Commentary on Hosea, Joel and Amos 1.3.1

Verses 1–5. — “And the Lord said to me: Go again, love a woman loved by a friend, and an adulteress, as the Lord loves the children of Israel, while they look to other gods and love the husks of grapes. And I bought her for myself for fifteen pieces of silver, and a cor of barley, and half a cor of barley, and I said to her: You shall wait for me many days; you shall not commit sexual immorality, and you shall not belong to a man; and I also will wait for you. For the children of Israel shall sit many days without king, and without prince, and without sacrifice, and without altar, and without ephod, and without teraphim. And afterward the children of Israel shall return, and seek the Lord their God and David their king; and they shall fear before the Lord and his goodness in the last of days.” Since the prophet had taken up the opening of the prophecy, which promised the captivity of that people in words that then turned around, he here, as he showed at the beginning, announced in God’s person sad things, but things already imminent; and under the guidance of the same Holy Spirit he wove the oracle, as it were, out of contraries. For when he has roared terribly, he at once adds joyful things to comfort the wounded, either so that the people may become used to hearing sad things, or to show that the Lord himself hesitates and, as we said above, is eager to delay when he is about to punish. By this he teaches at the same time that they should never despair of salvation under such a judge, who is so ready to forgive that, by telling of gentle things in the midst of adversities, he seems earnestly to excuse his having been angry. So he commands the prophet not to lay aside, because of an earlier offense, the love he had spent on the obscene woman, but to contend against her shamelessness with professed kindness; and he lets him know, whether in fact or (as seems more consistent) only by the revelation of the Spirit, that that prostitute could be hired for a small fee not only to be content with the prophet’s company but to abstain alike from his and from others’ intercourse, as women who can show that they prostituted themselves more from the need to get a living than from pursuit of lust; and that if even scanty food were provided, she would readily do without the pleasure of the outrage. By this example the case of the synagogue is made worse: it did not keep, even when invited by abundance, the agreement that any harlot respects even under great scarcity. “We grant time, then,” he says, “to those who go astray, so that they may either break out in tears toward amendment or at last succumb to heavy vengeance. Now, putting precious things after worthless ones, they forget their own God and follow strange ones, just as if they scorned the grapes and gathered husks fit for pigs rather than for men.” So first the measure of a cor is named, containing thirty modii. Second he says, “half a cor of barley,” thereby establishing by agreement that the woman’s duty of continence is bought, in the image of the condition the synagogue would suffer in the Babylonian captivity, where, enduring exile but under hope of return, she would cleave neither lawfully to God nor to idols, but would live as if stripped of all comfort. For this reason he says, “You shall not commit sexual immorality, and you shall not belong to a man; and I also will wait for you.” The Jews, or those who follow them, contend that this passage refers to the judgment of the present time: that, being driven out of Jerusalem, they indeed have none of the marks of the priestly office that the prophet lists when he promises that they will be without king, without prince, without sacrifice, without altar, without ephod, and without teraphim; yet they hold the pledges of return, namely the word of God, who had promised that he too would wait for them. But that they are deceived in this opinion, or deceive others, is proved by the evidence of all the nations brought into the faith of Christ. For after they refused to believe the Gospel of Christ, the vineyard was taken from them and entrusted to other tenants who would render its fruit in its season. Therefore in that age in which they were serving the Babylonians, the nation and God are rightly said to have waited for each other: not that the whole people was free of the profanities of the Gentiles, which other holy leaders also charge them with, but because there was a mixture of righteous men there, and because offspring better than their parents would have the joys of liberation. For their sake God promises that he will wait, that is, that he will not at once take any other nation into the place of the one driven out until, as we said above, it returns better through chastisement, and, recovering the ornaments of its ancient priesthood that it had lost, in the throng of the faithful surrounds the horns of the altar, paying to God the vows that its lips uttered, and “they shall fear before his goodness in the last day.” He has set out, then, the reason for this banishment: that through it the afflicted nation might grow used to abstaining from profane things, until, chastened by lawful blows, it might deserve to be taken back into partnership, from which a godly and joyful swarm would come forth.