Hoseachapter 2
23 verses · BSBHosea book hub →
Speaks with:Ezekiel 23×3Isaiah 1×31 Peter 2×2Hosea 13×2Isaiah 54×2Jeremiah 2×2
Summary
Chapter summary
A covenant lawsuit against an unfaithful wife, who is Israel. She chased her lovers for bread and wool and flax, 'and she knew not that I gave her the grain and the new wine and the oil': the silver and gold she spent on Baal. So Jehovah hedges her way with thorns and strips her feast days away. Then the turn no lawsuit predicts: 'I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her,' giving the valley of Achor for a door of hope. She will call him Ishi, my husband, not Baali. 'I will betroth thee unto me for ever' (2:19).
Context
Prophecy · Hosea — Hosea overview
- A. 1–5 Plead with your mother, for she is not my wife
- B. 6–13 Hedged with thorns; she never knew who gave the grain
- C. 14–17 Allured into the wilderness and spoken to tenderly
- D. 18–23 Betrothed forever, and Jezreel sown in the land
The outline
A.Plead with your mother, for she is not my wifevv. 1 to 5
Read vv. 1 to 5 →B.Hedged with thorns; she never knew who gave the grainvv. 6 to 13
Read vv. 6 to 13 →C.Allured into the wilderness and spoken to tenderlyvv. 14 to 17
Read vv. 14 to 17 →D.Betrothed forever, and Jezreel sown in the landvv. 18 to 23
Read vv. 18 to 23 →
The world behind this chapter
Hosea 2The history
The chapter opens with a legal formula. In the ancient Near East a husband ending a marriage declared before witnesses, in words very like these, that she is not my wife and I am not her husband. Hearers recognised the sentence the way we would recognise the wording of a court summons.
The penalty described was also real law, not invention. Documents from Mesopotamia and the surrounding cultures prescribe stripping an adulterous wife and putting her out with nothing — she had brought nothing legally her own into the marriage, so she left with nothing. It was public, deliberate humiliation.
Baal was a rain god, and that is the whole quarrel. In a land with no great river to irrigate from, the harvest depended entirely on rain falling at the right weeks, and Baal was advertised as the one who supplied it. Worship at his shrines involved sexual acts believed to prompt the god to fertilise the land. So the list of what the lovers supposedly gave — grain, new wine, oil, wool, flax — is exactly what a Canaanite farmer thought he was buying.
Two of the promises at the end turn painful place names inside out. The Valley of Achor was where Achan was executed after the failure at Ai, remembered ever after as the valley of trouble; it becomes a door of hope. And the two Hebrew words for husband are set against each other — Israel will call God my husband instead of my master, because the second word is also the name Baal.
What it meant to them
The charge was not that Israel had stopped sacrificing to the LORD. It was that they credited the crops to somebody else while keeping up the appearance of covenant loyalty, and they had never noticed that the grain and the wine and the oil all came from the God they were cheating on.
The ending would have been almost shocking to the first hearers. After the stripping and the wilderness comes a courtship — she is led out and spoken to tenderly, and the covenant is renewed with the animals and the sky as parties to it. Judgment is the road, not the destination.
Sources cited
- John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews, Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament
- Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament: The Minor Prophets
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Hosea 2. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
Connections from this chapter
v. 23 · The covenant formula
'Thou art my people... Thou art my God' lands as 'they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them': the marriage IS the covenant. Bridges Rows 6 and 7.
Revelation 21:3→And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man, and He will dwell with them. They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God.
MT-ASV; public-domain quotation
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.