Yahweh's Marriage Pt. 2: Hosea

How Hosea used Israel's marriage laws to proclaim judgment and hope

Photo by Andrej Lišakov for Unsplash+

Sometimes when I read the Old Testament prophets, I feel like I see the same themes crop up again and again without any variation. God is faithful, the people are unfaithful, consequences are announced. And it’s true that the prophets are intentionally working from the same basic palate of metaphors and symbols. What’s easy to miss is the on-going conversation between the prophets, who read and commented on each other as well as on the Law. The prophets wrote to a people who were steeped in the Law of God, and this makes for some fascinating symbolic interplay.

In the first installment of this series, I looked at the Old Testament marriage law that required the husband to provide “food, clothing, and marital rights (sometimes translated ‘oil’)” for his wife (Ex. 21:10). If he would not do this, it was grounds for divorce. In response, the wife took those raw materials and used them to make clothing and meals, and to reciprocate the love of her husband. In this installment, I’m looking at the law about the return of the divorcee, and how the prophets use this theme as a conceptual restraint when speaking for God about his reunification with wayward Israel. 

In Deuteronomy 24:1-4 God forbids a divorced woman from returning to her husband after being with someone else: 

When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a bill of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house, and if she goes and becomes another man’s wife, and the latter husband dislikes her and writes her a bill of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter husband dies, who took her to be his wife, then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled; for that is an abomination before the Lord, and you shall not bring guilt upon the land which the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance.

When the prophets use marriage imagery to describe Yahweh’s grief and anger over his people’s sin, and his desire to win them back, they do so within the parameters of this law. How can Yahweh take his people back again, if doing so would violate his own command concerning the return of the divorcee? Hosea shares many themes and affinities with Deuteronomy, so it is worth exploring how Hosea in particular picks up this puzzle. 

Hosea

Hosea was a key text for later prophets, supplying much of the imagery and vocabulary that Jeremiah and Ezekiel used to portray the evolving status of Israel’s covenant with Yahweh. Hosea’s family acted out a theo-drama—a dramatic picture of God’s story—that demonstrated the seriousness of Israel’s sin, and the danger she was in of being separated from Yahweh forever. Hosea demonstrated that, through her dalliances with foreign gods, Israel had destroyed her marriage to Yahweh. While it was God who announced and finalized the divorce, Hosea made it clear that God did not want the divorce, that the divorce was in a real way a thing that God was suffering. David Instone-Brewer says, “God was forced into a divorce.” 

What reasons did Hosea give to show the necessity of this divorce? Instead of honoring Yahweh as the source of her abundance, Israel had begun seeing foreign gods as her providers. As a natural result, Israel took the food, clothing, and oil that God had given Israel for his own worship, and gave them to her lovers, the foreign gods of the Canaanites and other surrounding nations. 

For their mother has played the harlot;

    she that conceived them has acted shamefully.

For she said, ‘I will go after my lovers,

    who give me my bread and my water,

    my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.’ (Hosea 2:5, RSV)

In response, the Lord declared that he would “hedge up her way with thorns” and “build a wall against her.” (Hosea 2:6, RSV) God would cause his wayward wife to lose her way, to fail in her pursuit of her false lovers until she realized the error of her ways. 

Then she shall say, ‘I will go

    and return to my first husband,

    for it was better with me then than now.’

And she did not know

    that it was I who gave her

    the grain, the wine, and the oil,

and who lavished upon her silver

    and gold which they used for Ba′al. (Hosea 2:7b-8)

Israel had stopped recognizing God as the source of her provisions. Mistaking the foreign gods for her source of good things, she entered into illicit covenants with them. So far from using God’s gifts to bless their covenant, Israel had actually given the very food, wine, oil, and jewelry God gave her and turned them toward the worship of idols. 

In response, Yahweh says, 

Dispute with your mother, dispute,

Because she is not my wife, and I am not her husband;

But she must remove her infidelity from her face

And her adultery from between her breasts,

Otherwise, I will strip her naked

And expose her as on the day she was born. (Hosea 2:2-3, RSV)

“She is not my wife and I am not her husband,” is the formula used in divorces in the Ancient Near East. In cases where the wife was adulterous, the divorce ceremony often involved stripping the adulterous wife naked. Hosea used well-known customs and language to portray Israel as an adulterous wife. Israel would not only be sent away and lose her status as Yahweh’s covenant wife, she would be exposed and stripped bare as the adulteress she was. 

And yet the book of Hosea is full of hope for the future reconciliation between Israel and her God. Again, how could this be given the impossibility of God breaking his own law to accept his divorced wife back again? Hosea made it clear that God wanted to renew his marriage with Israel, but that it would not be the same marriage with the same adulterous wife. When Yahweh is reunified with Israel, it will be a new marriage, with a new wife. 

Hosea looked at the future reunification of Israel and Judah as the solution to this intractable problem. “The eschatalogical hope then became a new relationship with the united nation of Israel and Judah. It would not be merely an enlargement of Yahweh’s relationship with Judah to include Israel as well. It would be a completely new relationship with a new wife.” 

When Yahweh pursues a newly reconciled nation, “she will respond there as in the days of her youth” (Hosea 2:15, RSV). Just as the virgin nation accepted Yahweh as their God in the desert after the exodus from Egypt, so they will once again be made a new bride, a new nation, and enact a new covenant with the Lord. “And in that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘My husband,’ and no longer will you call me, ‘My Ba′al.’” Israel saying “my husband” to Yahweh reflects the woman’s part of the marriage ceremony, “(Be) my husband.” 

Yahweh says, 

“I will betroth you to Me forever;

Yes, I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and in justice,

In favor and in compassion,

And I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness.

Then you will know the Lord.” (Hosea 2:19-20, RSV)

This is not the language of a husband taking back his unfaithful wife; this is no return of Israel the divorcee. This is an entirely new marriage with an entirely new bride. Israel and Judah’s eschatalogical reunion represents a new person, and therefore a new betrothal to a new bride.

Of course, this is all leading to the work of Christ and the eschatalogical glory of the his bride. Despite many unfaithfulnesses and failures, we—Christ’s bride—have died with him and are now being gathered from every corner of the world and raised to new life in the Spirit. All the bridal and legal imagery in the Old Testament is building toward this glorious reality, a totally new marriage in a new covenant, with a newly resurrected bride.