VOL. I.
In ch. ii. 7, the adulterous woman (Israel) says, “ I will go and return to my former husband, for then was it better with me than now;” and Jehovah replies to this (ch. ii. 8, 9), “ Because she has not discovered that I gave her corn and new wine, etc.; therefore will I return, and take away my corn from her in the season thereof, and my wine,” etc. On the other hand, according to the view adopted by Kurtz, the prophet took his wife back again because she felt remorse, and assigned her the necessary maintenance for many days.
From all this it follows, that by the woman spoken of in ch. iii., we cannot understand the wife Gomer mentioned in ch.i. The “ wife beloved of the companion (i.e. of her husband), and committing adultery,” is a different person from the daughter of Diblathaim, by whom the prophet had three children (ch. i.). If, then, the prophet really contracted and consummated the marriage commanded by God, we must adopt the explanation already favoured by the earlier commentators, viz. that in the interval between ch. i. and ch. ili. Gomer had either died, or been put away by her husband because she would not repent. But we are only warranted in adopting such a solution as this, provided that the assumption of a marriage consummated outwardly either has been or can be conclusively established. And as this is not the case, we are not at liberty to supply things at which the text does not even remotely hint. If, then, in accordance with the text, we must understand the divine commands in ch. i. and iii. as relating to two successive marriages on the part of the prophet with unchaste women, every probability is swept away that the command of God and its execution by the prophet fall within the sphere of external reality. For even if, in case of need, the first command, as explained above, could be vindicated as worthy of God, the same vindication would not apply to the command to contract a second marriage of a similar kind. The very end which God is supposed to have had in view in the command to contract such a marriage as this, could only be attained by one marriage. But if Hosea had no sooner dissolved the first marriage, than he proceeded to conclude a second with a person in still worse odour, no one would ever have believed that he did this also in obedience to the command of God. And the divine command itself to contract this second marriage, if it was intended to be actually consummated, would be quite irreconcilable with the holiness of God. For even if God could command a man to marry a harlot, for the purpose of rescuing her from her life of sin and reforming her, it would certainly be at variance with the divine holiness, to command the prophet to marry a person who had either broken the marriage vow already, or who would break it, notwithstanding her husband’s love; since God, as the Holy One, cannot possibly sanction adultery." Consequently no other course is left to us, than to picture to ourselves Hosea’s marriages as internal events, “i.e. as merely carried out in that inward and spiritual intuition in which the word of God was addressed to him; and this removes all the difficulties that beset the assumption of marriages contracted in outward reality. In occurrences which merely happened to a prophet in spiritual intercourse with God, not only would all reflections as to their being worthy or not worthy of God be absent, when the prophet related them to the people, for the purpose of impressing their meaning upon their hearts, inasmuch as it was simply their significance, which came into consideration and was to be laid to heart; but this would also be the case with the other difficulties to which the external view is exposed—such, for example, as the questions, why the prophet was to take not only a woman of whoredom, but children of whoredom also, when they are never referred to again in the course of the narrative; or what became of Gomer, whether she was dead, or had been put away, when the prophet was commanded the second time to love an adulterous woman—since the sign falls back behind the thing signified.
But if, according to this, we must regard the marriages
1 This objection to the outward consummation of the prophet’s marriage cannot be deprived of its force by the remark made by the older Rivetus, to the effect that ‘‘ things which are dishonourable in themselves, cannot be honourable in vision, or when merely imaginary.” For there is an essential difference between a merely symbolical representation, and the actual performance of anything. The instruction given to a prophet to set forth a sin in a symbolical form, for the purpose of impressing upon the hearts of the people its abominable character, and the punishment it deserved, is not at variance with the holiness of God; whereas the command to commit a sin would be. God, as the Holy One, cannot abolish the laws of morality, or command anything actually immoral, without contradicting Himself, or denying His own nature, enjoined upon the prophet as simply facts of inward experience, which took place in his own spiritual intuition, we must not set them down as nothing more than parables which he related to the people, or as poetical fictions, since such assumptions as these are at variance with the words themselves, and reduce the statement, “ God said to Hosea,” to an unmeaning rhetorical phrase. The inward experience has quite as much reality and truth as the outward; whereas a parable or a poetical fiction has simply a certain truth, so far as the subjective imagination is concerned, but no reality.
Ch. i. 1 contains the heading to the whole of the book of Hosea, the contents of which have already been discussed in the Introduction, and defended against the objections that have been raised, so that there is no tenable ground for refusing to admit its integrity and genuineness. The t’chillath dibber- Y*hovah with which ver. 2 introduces the prophecy, necessarily presupposes a heading announcing the period of the prophet’s ministry; and the “ twisted, un-Hebrew expression,” which Hitzig properly finds to be so objectionable in the translation, “in the days of Jeroboam, etc., was the commencement of Jehovah’s speaking,” etc., does not prove that the heading is spurious, but simply that Hitzig’s construction is false, i.e. that Uchillath dibber- Y*hovah is not in apposition to ver. 1, but the heading in ver. 1 contains an independent statement; whilst the notice as to time, with which ver. 2 opens, does not belong to the heading of the whole book, but simply to the prophecy which follows in ch. 1.-i1i.
ISRAEL THE ADULTERESS, AND HER CHILDREN.—CHAP. I. DAG,
For the purpose of depicting before the eyes of the sinful people the judgment to which Israel has exposed itself through its apostasy from the Lord, Hosea is to marry a prostitute, and beget children by her, whose names are so appointed by Jehovah as to point out the evil fruits of the departure from God. Ver. 2. “ At first, when Jehovah spake to Hosea, Jehovah said io him, Go, take thee a wife of whoredom, and children of whoredom; for whoring the land whoreth away from Jehovah.” The marriage which the prophet is commanded to contract, is to set forth the fact that the kingdom of Israel has fallen away from the Lord its God, and is sunken in idolatry. Hosea is to commence his prophetic labours by exhibiting this fact. nena ‘ 9a7: literally, “at the commencement of ‘ Jehovah spake,’” 2.¢. at the commencement of Jehovah’s speaking (dibber is not an infinitive, but a perfect, and é’chillath an accusative of time (Ges. § 118, 2); and through the constructive the following clause is subordinated to ¢’chillath as a substantive idea: see Ges. § 123, 3, Anm. 1; Ewald, § 332, ¢.), 737 with 3, not to speak to a person, or through any one (2 is not = 8), but to speak with (lit. in) a person, expressive of the. inwardness or urgency of the speaking (cf. Num. xii. 6, 8; Hab. ii. 1; Zech. i. 9, ete.). “Take to thyself:” 7e. marry (a wife). D321 NYS is stronger than 732i. A woman of whoredom, is a woman whose business or means of livelihood consists in prostitution. Along with the woman, Hosea is to take children of prostitution as well. The meaning of this is, of course, not that he is first of all to take the woman, and then beget children of prostitution by her, which would require that the two objects should be connected with 1? per zeugma, in the sense of “accipe uxorem et suscipe ex ea liberos” (Drus.), or “ sume tibi uxorem forn. et fac tibi filios forn.” (Vulg.). The children begotten by the prophet from a married harlot-wife, could not be called yaldé 2°ninim, since they were not illegitimate children, but legitimate children of the prophet himself; nor is the assumption, that the three children born by the woman, according to vers. 3, 6, 8, were born in adultery, and that the prophet was not their father, in harmony with ver. 3, “he took Gomer, and she conceived and bare him a son.” Nor can this mode of escaping from the difficulty, which is quite at variance with the text, be vindicated by an appeal to the connection between the figure and the fact. For though this connection “necessarily requires that both the children and the mother should stand in the same relation of estrangement from the lawful husband and father,” as Hengstenberg argues; it neither requires that we should assume that the mother had been a chaste virgin before her marriage to the prophet, nor that the children whom she bare to her husband were begotten in adultery, and merely palmed off upon the prophet as his own. The marriage which the prophet was to contract, was simply intended to symbolize the relation already existing between Jehovah and Israel, and not the way in which it had come into existence. The “ wife of whoredoms” does not represent the nation of Israel in its virgin state at the conclusion of the covenant at Sinai, but the nation of the ten tribes in its relation to Jehovah at the time of the prophet himself, when the nation, considered as a whole, had become a wife of whoredom, and in its several members resembled children of whoredom. The reference to the children of whoredom, along with the wife of whoredom, indicates unquestionably @ priori, that the divine command did not contemplate an actual and outward marriage, but simply a symbolical representation of the relation in which the idolatrous Israelites were then standing to the Lord their God. The explanatory clause, “ for the land whoreth,” etc., clearly points to this. 783, “the land,” for the population ae the land (cf. ch. iv. 1). “ "1082 731, to whore from Jehovah, ¢.e. to fall away from Him (see at ch. iv. 12). Ver. 3. “ And he went and took Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim; and she conceived, and bare him a son.” Gomer does indeed occur in Gen. x. 2, 3, as the name of a people; but we never meet with it as the name of either a man or a woman, and judging from the analogy of the names of her children, it is chosen with reference to the meaning of the word itself. Gomer signifies perfection, completion in a passive sense, and is not meant to indicate destruction or death (Chald. Marck), but the fact that the woman was thoroughly perfected in her whoredom, or that she had gone to the furthest length in prostitution. Diblaim, also, does not occur again as a proper name, except in the names of Moabitish places in Num. xxxiii. 46 (Almon-diblathaim) and Jer. xlviii. 22 (Beth-diblathaim); it is formed from d*bhelah, like the form ’Ephraim, and in the sense of d’bhélim, fig-cakes. “ Daughter of fig-cakes,” equivalent to liking fig-cakes, in the same sense as “loving grape-cakes” in ch. iii. 1, viz. delictis dedita.' The symbolical interpretation of these names is not affected by the fact that they are not explained, like those of the children in vers. 4 sqq., since this
1 This is essentially the interpretation given by Jerome: ‘ Therefore is a wife taken out of Israel by Hosea, as the type of the Lord and Saviour, viz. one accomplished in fornication, and a perfect daughter of pleasure (filia voluptatis), which seems so sweet and pleasant to those who enjoy it.”
may be accounted for very simply from the circumstance, that the woman does not now receive the names for the first time, but that she had them at the time when the prophet married her.