Here, Barker is moving to the book of Hosea, to what he calls a feticidal passage.
In Hosea 13:4, 9, and 16, we get a series of verses that tells of how the people of Samaria must bear their guilt for having rebelled against God. Because of that, they will die by the sword, their little ones dashed on the ground, and their pregnant women ripped open. Truly a horrific portrayal.
Before we begin with this passage, I just want to make it clear that I’m not trying to justify or excuse portions of the Bible for being horrific. There are barbaric practices that are present in various texts. My intention is twofold.
First, not all passages that are deemed horrific really are, as we saw with Job. This leads to the second point. By diving into the text, at times we can see a deeper meaning in the work, as with Job, or we can put the verse into a historical context that helps us see what is going on. This doesn’t necessarily strip away the atrocity that is being committed, and neither should we try to do that. But it does help us understand what is going on.
Now one quick note before we continue. Barker is using the Christian Bible when he cites his verses. I prefer to use the Hebrew Tanakh instead, which is just the Jewish version of the Old Testament. The vast majority of things are the same between the two, but the manner in which the books are organized differently. In this case, while the Christian Old Testament will have Hosea 13:16, the Hebrew Tanakh has it as Hosea 14:1.
I mention this just so you’re aware of in case of discrepancies between the citation of verses. Barker and I are still using the same verse content, but the number of the verse may change, as it does here.
So who is Hosea. Hosea is considered to be part of The Twelve, or the Dozen as in Hebrew, which are a collection of, you guessed it, 12 prophetic books. Sometimes this 12 are called the minor prophets, which refers to their length. These are relatively short works, that are dealing with a smaller time period, as opposed to someone like Jeremiah who was active for decades.
Hosea was from the northern kingdom of Israel (as opposed from the southern kingdom of Judah). This is largely known because of the traditions that he puts forth, which diverge from the common ones we have say in Genesis, which was largely written and then edited in the south.
We don’t know too much more about Hosea. The only biographical detail we really have of him is that he was to marry a whore, but then we don’t know if that was something that was historical, or if it was more symbolic.
Here we do need to step back a bit. When looking at a prophetic book, there are a few things we need to know. First, these works are compiled after the fact. They are Biblical works that associated with a prophetic personage of the past. That’s not saying the entire thing is historical fiction, but that instead, we have to realize that while the information is earlier, those compiling it have the benefit of hindsight.
In the case of Hosea, we do have a bit of an added advantage, in that Hosea was one of the first so-called literary prophets. It is a mystery as to why in the 8th century BC, Hebrew prophets decided to start writing out their messages, primarily in poetic form, but it does help us get a better feel for them. Also, from a historical perspective, the transmission of poetry has it’s advantages also within oral tradition, as it helps keep the story together.
However, while Hosea would have written some of his message down, it really isn’t until the 6th century, at the fall of the Hebrew monarchy, or even possible during the Persian period (539-332 BC) that Hosea and most of the Twelve were compiled in the form we see today. Which means that the compilers, even though they were using earlier sources, knew the history of the kingdoms downfall.
Now the second point we have to keep in mind is that while each of these prophetic works presents itself as speaking for God, or being God’s communication, we are dealing with very human people who are presenting the messages, and are transcribing the message. While the prophet, like Hosea, may have felt as if the word was coming from God, it’s clear that it’s being uttered by a human, and regardless of how we see it, it’s coming from a man. Even if we take the view that it’s inspired by God, that it is truly a message from God, it’s being process by a human mind, with human views, and is being uttered by a human with all the biases and flaws that we have.
Putting those points together, we can actually pick out some of the biases within Hosea, or more the later compilers.
We are looking at these writings being post-monarchical. The city of Jerusalem, which probably had 25,000 people at it’s height, was now decimated. We are looking at only a couple of thousand people left. The independent Kingdom of David now didn’t matter. It wouldn’t even have been a blip on the radar anymore. Even more though, the Hebrew religion had taken a massive blow with the fall of the Temple.
This led writers in this period to try to figure out what happened. They were a powerless people. They were trying to come to terms with divine justice, and what that meant in light of their recent history. Looking back at the prophets, these later people found to main solutions. One, that it was their fault. God punished them for their immense level of sin. Two, there was also a message of hope, that while things were terrible right now, it was only a minor stop on a journey that would take them to a glorious future.
In Hosea, we get both of those ideas. We get divine punishment happening. Much of the work focuses on the transgressions of the Hebrew people. But at the end, we begin to see a path to hope. God hasn’t shut the door. While this will be a stumbling block, something better is still waiting. The message of hope is really what the earliest interpreters looked at, such as seen in Sirach 49:10, “They [these 12 prophets] comforted the people of Jacob and delivered them with confident hope.”
One last thing to keep in mind is that when Hosea was working, in the middle of the 8th century BC, it’s really during the last period of political strength of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. In 722, the Assyrians would conquer and destroy the the kingdom. This is what Hosea would have seen coming. The invasion was imminent, and Hosea was reacting to it.
So that is a whole lot of background here, but I think understanding the context is always key. It helps us better understand what the thought process is, and it let’s us get a bit of a glimpse into the history that helped form this work and the character.
Now to the passage Hosea 14:1. Barker uses the other two verses really to cement that God is the one who is supposed to be speaking here, but it’s 14:1 that gets to the heart of the matter. It states: Samaria must bear her guilt, For she has defied her God. They shall fall by the sword, Their infants shall be dashed to death, And their women with child ripped open.
Samaria here is referring to the second capital of the Kingdom of Israel. In 726 BC, the Assyrians besieged the city, and after a three year assault, the city would fall and the survivors would be taken into captivity.
By the time Hosea was pushing his message, this fate was already largely sealed. The Kingdom of Israel had been under threat for quite some time, and Hosea just had to read the writing on the wall. Those compiling Hosea would have known this history quite well.
So we have this historic event, one that Hosea saw coming, and one that the compilers would have known about. Samaria was going to fall, and the practices of many in the ancient near east were brutal. The citizens of Samaria, and Israel by and large, did fall victims to the swords of the Assyrians, and the Assyrians did kill women and children, including the unborn.
The Assyrians brutalized the inhabitants of Israel, and that is what Hosea 14:1 is in reference to. Hosea would have known what the common practices of war were at that time, and he would have known what being conquered by the Assyrians meant. It meant pregnant women would have their bellies ripped open, and their unborn child killed.
Why then does this passage as a whole suggest that it was by God’s command, or that God had anything to do with it? Two reasons. First, Hosea was claiming to speak from God. He had believed he was given a message, and he was going to try to spread it. More likely, he saw what was coming, and believed God was pushing him to try to find some way to help his people. When it boils down to it, he was largely pushing politics by warning people of impeding doom.
Second, people were simply trying to understand why they had been so brutalized. Why their power had been stripped, their families decimated. Their world had been turned upside down, and they were trying to make sense of it all.
The common wisdom at that time stated that sin was the cause of suffering, so it must have been sin that caused their downfall. They must have done something to deserve what had occurred to them. So they saw it as punishment from God.
This all fit into a grander scheme of the idea that God was a God of justice. Yes, they were suffering now, due to things they had done. God had allowed them to be punished, but it wasn’t the end of the road. They could repent, and they could once again be on a better path. They could become better people, and focus on what matters, instead of falling into sinful acts that cause devastation.
Did God really command or allow this to happen? Was God simply destroying fetuses because people didn’t worship him? Of course not. The story itself never implies that the people of Samaria (or really, the people of Israel) stopped worshiping God. It says that they became sinful. And because of that sin, God allowed Assyria to conquer them.
It was the Assyrians who caused the destruction, and that was inevitable. Israel just didn’t stand a chance against such a powerful adversary. People later on tried to find some justification for all of this, and the idea they came up with, or at least one such idea, was that it was ultimately their fault.
One final side step. If we go back to the book of Job, which was probably written around the 6th century BC, so around the same general time frame that Hosea would have been finished, we get a very different argument, that suffering wasn’t the cause of sin. We have other people looking at the past, the downfall of the Israel and Judah, and saying it wasn’t due to punishment. That traditional wisdom simply failed.
I think that is important to remember because really what we are reading is simply an attempt to make sense of a brutal history. It’s something we all do as well. We want to find some sort of meaning, and in Hosea, they find one meaning, while a book like Job finds a separate meaning.
