Hoseachapter 1
11 verses · Hosea · 755 to 715 BC · The Twelve
This is the word of the LORD that came to Hosea son of Beeri in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and of Jeroboam son of Jehoash, king of Israel.
Introduction
Hosea, The Twelve, Hosea Overview.
Hosea son of Beeri preached in the northern kingdom in its last years of wealth under Jeroboam II. His first hearers were his neighbours, farmers and traders who took their prosperity as a sign of God's favour. This chapter opens the book with his household and makes a marriage and three births into a public message. In that world a child's name was a sentence spoken aloud every day in the street. Listen for each name and the reason given for it, and for Jezreel, the valley every Israelite knew for a royal massacre. Listen also for the turn at the close, where judgment is reversed.
Context
- Who
- Israelites in the richest generation their kingdom had ever known
- What
- The account of Hosea's marriage to Gomer and of the three children whose names carry God's message to Israel.
- Where
- The northern kingdom of Israel, with the Valley of Jezreel, its best farmland and its old battlefield, at the centre of the first child's name.
- When
- About 755 BC, in the last prosperous years of Jeroboam II in Samaria while Uzziah reigned in Jerusalem; the date rests on the kings named in Hosea 1:1 and is approximate.
- Why
- To show the northern kingdom, in a household its neighbours could watch, that it had broken faith with God and that God still meant to restore it.
Historical context
Marriage in Israel began with a payment, not a proposal. The groom's family handed over a bride-price to the woman's father, witnesses were present, and the agreement was legally binding before the couple ever lived together. God telling a prophet whom to marry was therefore an instruction with a price tag and a public contract attached.
Show the rest of the historical context, 3 more paragraphs
Children were named to say something. A name was a sentence about the family, the moment, or the future, and it was spoken aloud a hundred times a day by neighbours. Naming a son Jezreel, a daughter Not-Pitied, and a second son Not-My-People meant the whole village heard the message every time Hosea called his children in from the street.
Jezreel was a place before it was a name. The broad valley cutting across the north was Israel's best farmland and its main battlefield, and a generation earlier Jehu had launched his coup there, wiping out Ahab's house in a bloodbath that also took the king of Judah. The dynasty ruling in Hosea's day was Jehu's, four generations on.
Jeroboam II's reign was the high-water mark. Assyria was distracted, the trade roads were open, and the kingdom's borders were the widest they had been since Solomon. To an Israelite farmer in these years, talk of the kingdom ending would have sounded like weather forecasting for a country that had never seen rain.
Significance
Hearers were being told that the very victory their royal house was founded on, Jehu's slaughter at Jezreel, was a debt still owed, and that the bow of Israel would be broken in the same valley.
Show the rest of the significance, 1 more paragraph
Then the sentence turns over inside itself. Not-My-People becomes sons of the living God, and the number of them becomes sand on the seashore. The same generation that heard the divorce papers read heard the promise that the marriage would not finally end.
This chapter in Jewish lifeWhat this chapter is in Jewish life and reading.
What is done
The site's own table in src/lib/hebraic/readings.ts sets this chapter in one prophetic reading of the annual cycle. It is read as the Haftarah of Bamidbar, Hosea 2:1 to 2:22, in both rites, on the Sabbath of the portion Numbers 1:1 to 4:20. A congregation keeping that cycle hears the verses of the reference read aloud after the Torah portion of its Sabbath. That table carries nothing for the special Sabbaths or the fast days, so any further public reading of this chapter is left to a source that holds those readings.
The table's own notes say that its verse numbers are the Hebrew ones, which part from an English Bible in several places. They give this book as the example. The Haftarah of Bamidbar runs Hosea 2:1 to 2:22 in Hebrew and Hosea 1:10 to 2:20 in English. So the last verses of this chapter in an English Bible are the opening of that Haftarah.
The corpus joins the chapter to the weeks of the Torah portions through the works arranged by portion. Under the first verse it carries Bereshit Rabbati, Parashat Vayeshev 42. Under the ninth verse it carries Midrash Tanchuma, Masei 7:1.
How it is read
Rashi is the one commentator on this chapter whose English the corpus carries. He is quoted here from The Judaica Press complete Tanach with Rashi, translated by A. J. Rosenberg, which Sefaria reports as CC-BY, and every quotation of it is held to fifty words or fewer because the translation is modern. His lemmas, which carry the verse in that translation's wording, are never quoted.
Rashi reads the heading of the book as a record of a long life. Of the four kings of Judah he says that Hosea "buried these four kings during his lifetime, for he outlived them all". He reports the maxim the Sages drew from it in Pesachim 87b, "Woe is to authority, for it buries its holders" (Rashi on Hosea 1:1:1). Jeroboam the son of Joash is counted with those kings for one deed, because "he did not heed slander concerning Amos" (Rashi on Hosea 1:1:2).
On the second verse Rashi sets the order of the prophets of that age. He reports the Rabbis' reading that Hosea was "The first of the four prophets who prophesied", with Isaiah, Amos and Micah after him, and he traces the order through Pesachim 87a and Seder Olam. He then gives the plain sense on its own, that the verse marks the opening of the Lord's speech to Hosea (Rashi on Hosea 1:2:1).
The command to take a wife of harlotry he reads three ways. The Rabbis took it at its apparent meaning and tied it to Pesachim 87a, where Hosea had spoken against Israel (Rashi on Hosea 1:2:2). Jonathan's Targum reads it as a prophecy against the cities of idolatry, and Rashi adds a reading of the verb as instruction: "Teach them to repent" (Rashi on Hosea 1:2:3). Gomer's name he also reads two ways. Through Pesachim 87a it is a name given for her harlotry. Through Jonathan it is a word of ending, "that if they would return from their way, their retribution would be finished" (Rashi on Hosea 1:3:1).
The names of the children are read as sentences on the nation. Jezreel, in Jonathan's rendering, means that "they will be sown among the peoples" (Rashi on Hosea 1:4:1). The blood of Jezreel is the blood of the house of Ahab, which Jehu shed because they worshipped Baal. Jehu's sons then served other gods themselves, so Rashi reads that blood as now counted against his house "as innocent blood" (Rashi on Hosea 1:4:2). The mercy promised to Judah he places in history, after the exile of the ten tribes, "from Hezekiah until Zedakiah", in the spelling the translation carries (Rashi on Hosea 1:7:1).
The corpus carries nine further notes on this chapter without an English text, each marked linked because Sefaria holds no English version of the ref. They stand cited and unquoted at Ibn Ezra on Hosea 1:1:1, 1:3:1, 1:5:1, 1:6:1 and 1:7:1. The corpus cites Metzudat David on Hosea 1:5:1 and 1:9:1 the same way. The corpus cites Radak on Hosea 1:5:1 and 1:9:1 the same way.
What the rabbis say
The corpus carries thirty-eight rabbinic locators on this chapter and the text of none, so each is cited and linked here rather than quoted. On the first verse it holds Aggadat Bereshit 14:4, Bereshit Rabbati, Parashat Vayeshev 42, Bereshit Rabbati, Parashat Vayishlach 26 and Ein Yaakov (Glick Edition), Pesakhim 8:4. It holds Ein Yaakov, Pesakhim 8:3, Ein Yaakov, Pesakhim 8:5, Midrash Aggadah, Deuteronomy 1:1:13, Midrash Tanchuma Buber, Ki Tisa 17:4, Pesachim 87a:12 and Pesachim 87b:11 there as well. It holds Pesikta DeRav Kahana 13:7, Pesikta DeRav Kahana 24:9, Seder Olam Rabbah 20:1 and Vayikra Rabbah 6:6 there as well.
On the second verse it holds Bamidbar Rabbah 2:15, Bava Batra 14b:8, Bereshit Rabbah 82:11, Ein Yaakov (Glick Edition), Bava Batra 1:27 and Ein Yaakov, Bava Batra 1:30. It holds Midrash Aggadah, Leviticus 16:30:15, Midrash Lekach Tov, Genesis 35:23:1 and Midrash Sekhel Tov, Bereshit 35:23:1 there as well. It holds Otzar Midrashim, Midrashim of Rabbi Akiba, Aleph Bet of Rabbi Akiba (Version 2) 18, Pesachim 87a:14 and Pesikta Rabbati, Supplement A 3:5 there as well. It holds Tanna DeBei Eliyahu Zuta 9:1 and Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 137:1 there as well. On the third verse it holds Pesachim 87b:3.
On the sixth verse it holds Ein Yaakov (Glick Edition), Pesakhim 8:5, Ein Yaakov, Pesakhim 8:6, Pesachim 87b:13 and Pesikta Rabbati 44:1. On the ninth verse it holds Bamidbar Rabbah 2:16, Bamidbar Rabbah 23:8 and Midrash Tanchuma, Masei 7:1. It holds Otzar Midrashim, Aggada of Shimon Kippa, Aggada of Shimon Kippa (Version 1) 2 and Sifrei Bamidbar 131:1 there as well. On the tenth verse it holds Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 48:9. What each of them teaches is a saying of the rabbis, and is reported as theirs wherever this site quotes one. The quotations wait on a fetch that carries the text.
Sources: Rashi, Rashi on Hosea 1:1:1 to 1:7:1, The Judaica Press complete Tanach with Rashi, translated by A. J. Rosenberg, reported CC-BY; Ibn Ezra, Ibn Ezra on Hosea 1:1:1, 1:3:1, 1:5:1, 1:6:1 and 1:7:1, cited by ref because the corpus carries no English text; Metzudat David, Metzudat David on Hosea 1:5:1 and 1:9:1, cited by ref because the corpus carries no English text; Radak, Radak on Hosea 1:5:1 and 1:9:1, cited by ref because the corpus carries no English text; The Sefaria corpus, scripts/data/sources/sefaria/hosea/1.json, the 38 Talmud and Midrash locators of this chapter; The site's own files, src/lib/hebraic/readings.ts, the Haftarah table and its note on Hebrew verse numbers.
The heads below are this chapter's scenes. The numbered points under each are its verses.
Go take a wife of whoredom
in the days of Uzziah: Hosea dates his ministry by four kings of Judah and only one king of Israel, "Jeroboam son of Jehoash". The span named runs from Israel's late prosperity under Jeroboam II into the kingdom's final collapse, a stretch of about eight decades.
Hosea 1:1
"The word of the Lord that came to Hosea the son of Beeri." LXX similarly. The word of the Lord, which was in the beginning with God the Father, and the Word was God, came to Hosea the son of Beeri, so that he too might make God known as a prophet, with the Savior saying: "If those to whom the word of God came are called gods, and the Scripture cannot be broken: 'Whom the Father has sanctified' and sent into the world, you say I blaspheme because I said, 'I am the Son of God' " (John 10:35-36).
Jerome · written before 420 · Commentary on Hosea 1:1patristic
3 more voices on this verseWhat preachers and commentators have said about this verse, in their own words.
Hosea 1:1
“The word of the Lord that came unto Hosea,.... Whose name is the same with Joshua and Jesus, and signifies a saviour; he was in some things a type of Christ the Saviour, and prophesied of him, and salvation by him; and was the instrument and means of saving men, as all true prophets were, and faithful ministers of the word are: to him the word of the Lord, revealing his mind and will, was brought by the Spirit of God, and impressed upon his mind; and it was committed to him to be delivered unto others.”
Hosea 1:1
“Jonah the prophet had promised success to Jeroboam II from God, not for the king's merit, but from God's mercy to Israel; so the coast of Israel was restored by Jeroboam II from the entering of Hamath to the sea of the plain (2Ki 14:23-27).”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown · Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
Hosea 1:1
“Jotham succeeded his father, and reigned sixteen years; and though it be a probable conjecture, that the beginning of his reign is to be counted from the time he undertook the government, after his father, being smitten with leprosy, was ejected from the society of men, it is yet probable that the remaining time to the death of his father ought to come to our reckoning.”
John Calvin · Commentaries (1554)reformed
Hosea 1:2-3
take a prostitute as your wife: The command is the first sermon. Hosea is told to "take a prostitute as your wife" because "this land is flagrantly prostituting itself", so the marriage acts out the nation's unfaithfulness. The text names "Gomer daughter of Diblaim", and the son she bears begins the naming.
Hosea 1:2
“Gomer is called "a wife of whoredoms," anticipatively. children of whoredoms--The kingdom collectively is viewed as a mother; the individual subjects of it are spoken of as her children.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown · Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
So Hosea went and married: Hosea went at once and took Gomer as his wife, and Barnes set that obedience beside Moses and Jeremiah, who pleaded against the call. Gomer bore him a son. At verses 6 and 8 the text says only that Gomer gave birth.
Hosea 1:3
“So he went - He did not demur, nor excuse himself, as did even Moses Exo 4:18, or Jeremiah Jer 1:6, or Peter Act 10:4, and were rebuked for it, although mercifully by the All-Merciful. Hosea, accustomed from childhood to obey God and every indication of the will of God, did at once, what he was bidden, however repulsive to natural feeling, and became, thereby, the more an image of the obedience of Christ Jesus, and a pattern to us, at once to believe and obey God’s commands, however little to our minds.”
Jezreel, Lo-ruhamah, Lo-ammi: three names of judgment
Hosea 1:4-5
the bloodshed of Jezreel: The name reaches back to Jehu's massacre at Jezreel in 2 Kings 9 and 10. That blood is now charged to "the house of Jehu", whose dynasty still held the throne in Jeroboam. The promise to "break the bow of Israel" names the collapse when Assyria ended the northern kingdom.
Hosea 1:4
“But how comes the same action to be both rewarded and punished? Very justly; the matter of it was good; it was the execution of a righteous sentence passed upon the house of Ahab, and, as such, it was rewarded; but Jehu did it not in a right manner; he aimed at his own advancement, not at the glory of God, and mingled his own resentments with the execution of God's justice.”
Matthew Henry · Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
break the bow of Israel: The bow stands for Israel's military strength, which John Wesley read as all their provision, power and skill for war. The Valley of Jezreel is the plain which Albert Barnes notes was later called the great plain of Esdraelon. Wesley held that whoever won that plain soon held the kingdom.
Hosea 1:5
“I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel - The valley of Jezreel is a beautiful and a broad valley or plain, stretching, from West to East, from Mount Carmel and the sea to the Jordan, which it reaches through two arms, between the Mountains of Gilboa, little Hermon, and Tabor; and from South to North from the Mountains of Ephraim to those of Galilee. Nazareth lay on its northern side. It is called “the great plain” (1 Macc. 12:49), “the great plain of Esdraelon” (Judith 1:8).”
Hosea 1:6-7
The daughter's name revokes the mercy that had shielded Israel, for the LORD says, "I will no longer have compassion on the house of Israel". Judah is spared, saved "not by bow or sword or war", as in 2 Kings 19, when the angel of the LORD ended Sennacherib's siege.
Hosea 1:6
“And she conceived again, and bare a daughter,.... One of the weaker sex; denoting the weaker state of the kingdom of Israel after Jeroboam, as Kimchi thinks; Zachariah his son reigning but six months, and Shallum the son of Jabesh, his successor, reigned but one month, 2Ki 15:8, and God said unto him, call her name Loruhamah; which signifies, "she hath not obtained mercy": and what follows explains it to the same sense.”
3 more voices on this verse
Hosea 1:6
“Call her Lo-ruhamah - לא רהמה, “Not having obtained mercy.” This also was a prophetic or typical name; and the reason of its imposition is immediately given: For I will no more have mercy - כי לא אושיף עיד ארחם ki lo osiph od arachem, “For I will no more add to have mercy upon the house of Israel.” This refers to the total destruction of that kingdom.”
Adam Clarke · Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
Hosea 1:6
Lo-ruhamah--that is, "not an object of mercy or gracious favor." take . . . away--Israel, as a kingdom, was never restored from Assyria, as Judah was from Babylon after seventy years. MAURER translates according to the primary meaning, "No more will I have mercy on the house of Israel, so as to pardon them."
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown · Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
Hosea 1:6
“If pardoning mercy is denied, no other mercy can be expected, for that opens the door to all the rest. Some make this to speak comfort: I will no more have mercy upon them till in pardoning I shall pardon them, that is, till the Redeemer comes to Zion to turn away ungodliness from Jacob. The Chaldee reads it, But, if they repent, in pardoning I will pardon them.”
Matthew Henry · Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
compassion on the house of Judah: Judah is named here as a contrast to Israel. The weapons listed are the ones Israel trusted, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown tie them to the bow of verse 5. Hilary of Poitiers read the LORD their God as the Father giving the name God to the Son.
Hosea 1:7
“For He says to Hosea the prophet, "I will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel, but will altogether be their enemy. But I will have mercy upon the children of Judah, and will save them in the Lord their God." Here God the Father gives the name of God, without any ambiguity, to the Son, in Whom also He chose us before countless ages. "Their God," He says, for while the Father, being Unoriginate, is independent of all, He has given us for an inheritance to His Son.”
Hilary of Poitiers · written before 367 · On the Trinity 4:37patristic
2 more voices on this verse
Hosea 1:7
“Judah is only incidentally mentioned to form a contrast to Israel. by the Lord their God--more emphatic than "by Myself"; by that Jehovah (Me) whom they worship as their God, whereas ye despise Him. not . . . by bow--on which ye Israelites rely (Ho 1:5, "the bow of Israel"); Jeroboam II was famous as a warrior (2Ki 14:25).”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown · Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
Hosea 1:7
“I will have mercy on the house of Judah - For to them the promises were made in David, and of them, according to the flesh, Christ was to come. Israel, moreover, as being founded in rebellion and apostasy, had gone on from bad to worse. All their kings clave to the sin of Jeroboam; not one did right in the sight of God; not one repented or hearkened to God.”
Hosea 1:8-9
After she had weaned Lo-ruhamah: The weaning marks time between the second child and the third. The words "you are not My people, and I am not your God" undo the covenant promise given at the exodus. The LORD unsays His own word to a people who had unsaid theirs first.
Hosea 1:8
“Now when she had weaned ... - Eastern women very commonly nursed their children two, or even three (2 Macc. 7:27) years. The weaning then of the child portrays a certain interval of time between these two degrees of chastisement; but after this reprieve, the last and final judgment pictured here was to set in irreversibly.”
Barnes read the names of the three children as three degrees of judgment: Jezreel for scattering, Lo-ruhamah for loss of compassion, and Lo-ammi for rejection. The kingdom of Israel came to its end by those same degrees. Henry saw the fulfilment when Israel was taken away to Assyria.
Hosea 1:9
“Call his name Lo-ammi - that is, “not My people.” The name of this third child expresses the last final degree of chastisement. As the “scattering by God” did not involve the being wholly “unpitied;” so neither did the being wholly “unpitied” for the time involve the being wholly rejected, so as to be no more His people. There were corresponding degrees in the actual history of the kingdom of Israel. God withdrew his protection by degrees. Under Jeroboam, in whose reign was this beginning of Hosea’s prophecy, the people was yet outwardly strong.”
1 more voice on this verse
Hosea 1:9
“But our being cast out of covenant is owing purely to ourselves and our own folly. The breach is on man's side: You are not my people, and therefore I will not be your God; if God hate any, it is because they first hated him. This was fulfilled in Israel when they were utterly taken away into the land of Assyria, and their place knew them no more.”
Matthew Henry · Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Yet as the sand of the sea, sons of the living God
Hosea 1:10-11
Those told "You are not My people" will be called "sons of the living God", which Paul applies at Romans 9:25-26 to the Gentiles. Jezreel, meaning God sows, turns from bloodshed to planting, and "great will be the day of Jezreel" when Judah and Israel gather under "one leader".
Hosea 1:10
“Some think that these promises will not have their accomplishment, at least not in full, till the general conversion of the Jews in the latter days, which is expected yet to come, when the vast incredible numbers of Jews, that are now dispersed as the sand of the sea, shall be brought to embrace the faith of Christ and be incorporated in the gospel-church.”
Matthew Henry · Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Cross references
Hosea 1:10
appoint for themselves one leader: Wesley took the one leader as Zerubbabel, appointed by Cyrus, and as Christ, appointed head of his church. He read going up as the return from Babylon. Gill answered that only Judah and Benjamin came back together from Babylon, with few of the people of Israel among them.
Hosea 1:11
“Then shall the children of Judah and the children of Israel be gathered together - A little image of this union was seen after the captivity in Babylon, when some of the children of Israel, i. e., of the ten tribes, were united to Judah on his return, and the great schism of the two kingdoms came to an end.”
3 more voices on this verse
Hosea 1:11
"They come up out of the land," namely, they will live the life of the saints as well, "for great is the day of Jezreel." Indeed, great is the day of Christ, when he will raise to life all the dead. In fact, he will descend from heaven and sit on his glorious throne. "And he will give everyone according to his works."
Cyril of Alexandria · written before 444 · Commentary on Hosea 1:9patristic
Hosea 1:11
“Thus Judah and Israel were gathered together; yet this was but a type of the much more celebrated coalition between Jews and Gentiles, when, by the death of Christ, the partition-wall of the ceremonial law was taken down. Christ died, to gather together in one all the children of God that were scattered abroad, John xi.”
Matthew Henry · Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Hosea 1:11
“The bow - All their warlike provision, power and skill. Jezreel - In this valley it is probable the bloodiest battles in the civil wars were fought; the reason whereof might be, because whoever carried the victory in this place, were soon masters of Samaria and Jezreel, and consequently of the kingdom. Israel's name had been through many ages Ruhamah, that is, pitied.”
John Wesley · Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765)evangelical
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Sources for this chapter
The summary
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.
The exposition
Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible; Albert Barnes; Carl Friedrich Keil, The Twelve Minor Prophets; Edward Bouverie Pusey, The Minor Prophets: A Commentary; Hilary of Poitiers, ON THE TRINITY 4:37; Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible; John Calvin, Commentaries on the Twelve Minor Prophets; John Gill; John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible.