Bible 911-Hosea

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Okay, this Bible 911 about Hosea is my background study for the 9:11 post. If you are new, I am looking at every book that has 9 chapters and then focusing on the eleventh verse. When I did Amos, I realized how little I knew about that book, so I did a background study. Now on to Hosea.

The timeframe is very important for this book. There are several prophets who prophesied at the same time and were led to write very similar things. Hosea started writing during the reign of Uzziah and ended in the time of Hezekiah, just like Isaiah. Both of these great prophets called for repentance, spoke out about Assyria, and had Messianic visions.

These are the kings of the southern kingdom of Judah, think Jerusalem and south along the Dead Sea. “Right” does not mean that they did not have problems, I am glad the Father is so gracious.

  • Uzziah did right (2 Kings 15, he is also known as Azariah)
  • Jotham did right
  • Ahaz did evil
  • Hezekiah did right like David (2 Kings 18)

The northern kingdom of Israel (Samaria); think north of Jerusalem on both sides of the Jordan and all-around Lake Galilee. None of these kings did right; well maybe Jehu. This is where Elijah and Elisha worked for the Lord.

  • Zechariah (2 Kings 15, he was the last of Jehu’s family to rule Israel. See verse 12.)
  • Shallum
  • Pekahiah
  • Pekah
  • Hoshea (2 Kings 17) He was the last king of Israel. Assyria was the Lord’s instrument for punishment, and they deported all the tribes and replaced them with various people groups including Babylonians. They became known as Samaritans.

Gomer is Hosea’s wife. After reading several articles, I think it would be right to refer to her as a “trophy wife”. Hosea 1 – 3 tells the story. She has three children, and it is possible they are not all Hosea’s (more on the names later). She is unfaithful and leaves Hosea. In 3:2 Hosea pays for her again, I will refer to this as a second “bride’s price” like what he did in chapter 1 when he first married her. So, either she sold herself or her father married her off again.

A thought I had here is the timeline for chapters 1 – 3; when did all of this happen? Given that this is a picture of an unfaithful Israel, it would seem right to believe that chapters 4 -14 happened during and after the marriage.

Prostitution and Adultery

This is the major theme of Hosea. Israel has left Jehovah and gone after other gods. In the NIV this idea is stated more than sixteen times. 4:12 and 5:4 talk about the spirit of prostitution that has affected the people of God.

The Kids

Hosea and Isaiah are contemporaries. Both had a mission and part of that was to be witnesses and signs to the two kingdoms. Their missions extended into their families; a very visible part was the names God instructed them to give the children. Hosea’s three children are mentioned in 1: 4 Jezreel is a son; 1:6 Lo-Ruhamah is a daughter; 1:8 Lo-Ammi is a son. I have to wonder who took care of the children when Gomer left. Isaiah had a very different family. His wife is called a prophetess and she bore two sons- 7: 3 Shear-Jashub and 8: 3 Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz. 8:18 refers to the family as symbols in Israel (NIV).

Children are a major theme in Hosea. The 9:11 verse highlights this, but it is not the only one to talk about children.

Assyria

This nation rose to world power during the lives of these prophets. They were the main nation that Israel prostituted itself to. Nineveh was the main city and was the focus for other prophets- Jonah and Nahum. The field commander of Assyria called his king the “great king” in Isaiah 36: 4 +13; this idea is repeated in Hosea 5:13, 10:6, and 8:10.

Egypt is frequently mentioned in the same verse as Assyria. They are seen to be a false help for Israel.

Deals much with history–

  • Massacre at Jezreel 1:4 by Jehu. See 2 Kings 10:11, it seems that Jehu went too far in carrying out his instructions 2 Kings 9.
  • Gibeah 5:8, 9:9, and 10:9. Judges 19, they sinned, and the other tribes of Israel destroyed Benjamin for the rape of the concubine. 
  • Gave them a king 13:11; this could reference Saul or more specifically Jeroboam (for the north). He had a promise from God if he did right.
  • Gilead- 6:8, 12:11 a city of wicked men. This is on the east bank.
  • Gilgal- 4:15, 9:15, 12:11 wrong sacrifices. This is where Joshua circumcised the young men when they entered the land. 
  • Jacob in Aram 12:12 
  • Moses the shepherd in 12: 13
  • Admah and Zeboyim 11:8 These are cities overthrown with Sodom and Gomorrah

Ephraim

Ephraim is the second-born son of Joseph. He was born in Egypt and has an Egyptian mother. Jacob blessed him to be over his brother Manasseh and get a bigger inheritance from Joseph. (See Tribes of Israel-Ephraim.) In Hosea, he is first mentioned in Chapter 4, he is lost to idols, and is talked about in every chapter, thereafter. In Chapter 14 he returns to God and remembers where his strength comes from. I suggest you use a search tool and follow his story through Hosea, it is very telling. The NIV has 32 passages with him in it. He is paired with Judah (another son who was elevated in status by Jacob) several times. It is easy to see that Ephraim is being used in place of Israel in representing the northern kingdom. That actually is shallow because I also see other things he is standing for-the tribe and someone who is still divided about God. The most telling statement about him is 7:11 where he compared to a dove who is easy to deceive. (A note. Manasseh got two sections of land, one on the east bank and one on the west.)

 Connections

These are random thoughts and comparisons; I am sure I missed some good ones.

  • 12:9 sounds like Amos 9: 11
  • 11:11 sounds like Amos 9:15
  • The Day, referring to a day of judgment, like in Isaiah. It is said several times, especially at 10:15.
  • 10:4 and 8 sound like Matthew 13:24 the Parable of the Weeds.
  • The name Hosea is used in Romans 9:25 and in his book, nowhere else.
  • The Bible is unique in that it talks about the shortcomings of some very important characters. Lot was willing to let his daughter suffer abuse (angels guarded them) and then is abused by them. Judges 19 tells a tale of sexual abuse by a city that is defended by a tribe. Absalom uses ten of his father’s concubines (wives). Hosea’s tale is special because the wife leaves and then is redeemed by her husband.
  • Baal Peor-9:10b, this is found in Numbers 25.

Prophets

Prophets of God are an amazing group of people. God loves His people but not all have the same mission, so some have higher levels of responsibility. According to talents, gifts, and callings, He expects more from some people, true prophets of God fall into the higher levels. Jeremiah had to walk hundreds of miles to bury and then retrieve a belt. Elijah had to face 850 false prophets and people who doubted God. Ezekiel had a special diet for a year and had to dig through the city wall. Jonah hated the Assyrians and a whale had to bring him back.

I think Hosea may have been the prophet that really mirrored the heart and actions of the Father and Jesus the most. He had to marry (pay a dowry) a beautiful woman he knew would cheat on him, and then purchase her again after she left him. God first purchased Israel when He freed them from Egypt.

Jesus in the Story

The task of buying back the unfaithful wife fell on Jesus. Hosea’s purchase speaks of Israel and Judah. The price Jesus gave was for all unfaithful mankind. His broken body and shed blood are the only things that could restore fellowship with the Father as Adam and Eve had in the Garden.

Homework-Find the meanings of the names of the children of Hosea and Isaiah. Now find how they would be symbols (a Bible 911) for a nation that is ignoring their God.

A Question About Rehoboam

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The question about Rehoboam was really on who his mother was. The problem for the questioner was the fact that she was an Ammonite and not a native Israelite. I have two posts on Naamah. Post #1 and Post #2. I will guess Deuteronomy 23 is the scripture the question stems from. I am not going to wade through the jots and tittles of Hebrew Law about marrying foreigners.

But I had to stop and think about all of the times that Hebrew men married foreign women. Moses, Salmon, Boaz, and probably David, and the men who returned to Jerusalem with Ezra and Nehemiah are the ones I thought of. Moses married a Cushite (Numbers 12), Salmon married Rahab (1 Chronicles 2:13, Matthew 1:5), Boaz married Ruth, David married Bathsheba (possibly a Hittite, 2 Samuel 11), and the men with Nehemiah (13:23) seemed to be marrying who was available. You may argue with God about the first four. I will try to contrast and compare the women of these two groups.

Group 1 – We know very little about the Cushite and Naamah, just that they had yoked themselves to the Israelite community. Rahab hid the spies in Jericho after acknowledging God and the things He had done. Ruth pledged to Naomi that she would follow her and accept Jehovah as her God. Bathsheba was part of the community and I guess David offered sacrifices for her when the first baby died. It seems to me that all of these women chose to follow God when they married into Israel.

Group 2 – These women were from Ashdod (Philistine), Ammon, and Moab, not that different from Group 1. Nehemiah 13: 23 and 24 paint a different picture of how they lived. They married the men but did not choose the God of Israel. To be fair to them their husband may not have been on fire for Jehovah either. They were not even taught to speak Hebrew, which met that they could not read Torah or participate in festivals with the Hebrew community.

A great, well-learned Pharisee wrote a New Testament commentary on this subject in 2 Corinthians 6:14-do not be unequally yoked to unbelievers. I am not sure if any of the women in Group 1 could enter the “temple” and worship God with their husbands. I have read that the Hebrew husband would “cover” the children of these marriages, but that finer point of the Law is above my paygrade. It does seem that these women did yoke themselves to the God of Israel.

Since much of the lineage of Jesus was mentioned in Group 1, I will let you question if Rehoboam should have had an Ammonite for a mother.

Homework-What did the people (men) of Israel yoke themselves to in Numbers?

A Word to Live by-Salvation

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Logos is a new category of study that is starting with the word salvation.  Since this is a Bible study blog you will need to be ready with your Word, a concordance, or at least a Bible study site like biblegateway.com.    

This post started by doing a search on the term “salvation”, where I went to the New Testament.  First, I noticed that the word salvation is not used in Matthew or Mark. (You may notice that number counts don’t match! Gateway does a verse count while a concordance does a word count. Throw in titles and modern word replacements, counts will vary between websites and concordances.)

You can focus on one verse, book, or writer and have a meaningful study.  I noticed in looking at the uses of salvation in the New Testament an interesting pattern.  In Luke 1: 69, 71, and 77, these verses are part of the prophecy of Zechariah about Jesus and John.  Luke 2:30 and 3:6 are “seeing” salvation.  Luke 19:9 and John 4:22 (only use) is Jesus talking to people about salvation – Zacchaeus, the hated tax collector, and the Samaritan woman at the well. 

Luke starts again in Acts 4:12 with salvation for mankind and his next three mentions (concordance please) have the Gentiles included in receiving salvation.  The Holy Spirit continues the inclusion of Gentiles in Romans 1:16 and 11:11. 

Romans 13:11 starts another facet of material that presents things and ideas associated with salvation.  Paul includes two different verses about salvation being our “helmets” – Ephesians 6:17 and 1 Thessalonians 5:8. Hebrews and Peter (1+2) include many verses about salvation.  The last verse about salvation is Revelations 19:1 where “salvation, glory, and power belong to God”.

Hebrews 2:10 I found interesting because it is about Jesus.  He is the pioneer of our salvation that was made perfect by what He suffered (most of that thought is from the NIV).  “Perfect” in the thinking of the Old Testament would be one who is complete.  That may cause a bump in our modern thoughts about the term perfect.

FYI – biblegateway.com has forty verses with salvation in the New Testament NIV.  I found the ordering of the word salvation in the Logos interesting because it makes a logical presentation on the topic starting in Luke and going to Revelations.

The First Direction

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The first cardinal direction mentioned in the Bible is East. Genesis 2:8 has God in the east planting a garden, so He must have come from the west.  I know this is a simple thought, but directions come in pairs – west and east, and north and south.  This simple thought is also important – where is the east?  You can face the east, something can come from the east, go to the east, or be of the east.  

Many important things in the Bible face east – the Temple (especially the one in Ezekiel), the Tabernacle, and I believe the throne of God.  The etymology of the word east deals with where the light comes from and how we orient our position on earth.  Like many other things in the Bible “modern man” picks and chooses why something is important by current standards.  My example here is the direction north – we choose that to be the top of the map or the best/positive direction to go, and it gets the biggest letter on the compass.  A study of “east” in the Bible will include many things, with each bring a different significance to the table for discussion. Several examples are:

  • In Exodus, the children of Israel went east from Egypt to the Promised Land, and the east wind blew in locust, and the east wind parted the Red Sea. The locust became a plague while at the Red Sea the wind provided deliverance. 
  •  In Israel, east winds are a problem, they come in from the desert and dry the land out.
  • The camp around the Tabernacle was laid out with an east/west axis as its prominent feature.  The position of a tribe around the Ark showed birthrights and importance.  I started a study of that in the post – Marching Order.
  • The Christmas star and the Magi also bring east into the discussion.  The star “was in” or “it rose in” the east which joins it to Jesus in many ways.  The Magi came from the east to worship the newborn King.
  • Scripture shows several west to east movements – God to the Garden, Israel leaving Egypt going to the Promised Land, and Jesus, as a young boy, returning to Nazareth. 

An important feature of the east/west axis is the light.  Starting with Genesis 2 we see the metaphor of west (darkness) and going to the east (light).  (No, there is not a problem with the west and it is not a negative “area”.  The little cloud that Elijah’s servant saw would have come from the west – it ended the drought.  In Israel most rain showers come from west or northwest.)  God started in the west heading to the light to plant the Garden.  The two trees in the center of that Garden can carry a dark/light context.  Knowledge of good and evil led to darkness while the tree of life would have led to the light.  Like the study of numbers, the study of directions can add much to your Bible reading, but be sure you are looking EAST.  

Earthquakes in the Bible 

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This post, Earthquakes in the Bible, grew out of my study of Amos. I took a look at the faults and volcanoes in the area of Israel and will mention several of the “major” quakes in the Bible. If you want to do your own study and are using a Bible app search tool, adding these terms will increase your hits. I used the NIV-earthquake, quake, earth open, shook, shake, melt, trembled, split, and mountain moving. 

A little science first. (Names have been an interesting problem and are different depending on what map you look at.) The main crack in the crust is called the Levant Fault and seems to follow the Jordan River. There are many smaller faults on the east and west sides of the Levant. This fault line is a border between the Arabian Plate (east) and the plate under the Mediterranean Sea (west). This is a transform fault (it moves laterally). The Arabian Plate also has a divergent line (spreads apart) in the Red Sea, and a convergent zone (comes together or is pushing into or under another plate) that runs through the Arabian or Persian Gulf. The divergent zone is associated with the fault that runs through the eastern side of Africa. Earthquakes in this region are numerous and would not have been anything new to the people of the Bible. There are also several volcanoes in the area, though none seem to have erupted in the last four thousand years.  

Korah, Dathan, and Abiram 

Numbers 16: 30 is the story of a rebellion against God and Moses. God stops it by removing the conspirators. For the location, this was on the east side of the Jordan and Dead Sea. “The earth opening up and swallowing” is something that can happen during a quake. Korah was a Levite and Dathan, and Abiram is from Ruben. In the layout of the camp around the Tabernacle, these two families/groups would have been next to each other in the heart of the camp on the south side. This just adds an extra level to the story, for me; God opened that hole in the middle of a busy “city” and did not harm anyone else. This power and judgment were talked about for a long time, it made a “second level” telling in Psalm 106:17. 

Psalm 114 is a retelling of Israel entering the Promise Land. Verse 3 adds an interesting phrase in the mountains and hills skipped like rams and the Jordan turned back. I know that there was no mention of a quake in Joshua, but an earthquake could have produced those effects.

Elijah also records a specific earthquake in 1 Kings 19:12. The man of God, was about to meet his Lord in a one-on-one encounter. I have heard it preached many ways, but I do not think God was pleased with Elijah being in that cave. This meeting has some parallels with Moses on the mountain when God came to him. God’s entrance also has wind and fire. When you study other mentions of quakes; severe weather, storms, landslides, and violent waves are talked about several times. 

Amos 1:1 tells of a quake that occurred during the reign of Uzziah. Zechariah uses that earthquake to tell a future quake that will happen when the Messiah returns and touches the Mount of Olives. Isaiah has many references to earthquakes (I counted 6x), the references in Isaiah 5:25 and 29:6 could be speaking of the one mentioned by Amos. The one in Isaiah 29 has thunder, great noise, windstorms, and fire, it may also talk of the one I mentioned in Zachariah and/or the quake in Revelations 16. 

Matthew tells of a quake and its aftershock in chapters 27 and 28 that occurred during the Passover when Jesus was sacrificed and reborn. The first quake occurred when Jesus breathed His last breath (verses 50-54). The thick curtain in the Temple was torn revealing the empty Holy of Holies and tombs around Jerusalem were opened. The timing convinced the centurion and soldiers that Jesus was the Son of God. The aftershock was provided by an angel who rolled the sealing stone out of the way, so the women could not find the body.  

There is a movie/documentary called the Crucifixion Quake. I saw three strands in this movie. The main strand was a geologist trying to find evidence of the earthquake talked about by Matthew, he did. He used fieldwork, lab work, and some impressive studying of ancient text to confirm that the quake actually happened. Strand two was a priest and several scientists that supported the Bible and the Christian beliefs of this quake and other events of that day. Strand three had a New Age pundit and several “New Testament experts” that did not believe Matthew’s account or spun the story to neutralize Jesus and that day. Okay, I did a lot of fast-forwarding because strand three was giving me a headache. I may try watching it again and doing a better review, but.   

In my study I used this link for the word seismos. σεισμός | billmounce.com 

Luke records a specific earthquake that set Paul and Silas free from chains and helped to get the jailor and his family saved. Philippi is far removed from the Levant but is no stranger to fault lines, earthquakes, and volcanoes. 

Metaphors, Prophecy, and Quakes 

Many writers talk about earthquakes in the Bible. Jerusalem and the Land are the epicenter of these really and predicted quakes. There are several references to the hills and mountains melting like wax. Of course our modern minds go to lava. But active volcanoes near the Holy Land are few, so may I suggest that a landslide or rockslide could be described like that. 

  • Debroah-Judges 5: 4+5 
  • Micah 1:4 
  • Nahum 1:5  
  • Jesus – Matthew 24:7, Mark 13, and Luke 21 
  • David – Psalm 68:8 this echoes Deborah, Psalm 18:7, 2 Samuel 22:8 
  • Moses – Psalm 97: 5 (I think he wrote this psalm) 
  • Asaph and the sons of Korah – Psalm 77:18, 75: 3, 46: 3  
  • Isaiah14:16 (a reference to Satan); 29:6; 5:25; 24:18,19; 42:15; 45:8 
  • Zechariah 14:4,5 
  • Ezekiel 38:19 
  • John – Revelations 16:18,19; chapters 6, 8, and 11 also reference earthquakes 

Seismos is a Greek word that references more than earthquakes. What other events does it talk about? 

Many of the earthquakes mentioned by the prophets talk about a great earthquake that will happen on the “Day” of His return. This may not be all of the references to earthquakes in the Bible, but it should get you started in your studies.