Hosea1chapter 1

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.

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.