Hoseachapter 3
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Speaks with:Jeremiah 3×1Jeremiah 31×1Isaiah 45×1Genesis 34×1Leviticus 27×1Ezekiel 45×1
Summary
Chapter summary
Fourteen verses that carry the whole book. Hosea is sent back: 'Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend, and an adulteress, even as Jehovah loveth the children of Israel, though they turn unto other gods.' He buys her for fifteen pieces of silver and a homer and a half of barley, then sets her under a long discipline of waiting. The interpretation follows exactly: Israel shall abide many days without king, without sacrifice, without pillar, without ephod: 'afterward shall the children of Israel return, and seek Jehovah their God, and David their king… in the latter days' (3:5), the nation restored as a nation.
Context
Prophecy · Hosea — Hosea overview
- A. 1–3 Bought back for fifteen pieces of silver and a homer of barley
- B. 4–5 Many days without king or sacrifice, then a return
The outline
A.Bought back for fifteen pieces of silver and a homer of barleyvv. 1 to 3
Read vv. 1 to 3 →B.Many days without king or sacrifice, then a returnvv. 4 to 5
Read vv. 4 to 5 →
The world behind this chapter
Hosea 3The history
The price is the sermon. Fifteen shekels of silver plus a homer and a half of barley comes to about thirty shekels of value, and thirty shekels of silver was the compensation the Law set for a slave gored by an ox. Hosea pays a slave's price for his own wife — and pays half of it in barley, the cheap grain the poor ate, because he apparently could not raise the full sum in silver.
How Gomer came to need buying back is not spelled out. She may have been sold into debt slavery, or bound to a shrine, or living under another man's roof; the text says only that Hosea acquired her. Readers have argued for centuries over whether she was already a prostitute when he married her or became one afterwards, and the book does not settle it.
The list of things Israel will go without is a list of the whole apparatus of national life. King and prince is the government. Sacrifice and standing stone is the worship, legitimate and illegitimate together. Ephod and household idols were the two ways people asked about the future — the priestly garment used for enquiring of God, and the small figures kept in the house for the same purpose by less careful families.
The instruction to her is a period of enforced waiting: she is to live with him without the marriage resuming, for many days. Hearers would have heard that as a probation with an end date, not a divorce.
What it meant to them
An Israelite listening to this knew what was being said about the nation. There would be a long stretch with no king, no altar, and no way to enquire — a state of affairs that must have sounded impossible in a kingdom at its peak.
And the last line names what comes after: they will return and seek the LORD their God, and David their king. That was a stunning thing to say in the northern kingdom, which had rejected David's house two centuries earlier and built its whole identity on the split.
Sources cited
- Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions
- 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 3. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
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.