William Robertson Smith and Henry Wheeler Robinson

“ The unity is one of feeling only, and the sob of anguish in which many of his appeals to a heedless people seem to end turns once and again with sudden revulsion into the clear accents of evangelical promise, which in the closing chapter swell forth in pure and strong cadence out of a heart that has found its rest with God from all the troubles of a stormy life. ”

“ The point of the allegory in i. 2 is plainly infidelity after marriage as a parallel to Israel’s departure from the covenant God, and a profligate wife (אשת זנונים‎) is not the same thing with an open prostitute (זונה‎) . The marriage was marred by Gomer’s infidelity; and the struggle of Hosea’s affection for his wife with this great unhappiness—a struggle inconceivable unless his first love had been pure and full of trust in the purity of its object—furnished him with a new insight into Yahweh’s dealings with Israel. ”

“ Of the life of Hosea [1] we know nothing beyond what can be gathered from his prophecies. That he was a citizen of the northern kingdom appears from the whole tenor of the book, but most expressly from i. 2, where “the land,” the prophet’s land, is the realm of Israel, and vii. 5, where “our king” is the king of Samaria. The date at which Hosea flourished is given in the title, i. 1, by the reigning kings of Judah and Israel. He prophesied (i) in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah; (2) in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel. ”

“ In ch. ii. the faithlessness of Israel to Jehovah (Yahweh) , the long-suffering of God, the moral discipline of sorrow and tribulation by which He will yet bring back His erring people and betroth it to Himself for ever in righteousness, love and truth, are depicted under the figure of the relation of a husband to an erring spouse. The suggestion of this allegory lies in the prophet’s marriage with Gomer, but the details are worked out quite independently, and under a rich multiplicity of figures derived from other sources. ”

“ And the name of Gomer bath Diblaim is certainly that of an actual person, upon which all the allegorists, from the Targum, Jerome and Ephraem Syrus downwards, have spent their arts in vain, whereas the true symbolical names in the book are perfectly easy of interpretation. [4] That the ancient interpreters take the whole narrative as a mere parable is no more than an application of their standing rule that everything in the Biblical history is allegorical which in its literal sense appears offensive to propriety (comp. Jerome’s proem to the book) . ”

“ Smend, p. 209: “Hosea rejects the kingship in itself”; Wellhausen, p. 125: “The making of kings in Israel is for him, together with the heathen cultus, the fundamental evil”) . This view depends on a disputed interpretation of the reference to Gibeah (x. 9; cf. ix. 9) ; and on the words: “I give thee kings in mine anger, and I take them away in my wrath” (xiii. 11) , which may refer to the rise and fall of contemporary kings (cf. Marti, ad loc.) . In any case, as Wellhausen himself says (p. 132) : “He does not start from a dogmatic theory, but simply from historical experience.” ”

“ It has the great advantage of supplying a psychological key to the conception of Israel or the land of Israel (i. 2) as the spouse of Yahweh, which dominates these chapters, but in the later part of the book gives way to the personification of the nation as God’s son. This conception has, indeed, formal points of contact with notions previously current, and even with the ideas of Semitic heathenism. On the one hand, it is a standing Hebrew usage to represent the land as mother of its people, while the representation of worshippers as children of their god is found in Num. ”