Extract from BartEhrman.com here.
A Heart-Rending Story and Stunning Condemnation: The Prophet Hosea
December 7, 2025
Bart began with: One of my favorites is Hosea, which tells a heart-wrenching story and delivers an unusually powerful message. The following is an edited version of my discussion in my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford University Press).
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No prophet of scripture emphasizes the deep and profound love of God for his people, and his bitter sense of betrayal for their unfaithfulness, more than the eighth-century Hosea. Here God is portrayed as the lover of Israel, which has rejected his adoration and become a whore.
Hosea was a contemporary of Amos and was prophesying in the north during almost the same time as Isaiah in the south during the reigns of kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah and of Jeroboam II in Israel. He shows no knowledge of the destruction of Assyria in 722 b.c.e. and so appears to have stopped his prophetic ministry possibly soon before that.
Like most of the other prophets of Scripture, Hosea maintains that the people of Israel have sinned against God and that as a result, he will harshly judge them. In this case, the problem is not principally that they have behaved in unethical ways and perpetrated social injustice and oppression. It is rather that they have rejected the worship of God and indulged, instead, in the worship of other gods. “My people consult a piece of wood and their divining rod gives them oracles. . . . They sacrifice on the tops of the mountains and make offerings upon the hills” (Hosea 4:12-13). They have, in a sense, prostituted themselves, wantonly going after lovers other than Yahweh “for a spirit of whoredom has led them astray, and they have played the whore, forsaking their God” (Hosea 4:12).
In a powerful and gripping set of images, Hosea speaks of the nation of Israel as the onetime spouse of God and mother of God’s people, who has, however, rejected her husband. The result will be a horrible punishment for both the nation and its people:
Plead with your mother, plead—for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband—that she put away her whoring from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts, or I will strip her naked and expose her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness and turn her into a parched land, and kill her with thirst. Upon her children also I will have no pity, because they are children of whoredom. For their mother has played the whore. (Hosea 2:2-5) (NRSV)
Hosea as well uses the image of a legal indictment that God levels against his people. He had made a covenant with them, and they violated it: “the LORD has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or loyalty. . . . Therefore the land mourns and all who live in it languish” (Hosea 4:1-3). As a result of this indictment, God “will punish Jacob according to his ways.” In places, the imagery Hosea uses to describe God’s incensed reaction is harsh and violent, seen nowhere more clearly than in Hosea 13:4-9. God brought the people out of Egypt and fed them in the wilderness. But they then forgot him. And so
I will become like a lion to them, like a leopard I will lurk beside the way. I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs, and will tear open the covering of their heart; there I will devour them like a lion, as a wild animal would mangle them. I will destroy you, O Israel; who can help you? . . . They will fall by the sword, their little ones shall be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women ripped open.
As with other prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah), God commands Hosea to carry out certain actions to convey his prophetic message, here in graphic and heart-rending terms. At the beginning of the book, to illustrate his message, God instructs Hosea to marry a woman who would not be faithful but would become highly promiscuous, to show how Israel has treated God: The LORD said to Hosea, “Go take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD” (Hosea 1:2).
And so Hosea does what he is told, in obedience to God (but miserably for himself), marrying an unfaithful woman named Gomer who bears him three children, each of them given a symbolic name. The first is a son and is named Jezreel, in remembrance of a bloody incident carried out by the king Jehu about a century earlier at a place called Jezreel. Gomer conceives a second time and gives birth to a daughter who is named Loruhamah, which means “not pitied.” God would no longer have pity on his people. She then bears another son named Loammi, which means “not my people.” No longer would Israel be the people of God.
As often happens in the prophets, there are faint—very faint—glimmers of hope even in this graphic description of the prostitution of Israel after other gods. The Lord indicates that he will remove his estranged spouse into the wilderness, and there he will “speak tenderly to her” and rehabilitate her (Hosea 2:14-23). In illustration of this message, Hosea is instructed to go after his wife, who has become so promiscuous, and lure her back into their relationship. That too will be what happens when Israel returns to God, who originally called her his own: “Afterwards the Israelites shall return and seek the Lord their God . . . they shall come in awe to the LORD and to his goodness in these latter days” (Hosea 3:5).
But before that, there are some ugly and bad times ahead: acts of prostitution, as Israel continues to adore and worship other gods more than Yahweh, and misery, as God exposes Israel for the prostitute she is and gives her in full measure the punishment that is her due.
End Extract from BartEhrman.com
