositional phrase ‘in/with their lēb’ means ‘with/in their heart’, and that ‘heart’ here refers to the seat of the thoughts and emotions as in Hos. 4:11, ‘Wine takes away (the) heart’, which means something like ‘consumption of alcoholic beverages in excess impairs the faculties of judgment and sensitivity’; see there. On the other hand, Ginsberg also demonstrated that the noun lēb in Biblical Hebrew frequently denotes not the seat of judgment and emotions, commonly rendered ‘heart’ and frequently, as in NJPS at Hos. 4:11, ‘mind’, but rather ‘throat’, designating the organ of speech, as in Isa. 33:18; 59:13; Pss. 19:15; 49:4; Job 8:10; and Qoh. 5:1.46 Especially important are Job 8:10b, ûmellibām yôṣîû millîm ‘and from their throat they produce words’ (as Ginsberg notes, there, a parallel text in Job 15:13 has another one of Job’s friends taunt Job with the charge, ‘and you let such words out of your mouth [mippîkā]’). Having seen, therefore, that frequently in Hebrew Scripture the noun lēb denotes the organ of speech, it is totally plausible to suggest that in Hos. 7:14 the complaint is not that the Israelite men did not cry to God sincerely when they were wailing on their beds reciting the ancient equivalent of ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’, but rather that these men did not cry out to me with their collective throat because they were making altogether different noises on their bed, namely the noise of lovers enjoying sexual intercourse, as I suggested with respect to Hos. 2:17, ‘And there she will call out in ecstasy as in the days of her

45.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, p. 75. 46.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, p. 80.

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youth’. Contrast NJPS’s construing the clause kî yĕyēlîlû al-miškĕbōtām, which we rendered ‘while they were making noises on their beds’, as follows: ‘as they lay wailing’, to which NJPS supplies a footnote referring the reader to an allegedly similar text.47 Indeed, I shall discuss elsewhere in this commentary possible influences of Hosea upon Isa. 58. As for the present instance, it should be noted that there is nothing in Isa. 58:3–4 that pertains either to wailing or to the wailers’ being in bed. Consequently, with all due respect to my revered teacher, H. L. Ginsberg, of blessed memory, I find no warrant for removing Hos. 7:14a–b from its present context of fornicating described in Hos. 7:14c and every reason for retaining it in that context. However, as Ginsberg points out, the verb yitgôrārû means literally ‘they (third person masculine plural) commit adultery’.48 In fact, as Ginsberg notes, this is the same verb that is attested in a number of ancient Hebrew manuscripts of Jer. 5:7, where, if we accept that reading, we find the following: wayyināpû ûbêt zônâ yitgôrārû ‘They committed adultery, and they fornicated at the house of the prostitute’. Here again we see the strong influence of Hos. 4–14’s condemnation of married men’s cheating on their wives upon the Prophet Jeremiah. Indeed, MT’s reading yitgôdādû ‘they went in troops (to the house of the prostitute)’ conveys the very same idea without, however, lending support for the existence of the same verb in Hos. 7:14c. It should be noticed that all of the three verb forms—wayyināpû, yitgôrārû, and yitgôdādû—are pausal forms in MT; consequently the full vowel rather than shewa and a pausal accent precisely at the point where the long vowel occurs. It should be noted that the verbal root gwr meaning ‘engage in extramarital sex, commit adultery’ is attested also in the Hebrew Ben Sira 42, where we read as follows: ‘A daughter is a treasure that keeps her father wakeful, and worry over her drives away sleep: lest she engage in sexual intercourse during her youth//not get married when she is nubile’. Whatever else may be uncertain about the correct reading of these texts, for which the medieval Hebrew witnesses are fragmentary, the clause binĕûrêāh pen tāgûr ‘lest she engage in sexual intercourse during her youth’, i.e., when her father is still responsible for her (cf. Num. 30:4), is certain. The Ben Sira text lends support to the argument that the verb gwr, well-attested in Aramaic as meaning ‘commit adultery’, refers to extramarital sexual relations also in early, middle, and late Classical Hebrew. Interestingly, if, following Ginsberg, we found support for interpreting

47.  I.e., Isa. 58:3–4; cf. Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, p. 76. 48.  Ginsberg, ‘Lexicographical Notes’, pp. 76–77.

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Jer. 5:7 in the light of Hos. 7:14c, LXX, on the other hand, misinterpreted Hos. 7:14c in the light of a misinterpretation of Jer. 5:7 supported by an analogy from Deut. 14:1. LXX according to Codex Vaticanus at Hos. 7:14c reads as follows: ἐπὶ σείτῳ καὶ οἴνῳ κατετέμοντο ‘they were lacerating themselves over grain and wine’. LXX’s understanding of Hos. 7:14c was influenced by Deut. 14:1, where the Hebrew text reads lō titgōdĕdû wĕlō tāśîmû qorḥâ bên ênêkem lāmēt ‘You shall not gash yourselves nor shall you shave the front of your heads because of the dead’ (so NJPS). Interestingly, there is no lexical relationship between LXX at Hos. 7:14c and LXX at Deut. 14:1. 7:14 yāsûrû bî ‘They turned away from me’ KJV renders ‘they rebel against me’, following Rashi, who takes the verb employed here as a form of the root swr, which frequently means ‘turn away’.49 NJPS seeks to avoid the difficulty of an anomalous sr b where one would expect sr m(n) by revocalizing yāsûrû as yāsôrû so that the verb can be parsed as a form of the verbal root srr ‘rebel’, which is nowhere attested with either of the two prepositions. What is far more significant for comprehending the message of Hos. 7:14 in the larger context of the book of Hosea is the insistence here at Hos. 7:14, as previously in Hos. 4:10–11, ‘They have abandoned Yhwh to cultivate adultery’, is that for our prophet private immorality (what we call victimless crime nowadays) is tantamount to apostasy. This idea, together with the castigation of public immorality in the form of injustice to the indigent emphasized in Amos, Isaiah, and Micah, is one of the two pillars of the high religion of the prophets of ancient Israel and Judah. These two pillars are summarized in the description of Job in Job 1:1, 9; 2:3 as yĕrē ĕlōhîm wĕsār mērā ‘devoted to God and eschewing evil’ (see also Job 28:28 where it is asserted that devotion to the Lord is wisdom and eschewing of evil is understanding. Since everyone knows that things which equal the same thing also equal one another—in this case religious devotion and ethical behaviour are equal to wisdom/understanding—religion means for the authors of the book of Job and for Hosea, ethical behaviour. Consequently, 49.  As for the usage bî meaning ‘from me’ only in this one place in all of Hebrew Scripture where one would have expected mimmennî, see N. M. Sarna, ‘The Inter­change of the Prepositions bēt and min in Biblical Hebrew’, JBL 78 (1959), pp. 310–16; contrast Z. Zevit, ‘The So-called Interchangeability of the Prepositions b, l, and m(n) in Northwest Semitic’, JANESCU 7 (1975), pp. 103–12.

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immorality, both public and private, is tantamount to rejecting God. That is, indeed, the sum and substance of Hos. 4–14. Having to puzzle out this message from the prophets of ancient Israel and Judah by the aid of highly sophisticated Semitic philology replicates the difficulty people who seek to be virtuous and/or religious have in achieving their goal despite all the temptations of this world. 7:15 waănî yissartî ḥizzaqtî zĕrōōtām ‘But as for me, I braced, I strengthened their arms’ (similarly, NJPS) This rendering assumes that the two verbs yissartî and ḥizzaqtî are virtually synonymous and that the first of these two verbs is an instance where r in MT is a scribal error for the similar d in virtually all phases of Hebrew writing, ancient and modern. We may compare the very similar use of the verb ysr ‘instruct, chastise’ in MT where the context calls for the verb ysd ‘support, uphold, strengthen’ in Job 4:3, where Eliphaz addresses Job as follows: hinnēh yissartā rabbîm//wĕyādayim rāpōt tĕḥazzēq ‘Look, you have supported many people//and you have strengthened many weak hands’.50 Typically, NJPS incorporates the emendation at Hos. 7:15 without comment. Typically, Macintosh does not even mention the likelihood that in both Hos. 7:15 and Job 4:3 MT’s ysr is an ancient scribal error for ysd.51 On the other hand, he invokes the attempt of Ibn Janah and later of G. R. Driver to find in both texts an attestation of an unusual meaning of ysr, namely, ‘strengthen’.52 wĕēlay yaḥšĕbû-rā ‘But they plotted evil against me’ A common thread that runs through the prophets of ancient Israel and Judah—Hos. 4–14; Isaiah; Jeremiah—is that when the kings of Israel and Judah attempt to forge alliances with other kings, they have committed treason against the king of the world, who is the only legitimate suzerain to whom the kings of Israel and Judah may be vassals. In addition to Hos. 5:13; 7:11, 15–16; 8:9, see also Isa. 7–8; Jer. 26:12–15.

50.  Following Tur-Sinai, Job, p. 76, I accept the correction of MT’s ysr ‘reproach, reprimand’ to ‘support/brace’ in both Hos. 7:15 and Job 4:3. 51.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 283. 52.  See G. R. Driver, ‘Studies in the Vocabulary of the Old Testament VIII’, JTS 36 (1935), pp. 293–301 (295).

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For the preposition el meaning ‘against’ see DCH (1:268), and note with DCH that this preposition has that meaning following the verb ḥšb ‘plot’ also in Jer. 49:20; 50:45; and Nah. 1:9a. Typical of the usage in question is the latter verse, where we read as follows: ‘Why do you plot against Yhwh?’ 7:16 yāšûbû ‘They have returned’ Here again we have the prefixed form of the verb, the so-called imperfect, employed to express the past. Here the prophet refers to the return of the delegation, which the king of Israel (probably Menahem son of Gadi) had sent to Egypt to negotiate a treaty of defence against Judah. See above at Hos. 7:11 where the prophet refers to the Israelites having vacillated between an attempt to invoke the help of Egypt and an attempt to seek help from Assyria. lō āl ‘He (Israel) did not succeed’ Joseph Qara (c. 1065–c. 1135) points out that the lexeme l is here pointed with qameṣ, i.e., long ā rather than patah, i.e., short a and that the meaning of the vocalization is that the lexeme in question is not a preposition joined to the following word but a word that stands by itself and that the lexeme is semantically akin to the expression môîl ‘it is helpful/ useful’. The latter hiphil present active participle is attested in Jer. 16:17, where we read, wĕên bāhem môîl ‘…and there is not benefit in them’. Qara does not suggest an etymological relationship between the verb āl in Hos. 7:16b and the participle môîl attested in Jer. 16:17. Rather, he seems to suggest most plausibly that we have here a verb, which we would construe as from a trilateral root wl on the analogy of bw ‘come’ and qwm ‘stand, abide’, whose meaning is ‘succeed’. In Hos. 7:16a–b the prophet informs us that the members of the delegation sent by King Menahem son of Gadi to Egypt returned from their mission and that they did not succeed in their mission. In the ensuing clauses of Hos. 7:16 the prophet will elaborate upon this point. Not surprisingly, the prophet will not tell us why, from an international relations point of view, the Israelite negotiators failed to achieve their goal of assistance from Egypt. From the prophet’s perspective, the negotiations were doomed to failure for the simple reason that seeking help from a foreign king rather than from God was tantamount to apostasy.

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hāyû kĕqešeṭ rĕmiyyâ ‘They (the members of the Israelite diplomatic mission to Egypt) were like a bow unprepared for battle’ My esteemed colleague Dr. Oded Tammuz was kind enough to share with me his study, which at the time was in preparation, concerning the Hebrew expression kĕqešeṭ rĕmiyyâ ‘like a bow whose string has not been attached so that the bow is unprepared for battle’, which is attested in Hos. 7:16c and in Ps. 78:57. As Tammuz points out, the Hebrew expression corresponds to Akk. qaštu ramītu, meaning ‘loose bow’. For the Hebrew feminine adjective rĕmiyyâ, meaning ‘loose, slack’, see also Prov. 10:4: ‘A slack palm brings about indigence, but a diligent hand creates wealth’; cf. Prov. 12:24: ‘The hand of the diligent will rule while [the hand of] the slack will become a serf’. See also Prov. 19:15: ‘Laziness produces slumber, and a slack person [nepeš rĕmiyyâ] will starve’; and Jer. 48:10: ‘Cursed be one who is slack in carrying out the mission of Yhwh’.53 Note that the feminine adjective and noun rĕmiyyâ, like the adjective rĕwāyâ ‘overflowing’ in Ps. 23:5 (KJV: ‘my cup runneth over’), belongs to that small group of lexemes in Biblical Hebrew where the third radical y is attested and the final syllables aya have not been contracted to â, which is normally indicated in MT by final h. Because of the usual contraction of aya to āh in participles and verbs in MT, it is widely perceived to this day even among learned instructors of Hebrew Bible and cognate literatures that the third radical of such common roots as śy ‘do’, ry ‘see’, bky ‘cry, weep’ is h rather than y. Indeed, even medieval Hebrew grammarians whose native language was Arabic, such as Ibn Janah, wrongly believed that in Hebrew the final radical of those roots was h rather than y, and they helped perpetuate ignorance on this score to this very day. In fact, not infrequently, doctoral dissertations written in Modern Hebrew frequently testify to the doctoral students’ and their mentors’ still not knowing that the final radical of such roots is y and that the h is meant only to mark the final vowel as long a. yippĕlû baḥereb śārêhem ‘Their kings will fall by the sword’ I have noted repeatedly that in the book of Hosea the noun śār, which is employed in Modern Hebrew to mean ‘official’, is a synonym for melek ‘king’; see the extensive discussion in my commentary at Hos. 7:3–5 and Hos. 8:4, 10. Here the prophet, speaking in the name of God, asserts that no less guilty than the assassins who put to death successively Zechariah son of Jeroboam II (2 Kgs 15:10) and Shallum son of Jabesh (2 Kgs 15:13), 53.  See now O. Tammuz, ‘Psalm 78: A Case Study in Redaction as Propaganda’, CBQ 79 (2017), pp. 205–21 (210–13).

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are the members of the delegation that went to Egypt. According to our prophet, these persons, who had no business negotiating with anyone other than the God of Israel, placed the kings of Israel and their subjects in mortal danger. mizzaam lĕšōnām zô laĕgām bĕereṣ Miṣrāyim ‘Because of their unintelligible foreign speech. This is their jabbering in the land of Egypt’ For the correct understanding of Hos. 7:16e–g the world of biblical scholarship owes a debt of gratitude to S. M. Paul.54 As Paul explains, the feminine demonstrative pronoun zô (spelled zw) occurs only here in Hos. 7:16, and its purpose is to introduce the explanation of the obscure phrase zaam lĕšōnām (we translate ‘their unintelligible foreign speech’; Paul translates it alternatively as ‘gibberish jabber’ or ‘barbarischen Rede’) in the previous clause.55 As Paul notes, Heb. zaam is one of many expressions attested in languages far and wide, which treat foreign languages as stammering or defective speech.56 In Ps. 132:12 the same form zô (also spelled zw) serves as a relative pronoun while the feminine demonstrative pronoun spelled zh and pronounced zō occurs eight times, as follows: 2 Kgs 6:19; Ezek. 40:45; Qoh. 2:2, 24; 5:15, 18; 7:23; 9:13. Chapter 8 The famous Masoretic codices, Codex Aleppo and Codex Leningrad (and so also Miqraot Gedolot Hakketer and Biblia Hebraica Quinta) recognize a paragraph division at the end of the division marked as ch. 8 in printed editions of the book of Hosea in Hebrew and in English. However, they recognize no division whatsoever separating ch. 7 from ch. 8. In LXX Vaticanus, which divides the entire book of Hosea into eleven major divisions, English and Hebrew ch. 8 is treated as part of the seventh major division of the book of Hosea, which begins with Hos. 7:13 and ends with Hos. 8:14 (i.e., the end of ch. 8). In the older division

54.  S. M. Paul, ‘Hosea 7:16: Gibberish Jabber’, in Pomegranates and Golden Bells: Studies in Biblical, Jewish, and Near Eastern Ritual, Law and Literature in Honor of Jacob Milgrom (ed. D. P. Wright et al.; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1995), pp. 707–12; reprinted in S. M. Paul, Divrei Shalom: Collected Studies of Shalom M. Paul on the Bible and the Ancient Near East 1967–2005 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 257–62. 55.  Paul, ‘Hosea 7:16: Gibberish Jabber’, p. 711 (p. 262 in Divrei Shalom). 56.  Paul, ‘Hosea 7:16: Gibberish Jabber’, p. 709 (p. 262 in Divrei Shalom).

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of the book of Hosea into twenty-one paragraphs, which is also reflected in LXX Codex Vaticanus, English and Hebrew Hos. 7:13–14a and Hos. 7:14b–8:14 are treated as two distinct units, which are numbered as units 15 and 16 respectively. The recognition in the chapter divisions of the English Bible of Hos. 8:1–14 as a unit will lead us to suggest that the three principal messages of this larger unit are as follows: (1) God is not happy with the political turmoil exemplified by the assassination of King Zechariah by Shallum and of King Shallum by King Menahem (an issue addressed previously in Hos. 7:3–7) [Hos. 8:4a–d]; (2) God is displeased with the veneration of a silver calf at Samaria [Hos. 8:5–6] (for condemnation of the veneration of calves in religious rites elsewhere in Hosea see Hos. 10:5; 13:2); (3) God is displeased with Israel’s seeking help from Assyria in its conflict with Judah [Hos. 8:9]; (4) God is displeased with sacrificial worship (cf. Hos. 6:6) [Hos. 8:11–14]. Robert Gnuse surveys the history of the scholarly division of Hos. 8:1–4 into a series of separate oracles. Moreover, he argues most convincingly for the unity of Hos. 8:1–3.57 In addition, he examines in detail both the use of the particle kî and other stylistic and lexical features, which unite Hos. 8:1–3 and the thematic and theological features, which unite Hos. 8:1–3.58 Indeed, Gnuse’s delineation of the three major themes of Hos. 8:1–3 coincides with my delineation of the three major themes of Hos. 8:1–14. Before examining the individual sections here referred to, the transitions between them, and the structure of the larger unit which corresponds to Hos. 8:1–14 in the English Bible, let us note, with Ginsberg, ‘that Hos. 8.1–2, 7–14 obviously served as a model for Isa. 58.1–4’.59 Consequently, Ginsberg,60 in a manner similar to Ginsberg’s treatment of Hos. 2:16 in light of Isa. 65:10, which Ginsberg regards as having been inspired by Hos. 2:16, utilizes the later post-exilic biblical text to restore an earlier pre-exilic biblical text. Isaiah 58, it should be noted, is part of the haftarah or prophetic lection in the synagogue on the Day of Atonement (Isa. 57:14–58:14), the only solemn day of fasting prescribed in the Pentateuch (Lev. 16:29, 31; 23:29,

57.  Robert Gnuse, ‘Calf, Cult, and King: The Unity of Hosea 8:1–13’, BZ 26 (1982), pp. 83–92. See pp. 83–85 on the division of Hos. 8:1–4 into separate oracles, and pp. 85–92 for the treatment of 8:1–3. 58.  See Gnuse, ‘Calf, Cult, and King’, pp. 85–88, for the stylistic and lexical features, and pp. 88–92 for the theological features. 59.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, p. 1020; 2nd ed., vol. 9, p. 555. 60.  Ginsberg, ‘Unpublished Notes on Hosea’, p. 21.

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32; Num. 29:7). Significantly, Isa. 58:2–7 takes a dim view of fasting and prefers charitable behaviour toward the needy as a substitute for bowing one’s head like a bulrush and abstaining from breakfast and lunch. Thus Isa. 58:2–7 seems to share Hosea’s disparagement of religious rites, which I noted in connection with Hos. 6:6 (and see also below in Hos. 8:11–14). Having seen briefly the kinship of ideas between Hos. 4–14 and Isa. 58, let us now examine Isa. 58:1a–b in order to see why Ginsberg would utilize this half of a verse in the book of Isaiah to restore the problematic Hos. 8:1. Isaiah 58:1a–b reads as follows: qĕrā bĕgārôn al-taḥśōk kaššōpār hārēm qôlekā ‘Call out with throat; do not hold back; raise your voice [so that it sounds] like a ram’s horn’. Note that according to Lev. 25:9 once every fifty years the ram’s horn is to be sounded on the fast of the Day of Atonement to proclaim a year of liberation called the jubilee. It is not unlikely that the association of ram’s horn, liberation, and the Day of Atonement, along with divine inspiration, may be part of the stream of consciousness in the association of making a noise like a ram’s horn with the liberation theology of Isa. 58:2–7. In Isa. 58:1 it is the prophet who is addressed by God with the command ‘Call out…like a ram’s horn’. It is then explained in Isa. 58:1c–d why the prophet is asked to call out in a loud voice, namely, ‘And tell my people their transgression//and the house of Jacob their sin’. Corresponding to Isa. 58:1c–d, Hos. 8:1c–d reads as follows: yaan ābĕrû bĕrîtî//wĕal-tôrātî pāšāû ‘Because they transgressed my covenant//and they rebelled against my teaching’. If in Isa. 58:1c–d transgression and sin appear in parallel clauses, in Hos. 8:1c–d we have two verbs meaning transgress whose objects, respectively, are ‘my covenant’ and ‘my teaching’ (Heb. tôrâ). The term ‘my torah’ occurs again in Hos. 8:12 while the term ‘covenant’ referring to obligations incumbent upon the people of Israel appears in Hos. 2:20; 6:7; 10:4. For bĕrît denoting a covenant between Israel and another nation see Hos. 12:2. The two themes common to Hos. 8:1 and Isa. 58:1 are God’s request that the prophet inform the people of Israel of their transgressions and God’s request that the prophet raise his voice, apparently to get the people’s attention. Similarly, according to Moses Maimonides in his introduction to the rules pertaining to the sounding of the shofar or ram’s horn on the New Year in his Mishneh Torah or Code of Jewish Law, the shofar is sounded to awake sinners from their lethargy.

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It is but a small step from the comparison of Hos. 8:1 to Isa. 58:1–7 for Ginsberg to suggest that behind MT’s enigmatic el-ḥikkĕkā šōpār kannešer al-bêt Yhwh ‘[Put a] ram’s horn to your mouth//like an eagle over the temple of Yhwh’ must be an original el-ḥikkĕkā šōpār al-bêt Yiśrāēl ‘Place a ram’s horn to your mouth addressing the house of Israel’. Ginsberg, assumes that MT’s knšr is a scribal error resulting from ditto­graphy of the final consonant of ḥkk ‘your mouth’ + the word špr miscopied as nšr. Moreover, Ginsberg holds that the phrase al-bêt Yhwh ‘over the Temple of Yhwh’ is a misinterpretation of an original al-bêt-y, in which the final yod was an abbreviation for Yiśrāēl ‘Israel’, just as in Hos. 5:12, 13, 14 (here alone it is House of Judah); 6:4; 10:11 Judah in the pair Ephraim//Judah derives from the mistaken or deliberate misinterpretation of an original Ephraim//Y meant to be Ephraim//Israel as Ephraim//Judah. (See the extensive discussion in my Introduction in the section ‘Judahite Glosses’, and see also in my commentary at Hos. 5:12.) The assumption, which finds much corroboration in the work of G. R. Driver,61 is that the original Hebrew text contains many abbreviations which were misunderstood in MT, LXX, and both, and which insightful modern researchers may properly interpret.62 What Ginsberg’s restored text of Hos. 8:1 actually says is the following: ‘[Put] a ram’s horn to your mouth addressing the house of Israel’. In other words, the prophet is asked to sound a nonverbal warning to the house of Israel in the spirit of Amos 3:6a, ‘When a ram’s horn is sounded in a city, are not the people frightened?’ It is in the post-exilic Isa. 58:1 that the original call for a nonverbal warning is changed into a simile comparing the prophet’s clarion call to the sound of a ram’s horn. el-ḥikkĕka ‘to your mouth’ While Heb. ḥēk means ‘palate’ in Ps. 137:6 and Lam. 4:4, this noun frequently means ‘mouth’ as the organ of speech. See Prov. 5:3: ‘The lips of a strange woman drip honey//her mouth [ḥikkāh] is smoother than oil/perfume’; and 8:7: ‘My mouth [ḥikkî] utters truth//wickedness is an abomination to my lips’; in Cant. 5:16a: ‘His [my beloved’s] mouth is sweetness’; and 7:10: ‘Your mouth [says the lady to the man] is like sweet wine’.63 61.  Driver, ‘Abbreviations in the Massoretic Text’, pp. 132–43, and ‘Once Again Abbreviations’, Textus 4 (1964), pp. 76–94. 62.  Ginsberg’s treatment of knšr as an ancient scribal error for an original kšpr is anticipated by Graetz, Emendationes, p. 12. 63.  See already, Wolff, Hosea, p. 131.

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8:1 el-ḥikkĕkā šōpār ‘(Put) a ram’s horn to your mouth’ LXX, however, reads as follows: Εἰς κόλπον αὐτῶν ὡς γῆ, which means ‘[He shall come] into their midst as the land’. It has been conjectured that the Hebrew Vorlage of this LXX reading was el ḥēqām kĕāpār, which means ‘unto their bosom like earth’64 or ‘into their lap/bosom like earth’.65 The relationship between this conjectured Hebrew Vorlage of LXX and MT is as follows: In the square Hebrew characters the letter ayin of āpār is, as it were, two thirds of the letter shin of MT’s šōpār. The final mem of ḥēqām reflects the common interchange of the similar kaph and mem in Paleo-Hebrew script. TJ renders nĕbîā bĕḥikkāk aklî kîd bĕšōpārā. K. J. Cathcart and R. P. Gordon render the latter into English as follows: ‘O prophet! Cry out with your mouth as with a ram’s horn’.66 Similar is Peshitta’s pwmk yk qrn ‘your mouth like a horn’. Rashi reflects TJ and explains, ‘Shekinah [prophetic revelation of God’s will] says to the prophet, “Make the sound of your organ of speech to be heard, and call out like a ram’s horn” ’. The latter understanding of Hos. 8:1 is probably reflected already in Isa. 58:1: qĕrā bĕgārōn al-taḥśōk kaššōpār hārēm qōlekā wĕhaggēd lĕammî pišām ûlĕbêt Yaăqōb ḥaṭṭōtām ‘Cry with (full)\throat Do not stint. Raise your voice like a ram’s horn! And declare to my people their transgression, And to the house of Jacob their sin.’

Concerning the influence of the book of Hosea on Isa. 40–66, see above, pp. 32, 142–44. That Hos. 8:1 has inspired Isa. 58:1 would seem to be supported by the reference to transgression in Isa. 58:1, which is reminiscent of Hos. 8:1c–d. Moreover, ‘house of Jacob’ in Isa. 58:1d is reminiscent of ‘house 64.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 486. 65.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 293. 66.  K. J. Cathcart and R. P. Gordon, The Targum of the Minor Prophets (The Aramaic Bible, 14; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), p. 45.

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of Israel’, which NJPS restores in Hos. 8:1b. Moreover, Ginsberg states, ‘[Hos.] 8.1–2, 7–14 obviously served as a model for Isaiah 58.1–4’.67 Ibn Ezra, on the other hand, anticipating NJPS, takes ‘ram’s horn to your mouth’ not as a suggestion that the prophet should raise his voice like a ram’s horn but that he should ‘put a ram’s horn to your mouth’. Ibn Ezra and NJPS thus take ‘ram’s horn to your mouth’ as ellipsis for ‘put a ram’s horn to your mouth, and blow into it’. Ibn Ezra, however, in one of his typical puns, adds the following interpretation: ‘And Jephet [b. Ali the Karaite biblical exegete, fl. 950–980 CE] said, “Make your mouth a ram’s horn for the enemy ‘will soar’ (Jer. 48:40) like an eagle over the temple of Yhwh”. And he [Jephet] interpreted nicely [yapheh, a play upon the name of the commentator Yephet/Jephet].’ Ibn Ezra concludes his comment on Hos. 8:1 noting that yaan [means] ‘because’. Indeed, the clause of Hos. 8:1, which is introduced by yaan ‘because’ constitutes a justification of the warning, which should call for an audible warning by the prophet’s voice or by means of the sounding of a ram’s horn. See below. As noted by Harper, the ram’s horn likely refers to ‘the sounding of the alarm uttered to the prophets by Yahweh, for the enemy is now approaching’.68 The most apt parallels (contrast those offered by Harper) are Jer. 4:5; 6:1; 51:27; Ezek. 7:14; 33:3, 6; Hos. 5:8; Joel 2:1; Amos 3:6. kĕnešer al bêt-YHWH ‘Like an eagle over the temple of Yhwh’ Rashi and Ibn Ezra have both aptly suggested that the simile ‘like an eagle’ refers here, as in Jer. 48:40, to an enemy swooping down to inflict divine retribution. Were the prophetic speaker in Hos. 8 Micah of Moresheth (see Mic. 3–4) or Jeremiah (see Jer. 7:1; 26:2), byt Yhwh ‘temple of Yhwh’ would be an apt epithet for the temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. However, in the context of Hos. 4–14, which recognizes a multiplicity of legitimate sanctuaries in the Northern Kingdom (in Hos. 4:15 we have Gilgal and Beth-aven; q.v.; and in Hos. 12:5 we have Bethel), the expression ‘house of Yhwh’ is totally anomalous. Consequently, NJPS construes the phrase byt Yhwh as arising from an original abbreviation byt y, which stood for ‘house of Israel’. Indeed, ‘house of Israel’ as an epithet of the Northern Kingdom occurs in MT of Hos. 4–14 at Hos. 5:1; 6:10; 12:1. It is likely that the correct interpretation, ‘house of Israel’, was available to the author of Isa. 58:1 67.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, p. 1020; 2nd ed., vol. 9, p. 555. 68.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 308.

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when he wrote ‘house of Jacob’. For ‘Jacob’ as an epithet specifically of the Northern Kingdom, see Mic. 1:5 where the prophet spells this out most explicitly. yaan ābĕrû bĕrîtî wĕal-tôrātî pāšāû ‘Because they transgressed my covenant, and they rebelled against my teaching’ Normally, the verb pāša is translated ‘transgressed’. However, I am forced to adopt the translation ‘rebelled against’ to reflect the fact that the prophet here employs two distinct, albeit synonymous, verbs to convey the same idea. I translate ābĕrû in the first clause ‘transgressed’ because, in fact, that is the literal meaning in context of this verb, whose basic meaning is ‘to pass over’. Hosea also employs the almost identical expression without the possessive pronominal suffix in Hos. 6:7 where he states, ābĕrû bĕrît ‘they violated at agreement’. Note should be taken of the chiastic synonymous parallelism in Hos. 8:1c–d, which equates ‘my covenant’ and ‘my teaching’. 8:2 lî yizāqû ĕlōhay yĕdaănûkā Yiśrāēl ‘Israel cries out to me, “My God, we are devoted to you” ’ I follow NJPS and Rashi in construing this verse as an instance of inversion in which the subject, which should follow the predicate, as frequently in Northwest Semitic poetry, appears at the end of the verse following the quotation of the words which they, the subject, Israel, ‘cry out’. Rashi explicitly states that this verse is an instance of inversion, while the syntactical anomaly inspires BHS to offer the conjectural emendation yĕdaănûkā ĕlōhê Yiśrāēl ‘We are devoted to you, O God of Israel’. Moreover, BHS suggests that LXX and Peshitta support the emendation. LXX reads as follows: ἐμέ κεκράξονται Ὁ θεός, ἐγνώκαμέν σε ‘They cry to me, “O God, we are devoted to You” ’.

Anticipating Rashi, Vulgate mediates between what the text must apparently mean and the anomalous syntax, translating as follows: Me invocabunt Deus me cognovimus te Israel ‘They call to me, “My God”//We are devoted to you, Israel’.

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Peshitta reads lhn ‘our God’ instead of MT’s ‘my God’, while TJ paraphrases the second half of the verse as follows: ărê lêt lanā ĕlāh bār mināk ‘Indeed, we have no God except you’. All of these renderings assume that as in the expression ‘knew his wife’ (Gen. 4:1, 17, 25), the Hebrew equivalent of ‘know’ means ‘be in an intimate relationship with’, one not necessarily of a sexual nature (cf. Hos. 2:22 and Hos. 4:1 and my discussion there concerning knowing Yhwh and knowledge of God, respectively). The verb ‘they cried’ is followed in some versions of LXX by the participle λεγοντες ‘saying’, equivalent of Heb. lēmōr, which generally introduces quotations in Hebrew Scripture.69 Likewise, TJ adds the participle wĕāmĕrîn ‘and they say’. The proper name Israel, which Rashi, followed by NJPS, construes as the subject of the verb ‘they cry out’, is omitted in one Kennicott MS and one de Rossi MS, as in LXX and Peshitta. Wolff concludes that this proper noun was absent from the Hebrew Vorlage of both LXX and Peshitta,70 while Rudolf holds that the translators of LXX and Peshitta simply omitted the proper noun from their translations because they did not know what to do with it.71 A marginal note in NJPS at Hos. 8:2 refers us to Hos. 7:14 where Yhwh asserts, ‘But they did not cry out to me sincerely as they lay wailing’. Apparently, in Hos. 8:2 also the prophet speaking in the name of Yhwh regards Israel’s declaration, ‘My God, we are devoted to you’, as insincere because this declaration is sandwiched between ‘they have violated my teaching’ (v. 1d) and ‘Israel has rejected goodness’ (v. 3a). 8:3 zānaḥ Yiśrāēl ṭōb ‘Israel has rejected goodness’ For Heb. ṭōb designating ‘moral goodness’, see Isa. 5:20: ‘Ah, those who call evil goodness and goodness evil’; Qoh. 9:2: ‘For the same fate is in 69.  G. Hatav, ‘(Free) Direct Discourse in Biblical Hebrew’, Hebrew Studies 41 (2000), pp. 7–30, argues that this infinitive is employed in Hebrew Scripture to introduce indirect quotations while R. Samuel b. Meir, commonly known by his acronym Rashbam, argues that the infinitive lemor is employed in Hebrew Scripture to introduce direct quotations; see Rashbam at Lev. 1:1; and see the extensive discussion in M. I. Lockshin, ed. and trans., Rashbam’s Commentary on Leviticus and Numbers: An Annotated Translation (BJS, 330; Providence: Scholars Press, 2001), pp. 13–14. 70.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 131. 71.  Rudolph, Hosea, p. 157. See also Macintosh, Hosea, p. 295.

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store for all: for the virtuous and for the wicked; for the good and pure, and for the impure…’; Deut. 30:15–19: ‘See, I set before you this day life and goodness, death and evil… Choose life.’72 The interpretation of ṭōb to mean ‘moral goodness’ in Hos. 8:3a is supported by LXX, which reads as follows: ’Ισραὴλ ἀπεστερέψατο ἀγαθά, which means, ‘Israel has turned away from good things’. The same interpretation is found also in the Peshitta, which reads as follows: t ysryl tbt ‘Israel has disregarded goodness’. The same interpretation is found also in the Vulgate, where we read, Projecit Israel bonum, which means, ‘Israel abandoned goodness’. TJ paraphrases as follows: ṭĕô bêt Yiśrāēl mibbātar pulḥānî dibdîlêh ănā mêtê ălêhôn ṭûbā mikkēan sānĕāh yirdôpinûn, which I paraphrase in English as follows: ‘Israel strayed from my service in deference to which I brought upon them goodness/ prosperity. From now on the enemy will pursue them.’ Strangely, Andersen and Freedman follow Dahood in understanding the noun ṭōb here to be a divine name.73 In fact, Dahood interpreted Hos. 8:2a to mean ‘Israel has rejected the Good One’, understanding the syntax as an example of verb–subject–direct object, exactly as in the common ancient and modern renderings, which assume that the noun ṭōb here refers to moral goodness.74 Andersen and Freedman, however, go beyond Dahood in translating ‘The Good One [i.e., Yhwh] rejects Israel’, and they argue, ‘No subject is provided for the verb…although Yahweh is most likely’.75 In fact, the clause zānaḥ Yiśrāēl ṭōb, meaning ‘Israel has rejected goodness’ is a perfectly normal verbal clause in Biblical Hebrew, in which the word order is verb–subject–direct object.76 72.  For other interpretations of ṭōb in Hos. 8:3a, see Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 491. 73.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 481. 74.  M. Dahood, ‘Ugaritic and the Old Testament’, ETL 44 (1968), pp. 35–54 (45). 75.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 481. 76.  Concerning this normal word order in Biblical Hebrew, see, inter alia, A. Müller, Outlines of Hebrew Syntax (trans. and ed. J. Robertson; 3rd ed.; Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1888), p. 88 #130; B. T. Arnold and J. H. Choi, A Guide to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 169; J. D. Wijnkoop, Manual of Hebrew Syntax (trans. from the Dutch by C. van den Biesen; London: Luzac & Co., 1897), p. 145; K. Jongeling, ‘On the VSO [i.e., verb– subject–object] Character of Classical Hebrew’, in Studies in Hebrew and Aramaic Syntax Presented to Professor J. Hoftijzer (ed. K. Jongeling, H. L. Murre-Van Den Berg, and L. Van Rompay; Leiden: Brill, 1991), pp. 103–11; similarly A. B. Davidson, Hebrew Syntax (3rd ed.; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1912), p. 146 #105; C. L. Seow, A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew (Nashville: Abingdon, 1987), p. 94; A. Moshavi, Word

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ōyēb yirdĕpô ‘May an enemy pursue him’ I understand the verb here as a jussive, which expresses a wish, in this case God’s wish that Israel should be punished for his disloyalty to God. NJPS translates literally the standard Hebrew text as follows: ‘An enemy will pursue him’, assuming that the verb is indicative rather than jussive, which is a matter that cannot be determined except for weak verbs, which will employ a shorter form of the imperfect as the jussive. However, NJPS’s marginal note, ‘Emendation yields “They pursue delusion” ’, suggests that while according to the literal meaning of the standard Hebrew text ‘an enemy’ is the subject of the clause and the predicate is ‘will pursue him’, namely, Israel, the translators of NJPS were confident that the original text of Hos. 8:3b said and meant something else entirely. LXX reads as follows: ἐχθρὸν κατεδίωξαν, meaning, ‘They have pursued an enemy’. Indeed, the consonantal text of MT will support both the reading suggested by the Masoretic vowel points as well as the interpretation suggested by LXX. 8:4 hēm himlîkû wĕlō mimmenî hēśîrû wĕlō yādatî ‘They have installed kings, but not with my sanction. They have installed rulers, but I did not consent’ This first half of Hos. 8:4 constitutes a classic example of synonymous parallelism. However, we have become so used to parallel word pairs that are not really synonymous such as silver//gold, heavens//earth, and the like that most scholars failed to recognize the synonymy of the first and third clauses until S. M. Paul provided the key. Indeed, even he failed to unlock the meaning of Hos. 8:4a. As noted by Andersen and Freedman, the word śārîm, commonly understood to mean ‘princes’ or ‘officials’, always occurs in Hosea in parallel with and after melek ‘king’, or coordinated with it.77 They refer to Hos. 3:4; 7:3, 5; 8:10; 13:10. To be precise, the pair melek/śārîm ‘king’//‘rulers’ appears in Hos. 7:3, 5 and 8:10 while in Hos. 3:4 we find wĕên melek wĕên śār ‘Neither king nor ruler’, and in Hos. 13:10 we find instead melek wĕśārîm ‘king and rulers’. (See the Order in the Biblical Hebrew Finite Clause (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010), p. 7; for a dissenting view, according to which the normal word order in Biblical Hebrew is, as in Modern Hebrew, subject–verb–object, see P. Joüon, Grammaire de l’Hébreu Biblique (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute Press, 1923), #155k. 77.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 454.

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extensive discussion in my commentary there.) Strange to relate, Hos. 8:4a also does not employ the aforementioned noun pair but rather the corresponding pair of synonymous verbs meaning ‘install king’//‘appoint ruler’. The key to understanding both the noun pair and the verb pair is to be found in the analyses supplied by S. M. Paul.78 In both of these studies Paul shows that maśśā melek śārîm means ‘tribute to the most august king’.79 He explains that melek śārîm in Hos. 8:10 ‘is a reflex of the extremely common Mesopotamian royal title šar šarrāni “most august king”, lit., “king of kings” ’. Paul argues that in the context of Hos. 8:10 the epithet refers to Tiglath-pileser III (745–727), to whom, the prophet predicts, Israel will, in the not too distant future, be required to render tribute. Paul also notes that in Ezek. 26:7 the same Akkadian expression is rendered into Hebrew as melek mĕlākîm, lit., ‘king of kings’, i.e., ‘supreme king’, referring to Nebuchadrezzar II as the supreme king, while in Dan. 2:37 the Aramaic equivalent melek mālkayyā also refers to that Babylonian king. The obvious conclusion is that just as in these several Akkadian, Hebrew, and Aramaic expressions Heb. and Aram. melek are equivalent to Akk. šarru ‘king’, so also is Akk. šarrānu ‘kings’ equivalent to both Heb. mĕlākîm and Heb. śārîm denoting ‘kings, monarchs, rulers’ and hence a lexical synonym of melek in Hos. 7:3, 5; 8:10. Having established that both melek and śārîm can and do denote king(s) in Hos. 4–14, we should not be surprised to find that the causative verbs himlîku//hēśîrû are employed in synonymous parallelism in Hos. 8:4 to refer to the installation of kings and that the word-order for both the several-times attested noun pair and the once-attested pair of verbs follows the Held–Ehelolf principle of common word preceding rare word. In Hos. 8:4, as also in Hos. 13:10, our prophet expresses the view held earlier by the Prophet Samuel and by the anonymous narrator in 1 Sam. 8:4, according to which, ‘all the elders of Israel assembled at Ramah asked the Prophet Samuel, “Appoint a king for us to govern us like all other nations” ’, and according to which God, as it were, opposed the establishment of the monarchy but, like a parent worn down by the incessant demands of a teenager, who wishes only to be like her/his schoolmates, 78.  Paul, ‘Hosea 8:8–10’, and ‘maśśā melek śārîm’. 79.  For the demonstration that, as the Rabbinic Sages (see b. Bava Batra 8a), David Kimchi, and A. Caquot, ‘Osee et la Royauté’, RHPhR 41 (1961), pp. 138–39, already knew, the noun maśśā ere designates tax or tribute. See Paul, ‘maśśā melek sarim’, p. 197 and n. 27, as well as Paul, ‘Hosea 8:8–10 maśśā melek śārîm and Ancient Near Eastern Royal Epithets’, p. 312.

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gave in to them. Hundreds of years later, in Hos. 8:4; 13:10, God reminds Israel that the monarchy ‘was never my idea anyway’. See also below at Hos. 13:10. The verb hēśîrû, understood to mean ‘they appointed rulers’, would qualify as a denominative verb derived from the noun śar meaning ‘ruler’, a relatively rare synonym of the noun melek ‘king’.80 HALOT (3:1363) follows the conventional wisdom of the standard dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew and treats the verb hēśîr as the hiphil of śrr, a denominative verb meaning ‘rule, reign’ and derived from the noun śar ‘ruler’.81 However, HALOT (3:1363) adds as an afterthought the idea that in fact the verb hēśîr attested in the plural in Hos. 8:4 may actually be derived from a by-form of the verbal root śrr, namely, the root śwr. DCH (8:199) suggests that either our verb hēśîrû ‘they appointed rulers’ is the hiphil of a root śrr or the hiphil of a root śwr (see also DCH 8:119). Interestingly, Rashi in his commentary at Hos. 8:4a offers an alternative interpretation of the verb hēśîrû in Hos. 8:4. Inspired by The Book of Masoret, which is a medieval precursor of S. Frensdorff’s Das Buch Ochlah W’ochlah (Massora),82 Rashi suggests that the verb hēśîrû in Hos. 8:4 is one of a number of instances [Ochlah W’ochlah, there lists eighteen instances as follows: Exod. 33:22; Judg. 4:18; 1 Sam. 5:9; Ezek. 41:16; Isa. 3:17; 5:5; Hos. 2:8; 8:4; 9:12; Job 5:2; 6:2; 10:11, 17; 17:7; 40:31; Lam. 2:6; 3:8; Qoh. 12:11; here all listed according to the order found in Ochlah W’ochlah] where a word is written with the Hebrew letter ś (the symbol shin, which Bibles point as ś rather than š by means of a dot on the left side of the alphabetical symbol rather than on the right side) and meant to be read as though it were written with samek (i.e., s), ‘and’, Rashi continues, ‘its meaning is “they removed” ’. M. Paran suggests that the biblical writer has deliberately hinted at two alternative meanings.83 The parallelism suggests that the verb form should actually be hēśērû, which would be a hiphil denominative verb from the root śrr ‘to be/act as a ruler’ derived from the noun śar ‘ruler’ and would mean ‘they appointed rulers’. However, as explicated almost telegraphically by Paran and in great detail by David Yellin, both the consonantal text in our Bibles, hśyrw, and the

80.  So Zorell, Lexicon, p. 809. 81.  So, e.g., Gesenius, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament (ed. R. Meyer, U. Rüterswörden, J. Renz, and H. Donner; 18th ed.; Berlin & Heidelberg: Springer, 2013), vol. 5, p. 1303. 82.  S. Frensdorff, ed., Das Buch Ochlah W’ochlah (Massora) (Hannover: Hahn’sche Hofbuchhandlung, 1864), #191. 83.  M. Paran, ‘Ambiguity in the Bible’, Beer-Sheva 1 (1973), pp. 150–61 (153–54) (in Hebrew).

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vocalization hēśîrû hint at an alternative meaning, namely, ‘they removed’ as noted already by Rashi (see above) as well as Ibn Ezra and Jephet Ben-Ali in their commentaries at Hos. 8:4.84 One might have assumed that LXX would resolve the question as to how Hos. 8:4a–b was understood in antiquity. In fact, Codex Vaticanus of LXX reads as follows: ἐαυτοῖς ἐβασίλευσαν καὶ οὐ δι’ ἐμοῦ, ἦρξαν καὶ οὐκ ἐγνώρισάν μοι, which Glenny renders as ‘They reigned for themselves and not by me; they ruled and did not inform me’.85 Some scholars86 render the first of the two verbs in LXX of Hos. 8:4 as a causative ‘they appointed a king’ based on the meaning of the same verb form in 3 Kgdms 1:43 and the MT here at Hos. 8:4. On the other hand, both the normal meaning of the Greek verb employed here in Hos. 8:4a and the non-causative meaning of the verb ἦρξαν ‘they ruled’ in the parallel clause in Hos. 8:4b support Glenny’s interpretation. There are three possible meanings of the assertion in Hos. 8:4a–b. One possible meaning is that, as I suggested above, here at Hos. 8:4 as again in Hos. 13:10 our eighth-century BCE prophet, like the prophet Samuel in the eleventh century BCE, holds that God opposes the Israelite monarchy altogether. A second possibility is that our eighth-century Second Hosea, like the ninth-century BCE prophet who speaks in Hos. 3:5, is opposed to any Israelite royal house other than the Davidic dynasty and looks forward to the reestablishment of the rule of the Davidic dynasty over all Israel. The third possibility is that here in Hos. 8:4, our eighth-century BCE prophet expresses contempt for the two kings who ruled in Israel following the assassination of Zechariah son of Jeroboam II in 747 BCE, i.e., Shallum son of Jabesh (one month in 747 BCE) and Menahem son of Gadi (747–737 BCE; see 2 Kgs 15:8–22), because both of these kings acceded to the throne as a consequence of their having assassinated the reigning king and having usurped the kingship. Indeed, our prophet refers to these unhappy events in Hos. 7:3–7. kaspām ûzĕhābām āśû lāhem ăṣăbîm lĕmaan yikkārēt ‘Of their silver and gold they made themselves images in order that they (Israel) may be cut off (from Yhwh)’ Concerning ‘of their silver and gold they made themselves images’, cf. Hos. 2:10, where TJ interprets MT’s ‘and gold they made for Baal’ to mean ‘they (the people of Israel) made gold into cultic statues for the 84.  David Yellin, ‘Ambiguity [in the Bible]’, in Selected Writings of David Yellin (2 vols.; Jerusalem: Kiryath Sepher, 1939), vol. 2, pp. 101–102 (in Hebrew). 85.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 49. 86.  See the discussion in Glenny, Hosea, p. 128.

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worship of gods other than the god of Israel’. Indeed, the two verses, Hos. 2:10 and Hos. 8:4, are commonly employed to elucidate each other. Concerning ăṣăbîm ‘images’, see my contribution on ‘azabbim’ in DDD2.87 There, I explained that the verb āṣab meaning ‘form, fashion, shape’ is attested in Jer. 44:19 and Job 10:8, while the singular noun eṣeb meaning ‘(clay) vessel, pot’ is attested in Jer. 22:28. The plural ăṣăbîm denoting zoomorphic and anthropomorphic statues employed in religious worship is attested 17 times in the Hebrew Bible. It is especially characteristic of Hosea (Hos. 4:17; 8:4; 13:2; 14:9), who employs this noun to refer to the golden calves at Dan and Bethel (certainly in Hos. 13:2; following Ginsberg, I infer that this is the case also in Hos. 8:4 and 14:988); concerning Hos. 4:17 see the discussion above, ad loc. In the view of our prophet Hosea, which is shared by the author(s) of 1 Kgs 12:28–30, the veneration of the golden calves was a form of apostasy. Micah 1:7, on the other hand, warns that Samaria’s ăṣăbîm will be destroyed because they were endowed from fees paid to prostitutes for services rendered (cf. Deut. 23:19). Psalms 115:4 and 135:15 refer to a time (perhaps early in the Second Temple period) when Israel’s neighbours taunted her for worshipping an unseen deity, while Israel, in return, taunted its neighbours for worshipping anthropomorphic ăṣăbîm fashioned by human hands from silver and gold. Ginsberg takes ăṣăbîm ‘images’ in Hos. 8:4b to refer to ‘the calf of Samaria’ (vv. 5–6).89 Moreover, Ginsberg suggests that ‘the calf of Samaria’ is ‘the calf of Beth-aven’ (so NJPS; but MT reads ‘calves’, on which see below) mentioned in Hos. 10:5, and he surmises with Rashi at Hos. 4:15 and 10:5 that Beth-aven, which means literally ‘House of Iniquity’, is a deliberate cacophony for Bethel, which means literally ‘House of God’. Similarly in Hos. 10:8 bāmōt āwen ‘the shrines of Aven’ is assumed by NJPS to be an abbreviation for ‘the shrines of Beth-aven’. In addition, Ginsberg surmises that during the Judahite threat to conquer Bethel referred to in Hos. 5:8–10 (there MT reads Beth-aven, and Ginsberg accepts Rashi’s view that Beth-aven is a pejorative epithet for Bethel) the calf may have been removed to Samaria for reasons of security.90 Similarly, Deutero-Isaiah makes fun in Isa. 45:20 and 46:1–2 of people who rely upon gods who ‘could not rescue the burden and they themselves went into captivity’. 87.  M. I. Gruber, ‘azabbim’, DDD2, pp. 238–40. 88.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, p. 1020; 2nd ed., vol. 9, p. 555. 89.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, p. 1020; 2nd ed., vol. 9, p. 555. 90.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, p. 1020; 2nd ed., vol. 9, 554.

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The Calf Images

According to 1 Kgs 12:28–29, King Jeroboam I (928–907 BCE) took counsel and made two golden calves. ‘He said to the people (so NJPS; but MT reads “to them”), “You have been going up to Jerusalem long enough. Behold your gods,91 Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt”. He set up one in Bethel and placed the other in Dan.’ Jeroboam’s having made two golden calves—one set up at Bethel and the other at Dan— would itself justify understanding ‘Behold your god(s)’ to mean ‘Here are your gods’ rather than ‘Here is your god’. How then may we account for ‘calves (in the plural) of Beth-aven’ in Hos. 10:5? Probably, both this plural and the plural ‘these are your gods’ spoken by Aaron with respect to the single calf in Exod. 32:4 (and quoted by Yhwh to Moses in Exod. 32:8) can be accounted for by the assumption that the clearest distinction between worship of the God of Israel and forbidden or pagan worship (from an Israelite point of view) is that the latter involves a multiplicity of deities (‘these, they’) while legitimate Israelite worship involves Yhwh alone as stated in Deut. 6:4: ‘Hear, Israel! Yhwh is our God, Yhwh alone’ (cf. NJPS there). It is reasonable to assume that some devotees of the one God of Israel saw in the calves of Bethel and Dan appurtenances which did not compromise monotheism. Judah Halevi has already compared the cherubim in the Mosaic Tabernacle and the calves that supported the Sea in Solomon’s Temple.92 However, our eighth-century BCE prophet shares with the author of 1 Kgs 12 the view that the calves placed by Jeroboam at Dan and Bethel and apparently later removed to Samaria compromised monotheism just as does, in the view of our prophet (see Hos. 12), the veneration of the angel of Bethel (see below at Hos. 12). 91.  Heb. hinnēh ĕlōhêkā; Heb. ĕlōhêkā can mean either ‘your god’ (so NJPS) or ‘your gods’. Since, however, the verbal predicate heĕlûkā is plural, the subject must be ‘your gods’; cf. Exod. 32:4: ēlleh ĕlōhêkā, literally, ‘These are your gods’; however, NJPS renders ‘This is your god’ and confines the literal translation to a footnote. The same phraseology is repeated in Exod. 32:8, and there again NJPS renders ‘This is your god’ and confines the literal rendering to a footnote. In both cases the literal rendering is attributed to ‘Others’. 92.  Judah Halevi, Kitab al Khazari (translated from the Arabic with an introduction by H. Hirschfield; London: George Routledge & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1905), Part I, #97 (pp. 68–69), explains that the sin of those who asked Aaron to make the golden calf ‘consisted in the manufacture of an image of a forbidden thing, and in attributing divine power to a creation of their own, something chosen by themselves without the guidance of God’. On the other hand, Judah Halevi continues (p. 70): ‘He [God] was to be worshipped according to His own ordinances. There was nothing strange in the form of the cherubim made by His command.’

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lĕmaan yikkārēt ‘In order that they (Israel) may be cut off (from Yhwh)’ Here, as in the expression lĕmaan ḥallēl et-šēm qodĕšî ‘in order to profane my holy name’ in Amos 2:7, the prophet’s point is that the people should have known full well that veneration of cult statues would provoke God to anger. Consequently, they were behaving, as it were, like children who have deliberately provoked a parent to punish them. For the passive of the verb krt ‘cut off’ outside the priestly corpora of Lev. 1–26 and cognate passages in Exodus and Numbers with respect to punishment of persons who misbehave, cf. Ps. 37:34, ‘when the wicked are cut off’; and 37:38, ‘the future of the wicked will be cut off’. Supporting Ginsberg’s contention that the images referred to in Hos. 8:4 were indeed the calves set up at Bethel and Dan, the prophet continues in 8:5a. 8:5 zānaḥ eglēk Šōmĕrōn ‘He (Yhwh) has rejected your calf, Samaria’ And he continues speaking about this calf in vv. 5b–6. ḥārâ appî bām ‘I [Yhwh] became angry at them’ Notwithstanding the fact that Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Kimhi, Joseph Qara, Eliezer of Baugency, Isaiah of Trani, and Joseph Ibn Kaspi all pass over it in silence, I cannot avoid the impression that our prophet suggests a reciprocal relationship between Israel’s rejection of goodness referred to in Hos. 8:2 and God’s rejection of the worship carried on in the kingdom of Israel referred to in Hos. 8:5. The two verses are the only instances in pre-exilic biblical texts where a clause begins with the verb zānaḥ ‘he has rejected’. The third and final attestation in all of Hebrew Scripture of this verb form is in post-exilic Lam. 2:7a, where we read, zānaḥ ădonāy mizbĕḥô ‘The Lord rejected his [own] altar’.93 J. R. Lundbom accepts the widely held view that there is a syntactic crux in Hos. 8:5b–6 in that the subject of the verb zānaḥ is, allegedly, less than obvious, while the identity of the speaker in Hos. 8:6a is also less than obvious.94 However, in light of the apt observation by Gnuse and Wolff that the change of persons is especially characteristic of the book 93.  Concerning the literal meaning of ḥārâ ap and the aptness of this expression for ‘be angry’, see the extensive discussion in Gruber, ANCANE, pp. 491–502. 94.  J. R. Lundbom, ‘Double-Duty Subject in Hosea VIII 5’, VT 25 (1975), pp. 228–30.

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of Hosea,95 there is no reason to adopt Lundbom’s far-reaching suggestion that the subject of both Hos. 8:5b and 8:6a is the noun ap ‘nose’. In fact, Lundbom’s suggestion, which was published before my own analysis of the anatomic idiom ḥārâ ap meaning ‘be angry’, cited above, failed to take into consideration that ḥārâ appî is an idiomatic expression, and that it is unlikely that the prophet would have intended that we understand the noun appî ‘my nose’ as functioning both in the idiomatic expression ḥārâ appî and as the subject of the verb zānaḥ ‘rejected’ in Hos. 8:5a. ad-mātay ‘It is enough’. Literally, ‘Until when, how long?’ This literal rendering is reflected also in NJPS’s ‘Will they never?’ However, as I have argued elsewhere, this rhetorical question, like its Akkadian and Latin parallels, always means ‘Enough!’ or ‘Stop it!’96 Thus the sense of Hos. 8:5c is ‘It is long enough that they (the Israelites of eighth-century BCE Samaria) behave as though they are incapable of purifying themselves from contamination by worship of/with illegitimate cult statues’. In v. 6 the prophet speaking in the name of Yhwh will explain why—anticipating the anti-idolatry polemics of Deutero-Isaiah—and he will promise a solution that echoes Moses’s resolution of the golden calf episode in Exod. 32:20. The Calves in Archaeology Several studies have examined the archaeological evidence for Israelite golden calves, similar to those posited in Exod. 32; 1 Kgs 12, and Hosea.97 lō yûkĕlû niqqāyōn ‘That they (Israel) are incapable of purity’ Since I take the rhetorical question ad-mātay, not as a request for information as to whether the questioner’s desired change in behaviour will take place on Monday or on Tuesday, in the morning or at night but as an exclamation, ‘Enough!’, meaning that the supposed questioner (God speaking through the prophet) expresses displeasure at the behaviour of Israel, the description of the behaviour of which God does not approve has to be introduced in English by the relative pronoun ‘that’ while the entire clause functions as a predicate nominative. 95.  Gnuse, ‘Calf, Cult, and King’, p. 88; Wolff, Hosea, p. 136. 96.  M. I. Gruber, Rashi’s Commentary on Psalms (Brill Reference Library of Judaism, 18; Leiden: Brill, 2004). p. 497 n. 41. 97.  R. Wenning and E. Zenger, ‘Ein bäuerliches Baal-Heiligtum im samarischen Gebirge aus der Zeit der Anfänge Israels: Erwägungen zu dem von A. Mazar zwischen Dotan und Tirza entdeckten “Bull Site” ’, ZDPV 102 (1986), pp. 75–86; A. Mazar, ‘ “The Bull Site”: An Iron Age I Open Cult Place’, BASOR 247 (1982), pp. 27–40.

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Andersen and Freedman note that the verb ykl ‘be capable of’ is normally followed by an infinitive and occasionally by a verb in the imperfect.98 The anomaly that the received text has a noun rather than an infinitive is solved by NJPS’s ingenious attempt to restore the original text (see below). Andersen and Freedman, on the other hand, compare Isa. 1:13, ‘I cannot…iniquity and solemn assembly’ where the missing infinitive ‘to endure, stand’ is understood. However, Andersen and Freedman suggest that in Hos. 8:5c the lexeme niqqāyōn be understood as a verbal noun meaning ‘be (or become) innocent’.99 Harper interprets niqqāyōn not as ‘innocence’, which is to say the inability to clean themselves of guilt’ but rather ‘freedom from punishment’.100 This understanding of the verbal root nqy is supported by NJPS’s rendering of Jer. 25:29, wĕattem hinnāqēh tinnāqû lō tinnāqû, ‘…do you expect to go unpunished? You will not go unpunished’. One may also compare Exod. 34:7, where NJPS renders wĕnaqqēh lō yĕnaqqēh ‘yet He does not remit all punishment’, which is modified in Joel 2:13, wĕniḥām al-hārāâ ‘and renouncing punishment’; for the latter paraphrase of the final clause of Exod. 34:7, see also Jon. 3:9; 4:2 and the use in Jewish liturgy of Exod. 34:7, which ignores by omission the words lō yĕnaqqēh ‘he will not cleanse’ at the end of the verse and treats the infinitive wĕnaqqēh as an infinitive consecutive meaning ‘and he will cleanse’.101 If we adopt Harper’s suggestion concerning the lexeme niqqāyōn, Hos. 8:5 should mean the following: ‘Yhwh has rejected your calf, Samaria I am angry with them. It is enough already! They cannot be left unpunished.’

J. M. Ward argues that the clause under discussion here spoils the climax of the preceding strophe, and he follows numerous commentators who delete the clause.102 This deletion assumes that suddenly God has relented, which he clearly has not done either in the preceding clauses or in v. 7. This assumption, which might justify deleting the clause, is obviated 98.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 494. 99.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 490. This interpretation is reflected in Gesenius, Handwörterbuch, 18th ed., p. 844 100.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 315. 101.  See Scherman, The Complete ArtScroll Siddur, pp. 434–35. 102.  J. M. Ward, Hosea: A Theological Commentary (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 141.

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by the adoption of Harper’s interpretation as expounded above. NJPS rather characteristically calls for emending MT without supplying the emendation. In a marginal note NJPS translates the emended text of Hos. 8:5c–6a as follows: ‘understanding/That House of Israel’. This translation assumes a restored Hebrew original of Hos. 8:5c–6a, which reads as follows: ad-mātay lō yûkĕlû hābîn bêt-Yiśrāēl. So reconstructed, Hos. 8:5c–6a should mean, ‘It is long enough that they, the house of Israel, exhibit no understanding’. Indeed, the idea that cultivation of improper forms of worship is the product of a lack of understanding is spelled out in Isa. 44:18–19, where it is stated as follows: ‘They do not know, and they do not understand. Their eyes are covered over with plaster so that they cannot see. And their hearts (are plastered over) so that they cannot think. Consequently he (the worshipper of a statue made from the very same wood that he burnt in a fire to grill meat and to warm himself; see Isa. 44:16) has neither knowledge nor understanding to say: “Part of it I burned in a fire; I also baked bread on its coals. I grilled meat, and I ate it, And what is left of it I shall make into a cult object [Heb. toēbâ; abomination, clearly a dysphemism for ‘cult object’], and I shall bow down to a block of wood”.’

The restoration of hābîn in place of MT’s niqqāyōn reflects, most likely, the following stream of consciousness in the mind of H. L. Ginsberg, Editor in Chief of the Prophets for the NJPS translation: (1) it has widely been recognized that the reading niqqāyōn is problematic and may reflect a corruption of the text; (2) it has been noted previously that Hos. 4–14 has influenced both the ideas and the phraseology of Isa. 40–66 (see above); (3) the restored lō yûkĕlû hābîn would seem to be expanded upon in Isa. 56:10–11: ṣōpāyw iwĕrîm kullām lō yādāû kullām kĕlābîm illĕmîm lō yûkĕlû linbōăḥ hōzîm šōkĕbîm ōhăbê lānûm wĕhakkĕlābîm azzê-nepeš lō yādĕû śobâ wĕhēmmâ rōîm lō yādĕû hābîn

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‘The watchmen are all blind, all of them. They are ignorant. They are all silent (guard) dogs. They are unable to bark. They lie sprawling. They love to nap. But the dogs are greedy. They never know satiety. And as for them, the shepherds, They do not know to understand.’

Ginsberg’s ingenious stream of consciousness, which suggests that Deutero-Isaiah expanded upon Hos. 8:5c, is especially worthy of consideration because it ties in with an important observation by C. L. Seow.103 Seow shows that Hos. 14:10, which has long been thought to be an extraneous addition to the book of Hosea, is integrated into the book of Hosea by the demonstration that ‘the foolish people motif’ is reflected not only in Hos. 14:10 but also in Hos. 4:6, 14; 7:9, 11; 8:3, 12; 12:2; 13:13. If NJPS’s restoration, in Hos. 8:5, which may well have influenced Isa. 56:10–11, is accepted, it follows that ‘the foolish people motif’ appears in Hos. 4–14 a total of ten times. 8:6 kî miyyiśrāēl ‘For it was at Israel’s initiative’ Similarly, NJPS’s ‘For it was Israel’s doing’. Cf. Rashi: ‘It was funded from the silver and the gold of each one…just like the first [golden] calf’ (see Exod. 32:2–3). NJPS margin, however, follows BHS in emending MT’s miyyiśrāēl to bêt Yiśrāēl ‘that House of Israel’. However, it is unclear how bêt Yiśrāēl, literally ‘the House of Israel’, can mean ‘that House of Israel’. In the interpretation reflected in the emendation referred to in NJPS margin the phrase bêt Yiśrāēl makes perfect sense as the subject of the restored sentence at the end of Hos. 8:5: ‘They will never be capable of understanding’.

103.  C. L. Seow, ‘Hosea 14.10 and the Foolish People Motif’, CBQ 42 (1984), pp. 212–24.

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8:7 kî rûăḥ yizrāû wĕsûpātâ yiqṣōrû ‘Indeed, they sow wind, and they will reap whirlwind’ Note that the verbs at the end of each of these two clauses are marked by the vowel points and the Masoretic accents as pausal forms with penultimate accent. The noun form sûpātâ ‘whirlwind’ is attested only here in Hos. 8:7b. Several authorities concur that the apparently double feminine ending (which would be analogous to the verb form āśĕtâ [e.g., Deut. 22:21 and altogether 29 times in Hebrew Scripture] in which a conventional feminine ending ah is added on to the archaic feminine ending t found in the form wĕāśāt attested only in Lev. 25:21), is not to be accounted for as a double feminine ending.104 On the contrary, the aforementioned grammarians agree the final h is a remnant of a locative accusative. So already Rashi in his comment on the form hammāwĕtāh in Ps. 116:15, which he interprets to mean ‘deathward’.105 Kaddari, inspired by Gesenius and Bauer and Leander, prefers to see the various feminine nouns, such as awlātâ ‘iniquity’ (Ps. 92:16 qere), yĕšûātâ ‘help, salvation’ (Ps. 3:3), êpātâ ‘darkness’ (Job 10:22), sûpātâ ‘whirlwind’ (here at Hos. 8:7), and various other feminine nouns belonging to the same pattern ending in tah forms, which are characteristic of poetry.106 As Wolff observes, ‘the influence of Wisdom upon Hosea’s language should be noted. We see it most visibly in the prophet’s quotation of a proverb in 8:7.’107 As Wolff goes on to explain, ‘Here rûaḥ, a gentle breeze, is a catchword used in Wisdom for unstable, helpless vanity’.108 Wolff further explains, ‘sûpâ is a destructive whirlwind, which, like the harvest, grows out of the seed of a gentle breeze. The law of correspondence as well as the law of multiplication applies to sowing and harvest.’ In fact, the closest correspondence in biblical wisdom literature to the proverb cited by our prophet in Hos. 8:7 is Prov. 22:8a: ‘One who sows awlâ “injustice” shall reap āwen “evil” ’. One may also compare Prov. 11:18: ‘A wicked person earns illusory wages//One who sows virtue (earns) a true reward’; and Job 4:8: ‘As I have seen [declares Eliphaz], those who plough āwen “evil” and sow āmāl “mischief” will reap it’. 104.  See Bauer and Leander, Historische Grammatik, #65u; GKC #90g; GKB, #30l; Joüon and Muraoka, Grammar #93j. 105.  And so DCH 6:134b, with respect to sûpātâ here at Hos. 8:7b. 106.  Kaddari, Dictionary, p. 751. 107.  Wolff, Hosea, p. xxiv. 108.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 142.

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Wolff notes that the proverb cited by our prophet in Hos. 8:7 reflects not only the law of correspondence found, inter alia, in the verses here cited from Proverbs and Job but also the law of multiplication found, inter alia, in Sir. 7:3: ‘Do not sow in the furrows of injustice, and you will not reap a sevenfold crop’; and Matt. 13:8: ‘Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty’.109 qāmâ ên-lô ṣemaḥ bělî yaăśeh-qemaḥ ‘Grain with no head produces no bread’ This section of Hos. 8:7 features one of the rare examples of rhyme in the poetry of the Hebrew Bible. Wolff offers the following literal translation of Hos. 8:7c–d: ‘The grain with no head produces no flour’.110 Wolff also offers the following translation to reproduce the rhyme found in the Hebrew text: ‘Grain with no head yields no bread’. In the final two clauses of Hos. 8:7 the prophet tells us of the very real logical material consequences that will follow upon Israel’s behaviour in both the religious and the moral sphere in a manner aptly described by the proverbs quoted in v. 7a–d. ûlay yaăśeh zārîm yiblāuhû ‘Perhaps it (the grain) will (in fact) yield (produce), (but) strangers will devour it’ Having made the point that the two proverbs describe the logical consequences of the nation’s collective misbehaviour, the prophet admits that contrary to the imaginary ideal world depicted in proverbs, in the world of reality it is likely that notwithstanding Israel’s misbehaviour, there may well be some meagre harvest, which might sustain the undeserving people. To this possibility, our prophet, speaking in the name of God, retorts that it is most likely that the very meagre harvest will be consumed by the very foreign nations whom Israel has been courting in the hope that they would help her defend herself against the aggression by Judah in the South (cf. Hos. 5:8–13). For Israel’s courting Assyria and Egypt, see Hos. 7:11; for Israel’s courting Egypt, see also Hos. 7:16; for Israel’s courting Assyria, see Hos. 5:13; 8:9–10.111 Hosea 8:7–8 employs concatenation, a literary device which consists of employing a form of the same root word yiblāuhû with which one verse, in this case, Hos. 8:7, concludes, and again at the beginning of the following clause, Hos. 8:8a, which opens with the verb nibla 109.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 142. 110.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 132. 111.  For the historical background, see the Introduction, pp. 9–12.

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‘is/was bewildered’. The point made by the play on words is that as a consequence of the moral and religious turpitude illustrated by the proverbs quoted in Hos. 8:7, which will lead, ultimately, to other nations (most likely Egypt and Assyria) devouring what little produce the land may still yield, Israel had become bewildered. Indeed, Hosea suggests that both the economic decline of the Northern Kingdom referred to at the end of Hos. 8:7, and the courting of other nations for help described in Hos. 8:9 as previously in Hos. 5:13; 7:11, 16, are a consequence of the bewilderment of Israel expressed so aptly by the proverbs quoted in Hos. 8:7. A marginal note in NJPS, which calls attention to the play on words effected by the sequence yiblāuhû–nibla ‘they will devour it//he will be bewildered’, indicates that the verb nibla (in the plural niblĕû; this the note in NJPS does not mention) means ‘they are bewildered’ also in Isa. 28:7. Also in Job 37:20 Elihu justifies Job’s failure to respond to Elihu by means of the rhetorical question, ‘Can a person say anything when one is confused?’112 8:8 attâ hāyû baggôyîm kikĕlî ên-ḥēpeṣ bô ‘They (Israel) have now become among the nations like an unwanted vessel’ Wolff remarks, ‘Hosea independently creates numerous metaphors. No other prophet—indeed, not one writer in the entire Old Testament—uses as many similes as Hosea does’.113 The simile employed here at the end of Hos. 8:8, ‘like an unwanted vessel’, is adopted, like many ideas and expressions employed in the book of Hosea, by the Prophet Jeremiah Thus in Jer. 48:38 we read, ‘For I have broken Moab like an unwanted vessel—declares Yhwh’. In Jer. 22:28 Jeremiah employs the expression ‘unwanted vessel’ as a metaphor for the exiled King Jehoiachin of Judah in one of Jeremiah’s eight famous triple rhetorical questions as follows: ‘Is this man Coniah a wretched broken pot, An unwanted vessel? [If not], why are he and his offspring hurled out And cast away in a land they knew not?’ 112.  Concerning the latter rhetorical question in its context, see M. I. Gruber, ‘The Unexpected Visitor: The Elihu Speeches in Personal Voice Perspective’, in Interested Readers: Essays on the Hebrew Bible in Honor of David J. A. Clines (ed. J. K. Aitken, J. M. S. Clines, and C. M. Maier; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), pp. 87–94. 113.  Wolff, Hosea, p. xxiv.

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Apparently, the opposite of ‘unwanted vessel’ is kĕlî ḥemdâ ‘desirable object, costly possession’, an expression which appears in Hos. 13:15: ‘The eastwind will come…it will plunder treasure, every object of delight’. The latter expression appears again in Jer. 25:34: ‘and you will fall (and be smashed) like a precious vessel’; Nah. 2:10: ‘Plunder silver! Plunder gold! There is no limit to the treasure. It is a hoard of all precious objects’; 2 Chron. 32:27: ‘Hezekiah enjoyed riches and glory in abundance; he filled treasuries with silver and gold, precious stones, spices, shields, and all desirable objects’. Since the term kĕlî ḥemdâ ‘desirable object’ is twice attested in non-figurative contexts while the term ‘unwanted vessel’ is attested only in figurative usages, it is quite possible that Hosea, or an earlier Hebrew poet whose writings are no longer extant, has created the term ‘unwanted vessel’ to express the opposite of the commonplace ‘desirable object’. 8:9 kî-hēmmâ ālû Aššûr pere bōdēd lô Eprayim hitnû ăhābîm ‘Indeed, they went up to Assyria, a lonely wild ass in relationship to him (Assyria), Ephraim sought to forge an alliance’ Here, as in Hos. 12:5c, an unmarked place name (there Bethel; here Assyria) is treated in Biblical Hebrew syntax as a locative adverbial. There in Hos. 12:5c Bethel is the place in which an encounter repeatedly took place. Here in Hos. 8:9 Assyria is the place to which a delegation representing the government of the Northern Kingdom of Israel went to engage in diplomatic negotiations. See my discussion at Hos. 12:5c. It is recorded in Hos. 5:13 that Israel sought help from Assyria. Likewise, in Hos. 7:11 we are told that Israel sought help from both Egypt and Assyria. The appeal to both Assyria and Egypt is referred to again in Hos. 12:2 and again in Hos. 14:4. Just as in Hos. 7:11 our prophet referred to the foolishness of Israel in seeking the help of Egypt and Assyria by means of the simile—‘like a silly dove with no mind’—so here in Hos. 8:9 the prophet refers to Israel’s foolishness by means of the metaphor ‘a lonely wild ass’. W. L. Moran has shown that in the book of Deuteronomy as well as in 1 Kgs 5:15; 2 Sam. 19:7; and 1 Sam. 18:16 the verbal root hb ‘love’ denotes a political relationship exemplified by a political alliance between two parties.114 On this basis, it should be clear that in the context of 114.  W. L. Moran, ‘The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy’, CBQ 25 (1963), pp. 77–87.

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Hos. 8:9 the abstract noun ăhābîm115 designates not ‘love’ but an alliance between two entities, in this case Israel and Assyria. It is this interpretation of the noun ăhābîm that is required by the context of Hos. 8:9–10, which condemns the foreign policy of the Northern Kingdom and not the sexual improprieties of its male citizens as in Hos. 4:10–15; 5:3–4; 9:1. Since, as Moran demonstrated, the verbal root hb is indeed attested in Biblical Hebrew as referring to a political alliance, it follows that the obscure verb forms hitĕnû and yitĕnû found respectively in Hos. 8:9c and Hos. 8:10a must also refer to attempting to forge a political alliance. Evidence for such an interpretation consists first and foremost of the fact that the noun ăhābîm ‘political alliance’ is the object of the so-called perfect form of the verb hitĕnû in Hos. 8:9c. The second important piece of evidence is that Hos. 8:10 refers to the very same activity employing the so-called imperfect form of the verb yitĕnû modified by the adverbial expression baggôyîm ‘among the nations’. Thus Rudolph and König both suggest that the verb form hitĕnû in Hos. 8:9c is hiphil of the verb ntn ‘give’ and means ‘conclude an agreement/drive a bargain’.116 Moreover, HALOT (4:1760a) suggests that the imperfect verb in the following clause be construed also as hiphil imperfect yatĕnu. Thus the two consecutive clauses, Hos. 8:9c and 8:10a, both refer to the Northern Kingdom, frequently called Ephraim, attempting to conclude an agreement with the Assyrian Empire. In Hos. 8:10 the prophet, speaking in the name of God, tells us that the logical consequences of Israel’s having attempted to enter into an alliance with the king of Assyria is that Israel will be bankrupted by the payment of tribute to the king of Assyria. As I noted previously with reference to the juxtaposition of the terms melek ‘king’ and śārîm ‘rulers’ in the book of Hosea (see above, inter alia, at Hos. 7:3; 8:4), S. M. Paul showed that the literal meaning of maśśā melek śārîm is ‘tribute imposed by the king of kings’, i.e., the Assyrian emperor.117 Understandably, of course, many scholars assumed that here in Hos. 8:9–10, as in Hos. 4; 5; 9, the prophet referred to harlotry rather than to the attempts of Israelite kings to form alliances with Assyria and Egypt. Those attempts are condemned also in Hos. 5:13; 7:11–12, 15–16.

115.  Concerning abstract nouns in Biblical Hebrew that look like masculine plurals, see above at Hos. 1:2b. 116.  Rudolph, Hosea, pp. 156, 159; König, Wörterbuch, p. 550a. See also HALOT 4:1760a. 117.  Paul, ‘Hosea 8:8–10’, and ‘maśśā melek śārîm’.

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8:11 kî-hirbâ Eprayim mizbĕḥōt laḥăṭō hāyû-lô mizbĕḥōt laḥăṭō ‘When Ephraim multiplied altars (it was) to incur guilt. He had altars to incur guilt’ As explained by S. Yona,118 epiphora is the rhetorical device in biblical and other ancient Near Eastern poetry by which a word or phrase is repeated at the end of successive versets. A classic example of the use of epiphora in Hebrew Scripture is the repetition of the phrase mizbĕḥōt laḥăṭō ‘altars to incur guilt’ at the end of each of the two halves of Hos. 8:11. The obvious irony is that a principal purpose of altars in biblical and Judaic thinking is to provide a means for expiation of sin as is explained in the Haggadah read/sung on the first night of Passover, ‘and he built for us the Temple to atone for all of our sins’. Interestingly enough, our prophet juxtaposes one irony with another in Hos. 8:11–12. Our prophet does not recognize the prohibition of a multiplicity of legitimate altars found in Deut. 12 and elsewhere in Deuteronomy and in 1–2 Kings and elsewhere in Hebrew Scripture. Likewise, in Hos. 4:15 our prophet, speaking in the name of God, takes it for granted that Israel worships Yhwh at a number of different legitimate sanctuaries. What bothers the prophet there is not the multiplicity of altars but the misbehaviour that makes Israel unwelcome at God’s many sanctuaries. What our prophet does tell us is that just as a multiplicity of altars does not increase the possibility of removing guilt so long as Israel does not attempt to improve her behaviour, so does a voluminous body of divine instructions (Torah) not achieve its avowed purpose of raising Israel’s consciousness with respect to the obligation to behave properly. Thus we read in Hos. 8:12: 8:12 ektob-lô rubbê tôrātî kĕmô-zār neḥšābû ‘I wrote out for him (Israel]) the abundance of my instruction. They (the many precepts) were regarded by him as alien’ One obvious implications of God’s declaration in Hos. 8:12 is that Hosea and possibly some persons among his original target audience were familiar with a significant body of written documents that constituted

118.  S. Yona, The Many Faces of Repetition (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 2013), p. 20 n. 8 (in Hebrew)

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part of what we now call the Written Torah or the Pentateuch.119 Cassuto’s conclusions after surveying twenty-seven parallels between the Pentateuch as we know it and the book of Hosea include the following observation: ‘…the book of Hosea contains passages that cause us to believe that much of what we read in the Torah today already existed in its present form in Hosea’s time and was known to broad circles of people’.120 In addition, Cassuto asserts, ‘These ancient sections often served as a model to Hosea, and often he alluded to them or borrowed phrases or ideas from them. Possibly, it was such sections that the prophet had in mind when he declared [what we read in Hos. 8:12].’121 In his study, Cassuto calls attention to an article by G. Jeshurun, which he had not seen at the time of his writing.122 In that piece, Jeshurun argues that the qere at Hos. 8:12 means ‘I have written for him my copies of the Torah, but they were counted as a strange thing’.123 Jeshurun argues there that the kethib means ‘I have written out for him multitudes [of ordinances] of my Torah, but they were accounted for him as a strange thing’. In fact, the idea that God did Israel a great favour insofar as His Instruction contained multiple commandments is repeated in m. Makkot 3:16, ‘R. Hananiah son of Aqashya says, “The Holy One Blessed be He wanted to bestow merit on Israel. Therefore he multiplied for them Torah and commandments, as it is stated in Scripture (Isa. 42:21), ‘The LORD desired for the sake of His own charity that He magnify and glorify Torah’ ”.’124 In b. Giṭṭin 60b the Hebrew expression rubbê in Hos. 8:12, which in Biblical Hebrew can mean ‘many’, is interpreted to mean ‘most’ as in Rabbinic Hebrew and Modern Hebrew. Consequently, it is invoked in the famous debate as to whether most of the Torah revealed by God to Israel was included in the Written Torah, i.e., the Pentateuch, or whether most of the Torah revealed by God to Israel was handed down orally from Moses to Joshua to the sages of the Mishnah (cf. m. Abot 1:1) and only the smaller part was included in the Pentateuch. 119.  See Cassuto, ‘The Prophet Hosea and the Books of the Pentateuch’, pp. 79–100. 120.  Cassuto, ‘The Prophet Hosea and the Books of the Pentateuch’, p. 100. 121.  Cassuto, ‘The Prophet Hosea and the Books of the Pentateuch’, p. 100. 122.  Cassuto, ‘The Prophet Hosea and the Books of the Pentateuch’, p. 100 n. 31, refers to G. Jeshurun, ‘A Note on Hosea VIII, 12’, Journal of the Society of Oriental Research 11 (1927), pp. 222–24. 123.  Jeshurun, ‘A Note on Hosea VIII, 12’, p. 224. 124.  In its Scriptural context the quoted verse actually means, ‘Yhwh desired for the sake of his own vindication that he multiply and glorify teaching [i.e., prophecy, referring to the old prophecies of Jeremiah now fulfilled with Cyrus’s defeat of Babylonia and the new prophecies of Deutero-Isaiah, yet to be fulfilled]’.

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8:13 zibĕḥê habhābay yizbĕḥû bāśār wayyōkēlû Yhwh lō rāṣām ‘When they present to me generous sacrifices, which they burn before me, let them eat meat. Yhwh does not want them’ The major crux in this first half of Hos. 8:13 is the noun habhābay. LXX appears to ignore the crux when it renders the verse as διότι ἐὰν θύσωσιν θυσίαν καὶ φάγωσιν κρέα, Κύριος οὐ προσδέξεται αὺτά, which Glenny renders as ‘Therefore, if they offer a sacrifice and eat flesh, the Lord will not receive them’.125 It should be noted first of all that LXX, anticipating Rashi in his commentary on Hos. 8:13, treats both the prefixed form of the Hebrew verb (now commonly called imperfect) and the suffixed form of the Hebrew verb (now commonly called perfect) as of no significance in determining the tenses of the verb in context. Indeed, LXX treats the verb wyklw, which is vocalized in MT wayyōkēlû, i.e., imperfect consecutive meaning ‘and they ate’, as though it means ‘and if they will eat’. Likewise LXX here treats the perfect verb with accusative pronominal suffix rāṣām as future in meaning. As for the noun form habhābay, which was either absent from the Hebrew Vorlage of LXX or was ignored because LXX did not know what to do with it, Kimchi writes as follows in his commentary on Hos. 8:13: ‘habhābay. “my gifts”. It [the lexeme habhābay] is [formed from] reduplication of the second and third root letters [and omission of the first of the three root letters], and it is derived from [the verb] yhb “give” [which is attested seven times in the third person singular perfect in Biblical Aramaic (Dan. 2:37, 38, 48; 5:18 etc.) and in Biblical Hebrew primarily in the long imperative singular hābâ (Gen. 11:3, 4; etc.) and the imperative plural hābû (Deut. 32:3; Ps. 29:1 [twice], 2; 96:7 [twice], 8 (see also Hos. 4:18 for another possible instance)]. I.e., [the noun habhābay “my gifts”] designates the gifts which they [the Israelites] intend to give me. And Jonathan [in TJ] translated “sacrifices [of animals] that they seized by force” [cf. Amos 2:9: “and drink in the temple of their God wine bought with fines they imposed”]. There are some [e.g., Ibn Ezra quoting his mentor R. Moses ha-Kohen Ibn Gikatilla] who explain habhābay as referring to the roasting of meat and derived from [the reduplicated form of the verbal root yhb] attested in [the second of the two verbs in the words] qippĕlāh wĕlō hibhĕbāh “he twisted it, but he did not singe it” [m. Shabbat 2:3]; mĕhabhăbîn bāûr [cf. m. Menaot 10:4] in the words of our Rabbinic sages [Heb. bĕdibĕrê rabbōtênû] of blessed memory. 125.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 51.

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Indeed, our Rabbi Solomon [i.e., Rashi (1040–1105 CE)] explained [Hos. 8.13a–c as follows], “As for those sacrifices that they burn [mĕhabhăbîn] before me at the altar, what need do I have that they should bring it before me? Let them slaughter [yizbĕḥû] them for themselves, and let them [the Israelites] consume them [Heb. wĕyōkĕlûm paraphrasing the biblical text bāśār wayyōkēlû “and they consumed flesh”] for I do not want them. Indeed, his [Rashi’s] interpretation would be excellent were it not that the reading of the biblical text embodied in his comment treats the initial waw of the verb wyklw as though it were pointed with shewa [indicating that the imperfect form of the verb here is employed to convey the volative subjunctive]. However, it is not [so pointed in MT] but rather with pataḥ [indicating that the verb is to be interpreted as imperfect consecutive conveying the past tense].’ In fact, MT employs imperfect consecutive with the so-called waw conversive or waw consecutive also to convey the present rather than the past in Cant. 6:9, where we read as follows: ‘Maidens see her [rāûāh; here also the so-called perfect appears to be employed to convey the present] and they acclaim her [wayĕaššĕrûhā], and queens and concubines praise her [wayĕhalĕlûhā]’. So NJPS. Similarly NJPS translates verbs in the imperfect consecutive as conveying the meaning of the present tense in Ps. 29:5b, 6a, 9b, 10b. It emerges that, unlike Kimchi, Rashi has anticipated and gone beyond the brilliant demonstration by S. Tatu,126 that the qatal form of the Hebrew verb commonly called perfect and the yiqtol form of the Hebrew verb commonly called imperfect when part of the qatal//yiqtol verb sequence in poetic couplets in the book of Psalms can be used with no individual reference to time or aspect. Rashi has gone further in realizing what was recently spelled out in NJPS’s treatment of Cant. 6:9 and Ps. 29:5, 6, 9, 10, namely, that in general in the poetry of the Hebrew Bible and not only in qatal//yiqtol and yiqtol//qatal parallelism, the respective forms of the verb have no individual reference to time or aspect. Applying Rashi’s brilliant analysis of Hos. 8:13, which Kimchi would have adopted had he heard of Tatu’s elaborate theory, we must conclude with Rashi that Hos. 8:13a–c must mean ‘When they present the offerings to me, which they burn before me by fire upon my altar, why do I have need that they should present them? Let them [rather] slaughter them for meat for food for themselves, and let them eat them, for I do not desire them.’ If so, we have in the heretofore largely obscure Hos. 8:13a–c, another example of a case where what Hosea has said in his characteristically 126.  S. Tatu, The Qatal//Yiqtol (Yiqtol//Qatal) Verbal Sequence in Semitic Couplets (Gorgias Ugaritic Studies, 3; Psicataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2008).

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obscure manner has reached us also in a thoroughly clear manner in the words of his spiritual disciple, Jeremiah, who, declares in Jer. 7:21–22, ‘Thus says Yhwh of Hosts, the God of Israel, “Add your burnt offerings to your other sacrifices, and eat meat. For I did not speak with your ancestors nor did I command them concerning burnt offering and sacrifice when I brought them out of the land of Egypt.’ For the disparagement of sacrificial worship in Hosea, see also Hos. 5:6; 6:6; 12:11–12; 14:3 and my commentary with respect to each of those texts. Yhwh lō rāṣām NJPS renders ‘The LORD has not accepted them’. It is not clear if NJPS means to say that God has not accepted the sacrifices offered by Israel or if NJPS means to say that God has not accepted Israel. Considerable light can be shed upon Hos. 8:13c if we look at Lev. 19:5, where it is stated, wĕkî tizbĕḥû zebaḥ šĕlāmîm laYhwh lirṣōnĕkem tizbāḥûhû ‘When you sacrifice a well-being offering to Yhwh, sacrifice it so that it may be accepted on your behalf’.127 Thus, in its original context the meaning of Hos. 8:13a–c is that the Israelites might as well consume the sacrificial meat since God has decided that the sacrifices they offer are unacceptable so long as the Israelites will not change for the better their behaviour. Indeed, Hos. 8:13d–f explains why: attâ yizkor ăwōnām wĕyipqōd ḥaṭṭōtām hēmmâ Miṣrayim yāšûbû ‘Consequently, he (Yhwh) will recall their iniquity, And he will keep in mind their sins They (Israel), in turn, will return to Egypt’

NJPS renders the parallel pair of verbs yizkor//weyipqod ‘He remembers// He will punish’. Indeed, in Hos. 4:14 the verb pqd means ‘punish’ as it does also in the expression pōqēd ăwōn ābōt al bānîm ‘punishes children for the iniquity of parents’. However, frequently the verb pqd, like the verb zkr, means ‘remember, keep in mind’, as in Gen. 21:1, ‘And God remembered Sarah’, and Exod. 4:31, ‘…When they heard that Yhwh had remembered the people of Israel and that he had noticed their suffering,

127.  My translation of Lev. 19:5 is based upon J. Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22 (AB, 3A; New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 1618; see also the extensive discussion in Milgrom’s commentary there, pp. 1619–20.

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they fell down and prostrated themselves’. As for the parallel pair yizkor// wĕyipqōd in Hos. 8:13d–e, it should be noted that the text appears almost verbatim in Hos. 9:9, where we read, yizkor ăwōnām wĕyipqōd ḥaṭṭōtām ‘He (Yhwh) will recall their iniquity. He will remember/punish their sins.’ That the consequence of God’s long-term memory of Israel’s habitual backsliding is that God contemplates a threat of punishment in Hos. 8:14d does not mean that in the context of the description of the sequential unfolding of Israel’s guilt in both Hos. 8:1–14 and in Hos. 9:1–9 the verb pqd actually means ‘punish’ rather than ‘remember’. Interestingly enough, in Jer. 14:10 Hosea’s famous spiritual disciple, Jeremiah, witnesses to a slight variation in the transmission of the text of Hos. 8:13c–e and to Jeremiah’s understanding of the text as a threat that God may remember rather than as a threat that God will immediately punish. In Jer. 14:10b we read as follows: waYhwh lō rāṣām attâ yizkor ăwōnām wĕyipqōd ḥaṭṭōtām ‘and Yhwh does not accept them [contrast my interpretation of the verb as meaning “Yhwh will not accept their sacrifices”]. Therefore he will recall their iniquity, and he will keep in mind their sins.’ In the context of Jer. 14 the prophet proceeds to attempt to convince God to accept Israel and not to befoul his memory with past iniquities and sins committed by the people of Israel. In Jeremiah’s transmission and interpretation of Hos. 8:13c–e we find a witness to an earlier stage of the text of Hos. 8:13 before which the conjunctive waw at the beginning of waYhwh lō rāṣām (so Jer. 14:10) dropped out by haplography because of the waw at the end of the proceeding word in Hos. 8:13b, wyklw ‘and let them eat’ (on which see above). The final verse of Hos. 8 explains why it is that God must remember the iniquities of Israel. It appears that in the eighth century BCE the proper antidote to defective memory on the part of a perpetrator is effective memory on the part of victim. Hosea 8:14 explains as follows why the only way to bring Israel back in line is for God to explain the logical consequences of Israel’s defective memory. 8:14 wayyiškaḥ Yiśrāēl et-ōśēhû wayyiben hêkālōt ‘Israel forgot his maker. So he built temples’ Here our prophet suggests that the sanctuaries where Israel committed depravity as described in Hos. 4:14 and which are referred to by two place names and one epithet in 4:15 (see my comment there) were not necessarily outdoor installations but substantial architectural achievements.

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In 8:11 the prophet, speaking in the name of God, speaks of Israel’s having built a multiplicity of altars, not for atonement of sin, but ironically to incur guilt. As we shall see below in 10:1–2, the building of many altars was at one point in the history of the Northern Kingdom an expression of gratitude for prosperity, while at a later juncture a sense of guilt led Israelites themselves to destroy their own sanctuaries as a form of selfinflicted punishment. In my discussion in the Introduction of ‘Judahite Glosses’, pp. 28–31, I delineated four categories of actual or imagined Judahite glosses in the Hebrew text of the book of Hosea. My third category consists of five instances where a phrase or clause, which clearly interrupts the train of thought of the original prophet in Hos. 4–12, suggests that Judah can learn from the unfortunate demise of the Northern Kingdom to behave differently than did the Northern Israelites//Ephraimites so that punishment can be avoided. The fourth of my five examples is found here in Hos. 8:14c, where we read as follows: wiYhûdâ hirbâ ārîm bĕṣûrōt ‘And Judah has made many fortified cities’. This clause, which interrupts Hosea’s castigation of the Northern Israelites for building many temples to offer many sacrifices rather than concentrating on the cultivation of private and public morality as the highest form of worship of God, asserts that Judah was preparing for war, clearly a non sequitur. wĕšillaḥtî ēš bĕārāyw wĕākĕlâ armĕnōtêhā ‘So I shall send fire into his cities, And it will consume their palaces/temples’ These two clauses must be compared to the stereotypic threat found in Amos 1:7 and repeated with slight variations in Amos 1:4, 10, 12, 14; 2:2, 5. I have deliberately mentioned Amos 1:7 out of its order in the Bible because it would appear to be the model for Hos. 8:14c. In Amos 1:7 we read as follows: wĕšillaḥtî ēš bĕḥōmat Azzâ wĕākĕlâ armĕnōtêhā ‘I shall send down fire upon the wall of Gaza, and it will consume its palaces’. The difference between the stereotypic threat found seven times in the first two chapters of the book of Amos and the threat found in Hos. 8:14 is as follows: With the exception of the threat to Jerusalem//Judah in Amos 2:5 for their spurning of Yhwh’s instruction (Torah) and their failure to abide by his laws, the stereotypic threat in Amos 1–2 is directed against nations who committed atrocities against other nations. In Hos. 8:14, if indeed, the Judahite gloss is limited to wiYhûdâ hirbâ ārîm bĕṣûrōt ‘And Judah has made many fortified cities’, the stereotypic threat is directed against the people of the Northern Kingdom for their having erected

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numerous temples for sacrificial worship when they should have made the people of Israel, individually and collectively, into temples of public and private morality. That is indeed the message of Hos. 8; 11; 12 and of 6:6 and 14:3. If that is the case, then the term armĕnōtêhā, which can mean ‘her [royal] palaces’ in Amos, must be employed in Hos. 8:14e to refer to the sanctuaries erected for sacrificial worship referred to by the term hêkālōt ‘temples’ mentioned in Hos. 8:14b. The Hebrew (and Canaanite) term hêkāl ‘palace, temple’, which probably entered Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Hebrew via Akk. ekallu, is commonly thought to derive from Sum. E·GAL ‘big house’, designating either a royal palace or the temple of a divinity. Indeed, the two terms hêkāl and armōn ‘temple, palace’ can both refer to a royal palace. If the author of Hos. 8:14e refers to the fortified cities of Judah mentioned in Hos. 8:14c, then the term armĕnōtêhā in Hos. 8:14e would mean ‘her palaces’. If, however, the author of Hos. 8:14e wrote before the incorporation of Hos. 8:14c, which I hold to be a post-722 BCE Judahite gloss in the standard Hebrew text of the book of Hosea, then the term armĕnōtêhā at the end of Hos. 8:14 would designate ‘her [Israel’s] cities’ temples’ referred to in Hos. 8:14b. If so, the radical implication of Hos. 8:14’s adoption of a stereotypic threat directed six times in the book of Amos against nations guilty of gross atrocities is that the cultivation by Israel of cultic installations rather than public and private morality is the equivalent, for the people of Israel who ought to know better, of other people cultivating the committing of atrocities. Indeed, that is the import already of the hurling of the stereotypic threat against Judah in Amos 2:7. We should and may compare Amos 3:2: ‘You alone have I known intimately from among all the families of the earth. Consequently, I recall with respect to you, all your iniquities.’

C h a p t er 9

Both the Latin Bible (and consequently Christian editions of the Bible in English), whose chapter divisions (with the exception of the book of Psalms) were created by Stephen Langton (c. 1220 CE), and Hebrew printings of the Jewish Bible concur in treating Hos. 9 as a unit containing 17 verses. This ch. 9 of the book of Hosea in modern Bibles in Latin, English, and Hebrew corresponds to the eighth of the eleven larger divisions of the Greek book of Hosea recognized in LXX Codex Vaticanus. Likewise, in the older division of the book of Hosea into twenty-one divisions, division 17 corresponds to Hos. 9 in modern editions of the Bible in Hebrew, Latin, and English. As I pointed out in the Introduction, both the Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex recognize a paragraph division marked by indentation of the space of seven letters at the beginning of Hos. 9:10 that separates Hos. 9:1–9 from Hos. 9:10–17.1 In the first of these two divisions of Hos. 9 the people of Israel is alternatively addressed in the second person (vv. 1, 5, 7–9) or spoken about in the third person. The speaker appears to be the prophet, and he does not explicitly indicate that he is a messenger speaking on behalf of God.2 In Hos. 9:10–16, on the other hand, God, speaking in the first person, addresses Israel while in Hos. 9:17 the prophet speaks about God in the third person. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Leningrad Codex treats Hos. 9:17 as a separate paragraph. As we shall see, Hos. 9:1–3 returns briefly to the subject of sexual license in the course of the observance of Israelite harvest festivals, a subject that was already treated in Hos. 4:10–15; 5:3; and 7:14. Hosea 9:6, like Amos 9 and like Hos. 11:5, threatens to punish the people of Israel by means of exile.

1.  Wolff, Hosea, pp. 151, 161. 2.  Cf. Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 335–36.

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9:1 al-tiśmaḥ Yiśrāēl el-gîl kāammîm ‘Do not rejoice, Israel as other peoples exult’ NJPS renders: ‘Rejoice not, O Israel As other peoples exult’. My translation is more faithful to twenty-first-century idiomatic English in that it does not mark the proper name of the addressee with archaic Eng. ‘O’, for which there is no equivalent in the Hebrew text. Andersen and Freedman render the second clause: ‘Don’t exult like other peoples’.3 This rendering seems to be based on the assumption that the particle el at the beginning of the second half of the verse should be revocalized as the negative particle al found also at the beginning of the first clause of the verse. Precisely the same understanding is reflected in LXX μηδέ εὐφραίνου ‘neither exult’ and Vulgate noli exultare, which means the same thing. Indeed, both of these ancient versions reflect an understanding of the consonantal Hebrew text in the second clause in which the particle l is understood as the rather common negative particle found at the beginning of the opening clause of our chapter. Thus both LXX and Vulgate construe the lexeme gîl not as a gerund meaning ‘rejoicing’, but as the imperative meaning ‘rejoice’. It is possible that Peshitta’s wl tdwṣ and TJ’s lā tĕbûûn both reflect a Hebrew original, which read al tāgîl ‘Do not exult’. However, both Andersen and Freedman and Macintosh regard the clause haśśĕmēḥîm ĕlê-gîl ‘those who rejoice unto excitement’ in Job 3:22 as supporting the reading el-gîl kāammîm in Hos. 9:1b.4 Moreover, Andersen and Freedman argue that the revocalization of the preposition el as the negative particle al results in Hos. 9:1b’s belonging to a group of six verses in Hos. 9 where ‘the parallelism is enhanced by alliteration’.5 The five cases in addition to the revocalization of Hos. 9:1b are 9:7a; 9:7bA; 9:7bB; 9:8b; and 9:9b. Support for perceiving in Hos. 9:1 the juxtaposition of two clauses both beginning with the negative particle al is found in 2 Sam. 1:20, ‘Tell it not in Gath//Proclaim it not in the streets of Ashkelon’, and Mic. 1:10, ‘Tell it not in Gath//Surely do not weep like other peoples’. Following BHS, Macintosh notes here that some medieval manuscripts in the Kennicott and de Rossi lists read in Hos. 9:1b bāammîm ‘in company with [other] peoples’ rather than kāammîm ‘like [other] peoples’. The variant reading bāammîm reflects the confusion of the letters b and

3.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 514. 4.  See Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 522, and Macintosh, Hosea, p. 339. 5.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 518.

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k, which are graphically similar in the square Hebrew script. Regardless of the reading with b or k, the noun ‘peoples’ in both Hos. 9:1 and Mic. 1:10 is understood to mean ‘other peoples’. Indeed both the noun ammîm ‘peoples’ and the noun gôyîm ‘nations’ are commonly employed to mean ‘other peoples’ (Ps. 96:7; 1 Chron. 16:286) and ‘other nations’ (Exod. 9:24; 34:10; Lev. 25:44; Num. 14:15; Isa. 11:10, 127). kî zānîtā mēal ĕlōhêkā ‘For you have turned away from your God’ The primary meanings of the Hebrew verb zānâ are ‘turn away from’ and ‘turn away toward someone else’. With respect to the meaning ‘turn away from Yhwh’, see Num. 15:39–40: ‘so that you do not follow your hearts and your eyes, after which you are wont to turn away. In order that you remember to observe all my commandments and be holy to your God.’ In the latter passage there is found the idea that the fringed garments that traditional Jews wear at prayer and on other occasions remind them not to forget to observe God’s commandments, much as a string tied around one’s finger in modern Western culture is meant to remind one not to forget an errand or an appointment. With respect to the meaning ‘turn toward someone else’, see Lev. 17:7: ‘and that they may offer their sacrifices no more to the goat-demons toward whom they are wont to turn’. Understandably, therefore, the verb zānâ and its noun derivatives may refer to adultery, which is to say, turning away from or cheating on one’s spouse by turning toward/straying after someone else. For the application of the verb and the noun to both men and women who display disloyalty to their spouses by engaging in sexual liaisons with other persons, see Hos. 4:14–15. Here in Hos. 9, as in Hos. 4, disloyalty to Yhwh includes the act of engaging in extra-marital sexual relations and thereby showing disloyalty to one’s spouse. An unfortunate consequence of this profound idea of God’s interest in both men and women being uncompromisingly loyal to a single spouse was the co-opting of these biblical passages for the fostering of the scholarly myth of sacred prostitution (see above at Hos. 4). Here in Hos. 9, as in Hos. 4, our prophet speaking in the name of Yhwh contends that Israel acts out its disloyalty to God’s ethical imperative by fornicating on the occasion of the festivals of the barley harvest (Passover), the wheat harvest (Hebrew Pentecost), and the vintage (Tabernacles). The prophet spells this out in Hos. 9:1d–2:

6.  See BDB, pp. 766–67. 7.  See BDB, p. 156.

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9:1d–2 āhabtā etnān al kol-gornōt dāgān goren wāyeqeb lō yirēm wĕtîrōš yĕkaḥeš bāh ‘You (masculine singular) love a harlot’s fee upon every threshing floor for grain. Threshing floor and wine press will not shepherd them, and wine will betray her’ Cf. LXX: ἠγάπησας δόματα ἐπὶ πάντα ἅλωνα σίτου· ἅλων καὶ ληνὸς οὐκ ἒγνω αὐτούς, καὶ ὁ οἶνος ἐψεύσατο αὐτούς, which Glenny translates as follows: ‘You have loved gifts on everything threshing floor of grain. Threshing floor and wine press did not know them, and the wine failed them.’8 Thus LXX anticipates NJPS’s reading bām ‘them’ instead of bāh ‘her’. See below. LXX’s other significant deviation from MT is its having either relied upon a Hebrew Vorlage, which read ydm instead of yrm, or its having misconstrued Heb. yrm as ydm because of the similarity of d and r in all phases of the Hebrew alphabet. Moreover, the sequence lō yĕdāēm ‘did not/will not know them’//yĕkaḥeš bām ‘did/will deny them’ at the end of Hos. 9:2a and 9:2b in the Hebrew retroverted from LXX constitutes an excellent instance of negative parallelism, in which the same idea is stated twice, once employing a verb with positive connotations negated by means of a negative particle and once employing a verb with negative connotations.9 In fact, serious examination of LXX’s treatment of Hos. 9:2 teaches us much about the absurdity of the standard English renderings of Hos. 9:2. Because LXX consistently and correctly understands that the Hebrew noun tîrōš denotes ‘wine’ (Gk. οἶνος), which is an alcoholic beverage produced from grapes that is consumed at religious festivals in the ancient Mediterranean world (see the extensive discussion in my commentary above at Hos. 4:11), it opens the door to a correct understanding of the entire context of Hos. 9:1–2. What Hosea describes here is the celebration of two distinct festivals, one of which takes place at the grain harvest (either Passover, which celebrates the barley harvest or Pentecost, which celebrates the wheat harvest) and another which takes place at the vintage (in Jewish tradition, this season begins with the 15th of the month of Ab [July or August] and culminates with the festival of booths [beginning on the 15th of Tishri [October]). In the celebration of both of these festivals, it is wine that is imbibed, regardless of whether one is celebrating the newly ripened grain (barley or wheat) or the newly 8.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 51. 9.  For the phenomenon in biblical poetry, see Ch. Cohen, ‘The Phenomenon of Negative Parallelism’.

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ripened grapes. What the prophet, speaking in the name of God, threatens is that if the festivals continue to be occasions for drunkenness and lechery, God will punish the people by preventing the growth of both the fields of grain and the vineyards. The consequence will be that there will be neither grain to be threshed at the threshing floor (for the threshing floor as a trysting place at the season of the grain harvest see Ruth 3:1–8) nor wine grapes to be turned into wine at the winepress. Glenny explains, ‘ “did not know them”…would probably be understood to mean that the crops were not sufficient’.10 One can imagine no better punishment of Israel for turning a festival of gratefulness to God for a bountiful harvest into an orgy of drunkenness and debauchery. In the same vein, Hos. 2:11 threatens to punish Israel for idolatry as follows: ‘I shall take back (i.e., withhold) my grain [from which people make bread] at its season//and my wine [which people make from grapes] at its appointed time’. Moreover, it appears that in Hos. 9:2, ‘And wine will betray her/them’, both Gk. ψεύδομαι and Heb. kḥš should be taken as a double entendre. These verbs refer both to punishment of Israel by means of a crop failure in the vineyards if Israel should fail to be moved to repentance by virtue of their hearkening to the prophetic harangue and to the horrible consequences of inebriation. As noted by our prophet in Hos. 4:11, alcoholic beverages tend to dull the senses and lead to poor judgment resulting in married men committing adultery in the course of a religious festival and thereby turning that festival into an abomination. The Masoretic marginal note, which designates the reading bām ‘them’ instead of bāh ‘her’ as sĕbîrîn ûmaṭṭîn ‘they surmise and they mislead’, teaches the following lesson, which is not found either in NJPS’s marginal emendation or in LXX: both the men who engaged in extra-marital sexual relations and the prostitutes who engaged in their profession for a livelihood were led to do so by their having become inebriated by imbibing wine at what was supposed to have been a religious festival. See below. If we assume, with Glenny,11 that the reading in the Hebrew text of the verb at the end of Hos. 9:2a as ydm is a mistake which led to LXX’s translation οὐκ ἒγνω αὐτούς ‘did not know them’, and that the correct reading of the Hebrew should be yrm, the meaning of that text should be ‘he will not feed them’. It should be noted that LXX at Hos. 9:2 and frequently elsewhere anticipates my own observation at Hos. 1:2 that Biblical Hebrew imperfect is often employed to express the past tense of the verb. 10.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 134. 11.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 134.

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For Heb. rāâ in the qal meaning ‘provide food for animals’, see, e.g., Song 1:7: ‘Where do you feed [your sheep]?’ For the same verb where the object is humans and the grammatical subject is God, see, e.g., Hos. 4:16: ‘Consequently, Yhwh will make them graze like a sheep on the open range’. NJPS renders as follows: ‘You have loved a harlot’s fee By every threshing floor of new grain. Threshing floor and wine press Shall not join them, And the new wine shall betray her.’

NJPS’s marginal emendation and rearrangement reflect the following attempt to restore what they regard as the original uncorrupted Hebrew text: āhabtā zĕnût al kol-goren wāyeqeb wĕhaddāgān lō yirēm wĕtîrōš yĕkaḥeš bām ‘You have loved fornication By every threshing floor and press; The new grain shall not join them, And the new wine shall fail them’.

In the marginal Masoretic note to the standard printed Hebrew text it is suggested that although the standard Hebrew text of this pericope ends with the phrase ‘her’, referring to an Israelite woman who accepts a harlot’s fee for services rendered to Israelite men in the course of their festival pilgrimages away from home (see above at Hos. 4), one would assume that the text should end with the masculine plural referring to the Israelite men. These men, who, engaging in extra-marital intercourse during the festival pilgrimages, are the guilty parties according to Hos. 4. In fact, the use of the feminine ‘her’ rather than the masculine ‘them’ intimates that just as Isa. 3–4 speaks in successive passages respectively of the arrogant men and the arrogant women, whose arrogance is to be punished, so do Hos. 4 and Hos. 9 speak respectively of (1) the disloyalty of married men who engage in intimate relations with prostitutes and (2) the sinfulness of the prostitutes, whose profession enables those married men to cheat on their spouses. Crucial to NJPS’s emended and rearranged text of Hos. 9:1–2 is the emendation of MT’s etnān ‘harlot’s fee for services rendered’ to zĕnût

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‘fornication’, obviously prompted by the seemingly correct assumption that the clause āhabtā etnān ‘You (masculine) have loved/been devoted’ to ‘harlot’s fee’ makes no sense because after all a harlot’s fee, everyone knows, is given to the prostitute for services rendered. The two seemingly plausible alternatives would be either to construe the verb as a feminine, ‘You (feminine) have loved/been devoted to a harlot’s fee’, or to substitute for etnān ‘harlot’s fee’ the noun zĕnût ‘fornication’, which refers to ancient Israelite men’s adultery. Apparently, the phallo-centric thinking of the generation to which the translators of NJPS belonged did not lead them to suggest a simple change in the vocalization so as to see the prostitute as addressed here. Obviously, the change in the vocalization of the verb from masculine to feminine eliminates the need to emend the phrase ‘her’ to ‘him’ at the end of v. 2. However, another possibility suggests itself in light of Mic. 1:7, where it is asserted that the very economy of Samaria in the eighth century BCE was based upon harlots’ fees for services rendered. Indeed, if Hos. 4 and Hos. 9 refer to the depravity of individuals engaged in consensual extra-marital sex, which is often victimless whether or not it is an offense against God or people, Mic. 1:7 addresses another issue, namely the huge sums which were amassed by owners of hotels adjoining the places of worship where men went on pilgrimage. Apparently, as in other times and places, prostitutes would pay the hoteliers for the privilege of using their establishments as a place of business during the festival seasons alluded to above. It is, therefore, altogether reasonable to suggest that the standard vocalization of the verb ‘you loved’ as masculine singular addresses the typical hotelier of eighth-century BCE Samaria and castigates him for aiding and abetting the immoral behaviour of both the prostitute and her client and thereby turning God’s festivals into an abomination and undermining the very foundations of the Israelite family. However, I am not ruling out the likelihood that many of the aforementioned hotels were owned by women, as was the one mentioned in Josh. 2, owned by the famous Madam Rahab. In either case, what is alluded to in both Hos. 9:1 and Mic. 1:7 is what is now called ‘sex tourism’. I learned about this term during a chance encounter with Professor Yaniv Poria of the Department of Hotel and Tourism Management in the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev School, in the course of our travelling together from Beer Sheva to Eilat where he was lecturing in the school of hotel management and I was lecturing in the Bible Division.12 12.  Important scholarly literature dealing with sex tourism in modern times includes R. Bandyopadhyay, ‘A Paradigm Shift in Sex Tourism Research’, Tourism Management Perspectives 6 (2013), pp. 1–2; T. Coles, E. Fenclova, and C. Dinan,

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LXX’s renders Heb. etnān, a relatively rare technical term for the fee paid to a prostitute for performing sexual services (the Hebrew noun appears altogether eleven times in the Hebrew Bible [see the discussion with respect to the cognate etnâ at Hos. 2:14 in my commentary there]) by means of Gk. plural δόματι ‘gifts’, reflecting both (1) an understanding of the Hebrew noun as a derivative of the verb ntn ‘give’ (so now also DCH 1:462); and (2) an understanding that in the present context the word etnān is a collective noun referring to many fees paid to many prostitutes. 9:3 lō yēšĕbû bĕereṣ Yhwh wĕšāb Eprayim Miṣrayim ûbĕAššûr ṭāmē yōkēlû ‘They will not abide in Yhwh’s land, but Ephraim will return to Egypt, and in Assyria they will eat unclean food’ Here as in Deut. 11:17 Israel is threatened that the logical consequence of disobedience to God is loss of the right to live in the Promised Land. Note the two instances of assonance in Hos. 9:3, which underscore the idea that the punishment is the logical consequence of Israel’s misbehaviour. The first instance is lō yēšĕbû…wĕšāb, meaning that many Israelite persons will not be allowed to abide in the land of Yhwh. Consequently collective Israel, here called Ephraim, will return to Egypt. The second instance of assonance in Hos. 9:3 is Eprayim Miṣrayim. As noted above (pp. 32, 235–36), the Northern Kingdom is frequently designated Ephraim because at the time when Hos. 4–14 were written, the Northern Kingdom consisted primarily of the hill country of Ephraim. In the case at hand, referring to Israel as Ephraim makes possible the assonance. Hosea 9:3 is the only occurrence in the Hebrew Bible of the designation of the promised land as ereṣ Yhwh ‘Yhwh’s land’. However, the use of the name Ephraim to designate the people of Israel is, indeed, adopted from Hosea by Jeremiah in Jer. 7:15; 31:17, 19; 50:19. With reference to Miṣrayim here meaning ‘to Egypt’, see the discussion of locative adverbial at Hos. 12:5, below. For the idea that the punishment of exile is to be avoided at all costs because any food, no matter how kosher it may be, if consumed outside of the land of Israel, is ipso facto unclean, see also Ezek. 4:13. For the idea that lands outside of the land of Israel are ipso facto unclean, see ‘Tourism and Corporate Social Responsibility: A Critical Review and Research Agenda’, Tourism Management Perspectives 6 (2013), pp. 121–41; M. Oppermann, Sex Tourism and Prostitution: Aspects of Leisure and Recreation (Putnam Valley, NY: Cognizant Communication Corporation, 1998).

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also Amos 7:17. In Deut. 11 as in Deut. 28:36 the punishment of exile is for disobedience in general and especially for worship of other deities. In Lev. 26:43 exile is meant primarily to allow the land of Israel to observe the sabbatical years of fallowness that Israel will have failed to observe while in the land. In Amos, exile of the king and the people seems to be principally a punishment for public immorality, which consists first and foremost of exploitation of the indigent. In Hos. 9, however, exile appears to be the punishment for private immorality, specifically extramarital sexual relations carried out in the course of religious pilgrimages commemorating the grain harvest and the vintage. For the threat of exile to Assyria see also Hos. 10:6, where however exile to Assyria is threatened as a punishment for the Northern Kingdom’s attempt to rely upon a military alliance with Assyria (on the latter, see also Hos. 7:11). For the threat of exile to Egypt, see also Hos. 8:13. The latter threat is to be understood in the larger context of an attempt of the Northern Kingdom to forge a military alliance with Egypt, which is condemned in Hos. 7:11, 16. For the pair Egypt//Assyria as destinations for exile, cf. Isa. 27:13: ‘On that day [designating a time in the future when good things will happen; see the discussion at Hos. 1:5; 2:23] a large ram’s horn shall be sounded and the exiles in the land of Assyria will come [back to the land of Israel] and those who were cast away in the land of Egypt, and they will bow down to Yhwh on the holy mountain, at Jerusalem’. In Hos. 9:4–7 the prophet, speaking in the name of God, will elaborate upon the consequences of the impending exile to Egypt and Assyria, which the prophet, speaking in the name of God, hopes to avoid if only Israel will promptly mend her ways. 9:4 lō-yissĕkû laYhwh yayin wĕlō yeerĕbû-lō zibĕḥêhem kĕleḥem ōnîm lāhem kol-okĕlāyw yiṭṭammāû kî-laḥmām lĕnapšām lō-yābô bêt Yhwh ‘They will not libate wine to Yhwh, and their sacrifices will not be pleasing to him. [On the contrary, their offerings shall be regarded] for them as the food of mourning [which is to say, lest it not be self-understood], all who eat it will be defiled. Indeed, their bread [shall be only] for their [collective] throat. It shall not come into the temple of Yhwh’ On the one hand, this verse continues the thought of Hos. 9:3, which threatens that the people of the Northern Kingdom will be exiled to Egypt and Assyria where whatever food they partake of there will be unclean food by virtue of the fact that all lands outside of the Land of Israel

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are regarded as places of defilement. On the other hand, Hos. 9:3 also shares the idea expressed in Hos. 8:13 that the Israelites might as well consume the sacrificial meat since God has decided that the sacrifices they offer are unacceptable so long as the Israelites will not change for the better their behaviour. One might even go so far as to suggest that in Hos. 9:3 and in Hos. 8:13 we find again the idea found also in Hos. 5:6; 6:6; 12:11–12 and in a traditional Jewish interpretation of Hos. 14:3 (see my commentary there) and also in Jer. 7:21–22—‘Thus says Yhwh of Hosts, the God of Israel, “Add your burnt offerings to your other sacrifices, and eat meat. For I did not speak with your ancestors nor did I command them concerning burnt offering and sacrifice when I brought them out of the land of Egypt’—that God disparages sacrificial worship. In fact, Hos. 8:13; 9:4; and Jer. 7:21–22 all share the idea that God would prefer that people consume sacrificial meat rather than offer it to God. While Hos. 8:13 presents some grammatical problems with respect to the significance or lack of significance for the indication of tenses of the prefixed and suffixed forms of the Hebrew verb, and while Hos. 9:4 may refer specifically to a situation in which Israel will find itself in exile in an unclean land, Jer. 7:21–22 declares unequivocally that God prefers that people consume sacrificial meat rather than offer it to God. With these caveats in mind, let us look now more closely at Hos. 9:4. Indeed, in its context within Hos. 9, v. 4 seems to follow upon the threat of exile to an unclean land in which sacrificial worship cannot be carried out. Apparently, this issue was still being debated at the time when Ezek. 20:29 was spoken. There the prophet asks the rhetorical question as to how it would enter anyone’s mind to engage in sacrificial worship of Yhwh during the Babylonian exile. In the context that includes Hos. 9:2–3, Hos. 9:4a, ‘They will not libate wine to Yhwh’, suggests that the punishment which constitutes the logical consequences of having turned the vintage festival pilgrimage into an occasion for debauchery is that the Israelites will be carried away to unclean lands, Egypt and Assyria, where they will not be able to engage in one of the most basic of rites associated with the vintage festival, namely the libating of wine to God to show both gratitude to God for the bountiful vintage and the expression of the fervent wish that future years should also see an abundant yield of grapes. Just as in the metaphorical banquet offered by personified Lady Wisdom in Prov. 9:5, food and drink accompany each other, and just as according to Num. 15:1–10 each kind of animal sacrifice is accompanied by an appropriate libation of wine, so also does Hos. 9:4a–b juxtapose the twin warnings of no libations to Yhwh in an unclean land and no sacrifices of slaughtered animals [Heb. zĕbāḥîm] in an unclean land.

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Hosea 9:4c–d explains the logic behind the threats pronounced in Hos. 9:4a–b. Hosea 9:4c reads as follows (for the transcription of the Hebrew text see above): ‘[On the contrary, their offerings shall be regarded] for them as the food of mourning’.

In this context the prohibition of offering as a gift to Yhwh of leḥem ōnîm ‘the food of mourning’ accords with the same prohibition found in the solemn declaration recited when one removes from his/her possession all tithes of the fruit of the land in the third (and sixth) year of every cycle of seven years recorded in Deut. 26:14, ‘I have not eaten of it when in mourning [Heb. bĕōnî], nor did I remove any of it when I was unclean, nor have I given any of it [as an offering] to the dead’. Probably reflecting the thought of Deut. 26:14 that food served in a house of mourning where presumably the person(s) being mourned expired, is unclean, Jews of Ashkenazic origin, who are not themselves part of the family of mourners, customarily do not consume any comestibles in a house of mourning. M. Laitner writes as follows: ‘A shiva [= a Jewish house of mourning; so called because Jews customarily observe seven (= Heb. šibâ) days of mourning at home following the death of a parent, child, sibling or spouse—clarification by M. Gruber] house is not a reception or a wake, such that mourners ought not to feel any pressure to provide catering for visitors. Accordingly, standard Ashkenazi practice is that non-family members do not eat or drink in a shiva house unless they need to for reasons of health or are weary from travel. Conversely, the practice in some Sephardi communities is that visitors to a shiva taste food, since by making a berachah before and after eating, they perform a mitzvah for the merit of the deceased.’13 Lest the implications of Hos. 9:4a not be abundantly clear, Hos. 9:4b explains as follows: ‘all who eat it will be defiled’. What, then, may be done with this food prepared for sacrifice by Israelites who find themselves in an unclean land such as Egypt or Assyria as punishment for their lechery when they were still in the land of Israel? This question is answered clearly enough in Hos. 9:4e: ‘Indeed, their bread is for their [collective] throat(s)’. 13.  M. Laitner, ‘Visitors to a Shiva House’, in Sefer HaShivah: Prayers and Ideas for Visitors to a House of Mourning (ed. M. Laitner and F. Palmer; London: The United Synagogue, 2013), pp. 24–25 (25).

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In this context, as frequently in Biblical Hebrew, the noun nepeš is employed in one of its primary meanings, ‘throat’, referring to the organ of ingestion.14 Having stated in Hos. 9:4d that the sacrificial meat prepared in unclean lands of exile is by virtue of its location in those unclean lands suitable only for human consumption, our prophet, again speaking in the name of God, explains in Hos. 9:4d for all who failed to draw the conclusion until now, ‘it shall not come into the temple of Yhwh’. Here again, as frequently, the noun or noun phrase, which designates a destination, functions as a locative accusative, and it does not require (as does the English translation) a preposition meaning ‘to’. On this syntactic phenomenon see my extensive discussion in the commentary at Hos. 12:5. M. J. Suriano has offered a somewhat different interpretation of Hos. 9:4.15 Suriano argues that the term nepeš in Hos. 9:4 denotes ‘defunct soul’ and refers to offerings rendered to the deceased and that likewise the cognate nbš in the Katamuwa stele designates an offering to Katamuwa after the latter’s death. Thus Suriano understands line 5b of that stele as follows: wybl lnbšy zy bnṣb zn ‘and a ram for my defunct soul that is in this stele’, and 10–12 of that inscription as follows: wyhrg bnbšy wyšwy ly šq ‘he should slaughter for my defunct soul and offer to me a thigh-cut’. In fact, regardless of the specific meaning of both nepeš in Hos. 9:4 and the cognate noun nbš in the Katamuwa stele from Zincirli, the famous eighth-century BCE Panamuwa I inscription also from Zincirli (KAI 214, lines 17, 21–22), and in line 3 of the fourth-century BCE inscription from Keseçek Köyö, well known from KAI 258, line 3, the three texts in question all refer, unquestionably, to offerings to the dead. Thus, while in all three cases the respective nouns nepeš/nbš may denote specifically dead person(s) to whom offerings were presented, napšām in Hos. 9:4 may mean simply ‘their throat’ and bnbšy in the Zincirli texts may mean simply ‘to me’. NJPS renders Hos. 9:4 as follows: ‘It shall be for them like the food of mourners, All who partake of which are defiled. They will offer no libations of wine to the LORD, 14.  Concerning nepeš in its primary meaning ‘throat’, see M. I. Gruber, ‘Hebrew daăbôn nepeš: “Dryness of Throat”: From Symptom to Literary Convention’, in Gruber, The Motherhood of God, pp. 185–92 (pp. 185–86), and the extensive literature cited there. 15.  M. J. Suriano, ‘Breaking Bread with the Dead: Katumuwa’s Stele, Hos. 9:4, and the Early History of the Soul’, JAOS 134 (2014), pp. 385–405 (397–405).

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And no sacrifices of theirs will be pleasing to Him; But their food will be only for their hunger, It shall not come into the house of the LORD.’

In this translation the translators render the noun napšām ‘their hunger’, assuming that the noun nepeš can indeed mean ‘throat’ and by extension ‘appetite, hunger’. However, the immediate context of Hos. 9:3–4 is the declaration that going into exile from the Holy Land means going to a place that is impure (so also Amos 7:17). One of the consequences of going into exile in a place that is impure by virtue of its being outside of the Holy Land is that any food that is consumed there is impure. Aside from Hos. 9:3–4, this point is made also in Ezek. 4:13. Hosea 9:3 makes the point that any comestible eaten outside of the Holy Land is contaminated because all places outside of the Holy Land are ipso facto contaminated. Hosea 9:4 seeks to stress this point by means of the comparison with the food of mourners, which is unclean, probably because it is consumed in the house where the person(s) being mourned had died and thereby defiled the house with corpse uncleanness (see Num. 19:14: ‘When a person dies in a tent, whoever enters the tent and whoever is in the tent shall be unclean seven days; and every open vessel, with no lid fastened down, shall be unclean’). Such being the case, J. Halévy connects the expression napāšm in Hos. 9:4 with the nuance ‘corpse’ of the same noun without the third personal pronominal suffix in Lev. 21:1 and passim.16 Moreover, Halévy stresses the affinity of Hos. 9:4 with the idea that corpses defile, which is spelled out in Num. 19:14 and following.17 Having made abundantly clear that the practice of lechery during festival pilgrimages will be punished by sending Israel into exile where there will be no festival pilgrimages, no libations, and no meat sacrifices, Hos. 9:5 hammers away at the same point by means of a rhetorical question, what I like to call parent-in-law rhetoric (as in ‘What are you going to sit on? Why do you not buy some new chairs?’): mah-taăśû lĕyôm môēd ûlĕyôm ḥag-Yhwh ‘What will you do for a festival day and for a feast of Yhwh?’ The obvious answer to this rhetorical question is something like the following: ‘In an unclean land I will not be able to observe the festival days which Yhwh prescribed in the Torah. I will be at loose ends. I certainly should have thought of this when I cheated on my wife when I went to Gilgal, Bethel, and other sacred cities ostensibly to celebrate the 16.  Halévy, ‘Recherches Bibliques’, p. 3. 17.  Halévy, ‘Recherches Bibliques’, p. 5.

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grain harvest and/or the vintage.’ Ultimately, the Jewish temples established successively at Elephantine and Heliopolis in Egypt and later the synagogues Jews established throughout the world showed that devotees of the God of Abraham had answers that outsmarted even Hosea and his God. Not yet outsmarted by the establishment of Jewish temples outside of the land of Israel and of synagogues found everywhere, Hosea, speaking in both the perfect of prophetic certitude and the imperfect expressing the future, spells out even more vividly in Hos. 9:6–7 the dire consequences that will follow Israel’s possible failure to cease and desist from the debauchery described in Hos. 9:1–2 (as previously in Hos. 4:10–15; 7:14). In Hos. 9:6 we read as follows: 9:6 kî-hinnēh hālĕkû miššōd Miṣrayim tĕqabbĕṣēm Mop tĕqabbĕrēm maḥmad lēkaspām qimmōš yîrāšēm ḥōăḥ bĕāholêhem ‘Look, indeed, they have gone away [to an unclean place] in the aftermath of destruction. Egypt will gather them, Memphis will bury them with the silver they treasure. Weed will inherit them [i.e., the lands they abandoned when they will have fled to Egypt]. Thorns [will be found] in their [erstwhile] homes’ Egypt//Memphis This word-pair, found only here in Hos. 9:6b–c, may be compared to the word-pair Judah//Jerusalem in Jer. 7:17; 44:6, 9, 17 and elsewhere. In both pairs the name of the country and the name of its capital are treated as synonyms. With NJPS’s marginal note, along with Andersen and Freedman, note that Hos. 9:6c is the only place in the Hebrew Bible where Memphis is called mōp.18 Elsewhere (seven times to be exact: Isa. 19:13; Jer. 2:16; 44:1; 46:14, 19; Ezek. 30:13, 16) in Hebrew Scriptures the city is called nōp. The difference can be accounted for on the basis of the frequent interchange of the consonants n and m in ancient Semitic languages and in many other languages, ancient and modern as well. D. B. Redford explains, ‘The site is identified with modern Mitrahineh, 13 miles south of Cairo on the west bank of the Nile. The site was first settled by Menes, the traditional founder of the first Egyptian dynasty, who ca. 3050 B.C. built a fortress there called the “White Fortress”.’19 Redford further explains that the early kings of Egypt established temporary pyramid 18.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 530. 19.  D. B. Redford, ‘Memphis’, ABD, vol. 4, pp. 689b–91a.

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towns to house the workers on the pyramids where these kings expected to be entombed after their death. One of these towns built by Pepy I (c. 2350–2315 BCE) was called ‘Pepy is Firm and Fair’, or in Ancient Egyptian, pepy-mn-nfr. From the Middle Kingdom onward this city was known by a shortened form of the latter name, namely mn-nfr. It is from the latter form that are derived the Greek designations Menophreos and Memphis, Akk. Mimpi as well as mp here in Hos. 9:6 and np in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Redford suggests that the tradition of Memphis’s impressive necropolis is employed here in Hos. 9:6 in the threat, ‘Egypt will gather them//Memphis will bury them’.20 There are two important differences between Hos. 9:6 and the two passages from the book of Jeremiah. First, Hosea, speaking in the name of God, threatens the Israelites who will be exiled to Egypt that they will be buried there by the Egyptians, while Jeremiah, speaking in the name of God, threatens the leaders and the people of Judah that they will be removed from their graves and neither gathered nor buried. Second, while the Hebrew word pair in Hosea for ‘gather//bury’ is qbṣ//qbr, in Jeremiah it is sp//qbr. Hosea’s point may well be here, as in Hos. 7:10–11; 11:5 and 12:2, that Israel should most certainly not seek help from Egypt in the form of a strategic alliance. Here Hosea adds the threat that the result of an attempt to form a strategic alliance with Egypt is that the famous necropolis of Memphis will only bury Israel, literally and figuratively. maḥmad lēkaspām ‘the silver they treasure’ LXX supplies something else, whose affinity with MT can readily be explained: καὶ θάψει αὐτοὺς Μαχμάς. τὸ ἀργύριον αὐτοῶν ὂλεθρος κληρονομήσει αὐτό, ἄκανθαι ἐν τοῖς σκηνώμασι, which Glenny renders into English as follows: ‘and Machmas will bury them. As far as their silver, destruction will inherit it, and thorns will be in dwellings’.21 This is to say that LXX, or its Hebrew Vorlage, has interpreted Heb. maḥmad as a place-name Maḥmas, and it construes Hos. 9:6 as referring not to two place names, namely Egypt and Memphis, but to three place names, namely Egypt, Memphis, and Machmas. However, everywhere else in LXX the place name Machmas refers to a city in the territory of the tribe of Benjamin in Judah, which is known in MT as Michmas [Heb. mkmś except in Ezra 2:17 and Neh. 7:31 where the spelling is mkms] (see, e.g., 1 Sam. 13:11, 23; 14:5; etc.). Consequently, E. Bons, J. Joosten, 20.  Redford, ‘Memphis’, p. 690a, with Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 530; cf. Jer. 8:2; 25:33: ‘they shall not be gathered, and they shall not be buried’. 21.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 53.

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and S. Kessler conclude that the Septuagintal version of Hos. 9:6 simply makes no sense;22 contrast the verbal acrobatics of Glenny.23 Perhaps what motivated the translators of LXX to construe mḥmd in Hos. 9:6 as a place-name Machmas is the fact that the phrase maḥmad lēkaspām ‘desire for their silver/wealth’ hardly makes much more sense in context than does ‘and Machmas will bury them’. Joosten cites LXX’s treatment of Hos. 9:6d, which turns Heb. maḥmad into a place name, as an example of LXX’s having ‘had no clear understanding at all of what the given Hebrew word signified: its meaning was simply guessed from the context’.24 Other instances where, according to Joosten, this aspect of LXX’s treatment of the book of Hosea can be demonstrated, include Hos. 2:5; 7:16; 10:4, 6; 13:2. Because of the inherent difficulty of Hos. 9:6d in its immediate biblical context, NJPS treats Hos. 9:6 as an instance of what medieval Hebrew biblical exegetes call inversion, which is to say a biblical text whose word order does not fit the syntax and requires that the exegete and the reader simply rearrange the words so that they do make sense. Thus NJPS treats maḥmad lēkaspām as an adverbial phrase modifying Miṣrayim tĕqabbĕṣēm, thus rendering Hos. 9:6b+d as follows: ‘[With] the silver they treasure Egypt shall hold them fast’. NJV’s marginal note states with reference to ‘she shall hold them fast’, ‘Meaning of Heb. uncertain’. However, see below for Andersen and Freedman’s perfectly reasonable explanation of the pair qbṣ//qbr ‘gather//bury’ as a variation upon the pair sp//qbr ‘gather//bury’ twice attested in the book of Jeremiah. qimmōš yîrāšēm ḥōăḥ bĕāholêhem ‘Weed will inherit them [i.e., the lands they abandoned when they will have fled to Egypt]. Thorns [will be found] in their [erstwhile] homes’ Y. Feliks explains that the plant called in Biblical Hebrew qimmōš referred to in Hos. 9:6 as also in Isa. 34:13 and Prov. 34:30–31 is a wild plant that grows in places which people have abandoned and left desolate.25 According to Feliks, the scientific names of the two plants that seem to fit this description are silybium marianum and notobasis syriaca.26 22.  Bons, Joosten, and Kessler, Les Douze Prophètes: Osée, p. 128. 23.  Glenny, Hosea, pp. 136–37. 24.  J. Joosten, ‘Exegesis in the Septuagint Version of Hosea’, in Collected Studies on the Septuagint (FAT, 83; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), pp. 123–45 (132). 25.  Y. Feliks, Plant World of the Bible (Ramat-Gan: Massada, 1968), p. 210 (in Hebrew). 26.  For illustrations, see respectively, Feliks, Plant World, p. 210 and p. 209. For other possible identifications of Heb. qimmōš, see the extensive discussion in Feliks,

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Illustration 6. Thorn [Heb. ḥōăḥ]

9:7 bāû yĕmê happĕquddâ bāû yĕmê haššillum yēdĕû Yiśrāēl ‘The days of punishment have come. The days of recompense have come. Let Israel know [this]’ This first half of Hos. 9:7, which consists of three clauses, the first two of which are identical with the exception of the distinct but synonymous nouns found at the end of each of the first two clauses, is a classic instance of the rhetorical device called anaphora, in which the same expression appears at the head of two or more clauses in a poetic unit.27 With reference to happĕquddâ meaning ‘the punishment’ note that the verb pqd is attested in the meaning ‘punish’ also in Hos. 1:4; 2:15; 4:9, 14; see also below at Hos. 9:9. The noun šillum ‘recompense’ is attested outside of Hos. 9:7 only in Mic. 7:3, and Isa. 34:8, while the construct feminine form of the noun, šillumat, also meaning ‘recompense’, is attested only in Ps. 91:8. there, pp. 206, 208, and see also H. N. Moldenke and A. L. Moldenke, Plants of the Bible (Waltham, MA: Chronica Botania, 1952), pp. 165, 202, 237, 245, 248. As for ḥōăḥ, a collective noun meaning ‘thorn’, Feliks, Plant World, p. 208, identifies it with scolymus maculatus; contrast Moldenke and Moldenke, Plants of the Bible, p. 153, and see Qyl, Hosea, p. 70 (in Hebrew). 27.  For extensive literature concerning this rhetorical device, see Yona, The Many Faces of Repetition, p. 19 n. 5.

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In the third and final clause of Hos. 9:7a–c, a collective noun, Israel, is the subject of a verb in the plural, yēdĕû.28 The perfect verbs in the first two clauses of Hos. 9:7 should be construed as perfects of prophetic certitude. For my understanding of the entire verse see below. Note, however, that NJPS creates a break between Hos. 9:7a–c and Hos. 9:7d–g, as though it regards Hos. 9:7a–c up to the caesura or etnaḥta as ending a paragraph and thus constituting another instance of ‘a section division in the middle of a verse’, which I discussed in my commentary at Hos. 1:2. However, even Uri, in his extensive list of 72 instances of the phenomenon in question does not cite any textual witnesses for such a break here in the middle of Hos. 9:7.29 However, as I noted in my introduction to Hos. 8, there is no basis in Hebrew or Greek manuscripts for the familiar and notably reasonable chapter division that sets Hos. 8 apart from Hos. 7. ĕwîl hannābî mĕšuggā îš hārûăḥ al rōb ăwōnĕkā wĕrabbâ maśṭēmâ ‘The prophet is a fool, the inspired person is a madman. Because of your great iniquity and great hatred’ The first two clauses of Hos. 9:7d–g appears to constitute an instance of synonymous parallelism. In the first of these two clauses the prophet, either Hosea or a contemporary of his, who came to a bad end, because the people whom he addressed ate his heart out, is referred to by the common word nābî, which appears in the singular 167 times in Hebrew Scripture. In the second of the two clauses, i.e., Hos. 9:7e, we find the expression îš hārûăḥ ‘the inspired person’, which is found only here. However, the idea that a prophet is characterized by inspiration referred to by the term rûăḥ, designating inspiration or charisma, is reflected in Num. 27:18, where God, speaking to Moses, asserts that Joshua, who is to succeed Moses as the leader of Israel, is îš ăšer-rûăḥ bô, ‘a person in whom there is inspiration’. Likewise, in Num. 11:17–26 it is asserted that seventy elders of Israel including Eldad and Medad prophesied by virtue of the divine gift of inspiration. In Gen. 41:38, Pharaoh attributes Joseph’s acumen to Joseph’s having in him ‘the spirit of God’, or, we might say, ‘divine inspiration’. Likewise, Ezekiel declares in Ezek. 2:2 and 3:24 that he was able to convey God’s message because a divine spirit had entered him. The idea that Israelite prophets were rarely thought to be 28.  Concerning the phenomenon of a collective noun, which is grammatically singular, as the subject of a plural verb in Biblical Hebrew, see the extensive list of examples provided by GKC #145c; Joüon and Muraoka, Grammar, #150e. 29.  Uri, ‘What Is “a section division in the middle of a verse”?’.

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mad, or as we would say, psychotic, has been discussed by Heschel.30 In fact, as Heschel demonstrates, the assertion that an Israelite prophet is a madman is found only three times in all of Hebrew Scripture and always with reference to persons who want to disparage the messages spoken by Israelite prophets in the name of God.31 Aside from Hosea’s referring to his having been disparaged and harassed in Hos. 9:7, the other instances are 2 Kgs 9:11 and Jer. 29:26. In 2 Kgs 9:11 one of the officials of Joram son of Ahab referred to the unnamed prophet who was sent by Elisha to inform Jehu that he had been chosen by God to reign in the place of Joram as a mĕšuggā, i.e., ‘a psychotic individual’. The second instance is in Jer. 29:26 where the false prophet (at least from the point of view of the editor[s] of the book of Jeremiah), Shemaiah the Nehelamite declares that kol-îš mĕšuggā ûmitnabbē ‘every person who is mad and pretends to be a prophet’ should be imprisoned, and he further explicates in Jer. 29:27 that he has in mind Jeremiah of Anatoth. As Ibn Ezra already explained in his commentary on Hos. 9:7, the designation ‘psychotic’ is what misinformed or malicious persons called God’s messenger, in this case the prophet who speaks in Hos. 4–14. Moreover, Ibn Ezra explains that the great sin and great hatred spoken of in Hos. 9:7 refers to the abominable behaviour of people who call Hosea a fool and a crazy person. If we follow Ibn Ezra’s interpretation, the gap which NJPS places between two halves of Hos. 9:7 should be removed and the entire verse should be rendered as follows: ‘The days of punishment have come The days of recompense have come Let Israel know [this]. [When you people say]: “The prophet is a fool The inspired person is a madman”, [The aforementioned punishment/recompense is] Because of your great iniquity and great hatred.’

The great iniquity is the people’s having disparaged the prophet’s God-given message and having sought to justify disparagement by delegitimatizing the messenger by referring to him as a fool and a deranged individual. The noun maśṭēmâ ‘hatred’, which is attested in Biblical Hebrew only twice, and only here in Hos. 9:7–8, is commonly assumed to be derived from 30.  Heschel, The Prophets, pp. 390–409. 31.  Heschel, The Prophets, pp. 402.

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the verb śāṭam ‘hate’ attested in Gen. 27:41; 49:23; 50:15; Ps. 55:4; Job 16:9; 30:21. Should there be any doubt that the ‘great hatred’ consists of the attempt to disparage the message of the prophet and to delegitimatize the messenger, Hos. 9:8 will make it abundantly clear that indeed this is the great hatred that constitutes a great iniquity.32 9:8 ṣōpeh Eprayim im-ĕlōhāy nābî paḥ yāqôš al-kol-dĕrākāyw maśṭēmâ bĕbêt ĕlōhāyw ‘The seer of Ephraim is with his God. The prophet is a fowler’s trap on all of his paths, an embodiment of hatred in the temple of his God’ Interestingly, the term ṣōpeh ‘seer’ to designate a prophet is found in the Bible outside of Hos. 9:8 only in Ezek. 3:17; 33:2, 6–7. In any case, since, as I have demonstrated here and below, that with the help of Ibn Ezra the received text of Hos. 9:7–9 can be shown to make perfect sense without any emendations, there is no need to adopt any of the restorations suggested by R. Dobbie.33 I adopt Ibn Ezra’s interpretation of Hos. 9:7, which makes possible a coherent interpretation of MT of that verse. If one further follows Ibn Ezra with respect to the following verse, Hos. 9:8, it emerges that the unnamed person or persons who refer to Hosea as a fool and a madman should be understood, like the prophets who opposed Jeremiah and Ezekiel in the late sixth century BCE, as false prophets. Thus Hosea refers to a typical member of the group of false prophets as ‘the prophet of Ephraim’ just as in Hos. 14:9 Ephraim, normally a synonym for Israel in Hos. 4–14, is the personification of a misbehaving Israel. In the continuation of his commentary at Hos. 9:8 Ibn Ezra states that it is that very same typical or paradigmatic false prophet who is spoken of in the nominal sentence in Hos. 9:8b, while in Hos. 9:8c the final nominal sentence of Hos. 9:8 asserts that indeed it is that same paradigmatic false prophet, who disparages the message of Hosea and delegimatizes the divine messenger by asserting that he suffers from a mental disease. Indeed, the unnamed false prophet declares that Hosea is hatred personified in the temple of his God.

32.  The expression ‘the great hatred’, which occurs in the Bible only in Hos. 9:7, was adopted by Maurice Samuel (1895–1972) as the title of his book, The Great Hatred (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), in which he called for the world to denounce anti-Semitism. 33.  R. Dobbie, ‘The Text of Hosea IX 8’, VT 5 (1955), pp. 199–203.

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Here we must understand that what true and false prophets have in common in Hos. 4–14, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel is that they share with the canonical prophets such as Hosea, Huldah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, the devotion to the one God of Israel, called Yhwh. They differ with respect to their beliefs/assertions as to who are and who are not the legitimate messengers of God and as to whether or not the prophecies of doom and consolation of the canonical prophets of Israel and Judah are indeed spoken on the authority of Yhwh. Unquestionably, the adoption of Ibn Ezra’s interpretation of the syntax and the allusions in Hos. 9:7–8 makes possible a coherent interpretation of both of those verses and obviates the questionable insertion of a paragraph division in the middle of Hos. 9:7, for which there is no attestation in the manuscript traditions of either MT or LXX. 9:9 heĕmîqû šiḥētû ‘They have been exceedingly perverse’ As I pointed out above in the commentary at Hos. 5:2a, following S. Morag’s discussion,34 Hos. 5:2a, wĕšaḥăṭâ Šēṭîm heĕmîqû ‘At Shittim they were exceedingly perverse’, has a close parallel in Hos. 9:9a–b, where it is stated, heĕmîqû šiḥētû kîmê haggibĕâ ‘They have been exceedingly perverse as in the days of Gibeah’.

Hosea 5:2a is a simple declarative sentence referring to past behaviour of Israel, specifically at Shittim during the forty-year sojourn of Israel in the wilderness of Sinai, where, according to Num. 25:1, ‘the people began to fornicate with the Moabite women’. Hosea 9:9a–b, on the other hand, compares the perverse behaviour of the people of Israel in his own time to the perverse behaviour of the people of Israel in past times, specifically to the event recorded in Judg. 19 concerning the Levite and his concubine who were initially refused hospitality by the people of Gibeah. Ultimately, the people of Gibeah gang-rape the concubine until apparently she loses consciousness and dies, and the people of Israel wage war against Benjamin, the tribe to which Gibeah belonged, to avenge the outrage committed by the people of Gibeah. In both passages in Hosea, 5:2a and 9:9a–b, the verb heĕmîqû ‘they went deep’ is employed as an adverbial modifier of another verbal form, the infinitive šaḥăṭâ in 34.  Morag, ‘On Semantic and Lexical Features’, p. 508.

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Hos. 5:2a, the perfect plural verb šiḥētû in Hos. 9:9a–b. The verb heĕmîqû ‘they went deep’ is similarly employed in Isa. 31:6, where we read as follows: ‘Return, Israel, to him to whom the people of Israel have been exceedingly unfaithful’. Interestingly, the prophet’s stream of consciousness, which links his use of the expression heĕmîqû šiḥētû here in Hos. 9:9 with his use of the similar expression wĕšaḥăṭâ Šēṭîm heĕmîqû in Hos. 5:2a, seems to be reflected also in his referring to the term paḥ ‘a trap for catching birds’ both in Hos. 5:1 and in Hos. 9:8. As for my contention, following Ibn Ezra and contrary to NJPS, that Hos. 9:7 need not be divided into two paragraphs, it should be noted furthermore that Hos. 9:7–9 constitute an inclusio, for Hos. 9:7 begins with the threat of punishment (happĕquddâ) while 9:9 ends with the repetition of that threat as follows: yizkōr ăwônām yipqōd ḥaṭṭōtām ‘He (Yhwh) will recall their iniquity. He will remember/punish their sins’ The inclusio would seem to reinforce the impression that here the verb pqd indeed means ‘punish’, as it certainly does in Hos. 9:7 where this meaning is reinforced by the parallelism with haššillum ‘the recompense’, the equivalence of which seems to be reinforced also by the rhetorical device of anaphora employed in Hos. 9:7. However, the parallelism in Hos. 9:9 yizkōr//yiqpōd might suggest that here in Hos. 9:9, as in Gen. 21:1, wayyipqōd Yhwh et-Śārâ kaăšer āmar ‘and Yhwh remembered Sarah as he had promised’, and Exod. 3:16, pāqōd yipqōd ĕlōhîm etĕkem ‘God certainly remembers you’, the verb means ‘remember’. The apparent ambiguity of Hos. 9:9 can be resolved, however. The point of mentioning Gibeah in Hos. 9:9b is indeed to suggest that God does not forget. Thus Hosea frequently mentions past sins, as in Hos. 10:10, where the sin of Gibeah is again mentioned, and in Hos. 10:14 (see in my commentary below) and 11:2 (see below). However, the point of our prophet’s reminding us specifically in Hos. 9:9b that God does not forget or ignore wrong-doing is to emphasize the contention that just as God remembers, so will he indeed punish, as promised in Hos. 9:7, ‘The days of punishment have come. The days of recompense have come. Let Israel know [this].’

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9:10–16 While MT recognizes no paragraph division in the middle of Hos. 9:7, Masoretic mss. such as Leningrad and Aleppo do recognize a division into paragraphs between Hos. 9:9 and Hos. 9:10, and Ms. Leningrad treats Hos. 9:17 as a separate unit. Ms. Vaticanus of LXX, on the other hand, which recognizes both a newer division of the book of Hosea into eleven larger units and an older division into twenty-one units, attests to both of these divisions as treating Hos. 9:1–17 as a single unit. 9:10 kaănābîm bammidbār māṣātî Yiśrāēl kěbikkûrâ bitěēnâ běrēšîtāh răîtî ăbōtêkem hēmmâ bāû Baal-Pěôr wayyinnāzěrû labbōšet wayyihěyû šiqqûṣîm kěāhobām ‘Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel//like the first ripe fig on a fig tree at its first bearing of fruit I perceived your ancestors. They came to Baal-peor, and they devoted themselves to Shamefulness, and they became abominations just like the object of their devotion’ Here in Hos. 9:10a–b, as in Hos. 2:16–17 and Jer. 2:1–2, the relationship of God and Israel in the wilderness period between the Exodus and the entry into the Promised Land is compared to a honeymoon. In Hos. 14:6, 8 Israel in the future is compared to the lily and the olive tree. However, it is pointed out immediately in Hos. 9:10c that a crisis came about when Israel arrived at Baal-peor. Matters between God and Israel took a turn for the worse. At Baal-peor the people of Israel came to devote themselves to bōšet, which can be either a common noun denoting ‘shamefulness’ or the name of a deity, Shamefulness, or a dysphemism for Baal, the common epithet of the Canaanite god of the storm and the rain, Hadad. See the discussion concerning Boshet as an element in proper names in my commentary at Hos. 2:18–19. The first two principal clauses of Hos. 9:10 employ synonymous parallelism: ‘I found Israel//I perceived your ancestors’. Likewise the two adverbial phrases present two parallel similes, which are meant to convey how very special seemed primordial Israel before the unfortunate apostasy at Baal-peor described in detail in Num. 25:1–3. It is possible that our prophet refers again to this apostasy in Hos. 13:1. It is not unlikely that when Jeremiah (speaking in the name of God) refers to Israel as the first fruit of his harvest (Jer. 2:3) he has drawn inspiration from the simile in Hos. 9:10, ‘like the first ripe fig on a fig tree at its first bearing of fruit’.

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9:11 Eprayim kāôp yitôpēp kĕbōdām millēdâ ûmibbeṭen ûmēhērāyōn ‘Ephraim’s glory shall be like a bird that flies away. [There will be] neither birth, nor womb, nor pregnancy’ Samuel ben-Meir, commonly known by his acronym Rashbam (c. 1085– c. 1174 CE), explains how it may have come about that the Israelites in Egypt literally swarmed. He suggests in his commentary at Exod. 1:7 that the Israelites multiplied in great numbers because, far beyond the usual statistical probabilities, Israelite women in Egypt succeeded in becoming pregnant, they did not experience miscarriage, and their foetuses were actually born alive. In a reversal of these unusual probabilities, our prophet of doom, speaking in the name of God, suggests that Ephraim may well disappear if her children are stillborn or if the mothers miscarry in great numbers or if large numbers of Ephraimite women fail to conceive. 9:12 kî im-yĕgaddĕlû et-bĕnêhem wĕšikkaltîm mēādām kî-gam-ôy lāhem bĕśûrî mēhem ‘Even if they should raise their children, I will make them bereft [of their] adult children. Indeed, also, woe is them when I turn away from them’ Having threatened that Ephraim (here again as in Hos. 9:8 Ephraim is not an epithet of endearment as it surely is in Jer. 31:19) may cease to exist because of fertility problems, our prophet of doom offers here an additional threat in v. 13. In fact, Hos. 9:13–16 explains how it is that in stages God will carry out the threat first enunciated in Hos. 9:12. bĕśûrî ‘when I turn away’ Functionally, we may compare the idea that bad things can happen to people when God, as it were, turns away, to the Rabbinic concept of hastarat pānîm ‘the turning away of the [divine] countenance’, Martin Buber’s concept of ‘the eclipse of God’,35 and the Samaritan concept of fanûtâ, literally, ‘the turning away (of God’s countenance)’ during the present era of lack of divine grace. With respect to the lexeme śûr, this form, attested only here in Hos. 9:12, is a biform of the infinitive construct sûr, which is attested 10 times in all of Hebrew Scripture (see, inter alia, Deut. 17:20; Josh. 23:6; Isa. 7:17; Jer. 32:40; Job 28:28). The spelling with ś instead of s can be a feature of either archaic or archaizing orthography. 35.  See Buber, Eclipse of God.

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9:13 Eprayim kaăšer-rāîtî lĕṢôr šetûlâ bĕnāweh wĕEprayim lĕhôṣî el-hōreg bānāyw ‘As for Ephraim, as I saw with respect to Tyre, which was planted in a meadow also Ephraim must bring out his children for slaying’ LXX renders Hos. 9:13 as follows: Ὲφράιμ ὃν τρόπον εἰς θήραν παρέστησαν τὰ τéκνα αὐτῶν, καὶ Ὲφράιμ τοῦ ἐξαγαγεῖν εἰς ἀποκέντησιν τὰ τέκνα αὐτοῦ, which Glenny renders as follows: ‘Ephraim, as they presented their children for prey, also Ephraim presented them to lead out his children for piercing’.36 Moreover, Glenny, in his commentary on this verse, explains, ‘This [our verse] suggests that Ephraim is leading its children to destruction by their involvement in the same kinds of sins as their fathers at Beel-Phegor’.37 With reference to LXX’s Beel-Phegor as the equivalent of MT’s Baal-peor, see my discussion above at Hos. 9:10. Bons, Joosten, and Kessler suggest that the Hebrew Vorlage of LXX reads instead of MT’s lṣwr štlh bnwh the following: lṣyd štw bnyw, i.e., ‘for prey they presented his (i.e., Ephraim’s collective) children’.38 The difference between the Hebrew retroverted from LXX and the consonantal text of MT can be explained as hinging upon three things. First, the similarity of w and y, which accounts for many instances of difference between kethib/qere variants; and the similarity of r and d in virtually all phases of Hebrew writing. Consequently an original lṣwr preserved in MT and meaning ‘with respect to Tyre’ was construed as lṣyd ‘for prey’. Second, haplography apparently occurred. Consequently, the word representing the feminine singular passive participle of a verb meaning ‘planted’ became št, meaning ‘he presented’. The latter form was apparently later construed as defective for štw ‘they presented’. Third, the rare in Biblical Hebrew bnwh ‘in a meadow’, attested only in Isa. 32:18; 35:7; Hos. 9:13; and Prov. 21:20, was construed as bnyw ‘his children’, which is found 197 times in the Hebrew Bible. In fact, the final clause of Hos. 9:13 employs this expression. Consequently, Brown construes 9:13 as originally containing a play on words involving bnwh and bnyw: ‘Ephraim, as I have seen, is like Tyre, that is planted in a meadow: but Ephraim shall bring out his children to the slayer’.39 Ibn Ezra explains, most convincingly, that Hos. 9:13 is the account of a prophetic vision,

36.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 53. 37.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 142. 38.  Bons, Joosten, and Kessler, Les Douze Prophètes: Osée, p. 132. 39.  Brown, Hosea, p. 84.

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in which the prophet came to understand that it was God’s intention to annihilate Israel. Consequently, Ibn Ezra further explains, what follows in Hos. 9:14, which begins with an imperative singular, is the prophet’s prayer to God that he mitigate the punishment.40 Outstanding among the classic examples of a prophet’s entreating God on behalf of Israel/ Judah are Amos 7:1–9; Jer. 12:14. Typologically, most similar to the case at hand is Ezek. 5:9–15. Both in Hos. 9:14 and in Ezek. 5:9–15 the prophet objects to what God proposes, and a compromise is offered. However, while in Ezek. 5:15 God offers the compromise in response to God’s original proposal, here in Hos. 9:14 it is the prophet who offers a compromise, and no divine response, either positive or negative, is forthcoming in the biblical text. Moreover, while in Ezek. 5:15 the objection and the compromise refer to the details of the preparation of a symbolic meal, in Hos. 9:14 the compromise refers to the stringency of the punishment that God has proposed. Here is the text: 9:14 tēn lāhem Yhwh mah-tittēn tēn lāhem reḥem maškîl wĕšādayim ṣōmĕqîm ‘Give them, Yhwh. What will you give? Give them womb that miscarries and breasts that are dried up’ S. Yona in a forthcoming study, ‘Additions to the Expanded Colon’, demonstrates that the structure of Hos. 9:14 is that of a well-known form of poetic parallelism common to Ugaritic and biblical poetry and called variously staircase parallelism, climactic parallelism, and the expanded colon.41 As explained already by Rashbam in his commentary at Exod. 15:6, in what we now call staircase parallelism, the first of two lines of poetry makes an incomplete statement while the second of the two lines repeats and completes the statement. Typical are Exod. 15:6: ‘Your right hand, Yhwh [who are] glorious in power, your right hand, Yhwh, shatters the enemy’; Ps. 93:3: ‘The ocean sounds, Yhwh, the ocean sounds its thunder…’; and Ps. 92:10: ‘Indeed, your enemies, Yhwh, indeed your 40.  So also Wolff, Hosea, pp. 166–67. Concerning the prophet as intercessor, see the classic studies by Muffs, Love and Joy, pp. 9–48; S. Blank, ‘Men Against God: The Promethean Element in Biblical Prayer’, JBL 72 (1953), pp. 1–13. 41.  On this type of parallelism, see especially S. D. Loewenstamm, ‘The Expanded Colon in Ugaritic and Biblical Verse’, JSS 14 (1969), pp. 176–96; Y. Avishur, ‘Addenda to the Expanded Colon in Ugaritic and Biblical Verse’, UF 4 (1972), pp. 1–10.

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enemies, will perish…’. Likewise, as noted by Yona, Hos. 9:14 consists of two parallel clauses together constituting staircase parallelism, in which the first of the two parallel clauses (Hos. 9:14a) constitutes an incomplete statement while the second of the two clauses (Hos. 9:14c) repeats that statement. The innovation introduced by Yona is that Hos. 9:14b, which intervenes between the two steps on the staircase, is not, as one might imagine, an instance of dittography, but rather an intervening question addressed to God. Thus the structure of Hos. 9:14 is as follows: Incomplete request: Rhetorical question: Complete request:

‘Give them… What shall you give them? Give them [collective] womb that miscarries and [plural] breasts that are dried up’.

Moreover, as demonstrated by Yona in that forthcoming study, a similar structure of staircase parallelism, with an addition, is attested also in Jer. 31:21. However, that passage need not concern us here. Referring back to what was already stated in Hos. 9:11, that a population can be reduced first and foremost by three factors—namely, (1) the failure to deliver live births; (2) miscarriage; and (3) failure of women to become pregnant, all of which factors can be the result of women being undernourished—our prophet entreats God not to carry out the punishment described in Hos. 9:12, namely, that people manage to raise their children only to see them die in the prime of their life, ‘please, God, let their potential progeny suffer miscarriage’, or at worst, suffer from undernourishment because the mothers cannot consume sufficient food as to be able to nurse their babies. The curse of miscarrying wombs and breasts that cannot deliver enough milk to sustain an infant amounts to rescinding the blessing, with which Jacob blesses his children in Gen. 49:25: ‘From the God of your father who helps you and (from) El Shadday [possibly a word-play with šādayim “breasts” at the end of the verse], who blesses you, the blessings of heaven from above, the blessing of the abyss [the ground water] that couches below, blessings of breasts and womb’. With respect to the unique parallel between Gen. 49:15 and Hos. 9:14, it is interesting that among the many parallels between the Pentateuch and the book of Hosea cited by Cassuto, this parallel is not cited.42

42.  Cassuto, ‘The Prophet Hosea and the Books of the Pentateuch’, pp. 79–100.

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9:15 kol-rāātām baggilgāl kî-šām śĕnētîm al roă maalĕlêhem mibbêtî ăgārĕšēm lō ôsîp ahăbātām kol-śārêhem sōrĕrîm ‘All their evil [was already] at Gilgal. For there I showed antipathy toward them because of their evil deeds. I shall drive them out of my house. I shall not continue showing them favour. All their rulers habitually act perversely’ ‘All their evil [was already] at Gilgal’ As emphasized by E. K. Holt, one of the characteristics of the book of Hosea, or, to be more precise than Holt, of Hos. 4–14 and especially of Hos. 6:9; 9:10; 10:9, 14; 11:1; 12:11; 13:1, is the frequent allusion to past events and the places where these past events took place.43 A marginal note at Hos. 9:15a in NJPS states, ‘The specific allusion is uncertain’. However, given the fact that, as we shall see below, Hos. 9:15f refers to the rulers of the Northern Kingdom who act perversely, there is a very interesting answer to the question as to what it is that annoys Hosea speaking in the name of God that began at Gilgal or at least can be traced back to Gilgal. It should be recalled that in Hos. 8:4 as also in 13:10 our prophet expresses the view held earlier by the prophet Samuel and by the anonymous narrator in 1 Sam. 8:4, according to which ‘all the elders of Israel’ assembled at Ramah asked the Prophet Samuel, ‘Appoint a king for us to govern us like all other nations’, and according to which God, as it were, opposed the establishment of the monarchy but, like a parent worn out by the incessant demands of a teenager, who wishes only to be like her/his schoolmates, gave in to them. Hundreds of years later, in Hos. 8:4 and 13:10, God reminds Israel that the monarchy ‘was never my idea anyway’. Indeed, according to 1 Sam. 11:14–15, ‘Samuel said to the people, “Come, let us go to Gilgal, and there inaugurate the monarchy”. Thus all the people went to Gilgal, and there at Gilgal they made Saul king before Yhwh.’ Such an interpretation of Hos. 9:15a is found already in Jerome, Kimchi, Wolff, Mays, and E. Jacob.44 However, Rudolph and Macintosh prefer to see Hos. 9:15a as referring to some more recent (from the perspective of eighth-century BCE Hosea) event, which is unknown to modern Bible readers.45 Harper 43.  E. K. Holt, Prophesying the Past: The Use of Israel’s History in the Book of Hosea (JSOTSup, 194; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995). 44.  E. Jacob, ‘Der Prophet Hosea und die Geschichte’, Evangelische Theologie 24 (1964), pp. 281–90 (284). 45.  Rudolph, Hosea, p. 188, and Macintosh, Hosea, p. 376.

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writes, ‘Gilgal was the seat of Baalistic practices (cf. 4.15; 12.11; Amos 4.4; 5.5); but there is no evidence of its being the headquarters of human sacrifice’.46 Dearman speculates that perhaps there is a reference to Saul’s failed kingship.47 On the contrary, I suggest with the ancient, medieval, and modern authorities cited above, that the reference is to monarchy itself being a failure from its inception through the reign of Menahem son of Gadi. Andersen and Freedman remark, ‘ “All their evil (is) in Gilgal”. This is not likely; their evil was all over the country, not just in one spot.’48 kol-śārêhem sōrĕrîm ‘All their rulers habitually act perversely’ Having seen that in Hos. 7:3, 5; 8:10, as also in Hos. 13:10, q.v., as well as in Hos. 3:4, the term śār, which elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible may mean simply ‘official’ and appears to be like Akk. šarru a word for ‘king’, it is most likely that here in Hos. 9:15 the prophet, speaking in the name of God, castigates the people of the Northern Kingdom for having perverse rulers. These, we should recall, include Jeroboam II (787–747 BCE) the son of Joash, whose wickedness is described in 2 Kgs 14:24; Zechariah the son of Jeroboam II, whose wickedness is described in 2 Kgs 15:9, and who, after reigning in Samaria for only eight months, was assassinated by Shallum son of Jabesh, who reigned in his stead (2 Kgs 15:8–10) for only one month, after which he was assassinated by Menahem son of Gadi (2 Kgs 15:14), whose wickedness is detailed in 2 Kgs 15:16–18. As explained in my Introduction, following Ginsberg and Tadmor, I date the speeches of prophetic rebuke of Israel and her leaders to the reign of Menahem son of Gadi, and more specifically to the period of that reign prior to the year 743 BCE. Interestingly, the expression ‘perverse śārîm’ appears once more in the Hebrew Bible outside of Hos. 9:15, namely in Isa. 1:23, where we read as follows: śārayik sōrĕrîm wĕḥabĕrê gannābîm kullô ōhēb šoḥad wĕrōdēp šalmonîm yātom lō yišpoṭû wĕrîb almānâ lō yābô ălêhem ‘Your officials act perversely, and they are persons associated with thieves. Everyone is devoted to a fee for services rendered and pursues pay-offs. They do not defend the orphan and the cause of the widow never reaches them.’

46.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 339. 47.  Dearman, Hosea, p. 257. 48.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 545.

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As we have seen, kol-śārêhem sōrĕrîm read in the larger context of Hos. 3–13 appears to refer to perverse kings. Isaiah 1:23, on the other hand, first spoken in the very different context of Judah in the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, appears to refer to perverse local officials, who ought to serve as ombudsmen for persons belong to the underprivileged underclasses. However, they refuse to do so because they will seek justice only on behalf of persons who are willing to pay a fee. (Cf. Mic. 3:11: ‘Their leaders will adjudicate only in exchange for a fee [šoḥad]’.) This situation came about because a previously rural society, in which the affluent took care of the needs of the less affluent on the basis of noblesse oblige, evolved into an urban society, in which the rich could afford to obtain justice while the poor had no one to turn to.49 We may well compare the situation with respect to health care in capitalist economies of the late twentieth century CE where availability of health care and health insurance was dependent upon a person’s wealth. 9:16 hukkâ Eprayim šorĕšām yābēš pĕrî bĕlî-yaăśûn ‘Ephraim has been struck. Their root has dried up. They do not produce fruit’ So reads the Hos. 9:16a–c, according to the kethib. The qere reads: hukkâ Eprayim šorĕšām yābēš pĕrî bal-yaăśûn. There is no difference in meaning between the qere and the kethib. Both the shorter form of the negative particle without the final yod, as in the qere, and the longer form with the final yod are found in all phases of Biblical Hebrew. The expression ‘do not/will not produce’, employing the form bĕlî, also followed by third person masculine plural imperfect of the verb śh, appears also in Hos. 8:7, q.v. Ginsberg has treated the non-synonymous fixed pair ‘root–fruit’.50 He argues there that in five of the six cases where the pair root–fruit occurs (2 Kgs 19:30; Isa. 14:29; 37:31; Ezek. 17:9; Amos 2:9) the noun pĕrî denotes foliage rather than fruit, denoting ‘fruit’ only in Hos. 9:16. Equally important, the pair root below–fruit (or foliage) above is attested also in lines 11–12 of the early fifth-century BCE Phoenician inscription attributed to (or composed in advance of the author’s death because, like 57.

49.  Cf. John Bright, A History of Israel (2nd ed.; London: SCM, 1972), pp. 256–

50.  H. L. Ginsberg, ‘Concerning the Biblical Lexicon’, in Henoch Yalon Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of his Seventy-Fifth Birthday (ed. S. Lieberman, S. Abramson, E. Y. Kutscher, and S. Esh; Jerusalem: Kiryat Sepher, 1963), pp. 167–73 (166–70) (in Hebrew).

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Moses in Deut. 34:5–12, the speaker refers to his own death) Eshmunazor II on his sarcophagus. There the king expresses his wish that anyone who might open the coffin for good or malicious purpose alike should have neither root below nor fruit/foliage above. In the latter case the pair seems to be employed as a merism, meaning that Eshmunazor wishes the guilty individual that he/she and his/her entire family past, present, and future should be obliterated. The verb form yaăśûn is one of four instances in the book of Hosea of a verb form ending in paragogic nun. The second of the four instances in the book of Hosea of a verb form ending in paragogic nun is the verb form yēlēdûn found in Hos. 9:16d. As noted by Joüon and Muraoka, in general, second and third person imperfect plural forms terminating in paragogic nun seem to be employed for emphasis in major and intermediate pauses.51 Thus the form yaăśûn ‘they will produce’ is marked with the Masoretic accent called etnaḥtā or caesura, which is the major pause found in this and most cases in the middle of the biblical verse. The other instance in Hos. 9:16 of a verb form terminating in paragogic nun is the verb yēlēdûn, which is marked with the pausal accent called zaqep qaṭon. (See the extensive discussion and bibliography concerning paragogic nun in my commentary at Hos. 11:2.) gam kî yēlēdûn wĕhēmattî maḥmaddê biṭnām ‘Even when they give birth, I shall slay their cherished offspring’ Previously, in Hos. 9:11, our prophet, speaking in the name of God, threatens Ephraim with the denial of the blessings of birth, womb, and pregnancy, suggesting, as I suggested in my commentary there, that Ephraim may well disappear if her children are stillborn or if the mothers miscarry in great numbers or if large numbers of Ephraimite women fail to conceive. In Hos. 9:12 our prophet, again speaking in the name of God, threatens that even if Ephraim should survive the three-fold threat of fewer pregnancies, many spontaneous abortions, and stillborn children, God will bring about increased adult mortality to compensate for the few children who are conceived and who are born alive. Likewise, Hos. 9:16a–c repeats the threat that few children will be conceived, ‘Their root has dried up; they produce no fruit’, meaning again that fewer women will conceive because of the combination of infertile men and women, spontaneous abortion, and stillborn children. In addition, just as in Hos. 9:12, the prophet, speaking in the name of God, threatens that the few children who are born under the circumstances of reduced fertility, spontaneous 51.  Joüon and Muraoka, Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, #44e.

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abortion, and stillbirths will die after the mothers have carried them to term and delivered them. Our prophet refers to the children who are born and are then killed thereafter (sooner or later at whatever age) as maḥmaddê biṭnām ‘the beloved of their [Ephraim’s collective] womb’. I have already published a treatment of womb fruit referring to progeny of the collective wombs of the people of Israel and not necessarily from the perspective of women who have wombs (as opposed to men who do not).52 There I distinguished between cases where progeny are called womb fruit from the perspective of women who have wombs and cases where progeny of a nation are called womb fruit, specifically of their fathers. Cases belonging to the former category include Pss. 22:11; 71:6; Job 1:21; 31:18; and Qoh. 5:14, while cases belonging to the latter category include Deut. 7:13; 28:4, 11, 18, 53; 30:9; Ps. 132:11; Job 19:17. The expression *maḥmad beṭen, which is attested only in the plural form maḥmaddê biṭnām, and only here in Hos. 9:16, refers to the fruit of the womb, i.e., children who are precious to their parents, their village, and their nation. In Ezek. 24:16 the wife of the prophet Ezekiel is referred to by God as maḥmad ênêkā ‘the delight of your eyes’. Note that there, since the context in Ezek. 14:17–18 indicates that the epithet refers to the prophet’s wife, the sex of the person so referred to is female, while the grammatical gender of the expression maḥmad ênêkā ‘the delight of your eyes’ is masculine. Similarly, the grammatically masculine plural expression maḥmaddê biṭnām ‘the delightful [fruits] of their [collective] womb’ refers to both girls and boys, women and men, who die at some point in time between live birth and old age. 9:17 yimāsēm ĕlōhay kî lō šāmĕû lô ‘My God rejects them because they did not obey him’ Frequently, as in Hos. 9:15, 16, the prophet quotes God, who speaks in the first person singular. Slightly less frequently as here in 9:17a–b and as in 9:8–9 the prophet speaks about God. Also, here in 19:17a, as in 9:8, the prophet refers to the God of Israel as ‘my God’. In 4:6 God threatens to reject the current priestly house or dynasty because the current members of that priestly house had rejected God’s commandments by sins of omission. Here in 9:17a–b God threatens the entire nation of Ephraim because of their failure to fulfil God’s commandments.

52.  Gruber, ‘Is the Principal Human Speaker in Micah 6–7 a Woman?’, p. 14.

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With respect to all instances of the expressions šm l/b, and especially šm lĕqōl/bĕqōl ‘hear/obey (the voice of)’, commentators argue as to whether or when the expressions denote obedience and when they denote simply listening.53 I have found that male authors, who have an inclination to traits of authoritarian personality, tend to treat more of the various instances of the expressions in question as meaning ‘do what I want/ obey me’, while authors (regardless of physical sex) who have feminist inclinations (D. H. Lawrence would say that they were more in touch with their own woman being) are more likely to notice more instances of these expressions denoting rapport or close reading of the other person’s oral and body language, i.e., listening, pure and simple, rather than obedience. In fact, the task of the biblical commentator is to discern what is the most reasonable of all of the philological possibilities in a given context. Just as in Hos. 4:6 the prophet, speaking in the name of God, threatens to reject the priesthood because of the priests’ failure to execute God’s command, so here in Hos. 9:17 Hosea tells us that God will undoubtedly reject Ephraim collectively because of Ephraim’s collective failure to pay heed to and to carry out their obligations to God. wĕyihyû nōdĕdîm baggôyîm ‘And they shall wander among the nations’ Here, as in Lev. 26:33; Deut. 28:36, 64; and Amos 8:17, exile is threatened as punishment for Israel’s disobedience to God’s prescriptions and proscriptions. Through the greater part of the long period of time, from the Achaemenid period to the nineteenth century CE, it was largely taken for granted that God had pronounced this threat long before, God forbid, the people of Israel had ever experienced exile from the land of Israel. Nineteenth-century skepticism, which played a big part in the higher criticism of Hebrew Scripture, came to take for granted the idea that any and all threats of exile as punishment can only have been pronounced after the Assyrian King Tiglath-pileser III had annexed ‘Ijon, Abel-bethmaacah, Janoah, Kedesh, Hazor, Gilead, Galilee, the entire region of Naphtali, and he deported them to Assyria’ (2 Kgs 15:29) during the period 734–732 BCE. However, an alternative approach fostered during the first half of the twentieth century CE suggested that Israelite sacred literature prior to the Assyrian conquest of Samaria in 722 BCE and the Babylonian conquest of Judah in 586 BCE could have been aware that the Assyrian kings had long followed a fourteenth-century BCE Hittite Empire practice 53.  See, e.g., M. I. Gruber, ‘Genesis 21:12: A New Reading of an Ambiguous Text’, in Genesis (ed. Athalya Brenner; The Feminist Companion to the Bible [Second Series]; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998), pp. 172–79.

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of exiling the inhabitants of conquered territories and settling persons from other regions in the conquered territories (so also the petty Anatolian ruler Azitawwada in the eighth century BCE as related in his royal inscriptions recorded in both Hieroglyphic Hittite and Phoenician; see KAI 26, A, I, line 18–II, line 3). In fact, scholars and others who begin with the a priori assumption that Hebrew Scripture lies, will see more anachronisms; traditional-minded scholars and others will see no need to question a corpus of literature attributed to God and God’s messengers; scholars who want to justify faith by means of history and archaeology will continue to refer to evidence in ancient Near Eastern royal inscriptions that prove that the prophets who speak in the biblical books of Hosea and Amos did not have to experience the exiles of 734 BCE and later in order to believe that God threatened their own contemporaries prior to the year 734 BCE with conquest and deportation.

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Tadmor argues that the background of Hos. 4–14 is the period that begins 743–739 BCE, the period of time when King Tiglath-pileser III of Assyria (745–727 BCE) was engaged in Northern Syria and posed no threat to the King of Israel (Ephraim).1 On the contrary, King Tiglath-pileser was perceived as a possible ally of Israel against Judah in the south. We have seen that this is the situation alluded to repeatedly in Hos. 5:13; 7:11; 8:9. We shall encounter this situation again in Hos. 11:5, 11; 12:2; 14:4. As we shall see, this is also the situation that is reflected in Hos. 10. Thus in both Hos. 5:13 and Hos. 10:4 our prophet refers disparagingly to the desire of King Menahem son of Gadi of Israel (747–737 BCE) to see in the King of Assyria, Tiglath-pileser III (745–727 BCE), a king who will champion the cause of Israel against Judah, the enemy to the south. This same chapter reflects also our prophet’s conviction that he was given a divine mandate to disparage the institution of the monarch just as did the Prophet Samuel centuries before. 10:1a–b gepen bōqēq Yiśrāēl pĕrî yĕšawwe-lô ‘Israel is a ravaged vine, and its fruit will be like it’ LXX renders Hos. 10:1a–b as follows: Ἄμπελος εὐκληματοῦσα Ἰσραήλ ὁ καρπός εὐθηνῶν αὐτῆς, which Glenny renders ‘Israel is a healthy vine; her fruit is abundant’.2 Ancient and modern interpreters disagree as to the literal meaning of the metaphor with which this chapter begins, gepen bōqēq. If the lexeme bōqēq is taken from a root bqq ‘to empty out’, which is attested in promises of and descriptions of destruction in Isa. 19:3; 24:3 (twice); Jer. 19:7; 51:2; and Nah. 2:3 (twice), the opening clause of Hos. 10:1 means ‘Israel is a ravaged vine’ (NJPS). The latter interpretation follows KJV as well as 1.  Tadmor, ‘Historical Background’, pp. 84–88. See also the extensive discussion of Tadmor’s later refinements of his views in the Introduction, pp. 11–12. 2.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 55.

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Rashi. Harper prefers to translate the clause ‘A luxuriant vine is Israel’.3 The latter interpretation is reflected in LXX, the Vulgate, and Theodotion, and can be reconciled with the fact that the verbal root bqq always denotes ‘empty out’ because it is taken to refer to fruit emptying out into the light of day. The latter process apparently was compared to the process by which reptiles and birds emerge from eggs. That process is described in Biblical Hebrew using a different root, namely bq, which is twice attested in the description of a poisonous snake hatching out of an egg in Isa. 59:5. The essential difference between Rashi, KJV, and NJPS, on the one hand, and the ancient Greek translations and Harper, on the other hand, is the rather small matter as to whether the opening clause of Hos. 10:1 describes the situation before or during the current disastrous situation, which will be described by our prophet in the continuation of ch. 10. It appears that the other attestations of the root bqq in Biblical Hebrew support Rashi’s and NJPS’s understanding of Hos. 10:1. However, S. Morag argues that bqq here in Hos. 10:1 has the meaning ‘be luxuriant’, as suggested already by LXX, the Vulgate, and Theodotion.4 Morag sees in this unique usage of the root bqq only here in Hos. 10:1 an instance of what the Arabic grammarians call addad, which designates a word that has two opposite meanings. R. Gordis devoted an entire article, entitled ‘Studies in Hebrew Roots of Contrasted Meanings’, to this subject.5 There, Gordis lists twentyeight distinct examples of the phenomenon, and devotes a paragraph to the argument that bqq in Hos. 10:1 means ‘be luxuriant’.6 Significantly, there is a series of correct terms in Modern English for the phenomenon in question and they are as follows: contronym and auto-antonym (also spelled autantonym), antagonym, enantiodrome, self-antonym, antilogy, and Janus word (named for the Roman god who looks both ways at once). The phenomenon is also called enantionymy and antilogy, and it is also referred to by means of the Arabic loanword addad, which, I just noted, Gordis employed in the two studies referred to above.7 3.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 343. 4.  Morag, ‘On Semantic and Lexical Features’, p. 493. 5.  R. Gordis, ‘Studies in Hebrew Roots of Contrasted Meanings’, JQR ns 27 (1936), pp. 33–58. 6.  Gordis, ‘Studies in Hebrew Roots of Contrasted Meanings’, p. 49. Gordis discusses the phenomenon also in ‘Some Effects of Primitive Thought on Language’, AJSL 55 (1938), pp. 270–84. 7.  For the English terms I am grateful to Judith Esther Cohen of Tel Aviv and to my revered teacher, Professor Shalom Paul, who forwarded me information gathered by his typist, Hani Davis of Jerusalem. For the correct information about the Arabic term I thank Professor Daniel Sivan of the Department of Hebrew Language at

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10:1c–f kĕrob lĕpiryô hirbâ lammizbĕḥōt kĕṭôb lěarṣô hêṭîbû maṣṣēbōt ‘When his fruit was plentiful, he made many altars. When his land was fertile, they multiplied cultic pillars’ In these four versets the verbal roots rby and ṭwb are treated as synonymous. In the parallel clauses c and e the respective roots are employed in the qal as statives, referring to prosperity. Thus the possessive pronominal suffixes in the expressions ‘his fruit’ and ‘his land’ refer to the fruit and land belonging to the metaphoric vine in times past before that vine had been ravaged. The plentiful fruit of that vine before it became ravaged represents the prosperity of the kingdom of Israel, and the bounty represents the prosperity that accrued to the kingdom of Israel from an agricultural surplus. Rashi seems to have concluded on the basis of the parallelism that the hiphil verb hêṭîbû must mean ‘multiplied’. The use of the root ṭwb in the hiphil as a synonym of the root rby in the hiphil to mean ‘multiply, make/ do a great deal’ is reflected also in the twin expressions mēṭîbê ṣaad and mēṭîbê leket in Prov. 30:29 for species of animals who can habitually walk great distances, i.e., ‘multiply step/multiply walking’. The verbal roots rby and ṭwb in the hiphil also both mean ‘multiply/make a lot of’ in Isa. 32:16, where Tyre, personified as a prostitute roaming the city searching for clients, is told hēṭîbî naggēn//harbî šîr ‘make music abundantly//make a lot of music’. Having seen that indeed in the hiphil the two roots rby and ṭwb are attested in the sense ‘multiply, make/do a great deal’ both in Hos. 10:1 and elsewhere, it should not be altogether surprising that our prophet employs these two roots also in the qal as synonyms meaning respectively ‘was plentiful’ and ‘was bountiful’. It should further be noted that in the sequence of verbal roots meaning ‘increased, became plentiful, became bountiful’ our biblical poet follows the Held–Ehelolf rule that the lexeme which is more frequently attested in the given meaning appears in the earlier clause and the lexeme which is less frequently attested in the given meaning appears in the later clause.8 Now the point that is here made by Hosea in Hos. 10:1c–f is that the more successful the (Northern) Kingdom of Israel (i.e., Samaria, or as the kingdom is frequently called in Hos. 4–14, Ephraim), the more did he (Israel) collectively make more and more cultic installations. Note that Ben-Gurion University and Dr. Ali Watad, Head of the Institute for Arabic at Beit Berl College in Kfar Saba, Israel. 8.  For the Held–Ehelolf law, see Held, ‘Studies in Ugaritic Lexicography and Poetic Style’, p. 7.

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the verb hirbâ at the end of Hos. 10:1d is in the singular and refers to the deeds of collective Israel while the verb hêṭîbû just before the end of the final clause of Hos. 10:1 is in the plural and refers to the deeds of the men and women of Israel, in the plural. The assertion here, as in Hos. 8:11, that eighth-century BCE Israel established a multitude of cultic institutions for the presentation of sacrifices for the atonement of sin, transgression, and iniquity, prepares us for the prophetic vision of a better time yet to be when collective Israel will feel ashamed of his previous multiplying of cultic institutions while multiplying his improper behaviour and wreak upon himself the just punishment of having these institutions for the remission of sins destroyed while truly striving to behave in such a way as not to require symbolic means for atonement of sin, transgression, and iniquity. kĕrōb lĕpiryô hirbâ lammizbĕḥōt ‘When his fruit was plentiful, he made many altars’ LXX renders Hos. 10:1c–d as: κατὰ τὸ πλῆθος τῶν καρπῶν αὐτῆς ἐπλήθυνεν θυσιαστήρια, which Glenny renders ‘According to the multitude of her fruits, she has multiplied altars’.9 kĕṭōb lĕarṣô hêṭîbû maṣṣēbōt ‘When his land was fertile they multiplied cultic pillars’ LXX renders Hos. 10:1e–f as follows: κατὰ τὰ ἀγαθὰ τῆς γῆς αὐτοῦ ᾠκοδόμησεν στήλας, which Glenny renders ‘According to the good things of his land, he built steles’.10 With Morag,11 note that unique, peculiar, and recurring in Hos. 4–11 is the comparative clause employing the comparative k followed by an infinitive found here in Hos. 10:1 and also in Hos. 4:7, q.v. For Morag’s comparison of Hos. 11:2, see my commentary there. As we shall see below, Hos. 10:1 constitutes an overture to Hos. 10:2, in which the prophet reports that feelings of remorse on the part of Israel will lead her to engage in self-inflicted punishment. The overture consists of a short description of two phenomena, which the prophet, speaking in the name of God, conceives of as having a causal relationship. The first of these is the alleged moral collapse of Israel expressed metaphorically. The opening clause of Hos. 10 consists of a simple metaphor, ‘Israel is a ravaged vine’, a comparison that is effected by means of a nominal sentence in which Israel appears as the grammatical subject of a nominal 9.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 55. 10.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 55. 11.  Morag, ‘Concerning the Unique Language of Hosea’, p. 490.

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sentence and the object to which Israel is compared, namely a ravaged vine, appears as the predicate nominative in the nominal sentence. An abundance of similarly constructed metaphors, albeit with positive connotations rather than a negative connotation as here in Hos. 9:1a, can be found passim in Song of Songs; q.v. The second clause indicates that at the same time that Israel became morally depraved and therefore a victim to the wiles of international affairs, so also did the land of Israel become less fertile. The verb found in the second clause is the third person singular imperfect piel of the verbal root šwy ‘be like’.12 Once we understood the point made in Hos. 10:1a–b, the overture to Hos. 10, namely, that just as the people Israel, the metaphoric vine, deteriorated morally, so at the very same time and at the same pace did the real fruit of Israel decline in quality, we are well on our way to understanding the entire chapter. The idea that at the same pace at which the metaphoric vine, Israel, deteriorated morally so did the agricultural productivity of the land of Israel decline, is twice reiterated in Hos. 10:1c and Hos. 10:1e. Our prophet chooses to reiterate the point made already in Hos. 10:1b by employing the rhetorical device called anaphora, which consists of the repetition of a single element at the beginning of successive clauses. See the extensive discussion in the commentary above at Hos. 2:21–22. There the element repeated three times is a Hebrew verb form, which contains within it subject, verb, and direct object followed in each case by a prepositional phrase ‘unto me’. In Hos. 10:1c and e the anaphora is much more subtle. It consists of the preposition kĕ ‘when’ repeated at the beginning of clauses c and e and in each case followed immediately by infinitives (rōb and ṭōb), both of which rhyme with each other and both of which are followed in turn by prepositional phrases, each of which ends with the third person masculine singular possessive pronominal suffix ô. In addition, each of the longer clauses, Hos. 10:1d and Hos. 10:1f, ends with the plural suffix ōt. The repetition of the latter sound at the end of those two clauses thus creates a rhyme, which further adds a sense of unity to the final four elements of Hos. 10:1. The basic meaning of the first of the two rhyming infinitives, rōb, means ‘to be plentiful’. The second of the two rhyming infinitives, ṭōb, can mean ‘to be more/plenty’ as also in Hos. 2:9, ‘It was better for me then than now’; so DCH (3:350); and so does NJPS understand the infinitive here in Hos. 10:1d, where it renders, ‘When his 12.  See Joseph Qara’s commentary ad loc in Mikraot Gedolot ‘Hakketer’: The Twelve Minor Prophets (ed. Menachem Cohen; Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2012). See also, DCH 8:300, for both explanation and consideration of alternative interpretations.

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land was bountiful’. Precisely because NJPS is correct in understanding the infinitive ṭōb here to mean ‘was plentiful’, the prophetic author of Hos. 10:1e–f can employ the word-play ṭōb—hêtîbû ‘there was plenty—they made plenty’ in synonymous parallelism with the word play rōb—hirbâ ‘there was plenty—he made plenty’. Already Joseph Qara (c. 1065–1135 CE) in his commentary on Hos. 10:1 notes that the same meaning of the verbal root ṭwb, namely, ‘be plenty’, is reflected also in 1 Sam. 20:13: ‘…if my father multiplies [yêṭîb] evil against you…’.13 Gordis cites also Jon. 4:9: ‘Then God asked Jonah, “Are you exceedingly (hêṭēb) sad because of the juniper bush?” And he replied, “I am exceedingly (hêṭēb) sad to [the point of wanting to] die” ’; and Mic. 1:2, where Gordis construes the clause kî ḥālâ lĕṭōb as meaning either ‘he was exceedingly sick’ or ‘he trembled greatly’. In addition, Gordis cites the ubiquitous Babylonian Jewish Aramaic cognate ṭûbā ‘exceedingly, very much’. Interestingly enough, precisely because the Greek prepositions are longer than the corresponding Hebrew expressions, which often consist of a single consonant (as also for the most part in Ugaritic), the anaphora and the other rhetorical features of Hos. 10:1 are much more obvious in LXX than in MT. See above for LXX of our verse followed by Glenny’s translation of each of the successive clauses. With reference to the pair of nouns in synonymous parallelism, mzbḥt//mṣbt ‘altars//cult pillars’, we need to recall the following facts, to which I called attention above, in my commentary on Hos. 3:4 where God threatens to take away from Israel for a limited time a number of standard and accepted features of daily life, one of them being maṣṣēbâ ‘cult pillar’, there a collective noun. Apart from the collective noun phrase maṣṣebet habbaal ‘the cultic installation for Baal’ attested only twice, specifically in 2 Kgs 3:2 and 10:17, where Jeshoshaphat and Jehu, respectively, are credited with dismantling them, the singular noun maṣṣēbâ with reference to a cultic installation is attested altogether nine times in the entire Hebrew Bible (Gen. 28:18, 22; 31:13; 35:14; Exod. 24:4; Lev. 26:1; Deut. 16:22; Isa. 19:19; Hos. 3:4). In one additional case, Gen. 31:45, the term maṣṣēbâ refers to the pillar Jacob sets up as a witness to the pact between him and Laban, and in another additional case, Gen. 35:20, the noun maṣṣēbâ refers to the gravestone, which marks the grave of Rachel. Aside from Deut. 16:22, there is no hint in the Hebrew Bible that maṣṣēbâ in the singular is ever associated with a form of worship forbidden to Israelites. On the other hand, the plural form 13.  For the observation that the verbal root ṭwb means ‘become many, increase’ in Hos. 10:1 and elsewhere in Biblical Hebrew, see also R. Gordis, ‘A Note on ṭōb’, JTS 35 (1934), pp. 186–88.

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maṣṣēbōt ‘cult pillars’, which is attested only four times in all of Hebrew Scripture (2 Kgs 10:26; 17:10; Jer. 43:13; Hos. 10:6), refers three times to an instrument of forbidden worship (in 2 Kgs 10:26 to the worship of Baal, which was eliminated by King Jehu) and once to an instrument of worship found in the Northern Kingdom in the time of the eighth-century prophet, whose writings are found in Hos. 4–14. In Hos. 10:2 again we find the two plural nouns mzbḥt//mṣbt, but this second and last time with third person masculine (or common) plural pronominal suffixes. Here, however, both of the terms refer to legitimate appurtenances of worship of God in the Northern Kingdom prior to the demise of that kingdom in 722 BCE. Unfortunately, many of the standard critical commentaries on the book of Hosea take it for granted that mṣbt in Hos. 10:1–2, like maṣṣēbâ in Deut. 16:22, refers to an installation for the explicit purpose of engaging in worship which is forbidden to Israelites. Delitzsch renders maṣṣēbōt ‘Baal’s pillars’, drawing an incorrect inference from 2 Kgs 3:2 and 10:27.14 Cheyne writes as follows: ‘Isaiah himself, too, speaks of a “pillar”, or sacred stone, as a sign together with an altar, of the worship of Jehovah in Egypt (Isa. 19:19). If then pillars, sacred to Jehovah, were tolerated in Judah in Isaiah’s time, much more must we suppose that they were tolerated in Israel. But why does Hosea refer to them as signs of infidelity? Because the worship of Jehovah at the high places was purely formal, and produced no moral effect upon the character….’15 In fact, as we shall see, there is nothing in Hos. 10 to indicate that the prophet, or the God in whose name he spoke, had any objection to either the altars or the pillars referred to in Hos. 10:1–2. It appears, therefore, that Hos. 1:1–2 employs the two terms mzbḥt//mṣbt as a–b words, which is to say, synonymous expressions in parallel lines in a poem. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that in a limited number of contexts that includes Hos. 3:4 and 10:1–2, the term maṣṣēbōt functions as a rare synonym of the term mizbĕḥōt ‘altars’. One yearns for archaeological testimony to a goblet inscribed with the Ugaritic and Hebrew word qbt. Such testimony would make it possible to distinguish between the latter kind of goblet and the well-known kōs ‘drinking cup’, which can be identified because of the appearance of one ancient drinking cup bearing the inscription kōs. Likewise, it would be more than useful both to satisfy normal human curiosity and to shed light on Hos. 3:4 and 10:1–2 to discover an altar bearing an inscription designating it as maṣṣēbâ rather than mizbēăḥ, the much more frequently attested Biblical Hebrew word for ‘altar’. We 14.  Delitzsch, Hosea, p. 128. 15.  Cheyne, Hosea, p. 101.

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need not wait for the hoped-for archaeological find to dispose of the false rumour that maṣṣēbâ is more likely than mizbēăḥ to be a location for worship forbidden to Israelites and/or disparaged by the prophets of Israel and Judah.16 Interestingly, in the two parallel direct objects at the end of the respective parallel clauses at Hos. 10:1d and 10:1f, the second of the two direct objects, like most indefinite direct objects in Biblical Hebrew, has no marker for the accusative. The first of the two direct objects is introduced by the particle l, which grammarians generally construe as a preposition whose basic meaning is ‘to’. If so, Hos. 10:1d might constitute one of the instances in pre-exilic Hebrew where the preposition l introduces a direct object, as frequently in Biblical Aramaic, as, for example, in Daniel and in Late Biblical Hebrew. Additional examples of the particle l introducing direct objects in texts that are likely not to stem from the Achaemenid period and later include, aside from Hos. 10:1d, the following: Exod. 32:13; Lev. 19:18, 34; Deut. 9:27; Ps. 69:6.17 10:2 ḥālaq libbām attâ yeĕšāmû ‘Now that their (collective) boughs are broken up, now they (the people of Israel) feel guilty’ For the verb šm meaning ‘feel guilty’, see the commentary at Hos. 5:15, and see also below. ḥālaq libbām NJPS renders, ‘Now that his boughs are broken up’. Contrast KJV: ‘Their heart is divided’. It has long been assumed (with KJV) that the expression found here refers to the human heart as the seat of thoughts and emotions. One might compare Ps. 12:3, where we read: šāwĕ yĕdabbĕrû îš et-rēēhû śĕpat ḥălāqōt bēlēb wālēb yĕdabbērû ‘One person speaks lies to another, divided speech; They speak with two hearts’. 16.  For attempts to correlate various objects from the archaeological record of the ancient Near East with the various kinds of objects designated by the term maṣṣēbâ in Biblical Hebrew, see C. F. Graesser, ‘Standing Stones in Ancient Palestine’, Biblical Archaeologist 35, no. 2 (1972), pp. 33–63; E. Stockton, ‘Sacred Pillars in the Bible’, Australian Bible Review 20 (1972), pp. 16–32. 17.  See Joüon and Muraoka, Grammar, #125k; cf. GKC, # 117n.

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Rashi, on the other hand, adopts the equally plausible interpretation of Hos. 10:2, ‘Their heart is divided from me’. Ginsberg, on the other hand, regards Hos. 10:2 as a continuation of the metaphor comparing eighth-century BCE Israel to a ravaged vine.18 Therefore, he points out that there is a homonym of lēb ‘heart’, namely, the word lēb, which designates ‘branches (of a tree, vine, or shrub)’ and which is attested in 2 Sam. 18:14–15, where we read, ‘…he [Joab] took three darts and drove them into Absalom’s chest [Heb. lēb]. He [Absalom] was still alive among the branches of the oak tree [Heb. lēb haēlâ] when ten of Joab’s young arm-bearers surrounded Absalom and beat Absalom until they had killed him.’ It is not unlikely that the latter biblical text deliberately juxtaposes the two homonymous usages of the word lēb in a deliberate play on words. If, indeed, the term lēb can mean ‘branches (of a tree, vine, or shrub)’, then ḥālaq libbām ‘their branches are divided from them (the vine)’, means that the branches have been cut off of the vine. This is the very devastation referred to in Hos. 10:1. Consequently, NJPS renders Hos. 10:2, ‘Now that his boughs are broken up’. The continuation of v. 2 informs us that the effect of devastation was to make Israel repentant. Either this is a prediction couched in the perfect of prophetic certitude or, like Hos. 6:1–3, q.v., the description of Israel’s attempt to repent. In Hos. 5:15, q.v., the prophet, speaking in the name of God, clearly indicates that the purpose of chastisements is to make the individual and the nation feel guilty so that the individual and the nation change their behaviour for the better. attâ yeĕšāmû hû yaărōp mizbĕḥōtām yĕšōdēd maṣṣēbōtām ‘Now they (the men and women of Israel) feel guilty. He (collective Israel) tears apart their (the people’s) altars. He destroys their cultic pillars’ Here our prophet alludes to the idea we found in Hos. 8:11, q.v., that eighth-century BCE Israel had many altars for the worship of God and that the use of these many altars did not make Israel a virtuous people. On the contrary, we are told in Hos. 8:11, ‘Ephraim multiplied altars in order to sin’. In fact, Hos. 8:11 is an example of prophetic sarcasm exemplified also by the expression ‘to profane my holy name’ in Amos 2:7 and the expression ‘to anger me’ in Jer. 11:17; 32:32; 44:3; Ezek. 16:26; etc.

18.  Ginsberg, ‘Unpublished Notes on Hosea’.

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NJPS’s rendering, ‘he feels his guilt’, reflects Milgrom’s observation that the stative use of the verbal root šm in the qal often means ‘feel guilty’ rather than simply ‘be guilty’.19 (See the discussion above, at Hos. 5:15.) Were one to go so far as to construe the references in Hos. 8:11 and 10:2 to multiple altars as either a reflection of or adumbration of the centralization of worship idea found especially in Deut. 12, then the destruction of Israelite altars by the hands of the Israelites themselves referred to in Hos. 10:2 could be construed as a prediction of Israel’s adoption of the centralization of worship doctrine or a description of the consequences of Israel’s adopting that doctrine. However, there is a much more plausible explanation of what lies behind the description of Israel’s destroying his own altars and pillars. This explanation is that the destruction of places of worship was conceived in a number of probably non-Deuteronomic texts in Leviticus, Micah, and Hosea as a punishment to be meted out to a people that has so violated the rules of morality that it does not deserve to have available to it the means of seeking atonement for the occasional lapse in behaviour by means of sacrifice. See, for example, Lev. 26:31: ‘I will lay your cities in ruin and destroy your temples, and I will not savour the pleasing odour [of your sacrifices]’; Mic. 3:12: ‘Zion shall be ploughed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the temple mountain a shrine in the woods’; and see especially Hos. 12:12, discussed below in the commentary. Indeed, in Israelite thought, both pre-prophetic and prophetic, a classic and canonical punishment of a people who needs sacrificial worship as a means of atonement of its sins against a God, who has no material or psychological benefit from those sacrifices, is to deny the people access to that means of atonement.20 Hosea, here in Hos. 10, goes one step further than all of the aforementioned texts, which contemplate God’s destroying sanctuaries and altars and holy cities through the agency of foreign nations or by other unspecified means. Our prophet suggests that a truly repentant Israel, seeing itself undeserving of the atonement that might be effected for venial sins by sacrificial worship, would punish itself by ripping down its own altars. We might compare the sight of a child overcome by guilt for offenses real or imagined against her/his parents destroying her/his own toys rather than await the deserved but delayed punishment by parents or other adult authority figures for the real or imagined offenses.21 19.  Milgrom, Cult and Conscience. 20.  See above at Hos. 3, and see also Kaufmann, HIR, 1–3:532–38. 21.  For the literature on this phenomenon, see, inter alia, L. Davies, ‘Self-Injury in Children’, on the Kelly Bear website [www.kellybear.com] 4/04; M. I. Myhre,

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10:3 kî attâ yōmĕrû ên melek lānû kî lō yārēnû et-Yhwh wĕhammelek mah-yaăśeh-lānû ‘For now (when they will have become repentant) they will say, “We have no king for we did not obey Yhwh. So what can a king do for us?” ’ We should assume that here in Hos, 10:3 Heb. yr Yhwh/ĕlōhîm, traditionally translated ‘fear Yhwh/God’, refers as it does in Job 1–2 and Job 28:28 to devotion to God expressed by means of obedience to the same rules of moral behaviour, obedience to which is called in Hos. 4:1 daat ĕlōhîm ‘knowledge of God’, and which is there said to be obedience to the rules that govern interpersonal relations in the second half of the Decalogue. See above in the commentary at Hos. 4:1. If so, then just as in Hos. 10:2 our prophet looks forward to a better time when Israel will feel guilty of her past violations of those ethical precepts and will destroy her own altars as punishment for her previous misbehaviour, so here in Hos. 10:3 our prophet imagines a kingless Israel as punishment for Israel’s having obeyed kings when she should have obeyed God. For the idea that Israel’s relying upon a king is tantamount to rejection of and disobedience to God, see 1 Sam. 8, where the Prophet Samuel says exactly that and where God says to Samuel (1 Sam. 8:7), ‘Not you have they rejected, but they have rejected having me rule over them’. Hosea 10:2–3 juxtaposes eliminating altars and pillars as appurtenances of worship with the abolition of the monarchy as parts of a process of return to obedience to God’s ethical precepts. Similarly Hos. 3:4–5, which may well have influenced our prophet (most scholars would still see a single human author behind both Hos. 3 and Hos. 4–14). Both passages see as prerequisites for repentance a cooling-off period during which there will be neither the aforementioned appurtenances of worship nor a king. In Hos. 3:4–5 we read, ‘Because for a long time the people of Israel will cease and desist without a king and without a ruler [I take the noun śar as a synonym for melek “king” as it certainly is in Hos. 8:4 and Hos. 8:8–10] and without sacrifice and without a pillar and without ephod and teraphim. Afterward the people of Israel will again seek Yhwh and David their king, and they will thrill over Yhwh and his bounty….’

Ending Self-Punishment (a self-published e-book, 2010); J. E. Grusec and L. Kuczynski, ‘Teaching Children to Punish Themselves and Effects on Subsequent Compliance’, Child Development 48 (1977), pp. 1296–300.

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Now if Hos. 10:2–3, like Hos. 3:4–5, is a prophetic vision of a better time to come when Israel will repent and no longer be a ravaged vine, Hos. 10:4 takes us back to the reality of the reign of Menahem son of Gadi when Israel sought to protect itself from the threat of Judah (see above, Hos. 5:8–15) by contemplating alliances with Egypt and with Assyria. 10:4 dibbĕrû dĕbārîm ālōt šāwĕ kārōt bĕrît ûpāraḥ kārōš mišpāṭ al talmê śādāy ‘They vow vows (which are) vain oaths, concluding treaties (while at the very same time) (miscarriage of) justice produces poison weeds all over the ploughed fields’ In this passage, as in Hos. 5:13 and 7:11–13, our prophet attacks the attempt of the ruler of the Kingdom of Israel (probably Menahem son of Gadi) to conclude a treaty with either Egypt or Assyria to defend Israel from the very real threat posed by Judah’s successful attempt to annex portions of the Northern Kingdom (see especially Hos. 5:9–10). The Hebrew expression dibbēr dābār refers to the vowing of vows or swearing of oaths in the context of treaty-making also in Isa. 8:10, where the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz says to King Rezin of Aram and King Pekakiah son of Remaliahu, who were conspiring to conquer Judah: ‘Hatch a plot, and it shall be foiled; vow a vow (dabběrû dābār) [to conclude a treaty of alliance against Judah], and it will not succeed, for God is with us’. Likewise, in Jer. 29:23 where, as in the Decalogue, adultery and swearing false oaths in the name of God are juxtaposed, we read as follows: ‘because they committed obscenity by committing adultery with other men’s wives, and they swore by my name false oaths (wayyědabběrû dābār bišěmî šeqer), which I commanded them not to do while I am the one who knows and bears witness’. Cf. also Ezek. 12:25, ‘For I, Yhwh, will promise what I shall promise…’. In Ps. 92:13 it is said that ‘a virtuous person blooms like a date-palm, and thrives like a cedar in Lebanon’. Here in Hos. 10:4 our prophet says that the miscarriage of justice, or, to be more precise, a court system that pretends to be an instrument of justice but does not properly function, produces not virtue that grows like palm trees and cedars but poisonous plants, a metaphor for injustice that spoils the entire landscape. The term rōš, here denoting poisonous vegetation, is attested in the meaning ‘[snakes’] venom’ in Deut. 32:33, ‘Their wine is the venom of asps, the pitiless poison (rōš) of vipers’. Similarly, in Job 20:16 we read, ‘He sucks the poison (rōš) of vipers, the tongue of the asp kills him’. For rōš

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denoting poisonous vegetation, see also Deut. 29:17 where the term is employed as a metaphor for an Israelite who is inclined to disobey God and worship other gods, ‘…lest there be among you a family from which blooms poison weed and wormwood’. Likewise in Lam. 3:19 the term is attested in the sense of poisonous weed employed as a metaphor for misery, unhappiness: ‘To recall my distress and my misery was wormwood and a poisonous weed’. See also Deut. 32:32: ‘Indeed, their vine is a Sodomite vine, and from the vineyards of Gomorrah. Their grapes (ănbēmô) are poisonous grapes (innĕbê rōš), their grape clusters are poison.’ 10:4 al talmê śādāy The expression ‘over the ploughed fields’, literally ‘over the furrows which are ploughed in preparation for planting grain’, appears only twice in the entire Hebrew Bible, both times in the book of Hosea, here in Hos. 10:4 and again in Hos. 12:12. 10:5 lĕeglōt Bêt Āwen yāgûrû šĕkan Šōmĕrōn kî-ābal ālāyw ammô ûkĕmārāyw ālāyw yāgîlû al-kĕbōdô kî-gālâ mimmennû ‘For the calves of Beth-aven the inhabitants of Samaria fear. Indeed, its people and its priests mourn over it (Beth-aven) for its glory, that (the calf) will have departed from it’ Here in Hos. 10:5, as also in Hos. 8:5–6 and 13:2, the calves refer to the gold and silver calves, which served as appurtenances in the worship of the God of Israel at various times at Dan, Bethel, and Samaria (see also 1 Kgs 12:28, 32 and my discussion at Hos. 8:5–6 and at Hos. 13:2). Elsewhere in the book of Hosea these appurtenances of divine worship are called ăṣābîm ‘images’. See Hos. 4:17; 8:4; 13:2; 14:9. These same calves may be referred to by the term ăṣābîm ‘images’, as in Mic. 1:7. (See the discussion in the commentary above at Hos. 8:4 and at the other passages mentioned there.) The place name Beth-aven occurs three times in the book of Hosea, at Hos. 4:15; 5:8; and 10:5 where, following Rashi, it is commonly accepted that this name which can be interpreted to mean ‘House/Place/ Temple of Wrong-doing’ is a dysphemistic epithet for Bethel, toward which our prophet displayed antipathy (see below at Hos. 10:15) because of both the reverencing of the golden calves and the devotion to the

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angel of Bethel (Hos. 12:5; cf. Jer. 48:13; and see my commentary at Hos. 12). See above in my commentary at Hos. 4:15 and 5:8. Gomes argues, ‘Hosea saw the calf as the epitome of idolatrous [I would prefer “apostate” for reasons argued above and below] Israel and the shrine that housed it as the “house of iniquity” ’.22 Gomes goes further in suggesting that the idea that the veneration of the calf at Bethel and elsewhere was Israel’s primary sin was inherited by the Deuteronomists, who attributed this sin to Jeroboam I and to all of his successors as kings of the Northern Kingdom as well. The verb yāgûrû ‘they fear’ from the verbal root gwr is to be distinguished from the verbal root yr because while both roots may refer to fright which leads to either resistance or flight, the root yr refers also to awe, which leads to reverence, devotion, and obedience. For the latter verb see the discussion at Hos. 10:3. The irony, which our prophet expresses by employing Yhwh as the grammatical object of the verb yr in Hos. 10:3, but calves as the object of the verb gwr in Hos. 10:5, is that while our prophet almost takes for granted ‘fear of Yhwh’ as awe leading to devotion and obedience, he equally takes for granted that the root gwr cannot possibly refer to awe leading to devotion and obedience. Indeed, the God of Israel can be the direct object also of the verb gwr ‘to fear’ in three instances: Isa. 54:15; Pss. 22:24; 33:8. The only reasonable fear that one may have with respect to the calves is what may befall them when Bethel is destroyed in war waged by a foreign enemy as the consequence of the moral turpitude of the people of Israel and the mismanagement of their domestic and foreign affairs by a series of kings culminating in the reign of Menahem son of Gadi. The latter king was, apparently, the Israelite monarch when our prophet spoke the speech found in Hos. 10. (See the discussion in the Introduction to this commentary, pp. 9–12) For the idea that people worry about idols and other sacred objects, which cannot worry about the persons who reverence them, see Isa. 46:1–3: ‘Bel is bowed, Nebo is cowering. Their images [ăṣābêhem] are a burden for beasts and cattle. [These holy objects], which you would carry, are now piled as a burden on tired [animals]. They cowered.’ To this description, which is very close to what Hosea here in Hos. 10:5 anticipates as the ultimate fate of the calves of Beth-aven, we may contrast the description of God’s boundless care for his people described in Isa. 46:4: ‘Listen to me, House of Jacob and the entire remnant of the House of Israel who have been carried since [emerging from] the womb; supported since [leaving] the uterus’. 22.  Gomes, The Sanctuary of Bethel, p. 166.

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ammô ûkěmārāyw ‘Its people and its priests’ The Hebrew term denoting ‘its priests’ is kĕmārāyw, which represents the plural with singular pronominal suffix of the noun kōmer ‘priest, clergyman’, which is attested in Hebrew Scripture only in the plural. The three occurrences of the noun in the Hebrew Bible include this reference to clergy who were associated with the reverencing of silver or golden calves at Beth-aven here in Hos. 10:5, a reference to priests of idolatrous cults being removed from the temple at Jerusalem during King Josiah’s reform according to 2 Kgs 23:5 and the divine promise to remove from Jerusalem the priests associated with idolatrous worship in Zeph. 1:2. There such clergy are called both kĕmārîm and kōhănîm. Apparently, the noun kmr to designate a clergyman or priest was a totally neutral term in Old Aramaic (see KAI, vol. 2 [glossary], p. 35 and textual references in KAR, 1:225, line 1; 226, line 1; 228 A, line 23; 228 B, line 2; 239, line 3; 246, line 1); and probably also in the original historical context of Hos. 10:5 and possibly so even in the original historical context of 2 Kgs 23:5 and Zeph. 1:2. Later, in both Jewish and Christian Aramaic, the noun in question came to be employed specifically to designate clergy of other religions which the Jews and the Christians respectively did not regard as legitimate forms of the worship of the One God of Israel. More recently, when the prurient imagination of some twentieth-century biblical scholars ran wild, it was suggested and then repeated ad nauseam that the kmr was a clergyperson who engaged in sacred prostitution, fertility cults, and the like.23 Precisely because in both Jewish and Christian usage the term kōmer came to mean ‘clergyman of an idolatrous religion’, in twentiethand twenty-first-century CE Hebrew in the field of interfaith relations it is not acceptable to refer to clergypersons of non-Judaic religions by the term kōmer, pl. kĕmarîm; instead the proper term is kōhănê dat ‘ministers of religion’. Here, in Hos. 10:5, as in Hos. 5:13; 7:11; 8:9; 10:6, the prophet, speaking in the name of God, disparages Israel’s attempt to forge alliances with Assyria and with Egypt. He contends that the flirting with Assyria will only result in the ultimate conquest of Israel by Assyria. This, in turn, will lead to the exile of the Israelites for the crime of having relied upon foreign alliances. For Isaiah son of Amos’s similar disparagement of foreign alliances at a later date see Isa. 8.24

23.  See the discussion in Gruber, ‘The qadesh in the Book of Kings’, p. 171; see also the discussion at Hos. 4:14 above. 24.  Cf. Tadmor, ‘Historical Background’, p. 85.

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In Hos. 10:5d–e, 12:12, Amos 5:5, Mic. 1:10–16; and Zeph. 2:4 (see below at Hos. 12:12) alliteration is employed to highlight the seriousness of the exile being a punishment that derives almost naturally or automatically from the misbehaviour of the people inhabiting the particular place. In Amos 5:5, the assonance of Gilgal galoh yigleh, meaning ‘Gilgal shall surely go into exile’, is created by making the place name the subject of the verb ‘go into exile’. Likewise, in Hos. 12:12 the assonance Gilgal… kĕgallîm ‘Gilgal shall be like heaps of stones’ is created from the proper name subject Gilgal and the adverbial phrase kĕgallîm. Hosea 10:5 offers us a play on words, which seems to be infinitely more creative. This rather unusual play on words, like the one found in Amos 5:5, involves the unfortunately all too common expression in Hebrew Scripture and in the life of the people of Israel over many generations, namely, the prophetic perfect verb (with future meaning) gālâ ‘he will depart/go into exile’. However, unlike Amos 5:5 and Hos. 12:12, it does not involve the use of a proper name of a city which will be exiled but rather a rare verb, namely gîl, which can mean, depending on the context, both ‘mourn’ and ‘rejoice’. In Hos. 9:1, the parallelism, reflected especially in the LXX and Vulgate renderings, assumes a Hebrew original that read al tiśmaḥ…al gîl, ‘do not rejoice…do not exult’, which is reminiscent of the ironic statement attributed to suicidal people in Job 3:22, ‘who rejoice [haśśĕmēḥîm] to exultation/at the grave [ĕlê gîl]//they rejoice [yāśîśû] when they find a grave’. It has frequently been suggested that the lexeme gîl in the latter verse is actually a form of the Arabic term for grave, jal, and that therefore the entire verse should be understood as follows: ‘They rejoice at a sepulchre//they exult when they find a grave’. It is but one step further to suggest that the poetic author of Hos. 10:5 understood that Heb. gîl, whether a noun or a verb, can refer to mourning as well as joy and that in Hos. 10:5 it has the, to the modern reader (as in Job 3:22), ironic sense of ‘rejoice’. Ehrlich arrives at almost the same sense, suggesting that a primary meaning of the verbal root gyl reflected both in Hos. 10:5 and in Ps. 2:11 is ‘tremble’.25 It may well be that the apparent use here in Hos. 10:5 and in Job 3:22 of a single root in opposite meanings is the same phenomenon, which Gordis discusses in ‘Studies in Hebrew Roots of Contrasted Meanings’, cited above with respect to the verbal root bqq in Hos. 10:1. (See also below.) With respect to the subject at hand, joy/ mourning, one may compare the Syriac version of Qoh. 3:4b, which employs distinct forms of the identical root rqd for both mourning and

25.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, p. 381.

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dancing. H. L. Ginsberg, holding that the Hebrew book of Ecclesiastes is a flawed translation of an Aramaic original, argues that the same play on words was found in the Aramaic original at Qoh. 3:4b.26 Interestingly, Ginsberg senses that what is called for here in Hos. 10:5 is a verb meaning ‘mourn’ rather than a verb meaning ‘rejoice’. He simply emends MT’s ygylw to read yylylw ‘they will wail/mourn’.27 If, however, we follow Rashi and the majority of modern interpreters in treating ygylw as a form of a verb which commonly means ‘rejoice’, then this verb refers not to the attitude of priests and people at the time when the prophecy of doom will have been fulfilled but to the previous state of mind before disaster will have struck. The fact that the editors of NJPS cannot in all good conscience accept this understanding of the text, which sounds too much like scratching the left ear with the right hand, obliges them to translate ‘whose joy it once was’. This rendering assumes the presence within Hos. 10:5 of a nominal sentence in place of the verbal clause ālāyw yāgîlû, and it requires them to add a marginal note, ‘Meaning of Heb. uncertain’. The best solution is to treat the verb yagîlû in Hos. 10:5 as a verb meaning ‘mourn’. In fact, this interpretation was already offered by the Medieval Karaite biblical exegetes Jephet Ben Ali and Moses Alkumisi and also Ibn Ezra in his second commentary on Hosea and by Kimchi in his Book of Hebrew Roots, s.v. gwl.28 The appearance of two homonymous roots in Biblical Hebrew, gyl I meaning ‘rejoice’ and gyl II meaning ‘mourn’, may be totally fortuitous or coincidental, as is possibly the appearance of two nouns, the ubiquitous ḥsd I denoting ‘love, loyalty, kindness’ (e.g., Gen. 24:12; 39:21; Judg. 1:24; etc.) and the rare ḥsd II denoting ‘abomination, reproach’ (Lev. 20:17; Prov. 14:34; and perhaps Job 6:14). On the other hand, the instance at hand of gyl in the two distinct meanings of ‘rejoice’ and ‘mourn’ may be a case of what is called in Modern English contronym and auto-antonym. Concerning the latter and other terms, see above in my commentary concerning the verbal root bqq in Hos. 10:1.

26.  H. L. Ginsberg, Koheleth (Tel Aviv/Jerusalem: M. Newman, 1061), p. 73 (in Hebrew). 27.  Ginsberg, ‘Unpublished Notes on Hosea’, p. 24. In fact, this emendation is taken from Wellhausen, Kleinen Propheten, p. 125. 28.  See the extensive discussion in Meira Polliack and Eliezer Schlossberg, Yefet Ben ‘Eli’s Commentary on Hosea: Annotated Edition, Hebrew Translation and Introduction (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2009), p. 410 n. 31.

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10:6 mlk yrb ‘a king who might champion their cause’ See the extensive discussion of this expression and its possible derivation from the Akkadian epithet of King Tiglath-pileser III, šarrum rabum ‘the great king’ in the commentary at Hos. 5:13, above. Tadmor,29 partially under the inspiration of Kaufmann (HIR, 6:107–109), argues most convincingly that our prophet spoke these words considerably before the years 734–732 BCE when Aram was destroyed by Assyria and the Israelites were exiled by Assyria from the Galilee and Transjordan. At the time when our prophet composed Hosea, ch. 10, both Assyria and Egypt were viewed by King Menahem of Israel as suitable allies against Judah. Just as Isaiah son of Amoz would later oppose Judah’s forming an alliance with King Rezin of Aram and King Pekah son of Remaliahu of Israel against Assyria (Isa. 7–8), so here in Hos. 10 our prophet opposes defensive alliances with foreign powers. The two prophets shared the view that the only proper ally for a king of Israel is God. Thus, as Tadmor argues, the role of Assyria according to Hos. 10 is not to punish Israel for moral turpitude but inevitably to disappoint Israel, who should rely only upon God.30 Hence our prophet declares: gam-ōtô lĕAššûr yûbāl minḥâ lĕmelek yārēb bošnâ Eprayim yiqqaḥ wĕyēbôš Yiśrāēl mēăṣātô ‘That (the calf) also will be brought to Assyria as tribute to a king who (so they thought) might champion their cause. Ephraim will receive chagrin and Israel will be embarrassed as a result of his (the Assyrian king’s) counsel’ Note the parallel pair Ephraim//Israel, which is a pair of names that our prophet applies to the Northern Kingdom, commonly known as the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Samaria and in the Assyrian inscriptions as bīt ḫumri ‘domain/dynasty of Omri, referring to the powerful father of Ahab and builder of the capital city of Samaria, who ruled Israel from 882 to 871 BCE. As noted above in my Introduction (s.v., ‘Judahite Glosses’, p. 28 n. 64), the pair ‘Ephraim//Israel’ appears in synonymous parallelism in the following verses in the book of Hosea: Hos. 5:3; 6:10; 10:6; 11:8; 12:1; only in that last case do we find ‘House of Israel’ rather than ‘Israel’. Moreover, as I have pointed out, in the following verses the original pair ‘Ephraim//Israel’ has been altered to ‘Ephraim//Judah’ in the standard Hebrew text: Hos. 5:12, 13, 14 [here

29.  Tadmor, ‘Historical Background’, p. 85. 30.  Tadmor, ‘Historical Background’, pp. 85–87.

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alone it is House of Judah]; 6:4; 10:11. (See also my discussion in the commentary at Hos. 5:12.) In addition, the Northern Kingdom is referred to simply as Ephraim without the synonymous Israel in a parallel clause in the following texts in the book of Hosea: Hos. 4:17; 5:11; 7:1, 8, 11; 8:9, 11; 9:3, 8, 11, 13; 10:11; 11:3, 9; 12:2, 9, 15; 13:1, 12; 14:8. As Tadmor argues, the Northern Kingdom is referred to in Hos. 4–14 as Ephraim because the territory of the kingdom had been reduced primarily to the hill country of Ephraim by the time of the rule of Menahem son of Gadi (747–737 BCE), to whose reign Tadmor assigns the composition of Hos. 4–14. ‘Tribute to a king who might champion their cause’ This refers to tribute to King Tiglath-pileser III of Assyria (745–727 BCE). Concerning the epithet melek yārēb applied to King Tiglath-pileser III, see above at Hos. 5:13. bošnâ Eprayim yiqqaḥ wĕyēbôš Yiśrāēl mēăṣātô ‘Ephraim will receive chagrin//and Israel will be embarrassed as a result of his (the Assyrian king’s) counsel’ Here we have two verbal clauses, the first of which employs as direct object an otherwise unattested noun bōšnâ denoting ‘embarrassment, chagrin’, while the second employs a stative verb meaning ‘be embarrassed’. Rashi treats the issue rather matter-of-factly, by quoting the three words of the first clause as a lemma and immediately paraphrasing with substitution of the commonly attested noun bōšet. Many moderns, including Ehrlich,31 suggest emending the noun form to the synonymous and frequently attested bošet (e.g., Isa. 42:17; 54:4; Job 8:22; etc.).32 The stylistic phenomenon of two verbal clauses, the first of which employs a noun meaning ‘embarrassment’ in synonymous parallelism with a verb meaning ‘be embarrassed’ in the second clause, is an example of the phenomenon described by D. Grossberg.33

31.  Ehrlich, Mikra ke-Pheschuto, vol. 3, pp. 381–82. 32.  J. Barth, Die Nominalbildung in den semitischen Sprachen (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1894), #210c, asserts that the form bōšnâ is much too unusual in Biblical Hebrew to make possible an analysis of it. On the other hand, F. E. König, Lehrgebäude der hebräischen Sprache (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1881–97), pt. 2/1, p. 185, treats bōšnâ as a feminine segholate noun. 33.  Grossberg, ‘Noun/Verb Parallelism’, pp. 481–88.

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10:7 nidmeh Šōmrōn malkāh kĕqeṣep al-pĕnê-māyim ‘As for Samaria, her king is finished like foam on the surface of water’ NJPS renders malkāh ‘monarchy’, assuming that here the noun melek means ‘monarchy’ rather than ‘king’. NJPS’s interpretation follows LXX, which reads βασιλέα. However, LXX in Hos. 10:15 below reads βασιλεὺς. The Peshitta, on the other hand, reflects the interpretation ‘her king’ in both verses. Moreover, without necessarily invoking LXX, NJPS probably reflects the argument of H. L. Ginsberg,34 that in Hos. 10:7, as frequently in Arabic, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, and in the Hebrew of the book of Daniel [i.e., Dan. 8:20, 21 as emended by Ginsberg] and below in Hos. 10:15, the noun melek means ‘monarchy’ rather than ‘king’. Ginsberg revocalizes mlkh as molkāh ‘her monarchy’.35 NJPS’s interpretation is congruent with our prophet’s happy anticipation of the demise of the monarchy in Hos. 10:3. Rashi, KJV, and Harper, among others, also understand ‘her king’. For the verbal root dmy meaning ‘come to an end, die’ and as a transitive verb meaning ‘kill, put to death’ in Biblical Hebrew, see above at Hos. 4:5–6 and below at Hos. 10:15, and see the dictionaries cited above at Hos. 4:5; the verbal root is attested also in Jer. 25:37; 47:5. For the expression ‘like foam on the surface of water’ see the discussion offered by Cohen,36 ‘Foam in Hosea 10:7’, cited above at Hos. 5:10b. Cohen notes that he was anticipated by TJ, which renders rôtā meaning ‘foam’ and that the alternative rendering ‘splinter’ (so, e.g., RSV: ‘chip’) is based upon LXX, which renders φρύγανον ‘splinter’, which is probably based upon Joel 1:7 where we find ‘He turned my vine(s) into waste and my fig tree(s) into splinter(s)’. Note that Joel employs both vine and fig tree as collective nouns referring to many vines and many fig trees. NJPS treats the nouns referring to names of trees in Joel 1:7 as plurals. I indicate the dissonance between what the prophet writes and what he seems to intend by placing the English plural suffixes in parentheses. The interpretation of the noun qeṣep in Hos. 10:7 to mean ‘foam’ is found also in Rashi, who glosses the Biblical Hebrew expression with Old Northern French eskoume, the equivalent of Modern French écume as in the stereotypical sentence, ‘Je n’aime pas voir l’écume sur la plage’, meaning, ‘I do not to like to see foam on the beach’; and so also KJV.

34.  H. L. Ginsberg, ‘Notes on the Twelve Prophets’, EI 3 (1954), pp. 83–84 (83). 35.  Cohen, ‘Foam in Hosea 10:7’. 36.  Ginsberg, ‘Notes on the Twelve Prophets’, p. 83.

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10:8 wĕnišmĕdû bāmōt Āwen ḥaṭṭat Yiśrāēl qōṣ wĕdardar yaăleh al mizbĕḥōtām wĕāmĕrû lĕhārîm kassûnû wĕlaggĕggĕbāōt nipĕlû ālênû ‘The shrines of Aven, the sin of Israel, will be destroyed. Thorn and thistle will grow upon their altars. They will call to the mountains, ‘Bury us’, and to the hills, “Fall upon us” ’ Here the prophet creates a most ingenious play on words. I assume with Rashi and Ibn Ezra that the place name Aven here in Hos. 10:8a is a shortened form of the place name Beth-aven found in Hos. 4:15; 5:8; and 10:5 and that the place name Beth-aven in the book of Amos and in the book of Hosea is a dysphemism for Bethel. I further understand that the Prophet Hosea of Hos. 4–14, speaking in the name of God, regards the behaviour of the Israelites at Bethel, both in respect of their moral turpitude and in respect of their manner of worship, as having turned that place over from ‘a temple of God’ (Heb. Bethel) to a ‘temple of wrongdoing’ (Heb. Beth-aven). Lest our prophet be told by humans and God alike, ‘Hosea, you are much too subtle. You are speaking over their heads. Your audience does not know what you want’, Hosea brings home the point that Bethel, which he calls Beth-aven, or for short Aven, and whose holy places he refers to as bāmōt Aven ‘the shrines of Aven’, i.e., ‘the shrines of Wrong-doing’, thoroughly merits that dysphemism. The way in which he brings home this point is to employ in Hos. 10:8 the single place name ‘the shrines of Wrong-doing’, as the subject of both a verbal sentence and a nominal sentence. The verbal sentence reads, ‘The shrines of Wrong-doing will be destroyed’, while the nominal sentence reads ‘The shrines of Wrong-doing are the sin of Israel’. The two clauses are best read together in English as a single verbal sentence whose subject is ‘the shrines of Wrong-doing’, and whose predicate is ‘be destroyed’. In my rendering, therefore, the predicate of the nominal sentence, ‘the sin of Israel’, is treated as a phrase in apposition to the subject, ‘the shrines of Wrong-doing’. My interpretation of the two subjects as, in effect, in apposition to each other, is found already in the Peshitta, q.v. In the first two clauses of Hos. 10:8, the prophet thus conveys the idea that everything that went on in Bethel, which was dysphemistically called Beth-aven or Aven, including interpersonal relations, international relations, and manner of worshipping God, constituted a crime against God. bāmōt Āwen ḥaṭṭat Yiśrāēl ‘The shrines of Wrong-doing are the sin of Israel’ In this clause (see above) the noun ḥaṭṭat is not the frequently attested noun designating a type of sacrificial offering meant to bring about the

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forgiveness of wrong-doing (so, for example, Lev. 16:9) but rather a distinct and both culturally and etymologically related usage of the lexeme, which is a synonym of the frequently attested noun ḥēṭĕ denoting ‘sin, misdemeanour, crime’. Typical of the form ḥaṭṭat in the latter meaning are Gen. 4:7 (‘sin is the demon at the door’); Jer. 17:1 (‘the sin of Judah is inscribed with an iron stylus’); and Prov. 24:9 (‘a foolish scheme is sin’). The nominal sentence created by the juxtaposition of the two construct– genitive chains bāmōt Āwen ḥaṭṭat Yiśrāēl ‘the shines of Wrong-doing are the sin of Israel’ corresponds precisely to the structure of two sequences of questions and answers found in Mic. 1:5c–f: ‘What is the transgression of Jacob? Indeed, it is Samaria. And what are the shrines of Judah? Indeed, they are Jerusalem.’ Concerning the noun bāmâ ‘shrine’, note that the primary meanings of the noun are ‘back’ (of the body) and ‘geographical ridge or elevation’. An extension of this latter meaning is the term ‘high place’ used in Hebrew Scripture for a place of worship whether of God or of other deities.37 In the biblical books of First and Second Kings the term is used primarily to refer to the many places for the worship of the God of Israel which were interdicted by King Hezekiah’s and King Josiah’s respective attempts to centralize sacrificial worship at the temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. If, as I have suggested elsewhere in this commentary, Hos. 4–14 is not aware of or concerned with the doctrine of centralization associated especially with Deut. 12 and does not even adumbrate such a doctrine,38 it follows that in Hos. 10:8, the expression ‘the shrines of Wrong-doing’ reflects attitudes toward Bethel (also called dysphemistically Beth-aven) that are peculiar to the books of Amos and Hosea and have nothing whatsoever to do with Deuteronomy or with the posited Deuteronomic School. This school adopts the ideology of centralization of worship and employs it as a yardstick for measuring the virtue/turpitude of the kings of Israel and Judah from the division of the kingdom in 922 to the demise of the respective states of Israel and Judah.39

37.  See K.-D. Schunck, ‘bāmāh’, TDOT, vol. 2, pp. 139–45. 38.  Contra Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, pp. 1023–24; 2nd ed., vol. 9, pp. 557–58. 39.  For a demonstration that early Rabbinic Judaism anticipated although it did not welcome the restoration of worship at bāmōt ‘high places’, i.e., places of sacrificial worship of the God of Israel alongside of the restored Third Temple on Mount Moriah, see M. I. Gruber, ‘Discreet Theologies of Sacred Space: D, Dtr and Jeremiah: What the Mishnah Already Knew and No One Ever Told Us’, Review of Rabbinic Judaism 11 (2008), pp. 228–42.

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qōṣ wědardar yaăleh al-mizběḥōtām ‘Thorn and thistle will grow upon their altars’ The proper name Israel, like other terms for groups such as ēdâ ‘community’, can be treated both as a collective noun referring to the group and as a plural noun referring to the many people who constitute the group. Thus the antecedent of the third person plural pronominal suffix meaning ‘their’ in the expression ‘their altars’, refers to the plural of the people of Israel, whose altars at Bethel, also called Beth-aven and Aven, the prophet believes, will be overgrown with plants. For the idea that people are/will be punished by having their places of worship become overgrown with wild plants and weeds, see above at Hos. 10:2, and see also below at Hos. 12:12. Regarding ‘thorn and thistle’, in Hos. 10:8c, as also in Gen. 3:18 (and nowhere else in all of Hebrew Scripture), the two singular nouns are employed as collective nouns referring to multiple thorns and multiple thistles. Similarly, in Joel 1:7, quoted above, ‘vine’ and ‘fig tree’ are both employed as collective nouns referring to numerous vines and numerous fig trees. ‘They will call to the mountains, “Bury us”, and to the hills, “Fall upon us” ’ In Lev. 26:21; Mic. 3:12; and Hos. 12:12 the destruction of Israel’s holy places is seen as a punishment that might be meted out to Israel by God or God’s agents if Israel were to abandon virtuous behaviour. Hosea 10:2, on the other hand, suggests that alternatively, a guilty-feeling Israel might punish itself by destroying the altars and sanctuaries which would have effected atonement for a truly contrite Israel; see my commentary there. Hosea 10:10e–f goes one step further and imagines that the shrines themselves will feel so disgusted with what has taken place on them and in their vicinity that they will ask to be obliterated through the agency of natural forces such as earthquakes and avalanches. Rashi, on the other hand, and so Harper,40 suppose that it is Israel who requests to be covered by mountains//hills so as not to fall into the hands of their enemies. Similarly, Jesus in the Gospel of Luke 23:31 quotes Hos. 10:8e–f when Jesus tells the Daughters of Jerusalem who follow him and weep for him on the way to Calvary, ‘Then shall they [the people of Jerusalem] begin to say to the mountains, “Fall on us”; and to the hills, “Cover us” ’ (so KJV). Similarly, in Rev. 6:15–16 we see the following secondary use of Hos. 10:10e–f, which is reminiscent of the one found in the Lukan Jesus 40.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 347.

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quoted above: ‘And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains. And said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb”. For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?’ (so KJV). With all due respect to Rashi, Harper, and the secondary history of Hos. 10:8e–f in Luke and Revelations, in the context of Hos. 10 the only possible grammatical antecedent of the first person plural pronominal objects of the verb ‘cover’ and the preposition ‘on’ in Hos. 10:8e–f is the plural subject ‘shrines of Aven’ in Hos. 10:8a. The nouns mountains//hills are a fixed word-pair in synonymous parallelism in biblical poetry found also in Isa. 2:2; Hos. 4:13; Amos 9:13; Mic. 4:1 Song 2:8; Ps. 114:4, 6; and passim in Hebrew Scripture. In Masoretic manuscripts there is a break between vv. 8 and 9. 10:9 miyĕmê haggibâ ḥāṭātā Yiśrāēl šām āmĕdû lō-taśśîgēm baggibâ milḥāmâ al-bĕnê alwâ ‘From the days of Gibeah you have sinned, Israel. There they stood. It will not overtake them upon the hill, (in the) war against scoundrels’ In this passage, which corresponds to Hos. 10:9a–c in the standard Hebrew text, we seem to have two examples of concatenation if the passage before us is read as a continuation of Hos. 10:8. Indeed, the second clause of both verses of the consonantal text includes the expression ḥṭt Yisrl, which subtly links the two clauses. After all, in the first of the two verses the expression is commonly understood to constitute two nouns in a construct genitive chain, ‘the sin of Israel’, while in the second clause the same expression appears to be a verb followed by a vocative, the proper name Israel. The latter combination corresponds to the English translation ‘You sinned, Israel’. In addition, the final segment of Hos. 10:8 begins with the expression ‘to the hills’ (Heb. wlgbwt), while the first segment of the following verse begins with a proper name, which is a form of the singular of the noun ‘the hills’, namely hgbh, literally ‘the hill’, commonly understood to designate a place name, ‘Gibeah’. This place is mentioned also in Hos. 9:9 as the site of a famous atrocity described in vivid detail in Judg. 19–20. The latter atrocity tale features the gang-rape of an unnamed women and the dismemberment of her body by a husband, whom the Rabbinic Sages plausibly suggest had a previous history of committing domestic violence, at the very least verbal violence (see b. Giṭ. 6b). The

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husband in question dismembers the body of the spouse before anyone can ascertain whether it was the husband who killed her or the alleged perpetrators of the alleged gang-rape, and this is only the beginning of a biblical tale of terror that could fill several segments of a television series about women victims of sex crimes and domestic violence. The precise meaning of the initial clause of Hos. 10:9a depends on whether the prefixed particle m means ‘since’, as understood by Rashi and by Harper,41 or if the particle means ‘more than’ as understood by Ibn Ezra and NJPS. Rashi follows the Tannaitic Chronicle Seder Olam Rabbah in understanding this particle to mean ‘since’. Thus he interprets the entire clause as a reference to the atrocity committed at Gibeah. Rashi, like Seder Olam Rabbah, points out that the atrocity at Gibeah and the inauguration of a private shrine by Micah both took place during the reign of the first of the judges, Othniel son of Kenaz. Thus, the present arrangement of the book of Judges contradicts history and suggests that matters went from bad to worse until it was necessary to adopt the monarchical form of government that begins with King Saul. My understanding that the appearance of wlgbwt at the end of Hos. 10:8 followed by hgbh ‘Gibeah’ at the beginning of Hos. 10:9 constitutes concatenation may, in fact, be strengthened by the fact that LXX employs precisely the same Greek plural noun meaning ‘hills’ in both positions, specifically as dative plural in Hos. 10:8 (βονοῖς) and as nominative plural near the beginning of Hos. 10:9 (βονοί). Strangely enough, Peshitta substitutes Ramah for Gibeah in Hos. 10:9 as also in Hos. 9:9, q.v. šām āmādû ‘There they stood’ Three exegetical questions must be asked about this clause. The questions are as follows: (1) What place is referred to as ‘there’? (2) What is the grammatical subject of the verb ‘they stood’? (3) When did this happen? Kimchi offers a cogent series of answers, which cohere to make sense of the clause in both of the two contexts, to which the clause belongs. These contexts are (1) the time of our prophet, probably the reign of Menahem son of Gadi, and specifically the years 743–738 BCE as explained in my Introduction, following Tadmor; and (2) the context of the reference to a tragedy that took place at Gibeah (see above at the first and fourth clauses of 10:9). Kimchi’s explanation of Hos. 10:9c follows the lemma ‘There they stood’, and it provides a coherent reading of Hos. 10:9 both within the context of the reign of Menahem and with reference to events at Gibeah in the period of the Judges. Kimchi writes 41.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 349.

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as follows: ‘It appears that THERE STOOD these sinners in the time when the prophet is speaking, who hold on to their wickedness and will not improve their behaviour. Thus he [the prophet] said above (Hos. 9:9), “They have been grievously corrupt [as in the days of Gibeah]”.’ ‘Now’, Kimchi continues quoting the next lemma, ‘IN THE DAYS OF GIBEAH IT DID NOT ACHIEVE FOR THEM ANYTHING’ (Heb. taśśîgēm; an imperfect verb with third person plural pronominal suffix construed as a past tense verb). Here Kimchi changes the word order so that the temporal adverbial phrase ‘in the days of Gibeah’ is moved from the end of the clause to the head of the clause. Now Kimchi continues (referring to Hos. 10:9d–e), ‘Now these [the wicked people in the generation of the Prophet Hosea] think that WAR WILL NOT OVERTAKE THEM [Heb. taśśîgēm; the same verbal form plausibly construed previously as a past tense verb] as it overtook those sinners at Gibeah when the people of Israel came to those “scoundrels” (Hos. 10:9d), and they were the Benjaminites, and they [the Benjaminites] were indeed consumed as a punishment for their sin’ (see Judg. 20). ‘Likewise’, Kimchi continues, ‘these [the sinners in the time of Hosea, argues our prophet], will be consumed as a punishment for their sin, and the sword of the enemy WILL OVERTAKE THEM [again quoting the Hebrew verb taśśîgēm in Hos. 10:9]; and let them [the wicked people of Hosea’s generation] not think, lō-taśśîgēm “it will not overtake them” ’. Note that in the previous clause Kimchi quotes the verb ‘will overtake them’ out of context while here in the latter clause Kimchi quotes verbatim Hos. 10:9d, in which the verb is linked to the negative particle lō ‘not’. In fact, in the latter clause of his comment, Kimchi construes the verb and the negative particle as an implied quotation of the thoughts of the wicked people of Hosea’s generation, an example of the rhetorical device frequently examined in depth by R. Gordis and referred to as a virtual quotation or quotation without a verb of saying, or in this and many other instances, a quotation of a thought without a stated verb of thinking.42 bĕnê-alĕwâ ‘scoundrels’ LXX renders τέκνα ἀδικίας, i.e., ‘children of injustice’, which is a literal rendering of Heb. bĕnê-awĕlâ, literally ‘children (or persons) of injustice’. It is quite possible that LXX reflects a Hebrew Vorlage, which read bĕnê-awĕlâ. It is equally possible that LXX, like Ibn Ezra and Kimchi, saw the form alĕwâ as a biform of awĕlâ, related to the usual 42.  See R. Gordis, ‘Quotations as a Literary Usage in Biblical, Oriental, and Rabbinic Literature’, HUCA 22 (1949), pp. 157–219 (166–73).

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form by metathesis. Common examples of metathesis in Biblical Hebrew are the pair of nouns meaning ‘garment’, śimlâ and śalmâ and the pair of nouns meaning ‘lamb’, keśeb and kebeś.43 10:10 bĕawwātî wĕessorēm wĕussĕpû ălêhem ammîm bĕosrām lišĕtê ênōtām ‘When I chose (them, the people of Israel), then I harnessed them, when peoples were gathered against them, when they had been harnessed to two furrows’ Contrast NJPS’s translation: ‘When I chose [them], I broke them in …harnessing them for two furrows’.

Note first of all that NJPS removes the second clause of Hos. 10:10 from the middle of that verse, and places this clause at the end of Hos. 10:9. Whether or not we accept NJPS’s characteristic rearrangement of the received text of Hebrew Scripture, it is certain that the first and final clauses of Hos. 10:10 are linked by means of concatenation, i.e., the appearance of the same lexeme or a variant thereof at the end of one clause and again at the beginning of a following clause. The standard dictionaries and grammars of Biblical Hebrew and the major critical commentaries on Hosea understand the verbal form wĕessorēm in Hos. 10:10a as a derivative of the root ysr ‘discipline’. They also find this root ysr reflected in the infinitive phrase bĕosrēm ‘when they were harnessed’. (See below.) However, as I shall suggest below, the standard parsing of the two forms ignores the rhetorical device of concatenation, which is to say the deliberate placing of wĕessorēm at the end of the first clause of Hos. 10:10 and the placing of the apparently cognate bĕosrēm at the head of the final clause of Hos. 10:10. In fact, NJPS’s removal of the middle clause of Hos. 10:10 to the end of Hos. 10:9 unequivocally recreates the concatenation. See below for the exegetical consequences of this observation. If, on the other hand, one follows most scholarship in treating the first of the two verbal forms as a derivative of the verbal root ysr ‘discipline’, the following are the exegetical consequences: It is commonly assumed that the verb ysr ‘to discipline’ is applied in Hebrew Scripture both to 43.  For the interpretation of alĕwâ as metathesis for awĕlâ ‘wickedness’, see also Wolff, Hosea, p. 178; Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 565.

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the education of persons and the training of domesticated animals. To be more precise, it is only here in Hos. 10:10–11 where (1) Ephraim//Israel is compared metaphorically to a trained calf, whose education, was less than effective (Hos. 10:11); and (2) the prophet speaking in the name of God refers to two furrows that were to be ploughed by the metaphoric calf, who is Israel//Ephraim. Thus, Hos. 10:10c suggests that also in Hos. 10:10a we have a clear case of the verb ysr ‘to discipline’ applied both to people and to farm animals. If, indeed, we assume that the form wĕessorēm is a form of the verbal root ysr, the form at hand is to be parsed as follows: conjunctive waw followed by the first person singular imperfect followed by the accusative pronominal suffix, meaning ‘them’, referring to the people of Israel, here treated as a plural rather than as a collective.44 Consequently, what would appear to be a perfect example of concatenation is a less than perfect example of concatenation but rather a case of assonance, the juxtaposition of two distinct ideas that sound alike. On the other hand, if we parse the verbal form wĕessorēm not as a form of the verb ysr ‘discipline’ but as first person singular imperfect qal form of the verb sr ‘bind, harness’, then we have a perfect example of concatenation, creating the following message: ‘When I chose [them] I bound them, binding them to two furrows’. Interestingly, the infinitive construct with prefixed preposition and pronominal suffix, bĕawwātî, functioning as a temporal clause like ‘when you lie down and when you get up’ in Deut. 6:7, refers to the election of Israel employing the relatively rare verb wy rather than the more common verb bḥr. The verbal root wy, usually employed in Hebrew Scripture to refer to human desires, refers to God’s choice of Jerusalem as his capital in Ps. 132:13–14. KJV translates the standard Hebrew text of Hos. 10:10 literally according to the kethib rather than the qere of the final word at the end of the verse: the qere reads ‘their iniquities’ while the kethib reads ‘their furrows’. KJV of Hos. 10:10 thus reads, ‘It is in my desire that I should chastise them; and the people shall be gathered against them, when they shall bind themselves in their two furrows’. KJV understands the first active verb wsrm as an imperfect with conjunctive waw employed to refer to present time. Rashi, on the other hand, followed by NJPS, understands this verb as a so-called imperfect or, if you will, prefixed conjugation of the verb referring to past time. (On this phenomenon see GKB, pt. 2 #7.) 44.  This analysis is implied by Mandelkern, Concordantiae, p. 488a, and almost spelled out in DCH 4:238b; see also Wolff, Hosea, pp. 178–79; and GKC #60a.

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Hence NJPS renders, ‘I broke them in’. Thus Rashi interprets the verse as referring to the period of the Judges: ‘According to my will I always punished them between judges [when they again sinned; see Judg. 2:19], and I handed them over to their oppressors [Judg. 2:14]’. In addition, Rashi here apparently understands ‘their two furrows’ as a reference to metaphorical valleys between metaphorical hills. The metaphorical hills are the periods of Israel’s prosperity during the reign of a judge, during whose rule the people were loyal to God and his rules. The metaphorical valleys are the periods of Israel’s being harassed by other peoples because they were being punished for their disloyalty to God. Rashi reaffirms his following the kethib rather than the qere with respect to the final word of the verse, when without warning he introduces an alternative interpretation, and he explains that the noun yntm refers to the openings for the eyes of the animal in the straps that tied the yoke to the animal, and that the opening is called ênat (construed as a derivative of the well-known contracted form of the noun ayin, namely ên, which is employed in the construct and as the base form to which are appended suffixes including the dual suffix ayim) because it is literally an eyelet in the sense of peephole. Interestingly, LXX’s rendering, ἀδικίαις αὐτῶν ‘their iniquities’, accords with the qere in MT, which reads ăwōnōtām ‘their iniquities’. Thus Bewer renders, ‘when I chastened them for their double transgressions’.45 Some versions of LXX insert the verb ἦλθεν (Rahlfs) or ἦλθον (Ziegler) ‘I came’ at the beginning of Hos. 10:10. Many scholars hold that this reading in LXX reflects a Hebrew Vorlage, which read bātî ‘I came’ instead of MT’s bawwātî ‘in my desire’. Thus Bewer renders, ‘But I came against the wicked people and chastised them, and tribes gathered against them…’.46 The clause, which Bewer renders ‘and tribes gathered against them’, and which Rashi construes as a reference to the nations which harassed Israel frequently between the end of the reign of one judge and the appearance of the next judge during the period of the Judges, is construed by NJPS as being out of place in the MT. NJPS moves this clause to v. 9 and attaches it to the description of the famous tragedy at Gibeah in the period of the Judges. In NJPS’s understanding ‘peoples gather against them’ refers to the war waged by the other eleven tribes of Israel against the tribe of Benjamin (Judg. 20) because of the apathy that the Benjaminites displayed with respect to the atrocity committed against the famous unnamed concubine in the streets of Gibeah. 45.  J. A. Bewer, The Book of the Twelve Prophets. Vol. 1, Amos, Hosea, and Micah (Harper’s Annotated Bible Series; New York: Harper & Brothers; London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1949), p. 55. 46.  Bewer, Twelve Prophets, p. 55.

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If, indeed, v. 10, like v. 9, refers to the tragic cycle of violence described in Judg. 19–20, what then would constitute the two sins? Perhaps the first sin was the failure of the Benjaminites to provide hospitality to the passers-by, the Levite and his concubine. The second sin would, therefore, have been the failure of the Benjaminites to turn over the culprits to law enforcement officials. It was this second failure that led to the war in which the tribe of Benjamin was almost annihilated. 10:11 wĕEpraim eglâ mĕlummādâ ‘Indeed, Ephraim is a trained heifer’ The reason that Ephraim in the present tense is a trained heifer is either (1) the verb at the end of Hos. 10:10a is a form of ysr and refers, like the verbal root lmd found in Hos. 10:11a, to the training of farm animals; or (2) the verb at the end of Hos. 10:10a is a form of the root sr ‘bind’ and refers to God’s having placed the metaphoric yoke upon the neck of Ephraim; or (3) the verbal form wĕessorēm is a deliberate instance of ambiguity referring both to the abstract notion of discipline (ysr) and the concrete idea of binding (sr) the yoke to the metaphoric heifer. ohabtî lādûš ‘Ephraim is a trained heifer who loves to thresh’ Syntactically we have here a nominal sentence that states, ‘Ephraim is a trained heifer’, followed by a participial clause, ‘who loves to thresh’ in apposition to ‘trained heifer’. Primarily, we have in this part of Hos. 10:11 a prophetic critique of the people of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, which is here, as frequently in Hos. 4–14, referred to as Ephraim (for reasons that are discussed in the Introduction and also in the commentary at Hos. 5, q.v.). To the assertion of Hosea, speaking in the name of God, here in Hos. 10:11a, that Ephraim (= Israel) is a trained heifer, who did not make proper use of her education, we may compare Jeremiah’s complaint in Jer. 31:18 that Ephraim is an untrained calf. Quite likely, Jer. 31, like many passages in the book of Jeremiah which betray the inspiration of the book of Hosea, has been influenced by Hosea. It is all the more likely, therefore, that Jer. 31:18 has been influenced by Hos. 10:11. In the later reception history of Jer. 31 in Jewish liturgy, the references to Ephraim are treated as simply references to the people of Israel/the Jewish people in general. In the context of Jer. 31, however, the prophet uses the name Ephraim to designate an ethnic group, specifically the Israelites who were exiled from the Northern Kingdom, which Jeremiah, following Hos. 4–14 calls Ephraim. Jeremiah expresses the hope that the exiles from both the

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Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom will return home to the Land of Israel. Jeremiah 31:18 goes so far as to contend that Ephraim who was already exiled was punished because she behaved like an untrained calf, a metaphor for an undisciplined, unruly human being. Hosea 10:11, on the other hand, written between seventeen and twelve years before the exile of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE, addresses the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom, i.e., collective Ephraim, and berates him for behaving like a person who had a proper education in manners and morals but who prefers to behave in a manner, which is immoral and ill-mannered. Kimchi explains the nexus between the metaphorical expressions and the meaning of this prophetic diatribe in the following words: ‘Above he [the prophet] compared her [Israel/Ephraim] to a cow when he said, “Indeed Israel has balked like a stubborn cow” (Hos. 4:16), and now he calls [her] “heifer” because in her youth, God, may he be blessed, taught her to plough, and he had her plough during the process of sowing the soil. The latter process serves as a metaphor for doing good deeds while the harvest is a metaphor for reaping the fruits of [good] deeds. And I [God] taught her to do good deeds in order to eat the good [fruits]. However, she refused to plough, which is to say, do good deeds. On the contrary, she chooses to eat, i.e., to benefit from the good which I give her without doing good deeds but [to receive benefit] for free. The metaphoric expression [in Hos. 10:11] for so doing is what he [the prophet] says, “she loves to thresh”, which is to say “to thresh” rather than “to plough” so that she may eat during the threshing [cf. Deut. 25:4: “do not muzzle a bull when he is threshing”]. By so doing she fails to execute the desire of her owners, but she acts for the sake of her own desire and her own benefit.’ ohabtî The verbal form ōhabtî is the feminine singular qal active participle, which would normally be ōhebet (Gen. 25:28). The form with the suffix is one of a number of examples in Hebrew Scripture of a superfluous final yod appended to a noun, which may be a survival of the case ending i, which indicates the genitive in ancient Semitic languages such as Ugaritic and Akkadian and Classical Arabic, or, as Gesenius, following Barth, prefers to suggest, a means of emphasizing the construct genitive relationship between the two elements in the construct genitive chain (see GKC #90 l). As noted already by Rashi and Kimchi, the form ohabtî is an alternative form of the feminine singular active qal participle ohebet ‘she loves’. Rashi holds that the final yod in the form attested in Hos. 10:11 constitutes

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a superfluous final yod, which is to say a suffixed yod, which has no known function in the grammar of Standard Biblical Hebrew.47 The importance of Rashi’s having pointed out correctly that the appended yod has absolutely no grammatical function in Standard Biblical Hebrew is brought home by examining the attempt of Andersen and Freedman to construe the form as a first person singular perfect form of the verb hb meaning ‘I love’.48 As noted by Rashi, another example of the superfluous final yod is the form gĕnubtî meaning ‘stolen’, and certainly not ‘stolen by me’ in Gen. 31:39. Other examples of participles with the superfluous final yod include hammagbîhî ‘one who ascends’ (Ps. 113:5), hammašpîlî ‘one who descends’ (Ps. 113:6), mĕqîmî ‘one who raises up’ (Ps. 113:7), and môšîbî ‘one who sets/seats’. Superfluous final yod appears also, inter alia, in the infinitive lĕhôšîbî ‘to set/seat’ in Ps. 113:8 and in nouns such as śûśātî ‘a mare’ (not ‘my mare’) in Song 1:9; rabbātî ‘queen, great lady’ (not ‘my queen’ or ‘my great lady’), twice in Lam. 1:2 and śārātî ‘queen, princess, great lady’ in Lam. 1:2. Rashi’s comparison of the active participle ohabtî specifically with the passive participle gĕnubtî ‘stolen’ is especially apt because the point Jacob attempts to make in his dialogue with Laban in Gen. 31 is that far from having cheated Laban by engaging in inventory shrinkage, he, Jacob, had made good what had been stolen by others while he, Jacob, was on the watch. Unquestionably, the point of Rashi’s comparison is to put to rest almost a thousand years before Andersen and Freedman the notion that the form ohabtî here in Hos. 10:11 could possibly be a first person singular verb form. Cf. Rashi at Gen. 31:39, and with Rashi there cf. also the participial phrase mĕlēătî mišpāṭ ‘full of justice’ in Isa. 1:21. Many modern scholars have argued that all of these instances of what Rashi called superfluous final yod represent archaic survivals of the noun case endings that are known to us from ancient Semitic languages such as Akkadian, Classical Arabic, and Ugaritic.49 Whether or not this is the case, in the context of the standard Biblical Hebrew of Gen. 31:39 and Isa. 1:21, as also in the context of the northern dialect of pre-exilic Biblical Hebrew found in Hos. 10, the form no longer has any grammatical or syntactical significance and is to be recognized as by no means a suffix of the first person singular. In Ps. 113, and in the exilic-period Lam. 1:2, the rare, archaic forms may well be employed deliberately for the sake of assonance. 47.  See also the discussion in Macintosh, Hosea, p. 417, and with Macintosh, cf. GKC #90k, l, both of which have been influenced by Kimchi. 48.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 567. 49.  See the extensive literature cited in Gruber, Rashi’s Commentary on Psalms, pp. 660, 672, 724 n. 7; Dahood, Psalms, 3:130–32, at Ps. 113.

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ōhabtî NJPS renders ‘preferred’ followed by the infinitive finalis lādûš meaning ‘to thresh’, suggesting that while the metaphoric trained heifer knew how to plough the field, the metaphoric equivalent of Israel’s obedience to the do’s and don’t’s of the Decalogue, the real Israel of the eighth century BCE chose instead to do her own thing, which is to say, express disloyalty to God by means of sins of commission and omission. waănî ābartî al-ṭûb ṣawwārāh ‘Now, as for me, I passed by her beautiful neck’ LXX reads, ἐγὼ δὲ ἐπελεύσομαι ἐπὶ τό κάλλιστον τοῦ τραχήλοθ αὐτῆς. Glenny renders the latter clause, ‘And I will come down upon the fairest part of her neck’.50 In his commentary on the Greek Hosea, Glenny explains that the verb ἐπέρχομαι can mean ‘mount’ or ‘attack’ but that in connection with a neck, it can refer to placing a yoke upon her, i.e., the people Ephraim/Israel for whom the heifer is a metaphor.51 According to NJPS’s marginal note, the literal meaning of the Hebrew clause should be ‘I passed over the comeliness of its neck’. In fact, in the biblical context, the reference is to the neck of the aforementioned (Hos. 10:11a) trained heifer, employed as a metaphor for Ephraim, i.e., the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom. The translators of NJPS seem to have forgotten that an idiomatic translation of the construct genitive chain ṭûb ṣawwārāh is ‘her beautiful neck’, not ‘the beauty of her neck’. One may compare kol-yěmê heblĕkā ‘all your vain days’ (not ‘all the days of your vanity’) twice in Qoh. 9:9 and diběrê qodšĕkā ‘your holy words’ (not ‘the words of your holiness’) many times in the standard Jewish liturgy. In the body of NJPS we find the idiomatic rendering, ‘I placed a yoke upon her sleek neck’. The latter understanding of the clause is found already in Kimchi, who comments, ‘When I passed by her to place upon her the yoke I made her neck fat so that I did not make her yoke overly heavy’. The reason is that the necks of cows whose yokes are overly heavy get crushed. What he [God speaking through the prophet] wishes to say by means of the metaphor is that he did not make the yoke of the commandments particularly heavy. An equally plausible interpretation is as follows: When I passed by them [the people of the Northern Kingdom] to remove from them the yoke of the kingdom [of Rehoboam]. This is to say that when I spoke through the agency of the prophet Ahijah [1 Kgs 11:29–39 with respect to God’s taking the ten Northern tribes away from 50.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 54. 51.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 148.

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the Davidic dynasty] “I passed by her comely neck” (Hos. 10:11c–d), which is to say that all Israel were at peace with each person “under his vine and under his fig tree” (1 Kgs 5:5; Mic. 4:4) throughout the reign of Solomon, and it was this [to remove the yoke] that I thought [Heb. āmartî] with respect to dividing the [united] kingdom [of Israel into the two kingdoms of Judah and Israel].’ In consonance with this understanding of Hos. 10:11c–d, Kimchi is able to explain also the meaning of Hos. 10:11e, arkîb Ephraim ‘I shall place [the yoke] upon Ephraim’, which Kimchi sees as a reference to God’s assigning to Jeroboam I and to his dynasty the Northern Kingdom, which in the time of the prophetic voice of Hos. 4–14 was called Ephraim. Kimchi comments, ‘[arkîb Ephraim means], “I thought to PLACE UPON EPHRAIM”, which is to say to place upon him the yoke of Jeroboam who was from the tribe of Ephraim. Since I placed upon him [Jeroboam; see below for explication of Kimchi’s using yoke in two distinct senses here] the yoke, I asked [Heb. āmartî] that he [Jeroboam] do my will and command the people to serve me and to be subservient to my will, for I said to him, “If you truly heed [Kimchi here adds, misquoting from memory the addition of infinitive absolute šāmōă before the finite second person singular verb, under the influence of Exod. 15:26; 23:22; Deut. 15:5] all that I command you, and walk in my ways…I will build for you a lasting dynasty…” (1 Kgs 11:38).’ As I noted above, in this comment Kimchi employs the term ‘yoke’ as well as the expression ‘place a yoke upon’ in two distinct metaphorical senses. The first of these is, indeed, the sense in which it is employed in Hos. 10:11 and other biblical texts, in which the obligations of the people of Israel and Judah to God are compared to the burdens borne by a beast of burden who is bound to that burden by means of a yoke. The second sense is the responsibility that is placed upon a faithful monarch and a faithful dynasty to be the subject of a nation’s obeisance. Thus Kimchi holds that when Hos. 10:11 speaks of God’s having noticed in passing, as it were, the beautiful neck of the metaphorical heifer, the sight of the fat neck led God to assume that the nation of Ephraim was fully capable of accepting the yoke of God’s commandments. Further on, however, in the course of his alternative explanation of Hos. 10:11, Kimchi suggests that not only was Ephraim found worthy of accepting the yoke of God’s agent, King Jeroboam, but also Jeroboam and his dynasty were found worthy of being the object of the nation’s obeisance and obedience. As we shall see, Kimchi understands the continuation of Hos. 10:11 as informing us that God was disappointed with the nation, with King Jeroboam, and with the dynasty of Jeroboam.

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Significantly, Kimchi’s interpretation avoids the necessity of treating the qal of the verbal root br ‘pass by’ as though it were a causative piel or hiphil meaning ‘I removed’. The latter interpretation employing the Aramaic haphel causative is reflected in TJ’s rendering aĕdētî ‘I removed’, which inspires Ibn Ezra in both of his commentaries edited by U. Simon,52 and before him Yefet Ben Eli.53 What makes TJ’s solution especially unattractive is the fact that not only does it attribute an otherwise unattested nuance, ‘remove’, to the verb br in the qal, but also it treats the verb in the otherwise unattested nuance as an ellipsis for a verb followed by a direct object nîr tĕqôp ‘a strong yoke’, which is not attested in the text of Hos. 10:11.54 All in all, it appears that Kimchi found the high ground between the attempt of TJ and many medieval and modern commentators to explain what they thought the text ought to say and the suggestion by Andersen and Freedman that ‘MT is unintelligible’.55 In fact, the verb br in the piel is attested only in two places and in two meanings, which are clearly distinct from the one that Kuhnigk and other moderns seek to read into Hos. 10:11. The first meaning, which is attested only in Job 21:10, is ‘become pregnant’, which is obviously related to Rabbinic Hebrew ubbar ‘foetus’. The second meaning, which is attested only in 1 Kgs 6:21, denotes the overlaying of wood with precious metal. My goal is to present a coherent commentary, which treats the entire corpus of Hos. 4–14 as a coherent text. Consequently, I prefer to accept Kimchi’s solution until epigraphic Hebrew or cognate languages may offer us a more convincing alternative. 10:11 arkîb Eprayim yaḥărōš Yĕhûdâ yĕšaddēd-lô Yaăqob ‘I make Ephraim break up the ground. Israel must plough (to cover the seed). Jacob must harrow for himself’ NJPS renders these three final clauses of Hos. 10:11 as follows: 52.  See Simon, ed., Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Two Commentaries on the Minor Prophets, pp. 103–104 and p. 285, respectively. 53.  Polliack and Schlossberg, Yefet Ben ‘Eli’s Commentary on Hosea, p. 420. 54.  W. Kuhnigk, Nordwestsemitische Studien zum Hoseabuch (Biblica et Orientalia, 27; Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1974), p. 122 (followed by Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 567, and Rudolph, Hosea, p. 201), suggests revocalizing the verb form ābartî as a piel that would have the sense of the haphel found in TJ. For additional far-fetched suggestions, see Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, pp. 567–68, and Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 417–18 55.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 567.

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Hosea: A Textual Commentary ‘I will make Ephraim do advanced ploughing; Judah shall do [main] ploughing! Jacob shall do final ploughing!’

Here as in virtually all instances in the book of Hosea, with the notable exception of Hos. 5:10, NJPS (see marginal note c in NJPS at Hos. 10:11g) regards the reading Yĕhûdâ (i.e., Judah) as an ancient misinterpretation of the initial letter Y., which was meant to be read as an abbreviation for the proper name Yiśrāēl (i.e., Israel). See the extensive discussion in my Introduction (‘Judahite Glosses’, pp. 28–29). Unfortunately, NJPS’s marginal note, ‘Emendation yields “Israel” ’, fails to explain that the reading ‘Israel’ constitutes a restoration of the original prophecy rather than an arbitrary attempt of modern professors to profane the sacred text by tampering with it. Both the unamended text of Hos. 10:11e–g and NJPS’s restored version feature a triplet where one might have expected a doublet. With reference to the triplet ‘Hear this, priests, Pay attention, House of Israel, And Royal House, Give ear’ in Hos. 5:1, Wolff remarks, ‘The formula usually has two parts’.56 Not surprisingly, therefore, Macintosh greets the triplet in Hos. 5:1 with virtual silence57 and remarks concerning Hos. 10:11, ‘to vary the name (i.e. Ephraim to Israel) within the space of a few words, when the parallel “Jacob” conveys what is necessary, seems clumsy’.58 However, it is more than reasonable to suggest that the prophet, speaking in the name of God, must use three distinct epithets for the one nation of Israel precisely because he speaks of three stages of ploughing. E. Ben-Zvi explains the three stages of ploughing in these words: ‘the initial breaking up of the ground, plowing to cover the seed, harrowing to clear the ground for the next cycle’.59 NRSV also accepts NJPS’s understanding of Hos. 10:11e–g, rendering the three clauses, ‘but I will make Ephraim break the ground; Judah must plough; Jacob must harrow for himself’. Marginal note b–b in NJPS explains that the hiphil verb arkîb is construed as metathesis for the Arabic verb krb meaning ‘plough’. Hosea, who employs a triplet in 5:1 and in 10:11, employs the rather rare device again in 12:11, where again as in 5:1 we find three synonymous verbs, the first and last of which constitute chiastic parallelism. In my commentary on Hos. 4:14 I also suggest metathesis as a key to understanding the Hebrew root prd. 56.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 97. 57.  Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 175–76. 58.  Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 420–21. 59.  E. Ben-Zvi, ‘Hosea’, in The Jewish Study Bible (2nd ed.; ed. A. Berlin and M. Z. Brettler; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 1131–53 (1147).

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10:12 zirû lākem liṣĕdākâ qiṣĕrû lĕpî ḥāsed nîrû lākem nîr wěēt lidrōš et-Yhwh ad-yābô wěyôreh ṣedeq lākem ‘Plant for yourselves generously. Harvest in abundance. Break up your fallow ground. It is the appointed time for seeking Yhwh until he comes and generously provides you with rain’ If on one level or another our prophet meant to speak in the first two clauses of planting grain and harvesting grain and of seeking God’s cooperation, then the final clause must speak of God’s responding to the people’s seeking God by means of God’s providing the seasonal rain upon which the harvest in the land of Israel depends. The prophet seems deliberately to employ ambiguous language, which should give food for thought about what precisely it is that humans must do to receive the divine gift of rain, without which the efforts of the farmer will be in vain. All three of the nouns ṣedāqâ, ḥesed, and ṣedeq can, in Biblical Hebrew, denote both ‘virtue, virtuous behaviour, justice’ as well as ‘kindness, charity, generosity’.60 As noted already independently by A. Hurvitz and by M. Kadushin, in Rabbinic Hebrew two of the lexemes that previously denoted ‘justice, kindness, generosity, undeserved love’ were separated so that mišpāṭ and ṣedeq could only mean ‘justice’ while ṣĕdāqâ could only mean ‘charity, kindness’.61 In light of the above, it is likely that in its original biblical context Hos. 10:12 could have meant ‘Sow for yourselves unstintingly, and you will reap a plentiful harvest. Break up your fallow ground [in order to sow unstintingly]. At the appropriate time seek Yhwh until he comes to provide for you rain in abundance.’ Precisely because the concepts of justice and kindness are separated in the modern mind, which then distinguishes nuances, or, more often, distinct meanings, each of them numbered in modern dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew, I prefer the above translation in which all three of the nouns ṣedāqâ, ḥesed, and ṣedeq refer to amounts of concrete substances such as seed, harvest, and rain. To Hosea’s target audience the original connotation of Hos. 10:12 may well have been also, but not to the exclusion of the previous understanding, the rendering we find in KJV: ‘Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy…time to seek the LORD, till he come and rain righteousness upon you’. 60.  See H. L. Ginsberg, ‘A Strand in the Cord of Hebraic Hymnody’, Eretz-Israel 9 (1969), pp. 44–50 (46–47). 61.  See A. Hurvitz, ‘The Biblical Roots of a Talmudic Term: The Early History of the Concept sedeqah (= charity, alms)’, in Studies in Language, nos. 2–3 (Jerusalem: Institute of Jewish Studies, 1987), pp. 155–60 (in Hebrew); and see M. Kadushin, The Rabbinic Mind (3rd ed.; New York: Bloch, 1972), pp. 297–98.

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The secondary, not necessarily allegorical interpretation, of the clause wĕyôreh ṣedeq lākem to mean not ‘he will provide you abundant rain’ but ‘he will teach you the truth’ is found, inter alia, in Yefet Ben Eli, and, not surprisingly, in Ibn Ezra, who was strongly influenced by Yefet Ben Eli. In fact, the interpretation of wĕyôreh ṣedeq lākem to mean ‘he will teach you the truth’ is found in Rabbinic literature in b. Bekorot 24a; Seder Eliyahu Rabbah 14:68.62 Ben-Yashar et al. note that the participial phrase in Rabbinic Hebrew, moreh ṣedeq, derived from the biblical clause under discussion, designates God as the ultimate teacher of the correct halakah.63 Most likely, the Rabbinic phrase derives from Second Temple Hebrew literature, specifically, the Dead Sea Scrolls. There the expression moreh haṣṣedeq ‘he who teaches the law aright’ or more commonly in modern secondary literature about the Dead Sea Scrolls, ‘the teacher of righteousness’ (better would be ‘the authoritative teacher’), for the founder of the so-called Dead Sea Sect.64 As Roth points out,65 the derivation of the title ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ from Hos. 10:12 assumes that the final clause of Hos. 10:12 can mean ‘until he come and teach righteousness’, to which Roth compares the Vulgate translation of the same clause: cum venerit qui docebit vos justititam. Roth has commented on the persistence of what may have been characteristically Qumran Sect terminology in Rabbinic literature.66 Roth’s speculation that perhaps the Dead Sea Scroll expression moreh ṣedeq reflects the influence of an ancient variant reading in the Bible at Hos. 10:12 of moreh ṣedeq instead of wĕyoreh ṣedeq, which we find in MT, can probably be put to rest in the light of D. L. Washburn’s research.67 62.  See Ben-Yashar et al., Bible in Rabbinic Interpretation I, pp. 427–28. 63.  Ben-Yashar et al., Bible in Rabbinic Interpretation I, p. 426. 64.  Among the scholars who noted that the usage in the sectarian writings of the Dead Sea Scrolls must be derived from Hos. 10:12 (as well as Joel 2:23, on which see below) are G. R. Driver, The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Problem and a Solution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), p. 256; and C. Roth, ‘The Teacher of Righteousness and the Prophecy of Joel’, VT 13 (1963), pp. 91–95. 65.  Roth, ‘The Teacher of Righteousness and the Prophecy of Joel’, p. 91. 66.  Roth, ‘The Teacher of Righteousness and the Prophecy of Joel’, p. 91 n. 1. Concerning the relationship between Hos. 10:12 and the Qumran and Rabbinic usages of moreh ṣedeq, see also J. C. von Kolichen, ‘Der “Lehrer der Gerechtigkeit” und Hos. 10:12 in einer rabbinischen Handschrift des Mittelalters’, ZAW 74 (1962), pp. 324–27. Concerning the figure so designated in the Dead Sea Scrolls, see, inter alia, M. O. Wise, ‘Dating the Teacher of Righteousness and the Floruit of His Movement’, JBL 122 (2003), pp. 53–87. 67.  D. L. Washburn, A Catalogue of Biblical Passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Society of Biblical Literature Text-Critical Studies, 2; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002), p. 141.

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U. Simon, in the notes to his Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Two Commentaries on the Minor Prophets,68 contends that Ibn Ezra was the first commentator in history to have suggested, as I did above, that wĕyôreh ṣedeq lākem in Hos. 10:12 refers to rain rather than divine instruction. Ibn Ezra himself makes the point that, indeed, he is original when he writes as follows: ‘PLANT AND HARVEST. That [the harvest] is the reward. BREAK UP YOUR FALLOW GROUND to remove the weeds (and) to make the plot of ground clear of stones. AND AT THE APPROPRIATE TIME You seek God [i.e., “pray” as is the meaning of “seek God/Yhwh” in Gen. 25:22; Job 5:8—clarification by M. Gruber] to wet [lĕrawwôt] the seed, then the winter rain will come AND IT WILL RAIN UPON YOU ABUNDANTLY. [Here the verb yôreh] is a cognate of [the noun yôreh in the phrase] yôreh umalqoš “fall rain and winter rain” (Deut. 11:14). However, all the commentators [before me, Abraham Ibn Ezra] say [that the meaning of Hos. 10:12 is as follows]: “Seek you people [to obey] his Teaching [Heb. tôrâ], and he will come and teach [yôreh] you”.’ Simon, in his notes to his edition of Ibn Ezra’s commentary,69 notes that most medieval commentaries did understand the almost identical phraseology in Joel 2:23, hammôreh liṣdāqâ, to refer to the pouring down of rain; cf. NJPS there: ‘For he has given you the early rain [above I translated fall rain] in kindness’. Simon suggests that the reason that commentators prior to Ibn Ezra did not understand the verb yôreh in Hos. 10:12 as pouring down rain is precisely because the latter verse employs a verb while Joel 2:23 employs the participle hammôreh. Simon suggests that by supplying the implied object malqoš ‘winter rain’ from Joel 2:23 and Deut. 11:14, Ibn Ezra sought to overcome challenges to his interpretation of the verb yôreh ‘he will pour down (rain)’ in Hos. 10:12. Interestingly, Ibn Ezra’s interpretation of ‘seeking God’ in Hos. 10:12 as referring to a prayer for rain, which, in turn, should be followed by God’s bringing rain, reminds one of the midrash quoted by Rashi in his commentary at Gen. 2:5, ‘Yhwh God had not yet sent rain upon the land, and there was no man…’. The midrash, which seeks to offer an explanation for the apparent non sequitur, ‘not yet sent rain…there was no man’, states, ‘When the man appeared…he prayed for them [the rain], and they came down’. The employment in Hos. 10:12 of the expressions plant and harvest to refer to agricultural labour and its consequences by means of the principles of cause and effect and/or logical consequences or indirectly 68.  Simon, Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Two Commentaries on the Minor Prophets, p. 104. 69.  Simon, Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Two Commentaries on the Minor Prophets, p. 104.

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by means of divine response to virtue and prayer, prepares the way for the prophet, again speaking in the name of God, to inform his audience in Hos. 10:13a–b that, in fact, in the time of our prophet (probably during the reign of Menahem son of Gadi; see my Introduction) the people planted not virtue but wickedness. 10:12 nîrû lākem nîr ‘Break up your fallow ground’ The concrete meaning of this expression is to plough furrows for the planting of seed. In Hos. 10:4, as in Hos. 12:12, these furrows are called talmê śādāy. The expression nîrû lākem nîr appears only once more in the Bible, in Jer. 4:3, where, as here in Hos. 10:12, the expression is employed as a metaphor for turning over a new leaf and starting to behave properly both with respect to God and in interpersonal relations. Given the many instances where the book of Jeremiah seems to reflect the influence of the book of Hosea, it is likely that the reappearance in Jer. 4:4 of the metaphoric usage of the expression ‘break up your fallow ground’ is another instance of the influence of the book of Hosea upon the book of Jeremiah. 10:13 ḥāraštem-reša awlātâ qěṣartem ăkaltem pěrî-kāḥaš ‘You ploughed wickedness//iniquity you harvested//you have eaten the fruit of treachery’ Wolff notes that ‘the bicolon [is]…the most characteristic prosodic unit [in the book of Hosea]. But it is distinctive to join these quite frequently with tricola.’70 Significantly, in his list of nine instances of tricola in the book of Hosea, Wolff does not include Hos. 10:13a–c. M. J. Buss not only cites the unit at hand but also argues, ‘Altogether about fifty stanzaic tricola can be found in Hosea’. In consonance with Buss’s observation, ‘that, in Hosea at least…two of the members [of the tricolon] can be grouped together, with the third balancing the others’,71 I now analyze the first two members of Hos. 10:13a–c, and later I discuss what it is that the third member adds to the ideas expressed by the first two members. 70.  Wolff, Hosea, p. xxiv. 71.  M. J. Buss, The Prophetic Word of Hosea: A Morphological Study (BZAW, 111; Berlin: Töpelmann, 1969), p. 41. Buss’s observation is not valid with respect to Hos. 5:1; 10:11; or 12:11.

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The literal meaning of Hos. 10:13a–b is ‘You ploughed wickedness; iniquity you harvested’. This is to say that in the period of King Menahem son of Gadi what the people of Samaria had done was not to follow the advice of God through the prophet summarized in the metaphoric meaning of Hos. 10:12, namely, ‘Plant for yourselves in virtue; bring in a harvest of love’. On the contrary, says our prophet speaking in the name of God, you harvested the logical consequences of what you planted. For agricultural metaphors in a declaration concerning the logical consequences of moral turpitude, cf. the unkind words of Eliphaz to the suffering Job in Job 4:8: ‘As I have seen, those who plough evil (āwen) and plant wickedness (āmāl), harvest it’. In the latter verse, as in Hos. 10:13b, metaphoric harvesting of the logical but unhappy consequences of misbehaviour is expressed by the verb qāṣar.72 Likewise, Prov. 11:18 employs the sow–reap metaphor to express the idea that prosperity is the logical consequence of good behaviour: ‘A wicked person acquires [Heb. ōśeh; cf. the use of the verbal root śy to mean “acquire” in Gen. 12:5: “…and the persons (i.e., slaves) whom they had acquired in Haran”; and see Rashi’s commentary there] illusory wages [so NJPS] while one who sows virtue [Heb. ṣĕdāqâ] acquires a reliable income’. In the latter verse the second clause lacks a verb because by means of ellipsis the poet sage assumes that the reader supplies mentally the verb from the first clause as in Ps. 114:9: ‘who turned the rock into a pool of water//(“who turned” mentally supplied from the first clause) the flinty rock into a fountain’. In Prov. 11:18 the two nouns šeqer and ĕmet, whose common meanings in Modern Hebrew are ‘lie’ and ‘truth’, respectively, both have the typically biblical meanings of the two lexemes, namely, ‘unreliable’ and ‘reliable’ respectively. (Concerning šeqer ‘treachery, unreliability’ see Hos. 7:1; concerning ĕmet in the sense ‘reliability, faithfulness’ see Hos. 4:1 above and my discussion there.) The implication found in the possibly concrete usage of the sowing–harvesting logical consequences sequence in Hos. 10:12 that plentiful rain in the land of Israel (which depends on an uncertain seasonal rain from October to May) and prosperity are the just rewards of loyalty to God and virtuous behaviour (for Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah son of Amoz, loyalty to God is expressed primarily by means of virtuous behaviour in public and private endeavours), is spelled out also in Deut. 11:8–17 and Lev. 26:5. However, Hos. 10:12 interposes between references to hard work in the field and/ or virtuous behaviour ‘seeking Yhwh’. I suggested above that the latter 72.  Cf. also Prov. 22:8a: zōrēa awlâ yiqṣor-āwen ‘one who plants iniquity will harvest evil’. Comparison of Hos. 10:13a–b with Job 4:8 and Prov. 22:8 strengthens the argument of Wolff, Hosea, p. xxiv, that Hosea has been influenced by Wisdom.

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expression probably calls for prayer. If so, our prophet adumbrates the central idea of Tractate Ta‘anit (which deals primarily with responses by supplication and self-affliction to the failure of the seasonal rain to arrive on time in the land of Israel) of the Mishnah, and its ancient commentaries, in the Tosefta and the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, namely, that even in the utopia imagined by the Mishnah, in which society is made up of paragons of virtue, who are well-versed in the Torah, Written and Oral, of Moses our Rabbi, virtue and hard work must be supplemented by prayer and other more radical forms of supplication in order for the divine reward of virtue to be delivered. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the author of the book of Job has deliberately placed only in the mouth of Eliphaz, who ultimately is made to apologize to Job for his rudeness (Job 42:7–9), the simplistic formulation of the sowing–harvesting metaphor. In the mouth of Eliphaz, the formulation reflects deductions from a most limited life experience, or, possibly, from a cursory reading of Hos. 10:12–13, that virtue is inevitably rewarded and that evil is inevitably punished. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the other references to such an idea in the biblical corpus of Wisdom Books (Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes [in the latter the idea does not even appear; in fact it is contradicted in Qoh. 9:1–6]) are minimal. I have, as seen above, managed to find only two passages in the book of Proverbs that reiterate such an idea using the sowing–harvesting metaphor. In Hos. 10:12–13 the prophet repeats twice, once using positive metaphors in v. 12 and a second time using negative metaphors in v. 13, the idea that national prosperity is the consequence of hard work and virtuous behaviour while calamity and disaster are the logical consequences of vice. As we have seen, v. 12, as suggested already by Ibn Ezra, can well have referred to the diligent work of farmers being rewarded by the divine gift of a plentiful and timely seasonal rain guaranteeing an abundant harvest. However, v. 13, in which the direct objects of the verbs meaning ‘plough’ and ‘harvest’ are the nearly synonymous ‘wickedness’ and ‘iniquity’, suggests that, with all due respect to Ibn Ezra, the prophet intended that both of the two adjacent verses, 12 and 13, convey the message that virtuous behaviour (more than diligent work) is rewarded while the opposite of virtuous behaviour, namely, vice, is punished. Significantly, neither in his Introduction, nor in his commentary on Hos. 10:13, does Wolff suggest a sapiental background to Hos. 10:13.73 What makes Hos. 10:13a–b especially powerful is the utilization in these two parallel clauses of a chiastic structure in which the first of the two clauses ends with a noun (reša) denoting the evil which Israel has ploughed, i.e., 73.  See Wolff, Hosea, p. xxiv and pp. 186–87, respectively.

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planted (cf. Job 4:8) while the second clause begins with a synonymous noun (awlātâ) denoting the evil which Israel harvests. Moreover, the two verbs, of which the synonymous nouns are direct objects, appear in chiastic order (a–b//b–a; i.e., verb–direct object meaning wickedness// direct object meaning iniquity–verb) at the beginning and end, respectively, of the two clauses 10:13a, 10:13b. The chiastic structure seems to have been meant to convey to the discerning people among the prophet’s target audience that indeed misbehaviour and punishment are virtually synonymous. Lest the point be lost on his audience, that the dire straits in which the people find themselves constitute logical consequences, the prophet continues in Hos. 10:13c, which functions in the poetic structure to complete the tricolon: ăkaltem pěrî-kāḥaš ‘You have eaten the fruit of treachery’ In other words, the prophet declares, you planted evil, you reaped evil, and thus you ate evil for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Hosea 10:13a–c appears to reinforce, by the use of assonance, the idea that misbehaviour and punishment are bound together in a relationship of logical consequences. The assonance here consists of the repetition of the pronominal suffix tem in each of the three clauses, the appearance of the consonant r four times in the three clauses, the appearance of the consonant š three times, and the appearance of the consonant ḥ at the beginning and the end of 10:13a–c.74 Moreover, the prophet, speaking in the name of God, in Hos. 10:13d–e tells the people just how this dire state of affairs came about: kî-bāṭaḥtā bědarkěkā běrob gibbōrêkā ‘For you relied upon your ways//upon your many warriors’ Obviously ‘your ways’//‘your many warriors’ constitutes a rather strange pair of nouns in parallelism. Not surprisingly, Rahlfs’s edition of LXX renders the latter two sections of Hos. 10:13 in a different way: ὅτι ἤλπισας ἐν τοῖς ἃρμασίν σου, ἐν πλήθει δυνάνεώς σου, which means ‘You relied upon your chariots, upon the multitude of your warriors’. Similarly, Ziegler’s edition of LXX. Rahlfs and Ziegler rely upon Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Marchalianus of LXX. As suggested by BHS, this Old Greek rendering suggests that the Hebrew text it translated here contained the expression běrikběkā ‘by means of your chariotry’ where MT now reads bědarkěkā ‘on/in/according to your ways’. The change of an original běrikběkā ‘by means of your chariotry’, to which some manuscripts of LXX witness, to the corrupt form bědarkěkā ‘on/in/ 74.  Kaatz, ‘Wortspiel, Assonanz und Notarikon’, p. 436, cites only ḥăraštem-reša.

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according to your ways’ can easily be accounted for by the common interchange and confusion in all stages of Hebrew writing between the letters d and r. In the present instance an original r was first miscopied twice (dittography) and then by means of hypercorrection altered to bdrkk. Likewise, the original b at the end of the Hebrew word for ‘chariot(s)’ in the singular, plural, and collective, before the pronominal suffix was miscopied as the very similar k; hence the anomalous ‘upon your ways’ followed by ‘the multitude of your warriors’, who belong more with chariots than with ‘ways’, be they good or bad ways. Moreover, as noted by Macintosh,75 the LXX reading found, inter alia, in Rahlfs’s edition has been adopted by numerous modern commentators, including Wellhausen, Marti, Wolff, Borbone, and NEB.76 On the other hand, the reading of the standard Hebrew text is supported by the Vulgate, Targum Jonathan, and the Peshitta.77 If the LXX reading, which, as I have noted, is preferred by numerous modern scholars, does, in fact, reflect the original intent of our prophet, it may well be that what we have in Hos. 10:13b is the earliest expression in classical Israelite prophecy that war is not the means by which states should achieve their goals. (See also Hos. 14:4.) It should be noted, however, that Ms. Vaticanus of LXX reads instead of ἐν τοῖς ἃρμασίν σου rather ἐν τοῖς ἁμαρτήμασίν σου, which means ‘in your sinful deeds’. Macintosh, following Rudolph, regards the latter reading as resulting from an ancient attempt to harmonize the Old Greek with the standard Hebrew text.78 10:14 wĕqām šāôn bĕammekā wĕkol-mibṣārêkā yuššad kĕšōd Šalman Bêt Arbēl bĕyôm milḥāmâ ēm al-bānîm ruṭṭāšâ ‘And there shall occur a disaster with respect to your people, and all your fortresses will be plundered as plundered was Shalman(eser III) at Beth-arbel on the day of battle when mother and children were smashed to death’ Typically Hosean, this verse is especially rich in rhetorical devices, historical allusions, and vivid imagery derived from acquaintance with atrocities committed in war time against civilian populations. NJPS renders as follows: 75.  Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 425, 427. 76.  So already before any of those authorities, Graetz, Emendationes, p. 14. 77.  For a detailed explanation as to how the original reading was miscopied in stages, see Ehrlich, Mikrâ ki-Pheschutô, vol. 3, p. 383. 78.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 427, following Rudolph, Hosea, p. 205.

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‘But the din of war shall arise in your own people, And all your fortresses shall be ravaged As Beth-arbel was ravaged by Shalman On a day of battle, When mothers and babes were dashed to death together’.

The latter rendering fails to reduplicate the rhetorical device of concatenation. In this instance the concatenation consists of the repetition of the same word or root, specifically šdd, at the end of the second line of the verse (‘will be plundered’) and again at the beginning of the third line of the verse (‘as plundered’). In addition, my rendering is informed by Tammuz’s most plausible explanation of both the grammar of the simile kĕšōd and the historical allusion to the defeat of King Shalmaneser III of Assyria (858–824 BCE) by his son Aššur-daᵓᵓin-apla at Arbela in 826 BCE. (See below for the details.) wĕqām ‘And there shall occur’ The verbal form wĕqām ‘But/And it shall arise/occur/happen’ is a third person singular perfect consecutive qal form of the verbal root qwm, whose primary meaning is ‘arise’. One would expect instead of wqm, the form wqm, as in Exod. 33:10; Lev. 25:30; 27:19; Num. 24:17; Deut. 19:11; 31:16; Isa. 31:2; and Prov. 24:16 (in the latter case alone the conversive waw is vocalized with qameṣ rather than with shewa). The additional aleph to mark the long vowel is common in the Hebrew of the Qumran scrolls, Late Aramaic, and Arabic, and is relatively rare in Biblical Hebrew.79 Other examples in the standard text of the Hebrew Bible, commonly cited by commentators and grammars, where an aleph is used to mark a long vowel include the form ēpô meaning ‘then’ for more common ēpô in ten places in the standard text of the Hebrew Bible including Hos. 13:10, q.v.; the strange hehālĕkû in Josh. 10:24 where we would expect ăšēr hālĕkû ‘who went’;80 and nāqî ‘clean, innocent’ in Joel 4:19 and Jon. 1:14 for nāqî. However, a much closer parallel to the case at hand is the form rāš, a singular qal participle denoting ‘poor man’ from the root rwš ‘to be poor’ attested in 2 Sam. 12:1, 4 alongside of the more common form rāš without the aleph in 2 Sam. 12:3. Another example of the added aleph to mark the long vowel in a verb form of a trilateral root whose middle 79.  See the discussion in GKC #9b, #23b, and #24. 80.  See S. Aḥituv, Joshua: Introduction and Commentary (Tel Aviv: Am Oved/ Jerusalem: Magnes, 1995), p. 169 (in Hebrew).

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radical is waw is the prepositional phrase ballāṭ ‘with stealth’, in which the element lāṭ ‘stealth’ is, as already noted by R. Judah Hayyuj, a qal participle derived from a trilateral root with medial waw, like qām in Hos. 10:14. If so, the root of the verbal element in the expression ballāṭ is lwṭ.81 It has been suggested also that the word wĕrōš at the head of the second clause of Prov. 8:26 is a scribal error (specifically initial r instead of the original and graphically similar in all stages of the Hebrew script d) and that the originally intended form wĕdāš was meant to be conjunctive waw followed by the third person singular qal perfect form of the root dwš ‘grind up’ (the same root used to mean ‘thresh’ in Hos. 10:11). Note that the third person perfect singular and the participle of medial waw roots in the qal are identical. Torczyner explains, ‘The ancients believed that the Creator trampled upon the dust of the earth and walked upon the body of the [personified and deified—Gruber’s clarification] Sea. The result was the flattened surface of both sea and land.’82 The frequently attested noun šāôn ‘disaster’ is derived from the verbal root šy ‘be laid waste’ attested, inter alia, in Isa. 6:11: ‘…until towns are laid waste without inhabitants and houses without people, and the ground is laid waste in desolation’. The noun used here is attested altogether seventeen times in Hebrew Scripture. The cognate and synonymous šōâ, also spelled šwh with the use of the waw to indicate long o, is attested altogether eleven times not counting one where the noun appears in the construct singular (Prov. 3:25) and one where the noun appears in the plural with a third person plural pronominal suffix (Ps. 35:17). In recent times, the term came to be the standard term in Modern Hebrew (corresponding functionally to the use of the term holocaust in English) for the organized program of the Nazi regime to annihilate the Jewish people in Europe and North Africa during the Second World War. The term šōâ, may have been applied to the Nazi program as early as 1934 in a Hebrew translation of a speech in German by Chaim Weitzman, in which the latter employed the term Katastrophe, i.e., catastrophe, which, in fact, is the sense of the Biblical Hebrew terms considered here. The Modern Hebrew term ha-shoah with the definite article to refer to the Nazi program to exterminate the Jewish people was institutionalized April 12, 1951 when the Israeli parliament or Knesset instituted ‘holocaust memorial day’, employing the term yom ha-shoah for the date on the Hebrew calendar, 27 Nissan, which falls eight days before Israel Independence Day. The 81.  See Mandelkern, Concordantiae, p. 625b. 82.  See N. H. Torczyner, The Proverbs of Solomon (Tel Aviv: Yavneh, 1947), p. 102 (in Hebrew).

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original proposal, which was to observe the memorial day on the Hebrew date corresponding to the beginning of the Warsaw Gehtto uprising (14 Nissan corresponding to 19 April 1943) proved impractical as 14 Nisan is the Eve of Passover, a day of celebration when Jewish tradition prohibits any kind of mourning. yuššad ‘it will be plundered’ Since the subject of this verb is ‘all of your fortresses’, BHS and many nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators, including Macintosh,83 assume that the singular form of the verb attested in the standard Hebrew text is an error for an original plural. Indeed, TJ and the Peshitta employ plural verbs at this point in the text. Andersen and Freedman prefer to believe that the subject of the singular verb is the indefinite pronoun kol ‘all’.84 Similarly, Kimchi attempts to account for the apparent lack of agreement in number between the plural noun ‘your fortresses’ and the singular verb ‘it will be destroyed’ as follows: ‘As for all your fortresses on which you rely, each one of them will be destroyed [Heb. ywšd] by the destroyer who will come against you’. In Arabic it is standard procedure to employ a singular verb with a plural subject. It is quite possible that the very same usage is far more common in Biblical Hebrew than is commonly recognized and that this is the usage reflected here in Hos. 10:14. In addition, the prophet’s use of the poetic device called concatenation, in which the same or an etymologically related lexeme is employed at the end of one clause, in this case Hos. 10:14b, and again at the beginning of the following clause, in this case Hos. 10:14c, may have led the prophetic author to juxtapose ywšd–kšd rather than ywšdw–kšd. In the version offered by the standard Hebrew text we have the same number of syllables in each of the two lexemes that create the concatenation rather than three syllables followed by two syllables in the emended text proposed by BHS. In addition, it should be noted that the verb yuššad is pointed in MT as a pual. However, the tendency of recent scholarship is to recognize in this form and in many others where the root is not attested in the piel, examples of the passive of the qal. Other famous examples of this phenomenon include luqāḥâ ‘was taken’ in Gen. 2:23; ukāl ‘consumed’ (what did not happen to the burning bush) in Exod. 3:2; and yûlad ‘will be born’ in Isa. 9:5. It should also be noted that the idea that a singular verb or expression might be employed in Biblical Hebrew where one might expect a plural in order to suggest that the prophet speaks to 83.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 430. 84.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 570.

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each and every individual within a group seems to be reflected also in the expression yiśĕû napšô ‘they each desire’ in Hos. 4:8 rather than the expected yiśĕû napšām ‘they desire’; see the extensive discussion at Hos. 4:8 above. kĕšōd Šalman Bêt Arbēl bĕyôm milḥāmâ ‘As plundered was Shalman(eser III) at Beth-arbel on the day of battle’ NJPS renders this section of Hos. 10:14 as follows: ‘As Beth-arbel was ravaged by Shalman. On a day of battle….’ NJPS margin at Hos. 10:14 remarks as follows: ‘Perhaps identical with the Shallum of 2 Kings 15:10ff; cf. the atrocities of Shallum’s rival, ibid., v. 16’. The Shallum referred to there is King Shallum son of Jabesh of Israel who assassinated King Zechariah son of Jeroboam II of Israel, who had succeeded to the throne upon the natural death of Jeroboam II. It is reported there in 2 Kgs 15 that when Zechariah had reigned for only six months, Shallum assassinated him and ruled for only one month, at the end of which he, in turn, was assassinated by Menahem son of Gadi, who ruled over Israel for a decade from 747 to 737 BCE. In fact, there is nothing in 2 Kgs 15 to connect Shallum with either a place called Beth-arbel or with any other atrocities other than his ill-fated attempt to usurp the throne of King Zechariah. For possible references to the unhappy events of 2 Kgs 15:8–14 in Hos. 7:3–7 and Hos. 8:4, see my commentary at those passages, above. M. C. Astour argues that the proper name Shalman in this passage is a typically Assyrian hypocoristcon and that this is a shortened form of the Assyrian royal name Shalmaneser and that here reference is made to an invasion of Israel by King Shalmaneser III in 841 BCE.85 Not surprisingly, the Shalman of Hos. 10:14 has been variously identified with the Midianite king Zalmunna killed by Gideon according to Judg. 8:21 (so Jerome), the Moabite King Salamanu who sent tribute to King Tiglath-pileser III (745–727 BCE), and King Shalmaneser V of Assyria who besieged Samaria from 724 to 722 BCE (see inter alia, Harper, Macintosh, and Wolff for discussion of these various suggestions). In Hos. 10:5–6 our prophet already referred to a future invasion of Israel by Assyrian forces (vv. 5–6) as the just reward for a nation that has relied upon a king of Assyria (Tiglath-pileser III) to defend herself from Judah; see also Hos. 8:9–10. It is all the more likely that to bring home the point that help should not be sought from Assyria, Hosea would 85.  M. C. Astour, ‘841 B.C.: The First Assyrian Invasion of Israel’, JAOS 91 (1971), pp. 383–89 (386).

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remind his audience of a disaster that had, in the past, been perpetrated against Israel by an Assyrian king. Interestingly, Ehrlich argues that we today (at the beginning of the twentieth century CE) have no means of knowing what was the past event here referred to by Hosea.86 Ibn Ezra, on the contrary, already sensed that Shalman must be a short form of the Assyrian royal name Shalmaneser. Moreover, as noted by Simon in his notes to his critical edition of Ibn Ezra’s commentary on Hosea, Ibn Ezra was anticipated by Saadia Gaon, Yefet Ben-Eli, Alfasi, and Ibn Janah. By pinpointing the date of the fall of Beth-Arbel to the armies of Shalmaneser III, Astour would seem not only to have elucidated Hos. 10:14 but also to have vindicated the wisdom of the medieval commentators who preceded and inspired Ibn Ezra. However, there are several fatal flaws in Astour’s brilliant attempt to identify the place and person referred to in Hos. 10:14c–d. Fortunately, my esteemed colleague, Assyriologist and historian, O. Tammuz, in a recent article, has offered a series of arguments that lead to an interpretation of Hos. 10:14c–d that accords best with both Biblical Hebrew grammar and syntax and the most up-to-date knowledge of events, persons, and placenames that could reasonably be reflected in the simile recorded in Hos. 10:14c–d.87 First and foremost, Tammuz explains, ‘If Shalman is understood as the victim of the plundering of Beth Arbel rather than its perpetrator, then the perpetrator must have been his foe’. In fact, the interpretation of the lexeme šōd ‘destruction’ as passive in meaning is reflected also in the commentary by Joseph Qara of Troyes (c. 1065–c. 1135 CE) where we read as follows: ‘LIKE THE DESTRUCTION which a person experiences when one is dwelling securely and in peace and is not wary of the armies which are advancing against one’.88 Interpretation of the lexeme šōd as passive in meaning is proposed by Andersen and Freedman.89 They argue as follows: ‘A passive meaning for the verb gains support from the passive verb…[adjacent to it]’. Support for the interpretation of the lexeme šōd as passive in meaning is found also in the Greek translation by Symmachus (late second century CE) καθὼς ἠφθανίσθη σαλμαν εν τω οικω του αρβεηλ ‘as Salman was destroyed in the city of Arbel’.90 Moreover, 86.  Ehrlich, Mikrâ ki-Pheschutô, 3:383. 87.  O. Tammuz, ‘Hosea 10:13b–14b’, BN 170 (2016), pp. 35–49. 88.  See Zorell, Lexicon, p. 822. 89.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 570. 90.  I have taken the complete text of this clause from Symmachus’s translation of Hosea from J. Ziegler, ed., Duodecim prophetae (Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum

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the passive sense of Heb. šōd in the present context is also reflected in TJ, which probably inspired the more lucid Joseph Qara. TJ writes as follows: kĕbîzat šalmā bĕkāmnā bĕyômā diqrābā ‘like the destruction of tranquillity by means of an ambush on the day of battle’. Thus, while the majority of modern commentators treat Shalman as the perpetrator of the destruction referred to in Hos. 10:14, there is a very strong exegetical tradition which understands Shalman as the victim rather than the perpetrator of the destruction referred to in the simile in Hos. 10:14. Typical of the treatment of Shalman as the perpetrator is KJV, which renders Hos. 10:14c–d as follows: ‘as Shalman spoiled Beth-arbel in the day of battle’. Tammuz, in the previously cited study, goes on to explain, ‘The prime candidate to be identified with Shalman in this case as well [i.e., if he is the victim rather than the perpetrator] is Shalmaneser III’. Tammuz then points out that in the thirty-third regnal year of Shalmaneser III, i.e., 826 BCE, ‘a rebellion broke out against him. The rebellion lasted for seven years and was finally put down by Shalmaneser III’s successor Shamsi-Adad V’.91 Finally, Tammuz, writes as follows: ‘The leader of the rebellion was Aššur-daᵓᵓin-apla one of the sons of Shalmaneser III. He took control of twenty seven cities in Assyria including Arba’il (RIMA 3 A.O.103.1 col. i lines 39–53a). The Assyrian army under the command of Aššur-daᵓᵓin-apla may have plundered the temple of Ishtar of Arbela.’ Concerning the latter conjecture, Tammuz writes early on in his aforementioned study as follows: ‘Of the three kings who bore the name Shalmaneser, Shalmaneser III is the only one who is known to have visited Arba’il and to have done so more than once’.92 However, relying, Graecum Auctoritate Academiae Scientiarum Gottigensis editum, 13: Duodecim prophetae; 3rd ed.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), p. 171 n. 14; cf. Macintosh, Hosea, p. 430; similarly, Vulgate: sicut vastatus est Salman a domo ejus qui judicavit Baal in die proelii, i.e., ‘as Salman was destroyed by the house of him that judged Baal in the day of battle’. Vulgate reflects a tradition according to which in place of MT’s ‘House of Arbel’ the reading was ‘House of Jerubbaal’, with the historical allusion to ‘Salmana’, the king of Midian mentioned in Judg. 8:5, 10, 12, and 15 (in LXX A), who was defeated by Gideon (Ierobaal); cf. Glenny, Hosea, p. 150. In fact, the reading ἐκ τοῦ οἴκου ΙεροΒααλ, meaning ‘by means of/through the agency of the house of Jerubbaal’, is found in the Ziegler (p. 171) and Rahlfs’s editions (p. 499), both of which eclectic texts here follow Codex Alexandrinus (fifth century CE) and Codex Marchalianus (sixth century CE). 91.  With Tammuz, see A. R. Millard, The Eponyms of the Assyrian Empire 910–612 BC (State Archives of Assyria Studies, 2; Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 1994). 92.  Tammuz, ‘Hosea 10:13b–14b’, p. 41.

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as do Andersen and Freedman, on the fact that the simile in Hos. 10:14 compares the lexeme šōd ‘destruction/plundering’ to a passive verb in the previous clause, Tammuz prefers to suggest that indeed Shalmaneser III was the victim rather than the perpetrator.93 Consequently, Tammuz understands the import of the simile in Hos. 10:14c–d as follows: ‘You (the king), who trust in the chariots and your many trained soldiers, a noise will arise among your people (i.e. army) and your fortresses will be plundered by your own army in the same way that Shalmaneser III was plundered by the Assyrian army in the temple of Ishtar of Arba’il’. Hosea 10:14c–d is treated as follows in LXX Codex Vaticanus: ὡς ἄρχων Σαλαμὰν ἐκ τοῦ οἴκου Ἰεροβοάμ, which Glenny94 translates ‘as the ruler Salaman disappeared from the house of Ieroboam’. This is to be accounted for first and foremost by the Greek translator’s or his Hebrew Vorlage’s having misconstrued the Hebrew lexeme šōd (written šd in the standard Hebrew text to this day) as the Hebrew lexeme śr (in unpointed Hebrew there is no distinction between the phonemes š and ś to this very day) because of the ubiquitous similarity and hence confusion of the letters r and d in virtually all stages of Hebrew writing. Secondly, this version of LXX appears to want to date the event in question to the time of our prophet, who is said to have prophesied during the reign of Jeroboam II (see Hos. 1:1). See, however, below for the reading Jerubbaal in other versions of LXX. ēm al-bānîm ruṭṭāšâ ‘When a mother and her children were smashed to death’ NJPS renders as follows: ‘When mothers and babes were dashed to death together’. One of the ideas shared by biblical law, biblical narrative, and biblical prophecy is the powerful notion that the most grievous kind of atrocity imaginable is for a mother and her children to witness each other’s death. Thus the Hebrew phrase ‘mother along with children’ with reference to being killed is found in law in Deut. 22:6–7: ‘If, along the road, you chance upon a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs and the mother sitting over the fledglings or on the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young. Let the mother go, and take only the young, in order that you may fare well and have a long life’ (rendering according to NJPS). The same notion that killing a parent and a child in

93.  Tammuz, ‘Hosea 10:13b–14b’, p. 45; Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 570. 94.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 57.

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each other’s presence is the ultimate form of barbarity is reflected also in Lev. 22:28: ‘As for a bull or a sheep, you shall not kill him and his child on the same day’. Our literal translation of the latter verse emphasizes the fact that from the biblical point of view it is not only women and their children who should be spared the ultimate act of cruelty of seeing each other killed but also males and their children as well. Also in 2 Kgs 25:7 it is reported that the Babylonians murdered the children of King Zedekiah of Judah in front of his eyes before blinding him.95 Precisely because the stereotyped phraseology of ‘mother along with her children’ expressed to the biblical mind the ultimate act of cruelty, Jacob was able to pray in Gen. 32:12, ‘Please deliver me from my brother, from Esau, because I am afraid of him lest he come and strike me down “mother together with children” ’. NJPS renders the final phrase ‘mothers and children alike’, as though the reference were to the killing of Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, Zilpah, and their respective children without distinction between the relative status of mothers vis-à-vis children. However, I would suggest that the expression ‘kill me/strike me down mother together with children’ means to commit the ultimate atrocity of having children witness the death of their parents while parents witness the death of their children while the phraseology ‘mother together with children’ may well derive from the legal traditions of Israel. In those traditions the questionable act of deriving sustenance from the bloody killing of members of the animal kingdom is fenced about with a regulation designed to inculcate even in carnivorous people a modicum of respect for the suffering of others, including the animals whose carcasses are served up on our tables. Even a cursory reading of the annals of the kings of Assyria which describe the delight of the Assyrian kings and their scribes in the atrocities committed by the Assyrian armies against the populations of the cities and villages they conquered will reveal that our prophet’s use of the expression ‘mothers together with their children’ sounds like a mere misdemeanour compared with the delight of the Assyrian kings in describing their treatment of conquered cities. In those annals, the kings describe with relish how the people of conquered states were impaled on stakes in order to terrorize the lucky members of the conquered people who only had to observe these atrocities. The prophet’s memory of events of slightly more than a century before the reign of Menahem son of Gadi, whether derived from what he heard by word of mouth (like the report in Jer. 26:17–19 to the effect that Micah of Moresheth had upon King Hezekiah a century 95.  For the comparison of this text with Hos. 10:14, see Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 571.

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before the reign of King Jehoiakim, the reigning king at the time of the events reported in Jer. 26) from old people with long memories, or from schooling, is invoked here to bring home the point that the Assyrians are not to be thought of as Israel’s allies in her conflict with Judah to the south. When and if the power of the Assyrians should be released, God forbid, to punish the Kingdom of Israel, for her disloyalty to God and her moral turpitude, the prophet warns us here, you will, God forbid, see the unleashing of atrocities, for the description of which the Hebrew language is inadequate. It must make do with the limited vocabulary of biblical law. The feminine singular passive participle ruṭṭāšâ ‘smashed/dashed’ refers to the smashing on rocks one by one of individual women and girls. Even in the twenty-first century, notwithstanding the frequent screening in the public media of documentaries concerning atrocities committed around the world against civilian populations, the empathy/revulsion of most people is best invoked by the tragic accounts of individual victims of atrocities rather than by the accounts of the numbers of the victims that are no more comprehensible than the number of grains of sand upon a beach. Here again as in the case of the verb yuššad ‘he will be destroyed’ in the previous verse, the pointing of the Masoretic text treats the verbal form as though it belonged to the pual conjugation although it is more likely that in its original biblical context the verbal form was meant to belong to the relatively rare qal passive. However, as we shall see, the verbal root rṭš is indeed employed in both the piel active and pual passive with respect to smashing people, especially infants, an atrocity designed deliberately to humiliate and disempower defeated populations. The four other passages in the Hebrew Bible that employ the verb in question, all with reference to smashing infants in the presence of their parents and other members of the civilian population, are the following: ‘You [King Hazael of Aram] will set their [the Israelites’] fortresses on fire, you will kill their young men by the sword, and you will dash their infants in pieces, and you will rip open their pregnant women’ (2 Kgs 8:12); ‘Their infants shall be dashed to pieces in front of their eyes’ (Isa. 13:16); ‘Their bows will smash young people, and they will show no pity to the fruit of the womb, and their eyes will not spare children’ (Isa. 13:18); ‘Her infants, also, were dashed in pieces at every street corner’ (Nah. 3:10). The twin atrocities of dashing in pieces infants and ripping open pregnant women are juxtaposed, employing precisely the same vocabulary as in 2 Kgs 8:12 again in Hos. 14:1. In the latter verse, q.v., these atrocities are said to be divine punishment for the moral turpitude of Samaria, again apparently during the reign of Menahem son of Gadi. The smashing of human infants is mentioned again as a punishment meant to terrify people in Ps. 137:9,

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where, however, the Judean psalmist in exile in Babylon (after being marched across the desert and seeing most of his fellow Judeans die of thirst and hunger and exhaustion on the way and then asked to perform for his captors the quaint songs of Zion for an audience of cultured Babylonians) wishes that cruel fate for his conquerors.96 10:15 kākâ āśâ lākem Bêt-El mippĕnê rāat rāatĕkem ‘This is what Bethel has done to you because of your unmitigated wickedness’ NJPS margin would prefer to emend this text to say the following: kākâ eĕśeh lākem Bêt-Yiśrāēl mippĕnê rāat rāatĕkem ‘This will I do to you, O House of Israel, for your horrible wickedness’.

However, in this particular instance the standard Hebrew text interposes between Israel’s horrible wickedness and the anticipated cruel fate of Israel at the hand of the Assyrians if Israel does not reform its behaviour just in time to avoid that horrible fate, not divine intervention but rather logical consequences. In the description of these logical consequences our prophet abandons the use of the dysphemisms Beth-aven ‘House of Wickedness’ and ‘Shrines of Wickedness’ employed in Hos. 10:5, 8, choosing instead to employ the correct name of the place alluded to (according to the medieval Hebrew exegetes Rashi and Ibn Ezra, et al.), namely, the ironic in the present context, Bethel, which means literally ‘House/Temple of God’. Thus the unamended Hebrew text of Hos. 10:15a–b should be rendered, ‘This is what Bethel has done to you because of your unmitigated wickedness’. rāat rāatĕkem ‘Your unmitigated wickedness’ If we strip away all the elaborate rhetoric of Hos. 10, especially the elaborate description of the dire fate that awaits anyone who gets involved in an entangling alliance with Assyria, the terrorist nation par excellence 96.  A. Brenner, eloquently crosses the line from apologetics to ethical criticism in questioning the appearance of such cruel sentiments in Ps. 137 in ‘ “On the rivers of Babylon” (Psalm 137), or between Victim and Perpetrator’, in Sanctified Aggression: Legacies of Biblical and Post Biblical Vocabularies of Violence (ed. Jonneke Bekkenkamp and Yvonne Sherwood; London: T&T Clark International, 2003), pp. 76–91.

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of the ancient Middle East, the principal target of Hosea’s critique of the Northern Kingdom is the simple lack of justice and honesty in the courts of law upon which ordinary people depend as they attempt to make a living, raise their children, and pay their taxes (see Hos. 10:4). Meanwhile, the prophet has informed us that the king of Israel engages in elaborate plans to forge an alliance with Assyria in the face of a minor threat from the Southern Kingdom, Judah (Hos. 10:6, q.v; and see also Hos. 5:13 and my extensive discussion there). Recalling with Heschel that to the mind of an Israelite prophet speaking in the name of God in the eighth century BCE, economic injustice is not a misdemeanour but a disaster (see above in my commentary at Hos. 6:9), we can understand why Hosea refers to the problem as ‘unmitigated evil’ expressed as ‘evil of evil’, employing the construct to convey the superlative as in the expression qdš qdšm, literally ‘holy of holies’ to designate the unmitigated holiness of the tabernacle’s and the temple’s inner sanctum (e.g., Exod. 26:34; 1 Kgs 6:16; 7:50 and many many more). Similarly, in ancient Rabbinic exegesis of Song of Songs the expression ‘Song of Songs’ is taken to mean ‘the best of all possible poems’ rather than a book that constitutes an anthology of songs from different places and periods.97 baššaḥar nidmōh nidmâ melek Yiśrāēl ‘At dawn the Israelite monarchy will certainly perish’ The interpretation of Heb. melek to mean ‘monarchy’ rather than ‘king’ reflects Ginsberg’s contention that in both Hos. 10:7 and 10:15 the Hebrew noun mlk has the meaning ‘monarchy, kingdom’.98 In my commentary above at Hos. 10:7 I noted that in that earlier verse the noun is so understood already in LXX. Moreover, there in my commentary I noted, following Ginsberg, that in cognate languages the noun in question frequently has the meaning ‘monarchy, kingdom, kingship’ in addition to ‘king’.99 While in Hos. 10:7 LXX’s reading βασιλέα supports the interpretation of the Hebrew noun melek in the meaning ‘kingship, monarchy’, in LXX here at Hos. 10:15 the reading βασιλευς ‘king’ supports the interpretation of the Hebrew noun melek in the meaning ‘king’, referring to a specific king, probably Menahem son of Gadi, the last reigning king of Israel, with whom our prophet was acquainted. 97.  See Rashi’s Commentary at Song 1:1. 98.  H. L. Ginsberg, ‘Some Notes on the Minor Prophets’, EI 3 (1954), pp. 83–84 (83). 99.  Ginsberg, ‘Some Notes on the Minor Prophets’, p. 83.

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For the verbal root dmy meaning ‘kill, perish’, depending on whether the verb appears in an active or a passive conjugation, see above at Hos. 4:5, 6; 10:7. In Hos. 4:5, as I have noted above in the commentary, the verb in the first person singular perfect conversive in the qal certainly means ‘I will execute, kill’. In Hos. 4:6 the same verb in the niphal is employed as a prophetic perfect meaning ‘My people is going to die because of a lack of knowledge’. The use of the verb dmy in the niphal with the nuance perish is attested also in Isa. 6:5 (‘I am about to perish’); 15:1 (‘For in the night Ar was sacked//Moab was destroyed [Heb. nidmâ]; for in the night Kir was sacked//Moab was destroyed [Heb. nidmâ]’; Jer. 47:5 (‘Ashkelon was destroyed’); Obad. 5 (‘how you are destroyed’); Zeph. 1:11 (‘The entire merchant class is about to perish’). Here in Hos. 10:15 the prophet makes more emphatic the prophetic perfect by preceding the finite verb in the niphal, ‘he (the king or the monarchy) is about to perish’, with the niphal infinitive just as frequently a finite verb in the qal perfect or imperfect is preceded by a qal infinitive absolute for the sake of emphasis (e.g., ‘you shall surely know’ in Gen. 15:13; ‘I certainly said’ in Judg. 15:2; 1 Sam. 2:30; ‘if you truly hearken’ in Deut. 11:13).

C h a p t er 11

The chapter division between Hos. 10:15 and Hos. 11:1 established by Stephen Langton in the thirteenth century CE corresponds to no division in ancient and medieval divisions in the book of Hosea. Moreover, in LXX Codex Vaticanus, which recognizes eleven major divisions in the book of Hosea, division 9 corresponds to Hos. 10:1–11:4 in modern editions of the Bible in Hebrew and English while division 10 corresponds to Hos. 11:5−14:1 in modern editions of the Bible in Hebrew. Nevertheless, Wolff is able to remark, ‘Chapter 11 is a homogeneous unit, separate from the previous and following context. Not a single catchword connects it with 10:9–15; the direct address to Israel predominating there is almost lacking here. The new unit begins with a completely novel and much more intensive historical retrospect. It is equally evident that a new passage begins in 12:1, where the subject is named anew and the theme clearly changes.’1 Brown goes so far as to say, ‘With the possible exception of ii. 2–23, this [Hos. 11] is the finest and most moving passage in the whole book’.2 The central theme of Hos. 11 is God’s fatherly devotion to his child Israel.3 Stressing that God’s special relationship with the people of Israel began when Israel was enslaved in Egypt (v. 1), God expresses his fervent hope that Israel’s disloyalty will not be punished by Israel’s being exiled to Egypt (v. 5) and concludes with the hope that if indeed Israel is to be exiled to Egypt, God will restore Israel to their homes in the Land of Israel. 1.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 193. 2.  Brown, Hosea, p. 97. 3.  J. P. Kakkanattu, God’s Enduring Love in the Book of Hosea (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), p. 127, argues that ‘The portrayal of Yahweh’s relationship with Israel by means of parent–child metaphor is rather rare in the Old Testament’. Indeed, she finds this metaphor outside of Hos. 11 only in the following texts: Exod. 4:22; Deut. 32:6; Jer. 3:19; 31:9; Isa. 45:9–11; 64:8. Moreover, in God’s Enduring Love, pp. 128–29, responding to the challenge of feminist critics, who would prefer to see in Hos. 11 the mother–child metaphor, which Kakkanattu regards as philologically a far-fetched interpretation, she prefers ‘to regard Hos 11 as bringing to the fore the parental love and care of Yahweh towards Israel’.

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11:1 kî naar Yiśrāēl wāōhăbēhû ‘When Israel was still a child, I fell in love with him’ Similarly NJPS, ‘I fell in love with Israel when he was still a child’. However, NJPS alters the order of the clauses without, it appears to me, any justification. ûmimmiṣrayim qārātî liběnî ‘And out of Egypt I called my son’ NJPS renders this verset as follows: ‘And I have called [him] My son ever since Egypt’. Of the 680 references to Egypt in Hebrew Scripture, thirteen are found in Hosea, and they are as follows: 2:17; 7:11, 16; 8:13; 9:3, 6; 11:1, 5, 11; 12:2, 10, 14; 13:4. The Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt is mentioned in Hos. 2:17; 11:1; 12:10, 14; 13:4. Egypt figures as a world power and plays a role in the foreign relations of the Israelite State in Samaria in the ninth century BCE in Hos. 7:11, 16; 12:2. A possible return to Egypt as a punishment for sin is mentioned in 8:13; 9:3, 6; 11:5. For the unique usage in Hos. 11:11, see below. The expression mimmiṣrayim, meaning ‘ever since Egypt’ referring to the Exodus from Egypt as a point in time in the past, is found in Hos. 11:1 and in Num. 14:19 in Moses’ prayer of supplication in which he asks God to forgive the people of Israel for having suggested that in view of the spies’ account of the land of Israel as a place inhabited by powerful giants, it would be better to choose a new leader instead of Moses and to return to Egypt. There Moses entreats, ‘Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of the people according to your great kindness, as you have forgiven this people ever since Egypt’. This entreaty is incorporated in the service for the Eve of the Jewish Day of Atonement, where, of course, it now refers to events understood to have taken place more than three thousand years ago.4 In the context of Hos. 11:2, ‘ever since Egypt’ was understood to refer to events that took place slightly more than five hundred years before Hos. 4–14’s eighth-century BCE audience. In the original context of Num. 11:19 the import of ‘ever since Egypt’ is considerably less dramatic than it sounds in a Jewish Day of Atonement Service, for according to Num. 10:11 the events recounted in Num. 10–14 took place at the beginning of the second year after the Exodus.

4.  See Silverman, High Holiday Prayer Book, p. 207.

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In addition to Hosea, references to the Exodus from Egypt are found in the writings of Northern prophets in Amos 2:10 and Mic. 7:15. NJPS’s interpretation of the clause qārātî liběnî as ellipsis for qārātî lô běnî ‘I called him My son’ follows Ehrlich5 and reflects TJ’s qěrêtî lěhôn běnîn ‘I called them sons’. Ehrlich holds that the Hebrew Vorlage of TJ read qārātî lô běnî and that MT reflects the end of a process in which one scribe omitted the waw of lô and then either he or a later scribe then joined the now lonely lamedh of the original lô to běnî and created the expression liběnî. Consequently, notwithstanding the claim of NJPS to be an English rendering ‘according to the traditional Hebrew text’, commonly called the Masoretic text, in the case at hand, it is NRSV’s ‘and out of Egypt I called my son’ rather than ‘I called him My son’ that literally translates the standard Hebrew text of Hos. 11:2. It is the very same understanding of 11:2, which reflects the version found in the standard Hebrew text, that is attested also in New Testament Matt. 2:1–15, which reports that when Jesus was born in Bethlehem and wise men from the east came and asked ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?’, King Herod determined to find this baby king and kill him. And the Gospel passage (according to NRSV) concludes in vv. 14–15 as follows: ‘Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son”.’ The Greek text of the quotation from Hos. 11:1 at the end of Matt. 2:15 reads as follows: Ἐξ Αἰγύπτου ἐκάλεσα τόν υἱόν μου, meaning, ‘From Egypt have I called my son’. The latter clause is a literal rendering of the now standard Hebrew text (obviously the term MT would be anachronistic in the context of Matthew). The parallel text in LXX of Hos. 11:1b reads as follows: καὶ ἐξ Αἰγυπτου μετεκάλεσα τὰ τέκνα αὐτοῦ, which Glenny renders as follows: ‘and out of Egypt I recalled his children’.6 The direct object in the latter text, ‘his sons’, reminds us, of course, of TJ’s use of the plural, quoted above. In addition, the switch to the plural anticipates v. 2 in which Israel is no longer a collective noun referring to an entire people but rather a group of individuals referred to as ‘they’.

5.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, p. 389. 6.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 57.

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11:2 qārěû lāhem kēn hālěkû mippěnêhem labběālîm yězabbēḥû wělappěsilîm yěqaṭṭērûn ‘They were called (to the service of Yhwh). In the very same measure (in which they had been summoned) they went away from me [following LXX; see above]. They sacrificed to the Baals, and they made offerings to idols’ Ignoring the division into clauses indicated by the Masoretic accents, NJPS treats the two words of v. 2a and the first word of v. 2b as a unit, qārěû lāhem kēn, and it renders this clause idiomatically, ‘Thus they were called’, assuming that here, as frequently, Biblical Hebrew employs an active verb where modern languages would make use of the passive. Similarly, LXX renders καθώς μετεκάλεσα αὐτοῦ, which Glenny renders as follows: ‘As I recalled him’.7 Thus NJPS agrees with LXX that the point of v. 2a is that indeed the people of Israel were called God’s children (cf. Deut. 14:1–3): ‘You are children of Yhwh your God. You shall not gash yourselves or shave the front of your heads because of the dead. For you are a people consecrated to Yhwh your God: Yhwh your God chose you from among all other peoples on earth to be his treasured people.’ Thus NJPS and LXX understand ‘they called’ to be an impersonal third person plural. Rashi, on the other hand, takes ‘the prophets’ as the subject of the verb ‘they called’, and he adds the following remark: ‘As much as the prophets called to them to teach them the path of goodness, in equal measure (Heb. kēn) they turned their back to flee from them [i.e., obedience to the words of the prophets]’. The latter clause in Rashi, ‘they turned their back to flee from them’, paraphrases MT’s hālěkû mippěnêhem, literally ‘they went away from them’. One may well compare the clause, wayyānusû mippěnêhem ‘they [the Moabites] fled from before them [the Israelites]’ in 2 Kgs 3:24: ‘When they came to the Israelite camp, Israel proceeded to attack Moab, and they [the Moabites] fled from before them [the Israelites]’ (my translation). Rashi supports his contention that the adverb kēn in v. 2a means ‘in equal measure’ by comparing Hos. 4:7, ‘As much as they multiplied, in equal measure they sinned against Me’; and (in precisely this order) Exod. 1:12: ‘And when they [the Egyptians] oppressed him [the Israelite slaves collectively], in equal measure did he [Israel] multiply and spread out’. Rashi’s suggestion that the subject of ‘they called’ is the prophets provides also an antecedent for the third person pronominal suffix in ‘away from them’. NJPS’s taking the verb ‘they called’ as an impersonal third person plural employed to express the passive as in contemporary 7.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 57.

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English ‘they say’, meaning ‘it is commonly said’, absolves one from having to find a subject. However, it leaves unanswered the question as to the identity of the antecedent of the personal pronominal suffix in the expression mippěnêhem ‘away from them’. NJPS attempts to solve this problem by translating ‘But they went their own way’. However, there is no basis whatsoever for rendering mippěnêhem ‘their own way’. No less ingenious than Rashi’s providing an antecedent for the pronominal suffix in the expression mippěnêhem is the widely accepted emendation of mippěnêhem to mippěnê hēm. This emendation assumes that the standard Hebrew text reflects an incorrect word division, for which there is ample evidence in the transmission of the Hebrew text of the Bible. Andersen and Freedman list some of the famous modern commentators, who adopted this emendation.8 The emended reading would constitute a nominal sentence meaning ‘they were away from me/my face’ and would seem to be supported by LXX’s ἐκ προσώπου μου. However, LXX does not supply a form of the verb ‘to be’, which would support the emendation, which creates a nominal sentence. On the contrary, in LXX the aforementioned adverbial phrase, ἐκ προσώπου μου, modifies the participle ἀπῴχοντο, which renders Heb. hālĕkû. Consequently, with all due respect to the erudition that produces the emendation mippěnê hēm, it would seem more prudent to emend to mippānāy ‘away from me’ and thus to accept LXX’s reading and treat MT as incomprehensible. (So already Kaufmann, HIR 6:117 n. 36.) Strangely enough, both Rashi and NJPS ignore the Masoretic accents, which reflect the inherent poetic structure of Hos. 11:2, which consists of four clauses as follows: qārěû lāhem kēn hālěkû mippěnêhem labběālîm yězabbēḥû wělappěsilîm yěqaṭṭērûn ‘They were called (to the service of Yhwh) In the very same measure (in which they had been summoned) They went away from me [following LXX; see above]. They sacrificed to the Baals, And they made offerings to idols’.

In Hos. 11:2a, like NJPS, I understand the Biblical Hebrew active construction, qārěû lāhem, meaning literally ‘they called to them’, as functionally equivalent to the English passive, ‘they were called/summoned’. (See 8.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 578.

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above.) One may compare also NJPS’s passive renderings of wayyiqrā (lit., ‘and he called/named’) ‘it was named’ in Num. 11:3, 34; 21:3; 32:41, 42; etc. However, I follow MT’s division of Hos. 11:2a–b into clauses. NJPS renders Hos. 11:2c–d as follows: ‘They sacrifice to Baalim And offer to carved images’.

A marginal note in NJPS reads, ‘Emendation yields “calves”; cf. 8:4–6; 13:2’. Here NJPS reflects the view of Kaufmann (HIR, 6:117) that worship of Baal is not an issue for the eighth-century BCE prophet of Hos. 4–14. Kaufmann treats Baalim here as a dysphemism for ‘images’. NJPS, reflecting the views of editor-in-chief H. L. Ginsberg, characteristically emends Baalim to ăgālim ‘calves’ and sees here as in Hos. 8:4–6 and 13:2 a reference to the reverencing of the golden calves of Dan, Bethel, and Samaria (on which see above at 8:4–6). I agree with Kaufmann and Ginsberg that the problem that confronted the prophet of Hos. 4–14 was indeed not the worship of Baal as reflected in the Elijah cycle of narratives in 1–2 Kings and in Hos. 1–3 but the reverencing of the calves. However, emending the biblical text to support the Kaufmann–Ginsberg–Gruber theory only undermines the theory insofar as emendation in support of a theory often suggests that one has re-written the Bible to make it prove what the Bible does not itself say. In fact, the book of Hosea supports the view that in Hos. 4–14 worship of Baal was a problem of the past (e.g., the period of the judges as portrayed in the book of Judges and the eras of Elijah and Hos. 1–3). Our prophet explains this in Hos. 13:1–2: ‘When Ephraim spoke piety, he was exalted in Israel. However, he incurred guilt through Baal, and so he died. And now they go on sinning. They have made themselves molten images, idols, by their skill, from their silver, wholly the work of craftsmen. Nevertheless, for these they appoint people to sacrifice; they are wont to kiss calves’ (similarly NJPS). This is to say that while in the past Israelites worshipped deities other than God, now they do something only slightly less reprehensible in that they venerate molten calves; see above at Hos. 8. In fact, the final clauses of Hos. 11:2 probably say the same thing if we recall that the prefixed form of the verb in Hebrew and in Ugaritic can represent past, present, and future tenses.9 Consequently, our prophet is able to express the very symmetry between past bad behaviour and present bad behaviour (the same idea that Kaufmann and Ginsberg 9.  See, inter alia, GKB, part 2, #7, pp. 29–36.

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already saw in Hos. 13:1–2) by employing two synonymous verbs both in the prefixed form. The meaning is as follows: ‘They used to sacrifice to Baals, and now they present burnt offerings to [calf-]images’. If both Ugaritic and Biblical Hebrew can employ prefixed (yqtl or so-called imperfect) and suffixed (qtl or so-called perfect) forms of the same verb as synonyms, whose tense is determined by the context,10 there is no reason to be surprised that one might also juxtapose the prefixed forms of two distinct verbs, one in past meaning and one in future meaning; see also my discussion of the verb tizneh in Hos. 1:2. labběālîm yězabbēḥû wělappěsilîm yěqaṭṭērûn ‘They sacrificed to the Baals [or is it calves?—see above], and they made offerings to idols’ With respect to the two verbs in synonymous parallelism, yězabbēḥû// yěqaṭṭērûn, we should compare Hos. 4:13a, where we find precisely the same pair of verbs in the precise synonymous parallelism: al-rāšê hehārîm yĕzabbēḥû//wĕal-haggĕbāōt yĕqaṭṭērû ‘On mountaintops they offer sacrifices//And on hills they make offerings’. The verb qiṭṭēr ‘to offer (sacrifice)’ (see DCH 7:243) refers in most cases to sacrifice in places (such as ‘high places’ in 1 Kgs 22:44; 2 Kgs 12:4; 14:4; 15:4, 35) of which the biblical writers do not approve or to objects of worship of which the biblical writers do not approve. The latter objects include the brazen serpent (2 Kgs 18:4), the queen of heaven (i.e., the Assyro-Babylonian goddess Ishtar = Sum. IN·AN·NA [the three elements mean ‘lady/princess–heaven–of’, or, as we are wont to say and the commonly emended text of Jer. 44:19 says, ‘the queen of heaven’]), ‘other gods’ (Jer. 44:5, 8, 15), and Baal (2 Kgs 23:5; Jer. 7:9; 11:13; 32:29). In the context of Amos 4:5, the imperative wěqaṭṭēr mēḥāmēṣ tôdâ ‘and offer a thanksgiving offering made of unleavened bread’ does not disparage a particular form of sacrificial worship of Yhwh but rather sacrificial worship of Yhwh in general as opposed to the higher divine worship that is constituted by the cultivation of private and public morality. In view of the abundance of instances in which the verb qiṭṭēr in the piel refers to engaging in worship of objects, which the biblical writers and the deity in whose name they speak and write disparage, either MT’s Baalim (so also LXX) or NJPS’s emendation ‘calves’ is equally appropriate in the present context. The verb form yěqaṭṭērûn ‘they offer (sacrifices)’ terminates in paragogic nun. Joüon and Muraoka explain that in the Hebrew Bible we find 350 imperfect second and third person plural verbs ending with paragogic 10.  See Held, ‘The YQTL–QTL [QTL–YQTL] Sequence’, pp. 281–90.

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nun.11 Moroever, they explain, ‘the presence of a form [terminating] with ûn can be due to the antiquity of a text, a deliberate archaism, or metre. But the usual reason seems to be a preference for a fuller and more emphatic or expressive form. This explains why one finds forms with ûn especially in pause….’ Indeed, the pausal form yězabbēḥû (with a full vowel in the accented penultimate syllable; the medial form would be yězabbĕḥû with the stress on the final syllable) marked with the Masoretic accent zaqep qaṭon at the end of Hos. 11:2c and the pausal form with paragogic nun at the end of the verse illustrate the respective uses of pausal forms without and with paragogic nun in the rhetoric of the Masoretic accents.12 The other two instances of third person plural masculine verbs in the imperfect terminating in paragogic nun in the book of Hosea are yēlēdûn in Hos. 9:16 and yiššāqûn in Hos. 13:2. The only other instance of a third person plural masculine verb with paragogic nun in the imperfect in the book of Hosea is reflected in the form yĕšaḥărunĕnî in Hos. 5:15. However, as I explain in my commentary there, the latter form belongs to the special category of twelve verb forms in Hebrew Scripture, in which paragogic nun intervenes between the plural suffix û and the pronominal accusative suffix. (See GKC, #60e.) There are no instances of second person plural verbs ending with paragogic nun in the book of Hosea. 11:3 wĕānōkî tirgaltî lĕEprayim qāḥām al-zĕrōōtāyw wĕlō yādĕû kî rĕpātîm ‘It was I who taught Ephraim how to walk taking him (Ephraim/Israel) in his (God’s) arms. Yet (they acted as though) they did not know that I healed them’ My rendering wĕānōkî ‘It was I who’ reflects the fact that in a verbal clause in Biblical Hebrew the independent personal pronoun, which is almost superfluous because the pronominal subject is embedded in the verb form, is almost always employed for emphasis.13 11.  Joüon and Muraoka, Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, #44e. 12.  Contrast J. Hoftijzer, The Function and Use of the Imperfect Forms with Nun Paragogicum in Classical Hebrew (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1986); D. Sivan, ‘Remarks Concerning the Use of the forms tiqṭĕlûn/yiqṭĕlûn in the Bible in Light of a Recent Study’, in Hadassah Shy Jubilee Book: Research Papers on Hebrew Linguistics and Jewish Languages (ed. Y. Bentolila; Eshel Beer-Sheva; Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 1997), pp. 27–36 (in Hebrew). The latter study, it should be noted, is a scathing review of Hoftijzer’s book published eleven years earlier. 13.  See Joüon and Muraoka, Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, #146.

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Characteristically, NJPS emends ‘his arms’ to ‘My arms’. In fact, NJPS here follows LXX (ἀνέλαβον αὐτόν ἐπὶ τὸν βραχειόνά μου, ‘I took him upon my arm’) while MT here at Hos. 11:3 does exactly what LXX does at Hos. 11:1, where LXX’s τὰ τεκνα αὐτοῦ ‘his children’ corresponds to MT’s (and NT Matt. 2:15’s) ‘my son’. It is well known that in prayer, as in many of the psalms and in the Jewish liturgy, there is a tendency in addressing the deity to move back and forth between direct address (I–Thou, as Buber would have it) and speaking about (I–It, as Buber would have it). Quite likely, the original text in Hos. 11:3 read ‘taking them in arms’ and each of the two venerable traditions represented by MT and LXX clarified the owner of the arms, each in its own way. A similar tendency was observed by Kaufmann (HIR 6:362), discussing Hab. 1, with respect to both LXX’s and MT’s providing personal pronouns of the first and third persons where the original text seems to have provided no pronouns but only a series of verbs. tirgaltî ‘I taught [him/her] how to walk’ It is commonly accepted that the verb employed here is a form of a denominative verb rāgal ‘to walk’, derived from the noun regel denoting ‘foot’. The basic meaning of the verb in question would be ‘to walk’ while the form found in Hos. 11:3 is commonly taken (GKC #55h; BDB, p. 920; HALAT, 3rd ed., p. 1104; and so already Rashi in his commentary here) to represent one of the several rare occurrences of the tiphel or taphel conjugation, a rare equivalent of the causative hiphil. In its only attestation in Hos. 11:3 the verb should mean ‘taught someone to walk’ and it should evoke the image of a parent teaching his/her child to walk. If so, Hos. 11:3a–b informs us that when Ephraim was just beginning to walk it was Yhwh the father who taught him to walk and who would take them—the Ephraimites—up in his arms whenever baby Ephraim fell down. The final clauses of v. 3 state, wĕlō yādĕû kî rĕpātîm ‘Yet (they acted as though) they did not know that I healed them’. (Cf. NJPS: ‘But they have ignored My healing care’.) This assertion on the part of the prophet speaking in the name of God reminds one of Isa. 1:2–3: ‘I raised children and I brought them up, but they rebelled against me. A bull knows its owner, an ass its master’s crib: Israel does not know, my people gives no heed.’ Both biblical passages compare the relationship of God to Israel to that of a parent and child. Where Isaiah suggests that the erstwhile child should remember the divine parent who had nurtured the child, Hosea suggests that the erstwhile child should remember the divine parent who had attempted to teach the child to walk, picked up the child as he repeatedly fell in the course of learning how to walk,

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and healed the bruises incurred by the child in the course of learning to walk. The image of Ephraim as the erstwhile child is invoked also in Jer. 31:19: ‘Truly, Ephraim is a dear son to me, a child that is dandled! Whenever I spoke against him, my thoughts would dwell on him still. That is why my heart yearns for him; I will receive him back in love— declares Yhwh.’ The fact that the latter verse in Jeremiah recalls the image of Ephraim the child who was taken care of by a doting parent, who cannot forget the child even though, as is often the case, the child might forget the parent’s devotion to the child, suggests that Jer. 31:19 belongs to a long list of passages in Jeremiah which have been inspired by Jeremiah’s acquaintance with the book of Hosea.14 Moreover, the cogency of the comparison of Hos. 11:3 with both Isa. 1:2–3 and Jer. 31:20 supports my interpretation of Hos. 11:3, which was anticipated by Ibn Ezra and more recently by Harper, and by Z. Weisman and D. Levinstein.15 The interpretation offered by Ibn Ezra is anticipated also by Symmachus who translates Heb. tirgaltî by means of Gk. ἐπαιδαγώγοθν ‘I trained/ I nurtured’ and the Vulgate, which renders the Hebrew verb by Lat. quasi nutritius. Since the Hebrew verb tirgaltî occurs only here in Hos. 11:3 and since the verbal form qāḥām ‘taking them’ is also obscure, it is not surprising that some ancient and modern interpreters including LXX and Andersen and Freedman have preferred other interpretations. LXX renders Hos. 11:3a as follows: καὶ ἐγὼ συνεπόδισα τὸν Ẻφράιμ, meaning, ‘And I bound the feet of Ephraim’. Glenny16 follows Muraoka in suggesting that here the Greek verb meaning ‘bind the feet (of someone else)’ refers to tying ‘the feet of an infant so that he will not walk off without proper guidance and a watchful eye’.17 If vv. 1–3 refer largely to the past when Israel/Ephraim was a child and Israel worshipped Baals, v. 4 (like v. 2 in our interpretation above) seems to refer to the era of our eighth-century BCE prophet.

14.  See Ginsberg, Israelian Heritage of Judaism, pp. 97–99. 15.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 363; Z. Weisman and D. Levinstein, The Book of Hosea, in The Twelve Prophets, Part One, Olam ha-Tanakh (Tel Aviv: Davidson-Ittai, 1994), p. 70 (in Hebrew). 16.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 154. 17.  See Muraoka, ‘Hebrew Hapax Legomena’, p. 212; see also Muraoka, Greek– English Lexicon of the Septuagint, p. 649.

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11:4 bĕḥabĕlê ādām emšĕkēm//baăbotōt ahăbâ ‘With human ties I draw them with cords of love’ Here a single verb, the imperfect emšĕkēm with common plural masculine accusative pronominal suffix referring to the people of Israel, is located between two virtually synonymous adverbial phrases ‘with human ties’//‘with cords of love’. Consequently, the verb functions in this context as a pivot word, which is to say that it is meant to serve as subject and predicate of two successive clauses.18 The point is that just as God had demonstrated parental devotion to Ephraim when he was not quite a toddler, so did God continue to attempt to draw Ephraim to him with the intangible bonds of human love. However, God, the father, as it were, of Ephraim, reports that Ephraim misinterpreted the parental mother-love as though it were smother-love. The Collins On-Line Dictionary of the English language defines ‘smotherlove’ as follows: ‘a relationship between a parent and child in which the parent is over-protective to the extent that the child’s normal psychological development is inhibited’. The Hebrew text of Hos. 11:4b–d phrases Yhwh’s perception that Ephraim misinterpreted God’s love of Ephraim as smother-love in the following words: wāehĕyeh lāhem kĕmĕrîmê ōl lĕḥêhem wěaṭ ēlāyw ôkîl ‘I was to them like people who raise up a yoke on their jaws, and (in fact) I turned toward him (Ephraim/Israel, saying), “I shall feed you” ’ In other words, God was the quintessential Jewish mother, as it were, who only meant well. Her attempts to draw the erstwhile child close to her were interpreted as attempts to enslave the erstwhile child. Consequently, the metaphorical bonds can be interpreted either from the parents’ point of view as human ties//cords of love or as the leather straps with which one binds a yoke to a pair of draft animals so that they may pull a plough or a wagon or, alternatively, the leather straps, which one ties to the necks of captives both to humiliate them and to make certain that they do not escape.19 (See Illustration 7 for a graphic representation of the yoke.) God, the quintessential Jewish mother, responds to the spoken or unspoken 18.  On the phenomenon of pivot words, see D. Sivan and S. Yona, ‘Pivot Words or Expressions in Biblical Hebrew and in Ugaritic Poetry’, VT 48 (1998), pp. 399–407. 19.  See C. U. Wolf, ‘Yoke’, IDB, vol. 4, pp. 924–25; for illustrations, see Y. Hoffman, Jeremiah (Olam ha-Tanakh; Tel Aviv: Revivim, 1983), pp. 37, 139, 14 (in Hebrew).

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disparaging accusation by her beloved Ephraim, ‘All I wanted was that my child should eat something and not starve to death. What did he want from me?’

Illustration 7. Yoke [Heb. ol]: two pairs of oxen, each pair tied together with a wooden yoke (from Louis-Charles Émile Lortet, La Syrie d’Aujourd’hui [Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1884], p. 381)

11:5 lō yāšûb el-ereṣ-Miṣrayim wěAššûr hû malkô kî mēănû lāšûb ‘ “No!” [negating Ephraim’s charge that the divine parent engaged in smother-love] He (Ephraim/Israel) returns to Egypt, and Assyria is his (Ephraim’s/Israel’s) king. Indeed, they (the people of Israel/ Ephraim) refuse to repent’ In this rendering I was inspired by NJPS, which translates as follows: ‘No! They return to the land of Egypt, And Assyria is their king. Because they refuse to repent.’

NJPS’s treating the exclamation ‘No!’ as a verset distinct and separate from the other three clauses of Hos. 11:5 reflects NJPS’s possibly correct but nevertheless idiosyncratic perception that the negative particle should be pointed in MT with the disjunctive accent yetib. This accent sign, which often can be confused with the conjunctive accent mehuppak, frequently indicates that a word is to be treated as an exclamation. Obvious examples include ‘Behold!’ at the beginning of Gen. 4:10b: ‘Behold! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground’; the word šeqer ‘falsehood’ in

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Jer. 14:14: ‘Yhwh said to me, “Falsehood the prophets prophesy in my name…’; ‘This is the dedication of the altar’ in Num. 7:88; ‘Each one (îš) after the stubbornness of his evil heart’ in Jer. 16:12. In addition to the fact that both the Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex and other medieval manuscripts point the negative particle lō with the conjunctive accent mehuppak, there is the negative testimony of the eleven cases where yetib comes before pashta and therefore might be mistaken for mehuppak. I. Yeivin lists those eleven cases as follows: Lev. 5:2; Deut. 1:4; Isa. 5:24; 30:12; Jer. 14:14; 16:12; 22:30; Dan. 2:10; 7:27; Ezra 6:8; 9:4.20 Presumably, the reason that neither medieval Hebrew exegetes nor modern critical commentators invoked a yetib at Hos. 11:5a to anticipate NJPS’s treatment of the negative particle as an exclamation is that none of these interpreters ever saw an edition of the book of Hosea in Hebrew that supplied the expression lō with the disjunctive accent yetib. However, NJPS’s brilliant treatment of the negative particle lō at the beginning of Hos. 11:5 as though it were pointed with a disjunctive accent and as though it did not modify the verb yāšûb enables one to make sense of the entire verse syntactically and in light of other references in Hos. 5–11 to Israel’s attempt to gain the support of both Egypt and Assyria in the struggle against Judah. Landy shows that the consequence of the common understanding of the negative particle lō as an adverb modifying the verb yāšûb in Hos. 11:5a–b is that 11:5 contradicts 11:10–11 as well as 9:3, 6, in all of which Israel is seen to court the help of Egypt, which, as pointed out by our prophet in 11:10–11, will be of no help.21 Wolff suggests that the particle lō at the beginning of Hos. 11:5 be understood as an asseverative particle.22 Indeed, the prefixed particle l appears in Ugaritic poetry as both a negative particle and an asseverative particle, and the precise meaning is determined by the context. Wolff attributes the treatment of lō at the beginning of Hos. 11:5 as an asseverative particle to Gordis. To be precise, R. Gordis arrives at his interpretation of Hos. 11:5a as an emphatic declarative, ‘He will surely return to Egypt’, by assuming that the literal meaning of the particle lō at the beginning of Hos. 11:5 is ‘an interrogative (“will he not?”) equivalent to an emphatic declarative’.23 It is no wonder that NJPS avoided this circuitous route to making sense in 20.  I. Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell (SBL Masoretic Studies, 5; Atlanta: Scholars Press for Society of Biblical Literature & International Organization for Masoretic Studies, 1980), p. 199. 21.  Landy, Hosea, p. 161. 22.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 5. 23.  Gordis, ‘Studies in the Relationship of Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew’, pp. 181–82.

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context of Hos. 11:5a and opted for a tacit emendation of the Masoretic accent from mehuppak to yetib. Significantly, S. Cohen anticipates NJPS’s treatment of the syntactic function of the negative particle lō in Hos. 11:5 with his treatment of the negative particle lō in the middle of Amos 7:14, lō-nābî ānokî wĕlō ben- nābî ānokî, which Cohen understands as follows: ‘No! I am indeed a Navi (prophet), but not a Ben Navi (professional prophet’.24 Cohen compares what he calls ‘the plain unqualified negative’ in Judg. 12:5 and Hag. 2:12. In both of those texts the particle lō standing by itself constitutes the negative response ‘No!’ to a question addressed to a person or persons. Without showing any awareness of Cohen’s study, Z. Zevit offers a similar interpretation of Amos 7:14: ‘No! I am a nābī, I am not even a ben nābī’.25 What Cohen calls ‘the plain unqualified negative’, Zevit calls ‘absolute denial’.26 Hoffman denies absolutely the contention that in Biblical Hebrew the negative particle lō, by itself, can express absolute denial. I, however, affirm the veracity of the claims made independently by Cohen and Zevit with respect to Amos 7:14 and by NJPS with respect to Hos. 11:5. As attractive as is NJPS’s imaginative interpretation of the particle lō at the beginning of Hos. 11:5, NJPS’s treatment of the remainder of the verse cannot be accepted because it ignores and levels the distinction in the Hebrew text between the treatment of Ephraim/Israel as an entity in all but the final clause where the people of Ephraim/Israel are referred to in the plural. The exclamation ‘No!’, which NJPS treats as the first of the five clauses of v. 5, seems to suggest that contrary to God’s parental reasoning, Ephraim should have considered all that God had done for him and relied upon God to save Ephraim from the threat posed by Judah. Instead, Ephraim, upon whom God had bestowed parental love ‘ever since Egypt’ (Hos. 11:1), i.e., ever since God brought Israel out of Egypt, returns to the land of Egypt rather than treating that place as the land to which one would not want to return (cf. Deut. 17:16). Both the reason for the return to Egypt and the juxtaposition of Egypt and Assyria are spelled out in Hos. 7:11: ‘They have appealed to Egypt! They have gone to Assyria.’27 24.  S. Cohen, ‘Amos Was a Navi’, HUCA 32 (1961), pp. 175–78 (177). 25.  Z. Zevit, ‘A Misunderstanding at Bethel, Amos VII 12–17’, VT 25 (1975), pp. 783–90, and ‘Expressing Denial in Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew, and in Amos’, VT 29 (1979), pp. 505–509. 26.  Contrast Y. Hoffman, ‘Did Amos Regard Himself as a nābî ?’, VT 27 (1977), pp. 209–10. 27.  See also Hos. 9:3–6. Concerning the appeal to Egypt for help, see also 7:16. Concerning the appeal for help from Assyria, see also Hos. 5:13; 8:10; 10:6.

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We receive the impression from 1 Sam. 8 and 12 that while the Prophet Samuel was personally opposed to the establishment of the Israelite monarchy, God required Samuel to accede to the wishes of the people and to anoint Saul as king. Hosea 8:3–4 and 13:9–11, on the other hand, portray God himself as rebuking Israel for having relied on a king rather than on God alone. Similarly, here in Hos. 11:5b, ‘Assyria is his king’ is an ironically phrased rebuke of Ephraim/Israel’s attempt to rely upon Assyrian foreign aid in meeting the military challenge posed by Judah. And no less ironically, the verse concludes with the words, ‘Because they refuse to repent’, the very same sense of the verb which is found in Hos. 14:2. However, the prophet, speaking in the name of Yhwh, asserts that for the moment Israel would rather return to Egypt than to God (11:5). Consequently, God would like to punish Israel/Ephraim, or so he states in vv. 6–7, q.v., but, as we shall see in vv. 8–9, the God of Hosea totally anticipates the God of Jer. 31:19 in refusing to give up on his beloved child, Ephraim. The employment of the same verbal root šwb in the contrasted meanings of ‘going back to where one ought not to be’ and ‘turn back to God, repent’ expresses the following irony: ‘He [collective Israel] returns to Egypt because they [the Israelites] refuse to return [to God]’. The chiastic structure of the two usages of the verbal root šwb in this verse creates in the audience the expectation of synonymy. The surprise ending, as it were, in which the expected synonymy is replaced by homonymy, accents the irony and makes the prophet’s message especially clear.28 Finally, it should be observed that the appearance of derivatives of the same root šwb in four distinct meanings in Hos. 11:4, 7, 9 appears to constitute a case of what Buber called Leitwort, or in Modern Hebrew millâ manḥâ ‘leading word’.29 Following M. Weiss, Y. Amit notes that a leading word may often be simply an aesthetic device while in other cases it can serve as a device for the expression of meaning.30 Moreover, 28.  Cf. Jer. 3:14, šûbû bānîm šôbābîm ‘Return [to proper behaviour], backsliding children’; cf. also Jer. 3:22, šûbû bānîm šôbābîm erpā měšûbōtêkem ‘Return [to proper behaviour], backsliding children. I will heal your backsliding’. Concerning God’s being depicted as Israel’s healthcare deliverer, see Hos. 11:3. 29.  See M. M. Buber, ‘The “Leading Word” Device in the Narratives of the Torah’, in The Way of Scripture: Studies in Stylistic Patterns of the Bible (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1964), pp. 284–99 (in Hebrew), and, in the same collection, ‘The “Leading Word” and the Ur-Form of the Speech’, pp. 300–307. 30.  See M. Weiss, ‘The Secret of Scripture—Some of Buber’s Methods in Interpreting the Bible’, the Preface to Buber, The Way of Scripture, pp. 9–33 (24–31), and Y. Amit, ‘The Multi-Purpose “Leading Word” and the Problems of its Usage’, Prooftexts 9 (1989), pp. 99–114 (103).

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as Amit emphasizes, ‘The leading word only guides or brings out some meaning inherent in the text; one could also arrive at that meaning by other methods…the leading word cannot serve as solitary proof’.31 It is widely understood32 that LXX at Hos. 11:4–5 reflects both a different verse division between vv. 4 and 5 and a different treatment of the enigmatic lō, which appears at the beginning of Hos. 11:5 in MT. It is thus widely understood that LXX presupposes a Hebrew Vorlage, in which the prepositional phrase lô ‘to/for/against him’ appeared instead of MT’s negative particle lō. To this interchange of lō and lô we may compare Ps. 100:3, where the qere is wělô, yielding a nominal sentence, ‘we are his’ (so NJPS), while the kethib is wělō, yielding a different nominal sentence, ‘and not we ourselves’ (so KJV). To be precise, however, it is not only with respect to the lexeme lō/lô that LXX differs from the Hebrew version of Hos. 11:4–5. In fact, in LXX Hos. 11:4 ends with the following words: δυνήσομαι αὐτῷ, meaning ‘I (God) will prevail over him (Israel)’.33 LXX’s rendering of the closing clause of Hos. 11:4 presupposes not only lô instead of MT’s lō and the location of the latter lexeme at the end of v. 4 rather than at the beginning of v. 5, but also that the Hebrew Vorlage of LXX read ûkal ‘I shall prevail’ rather than ôkîl ‘I shall feed’. 11:6 wĕḥālâ ḥereb bĕārāyw wĕkiltâ baddāyw wĕākālâ mimmoăṣōtêhem ‘A sword will descend upon their skins, and it will consume their limbs, and it will devour their bones’ NJPS renders as follows: ‘A sword shall descend upon their towns And consume their limbs And devour [them] because of their designs’.

31.  Amit, ‘Multi-Purpose “Leading Word” ’, p. 102. Concerning ‘leading word’ in prophetic texts of the Bible, see also R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 144. For important words of caution with respect to identifying leading words in analyzing biblical texts, see F. Polak, Biblical Narrative (2nd ed.; Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1999), pp. 91–93 (in Hebrew). For another interesting case of homonymous roots zny constituting leading words, see Hos. 4:10–19. 32.  See, e.g., G. A. Smith, The Book of the Twelve Prophets (2 vols.; 2nd ed.; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1896), vol. 1, p. 294 n. 2. 33.  Cf. Glenny, Hosea, p. 57.

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The marginal note in NJPS suggests emending bĕārāyw ‘in his cities’ in v. 6a to bĕôrô meaning ‘his skin’; the marginal note in NJPS at Hos. 11:6a compares Job 18:13, where we read as follows: yōkal baddê ôrô//yōkal baddāyw bĕkōr māwet Tur-Sinai understands the latter verse as follows: ‘The firstborn who is about to die [of starvation] eats strips of his own skin’.34 Tur-Sinai, however, ignores the repetitive parallelism, which should better be rendered: ‘He eats strips of his own skin//the firstborn who is about to die eats his own strips [of skin]’. The noun baddāyw in that context is the plural with third person singular with pronominal suffix of the noun bad meaning part or limbs of a body, and it is derived from the verb bdd meaning ‘be separate/isolated’.35 Since the term baddāyw is often taken to mean ‘his limbs’, i.e., broken parts of one’s own body, NJPS margin understands Hos. 11:6a–b to mean ‘A sword descended upon his skin so that his limbs were consumed’. In addition, NJPS’s margin understands the form mimmoăṣōtêhem ‘because of their designs’ to be a corruption of an original ăṣmōtêhem meaning ‘their bones’. Given that the verse seems to be divided quite naturally into three clauses, it is easy enough to adopt NJPS’s marginal emendations and to perceive the verse as telling us three times about a person’s or persons’ limbs having been under attack: ‘A sword shall descend upon their skins. And consume their limbs. And devour their bones.’

The reconstructed Hebrew text, that would justify this translation, reads as follows: wĕḥālâ ḥereb bĕôrāyw wĕkiltâ baddāyw wĕākālâ ăṣmōtêhem

LXX renders the verse as καὶ ἠσθένησεν ῥομφαία ἐν ταῖς πόλεσιν αὐτοῦ, καὶ κατέπαυσεν ἐν ταῖς χερσὶν αὐτοῦ. καὶ φάγονται ἐκ τῶν διαβοθλίων αὐτῶν, which Glenny renders as follows: ‘And the sword was weak in his cities, and it ceased to work in his hands; and they shall eat from their schemes’.36 34.  Tur-Sinai, Job, p. 291. 35.  Cf. DCH 2:93–94; BDB, p. 94; HALOT 1:108–109. 36.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 59.

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The final lexeme διαβοθλίον meaning ‘schemes’ attests to a Hebrew Vorlage of LXX, which shared with MT the reading mimmoăṣōtêhem ‘because of their schemes’. Macintosh offers a plethora of suggested readings and interpretations.37 11:7 As I pointed out in the Introduction (p. 37), Hos. 11:7–12:12 is treated as a unit in the delineation of the prophetic lection or haftarot. In the Sephardic tradition this unit is the haftarah that is read on the Sabbath of the weekly Pentateuchal portion wayyēṣē, i.e., Gen. 28:10–32:3. In the Ashkenazic tradition that very same unit of the book of Hosea, namely, Hos. 11:7–12:12, is the haftarah that is read on the Sabbath of the weekly Pentateuchal portion wayyišlaḥ, i.e., Gen. 32:4–36:3, which falls one week after wayyēṣē. As I noted in the Introduction, these divergent Jewish traditions concerning the prophetic lection both attest to the treatment of Hos. 11:7–12:12 as a unit, notwithstanding this unit’s crossing the boundaries of other units recognized in Masoretic codices. wěammî tělûîm liměšûbātî wěel-al yiqrāûhû yaḥad lō yěrômēm ‘My people depends upon my turning back, when he (the people of Ephraim/Israel) is summoned upward, he does not rise at all’ NJPS renders this received text as follows, but warns in a marginal note, ‘Meaning of Heb. uncertain’: ‘For My people persists In its defection from Me; When it is summoned upward, It does not rise at all’.

tělûîm It is commonly accepted that this form is a plural passive participle of a verbal root tl, which, in turn, is a bi-form of the verbal root tly, which means ‘to hang’, which is attested, inter alia, in Gen. 40:22: ‘and he (Pharaoh) hung the chief of the bakers’. In light of the suggestion by Ehrlich that měšûbātî here means not ‘their defection from me’ (for měšûbâ meaning ‘turning away, rebellion’ see Hos. 14:5; Jer. 2:19; 3:6, 8, 11, 12, 22; 5:6; 8:5; 14:7) but ‘my turning back toward Israel’.38 This 37.  See Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 452–54. 38.  Ehrlich, Mikra Ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, p. 385.

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interpretation is already found in the Vulgate, which renders, ‘ad reditum meum’. TJ and Rashi’s commentary construe the noun měšûbātî here as meaning ‘turning toward me (i.e., to God in repentance)’ while Ibn Ezra and Kimchi insist that the noun měšûbâ always has the negative connotation of rebellion, turning away from God. If we understand that the passive participle tělûîm ‘hangs upon’ is here employed in the extended meaning ‘depending’, which is amply attested in post-biblical Hebrew and if we also follow the Vulgate and Ehrlich with respect to the noun měšûbātî, then the meaning of the first clause of v. 7 is as follows: ‘My people depends upon my turning back’. In the second half of v. 7, however, our prophet, speaking in the name of God, adds the following ironic conclusion: ‘When he [the people of Israel/Ephraim] is summoned upward, he does not rise at all’. Thus I follow NJPS in my understanding of the second half of Hos. 11:7.39 Macintosh, at Hos. 7:16, follows Ibn Janah and Morag in construing the phrase el-al, as the preposition el meaning ‘to’ followed by the noun al ‘highest level’, to mean ‘to the highest level of behaviour’.40 Andersen and Freedman construe the phrase el-al as a divine name, a variant of el-elyon ‘Most High God’, attested four times in Gen. 14:18–22 as the name of the deity served by Melchizedek and identified by Abram there as an epithet of his own deity, Yhwh. The expression el-al understood to mean ‘skyward’ is the name that was adopted for the State of Israel’s national airline.41 Interestingly, Y. Canaani suggests that the expression el-al meaning ‘skyward’ is a creation of Modern Hebrew, and he gives no indication that it derives from Hos. 11:7.42 yaḥad This adverb normally means ‘together’; consequently, NJPS, followed by my translation, treats the combination of this adverb with the negative particle at the head of the clause to mean ‘not at all’.

39.  Similarly E. Halpern, Hosea: An Attempt at a New Commentary (Jerusalem: Kiryat-Sepher for the Israel Society of Biblical Research, 1976), p. 228 (in Hebrew): ‘However, the people is not capable of lifting himself up’. 40.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 285. 41.  See above, in the Introduction, ‘Influences in Life in General from Chapter 2 to Chapter 14’, p. 35. 42.  Y. Canaani, Ozar Ha-Lashon HaIvrit (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Massada, 1960–89), 13:4327b (in Hebrew).

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yěrômēm Here we have the imperfect of the polel conjugation of a root whose middle radical is waw, and its literal meaning is ‘He [Israel] does not lift himself up heavenward when God moves towards him and summons him heavenward’. 11:8 êk etteněkā Eprayim ămaggenĕkā Yiśrāēl êk etteněkā kĕAdmâ ăśîmĕkā kiṢĕboyim nehpak ālay libbî yaḥad nikmĕrû niḥûmāy ‘How can I give you, Ephraim? (How) can I surrender you, Israel? How can I make you like Admah? (How) can I render you like Zeboiim? I had a change of heart, I experienced a feeling of empathy’ Wolff notes that Hos. 11:8–9 ‘is the most poetic passage in the book [of Hosea]’.43 He explains44 that the first word of Hos. 11:8, êk ‘how?’, which is repeated again at the beginning of the third clause of that verse, indicates neither lamentation as in Mic. 2:4; Jer. 48:39; Ezek. 26:17; 2 Sam. 1:19, 25, 27, nor self-accusation as in Prov. 5:12, but rather, with Rudolph,45 ‘self-caution’ as in Gen. 39:9; 44:34; Ps. 137:4; Jer. 9:6. However, argues Wolff, ‘In our passage the self-caution is combined with an address to the defendant within the context of a legal dispute. Here the caution—immediately after the accusation brought against the opponent’s former actions—gives the “proposal to reach a settlement” the definite form of a declaration of amnesty (Strafverzichterklärung, cf. Gen. 18:8f.). Thus the defendant witnesses the plaintiff’s own inner struggle as he first utters a self-caution (v. 8a [and Gruber would add, again in 8c]) and then waives the punishment (v. 9b).’46 Interestingly, a similar change of heart on the part of God is found in Hos. 2:16. Wolff’s analysis of the metrical structure of Hos. 11:8–9, which, as I noted, he calls the most poetic passage in the entire book of Hosea, is as follows: 8a 8b 9a 9b

qinah-meter (3+2) a three-stress bicolon a four-stress bicolon ‘The motivation is expressed in two-stress bicola, in which the emphasis of each word is increased by a distinct alliteration’.47

43.  Wolff, Hosea, p. xxiv. 44.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 194. 45.  Rudolph, Hosea, p. 217. 46.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 194. 47.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 195.

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Indeed, these four verses represent the use of qinah-meter, which one would expect was (along with the twice stated and twice more understood exclamation êk ‘how’) actually meant to express a lament rather than, as argued most convincingly by Rudolph and by Wolff, on the basis of the larger context of Hos. 11, self-caution followed by a declaration of amnesty as stated explicitly in Hos. 11:8e–9e, ‘I had a change of heart// All My tenderness is stirred. I will not act on my wrath, Will not turn to destroy Ephraim. For I am God, not a human, the holy one in your midst: I will not come in fury.’48 The first and the third clauses begin with the interrogative particle ek ‘how’ while the second and fourth clauses represent instances of ellipsis, in which it is understood that the particle ek is understood as being repeated in the second and fourth clauses, which essentially reiterate what was asked in the first and third clauses respectively. Israel and Ephraim are synonymous epithets of the people who inhabit the Kingdom of Samaria (see the discussion at Hos. 5:3). The rare verb miggēn ‘give’ is employed as a synonym of nātan ‘give’ in the second clause. This rare verb meaning ‘give’ is attested also in Gen. 14:20, ‘And blessed be God Most High, Who has given [miggēn] your foes into your hand’; and Prov. 4:9, ‘She will give to your head a graceful wreath//she will provide you [tĕmaggĕnekkā] a glorious diadem’. Just as in clauses a and b the proper nouns Israel and Ephraim are employed as synonyms and the verbs nātan and miggēn as synonyms so in clauses c and d are the verbs nātan and śām employed as synonyms meaning ‘make, render, turn into’. Outside of Hos. 11:8 the place names Admah and Zeboiim are mentioned only in Gen. 10:19; 14:2, 8; and Deut. 29:22. The latter verse mentions four cities that were destroyed in the time of Abraham: Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim. Genesis 18:24–25 refers specifically to Sodom and Gomorrah as well as ‘the entire plain’. Isaiah 3:9 and Lam. 4:6 mention only the destruction of Sodom. The following texts employ the pair ‘like Sodom//like Gomorrah’: Isa. 1:9; 13:19; Jer. 50:40; Amos 4:11. Jeremiah 49:18 refers to the destruction of ‘Sodom and Gomorrah and their neighbours’. Hosea 11:8 is unique in choosing the paradigmatic pair Admah and Zeboiim to indicate the quintessential destruction. Genesis 10:19; 14:2, 8 mention all four cities but not with respect to their catastrophic destruction, which takes place later in the chronological sequence of the biblical narratives. Ezekiel 16:46 refers to ‘Sodom and her daughters’. M. Greenberg explains, ‘ “Daughters” is the regular epithet 48.  Rudolph, Hosea, pp. 217–18; Wolff, Hosea, pp. 193, 195–96, 201–202.

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of towns (hamlets) included in the territory of a main city’.49 Examples of this usage, which Greenberg cites, are found in Josh. 15:45; Ezek. 26:6; 30:18; and Neh. 11:25–31. nikmĕrû This form represents the niphal perfect third person common plural of a verbal root kmr. No other form of this root is attested in the Bible. The form is attested four times. In Gen. 43:30 we find kî-nikmĕrû raḥămāyw, while in 1 Kgs 3:26 we find kî-nikmĕrû raḥămêāh, both meaning ‘he/ she experienced pangs of love/mercy/empathy’, while in Lam. 5:10 we find ôrēnû kĕtannûr nikmārû ‘our skin burns like an oven’. It appears, therefore, that the expression nikmĕrû raḥămîm belongs to the class of expressions referring to human emotions, which are derived from either descriptions of the physical appearance of persons experiencing those emotions or from people’s descriptions of the physical ramifications of their emotions. A classic example of an expression in Biblical Hebrew, which both denotes an emotion and refers to the physical appearance of a person experiencing that emotion is ḥārâ appô. This expression means ‘he was angry’, and it refers literally to burning of the face/nose, which describes the reddening of the face/nose of light complexioned people due to the extensive flow to the head of blood in angry persons. (See below at 11:9 and the literature cited there.) The related expression ḥārâ lô ‘he was sad/depressed’ has been shown to reflect the idea formulated in modern times by Freud that depression is anger turned inward upon oneself.50 Just as the expression ḥārâ appô reflects a physical phenomenon that persons other than the angry person can observe, while the expression ḥārâ lô refers to an experience in the inner life of a person, so do even more obviously ôrēnû kĕtannûr nikmārû ‘our skin burns like an oven’ (Lam. 5:10) and nikmĕrû raḥămîm ‘a person experienced love/mercy/ empathy’ refer respectively to physical symptoms of suffering from physical violence and sensations belonging to the inner life of persons. The primary meaning of the Hebrew verb kmr is widely understood to mean ‘burn’.51 G. R. Driver, arguing that what is described in Lam. 5:10 is a symptom of starvation, quotes the observation of an unnamed 49.  M. Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20 (AB, 22; Garden City: Doubleday, 1983), p. 289. 50.  See Gruber, ANCANE, pp. 365–79. 51.  So Kaddari, Dictionary, p. 515; HALOT 2:4; S. Mowinckel, ‘Miscellen: kōmer, kmr’, ZAW 36 (1916), pp. 238–39 (238). Gesenius, Handwörterbuch, p. 552, prefers the primary meaning ‘warm up, ripen’; BDB, p. 485, ‘grow warm and tender, be or grow hot’; DCH 4:389, suggests primarily ‘be agitated’ and secondarily ‘be hot, burn’.

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professor of medicine: ‘[In starvation] there is no burning sensation of the skin [Driver adds in a footnote: “there are, however, severe burning pains in the stomach in acute cases of starvation; this is what is called zalapōt raab by the Hebrew poet (i.e., the author of Lam. 5:10)”], and that, although there is some discoloration of it, this is often hardly noticeable; the skin, however, does become wrinkled and flakes off or, as the process is called, desquamates, so that Hebr. nikmar must have the sense of the Aram. kmr “shrivelled” and here mean “wrinkled”, as one of the translations of the LXX and that of the Pesh. suggest. The comparison [in Lam. 5:10] then is of the skin in such a condition with the clay of an oven which is cracked by the heat of the fire and flakes off’.52 Nevertheless, D. Hillers53 translates ‘our skin has turned black as an oven’, relying on the reading ἐπελειώθη in LXX and the parallels in Lam. 4:8 and Job 30:30, which speak of the blackened skin of a victim of suffering.54 I surmise from Lam. 5:10 that originally nikmĕru (the form nikmārû in Lam. 5:10 is pausal) was an anatomic expression referring to the physical deformation of a suffering person. Just as the expression ḥārâ lô seems to be an extension, indeed an internalization of ḥārâ appô, so must nikmĕrû raḥămîm ‘a person experienced love/mercy/empathy’ be an extension and internalization of suffering. In both Gen. 43:30 and 1 Kgs 3:26 a person (Joseph in Genesis and the mother whose child is about to be sliced in half by King Solomon in Kings) nikmĕrû raḥămîm refers to internal suffering/turmoil leading to love/mercy/empathy. As I point out in the commentary at Hos. 1:6, the Hebrew verbal root rḥm can refer both to love (Akk. raāmu) and to compassion/mercy (Akk. rêmu). While the Hebrew root nḥm has a variety of nuances, including ‘change one’s mind’ (Gen. 6:6; Amos 7:3; Jer. 26:3; etc.), ‘show compassion’ (Ezek. 24:14), and ‘accept condolences’ (Ps. 77:3), it is sufficient to note that in Isa. 49:13 the piel of the two verbs rḥm and nḥm appear in synonymous parallelism in order to see clearly that nikmĕrû niḥûmāy ‘I experienced a feeling of love, mercy, empathy’ is a first-person equivalent of the third person masculine nikmĕrû raḥămāyw in Gen. 43:30 and the third person feminine nikmĕrû raḥămêāh in 1 Kgs 3:26. Isaiah 49:13 reads as follows: kî-niḥam Yhwh ammô//waăniyyāyw yĕraḥēm ‘Indeed, 52.  G. R. Driver, ‘Hebrew Notes on “Song of Songs” and “Lamentations” ’, in Festschrift Alfred Bertholet zum 80. Geburtstag (ed. W. Baumgartner, O. Eissfeldt, K. Elliger, and L. Rost; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1950), pp. 134–46 (143). 53.  D. Hillers, Lamentations (AB, 7A; 2nd ed.; New York: Doubleday, 1992), p. 155. 54.  Cf. A. Berlin, Lamentations (OTL; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), p. 115.

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Yhwh has shown compassion to his people//and to his afflicted he has shown mercy’. What God speaking through the prophet has indicated in v. 8, that he cannot bring himself to destroy Ephraim//Israel because of a change of heart//a stirring of tenderness, he explicates further in v. 9. 11:9 lō eĕśeh ḥārôn appî lō āšûb lĕšaḥēt Eprāyim kî ēl ānokî wĕlō-îš bĕqirběkā qādōš wĕllō ābô bāîr ‘I shall not activate my anger. I shall not turn to destroy Ephraim, for I am God, and not a human. (I am) the Holy One among you. I shall not come with hatred’ As for the first clause, lō eĕśeh ḥārôn appî, it should be noted that in Hebrew ḥārôn appî ‘my anger’ is the direct object of the verb ‘to do, execute, activate’. The anatomical expression ḥārôn ap refers to the physical manifestation of anger, a ‘burning of nose/face’, i.e., the red appearance of the face of a light-skinned person when she/he is angry.55 The idea that God had every right to be angry and to act upon his anger with physical violence, but that God in his abounding love for Israel restrained himself, is found also in Hos. 2, where God contemplates humiliating his unfaithful wife and then decides that the proper way of dealing with her unfaithfulness is to pay her more attention, beginning with a long vacation for the two of them in the place where they spent their honeymoon. It is quite likely that Jeremiah (whose being influenced by the book of Hosea has been noted above at Hos. 2 and Hos. 11:3) is influenced by this description of how God deals with God’s own anger in Jer. 3:12: ‘…I shall not look askance at you, for I am compassionate, I shall not be angry forever’; see also Jer. 3:5: ‘Is one angry forever?//Does one rage for all time?’ In the same vein, Jeremiah repeats in Jer. 4:27; 5:18; 30:11; 46:28 the assertion ‘but I shall not make an end of…’; similarly in Jer. 5:10 unnamed emissaries are instructed: ‘Go up among her vines and destroy; lop off her trailing branches; for they are not of Yhwh. But do not make an end.’ It is widely accepted that ‘shall not/do not make an end’, found five times in Jeremiah, is a post-Jeremian gloss, which was meant to mitigate God’s anger. However, as noted by Kaufmann (HIR 6:36–38), there is no reason to assume that the words of consolation were later additions to the prophetic writings. Indeed, the words of consolation serve two functions in the book of Jeremiah. In the chapters that were composed after the exile 55.  See Gruber, ANCANE, pp. 494–502.

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of Jehoiachin in 597 BCE (Jer. 29–33), the prophet encourages the Jews to accept the yoke of Babylonia and by adhering to God’s precepts to assure the speedy end of the exile and the return of the Jews to Judah. In the chapters that were composed prior to the events of 597 BCE, the prophecies of consolation (as also in Isa. 1; Amos 9) are designed to encourage Israel/Judah to improve her behaviour and merit the benefits of God’s unending love. This is precisely the point that is made in Hos. 11:8–9 and in Hos. 2. Precisely because the influence of the book of Hosea can be found in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, it is possible by reading the speeches of the earlier prophets (i.e., the ninth-century BCE prophet of Hos. 1–3; and the eighth-century BCE prophet of Hos. 4–14) and the two later ones in tandem to see that the abiding love of God for Israel no matter what is integral to Hos. 1–3; 10–14; Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. lō āšûb lĕšaḥēt Eprāyim ‘I shall not turn to destroy Ephraim’ This is to say that God will not in a fit of anger send another nation such as Judah to harass Ephraim. Tadmor points out that the historical setting of Hos. 4–14 is in the years before the beginning of the conquest of Northern Syria by Tiglath-pileser III of Assyria in the years 743–738 BCE.56 Moreover, Tadmor points out that during the period reflected in Hos. 4–14 Ephraim is an appropriate name for the Northern Kingdom, which is limited to the historical territory of the tribe of Ephraim. And, in addition, he points out there that the state which directly threatens Israel/ Ephraim in the time of our prophet is neither Assyria nor Aram but Judah. Taking for granted that the setting of Hos. 11 is to be found in the eighth century BCE prior to the accession to the throne of Assyria of Shalmaneser V (727–722 BCE),57 Wolff must reject the possibility that in Hos. 11:9b, as in Hos. 2:11; Job 1; and Dan. 10:20, the verb āšûb, lit., ‘I will return’, followed by an infinitive means ‘I will again…’.58 Wolff argues most cogently, ‘Had Yahweh once before brought about Israel’s destruction? Certainly not… Therefore the verbum relativum šwb cannot indicate a second destructive action. Šwb denotes, however, not only the repetition of an action, but also the restoration of previous conditions, or the nullification of a deed.’ With respect to the contention that in Hos. 11:9b, lō āšûb lĕšaḥēt Eprāyim therefore means simply, ‘I will not destroy Ephraim’, Wolff invokes the authority of Holladay,59 who explains that the meaning of lō āšûb in the present context is ‘I will not do another 56.  Tadmor, ‘Historical Background’, pp. 87–88. 57.  So Wolff, Hosea, p. xxi. 58.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 202. 59.  Holladay, The Root šûbh in the Old Testament, p. 69.

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action with the same object, namely, that denoted by the following verb’. Thus, Holladay explains, Hos. 11:9b means, ‘(I have brought Israel out of Egypt) but I shall not do the (logical) second action with him, namely, destroy him’. Macintosh invokes a number of resources in favour of the idea that the verb šwb can denote reverse action.60 Moreover, since, from the same root šwb are derived the noun tĕšûbâ ‘repentance’ and the noun měšûbâ, which usually means ‘turning away’ (see the discussion in my commentary at Hos. 11:7), as well as the infinitive lāšûb in Ruth 1:7, where it refers to Naomi’s two daughters-in-law going toward a destination at which the two daughters-in-law had never been previously, it follows that NJPS is totally reasonable in its unexpected understanding of lō āšûb lĕšaḥēt Eprāyim to mean ‘I shall not turn to destroy Ephraim’. ‘For I am God, and not a human’ The expression ‘I am…, and not a human’ appears only twice in all of Hebrew Scripture. Here in Hos. 11:9c the point is that while a human would be less accommodating to someone who had behaved offensively, it is characteristic of God, by contrast, to be less likely than a human to respond to offensive behaviour by expressing anger. In the other biblical attestation of the expression wĕlō-îš ‘and not a human’, in Ps. 22:7 the suffering supplicant seeks to account for God’s apparently abandoning the sufferer to verbal and physical abuse because this victim is, as it were, subhuman: ‘For I am a worm and not a human’. Taken together, Hos. 11:9c and Ps. 22:7a suggest that anger, which might lead to abusing others, is characteristic of humans but not of God and that abuse, on the other hand, should not be dealt out to humans. The meta-message of the two verses is that insofar as people attempt to emulate the deity, they should curb their anger. The very least that they can do while climbing the ladder to imitatio Dei is not to abuse other humans. Here abounding love, which overlooks offenses committed by the love object, is said to be a divine quality, which persons who are familiar with human vindictiveness might find hard to fathom. The meta-message is that people who would like to play God should first of all emulate the abounding love, which enables God to overlook offenses. Ironically, the very same argument that God is not human is invoked by the Prophet Samuel in explaining to Saul that because of the latter’s transgression in committing sacrilege with respect to the spoils of victory against the Amalekites: ‘Samuel said to him, “Yhwh has this day torn 60.  Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 463–64, invoking Jerome; Rashi; BDB, p. 997; Ehrlich, Mikrâ ki-Pheschutô, vol. 3, pp. 385–86.

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the kingship over Israel away from you and has given it to another who is worthier than you. Moreover the Glory of Israel does not deceive or change his mind, for he is not human that he should change his mind” ’ (1 Sam. 15:28–29). While in Hos. 11:9 and Ps. 22:7 ‘human’ is expressed by Heb. îš, in 1 Sam. 15:28–29 ‘human’ is expressed by Heb. ādām. Malachi, more in the spirit of Hosea than in the spirit of Samuel, also suggests that precisely because God, perhaps, unlike people, has not changed, the descendants of Jacob can count on God’s love to sustain them now and in the future if they will only stop attempting to defraud God: ‘For I am Yhwh—I have not changed; and you are the children of Jacob—you have not ceased to be. From the very days of your fathers you have turned away from my laws and have not observed them. Turn back to me, and I will turn back to you…and all the nations shall account you happy, for you shall be the most desired of lands—said Yhwh of Hosts’ (Mal. 3:6–12). There the implied comparison between God and humans is expressed without employing either îš or ādām to denote ‘human’. 11:9 wĕlō ābô bāîr ‘I shall not come with hatred’ In my running translation of ch. 11 and also in my complete citation of Hos. 11:9 earlier in the commentary, I take for granted that Hos. 11:9 means ‘I shall not come with hatred’. Indeed, NJPS already translates similarly, ‘I shall not come with fury’. Obviously, anyone with an elementary knowledge of Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew knows that the clause ought to mean simply, ‘I will not enter a/the city’. In fact, this understanding is shared by LXX, the Vulgate, KJV, Andersen and Freedman,61 and Macintosh.62 NJPS’s rendering, which deviates from the interpretation shared by LXX, Vulgate, and KJV, is anticipated by unnamed commentators cited both by Rashi in his Commentary on Hosea ad loc and by the Talmudic commentary of Tosafot at b. Taanit 5a. The latter commentary includes the following remark: ‘Some explain that the literal meaning of the Scriptural expression byr is “with hatred”, which is to say [that the clause means] “I shall not come with hatred”, and the expression byr is a synonym for “with hatred”, and it is a cognate of [the plural noun arîm in] “and the face of the world shall be filled with arîm ‘hatred’ ” ’ (Isa. 14:21, where NJPS renders ‘Then the world’s face shall be covered with 61.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 591. 62.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 464.

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towns’). Rashi at Hos. 11:9 cites a different unnamed commentator who finds support for his understanding of the final clause in Hos. 9:11 in the cognate r ‘adversary’ in 1 Sam. 28:16: ‘Samuel said, “Why do you ask me, seeing that the LORD has turned away from you and has become your adversary?” ’ It is likely that Ginsberg derived his interpretation reflected in NJPS neither from Tosafot nor from Rashi but rather from numerous modern Christian commentators, some of whom may have also been influenced by Rashi. Significantly, rather than cite the cognates referred to by Rashi and Tosafot, Ginsberg cites Isa. 42:13: kĕîš milḥāmōt yāîr qinâ ‘like a warrior he stirs up rage’; and Ps. 78:38, wĕlō-yāîr kol-ḥămātô ‘and he does not stir up all of his anger’.63 Interestingly, both Rashi and Tosafot marginalize the interpretation of byr in Hos. 11:9 as meaning ‘with hatred’ by assigning it to ‘there is one who interprets’ (Rashi) or ‘there are some who interpret’ (Tosafot). In the context at hand, i.e., Hos. 11:9, which speaks of God’s having decided not to exercise his anger but to exercise his love, compassion, and empathy, it is understandable that Rashi and his disciples would have stumbled upon an interpretation of the final clause of 11:9, which is congruent with God’s eschewing anger and embracing love. This interpretation, which Rashi and his disciples marginalized, somehow made its way into NJPS in the latter half of the twentieth century CE. I adopt it because it is totally congruent with everything else in the verse. As such, it is a fitting conclusion to the verse. The alternative interpretation, which would have suggested itself to any elementary student of Biblical Hebrew, is to be eschewed because it adds nothing, and it requires Macintosh almost an entire page to try to fit its literal meaning into the context of Hos. 11:9.64 11:10 aḥărê Yhwh yēlĕkû kĕaryēh yišāg kî-hû yišag wĕyeḥerdû bānîm miyyām ‘Then they will follow Yhwh when he roars like a lion. When he roars, his children will come hurrying from the west’ NJPS renders as follows: ‘The LORD will roar like a lion, and they shall march behind Him; When He roars, His children shall come Fluttering out of the west’. 63.  Ginsberg, ‘Notes’. 64.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 464.

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NJPS’s rendering of the final clause ‘fluttering out of the west’ appears to constitute an ad hoc treatment of the verb yeḥerdû based on the fact that in the immediate following verse, v. 11, where again the implied grammatical subject of the verb yeḥerdû is the Israelites described as his (Yhwh’s) children in Hos. 11:10, the verb is modified by the adverbial phrases (and similes) ‘like a bird//like a dove’. In light of Driver’s demonstration (discussed below with reference to v. 11) that a root ḥrd ‘come/go hurriedly’ is attested altogether five times in the Bible, I prefer my own rendering, given above. For Heb. miyyăm, literally ‘from [the direction of the Mediterranean] sea’, meaning ‘from the west’ (here the reference is to Egypt; see immediately below), see Gen. 12:8 and Josh. 11:3, where miyyăm ‘from the west’ is contrasted with ‘from the east’. NJPS’s rendering treats the first two clauses as semantically parallel to the last two clauses of the verse. All four clauses tell us that when Yhwh summons his children to return from abroad, they will follow him from wherever they may be scattered. Read in the light of Isa. 27:13, ‘And in that day, a great ram’s horn shall be sounded; and the strayed who are in the land of Assyria and the expelled who are in the land of Egypt shall come and worship Yhwh on the holy mount, in Jerusalem’, also Hos. 11:10 would seem to refer to the exiled persons who had been transported to Assyria from Samaria by Sargon II in 722 and those Judeans who fled to Egypt after the assassination of Gedaliah in 586 BCE (see 2 Kgs 25:26; Jer. 41–44). However, in light of Hos. 5:13; 7:11, 16; 8:9, 13; 9:3, 6 it is quite likely, in light of Ginsberg’s and Tadmor’s dating of the background of Hos. 4–14 (see my Introduction, pp. 9–12) that here in Hos. 11:10–11 the returnees who will follow the summons of Yhwh roaring like a lion are not Israelite and Judean exiles but Israelites who went to Egypt to enlist the help of Egypt during Israel’s attempt to defend itself from the military threat of Judea during the reign of Menahem son of Gadi, king of Israel (747–737 BCE), and more precisely the period 743–738 BCE,65 as referred to in Hos. 8:11, 16. If the final clause of Hos. 11:10 refers to the Israelites who will return from Egypt (see the passages in chs. 5, 7, 8, and 9 quoted above), the final verse of ch. 11 refers both to those who went to Egypt for support in their struggle against Judah and to those who went to Assyria in support of that same struggle:

65.  See Tadmor, ‘Historical Background’, especially, p. 88.

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11:11 yeḥerdû kĕṣippōr miMiṣrayim ûkĕyônâ mēereṣ Aššûr wĕhôšabtîm al-bāttêhem nĕum-Yhwh ‘They will fly away like a bird from Egypt, and like a dove from Assyria, and I will resettle them in their homes— word of Yhwh’ Similarly Wolff:66 ‘They shall come trembling from Egypt, Like (fluttering) birds And like doves from the land of Assyria. I will return67 them to their houses, [says Yahweh].’

NJPS, however, translates as follows: ‘They shall flutter from Egypt like sparrows, From the land of Assyria like doves; And I will settle them in their homes—declares the LORD’.

The Vulgate renders as follows: ‘et avolabunt quasi avis ex Aegypto et quasi Columba de terra Assyriorum et conlocabo eos in domibus suis dicit Dominus’.

LXX Vaticanus renders as follows: ἐκστήσονται ὡς ὄρνεον ἐξ Αἰγύπτου, καὶ ὡς περιστερὰ ἐκ γῆς Ἀσσυρίων· καὶ ἀποκαταστήσω αὐτοὺς εἰς τοὺς οἴκοθς αὐτῶν, λέγει Κύριος. 66.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 192. 67.  As noted by Wolff, Hosea, p. 193 n. aa (similarly by Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 372), this translation reflects LXX’s καὶ ἀποκαταστήσω αὐτοὺς, which assumes the vocalization of the Hebrew text as wahăšîbôtām. The latter form represents the hiphil of the root šwb ‘return’. My own rendering, like Vulgate, KJV, and NJPS, reflects the vocalization found in the standard Hebrew text wĕhôšabtîm, which represents the hiphil of the root yšb ‘dwell’. Wolff, finds support for his reading in the appearance of the preposition al in Hos. 11:10. He regards the latter preposition as incongruent with the verb wĕhôšabtîm. Contrast Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 592, and note with S. R. Driver, Notes on the Hebrew Text and the Topography of the Books of Samuel (2nd ed.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), pp. 12, 101, concerning the interchangeability of the prepositions al and el in the books of Samuel, Jeremiah, and other books of Hebrew Scripture; see also DCH 6:387–88.

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Glenny68 renders LXX into English as follows: ‘They shall be amazed like a bird from Egypt and like a dove from the land of the Assyrians, and I will restore them in their homes, says the Lord’.

KJV renders as follows: ‘They shall tremble as a bird out of Egypt. And as a dove out of the land of Assyria: And I will place them in their houses, saith the LORD’.

NEB renders as follows: ‘They will come speedily, like flying birds out of Egypt, like pigeons from Assyria, and I will settle them in their own homes. This is the very word of the LORD.’

More than a word or two must be said concerning the relatively modern but certainly distinguished exegetical tradition, which leads NJPS to deviate from KJV and NEB as well as LXX and the Vulgate in rendering ṣippōr as ‘sparrow’ rather than simply ‘bird’. Just after the middle of the twentieth century CE, G. R. Driver argued, ‘The Heb. ṣippōr…is primarily a generic term for any small bird of the passerine kind. It includes the turtle-dove and the young pigeon (Gen. xv 10) and edible fowl of some kind (Neh. v 18). When parallel to or contrasted with another specific bird, for example the swallow (Ps. lxxxiv 4, Prov. xxvi 2) or the dove (Hos. xi 11, Lam. iii 52), or song-birds (Eccl. xii 4), the sparrow is probably meant, since the corresponding words in the cognate languages denote also this bird.’69 In fact, the equation of ṣippōr with ‘sparrow’ was argued already by H. B. Tristram.70 Tristram was successfully refuted by G. E. Post: ‘There 68.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 59. 69.  G. R. Driver, ‘Birds in the Old Testament II. Birds in Life’, PEQ 87 (1955), pp. 129–40 (130–31). See also G. R. Driver, ‘Problems and Solutions’, VT 4 (1954), pp. 225–45 (233). Driver’s opinion was treated as canonical by J. A. Maclean, ‘Sparrow’, in Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (ed. D. N. Freedman; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), p. 1246. 70.  H. B. Tristram, The Natural History of the Bible (7th ed.; London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York: E. & J. B. Young, 1883), pp. 201–202. Tristram’s view is reflected also in Cheyne, Hosea, p. 112.

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is only one passage where the context makes it reasonably certain that the house sparrow is intended by zippôr (Ps 84.4 [LXX στρουθίον], where AV and RV both translate ‘sparrow). The “zippôr alone upon a housetop” (Ps 102:7 [LXX νυκτικόραξ] may also be this bird.’71 Moreover, Post argues, the Hebrew term ṣippōr cannot refer to a sparrow in any biblical context (he cites Prov. 26:2 [LXX ὄρνεα] where the bird in question is said to wander, ‘for the sparrow never wanders’). In addition, Post insists, ‘ṣippōr is also used generically for birds, and even for birds of prey [Ezek. 39:17; see FOWL)’. Finally, Post writes, ‘The meaning of the Heb. root to twitter or chirp, which caused its original application to the passerines, has been overlooked in this broader application’.72 Significantly, the term ṣippōr is employed as a collective noun in Deut. 14:11 to refer to birds, or more precisely, winged vertebrates, in general. I say, ‘precisely, winged vertebrates, in general’ because the ultimate creature listed in both Lev. 11:19 and Deut. 14:18 is hāăṭallēp ‘the bat’, which is a winged flying mammal. The parallel to Deut. 14:11 in the book of Leviticus, namely Lev. 11:13, employs instead of the term ṣippōr the term ôp ‘bird’. The respective verses read as follows: Deut. 14:11, kol- ṣippōr ṭĕhorâ tōkēlû ‘you may eat every clean bird’; Lev. 11:13, wĕet-ēlleh tĕšaqqĕṣû min-hāôp lō yēākēlû ‘and these you shall abominate from among the bird; they shall not be eaten’. Treating the collective noun ôp as a plural, the Vulgate translates the term min-hāôp by means of Latin de avibus ‘from among the birds’. Likewise, the Vulgate translates the term ṣippōr in Deut. 14:11 by means of Latin aves, meaning ‘birds’. The equivalence of Heb. ṣippōr and Heb. ôp as synonymous designations of bird(s) in general is confirmed by Deut. 14:20, kol-ôp ṭāhor tōkēlû ‘you may eat every clean bird’. In fact, the two synonymous sentences, Deut. 14:11 and Deut. 14:20, in between which is sandwiched the list of unclean birds, which may not be consumed, found in Deut. 14:12–19, constitute an inclusio. Thus there seems to be no basis for the assertion that ṣippōr in Hos. 11:11 denotes ‘sparrow’. Indeed, the argument offered by H. Gunkel73 that whenever the term ṣippōr is juxtaposed with a noun designating some specific kind of bird, the term

71.  G. E. Post, ‘Sparrow’, in Dictionary of the Bible (ed. J. Hastings; 4 vols.; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), vol. 4, p. 609. 72.  It is thus taken almost for granted by W. Nowack, Lehrbuch der hebräischen Archäologie (2 vols.; Freiburg & Leipzig: J. C. B. Mohr, 1894), vol. 1, p. 82, that ṣippōr designates ‘bird’, in general and especially ‘a small bird’. 73.  H. Gunkel, Die Psalmen (Göttinger Handkommentar zum Alten Testament; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1926), p. 370.

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ṣippōr must mean specifically ‘sparrow’, reflects the kind of thinking which J. Kugel74 refers to as the rabbinic or midrashic principle of omnisignificance, which includes the reluctance to accept the possibility that two lexemes juxtaposed in the same clause or in parallel clauses could possibly be synonyms. During my thirty-three years of full-time academic teaching at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel, I found that this oft-repeated description of how Jewish rabbis from antiquity to the present day have dealt with parallelism in biblical texts poses a serious challenge to helping Israeli students cope with David Kimchi’s (c. 1160–c. 1235 CE) ubiquitous use of the expression kepel hāinyān bĕmillîm šonōt ‘repetition of the same idea twice using different words’ to refer to synonymous parallelism. It was even more difficult to have students unlearn the notion that Rashi (1040–1105 CE) could not possibly have stated, ‘In the Bible there are precise synonyms juxtaposed’ (so Rashi’s Commentary on Psalms at Ps. 9:575). Lest it be assumed that the rejection of the principle of biblical omnisignificance was an innovation of medieval Hebrew biblical exegesis, it should be recalled that in b. Beṣa 16a and b. Rosh ha-Shanah 8a–b, Ps. 81:4, ‘Sound the ram’s horn at the new moon//at the kĕseh for the day of our festival’, the obscure term kĕseh is interpreted as a synonym for ‘new moon’. Thus the rabbinic sages treat Ps. 81:4 as an instance of synonymous parallelism while NRSV interprets kĕseh in that verse to mean ‘full moon’. It turns out that biblical omnisignificance can be both rightly and wrongly invoked by exegetes regardless of their religion, ethnicity or century of activity. In the case at hand, the noun ṣippōr in Hos. 11:11, given the ubiquity of synonymous parallelism in the book of Hosea, the doctrine of omnisignificance is hardly a criterion for understanding the term at hand as designating ‘sparrow’ rather than simply ‘bird’. As noted by Ibn Ezra, followed by Kimchi, and more recently by Macintosh,76 it is appropriate here to compare the Israelites to doves, because earlier (Hos. 7:11) our prophet had remarked as follows concerning Israel’s attempt to get help from Egypt and Assyria: ‘Instead, Ephraim has acted like a silly dove with no mind. They called to Egypt// they went to Assyria!’ In the context of Hos. 11:11, however, it is equally appropriate to compare Israel’s fleeing from her flirtation with Egypt, described in detail in Hos. 7:11–17, to a bird of any sort flying away. 74.  Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry, pp. 104–105, 107, 138. 75.  See the discussion in Gruber, Rashi’s Commentary on Psalms, pp. 150–54, 205 n. 12. 76.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 468.

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The point is that the ever-optimistic Hosea, who describes God as never giving up on Ephraim and never surrendering to divine anger, offers to those who had abandoned trust in God in favour of trust in foreign powers as in Hos. 11:5 (‘They return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria is their king’) safe passage back home with no recriminations whatsoever. yeḥerdû ‘fly away’ G. R. Driver recognizes four distinct ḥrd roots in Biblical Hebrew where virtually all dictionaries apart from DCH (3:311–12) recognize only one, namely ḥrd ‘tremble’.77 Driver most convincingly suggests that a nuance ‘set out, hurry off’ in the qal conjugation is attested altogether five times in Hebrew Scripture in Hos. 11:10, 11, as well as in 1 Sam. 13:7, ‘all the people went hurriedly after him’; 1 Sam. 16:4, ‘the elders of the city set out to meet him’; and 1 Sam. 21:2, ‘Ahimelech hurried out to meet him’.78 As hinted in HALOT (1:350), with respect to 1 Sam. 16:4; 21:2, Driver was anticipated by H. Tiktin with respect to 1 Sam. 16:4.79 Contrast McCarter’s comment: ‘the elders of the city came trembling out to meet him’.80 There can be no better demonstration that in this and the other cases noted by Driver and by Tiktin the verb must mean ‘hurry’ rather than ‘tremble’.81 nĕum-Yhwh ‘word of Yhwh’ The phrase nĕum-Yhwh ‘word of Yhwh’ identifying a prophetic speech or a portion thereof as emanating from a close encounter of the third kind between Yhwh and a prophet is found 364 times, with or without additional epithets of Yhwh in 1 and 2 Samuel, 2 Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea (Hos. 2:15, 18, 23; 11:11), Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Wolff, following W. Nowack,82 holds that the phrase was added to the book of Hosea by a later editor.83 Concerning the meaning of the expression nĕum-Yhwh 77.  G. R. Driver, ‘Hebrew Homonyms’, in Hebräische Wortforschung, pp. 50–64 (54–56). 78.  Driver, ‘Hebrew Homonyms’, p. 54. 79.  H. Tiktin, Kritische Untersuchungen zu den Büchern Samuel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1922), pp. 16–17, 22. 80.  P. K. McCarter, Jr., 1 Samuel (AB, 8; Garden City: Doubleday, 1980), p. 273. 81.  Driver, ‘Hebrew Homonyms’, pp. 54–56 and by Tiktin, Kritische Unter­ suchungen, pp. 17–18. 82.  Wolff, Hosea, pp. 196–97, following W. Nowack, Amos und Hosea (Religions­ geschichtliche Volksbücher, second series, 9; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1908), p. 45. 83.  Contrast Rudolph, Hosea, p. 219; Macintosh, Hosea, p. 471.

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‘word of Yhwh’, which occurs three times in Hosea 2 (vv. 15, 18, 23) and only once more in the book of Hosea, namely, here in Hos. 11:11, see the discussion in my commentary at Hos. 2:18.

C h a p t er 12

Hosea chastises Israel for devotion to an angel called both Bethel and ‘the angel of Bethel’, who was revered especially at the town of Bethel, as is known also from Gen. 31:10–13 and Jer. 48:13. In Gen. 31:11 Jacob tells us that an angel of God spoke to him, while in Gen. 31:13 that same angel declares, ‘I am the el of Bethel’ (contrast NJPS: ‘I am the God of Bethel’). The latter verse in its context within Gen. 31:10–13 indicates that the noun el is a synonym of the noun malak ‘messenger’ (Gk. ἀγγελός, from which is derived Eng. ‘angel’). In Jer. 48:13, on the other hand, the prophet, speaking in the name of God, declares, ‘Moab shall be shamed because of Chemosh, as the House of Israel were shamed because of Bethel, on whom they relied’. Precisely because Jer. 48:13 seems to refer to the angel or deity El by the name Bethel, which in Gen. 28:19 and Gen. 31:12 is a place name, and because of a possible ambiguity in Hos. 12:5, all of these texts have generated the important question as to whether Hos. 12 refers to devotion to an angel/ deity named El or to an angel/deity named Bethel or to an angel/deity known by both names.1 Since Hos. 13 deals with two other subjects, which are distinct from the chastisement of Israel for reliance upon and devotion to Bethel, specifically, past reliance on Baal and present veneration of silver calves, it appears that the chapter division in modern editions of the Bibles in Hebrew and in translations into European languages, which treat Hos. 12 as a distinct literary unit, should be accepted. It should be kept in mind, however, that reliable medieval manuscripts of the Bible in Hebrew indicate no break between Hos. 12 and Hos. 13. A fascinating question that has inspired extensive scholarly literature concerns the precise literary and historical relationship between the Jacob traditions in the book of Genesis and the Jacob traditions reflected in Hos. 1.  See R. S. Chalmers, The Struggle of Yahweh and El for Hosea’s Israel (Hebrew Bible Monographs, 11; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2008), especially pp. 74–133, 227–37.

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12:1–15.2 The present commentary on Hos. 12:1–15 regards the questions as to whether the Jacob traditions of the book of Genesis influenced Hos. 12 or were influenced by Hos. 12, or as to whether both biblical texts may have been influenced by a common epic tradition, as beyond its scope. My concern here is to attempt to understand and to shed light upon the meaning of Jacob at Bethel in the immediate context of the prophecy of rebuke contained in Hos. 12:1–15. However, it should be noted that in the English versions published under Christian auspices the opening verse of this chapter is treated as Hos. 11:12. Significantly, the chapter division found in the standard Hebrew editions is shared also by the Peshitta. LXX Ms. Vaticanus, which recognizes eleven major divisions instead of the fourteen chapters found in Hebrew and English Bibles, treats Heb. Hos. 11:10–14:1 as division no. 10, while the older division into twenty-one units recognized in LXX Ms. Vaticanus treats Heb. Hos. 11:5–9 and Hos. 11:10–14:1 as two distinct units (nos. 19 and 20 respectively). 12:1 sĕbābûnî bĕkaḥaš Eprayim//ûbĕmirmâ bêt Yiśrāēl ‘Ephraim surrounded me with treachery//And Israel with guile’ The vocalization of the verbal predicate of the initial clause treats the collective Ephraim as a plural, meaning that a significant number of Ephraimites are held culpable for being unfaithful to the God of Israel. In light of the larger context that includes Hos. 12:5–15 one might assume that the treachery and guile mentioned here consist of Israel’s disloyalty to God manifest in Israel’s veneration of the angel of Bethel. A marginal note in NJPS, however, understands the deceit//guile (render treachery// guile) mentioned in Hos. 12:1a–b as referring to dishonesty in business practiced by Israelites toward each other as spelled out in Hos. 12:8–9. D. A. Hubbard sees here, inter alia, a reference to the foreign policy of the Northern Kingdom, which vacillated between seeking help from Assyria

2.  See, inter alia, S. L. McKenzie, ‘The Jacob Traditions in Hosea XII 4–5’, VT 36 (1986), pp. 311–22; H. A. McKay, ‘Jacob Makes it Across the Jabok’, JSOT 38 (1987), pp. 3–13; A de Pury, ‘Le Cycle de Jacob’, in Congress Volume: Leuven 1989 (ed. J. A. Emerton; VTSup, 43; Leiden: Brill, 1991), pp. 78–96; B. Blum, ‘Once Again: Hosea and the Pentateuchal Traditions’, in From Author to Copyist: Essays on the Composition, Redaction, and Transmission of the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Zipi Talshir (ed. C. Werman; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2015), pp. 81–94.

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and seeking help from Egypt, rather than rely upon God (see Hos. 5:13; 7:11, 16; 8:9; 10:6; 11:5, 11).3 In the parallel clause, Hos. 12:1b, Ephraim collectively is equated with ‘the House of Israel’. Indeed, as I noted in my discussion at Hos. 5:12, the parallel pair ‘Ephraim’//‘Israel’ appears four times in the standard Hebrew text of the book of Hosea while the pair ‘Ephraim’//‘House of Israel’ appears only here in Hos. 12:1. wiYhûdâ ōd rād im ēl//wĕim qĕdōšîm neĕmān ‘And Israel is devoted with respect to El//And with respect to angels is loyal’ NJPS renders as follows: ‘But Judah stands firm with God// And is faithful to the Holy One’.

However, as I shall demonstrate, the correct rendering is as follows: ‘And Israel is devoted with respect to El// and with respect to angels is loyal’.

H. L. Ginsberg argues that this is one of as many as fourteen Judahite glosses or additions in the extant book of Hosea.4 Inspired by Ginsberg, I explain in my introduction to the book of Hosea that a Judean prophet at some time after the defeat of Samaria at the hands of Sargon II of Assyria in 722 BCE and the exile of the Northern tribes, substituted Judah for an original Israel. Or, to be more precise, he deliberately construed an abbreviation Y as standing for Judah although originally it stood for Israel (both names begin with Y in Hebrew). (See in the Introduction, pp. 28–29, and see also in the commentary at Hos. 5:12, and see also below in the commentary on Hos. 12:3.) The purpose of the substitution here in Hos. 12:1b was to suggest that the Judeans should be consoled that they would remain secure in their land and their homes so long as they continue not to revere any superhuman personality or entity alongside of the God of Israel. The implicit warning of the anonymous Judean prophet/glossator would seem to be that if Judah should, like Israel, compromise its monotheism by worshipping angels, it too could suffer the fate of defeat, destruction, and exile. Ironically, the half-verse, which makes perfect sense as praise of Judah’s virtue in the NJPS rendering, makes equally perfect sense as 3.  D. A. Hubbard, Hosea: An Introduction and Commentary (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries; Leicester: Inter-Varsity, 1989), p. 200. 4.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim, More Fool Than Knave’, pp. 340–42.

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castigation of the apostasy of the Northern Kingdom, which it serves in my rendering. It all depends on how we construe the names/epithets ēl and qĕdōšîm. In NJPS’s rendering both epithets refer to the God of Israel, commonly called Yhwh. In my rendering, on the other hand, I treat both of the Hebrew terms as designations of superhuman powers other than Yhwh, namely angels. Kimchi in his commentary here argues on the basis of the parallelism that the hapax legomenon rād is a synonym of the common neemān ‘faithful’ found in the following clause. A. Rofé takes the phrase rād im as meaning ‘continually walk in the company of’.5 Note also should be taken of the chiastic parallelism represented by the two clauses rād im ēl//wĕim qĕdōšîm neĕmān ‘loyal with God//with the Holy faithful’. However, it is the angel, whose veneration Hosea speaking in the name of God condemns in Hos. 12:4–6, who is called ēl in Jer. 48:13, while the noun qĕdōšîm designates ‘angels’ in Job 5:1 where Eliphaz taunts Job for his reliance upon a revelation he received from an angel.6 The noun qĕdōšîm also indicates the angels who constitute God’s entourage in Ps. 89:8: ‘God greatly dreaded in the council of holy beings, held in awe by all around Him’ (so NJPS). In light of the irony that would be manifest in imputing to Hosea the assertion that Judah, unlike Israel who venerates an angel called the el of Bethel, is in fact both loyal to that same el and devoted to qĕdošim, i.e., angels, it is much more plausible to see Hos. 12:1c–d not as an assertion of the loyalty of Judah to the God of Israel but rather as a continuation of the description of the devotion of Israel to angels and the lexeme ‘and Judah’ as but one more example of an original Y meant as an abbreviation for Israel.7 12:2 Eprayim rōeh rûăḥ wĕrōdēp qādîm ‘Ephraim shepherds the wind, and he pursues the east wind’ NJPS renders as: ‘Ephraim tends the wind and pursues the gale’. As for the expression qādîm, literally ‘east (wind)’, which NJPS translates ‘gale’, it should be noted that the expression rûăḥ qādîm, literally, ‘a wind of [i.e., from] the east’ is attested five times in Hebrew Scripture— Exod. 10:13; 14:21; Jer. 18:17; Jon. 4:8; Ps. 48:8—while the expression 5.  A. Rofé, Angels in the Bible: Israelite Belief in Angels as Evidenced by Biblical Traditions (2nd ed.; Jerusalem: Carmel, 2012), p. 203 (in Hebrew). 6.  See especially Ginsberg, ‘Job the Patient and Job the Impatient’, p. 99. 7.  See Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 342 and n. h.

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rûăḥ haqqādîm ‘the east wind’ with definite article is likewise attested five times: Exod. 10:13; Ezek. 17:10; 19:12; 27:26; 42:16. The expression here attested in the second half of Hos. 12:2a, namely qādîm to designate an east wind, or as NJPS would have it, simply a wind or gale, is found, apart from Hos. 12:2 and 13:5, an additional seven times: Gen. 41:6, 23; Isa. 27:8; Ps. 78:26; Job 15:2; 27:21; 38:24. Not surprisingly, in Hos. 12:2 the two expressions rûăḥ and qādîm appear in synonymous parallelism in the order (1) shorter/more common expression for wind; (2) longer word, which only secondarily means wind but primarily means ‘east’ (the latter meaning of qadim is attested in Ezek. 43:17; 44:1; 46:1, 12; 47:1, 2, 3, 18; 48:1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 16). On the other hand, Hos. 13:15 employs the two terms in the opposite order, also in synonymous parallelism. Ginsberg notes that rûăḥ and other synonyms meaning ‘wind’ are commonly employed in Biblical Hebrew to refer to futility and foolishness.8 Aside from numerous examples in Qoheleth (Qoh. 1:14, 17; 2:11, 17, 26; 4:4, 6, 16; 6:9), note should also be taken of Job 15:2, ‘Does a wise person answer with opinions that are wind//and fill his belly with the east wind?’, where Eliphaz accuses Job of uttering foolishness and Job 16:3, ‘Have windy words no limit?’ with which Job hurls the same accusation back at Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, his would-be comforters. kol-hayyôm kāzāb wāšōd yarbeh ‘Every day he multiplies treachery and plunder’ LXX reflects a totally different understanding of the division into clauses and verses. The LXX text that corresponds to MT Hos. 12:2a reads as follows: ό δὲ Ἐφράιμ πονηρὸν πνεῦμα ‘But Ephraim [is] an evil spirit’. This LXX reading seems to construe the pair of words rh rûăḥ not as a participle rōeh ‘tend/shepherd’ as in MT followed by the noun rûăḥ ‘wind’ construed as object of the participle, but rather as a construct chain ra hārûăḥ ‘evil in respect of spirit’, i.e., ‘evil spirited’. The LXX text that corresponds to MT Hos. 12:2b reads as follows: ἐδίωξεν καύσωνα ὅλην τὴν ήμέραν, which means, ‘He has chased the east wind all day’. Where MT, followed by the various English versions, would seem to treat ‘tend the wind//pursue the east wind’ as two synonymous clauses and the adverbial phrase kol-hayyôm ‘all day/every day’ as belonging to the following clause, LXX construes the first three lexemes of Hos. 12:2 as

8.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 340.

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a nominal sentence and the following four lexemes as a verbal sentence ending with the adverbial phrase kol-hayyôm. In addition, while in Biblical Hebrew kol-hayyôm usually means ‘every day’, LXX renders it literally, ‘all day long’. There is no implicit reason to reject MT’s pair in 12:2b, ‘treachery and plunder’. Indeed, dishonesty and misappropriation of other persons’ goods are juxtaposed in Lev. 19:11: ‘You shall not steal; you shall not deal deceitfully or falsely with one another’. However, the pair kāzāb wāšōd is nowhere else attested in Hebrew Scripture, while the pair šāwĕ//kāzāb ‘futility’//‘dishonesty’ precisely in that order appears in synonymous parallelism in Ezek. 13:6, 7, 8, 9; 21:34; 22:28; and Prov. 30:8. On the basis of LXX at Hos. 12:2b, Ginsberg seeks to restore an original wāšāwĕ in the Hebrew text on the assumption that wāšōd in the standard Hebrew text resulted from an ancient scribe’s miscopying an original wāšāwĕ.9 Not surprisingly, Ginsberg takes note of the LXX reading ‘futility’ also in the margin of NJPS. Indeed, a great many of the most important modern critical scholars of Hebrew Scripture have adopted the LXX reading for the lexeme in question without taking into consideration the fact that LXX differs from MT at Hos. 12:2 not only with respect to this lexeme. Moreover, were it the case that Hosea has employed a stereotyped phrase, which LXX transmitted correctly and which MT misconstrued, we should expect to find the word order šāwĕ//kāzāb ‘futility’//‘dishonesty’ found in Prov. 30:8 (much less likely a candidate for pre-exilic Hebrew than Hos. 12) and in Ezekiel. Macintosh rejects the emendation; Harper accepts it, and Andersen and Freedman make no mention of it.10 ûbĕrît im-Aššûr yikrōtû//wĕšemen lĕMiṣrayim yûbāl ‘They (the Kingdom of Israel) make a treaty with Assyria//And oil is brought to Egypt’ As noted in NJPS’s marginal note here, both of these clauses refer to the forging of alliances with the major world powers—Assyria to the northwest with its capital at Nineveh in what is today Northern Iraq, and Egypt to the southwest. Our prophet’s disparagement of an alliance with Assyria is reflected also in Hos. 5:13–14, while Israel’s forging treaties of defence with both Assyria and Egypt is disparaged in Hos. 7:10–12.

9.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 340. 10.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 477; Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 604; Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 374.

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12:3 wĕrîb laYhwh im Yĕhûdâ ‘And so Yhwh is now engaged in a lawsuit against Israel’ Concerning the lawsuit in which God, as it were, summons Israel to court to account for Israel’s misbehaviour see above at Hos. 4:1; 5:1–6, and see the extensive scholarly literature on the so-called covenant lawsuit cited there. Ginsberg explains that in place of the proper name ‘Judah’ we must here restore an original ‘Israel’.11 It is possible that here as elsewhere in the book of Hosea (see in my Introduction, concerning ‘Judahite Glosses’) the original text of the prophecy employed the abbreviation ‘Y’ for Israel and that when the book was brought to Judah the abbreviation was deliberately misconstrued as standing for Judah so that the rebuke might prompt Judah after the fall of Samaria in 722 BCE to learn an object lesson from the demise of the Northern Kingdom and resolve to behave more prudently. Ginsberg points out that in the text that follows mention is made repeatedly to the name Israel and its etymology and that no mention is made of a person or nation named Judah.12 wĕlipqōd al-Yaăqōb kidĕrākāyw kĕmaălālāyw yāšîb lô ‘That is, to punish Jacob for his misbehaviour and to requite him for his misdeeds’ I understand the initial waw in Hos. 12:3b as an explicative waw. Consequently, I translate it ‘That is’ (Latin id est).13 BHS and numerous modern commentators, including Graetz, Nowack, Oort, Wellhausen, and Wolff, simply eliminate the seemingly anomalous conjunctive waw, and some find support in seven manuscripts collated by Kennicott and in the LXX, which also does not attest to a conjunction here. If in the restored version of the opening clause of Hos. 12:3 the patriarch and the nation he founded are called Israel, in the second clause both the patriarch and the nation are called Jacob. The pair Israel//Jacob in Hos. 12 is found in the received text also in v. 13, and it is frequently 11.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 342 n. b. 12.  So also E. M. Good, ‘Hosea and the Jacob Tradition’, VT 16 (1966), pp. 137– 51 (13); similarly, Emmerson, Hosea, p. 63. 13.  Concerning explicative waw in Biblical Hebrew see, inter alia, H.A. Brongers, ‘Alternative Interpretationen des sogennanten Waw Copulativum’, ZAW 90 (1978), pp. 273–77; D. W. Baker, ‘Further Examples of the Waw Explicativum’, VT 30 (1980), pp. 129–36; B. A. Mastin, ‘Waw explicativum in 2 Kings viii 9’, VT 34 (1984), pp. 353–55. Take note of the chiastic parallelism in Hos. 12:3b–c, wĕlipqōd al//yāšîb lô ‘punish him//requite him’.

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attested outside of Hosea as follows: Exod. 19:3, ‘Thus shall you say to the house of Jacob//and declare to the children of Israel’; Num. 23:7, ‘Come, curse before me Jacob//Come, tell Israel’s doom’; Num. 23:10, ‘Who can count the dust of Jacob//Number the dust-cloud of Israel?’; Num. 24:5, ‘How fair are your tents, Jacob//Your dwellings, Israel’; etc. If in the text of Hos. 12:3 restored by Ginsberg the order is Israel// Jacob, Hos. 12:4 refers to the etymologies of the two names Jacob and Israel in precisely that reversed order so that a chiastic relationship is created between the announcement that God intends to call Israel//Jacob to account and the recounting of the origins of Jacob//Israel. 12:4 babbeṭen āqab et-āḥîw//ûbĕônô śārâ et-ĕlōhîm ‘In the womb he cheated his brother. And in his manhood he strove with a divine being’ The first of these two clauses should remind us of Gen. 25:26, where it is stated that Jacob indeed was born second but that when he emerged from the womb of Rebekah his hand was holding on to the heel [ăqēb] of his older twin brother Esau and that therefore the second twin was named Yaăqōb ‘he will cheat’. That this is supposed to be the meaning of the proper name Jacob and that ‘cheat’ is the meaning of the past-tense verb in the first clause of Hos. 12:4 is demonstrated by the words of Esau in Gen. 27:36, ‘Was he then named Jacob that he might cheat me these two times? He took away my birth right, and look now, he has taken away my blessing.’ As noted by Ginsberg, the literal meaning of the clause, ‘In the womb he cheated his brother’, does not appear to correspond to the chain of events as described in Genesis.14 Indeed, according to Gen. 27:36, Esau notes that the cheating took place later. However, Ginsberg also notes there that all was foreshadowed at birth with Jacob’s holding on to his older brother’s heel and the granting of the name Jacob to the younger twin. The striving with the divine being, called an angel in Hos. 12:5 (see the discussion in my introduction to this chapter of Hosea), is recounted in great detail in Gen. 32:25–29, where we read as follows: ‘And a person wrestled with him [Jacob] until the break of dawn. When he [the person] saw that he had not prevailed against him [Jacob], he wrenched Jacob’s hip at its socket, so that the socket of Jacob’s hip was strained as he wrestled with him. Then he [the person] said, “Let me go, for dawn is 14.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 342 n. i

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breaking”. But he [Jacob] answered, “I will not let you go unless you bless me”. He [the person] said, “What is your name?” He replied, “Jacob”. Said he [the person], “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven [Heb. śārîtâ; from the same verbal root as the verb śarâ ‘he strove’ in Hos. 12:4b] with ĕlōhûm ‘a divine being’ [the same noun that is employed at the end of Hos. 12:4b] and with persons, and you have prevailed”.’ 12:5 wayyāśar el-malāk wayyukāl bākâ wayyitḥannēn lô ‘He (Jacob) strove with an angel, and he (Jacob) prevailed He (the angel) cried, and he (the angel) pleaded with him (Jacob)’ Ginsberg takes it for granted that the preposition el in this verse has the unusual meaning ‘with’; so also NJPS.15 I have demonstrated elsewhere that in Hos. 12:5 the preposition el means ‘with’.16 The first two clauses of Hos. 12:5 retell what is recounted in Gen. 32:29 in the words of the divine being/angel to Jacob, kî-śārîtā im-ĕlōhîm wĕim-ănāšîm wattûkāl ‘Indeed, you strove with a divine being and with humans and you prevailed’. The juxtaposition of Hos. 12:4, in which the ‘person’ with whom Jacob struggled is called ĕlōhîm ‘divine being’, with Hos. 12:5, where that same divine being is called ‘angel’, conveys the message that in the context of both Gen. 32 and Hos. 12 the two terms are synonymous. Moreover, should there be any doubt as to whether the ‘person’ with whom Jacob struggled all night was an angel, we should recall that the refusal of the mysterious personage to reveal the personage’s name corresponds to the typology of encountering an angel that is attested in Judg. 13, where the angel who announces the birth of Samson likewise refuses to disclose a personal name. The final two clauses of Hos. 12:5a–b clearly paraphrase the words of the ‘angel/person/divine being’ in Gen. 32:27. There the personage says only ‘Let me go…’. Hosea is somewhat more dramatic as he prepares to make a point of great significance for, he hopes, the future conduct of the people of Israel in his own time. He makes it clear that the angel wept and pleaded. As Ginsberg points out, ‘A being who couldn’t even hold his own against Jacob was to be Jacob’s protector!’17

15.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 342. 16.  Gruber, ‘el = et’, pp. 267–79. 17.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 342 n. k.

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Perhaps a question mark would be better than an exclamation point there. Hosea himself puts it this way in Hos. 12:5c–d: Bêt-ēl yimṣāennû wĕšām yĕdabbēr immānû ‘At Bethel he (Jacob) would meet him (the angel), and there he (the angel) would speak with us’ Indeed, the last two clauses of Hos. 12:5 can be understood as follows: ‘At Bethel he [Jacob who is renamed Israel and the people of Israel who are still called Jacob; see above at Hos. 12:3b] continually meets him (hence the use of the so-called imperfect form of the verb frequently employed to refer to habitual activity; see GKC #107 e, g), and there he (the angel) speaks with us’. Bêt-ēl ‘At Bethel’ With reference to place names understood as locative adverbials, cf. also Gen. 33:18, ‘Jacob came [to] Shalem, the city Shechem’; Josh. 18:1; 22:12, ‘All the congregation of Israel assembled [at] Shiloh’; Judg. 1:7, ‘And they brought him [to] Jerusalem, and he died there’; 1 Sam. 16:4, ‘And he came [to] Bethlehem’; 2 Kgs 25:7, ‘And he brought him [to] Babylon’. Strange to relate, the treatment of place names as locative adverbials in Biblical Hebrew merits virtually no mention in the various reference grammars and treatises on the syntax of Biblical Hebrew. The point of employing the imperfect form of the verb in both members of the pair of clauses in synthetic parallelism is that the close encounters with the angel, who would not reveal his name to Jacob, continue to this day and there (here Hosea speaks in the name of his contemporaries whose opinion he does not share) he speaks with us (the Israelites in the eighth century BCE). With respect to the assertion here that it was at Bethel that Israel would invoke the very angel whom Jacob had earlier vanquished, Gomes argues that, on the contrary, Hos. 12:1–15 refers in a positive vein both to the initial encounter of Jacob and God (i.e., the God of Israel!) at Bethel and to the meeting place of God and Israel in the prophet’s own era.18 It appears to me that what makes Gomes’s tendentious interpretation of Hos. 12 plausible is the simple fact of the homonymous usage of the nouns el and ělōhîm in Hebrew Scripture to designate variously the one God of Israel, other superhuman powers whose veneration a major trend in Pentateuchal law and the wider biblical narrative opposed, and angels,

18.  Gomes, The Sanctuary of Bethel, pp. 172–78.

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concerning the legitimacy of the veneration of which there has been a controversy in Israel and Judah at least since the time of the prophet of Hos. 4–14 until this day.19 Codices Alexandrinus, Marchalianus, and Purpureus Vindobonensis of LXX at Hos. 12:5d read πρὸς αὐτόν ‘with him’, while Codices Vaticanus, and Venetus read πρὸς αὐτούς ‘with them’. Both Rahlfs and Ziegler prefer the reading πρὸς αὐτόν ‘with him’. Contrary to Ginsberg and NJPS margin, as well as Rofé, who relies on some but clearly not all traditions of LXX, there is no reason to prefer the reading ‘with him’ in place of MT’s ‘with us’.20 Indeed, the prophet’s point is that the problem is not that long ago Jacob revered an angel over whom he, Jacob, had prevailed, but that his descendants still rely on that same angel and thereby compromise their loyalty to the God of Israel. And this is the point made now in Hos. 12:6: waYhwh ĕlōhê haṣšĕbāōt Yhwh zikrô ‘But as for Yhwh, the God of hosts, Yhwh is his name’ Compare NJPS: ‘Yet the LORD, the God of Hosts, Must be invoked as “LORD” ’.

For the Hebrew noun zēker as a synonym of the Hebrew noun šēm ‘name’ see also Exod. 3:15, zeh-šĕmî lĕōlām wĕzeh zikrî lĕdōr dōr ‘This is my name for ever//this is my appellation for all time’; Ps. 135:13, Yhwh šimĕkā lĕōlām//Yhwh zikrĕkā lĕdōr-wādōr ‘Yhwh is your name forever// Yhwh is your appellation for all time’. As explained in NJPS’s marginal note at Hos. 12:6, the point is that one should not invoke any of the angelic hosts but only the God of Israel by his sacred four-letter name. Ginsberg contrasts the belief expressed explicitly by Jacob in blessing Joseph’s children, Ephraim and Manasseh, in Gen. 48:16, ‘The angel who has redeemed me from all harm—Bless the lads’.21 Similarly, we read in Gen. 31:11–13, ‘And in the dream an angel [Heb. malak] of God said to me…I am the angel [Heb. el] of Beth-el…’. See also Gen. 35:1, ‘God said to Jacob, “Arise, go up to Bethel and remain there; and build an 19.  See the discussion, below. Concerning the locative adverbial use of the place name Bethel here in Hos. 12:5, see also Chalmers, Struggle of Yahweh and El, pp. 101–14. 20.  Rofé, Angels in the Bible, pp. 196, 201. 21.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 342 n. k.

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altar to the angel [Heb. el] who appeared to you when you were fleeing from your brother Esau” ’. See also Gen. 35:3, ‘[Jacob says], Come, let us go up to Bethel, and I will build an altar there to the angel [Heb. el] who answered me when I was in distress and who has been with me wherever I have gone’. Obviously, modern translations of Genesis, even when executed by Jewish and Christian translators, have treated all of these references to the angel of Bethel as references to ‘God’ construed as another way of referring to the One God of Israel. In so doing, even if these translators may revere other angels, they have absorbed, as it were by osmosis, the Hosean teaching with respect to ceasing and desisting from venerating the angel of Bethel by transforming the angel of Bethel of Hos. 12 into the One God of Israel. Indeed, as pointed out by Rofé in his Angels in the Bible, our prophet did not deny the existence of angels; rather, he was opposed to veneration of angels because he fully understood that the angels whom other biblical writers venerated had originally been gods, whose veneration biblical religion forbade (as, e.g., in the second commandment of the Decalogue and passim in Deuteronomy).22 It should be observed that the debate as to whether or not angels should be venerated and the debate as to whether or not veneration of angels is tantamount to idolatry continues in Orthodox Judaism in modern times. In many Jewish households the Sabbath evening table ceremony for welcoming the Sabbath begins with a hymn to the ministering angels, first inviting them into the home and then dismissing them because, presumably, angels do not drink wine or eat supper. In many ultra-Orthodox Jewish homes this hymn to the angels has been eliminated on the grounds that invoking angels is a form of idolatry. Similarly, it was common for several centuries to ask the help of angels to help the sounds of the shofar or ram’s horn to be emitted from the shofar on the Jewish New Year. In the course of the twentieth century the appeal to angels was eliminated on the grounds that the appeal to angels constituted an interruption in the course of sounding one hundred blasts of the shofar, which may be interrupted only by prayers to the One God. Unlike Ginsberg, Rofé, and Good,23 R. S. Chalmers24 argues that El in Hos. 12 is understood both by the Prophet Hosea and by the devotees of El, whose devotion to El our prophet disparages, as a deity who is a rival to Yahweh. I, on the other hand, would suggest that quite possibly Gen. 31 and Gen. 35, before they were incorporated into the book of Genesis 22.  Rofé, Angels in the Bible, p. 203. 23.  See Good, ‘Hosea and the Jacob Tradition’, pp. 137–51. 24.  Chalmers, Struggle of Yahweh and El, especially, pp. 85–133.

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and assimilated to the belief in, experience of, and worship of a single deity often called by the proper name Yhwh, referred to a deity named El. In Hos. 12, on the other hand, it appears to me, on the basis of Hos. 12:4–6 as well as Hos. 12:1c (see above), this deity has been demoted to the rank of an angel. Thus in the context of Hos. 12, the polemic against the devotion to the angel El is similar to Eliphaz’s polemic against the reliance upon angels/holy beings in Job 5:1; 15:4, 13–16; 25:1.25 Both our eighth-century BCE prophet and Eliphaz disparage reliance upon angels. With respect to the book of Job, I find myself and my late and revered teacher, H. L. Ginsberg, on the side of Job and God against Eliphaz. With respect to Hos. 12, on the other hand, I find myself and my late and revered teacher, H. L. Ginsberg, on the side of Hosea. 12:7 wĕattâ bēlōhêkā tāšûb ḥesed ûmišpāṭ šĕmor wĕqawwēh el-ĕlōhêkā tāmîd ‘But you must return by means of the help of your God. You must practice kindness and justice, and pray always to your God’ Contrast NJPS, which renders as follows: ‘You must return to your God! Practice goodness and justice, And constantly trust in your God.’

The latter translation assumes that the Hebrew expression šāb bĕ (elohim) is the equivalent of šāb el ‘return to (God)’ attested in Hos. 7:10 (q.v.) and the synonymous šab ad (elohim) ‘return to God’ attested in Deut. 4:30; 30:2; and Hos. 14:2 (q.v.). Ginsberg already pointed out that šāb bĕ is not the equivalent of šāb el and šāb ad ‘return to’.26 Anticipating Ginsberg in recognizing this fact, Harper,27 following Hitzig and G. A. Smith, construes šāb bĕ in our verse to mean not ‘return to’ but ‘return by the help of’. In the same vein, Macintosh renders ‘You shall return through the help of your God’, construing the prefixed preposition as bet instrumenti, corresponding to the Latin ablative of means.28 (With Macintosh, cf. also Rashi and Ibn Ezra.)

25.  Concerning this polemic, see Ginsberg, ‘Job the Patient and Job the Impatient’, pp. 94–111. 26.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 343 n. w. 27.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 382. 28.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 491.

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Ginsberg characteristically suggests emending the text of Hos. 12:7a from bēlōhêkā tāšûb to bĕohālêkā tēšēb ‘and you shall dwell safe in your tents’, which makes perfect sense if the latter verse is to be relocated after v. 11 (see below).29 However, in the context of the received text, Hos. 12:7a makes perfect sense as a call to renounce reliance upon the angel of Bethel and to return to trusting in the one God of Israel and to express that reliance by hearkening to the two imperatives that appear in v. 7b and v. 7c. The first of these imperatives is ‘take care of/cherish kindness and justice’. The failure of Israel collectively to do so is spelled out in Hos. 4, where kindness and justice and knowledge of God (NJPS there renders this expression ‘obedience to God’) are seen to be synonymous with observing the dos and don’ts of the Decalogue. Similarly, in Job 28:28 the two technical terms ‘fear of the Lord’ and ‘shunning evil’ appear in synonymous parallelism, suggesting that devotion to/obedience to God and ethical behaviour are, if not synonymous, then two aspects of one reality. Similarly, in Job 1:1, 8; and 2:1 Job himself is characterized as ‘fearing God and shunning evil’. As noted already by Rashi in his commentary on Ps. 27:14, one of the basic meanings of the verb qiwwâ, which NJPS here translates ‘trust’ and which is often translated ‘hope’ (cf. Jerusalem Bible at Hos. 12:7c and Ps. 27:14), is ‘pray’. In other words, the point of Hos. 12:7 is to continue the basic idea of the previous verses of the present chapter, namely, that Israel has fallen on hard times because of his reliance upon an angel who was weaker than Israel’s ancestor Jacob/Israel and that Israel will flourish when he ceases to pray to the angel Bethel and prays instead to Yhwh and shows devotion to Yhwh by observing the Ten Commandments. 12:8 kĕnaan bĕyādô mōzĕnê mirmâ laăšōq āhēb ‘(Israel is) a trader who employs false scales, Who loves to overreach’ As we shall see, these uncomplimentary descriptions of a culprit are meant to describe the subject of the following clause, to whom will be attributed in v. 9, the following declaration: ‘Ah! I have become rich; I have achieved power/wealth/ill-gotten gains’. The prophet speaking in the name of God will reply to this declaration by collective Israel: ‘Not all his pelf is worth the guilt he has occurred’.30 This interpretation of

29.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 342. 30.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 341, dealing with v. 9d–e.

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Hos. 12:9d–e requires emending the consonantal text I v. 9d so that the consonantal text reads not kol-yĕgîay lō yimṣĕû-lî ‘All of my gains will not reach me…’

but rather, following LXX, kol- yĕgîāyw lō yimṣĕû-lô ‘All the fruits of his toil will not be available to him’.

However, I also prefer here the LXX reading. Moreover, it requires the revocalization of the noun ḥēṭĕ at the end of Hos. 12:9e as the verb ḥāṭā ‘he incurred’. As Ginsberg has noted,31 this treatment of the two clauses is ‘a well-known emendation’. Indeed, it is accepted by Harper,32 who explains that it is based upon LXX, which reads as follows: οὐκ εὑρεθήσονται αὐτῷ δι’ ἀδικίας ἅς ἥμαρτεν ‘None of the fruits of his toil will be available to him because of the injustices by which he sinned’.33 The Peshitta, on the other hand, attests to a version which accords with the now standard Hebrew text with respect to Hos. 12:9d, but which understands Hos. 12:9e as follows: ‘which I sinned’. If, indeed, the Peshitta attests to the original reading at Hos. 12:9d–e, then both clauses constitute a declaration on the part of Ephraim, which is a continuation of the declaration of guilt found in Hos. 12:9a–c. However, if, indeed, v. 9 is a declaration of guilt rather than, as Ginsberg construes it, the attribution to Ephraim of a declaration that, like Job in his arguments with his three friends, his crimes have only been misdemeanours, it would make no sense for God, speaking through the prophet, to continue the harangue in vv. 10–15. Therefore, one must either follow Ginsberg in accepting the LXX reading as the original sense of Hos. 12:9d–e, or one must attempt to make sense of MT at Hos. 12:9d–e. For my attempt to do the latter, see below. With respect to Hos. 12:8–9, it needs to be noted first of all that in Hos. 12:8 the noun kĕnaan, which usually designates in Biblical Hebrew an ethnic group identified with some or all of the pre-Israelite inhabitants of the Land of Canaan [the boundaries are defined, inter alia, in 31.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 342 n. c. 32.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 385. 33.  Transcription and rendering of LXX according to Glenny, Hosea, p. 61.

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Num. 34 and are identical more or less with the province of Canaan in the Egyptian Empire of the thirteenth century BCE] or a member of that ethnic group. By contrast, the adjectival noun kĕnaănî in Zech. 14:21 and Prov. 31:24 is commonly understood to designate ‘merchant’, while the plural of that same noun is commonly understood to designate ‘merchants’ in Isa. 23:8 and Job 40:30. It is commonly accepted that because the Canaanites (the same people who are called Phoenicians in Greek sources) engaged in international commerce (as described in the prophecy of doom pronounced against the Phoenician city-state of Tyre in Ezek. 26–28) the terms Canaan and Canaanite acquired the secondary meaning ‘merchant’ regardless of the ethnic origin or affiliation of the particular business woman or man. Similarly, in Medieval English—as, for example, in the Magna Carta—‘Jew’ may designate both an adherent of Judaism and a moneylender of whatever religious persuasion because of the association of moneylending with Jews (a consequence of both the Jews’ and the Christians’ acceptance of Deut. 15’s prohibition of lending money on interest to one’s co-religionists). Similarly, in Medieval Latin and consequently in Modern English the term ‘slave’ (a form of the word Slav) replaced Latin servus to designate a chattel slave because it was common for Christians (and Jews) to acquire as chattels ethnic Slavs who were not Christians. Similarly, in Medieval Hebrew texts from Central Europe the term ‘Canaanite’ designates the Slavic language because in Gen. 9:26 Canaan the grandson of Noah is punished by his becoming a chattel slave of the lowest possible rank. It was argued by E. A. Speiser that the Hurrian term kinaḫḫu, from which we get Hebrew and English Canaan, designated ‘purple’, the dye derived from an aquatic snail called the murex.34 Inhabitants of the coastal cities of what is now Lebanon and Syria produced textiles that were dyed purple (tĕkēlet) and scarlet (argāmān), which they exported all over the Mediterranean world. Consequently, in the Middle East they were called Canaanites, originally meaning ‘purple’, and among Greek-speaking peoples they were called Phoenicians from the Gk. phoenix, also meaning ‘purple’. However, this attractive and still widely admired explanation as to why the very same people would be called both Canaanite and Phoenician has been challenged most vehemently by P. C. Schmitz.35

34.  E. A. Speiser, ‘The Name Phoenikes’, Language 12 (1936), pp. 121–26. 35.  P. C. Schmitz, ‘Canaan’, ABD, vol. 1, pp. 828–31.

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12:9 wayyōmer Eprayim ak āšartî māṣātî ōn lî kol-yĕgîay lō yimṣĕû-lî āwōn ăšer-ḥeṭě ‘Ephraim said (or thought), “Ah! I have become rich. I have achieved power/wealth for myself.” All the fruits of his toil will be unavailable to him36 Because of the iniquity by which he sinned’ For the use of unreliable scales as the epitome of dishonest business practices, cf. the exhortations contained in Lev. 19:36; Deut. 25:14–15 and the prophetic critique of the dishonest business practice in question in Amos 8:5; and see also Ezek. 45:10–11: ‘Thus said the Lord Yhwh: Enough, princes of Israel! Make an end of lawlessness and rapine, and do what is right and just! Put a stop to your evictions of my people—word of the Lord Yhwh. Have reliable balances, a reliable ephah, and a reliable bath. The ephah and the bath shall comprise the same volume, the bath a tenth of a ḥomer and the ephah a tenth of a ḥomer, their capacity shall be gauged by the ḥomer.’ (Cf. also Prov. 20:10.) It should be noted that Ezek. 45:10–12 goes beyond exhortation to providing the functional equivalent of the office of weights in measures in the United States of America, a legal definition of each of the standard measures of capacity for dry measure, liquid measure, and weights. Vessels recovered by archaeologists from ancient Israel confirm on the one hand that indeed merchants could have taken advantage of the lack of a single standard for weights and measures. Thus an omer could be between 1 and 2 litres, an ephah between 10 and 20 litres, and a ḥomer anywhere between 100 and 200 litres.37 As for the third clause of Hos. 12:9, māṣātî ôn lî ‘I have achieved power/wealth for myself’, I offer here and in the running translation two alternative renderings of the noun ôn, the first of which alludes to the prowess of Jacob in his encounter with the angel (Hos. 12:4), and the second of which alludes to the material success of the people of Israel in the time of the prophetic author of Hos. 12. kol-yĕgîay lō yimṣĕû lî āwôn ăšer-ḥēṭĕ ‘All the fruits of my toil will be unavailable to me because of the iniquity by which he sinned’ NJPS renders these clauses as follows: ‘All my gains do not amount to an offense which is real guilt’. However, a marginal note there remarks, ‘Meaning of Heb. uncertain’. (Concerning the readings in LXX and the 36.  In employing third person pronominal suffixes rather than first person pronominal suffixes here I follow LXX; see the commentary. 37.  See M. A. Powell, ‘Weights and Measures’, ABD, vol. 6, pp. 897–908.

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Peshitta see above.) The meaning of MT is that Ephraim, like Job in his dialogue with his three friends who suggest that he brought disaster upon himself and his family because he misbehaved, asserts his innocence. Indeed, while Ephraim is here alleged to assert that exploitation of the consumer to the undeserved benefit of the merchant, of the less affluent to the undeserved benefit of the more affluent, is of no significance in the grand scheme of things. On the contrary, the castigation of specifically this kind of injustice is, indeed, a central issue in the prophetic books of the Bible that refer to the events of the middle of the eighth century BCE in Judah and Israel. As Heschel points out, a central issue in the literary prophets of the eighth century BCE is precisely the fact that many people then and now look upon the exploitation of the less affluent as a misdemeanour, while the literary prophets speaking in the name of God look upon it as a disaster.38 If we recall that in Biblical Hebrew, and in the standard Jewish liturgy to this day, the hierarchical scale of crimes from least severe to most severe is ḥeṭĕ, peša, āwôn, commonly rendered ‘sin, transgression, iniquity’ (see dictionaries), then Hosea tells us that Ephraim here claims that what Hosea, speaking in the name of God, regards as Ephraim’s iniquity is only a mere misdemeanour. In other words, the two final clauses of Hos. 12:9 tell us that careful attention to the nuances of textual variants reveal in the MT what LXX and the Peshitta could not imagine, namely the fact that the final clauses of 12:9 confirm what Heschel attributed both to the original audience of the eighth-century BCE prophets and to the prophets themselves, specifically, the controversy as to whether exploitation of the less affluent then and now is a misdemeanour or a disaster. Neither LXX nor the greatest modern text-critical scholars could believe that this controversy is the issue in Hos. 12:9. Hence they seem compelled to alter the unbelievable message of MT in the final clauses of Hos. 12:9. However, the ultimate reason for rejecting the above attempt to make sense of the final two clauses of MT Hos. 12:9 is not that previous generations could not see in it a reflection of Heschel’s profound summary of the import of the eighth-century BCE prophetic critique of the behaviour of the affluent towards the less affluent in Israel and Judah. The ultimate reason for rejecting the above suggested interpretation of MT at Hos. 12:9e is that āwôn ašēr ḥeṭĕ ‘an iniquity which is a sin’ is not, as much as we might like it, a Biblical Hebrew nominal sentence. Consequently, Ginsberg revocalizes the final lexeme in that series of three words as the 38.  Heschel, The Prophets, p. 4.

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verb ḥāṭā’ ‘he sinned’ so that the three words now mean ‘the iniquity, which he committed’.39 This, in turn, requires Ginsberg to accept the LXX reading of the entire verse, without which the final clauses of Hos. 12:9 will not mesh.40 Hosea 12:9 reads as follows in Codex Vaticanus of LXX, where, however, it is numbered as Hos. 12:8: καὶ εἶπεν Ἐφράιμ Πλὴν πεπλούτηκα, εὕρηκα ἀναψυχὴν ἐμαυτῷ. πάντες οἱ πόνοι αὐτοῦ οὐκ εὑρεθήσονται αὐτῷ δι’ ἀδικίας ἅς ἥμαρτεν. Glenny renders the Old Greek text of this latter verse as follows: ‘And Ephraim said, “But I am rich: I have found relief for myself. None of the fruits of his toil will be available to him because of the injustices by which he sinned”.’41 12:10 wĕānōkî Yhwh ĕlōhêkā mēreṣ Miṣrāyim ōd ôšîbĕkā bāŏhālîm kîmê môēd ‘But as for me, Yhwh your God since (you left) the land of Egypt, I shall settle you in your tents as in times past’ We have seen, with Ginsberg,42 that the basic thesis propounded by our prophet speaking in the name of God in Hos. 12 is that praying to and relying upon the angel known as Bethel or the angel of Bethel is not only foolish but also reprehensible. Moreover, we noted that Jer. 48:13 testifies to a tradition which treated the Northern Kingdom’s devotion to Bethel as analogous to Moab’s devotion to Chemosh. In other words, the people of the Northern Kingdom compromised their devotion to the one God of Israel by appealing to Bethel. Such being the case, it is totally appropriate that our prophet whose familiarity with the Decalogue has been noted above in my commentary in connection with Hos. 4:2; and 6:5 would here (as again in Hos. 13:14) invoke the Decalogue in attempting to cajole Israel to show God totally loyalty and to give up reliance upon other superhuman entities. U. Cassuto interprets our verse as follows: ‘But I… who am in truth your God…I am your God since before you came here, since the days when you were poor and needy, in bondage to Pharaoh in Egypt. Now since, after I brought you to the present state of prosperity, you have turned your back on Me, I shall punish you…that is I shall exile you from your land, which I have given you, and I will make you dwell

39.  Ginsberg, Notes, p. 26. 40.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 341 and p. 342 n. c. 41.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 61. 42.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’.

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in the wilderness, in tents, as in the days when we first met together.’43 Cassuto further notes, ‘the nexus between the words “I am THE LORD your God” and “out of the land of Egypt” found in the first commandment of the Decalogue (Exod. 20:2; Deut. 5:6) was already firmly established in a saying known to all and used by all’.44 However cautiously, Cassuto goes on to suggest that here in Hos. 12:10, as in Hos. 13:4, the prophet alludes to the first of the Ten Commandments. In the latter verse, as Cassuto points out, our prophet refers at once to the first two of the Ten Commandments when, speaking in the name of God, he declares, ‘I am the LORD your God since the land of Egypt, and you have never known intimately any other deity besides Me, and there is no redeemer other than Me’. Consequently, Cassuto argues most convincingly that the allusion to the first of the Ten Commandments in Hos. 12:10a, which, Cassuto maintains, was fully understood by the prophet’s original target audience, ‘enabled his hearers to understand at once what was meant by yěmê môēd “the days when we met together” ’, namely the revelation of the Decalogue at Mount Sinai. ‘Moreover’, Cassuto argues, ‘the repetition of the sentence [in Hos. 12:10 and 13:4] testifies that the words were cherished and easily recalled by the speaker and his audience’.45 Hosea, speaking in the name of God, in Hos. 12:10–11, like God Almighty in Num. 12:6, indicates that just as God spoke with Moses (in revealing the Decalogue), so does God speak also with the prophets. The main point of Num. 12:6 is to declare that the degree of intimacy, with which God spoke with Moses, is far greater than the degree of intimacy with which God will speak with post-Mosaic prophets. Here in Hosea the point is that the very same God who brought the Israelites out of Egypt and demanded that they not worship or pray to other powers now repeats the same point through the agency of the prophetic author of Hos. 12. Indeed, Hos. 12:14 will allude to Moses the prophet through whose agency Israel came out of Egypt. What is especially interesting is the fact that the literal interpretation of Hos. 12:11 has God employing chiastic parallelism to declare three times that God frequently speaks with prophets to make known his will.

43.  Cassuto, ‘The Prophet Hosea and the Books of the Pentateuch’, p. 90. 44.  Cassuto, ‘The Prophet Hosea and the Books of the Pentateuch’, p. 91. 45.  Cassuto, ‘The Prophet Hosea and the Books of the Pentateuch’, p. 91.

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12:11 wědibbartî al-hannĕbîîm wĕānokî ḥāzôn hirbêtî ûbĕyad hannĕbîîm adammeh ‘I spoke through the agency of the prophets, and, as for me, prophetic revelation I multiplied, and through the agency of the prophets I communicated’ It may be no accident that the very same prophet Hosea twice employs the extremely rare form of synonymous parallelism that consists of a triplet, whose first and last lines constitute chiastic synonymous parallelism. The other example is found in Hos. 5:1, while a third set of three parallel clauses employing three distinct epithets for the people of the Northern Kingdom is found in Hos. 10:11. Assuming that the final clause of Hos. 12:11 contains a piel form of a verb dāmâ ‘be like’ and that the piel of this verb can mean ‘use similitudes’ (so DCH 2:447–48), Moses Maimonides in his introduction to the first part of his Guide of the Perplexed argues that ‘the key to the understanding of all that the prophets, peace be upon them, have said, and to the knowledge of its truth is an understanding of the parables, of their import, and of the meaning of the words occurring in them. You know what God, may He be exalted, has said: And by the ministry of the prophets have I used similitudes.’46 The latter proof-text indicates that Maimonides indeed understood the verb adammeh at the end of Hos. 12:11 to mean ‘I have used similitudes’ precisely as indicated in DCH. Ehrlich argues that the verb adammeh cannot have the meaning ‘use similitudes’.47 In fact, the chiastic structure of the verse which begins ‘I spoke by/to the prophets’ and ends ‘and by the hand of the prophets I…’, suggests that what is called for at the end of the verse is a verb in the so-called imperfect form which can mean either ‘I spoke’ or ‘I will speak’ and serve as a synonym of the first lexeme in the verse, wĕdibbartî, which, according to the Masoretic accents, is to be construed as conjunctive waw followed by a verb in the so-called perfect meaning, ‘I spoke’. In fact, as noted already by G. V. Schick,48 such a verb whose root is dmm and which can mean ‘be silent’, ‘murmur’, or ‘speak’ is amply attested in Biblical Hebrew. Examples of the use of this verb in the last of these three meanings include 1 Kgs 19:12, where qôl dĕmāmâ daqqâ must mean ‘the sound of a soft whisper’,49 rather than ‘the sound 46.  Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed (trans. S. Pines; Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 110–11. 47.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 2, p. 389. 48.  G. V. Schick, ‘The Stems dûm and damám in Hebrew’ (PhD diss., The Johns Hopkins University; Leipzig: W. Drughulin, 1913). 49.  So Schick, ‘The Stems dûm and damám in Hebrew’, p. 21.

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of a thin silence’, especially since in the following verse the sound is referred to by Elijah as having been heard by him. Similarly, Schick argues, most convincingly, that in Ezek. 24:17 the two imperatives hēānēq dōm mean ‘sigh (and) moan’ rather than ‘moan (and) be silent’;50 Schick’s view of the matter seems to be shared by NJPS at Ezek. 24:17, which renders ‘Moan softly’. Consequently, Hos. 12:11 is to be understood as follows: ‘I spoke through the agency of the prophets, and, as for me, prophetic revelation I multiplied, and through the agency of the prophets I communicated’. The chiastic parallelism of the first and final clauses of the verse, which I have just now established, requires that we understand the preposition al in the first clause as a synonym of bĕyad ‘through the agency of’ in the final clause. Indeed, the expression bĕyad ‘through the agency of’ with respect to the human messenger (prophet) of prophetic revelation is attested in Isa. 20:2; Ezek. 38:17; Hag. 1:1, 3; 2:1; Zech. 7:7, 12; Mal. 1:1. Once it is recognized that Hos. 12:11 both opens and closes with the declaration that God speaks through the agency of the prophets, one can fully appreciate the expanded chiastic structure in which the middle clause repeats the idea by declaring ‘And as for me, prophetic revelation I multiplied’. The Hebrew noun ḥāzôn, which I here render ‘prophetic revelation’, is, in fact, a collective noun referring both to (1) prophetic speech, which conveys the message(s), which the prophet believed had been communicated to her/him by the deity, and to (2) the divine communication to the prophet and to each of these and both of these together in the aggregate. The singular noun ḥizzāyôn ‘vision’ may refer to a single instance of either the message to the prophet or the prophet’s conveying that message to people. The latter noun form is attested twice with reference to prophecy in Isa. 22:1, 5, respectively (see below). The construct singular form ḥezyôn, which is only twice attested in all of Hebrew Scripture, refers in both instances to personal revelations in a dream (Job 20:8; 33:15). In 2 Sam. 7:17 the rare noun form haḥizzāyôn ‘the vision’ refers to the message conveyed to David by God through the agency of the prophet Nathan: ‘Nathan spoke to David according to all these words (contained in 1 Sam. 7:4–16) and in accord with all of this vision’. Zechariah 13:4 tells of a time when charlatan prophets will be ashamed of the lies that they had transmitted while claiming that these lies had been revealed to them by God in visions: ‘On that day each of the [false] prophets will be ashamed of his [fabricated] vision [Heb. miḥezyônô] when he pretended to be prophesying…’. In Isa. 22:1, 5 the singular noun ḥizzāyôn twice refers to a place where prophetic revelation had taken place, ‘the valley of vision’. 50.  Schick, ‘The Stems dûm and damám in Hebrew’, p. 22.

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The plural form ḥezyōnōt ‘visions’ refers in Joel 3:1 to revelations to be experienced when God will make close encounters of the third kind between God and humans frequent and available without any discrimination based upon sex, age, or socio-economic status: ‘After that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy; your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. I will even pour out my spirit upon male slaves and female slaves in those days.’ The plural form ḥezyōnōt refers to revelation of information in dreams in Job 4:13 and 7:14. The collective noun ḥāzôn ‘revelation in the aggregate’ appears, inter alia, in the titles of prophetic books in Isa. 1:1; Obad. 1; and Nah. 1:1. The noun also refers to prophetic revelation in the aggregate in 1 Sam. 3:1; Ezek. 7:26; 12:22. If the latter three verses speak of times when divine revelation has been or will be scarce and very much missed, Hos. 12:11 insists, ‘I have made prophetic revelation abundant’. Here, as we shall see, the prophet, speaking in the name of God, seeks to make the point that with the abundance of prophets conveying God’s message that people should behave, there is no reason for people to misbehave. Before moving on to tell us in Hos. 12:13–14 that just as Jacob had served Israel for a single wife in payment for which he guarded sheep so was Israel brought up from Egypt by the agency of a single prophet (Moses) who guarded them (like sheep), our prophet injects what might seem to be a total non sequitur in Hos. 12:12, a diatribe against Israelite sacrificial worship at Gilead and Gilgal. The reasons that this diatribe against sacrificial worship may make sense within the context of Hos. 4–14 is the fact that our prophet has previously denounced or made light of sacrificial worship in Hos. 6:6, ‘For I [God] desire goodness, not sacrifice; obedience to God, rather than burnt offerings’. We shall see our prophet denounce sacrifice again in Hos. 14:3. It almost goes without saying that in respect of his telling us that God prefers ethical behaviour in both the public and the private spheres to sacrifice our prophet expresses an idea well known from other eighth-century BCE prophets, such as Amos 5:21–25; Isa. 1:10–17, and Mic. 6:6–8. Strangely, therefore, Holt remarks as follows concerning the reference to Gilgal in Hos. 12:12: ‘Unfortunately, there is a problem for our understanding of the passage, namely, that the sacrifices of bulls was not an offence—on the contrary! We can only make guesses as to what the sin involved amounted to, but there can be no doubt that it is a question of cultic offense. The evil of Gilgal is of a purely cultic character, and the punishment consists therefore in expulsion from the shrine.’51 51.  Holt, Prophesying the Past, p. 69.

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12:12 im-Gilĕad āwen ak šāwĕ hāyû ba-Gilgāl šĕwārîm zibbēḥû gam mizbĕḥōtām kĕgallîm al talmê śādāy ‘If Gilead is evil/vanity, ultimately, they (stones of testimony set up there) were of no value,52 (that) they sacrifice bulls in Gilgal. Indeed, their altars will be like stone heaps upon furrows in a ploughed field’ NJPS renders as follows: ‘As for Gilead, it is worthless; And to no purpose have they Been sacrificing oxen in Gilgal: The altars of these are also Like stone heaps upon a ploughed field’.

For the idea that an Israelite holy place might be turned into ruins one should compare Mic. 1:6, ‘So I will turn Samara into a ruin in open country, into ground for planting vineyards; for I will tumble her stones into the valley and lay her foundations bare’; and also Mic. 3:12, ‘Assuredly, because of you Zion shall be ploughed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps of ruins, and the Temple Mount an elevated place in the midst of a forest’. In the commentary above at Hos. 6:8, I pointed out that the place name Gilead there designates not, as usually, a region, but explicitly a city, of which it is stated there, ‘Gilead is a city of evildoers tracked up with blood’. Presumably, the description of Gilead as a city tracked up with blood refers to that city’s having been the scene of crimes of violence including the shedding of blood. Now if in Hos. 6:8 the designation qiryat pōălê āwen means ‘city of evildoers’, it is reasonable to assume that here in Hos. 12:12 the noun āwen can also mean ‘evil’ as it does in Hos. 6:8. However, the noun can also indeed mean ‘vanity, worthlessness, lie’, which would qualify it as a synonym of the noun šawĕ ‘vanity, worthlessness, lie’ in the next line of the verse where NJPS renders ‘and to no purpose’. I suggest therefore that the prophet here assumes that his audience remembers that he has said that Gilead is a city of doers of āwen, which can and does mean ‘evil’, but that the prophet also assumes that his audience knows that the noun āwen can also be a synonym of šāwĕ 52.  I understand the clause ‘They were of no value’ as referring both to the literal meaning of Gilead in v. 12a and to the sacrificing of bulls in v. 12c; see the commentary.

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‘vanity, worthlessness, lie’. Therefore, it would appear, he suggests the following deduction, ‘If [the common meaning of the particle im, which NJPS rendered “as for” for lack of any idea as to what to do with that particle here] Gilead is āwen, which can mean both evil (because of shedding blood there) and vanity, then it is certainly a vain and foolish thing for the people who live there to travel to the well-known sanctuary at Gilgal’. This latter place is mentioned as a holy place of pilgrimage in Hos. 4:15; Amos 4:4; and Amos 5:5. Moreover, by substituting šawĕ for the often synonymous āwen in the beginning of the second clause of Hos. 12:12 the prophet creates the link between vanity and sacrifice by means of the alliteration created by the juxtaposition of šāwĕ and šĕwārîm ‘vanity and bulls’, which is then followed by the alliteration of Gilgal (name of sacred place of sacrifice) and gallîm heaps of stones, an alliteration that can certainly compete with Amos’s famous ‘Gilgal will be exiled’ (Heb. gālōh yigleh) in Amos 5:5. Moreover, the transition from āwen ‘evil’ to āwen ‘vanity’ creates semantic concatenation. (On this rhetorical device, see below.) Gilead in the Context of Hosea 12 It is quite possible that Gilead in Hos. 12:12 refers not to the city mentioned in Hos. 6:8 but to a place name much more germane to the context of Hos. 12. Chapter 12 of the book of Hosea refers more than once to the cycle of events in the narrative of Jacob’s flight from Esau, Jacob’s twenty-year sojourn with Laban, his flight from Laban, and Jacob’s encounter with the angel of Bethel in the course of his flight from Laban (cf. Gen. 31–32). In the context of these recollections of the narrative of Jacob the patriarch and his maternal uncle and father-in-law Laban, the place name Gilead has a very special significance. The Hebrew place name Gilead and its Aramaic equivalent yĕgar śāhădûtā mean ‘a heap of stones serving as the witness’. According to Gen. 31:44–54, Jacob and Laban erected a heap of stones to serve as testimony to a treaty of peace between Aram and Israel. However, 2 Kgs 8:29; 9:15; 10:32; 13:22 indicate that for an entire century the kingdom of Aram waged war against the kingdom of Israel. Consequently, from the perspective of Hosea and his audience in the reign of Menahem son of Gadi (747–737 BCE) the very name Gilead is testimony to the unfaithfulness of Laban and his descendants to the treaty of peace, which he had concluded with Jacob the patriarch. Consequently, the name Gilead is also a fitting testimony to the unfaithfulness of Israel toward God. (For reference in Hos. 12:12 to the heap of stones with which Gilead began and to which Gilead and other sacred sites are to be consigned, see below.)

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As for my contention that the terms āwen and šāwĕ both refer to dishonesty in violating an oath, treaty, or other solemn obligation, cf. Zech. 10:2: ‘For the teraphim spoke āwen, and the augurs saw/foresaw šeqer, and dreamers speak haššāwĕ, and they console with hebel [“nothingness/ breath, vanity”]’. The point of the latter verse is to describe a situation in which none of the accepted media for knowledge of the divine will or intent can be trusted because all of these media, like the public media in a totalitarian state, can be relied upon only to spread falsehood. For further evidence that in Biblical Hebrew the two terms šāwĕ and šeqer both mean falsehood we should compare the two versions of the ninth commandment of the Decalogue. In Exod. 20:16 it is written, ‘You may not testify as a witness of šeqer against your fellow human’ while in the parallel text in Deut. 5:17 it is written, ‘You may not testify as a witness of šawĕ against your fellow human’. When, therefore, the prophet asserts here in Hos. 12:12, ak šāwĕ hāyû, meaning, ‘ultimately they were false, ultimately they were of no consequence’, he may well refer to the stones from which Jacob and Laban, possibly both in good faith, set up a pillar of testimony to their intention to abide by the conditions of a treaty of non-aggression. Moreover, as I stated above, the name Gilead, referring, therefore, to a broken promise, is a fitting reminder of the disloyalty of Jacob’s descendants to the God of Israel, disloyalty expressed primarily by violation of the ethical precepts of the Decalogue (see above at ch. 4). 12:12 ‘At Gilgal…their altars will be like stone heaps upon furrows in a ploughed field’ We have seen that ultimately the place name Gilead/Jegar Sahadutha came to symbolize a broken promise because ultimately Aram violated the treaty of peace concluded between Jacob and Laban by waging aggressive war against Israel. According to Josh. 5:9, Gilgal became a sacred site because it was there that Joshua circumcised the Israelites who had been born after the Exodus and had not been circumcised during the forty years in the wilderness of Sinai. Testimony that Gilgal continued to be a sacred site before the building of Solomon’s Temple is found in 1 Sam. 10:8 and 11:14–15 (see also m. Zebaḥim 14:5). Amos 4:4 and 5:5 both disparage Gilgal as a site of an altar to the God of Israel, which the prophet, speaking in the name of God, disparages because the Israelites do not obey the ethical precepts of God’s instruction. Consequently, Amos composes the play on words Gilgal gālōh yigleh, meaning ‘Gilgal shall surely go into exile’ (Amos 5:5). In the same vein, Hosea states here in Hos. 12:12c–e that the altars of these (the people who worship at Gilgal)

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shall become like stone heaps upon a ploughed field. If, according to Josh. 5:9, Gilgal received its name because there God said gallôtî ‘I rolled away the disgrace of Egypt (i.e., the foreskins of the Jewish males born since the departure from Egypt)’, according to Hos. 12:12c–e the place name Gilgal is to take on a new meaning because the place will be destroyed. The heap of stones that will be left at the site of the former holy place will be only a hindrance to farmers attempting to plant and harvest food crops in that place. (For comparison with the similar punishments, which Micah, speaking in the name of God, promises both Samaria and Jerusalem if they do not repent, see above, with reference to Mic. 1:6; 3:12.) The expression talmê śādāy ‘furrows in a ploughed field’ appears also in Hos. 10:4, q.v. 12:13 wayyibraḥ Yaaqob śĕdēh Ǎram wayyabod Yiśrāēl bĕiššâ ûbĕiššâ šāmar ‘Jacob fled to the land of Aram. Israel served in exchange for a wife, and in exchange for a wife he kept (sheep)’ 12:14 ûbĕnābî heĕlâ Yhwh et- Yiśrāēl mimMiṣrāyim ûbĕnābî nišmār ‘By the agency of a prophet Yhwh brought up Israel from Egypt, and by the agency of a prophet was he (Israel) kept’ There is a deliberate play on words created by the use in the successive verses Hos. 12:13 and 12:14 of adverbial phrases introduced by the prefixed preposition b both modifying the verb šmr ‘keep, guard, protect’. In the first of the two successive verses the prefixed preposition b serves as bet pretii, i.e., the preposition denoting ‘in exchange for, for the price of’, which we saw repeated five times in Hos. 2:21 and once again in Hos. 3:2 in connection with a sum of money which is paid to a bride by the bridegroom (like the wedding ring in modern Jewish and Christian ceremonies) as a symbolic act effecting the marriage of the bride to the bridegroom). The point of the play on words in Hos. 12:13–14 is to suggest that just as Jacob acquired a wife, namely Rachel, in exchange for his having guarded sheep for her father Laban and expected to receive his just reward, namely marriage to Rachel, so did God expect to be rewarded with loyalty for his having liberated Israel from Egypt by means of a prophet (Moses) and having guarded Israel in the wilderness by means of a prophet (Moses). Many years ago a biblical historian remarked to me concerning Hos. 12:13, ‘It is strange that this prophet does not mention

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Leah’. In fact, given our prophet’s firm belief in monogamy reflected in Hos. 4:10–14, it would not be altogether surprising if our prophet here in Hos. 12:13–14 reflected a tradition which did not recall Jacob’s having been tricked by his father-in-law Laban into engaging in bigamy. However, what Hos. 12:13–14 actually suggests is that just as Jacob was tricked into marrying a woman, namely Leah, for whom he had not guarded sheep for seven years and then worked another seven years in order to merit being married to his beloved Rachel (so Gen. 30:21–30), so did the people of Israel, not unlike Laban with respect to Jacob, act improperly towards God. With respect to Jacob it is stated in Hos. 12:13 that he kept (sheep) in exchange for [Heb. b] a woman, namely, Rachel, whom according to Gen. 30:20–25, because of Laban’s deceitful behaviour, he did not immediately acquire. Likewise, it is hinted in Hos. 12:14 that while the people of Israel had been liberated from Egypt and sustained in the wilderness by God through the agency of a prophet, the people, acting improperly like Laban, relied not upon a prophet but upon an angel. According to footnote m repeated twice in NJPS at Hos. 12:14 with reference to the biblical expression ûbĕnābî, which NJPS renders ‘through a prophet’, the meaning is actually ‘through the agency of a prophet (Moses)’. Indeed, Ginsberg argues that to appreciate the alleged reference to Hosea’s rejection of the veneration of the angel of Bethel in Hos. 12:14 one must restore the alleged original order of the verses in Hos. 12 so that Hos. 12:13–14 follow immediately upon Hos. 12:4–6a as follows: ‘In the womb he cheated his brother. Grown to manhood he struggled with a divine being [ĕlohîm]. He struggled with an angel and triumphed. The latter [the angel] wept and implored him [Jacob]. At Beth-el, he [Jacob] encounters him [the angel], and there he [the angel] speaks with him [so Ginsberg emending Heb. immānû “with us”; the latter reading, if authentic, should mean that the prophet means to say, with irony, “there he (the angel) speaks with us”; the prophet thus includes himself as part of the guilty people of Israel rather than speaking to his fellow Israelites condescendingly]. However, as for the LORD, the God of Hosts, the LORD is his name. And Jacob fled to the land of Aram, and he served in exchange for a woman. And in exchange for a woman he kept [sheep]. [Likewise], by the agency of a prophet the LORD liberated Israel from Egypt, by the agency of a prophet he [Israel] was guarded.’53 Thus understood, either by penetrating the prophet’s stream of consciousness or by restoring what Ginsberg alleges to have been the original order of the verses in the speech constituted by Hos. 12, Jacob’s cheating his brother anticipates his later cheating God Almighty by invoking an angel rather 53.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 342.

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than God Almighty. Moreover, Jacob’s having watched sheep in exchange for a woman, namely Rachel, corresponds to God’s having kept Israel by the agency of a prophet, only because the homonymous usages of the prefixed preposition b meaning both ‘in exchange for’ and ‘by the agency of’ are homographic homonyms. What should have been the reciprocal relationship between Jacob’s keeping sheep in order to acquire a wife and God’s keeping Israel from harm by the agency of a prophet is reinforced by the near inclusio created by Hos. 12:13’s ending with ûbĕiššâ šāmar while Hos. 12:14 ends with the metrically identical ûbĕnābî nišmār. The reciprocity is further enforced by the chiastic parallelism and concatenation (repeating the same word bĕiššâ at the end of Hos. 12:13b and again in 12:13c) in Hos. 12:13b–c, ‘And Israel served Israel for a wife// and for a wife he kept (sheep)’. 12:15 hikîs Eprayim tamrûrîm wĕdāmāyw ālāyw yiṭṭōš wĕḥerpātô yāšîb lô ădōnāyw ‘Ephraim angered (God) bitterly, so he (God) cast his (Ephraim’s) guilt upon him, and his Lord requited him for his despicable behaviour’ While Ginsberg54 and NJPS treat Hos. 12:1–14 as a literary unit and Hos. 12:15 as belonging to a new unit, namely Hos. 12:15–14:1, the verse division in the standard editions of the Bible in both Hebrew and English treat Hos. 12:1–15 as a single unit. Interestingly, the division of the book of Hosea into eleven major divisions in Codex Vaticanus of LXX treats as division no. 10 the unit that corresponds to Hebrew and English 11:5–14:1 and as the eleventh and final division of the book of Hosea the verses that correspond to Hos. 14:2–10 in the standard editions of the Bible in Hebrew and English. Rudolph offers the following division of Hos. 12:1–15 of the standard editions: (1) vv. 1–10; (2) vv. 13–14; (3) v. 11; (4) vv. 12, 15.55 Ginsberg, as I already noted, detaches Hos. 12:15 from the chapter at hand, rearranging the verses of Hos. 12:1–14 as follows: 1, 8–9, 2–6, 13–14, 12, 10–11, 7.56 Thus in the standard Hebrew and English editions of the book of Hosea, as well as in Rudolph’s reconstruction, the chapter ends with the observation that Ephraim’s misbehaviour led to God’s punishing Ephraim. If, in fact, this was the way in which the prophetic speech ended, one may reasonably conclude that one of the messages of Hos. 12 is that justice 54.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’. 55.  Rudolph, Hosea, pp. 220–21. 56.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, pp. 341–42.

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achieved should be indeed a great consolation for ordinary people, who often feel, and often with good reason, that justice is seldom achieved in this temporal life. Ginsberg, on the other hand, holds that the chapter originally ended with Hos. 12:7, which he construes to mean the following: ‘and you shall dwell safe in your tents. But cherish goodness and justice and at all times make your God your hope.’ The latter conclusion to the chapter would seem to constitute words of consolation and comfort, with which it is appropriate to conclude a chapter of prophetic critique. However, Ginsberg himself explains that the second half of Hos. 12:7b is, in fact, equivalent to ‘Stop being a cheat, and stop being a sucker’.57 In other words, for Ginsberg the chapter is understood as originally having ended not with consolation but with a prophetic critique of Ephraim’s having acted foolishly and consequently having behaved badly. This critique reiterates the very same charges that are made in the opening verses of the chapter, both as preserved in the standard editions of the Hebrew Bible and as restored by Ginsberg to a supposedly original version, which read more smoothly.

57.  Ginsberg, ‘Hosea’s Ephraim’, p. 340.

C h a p t er 13

There is no graphic indication of a break in MT between the chapters now designated in standard editions of the Hebrew Bible in English and Hebrew as Hos. 12 and Hos. 13. In Codex Vaticanus of LXX, which divides the book of Hosea into eleven major divisions, the penultimate division, which is division no. 10, corresponds to Hos. 11:5–14:1 in the standard editions of the book of Hosea in Hebrew and English. As I noted previously (see above in the Introduction and again in my discussions of Hos. 11–12 in the commentary above), the tenth of the eleven larger division of the book of Hosea in Codex Vaticanus of LXX corresponds to divisions 19–20 of the 21 original divisions of the book of Hosea in Codex Vaticanus. On the other hand, Hos. 13:1, like 6:1 and 8:1, was considered to be an appropriate place to begin a new division by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, c. 1220 CE, who separated the text of Hosea into fourteen chapters. While in most places the Hebrew and English printings adopt the same chapter divisions, there are three instances of variance. Leaving aside Hos. 13:16, which in Hebrew printings appears as Hos. 14:1, where it is out of place (see below in my commentary on Hos. 13:6 and in my commentary at Hos. 14:1), Hos. 6:1, 8:1, and 13:1 all occur at places in the text where neither ancient and medieval Hebrew manuscript tradition nor Greek manuscript tradition recognized a break in the text. 13:1 kĕdabbēr Eprayim rĕtēt nāśā hû bĕYiśrāēl wayyeĕšam babbaal wayyāmōt ‘When Ephraim spoke piety, he was exalted in Israel. When, however, he (Ephraim/Israel) became guilty with respect to Baal, he died’ NJPS renders as follows: ‘When Ephraim spoke piety He was exalted in Israel;

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But he incurred guilt through Baal, And so he died’.

The NJPS’s marginal note states that Baal in the third clause refers to Baal-peor and urges the reader to compare Hos. 9:10 where Baal-peor is specifically mentioned. (For a discussion of Baal-peor see above at Hos. 9:10.) The point of NJPS’s marginal note is to reflect the view of H. L. Ginsberg, editor in chief of the NJPS. In fact, Baal and Baalim occur three times in Hos. 1–3 (specifically ‘for Baal’ in Hos. 2:10 and ‘the Baals’ in Hos. 2:15, 19). The expression ‘to the Baals’ occurs once in Hos. 4–14 (specifically in Hos. 11:2), Baal once (here in Hos. 13:10), and Baal-peor once (in Hos. 9:10). According to the view shared by Kaufmann, Ginsberg, and the writer of this commentary, the prophetic author of Hos. 4–14 holds that widespread worship of Baal took place in Israel during the reign of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. Our prophet understands that this is no longer part of the religious landscape in the period of Hos. 4–14, which stems from the reign of Menahem son of Gadi (747–737 BCE). Consequently, it is made explicit in Hos. 13:1 and in Hos. 13:10 that worship of Baal took place in the past and does not take place in the present described by our prophet.1 In my commentary at Hos. 11:2, I interpret the ambiguous ‘to the Baals’ also as a reference to what Israelites did in the past; see above in the commentary at Hos. 11:2. NJPS’s (and my) ‘when Ephraim spoke’ reflects MT’s vocalization kĕdabbēr, which construes the morpheme dabbēr as an infinitive meaning ‘to speak’ and the infinitive with prefixed temporal particle k as an adverbial phrase. A similar understanding of the Hebrew is reflected in Symmachus’s rendering ἐν τῷ λαλεῖν. However, LXX renders κατὰ τόν λόγον, while Aquila renders κατά τόν ῥῆμα, both of which mean ‘according to the word/speech’. The latter renderings assume that the letters kdbr represent the comparative particle k followed by the noun dābār in its primary meaning ‘word, speech’.2 Glenny shows that in LXX Codex Vaticanus our Hos. 13:1a, i.e. kdbr Eprayim, is construed as the conclusion of the sentence, which begins in Hos. 12:14, and that the entire sentence is construed as follows: ‘Ephraim made angry and provoked to anger, and his blood will be poured out upon him, and the Lord will pay him back for his reproach, according to the report of Ephraim’.3 1.  Similarly, Holt, Prophesying the Past, p. 67. 2.  See Macintosh, Hosea, p. 521. 3.  Glenny, Hosea, pp. 61, 170.

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Ibn Ezra and Kimchi, following TJ, interpret the noun rtt in light of Aramaic rĕtîtâ ‘trembling’, and they interpret the entire clause to mean ‘When Israel spoke, the fear of him [Israel] seized the nations round about’. Ibn Ezra holds that the background of this assertion is the reign of Jeroboam II son of Joash (788–747 BCE). Rashi, on the other hand, interprets, ‘When Jeroboam (I) son of Nebat was zealous for God and castigated [King] Solomon and [did so] with [fear and] trembling’. Rashi here refers to the fact that according to 1 Kgs 11:29–39, Jeroboam son of Nebat was chosen by God through the agency of the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite to rule over ten or eleven of the twelve tribes of Israel.4 The reason for this punishment of the Davidic dynasty is that (as explained in 1 Kgs 11) during the reign of Solomon the Israelites ‘abandoned God and worshipped Ashtoreth the goddess of Sidon, Chemosh, the god of Moab, and Milcom, the god of the Ammonites and did not walk in my ways to do what is right in my sight and the statutes and judgments like David his father’ (1 Kgs 11:33). Jeroboam, on the other hand, is told in 1 Kgs 11:38, that if he is faithful to God’s statutes and judgments, God will build for him a lasting dynasty. NJPS, following KJV (‘When Ephraim spake trembling’), follows Rashi’s interpretation which sees in Hos. 13:1a–b an affirmation that in the beginning, Jeroboam carried out the repentance program dictated by God through Ahijah in 1 Kgs 11:38. nāśā hû bĕYiśrāēl ‘He was exalted in Israel’. KJV, following Kimchi, ‘He raised up his head in Israel’, renders ‘when he exalted himself’ while the marginal note there compares Prov. 18:12, ‘Before destruction a person’s heart is haughty while humility leads to honour’. NJPS, however, follows Rashi and Ibn Ezra in treating the verb nāśā as an impersonal third person masculine singular active verb meaning ‘he was exalted’. To this usage of the active to express what in English would be understood as a passive one may compare the frequent wayyiqrā and qārā in the expression ‘he [unidentified impersonal subject] named him’, which is employed to mean ‘he/she/it was named’. Typical of the latter usage are Gen. 16:14, ‘the well was called…’; Gen. 19:22, ‘the town was called Zoar’; Gen. 21:31, ‘Hence that place was called Beersheba’; etc. Concerning the use of the seemingly superfluous third person masculine singular independent pronoun as characteristic of the book of Hosea, see my comment at Hos. 7:8; see also Hos. 13:13b, 15a, 15d. 4.  1 Kgs 11:31–32, 36 appears to reflect two contradictory views as to whether Rehoboam son of Solomon was given one (Judah) or two (Judah and Benjamin) tribes.

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For rtt ‘trembling’ being equivalent to ‘piety’ we may compare the frequent equation of ‘fear of Yhwh/God’ to piety and obedience to moral precepts. See, e.g., Job 28:28: ‘And he said to humankind, “Behold the fear of the Lord is wisdom and eschewing of evil is understanding” ’. Similarly Job is described in Job 1:1, 8; 2:3 as ‘one who fears God and eschews evil’. wayyeěšam ba-Baal wayyāmot ‘When, however, he (Ephraim/Israel) became guilty with respect to Baal, he died’ As noted by Kaufmann (HIR 6:117), here in Hos. 13:1 as in Hos. 9:10 the worship of Baal is understood to be something of the past but worthy of comparison to the present (in the time of our prophet, a contemporary of King Menahem son of Gadi of Israel) reverencing of the golden calves at Bethel and Dan. So what, then, is the meaning of ‘he died’? If we recall that Rashi interprets ‘When Ephraim spoke piety’ to refer to the Ephraimite leader Jeroboam I son of Nebat (928–907 BCE) at the beginning of his reign when 1 Kgs 11 suggests that he was prepared to follow the divine instructions mediated by Ahijah the Shilonite, then the continuation of the verse which reports, ‘When he became guilty with respect to Baal, and he died’, refers to what is reported in 1 Kgs 12–14, according to which Jeroboam did not remain faithful to God. Indeed, the allegation that Jeroboam worshipped Baal may have inspired the author of 1 Kgs 17:10–23 to assert that the worship of Baal and Asherah, which allegedly characterized the Northern Kingdom and led to God’s exiling the Israelite inhabitants of Samaria was initiated by Jeroboam son of Nebat. In 1 Kgs 12–13, on the other hand, the sin of Jeroboam was not the worship of Baal but the worship of the calves at Bethel and Dan (1 Kgs 12:28–30), his establishing a temple of bāmōt (i.e., bêt bāmōt), and his appointing priests who were not of the children of Levi (1 Kgs 12:31; cf. 1 Kgs 13:33–34). Closer to the charge made by Hos. 13:1 is the assertion by Ahijahu the prophet speaking in the name of God in 1 Kgs 14:9–10, ‘You made for yourselves other gods and molten images to anger me; and me you have cast behind your back. Therefore I will bring disaster upon the House of Jeroboam, and I will cut off from Jeroboam every male, bond and free in Israel. I will sweep away the House of Jeroboam utterly as dung is swept away.’ Mirabile dictu, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Kimchi take the death of Jeroboam the head of Ephraim here alluded to in Hos. 13:1, as a metaphor rather than as a reference to the death of Jeroboam son of Nebat. The possible reason for treating this prophecy as a metaphor is the clear reference in

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1 Kgs 14:20 to Jeroboam’s having died a natural death followed by burial in the family sepulchre and the accession to the throne of his son Nadab. Hosea 13 and the several contradictory accounts presented in 1–2 Kings show that there were various traditions concerning the misbehaviour of Jeroboam, if indeed he is alluded to in Hos. 13:1. Alternatively, Hos. 13:1 could be a post-722 gloss referring to the demise of the Northern Kingdom (Ephraim) because of the sin of idolatry as described in 1 Kgs 17. However, the latter interpretation of Hos. 13:1 is to be rejected because it leaves ‘However now’ (Heb. wĕattâ) without a preceding clause describing what was the state of affairs before now. It would appear, therefore, that in contrast to 1 Kgs 13, which attributes to Jeroboam I the setting up of calves at Bethel and Dan but not the worship of Baal, Hosea attests to an alternative tradition according to which a past sin of Ephraim was the worship of Baal (perhaps in the days of Jeroboam and Ahab, who died for their apostasy). However, Hosea suggests, the present-day sin of Ephraim (in the reign of Menahem son of Gadi) is the reverencing of silver calves (not the golden calves of 1 Kgs 12:28) in the worship of Yhwh. Most instructive is the remark of Qyl in his commentary on Hos. 13:2 where he asserts that the silver calves of Hosea are indeed the golden calves of 1 Kings. When a commentator says that x is y precisely when x is not precisely y, she/he is usually telling the reader that she/ he wishes to cover up the fact that Hebrew Scripture is full of contradictions because it is not from the pen of a single author. Let the Bible reader beware. Following the marginal note a in NJPS here at Hos. 13:1, I suggest that ‘he died’ here in Hos. 13 refers not to the death metaphoric or otherwise of King Jeroboam I in the tenth century BCE but to the putting to death of numerous Israelites by the duly appointed leaders of the nation of Israel as punishment for their worshipping Baal-peor in the days of Moses as recorded in Num. 25:1–5. The latter text reads as follows: ‘While Israel was staying at Shittim, the people began to fornicate with the Moabite women, who invited the people to [partake of] the meat sacrificed to their gods. Indeed, the people ate [of the meat sacrificed to the Moabite women’s deities], and they [the Israelite people—both women and men] worshipped their [the third person feminine plural suffix refers to the Moabite women’s] deities. Thus Israel attached itself to Baal-peor, so that Yhwh became angry with Israel. Yhwh said to Moses, “Take all of the ringleaders [so NJPS; marginal note in NJPS reads: ‘heads of the people’] and have them publicly impaled before Yhwh so that Yhwh’s anger may be turned away from Israel”. Moses then told Israel’s judges, “Each of you slay those of the people under his jurisdiction who attached

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themselves to Baal-peor”.’5 Kaufmann holds that Hos. 13:1 refers to the veneration of Baal in the Northern Kingdom during the reign of Ahab. As for the assertion that worship of other gods may be the unfortunate but natural outcome of Israelite men getting emotionally and sexually involved with women who worship other gods, cf. Exod. 34:15–16: ‘You must not make a covenant with the people living in the land [of Canaan], for they [the people of the land of Canaan] will lust after their deities, and they will sacrifice to their deities, and they will invite you to eat of their sacrifices. If you marry his [the Canaanite’s] daughters to your sons, his [the Canaanites’] daughters will lust after their gods, and they will cause your sons to lust after their gods.’ Kaufmann (HIR 8:118 n. 38) suggests that referring to Israel of the period of Ahab as Ephraim is anachronistic, all the more so if we follow Ginsberg in seeing in Hos. 13:1 a reference to the wilderness era before the entry of Israel into the land of Canaan. Perhaps we may conclude from our prophet’s use of the epithet Ephraim to refer to Israel of the Mosaic era that with all due respect to Tadmor’s and Ginsberg’s rational explanation as to why in Hos. 4–14 the names Israel and Ephraim are interchangeable (see above, pp. 32, 235–36, 248, 418), our prophet may have taken for granted that the names Israel and Ephraim are interchangeable without having delved into the possible historical background for this phenomenon. 13:2 wĕattâ yôsîpû laḥăṭō wayyaăśû lāhem massēkâ mikkaspām maăśēh ḥārāšîm kullōh lāhem hēm ōmĕrîm zōbĕḥê ādām ăgālîm yiššāqûn ‘But now they continue to sin. They have made for themselves molten images from their silver. According to their skill (they have produced) images, entirely the work of craftsperons. They say, “Persons who sacrifice must kills calves” ’ Contrast NJPS, which renders as follows: ‘And now they go on sinning; They have made them molten images, Idols, by their skill, from their silver, Wholly the work of craftsmen. Yet for these they appoint men to sacrifice; They are wont to kiss calves!’

5.  Similarly, Ginsberg, ‘Hosea Book of’, vol. 8, p. 1021; 2nd ed., vol. 9, p. 555; contrast Kaufmann, HIR, vol. 6, p. 117.

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In Hos. 13:2 as in Hos. 8:4–6 the term ǎṣabbîm, literally ‘images’, refers to the golden calves employed in the worship of Yhwh at Dan and Bethel. Consequently, the two terms are juxtaposed with each other in Hos. 8:4–6 and 13:2. As noted in the commentary at Hos. 8, our prophet is opposed to the use of these appurtenances. Apparently, NJPS here at Hos. 13:2 translates ‘idols’ because the term ‘images’, which NJPS employs to render ăṣabbîm at Hos. 8:4, has been co-opted to translate the collective noun massēkâ, literally, ‘molten image’ in Hos. 13:2b. In any case, as has already been noted by Kaufmann and Ginsberg, the images here are not appurtenances for the worship of ‘other gods’.6 In fact, while the worship of ‘other gods’ is a big issue in the last days of the First Temple in Judah and in the Northern Kingdom in the reign of Ahab, this issue is, as I have shown, absent from Hos. 4–14 except when reference is made to past sins as in Hos. 13:1. The term massēkâ ‘molten object’ designates an object produced by pouring hot liquid metal into a mould. The noun massēkâ is derived from the verb nāsak ‘to pour liquid’, which is used also for pouring oil for anointing a king (Ps. 2:6) and for pouring a libation to God (Hos. 9:4). According to Exod. 32:4, 8, and Deut. 9:16, the golden calf produced by Aaron was a massēkâ ‘molten object’. Exodus 34:17 and Lev. 19:4 forbid the Israelites to fashion and to worship ĕlohê massēkâ ‘molten gods’, while Deut. 27:15 curses anyone who produces a massēkâ, apparently because it is self-understood that such an object is employed in the worship of ‘other gods’. The conviction reflected in Hos. 13:2 that massēkâ and the worship of Yahweh do not go together would thus seem to be no different than the view reflected in the passages from Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy just referred to. However, as Kaufmann and Ginsberg have pointed out, there is indeed a significant difference. In the Northern Kingdom there was a long-standing tradition of reverencing golden calves as part of the worship of Yhwh. The author of 1 Kgs 12:28–29 would have us believe that when Jeroboam I commissioned the golden calves for the sanctuaries at Bethel and Dan, he was substituting these images for the worship of Yhwh. Hosea, however, does not suggest that the veneration of the calves was a substitute for worship of Yhwh. Nevertheless, he vehemently opposes this practice. It is altogether understandable that generations of scholars prior to Kaufmann and Ginsberg failed to comprehend the distinction between veneration of calves and worshipping other gods. 6.  See Kaufmann, HIR, vol. 6, pp. 117–19, and Ginsberg, ‘Hosea, Book of’, vol. 8, p. 1020; 2nd ed., vol. 9, p. 555

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kitĕbûnām ‘according to their skill’ Here, as in Exod. 35:31 where Bezalel is commissioned to direct the making of the furnishings of the tabernacle, the ability to make gold and silver appurtenances for the sanctuary is understood to be a form of ḥokmâ ‘wisdom’, tĕbûnâ ‘understanding’, and daat ‘knowledge’, which are normally acquired by education or via work experience. Just as in reference to the wisdom of Solomon, which enables him to be an exemplary ruler, his knowledge/wisdom is said to be a divine gift (1 Kgs 3:12), so also Bezalel son of Uri son of Hur of the tribe of Judah and his assistant Oholiab son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan, and all the members of their staff of temple-builders and temple-furnishers acquired ‘wisdom, understanding, and knowledge’ not from human mentors or in the course of their working lives, but as a gift from heaven (see Exod. 31:1–6). Likewise, 1 Kgs 7:14 asserts that Hiram, who produced all the bronze parts of Solomon’s Temple, was endowed with ḥokmâ ‘wisdom’, tĕbûnâ ‘understanding’, and daat ‘knowledge’. NJPS at Exod. 31:3 translates ḥokmâ as ‘skill’ and tĕbûnâ as ‘ability’. Similarly, here at Hos. 13:2 NJPS renders tĕbûnâ ‘their skill’, but the intent is probably to suggest the abuse of their wisdom. Indeed, if that is the case, when Hos. 13:2 castigates the Israelites who fashion molten images to accompany the worship of Yhwh and who abuse their wisdom/talent in so doing, Hosea anticipates Isa. 44:13–19, where the prophet makes fun of the person who fashions an idol and worships it: ‘The craftsman in wood measures with a line/And marks out a shape with a stylus; He forms it with scraping tools, Marking it out with a compass. He gives it a human form, The beauty of a man, to dwell in a shrine. For his use he cuts down cedars; He chooses plane trees and oaks. He sets aside trees of the forest; Or plants firs, and the rain makes them grow. All this serves man for fuel: He takes some to warm himself, And he builds a fire and bakes bread. He also makes a god of it and worships it, Fashions an idol and bows down to it! Part of it he burns in a fire: On that part he roasts meat, He eats the roast and is sated; He also warms himself and cries. “Ah, I am warm! I can feel the heat!” Of the rest he makes a god—his own carving! He bows down to it, worships it; He prays to it and cries, “Save me, for you are my god!” They have no wit or judgment: Their eyes are besmeared, and they see not; their minds, and they cannot think. They do not give thought, They lack the wit [Heb. daat] and judgment [Heb. tĕbûnâ] to say: “Part of it I burned in a fire…”.’7

7.  The translation is taken verbatim from NJPS.

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Given the influence of Hos. 7:14 and 8:1–2 on Isa. 58:1–5 and the influence of Hos. 2:14–17 on Isa. 35:1–2; 51:3; 65:10,8 it should not be surprising that Isa. 44 has made rather ironic use of the assertion in Hos. 13:2 that people created idols by use (or rather misuse) of acquired wisdom and/or God-given ability. In Deutero-Isaiah it becomes lack of acquired wisdom and/or God-given ability. maăśēh ḥārāšîm kullōh ‘Entirely the work of craftspersons’ Here in Hos. 13:2, as in Jer. 10:3–10, Isa. 40:19–20, and 41:6–7, the point is made that it is foolish for people to reverence objects that have been fashioned by human hands. Cf. Ps. 115:4: ‘Their [the nations of the world] idols [Heb. ăṣabbîm] are silver and gold, the work of human hands’. lāhem hēm ōmĕrîm zōbĕḥê ādām ‘They say, “People who sacrifice must kiss calves” ’ NJPS, however, renders ‘Yet for these they appoint men to sacrifice’. A marginal note in NJPS reads, ‘Meaning of Heb. uncertain’. Ginsberg suggests dividing clauses e–f of our verse as follows: lāhem hēm ōmĕrîm zibĕḥû ādām ăgālîm yiššāqûn, which he interprets as follows: ‘They say to them, “Sacrifice!” People kiss calves [Can you imagine such a thing!].’9 With all due respect to my late and revered teacher, H. L. Ginsberg, any understanding of a biblical text that requires the addition in brackets of an entire clause other than the ubiquitously necessary ‘He/she/you said’ and ‘But I say’ is highly suspect as expressing more of the brilliant imagination of the commentator and considerably less of the commentator’s insight into the original meaning of a biblical text. In addition, where MT treats the two words zōbĕḥê ādām as a construct genitive chain meaning either ‘sacrificers from among humankind’ or ‘persons engaged in human sacrifice’ (for the latter of which there is no warrant in the context of Hos. 4–14), Ginsberg, following Ehrlich,10 suggests that MT’s zōbĕḥê is a scribal error for an original zĕbāḥû, which he takes to be the pausal form of the plural imperative meaning ‘sacrifice, worship’. There is, of course, ample evidence for the interchange of y and w in the MT.11 Moreover, the reading zĕbāḥû ‘sacrifice!’ is supported by LXX’s θύσατε, Symmachus’s θύσιάσατε, and Vulgate’s immolate. Consequently, Ginsberg, following Ehrlich and Rudolph, divides and 8.  See Ginsberg, Israelian Heritage, p. 97. 9.  Ginsberg, ‘Notes’, p. 29. 10.  Ehrlich, Mikra Kipheschuto, vol. 3, p. 391. 11.  See Delitzsch, Die Lese- und Schrebfehler im Alten Testament, pp. 103–105.

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understands clauses e–f as follows: ‘They say to them, “Sacrifice!” People kiss calves.’ According to this interpretation, clause e tells us what devotees of the use of the calves in the worship of Yahweh say to people while clause f makes fun of the veneration of the molten calves by describing precisely how it is that people kiss these holy objects. However, it should be added that the seeming foolishness of kissing molten calves can be experienced only by those who think that the veneration of calves ought not to be part of Yahwistic worship. After all, kissing various holy objects such as rosary beads, prayer books, scrolls of the Pentateuch, mezuzot containing biblical passages and mounted on doorposts of Jewish homes, tefillin, and the fringes of the Jewish prayer shawl seem amusing and foolish only to persons who are unfamiliar with or ideologically opposed to these practices or to the deity that is associated with them or the faith community/ethnic group that is characterized by these practices. (Concerning Judah Ha-Levi’s suggestion regarding the calves, see above in my commentary at Hos. 8:4.) An equally plausible understanding of Hos. 13:2e is that lāhem hēm ōmĕrîm means ‘they [i.e., people] say’, meaning ‘people recite a proverb’, namely, the proverb found in Hos. 13:2f, where it is stated, zōbĕḥê ādām ǎgālîm yiššāqûn ‘People who sacrifice must kiss calves’. With reference to the syntax of this proposed understanding of Hos. 13:2e–f, cf., with Qyl and with Macintosh, Gen. 20:13, ‘I said concerning her’ (Heb. wāōmar lāh; NJPS renders ‘I said to her’). In interpreting the construct genitive chain zōbĕḥê ādām as vocalized in MT as meaning ‘people who sacrifice’ rather than ‘persons who engage in human sacrifice’,12 an idea nowhere else attested in the book of Hosea,13 Macintosh follows Kimchi, and relies also upon Gesenius’s Hebräische Grammatik.14 There Gesenius explains that ebyōnê ādām ‘the poor (pl.) among human’, i.e., ‘people who are poor’ in Isa. 29:19 corresponds syntactically to zōbĕḥê ādām ‘sacrificers among human’, i.e., ‘people who sacrifice’.15 While there is a widespread tendency among both medieval Hebrew exegetes and modern critical commentators to maximize references to idolatrous worship in the book of Hosea, I, following my late and revered teacher H. L. Ginsberg, see idolatrous worship as an issue of the present in 12.  So Ibn Ezra; and so emphatically Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 632, and Wolff, Hosea, p. 219. 13.  See Macintosh, Hosea, p. 523. 14.  The correct reference it to Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebräische Grammatik, ed. E. Rödiger (18th ed.; Leipzig: Emil Graul, 1857), #112. 15.  So also Qyl, Hosea, p. 99.

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the ninth century BCE Hos. 1–3 and as an issue of the past in the eighthcentury BCE Hos. 1–14. Consequently, I tend to accept Macintosh’s understanding of Hos. 13:2e–f and to regard as the second most likely interpretation the suggestion of revocalizing the Hebrew text on the basis of LXX’s rendering. In any case, we see first and foremost that in Hos. 13 the revering of silver calves as appurtenances to worship was, according to Hosea, a peculiarly Ephraimite religious practice of which he, speaking in the name of God, did not approve. Finally, it should be noted that the verb form yiššāqûn ‘they kiss’, which appears at the end of v. 2, is the fourth and final instance in the book of Hosea of a verb form ending in paragogic nun. Concerning the use in pausal positions in the biblical text of second and third person masculine plural imperfect verbs for the sake of emphasis, see the discussion in my commentary at Hos. 9:16 and 11:2. 13:3 Here the prophet, speaking in the name of God, informs us of the proper punishment to be meted out to those who reverence molten calves in their worship of Yhwh: lākēn yihyû kaănan bōqer wĕkaṭṭal maškîm hōlēk kĕmōṣ yĕsōēr miggōren ûkĕāšān mēărubbâ ‘Therefore, They will be like morning clouds, Like dew that departs early in the morning, Like chaff hurled away from the threshing floor, And like smoke from an aperture in the roof’.

The point of all four of these similes is that those who continue to reverence molten calves will come to a bad end; they will simply vanish. lākēn ‘Therefore’ ‘Therefore’ is the primary meaning of Heb. lākēn (see dictionaries), and it is a totally appropriate transition from the description of Ephraim’s misbehaviour to a description of his imminent demise if he does not mend his ways.

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yihyû ‘They will be’ This verb, meaning ‘they will be’, governs all four clauses of v. 3, which follow the subordinate conjunction ‘therefore’. All four of the physical objects to which the duly promised Ephraim is compared have one thing in common; they all disappear before one can take notice. For the simile ‘like chaff’ applied to people who ought to be punished, see Ps. 1:4: ‘Not so the wicked; rather, they are like chaff that wind blows away’. For this simile applied to people see also Ps. 35:5. rubbâǎ ‘an aperture in the roof’ NJPS translates ‘lattice’. KJV translates, ‘as the smoke out of the chimney’. Consequently, Macintosh must point out that houses in the ancient Levant did not have chimneys.16 So what then might the term mean? Macintosh, following Dalman, notes that in modern times in the Levant smoke was emitted from houses ‘either through the door, through apertures in the walls (“windows”) or near the roof’.17 NJPS has opted for apertures in the walls, preferring the more literary depiction thereof as ‘lattices’ while Ehrlich asserts that windows cannot have been intended ‘but rather a hole in the roof through which smoke from the oven and the stove top go out. And I saw with my own eyes apertures like these in the houses of the farmers in the cities of Volhynia in Russia.’18 13:4 wĕānōkî Yhwh ĕlōhêkā mēereṣ Miṣrāyim wēlōhîm zûlātî lō tēdā ûmôšîa ayin biltî ‘I am Yhwh your God since the land of Egypt. You have never known a God other than me. There is no helper other than me’ Obviously, this verse reminds one of the first two commandments of the Decalogue in the Jewish enumeration which treats ‘I am Yhwh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage’ (Exod. 20:2 = Deut. 5:6) as the first commandment and ‘You shall have no other gods beside me’ (Exod. 20:3 = Deut. 5:7) as the beginning of the second commandment, which terminates with ‘but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments’ (Exod. 20:6 = Deut. 5:10).

16.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 526. 17.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 526, following Dalman, Arbeit und Sitte, vol. 7, p. 74. 18.  Ehrlich, Mikrâ ki-Pheschutô, vol. 3, p. 391.

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Consequently, the eighth-century prophet Hosea is regarded by a number of early twentieth-century scholars as evidence that the Decalogue is not post-exilic.19 Indeed, E. Sellin argues for a pre-exilic and possibly even a Mosaic origin of the Decalogue partly on the basis of the testimony of the book of Hosea.20 However, he cites only Hos. 6:5 and 8:12, and he seems to have been, like most of the critical scholars cited above and many others listed by Spiegel, so influenced by the overwhelming tendency in modern biblical scholarship to accept an exilic or post-exilic date for the Decalogue that he simply did not notice the obvious affinity of Hos. 13:4 to the Decalogue.21 Apparently, anticipating Spiegel and the other aforementioned scholars in recognizing the affinity of Hos. 13:4 to the Decalogue, LXX harmonizes Hos. 13:4 with the Decalogue by adding to Hos. 13:4 the clause ἀνήγαγόν σε, which means ‘I brought you out’; similarly, among the Dead Sea Scrolls 4QXIIc (4Q78) adds at Hos. 13:4 the two words ănōkî haălōtîkāh, corresponding in meaning to the words ānōkî…ăšēr hôṣētîkā in the standard text of the Decalogue in Exod. 20:2 = Deut. 5:6. The addition is found also in the Peshitta version of Hos. 13:4 and in TJ there. However, the special link between Hos. 13:4 and the Decalogue is established not by the ancient insight made explicit by 4Q78 and ancient translations but by the juxtaposition of Hos. 13:4a and Hos. 13:4b in the Hebrew original, which recalls the juxtaposition in the Hebrew versions of the Decalogue in Exod. 20 and Deut. 5 of what are perceived in Rabbinic tradition as the first and second commandments of the Decalogue. To be precise, ‘I am Yhwh your God from Egypt’ (Hos. 19.  These scholars include, inter alia, A. Klostermann, Der Pentateuch: Beiträge zu seinem Verstaendnis und seiner Entstehungsgeschichte (2 vols.; Leipzig: Deichert, 1907), pp. 578–79; S. Mowinckel, Le Décalogue (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1927), pp. 52–55; O. Procksch, Jesaia (Leipzig: A. Deichert, 1930), p. 119; Cassuto, ‘The Prophet Hosea and the Books of the Pentateuch’, p. 268 (in Hebrew); 1973, vol. 1, p. 91; Cassuto, ‘The Second Chapter of the Book of Hosea’, p. 129 (in Hebrew), republished in English translation in Cassuto, Biblical and Oriental Studies, p. 125; Spiegel, ‘A Prophetic Attestation of the Decalogue’, pp. 140–41. Spiegel, there, p. 142, who makes much ado of the fact that also H. Schmidt, ‘Moses und der Dekalog’, in ΕΥΧΑΡΙΣΤΗΡΙΟΝ: Studien zur Religon und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments: Hermann Gunkel zum 60. Geburtstag (ed. Hans Schmidt; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1923), p. 103, finds references to the Decalogue in Hosea. In fact, Schmidt cites only Hos. 4:2 and 6:9, and he does not cite Hos. 13:4. 20.  E. Sellin, Introduction to the Old Testament (trans. W. Montgomery with an introduction and a bibliography for English readers by A. S. Peake; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1923), p. 40. 21.  Spiegel, ‘A Prophetic Attestation of the Decalogue’, pp. 140–41.

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13:4a) and ‘a God other than me you may not know; and there is no helper besides me’ (Hos. 13:4b) clearly replicates the juxtaposition of ‘I am Yhwh your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage’ (Exod. 20:2 = Deut. 5:6) with ‘You shall have no other gods besides me’ (Exod. 20:3 = Deut. 5:7). Hosea 13:4c, ‘You have never had a helper other than Me’ (so NJPS; cf. KJV: ‘for there is no saviour beside me’), is clearly echoed in Isa. 43:3, ‘The Holy One of Israel is your helper’ (Gruber’s rendition; cf. KJV: ‘the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour’); 43:11b, ‘And there is no helper besides me’ (Gruber’s translation; cf. KJV: ‘and beside Me there is no saviour’); 45:15, ‘the God of Israel is a helper’ (Gruber’s translation; cf. KJV: ‘God of Israel, the saviour’); 45:21, ‘there is no helper besides me’ (Gruber’s rendering; cf. KJV: ‘and a Saviour; there is none beside me’); 49:26; 60:16. In the latter two verses we find, ‘For I Yhwh am your helper’ (cf. KJV: ‘I the LORD am thy saviour’). Note that NJPS consistently avoids the use of the word ‘saviour’, the traditional translation of Heb. môšîa (reflected still in Ladino versions of the traditional Jewish liturgy where the text reads salvador) because of the Christological associations of that term, which the editors of NJPS regarded as not only offensive to Judaism from a doctrinal point of view but also as contrary to the original meaning of ancient Hebrew Scripture. Note that in Judg. 3:9, 15; 2 Kgs 13:5; Isa. 19:20 the noun môšîa designates a mortal hero who delivers a nation (not necessarily Israel; see Isa. 19:20) from its enemies. While R. Fuller, who first edited the text of 4Q78,22 assumed that the latter text and LXX each expanded Hos. 13:4a independently, Macintosh holds that the Qumran text at Hos. 13:4a reflects the Hebrew Vorlage of LXX’s expansion. It seems to me, however, that the Qumran text is much too fragmentary to enable one to decide which of the two scholars, Fuller or Macintosh, is correct on this point. 13:5 ănî yĕdaĕtîkā bammidbār ‘I knew you in the wilderness’ Note first of all the pausal form of the lexeme bammidbār required by the Masoretic accent etnaḥtā or caesura marking the middle of the verse, with long ā in the final syllable rather than the medial form bammidbar. NJP renders, ‘I looked after you in the wilderness’. Stuart argues that 22.  R. Fuller, ‘A Critical Note on Hosea 12:10 and 13:4’, RB 98 (1991), pp. 343–57.

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MT’s yĕdatîkā ‘I knew you’ is a corruption of an original rĕîtîkā ‘I fed you’.23 The latter reading reflects the Vorlage of LXX, which reads ἐγὼ ἐποίμενόν σε ‘I shepherded you’. So also Peshitta, which renders rytyk, and TJ, which appears to paraphrase such a reading when it reads ănā sôpêkît ṣurkêhôn ‘I satisfied your needs’. Ehrlich argues, however, that LXX may be rendering a Hebrew Vorlage identical to MT but that LXX here interprets the knowledge referred to as ‘loving care’ in light of Prov. 12:10, ‘A virtuous person knows the culinary needs [Heb. nepeš] of his beast’.24 bĕereṣ talubbōt ‘in a parched land’ NJPS renders ‘In a thirsty land’. With Harper, note that while the expression appears only here, the idea is found also in Deut. 8:15, ‘who led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its seraph serpents and scorpions, a parched land [Heb. wĕṣimmaôn] with no water in it’ (rendering according to NJPS).25 13:6 kĕmarîtām wayyiśbāû śābĕû wayyārom libbām al-kēn šĕkēḥûnî ‘When they grazed, they were satisfied, when they were satisfied, they became arrogant. Consequently, they forgot me’ See the discussion at Hos. 13:5, and see especially Jer. 10:21; Ezek. 34:31; Pss. 23:1; 74:1; 79:13; 80:2; 95:7; 100:3. The idea expressed here, that when things went well for Israel they were wont to forget the God of Israel, who had helped them in their erstwhile suffering see Judg. 2:11–19, and see also passim in Judg. 3–11. For the idea expressed in Judg. 2:11–19 that whenever Israel forgot how God had protected them and saved them from their enemies in the past, God would punish them, see also immediately below in Hos. 13:7–8. For the idea that when Israel was well-off, Israel tended to forget and to abandon God who had taken care of Israel and that God would, in turn, cease for a time to protect Israel from his enemies, see also Deut. 32:10–34. The idea repeated again and again in Deut. 32 and in Judges, that when Israel was taken care of by God, Israel forgot and abandoned God, is expressed most succinctly in Hos. 13:6, which employs within two poetic lines the three literary devices of concatenation, chiastic parallelism, and the employment as 23.  Stuart, Hosea, p. 203. 24.  Ehrlich, Mikrâ ki-Pheschutô, vol. 3, p. 8. 25.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 398.

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synonyms of the so-called imperfect and the so-called perfect forms of the same verbal root śb ‘be satisfied’ to express the irony of Israel’s responding to prosperity by arrogant rebellion. The term concatenation here refers to the appearance of forms of the same verbal root at the end of the first half of v. 13 and again at the beginning of the second half of that verse. In this instance the concatenation results in a relationship of chiastic parallelism between the two halves of the verse. In the first half of the verse we hear of the erstwhile success of the people of Israel while in the second half of that verse we hear of the subsequent situation in which success led not to loyalty to their divine protector but to arrogance. The final clause of v. 13 tells us that arrogance born of prosperity led the people of Israel to forget their God. Thus in one verse containing three short clauses Hosea tells us precisely what the book of Judges tells us over many chapters and what Deut. 32 tells us in one of the longest poems in biblical literature. 13:7 wāĕhî lāhem kĕmô-šāḥal kĕnāmēr al-derek āšûr ‘Thus I became like a lion toward them, like a leopard on the road to Assyria’ Compare LXX, which appears to construe the consonantal text of the Hebrew original of the initial lexeme of the verse why as conjunctive waw followed by the imperfect form of the verb (i.e., wĕehî) used to convey the future tense where MT vocalizes that same lexeme as wāĕhî ‘I was/I became’: καὶ ἔσομαι αὐτοῖς ὡς πανθὴρ καὶ ὡς πάρδαλις κατὰ τὴν ὁδὸν Ἀσσυρίων, which Glenny renders, ‘And I will be to them like a panther and like a leopard along the way of the Assyrians’.26 Contrast NJPS: ‘So I became like a lion to them, like a leopard I lurk on the way’. While LXX and Vulgate (which reads here ‘Assyriorum’) and Peshitta (which reads here dtwr) understand the final lexeme in Hos. 13:7 to represent the place name ‘Assyria’, another tradition reflected in TJ and in the writings of many medieval Hebrew lexicographers and exegetes distinguishes between the lexeme found at the end of Hos. 13:7 and the place name Assyria, which is consistently vocalized in MT as aššûr, except in 1 Chron. 5:6, where it is spelled defectively, as follows: aššur. In fact, in Hos. 13:7 the final lexeme is vocalized as follows: āšûr. The latter lexeme is construed by R. Judah Ḥayyuj and most likely independently of him by Rashi as a verb in the imperfect from the root šwr ‘see’, with the specific connotation of ‘lying in wait’. According to this 26.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 63.

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interpretation, God compares himself not to a leopard on the road that leads from the land of Israel to Assyria but rather to a leopard that lies in wait to wreak havoc upon those who lie in his path. In either case, the lion and the leopard lie in wait to wreak havoc upon persons and animals that may threaten them or to devour persons and animals for food much as humans devour cattle and sheep.27 Just as v. 6 expresses most succinctly the irony of Israel’s having responded with uncalled for arrogance to God’s being their Good Shepherd, so does v. 7 express the ironic result of the behaviour of the ungrateful flock, namely, that the erstwhile Good Shepherd became like a predatory lion and a predatory leopard. The comparison of the angry God of Israel to various predators continues in v. 8. 13:8 epgĕšēm kĕdob šakkûl wĕeqra sĕgōr libbām wĕōkĕlēm šām kĕlābî ḥayyat haśśādeh tĕbaqqĕēm ‘I shall attack them as does a she-bear bereft of her young, and I shall rip open their (collective) rib cage. I will devour them as does a lion, a wild beast will rip them to pieces’ Both the noun and the adjective expressing ‘bereft she-bear’ are grammatically masculine in Hebrew and classic examples of the fact that grammatical masculine and feminine gender in Biblical Hebrew does not always correspond to social or physical gender/sex. For similes comparing violent behaviour of persons to the behaviour of a bereft she-bear see also 2 Sam. 17:8 and Prov. 17:12 (‘It is better to encounter a bereft she-bear than a fool with his nonsense’). The Hebrew expression sĕgor-lēb, lit., ‘enclosing of the heart’, meaning ‘rib cage’ is found in the Bible only here. 13:9 šiḥetĕkā Yiśrāēl kî-bî bĕezrekā ‘The destruction is of your own doing, Israel, for your help is to be found in me’ Here as in Hos. 5:14 we see the influence upon our prophet of Deut. 32. In my commentary at Hos. 5:14, I noted the affinity of Hos. 5:14 with Deut. 32:40. In Deut. 32:5a we read, ‘Destructive behaviour is 27.  For an extensive discussion of the possible interpretations of the anomalous vocalization in Hos. 13:7b of the lexeme šr from antiquity until now, see Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 532–33.

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not his; as for his children, theirs is the blemish’. Both in Deut. 32:5a and in Hos. 13:9 the form šiḥēt, which would seem to be the piel third person perfect singular of a verb meaning ‘destroy’,28 is employed as a substantive meaning ‘destruction, destructive behaviour, corruption’. This is obviously the case in Deut. 32:5a, where the lexeme in question is employed as the subject of a nominal sentence, ‘Destructive behaviour is not his’. In the case of Deut. 32:5a both the syntax of the entire clause and the content of the following clause, which supports my interpretation of the first clause of Deut. 32, confirms the impression that the lexeme šiḥēt functions there as a substantive. In Hos. 13:9 our prophet seems to echo the content of Deut. 32:5. The prophet, speaking in the name of God, says ‘šiḥētĕkā “destructive behaviour” is yours’, again employing the lexeme šiḥēt ‘destruction’ as a substantive. Indeed, the lexeme is construed as a noun with pronominal suffix by Qyl.29 Moreover, Qyl there compares the noun šillēm ‘recompense’ in Deut. 32:35 and the noun haddibbēr ‘divine speech by the agency of a prophet’ in Jer. 5:13. Similarly, A. Mirsky, with reference to šiḥētĕkā in Deut. 32, notes that the latter lexeme is a noun, and he compares the noun haddibbēr in Jer. 5:13.30 Indeed, Qyl suggests that Hos. 13:9 was inspired by Deut. 32:5.31 BDB (p. 1008a) construes the form in Hos. 13:9 as a verb with accusative pronominal suffix, and makes no mention of Deut. 32:5. (Similarly, DCH 8:328.) HALAT (pp. 1470–71) construes both forms as verbs.32 However, once we recognize the reasonable possibility that ‘The destructive behaviour is yours, Israel’ in Hos. 13:9 is a reflection of Deut. 32:5, ‘Destructive behaviour is not his; as for his children, theirs is the blemish’, we can readily see with Qyl that ‘For in me is your help’ is a reflection of Deut. 33:26, where it is stated, ‘He who rides upon the clouds is bĕezrekā “at your help” ’, and Deut. 33:29, where it is stated, ‘Who is like you, a people saved by Yhwh, māgēn ezrekā “the shield for your help”?’33 While the prefixed preposition bĕ makes perfect sense in the context of Deut. 33:26, it appears to many commentators awkward in the context of Hos. 13:9. 28.  So Mandelkern, Concordance, p. 1162d. 29.  Qyl, Hosea, p. 9. 30.  A. Mirsky, Deuteronomy (Da‘at Mikra; Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 2001), p. 447 (in Hebrew). 31.  Qyl, Hosea, p. 102. 32.  Similarly, Gesenius, Handwörterbuch 18th ed, p. 1344, which, following BHS and the previously cited dictionaries, suggests revocalizing or emending to make more convincing the interpretation of the two forms found respectively in Deut. 32:5 and Hos. 13:9 as verbs. 33.  Qyl, Hosea, p. 120.

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However, Qyl notes that the prefixed preposition may be just one more instance of a superfluous use of a prefixed preposition attested elsewhere as, for example, in Job 18:8, where the prefixed preposition b appears twice rather than once, and in Gen. 32:19, where the prefixed preposition l appears twice rather than once.34 It is equally plausible to suggest either that the prophet himself employed the seemingly superfluous b in Hos. 13:9 under the influence of Deut. 32:26, or that an ancient scribe inserted it because that scribe had anticipated Qyl and the writer of these lines in making the association between Hosea and the archaic poetic texts of the Pentateuch such as Deut. 32 and Deut. 33. D. A. Garrett offers the brilliant suggestion that in Hos. 13:9 the prophet employs the expression bĕezrekā under the inspiration of Exod. 18:4, ‘For the God of my father is bĕezrî “at my help” ’ where we might have expected simply ezrî ‘my help’.35 Moreover, Garrett adds there, ‘A curious preference for the preposition b when used with ēzer in reference to God, in texts where it would not be expected, also appears in Deut. 32:26; and Ps. 146:5’.36 In the latter text we read, ‘Fortunate is one in whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is upon Yhwh, his God’. 13:10 ĕhî malkĕkā ēpō wĕyôšîăkā bĕkol-ārêkā wĕšōpĕtêkā ăšēr āmartā tĕnāh-lî melek wĕśārîm ‘I shall be your king, then, Who will save you in all your cities//And your judges of whom you said, “Give me a king and rulers” ’ In LXX we read as follows: ποῦ ὁ βασιλεύς σου οὗτος; καὶ διασωσάτω σε ἐν πάσαις ταῖς πόλεσίν σου· κρινάτω σε ὅν εἶπας Δός μοι βασιλέα καὶ ἄρχοντα. The meaning of the Old Greek of Hos. 13:10 is as follows: ‘Where is this king of yours? And let him save you. In all your cities let him judge you. Of him you said, “Give to me a king and rulers”.’ It should be noted first of all that, unlike LXX, MT of Hos. 13:10a begins with the first person singular short imperfect verb ĕhî, which should mean ‘I shall be’ or ‘let me be’ and ends with the emphatic particle ēpō, which means ‘then, therefore’.37 Thus the literal meaning of the Hebrew version of Hos. 13:10 is as follows: ‘Let me, then, be your king’. Translation into English requires that we move the emphatic particle from the end of the clause to the middle of the clause. KJV renders the entire verse as follows: 34.  Qyl, Hosea, p. 102. 35.  Garrett, Hosea–Joel, p. 260. 36.  Garrett, Hosea–Joel, p. 137. 37.  Concerning this particle, see BDB, p. 66a; DCH 1:357a.

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‘I will be thy king; where is any other that may save thee in all thy cities? and thy judges of whom thou saidst, Give me a king and princes?’

KJV appears to misconstrue the Hebrew emphatic particle ēpō ‘then, if so’ as a variant spelling of Heb. interrogative particle êpōh meaning ‘Where?’ (See below concerning LXX.) The Greek translator responsible for LXX on Hosea, however, appears to have worked from a Hebrew Vorlage which read ayyēh malkĕkā ēpō ‘where, then, is your king?’ Perhaps the latter reading was original and the first of the three words in the clause (the consonants are yh) was miscopied in the Hebrew tradition, culminating in MT as the anagram hy. Alternatively, the original Hebrew read hy, which was copied in the Vorlage of LXX as yh, i.e., the interrogative particle ayyēh, which does not so much mean ‘tell me the location of’ but rather ‘tell me why the named person/entity is not available’. Cf. the taunt quoted in Ps. 42:4, ‘When they ask me daily “Where is your God?” ’; so also in Ps. 42:11; cf. also the similar taunt found in Ps. 79:10, ‘Where is their god?’; see also Ps. 115:2; and cf. also the taunt addressed to the unnamed prophetess by her rival in Mic. 7:10, ‘Where is he, Yhwh, your God?’38 Interestingly, NJPS, which renders ‘Where now is your king?’, gives no inkling whatsoever that it is not translating what it calls the traditional Hebrew text, commonly called MT, but rather LXX. However, the bold decision not to translate the received Hebrew text but rather the LXX is NJPS’s subtle way of asserting that in the case at hand LXX preserves the authentic version of the prophetic speech while MT derives from miscopying of original yh as hy. As for the verb form hy ‘I shall be/let me be’, it is attested altogether three times in MT Hos. 13, once here in Hos. 13:10 and twice in Hos. 13:14, q.v. The short imperfect with waw consecutive waĕhî ‘and I became’ is attested altogether twelve times in Hebrew Scripture including Hos. 13:7; see above at Hos. 13:7. Assuming for the moment that LXX, followed now by NJPS, properly conveys the words of our prophet at Hos. 13:10, let us now examine the meaning of Hos. 13:10 in the wider context of its allusion to 1 Sam. 8:4 and in the wider context of previous pronouncements disparaging the Israelite monarchy in Hos. 7:3, 5; 8:4, 10. I noted previously in my discussion of

38.  On this use of the interrogative particle ayyēh, see Ch. (Harold) Cohen, ‘Ugaritic Lexicography and Comparative Semitic Philology (1)’, in Teshurot LaAvishur: Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, in Hebrew and Semitic Languages in Honor of Yizhak Avishur (ed. M. Heltzer and M. Malul; Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publications, 2004), pp. 13–23.

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Hos. 8:4a that ‘They have installed kings but not with my sanction//They have appointed rulers but not of my choice’ can be construed as reflecting the anti-monarchic position attributed both to the Prophet Samuel and to God in 1 Sam. 8, q.v. There in 1 Sam. 8:6 the people of Israel are quoted as saying to Samuel, tĕnāh-lānu melek lĕšopṭēnu ‘Give us a king to judge us’. Interestingly enough, the taunting question in Hos. 13:10 refers directly to this narrative. Thus the text continues in Hos. 13:10b–c, ‘And let him [the king concerning whom the prophet asks according to LXX and NJPS, “Where then is your king?”] save you in all your cities//and your rulers [šōpĕṭêkā] of whom you said, “Give us a king and rulers” ’. When Hosea uses the expression šōpĕṭêkā ‘your rulers’ he alludes to 1 Sam. 8:5, 6, in which the people say to the Prophet Samuel, first, śîmāh-lānû melek lĕšopṭēnû kĕkol-haggôyîm ‘Bestow upon us a king to rule us like all the nations’, and second, tĕnāh-lānû melek lĕšopṭēnû ‘Give us a king to rule us’. Hosea refers in Hos. 13:10b wĕšōpĕṭêkā ‘and your rulers’ to the request repeated twice in 1 Sam. 8:4, 6 that the task of the desired king is lĕšopṭēnû ‘to rule us’. Moreover, the words tĕnāh-lî melek in Hos. 13:10 are a quotation of ăšēr āmartā ‘what you [the people of Israel] said [to the Prophet Samuel some 270 years before Hosea]’. However, interestingly enough, Hosea has Hoseanized the quotation by having the Israelites ask not ‘Give me [so Hos. 13:10, as against “Give us” in 1 Sam. 8:6] a king’, but tĕnāh-lî melek wĕśārîm ‘Give me a king and rulers’, alluding to the succession of rulers not a few of whom attained the throne by assassinating the reigning monarch, of which Hosea, speaking in the name of God, states in Hos. 8:4, ‘They have installed kings, but not with my sanction//They have installed rulers, but I did not consent’. It is precisely this point that Hosea brings home again at the end of Hos. 13:10–11 when he states, eten-lĕkā melek bĕappî//wĕeqqaḥ bĕebrātî ‘I shall give you a king in my anger//and I shall take away (your king) in my ire’. The structure of this closing verse of the anti-monarchy pericope in Hos. 13:10–11 is one of typical synonymous parallelism with ellipsis in that the direct object of the two distinct verbs found in each of the two parallel clauses is melek ‘king’ mentioned only in the first of the two clauses. Here in Hos. 13:11, as in 1 Sam. 8, God makes it clear that he is dead against the establishment of a monarchy of mortal kings in Israel. The pair ‘I will give’//‘I will take away’, suggesting respectively ‘allow to live//allow to die’, is reminiscent of the declaration of Job in Job 1:21 upon hearing the death of his sons and daughters, ‘Yhwh gave, and Yhwh took away’, meaning that God allowed Job’s children to live, and he allowed them to die.

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In my translation (see above) I follow the consonantal text and the vocalization of MT in understanding the first lexeme in Hos. 13:10 as the short first person singular imperfect of the root hyy. As I noted above, this form occurs only three times in the entire Hebrew Bible, once here in Hos. 13:10 and twice more in Hos. 13:14, concerning which see below. As hinted at above, I construe the third lexeme in MT of Hos. 13:10 as the emphatic particle ēpô ‘then’. The latter lexeme is attested ten times in the spelling pw (Gen. 27:33, 37; 43:11; Exod. 33:16; 2 Kgs 10:10; Isa. 19:12; 22:1; Hos. 13:10; Prov. 6:3; Job 9:24); once in the form ypw (Judg. 9:38); and four times in the spelling pw (Job 17:15; 19:6, 23; 24:25). I construe the verb form wĕyôšîăkā as conjunctive waw functioning as a subordinate conjunction followed by the third person singular imperfect hiphil of the root yšy ‘save’ followed by the second person singular accusative pronominal suffix. Moreover, I construe the latter verb form as functioning as an adjectival relative clause modifying ‘your king’ just as in the Rabbinic formulation of the benediction to be recited before performing a positive commandment the clause ‘who sanctified us by his commandments and commanded us to’ modifies the phrase ‘LORD our God, King of the world’. Precisely in that manner, God, quoted by the prophet, as it were, refers to himself in the third person masculine singular. For other examples of relative clauses in Biblical Hebrew introduced by conjunctive waw followed by the imperfect form of the verb, see Gen. 49:25a, wĕyaăzrekkā ‘who will help you’, and Gen. 49:25b, wîbārkekkā ‘who will bless you’. Hosea 13:10a–b asserts that the God of Israel rather than any mortal king is the legitimate monarch of Israel. This very same assertion is repeated, employing the ubiquitous rhetorical device commonly called synonymous parallelism, in Hos. 13:10c–d: ‘And your judges [Heb. šōpṭêkā] of whom you said, “Give me a king and rulers (śārîm) [alluding to 1 Sam. 8:5: ‘Appoint for us a king to rule us (lĕšopṭēnû) like all the nations’]”’. The synonymous parallelism employed by Hosea, speaking in the name of God, treats the lexemes melek ‘king’ and lĕšopṭēnû ‘to judge us’ as both the respective equivalents of melek ‘king’ and śārîm ‘rulers’ in both Hos. 13:10 and Hos. 7:3 (and by way of allusion in Hos. 8:4, concerning which see above in the commentary at both Hos. 7:3 and 8:4). Consequently, the prophet, speaking in the name of God is able to declare in parallel clauses concerning God, ‘I shall be the king, then, who will save you in all your cities//and your judges of whom you said, “Give me a king and rulers” ’. Interestingly, the use of the plural ‘your judges’ as a predicate noun in a sentence which begins ‘I [God] shall be’ corresponds

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to the ubiquitous use of the grammatically plural ĕlōhîm to refer to the One God of Israel and to the assertion in Rabbinic exegesis that in Exod. 21:6 and 22:27 the term ĕlōhîm actually means ‘the judges’. Concerning the latter verses from Exodus see TJ, and see the marginal notes in JPSV. Hosea 13:12–14:1 In MT, exemplified by Aleppo Codex, Hos. 13:12 is separated from Hos. 13:11 by a blank space the equivalent of nine letters at the end of the line on which Hos. 13:11 concludes. Moreover, no break in the Hebrew text corresponds to the medieval Christian introduction of a chapter division at Hos. 14:1. Finally, a space the equivalent of four letters is left blank at the end of the line concluding with the latter part of Hos. 14:1, and a blank space separates Hos. 13:12–14:1 from Hos. 14:2. In Ms. Vaticanus of LXX, which divides the book of Hosea into eleven major divisions, division no. 10 corresponds to Hos. 11:5–14:1 in the English Bible. Moreover, the older division attested to in Ms. Vaticanus, according to which the book of Hosea consisted of 21 units, recognizes within the modern Hos. 11:5–14:1, two units as follows: 11:5–9 and 11:10–14:1. 13:12 ṣārûr ăwôn Eprāyim//ṣĕpûnâ ḥaṭṭātô ‘The iniquity of Ephraim is bundled up//his sin is stored away’ Here, following the long-standing convention to translate the Hebrew noun āwōn by the English noun ‘iniquity’ and the various forms of the Hebrew noun ḥṭ when denoting a crime or misdemeanour by English ‘sin’, I have turned around the translations offered by S. E. Holtz: ‘The sin of Ephraim is bundled up, his iniquity is stored away’.39 Interestingly, our prophet employs a variation upon gender-matched synonymous parallelism when he employs two virtually synonymous subjects in two successive clauses, the first being the masculine noun āwôn ‘iniquity’, the second being the feminine noun ḥaṭṭātô ‘his sin’ where the prophet might well have employed the masculine form ḥeṭṭô. Had the prophet employed classic gender-matched parallelism, he would have used the masculine and feminine forms of the identical noun in the respective clauses. Our prophet’s variation upon gender-matched synonymous parallelism in the verse at hand, like gender-matched synonymous parallelism, in general, 39.  S. E. Holtz, ‘Why Are the Sins of Ephraim (Hos 13,12) and Job (Job 14, 17) Bundled?’, Biblica 93 (2012), pp. 107–15 (107).

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seems to be employed to convey a sense of the whole.40 In the case at hand, as we shall see, reference is to the totality of the evidence collected in the court case of God vs. Ephraim. Holtz explains, ‘Neo-Babylonian trial records from the Eanna temple at Uruk…show that when the temple authorities were informed of a misdeed, they would tie up ([Akk.] rakāsu) and seal ([Akk.] kanāku) the physical evidence or the corpus delicti for use in the subsequent proceedings against the offender’.41 Holtz supplies numerous examples from cuneiform sources in both the main text of his article and in the notes.42 Just as Hos. 13:12 and Job 14:17 refer to tying up and sealing, in Holtz’s words, ‘sins, and not their representations’,43 so in modern-day criminal litigation concrete evidence from crime scenes is essential in gaining a conviction. Conversely, the negligence of police personnel who lose evidence is the delight of attorneys for the defence. 13:13 ḥeblê lêdâ yābôû lô hû-bēn lō ḥākām kî-ēt lō-yaămōd bĕmišbar bānîm ‘He will experience pangs of childbirth. He is not a wise child. Indeed, this is not an appropriate time to survive the birthing process’ As I demonstrated elsewhere,44 while it is perfectly reasonable for a woman about to give birth to experience intense uterine contractions, when symptoms of childbirth are exhibited by persons who are not women about to give birth these symptoms are understood to be signs of anxiety, which is to say, unjustified fear, which leads to inaction. Should there be any doubt as to whether the prophet refers here to childbirth or to anxiety, the prophet removes all doubt when he states concerning that very person, i.e., the people of Israel/Ephraim, who is described as a man writhing like a woman about to give birth, ‘He is not a wise child. Indeed, this is not an appropriate time to survive the birthing process.’ It is quite interesting that while Rashi understood the noun mašbēr as designating the birth stool on which a woman sat to give birth, it is called ōbnayim, literally ‘two stones’ in Exod. 1:16. Kimchi, on the other hand, holds that the term mašbēr designates the womb of the mother. 40.  Cf., on the latter point, W. G. E. Watson, ‘Gender-Matched Synonymous Parallelism in the OT’, JBL 99 (1980), pp. 321–41 (326). 41.  Holtz, ‘Why Are the Sins of Ephraim and Job Bundled?’, p. 110. 42.  See Holtz, ‘Why Are the Sins of Ephraim and Job Bundled?’, pp. 111–12 nn. 14–15. 43.  Holtz, ‘Why Are the Sins of Ephraim and Job Bundled?’, p. 111. 44.  M. I. Gruber, ‘Fear, Anxiety and Reverence in Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew and Other Northwest Semitic Languages’, VT 40 (1990), pp. 411–22.

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To this verse one may compare Jer. 4:31: ‘Indeed…I hear a voice like that of a woman in childbirth for the first time [Heb. mabkîrâ], the voice of Lady Zion gasping and pleading…’.45 One may likewise compare also Isa. 37:3b, ‘For the children have reached the birthstool [so NJPS; Heb. mašbēr] but the strength to give birth is lacking’. It seems to me that in all three instances it is the birthing process that is said to be dangerous, not the birthing chair. Hence my translation of Hos. 13:13. 13:14 miyyad Šĕōl epdēm mimMāwet egālēm ĕhî dĕbārêkā Māwet ĕhî qāṭebĕkā Šĕōl noḥām yissāter mēênāy ‘I shall ransom them from Sheol. I shall redeem them from Death. I shall be your Pestilence, Death. I shall be your Scourge, Sheol. Pity will be hidden from my eyes’ Rather ironically, immediately after declaring that God has sufficient evidence to convict and punish Israel and that Israel is not about to perish, God performs an about face and declares that indeed he will ransom Israel from death itself. Here in Hos. 13:14 as in 2 Sam. 22:6 = Ps. 18:6) the proper names Mot and Sheol appear in synonymous parallelism, and both of them refer to the domain to which dead persons are dispatched and to the official called sometimes Sheol and sometimes Mot ‘Death’ in the celestial governmental cabinet (two successive meetings of which are described in Job 1:6 and 2:1), who is in charge of that domain. As I have outlined in a prior publication, with reference to Ps. 49:15b, in the Ugaritic myths Mot, the deification of summer drought, is a major deity who belongs to a pantheon.46 In biblical literature, on the other hand, Mot, like other Canaanite deities, has been reduced to the level of creatures who serve the will of the One God, who created them. In Rabbinic Judaism these former deities, who serve the One God, who created them, are designated angels. Both the Greek and the Hebrew terms for angels designate messengers or agents, who perform the will of the One God.47 Once we realize that in Hos. 13:13, as in 2 Sam. 22:6 (= Ps. 18:6); Ps. 49:15, Death and Sheol refer to subterrestrial powers, we can fully understand the bold assertion by the prophet speaking in the name of God that God is ever prepared to reprieve persons and nations from serving time in the domain of the dead. Moreover, we can 45.  Concerning which see Gruber, ANCANE, pp. 28–29. 46.  Gruber, Rashi’s Commentary on Psalms, p. 378 n. 41. 47.  See also Gruber, Rashi’s Commentary on Psalms, p. 286, with reference to Ps. 29:1.

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understand fully the fact that God in Hos. 13:14 addresses personified/ deified/angelized Death//Sheol in terms that the latter personages ought to be able to understand. Indeed, it is the combination of imagery and assumptions drawn from the world of Canaanite and biblical mythology with the profound but otherwise prosaic message that God is ever ready to rescind the punishment of erring humans that makes Hos. 13:14 such a poignant and powerful statement of that message, with its eternal message to humans who would like to play God: to be angry is human; not to forget but to move on and to pardon is divine. Indeed, in Hos. 13:14c–d God addresses the probably synonymous Mot and Sheol respectively with the threat that he will play the role vis-à-vis each of these personifications of death respectively, the pestilence and the plague. In Deut. 32:24 God threatens to attack disobedient Israel by means of three instruments of punishments: mizzê rāāb ûlĕḥumê rešep wĕqeṭeb mĕrîrî ‘sucked dry by hunger and devoured by Resheph and bitter Qeṭeb’. The very same pair, Resheph and Qeṭeb, appears also in Ps. 91:5–6, where we read as follows: ‘You [who are faithful to God] need not fear the terror by night nor the arrow [instrument of Resheph] that flies by day, from the plague [deber] that stalks in the darkness, from the scourge [qeṭeb] that ravages at noon’. A comparison of all three passages—Deut. 32:24; Ps. 91:5–6; Hos. 13:14—reveals that while Resheph can be a deity as we know from extrabiblical sources, all three terms—Resheph, Deber (‘Personified Pestilence/Plague’) and Qeteb (apparently daytime plague or pestilence)—appear in all three of these texts as agents of the minister in God’s cabinet in charge of dispatching people to the grave, namely Mot or Sheol. Consequently, reminding us that God is the Supreme King of the Cosmos, Hosea, speaking in the name of God, threatens to punish Mot or Sheol by himself being the plagues and the Qeṭeb that will disempower Mot//Sheol. It is fascinating to observe that Hos. 13:10, in which we find the only other instance in the Hebrew Bible of the verb form ĕhî ‘I shall be’ outside of the two occurrences in Hos. 13:14, provides a perfect analogy to the plural predicate nominative in Hos. 13:14c, dĕbārêkā ‘I shall be your pestilences/plagues’. The perfect analogy to dĕbārêkā ‘your plagues/pestilences’, where we might have expected, especially in light of the parallel predicate nominative in Hos. 13:14d, qāṭebĕkā ‘your daytime plague/pestilence’, is the assertion in Hos. 13:10a–b that ‘I shall be…šōpĕṭêkā “your rulers” ’, where we should have expected ‘your ruler’ in the singular. At this point we are fortunate to have data concerning the lexeme rešep both as a common noun meaning ‘arrow’ in Biblical Hebrew and as a proper noun designating a

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deity associated with plagues, disease, and the underworld.48 Rofé takes both of the two clauses ĕhî dĕbārêkā Māwet ĕhî qāṭebĕkā Šĕōl, which I treat as assertions, as being, in fact, rhetorical questions whose answers are in the negative. What seems not to have been noticed until now is the fact that since the only three occurrences in all of the Hebrew Bible of the verb form ĕhî are all found in Hos. 13, the last two of them in parallel clauses in Hos. 13:14c–d and the first of them in Hos. 13:10, the result is the appearance of the rhetorical device called anaphora, which means the repetition of the same lexeme at the head of a series of poetic lines, in this case, with interruption between the first and the second occurrences. The consequence of our prophet’s use of anaphora with intervening interruption is his conveying the message that just as God hopes optimistically that he will be acknowledged as the king and ruler of Israel, so does God hope optimistically that he will send his agents, namely, plagues (in the plural) and Qeṭeb, a personification of noontime plagues/pestilence, to thwart the plan of personified Death//Sheol to punish the people of Israel, whom God hopes to pardon. For the phenomenon in the book of Hosea of a rhetorical device involving repetition, which is interrupted by an intervening clause, see also Hos. 9:14, where a question intervenes between two clauses that constitute staircase parallelism. See also Hos. 10:10, where the clause ‘and peoples shall be gathered against them’ intervenes between two clauses that create an instance of concatenation; see the extensive discussion in my commentary there. In my commentary above at Hos. 13:10, I noted that LXX is based upon a Hebrew Vorlage which read yh ‘where is…?’ rather than hy ‘I shall be’. The same phenomenon occurs also here at Hos. 13:14, where LXX translates Hos. 13:14c–d as interrogative rather than declarative clauses. LXX at Hos. 13:14a–d reads as follows: ἐκ χειρὸς ᾃδου ῥύσομαι καὶ ἐκ θανάτου λυτρώσομαι αὐτούς. ποῦ ἡ δίκη σου, θάνατε; ποῦ τὸ κέντρον σου, ᾃδη; Glenny renders the latter text as follows: ‘Out of the hand of Hades I will save, and out of death I will redeem them. Where is your punishment, O death? Where is your sting, O Hades?’49 48.  See, inter alia, W. J. Fulco, The Canaanite God Rešep (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1976); J. M. Blair, De-Demonising the Old Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), pp. 219–33. We do not yet have extrabiblical attestation of a deity named Qeṭeb. For the present state of knowledge, see T. H. Gaster, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 321, 769–71; N. Wyatt, ‘Qeteb’, in van der Toorn, Becking, and van der Horst, eds., DDD2, pp. 673–74; A. Caquot, ‘Sur Quelques Démons de L’Ancien Testament (Reshep, Qeteb, Deber)’, Semitica 6 (1956), pp. 53–68; Rofé, Angels in the Bible, p. 131. 49.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 63.

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In my translation and commentary on the Hebrew of Hos. 13:14, above, I understand both Mot and Sheol in Hos. 13:14 as proper names for the officials in the divine government who are in charge of the abode to which the dead are dispatched. Glenny’s translation of the Old Greek version, however, treats Hades, the equivalent of Heb. Sheol, as referring to the supernatural power in charge of the domain of death and ‘death’ in the previous and parallel clause as a common noun. However, since almost synonymous rhetorical questions are addressed to both ‘death’ and Hades, both of which appear in the vocative case, it is probably better to follow Glenny in treating both Death and Hades as personified.50 Significantly, it is the Old Greek version of Hos. 13:14c–d, which has entered Christian reception history in 1 Cor. 15. Moreover, it is the Old Greek version of Hos. 13:14a–b, which by way of Paul’s First Letter to the Church at Corinth is immortalized in the famous duet ‘O Death where is thy sting?’ for contralto and tenor in George Frederick Handel’s oratorio, The Messiah. There we read as follows: ‘O death! O death, where is thy sting//O grave! where is thy victory, O grave?’ The latter text is based on KJV’s rendering of 1 Cor. 15:55, ‘O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’ The Greek text of 1 Cor. 15:55 reads as follows: Ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ νῖκος; ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ κέντρον; Stuart suggests that the Apostle Paul has either quoted Hos. 13:14 periphrastically or from a version of LXX which contained the noun νίκη ‘victory’ rather than the noun δίκη ‘penalty’, as in Codex Vaticanus, and the noun θάνατε ‘death’ twice rather than once in parallel with ᾃδη ‘Hades’.51 C. T. Craig suggests that when KJV renders 1 Cor. 15:55, ‘O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’, it corrects the Apostle Paul’s misquotation of LXX.52 nōḥam yissātēr mēênāy ‘Pity will be hidden from my eyes’ NJPS renders as follows: ‘Revenge shall be far from My thoughts’. NJPS’s marginal note explains that the literal meaning of this verset is ‘Satisfaction shall be hidden from My eyes’, and it refers the reader to Deut. 32:36 and Isa. 1:24 to demonstrate the meaning ‘satisfaction’, in this case the hypothetical satisfaction of the divine judge in carrying out punishment through the agency of plagues//pestilence, which, as I argued above, God, according to Hos. 13:14, has resolved to forego, preferring to exercise divine love and eschewing divine justice. Deuteronomy 50.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 63. 51.  Stuart, Hosea, p. 207. 52.  C. T. Craig, ‘The First Epistle to the Corinthians’, in Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 10, p. 252.

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32:36a reads as follows: kî yādîn Yhwh ammô//wĕal ăbādāyw yitneḥām, which NJPS at Hos. 13:14e understands as follows: ‘Indeed, the LORD will judge His people//and He will be satisfied [with his execution of justice] at the expense of His [wayward] devotees’. Contrast NJPS at Deut. 32:36a: ‘For the LORD will vindicate His people and take revenge for His servants’, which is a much more comforting assertion to place in the mouth of the God of Israel. However, unquestionably NJPS’s note at Hos. 13:14e captures the correct meaning of the ambiguous text in its context within Deut. 32, which consistently promises to punish Israel for disloyalty to God. (See passim in Deut. 32.) Isaiah 1:24b is the other text cited in the marginal note at Hos. 13:14e in support of the idea that the verbal root nḥm in Hos. 13:14e refers to the satisfaction that a judge and prosecutor experience when a criminal has received her/his appropriate punishment. There in Isa. 1:24b we read as follows: ‘Alas! I shall receive satisfaction (or, I shall be requited; so Gruber) at the expense of my enemies//and let me be avenged at the expense of my foes’. In light of both Deut. 32:36a and Isa. 1:24b it is indeed plausible to suggest that Hos. 13:14e means ‘Satisfaction in the execution of deserved punishment will be hidden from my [i.e., Yhwh’s] eyes’. Indeed, such an interpretation reinforces my understanding of MT in Hos. 13:14a–d, according to which (1) God promises to redeem//ransom the people of Israel//Ephraim from a well-deserved death sentence (Hos. 13:14a–b); and (2) God promises to disempower Death//Sheol by assuming the role of both night-time plagues and noontime plagues visited upon personified Death//Sheol. NJPS, on the other hand, and characteristically without warning, does not translate MT of Hos. 13:14c–d as two indicative sentences each beginning with the verb hy ‘I shall be’, but rather, following LXX, translates them as rhetorical questions beginning with the Hebrew interrogative particle yh more or less corresponding to Gk. ποῦ. I say ‘more or less’ because, as I noted in the commentary at Hos. 13:10, above, the Hebrew interrogative particle ayh conveys less a request for information as to where a person or object might be located and more an assertion that the person or object is not to be found where one might expect to find them. Consequently, the pity, which God promises not to activate, is with reference to personified death and not with respect to Israel. The anaphora, that is to say, the rhetorical device of beginning a series of poetic lines with the same word, in this case, the ‘I shall be’, repeated in vv. 10a, 14c, and 14d, reinforces the message that God here promises to renege on his promise to punish Israel. On the contrary, here he promises to treat Israel with mercy.

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Hosea 13:15 according to MT The famous Leningrad Codex of the Bible (1009 or 1008 CE) is the basis of the text transcribed in the third edition of Biblica Hebraica (1937), BHS (1967; 2nd ed., 1977), as well as The Twelve Prophets in the series Biblica Hebraica Quinta, as also of the Hebrew text found in the bi-lingual editions of the JPS Tanakh. As we shall see, with respect to Hos. 13:15 the Leningrad Codex presents a reading, kî hû bēn aḥîm ‘if he, a son of brothers…’, which turns out to be an anomalous reading within the spectrum of readings offered by the Tiberian Masoretes. It is this anomalous reading found in the third edition of Biblica Hebraica and taken in most critical commentaries to be ‘the Masoretic text’ (MT) that is the basis of extensive discussion in commentaries produced at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century CE. Interestingly, the Second Rabbinic Bible edited by Jacob ben Hayim Ibn Adoniya and published by Daniel Bomberg at Venice in 1525 CE reads at Hos. 13:15 not kî hû bēn aḥîm ‘for he, a son of brothers (siblings?)’, but rather kî hû bên aḥîm ‘for he, among brothers (siblings?)’. As noted by M. Goshen-Gottstein in his title page for the Makor Publishing Ltd (Jerusalem, 1972) facsimile edition of the Second Rabbinic Bible, ‘The text as fixed for this edition has been adopted as textus receptus by Jews and Christians alike’.53 Consequently, it should not be altogether surprising that the text found in the Second Rabbinic Bible is also the one reproduced in virtually all printed editions of the Hebrew Scriptures since 1525, including the famous Letteris Edition of the Hebrew Bible, which most of my revered teachers made use of in their teaching in the second half of the twentieth century. No less surprisingly, with respect to Hos. 13:15 the text as reproduced in the Second Rabbinic Bible is also the text as it appears in the Koren Bible, which was popular with my generation of students and teachers of the Hebrew Bible, primarily because of its highly readable type and the proper balance of white space and text, which always makes a text (like three columns to the page rather than two columns to the page in medieval Hebrew manuscripts) particularly reader friendly. Mirabile dictu, the reading found in the Second Rabbinic Bible at Hos. 13:15, namely kî hû bên aḥîm ‘for he, among brothers’, is shared also by the Aleppo Codex. Consequently, it appears that the extensive discussion concerning the anomalous and problematic reading found in the Leningrad Ms. of Hos. 13:15 could have been avoided if only

53.  M. Goshen-Gottstein, The Second Rabbinic Bible (1525 CE) Facsimile Edition (Jerusalem: Makor, 1972), title page.

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the commentators had bothered to take into consideration the fact that for more than four centuries prior to the publication of the third edition of the Biblia Hebraica the so-called MT had agreed with the text as emended by critical scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries CE and as confirmed by the Aleppo Codex. Let us first look at the text as presented in the Leningrad Codex and the discussion of its version of Hos. 13:15a in several of the important critical commentaries that take it for granted that the Leningrad Codex represents the standard Hebrew text or MT for that verse. According to Leningrad Codex, Hos. 13:15a reads: kî hû bēn aḥîm yaprî If he [i.e., Ephraim named in v. 13], a son of brothers, will behave like a wild ass…

This literal rendering of MT is suggested by Andersen and Freedman.54 Such an understanding of Hos. 13:15 means that the content and structure of Hos. 13:15a are meant to recall Hos. 13:13b, hû bēn lō ḥākām ‘he is not a wise child’, in which, as in Hos. 13:15a, the antecedent of the personal pronoun hû meaning ‘he’ is Ephraim designating the people of Israel or the Northern Kingdom (see the discussion at Hos. 13:13) mentioned by name in Hos. 13:12. To the assertions in Hos. 13:13b, ‘he is not a wise child’, and Hos. 13:15a, ‘he, a son of brothers’, one should, with Andersen and Freedman, compare ‘a people that will not discern’ in Hos. 4:14.55 Andersen and Freedman suggest that in the context of Hos. 13:15a the verb yaprî is a denominative verb derived from the noun pere ‘wild ass’, that it means ‘behave like a wild ass’, and that it is a deliberate and not complimentary word-play on the proper name Ephraim.56 Now if, indeed, one accepts the text of MT as presented in the Leningrad manuscript at Hos. 13:15a, it follows that the entire final verse of Hos. 13, i.e., v. 15, is a conditional sentence reminiscent of the conditional sentences in the Covenant Code (Exod. 21–24), ‘if he/she do this, then’, in which the apodosis or result clause describing the punishment (logical consequences) is invariably phrased in either the imperfect conveying present or future or the perfect with waw consecutive also conveying

54.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 640. 55.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 639. 56.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 640.

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the future. As I noted above, the long unit that begins with Hos. 13:10 and ends with Hos. 13:14 is a prophecy of consolation and comfort, in which God promises to rescue Ephraim from death if only Ephraim, who can be convicted in the divine court of law on the basis of clear and unambiguous evidence, will act wisely. Frequently, a prophecy of doom is followed by a promise of consolation if only the people of Israel/Judah will heed the divine warning and change their behaviour for the better (see, e.g., Isa. 1:18, which is followed by another warning concerning the logical consequences of continued misbehaviour; similarly, Isa. 1:26–27, followed by another warning in Isa. 1:28; Isa. 6:13; Amos 9:11–15; Mic. 7:18–20). So, apparently, here in Hos. 13, the prophecy of consolation is followed by a warning, couched in the style of apodictic law: if, nevertheless, Ephraim fails to seize the opportunity to take advantage of God’s offer of amnesty, the consequences will be most unfortunate. The consequences are spelled out in Hos. 13:15b–14:1. Let us recall that MT recognizes no break between chs. 13 and 14. Let us likewise recall that in the older division of the book of Hosea into 21 divisions, Ms. Vaticanus of LXX treats Hos. 13:10–14:1 as a single unit, corresponding precisely to what I suggest is essentially a prophecy of consolation (Hos. 13:10–14) followed by a warning of dire consequences in case, God forbid, Israel//Ephraim should not accept God’s offer of amnesty. Hosea 13:15b is the apodosis of the conditional sentence that begins with Hos. 13:15a. yābô qādîm rûăḥ Yhwh mimmidbār ōleh ‘There will come an east wind//a mighty wind from the wilderness will ascend’ For the adjectival noun qādîm meaning rûăḥ qādîm ‘easterly wind’, a destructive force, see also Gen. 41:6, 23; Isa. 27:8; Hos. 12:12; Ps. 78:26; Job 27:21; 38:24; for the expression rûăḥ qādîm meaning literally ‘easterly wind’, see Exod. 10:13; 14:21; Jer. 18:17; Jon. 4:8; Ps. 48:8; for the expression haqqādîm meaning rûăḥ haqqādîm ‘the easterly wind’, see Gen. 41:27; and for the expression rûăḥ haqqādîm meaning ‘the easterly wind’, see Exod. 10:13; Ezek. 17:10; 19:12; 27:26. Note that in all of these expressions the Hebrew noun rûăḥ is treated as masculine while in most instances that same noun is treated as feminine.57

57.  See HALOT 3:1197b; see also the discussion in K. Albrecht, ‘Das Geschlecht der hebräischen Hauptwörter (Fortsetzung)’, ZAW 16 (1896), pp. 41–121 (42–43).

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rûăḥ Yhwh ‘a mighty wind’ To this expression, which probably means simply ‘a mighty wind’, i.e., a wind of divine proportions, one should compare rûăḥ ĕlōhîm ‘a mighty wind’ in Gen. 1:2.58 Note also should be taken of the chiastic structure of Hos. 13:15b: verb subject (a kind of wind)//subject (another kind of wind) verb. wĕyēbôš mĕqôrô//wĕyeḥerab maĕyānô ‘And his (Ephraim’s) fountain will dry up//and his spring will be dried up’ hû yišseh ōṣar kol-kĕlî ḥemdâ ‘And he (that wind) will plunder treasure, every object of delight’ For the expression kĕlî ḥemdâ ‘object of delight’ see also Jer. 25:34; Nah. 2:10; 2 Chron. 32:27. Note also that just as the first person singular imperfect of the verb ‘to be’ is repeated three times at the head of clauses in Hos. 13:10–14 (and four times if we consider Hos. 13:7 as part of the unit that ends in Hos. 13:15), so is the third person masculine singular independent pronoun hû repeated three times in Hos. 13:13–15. The repetition of the latter pronoun appears also to constitute an anaphora, i.e., the repetition at the head of successive clauses of an identical expression which suggests that the three clauses constitute a distinct unit within the larger unit of Hos. 13:10–14:1. The point that is made by this anaphora is that by the principle of measure for measure he, Ephraim, who has behaved unwisely, i.e., he who has behaved like a wild ass, will, in turn, be punished by an east wind//a powerful wind which will destroy all of Ephraim’s prosperity. For the continuation in Hos. 14:1 of the warning appended (Hos. 13:15–14:1) to the prophecy of consolation (Hos. 13:10–14), see immediately below for my discussion of precisely where Hos. 14:1 belongs both in the presumed original version of the final chapters of the book of Hosea and in Jewish and Christian reception history. According to LXX, Hos. 13:15 reads: διότι οὗτος ἀνὰ μέσον ἀδελφῶν διαστελεῖ, ἐπάξει καύσωνα ἄνεμον Κύριος ἐκ τῆς ἐρήμου ἐπ’ αὐτόν, καὶ αναξηρανεῖ τὰς φλέβας αὐτοῦ, ἐξερημώσει τὰς πηγὰς αὐτοῦ. αὐτος καταξηρανεῖ τὴν γῆν αὐτοῦ καὶ πάντα τὰ σκεύη τὰ ἐπιθυμητὰ αὐτοῦ. Glenny renders the Greek as follows: ‘For this one will divide between

58.  See E. A. Speiser, Genesis (AB, 1; Garden City: Doubleday, 1965), p. 5, and cf. R. Gordis, The Book of Job: Commentary, New Translation and Special Studies (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1978), p. 16, with respect to ēš ĕlōhîm ‘a great fire’ in Job 1:16.

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brethren; the Lord will bring a hot wind from the desert against him, and it will dry up his springs; and it will devastate his fountains; it will ravage his land and all the desirable vessels’.59 The first exegetical question to which LXX responds in thus translating Hos. 13:15 is the precise meaning of the Hebrew particle kî at the beginning of the verse. NJPS likewise understands this particle as functioning here as a subordinate conjunction meaning ‘for’; so also NJPS. Wolff understands this lexeme to function here as the deictic particle (also called asseverative) meaning ‘indeed’.60 The second exegetical question to which LXX responds in translating Hos. 13:15 is the meaning of the third lexeme in the verse, namely bn, which either LXX understands to be a defective reading of the preposition byn meaning ‘between (so also NJPS) or attests to a reading byn meaning ‘between’, precisely as in the Aleppo Codex of the Hebrew Bible and in the text reproduced in the Second Rabbinic Bible and in virtually all printed editions of the Hebrew Bible until twentieth-century CE scholars came to treat the third edition of Biblica Hebraica as though it were the autograph produced by the biblical authors. Thus Macintosh writes, ‘MT reads bn…the word must be understood as the preposition byn written defectively’.61 In the same vein, Andersen and Freedman write, ‘MT reads “a son of brothers”. LXX reads “between brothers”. The spelling bn would be the correct spelling for the preposition “between” in northern orthography.’62 In fact, it turns out that what late twentieth-century and early twenty-firstcentury CE commentaries call MT, is, in fact, in respect to Hos. 13:15a an anomalous reading peculiar to Leningrad where Aleppo Codex and the Second Rabbinic Bible agree with the Vorlage of LXX in reading byn. On the other hand, the anomalous reading found in Leningrad results in an inclusio created by the appearance in Hos. 13:13b and again in Hos. 13:15a of the clause hû bēn ‘he is a son’: ‘he is a son who is not sagacious//he is a son who acts like a wild ass’. Significantly, Ehrlich63 and Harper64 do not discuss the discrepancy between LXX and MT with respect to the lexeme b(y)n in Hos. 13:15 for the simple reason that they were not aware of Leningrad, having at their disposal what GoshenGottstein called the textus receptus of the Hebrew version, which read

59.  Glenny, Hosea, p. 63. 60.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 228. 61.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 551. 62.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 640. 63.  Ehrlich, Mikrâ ki-Pheschutô, vol. 3, p. 392, 64.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 406.

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byn, just as did LXX.65 He suggested emending byn aḥîm to bānîm wĕaḥîm. The consequence of this latter reading would be to understand the entire clause, Hos. 13:15, to read ‘for/indeed he [God] will separate children and brothers’. Ehrlich understands the clause ‘He will separate the brothers’ as follows: ‘Yhwh will separate the brothers when Ephraim predeceases Judah when Ephraim is in exile and Judah remains in his land’.66 However, to arrive at such an interpretation of Hos. 13:15, not only must Ehrlich connect ‘he will separate brothers’ with ‘may nothing other than death separate me and you’ in Ruth 1:18, but also he must assume that Hos. 13, like Hos. 12, speaks about both Judah and Israel/ Ephraim. The comparison is not justified for two reasons: first, Hos. 13 says nothing at all about Judah; and second, Hos. 12:3 castigates Judah, and Hos. 12:1 may also castigate Judah. In any case, contrast my commentary at Hos. 12:1–3. Thirdly, the Gk. verb διαστελεῖ ‘tears asunder’ appears to reflect a Hebrew Vorlage that read ypryd ‘he will divide’ instead of the anomalous ypry ‘he will behave like a wild ass’. Many moderns, including Graetz, therefore follow LXX’s reading and restore ypryd ‘he will divide’ instead of the anomalous ypry, assuming that MT reflects a scribal error. In Hos. 13:15c, LXX, as frequently does the LXX of Job, collapses the two parallel and virtually synonymous clauses of MT, ‘There will come an east wind//a mighty wind from the wilderness will ascend’, into a single clause, ‘The Lord will bring a hot wind from the desert against him’. In addition, LXX construes the two lexemes rûăḥ Yhwh not as a construct genitive meaning either ‘a wind of the LORD’ (so NJPS) or ‘a great wind’, but rather as direct object ‘wind’ followed by the subject ‘the Lord’, and it construes the qal imperfect verb ybw ‘will come’ as though it were written yby, which is the hiphil imperfect of the same verb meaning ‘he will bring’. Consistent with construing MT’s ybw as yby, LXX also treats MT’s two stative verbs ybwš ‘it will dry up’ and yḥrb ‘it will be dried up’ as hiphil verbs, of which spring(s) and fountain(s), respectively are direct objects. In addition, where MT employs the verbal root ḥrb ‘dry up’, LXX confuses this with the homonymous root ḥrb, which can mean ‘destroy’.67 For the final clause of the speech, which begins in Hos. 13:1, namely Hos. 14:1 in the standard editions of the Bible in Hebrew and in English, see below in my commentary at Hos. 14, and see also my brief discussion above in my introduction to Hos. 13. 65.  So also Graetz, Emendationes, p. 14. 66.  Ehrlich, Mikrâ ki-Pheschutô, vol. 3, p. 392. 67.  These two roots are treated in Mandelkern, Concordantiae, pp. 422–23 as ḥrb I and ḥrb II respectively.

C h a p t er 14

Harper summarizes the contentions of numerous nineteenth-century critical scholars to the effect that Hos. 14 (i.e., Hos. 14 as defined in the chapter divisions of the Latin and English Bible; not the chapter divisions found in Hebrew editions in modern times; see below concerning the problem of Heb. Hos. 14:1) is an addition to the book of Hosea ‘in accordance with the thought of a much later period’.1 On the other hand, most of the classic critical commentaries produced in the second half of the twentieth century (Rudolph, Wolff, Andersen and Freedman, and Stuart, among others) do not even mention the idea that Hos. 14 is a later addition to the book of Hosea. A rare exception is Macintosh, who calls attention to the latter view and cites more recent literature on this subject.2 In my commentary below I treat Hos. 14 as defined by the chapter divisions in the English Bible as integral to Hos. 4–14, and I call attention to the arguments of Frisch on this score; see below. The Status of Hosea 14:1 The first exegetical question that is commonly raised with respect to Hos. 14:1 is whether this verse belongs with ch. 13 or with ch. 14. KJV and the modern Christian versions based upon it or highly influenced by it treat the verse numbered in so-called MT Hos. 14:1 as the final verse of ch. 13, and they number it 13:16 while so-called MT (i.e., Hebrew printings of the so-called Old Testament whether produced under Jewish or Christian auspices) number that same verse as 14:1. The impression, which is created by that particular discrepancy, is that Christianity treats Heb. 14:1 as part of ch. 13 while Judaism treats that verse as part of ch. 14. In fact, it is common in Hebrew manuscripts and printed editions of Hosea to treat 14:1 graphically as part of the previous unit of text and to leave a space between 14:1 and 14:2. Moreover, in printed editions and 1.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, pp. 408–409. 2.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 558 n. 1.

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manuscript codices where petuhah is marked with the abbreviation p, the unit of 14:1 is so marked. Likewise in the Dead Sea Scroll ms., which is designated 4QXIIc, MT’s 14:1 is treated as a distinct unit.3 In Codex Vaticanus of LXX, however, which divides the book of Hosea into eleven major units (as against the fourteen chapters in the printed editions of the standard Hebrew text), Hebrew text’s 14:1 is found at the end of division ten while according to the older division into 21 units, also reflected in Codex Vaticanus of LXX, Hebrew text’s Hos. 14:1 belongs to a unit of 31 verses beginning with Hebrew text’s Hos. 11:10 and concluding with Hebrew text’s Hos. 14:1. The Testimony of Jewish Reception History The sixth-century CE Pesiqta deRab Kahana is a collection of 28 midrashic compositions arranged according to the order of the Pentateuchal and Prophetic lection for special Sabbaths and for festivals during a yearly cycle that begins with Hanukkah in Kislev, usually December, and ends with the Eighth Day of Solemn Assembly (Heb. Shemini Aṣeret, the festival that occurs on the day following the seventh day of the Feast of Tabernacles), almost at the end of the month of Tishri (October). The twenty-fourth unit of Pesiqta deRab Kahana is a series of 19 smaller units, which presuppose the prophetic lection or haftarah for the Sabbath that falls between the New Year or Rosh ha-Shanah and the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur, which begins with Hos. 14:2. In Jewish editions of the Pentateuch with haftarot or prophetic lection, it is commonly indicated that the haftarah or prophetic lection for Sabbath Morning that occurs between the New Year and the Day of Atonement consists of Hos. 14:2–10 followed by Mic. 7:18–20 followed by Joel 11–27. Moreover, that Sabbath is referred to in Jewish tradition as Shabbat Shuvah, i.e., the Sabbath on which the haftarah begins with the word Shuvah ‘Return’ (i.e., Repent) just as the Sabbath before the Fast of the Ninth of Av is called Shabbat Hazon, because the first word of the haftarah on the morning of that Sabbath is ḥāzôn ‘vision’ found in Isa. 1:1. Likewise, the Sabbath following the Ninth of Av is called Shabbat Naḥamu because the first word of the haftarah on the morning of that Sabbath is naḥămû ‘Comfort ye’ found in Isa. 40:1. How, then, did it happen that in Hebrew printings of the Bible, what should be the final verse of ch. 13 (in the English Bible, Hos. 13:16) came 3.  See M. Testuz, ‘Deux fragments inédits des manuscripts de la Mer Morte’, Semitica 5 (1955), pp. 37–38.

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to be numbered as Hos. 14:1? The answer can be surmised from a perusal of the extensive scholarly literature dealing with the few differences between the division of the Hebrew Bible into numbered chapters that was introduced by Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, c. 1220 CE (see in my Introduction, p. 23) and the numbering of the chapters in the standard printed editions of Hebrew Scripture in the Hebrew language. Marcus notes that when the chapter divisions of the Latin Bible were first introduced into printed editions of the Bible in Hebrew beginning in the year 1517 the chapter numbers were printed in the margin so that it was less than obvious at which verse (numbers for all verses were introduced into a Bible printed in Hebrew only in 1595) a given chapter ended and the following chapter began.4 Thus the few discrepancies between the numbering of chapters in English and Hebrew editions of the Bible represent not two distinct confessional readings but rather mistakes of Hebrew printers (regardless of whether they were Jewish or Christian) in their innocent attempt to apply Langton’s division of the Latin Bible into chapters to Hebrew printed Bibles. Hence to this day the chapter division that treats English Bible Hos. 13:16 as Hebrew Bible (so-called Masoretic text) Hos. 14:1 is nothing more than a mistake that arose in the sixteenth century. It is indeed amazing that by-and-large scholars and students of many religious persuasions assume blindly that the chapter division at Heb. Hos. 14:1 is the authentic Jewish division into chapters and that the treatment of that verse as Hos. 13:16 reflects some kind of Christian doctrine and that therefore the real beginning of our ch. 14 must accord with that found in Hebrew printings and Jewish translations. As we have seen, there is no basis in ancient Jewish reception history for treating Heb. Hosea 14:1 as the beginning of anything. See also above, in my Introduction, ‘Chapters of the Book in Greek, English and Hebrew’ (pp. 12–14), concerning the three discrepancies with respect to chapter divisions between English translations of the book of Hosea produced by Christians, on the one hand, and Hebrew editions of the book of Hosea as well as English translations produced under Jewish auspices, on the other hand. See also my discussion of the other two instances, namely, the divisions between chs. 1 and 2 (Heb. Hos. 2:1 = Eng. Hos. 1:10; Heb. Hos. 2:3 = Eng. Hos. 2:1) and the divisions between chs. 6 and 7 (Eng. Hos. 6:11b, ‘When I would restore the fortunes of My people’, is treated in Hebrew editions and consequently in English translations produced under Jewish auspices as Hos. 7:1b) in my commentary above at the chapter divisions in question. 4.  Marcus, ‘Alternative Chapter Divisions’, p. 121.

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14:1 teĕšam Šōmrōn kî mārĕtâ ‘Samaria should feel guilty because she rebelled’ Contrast NJPS, which translates, ‘Samaria must bear her guilt for she rebelled’.5 In light of Milgrom’s demonstration that the Hebrew verb šm usually means ‘feel guilty’ rather than ‘be guilty’, the verse probably means ‘Samaria should feel guilty because she rebelled’.6 However, Ibn Ezra, followed by Kimchi and more recently Rosenmüller and still more recently by D. Stuart,7 derives the verb form teĕšam not from the root šm but rather from the root šmm ‘be desolate’ while W. Kuhnigk8 derives the verb teĕšam not from the root šmm, but rather from a synonymous root šm, which is a homonym of the common verb meaning ‘feel guilty’. In fact, this suggestion was previously proposed by G. R. Driver.9 Moreover, Driver notes that such a meaning of the verb šm is supported in a number of passages in the prophets by both the context and the ancient versions.10 For example, in Isa. 24:6 the rendering of wayyešĕmû yōšĕbê bāh ‘and they that dwell therein were made desolate’ is supported by TJ’s wĕṣaddîû ‘they were made desolate’, while the rendering of Ezek. 6:6, yeḥerĕbû wĕyešĕmû mizbĕḥōtêkem ‘Your altars shall be laid waste and made desolate’ is supported by Symmachus’s ἀφανισθῶσι and by Syro-Hexapla and TJ’s wĕyiṣdôn. Driver cites also Hos. 10:2, ḥālaq libbām attâ yeĕšāmû, which he interprets ‘Their heart is deceitful; now shall they be made desolate’. Here at Hos. 14:1 LXX renders the verb teĕšam by means of Gk. ἀφανισθήσεται, which means ‘she will be annihilated’, while the Vulgate renders pereat, which also means ‘she will be annihilated’, anticipating Ibn Ezra and the other medieval and modern scholars cited above. baḥereb yippōlû ‘They (the people of Samaria) will fall by the sword’

5.  So also Wolff, Hosea, pp. 222–23. Macintosh translates instead, ‘Samaria shall bear her guilt’. 6.  See Milgrom, Cult and Conscience. 7.  Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, p. 199. 8.  Kuhnigk, Nordwestsemitische Studien zum Hoseabuch, p. 153. 9.  G. R. Driver, ‘Confused Hebrew Roots’, in Occident and Orient: [Moses] Gaster Anniversary Volume (ed. Bruno Schindler in collaboration with A. Marmorstein; London: Taylor’s Foreign Press, 1936), pp. 73–83. 10.  Driver, ‘Confused Hebrew Roots’, p. 75.

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ōlĕlêhem yĕruṭṭāšû wĕhāriyyōtāyw yĕbuqqāû ‘Their babies will be dashed to death, and his (Samaria’s) pregnant women will be ripped open’ With respect to v. 1e, cf. Amos 1:13: ‘Thus said Yhwh: For three transgressions of the Ammonites, For four, I will not revoke it: Because they ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead in order to enlarge their own territory’. This kind of barbaric behaviour is attributed in the Bible also to the very king of Israel, Menahem son of Gadi, in whose reign Tadmor has dated Hos. 4–14 (see my Introduction). Concerning that king’s atrocities committed in Tiphsah, see 2 Kgs 15:16: ‘At that time, [marching] from Tirzah, Menahem subdued Tiphsah and all who were in it, and its territory; and because it did not surrender, he massacred [its people] and ripped open all the pregnant women’. M. Cogan11 points out that while Hebrew Scripture attributes the atrocity of ripping open pregnant women to King Hazael of Damascus in the time of Elisha (2 Kgs 8:11–12), the Ammonites in the time of the Prophet Amos (Amos 1:13 cited above), and King Menahem son of Gadi of Israel (2 Kgs 15:16), Assyrian literature, which is replete with delight in the atrocities perpetrated by the kings of Assyria in the Middle Assyrian and Neo-Assyrian periods, mentions the atrocity of ripping open pregnant women only in a poem in which an unnamed hunter chases and defeats an unnamed wild ass.12 In r. 3–4 of that text, treated by Cogan, we read as follows: ‘He slits the wombs of pregnant women; he blinds the infants. He cuts the throats of their warriors.’13 Ebeling identified the hunter as King Tiglath-pileser I of Assyria (1114–1076 BCE) and the wild ass as the ruler of Murattash and Saradaush, whom Tiglath-pileser defeated just prior to the beginning of the fifth year of his reign (i.e., 1110 BCE). With respect to v. 1d, cf. also Ps. 137:9: ‘a blessing on one who seizes your babies and dashes them against the rocks’.14

11.  M. Cogan, ‘ “Ripping Open Pregnant Women” in Light of an Assyrian Analogue’, JAOS 103 (1983), pp. 755–57. 12.  For the text, see E. Ebeling and F. Köscher, Literarische Keilschrifttexte aus Assur (Berlin: Akademie, 1953), No. 61. 13.  Cogan, ‘“Ripping Open”’, p. 756. 14.  See Brenner, ‘“On the rivers of Babylon” (Psalm 137), or Between Victim and Perpetrator’. See also the extensive discussion in my commentary on Hos. 10:14 above.

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14:2–10 B. Oestreich presents nine arguments for regarding the Hebrew Hos. 14:2–9, which corresponds to Hos. 14:1–8 in the English Bible, as a distinct unit within the book of Hosea.15 These include the evidence of the Qumran fragment cited above, and the following five especially convincing arguments: (1) the content of the passage differs from Hos. 13:1–14:1, which is an announcement of judgment while Hos. 14:2–9 contains a message of hope and restoration; (2) the key word in the passage, the root šwb, occurs twice toward the beginning (vv. 2, 3), twice in the centre of the passage (vv. 5a, 5c), and once toward the end (v. 8); (3) the subject matter of Hos. 14:2–9 contains vocabulary such as rḥm, prḥ, hb, šwb, which can be found in other parts of the book of Hosea but not in Hos. 13, while a number of words, many of them from the semantic field of plant life, cannot be found elsewhere in the book of Hosea; (4) comparison of Hos. 13:1–14:1 with Hos. 14:2–9 reveals contrasting themes; (5) Hos. 14:10 contains key words, which are well attested in the book of Hosea but are absent from Hos. 14:2–9. Oestreich argues further that the structure of Hos. 14:2–9 should be seen as follows: Unit One, vv. 2–4, consisting of three stanzas that correspond to vv. 2a–3b, 3c–f, and 4 respectively; Unit Two, v. 5; Unit Three, vv. 6–8, which constitute three stanzas (vv. 6, 7, 8 respectively); and Unit Four, which corresponds to v. 9. 14:2 According to the chapter and verse division in Hebrew editions of the Bible), v. 2a–b reads: šûbāh Yiśrāēl ad Yhwh ĕlōhêkā kî kāšaltā baăwônêkā ‘Return, Israel, to Yhwh, your God, for you have fallen because of your iniquity’ šûbāh ‘Return’ In general, the long imperative with final (paragogic) he is the more widely attested form of the masculine singular imperative in Biblical Hebrew. With specific reference to the form attested here, it should be noted that while the short masculine imperative is attested twenty-one times and an additional five times with prefixed conjunctive waw, the long imperative form šûbāh is attested only eight times while the defective form šbh is attested twice (2 Sam. 15:27; Jer. 40:5). 15.  B. Oestreich, Metaphors and Similes for Yahweh in Hosea 14:2–9 (1–8) (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1998), pp. 45–46.

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In five cases (Num. 10:36; Pss. 6:5; 7:8; 90:13; 126:4) it is Yhwh to whom the imperative of the verb šwb is addressed, while in one case (1 Sam. 15:27) it is Zadok the priest who is addressed by King David, ‘Return to the city in peace’. Only in three cases in the Hebrew Bible is the addressee of the long imperative šûbāh ‘return’ the people of Israel. The three cases are Hos. 14:2; Isa. 44:22; and Jer. 3:12. In these three instances the imperative refers to what we today call ‘repentance’. This is also the case with respect to the plural imperative wĕšûbû in Hos. 14:3 and Joel 2:13; see below. It is likely that Jer. 3:12, in which the imperative šûbāh calls for Israel to return from misbehaviour to good behaviour, belongs to a long list of influences of the book of Hosea on the diction and thought of Jeremiah, while Isa. 44:22 reflects the influence of Jeremiah on the diction and thought of Deutero-Isaiah.16 The phraseology šb d Yhwh ‘return to Yhwh’ reflects the wellknown links between Deuteronomy and Hosea. Moreover, the assertion wĕlō-šabtem āday nĕum-Yhwh ‘You did not return to me, said Yhwh’ is repeated five times in Amos 4 (vv. 6, 8, 9, 10, 11) while šubû āday bĕkol-lĕbabĕkem ‘Turn back to me with all your hearts’ is found in Joel 2:12, and the following promise of reciprocity is found in Joel 2:13–14: ‘…And turn back to Yhwh your God. For he is gracious and compassionate, Slow to anger, abounding in kindness, And renouncing punishment. Who knows but that he may turn and relent, And leave a blessing behind for meal offering and drink offering to Yhwh your God…’. For šb d Yhwh in Deuteronomy, see Deut. 4:30: ‘when you are in distress because all these things have befallen you and, in the end, return to Yhwh your God and obey him’; and see also Deut. 30:2: ‘and you return to Yhwh your God, and you and your children heed his command with all your heart and soul, just as I enjoin upon you this day’. See also Deut. 30:10, ‘…once you return to Yhwh your God with all your heart and soul’. It is more than reasonable to suggest that ‘turn back to me with all your heart’ in Joel 2:12 may reflect dependence on D and/or Dtr because ‘with all your hearts’ is found in Deut. 11:13; 13:4; Josh. 22:5; 23:14; 1 Sam. 6:6; 12:20, 24; Jer. 29:13. 16.  Concerning the influence of the book of Hosea upon Jeremiah, see K. Gross, Die literarische Verwandschaft Jeremias mit Hosea (Borna: Noske, 1930), and K. Gross, ‘Hoseas Einfluss auf Jeremias Anschauungen’, NKZ 42 (1931), pp. 241–56, 327–43. Concerning the influence of the book of Jeremiah upon Deutero-Isaiah, see S. M. Paul, ‘Literary and Theological Echoes of Jeremiah in Deutero-Isaiah’, World Congress of Jewish Studies 5, no. 1 (1969), pp. 102–20.

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The preposition ad meaning ‘to’ is so frequent in Hebrew Scripture as not to deserve comment.17 For the verb šb in Jeremiah in connection with a return from misbehaviour to exemplary behaviour, see Jer. 34:15: ‘Lately, you turned about and did what is proper in my sight, and each of you proclaimed a release to his countrymen; and you made a covenant accordingly before me in the temple which bears my name’; see also Jer. 36:3: ‘Perhaps when the House of Judah hear of all the disasters I intend to bring upon them, they will turn back from their wicked ways, and I will pardon their iniquity and their sin’. For the verbal root šwb referring to returning specifically to God/Yhwh see also Hos. 3:5, ‘Afterward, the Israelites will turn back and will seek Yhwh their God and David their king…’; Hos. 6:1, ‘Come, let us turn back to Yhwh’; Jer. 24:7, ‘And I will give them the understanding to acknowledge me, for I am Yhwh. And they shall be my people and I will be their God, when they turn back to me with all their heart’; Lam. 3:40, ‘Let us search and examine our ways, And turn back to Yhwh’; Lam. 5:21, ‘Turn us back, Yhwh, to yourself, and let us come back’. With respect to the latter verse, note that there is a kethib–qere variant; the kethib, which is found in the synagogue scrolls, is the short imperfect wĕnāšûb, which probably means ‘We shall come back (if you help us to do so)’, while the traditional reading or qere, which is chanted in the synagogal reading of the book of Lamentations on the Eve of the Ninth of Av, is the cohortative wĕnāšûbāh, which probably means ‘and let us come back’. The very same verbal root šwb refers to turning away from God in Num. 32:15, ‘If you [pl.] turn away from Him and He abandons them once more in the wilderness, you will bring calamity upon all this people’. See also 1 Kgs 9:6, ‘[But] if you and your descendants really turn away from Me and do not keep the commandments [and] the laws which I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worship them…’; and see also 2 Chron. 7:19, ‘But if you turn away from Me and forsake My laws and commandments that I set before you and go and serve other gods and worship them…’. Likewise in Jer. 34:16 the verbal root šwb, which refers in v. 15 there (quoted above) to repentance concretized in release of the indentured servants, who had been held beyond the seven-year limit, is employed in v. 16 to refer to the backsliding reflected in the illegal re-enslavement of the men and women who had been released: ‘But now you have turned back and have profaned My name; each of you has brought back the men and women whom you had given their freedom, and forced them to be your slaves again’. 17.  Contrast Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 559–60.

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It is imperative that any discussion of the imperative šûbāh in Hos. 14:2 and other usages of the verbal root šwb in Hos. 14:3 and elsewhere take note of the important findings recorded by W. L. Holladay.18 Importantly, he notes that the verb in question is the twelfth most frequently attested verb in Hebrew Scripture,19 being found a total of 1059 times in the Bible and 22 times in Hosea.20 Holladay lists ten instances of what he calls the ‘covenantal usage’ of the verbal root in question in the book of Hosea, which is to say the use of this root with respect to returning to Yhwh in repentance.21 The ten examples are Hos. 3:5; 5:4; 6:1; 7:10; 11:5 (twice), 7; 14:2, 3, 5. Of these ten instances seven employ the verb šb, while two—11:17 and 14:5—employ the derived adjectival noun mĕšûbâ denoting ‘defection’, i.e., turning away from Yhwh and from proper behaviour. kî kāšaltā baăwônêkā ‘For you have fallen because of your iniquity’ The verb kāšal meaning ‘fall’ referring to failure in the realm of human behaviour is twice attested in Hos. 4:5, q.v. and twice again in Hos. 5:5 (the second occurrence there is likely to be a Judahite gloss; see my commentary there and the discussion of Judahite glosses in my introduction). In Isa. 3:8 we have the pair kāšĕlâ//nāpal employed in feminine//masculine gender matched parallelism referring to the moral failure of the city of Jerusalem and the people of Judah respectively, while in Ps. 27:2 both verbs refer to the ultimate failure of wicked persons who seek to make life difficult for the virtuous psalmist. 14:3 qĕḥû immākem dĕbārîm ‘Take with you words’ Stewart offers the following explanation: ‘An Israelite who appeared before Yahweh was supposed to bring a sacrificial offering to guarantee his or her vow (Exod. 23:15; 34:20 [to which we should add Deut. 16:16–17, on the basis of which the pilgrimage festivals on which such offerings were presented are called in the Jewish liturgy for a festival which begins on Saturday Night “festivals of free-will offerings”]) to their covenant Lord. Sacrifices are worthless without obedience (cf. [Hos.] 4:8; 5:6; 6:6; 8:13). They are rather to take “words” accompanied by 18.  W. L. Holladay, The Root Shubh in the Old Testament with Particular Reference to its Usages in Covenantal Contexts (Leiden: Brill, 1958). 19.  Holladay, The Root Shubh, p. 2. 20.  Holladay, The Root Shubh, p. 7. 21.  Holladay, The Root Shubh, p. 120.

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right actions which will fulfill that promise.’22 Andersen and Freedman render the clause, ‘Bring vows with you’.23 Macintosh comments as follows: ‘Hosea expresses the wish that his people will take as their sin offerings simply their words, i.e., their sincere confession and expressed repentance’.24 Indeed, Macintosh again reflects his interpretation of ‘words’ as confession when he translates v. 3 as follows: ‘Take with you words and go back to Yahweh. Say to him, “Forgive all our iniquity and accept what pleases [you]; that we may requite you with our confession as if with young bulls” ’.25 Indeed, in a footnote to the plural imperative ‘Say’ in v. 3b Macintosh offers the following explanation: ‘I.e., adopt this formula of confession and attitude of mind’. A few pages earlier, however, Macintosh writes, ‘Chapter 14:2–9…constitute a prayer over Israel (sic v. 2) in Hosea’s name’.26 Macintosh continues further on, ‘This, Hosea’s prayer for Israel, is manifestly consistent with the totality of the prophet’s endeavour’.27 Certainly, I would adopt the suggestion that indeed Hosea presents us in vv. 3d–4a with a formula of prayer to be recited by Israel. Moreover, I would understand the imperative ‘Say’ in v. 3c as Hosea’s call to the Israelites to recite the prayer. Contrary to what Macintosh has written, v. 2, which is addressed to collective Israel, is not part of the prayer, nor are vv. 5–9 part of the prayer, for in these verses it is neither Israel nor the prophet who addresses God in supplication but rather God who addresses Israel. Moreover, the idea that dĕbārîm ‘words’ in v. 2 may refer to the prayer formulated in vv. 3d–4a is supported by several instances in Hebrew Scripture where the noun dābār ‘word’ denotes prayer. For example, in Num. 14:13–19 Moses supplicates God, while in v. 20 the narrator describes God’s response in the following words: wayyōmer Yhwh sālaḥtî kidĕbārekā, which probably means, ‘Yhwh said, “I hereby pardon (Israel) in accord with your prayer” ’. NJPS, fully understanding that God here responds positively to Moses’ prayer in vv. 13–19 but not yet willing to translate dābār as ‘prayer’, renders as follows: ‘And the LORD said, “I pardon, as you have asked” ’. If, indeed, dābār can mean ‘prayer’ in Biblical Hebrew, it would be possible to make sense of the enigmatic Jer. 14:1, ăšer hāyâ dĕbar-Yhwh el-Yirmĕyāhû al-dibĕrê habbaṣārōt, which NJPS renders, ‘The word of the LORD which came to Jeremiah concerning the droughts’. The latter rendering leads us to expect 22.  Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, p. 213. 23.  Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 642. 24.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 563. 25.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 561. 26.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 558. 27.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 558.

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that in the following verses, vv. 2–10, we should find the content of ‘the word of Yhwh’, which is to say that we should expect that the speaker in those verses would be Yhwh. Instead, it is Jeremiah, who utters a prayer of supplication while the word of Yhwh is found only from the end of the first third of v. 10. If, however, we entertain the possibility that the noun dābār may mean ‘prayer’ as in Hos. 14:3 and Num. 14:20, perfect sense can be made also of Jer. 14:1 if it is translated as follows: ‘Concerning the divine revelation to Jeremiah [i.e., v. 10b] in response to [Heb. al] the prayers [of Jeremiah] concerning the droughts’. In fact, NJPS simply ignores the two expressions ăšēr ‘concerning…’ and dibĕrê ‘prayers concerning’. Just as in Hos. 14:3; Num. 14:20, and possibly Jer. 14:10, the term dābār in singular and plural can designate ‘prayer(s)’ so also in Ps. 56:11, baĕlōhîm ăhallēl dābār//baYhwh ăhallēl dābār should probably be translated as follows: ‘To God I shall sing a prayer//to Yhwh I shall sing a prayer’. And dābār ‘word’, meaning specifically ‘prayer’, is also attested in Qoh. 5:1–2: ‘Keep your mouth from being rash, and let not your throat be quick to bring forth a prayer before God. For God is in heaven and you are on earth; that is why your prayers should be few.’ Hosea 14:3d–4 is, then, a prayer, and this prayer begins: kol-tiśśā āwôn ‘Forgive all iniquity’ Jonah Ibn Janah argues that this clause is an instance of inversion, in which the word order does not reflect the syntax and that the meaning is ‘Forgive all iniquity’.28 Ibn Janah’s view is accepted by Kimchi and defended also in GKC (#128a). In fact, Rashi, who did not know of Ibn Janah, also treats the clause as inversion by simply paraphrasing, kol-ăwônōtênû sĕlaḥ ‘Forgive all our iniquities’. Concerning inversion in the book of Hosea see also above at Hos. 7:7d. LXX renders ὅπως μὴ λάβητε ‘so that you may not accept our iniquity’, which appears to reflect a Hebrew Vorlage containing the negative particle bl rather than the graphically similar (in square Hebrew characters) indefinite pronoun kl. This negative particle is well known in Ugaritic and Phoenician and Rabbinic Hebrew, and it is attested 63 times in the Hebrew Bible including the qere at Hos. 9:16 where the kethib is bĕlî and another five times with prefixed conjunctive waw, including Hos. 7:2.29 However, Gordis points 28.  Jonah Ibn Janaḥ, Sefer ha-Riqma (trans. from Arabic into Hebrew by Judah Ibn Tibbon; ed. M. Wilesnky, 2nd ed., ed. D. Tene with advice from Z. Ben-Hayyim; 2 vols.; Jerusalem: Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1964), vol. 1, p. 224, line 22. 29.  R. Gordis, ‘The Text and Meaning of Hosea XIV 3’, VT 5 (1955), pp. 88–90, accepts the LXX reading.

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out that in Ugaritic the negative particle bl can be employed as an asseverative as can the negative particle lō in Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew. Consequently, Gordis renders ‘Indeed, forgive our iniquity’, which is exactly the way Rashi understands the MT. Thus Gordis’s circuitous route via LXX, Ugaritic, and Rabbinic Hebrew to Rashi’s exegesis strikes one as an example of what is called in the yeshivah-world ‘scratching one’s left ear with one’s right hand’. If we accept the LXX reading, the opening clauses of the prayer ask God not to forgive sin but to accept its opposite, which is ṭōb, which may designate moral goodness. However, see below for the interpretation I prefer. The prayer continues with the promise that Israel will repent by substituting good behaviour for the erstwhile bad behaviour. In vv. 5–9 God responds to this generous promise with generosity of his own. wĕqaḥ-ṭōb ‘And take/accept (our) goodness’ Gordis argues first of all on the basis of context—the reference to ‘taking words’ in v. 3a and the reference to vows referred to in v. 3f as ‘fruit of our lips’, i.e., a kind of speech act—that the noun ṭōb must also denote ‘speech’.30 He argues furthermore that the latter noun is probably a cognate of the verb dbb ‘speak’ attested in Cant. 7:10 and the noun dibbâ ‘slanderous speech’ attested in Gen. 37:2 and Num. 14:37. It is almost superfluous to mention the Akkadian cognate dabābu ‘speak’ and the derived nouns in Akkadian, for which the reader is referred to the dictionaries of Akkadian. It is equally unnecessary to refer the reader in the present context to the Aramaic cognates reflected in BT and elsewhere. What is important in the present context is Gordis’s most convincing argument that there are Aramaic and Syriac cognates of Heb. dibbâ in which ṭ appears instead of d. Moreover, he points out that such cognates are employed to render Heb. dibbâ by TO and the Peshitta at Gen. 37:2 and by the Proverbs Targum found in the Rabbinic Bible. In addition, Gordis notes that in Neh. 6:19 the two nouns ṭōbōtāyw ‘his utterances’ and dĕbāray ‘my words’ appear in a kind of parallelism, which, like Ps. 62:12, lies on the border between synonymous and synthetic parallelism. In Gordis’s rendering, Neh. 6:19 reads as follows: ‘His utterances they were wont to repeat to me and thy words they would bring to him’. Moreover, Gordis points out, his rendering is anticipated by three distinct manuscript traditions of the LXX, all of which render both nouns by λόγους ‘words’.

30.  Gordis, ‘The Text and Meaning of Hosea XIV 3’.

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The LXX reading of Hos. 14:3d, ‘Do not forgive iniquity’, suggests that our prophet praying on behalf of Israel does not ask God to pass over or ignore or forgive Israel’s erstwhile iniquitous behaviour but only to accept Israel’s improved behaviour embodied in the fulfilment of the promises spelled out in 14:4. The consequence of this repentance is that God will be equally generous, as explained in vv. 5–9, in accepting the prayer and the promise. Here we have the prophetic doctrine of repentance, which is fully spelled out in Ezek. 3 and 33. According to this doctrine, if the person changes her/his behaviour for the better, the previous bad behaviour is ignored in assigning reward and punishment. If, on the other hand, the person changes her/his behaviour for the worse, the previous good behaviour is ignored in assigning reward and punishment. Obviously, the placing of the present ch. 14 at the end of the book of Hosea underscores the prophetic doctrine according to which improvement in behaviour at the end is what counts at the end. ûnĕšallĕmāh pārîm śĕpātênû ‘And let us pay with our lips instead of (offering) bulls’ Other translations cited below fail to take note of the long imperfect form of the form ending in āh, which indicates the cohortative sense of the verb conveyed by my translation ‘and let us’. NJPS renders, ‘Instead of bulls we will pay [the offering of] our lips’, and a marginal note in NJPS indicates, ‘Meaning of Hebrew uncertain’. It is worthy of note that the interpretation which NJPS giveth but which NJPS marginal note taketh away follows Rashi, who comments as follows: ‘WE SHALL PAY FOR THE BULLS, which we should have offered before you, we shall pay for them by means of making acceptable the words of our lips’. Rashi’s comment reflects the following Talmudic dictum found in Yoma 86b: ‘R. Isaac said that in the West [the land of Israel] they say quoting Rabbah bar Mari: “Come and see that the behaviour [lit., attribute] of the Holy One Blessed be He is not like the behaviour of people [lit., flesh and blood]. The behaviour of a human [lit., flesh and blood] is that when someone insults him [printed editions add ‘by means of words’], it is doubtful whether one can be reconciled and even if you say that one can be reconciled, it is doubtful whether one can be reconciled by means of words. However, as for the Holy One Blessed be He, if a human [Heb. ādām] commits a transgression in secret, He [i.e., God] is reconciled with him [the human] by means of words, as it is stated in the Bible (in Hos. 14:3], ‘Take with you words and return to the LORD’. And not only that, but God accounts it to him for good, as it is stated in the Bible (there), ‘And accept good’, and not only that but Scripture credits him [the person] as though he had offered bulls, as it is stated in the Bible

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(there), ‘And we shall pay [with] our lips bulls’.” ’ Rashi’s commentary to the Babylonian Talmud clarifies, ‘ “our lips”, as a substitute for [Heb. bimĕqom] bulls’. Similarly, Rabbi Mendy Wechsman comments in his note ad loc in the ArtScroll translation of Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yoma: ‘The last phrase expresses the hope that prayer uttered by the lips will be accepted in the place of animal sacrifices’. It is equally worthy of note that the interpretation of the clause ûnĕšallĕmāh pārîm śĕpātênû to mean ‘we shall substitute prayers for sacrificial bulls’ is canonized in the liturgy for the Jewish Day of Atonement, where it is stated, for example, in the so-called Additional Service: ûnĕšallĕmāh pārîm śĕpātênû, which is to say, ‘we are permitted by God to offer prayers instead of sacrifices’.31 An essential difference between Orthodox Judaism in modern times and Reform Judaism hinges upon the question as to whether prayer has become a permanent substitute for sacrifice or only a temporary one so that the function of prayer as a substitute for sacrifice will terminate when the Temple will have been restored. With all due respect to the reception history of Hos. 14:2–3 in the Babylonian Talmud and the Rabbinic liturgy for the Day of Atonement, in which the latter verse is understood to mean that prayer can serve as a substitute for sacrifice, Gordis argues that the lexeme commonly read as ‘bulls’ in the later verse, is, in fact, the singular noun pĕrî ‘fruit’, that the term ‘fruit of our lips’ refers to ‘spoken vows’, and the entire clause should be rendered, ‘And we shall render (unto Thee) the fruit of our lips’.32 More recently, Ch. (Harold) Cohen argues that the purpose of the prophet’s using a form of the lexeme pĕrî with enclitic mem is to allow the text to express also the secondary meaning of substituting words for bulls, which, interestingly enough, is the understanding of the clause embodied in the Rabbinic texts cited above.33 31.  Cf. Silverman, ed., High Holiday Prayer Book, p. 398: ‘so will we render for bullocks the offering of our lips’. Moreover, in D. Goldschmidt, High Holy Day Prayer Book. Vol. 2, Yom Kippur (Jerusalem: Koren, 1970), pp. 587–88 (in Hebrew), the quotation of Hos. 14:2–3 is preceded by a medieval liturgical poem which embodies the aforementioned canonical interpretation of Hos. 14:3f.: ûkĕpārîm rĕṣēh nā śĕpātênû bĕšillûm wĕēlêkā nāšûb ‘Accept, please, as bullocks our lips as payment, and we shall return unto you’. 32.  Gordis, ‘The Text and Meaning of Hosea XIV 3’, pp. 88–90. 33.  Ch. (Harold) Cohen, ‘The Enclitic-mem in Biblical Hebrew: Its Existence and Initial Discovery’, in Sefer Moshe: The Moshe Weinfeld Jubilee Volume (ed. Ch. Cohen, A. Hurvitz, and S. M. Paul; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004), pp. 254–55. As for the use of the enclitic mem to mark a secondary meaning, see Cohen, ‘The Enclitic-mem’, pp. 250–51, with respect to Isa. 5:11 and Cohen, there, p. 260.

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Aššûr lō yôšîēnû ‘Assyria cannot save us’ If in Isa. 10:5 Assyria is called ‘the rod of my anger’, i.e., ‘the instrument by which God seeks to punish Judah for subverting the cause of the indigent and robbing the needy of their rights’ (Isa. 10:2), here in Hos. 14, as noted already by Tadmor (see above at Hos. 11), the state which directly threatens Israel/Ephraim in the time of our prophet is neither Assyria nor Aram but Judah.34 Moreover, here, as in Hos. 7:11 and 11:5, the prophet refers to Israel’s having sought help from Assyria against Judah. If in earlier chapters (see also Hos. 8:9; 9:3) it is the prophet speaking in the name of God who speaks disparagingly of the help sought from Assyria, here in the prayer that begins in Hos. 14:3d and ends in 14:9 it is repentant Israel who finally recognizes that help is not to be found in Assyria but only in God. al-sûs lō nirkāb (literally) ‘we shall not ride upon a horse’ NJPS renders: ‘No more will we ride upon steeds’. Obviously, NJPS assumes that the term ‘horse’ is a collective noun referring either to horse-drawn chariots or to cavalry. Targum renders, ‘We shall not rely upon those who ride upon horses’. NJPS footnotes the clause ‘No more will we ride upon steeds’ with the following remark: ‘I.e., we will no longer depend on an alliance with Egypt; cf. 2 Kgs 18:24 (Isa. 36:9); Isa. 30:16’. Interestingly enough, NJPS’s note, which leaves unexplained why riding upon horses should refer to Egypt, is in fact based upon Rashi, who comments as follows on Hos. 14:4a–b: ‘ASSYRIA SHALL NOT SAVE US. In addition they said before him [God] the following: “We shall no longer request help from mortals, neither from Assyria nor from Egypt”. NO MORE SHALL WE RIDE UPON STEEDS. This refers to Egyptian help for they [the Egyptians] used to send them [Israel and Judah] horses in consonance with what they [the people of Judah] said to Isaiah, “No. We shall flee on steeds…we shall ride on swift mounts” (Isa. 30.16).’ Rashi and NJPS assume that since in Hos. 7:11; 11:5, and 11:11 Assyria and Egypt appear as a pair of nations upon whom Israel relies and upon whom God speaking through the prophet asks Israel not to rely so also here in Hos. 14:4 reference is made, albeit obliquely, to the same pair of world powers, Assyria in the East and Egypt in the West. For Egypt as a source of horses, see also Deut. 17:16: ‘Moreover, he shall not keep many horses or send people back to Egypt to add to his horses [Heb. lĕmaan harbōt sûs, lit. “in order to multiply horses”, again 34.  Tadmor, ‘Historical Background’, pp. 87–88.

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employing the singular form of the word for horse as a collective as in Hos. 14:4], since Yhwh has warned you, “You must not go back that way again” [cf. Exod. 14:13: “…for the Egyptians whom you see today you will never see again”’. 1 Kings 10:26–28 may indicate that King Solomon violated specifically the prohibition contained in Deut. 17:16. There in 1 Kgs 10:26 we read, ‘Solomon assembled chariots and horses. He had 1,400 chariots and 12,000 horses…’, while there in v. 28 we read, ‘The source of the horses which Solomon possessed was Mizraim and Kue’. Now, of course, Mizraim is the Hebrew name for Egypt. However, a marginal note in NJPS suggests that, in fact, Mizraim here may be Musru, a neighbour of Kue in Cilicia in Asia Minor. This is to say that according to the NJPS translators any resemblance between the prohibition in Deut. 17:16 and the description of King Solomon’s behaviour with respect to the place from which he imported horses is purely coincidental.35 Finkelstein and Silberman explain on the basis of the documents discussed by Dalley ‘that while other specialized troops from conquered regions were incorporated into the Assyrian army as individuals, the Israel chariot brigade was the only foreign unit permitted to retain its national identity. The Assyrian king Sargon II [722–705 BCE; date supplied by Gruber] says it best: “I formed a unit with two hundred of their chariots for my force”.’36 Moreover, Finkelstein explains, ‘Large Egyptian (Nubian) horses were essential for the chariot force of the Assyrian army. Before Assyria established direct contact with Egypt in the late eighth century [BCE], Israel was the source of these horses, which were brought from Egypt, bred and trained at Megiddo, and then sold to Assyria and other kingdoms in the north. The great skill of Israel in chariotry is attested in Assyrian records.’37 35.  For extra-biblical references to the use of horses in the armies of the Northern Kingdom, see with Macintosh, Stephanie Dalley, ‘Foreign Chariotry and Cavalry in the Armies of Tiglath-pileser III and Sargon II’, Iraq 47 (1985), pp. 31–48; see also Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001), pp. 211–12. 36.  Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, pp. 211–12. 37.  Israel Finkelstein, The Forgotten Kingdom: The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel (SBL Ancient Near Eastern Monographs, 5; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), p. 135. Finkelstein cites also D. O. Cantrell, The Horsemen of Israel: Horses and Chariotry in Monarchic Israel (Ninth and Eighth Centuries B.C.E.] (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), and D. O. Cantrell and I. Finkelstein, ‘A Kingdom for a Horse: The Megiddo Stables and Eighth Century Israel’, in Megiddo IV: The 1998–2000 Seasons (ed. I. Finkelstein, D. Ussishkin, and B. Halpern; Monographs of the Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University, 24; Tel Aviv: Emery and Claire Yass Publications in Archaeology, 2006), pp. 643–65.

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Finally, Finkelstein concludes, ‘One way or another, the horse industry was probably one of Israel’s most important economic ventures in the eighth century B.C.E.’.38 wĕlō nōmar ōd ĕlōhênû lĕmaaśēh yādênû ‘And we shall no longer venerate our handiwork’ NJPS translates more literally: ‘Nor ever again will we call our handiwork our god’. In my treatment of Hos. 8:4 I argued on the basis of the reference to the calf of Samaria in Hos. 8:5 that the images which the Israelites made and venerated must be the calves venerated at Dan and Bethel. Likewise, in my treatment of Hos. 13:2, I argued on the basis of the reference to kissing calves in Hos. 13:3 that the molten images must be the aforementioned calves. One tendency in modern biblical scholarship is to see in Hos. 14:4 a reference to the worship of other gods, most likely the gods of the Canaanite pantheon. Typical is M. A. Sweeney’s reading: ‘[This clause] returns to issues of apostasy against YHWH by referring to the people’s penchant for worshipping idols and calling them “our God” ’.39 Macintosh remarks, ‘It is difficult to be certain whether his [Hosea’s] hearers are bidden to repudiate idols in the plural (cf., e.g., 2:15, EV 13), or to repudiate the “calf of Samaria” in the singular’.40 If, indeed, Hos. 14:4c is read as part of Hos. 4–14, i.e., Kaufmann’s ‘Deutero-Hosea’, then that larger context would suggest that here also in Hos. 14:4 the reference is to the veneration of the calves and not to full-blown ‘worship of other gods’. Likewise, if Hos. 14:4c is read as part of the larger context of Hos. 1–14, then there should be no question but that the prophet referred in Hos. 1–3 to worship of other gods and would refer to that issue again. Interestingly, Wolff suggests that in the present context ‘work of human hands’ refers simultaneously to three distinct objects.41 These are (1), the great foreign power, Assyria; (2) Israel’s own military strength, her horses; and (3) the calf image of the Baal cult, which though the ‘work of our hand’ (8:6; 13:2) was worshipped as ‘our God’ (8:6). ‘In the solemn disavowal of the gods she presently worships, Israel renews her original confession of faith in Yahweh, her only saviour, the comforter of the helpless’.42 38.  Finkelstein, Forgotten Kingdom, p. 135. 39.  M. A. Sweeney, The Twelve Prophets: Volume 1 (Berit Olam; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), pp. 138–39. See also Brown, Hosea, p. 119: ‘the work of our hands. Alien gods as well as alien protection are abjured.’ 40.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 566. 41.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 235. 42.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 235.

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Harper compares our prophet’s reference to ‘calling our handiwork our god’ to the mocking of idolatry in Isa. 42:17, ‘Driven back and utterly shamed shall be those who trust in an image, those who say to an idol [Heb. massēkâ; literally, molten image] “You are our gods!”; and in Isa. 44:17: ‘Of the rest [of a piece of wood which he had burnt for heating and cooking] he makes a god—his own carving! He bows down to it, worships it; He prays to it and cries, “Save me, for you are my god!” ’43 The precise expression ‘work of human hands’ applied to the statues of deities, which in some strands of ancient Israelite thought are understood to be characteristic of the religion of the nations of the world and uncharacteristic of Israelite religion, is found in Ps. 115:4: ‘their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands’; more explicit is the near parallel in Ps. 135:15: ‘the idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands’. This expression is found also in Deut. 4:28: ‘There [in exile] you will serve gods, which are the work of human hands, wood and stone [objects], which cannot see and cannot hear and cannot eat and cannot smell’. See also Hezekiah’s prayer in 2 Kgs 19:17–18: ‘True, Yhwh, the kings of Assyria have annihilated the nations and their lands, and have committed their gods to the flames and have destroyed them; for they are not gods but the work of human hands, of wood and stone’. See also the almost verbatim account in Isa. 37:18–19. For the expression ‘work of hands’ to refer to idols, see also Isa. 2:8: ‘And their land is full of idols; they bow down to the work of their hands//to what their own fingers have wrought’. In the latter passage, as in Hos. 14, the condemnation of improper worship is juxtaposed with the remark that the population in question raises horses. For the expression ‘work of hands’ with respect to idols (and also juxtaposed with the remark that the people addressed raise horses), see Mic. 5:9–10: ‘In that day—word of Yhwh—I will destroy the horses in your midst and wreck your chariots. I will destroy the cities of your land and demolish all your fortresses. I will destroy the sorcery you practice, and you shall have no more soothsayers. I will destroy your idols [Heb. pĕsîlêkā] and the sacred pillars in your midst; and no more shall you bow down to the work of your hands.’ ăšēr-bĕkā yĕruḥam yātōm ‘Insofar as in you (Yhwh) an orphan is loved’ NJPS: ‘Since in You alone orphans find pity’. Note that NJPS’s added expression ‘alone’ is not found in the biblical text; otherwise, Rashi would not have had to add this modifier. 43.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 165.

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Note that here as with respect to ‘horse’ in v. 4b NJPS translates the collective noun ‘orphan’ as a plural. Rashi construes clause 4d as an explanation as to why Israel has decided to stop treating the work of human hands as god(s) and to return to the worship of Yahweh alone: ‘INSOFAR AS IN YOU, You alone, He who pities orphans, will be our hope’.44 With respect to the juxtaposition of the rejection of idols and a relative clause, which refers to God’s pitying the unfortunate, Wolff compares another confession, Josh. 24:16–17, where we read as follows: ‘In reply, the people declared, “Far be it from us to forsake Yhwh and serve other gods! For it was Yhwh who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage…” ’.45 The vocalization of the verb yrḥm as a pual is supported by the Qumran fragment of Hos. 14 published by M. Testuz in 1955.46 LXX construes yrḥm as an active verb and renders, ὁ ἐν σοὶ ἐλεήσει ὀρφανόν, i.e., ‘He who is in thee shall pity the orphan’. Wolff follows GKC (#158b) in explaining that in the present context (and in numerous others) the relative particle ăšēr is an abbreviation for yaan ăšēr ‘because, on account of the fact that’.47 GKC explains there that the latter formula and its various abbreviations introduce causal clauses, which assign the reason for statements. Here the causal clause explains why it is that Israel would want to confess loyalty to Yahweh. The answer is that he is synonymous with the highest of virtues, namely, protection of the socio-economically deprived, specifically orphans, who cannot protect their own interests. Likewise, Hammurabi in the epilogue to his famous Code of Laws, line 61, also characterizes himself as one who (by way of his code of laws) seeks to protect orphans and widows. With Macintosh note that God is addressed as the protector of orphans also in Deut. 10:18; Pss. 10:14; 68:6.48 To this short list we should add also Pss. 10:18 and 146:9, and we should note also that the heroes of the Ugaritic epics, Danilu and Keret, were also characterized as persons who took upon themselves to protect the rights of orphans and widows. It was in consideration of this great virtue that Danilu’s son Aqhat was resurrected from the dead.

44.  Similarly, Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, p. 394. 45.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 235. 46.  Testuz, ‘Deux fragments inédits des manuscrits de la Mer Morte’, pp. 38–39. 47.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 231. 48.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 567.

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14:5–9 In vv. 3d–4 we have the prayer which Hosea, speaking either in his own name or in the name of God, urges Israel to pray in v. 3a–c. In vv. 5–9 we have God’s positive response to that prayer, which includes a quotation within a quotation, v. 9, in which Ephraim declares that he indeed acts positively upon God’s call to repentance in vv. 2–3. Cf. Rashi: ‘The prophet said, “Prophetic revelation [Heb. ruaḥ haqqodeš, lit., ‘the holy spirit’] said to me, ‘After they will have said thus [i.e., the prayer found in vv. 3d–4], I shall heal their backsliding’ ” ’. One may compare Exod. 34:11–14. There in vv. 11–13 Moses entreats God not to annihilate the people of Israel because of their veneration of the golden calf, while in v. 14 the narrator declares, ‘And Yhwh renounced the punishment he had planned to bring upon his people’. Similarly, in Num. 14:13–19 Moses entreats God not to annihilate the people of Israel because of their endorsement of the negative report of ten of the twelve spies concerning the Promised Land, while in v. 20 it is reported, ‘And Yhwh said, “I pardon, as you have asked” ’. For a different interpretation of that verse in Numbers see above in my comment at Hos. 14:3. In Jer. 14:19–22 Jeremiah entreats God on behalf of Judah/ Zion, while in 15:1–9 God elaborates upon the idea found in Jer. 15:1, ‘Yhwh said to me [Jeremiah], “Even if Moses and Samuel were to intercede with me, I would not be won over to that people…” ’. The common thread that runs through all of these texts is that indeed God often answers prayer, but the answer is not always positive. erpā mĕšûbātām ‘I shall heal their backsliding’ The KJV translates similarly, ‘I will heal their backsliding’. This rendering reflects the interpretation of Kimchi, who writes as follows: ‘If you will do so [i.e., pray the prayer provided in vv. 3d–4], he [God] will answer you saying, “I will bring healing” [Heb. arukkâ] (Jer. 30:17), i.e., a cure [Heb. marpe] for their backsliding, i.e., for their rebelliousness [Heb. mirdām], with which they rebelled against me until now” ’. Kimchi uses the explicative waw linking the meaning of relatively obscure words both in the quotation from Jeremiah and in the text of Hosea to the more common synonyms he provides. NJPS renders ‘I will heal their affliction’, and a marginal note in NJPS indicates that the noun mĕšûbâ has the meaning ‘affliction’, also in Jer. 2:19 and 3:22.49 It should be noted that the interpretation of the plural ‘your afflictions’ in the two cited verses from Jeremiah in the sense of 49.  See also Morag, ‘On Semantic and Lexical Features in the Language of Hosea’, p. 506.

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‘your wounds/diseases’ is supported by LXX, which renders Jer. 3:22b as follows: καὶ ἰάσομαι τὰ συντρίματτα ὑμῶν ‘And I will heal your bruises’. Moreover, the first two clauses of Jer. 3:22, šûbû bānîm šôbābîm erpāh mĕšûbōtêkem ‘Turn back, O rebellious children, I will heal your afflictions!’ (so NJPS), suggest that the latter passage in Jeremiah may have been inspired by Hos. 14:1–5a, which begins with ‘Turn back, O Israel’ and ends with ‘I will heal their affliction’. It is likely that NJPS’s interpretation of both Jer. 3:22 and Hos. 14:5a is inspired by Ehrlich.50 There Ehrlich explains, ‘The physician heals the patient of the disease, and the meshubot that are mentioned here are diseases’. There Ehrlich also reminds the reader that he has first dealt with the matter at hand in his comment on Isa. 57:18, ‘I saw his [Israel’s] behaviour, and I shall heal him’. Ehrlich explains that the prophetic author of Isa. 57 speaking in the name of God says, ‘When I saw the behaviour of Israel who acted stubbornly and after I had afflicted him…I thought, “This is not the way to improve his behaviour”. Therefore, I ceased afflicting him.’51 ‘This’, Ehrlich continues, ‘is the meaning of “I shall heal him” ’. Not surprisingly, in his comment on Hos. 14:5 Ehrlich states that Hos. 14:5a must be exegeted and translated in line with what Ehrlich wrote concerning Jer. 3:22.52 Strangely enough, Ehrlich does not cite LXX’s rendering of Jer. 3:22. The very same exegetical question, ‘What disease does God promise to heal here?’, is answered also by Harper when he states, ‘Their apostasy, or backsliding, is regarded as a disease, which will be healed’.53 At Hos. 14:5 LXX renders mĕšûbātām as follows: τὰς κατοικίας αὐτῶν ‘their dwelling-places’, deriving the Hebrew noun from the root yšb rather than from the root šwb ‘turn, return, turn away’. LXX’s understanding of the Hebrew noun was shared, apparently, by an unnamed medieval Hebrew exegete, whom Ibn Ezra attacks as follows: ‘The word mešûbâ [= backsliding] is used in a pejorative sense throughout Scripture. Its meaning is not as [a certain interpreter] claims, namely, that the word equals môšbôtām [= their dwellings], meaning that [I will heal them] everywhere I smote them; but rather it means backsliding, which is [as harmful] for the soul as a disease for the body…’.54 50.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, p. 182. 51.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, pp. 140–41. 52.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, p. 393. 53.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 413. 54.  The rendering of Ibn Ezra is taken from Abe Lipshitz, The Commentary of Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra on Hosea: Edited from Six Manuscripts and Translated with an Introduction and Notes (New York: Sepher-Hermon, 1988), p. 134.

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Vulgate, on the other hand, renders contritio, i.e., ‘remorse’, which suggests that the Hebrew noun mešûbâ, which is commonly assumed to denote ‘turning away (from virtue)’, would, in this instance, constitute a synonym of tĕšûbâ ‘repentance’, i.e., ‘turning back (to virtue)’. ōhăbēm nĕdābâ kî šāb appî mimmennî ‘I shall love them (Israel) generously for my anger has turned away from him (Israel)’ Macintosh renders: ‘I will love them generously for My anger has abated from him’.55 Macintosh explains that the noun nĕdābâ ‘generosity’ is here employed as an adverbial accusative modifying the verb ‘I will love them’. NJPS translates mimmenû at the end of the second clause ‘from them’ and adds a marginal note indicating that the Hebrew text means literally ‘from him’. Kimchi characteristically responds to the same exegetical crux, which inspires NJPS’s translation and marginal note in the following words: ‘He [the prophet or the text] made use of the plural [in v. 5b] to refer to [all the] individuals [who constitute the people of Israel] and the singular [in v. 5c] to refer to the collectivity [of Israel]’. In fact, the tendency to juxtapose referring to Israelite people in the plural with referring to the Israelite nation as a collective in the singular is found throughout Hebrew Scripture; see, inter alia, Hos. 4:6–12 for a whole series of examples of this phenomenon. With all due respect to some of the greatest critical commentators of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one must agree with Macintosh that there is no need to emend either of the clauses of Hos. 14:5b–c.56 To do so is to create a consistency, which is inconsistent with the facts of MT. The clause ‘My anger has abated from him’ is reminiscent of the description of the assuaging of God’s anger by prayer in Exod. 34 and Num. 14 cited above; cf. also Joel 2:12–14: ‘Yet even now—word of Yhwh—Turn back to me with all your hearts, and with fasting, weeping and lamenting. Rend your hearts rather than your garments. And turn back to Yhwh your God. For he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and renouncing punishment. Who knows but he may turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind for meal offering and drink offering to Yhwh your God.’ See also Jon. 1:6, where the captain of the ship says to Jonah: ‘Up, call upon your god! Perhaps the god will be kind to us and we will not perish.’ As for the term nĕdābâ ‘generously’, to love generously is to bestow what is referred to in m. Abot 5:16 as ‘love that is not dependent on 55.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 568. See, with Macintosh, GKC, #118 m, q. 56.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 568.

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something’. The point made here in God’s response to the prayer prescribed in Hos. 14:3–4 is that indicated already in Hos. 14:3 (see above), especially in the LXX version of that verse, which explicitly does not ask God to forgive sin but to accept Israel’s prayer: Israel has misbehaved. Israel cannot undo what he/she has done by suddenly behaving well (contra Ezek. 3; 18; 33). However, if Israel is willing to entreat God to give Israel another chance, God is more than willing to exercise largesse and to give Israel another chance. Thus, alongside Ezekiel’s doctrine of repentance as, as it were, undoing wrong-doing, the prophetic canon of Hebrew Scripture presents Hosea’s doctrine of the efficacy of prayer in evoking the undeserved divine largesse. Indeed, the prayer in Hos. 14 as in Joel 2 (where the prayer is to be accompanied by meal offering and libation) expresses a commitment to a change of behaviour on the part of Israel as well. The realism of Hosea’s God with respect to human behaviour is expressed in God’s declaration that God’s response is indeed ‘generous’ rather than somehow deserved. The subtle distinction between the various prophetic doctrines of repentance can be grasped only by an extremely close reading of MT, LXX, other ancient versions, and the best of the various emendations, which are commonly listed in the apparatus of critical editions of the Hebrew Bible and in commentaries. 14:6 ehĕyeh kaṭṭāl lĕYiśrāēl ‘I shall be like dew to Israel’ Ibn Ezra (partially quoted by Kimchi) points out that this declaration is contrary to what the prophet stated in 9:16, ‘their stock is withered; they can produce no fruit’, and in 13:15, ‘his fountain shall be parched, and his spring dried up’. Kimchi adds, ‘He [the prophet speaking in the name of God] compared God to dew because dew does not cease’. Kimchi’s point is that in the Land of Israel where the rain is seasonal (from the late fall until the spring) there is always dew. Thus God’s perpetual generosity is like dew and not like rain in the Land of Israel, which comes and goes and sometimes arrives late and often does not arrive at all. Lest someone ask if indeed in the world of unabated natural and human-wrought disasters, one dare compare God’s generosity to the ever-present dew and not rather to the ephemeral rain, Kimchi adds: ‘This [God’s always seeming to be there for you] will be in the future when the Exile has ended’. In other words, Kimchi agrees with the atheists that God’s always being there for you is not part of the reality of this pre-eschatological era.

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yipraḥ kaššōšannâ ‘He (Israel) will blossom like the lily’ Since God will be metaphorically like the ever-present dew, Israel will prosper metaphorically like the lily. Now, how is it that the lily flourishes even without rain? The answer is provided by W. Walker: ‘There is an underground bulb that stores nourishment and supplies the flower with food even through the drought of the desert’.57 He explains: ‘The white lily is a bulbous herb 1–1.5 m. tall; its bulb consisting of many fleshy scales with green blades only on the inner ones’.58 wĕyak šorāšāyw kallĕbānōn ‘He will strike roots like (the roots of the trees of) Lebanon’ Compare NJPS: ‘He shall strike roots like a Lebanon tree’. wĕyak šorāšāyw Note the short imperfect with conjunctive waw, on which see below. J. Wellhausen assumes that the expression hikkâ šorāšîm ‘to strike roots’ did not exist in Biblical Hebrew; hence he emends MT’s weyak ‘and it will strike’ to wĕyēlĕkû ‘and they (its roots) will go, spread’.59 (But see below, the very next clause, v. 7a, for the foolishness of substituting one expression found only once in Hebrew Scripture [but so far twice more in Second Temple Hebrew] for another one heretofore found only twice in Hebrew Scripture.60) Wellhausen and Nowack and the many lesser scholars who have followed their emendation blindly seem not to have noticed that, in fact, the expression hikkâ šorāšîm, literally ‘struck roots’, did itself strike roots 57.  W. Walker, All the Plants of the Bible (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), p. 118. Concerning the white lily or lilium candidum, see also M. Zohary, Plants of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 178–80. 58.  Walker, All the Plants of the Bible, p. 176. See also A. W. Anderson, Plants of the Bible (London: Crosby Lockwood & Son, 1956), p. 45. Some scholars dissent from the identification of Heb. šōšannâ in Hos. 14:6 and elsewhere with lilium candidum; see, e.g., Moldenke and Moldenke, Plants of the Bible, p. 117; L. J. Musselman, Figs, Dates, Laurel, and Myrrh: Plants of the Bible and the Quran (Portland, OR: Timber, 2007), pp. 178–80. Moldenke and Moldenke, Plants of the Bible, p. 117, identify the šōšannâ of Hos. 14:6 (EVV 14:5) as Iris pseudacorus L., which is a kind of iris. 59.  J. Wellhausen, Die kleinen Propheten übersetzt und erklärt (4th ed.; Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1898), p. 133. 60.  Sharing the assumption that ‘it struck root’ cannot be authentic ancient Hebrew, Nowack, Die kleinen Propheten, p. 80, restores wayyašrēš šorāšāyw ‘it took deep root’ on the basis of Ps. 80:10, where we find the feminine watašrēš šorāšêāh ‘it took deep root’ (so NJPS there).

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in Second Temple period Hebrew (and quite independently of that in Modern Hebrew as well where the expression is commonplace) as did its English counterpart.61 As noted in DCH (5:685, s.v.), nkh, meaning k, the expression ‘strike roots’ is attested also in one old version of Ben Sira, specifically the margin of Geniza Ms. B (twelfth century CE) at Ben Sira 40:15: nôṣār mēḥāmās lō yakkeh bô ‘The offshoot of violence will not strike root’. DCH also points to an additional ancient attestation of our Hebrew expression in the Dead Sea Thanksgiving Hymn Scroll, 1QH, col. 16, line 23, where the poet, speaking of the trees of life in Paradise, states yakkû šorāšāyw bĕṣûr haḥalāmîš ‘They will strike their respective roots in the flinty rock’. Note that the phrase ‘flinty rock’ is taken from Deut. 8:15. kallĕbānōn ‘like (the roots of the trees of) Lebanon’ Compare NJPS: ‘Like a Lebanon tree’. NJPS’s marginal note reads: ‘Emendation yields “like a poplar” ’. The Hebrew equivalent of ‘poplar’ is libneh, which is attested in Hos. 4:13. On this plant see my discussion there. NJPS thus follows a significant number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century authorities.62 The many ancient, medieval, and modern authorities who accept MT’s ‘like Lebanon’ are divided between those who appear to hold that the simile refers to the cedar(s) of Lebanon and those who hold that the simile refers to the mountains of Lebanon. Among those who are commonly cited as seeing here a reference to the cedar are the following: TJ; Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Kimchi. In fact, TJ states, ‘Like the tree of Lebanon, which puts forth its branches’. Ibn Ezra comments, ‘Its roots will be like the root of the trees of Lebanon’; 61.  In fact, such basic English dictionaries as L. Brown, Oxford Shorter Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), p. 2625; W. A. Nelson, Webster’s New International Dictionary (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam, 1958), p. 2496; and S. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (ed. H. J. Todd; London: Longman et al., 1818), vol. 4, s.v., ‘Root’, indicate no awareness that the expression is strange or possibly a Hebraism derived from an obscure verse in Hosea. 62.  These include: H[enricus] Oort, Textus hebraici emendation quibus in vetere Testamento Neerlandice Vertendo us: sunt A. Kuenen, I. Hooykaas, W. H. Kosters, H. Oort (Leiden: Brill, 1900), p. 140; HALOT 2:519; Sellin, Das zwölfprophetenbuch, p. 140; J. Lippl, ‘Hosea’, in J. Lippl and J. Theis, Die Zwölf Kleinen Propheten (HSAT, 8/3.1; Bonn: Hanstein, 1937), p. 83; T. H. Robinson, ‘Hosea bis Micha’, in T. H. Robinson and F. Horst, Die Zwölf Kleinen Propheten (HAT, 1/14; 2nd ed.; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1954), pp. 52–53; Weiser, Das Buch der zwölf kleinen Propheten, p. 103; BHS; DCH 4:515; the latter suggests also an alternative emendation, namely lĕbōnâ ‘frankincense’.

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similarly, Rashi comments, ‘Like the roots of the trees of Lebanon, which are large’. Kimchi characteristically elaborates as follows: ‘Like the trees of Lebanon, which are tall and whose roots are many’. Ehrlich shares this ancient interpretation when he writes, ‘like Lebanon. Like the trees of the forest, which are in Lebanon.’63 Ehrlich continues, paraphrasing TJ, Ibn Ezra, and Kimchi: ‘He [the prophet] compares them [Israel] to the lily with respect to the flower and to the [cedar of] Lebanon with respect to its roots because neither of the two of them [the two plants, the lily and the cedar] are good with respect to both of them [flowers and roots]’.64 The pros and cons of the various views are well summarized by S. Brown: ‘If the text is correct, we can only translate, and strike his root as Lebanon, the allusion being either to the cedars of Lebanon or to Mount Hermon which dominates the whole of Hosea’s landscape… Many scholars also change “Lebanon” into libneh, the white poplar of [Hos.] iv. 13. This makes a good parallel, suits the context, and avoids reading “Lebanon” three times in as many verses.’65 The three medieval Hebrew Biblical exegetes—Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Kimchi—whose commentaries on Hosea are commonly reprinted in the so-called Rabbinic Bible, respond in their characteristic manner to each of the cruces noted by the modern commentators referred to in the above discussion of Hos. 14:6c–d. Rashi, ostensibly commenting on ‘struck roots’, which is the lemma, also comments on ‘like Lebanon’. Rashi writes as follows: ‘AND IT WILL STRIKE, like the dew its roots and it made them grow large LIKE LEBANON, [i.e.], like the roots of the trees of Lebanon, which are large’. Ibn Ezra comments as follows: ‘Israel] shall strike [wĕyak] his roots lengthwise and breadth wise. [For the meaning of the verb wĕyak] compare “[the border]…shall strike [ûmāḥâ] upon the slope of the sea of Chinnereth” [Num. 34:11]….’66 Kimchi 63.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, p. 393. 64.  See the discussion in Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 570–71, and Harper, Amos and Hosea, pp. 414–15. Those who hold that the reference is to the Lebanon mountain range include C. K. F. Keil, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament: The Twelve Minor Prophets, vol. 1 (trans. J. Martin; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951), p. 166, who comments as follows: ‘ “Strike roots like Lebanon”, i.e., “not merely the deeply rooted forest of Lebanon, but the mountain itself, as one of the ‘foundations of the earth’ ” (Mic. vi. 2)’. Similarly, G. A. Smith, The Book of the Twelve Prophets (Expositor’s Bible, 1; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1896), p. 315. 65.  Brown, Hosea, p. 120. 66.  The rendering of Ibn Ezra’s comment is taken verbatim from Lipshitz, The Commentary of Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra.

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characteristically has more to say, and he copies out phrases more or less verbatim from both Rashi and Ibn Ezra. Kimchi writes as follows: ‘AND IT WILL STRIKE ITS ROOTS LIKE LEBANON, [i.e.], like the trees of Lebanon, which are tall and whose roots are many, so they [the Israelites] will be planted upon their land, and they shall produce strong roots so that they cannot be uprooted from their appointed place. This accords with what is stated in the Bible, “so that they will not again be uprooted from their land” (Amos 9:15). And in the same spirit he [God through the agency of a prophet in Isa. 27:6] said, “In days to come Jacob shall strike root”. And as for what he [Hos. 14:6] stated, “IT WILL STRIKE” corresponds in meaning to “strike [ûmāḥâ] upon the slope of the sea of Chinnereth” [Num. 34:11, which is to say, they shall strike roots hither and thither lengthwise and breadthwise.’ Obviously, these commentators would not have had so much to say about two clauses in Hos. 14:6 had they not assumed that any intelligent audience would raise the very questions posed by the modern exegetes cited above. 14:7 yēlĕkû yōnĕqōtāyw ‘His boughs will spread out’ Compare NJPS: ‘His boughs shall spread out far’. Concerning the use of the verb hlk, lit. ‘go’ in the sense ‘grow out, spread’ with reference to plants, see, with Macintosh,67 Jer. 12:2, ‘You have planted them, and they have taken root, they spread [Heb. yēlĕkû], they even bear fruit’, and BDB (p. 232). However, with all due respect to Macintosh, the verb hlk is attested in Hebrew Scripture with respect to the actual and/or metaphoric growth of plants and parts thereof only in Jer. 12:2 and Hos. 14:7. However, in both cases the contexts left us no choice but to understand ‘grow, spread out’. Wolff explains this metaphor as follows: ‘Refreshed by Yahweh, the tree of Israel shall put forth young “shoots, which signify the abundance of new life” ’.68 Rashi copies out TJ which understands yōnĕqōtāyw, literally ‘its suckling children’, rather than contextually as parts of a plant and renders ‘sons and daughters’. Kimchi, on the other hand, offers a variety of interpretations as follows: ‘HIS BOUGHS SHALL SPREAD OUT. And just as the roots will spread afar so will the branches spread afar, which is to say that they will extend themselves hither and thither. And the yōnĕqōt “sucklings” are the branches which are soft like a baby [Heb. yōnēq, masculine singular of yōnĕqōt]. And the 67.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 572. 68.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 236.

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boughs are a metaphor for the good things that happen to them [Israel] by God’s intention every day. Or, the metaphor can be [as follows]: The roots are the Torah of Moses our Rabbi, which abides forever while the boughs are the new ideas which occur to them [Israel] with respect to the knowledge of God every day.’ Interestingly, Kimchi’s suggestions that the branches of the Torah given to Moses include new ideas first encountered many generations after Moses adumbrates the modern idea, characteristic of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Reform Judaism, called ‘progressive revelation’. In fact, the noun yōnēq appears a total of 19 times in Hebrew Scripture, nine times designating a child of unspecified age (Num. 11:12; Deut. 32:25; 1 Sam. 15:3; 22:19; Isa. 11:8; Jer. 44:7; Lam. 2:11; 4:4; Ps. 8:3); twice in the etymological sense, denoting a literally nursing baby (Joel 2:16; Cant. 8:1); and eight times with respect to shoots or boughs of a plant: Isa. 53:2; Hos. 14:7; Ezek. 17:4, 22; Ps. 80:12; Job 8:16; 14:7; 15:30. 14:8 yāšûbû yōšĕbê bĕṣillô ‘They who abide in his shade shall again thrive’ Note the obvious alliteration yāšûbû yōšĕbê. KJVs rendering, ‘They that dwell under his shadow shall return; they will revive…’. This rendering assumes that the first of the three lexemes in this verset is the transitive verb commonly meaning ‘they will return’, employed here to refer to the return of the people of Israel from physical and economic catastrophe to physical and economic well-being as a result of Israel’s commitment, expressed in the prayer prescribed in Hos. 14:3–4, to improve their behaviour. Gordis argues that in the present context, as in many others, the verbal root šwb denotes ‘rest, enjoy rest/ peace’.69 Hosea 14:8a should therefore be rendered, ‘Those who sit in His [God’s] shade shall enjoy rest’. Gordis finds support for the idea that indeed the verbal root šwb can denote ‘rest, quiet’ in Isa. 30:15c where NJPS renders as follows: ‘You shall triumph by stillness [šûbâ] and quiet [wĕnaḥat]’.70 Aside from numerous other examples, Gordis renders Jer. 4:1a–b as follows: ‘If you wish to rest, O Israel, saith the LORD, you will return to me…’.71 Alternatively, Ehrlich construes the verb yāšûbû as constituting a hendiadys (although he does not use that term) with the 69.  R. Gordis, ‘Some Hitherto Unrecognized Meanings of the Verb Shubh’, JBL 52 (1933), pp. 153–62 (157–58). 70.  Gordis, ‘Some Hitherto Unrecognized Meanings of the Verb Shubh’, p. 155. 71.  Gordis, ‘Some Hitherto Unrecognized Meanings of the Verb Shubh’, p. 158.

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verb yĕḥayyû ‘they will cultivate’ in the following clause and conveying the following sense: ‘Those who dwell in his [i.e., God’s] shadow will again cultivate grain [lit. “return and cultivate grain”]’.72 Similarly, Keil73 and especially Macintosh: ‘Those who dwell in his shadow shall again revive the growth of corn’.74 Macintosh explains that the verb yāšûbû is here employed as an auxiliary verb denoting repetition or restoration, and he notes that this phenomenon with respect to the verb šwb is discussed at length in BDB (p. 998). Macintosh also notes that the separation of the auxiliary verb from the following main verb by its subject is attested also in Josh. 2:23, wayyāšûbû šĕnê hāănāšîm wayyērĕdû mēhāhār, which NJPS renders, ‘Then the two men came down again from the hills…’; and 2 Kgs 13:25, wayyāšob Yĕhôāš…wayyiqaḥ et-heārîm, where NJPS renders the hendiadys ‘he came back, and he took’ by means of the single English verb ‘recovered’, yielding the following rendering of the quotation: ‘And then Jeshoash…recovered the cities…’. bĕṣillô ‘In his shade’ In view of the frequency with which Hos. 14 alternates between the first person singular pronominal suffix to refer to God and the third person pronominal suffix to refer to God, and the similar frequency with which this chapter refers to the people Israel employing the singular third person pronominal suffix to refer to the collectivity and the plural third person pronominal suffix to refer to the sum total of individuals who constitute Israel, it seems almost superfluous to have to dismiss the suggestions of many scholars including Wolff and Nowack that MT’s ‘in his shade’ is a scribal error for an original ‘in my shade’.75 For the expression ‘in my/his shade’ for the protection offered persons and nations by royal patrons, cf. Judg. 9:15: ‘And the thorn bush said to the trees, “If you are acting honourably in anointing me king over you, come and take shelter in my shade…” ’. See also Ezek. 31:6: ‘And in his [Assyria]’s shade all the great nations live’; see also Ezek. 31:12, 17; see also Lam. 4:20: ‘The breath of our life, the king anointed by Yhwh, of whom we thought, “In his shade we shall abide among the nations”, was captured in their [the Babylonians’] traps’. Similarly, employing the etymologically identical expression in Akkadian ṣillu ‘shade’, Hammurapi in the Epilogue to his Code of Laws says of Babylon, ‘My benign shadow 72.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, p. 393. 73.  Keil, Hosea p. 166. 74.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 573. 75.  See Wolff, Hosea, p. 232, and Nowack, Hosea, p. 81.

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is spread over the city’.76 In Ps. 17:8 the suppliant entreats God to take care of him/her in the following words: ‘…hide me in the shadow of your wings’. Psalm 36:8 declares, ‘Human beings find shelter in the shadow of your wings’. Likewise, in Ps. 91:1 we find, ‘one who abides in the shadow of the Almighty’. wĕyiprĕḥû kaggepen ‘And they will blossom like the grapevine’ Compare the NJPS’s translation: ‘They shall blossom like the vine’. Responding to the exegetical question, ‘How does a vine blossom, and why is Israel’s blessed future compared to that of a vine?’, Kimchi explains, ‘kaggāpen means “like the vine” for after its grapes have been gathered it does not cease to live, and it does not dry up, but it blossoms another year and likewise every year’. Kimchi thus anticipates the modern books on biblical plants (see above at Hos. 14:6 with respect to the lily), which seek to understand more precisely biblical plant metaphors and similes by bringing to bear on them the specialized knowledge of plantlovers, horticulturists, and botanists.

Illustration 8. Sodom apple (from Louis-Charles Émile Lortet, La Syrie d’Aujourd’hui [Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1884], p. 412) 76.  For numerous additional attestations of this expression for the protection offered persons and nations by royal patrons in virtually every period of Akkadian see CAD, vol. Ṣ, pp. 190b–92b.

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Illustration 9. Grapevine from Kibbutz Yahel in the Arava Region of Israel (courtesy of Rabbi Jehiel Benjamin Gruber)

It should be observed that the English expression ‘vine’ shares with the Biblical Hebrew counterpart gepen the two distinct meanings discussed below. Moreover, Kimchi also alludes to the irony that the plant on which grapes grow is both a vine and perennial. In this connection, it should be observed that both Heb. gepen and its English equivalent ‘vine’ may refer both to the plant which yields grapes and to other plants as well. Thus Deut. 32:32 refers to gepen Sĕdom (KJV ‘vine of Sodom’), whose scientific name is Solanum sodomeum. Concerning this plant, Walker writes as follows: ‘One of the many thorny plants of the Holy Land is the apple of Sodom. It bears only bitter fruit that looks like a tomato with its flame-red skin, but it is not edible for it is full of hard black seeds mingled with silky hairs resembling ashes. The Sodom apple, or ampleos sodomorum, was known to the Greeks, and the Latin peoples have recorded references to the kinea sodomorum… The leaves are long, with undulating edges, and its flowers resemble potato blossoms. This plant covers large areas around the Dead Sea, and is known as “dead sea fruit” or “dust and ashes”.’77 If Heb. gepen in the latter context designates not a vine but rather a shrub, which can grow to the height of four feet, it should be no less surprising that Eng. ‘vine’ has two primary meanings. These 77.  Walker, All the Plants of the Bible, p. 224; see also the illustration on p. 225.

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are (a) the plant, which produces grapes; and (b) ‘any plant whose stem requires support, and which climbs by tendrils or other means, or which trails or creeps along the ground’.78 Etymologically Eng. ‘vine’ is related to Latin vinea ‘vineyard’ and vinum ‘wine’ as well as to Heb. yyn; Ugar. yn; Gk. οἶνος; and Eng. ‘wine’. Typical plants, which are defined as vines according to the secondary meaning of that term, include the honeysuckle plant, the banana plant, and the tomato plant. It should not be altogether surprising, therefore, that ‘according to classical tradition it was bananas that the spies brought back [from the land of Canaan as described in Num. 13:23–24]’.79 However, insofar as modern travellers replicated the ancient Israelite spies’ observation of grape clusters of immense proportions80 there is no reason to suppose that the spies brought back bananas rather than grapes. Nevertheless, Kimchi’s point may very well be that the continual regeneration of Israel is altogether unexpected just as is the perennial character of the grapevine, whose trailing or climbing stems make it resemble many herbaceous plants, which live for only a single growing season. Indeed, when Zohary writes, ‘The identification of the Hebrew gefen with “vine” is as unquestionable as is the identification of kerem with “vineyard” and anavim with “grapes” ’,81 he is attempting to commit ‘death by silence’ to generations of learned individuals who, rightly or wrongly, thought otherwise with respect to Num. 13. In fact, Zohary may have gone too far given the fact that gepen does seem to refer to an altogether different plant in Deut. 32:32. yiprĕḥû ‘will blossom’ Aside from Ezek. 13:20 where the term pōrḥōt appears to designate ‘birds’, the verb pāraḥ ‘blossom, break out’ appears 34 times in Hebrew Scripture. In ten cases (Exod. 9:9–10; Lev. 13:12 [twice], 20, 25, 39, 42, 57; 14:43) this verb refers to the eruption of a skin disease while in Num. 17:20, 23 it refers to the sprouting of Aaron’s rod. Here in Hos. 14:8, as also in Gen. 40:10; Cant. 6:11; 7:13, it refers to the blossoming of a grapevine; in Hos. 14:6 to the blossoming of a lily; in Hab. 3:17 to the blossoming of a fig tree; in Isa. 35:2 to the blossoming of a crocus; and in Job 14:9 to a tree’s reviving when it is watered. In Isa. 27:6; Pss. 72:7; 92:13–14, the verb pāraḥ refers to the flourishing of virtuous people and 78.  Nelson, Webster’s New International Dictionary, p. 2845a. 79.  So Moldenke and Moldenke, Plants of the Bible, p. 243; see also Anderson, Plants of the Bible, pp. 71–72. 80.  Moldenke and Moldenke, Plants of the Bible, p. 243. 81.  Zohary, Plants of the Bible, p. 54.

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in Ps. 92:8 to the flourishing of wicked people. Similarly, in Ezek. 7:10 and Hos. 10:4 the verb refers to the flourishing of evil. zikĕrô kĕyên lĕbānōn ‘His fragrance will be like that of the wine of Lebanon’ The NJPS interpretation of the noun zēker here to mean ‘scent, fragrance’ (so NJPS) rather than ‘renown’82 is found already in KJV, which renders, ‘The scent thereof shall be as the wine of Lebanon’. The interpretation of the noun zēker to mean ‘fragrance’ and of its verbal root zkr to mean ‘smell’ is found not only in Ibn Janah (as noted by numerous scholars) but also (as noted by Macintosh83) it is reflected in Ibn Ezra, whose influence is reflected in Kimchi. Ibn Ezra comments as follows: ‘[The noun] zikĕrô [in the closing phrase means Israel’s] fragrance; compare azkārātāh (= the incense thereof [Lev. 2:2])’. With Lipshitz,84 note that Ibn Ezra cites this interpretation also in his commentary at Lev. 2:2 and Cant. 1:4. Kimchi comments as follows: ‘ZIKĔRÔ IS LIKE THE WINE OF LEBANON. [zikĕrô means] its scent. It is the same lexeme that is reflected in azkārātāh “its fragrance unto Yhwh” (Lev. 2.2).’ Unquestionably, KJV here, as frequently, reflects Kimchi’s interpretation.85 Interestingly, Harper revocalizes zkrw as a verb meaning ‘they shall be fragrant’, and he cites in support of both the meaning and the revocalization, Isa. 66:3, where he takes mazkîr lĕbōnâ to mean ‘make frankincense give off a fragrant smell’.86 Interestingly the interpretation of zikĕrô to mean ‘its scent’ is reflected also in the Sabbath Table Song ‘Yom Shabbaton’, i.e., ‘Sabbath Day’, composed by the poet and philosopher Judah Ha-Levi (b. Tudela, Spain before 1075; d. Egypt 1141).87 The second half of the first line, which reads zikĕrô kĕrēaḥ hannîḥôaḥ ‘Its fragrance is like the sweet smell [of sacrifices’; see Exod. 29:25, 41; Lev. 3:16; 4:31; 17:6 etc.], which suggests that remembering the Sabbath (and thereby fulfilling the injunction in the Exodus version of the Decalogue, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy” [Exod. 20:8]) is like a pleasing odour [e.g., Lev. 1:9] produced by sacrificial worship’. The only way that this verset of the Sabbath song can 82.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 573; Wolff, Hosea, p. 236. 83.  Macintosh, Hosea, p. 573. 84.  Lipshitz, Ibn Ezra, p. 139 n. 28. 85.  This interpretation is accepted also without explanation by Keil, Hosea, p. 166. 86.  Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 414. 87.  For the complete text with English translation of this song, which is sung in many Jewish homes at the Sabbath dinner table see Scherman, The Complete ArtScroll Siddur, pp. 498–501.

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make sense is if the author intends for the noun zikĕrô to evoke not only Exod. 20:8 but also Hos. 14:8, where the phrase zikĕrô kĕ means literally (with Ibn Janah and others cited above) ‘its fragrance is like’. 14:9 Ephraim (will ask) NJPS treats this Ephraim as the introduction to a quotation without a verbum dicendi and renders as follows: ‘Ephraim [shall say]:’ Indeed, vv. 5–8 make perfect sense as God’s response to Israel’s prayer quoted in vv. 3d–4, while v. 9b makes perfect sense as Israel’s (1) affirmation of the promise contained in the prayer, specifically v. 4, where Israel resolves never more to venerate Israel’s own handiwork; and (2) acceptance of God’s promise in vv. 6–8 to make Israel flourish like various plants characteristic of the Levant. I render ‘will ask’ because in the present context what follows the speaker Ephraim is not an assertion but a question. Lest it be thought that supplying in brackets a verbum dicendi and treating text following the bracketed verbum dicendi was invented by modern scholars such as N. H. Tur-Sinai and R. Gordis,88 it should be observed that this particular verbum dicendi is already supplied here by Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Kimchi. In the case at hand, it is likely that all three of these commentators were inspired by TJ. The missing verbum dicendi is supplied also by the Peshitta. Characteristically, KJV reflects Kimchi’s understanding and supplies the verbum dicendi in italics, which always indicate a necessary addition in English (such as the present forms of the verb ‘to be’) that is not found literally in MT. Ironically, Cathcart and Gordon construe MT as meaning, ‘What has Ephraim any more to do with idols?’89 This translation reflects not MT but LXX. LXX reads as follows: τῷ Ἐφράιμ, τί αὐτῷ ἔτι καὶ εἰδώλοις. LXX’s reading is preferred by Wellhausen and by Harper.90 Nowack acknowledges that TJ and the Peshitta treat vv. 9b–10 as a quotation, but he declares their interpretation ‘impossible’.91 Ehrlich ultimately arrives at the understanding that ‘What need have I of images?’ should 88.  S. Japhet and R. B. Salters, The Commentary of R. Samuel ben Meir Rashbam on Qoheleth (Jerusalem: Magnes; Leiden: Brill, 1985), p. 53 write as follows: ‘Rashbam preceded Gordis in observing the existence of quotations [without a verb of saying; clarification by Gruber] in Qoheleth, but his motives and guidelines are purely literary, devoid of any apology’. 89.  Cathcart and Gordon, The Targum of the Minor Prophets, p. 62. 90.  See Wellhausen, Hosea, p. 134, and Harper, Amos and Hosea, p. 414. 91.  Nowack, Hosea, p. 81.

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be said by Ephraim.92 However, it takes him 40½ lines to get to this. Keil takes Ephraim as a vocative and ‘What have I yet to do with idols’ as a quotation of what God tells Ephraim that he should say.93 Thus Keil, like Ehrlich and Macintosh, bring in the quotation without verbum dicendi through the back door, as it were. Wolff agrees that MT makes no sense unless we supply the verbum dicendi.94 However, he prefers to treat the proper name Ephraim as casus pendens and to follow LXX in reading lô rather than lî.95 mah-lî ôd lāăṣabbîm ‘For what more do I need images?’ Contrast NJPS: ‘What more have I to do with idols?’ I noted above at Hos. 8:4 and Hos. 13:2 that certainly in Hos. 13:2, and most likely also at Hos. 8:4, in both of which contexts the term ăṣabbîm ‘images’ is juxtaposed with and appears to be synonymous with the ‘calf of Samaria’ (8:5) and ‘calves’ (13:2), the term alludes not to worship of deities other than the God of Israel but to the employment of calves in the worship of the God of Israel. Nevertheless, in both of those passages our prophet shares with the author of 1 Kgs 12:28–30 the view that the veneration of calves in the worship of Yhwh is a form of apostasy. It is likely, therefore, that also here in the prayer of repentance or recommitment to Yhwh, which God asks Israel to pray, Israel/Ephraim pledges his resolve to renounce the veneration of the calves. From all that I have noted above it follows that ch. 14 consists of (1) a call to repentance (vv. 2–3c); (2) Israel/Ephraim’s acceptance of that call and expression of that acceptance by means of the recitation of a prayer (vv. 3d–4); (3) God’s acceptance of Israel/Ephraim’s sincere repentance (vv. 5–8); (4) Ephraim’s reaffirmation that this repentance is indeed sincere (v. 9); (5) the prophet’s calling upon unspecified persons (the reader/those who hear the synagogue lection/all who call themselves Israel after the flesh or after the spirit in all generations) to accept the cogency (Heb. ḥokmâ ‘wisdom’) of the lesson that has been taught by way of the veritable socio-drama in which God asks Israel to repent, Israel repents, God accepts the sincerity of his repentance; and Israel, in turn, reaffirms the sincerity of his declared recommitment to Yhwh. Insofar as our prophet has been calling repeatedly for Israel to abandon the veneration 92.  Ehrlich, Mikra ki-Pheschuto, vol. 3, p. 394. Ehrlich’s approach is adopted also by Macintosh, Hosea, p. 576. 93.  Keil, Hosea, p. 166. 94.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 233. 95.  Following O. Grether, Hebräische Grammatik für den akademischen Unterricht (2nd ed.; Munich: Claudius-Verlag, 1955), #95c.

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of the calves, it makes perfect sense that here in v. 9, where Ephraim declares that its prayer of recommitment was not simply socio-drama but an expression of a heartfelt conviction, this recommitment would include Israel’s resolve finally to abandon the veneration of the calf images, the rejection of which the prophet speaking in the name of God had urged previously in Hos. 8:4 and Hos. 13:2. Interestingly, the commitment takes the form of one of those typically Jewish rhetorical questions in which affirmation and negation is expressed by pseudo-interrogation. In other words, ‘What more have I to do with idols?’ means ‘I have nothing more to do with idols’, just as in Elkanah’s barrage of questions addressed to Hannah in 1 Sam. 1:8, ‘Why are you crying and why aren’t you eating and why are you sad?’, really means, ‘You have no reason to cry, no reason not to eat and no reason to be sad’. My late and revered teacher, theologian laureate of twentieth-century Judaism, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, used to make fun of the utilitarian arguments for virtuous behaviour saying that the problem with asserting that honesty pays is that some people can always counter that in their experience ‘dishonesty pays even better’. Job, on the other hand, never suggests for a minute that he would abandon virtuous behaviour, but he does insist that indeed the virtuous and the wicked often suffer the same fate (see, e.g., Job 9:22). Indeed, in many cases the wicked prosper and the virtuous suffer (see, e.g., Job 21:7–15). Jeremiah apparently shares Job’s point of view when he asks, ‘Why does the way of the wicked prosper?’ (Jer. 12:1). Like Job, Jeremiah acknowledges that often dishonesty pays better than honesty. Hosea 14, on the other hand, reflects another point of view whose classic expression is Job 28:28: ‘Obedience to Yhwh is wisdom//ethical behaviour is sagacity’. The same idea that the ultimate truth is that loyalty to God’s rules is not only the right thing but the most practical path in life is found in Deut. 4:6: ‘Observe them [the rules of the Torah] faithfully, for that [the Torah] will be proof of your wisdom and discernment…’. Thus it is in the spirit of the idea that honesty pays better than dishonesty, which permeates the biblical book of Proverbs, that Hosea envisions the people of Israel responding to God’s call to repentance and God’s promise to reward them with the following summation (Hos. 14:9c–d): ănî ānîtî waăšûrennû ănî kibĕrōš raănān ‘I shall respond to him (God), and I shall look upon him. I shall be like a verdant cypress’ Ephraim here affirms his acceptance of God’s promise in vv. 6–8 that God will reward repentant Israel by making him flourish like the lily and the Lebanon tree (which may be a designation of the cedar; see above; or is it the poplar? see above) and by making him handsome like the olive

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tree. Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Kimchi, Harper, Macintosh, and Stuart all attribute these two clauses to God. It was already noted by S. L. Brown that the attribution of clauses c–d to Israel rather than to God has the advantage ‘of avoiding the unusual comparison of Jahveh with a tree’.96 ‘When I respond’ This interpretation appears to be accepted now in DCH (6:492b). LXX, however, renders as follows: ἐγὼ ὡς ἄρκευθος πυκάζουσα ‘I have afflicted him, and I will strengthen him’. DCH (6:497) does not recognize a qal-usage of the verb(s) ny in the meaning ‘afflict (someone else)’ but only ‘I am/was afflicted’ in the qal in Ps. 116:10 and ‘afflict (someone else)’ in the piel, as in Gen. 15:13; 16:6; Exod. 1:11, 12 etc. It is possible, of course, that LXX construed the verb nyty in its Hebrew Vorlage at Hos. 14:9 as a piel. Moreover, BHS suggests that LXX’s rendering, which means ‘I will strengthen him’, presupposes a Hebrew original which read either wšybnw or wšrnw. NJPS’s rendering ‘And [I Ephraim] look to Him [i.e., to God]’ assumes that we have an instance of the verbal root šwr which is attested, inter alia, in Hos. 13:7 (q.v.); Job 7:8; 17:15; Cant. 4:8, and as a b-word or poetic synonym of the common verb ‘to see’ rāâ in Num. 23:9 and 24:17. mimmennî peryĕkā nimṣā ‘(God will respond): “From me is your fruit” ’ NJPS renders: ‘Your fruit is provided by Me’, along with a marginal note: ‘Meaning of Heb. uncertain’. With the long list of commentators cited with respect to clauses c–d, one may construe clause 9d to contain God’s response to Israel, in which God says, ‘Your fruit is provided by me’. If, however, clauses 9c–d are a continuation of the words of Ephraim, who says, ‘I renounce idols. I respond (in sincere repentance) to God and I look to him, and consequently he makes me like the cypress’, just as in vv. 6–7 God promised to make Israel like the lily and the Lebanon tree, what do we do with clause 9d, ‘Your fruit is provided by me’? I suggest that this clause, which describes God as the source of the blessings of Ephraim, who here compares himself—and not God—to a tree, corresponds syntactically to Hos. 14:4e where Israel having pledged himself to rely upon God alone (14:4a–d) adds a remark about why it makes sense to rely upon God alone. There Ephraim explains, ‘Since in you alone orphans find love/compassion’. Now here similarly, Ephraim suggests that God who will make Ephraim like a tree will be able to say 96.  Brown, Hosea, p. 121.

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to Ephraim, ‘Your fruit is provided by me’. If so, then God’s promise to reward Ephraim/Israel for his repentance (vv. 5–8) is followed by a quotation of Ephraim’s commitment to accept God’s offer: ‘Ephraim [shall say]: “I have no need of images. I will respond to him [that is, to God who made me an offer I would be foolish to refuse in vv. 5–8, and I shall look upon him [and not upon images] and I shall be like a tree of whom God will be able to say, as he must say of trees real and metaphoric alike, ‘I provide Your fruit’ ”.’ Thus we have in the space of the six verses, vv. 4–9, two quotations each missing verbum dicendi and two adverbial clauses that answer the question ‘Why trust in him?’ Two answers are provided to this question. To the question posed by Ephraim as to why choose Yhwh, the answer is, as Rashi states in his commentary at 14:4, ‘He is the quintessential lover of the neglected’. To the similar question posed by Ephraim, the metaphoric tree, the answer is ‘Because God provides the fruit of the tree’, as in the Rabbinic benediction formula recited by Jews before partaking of the fruit of fruit trees [a different formula is recited before eating plants such as tomatoes that do not grow on trees]: ‘Praised are You, O LORD, our God, King of the world, who creates the fruit of the tree’. Ibn Ezra, however, is troubled by the suggestion made here that cypress trees bear fruit, and he comments as follows: ‘[God says] do not be dismayed by the fact that a cypress has no fruit, for from me is thy fruit found’. To be precise, Zohary points out, ‘The biblical berosh…denotes coniferous trees with small scale-like or short-linear (rather than needle-like) leaves, and refers in general to the evergreen or the common (horizontal) cypress’.97 To be still more precise with respect to the berosh of Hos. 14:9, one should note that in KJV bĕrōš is never rendered ‘cypress’. The latter term is reserved in KJV for tirzâ found in Isa. 44:14: ‘He heweth him down cedars and taketh the cypress [Heb. tirzâ] and the oak…’. In fact, KJV renders bĕrōš in Hos. 14:9 (v. 8 in KJV) ‘green fir tree’. Concerning this latter tree, Moldenke and Moldenke write as follows: ‘The “green fir tree” of Hosea—“berosh raanan” in the Hebrew…differs from all the other [fir trees in the Bible] in containing a reference to a fruit, presumably an edible sort. In all other cases [in the Bible] the “fir” was valued for its wood. The only conifer of the region with an edible nut-like seed is the stone pine, Apinus pinea. This tree attains a height of 30 to 60 or more feet, with a hemispheric top, the lower branches horizontal… The seeds are practically wingless, sweet, and nut-like. Somewhat resembling almonds, they are extensively eaten where the tree is native, and even today used in confectionary.’98 97.  Zohary, Plants of the Bible, p. 106. 98.  Moldenke and Moldenke, Plants of the Bible, p. 46.

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To the veritable socio-drama, in which a prescribed prayer (Hos. 14:3b–4) is followed by God’s response to that prayer, one may compare Joel 2:15–4:4, in which we find (1) all Israel are summoned to a prayer service (Joel 2:15–17a); (2) the text of the short prayer to be recited (Joel 2:17b); and (3) God’s positive response to the prayer (Joel 2:18–4:3). One may contrast Hos. 6:1–11, where Israel’s decision to repent and pray (Hos. 6:1–3) is severely rebuffed in Hos. 6:4–11. One may likewise compare Lam. 3:55–66, where the author anticipates a positive response from God, and the reader is left to decide whether the positive response took place sooner or later. One may also compare Isa. 12 in which the prophet calls upon the people to pray (vv. 1–2) and then tells us that God does indeed respond most positively to the prayer (vv. 3–6). All of this having been said, it is worthwhile, nevertheless, to refer to an alternative interpretation of Hos. 14:9 which was offered by A. Frisch.99 Frisch there also assumes that in Hos. 14:9 we have a dialogue between speakers, which is not indicated by verba dicendi. Frisch thus construes the sequence of speakers in Hos. 14:9 as follows: Ephraim [asks the rhetorical question]: What need have I of cult objects? [God responds]: I respond to him, and I look upon him [Ephraim]: I am like a verdant cypress [God]: Your fruit is provided by Me.

Frisch’s fascinating study is to be recommended not only for its valiant attempt at a holistic interpretation of Hos. 14:2–10 but also for the numerous ancient and medieval and modern authorities Frisch cites in favour of recognizing unmarked quotations in Hos. 14:9. Ultimately, my own interpretation differs from Frisch’s interpretation only in respect of the fact that I assign Hos. 14:9b to Israel/Ephraim while Frisch assigns this verset to God. mî ḥākām wĕyābēn ēlleh nābôn wĕyēdāēm ‘Whoever is wise will understand these words (whoever is) sagacious will comprehend them’ Note the synonymous parallelism. Note also the typical ellipsis in which the subject of the first nominal clause, which is a question, is not repeated in the second and parallel clause but is understood as though it were repeated. For synonymous parallelism with ellipsis compare the classic example in Ps. 114:5: 99.  A. Frisch, ‘ “Return, O Israel”: A Study of Hosea’s Prophecy of Repentance (Hosea 14:2–10), based on the Key Word š-w-b’, Studies in Bible and Exegesis 9 (2009), pp. 217–30 (219–20) (in Hebrew).

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According to Watson, ellipsis can be defined as ‘the omission of a particle, word, or group of words within a poetic or grammatical unit, where its presence is expected’.100 In addition to the ellipsis, Watson101 calls attention to another rhetorical feature of Hos. 14:10, namely the pentacolon, which exhibits the following structure: mî ḥākām wĕyābēn ēlleh nābôn wĕyēdāēm kî yĕšārîm darĕkê Yhwh wĕṣaddîkîm yēlĕkû bām ûpōšěîm yikkāšělû bām

A A′ B C D

‘Whoever is wise will understand these words, (Whoever is) sagacious will comprehend them, For the ways of Yhwh are straight. Virtuous people will walk in them, While transgressors will stumble in them.’

The pair of synonymous nouns ḥākām//nābôn ‘wise person//sagacious person’ is attested also in Prov. 1:5 and 14:6; the word order is reversed in Prov. 18:15 while the pair ḥăkāmîm//nĕbônîm ‘wise persons//sagacious persons’ in the plural is attested in Isa. 29:14 and Qoh. 9:11c. The first two clauses of Hos. 14:10 exhibit synonymous parallelism while the final two clauses exhibit antithetic parallelism. The entire structure conveys the idea that astute individuals should understand on the basis of God’s promises in Hos. 14:2–9 that God can be trusted to behave justly. It follows, therefore, that since ‘the ways of Yhwh are straight’ (v. 10c) virtuous people (i.e. people whose behaviour is upright rather than crooked) will walk successfully in those paths (v. 10d) while their opposite numbers, transgressors, i.e., the crooked, will stumble therein. To what may this antithetical pair be compared? This antithetical pair may be compared to the way in which people and snakes are said to walk. People who are sober are said to walk in straight paths while inebriated people are known to be incapable of walking straight. Snakes, on the other hand, normally walk in roundabout paths. Common wisdom holds that it 100.  Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry, pp. 303–304. 101.  Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry, pp. 187–88.

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makes sense that a drunken snake would walk in straight paths. Similarly, people who are upright should be able to walk straight on a well-paved road, which is a fitting metaphor for the behaviour advocated by the prophets and the sages and the priests of ancient Israel. It should follow logically that crooked people would stumble on such metaphorically properly paved streets and would be able to walk without stumbling only in ‘roundabout paths’ (for this term see Judg. 5:6; cf. also Deut. 32:5). To put it another way, it is well known that in nature for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Consequently, it should be expected that if people whose behaviour is straight can be expected successfully to navigate God’s paths (i.e., his rules for proper behaviour), crooked persons should be expected to stumble therein. The Hebrew verb wĕyābēn ‘and he will understand’ is employed in its basic and common meaning in the hiphil.102 Examples of the verbal root byn in the hiphil in the meaning ‘to understand’ are found, inter alia, in Isa. 40:21; 56:11; Prov. 1:2, 6; 8:5; 14:8. For Heb. yd in the sense ‘understand’, cf. Ps. 81:6, where it is related that ‘when he went forth upon the land of Egypt’, Joseph reported that ‘I heard a language I did not understand’. Similarly, Jer. 5:15 promises that Judah will be attacked by ‘…a nation from afar…a nation whose language you do not understand (Heb. lō tēda); and you will not comprehend what they say (Heb. lō tišma)’. The parallel passage in Deut. 28:49 states simply, ‘a nation…whose language you will not understand (Heb. gôy…ăšēr lō tišma lĕšōnô)’. With C. L. Seow,103 note that the contention that Israel’s bad decisions and their logical consequences have been rooted in her foolishness pervades Hos. 4–14 (with Seow, see especially Hos. 4:6, 14; 7:9, 11; 8:3, 12; 12:2; 13:13). Consequently, it is a fitting conclusion to Hos. 4–14 for the prophet speaking in the name of God to argue that sagacity will lead to right living and that right living will lead to success. The verbal root kšl ‘stumble’ is attested 62 times in Hebrew Scripture, six times in the book of Hosea, including Hos. 5:5, which, probably modelled on Hos. 4:5, is most likely a Judahite gloss (see above at Hos. 5:5, and in my Introduction for discussion of the issue of ‘Judahite Glosses’). Whether or not Hos. 14:10 is an integral part of our chapter or a later edition as contended by Wolff, the use of the expression in Hos. 14:10 does not necessarily support the view that the final verse of the book of Hosea is a later addition.104 After all, the verb appears 102.  See BDB, p. 107a; HALAT, p. 122b; DCH 2:144a. 103.  Seow, ‘Hosea 14.10 and the Foolish People Motif’, pp. 212–24. 104.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 239.

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also in Hos. 14:2.105 As suggested by Wolff, the final verse of Hosea reminds us of Prov. 24:16: ‘The virtuous person will fall seven times and yet arise while wicked people will stumble by virtue of evil’.106 The innovation of Hos. 14:10 as against both Prov. 24:16 and Hos. 14:2 is the idea that persons who are habitually crooked ultimately stumble not only as a result of their own and other’s people’s wickedness but also as a consequence of their inability to cope with virtue. Most likely, given the abundant evidence of the influence of the book of Hosea upon the book of Jeremiah it is likely that Jer. 31:9 may well reflect the influence of Hos. 14:10. The relevant part of Jer. 31:9 reads as follows: ‘I will bring them [the returning exiles] to streams of water on a level path, in which they will not stumble. For I am a father to Israel//and Ephraim is my firstborn son’. Note that the pair ‘Israel//Ephraim’ is typical of Hos. 4–14 and that its use in Jeremiah represents the influence of the book of Hosea in the book of Jeremiah. G. I. Davies summarizes a trend in scholarship, which holds that the final verse of the book of Hosea, like Ps. 107:43; Qoh. 12:13–14; and Sir. 50:28–29, appears ‘to derive from a scribal setting in post-exilic times where a wide range of biblical traditions was valued as a means of inculcating a piety which had both legal and more speculative aspects’.107 Since, in any case, probably all of Koheleth and certainly all of Sirach is generally agreed to belong to post-exilic Hebrew wisdom, why should the cited verses stand out as post-exilic wisdom sayings? As for Hos. 14:10, the verse is totally at home in both Hos. 14, which speaks of the consequences of acting foolishly, and in the wider context of Hos. 4–14, which in Hos. 4:14 accounts for Israel’s failures and the logical consequences thereof as the result of foolishness. This idea that unfaithfulness to God and devotion to rival deities is the consequence of foolishness while recognition of God alone is the consequence of sagacity is taken up, possibly under the influence of Hos. 4:14 and 14:10 in Isa. 44. Stuart labels the closing verse of the book of Hosea a ‘Challenge to the Wise Reader’.108 In fact, this verse should also be seen as a classic example of what Westermann calls a ‘salvation-speech’,109 and which 105.  Concerning the final verse of the book of Hosea, see K. Budde, ‘Der Schluss des Buches Hosea’, in Studies Presented to C. H. Toy (New York: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 205–11. 106.  Wolff, Hosea, p. 239. 107.  G. I. Davies, Hosea (New Century Bible Commentary; London: Marshall Pickering; Grand Rapid: Eerdmans, 1992), pp. 310–11. 108.  Stuart, Hosea, p. 218. 109.  Westermann, Basic Forms, p. 98.

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Kaufman calls a ‘prophecy of consolation’.110 To the appearance of such a promise of better times yet to be, if indeed the members of the prophet’s audience will apply their sagacity to improving their behaviour, one may compare with Westermann111 the end of the book of Amos and all the appended words of consolation to words of speeches of rebuke in Isa. 2:1–4; 4:2–6; 9:1–6; and 11:1–9. K. Berge asserts that Hos. 14:10 is ‘a redactional addition [to the book of Hosea], which introduces a wisdom-related interpretation of the book as a whole, a kind of meta-commentary’.112 However, the remainder of Berge’s interesting study refers to numerous references to pedagogy in the book of Hosea without explaining why the final verse of the book of Hosea must be an addition to the book of Hosea. Frisch, following Ibn Ezra, argues most convincingly that the assertion in Hos. 14:10 that transgressors will stumble in the way of Yhwh refers back to Hos. 14:2b, ‘For you have fallen because of your sin’, and that the deliberate opening and closing of the prophetic speech of Hos. 14:2–10 with the idea that transgressors stumble while virtuous people follow the paths of Yhwh without stumbling constitutes an inclusio.113 For all of the above reasons, I see Hos. 14:2–10 as an integral part of the book of Hosea and Hos. 14:10 as an integral part of a speech that commences with the call to repentance in Hos. 14:2a and ends with the conclusion that sooner or later virtuous people will succeed in walking in the paths of virtue while, unfortunately, persons who act foolishly will stumble and fail to repent.

110.  See Kaufmann, HIR, passim. 111.  Westermann, Basic Forms, p. 98. 112.  K. Berge, ‘Divine and Human Wisdom in the Book of Hosea’, in Poets, Prophets, and Texts in Play: Studies in Biblical Poetry and Prophecy in Honour of Francis Landy (ed. E. Ben Zvi, C. V. Camp, D. M. Gunn, and A. W. Hughes; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), pp. 19–36 (19). 113.  Frisch, ‘ “Return, O Israel” ’, pp. 217–30 (217–18).

A p p en d i x K i ngs of I s r a el , J u d a h , and A ssy r i a M e nt i on ed or A l l ud ed to i n t he B ook of H os ea

The United Kingdom [of Israel and Judah] (c. 1005–928 BCE)1 David (1005–965 BCE) mentioned in Hos. 3:5 Israel (928–724 BCE) Jehu (842–814 BCE), whose dynasty is mentioned in Hos. 1:4. Zechariah (747 BCE), whose assassination may be alluded to in Hos. 7. Shallum (747 BCE), whose assassination may be alluded to in Hos. 7. Menahem (747–737 BCE), whose reign is the historical setting of Hos. 4–14 according to Ginsberg and Tadmor (see in the Introduction, ‘The Divisions of the Book of Hosea and their Provenance’, pp. 9–12). Judah (928–586 BCE) Azariah (also called Uzziah) (785–733 BCE) Jotham (759–743 BCE) Ahaz (743–727) (The co-regency of these three kings may be alluded to in Hos. 5:10; see the commentary there.) Assyria Shalman[eser III] (858–824 BCE) is referred to in Hos. 10:14. Tiglath-pileser III (745–727 BCE) may be alluded to in Hos. 5:13; 10:6 as ‘a king who might champion (his/their [i.e., Israel’s] cause’. 1. The dates of the kings of the United Kingdom and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah follow M. Cogan, ‘Chronology’, ABD, vol. 1, pp. 1002–10. The dates of the kings of Assyria from 911 BCE onward are absolute and universally accepted.

B i b l i og r a p h y

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602 Bibliography Brenton, L. C. L. The Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and English (London: Samuel Bagster & Sons, 1851). Breuer, Mordechai. Jerusalem Crown: The Bible of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Printing Enterprises; Basel: Karger Family Fund, 2000). ———. Torah Prophets and Writings According to the Text and the Massorah of Keter Aram Zova (2nd printing; Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1992). Bright, J. A History of Israel (2nd ed.; London: SCM, 1972). Brim, C. J. Medicine in the Bible (New York: Froben, 1936). Brockelmann, C. Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der semitischen Sprachen (2 vols.; Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1908–13). Brown, L. Oxford Shorter Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). Brown, S. L. The Book of Hosea with Introduction and Notes (Westminster Commentaries; London: Methuen & Co., 1932). Buber, M. The Eclipse of God (New York: Harper, 1952). ———. Kingship of God (3rd ed.; trans. Richard Scheiman; Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey & London: International Humanities Press, 1967). ———. The Way of Scripture: Studies in Stylistic Patterns of the Bible (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1964 [in Hebrew]). Budin, Stephanie Lynn. The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Buss, M. J. The Prophetic Word of Hosea: A Morphological Study (BZAW, 111; Berlin: Töpelmann, 1969). Butler, T. C. Joshua (WBC, 7; Waco, TX: Word, 1983). Canaani, Y. Ozar Ha-Lashon Ha‘Ivrit (18 vols.; Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Massada, 1960–89). Cantrell, D. O. The Horsemen of Israel: Horses and Chariotry in Monarchic Israel [Ninth and Eighth Centuries B.C.E.] (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011). Cassuto, U. A Commentary on the Book of Exodus (trans. Israel Abrahams; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1967). Cathcart, K. J., and R. P. Gordon. The Targum of the Minor Prophets (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1989). Chalmers, R. S. The Struggle of Yahweh and El for Hosea’s Israel (Hebrew Bible Monographs, 11; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2008). Cheyne, T. K. Hosea (Cambridge Bible for Schools & Colleges; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889). Cogan, M., and H. Tadmor. II Kings (AB, 11; New York: Doubleday, 1988). Craigie, P. C., P. H. Kelley, and J. F. Drinkard, Jr. Jeremiah 1–25 (WBC, 26; Dallas, TX: Word, 1991). Dahood, M. Proverbs and Northwest Semitic Philology (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1963). ———. Psalms (3 vols.; AB, 16–17A; Garden City: Doubleday, 1965–70). Dalman, G. Arbeit und Sitte in Palästina (8 vols; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001). Danell, G. A. Studies in the Name Israel in the Old Testament (Uppsala: Appelbergs boktrykeri, 1946). Daniels, D. W. Hosea and Salvation History: The Early Traditions of Israel in the Prophecy of Hosea (BZAW, 197; Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1990). Davidson, A. B. Hebrew Syntax (3rd ed.; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1912). Davies, G. I. Hosea (New Century Bible Commentary; London: Marshall Pickering; Grand Rapid: Eerdmans, 1992).

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604 Bibliography Glueck, N. Hesed in the Bible (trans. Alfred Gottschalk; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1967). Goldschmidt, Daniel. High Holy Day Liturgy: Part II: The Day of Atonement (Jerusalem: Koren, 1970). Gomes, J. F. The Sanctuary of Bethel and the Configuration of Israelite Identity (BZAW, 368; Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2006). Gordis, R. The Book of Job: Commentary, New Translation and Special Studies (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1978). Gordon, C. H. Ugaritic Textbook (Analecta Orientalia, 38; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute Press, 1965). Goshen-Gottstein, M. The Second Rabbinic Bible (1525 CE) (Facsimile ed.; Jerusalem: Makor, 1972). Graetz, H. Emendationes in Plerosque Sacrae Scripturae Veteris Testamenti Libros (ed. Guil. Bacher; 3 fascicles; Breslau: Schlesische Buchdruckerei, 1893). ———. History of the Jews (6 vols.; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1891–96). Greenberg, M. Ezekiel 1–20 (AB, 22; Garden City: Doubleday, 1983). Grether, O. Hebräische Grammatik für den akademischen Unterricht (2nd ed.; Munich: Claudius-Verlag, 1955). Gross, K. Die literarische Verwandschaft Jeremias mit Hosea (Borna/Leipzig: Noske, 1930). Gruber, M. I. Aspects of Nonverbal Communication in the Ancient Near East (Studia Pohl, 12; 2 vols.; Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1980). ———. The Motherhood of God and Other Studies (University of South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism, 57; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992). ———. Rashi᾽s Commentary on Psalms (Brill Reference Library of Judaism, 18; Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2004). Gulkowitsch, L. Die Bildung von Abstraktbegriffen in der hebräischen Sprachgeschichte (Leipzig: Eduard Pfeiffer, 1931). Gunkel, H. Die Psalmen (Göttinger Handkommentar zum Alten Testament; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1926). Guthe, H. Hosea bis Chronik (HSAT, 2; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1923). Halevi, Judah. Kitab al Khazari (trans. from the Arabic with an introduction by H. Hirschfield; London: George Routledge & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1905). Halpern, E. Hosea: An Attempt at a New Commentary (Jerusalem: Kiryat-Sepher for the Israel Society of Biblical Research, 1976 [in Hebrew]). Hamilton, E. Spokesmen for God: The Great Teachers of the Old Testament (New York: W. W. Norton, 1949). Harper, W. R. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Amos and Hosea (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark,1905). Herodotus. Histories (trans. Aubrey de Selincourt; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954). Heschel, A. J. The Prophets (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962). Hillers, D. R. Lamentations (AB, 7A; 2nd ed.; New York: Doubleday, 1992). ———. Micah (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). Hitzig, F. Die zwölf kleinen Propheten (2nd ed.; Kurzgefasstes Exegetisches Handbuch zum Alten Testament; Leipzig: Weidmann, 1852). Hoffman, Y. Jeremiah (Olam ha-Tanakh; Tel Aviv: Revivim, 1983 [in Hebrew]). ———. Jeremiah (2 vols.; Mikra LeYisrael; Tel Aviv: Am Oved; Jerusalem: Magnes, 2001 [in Hebrew]).

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606 Bibliography Kuhnigk, W. Nordwestsemitische Studien zum Hoseabuch (Biblica et Orientalia, 27; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute Press, 1974). Landy, F. Hosea (Readings: A New Biblical Commentary; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995). Laster, J. A. Catalogue of Choral Music Arranged in Biblical Order (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1999). Levenson, J. D. Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2006). Lipshitz, A. The Commentary of Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra on Hosea: Edited from Six Manuscripts and Translated with an Introduction and Notes (New York: SepherHermon, 1988). Lockshin, M. I., ed. and trans. Rashbam’s Commentary on Exodus: An Annotated Translation (BJS, 310; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997). ———. Rashbam’s Commentary on Leviticus and Numbers: An Annotated Translation (BJS, 330; Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2001). Macintosh, A. A. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Hosea (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1997). Malul, M. Law Collections and Other Legal Compilations from the Ancient Near East (Haifa: Pardes, 2010 [in Hebrew]). Mandelkern, S. Veteris Testamnetii Concordantiae (ed. F. Margolin and M. GoshenGottstein; 8th ed.; Jerusalem/Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1969). Mann, J. The Bible as Read and Preached in the Old Synagogue, vol. 1 (Cincinnati, OH: Self-published, 1940). Mann, J., and I. Sonne. The Bible as Read and Preached in the Old Synagogue, vol. 2 (Cincinnati, OH: Mann-Sonne Publication Committee, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 1966). Mays, J. L. Hosea: A Commentary (London: SCM, 1969). McCarter, P. K., Jr. 1 Samuel (AB, 8; Garden City: Doubleday, 1980). McComiskey, T. E. The Minor Prophets: An Exegetical and Expository Commentary. Vol. 1, Hosea, Joel, and Amos (Grand Rapids: Baker Book, 1992). McConville, J. P. Deuteronomy (Apollos Old Testament Commentary, 5; Nottingham: Apollos; Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2002). McKane, W. Jeremiah, 1 (ICC; Edinburgh; T. & T. Clark, 1986). ———. Micah (ICC; Edinburgh; T. & T. Clark, 1998). Meissner, B. Beiträge zum altbabylonische Privatrecht (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1893). Milgrom, J. Cult and Conscience: The Asham and the Priestly Doctrine of Repentance (Leiden: Brill, 1976). ———. Leviticus (AB, 3, 3A, 3B; New York: Doubleday, 1991–2000). ———. Numbers (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990). Millard, A. R. The Eponyms of the Assyrian Empire 910–612 BC (State Archives of Assyria Studies, 2; Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 1994). Mirsky, A. Deuteronomy (Da‘at Mikra; Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 2001 [in Hebrew]). Moldenke, H. N., and A. L. Moldenke. Plants of the Bible (Waltham, MA: Chronica Botania, 1952). Moses Maimonides. The Guide of the Perplexed (trans. From the Arabic by Shlomo Pines; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). Moshavi, A. Word Order in the Biblical Hebrew Finite Clause (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2010).

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612 Bibliography Cantrell, D. O., and I. Finkelstein. ʻA Kingdom for a Horse: The Megiddo Stables and Eighth Century Israel’. In Megiddo IV: The 1998–2000 Seasons (ed. I. Finkelstein, D. Ussishkin, and B. Halpern; Monographs of the Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University, 24; Tel Aviv: Emery and Claire Yass Publications in Archaeology, 2006), pp. 643–65. Caquot, A. ‘Osee et la Royauté’. RHPhR 41 (1961), pp. 138–39. Cassuto, U. ‘The Prophet Hosea and the Books of the Pentateuch’. In Abhandlungen zur Erinnerung an Hirsch Perez Chajes (ed. V. Aptowitzer and A. Z. Schwarz; Vienna: Alexander Kohut Foundation, 1933), pp. 262–78 [in Hebrew]. Republished in English translation in U. Cassuto, Biblical and Oriental Studies (trans. I. Abrahams; 2 vols.; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1973), vol. 1, pp. 79–100. ———. ‘The Second Chapter of the Book of Hosea’. In Livre d’hommage à la mémoire du Dr. Samuel Poznánski (ed. Committee of the Great Synagogue in Warsaw; Warsaw: Harrassowitz, 1927), pp. 115–35 [in Hebrew]. Republished in English translation in U. Cassuto, Biblical and Oriental Studies (trans. I. Abrahams; 2 vols.; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1973), vol. 1, pp. 101–40. ———. ‘Sur Quelques Démons de l’Ancien Testament (Reshep, Qeteb, Deber)’. Semitica 6 (1956), pp. 53–68. Cazelles, H. ‘Les origine du décalogue’. Eretz Israel 9 (1969), pp. 14–19. Chaplin, T. ‘Das Klima von Jerusalem’. ZDPV 14 (1891), pp. 93–112. Cogan, M. ‘ “Ripping Open Pregnant Women”: An Assyrian Analogy’. JAOS 103 (1983), pp. 755–57. ———. ‘Tyre and Tiglath-pileser III’. JCS 25 (1973), pp. 96–99. Chatta, Ch. ‘The Enclitic-mem in Biblical Hebrew: Its Existence and Initial Discovery’. In Sefer Moshe: The Moshe Weinfeld Jubilee Volume (ed. Chaim Cohen, Avi Hurvitz, and Shalom M. Paul; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2004), pp. 231–60. Cohen, Ch. (Harold). ʻFoam in Hos. 10:7’. JANESCU 2, no. 1 (1969), pp. 25–29. ———. ‘Ugaritic Lexicography and Comparative Semitic Philology (1)’. In Teshurot LaAvishur: Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, in Hebrew and Semitic Languages in Honor of Yizhak Avishur (ed. M. Heltzer and M. Malul; Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publications, 2004), pp. 13–23. ———. ‘The Phenomenon of Negative Parallelism and its Ramifications for the Study of Biblical Poetry’. Beer-Sheva 3 (1988), pp. 69–107 [in Hebrew]. Cohen, G. D. ‘The Song of Songs and the Jewish Religious Mentality’. In Samuel Friedland Lectures 1960–1966 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1966), pp. 1–21. Cohen, S. ʻAmos Was a Navi’. HUCA 32 (1961), pp. 175–78. Clines, D. J. A. ‘Hosea 2: Structure and Interpretation’. In Studia Biblica 1978. Vol. 1, Old Testament and Related Themes: Sixth International Congress on Biblical Studies, Oxford, 3–7 April 1978 (ed. E. A. Livingstone; JSOTSup, 11; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1979), pp. 83–103. Reprinted in D. J. A. Clines, On the Way to the Postmodern, vol. 1 (JSOTSup, 292; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998), pp. 293–313. Clines, D. J. A., and D. M. Gunn. ‘ “You Tried to Persuade Me” and “Violence! Outrage!” in Jeremiah XX 7–8’. VT 28 (1978), pp. 20–27. Coles, T., E. Fenclova, and C. Dinan. ‘Tourism and Corporate Social Responsibility: A Critical Review and Research Agenda’. Tourism Management Perspectives 6 (April 2013), pp. 121–41.

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———. ‘Studies in Hebrew Roots of Contrasted Meanings’. JQR ns 27 (1936), pp. 33–58. ———. ‘Studies in the Relationship of Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew’. In Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume (English Section; New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), pp. 173–99. ———. ‘The Text and Meaning of Hosea XIV 3’. VT 5 (1955), pp. 88–90. Gordon, C. H. ‘Hos 2.4–5 in the Light of New Semitic Inscriptions’. ZAW 54 (1936), pp. 277–80. Graesser, C. F. ‘Standing Stones in Ancient Palestine’. Biblical Archaeologist 35, no. 2 (1972), pp. 33–63. Graetz, H. ‘Nachtrag zu den lückenhaften Versen in der Bible pisqā’ bě’emṣā’ pāsûq’. Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 36 (1887), pp. 193–200. ———. ‘Ueber die Bedeutung der masoretischen Bezeichnung: “Unterbrechung in der Mitte des Verses” ’. Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 27 (1878), pp. 481–503. Greenfield, J. C. ‘Hadad’. DDD2, pp. 377–82. Gross, K. ‘Hoseas Einfluss auf Jeremias Anschauungen’. NKZ 42 (1931), pp. 241–56, 327–43. Grossberg, D. ‘Noun/Verb Parallelism: Syntactic or Asyntactic’. JBL 99 (1980), pp. 481– 88. Gruber, M. I. ‘Azabbim’. DDD2, pp. 127–28. ———. ‘Contextual Interpretation of the Bible in the Babylonian Talmud: Rava on the Problem of Isaiah 6’. In Shefa Tal: Studies in Jewish Thought and Culture Presented to Bracha Sack (ed. Z. Gries, H. Kreisel, and B. Hus; Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2004), pp. 53–58 [in Hebrew]. ———. ‘Discreet Theologies of Sacred Space: D, Dtr and Jeremiah: What the Mishnah Already Knew and No One Ever Told Us’. Review of Rabbinic Judaism 11 (2008), pp. 228–42. ———. ‘el = et: An Unrecognized Lexeme in Biblical Hebrew’. In Marbeh Ḥokmah: Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East in Loving Memory of Victor Avigdor Hurowitz (ed. S. Yona, E. L. Greenstein, M. I. Gruber, P. Machinist, and S. M. Paul; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2015), pp. 267–79. ———. ‘Fear, Anxiety and Reverence in Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew and Other Northwest Semitic Languages’. VT 40 (1990), pp. 411–22. ———. ‘Forbidden Sexual Relations in Biblical Hebrew’. In Studies in Bible and Exegesis 10 (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2011), pp. 501–508 [in Hebrew]. ———. ‘Genesis 21:12: A New Reading of an Ambiguous Text’. In Genesis (ed. Athalya Brenner; The Feminist Companion to the Bible, 2nd Series; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998), pp. 172–79. ———. ‘Hebrew daăbôn nepeš: “Dryness of Throat”: From Symptom to Literary Convention’. In Gruber, The Motherhood of God, pp. 185–92. ———. ʻHebrew qĕdēšāh and her Canaanite and Akkadian Cognates’. UF 18 (1987), pp. 133–48. Reprinted in M. I. Gruber, The Motherhood of God and Other Studies (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), pp. 17–47. ———. ‘How Can True Prophets Disagree’. Mo‘ed 13 (2003), pp. 31–37 [in Hebrew]. ———. ‘Is the Principal Human Speaker in Micah 6–7 a Woman?’. Shnaton Leheqer HaMiqra 18 (2008), pp. 13–23 [in Hebrew].

616 Bibliography ———. ‘Jeremiah 3:1–4:2 between Deuteronomy 24 and Matthew 5: Jeremiah’s Exercise in Ethical Criticism’. In Birkat Shalom: Studies in the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern Literature and Postbiblical Judaism Presented to Shalom M. Paul on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (ed. Ch. Cohen, V. A. Hurowitz, A. Hurvitz, Y. Muffs, B. J. Schwartz, and J. H. Tigay; 2 vols.; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008), pp. 233–49. ———. ‘Job’. In The Jewish Study Bible (ed. A. Berlin and M. Z. Brettler; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 1499–62. ———. ‘Nuances of the Verb ny—to Fructify’. Studies in Bible and Exegesis 7 (2005), pp. 233–44 [in Hebrew]. ———. ‘Prostitutes and Prostitution in the Bible’. Zemanim no. 90 (2005), pp. 22–29. [in Hebrew]. ———. ʻThe qadesh in the Book of Kings and in Other Sources’. Tarbiz 52 (1982), pp. 167–76 [in Hebrew]. ———. ‘The qedeshah—What Was Her Function?’. Beer Sheva 3 (1988), pp. 45–51 [in Hebrew]. ———. ‘A Re-Evaluation of Hosea 1–2: Philology Informed by Life Experience’. In The Personal Voice in Biblical Interpretation (ed. I. R. Kitzberger; London/New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 170–82. ———. ‘Rewritten Deuteronomy in 1 QS and in m. Soṭah 7:5’. In Mishneh Todah: Studies in Deuteronomy and Its Cultural Environment in Honor of Jeffrey H. Tigay (ed. N. S. Fox, D. A. Glatt-Gilad, and M. J. Williams; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009), pp. 139–56. ———. ‘The Source of the Biblical Sabbath’. JANESCU 1, no. 2 (1969), pp. 14–20. Reprinted in M. I. Gruber, The Motherhood of God and Other Studies (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), pp. 111–19. ———. ‘The Unexpected Visitor: The Elihu Speeches in Personal Voice Perspective’. In Interested Readers: Essays on the Hebrew Bible in Honor of David J. A. Clines (ed. J. K. Aitken, J. M. S. Clines, and C. M. Maier; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), pp. 87–94. ———. ‘Women’s Voices in the Book of Micah’. Lectio Difficilior 1 (2007), 12 pp. ———. ʻYear’. EncJud (1972), vol. 16, pp. 724–26. ʻYear’. EncJud 2nd ed., vol. 21, pp. 291–92. Grusec, J. E., and L. Kuczynski. ‘Teaching Children to Punish Themselves and Effects on Subsequent Compliance’. Child Development 48 (1977), pp. 1296–300. Halévy, J. ‘Recherches Bibliques: Influence du Code sacerdotal sur les prophétes’. Revue Sémitique 9 (1901), pp. 1–6. Haran, M. M. ‘Biblical Studies’. Tarbiz 39 (1969), pp. 109–36 [in Hebrew]. ———. ‘The Graded Numerical Sequence and the Phenomenon of “Automatism” in Biblical Poetry’. In Congress Volume: Uppsala 1971 (VTSup, 22; Leiden: Brill, 1972), pp. 238–67. Harvey, J. ‘Le “Rîb-Pattern”, Réquisitoire prophétique sur la rupture de l᾽alliance’. Biblica 43 (1962), pp. 172–96. Hasson, S. ‘Petah Tikvah’. EncJud, vol. 13, pp. 336–38. Hasson, S., and S. Gilboa. ‘Petah Tikvah’. EncJud, 2nd ed., vol. 16, pp. 14–15. Hatav, G. ‘(Free) Direct Discourse in Biblical Hebrew’. Hebrew Studies 41 (2000), pp. 7–30.

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618 Bibliography Levine, B. A. Review of H. Louis Ginsberg, The Israelian Heritage of Judaism. AJS Review 12, no. 1 (1987), pp. 143–57. Lippl, J. ‘Hosea’. In J. Lippl and J. Theis, Die Zwölf Kleinen Propheten (HSAT 8.3.1; Bonn: Hanstein, 1937). Loewenstamm, S. D. ‘Concerning Newly Published Ugaritic Texts’. Leshonenu 29 (1965), pp. 6–8 [in Hebrew]. ———. ‘The Expanded Colon in Ugaritic and Biblical Verse’. JSS 14 (1969), pp. 176–96. Lundbom, J. R. ‘Double-Duty Subject in Hosea VIII 5’. VT 25 (1975), pp. 228–30. Maclean, J. A. ‘Sparrow’. In Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (ed. D. N. Freedman; Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2000), p. 1246. Manor, D. W. ‘Massebah’. ABD, vol. 4, p. 602. Marcus, D. ‘Alternate Chapter Divisions in the Pentateuch in Light of the Masoretic Sections’. Hebrew Studies 44 (2003), pp. 119–28. ———. ‘Animal Similes in Assyrian Royal Inscriptions’. Orientalia ns 46 (1977), pp. 86–108. Mastin, B. A. ‘Waw explicativum in 2 Kings viii 9’. VT 34 (1984), pp. 353–55. Mazar, A. ‘ “The Bull Site”: An Iron Age I Open Cult Place’. BASOR 247 (1982), pp. 27–40. McKay, H. A. ‘Jacob Makes it Across the Jabok. JSOT 38 (1987), pp. 3–13. McKenzie, S. L. ‘The Jacob Traditions in Hosea XII 4–5’. VT 36 (1986), pp. 311–22. Moon, J. ‘A Short Note on Hos 3:12’. VT 65 (2015), pp. 474–79. Moore, G. F. ‘The Vulgate Chapters and Numbered Verses in the Hebrew Bible’. JBL 12 (1893), pp. 73–78. Morag, S. ‘On Semantic and Lexical Features in the Language of Hosea’. Tarbiz 53 (1984), pp. 484–511 [in Hebrew]. Moran, W. L. ‘The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy’. CBQ 25 (1963), pp. 77–87. ———. ‘The Scandal of the “Great Sin” at Ugarit’. JNES 18 (1959), pp. 280–81. Mowinckel, S. ‘Miscellen: kōmer, kmr’. ZAW 36 (1916), pp. 238–39. Muraoka, T. ‘Hebrew Hapax Legomena and Septuagint Lexicography’. In VII Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies Leuven 1989 (ed. Claude E. Cox; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), pp. 205–22. ———. ‘Hosea V in the Septuagint Version’. Abr-Naharain 24 (1986), pp. 120–38. ———. ʻHosea IV in the Septuagint Version’. Annual of the Japanese Biblical Institute 9 (1983), pp. 24–64. Naeh, S., and M. P. Weitzman, ‘Tīrōš—Wine or Grape? A Case of Metonymy’. VT 44 (1994), pp. 115–19. Noth, M. ‘Gilead und Gad’. ZDPV 75 (1959), pp. 14–73. Ofer, Y. ‘The sedarim of the Prophets and the Hagiographa’. Tarbiz 58 (1989), pp. 155–89 [in Hebrew]. Oort, H. ‘Hosea’. Theologisch Tijdschrift 24 (1890), pp. 345–64, 480–505. Oppenheim, A. L. ‘Studies in Akkadian Lexicography II’. Orientalia 11 (1942), pp. 119–33. Paran, M. ‘Ambiguity in the Bible’. Beer-Sheva 1(1973), pp. 150–61 [in Hebrew]. Paul, S. M. ‘Hosea 8:8–10 maśśā’ melek śārîm and Ancient Near Eastern Royal Epithets’. In Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East Presented to Samuel E. Loewenstamm on His Seventieth Birthday (ed. Y. Avishur and L. Blau; Jerusalem: Rubenstein, 1978), pp. 309–17 [in Hebrew].

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620 Bibliography Stein, D. E. S. ‘The Grammar of Social Gender in Biblical Hebrew. Hebrew Studies 49 (2009), pp. 7–26. ———. ʻThe Noun ’îš in Biblical Hebrew: A Term of Affiliation’. Perspectives on Hebrew Scriptures 5 (2009), pp. 1–28. Stewart, D. T. ‘Leviticus’. In The Queer Bible Commentary (ed. D. Guest, R. E. Goss, M. West, and T. Bohache; London: SCM, 2006). Stockton, E. ‘Sacred Pillars in the Bible’. Australian Bible Review 20 (1972), pp. 16–32. Strydom, J. G. ʻMicah of Samaria: Amos’s and Hosea’s Forgotten Partner’. Old Testament Essays 6 (1993), pp. 19–32. Suriano, M. J. ʻBreaking Bread with the Dead: Katumuwa’s Stele, Hos. 9:4, and the Early History of the Soul’. JAOS 134 (2014), pp. 385–405. Tadmor. H. ‘Azriyahu of Yaudi’. Scripta Hierosolymitana 8 (1961), pp. 232–70. ———. ‘The Historical Background of the Prophecies of Hosea’. In Yehezkel Kaufmann Jubilee Volume (ed. Menahem M. Haran; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1961), pp. 84–88 [in Hebrew]. ———. ‘Introductory Remarks to a New Edition of the Annals of Tiglath-pileser III’. In Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 2, no. 9 (1967), pp. 168–87. Tammuz, O. ‘Hosea 10,13b–14b: A Warning about a Rebellion’. BN 170 (2016), pp. 35– 49. ———. ‘Psalm 78: A Case Study in Redaction As Propaganda’. CBQ 79 (2017), pp. 205– 21. Testuz, M. ‘Deux fragments inédits des manuscripts de la Mer Morte’. Semitica 5 (1955), pp. 37–38. Tsevat, M. ‘Ishbosheth and Congeners: The Names and their Study’. HUCA 46 (1975), pp. 71–87. Tur-Sinai, N. H. ‘Gilead is a city of evildoers (Hos. 6. 7–9)’. In Hallashon WeHassepher, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1950), pp. 324–34 [in Hebrew]. Uri, A. ‘What Is “a section division in the middle of a verse”?’. In Studies in Biblical Research in Honor of Eliyahu Urbach (ed. A. Biram; Jerusalem: Kiryat Sepher for the Israel Society of Biblical Research, 1955), pp. 31–42 [in Hebrew]. Van der Woude, A. S. ʻDeutero-Micha: Ein Prophet aus Nord-Israel’. NedTTs 75 (1971), pp. 365–78. Vasselin, M. ‘Les prophètes hébreux dans les Bibles européennes (c. 1150–1425): des images pour contribuer à l’edification morale des lecteurs chrétiens’. Perspectives: Revue de l’Université Hébraïque de Jérusalem 20 (2013), pp. 159–79. Watson, W. G. E. ‘Gender-Matched Synonymous Parallelism in the OT’. JBL 99 (1980), pp. 321–41. Weiss, M. ‘The Secret of Scripture—Some of Buber’s Methods in Interpreting the Bible’. Preface to M. M. Buber, The Way of Scripture (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1964), pp. 9–33 [in Hebrew]. Wenning, R., and E. Zenger. ‘Ein bäuerliches Baal-Heiligtum im samarischen Gebirge aus der Zeit der Anfänge Israels: Erwägungen zu dem von A. Mazar zwischen Dotan und Tirza entdeckten “Bull Site” ’. ZDPV 102 (1986), pp. 75–86. Wieder, A. A. ‘Ugaritic-Hebrew Lexicographical Notes’. JBL 84 (1968), pp. 160–64. Wise, M. O. ‘Dating the Teacher of Righteousness and the Floruit of His Movement’. JBL 122 (2003), pp. 53–87. Wolf, C. U. ‘Yoke’. IDB, vol. 4, pp. 924–25. Wyatt, N. ‘Qeteb’. DDD2, pp. 673–74.

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Unpublished Works Abecassis, I. ‘ “And Smote Him, and Slew Him, and Reigned in His Stead” (2 Kings 15, 30): Political Assassinations in the Ancient Near East᾽ (PhD diss., Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, 2009). M. Ben-Yashar. ‘The Division into sedarim in the Books of the Prophets and the Hagiographa’ (MA thesis, Bar-Ilan University, 1976 [in Hebrew]). Ginsberg, H. L. ‘Hosea Notes᾽. Held, M. ‘Studies in Ugaritic Lexicography and Poetic Style’ (PhD diss., The Johns Hopkins University, 1957). Taragan, Hagit. ‘Rhetoric and Prophecy: Rhetorical, Stylistic and Linguistic Aspects in Isaiah 40–66’ (PhD diss., Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, 2006).

I n d ex of R ef er e nce s Hebrew Bible/ 15:10 487 Old Testament 15:13 83, 146, Genesis 252, 456, 1–3 72 593 1:1–6:8 37 16:6 146, 252, 1:1 72, 73 593 1:2 116, 554 146, 252 16:9 1:26 188, 190 16:14 524 116, 327, 2:5 18:1 167 439 18:3 130, 288 2:23 447 18:8 476 3:13 74 18:24–25 477 3:18 423 18:24 98 4:1 155, 341 198, 246, 18:25 197, 422 4:7 247 4:10 468 18:26 98 4:17 155, 341 18:27 130 4:19 74 18:31 130 4:25 155, 341 19:1 167 4:26 311 19:14 74 6:6 479 19:18 130 9:26 507 19:22 524 10:19 477 20:3 288 74, 361 11:3 20:13 531 11:4 361 21:1 363, 388 11:6 311 21:31 228, 524 11:7 74 22:3 290 11:29 74 22:17 103 11:31 94 24:12 417 12 94 24:16 155 12:5 441 24:35 129 12:8 485 24:47 140 13:17 74 24:67 74 14:2 477 25:1 74 14:8 477 25:8 191 14:18–22 475 25:17 191 14:20 238, 477 25:22 439 14:22 278 25:26 499 15:5 103 25:28 431

26:7 288 26:25 170 26:34 74 27 102 27:28 133 27:33 543 27:36 499 27:37 543 27:41 386 28:2 74 28:10–32:3 37, 474 28:14 102, 189 178, 406 28:18 28:19 492 28:22 178, 406 29:13 326 29:32 126 29:33–35 95 29:34 126 30:1 202 30:7 95 30:15 126 30:20–25 519 30:20 126 30:21–30 519 31–32 516 432, 503 31 31:9 134 31:10–13 492 31:11–13 502 31:11 492 31:12 492 31:13 178, 406 31:16 134 31:19 179 31:34 179 31:35 179 31:36 197 223, 432 31:39

31:44–54 516 31:45–92 178 31:45 178, 406 32 500 32:4–36:3 37, 38 32:9 240 32:12 452 32:13 102 32:19 540 32:25–29 499 32:27 500 33:18 501 34 85, 141, 151, 250, 299 74, 157, 34:2 160 34:3 121, 141 34:4 249 34:5 249 34:13 249 34:25–29 299 35 503 35:1 502 35:3 503 35:14 178, 406 35:20 406 35:21 213 35:22 70 35:29 191 37:2 568 38 4, 217, 221, 225 38:4 95 38:5 97 38:11 173 38:15–21 226 38:15 213 38:21–22 213, 220 38:21 221 38:24 81, 111, 284 38:26 155 39:9 476 39:14 319 39:21 417 40:10 588

Index of References 41:6 496, 553 41:23 496, 553 41:27 553 41:38 384 41:49 102 43:11 543 43:30 478, 479 44:34 476 48:16 502 49 275 49:1–2 242 49:1 182 49:5 299 49:6–7 318 49:9 275 49:15 393 49:23 386 49:25 393, 543 49:33 191 50:5 170 50:15 386 50:17 197 Exodus 1–15 104 1:7 390 1:10 74, 104 1:11 593 1:12 84, 189, 252, 460, 593 1:16 545 1:19 116 2:1 74 2:2 104 2:5 319 2:14 124 3:2 447 3:15 502 3:16 74, 388 4:1 164 4:2–6 164 4:6 164, 165 4:9 164 4:10 130 4:13 130 4:19 74

623 4:22 457 4:31 363 5:22 130 6:20 74 6:23 74 9:9–10 588 9:24 369 9:31 120 10:8–9 253, 254 10:9 278 10:13 495, 496, 553 12:37 147 12:43 224 13:9 112 13:16 112 14:13 572 14:21 495, 553 15:1 327 15:6 158, 392 15:17 130 15:21 147 15:26 434 17:4 91 18:2 78 18:4 540 18:16 224 19:3 499 20 187, 230, 534 20:2 511, 533–35 20:3 533, 535 20:5 91 20:6 533 20:8 589, 590 20:16 517 21–24 552 21:6 544 21:33 170 22 187 22:27 544 22:30 223 23:1 326 23:15 256, 565 23:17 309 23:22 434

624 Exodus (cont.) 23:24 178 24:1 223 24:4 178, 406 26:34 455 27:20 38 28:4 179 28:6 179 28:12 179 28:25–28 179 28:31 179 28:43 38 29:5 179 29:14 197 29:25 589 29:33 255, 315 29:36 197 29:40 320 29:41 589 30:33 255 31:1–6 529 31:3 529 32 147, 350 140, 353 32:2–3 32:4 348, 528 32:6 147 32:7 150 32:8 348, 528 32:10 76 32:11–14 76 32:13 408 32:18 147 32:20 350 32:34 91 33:1 74 33:10 445 33:16 543 33:22 345 34:7 91, 98, 351 34:9 130 34:10 369 34:11–14 576 34:13 178 34:15–16 80, 527 34:17 528 34:18 256

Index of References 34:20 565 35:29 107 35:31 529 36:6 107 39:2 179 39:7 179 39:18 179 39:19 179 39:20–22 179 Leviticus 1–26 349 1–16 295 1:1 341 1:5 245 1:9 140, 589 1:11 245 1:13 140 1:15 140 1:17 140 2:2 140, 589 2:5 320 2:9 140 2:16 140 3:8 245 3:16 589 4 197 4:19 140, 197 4:24 197 140, 589 4:31 4:35 140 5:2 469 5:9 197 5:11 197 5:12 140, 197 5:21 265 5:23 265 6:7–11 258 6:9 257 6:17–22 197 6:23 197 7:6 197 7:10 320 8:7 179 10:10 194 11:13 488 11:19 488

13:12 588 13:20 588 13:25 588 13:39 588 13:42 588 13:57 588 14:21 320 14:43 588 15 250 15:17–18 249, 250 15:17 249 15:18 249 16:4 315 16:9 422 16:29 335 16:31 335 17 80 17:6 589 17:7 369 17:17 80 19:4 528 19:5 363 19:11 497 19:16 273, 274, 276 19:18 408 19:29 85 19:34 408 19:36 508 20 80 20:5–6 80 85, 167, 20:10 229, 230 20:17 417 21:1 379 21:3 175 22:10 255 22:12 175, 255 22:13 255 22:28 452 23:13 320 23:29 335 23:32 336 23:40 215 23:42 215 25:9 336 25:21 354

25:30 445 25:44 369 26 252 26:1–11 151 26:1 406 26:3 263 26:5 151, 441 26:12 100 26:14 263 26:19 252 26:21 423 26:28 247, 325 26:31 177, 410 26:33 399 26:43 375 27:1–8 171 27:4 171 27:19 445 27:28 225 Numbers 1:1–4:20 38 1:16 315 1:51 255 3:10 255 3:38 255 5 38, 39, 216, 250 5:6 197 5:11–6:21 38 5:13 249 5:23 223 7:1 256 7:88 469 10–14 458 10:2–3 326 10:2 261 10:9 261 10:11 458 10:36 563 11 281 11:3 462 11:12 584 11:17–26 384 11:19 458 11:34 462 12:6–8 78

Index of References 12:6 78, 511 12:11 197, 266 13 588 13:8 68 13:23–24 588 14 578 14:4 104 14:13–19 566, 576 14:15 369 14:18 98 14:19 458 14:20 566, 567, 576 14:27 326 14:37 568 14:43 85 15:1–10 376 15:39–40 369 15:39 80 16:11 326 16:16 326 17:5 255, 326 17:20 588 17:23 588 17:26 75 18:7 255 18:12 206 19:14 379 20:27 75 21:2–44 38 21:3 462 21:17 327 21:18 170 21:20 143 21:28 298 22:18 129 23:7 499 23:9 593 23:10 499 23:24 275 23:28 143 24:3 129, 149 24:5 499 24:9 275 24:14 182 24:15 149 24:17 593

625 25:1–5 246, 526 25:1–3 389 25:1 245, 387 26:1–2 70 26:1 70 26:2 70 27:18 384 28–29 295 28:5 320 28:9 320 28:11–14 257 28:12 320 28:13 320 28:15 257 30:4 329 30:7 175 32 297 32:15 564 32:41 462 32:42 462 34 507 34:11 582, 583 Deuteronomy 1:4 469 1:27 314 2:6 170 2:36 298 3:4 298 4:2 202 4:6 592 4:21 314 4:28 574 4:30 182, 504, 563 5 187, 230, 534 5:6 511, 533–35 5:7 533, 535 5:9 91 5:10 533 5:17 517 5:23 130 6:2 202 6:4 348 6:5 96, 204

626 Deuteronomy (cont.) 6:7 428 6:8 112 7:5 178 7:13 128, 398 7:25 129 7:26 225 8:5 247 8:13 129 8:15 581 9:8 314 9:16 528 9:20 314 9:27 408 10:13 202 10:18 575 11 375 11:4 439 11:8–17 441 11:13 83, 456, 563 11:14 128, 286, 287 234, 374 11:17 11:18 112 11:28 85 12–26 278 12 211, 212, 359, 410, 422 12:1 211 12:3 178 12:17 128 13:4 563 13:19 202 14:1–3 460 14:1 85, 330 14:11 488 14:12–19 488 14:18 488 14:20 488 14:23 128 15 507 15:1 284 15:5 434 16:1 256 16:16–17 565

Index of References 16:21–22 178 16:22 178, 179, 406, 407 17–18 180 17:11 195 17:16 470, 571, 572 17:20 390 18:4 128 18:6–8 258 19:11 445 19:14 264 20:7 152, 153 21 147 21:7 146 21:14 157 21:18–21 233, 234 21:18 233, 325 21:20 233 22:6–7 451 22:13 74 22:18 247, 325 85, 354 22:21 22:22–24 230 22:22 85 22:23–24 229 22:24 157, 160 23 4 23:1 74 23:18–19 226 23:18 221 23:19 138, 347 24 154 24:1–4 127 24:1 74, 223 24:2 78, 175 24:3 127, 223 24:5 74 25:4 431 25:5 175 25:14–15 508 26 147 26:5 146 26:6 146 26:14 377 27 147 27:14 146

27:15 528 27:17 265 28:4 398 28:11 398 28:18 398 28:30 152, 153 28:33 265 28:36 375, 399 28:37 262 28:49 597 28:51 128 28:53 398 28:64 399 29:17 413 29:22 477 30:2 504, 563 30:3 305 30:9 398 30:10 563 30:15–19 342 31:16 80, 445 31:22 182 32 278, 536, 538–40, 550 32:3 237, 361 32:5 538, 539, 597 32:6 457 32:10–34 536 32:10 116, 143 32:14 206 32:24 547 32:25 584 32:26 540 32:29–40 278 32:29–30 278 32:32 413, 587, 588 32:33 412 32:35 539 32:36 549, 550 32:39 277, 278, 283 32:40 278, 538 32:50 191 33 540

33:1–34:12 37 33:26 539 33:28 133 33:29 539 34:5–12 397 Joshua 2 373 2:6 120 2:7 286 2:8 327 2:10 119 2:16 286 2:22 286 2:23 585 3:10 103 3:15–16 296 3:16 296 4:3 119 4:4–9 178 4:20–24 178 5:1 119 5:9 517, 518 6:17 225 7 142 7:2 228, 260 7:13 225 7:21 143 7:24–26 143 7:25 143 7:26 143 8:30 327 10:24 445 11:3 485 11:5 326 15:7 143 15:8 89 15:45 478 18:1 501 18:12 228, 260 22:5 563 22:12 501 23:6 390 23:14 563 24:16–17 575

Index of References Judges 1:7 501 1:24 417 2 280 2:11–19 536 2:11 150 2:14 429 2:18–19 280 2:19 429 3:7 150 3:9 535 3:15 535 3:27 260 4:6 244 4:12 244 4:14 244 4:18 345 4:22 286 5:3 242 5:6 597 6:25 130 6:28 130 6:30 130 6:32 130 6:34 260 7:18 260 8:5 286, 450 8:10 450 8:12 450 8:15 450 8:21 448 8:24 315 8:27 179 8:33 150 9 299 9:15 585 9:25 299 9:43–56 299 9:49 107 10:6 150 10:10 150 11:34 244 11:39 155 12:5 470 13:9 167, 288 14 275 14:5 275, 276

627 14:6 196 14:8 284 15:2 456 16:27 107 17:5 179 18:14 179 18:17 179 18:18 179 18:20 179 19–20 424, 430 19 245, 387 19:10 89 19:25 155 20 426, 429 21:21 246 21:23 75 31:12 155 1 Samuel 1:8 592 1:19 155 1:24 172 1:43 lxx 346 2–4 256 2:6 277, 283 2:18 179 2:30 197, 456 3–4 94 3:14 92 3:18 248 4:18 130 5:9 345 6:6 563 7 244 7:4–16 513 7:4 150 411, 542 8 8:2 89 8:4 344, 394, 542 8:5 542, 543 8:6 542 8:7 411 10:3 172 10:8 517 11:14–15 394, 517 12:3 265

628 1 Samuel (cont.) 12:9 74 12:10 150 12:20 563 12:24 563 13:3 260 13:5 228, 260 13:7 490 13:11 381 13:23 381 14:5 381 14:23 228, 260 14:34 258 15:3 584 15:10 67 15:22–24 295 15:27 563 15:28–29 483 16:4 490, 501 17:26 130 17:36 130 18:16 357 19:13–16 179 20:5 256 20:18 256 21:2 490 22:19 584 23:1 149 23:7 170 23:19 143 23:24 143 25:18 172 26:1 143 26:3 143 28:16 484 2 Samuel 1:19 476 1:20 368 1:25 476 1:27 476 2–4 132 2:28 260 3:1 92 3:6 92 3:34 196 4 132

Index of References 6:14 179 6:19 168 7 180 7:4 67 7:17 513 8:7 89 9 132 12:1 445 12:3 445 12:4 445 13:12 157, 158 13:14 157, 158, 160 14:5 126 15:27 562 16 132 16:1 172 17:8 538 18:14–15 409 18:16 260 19 132 19:7 357 21 132 21:1 280 22:6 546 1 Kings 1:4 155 1:24 172 1:41 298 1:45 298 2:26–27 94, 256 3:1 74 3:12 529 3:26 478, 479 5:5 434 5:15 357 6:11 67 6:16 455 6:21 435 7:14 529 7:46 297 7:50 455 8:46 314 9:6 564 10:1 326 10:26–28 572

10:26 572 11 524, 525 11:9 314 11:29–39 433, 524 11:31–32 524 11:33 524 11:36 524 11:38 434, 524 12–14 525 12–13 525 12 348, 350 12:22 67 12:28–30 347, 525, 591 12:28–29 348, 528 12:28 413, 526 12:29 260 12:31 525 12:32 413 13 526 13:20 67 13:33–34 525 13:34 92 14:9–10 525 14:10 92, 94 14:14 92 14:20 526 14:23 178, 211 15 312 15:29 92 16:1 67 16:31 74, 130 16:32 130 17 526 17:2 67 17:8 67 17:10–23 525 17:21 92 18 149 18:18 150 18:25 130 18:26 130 18:40 93, 130 19:11 240 19:12 512 19:16–18 93 19:16 94

21 105 21:15 95 21:17–26 93 21:17–24 94 21:17 67 21:20 19 21:23 95 21:28 67 22 298 22:20 19, 296 22:44 463 22:54 130

Index of References

10:32 516 12:4 463 13:5 535 13:22 516 13:25 585 14:4 463 14:12–14 267 14:17 264 15 448 15:2 264 15:4 463 15:8–22 346 15:8–14 309, 317, 2 Kings 448 3:2 406, 407 308, 395 15:8–10 3:14 296 15:9–14 5 3:24 460 15:9 395 4:1 126 15:10 312, 333, 4:23 137, 256 448 6:19 334 15:13–14 308 7:1 184, 186 15:13 333 8:11–12 561 15:14 395 8:12 4538:29 15:16–18 395 106 15:16 561 8:29 516 15:19–21 269 9–10 298 15:19 269 9 105 15:25 236, 298 9:6–10 93 9, 259, 15:29 9:10 95 308, 399 9:11 385 15:30 68 9:15 106, 516 15:33 264 9:17 106 15:35 463 9:22 81, 111 16:1 172 9:24–26 93 16:2 264 9:24 112 16:4 211 9:30 106 16:9 9 9:36–37 93, 95 17 263 10 105, 106 17:6 68 10:1–11 92 17:10–11 211 10:1–10 105 17:10 178, 407 10:6–7 106 17:13 282 10:10–30 93 17:18 314 10:10 245, 543 18:4 178, 463 10:11 105, 106 18:24 571 10:17–30 94 18:27 267 10:17 406 18:32 134 10:26 178, 407 19:4 103

629 19:16 103 19:17–18 574 19:30 396 21 263 22:1 185 22:19 262 23:5 415, 463 23:14 178 25:4 258 25:7 452, 501 25:26 485 29:26 385 29:27 385 Isaiah 1–39 69 1–33 74 1 228, 481 1:1 28, 69, 514, 558 1:2–3 465, 466 1:2 187, 242 1:7 262 1:9 477 1:10–17 295, 514 1:10 184, 186, 242 1:11–17 240 1:13–14 137 1:13 256, 351 1:14 228 1:15 189, 229 1:17 269 1:18 553 1:21 432 1:23 395, 396 298, 549, 1:24 550 1:26–27 553 1:26 298 2:1–4 599 2:2 102, 182, 183, 424 2:3 195 2:8–4:6 251 2:8 574 2:10 251

630 Isaiah (cont.) 3–4 372 3:9 248, 252, 323, 477 3:13 269 3:14 282 3:17 130, 345 3:21 140 3:22 282 4:2–6 599 4:4 130, 267 5:5 345 5:6–7 116 5:8 264 5:11 570 5:20 341 5:24 196, 469 6:1–2 115 6:1 130 6:3 26 6:5 456 6:11 446 6:13 553 7–8 418 7–27 95 7–8 331 7 259, 322 7:14 130 7:17 28, 390 7:19 111 8 96, 415 96, 292 8:1 8:2 8 8:3 77, 90, 96, 163 8:6–8 121 8:9 292 8:10 412 8:19–20 68 8:19 68 9:1–6 599 9:3 105 9:5 447 10:2 91, 571 10:5 571 10:22 102 10:24–26 322

Index of References 10:25 91 11:1–9 599 11:8 584 11:10 369 11:12 369 12:1 314 13:9 116 13:11 91 13:16 453 13:18 453 13:19 477 14:9 240 14:21 483 14:29 396 15:1 456 16:7 168 18:11 282 19:3 401 19:8 190 19:12 543 19:13 266, 380 19:19 406, 407 269, 535 19:20 20:2 513 21:12 318 22:1 513, 543 22:2 298 22:5 513 22:18 197 23:5 326 23:8 507 23:17–18 138 23:17 138 23:19 138 24:2 198 24:3 401 24:4 190 24:6 560 24:7 190 24:10 298 24:22 284 25:2 116, 298 25:3 298 25:5 282 26:5 298 27:2 206 27:6 583, 588

27:8 27:13

496, 553 17, 375, 485 28:7 356 28:8 267 28:14 184, 185, 242 28:24 144 29:1 298 29:13 267 29:14 596 29:17 91, 144 29:19 531 30:6 275 30:12–14 121 30:12 469 30:14 172 30:15 584 30:16 571 30:25–26 234 31:2 445 31:6 245, 388 32:13 298 32:15 144 32:16 403 32:18 391 33:9 190 33:18 328 33:20 298 34:8 224, 383 34:13 382 35:1–2 530 35:2 588 35:7 391 35:8 240 35:15 282 36–39 322 36:9 571 36:12 267 36:17 134 37:3 546 37:4 103 37:17 103 37:18–19 574 37:31 396 38:4 67 40–66 338, 352

40:1 558 40:2 141, 151 40:17–26 128 40:19–20 530 40:21 597 41:6–7 530 42:3 120 42:13 315, 484 42:17 419, 574 42:21 360 43:3 535 43:6–20 128 43:11 277, 535 43:17 120 43:19 143 43:20 143 43:25 277 44 530, 598 44:13–19 529 44:14 594 44:17 574 44:18–19 352 44:18 128 44:22 282, 563 45:9–11 457 45:15 535 45:21 535 46:1–3 414 46:3–7 128 46:4 414 47:1 97 47:8 173 48:15 277 49:1 242 49:7 176 49:13 479 49:14 130 49:17–21 32 49:26 535 51:3 530 51:12 277 51:17 261 51:22 261, 269 52:1 97 53:2 584 54:4 419 54:15 414

Index of References 55:10 287 55:13 111 56:6 280 56:10–11 352, 353 56:11 597 57 577 57:2 202 57:3 167 57:14–58:14 335 57:18 577 58 329, 335, 336 58:1–7 337 58:1–5 32, 530 58:1–4 335, 339 58:1 336–38 58:2–7 336 58:3–4 329 59:5 402 59:13 328 60:5 181 60:7 281 60:10 281 60:16 535 61:2 224 63:4 224 64:8 457 65:1–2 280 65:8 207 65:10 32, 143, 144, 530 66:5 184 66:23 137, 256 Jeremiah 1:4–19 87 1:6 87 1:9 115 1:15 13 1:19 13 2–5 114 2–3 31, 80, 83 2:1–2 389 2:2–5 31 2:2 32, 85, 122, 140, 146

631 2:3 389 2:4 184, 187, 242 2:6–7 144 2:8 130 2:15 116 2:16 380 2:17–28 84 2:19 474, 576 2:20 211 2:23 150 233, 239, 2:24 281 3:1–4:2 127 3:1–2 166 3:1 175 3:2 4, 173 3:3 286 3:5 104, 203, 480 3:6 211, 474 3:8–9 167 3:8 474 3:11 474 3:12 282, 474, 480, 563 3:14 471 17, 31 3:18 3:19 166, 457 3:20 166 3:22 471, 474, 576, 577 4:1 584 4:3 440 4:4 440 4:5 339 4:7 116 4:10 87 4:11 100 4:26 144 4:27 480 4:28 190 4:30 169, 235 4:31 546 5:6 474 5:7–8 251 5:7 329, 330

632 Jeremiah (cont.) 5:9 91 5:10–14 121 5:10 480 5:13 539 5:15 597 5:18 480 5:20 324 5:22 233, 281 5:24 286, 287 5:27 339 5:29 91 5:30 300 6:1 339 6:8 116 6:15 118 6:28 274 7 187 7:1 339 7:2 184, 242 7:3 199 7:5 199 7:9 463 7:13 94 7:15 374 7:16–18:20 121 7:17 380 7:21–22 363, 376 7:22 294 7:23 100 7:25 94 8:2 381 8:5 474 8:9 118 8:12 118 8:18 274 8:21 262 9:1 167 9:3 274 9:6 476 9:8 91 9:10 142 9:13 150 9:24 91 10:3–10 530 10:14 118 10:21 536

Index of References 10:22 116 11:4 162 11:13 211, 463 11:17 211, 409 11:20 108 12:1 592 12:2 583 12:4 190 12:11 116 12:14 392 12:16 130 13:12 172 13:16 116 14 364 14:1 566, 567 14:7 474 14:10 364, 567 14:14 469 14:19–22 576 15:1–9 576 15:1 576 15:3 91 15:5 153 16:12 469 16:17 332 17:1 422 17:10 199 17:14 285 17:20 184 17:25 176 18:11 199, 282 18:16 116 18:17 495, 553 18:20 170 18:22 170 19:3 184 19:5 130 19:7 401 19:8 116 20:7 19 20:12 108 21:11 184 21:14 91 22:6 116 22:20 119 22:22 119 22:28 347, 356

22:30 469 23:10 167 23:13–14 300 23:13 130 23:14 300 23:17 130 23:34 91 23:36 130 24:7 162, 564 25:4–5 200 25:4 94 25:5 282 25:9 116, 309 25:12 91, 116 25:15 310 25:29 351 25:31 108 25:33 381 25:34 357, 554 25:37 420 26 453 26:2 339 26:3 479 26:5 94 26:12–15 331 26:13 199 26:17–19 452 26:18 116 26:20–23 292 27:8 91 28:12 67 29–33 481 29:9 184 29:10 91 29:13 563 29:14 305 29:17 301 29:19 94 29:23 167, 412 29:26 385 29:30 67 30:3 305 30:11 480 30:12–13 271 30:12 273 30:13 271 30:14 119

30:17 576 30:18 305 30:20 91 30:22 100, 162 31 430 31:9 32, 184, 236, 457, 598 31:12 153 31:17 374 31:18 285, 430, 431 31:19 32, 374, 390, 466, 471 31:20 466 31:21 393 31:23 305 31:33 318 31:34 285 32:17 87 32:19 199 32:20 182 32:24 182 32:26 67 32:29 463 32:32 409 32:40 390 32:44 305 32:38 162 33:1 67 33:7 305 33:9 181 33:11 305 33:19 67 33:22 103 33:23 67 33:26 305 34:12 67 34:15 564 34:16 564 35:12 67 35:14 94 35:15 282 36:3 564 36:27 67 36:31 91

Index of References 37:6 67 40:5 562 41–44 485 42:7 67 42:11 13 42:15 184 43:8 67 43:13 178, 407 44:1 380 44:3 211, 409 44:4 94 44:5 463 44:6 380 44:7 107, 584 44:8 211, 463 44:9 380 44:13 91 44:15 463 44:17 211, 380 44:18 211 44:19 347, 463 44:24 184, 242 44:25 211 44:26 184, 185, 242 46:11 129 46:14 380 46:19 380 46:24 118 46:28 480 47:5 420, 456 48 107 48:1 118 48:12 172 48:13 30, 414, 492, 495, 510 48:20 118 48:36 168 48:38 356 48:39 476 48:40 339 48:47 182, 305 49:6 305 49:18 477 49:20 332 49:38 176

633 49:39 182, 305 50:2 118 50:3 116 50:4 324 50:19 374 50:40 477 50:45 332 51:2 401 51:17 118 51:22 107 51:25 142 51:29 116 51:33 91 51:44 91 51:47 91 51:52 91 Ezekiel 1 115 2:2 384 2:9–33 115 2:9 240 3 569, 579 3:12 26 3:16–21 135 3:16–19 291 3:17 386 3:24 384 4:12–15 88 4:12 87 4:13 87, 374, 379 4:14 87 5:1 292 5:9–15 392 5:15 392 6:3 184 6:13 211 7:10 589 7:14 339 7:26 514 8:17 318 9:8 87 11:13 87 11:19 318 12:22 514 12:25 412

634 Ezekiel (cont.) 13:2 184 13:6 497 13:7 497 13:8 497 13:9 497 13:20 588 14:6 282 14:9 19 14:11 162 14:17–18 398 16 4, 32, 80, 83, 84, 114, 119, 167, 169 16:12 140 16:26 409 16:31 138 16:32 167 16:33 119 16:34 138 16:36 119 16:37–39 114 16:37 119 16:41 138 16:43 146 16:46 477 16:53 305 16:60 32, 146 17:4 584 17:9 396 17:10 496, 553 17:22 584 18 579 18:10 115 18:11 249 18:30 282 19:12 496, 553 19:2 275 19:5 266 20:6 278 20:15 278 20:23 278 20:28 278 20:29 376 20:42 278

Index of References 21:5 87 21:26 179, 180 21:32 116 21:34 497 22:3 115 22:9 274 22:28 497 23 4, 32, 80, 83, 84, 114, 167, 169 23:5 119, 169 23:7 169 23:9 119, 169 23:11 81, 111, 169 23:12 169 23:16 169 23:20 169 23:22 119 23:29 81, 111 23:45 115 24:7 115 24:14 479 24:16 398 24:17 513 24:21 252 25:3 184 25:5 142, 143 25:25 143 26–28 507 26:6 478 26:7 344 26:17 476 27:26 496, 553 29:14 305 30:13 380 30:16 380 30:18 478 31:6 585 31:12 585 31:17 585 33 569, 579 33:1–20 135 33:1–9 291 33:1 282

33:2 386 33:3 339 33:6–7 386 33:6 339 33:31–32 169 34:31 536 34:7 184 34:9 184, 185 35:4 116 36:1 184 36:4 184 36:18 115 36:28 100, 162 36:31 199 37:4 184 37:15–23 31, 104 37:15–2 18 37:24–28 31 37:24 31 38:8 182 38:16 182 38:17 513 38:20 190 39:17 488 39:25 305 40:45 334 41:16 345 42:16 496 43:17 496 44 256 44:1 496 45:10–12 508 45:10–11 508 46:1 496 46:12 496 47–48 263 47:1 496 47:2 496 47:3 496 47:18 496 48:1 496 48:2 496 48:6 496 48:7 496 48:8 496 48:16 496

Hosea 1–14

103, 532, 573 1–7 4 1–3 3–7, 10, 11, 17, 27, 28, 31, 67, 69, 73, 74, 80, 81, 93, 95, 98, 108, 114, 128, 138, 149–51, 165, 167, 173, 174, 176, 185, 189, 230, 313, 462, 481, 523, 532, 573 1–2 1, 6, 14, 17, 33, 68, 81, 83, 91, 93, 97, 106, 115, 133, 145, 148, 155, 162–64, 220, 232 1 7, 13, 16, 18, 23, 78, 88, 96, 163, 164, 184, 559 1:1–6:1 25 1:1–11 23 1:1–9 43 1:1–3 91 1:1–2 7, 22, 68, 407 1:1 7, 11, 15, 22, 27,

635

Index of References 28, 67, 70, 73 1:2–9 21, 22, 87, 118 1:2–3 75, 79, 81, 86, 87, 230 15, 21, 1:2 22, 43, 67, 69– 81, 83, 86–88, 97, 108, 109, 111, 114, 117, 119, 138, 142, 160, 163–66, 169, 174, 230, 306, 328, 358, 371, 384, 463 1:3–2:25 88 1:3–9 76, 87, 89, 96, 101, 117, 163, 164 1:3–8 90 88, 163 1:3–6 1:3 15, 22, 75–77, 79, 84, 86–88, 90, 102, 172, 174 1:4–9 106, 160, 161 1:4–5 15, 22, 105 1:4 15, 28, 91, 92, 94–96, 100, 139, 160, 298, 383, 600

15, 94, 95, 97, 151, 158, 161, 375 1:6–9 107 1:6–7 15, 22 1:6 15, 28, 33, 90, 95–100, 107, 117, 126, 133, 181, 479 1:7 15, 28, 98, 99, 151 1:8–11 16, 22 1:8 16, 90, 95, 99 1:9 16, 22, 95, 96, 100, 107, 110 1:10 16, 17 1:10 Eng: 559 1:10 lxx 17 1:10–11 lxx 18 1:10–11 13 1:11 17, 18 1:11 lxx 17, 18 1:11–2:11 13 1:12 21 1:16–25 91 4, 10, 13, 2 16–19, 23, 32, 33, 69, 86, 87, 101, 108, 119, 124, 135, 138, 150, 156, 159–61, 184, 480, 481, 491, 559 1:5

636 Hosea (cont.) 2:1 38, 68, 78, 101, 103, 158, 559 2:1 Eng: 559 17, 18 2:1 mt 2:1–23 23 2:1–22 38 2:1–15 lxx 18 2:1–15 21, 22 2:1–10 44 2:1–3 mt 16 2:1–3 13, 18, 34, 88, 89, 97, 101, 108, 114, 117, 123, 135, 160, 161, 163 17, 18 2:1–2 mt 2:1–2 16 2:2–12:1 29 2:2–23 457 2:2–22 156 2:2–13 lxx 19 2:2–13 Eng: 13 2:2–5 31 2:2 17, 30, 31, 101, 103–105 2:3 96, 100, 101, 106, 107, 109, 559 2:3 mt 16, 18 2:3–23 mt 18 2:3–17 mt 18 81, 83, 2:4 89, 100, 101, 108–13, 117, 142, 148, 193, 212, 243 2:4 mt 18 2:4–25 121, 124

Index of References 2:4–17 123 2:4–16 97, 108 2:4–15 mt 19 2:4–15 13, 88, 108, 121, 160 2:4–14 108 2:4–5 118 2:5–15 114 2:5–7 120, 121 113, 114, 2:5 116–19, 134, 135, 139, 382 2:6–15 88 2:6 81, 86, 111, 117, 193 2:7–15 117 2:7 89, 118– 20, 124, 134 2:8–16 122–24 2:8–15 118 2:8–9 135 2:8 120–22, 124, 132–34, 141, 345 2:9–18 127 2:9–14 133, 141 2:9–10 149 2:9 119, 121, 124, 125, 127, 128, 133, 135, 136, 149, 175, 181, 405 2:10–19 131 2:10–18 130 2:10–11 140 2:10 128–30, 132, 134–36, 138, 139, 149, 175, 180, 205,

220, 346, 347, 523 2:11 120–22, 124, 126, 133, 134, 136, 181, 205, 207, 371, 481 2:11 mt 207 2:11–22 45 2:11–15 135 2:11–12 136 2:12 135, 207 2:13–15 136, 137 2:13 137 2:13 Eng: 573 2:14–23 Eng: 13 2:14–17 530 2:14–15 lxx 19 2:14–15 101 2:14 116, 138, 139, 150, 374 2:14 lxx 19 2:15 22, 88, 89, 119, 139, 140, 150, 383, 490, 491, 523, 573 2:15 lxx 144 2:15–25 163 2:16–25 13, 34, 88, 97, 101, 108, 117, 121, 135, 160 2:16–24 114, 135 2:16–23 lxx 18, 20 2:16–23 22, 108 2:16–22 21, 22 2:16–19 151 2:16–17 mt 19 2:16–17 19, 22, 121, 122, 124, 141, 389

2:16

19, 31, 32, 85, 108, 114, 120–24, 135, 136, 141, 143– 46, 151, 161, 173, 335, 476 2:16 mt 19 2:17 1, 20, 22, 34, 74, 139, 141–47, 152, 158, 329, 458 2:18–25 mt 18, 20 2:18–25 141 2:18–22 22 2:18–20 152 2:18–19 148, 149, 389 2:18 13, 95, 126, 127, 130, 148, 175, 490, 491 2:19–20 148 2:19 88, 119, 139, 150, 152, 523 2:20 95, 150– 52, 336 2:21–25 6, 159, 160 2:21–24 6, 151 2:21–22 lxx 20 2:21–22 34, 89, 151–58, 186, 187, 405 2:21 36, 152, 159, 176, 231, 232, 518 2:22–23 155

637

Index of References 2:22

22, 155, 156, 159, 341 2:23–25 21, 22, 46, 105, 119, 157, 158, 160 2:23–24 mt 20 2:23–24 20, 146–48, 157–61 2:23 13, 95, 147, 155, 158–61, 375, 490, 491 89, 106 2:24–25 2:24 159, 161, 205 2:25 18, 22, 96, 97, 100, 141, 159, 161, 320 3–13 396 3 7, 20, 22, 31, 78, 79, 163, 164, 166, 174, 175, 177, 178, 230, 411 3:1–8 21 3:1–5 12, 23, 46 3:1–3 166, 173, 175 3:1–2 169 3:1 77, 164, 165, 167–71, 174, 235 3:2 169–71, 173, 174, 518 3:2 lxx 172 3:3 169, 172, 173, 175

3:4–5

173, 175, 411, 412 3:4 169, 175, 176, 179, 180, 187, 231, 264, 343, 406, 407 3:4 lxx 193 3:5 18, 22, 30, 31, 103, 104, 126, 176, 180–83, 324, 346, 564, 565 3:9 180 4–14 3, 5–12, 27, 35, 67, 69, 73, 98, 178, 185, 189, 211, 230, 235, 236, 244, 248, 259, 268, 305, 308, 321, 330, 332, 336, 339, 344, 352, 353, 374, 385–87, 394, 401, 403, 407, 411, 419, 421, 422, 430, 434, 435, 458, 462, 481, 485, 502, 514, 523, 527, 528, 530, 557, 561, 573, 597, 598, 600 4–12 29, 365

638 Hosea (cont.) 4–11 10, 404 4–9 11 4–7 292 4–6 306 4–5 243 4 2, 4, 5, 20, 39, 112, 156, 184–87, 189, 197, 216, 217, 220, 221, 225, 228, 232, 234, 240–42, 248–50, 299, 358, 369, 372, 373, 505 4:1–5:6 255 4:1–5:4 262 4:1–19 21–23 4:1–18 232 4:1–14 20, 22 4:1–10 47 4:1–9 185 4:1–3 187, 191 4:1–2 83, 156, 187, 243, 251, 294, 295, 299 109, 153, 4:1 186, 243, 281, 285, 306, 341, 411, 441, 498 4:2–3 189 4:2 187–89, 251, 285, 286, 293, 301, 510, 534 4:3 190 4:4–10 191

Index of References 4:4–8

191, 193, 200, 255 4:4–6 243 4:4–5 242, 300 4:4 109, 191, 192, 199, 243, 298 233, 279, 4:5–6 420 147, 193, 4:5 253, 292, 420, 456, 565, 578, 597 4:6–12 578 4:6–9 198 4:6 33, 192– 96, 248, 255–57, 353, 399, 456, 597 4:7 196, 238, 404, 460 197, 255, 4:8 257, 448, 565 4:9–19 240 4:9–10 198 4:9 139, 198– 200, 212, 243, 383 4:10–19 472 4:10–18 5, 232, 233, 236, 237, 301 4:10–16 48 4:10–15 210, 222, 226, 299, 313, 329, 358, 367, 380 4:10–14 519 4:10–12 204, 251 4:10–11 202–204, 208, 209, 250, 331

189, 200– 204, 237, 250, 251 4:11–12 208 4:11 190, 203–207, 209, 324, 329, 370 4:12 81, 111, 200, 204, 207–209 4:13–15 77, 137, 174, 216 167, 209, 4:13–14 212, 226, 227, 230, 250, 251 4:13–14 lxx 226 4:13 211, 212, 463, 581, 582 4:13 lxx 226, 227 38, 39, 4:14 112, 139, 195, 200, 210, 212– 14, 216, 220–22, 226, 230–32, 313, 323, 353, 363, 364, 383, 436, 552, 597, 598 4:14 lxx 227 4:14–5:2 38 4:14–15 369 4:15–19 20, 22, 184 4:15 29, 103, 187, 211, 222, 227– 29, 231, 232, 234, 250, 253, 260, 339, 4:10

347, 359, 364, 395, 413, 414, 421, 516 4:16 232–34, 372 4:17–19 49 4:17–18 48, 237 4:17–18 mt 49 4:17 169, 234, 235, 347, 413, 419 4:18 197, 200, 201, 234–38, 250, 361 4:19 22, 239, 240 5–11 469 5–7 269, 272 5 2, 27, 241, 242, 248, 250, 251, 358, 430, 485 5:1–17 21 5:1–7 20, 22, 23, 49, 241–43 5:1–6 498 5:1 187, 242–44, 246, 255, 261, 295, 300, 302, 306, 339, 436, 512 5:2 245–47, 387, 388 5:3–5 301 5:3–4 5, 358 5:3 28, 235, 236, 248, 268, 301, 306, 313, 367, 418, 477

Index of References 5:4–5 324 5:4 81, 111, 198, 200, 251, 565 5:5–6 270 5:5 30, 52, 103, 235, 251–53, 298, 323, 597 5:6–15 326 5:6 253–55, 258, 281, 363, 376, 565 5:7 22, 241, 254–57, 278, 302 5:8–7:12 23 5:8–7:12 mt 21 5:8–6:11 22, 241, 258, 259 22, 241 5:8–6:3 5:8–15 258, 412 5:8–13 355 5:8–10 305, 347 5:8–9 302 5:8 14, 49, 228, 241, 259–61, 339, 413, 414, 421 5:9–15 50, 259 5:9–10 412 5:9 235, 248, 259, 262 5:10–11 259 5:10 3, 9, 27, 243, 263–65, 268, 420, 436, 600 5:11 235, 265– 67, 419 5:12–13 269, 276 5:12 28, 92, 235, 236,

639 248, 268, 274, 275, 277, 337, 418, 419, 494 5:13–6:2 305 5:13–14 497 5:13 3, 9, 11, 28, 92, 115, 235, 236, 248, 259, 268– 74, 282, 320, 321, 332, 337, 355–58, 401, 415, 418, 419, 455, 470, 485, 494, 600 5:14–15 279, 281 5:14 28, 92, 235, 236, 248, 268, 274–79, 282, 337, 419, 538 5:15–6:11 280 5:15 279–81, 408–10, 464 6–7 13, 14 6 23, 241, 302, 304, 306, 559 6:1–11 595 6:1–3 50, 258, 259, 281, 285, 287, 409, 595 6:1–2 36 6:1 24, 243, 282, 283, 320, 522, 564, 565 6:2–10:11 25

640 Hosea (cont.) 6:2 25, 38, 283–85 6:3 34, 241, 285–87, 293 14, 22, 6:4–7:12 241 6:4–11 51, 258, 287 6:4–10 14, 260, 302, 305 6:4 14, 92, 123, 235, 236, 241, 248, 268, 287–91, 337, 419 6:5 2, 34, 292–94, 510, 534 6:6–11 595 6:6 7, 229, 294, 298, 363, 366, 376, 514, 565 6:7–11 295 6:7–10 260 6:7 295–97, 336 6:8 296–98, 515, 516 6:9 235, 296, 298, 299, 394, 455, 534 6:10 5, 28, 235, 236, 268, 300– 302, 305, 306, 313, 339, 418 6:11–7:1 304 6:11 13, 22, 30, 51, 103, 259,

Index of References 302, 304–306 6:11 Eng: 559 7–8 2, 241 13, 23, 7 51, 240, 259, 303–306, 312, 334, 384, 485, 559, 600 7:1–12 22, 304 7:1–9 21 7:1–2 51 7:1 13, 235, 244, 248, 304–307, 419, 441, 559 7:2 14, 198, 251, 307, 567 7:3–13 52 7:3–12 14 7:3–9 320 7:3–7 5, 307, 308, 316, 335, 346, 448 7:3–5 308, 309, 334 7:3 5, 176, 264, 307– 309, 312, 313, 317, 343, 344, 358, 395, 541, 543 7:4 309, 313–18 7:5 176, 264, 309–13, 317, 343, 344, 395, 541 7:6–7 317 7:6 317, 318, 320

7:7 319, 567 7:8–9 320 7:8 235, 319–22, 419, 524 7:9 320–22, 353, 597 7:10–12 497 7:10–11 381 7:10 251, 252, 323, 324, 337, 504, 565 7:11–17 489 7:11–16 115 7:11–13 321, 324, 326, 412 7:11–12 358 7:11 9, 11, 235, 259, 324, 326, 332, 333, 353, 355–57, 375, 401, 415, 419, 458, 470, 485, 489, 494, 571, 597 7:12–13 326 7:12 22, 241, 304, 326, 327 7:13–8:14 22, 23, 241 7:13–8:14 mt 21 7:13–14 22, 335 7:13–14 mt 21 7:13 241, 304, 328, 334 7:14–8:14 22, 335 7:14–8:14 mt 21 7:14–16 53 7:14 5, 13, 32, 134, 205, 207, 301, 313, 324, 329–31,

341, 367, 380, 530 7:14 mt 21 7:15–16 321, 326, 332, 358 7:15 324, 329, 332 7:16 333, 334, 356, 382, 470, 475, 485, 494 5, 304, 8 312, 334, 362, 364, 366, 462, 485 8:1–14 335 8:1–7 53 8:1–4 335 8:1–3 335 8:1–2 32, 335, 339, 530 8:1 24, 336– 39, 341, 522 8:2 340–42, 349 8:3 341–43, 353, 597 8:4–6 462, 528 8:4 235, 315, 334, 335, 343–47, 358, 394, 411, 413, 448, 531, 541–43, 573, 591, 592 8:5–6 335, 347, 349, 352, 413 8:5 349–51, 353, 573, 591 8:6 320, 349, 350, 353, 573

641

Index of References 8:7–14 335, 339 8:7–10 321 8:7–8 355 8:7 337, 351, 354–56, 396 54, 115 8:8–14 8:8–10 411 8:8 355, 356 8:9–10 355, 358 235, 332, 8:9 335, 357, 358, 401, 415, 419, 485, 494, 571 8:10 5, 176, 264, 312, 334, 343, 344, 358, 395, 470, 541 8:11–14 30, 335, 336 8:11–12 359 8:11 235, 359, 365, 409, 410, 419, 485 8:12 336, 353, 359, 360, 534, 597 8:13 361–64, 375, 376, 412, 458, 485, 565 8:14 22, 30, 103, 334, 364–66 8:16 485 9 4, 5, 22, 240, 251, 321, 358, 367, 369, 372, 373, 485 9:1–17 23, 389

22, 55, 364, 367 9:1–7 12 9:1–3 301, 367 5, 369, 9:1–2 370, 372, 380 9:1 138, 314, 358, 367– 69, 373, 405, 416 9:2–3 376 9:2 205, 207, 329, 370, 371, 373 9:3–6 470 9:3–4 379 235, 374– 9:3 76, 419, 458, 469, 485, 571 9:4–7 375 9:4 375–79, 528 9:5 367, 379 9:6–7 380 9:6 367, 380– 82, 458, 469, 485 9:7–9 367, 386 9:7–8 385, 387 9:7 35, 368, 383–89 9:8–9 398 9:8 235, 368, 386, 390, 398, 419 9:9 22, 181, 245, 246, 364, 368, 383, 387– 89, 425 9:10–17 21, 22, 56, 367 9:10–16 22, 367, 389 9:1–9

642 Hosea (cont.) 9:10 246, 367, 389, 391, 394, 523, 525 9:11 235, 390, 393, 397, 419 345, 390, 9:12 393, 397 9:13–16 390 9:13 235, 291, 390, 391, 419 9:14 392, 393, 548 9:15 198, 233, 251, 394, 395, 398 22, 235, 9:16 396–98, 464, 532, 567, 579 9:17 22, 367, 389, 398, 399 11, 481 10–14 10 2, 36, 401, 402, 404, 407, 410, 414, 418, 432, 454 10:1–11:4 21–23, 457 10:1–8 21, 22 10:1–2 196, 365, 407 10:1 56, 401– 406, 408, 409, 416, 417 10:2–11 57 10:2–3 411, 412 10:2 178, 320, 404, 407–11, 423, 560

Index of References 10:3

411, 414, 420 10:4 336, 382, 401, 412, 413, 455, 518, 589 10:5–6 448 10:5 228, 260, 335, 347, 413–17, 421, 454 10:6 3, 11, 28, 178, 235, 236, 248, 268, 270, 306, 321, 375, 382, 415, 418, 455, 470, 494, 600 420, 455, 10:7 456 10:7 lxx 455 10:8 22, 35, 421–25, 454 10:9–11:11 22 10:9–15 457 10:9–10 448 10:9 394, 424–27, 429, 430 10:10–11 428, 423, 427–30, 548 10:10 35, 388 10:11 92, 235, 236, 248, 268, 337, 419, 428, 430–36, 446, 512 10:12–14:5 25 10:12–15 58 10:12–13 270, 442 10:12 25, 437– 42 10:13 440–44

10:14

388, 394, 444, 446–52, 561, 600 10:15 57, 413, 420, 454–57 11–12 522 11 13, 23, 36, 366, 457, 477, 481, 483, 485, 571 11:1–5 58 11:1–3 466 11:1 24, 35, 57, 394, 457–59, 465, 470 11:2 139, 140, 388, 397, 404, 458–62, 464, 466, 523, 532 11:3 235, 419, 464–66, 471, 480 11:4–5 472 11:4 466, 467, 471, 472 11:5–14:1 21, 23, 457, 520, 522, 544 22, 493, 11:5–9 544 11:5–9 mt 21 11:5 320, 367, 381, 401, 457, 458, 468–72, 490, 494, 565, 571 11:6–11 59 11:6–7 471 11:6 472, 473 11:7–12:12 37, 474

11:7

35, 471, 474, 475, 482, 565 11:8–9 471, 476, 477, 481 11:8 28, 36, 123, 235, 236, 238, 248, 268, 306, 418, 476, 477, 480 235, 419, 11:9 471, 476, 478, 480–84 14, 22, 11:10–14:1 493, 544 11:10–14:1 mt 21 469, 485 11:10–11 11:10 320, 484–86, 490, 558 11:11 13, 22, 401, 458, 485–87, 489–91, 494, 571 11:12 493 11:17 565 12–14 10 12 13, 23, 29, 348, 366, 414, 492, 493, 497, 498, 500, 501, 503, 504, 508, 510, 511, 516, 519, 520, 522, 556 12:1–13:11 22 12:1–13:10 22 12:1–15 29, 493, 501, 520 12:1–14 520 12:1–10 520

643

Index of References 12:1–3 556 12:1–2 59 12:1 28–30, 103, 235, 236, 248, 268, 339, 418, 457, 493–95, 504, 520, 556 12:2–6 520 12:2 235, 336, 353, 357, 381, 401, 419, 458, 495–97, 562, 597 12:3–12 60 12:3 29, 109, 198, 199, 498, 499, 501, 562 495, 504, 12:4–6 519 12:4 251, 499, 500, 508 12:5–15 493 12:5 309, 339, 357, 374, 378, 414, 492, 499– 502, 562 12:6 502 12:7 282, 504, 505, 520, 521 12:8–9 493, 506, 520 12:8 505, 506, 510, 562 12:9 235, 419, 505, 506, 508–10 12:10–15 506 12:10–11 511, 520 12:10 293, 458, 510, 511

12:11–12

294, 363, 376 12:11 36, 129, 294, 394, 395, 436, 505, 511– 14, 520 12:12 60, 177, 297, 410, 413, 416, 423, 514– 18, 520 12:13–14:10 37, 38 12:13–14 514, 518–20 12:13–15 61 12:13 518–20 458, 511, 12:14 518–20, 523 12:15–14:1 520 12:15 235, 419, 520 13–14 14 13 23, 62, 492, 522, 526, 532, 541, 548, 552, 553, 556–58, 562 13:1–14:1 562 13:1–9 61 13:1–2 462, 463 24, 235, 13:1 248, 320, 389, 394, 419, 522– 27, 556 13:2 235, 335, 347, 382, 413, 462, 464, 526– 32, 573, 591, 592 13:3 532, 573

644 Hosea (cont.) 13:4 123, 125, 293, 458, 511, 533–35 13:5 496, 535, 536 13:6 522, 536, 538 13:7–8 536 13:7 259, 276, 537, 538, 541, 593 13:8 538 13:9 538–40 13:10–14:1 554 13:10–14 553, 554 62, 542 13:10–11 13:10 22, 176, 264, 343–46, 394, 395, 445, 523, 540–43, 547, 548, 550, 553 13:11–14:1 22 13:11 62, 542, 544 13:12–14:1 22, 62, 544 62, 235, 13:12 419, 544, 545, 552 13:13–15 554 13:13 320, 353, 524, 537, 545, 546, 552, 555, 597 13:14 510, 541, 543, 546– 50, 553 13:15–14:1 553, 554 13:15 320, 357, 496, 524,

Index of References 551–56, 579 13:16 24, 25, 62, 522, 557–59 14 13:16 Eng: 14 23, 32, 33, 36, 38, 62, 553, 556, 557, 559, 569, 571, 575, 579, 585, 591, 592 14:1–10 63 14:1–8 562 14:1–5 577 14:1 12, 14, 22, 24, 25, 62, 453, 522, 544, 554, 556–61, 567 14:1 lxx 560 14:2–10 12, 22, 23, 38, 520, 558, 562, 567, 595 14:2–10 mt 21 14:2–9 562, 566, 596 14:2–8 22 14:2–4 562 14:2–3 282, 562, 570, 576, 591 14:2 12, 38, 63, 253, 282, 471, 504, 544, 557, 558, 562, 564– 66, 598

566, 567, 576, 579, 584, 590, 591, 595 14:3 36, 294, 319, 363, 366, 376, 514, 562, 563, 565–71, 576, 579 14:4–9 594 14:4 9, 99, 215, 357, 401, 444, 562, 569, 571–73, 575, 590, 593, 594 14:5–9 568, 569, 576 14:5–8 590, 591, 594 562, 565, 14:5 577 14:5 Eng: 580 14:5 lxx 577 14:6–10 25 14:6–8 562, 590, 592 14:6–7 593 14:6 25, 283, 389, 562, 579, 580, 582, 583, 586, 588 14:7 38, 562, 580, 583, 584 14:8 22, 126, 181, 419, 562, 584, 588, 590, 594 14:9–10 22 14:9 235, 347, 386, 413, 14:3–4

562, 571, 576, 590–95 14:10 22, 195, 253, 353, 567, 596–98 14:14 215 Joel 1:2 242 1:7 420 1:10 190 1:12 118, 190 1:14 38 1:17 423 2 579 2:1 261, 339 2:6 111 2:12–14 578 2:12–13 282 2:12 563 2:13–14 563 2:13 351 2:14 38 2:15–4:4 595 2:15–27 38 2:15–17 595 2:16 584 2:17 595 2:18–4:3 595 2:19 128 2:23 286, 438, 439 2:24 207 3:1 514 4:19 445 11–27 558 Amos 1–2 365 1:1 28, 69 1:4 365 1:7 365 1:10 365 1:12 365 1:13 561

Index of References

645

1:14 365 7:14 470 2:2 365 7:17 120, 375, 2:5 365 379 2:6–8 83 8:1 98 2:6 266 8:4 242 2:7 349, 366, 8:5 137, 508 409 8:7 238 361, 396 2:9 8:17 399 2:10 4593:1 9 367, 481 242 9:11–15 553 3:2 91, 366 9:11 18, 180 3:3 326 9:13 424 3:6 337, 9:14 305 3393:11 9:15 583 120 3:13 242 Obadiah 3:14 91 1 514 4 563 5 456 4:1 242 7 271 4:4 395, 516, 18 153 517 4:6–11 324 Jonah 4:6 563 1:1 67 4:8 563 3:1 67 4:9 563 3:9 351 4:10 563 4:2 351 4:11 477, 563 4:8 495, 553 4:12 120 4:9 406 5 228 5:1 242 Micah 5:4–6 240 1–5 8 5:4 228 1–3 9 5:5 228, 395, 1:1 69 416, 516, 1:2 242, 406 517 1:5 340, 422 5:11 120 116, 515, 1:6 5:12 197 518 5:13 120 1:7 116, 138, 5:16 120 347, 373, 5:21–25 295, 514 413 5:21–22 227 1:10–16 416 5:22–23 229 1:10 368, 369 6:7 120 1:14 120 6:8 252 2:1–4 121 7:1–9 392 2:3 120 7:3 479 2:4 476 7:9 177 2:5 120

646 Micah (cont.) 3–4 339 3:1 242 3:6 120 3:9–12 121 3:9 242 3:11 266, 396 3:12 116, 120, 410, 423, 515, 518 4:1 102, 182, 183, 424 4:2 195 4:4 434 4:10 298 5:2 120 5:9–10 574 8, 9, 98 6–7 6:1–2 109, 242 187, 582 6:2 6:6–8 514 6:9 242 6:15 205, 207 7:3 383 7:10 541 7:14 144 7:15 459 7:18–20 38, 553, 558 7:18 98 Nahum 1:1 514 1:9 332 2:3 401 2:10 357, 554 2:11 111 2:13 275 3:4 81, 111 3:10 453 3:19 272–74 Habakkuk 1:2 319 2:8 298 2:12 298 2:16 197 2:17 298

Index of References 3:17 588 Zephaniah 1:2 415 1:3 190 1:6 85 1:8 91 1:9 91 1:11 456 1:12 91 2:4 416 2:7 305 2:9 120 3:8 120 3:20 305 Haggai 1:1 513 1:3 67, 513 2:1 513 2:12 470 2:20 67 Zechariah 1–8 8 1:1 292 1:3–4 282 1:4 199 1:16 120 2:15 162 7:7 513 7:12 513 9–14 8 9:5 118 10:1 286 10:2 517 10:3 91 10:5 118 11 165 11:7 120 11:13–14 165 11:15 165 12–14 95 12:11 149 13:4 513 13:6 112, 119 14:21 507

Malachi 1:1 513 1:3 116 2:7 194, 195 3:5 167 3:6–12 483 3:7 282 3:20 239 Psalms 1:4 533 2:6 528 2:11 416 2:12 314 3:3 354 4:8 73 5:7 188 6:2 247 6:5 563 7:8 563 7:16 170 8:3 584 8:9 190 9:5 489 9:15 73 10:9 246 10:14 575 10:18 575 12:3 408 14:4 298 14:5 181 14:7 305 15:2 298 17:8 586 18:6 546 19:3 193 19:15 328 22:2 216 22:7 482, 483 22:11 398 22:24 414 23:1 536 23:5 333 24:7 285 26:2 488 27:2 565 27:14 505 28:3 298

29:1 237, 361 29:2 361 29:5 362 29:6 362 29:9 362 29:10 362 30:4 283 33:8 414 35:5 533 35:17 446 36:8 586 36:13 298 37:34 349 37:38 349 42:3 103 42:4 541 42:11 541 45:3 238 45:5 263 45:8 311 45:20 347 46:1–2 347 46:9 116 47:2 262 48:3 298 48:8 495, 553 48:11 196 49:4 311, 328 49:15 546 50:18 167 52:5 311 53:5 298 53:7 305 55:4 386 55:24 188 56:4 258 56:9 223, 224 56:11 567 57:7 170 60:3 314 62:12 209, 568 63:4 281 66:10 196 68:3 196 68:6 575 68:8 143 69:6 408 69:15 285

Index of References 71:6 398 72:7 588 74:1 536 76:11 311 77:3 479 78:8 233 78:26 496, 553 78:33 315 78:34 281 78:38 484 78:40 143 78:57 333 79:1 116 79:5 314 79:10 541 79:13 536 80:2 536 80:10 580 80:12 584 81:2 262 81:4 489 84:3 103 84:4 487, 488 85:2 305 85:6 314 86:5 319 89:8 495 89:13 244 89:33 91 89:36–38 180 90:13 563 91:1 586 91:5–6 547 91:8 383 91:12 281 91:13 276 92:3 318 92:8 589 92:10 158, 392 92:13–14 588 92:13 412 92:16 354 93:3 158, 392 94:3 158 94:9 246 94:10 246, 325 94:12 247 94:13 170

647 95:1–2 261 95:7 536 96:7 237, 361, 369 96:8 237, 361 97:11 113 98:4 262 100:1 262 100:3 536 102:7 488 106:14 143 107:4 143 107:43 598 109:4 247 111:5 223 113 432 113:5 432 113:6 432 113:7 432 113:8 432 114:1 113 114:4 424 114:5 595 114:6 424 114:9 441 115:2 541 115:4 347, 530, 574 116:15 354 118:18 325 119:107 283 119:149 283 119:154 283 119:156 283 119:159 283 119:172 122 119:25 283 119:37 283 119:40 283 119:43 263 119:85 170 119:88 283 123:2 196 124:3 318 126:1 306 126:4 563 132:11 398 132:12 334

648 Psalms (cont.) 132:13–14 428 135:4 113 135:13 502 135:15 347, 574 137 454 137:4 476 137:6 337 137:7 105 137:9 453, 561 139:19 188 145:18 319 146:5 540 146:9 575 149:9 224 182:2 96 Proverbs 1:2 597 1:5 596 1:6 597 1:8 107 1:20 311 1:28 280, 281 189, 201, 3:10 207 3:24 181 3:25 446 3:35 197 4:1–18 233 4:9 238, 477 5:3 337 5:12 476 5:22 281 6:3 543 6:15 286 6:20 107 6:23 275 7:8–27 233 7:15 280 7:19 233 8:5 597 8:7 337 8:14–16 176 8:17 281 8:26 446 9:1 311

Index of References 9:2 310 9:5 376 9:6 82 9:7 238, 325 10:4 333 10:15 298 11:2 238 11:10 298 11:13 274 11:18 354, 441 12:10 536 12:16 238 12:24 333 13:18 238 14:6 596 14:8 597 14:12 240 14:34 417 16:27 170 17:12 538 17:22 272–74 18:12 524 18:14 240 18:15 596 18:19 298 19:15 333 19:18 325 20:10 508 20:19 274 21:20 391 22:8 354, 441 22:17 275 22:19 275 22:28 264 23:10 264 23:28 246 23:35 97 24:7 311 24:9 422 24:16 445, 598 26:1 196 26:2 487 26:8 196 26:13 275 26:18 196 26:19 196 26:27 170

28:15 275 29:8 298 29:17 325 30:1 149 30:4 153 30:8 223, 224, 497 30:12 267 30:20 167 30:29 403 30:30 275 31:1 247 31:15 223, 224 31:22 215 31:24 507 34:30–31 382 Job 1–2 411 1 481 1:1 330, 505, 525 1:6 546 1:8 505, 525 1:9 330 1:16 554 1:19 240 1:21 398, 542 2:1 505, 546 2:3 330, 525 2:9 230 2:10 196 2:11 326 3:3 193 3:22 368, 416 3:25 181 4:3 331 4:8 354, 441, 443 4:10–11 276 4:11 275 4:12–21 249 4:13 514 4:17–19 262 5:1 495, 504 5:2 345 5:8 439

6:2 345 6:10 248 6:27 170 7:8 593 7:9–10 277 7:14 514 8:10 328 8:16 584 8:22 419 9:12 246 9:22 592 9:24 543 10:8 347 10:11 345 10:17 345 10:22 354 12:7 190 12:8 190 14:7 584 14:9 588 14:17 545 15:2 496 15:4 504 15:13–16 504 15:13 328 15:18 249 15:30 584 16:3 496 16:8 252, 323 16:9 386 17:7 345 17:13 214, 215 543, 593 17:15 18:8 540 18:13 473 19:2 281 19:6 543 230, 398 19:17 19:23 543 20:8 513 20:16 412 21:7–15 592 21:10 435 21:19–20 311 24:25 543 25:1 504 27:11 249

649

Index of References 27:21 496, 553 28:8 276 28:28 330, 390, 411, 505, 525 29:23 286 30:21 386 30:30 479 31:1 230 31:9–11 230 31:9–10 230 31:9 222, 230 31:18 398 33:15 513 36:1 97 37:20 356 38:24 496, 553 39:7 298 40:30 170, 507 40:31 345 41:22 214, 215 41:26 276 42:5 326 42:7–9 442 42:10 305 Song of Songs 1:1 455 1:4 589 1:7 372 1:9 432 2:5 168, 214 2:8 424 3:4 118 3:10 214 4:8 593 5:16 337 6:9 362 6:11 588 7:10 337, 568 7:13 588 8:1 584 Lamentations 1:2 432 1:19 119 2:6 345

2:7 349 2:11 238, 298, 584 2:14 94 3:8 345 3:19 413 3:40 564 3:52 487 3:55–66 595 4:2 172 4:4 337, 584 4:6 477 4:8 479 4:20 585 5:10 478, 479 5:21 285, 564 Ruth 1:4 75 1:7 482 1:18 556 2:14 246 2:16 246 3:1–8 371 Esther 2:7 75 4:11 107 8:3 97 Ecclesiastes 1:14 496 1:17 496 2:2 334 2:11 496 2:17 496 2:24 334 2:26 496 3:4 416, 417 4:4 496 4:6 496 4:16 496 5:1–2 567 5:1 328 5:12 273, 334 5:14 398 5:15 273

650 Ecclesiastes (cont.) 5:18 334 6:9 496 7:23 334 9:1–6 442 9:2 198, 341 9:9 433 9:11 596 9:13 334 12:4 487 12:11 345 12:13–14 598 Daniel 2:10 469 2:37 344, 361 2:38 361 2:48 361 5:18 361 7:27 469 8:20 420 8:21 420 10:14 182 10:18 97 10:20 481 Ezra 2:17 381 6:8 469 8:33 89 9:4 469 9:14 314 10:44 75 Nehemiah 5:18 487 6:14 89 6:19 568 7:31 381 9:35 200 10:24 68 10:30 68 11:25–31 478 13:12 128 13:25 75

Index of References 1 Chronicles 5:6 537 8:33 132 9:39 132 15:27 179 16:3 168 16:26 125 16:28 369 17:3 67 27:20 68 2 Chronicles 3:11–13 240 6:36 314 7:19 564 11:2 67 11:21 75 13:21 75 14:2 178 16:14 170 18:18 184, 185 18:19 19, 296 21:2 268 22:6 106 24 292 24:3 75 24:7 132, 150 24:17–22 292 25:7 85 25:10 318 28:2 150 28:4 211 28:27 268 29:1 89 31:1 178 31:5 128 32:27 357, 554 32:28 134 33:3 150 36:16 311 New Testament Matthew 2:1–15 459 2:14–15 459 2:15 35, 459 5:17 185

5:27–28 230 6:1 223 13:8 355 23:35 292 23:39 292 27:46 216 Mark 15:34 216 Luke 11:3 223 23:31 35, 423 24:7 283 John 8:5 230 8:7 231 Romans 9:25–26 68 1 Corinthians 15 549 15:4 283 15:55 549 Revelation 6:15–16

35, 423

Apocrypha Ecclesiasticus 7:3 355 42 329 50:28–29 598 Qumran 1QH col: 16, l: 23

581

1QS 10:22 135 4QShirb 18:25 135

Damascus Document 4:20 216 5:6 216 Mishnah Abot 1:1 360 5:16 578 ullin 12:3 271 Makkot 3:15 173 3:16 360

Babylonian Talmud Bava Batra 14b 73 15a 71, 98 16a 68

Soṭah 47b 216

Bekorot 24a 438

Tosefta Megillah 3:39 152

Berakot 20a 173 32b 129 Beṣa 16a 489

Menaot 10:4 361

‘Erubin 100a 173

Parah 3:8 126

Giṭṭin 6b 424 53a 191 57b 292 60b 360

Rosh Ha-Shanah 31a 279 32b 300 Soṭah 7:1–2 313 9:9 38, 167, 210, 231, 313

ullin 27a 245 Megillah 10b 215 Pesaim 87a

73, 75, 77, 78 79, 89, 90

Sukkah 3:1–3 215 3:1 240

87b

Tamid 6:3 126

Qiddushin 39b 173

Yoma 1:3 126 1:5 126 1:7 126 4:1 126

Rosh Ha-Shanah 8a–b 489

Zebaim 14:5 517

651

Index of References

Sanhedrin 56b 266 95a 275 96b 292

Ta‘anit 5a 483

Moed Qaṭan 1:1 132 Midrash Genesis Rabbah 19:9 296 Lamentations Rabbah 6:6 68 Prologue 7 263 Proem 23 292 Seder Eliyahu Rabbah 14:68 438 Classical Herodotus Histories 1.181 221 1.199 218 Codices Aleppo Codex ll. 1–4 l. 5 l. 6 l. 7

70 70 70 70

Ancient Near Eastern Texts ANET pp. 283–84 269 Code of Hammurapi Law 65 182

652 Gilgamesh 11, l. 227

Index of References

322

KAI 10 94 14 94 14:11–12 396 14:20 94 14:22 94 26, A, I, l. 18–II, l. 3 400 214, l. 17 378 214, ll. 21–22 378 258, l. 3 378

KAR 1:225, l. 1 1:226, l. 1 1:228 A, l. 23 1:228 B, l. 2 1:239, l. 3 1:246, l. 1 KTU 1.3, ll. 5–7 1.17, col. 6, ll. 7–8

415 415 415 415 415 415 214 205

1.23, 62–63 190 1.112, l. 21 225 1.114 205 1.114, ll. 3–4 205 Lachish Letters 4.5 215 RIMA 3 A.O.103.1 col. i ll. 39–53a

450

I n d ex of A ut hor s Abecassis, I. 312 Abronin, A. 170 Adams, K. 226 Aejmelaeus, A. 275 Ahituv, S. 445 Albrecht, K. 553 al-Kumisi, D. 221 Alt, A. 259 Alter, R. 472 Amit, Y. 471, 472 Andersen, F. I. 72, 82, 111, 126, 132, 154, 164, 187–89, 232, 238, 276, 307, 308, 316, 317, 338, 342, 343, 351, 368, 380, 395, 427, 432, 435, 447, 449, 451, 452, 461, 483, 486, 497, 531, 555, 566 Anderson, A. W. 580, 588 Arnold, B. T. 342 Asensio, F. 288 Ashbel, D. 289, 290 Aster, S. Z. 105 Astour, M. B. 448 Avishur, Y. 138, 205, 318, 392 Baer, S. 156 Baker, D. W. 498 Bandyopadhyay, R. 373 Barth, J. 419 Bauer, H. 82, 111 Beer, G. 147 Ben-Yashar, M. I. B. 25, 32, 438 Ben-Zvi, E. 436 Bentzen, A. 187 Berge, K. 599 Berlin, A. 479 Bertholdt, L. 8 Bewer, J. A. 193, 429 Binns, L. E. 187 Bird, P. L. 218, 220 Blair, J. M. 548 Blank, S. 392 Blau, L. 110 Blum, B. 493 Bons, E. 92, 144, 209, 382, 391 Borbone, P. G. 255

Bos, J. M. 11, 185 Brenner, A. 454, 561 Brenton, L. C. L. 90, 133 Breuer, M. 69, 70 Bright, J. A. 396 Brim, C. J. 99 Brongers, H. A. 498 Brown, J. P. 206 Brown, L. 581 Brown, S. L. 74, 164, 187, 296, 324, 391, 457, 573, 582, 593 Buber, M. 177, 279, 390, 471 Budde, K. 124, 192, 598 Budin, S. L. 219 Burkitt, F. C. 8 Buss, M. J. 440 Butler, T. C. 260 Canaani, Y. 475 Cantrell, D. O. 572 Caquot, A. 344, 548 Cassuto, U. 2, 75, 104, 109, 110, 123, 254, 360, 393, 511, 534 Cathcart, K. J. 338, 590 Cazelles, H. 188 Chalmers, R. S. 492, 502, 503 Chaplin, T. 289 Chattaway, P. T. 33 Cheyne, T. K. 10, 238, 407, 487 Choi, J. H. 342 Clines, D. J. A. 19, 108, 122, 123 Cogan, M. 9, 12, 264, 269, 282, 561, 600 Cohen, Ch. 248, 265, 370, 420, 541, 570 Cohen, G. D. 32 Cohen, S. 470 Coles, T. 373, 374 Craig, C. T. 549 Craigie, P. C. 274 Cross, F. M., Jr. 187 Dahood, M. 188, 201, 224, 342, 432 Dalley, S. 572 Dalman, G. 317, 533 Danell, G. A. 252 Daniels, D. W. 10, 27

654

Index of Authors

Davidson, A. B. 342 Davies, G. I. 598 Davies, L. 410 Day, J. 225, 284 Day, L. 114 Day, P. L. 114 De Pury, A. 493 Dearman, J. A. 164, 307, 324, 395 Delitzsch, F. 16, 236, 252, 407, 530 Dinan, C. 373, 374 Dobbie, R. 386 Drinkard, J. F., Jr. 274 Driver, G. R. 268, 331, 337, 438, 479, 487, 490, 560 Driver, S. R. 244, 486 Ebeling, E. 561 Ehrlich, A. 143, 169, 192, 203, 204, 238, 240, 293, 304, 305, 326, 416, 419, 444, 449, 459, 474, 482, 512, 530, 533, 536, 555, 556, 575, 577, 582, 585, 591 Eichhorn, J. G. 8 Elkoshi, G. 33 Emmerson, G. I. 232, 498 Exum, J. C. 113 Feliks, Y. 382, 383 Fenclova, E. 373, 374 Finkelstein, I. 572, 573 Fisher, E. A. 220 Fleischer, G. 206 Fox, M. V. 201, 215, 272 Frazer, J. G. 217 Freedman, D. N. 72, 82, 111, 120, 126, 132, 134, 154, 164, 187–89, 232, 238, 276, 307, 308, 316, 317, 338, 342, 343, 351, 368, 380, 395, 427, 432, 435, 447, 449, 451, 452, 461, 483, 486, 497, 531, 555, 566 Frensdorff, S. 345 Friedman, S. 153 Friedmann, M. 85 Frisch, A. 147, 595, 599 Frymer-Kensky, T. 219, 222 Fulco, W. J. 548 Fuller, R. 535 Funck, S. 110

Galatzer-Levi, R. M. 250 Gandz, S. 20 Garrett, D. A. 86, 229, 540 Gaster, T. H. 309, 548 Gelander, A. 224 Gemser, B. 109, 243 Gesenius, W. 345, 351, 478, 531, 539 Gilboa, S. 145 Ginsberg, H. L. 2, 9, 11, 27–29, 32, 46, 49, 69, 75–77, 79, 92, 93, 106, 143, 144, 164–66, 169, 173, 175, 181, 201, 209, 221, 235–38, 249, 250, 259, 264, 266–69, 277, 292, 295, 302, 328, 329, 335, 339, 347, 396, 409, 417, 420, 422, 437, 455, 466, 484, 494–500, 502, 504– 506, 510, 519–21, 527, 528, 530 Glenny, W. E. 14, 19, 73, 84, 167, 171, 184, 192, 202, 203, 210, 226, 227, 238, 258, 293, 297, 346, 361, 370, 371, 381, 382, 391, 401, 404, 433, 450, 451, 459, 460, 466, 472, 473, 487, 506, 510, 523, 537, 548, 549, 555 Glueck, N. 288 Gnuse, R. 335, 350 Goldschmidt, D. 321, 570 Gomes, J. F. 228, 229, 260, 414, 501 Good, E. M. 10, 259, 498, 503 Goodfriend, E. A. 220 Goodnick Westenholz, J. 219, 222, 224 Gordis, R. 79, 110, 164, 165, 170, 402, 406, 426, 469, 554, 567, 568, 570, 584 Gordon, C. H. 110, 205 Gordon, R. P. 110, 338, 590 Görg, M. 206 Goshen-Gottstein, M. 551 Gottlieb, I. B. 32 Graesser, C. F. 408 Graetz, H. 7–9, 70, 74, 124, 203, 211, 238, 293, 337, 444, 556 Greenberg, M. 209, 210, 478 Greenfield, J. C. 132 Grether, O. 591 Gross, K. 563 Grossberg, D. 301, 419 Gruber, M. I. 6, 9, 26, 96, 99, 121–23, 127, 131, 137, 141, 146, 152, 160, 166, 181, 213, 217, 225, 247, 249, 250, 256, 265, 284, 309–13, 347, 349, 350, 356, 378, 398, 399, 415, 422, 432, 478, 480, 489, 500, 545, 546



Index of Authors

Grusec, J. E. 411 Gulkowitsch, L. 82 Gunkel, H. 488 Gunn, D. M. 19 Guthe, H. 192 Halevi, J. 348 Halévy, J. 197, 379 Halpern, E. 475 Hamilton, E. 230, 231 Haran, M. M. 284, 313 Harper, W. R. 72, 73, 90, 124, 164, 175, 233, 276, 289, 290, 304, 324, 339, 351, 395, 402, 423, 425, 448, 466, 486, 497, 504, 506, 536, 555, 557, 574, 577, 582, 589, 590 Harvey, J. 243 Hasson, S. 145 Hatav, G. 341 Held, M. 84, 113, 205, 285, 403, 463 Heschel, A. J. 78, 88, 299, 385, 509 Hillers, D. R. 182, 479 Hitzig, F. 252 Hoffman, Y. 274, 467, 470 Hoftijzer, J. 464 Holladay, W. L. 481, 565 Holt, E. K. 284, 394, 514, 523 Holtz, S. E. 544, 545 Hong, S-H. 272 Hubbard, D. A. 494 Huffmon, H. B. 109, 156, 187, 243 Humbert, P. 110 Hurowitz, V. A. 170, 201 Hurvitz, A. 437 Ibn Janah, J. 96, 567 Idelsohn, A. Z. 156 Inkelas, S. 112 Jacob, E. 394 Japhet, S. 589, 590 Jeremias, A. 110 Jeshurun, G. 360 Johnson, S. 581 Jongeling, K. 342 Joosten, J. 92, 144, 209, 382, 391 Joüon, P. 82, 196, 198, 314, 343, 354, 384, 397, 408, 464

655

Kaatz, S. 112, 233, 443 Kaddari, M. Z. 3, 82, 170, 316, 354, 478 Kadushin, M. 437 Kakkanattu, J. P. 457 Kalimi, I. 292 Kallai, Z. 259 Kaufmann, Y. 8, 69, 75, 106, 410, 418, 461, 462, 465, 480, 525, 527, 528, 599 Keil, C. F. 16, 252, 582, 585, 589, 591 Kelle, B. E. 4, 85, 222 Kelley, P. H. 274 Kessler, S. 92, 144, 209, 382, 391 Klostermann, A. 534 Kohler, J. 109 Kolichen, J. C. von 438 König, F. E. 358, 419 Köscher, F. 561 Krier, T. 33 Kuczynski, L. 411 Kugel, J. 215, 489 Kuhl, C. 110 Kuhnigk, W. 435, 560 Label, D. 82, 111 Laitner, M. 377 Landy, F. 277, 469 Laster, J. A. 33 Leander, P. 82, 111 Lerner, G. 220 Levenson, J. D. 278, 284 Levine, B. A. 128, 212 Levinstein, D. 466 Lippl, J. 581 Lipshitz, A. 577, 582, 589 Lockshin, M. I. 158, 341 Loewenstamm, S. D. 138, 392 Lortet, L.-C. E. 468, 586 Lundbom, J. R. 349 Macintosh, A. A. 16, 19, 30, 72, 89, 90, 92, 127, 132, 164, 183, 189, 192, 232, 233, 252, 255, 267, 298, 301, 306, 308, 314, 324, 326, 327, 331, 338, 341, 367, 368, 394, 432, 435, 436, 444, 447, 450, 474, 475, 482–84, 489, 490, 497, 504, 523, 531, 533, 538, 555, 557, 564, 566, 573, 575, 578, 582, 583, 585, 589, 591 Maclean, J. A. 487

656

Index of Authors

Malul, M. 110 Mandelkern, S. 113, 168, 287, 428, 446, 539, 556 Mann, J. 38 Manor, D. W. 179 Marcus, D. 14, 24, 277, 559 Mastin, B. A. 498 Mays, J. L. 123 Mazar, A. 350 McCarter, P. K., Jr. 490 McComiskey, T. E. 97 McConville, J. P. 226 McKane, W. 182, 183, 300 McKay, H. A. 493 McKenzie, S. L. 493 Meissner, B. 109 Milgrom, J. 4, 219, 245, 279, 363, 410, 560 Millard, A. R. 450 Mirsky, A. 539 Moldenke, A. L. 382, 383, 580, 588, 594 Moldenke, H. N. 382, 383, 580, 588, 594 Moon, J. 164 Moore, G. F. 23 Morag, S. 3, 160, 170, 238, 245, 387, 402, 404, 576 Moran, W. L. 79, 357 Moshavi, A. 342, 343 Mowinckel, S. 478, 534 Muffs, Y. 77, 392 Müller, A. 342 Muraoka, T. 82, 172, 196, 198, 203, 207, 208, 213, 258, 314, 354, 384, 397, 408, 464, 466 Musselman, L. J. 580 Myhre, M. I. 410, 411 Naeh, S. 206 Nelson, W. A. 581, 588 Neusner, J. 32 Newcombe, W. 8 Noth, M. 297 Nowack, W. 89, 488, 490, 580, 585, 590 Nulman, M. 156, 157 Oestreich, B. 562 Ofer, Y. 25, 26 Olmo Lete, G. del 205 Oort, H. 192, 581 Oppenheim, A. L. 320

Oppermann, M. 374 Orlinksy, H. M. 72, 74, 86, 124 Paran, M. 153, 155, 210, 345 Parker, S. B. 214 Paul, S. M. 52, 264, 270, 308, 313–15, 317, 318, 320, 322, 334, 344, 358, 563 Penkower, J. S. 32 Pietersma, A. 92 Polak, F. 472 Polliack, M. 417, 435 Pope, M. H. 214 Porten, B. 110 Post, G. E. 488 Powell, M. A. 171, 508 Procksch, O. 534 Propp, W. C. 147 Qara, J. 405 Qyl, Y. 89, 156, 221, 299, 383, 526, 531, 539, 540 Rabin, C. 205, 207 Rabinowitz, M. 33 Redford, D. B. 380, 381 Rhodokanakis, N. 112 Roberts, B. J. 296, 315 Robinson, T. H. 581 Rofé, A. 85, 249, 495, 502, 503, 548 Rolef, S. H. 35 Rollston, C. A. 312 Rösel, M. 131 Roth, C. 438 Roth, M. 182, 219 Roth, W. M. W. 284, 313 Rudolph, W. 10, 27, 72, 164, 192, 233, 255, 341, 358, 394, 435, 444, 476, 477, 490, 520 Sakenfeld, K. D. 288 Salters, R. B. 590 Samuel, M. 386 Sanmartín, J. 205 Sarna, N. H. 147, 330 Scherman, N. 26, 278, 351, 589 Schick, G. V. 512, 513 Schlossberg, E. 417, 435 Schmidt, H. 534 Schmitt, J. J. 84 Schmitz, P. 507



Index of Authors

Schoors, A. 275 Schunck, K.-D. 422 Sellin, E. 143, 144, 192, 534, 581 Seow, C. L. 342, 353, 597 Sherwood, Y. 80 Silberman, N. A. 572 Silverman, M. 34, 271, 458, 570 Simon, U. 267, 435, 439 Sivan, D. 464, 467 Skinner, B. F. 199 Smith, G. A. 472, 582 Smith, H. P. 132 Smith, M. 93 Sonne, I. 38, 39 Speiser, E. A. 72, 507, 554 Sperber, A. 221 Sperling, S. D. 96 Spiegel, S. 2, 294, 534 Stein, D. E. S. 126, 191 Stern, M. 32, 33, 36 Stewart, D. T. 219 Stockton, E. 408 Strydom, J. G. 9 Stuart, D. 72, 80, 117, 156, 164, 192, 233, 242, 283, 284, 317, 536, 549, 560, 566, 598 Suriano, M. J. 378 Sweeney, M. A. 573 Tadmor, H. 1, 9, 11, 12, 73, 236, 259, 264, 269, 282, 401, 415, 418, 481, 485, 571 Tammuz, O. 333, 449–51 Taragan, H. 277 Tatu, S. 362 Testuz, M. 558, 575 Thiele, E. R. 12 Thomson, C. 73, 168 Thureau-Dangin, F. 320 Tigay, J. H. 4, 219, 225, 287 Tiktin, H. 490 Torczyner, N. H. 446 Tov, E. 70, 131, 296, 304 Tristram, H. B. 487 Tsevat, M. 132 Tur-Sinai, N. H. 34, 169, 214, 215, 276, 293, 331, 473 Ungnad, A. 109 Uri, A. 70, 71, 384

657

Valeton, J. J. P. 192 Van der Woude, A. S. 8, 9 Vasselin, M. 37 Walker, W. 580, 587 Walter, D. M. 209, 210 Ward, J. M. 351 Washburn, D. L. 438 Watson, W. G. E. 111, 152, 159, 284, 301, 545, 596 Weiser, A. 192, 581 Weisman, Z. 466 Weiss, M. 471 Weitzman, M. P. 206 Wellhausen, J. 186, 417, 580, 590 Wenning, R. 350 Westermann, C. 120, 598, 599 Wieder, A. A. 213 Wijnkoop, J. D. 342 Wilkinson, J. G. 244 Williamson, H. G. M. 182 Wise, M. O. 438 Wolf, C. U. 467 Wolff, H. F. 72, 84, 126, 139, 192, 304, 337, 341, 354–56, 367, 392, 427, 428, 436, 440–42, 457, 469, 476, 477, 481, 486, 490, 531, 555, 560, 573, 575, 583, 585, 591, 597, 598 Wolff, H. W. 54 Wright, B. G. 92 Wyatt, N. 548 Wynkoop, J. D. 271 Yardeni, Z. 33 Yaron, R. 110 Yee, G. A. 86 Yeivin, I. 25, 469 Yellin, D. 210, 346 Yona, S. 155, 359, 383, 467 Zenger, E. 350 Zevit, Z. 330, 470 Ziegler, J. 449, 450 Zohary, M. 580, 588, 594 Zoll, C. 112 Zorell, F. 3, 273, 345, 449