Commentary on Hosea, Joel and Amos 1.1.1–1.1.4

Verses 1 and 2. — “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 in the days of Jeroboam son of Joash, king of Israel. The beginning of the Lord’s speaking in Hosea.” Mentioning the kings seems to come from the custom of those who narrate what was done at various times, so that we may know of what age the history is woven. The prophets, however, had far more need to observe it. For although they do not simply pursue the task of history, recording what has been done, but by the impulse of prophecy also announce things to come, yet since they present these as coming not by chance but by judgment, and argue according to the will of that Prince whose laws they lament as violated and his ceremonies as often polluted, they very properly set the names and times of the kings at the head of the work, so that, learning from history what was committed in those times, we may admit that the prophets had worthy and weighty grounds for their invective. So it is recorded in the annals of Kings and of Chronicles that while those whose names are set first were reigning, the whole nation of the Jews was indeed defiled by the worship of idols, but the ten tribes, which since the division made under Jeroboam were called Israel, were both foul with the worst sacrileges and pressed by calamities hanging over them. He therefore mentioned four kings of Judah, whose times his age of prophesying reached, and one who had reigned over the part of Israel. When he began to prophesy, the men he named were ruling those parts. Not long afterward the dominion at Samaria came to an end. For Zechariah son of Jeroboam, who had held the rule by succession for six months, was destroyed by civil sedition, that is, by the rebellion of Shallum. Against Shallum, when he had reigned one month at Samaria, Menahem son of Gadi went up, renewed the rebellion, and destroyed that earlier usurper. And Menahem himself, for ten years of disorderly rule rather than reign, served the king of the Assyrians, who was called Pul, under a heavy burden of tribute, so that his poverty was plain. Already, then, whirlwinds of calamity were rushing on that portion of the ten tribes. And so, while the kingdom still stood among the people of Jerusalem, the captivity that had been foretold carried off the ten tribes. After the people of Samaria had been removed to the territory of Assyria, holy Hosea, remaining in the region of Judah, saw the time of King Hezekiah, famous for miracles, and under him also exercised the office of prophesying. Because destruction was already imminent for Israel, he named the ruler of only one part of it, under whom he had begun to prophesy. When he wrote, “The beginning of the Lord’s speaking in Hosea,” this seems to show that he was the first to be taken up into this kind of speech. Not that there had been no prophets before, since the same history of Kings records the deeds and words of blessed Elijah and Elisha and many others; but when each of them was commanded to commit to writing, for everlasting memory, what he foretold, Hosea was the first to undertake the task. Nor indeed do we deny that blessed David and the most wise Solomon, as the Gospel and the apostles testify, were true prophets and handed down their words in writing. But the skilled reader will notice no small difference between their writings and those of the men we are now trying to explain. For although they said some things about the captivity of the people, they sang beforehand what they had seen would come long after with minds at rest, as it were, trembling at no nearness of evil. These men, by contrast, set in the very crash of vengeance, with hearts utterly stunned, since they were themselves made sharers in the calamities, carry out the whole with tearful laments, as it were, and portray the feeling of our Lord, who is driven to punish only with great reluctance; at times indeed they implore the help of divine mercy, but otherwise they follow the course of the calamities as if with a tragic pen. Let us recognize, then, that the beginning of these seers, who were marked especially by this name of “prophets,” was made by blessed Hosea. Conspicuous for holiness of life and of family, he took up the work of a preacher in such a way as to bear the person both of the Redeemer and of the judge, as will appear more clearly through the whole work.

Verses 2, 3, 4, 5. — “And the Lord said to Hosea: Go, take for yourself a wife of sexual immoralities and children of sexual immoralities, for the land, committing sexual immorality, will commit sexual immorality away from the Lord. And he went and took Gomer daughter of Debelaim, and she conceived and bore a son. And the Lord said to him: Call his name Jezreel, for yet a little while and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel on the house of Jehu, and I will make the kingdom of the house of Israel cease; and on that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.” Note the custom, or rather the dignity, of holy men: once they have risen to such honor that our Lord uses their tongue like a scribe’s pen, not only their words but also their deeds are clothed with prophetic honor, and they serve the announcing of mysteries either by teaching or by acting. At the very opening of the address, then, the holy Creator commanded blessed Hosea, he says, to disregard the splendor both of his calling and of his blood and to be joined in marriage to a most worthless woman, a common prostitute; and to bear not only the name of such a wife but also the matching disgrace in himself, so that he would be believed the father of offspring of uncertain origin, as one who had raised the children of another man’s obscenity. I am well aware how great the dispute among learned men has been over the meaning of this passage, so that whole regions disagree about how to explain it. For Palestine and Egypt, and all others who are much swayed by the authority of Origen, deny that this marriage was contracted bodily by the prophet Hosea. Rather, just as many things are narrated as done by the prophets in the spirit, so they say that these nuptials with a prostitute were carried out only in word. For the reason of that time, they say, did not require that Hosea, going out to preach, should play the wanton contrary to the institutions of the holy law, which had declared partnership with a prostitute wicked, and that, about to censure sins, he should first himself commit what the whole people would then be rebuked for. And how unfitting it would be if, to defend the outrage, he put forward the person of the one who commanded it, asserting that as far as his own character went he had shuddered at the foulness of that partnership, but had yielded to the authority of the Lord who had appointed him to rebuke the peoples! He would seem to have given cause for derision rather than for fear to those who would think the obscenities of others ought to be rebuked in the name of the one whom he himself proclaimed the author of the outrage he had committed. It is also asked whether this is supported anywhere in the whole law by a similar example, either of command or of deed: whether, that is, our Lord anywhere commanded something to be done against his own commandments, whose transgressors he would surely punish with the disasters announced through the prophets. If, to show this, someone brings forward the killing of his son commanded to blessed Abraham (although it was given before the times of the law), we shall be reminded by the very outcome of the deed that it was not the savagery of slaughter but the father’s piety and faith that was chosen. For “he who had received the promises was offering his only son, to whom it had been said, In Isaac shall your seed be raised,” showing that “God is able to raise even from the dead.” Yet, as his firm faith guarded him against fear that the promise would be frustrated, so God did not let the father’s devotion run on to the death of the boy, but checked the hand of the one about to sacrifice by interposing praise of the virtue now proved. “It is clear,” he says, “what alone I wished to make public: that nothing is stronger in you than love and honor for me. Now spare the blood that neither another could lawfully shed nor you fittingly. And lest you seem deprived of a priest’s office, see, a ram stands by for you, its horns caught in the thorns, whose life, as it was able to bring present help for setting your son free, will also deserve to signify a mystery to come.” In the case of blessed Hosea, however, a union not only commanded but also carried out and continued for a long time seems defensible neither by the honorableness of the act nor by the authority of the command. This is added: that in the very figures of prophecy the order was not kept. For to signify the tribes, which, though bound in God’s companionship and fellowship, had broken out into adulteries, that is, sacrileges, a prostituted woman is taken, who nevertheless, ennobled and made chaste by the partnership, receives children not from a shameful but from a revered husband, that is, from the prophet, and in honor of the marriage, forgetting her former vileness, is distinguished more by fruitfulness than by lust. How then will this woman, distinguished by such honors through her husband, be shown to represent the nation that did not shrink from obscene vices before its marriage, but is described as having pursued shameful things after it had first stood in the holy partnership of its Lord? By these and many other arguments they try to show that the prophet was not united bodily with a prostitute. Against this, on the other side, the Syrians, and those who think that the marriage was carried out in the flesh, rely especially on the testimony of the names, by which the woman, her parents, and her region are plainly made known, while the union is proved by the offspring that followed. And whatever the prophet, contrary to his own habits, took on through obedience must be credited to his devotion rather than to any violation of the law on his part. Indeed the act could also be defended as honorable, since he had brought the woman over from the trade of a prostitute to the office of a chaste wife for the rest of her life. Contending with each other in such disputes, they have made both opinions suspect. In truth it seems both shorter and safer, and more suited to the meaning of the events, to believe that the matter was done in the spirit: just as blessed Jeremiah, without leaving the borders of Judea, is described as having buried a loincloth in the region of the Parthians, and as holy Ezekiel, placed in the midst of the Babylonian captivity, is brought in as a spectator in the temple at Jerusalem, beholding only the images of places and actions while he was far elsewhere, so also blessed Hosea, who was to signify the deeds of many times, saw through fitting images the series of faults as well as of punishments. Whichever opinion one leans to, the testimony of this office shows the reverence due to the prophet, whose person the Creator of things seems to have taken on himself, so that the reason of the divine judgments may be gathered from the man’s deeds. Such a bond exists between the eternal Lord and his faithful servant that the reputation of both is, as it were, tied together: if the prophet’s action has to be excused, an excuse would seem to be needed for the divine goodness as well. But if whatever is beyond the human surpasses and sets aside the service of our testimony, let it claim the same authority for itself with minds that are satisfied, so that they learn that it has no need of human examination at all. This is what the apostle Paul’s verdict declares when he says: “But to me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human day; I do not even judge myself, for I am conscious of nothing against myself. It is the Lord who judges me” (1 Cor 4:4). So the Creator’s command and the prophet’s action stand under one and the same reverence. But the sequence and order of the words should be carefully noted, which point rather to the view that the union was not carried out bodily. “Go,” he says, “take for yourself a wife of sexual immoralities and children of sexual immoralities, for the land, committing sexual immorality, will commit sexual immorality away from the Lord.” Yet that time was not the beginning of the sacrileges, which he accuses under the name of sexual immorality, but already their last stage. For the corruption of religion had begun chiefly from the times of Jeroboam, and the worship of the heifers had been urged on the peoples and remained without interruption for many ages. But in these days, when the office of prophecy was laid on blessed Hosea, it was not transgressions but rather punishments that were beginning to arise. This certainly does not agree with the meaning that a prostitute taken in marriage seemed to show, indicating the insult that the Lord would bear for a long time. Now let us see what the order of the announcement contains. “Go, take for yourself a wife of sexual immoralities and children of sexual immoralities, for the land, committing sexual immorality, will commit sexual immorality away from the Lord. And he went and took Gomer daughter of Debelaim, and she conceived and bore a son. And the Lord said to him: Call his name Jezreel, for yet a little while and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel on the house of Jehu, and I will make the kingdom of the house of Israel cease, and on that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.” This way of speaking by our God is found frequently in the holy books: he accuses sacrileges under the name of sexual immorality. For because God, “known in Judea,” had chosen one nation to unite to himself, and had taken it like a wife, with the tablets of the law as the bond, so that from it he might beget children by instruction, he calls chaste those who keep the rights of religion inviolate, and on the contrary base and polluted those who have violated the covenants of holy worship by the infection of errors and the pursuit of heresy. By this image he expressed both the greatness of his love toward the godly and the vehemence of the severity with which he pursues the ungodly: for he rises up not only as a censor or judge but like a husband raging for vengeance. But since the passage runs plainly enough to be understood, we must ask what he accomplished by the apparatus of so great a figure. What need was there that a simple narrative should not contain all this, but that the prophet should be commanded to enter into union with a prostitute, whether in the body or only in images? Here, to those who think piously and wisely, a depth both of divine kindness and of prophetic dignity appears. For our God, who weaves his providence into human affairs, takes thought indeed for mortals in common, but, as if he counted as men only those who have won reverence by the virtues of their lives, he shows himself moved by their judgments and hastens to instruct them above all, now by commands, now by images. Either because he wishes to show what I said before, that he has the greatest regard for holy men and does not treat their complaints lightly, or else because he is accustomed to be softened by the prayers of the saints, when the time has come for him to begin to bring forth vengeance he first sets before them the matters by which he is angered, so that by explaining what has been deserved he may remove the obstacles of their intercession, and may first bring onto his own side those whom he could find to be delayers of the sentence, and urge them to be angry with him. This is like what happened when blessed Moses had sent spies into the land of promise from each of the twelve tribes: when they returned, all except two terrified the cowardly people, and the sedition that arose shook blessed Moses himself as well. But when he had fled to the tabernacle, “the glory of the Lord appeared,” it says, and, showing how much he valued him and how far he preferred him to all those peoples, he said, “Let me alone, that I may destroy this people, and I will make you over a nation much greater than this.” From these words the holy man understood how much he could do with God, and at once softened the judge’s indignation. So too, when the overthrow of the Babylonian captivity was threatening the temple of the people of Jerusalem, he led the prophet Ezekiel, in the contemplation of the spirit only, around the sanctuaries that had once been venerable, so that, seeing how the people sinned, he might cease to wonder if so great a reversal took place that a nation lately exalted by singular reverence should perish most vilely. In this way a similar apparatus is laid on blessed Hosea, through whom exile was announced as imminent for a people for whom neither the merits of their fathers nor the intercessions of the prophets would avail, so that he might feel and weigh in his own case whether God could, or should, bear that heap of insults. “Take on,” he says, “the person of a kindly man who has long endured a prostitute’s ways in his wife; receive children who are either held to be of uncertain fatherhood or are more naturally credited to another man’s obscenity; and find out whether you can keep up continual patience, and whether you would think it a cure for an old pain to be freed by separation from the woman whom you never corrected by your kindnesses, however many.” Whether, then, the commanded union was only in the affections of the mind or also in the business of the defiled body, it seems to regard the honor of the prophet, who, in order to show faithfully the severity of the judge, tastes the injury by which God was affected; and again, as if an obligation were laid on him to bring forth vengeance on the ungodly, this very fact, that the prophet bore an insult unworthy of himself for the sake of signifying the matter … Since, then, the reason for the parable that we have stated seems adequate, let us now follow its order. “Take for yourself,” he says, “a wife of sexual immoralities and children of sexual immoralities, for the land, committing sexual immorality, will commit sexual immorality away from the Lord.” This doubling belongs to the idiom of Hebrew speech: “doing he will do,” “speaking he will speak,” and so on. So too “committing sexual immorality it will commit sexual immorality.” A distinction might be drawn within this expression, but the brevity that comes from the habit of the Scriptures should not be overlooked. Note that by the name of sexual immorality he refers not so much to the time of entering on transgression as to that of already undergoing captivity. And not inconsistently. For because obscenity supplied the ground for the condemnation of profane minds, the punishment is marked with the name of its cause, so that we say the people commits sexual immorality when it is condemned for sexual immorality; and he shows that in the present passage there was also a weighty reason for this. For it is clear that punishment is not the same as guilt, since guilt is opposed to what is honorable, punishment to wantonness; and it is well established that the definitions of things can in no way be confused by sharing names, and therefore that punishment is [not] guilt. So he certainly did not without reason declare the people a fornicator at the time when it was about to enter on the evils of captivity. But because he knew that the chastisement itself would have different effects according to the difference of minds, and that some would be made better by affliction, others worse by shamelessness, he rightly says both that they would suffer punishment for the ungodliness they practiced within their own borders, and that in the very time of captivity some would show the marks of amendment, others the proofs of crime, according to what he threatens elsewhere: “You served in your own land gods whom your fathers did not know; you shall serve foreign gods in a land not your own.” Because the profanity that the nation committed when free it went on practicing as a slave, it is foretold that even in the midst of its punishments it will commit sexual immorality. The first son, whom the prostitute bore, as it were, is given the very name of the region over which captivity hangs. For he says, “Call his name Jezreel.” This name designated a valley lying next to Samaria. By the name of this place, then, they announce what the region will suffer. Next follows: “For yet a little while and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel on the house of Jehu, and I will make the kingdom of the house of Israel cease; and on that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.” The time for exercising vengeance, he says, is at hand, and therefore wrath rises against the kingdom of Samaria, which is designated by the name of Jezreel, the neighboring valley, as I said. Let offspring destined for punishment be born, then, in your mind, so that you may know that what you see ordained, as it were, against your own children is to be carried out against mine. “For I will avenge the blood of Jezreel on the house of Jehu.” Two senses would present themselves for explaining this, according to the usage of the law, if what follows did not confirm one of them. The offspring of Jeroboam ruled up to the family of Ahab, who was the husband of Jezebel. But when Ahab had become filthy with crimes both his own and his wife’s, whose boldness he served, the prophet Elisha, at God’s command, raised up Jehu son of Nimshi to take the kingdom. Moved to severity for these same causes, Jehu destroyed by slaughter the whole family of Ahab and Jezebel, and all the priests and ministers of the idol Baal alike. For this service of vengeance it was promised him that his descendants to the fourth generation would preside over the kingdom of Israel. But Jehu himself and his sons and grandsons did not abandon the sacrileges of Jeroboam, and so lost the honor of the devotion with which they had pursued the worshipers of Baal: they clung to the worship of the calves of Samaria and served various crimes of conduct, as profane worship requires. Therefore wrath is said to rise against them too, that is, against the descendants of Jehu who had destroyed Ahab’s family, in order to avenge the blood of those whom they had killed: not that the slaughter had been unjust, but because those who had done it had lost the honor of judges by imitating the crimes, and by doing things like those whom they had destroyed had passed into the number and fellowship of the guilty. Thus those whom the sword of wicked men had slain would seem worthy of vengeance: a manner of speaking that we could easily show to be frequent in the Scriptures as well. So the prophetic verse could be explained in two ways, I say: in the one I have set out, and in another that follows, were it not that the course of the work supports the latter more. For by the name Jezreel he meant the nation itself, and by the name Jehu the kingdom of the nation: that is, “See, the time has come for the people of Israel, which is either to be conquered in the valley of Jezreel or has its royal city set in that same valley, and which has a king descended from the stock of Jehu, to begin to experience the force of the vengeance it deserves.” Then, to confirm this understanding, he added: “And I will make the kingdom of the house of Israel cease, and on that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.” He called punishment “visitation,” and the end of the kingdom “rest”; and to indicate both more plainly he said, “I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.”

Verse 6. — “And she conceived again and bore a daughter, and he said: Call her name Without Mercy, for I will no longer have mercy on the house [Jerome: on the house] of Israel, but I will utterly forget them.” Because he had determined to anticipate the outcome of events by images that would point to them, a daughter is described as born, who received the name of another’s calamity, that is, Without Mercy. “For I will no longer,” he says, “have mercy on the house of Israel, but I will utterly forget them.” Here the weight of a twofold sentence is contained. For he does not only say, “In the time of their miseries I will deny them mercy,” but, “I will not even let them come back into my memory.” For it would be some comfort, even in extreme weakness, if at some time or other he took up again the memory of those he had cast off. Now, so that the threat he has put forward may grow harsher, he promises that both will belong to him: remembrance of those who are to be condemned, and the fullest forgetting of those who have been condemned. In the ears of a wise minister this could stir up a charge of cruelty, so that some such thing might be turned over, if not in speech then in thought: “How has so much bitterness flowed into that kindness which is the cause of all things, that you do not forget the guilt though you forget the guilty, and are attentive to the offender while never remembering the afflicted? I fear that the salvation of the penitent too must be despaired of, if forgetfulness of the fallen creeps upon so great a ruler.” Therefore he at once added that he had not cast off the care of mercy, but had applied the scale of due judgment; that is, that he would, as it were, forget only those who do not think of amendment even after blows. Verse 7. — “… for I will no longer have mercy on the house of Israel, but I will utterly forget them. But I will have mercy on the house [another reading: on the house] of Judah, and I will save them by the Lord their God; and I will not save them by bow and sword and battle and horses and horsemen.” “When I have subjected the people of Samaria,” he says, “defiled by transgression, to calamities and destruction, and have let them become so worthless because of their guilt that I seem to have quite forgotten them, then those who remain in the part of Judah and place their hope and confidence of safety in the worship of religion I will not only protect but also deliver by a marvelous new deed, so that it may be openly clear that they were defended not by arms but by merits, and won the victory not by the battle line but by piety.” He announces the time when, while Hezekiah reigned at Jerusalem, Sennacherib king of the Assyrians came with a great army to besiege that city, and there, having said much in insult to God and holy religion, stirred up the divine sentence against himself; and in a single night all his forces fell as the angel struck. For after losing one hundred and eighty-five thousand warriors, he himself is described as fleeing with a few to his own country and perishing there (2 Kgs 19).

Verse 8. — “She weaned,” he says, “the one who was Without Mercy, and she conceived and bore a son; and he said: Call his name Not My People, for you are not my people, and I will not be your God.” The title has shown that blessed Hosea lived and prophesied until the times of Hezekiah. Whatever was done during the whole span of his prophesying, then, he records briefly at the very opening, so that through the whole book he may then unfold the series and order of events. When the profanity of an ungrateful nation had driven our God to take up the work of vengeance, he announced that he would punish the guilty and leave them in their miseries in such a way that he would seem to have forgotten them entirely. But lest the forgetfulness admitted into his holy breast should also alarm the godly, he at once showed that he uses forgetting not as a fault but as a judgment, since he was making a distinction of merit between kinsmen: leaving the Israelites to destruction, he would protect the people of Judah, who clung to the worship of his religion, by miracles rather than by weapons. Although this was made plain at the proper time, yet because that portion of the Jewish nation too did not please him with constant devotion, but, as other prophets reproach it, burned with zeal for the worship of idols, it also suffered a like sentence and was carried off from its own borders when Babylon conquered. From that captivity, however, a return was promised by the prophecy of almost all the prophets, and it was fulfilled under Cyrus king of the Persians. Blessed Hosea’s discourse now speaks of both times. To signify the captivity of Israel, a daughter is brought in, who was to be called Without Mercy. As a figure of Judah, a boy is brought in, whose name is Not My People. Among the images of the children, it is said only of the girl that she was weaned, evidently to show that among the ten tribes the sentence of captivity laid on them grew strong, as it were. For in fact the captivity of the ten tribes is read to have lasted much longer, and so the lengthening of its time is signified by the weaning of the girl. The third child, who announces the last captivity, that of Judah, received the name Not My People. For as long as Judah remained within its borders, there was a multitude that could be called the people of God; but after the storm of captivity had torn it up too, the people once set apart from the confusion of the Gentiles seemed to have perished. And so he says: “You are not my people, and I will not be your God”: that is, “this distinction by which you were formerly conspicuous will be taken from you, so that you will not be called the people of God in the whole world, nor shall I be called your prince or your God. For it is just that you who corrupted by your eagerness for sin the institutions of the holy law, which separated you from foreign nations, should also be deprived of the glory that made you distinguished.” Having announced these things briefly on the side of severity, he passes over to prosperity, which the venerable plan of God fulfilled in deed just as he had woven it in prophetic speech.