But though Hosea dwells on the sonship of Ephraim with great tenderness, especially in speaking of the childhood of the nation, the age of its divine education (xi. 1 seq.), this analogy does not exhaust the whole depth of Israel's relation to Jehovah. In ancient society the attitude of the son to the father, especially that of the adult son employed in his father's business, has a certain element of servitude (Mal. iii. 17). The son honours his father as the servant does his master (Mal. i. 6.; Exod. xx. 12). Even now among the Arabs the grown-up son and the slave of the house do much the same menial services, and feel much the same measure of constraint in the presence of the head of the house. It is only towards his little ones that the father shows that tenderness which Hosea speaks of in describing the childhood of Ephraim. And so the whole fulness of Jehovah's love to His people, and the way in which Israel has proved unfaithful to that love, can be fitly brought out only in the still more intimate relation of the husband to his spouse.
In looking at the allegory of Jehovah's marriage with mother-Israel, or with the mother-land, we must again begin by considering the current ideas which served to suggest such a conception. Alike in Israel and among its heathen neighbours, the word Baal, that is "Lord" or "Owner," was a common appellative of the national Deity. Instead of the proper names compounded with Jehovah, which are common from the time of Elijah, we frequently find in old Israel forms compounded with Baal which are certainly not heathenish. When we meet with a son of Saul named Ish-Baal, a grandson Meri-Baal, both names meaning "Baal's man," while David in like manner gives to one of his sons the name of Beeliada, "Baal knoweth,'' we may be sure that Baal is here a title of the God of Israel. [12] In Hosea's time the worshipping people still addressed Jehovah as Baali, "my Lord," and the Baalim of whom he often speaks (ii. 13; xiii. 1, 2) are no other than the golden calves, the recognised symbols of Jehovah. Now, among the Semites the husband is regarded as the lord or owner of his wife (1 Pet. iii. 6), whom in fact, according to early law, he purchases from her father for a price (Exod. xxi. 8; xxii. 17). [13] The address Baali is used by the wife to her husband as well as by the nation to its God, and so in an early stage of thought, when similarities of expression constantly form the basis of identifications of idea, it lay very near to think of the God as the husband of the worshipping nationality, or of the mother-land. [14] It is not at all likely that this conception was in form original to Hosea, or even peculiar to Israel; such developed religious allegory as that which makes the national God, not only father of the people, but husband of the land their mother, has its familiar home in natural religions. In these religions we find similar conceptions, in which, however, as in the case of the fatherhood of the deity, the idea is taken in a crass physical sense. Marriage of female worshippers with the godhead was a common notion among the Phoenicians and Babylonians, and in the latter case was connected with immoral practices akin to those that defiled the sanctuaries of Israel in Hosea's day. [15] It even seems possible to find some trace in Semitic heathenism of the idea of marriage of the Baal with the land which he fertilises by sunshine and rain. Semitic deities, as we saw in Lecture I. (p. 26), are conceived as productive powers, and so form pairs of male and female principles. Heaven and Earth are such a pair, as is well known from Greek mythology; and, though Baal and Ashtoreth are more often represented as astral powers (Sun and Moon, Jupiter and Venus), it is certain that fertilising showers were one manifestation of Baal's life-giving power. Even the Mohammedan Arabs retained the name of Baal (ba'l) for land watered by the rains of heaven. The land that brings forth fruit under these influences could not fail to be thought of as his spouse; and, in fact, we have an Arabic word ('athary) which seems to show that the fertility produced by the rains of Baal was associated with the name of his wife Ashtoreth. [16] If this be so, it follows that in point of form the marriage of Jehovah with Israel corresponded to a common Semitic conception, and we may well suppose that the corrupt mass of Israel interpreted it in reference to the fertility of the goodly land, watered by the dews of heaven (Deut. xi. 11), on principles that suggested no higher thoughts of God than were entertained by their heathen neighbours.
This argument is not a mere speculation; it gives us a key to understand what Hosea tells us of the actual religious ideas of his people. For we learn from him that the Israelites worshipped the Baalim or golden calves under just such a point of view as our discussion suggests. They were looked upon as the authors of the fertility of the land and nothing more (ii. 5); in other words, they were to Israel precisely what the heathen Baalim were to the Canaanites, natural productive powers. We have already seen that a tendency to degrade Jehovah to the level of a Canaanite Baal had always been the great danger of Israel's religion, when the moral fibre of the nation was not hardened by contest with foreign invaders, and that in early times the reaction against this way of thought had been mainly associated with a sense of national unity, and with the conception of Jehovah as the leader of the hosts of Israel. These patriotic and martial feelings were still strong during the Syrian wars; and in the time of Amos, in spite of the many Canaanite corruptions of the sanctuaries, Jehovah was yet pre-eminently the God of battles, who led Israel to victory over its enemies. But a generation of peace and luxury had greatly sapped the warlike spirit of the nation, while the disorders of the state had loosened the bonds of national unity. The name of Jehovah was no longer the rallying cry of all who loved the freedom and integrity of Israel, and the help which Ephraim had been wont to seek from Jehovah was now sought from Egypt or Assyria. Jehovah was not formally abjured for Canaanite gods; but in the decay of all the nobler impulses of national life He sank in popular conception to their level; in essential character as well as in name the calves of the local sanctuaries had become Canaanite Baalim, mere sources of the physical fertility of the land. And that this view of their power was embodied in sexual analogies of a crass and physical kind, such as we have found to exist among the heathen Semites, is proved by the prevalence of religious prostitution and widespread disregard of the laws of chastity, precisely identical with the abominations of Ashtoreth among the Phoenicians, and accompanied by the same symbolism of the sacred tree, which expressed the conception of the deity as a principle of physical fertility (Hosea iv. 13 seq.).
Thus, in looking at Hosea's doctrine of the marriage of Jehovah with Israel, we must remember that the prophet was not introducing an entirely new form of religious symbolism. The popular religion was full of externally similar ideas; the true personality and moral attributes of Jehovah were lost in a maze of allegory derived from the sexual processes of physical life; and the degrading effects of such a way of thought were visible in universal licentiousness and a disregard of the holiest obligations of domestic purity. In such circumstances, we might expect to find the prophet casting aside the whole notion of a marriage of Jehovah, and falling back like Amos on the transcendency of the Creator and Ruler of the moral universe. But he does not do so. Instead of rejecting the current symbolism he appropriates it; but he does so in a way that lifts it wholly out of the sphere of nature religion and makes it the vehicle of the profoundest spiritual truths. Jehovah is the husband of His nation. But the essential basis of the marriage relation is not physical, but moral. It is a relation of inmost affection, and lays upon the spouse a duty of conjugal fidelity which the popular religion daily violated. The betrothal of Jehovah to Israel is but another aspect of the covenant already spoken of; it is a betrothal "in righteousness and in judgment, in kindness and in love," a betrothal that demands the true knowledge of Jehovah (ii. 19, 20). A union in which these conditions are absent is not marriage, but illicit love; and so the Baalim or local symbols of Jehovah, with which the nation held no moral fellowship, worshipping them merely as sources of physical life and growth, are not the true spouse of Israel; they are the nation's paramours, and their worship is infidelity to Jehovah. There is no feature in Hosea's prophecy which distinguishes him from earlier prophets so sharply as his attitude to the golden calves, the local symbols of Jehovah adored in the Northern sanctuaries. Elijah and Elisha had no quarrel with the traditional worship of their nation. Even Amos never speaks in condemnation of the calves. But in Hosea's teaching they suddenly appear as the very root of Israel's sin and misery. It is perfectly clear that in the time of Hosea, as in that of Amos, the popular worship was nominally Jehovah worship. The oath of the worshippers at Gilgal and Bethel was by the life of Jehovah (iv. 15); the feasts of the Baalim were Jehovah's feasts (ii. 11; 13, ix. 5); the sanctuary was Jehovah's house (ix. 4), the sacrifices His offerings (viii. 13). But to Hosea's judgment this ostensible Jehovah worship is really the worship of other gods (iii. 1). With the calves Jehovah has nothing in common. He is the living God (i. 10), the calves are mere idols, the work of craftsmen (xiii. 2); and the nation which calls the work of its hands a god (xiv. 3) breaks its marriage vow with Jehovah and loves a stranger.
If the prophecy of Hosea stood alone it would be reasonable to think that this attack on the images of the popular religion was simply based on the second commandment. But when we contrast it with the absolute silence of earlier prophets we can hardly accept this explanation as adequate. Amos is as zealous for Jehovah's commandments as Hosea; and, if the one prophet condemns the worship of the calves as the fundamental evidence of Israel's infidelity, while the other, a few years before, passes it by in silence, it is fair to conclude that the matter appeared to Hosea in a much more practical light than it did to Amos. Our analysis of Hosea's line of thought enables us to understand how this was so. Amos judges of the religious state of the nation by its influence on social relations and the administration of public justice. But Hosea places the essence of religion in personal fidelity to Jehovah and a just conception of His covenant of love with Israel. The worship of the popular sanctuaries ignored all this, setting in its place a conception of the Godhead which did not rise above the level of heathenism. The attachment of Israel to the golden calves was not the pure and elevated affection of a spouse for her husband. It was in its very nature a carnal love, and therefore its objects were false lovers, who had nothing in common with the true husband of the nation. Hosea does not condemn the worship of the calves because idols are forbidden by the law; he excludes the calves from the sphere of true religion because the worship which they receive has no affinity to the true attitude of Israel to Jehovah. By this judgment he proves the depth of his religious insight; for the whole history of religion shows that no truth is harder to realise than that a worship morally false is in no sense the worship of the true God (Matt. vi. 24; vii. 22).
As we follow out the various aspects of Hosea's teaching we see with increasing clearness that in all its parts it can be traced back to a single fundamental idea. The argument of his prophecy is an argument of the heart, not of the head. His whole revelation of Jehovah is the revelation of a love which can be conceived under human analogies, and whose workings are to be understood not by abstract reasonings but by the sympathy of a heart which has sounded the depths of human affection, and knows in its own experience what love demands of its object. One of the first points that struck us in Hosea's impassioned delineation of Israel's infidelity, in the inward sympathy with which he mourns over his nation's fall, yet holding fast the assurance that even in that fall the love of Jehovah to His people shall find its highest vindication, was that Jehovah's affection to Israel is an affection that burns within the prophet's own soul, which he has not learned to speak of by rote but has comprehended through the experience of his own life. It is a special characteristic of the Hebrew prophets that they identify themselves with Jehovah's word and will so completely that their personality seems often to be lost in His. In no prophet is this characteristic more notable than in Hosea, for in virtue of the peculiar inwardness of his whole argument his very heart seems to throb in unison with the heart of Jehovah. Amos became a prophet when he heard the thunder of Jehovah's voice of judgment; Hosea learned to speak of Jehovah's love, and of the workings of that love in chastisement and in grace towards Israel's infidelity, through sore experiences of his own life, through a human love spurned but not changed to bitterness, despised yet patient and unselfish to the end, which opened to him the secrets of that Heart whose tenderness is as infinite as its holiness.
In the first chapters of the book of Hosea the faithlessness of Israel to Jehovah, the long-suffering of God, the moral discipline of sorrow and tribulation by which He will yet bring back His erring people, and betroth it to Himself for ever in righteousness, truth, and love, are depicted under the figure of the relation of a husband to his erring spouse. This parable was not invented by Hosea; it is drawn, as we are expressly told, from his own life. The Divine Word first became audible in the prophet's breast when he was guided by a mysterious providence to espouse Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, who proved an unfaithful wife and became the mother of children born in infidelity (1, 2, 3). The details of this painful story are very lightly touched; they are never alluded to in that part of the book which has the character of public preaching — in chapter 1. the prophet speaks of himself in the third person; and as Hosea gave names to the children of Gomer, names of symbolic form, to each of which is attached a brief prophetic lesson (1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 seq.), it is plain that he concealed the shame of their mother and acknowledged her children as his own, burying his bitter sorrow in his own heart. But this long-suffering tenderness was of no avail. In chapter iii. we learn that Gomer at length left her husband, and fell, under circumstances of which Hosea spares the recital, into a state of misery, from which the prophet, still following her with compassionate affection, had to buy her back at the price of a slave. He could not restore her to her old place in his house and to the rights of a faithful spouse; but he brought her home and watched over her for many days, secluding her from temptation, with a loyalty which showed that his heart was still true to her. [17] These scanty details embrace all that we know of the history of Hosea's life; everything else in chapters i. and iii., together with the whole of chapter ii., is pure allegory, depicting the relations of Jehovah and Israel under the analogy suggested by the prophet's experience, but working out that analogy in a quite independent way.
It is difficult to understand how any sound judgment can doubt that Hosea's account of his married life is literal history; it is told with perfect simplicity, and yet with touching reserve. "We feel that it would not have been told at all, but that it was necessary to explain how Hosea became a prophet, how he was led to that fundamental conception of Jehovah's love and Israel's infidelity which lies at the root of his whole prophetic argument. Those who shrink from accepting the narrative in its literal sense are obliged to assume that Hosea was first taught by revelation to think of Jehovah's relation to Israel as a marriage, and that then, the better to impress this thought on his auditors, he translated it into a fable, of which he made himself the chief actor, clothing himself with an imaginary shame which could only breed derision. But in truth, as we have already seen, the history of Hosea's life is related mainly in the third person, and forms no part of his preaching to Israel. It is a history that lies behind his 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 realised the truths which he was commissioned to preach. The events recorded in chap. i. 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. [18]
Apart from the still surviving influence of the old system of allegorical interpretation, which, though no longer recognised in principle, continues to linger in some corners of modern interpretation, the chief thing that has prevented a right understanding of the opening chapters of our book is a false interpretation of chap. i. 2, as if Hosea meant us to believe that under divine command he married a woman whom he knew from the first to be of profligate character. But the point of the allegory is that Gomer's infidelity after marriage is a figure of Israel's departure from the covenant God, and the struggle of Hosea's affection with the burning sense of shame and grief when he found his wife unfaithful is altogether inconceivable unless his first love had been pure, and full of trust in the purity of its object. Hosea did not understand in advance the deep prophetic lesson which Jehovah desired to teach him by these sad experiences. It was in the struggle and bitterness of his spirit in the midst of his great unhappiness that he learned to comprehend the secret of Jehovah's heart in his dealings with faithless Israel, and recognised the unhappiness of his married life as no meaningless calamity, but the ordinance of Jehovah, which called him to the work of a prophet. This he expresses by saying that it was in directing him to marry Gomer that Jehovah first spoke to him (comp. Jer. xxxii. 8, where in like manner the prophet tells us that he recognised an incident in his life as embodying a divine word after the event). It was through the experience of his own life, which gave him so deep an insight into the spiritual aspect of the marriage tie, that Hosea was able to develop with inmost sympathy his doctrine of the moral union of Jehovah to Israel, and to transform a conception which in its current form seemed the very negation of spiritual faith, full of associations of the merest nature worship, into a doctrine of holy love, freed from all carnal alloy, and separating Jehovah for ever from the idols with which His name had till then been associated.
The possession of a single true thought about Jehovah, not derived from current religious teaching, but springing up in the soul as a word from Jehovah Himself, is enough to constitute a prophet, and lay on him the duty of speaking to Israel what he has learned of Israel's God. But the truth made known to Hosea could not be exhausted in a single message, like that delivered to Amos. As the prophet's own love to his wife shaped and coloured his whole life, so Jehovah's love to faithless Israel contained within itself the key to all Israel's history. The past, the present, and the future took a new aspect to the prophet in the light of his great spiritual discovery. Hosea had become a prophet, not for a moment, but for all his life.
We have already seen that the greater part of the book of Hosea, from chap. iv. onwards — the only part that has the form of direct address to his people — appears to date from the period of increasing anarchy, while the briefer prophecies in chap, i., associated with the names of Gomer's three children, belong to the reign of Jeroboam II. It would seem, therefore, that Hosea was conscious of his prophetic calling for some years before he appeared as a public preacher; and this fact we can well understand in a nature so poetically sensitive, and in connection with the personal circumstances that first made him a prophet. But it was impossible for him to be altogether silent. He felt that he and his family were living lessons of Jehovah to Israel, and in this feeling he gave to the three children symbolical names, to each of which a short prophetic lesson was attached. In this he was followed by Isaiah, whose sons, Mahar-shalal-hash-baz and Shear-jashub, also bore names expressive of fundamental points in the prophet's teaching.
The eldest of Gomer's sons was named Jezreel. "For yet a little while," saith Jehovah, "and I will punish the house of Jehu for the sin of Jezreel, and will cause to cease the kingdom of the house of Israel. And in that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel" — the natural battlefield of the land. To Hosea, as to Amos, the fall of the house of Jehu and the fall of the nation appear as one thing; both prophets, indeed, appear to have looked for the overthrow of the reigning dynasty, not by intestine conspiracy, as actually happened, but at the hand of the destroying invader. It was fitting, therefore, that the great sin of the reigning dynasty should hold the first place in the record of the nation's defection. To Hosea that sin begins with the bloodshed of Jezreel, the treacherous slaughter of the house of Ahab. The very existence of the ruling dynasty rests on a crime which cries for vengeance.
He's a queer man, Captain Ahab -- so some think -- but a good one. Oh, thou'lt like him well enough; no fear, no fear. he's a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn't speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain't Captain Bildad; no, and he ain't Captain Peleg; he's Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!"
-- Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
That Hosea judges thus of a revolution accomplished with the active participation of older prophets is a fact well worthy of attention. It places in the strongest light the limitations that characterise all Old Testament revelation. It shows us that we can look for no mechanical uniformity in the teaching of successive prophets. Elisha saw and approved one side of Jehu's revolution. He looked on it only as the death-blow to Baal worship; but Hosea sees another side, and condemns as emphatically as Elisha approved. In the forefront of his condemnation he places the bloodshed, still unatoned, which, according to the view that runs through all the Old Testament and was familiar to every Hebrew, continued to cry for vengeance from generation to generation. But we must not suppose that in Hosea's judgment all would have been well if the house of Omri had retained the throne. The Northern kingship in itself, and quite apart from the question of the particular dynasty, is a defection from Jehovah — "They have made kings, but not by Me; they have made princes, and I knew it not " (viii. 4); "Where now is thy king to save thee in all thy cities, and thy judges, of whom thou, saidst, Give me a king and princes? I gave thee a king in Mine anger, and take him away in My wrath" (xiii. 10, 11). The kingdom of Ephraim, in all its dynasties, rests on a principle of godless anarchy. What wonder, then, that the nation devours her judges like a fiery oven: [19] all their kings are fallen (vii. 7), the monarchy of Samaria is swept away as foam upon the water (x. 7). The ideal which Hosea holds up in contrast to the unhallowed dynasties of the North is the rule of the house of David. In the days of restoration the people shall inquire after Jehovah their God, and David their king (iii. 5). Now, it is not surprising that Amos, who was himself a man of Judah, should represent the re-establishment of the ancient kingdom of David as part of the final restoration; but when Hosea, a Northern prophet, gives utterance to the same thought, he places himself in striking contrast to all his predecessors, who never dreamed of a return of Ephraim to the yoke cast off in the days of the first Jeroboam. No doubt there were many things which made such a thought natural, at least in the days of anarchy that followed the death of Jeroboam II. The stability of the Davidic throne stood in marked contrast to the civil discords and constant changes of dynasty to which the prophet so often alludes; and, though he speaks of Judah as sharing Israel's sin and Israel's fall (v. 5, 10, 13, 14; viii. 14), Hosea regards the corruption of the Southern kingdom as less ancient (xi. 12; Heb., xii. 1) and deep-rooted (iv. 15), and, in his earlier prophecies at least, excludes Judah from the utter destruction of the North. When Jehovah's mercy is withdrawn from Israel He will yet save Judah, though not by war and battle as in days gone by (i. 7). Hosea is so essentially a man of feeling, and not of strict logic, that it would be fruitless to attempt to form an exact picture of his attitude to Judah, expressed as it is in a series of brief allusions scattered over a number of years. In his last picture of Israel's restoration the house of David is not mentioned at all, and images of political glory have no place in his conception of the nation's true happiness. One part of the ideal of Amos is the resubjugation of the heathen once tributary to David; he looks for a return of the ancient days of victorious warfare. But Hosea has altogether laid aside the old martial idea as we found it expressed in Deut. xxxiii. The fenced cities of Judah are a sin, and shall be destroyed by fire (viii. 1-i). The deliverance of Judah is not to be wrought by bow or sword (i. 7); repentant Ephraim says, "We will not ride upon horses" (xiv. 3). His picture of the future, therefore, lacks all the features that give strength to an earthly state; it reads like a return to Paradise (ii. 21 seq.; xiv.). In such a picture the kingship of David is little more than a figure. The return of David's kingdom, as it actually was, would by no means have corresponded with his ideal; but the name of David is the historical symbol of a united Israel. To Hosea the unity of Israel is a thing of profound significance. His whole prophecy, as we know, is penetrated by the conception of the people of Jehovah as a moral person; the unity of Israel and the unity of God are the basis of his whole doctrine of religion as a personal bond of love and fidelity. Thus the political divisions of Israel on the one hand, and on the other the idolatry which broke up the oneness of Israel's God, are set forth by Hosea as parallel breaches of covenant; when he mentions the one he instinctively joins the other with it (viii. 4; x. 1 seq.). In contrast to this twofold defection and division "Jehovah their God and David their king" appear in natural connection.
One sees from all this that in Hosea's hands the old national theory of the religion of Jehovah is on the point of breaking up, and that new hopes take its place. This was indeed inevitable. The ideal of a victorious and happy nation, dwelling apart in a goodly land and secure from invasion in Jehovah's blessing on its warlike prowess, as we find it in the prophecies of Balaam or the Blessing of Moses, was hopelessly shattered by the first contact with a great conquering empire such as Assyria. Amos was the first to realise that the advance of Assyria meant the ruin of Israel as it actually was, but he did not see that the new movements of history meant more than speedy captivity, that Israel could never again be restored on its old footing. To him it still seems possible that the remnant of the nation, purified by sifting judgment, may return to Canaan and restore the ancient kingdom of David. His picture of the last days is no more than a glorified image of the best days of the past, when the flow of Jehovah's blessings, victory in war and prosperous seasons in time of peace, is renewed in fuller measure to a nation purged of sinners. The realism of this picture has no counterpart in Hosea's eschatology. The total dissolution of national life which he foresees is not a mere sifting judgment, but the opening of an altogether new era. Hosea never draws a distinction between the sinners who must perish in captivity and the righteous remnant which shall return. To him Ephraim is not a mingled society of the righteous and the wicked, but a single moral person which has sinned and must repent as one man. Amos does not look for national repentance; the wicked remain wicked, and perish in their sins, the righteous return in their old righteousness, and so the new Israel is just a continuation of the old. But to Hosea the repentance of the nation is a resurrection from the dead. "Come and let us return to Jehovah, for He hath torn and He will heal is; He hath smitten and He will bind us up. After two days will He revive us, in the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live before Him" (vi. 1 seq.; xiii. 14). Even Ephraim's hard heart cannot for ever resist Jehovah's love. "He will allure her and lead her into the wilderness" of exile "and speak to her heart" (ii. 14). The desolate valley of Achor shall be to her the gate of hope, and there "she shall answer as in the days of her youth and the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt" (ii. 15). When His people are scattered in exile Jehovah shall roar like a lion, and the wanderers shall come fluttering to His call like a bird from Egypt, like a dove from the land of Assyria (xi. 10, 11). The purpose of the judgment is not penal; it is meant to teach them that Jehovah alone is the husband of Israel, and the giver of those good things which in their blindness she esteemed the gifts of the Baalim (ii. 5 seq.). Taught by adversity, Ephraim shall acknowledge that neither the alliance of strange empires, nor his own prowess, nor his vain idols can give deliverance; "Asshur shall not save us, we will not ride upon horses, neither will we say any more to the work of our hands, Ye are our gods; for in Thee the fatherless findeth mercy." And so at length all Israel shall be saved; but in this redemption every feature of the old nation has disappeared — its state, its religion, its warlike might, its foreign policy, king and prince, sacrifice and sanctuary, images (ephod) and teraphim. The very face of nature is changed; the wild beasts of the field, the fowls of heaven, the creeping things of the earth are at peace with Jehovah's people; sword and battle are broken out of the earth that they may lie down safely (ii. 18). Jehovah alone remains overshadowing Israel and Israel's land with His infinite compassion (xiv. 7). And then the voice of Ephraim is heard, "What have I to do any more with idols? I answer and look to Him; I am as a green fir-tree, from me is Thy fruit found." [20]
It is no mere accident that Hosea in this closing picture returns to the image of the evergreen tree which played so large a part in that nature-religion which it was his chief work to contend against. In translating religion into the language of the most spiritual human affections, Hosea fixed forever the true image of religious faith; and we still find in his book a fit expression of the profoundest feelings of repentant devotion — a delineation of Jehovah's forgiving love which touches the inmost chords of our being. But to Hosea the worshipping subject, the object of God's redeeming grace is the nation in its corporate capacity, not a true person but a personified society. So long as the individual side of religion fails to receive that central place which it holds in the Gospel it is impossible to represent the highest spiritual truth without some use of physical analogies; and this shows itself in the most characteristic way when the book of Hosea closes with an image derived from mere vegetative life. The true goal of Hosea's ideas lay beyond his own horizon, in a dispensation when the relation of the redeeming God to every believing soul should have all that tenderness and depth of personal affection with which he clothes the relation of Jehovah to Israel. [21]
