1. Hosea is in the Hebrew identical with the original form of the name Joshua, and with the name borne by the last king of Israel (Hoshea). All that is known as to Hosea's personal character and history is based upon the statements in his book. He was the son of an otherwise unknown man, Beeri, and he married a woman, Gomer, whose faithlessness to him was a principal factor in his mission as a prophet. Beyond the incident of his unhappy marriage we possess no further information as to his personal life.
2. That Hosea was a native of the Northern Kingdom needs no proof to any one who has read his book. Without laying any stress on occasional Aramaisms, or on the phrase “our king” in Hos_7:5, which is probably enough a popular phrase taken up half-satirically by the prophet, it would seem that the flow of sympathy towards the Israelites, the intimate knowledge of their circumstances, the topographical and historical allusions, point unmistakably to one born and bred in the Northern State. His images and turns of expression seem sometimes to be influenced by the Canticles, an exquisite idyll of pure love which originated in the Ten Tribes. His whole soul yearns for his native country with an infinite tenderness.
3. While there is enough in Hosea's book to make us sure that he had seen from the inside the work of the priests, both in connexion with the sacrifices and in connexion with their judicial functions, there is not enough to compel us to suppose that he was professionally identified with them. The prophets were intimately associated with the priesthood-so intimately that there is no need to postulate more for Hosea. Like Amos, he was probably outside the circle of professional prophetism. His attitude towards the official religious guides of the nation is distinctly antagonistic, and his preaching clearly met with much opposition. “As for the prophet,” he says, “a fowler's snare is in all his ways, and enmity in the house of his God.”
4. It was through his domestic trials that Hosea reached the consciousness of his prophetic calling. Under a Divine impulse, the significance of which he was afterwards to learn, he had married Gomer, who proved herself unworthy of his love. To her three children Hosea gives symbolic names expressive of his message-Jezreel, Lo-ruhamah, Lo-ammi. But his forbearance availed nothing. Attracted perhaps by the licentious orgies of the Canaanite worship, or simply in order to follow a paramour, this profligate woman deserted her husband. At last she sank so low as to be sold for a slave. But in this her lowest degradation her husband did not abandon her. By Divine command he redeemed her from bondage, and brought her home again. There he kept her in a stern seclusion, depriving her of the liberty which she had so wantonly abused, and not yet restoring her to the full rights of a wife, but watching over her, until her affection for him should revive.
There are in the main three interpretations of this story. (1) That it is wholly allegorical. Hosea invents it to describe the infidelity of Israel. But as G. A. Smith says, it “would be strange for Hosea to tell such a record of his wife if false, or, if he was unmarried, about himself.” (2) That it is wholly literal. God, indeed, lays heavy burdens upon His servants, but we should require a greater evidence than we have to believe that He demanded that a pure man should take a foul woman to his breast. (3) That the experience is real, but to be interpreted with discretion. The main point is that Gomer was pure, or thought to be pure by Hosea, and fell into wrong after marriage. This view has rapidly gained acceptance since its convincing presentation by W. Robertson Smith in his Prophets of Israel:
“It is a history that lies behind Hosea's public ministry; and we are told that it was through his marriage with Gomer-bath-Diblaim-whose very name shows her to be a real person, not a mere allegory-that Hosea first realized the truths which he was commissioned to preach. The events recorded in chap. 1 are not Hosea's first message to Israel, but Jehovah's first lesson to the prophet's soul. God speaks in the events of history and the experiences of human life. He spoke to Amos in the thundering march of the Assyrian, and he spoke to Hosea in the shame that blighted his home.”1 [Note: L. W. Batten, The Hebrew Prophet, 87.]
5. It was a real experience, and the very power of it depends on this, that Hosea's relation to the one unfaithful to him had at its very core and heart an exquisitely noble, genuine, true, human love. Hosea, a man of lofty character, grieved, broken-hearted for the sin of his own time, prays to God, struggling to know God's will, and in the providence of God is led to fall into a pure, sworn, noble love. He dreams of a bright, happy home with a woman to whom his heart goes out, whom he counts true, pure and good, and lovely in return. He loves her, and in his love for her learns to know what sweet human love is. Then a terrible disaster comes upon him: she proves unfaithful, and Hosea comprehends that this guilt that has struck his heart in his own house is but a part of the great pervading pollution of his time. It is that degraded religion, that unfaithfulness to God, that declension of all purity in the land that has broken into his own family circle and has cut his heart till it bleeds. And in all that passes through Hosea's heart he feels the echoes of the great heart of God.
6. Hosea had to learn what no prophet had learned before, and what no prophet ever could have learned by a mechanical revelation from without-that the essence of the Divine nature was not justice but love (cf. 1Jn_4:8). Gomer in her prime of purity was a symbol of Israel whom Jehovah “found as grapes in the wilderness”; in her unnatural infidelity, of Israel who “went after” the Baalim; in her undeserved gradual restitution into the position of a wife, of Israel, first led aside into the wilderness, and then taken back to the full favour of an eternally loving God. And Hosea in his mixed and harrowed feelings towards Gomer is himself a type of Jehovah. His loathing abhorrence of her sin, his flaming indignation at her infidelity, and, stronger than either, his tender compassion at the depth of misery to which she has reduced herself, are but a reflection of Jehovah's feelings towards His people. Hosea's work is to give expression to this newly-found truth.
Upon the themes of forgiveness and repentance Hosea has all the essence of the evangel; which indeed quotes his great saying: “I will have mercy, and not sacrifice.” Through terrible personal suffering inflicted by one whom he loved, Hosea was led to understand how men's sins cost God more pain than anger. From that moment the Gospel of Divine Forgiveness was assured. And just because she whom the prophet was himself moved to forgive and redeem was an individual, we may believe that, while the nation still continued with Hosea to be the unit of religion, he planted in Israel's faith the seeds which Jeremiah developed of the confidence that God too in forgiveness deals with the single souls of men. Upon Repentance Hosea's teaching is startlingly evangelical. The care with which he follows every symptom of it in his people; the ethical sternness with which he repels their easy optimism regarding it; the labour he takes to distinguish its true character from the sorrow of this world, and founds it on a new knowledge of God and of His love, in short, on a real change of mind-all this anticipates in a wonderful way the Metanoia of the Gospels and Epistles.1 [Note: G. A. Smith, Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament, 158.]
