Hosea Rereads the Wilderness Years
Read Numbers in its entirety and it is hard to avoid the sentiment made famous in William Norman Ewer’s jingle: “How odd /of God / to choose / the Jews.” God had just brought them out of slavery, set them on the road to freedom, given them bread from heaven and water from a rock, divided the sea for them, and surrounded them with clouds of glory. What did they do in return? They complained.
There are no less than seven rebellions in Numbers. The first was about food (ch. 11). The second was the criticism of Moses by his own brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam (ch. 12). Third was the panic caused by the spies (ch. 13–14). Fourth was the challenge to Moses and Aaron by Korah and his fellow conspirators (ch. 16). Fifth was the protest of the people after Moses had suppressed Korah’s revolt (ch. 16–17). Sixth was about water: the occasion when Moses lost his temper and forfeited his chance to enter the land (ch. 20). Seventh was the adultery and subsequent idolatry of the Israelites seduced by the Moabite women (ch. 25).
Not only this – there was the fear of freedom, its battles, and its responsibilities, that led the people into monumental false nostalgia. When they complained about the manna, they said, “We remember the fish we ate without cost in Egypt – also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic” (Num. 11:5). After the report of the spies the people say, “If only we had died in Egypt” (14:2). Most chilling of all are the words of Korah’s companions, Datan and Aviram: “Is it not enough that you have brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey to kill us in the wilderness?” (16:13). This is a devastating series of failures and indictments.
In the end – or more precisely in the middle, because the event is the turning point in the book as a whole – we arrive at the conclusion that the whole generation lacked the courage, the self-restraint, the ability to focus on the future and act together as a people to enter the land and shoulder the burden of freedom. The wilderness years were not the Israelites’ finest hour.
Thus far the Torah. But what is striking about Judaism as a whole is that the Torah is not the sum total of kitvei kodesh, sacred Scripture. It is merely the first and holiest of what are essentially three libraries, the others being Nevi’im and Ketuvim, the Prophets and the Writings. One way of summarising the difference between them is this: The Torah is God’s word to human beings. Nevi’im represents God’s word through human beings. Ketuvim are the words of human beings inspired by ruaḥ hakodesh, the “holy spirit,” to God.
Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible as a whole, is the work of approximately a thousand years, from the days of Moses to the last of the prophets. Nor is it all of equal authority. Only Torah, the Mosaic books, have the force of law. After Moses, said the rabbis, no prophet has the authority to innovate by way of primary legislation (Shabbat 104a).
Why then the prophetic books? Because they constitute a commentary on the Torah. Commentary is essential.1See on this Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), an important and pioneering study of what he calls “inner-biblical exegesis.” Not least among the implications of this study is that Midrash, the primary rabbinic mode of biblical exegesis, is in fact a continuation of the work of the prophets.
Without it we simply would not know what the Torah means for us. Meaning is never a once-and-for-all phenomenon. It is something that needs to be striven for in every age. That applies even to secular texts. What do Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Ethics mean for us? Or Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice?2See Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1986), for a fine study of interpretation of legal and other texts. Another key work is Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury, 1975).
Or for that matter, an event from childhood seared in our memory? As we grow, so does our understanding of the past and its relationship to the present.
That, in essence, is what the great prophets did for Israel. They had a profound, inspired sense of time. Prophets are usually thought of as people who can foretell the future. That may be so, but it is only because they understand the present and the past. Seeing where we are and where we have come from, they know where, unless we change direction, we will find ourselves in a generation’s time. Their insight into the past was no less compelling than their warnings about the future.
That is by way of a preface to one of the first literary prophets and one of the most passionate, the eighth-century-BCE figure known as Hosea. His book begins with an astonishing episode. God tells him to marry a prostitute. You will fall in love with her, God implies. She will betray you and cause you immense pain. She will be unfaithful. She will have children and you will not know who their father is. You will have an urge to disown them. You will call one of them “Unloved,” and another “Not my people” (Hos. 1:1–9).
Hosea will know on some rational, intellectual level that his wife is causing him pain and that the quicker they separate, the better. But, as Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”3M. R. O’Connell, Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), xi. He adds, “It is the heart that perceives God, and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason” (p. 169).
Logic can be powerless against emotion – especially when it comes to love. The fact that she has been unfaithful to you does not stop you loving her, and in the end you will find you cannot disown either her or her children.
There is, though, one thing you can do. You can wait for her to recover her senses and realise that you are the only one who really cared for her. You kept your side of the bargain however often she broke hers. When that happens, you will take her on a second honeymoon and renew your marriage vows. Hosea will learn through his own life experiences what God’s relationship with Israel feels like from the perspective of heaven.
In a fascinating passage in the Babylonian Talmud the rabbis speculated as to what led God to make this request of the prophet:
The Holy One, Blessed Be He, said to Hosea, “Your children have sinned.” To this, the prophet should have replied, “[My children?] They are Your children, the children of Your favoured ones, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Be merciful to them.” Not only did he not say this, but he actually said, “Lord of the universe, the whole world is Yours. Exchange them for another nation.”
The Holy One, Blessed Be He, said [to Himself], “What shall I do with this old man? I will tell him to go and marry a prostitute and have children by her. Then I will tell him to send her away. If he can, then I too will send Israel away.” (Pesaḥim 87a)
This is a fundamental rabbinic insight into the nature of prophecy: Who is qualified to bring God’s word to the Jewish people? Only one who loves the Jewish people. It is easy to see the prophets as social critics, which they were. They saw the people’s faults; they were candid in declaring them. They were the world’s first social critics.4See Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Their message was often a negative one, foretelling disaster. The Talmud is telling us that such a view is superficial and misses the essential point.
The prophets loved their people. They spoke not out of a desire to criticise but from the depths of solidarity and love. Initially, implies the Talmud, Hosea lacked this love. When God said that the people had sinned, he accepted the verdict and told God to choose another people. This was a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of a prophet. A prophet is entitled to criticise but only out of love for those he critiques. That is why God told him to experience love in his own life. Only then would he understand God’s feelings for His people. That is why, in Israel’s darkest nights, the prophets always had a message of hope.
The significance of Hosea’s story here is that part of it forms the haftara for Parashat Bemidbar. This is the passage in which God talks about His own future second honeymoon with the Israelites:
Therefore I am about to woo her.
I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her….
There she will respond as in the days of her youth,
As in the day she came out of Egypt. (Hos. 2:16–17)
Hosea had been given to see by God that the wilderness years were not simply, or even primarily, years of rebellion. They were the first honeymoon between God and His people. They were what we call nowadays yiḥud, the point in the wedding ceremony in which bride and groom are alone together. The making of the covenant at Mount Sinai was a form of marriage, and though there were many domestic quarrels in those first years, on the part of the husband – God Himself – there was never less than love. It may sometimes have been injured, betrayed, and wounded – but it was still love.
The prophets use many metaphors to describe the relationship between God and the people He chose to be His special witnesses on earth. Religious language cannot but be metaphorical – the Infinite cannot be compassed in finite categories. So God is described as artist, creator, king, master, warrior, shepherd, judge, teacher, redeemer, and father, but the loveliest and most intimate is God as husband, with Israel as His bride. Isaiah and Jeremiah both use this language. So, poignantly, does Ezekiel. This, he says, is what God felt when He saw the Israelites in Egypt:
Later I passed by, and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness. I gave you My solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you – declares the Lord God – and you became Mine. (Ezek. 16:8)
But the earliest and supreme poet of faith-as-marriage was Hosea. Reading this haftara as we begin the book called “In the Wilderness” completely reframes our image of the wilderness years. Reading it as we usually do, immediately prior to Shavuot, the commemoration of the giving of the Torah, we make another momentous affirmation: that in giving the Torah to Israel, God was not asserting His power, dominance, or lordship over Israel. He was declaring His love.5That is what Hosea means when he says, “In that day, declares the Lord, you will call Me ‘my husband [ishi],’ you will no longer call Me ‘my master [baali]’” (Hos. 2:18). This is a subtle play on words. Baal, the name of the Canaanite god, implies power, ownership. The word ish refers back to the opening of the Torah, when the first man, seeing the first woman, says, “She shall be called woman [isha], because she was taken from man [ish]” (Gen. 2:23). This is marriage as love between two individuals who recognise both sameness and otherness. That is the model for love between God and humanity, the other that God created in His image.
And though the wilderness years were often fraught, they were undergirded by love: God’s love for Israel that Israel did not always reciprocate.
The words with which the haftara ends are among the most beautiful in the entire religious literature of mankind. Jewish men recite them every weekday morning as they wind the strap of the hand-tefillin like a wedding ring around their finger, renewing daily the marriage covenant of Sinai:
I will betroth you to Me for ever;
I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and justice, love and compassion;
I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness,
And you will know God. (Hos. 2:21–22)
That is what the wilderness years were meant to be, and one day will be again: a time of love, when a people followed God into an unknown future, and faith became a marriage that might be shaken but would never be broken.