THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD-
HOSEA PASSIM
WE have now finished the translation and detailed
exposition of Hosea’s prophecies. We have followed his minute
examination of his people’s character; his criticism of his fickle
generation’s attempts to repent; and his presentation of true
religion in contrast to their shallow optimism and sensual
superstitions. We have seen an inwardness and spirituality of the
highest kind-a love not only warm and mobile, but nobly jealous, and
in its jealousy assisted by an extraordinary insight and expertness
in character. Why Hosea should be distinguished above all prophets
for inwardness and spirituality must by this time be obvious to us.
From his remote watchfulness, Amos had seen the nations move across
the world as the stars across heaven; had seen, within Israel, class
distinct from class, and given types of all: rich and poor; priest,
merchant, and judge; the panic-stricken, the bully; the fraudulent
and the unclean. The observatory of Amos was the world, and the
nation. But Hosea’s was the home; and there he had watched a human
soul decay through every stage from innocence to corruption. It was
a husband’s study of a wife which made Hosea the most inward of all
the prophets. This was "the beginning of God’s word by Hos 1:2."
Among the subjects in the subtle treatment of which Hosea’s service
to religion is most original and conspicuous, there are especially
three that deserve a more detailed treatment than we have been able
to give them. These are the Knowledge of God, Repentance, and the
Sin against Love. We may devote a chapter to each of them, beginning
in this with the most characteristic and fundamental truth Hosea
gave to religion-the Knowledge of God.
If to the heart there be one pain more fatal than another, it is the
pain of not being understood. That prevents argument: how can you
reason with one who will not come to quarters with your real self?
It paralyses influence: how can you do your best with one who is
blind to your best? It stifles love; for how dare she continue to
speak when she is mistaken for something else? Here as elsewhere
"against stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain."
This anguish Hosea had suffered. As closely as two souls may live on
earth, he had lived with Gomer. Yet she had never wakened to his
worth. She must have been a woman with a power of love, or such a
heart had hardly wooed her. He was a man of deep tenderness and
exquisite powers of expression. His tact, his delicacy, his
enthusiasm are sensible in every chapter of his book. Gomer must
have tasted them all before Israel did. Yet she never knew him. It
was her curse that, being married, she was not awake to the meaning
of marriage, and, being married to Hosea, she never appreciated the
holy tenderness and heroic patience which were deemed by God not
unworthy of becoming a parable of His own.
Now I think we do not go far wrong if we conclude that it was partly
this long experience of a soul that loved, but had neither
conscience nor ideal in her love, which made Hosea lay such frequent
and pathetic emphasis upon Israel’s ignorance of Jehovah. To have
his character ignored, his purposes baffled, his gifts
unappreciated, his patience mistaken-this was what drew Hosea into
that wonderful sympathy with the heart of God towards Israel which
comes out in such passionate words as these: "My people perish for
lack of knowledge. {Hos 4:6} There is no troth, nor leal love, nor
knowledge of God in the land. {Hos 4:1} They have not known the
Lord. {Hos 5:4} She did not know that I gave her corn and wine. {Hos
2:10} They knew not that I healed them. {Hos 9:3} For now, because
thou hast rejected knowledge, I will reject thee. {Hos 4:6} I will
have leal love and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather
than burnt-offerings." {Hos 6:6} Repentance consists in change of
knowledge. And the climax of the new life which follows is again
knowledge: "I will betroth thee to Me, and thou shalt know the Lord.
{Hos 2:22} Israel shall cry, My God, we know Thee." {Hos 8:2}
To understand what Hosea meant by knowledge we must examine the
singularly supple word which his language lent him to express it.
The Hebrew root "Yadha," almost exclusively rendered in the Old
Testament by the English verb to know, is employed of the many
processes of knowledge, for which richer languages have separate
terms. It is by turns to perceive, be aware of, recognize,
understand or conceive, experience, and be expert in. But there is
besides nearly always a practical effectiveness, and in connection
with religious objects a moral consciousness.
The barest meaning is to be aware that something is present or has
happened, and perhaps the root meant simply to see. But it was the
frequent duty of the prophets to mark the difference between
perceiving a thing and laying it to heart. Isaiah speaks of the
people "seeing," but not so as "to know"; {Hos 6:9} and Deuteronomy
renders the latter sense by adding "with the heart," which to the
Hebrews was the seat, not of the feeling, but of the practical
intellect. "And thou knowest with thy heart that as a man chastiseth
his son, so the Lord your God chastiseth you." Usually, however, the
word "know" suffices by itself. This practical vigor naturally
developed in such directions as "intimacy, conviction, experience,"
and "wisdom." Job calls his familiars "my knowers"; of a strong
conviction he says, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," {Job 19:25;
cf. Gen 20:6} and referring to wisdom, "We are of yesterday and know
not"; (Job 8:9) while Ecclesiastes says, "Whoso keepeth the
commandment shall know"-that is, "experience," or "suffer-no evil."
{Ecc 8:5; cf. Hos 9:7} But the verb rises into a practical sense-to
the knowledge that leads a man to regard or care for its object. Job
uses the verb "know" when he would say, "I do not care for my life";
{Job 9} and in the description of the sons of Eli, that "they were
sons of Belial, and did not know God," it means that they did not
have any regard for Him. Finally, there is a moral use of the word
in which it approaches the meaning of conscience: "Their eyes were
opened, and they knew that they were naked." {Gen 3:7} They were
aware of this before, but they felt it now with a new sense. Also it
is the mark of the awakened and the full-grown to know, or to feel,
the difference between good and evil. {Gen 3:5; Isa 7:15 etc.}
Here, then, we have a word for knowing, the utterance of which
almost invariably starts a moral echo, whose very sound, as it were,
is haunted by sympathy and by duty. It is knowledge, not as an
effort of, so much as an effect upon, the mind. It is not to know so
as to see the fact of, but to know so as to feel the force of
knowledge: not as acquisition and mastery, but as impression,
passion. To quote Paul’s distinction, it is not so much the
apprehending as the being apprehended. It leads to a vivid
result-either warm appreciation or change of mind or practical
effort. It is sometimes the talent conceived as the trust, sometimes
the enlistment of all the affections. It is knowledge that is
followed by shame, or by love, or by reverence, or by the sense of a
duty. One sees that it closely approaches the meaning of our
"conscience," and understands how easily there was developed from it
the evangelical name for repentance, Metanoia-that is, change of
mind under a new impression of facts.
There are three writers who thus use knowledge as the key to the
Divine life-in the Old Testament Hosea and the author of
Deuteronomy, in the New Testament St. John. We likened Amos to St.
John the Baptist: it is not only upon his similar temperament, but
far more upon his use of the word knowledge for spiritual purposes,
that we may compare Hosea to St. John the Evangelist.
Hosea’s chief charge against the people is one of stupidity. High
and low they are "a people without intelligence." Once he defines
this as want of political wisdom: "Ephraim is a silly dove without
heart," or, as we should say, "without brains"; {Hos 7:11} and
again, as insensibility to every ominous fact: "Strangers have
devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not; yea, grey hairs are
scattered upon him, and he knoweth it not," {Hos 7:9} or, as we
should say, "lays it not to heart."
But Israel’s most fatal ignorance is of God Himself. This is the
sign and the cause of every one of their defects. "There is no
truth, nor leal love, nor knowledge of God in the land. {Hos 4:1}
They have not known the Lord. Hos 5:4. They have not known Me."
With the causes of this ignorance the prophet has dealt most
explicitly in the fourth chapter. They are two: the people’s own
vice and the negligence of their priests. Habitual vice destroys a
people’s brains. "Harlotry, wine, and new wine take away the heart
of My people." Lust, for instance, blinds them to the domestic
consequences of their indulgence in the heathen worship, "and so the
stupid people come to their end." Again, their want of political
wisdom is due to their impurity, drunkenness, and greed to be rich.
Let those take heed who among ourselves insist that art is
independent of moral conditions that wit and fancy reach their best
and bravest when breaking from any law of decency. They lie: such
license corrupts the natural intelligence of a people, and robs them
of insight and imagination.
Yet Hosea sees that all the fault does not lie with the common
people. Their teachers are to blame priest and prophet alike, for
both "stumble," and it is true that a people shall be like its
priests. "The priests have rejected knowledge and forgotten the
Torah" of their God; they think only of the ritual of sacrifice and
the fines by which they fill their mouths. It was, as we have seen,
the sin of Israel’s religion in the eighth century. To the priests
religion was a mass of ceremonies which satisfied the people’s
superstitions and kept themselves in bread. To the prophets it was
an equally sensuous, an equally mercenary ecstasy. But to Hosea
religion is above all a thing of the intellect and conscience: it is
that knowing which is at once common-sense, plain morality, and the
recognition by a pure heart of what God has done and is doing in
history. Of such a knowledge the priests and prophets are the
stewards, and it is because they have ignored their trust that the
people have been provided with no antidote to the vices that corrupt
their natural intelligence and make them incapable of seeing God.
In contrast to such ignorance Hosea describes the essential temper
and contents of a true understanding of God. Using the word
knowledge, in the passive sense characteristic of his language, not
so much the acquisition as the impression of facts, an impression
which masters not only a man’s thoughts but his heart and will,
Hosea describes the knowledge of God as feeling, character, and
conscience. Again and again he makes it parallel to loyalty,
repentance, love, and service. Again and again he emphasizes that it
comes from God Himself. It is not something which men can reach by
their own endeavors, or by the mere easy turning of their fickle
hearts. For it requires God Himself to speak, and discipline to
chasten. The only passage in which the knowledge of God is described
as the immediate prize of man’s own pursuit is that prayer of the
people on whose facile religiousness Hosea pours his scorn. "Let us
know, let us follow on to know the Lord," he heard them say, and
promise themselves, "As soon as we seek Him we shall find Him." But
God replies that He can make nothing of such ambitions; they will
pass away like the morning cloud and the early dew. {Hos 6:4} This
discarded prayer, then, is the only passage in the book in which the
knowledge of God is described as man’s acquisition. Elsewhere, in
strict conformity to the temper of the Hebrew word to know, Hosea
presents the knowledge of the Most High, not as something man finds
out for himself, but something which comes down on him from above.
The means which God took to impress Himself upon the heart of His
people were, according to Hosea, the events of their history. Hosea,
indeed, also points to another means. "The Torah of thy God," which
in one passage he makes parallel to "knowledge," is evidently the
body of instruction, judicial, ceremonial, and social, which has
come down by the tradition of the priests. This was not all oral;
part of it at least was already codified in the form we now know as
the Book of the Covenant. But Hosea treats of the Torah only in
connection with the priests. And the far more frequent and direct
means by which God has sought to reveal Himself to the people are
the great events of their past. These Hosea never tires of
recalling. More than any other prophet, he recites the deeds done by
God in the origins and making of Israel. So numerous are his
references that from them alone we could almost rebuild the early
history. Let us gather them together. The nation’s father Jacob "in
the womb overreached his brother, and in his manhood strove with
God; yea, he strove with the Angel and he overcame, he wept and
supplicated Him; at Bethel he found Him, and there He spake with us
Jehovah God of Hosts, Jehovah is His name. And Jacob fled to the
territory of Aram, and he served for a wife, and for a wife he
tended sheep. And by a prophet Jehovah brought Israel up out of
Egypt, and by a prophet he was tended. {Hos 12:13-14} When Israel
was young, then I came to love him, and out of Egypt I called My
son. As often as I called to them, so often did they go from me:
they to the Ba’alim kept sacrificing, and to images offering
incense. But I taught Ephraim to walk, taking him upon Mine arms,
and they did not know that I nursed them {Hos 9:1-3} Like grapes in
the wilderness I found Israel, like the firstfruits on an early fig
tree I saw your fathers"; but "they went to Ba’al-Peor, and
consecrated themselves to the Shame {Hos 9:10} But I am Jehovah thy
God from the land of Egypt, and gods besides Me thou knowest not,
and Savior there is none but Me. I knew thee in the wilderness, in
the land of burning heats. But the more pasture they had, the more
they fed themselves full; as they fed themselves full their heart
was lifted up: therefore they forgat Me. {Hos 13:4-6} I Jehovah thy
God from the land of Egypt." And all this revelation of God was not
only in that marvelous history, but in the yearly gifts of nature
and even in the success of the people’s commerce: "She knew not that
it was I who have given her the corn and the wine and the oil, and
silver have I multiplied to her." {Hos 2:10}
This, then, is how God gave Israel knowledge of Himself. First it
broke upon the Individual, the Nation’s Father. And to him it had
not come by miracle, but just in the same fashion as it has broken
upon men from them until now. He woke to find God no tradition, but
an experience. Amid the strife with others of which life for all so
largely consists, Jacob became aware that God also has to be
reckoned with, and that, hard as is the struggle for bread and love
and justice with one’s brethren and fellow-men, with the Esaus and
with the Labans, a more inevitable wrestle awaits the soul when it
is left alone in the darkness with the Unseen. Oh, this is our
sympathy with those early patriarchs, not that they saw the sea dry
up before them or the bush ablaze with God, but that upon some
lonely battlefield of the heart they also endured those moments of
agony, which imply a more real foe than we ever met in flesh and
blood, and which leave upon us marks deeper than the waste of toil
or the rivalry of the world can inflict. So the Father of the Nation
came to "find" God at Bethel, and there, adds Hosea, where the
Nation still worship God "spake with us" in the person of our
Father.
The second stage of the knowledge of God was-when the Nation awoke
to His leading, and "through a prophet," Moses, were brought up out
of Egypt. Here again no miracle is adduced by Hosea, but with full
heart he appeals to the grace and the tenderness of the whole story.
To him it is a wonderful romance. Passing by all the empires of
earth, the Almighty chose for Himself this people that was no
people, this tribe that were the slaves of Egypt. And the choice was
of love only: "When Israel was young I came to love him, and out of
Egypt I called My son." It was the adoption of a little slave-boy,
adoption by the heart; and the fatherly figure continues, "I taught
Ephraim to walk, taking him upon Mine arms." It is just the same
charm, seen from another point of view, when Hosea hears God say
that He had "found Israel like grapes in the wilderness, like the
firstfruits on an early fig tree I saw your fathers."
Now these may seem very imperfect figures of the relation of God to
this one people, and the ideas they present may be felt to start
more difficulties than ever their poetry could soothe to rest: as,
for instance, why Israel alone was chosen-why this of all tribes was
given such an opportunity to know the Most High. With these
questions prophecy does not deal, and for Israel’s sake had no need
to deal. What alone Hosea is concerned with is the Character
discernible in the origin and the liberation of his people. He hears
that Character speak for itself; and it speaks of a love and of a
joy, to find figures for which it goes to childhood and to spring-to
the love a man feels for a child, to the joy a man feels at the
sight of the firstfruits of the year. As the human heart feels in
those two great dawns, when nothing is yet impossible, but all is
full of hope and promise, so humanly, so tenderly, so joyfully had
God felt towards His people. Never again say that the gods of Greece
were painted more living or more fair! The God of Israel is Love and
Springtime to His people. Grace, patience, pure joy of-hope and
possibility-these are the Divine elements which this spiritual man,
Hosea, sees in the early history of his people, and not the
miraculous, about which, from end to end of his book, he is utterly
silent.
It is ignorance, then, of such a Character, so evident in these
facts of their history, with which Hosea charges his people-not
ignorance of the facts themselves, not want of devotion to their
memory, for they are a people who crowd the sacred scenes of the
past, at Bethel, at Gilgal, at Beersheba, but ignorance of the
Character which shines through the facts. Hosea also calls it
forgetfulness, for the people once had knowledge. {Hos 4:6} The
cause of their losing it has been their prosperity in Canaan: "As
their pastures were increased they grew satisfied; as they grew
satisfied their heart was lifted up, and therefore they forgat Me."
{Hos 13:6}
Equally instructive is the method by which Hosea seeks to move
Israel from this oblivion and bring them to a true knowledge of God.
He insists that their recovery can only be the work of God
Himself-the living God working in their lives today as He did in the
past of the nation. To those past deeds it is useless for this
generation to go back, and seek again the memory of which they have
disinherited themselves. Let them rather realize that the same God
still lives. The knowledge of Him may be recovered by appreciating
His deeds in the life of today. And these deeds must first of all be
violence and terror, if only to rouse them from their sensuous
sloth. The last verse we have quoted, about Israel’s complacency and
pride, is followed by this terrible one: "I shall be to them like a
lion, like a leopard I Shall leap upon the way. I will meet them as
a bear bereft" of her cubs, "that I may tear the caul of their
heart, that I may devour them there like a lion: the wild beast
shall rend them." {Hos 13:7 ff.} This means that into Israel’s
insensibility to Himself God must break with facts, with wounds,
with horrors they cannot evade. Till He so acts, their own efforts,
"then shall we know if we hunt up to know," {Hos 6:3} and their
assurance, "My God, we do know Thee," {Hos 8:2} are very vain. Hosea
did not speak for nothing. Events were about to happen more
momentous than even the Exodus and the Conquest of the Land. By 734
the Assyrians had depopulated Gilead and Galilee; in 725 the capital
itself was invested, and by 721 the whole nation carried into
captivity. God had made Himself known.
We are already aware, however, that Hosea did not count this as
God’s final revelation to His people. Doom is not doom to him, as it
was to Amos, but discipline; and God withdraws His people from their
fascinating land only that He may have them more closely to Himself.
He will bring His Bride into the wilderness again, the wilderness
where they first met, and there, when her soul is tender and her
stupid heart broken, He will plant in her again the seeds of His
knowledge and His love. The passages which describe this are among
the most beautiful of the book. They tell us of no arbitrary
conquest of Israel by Jehovah, of no magic and sudden
transformation. They describe a process as natural and gentle as a
human wooing; they use, as we have seen, the very terms of this: "I
will woo her, bring her into the wilderness, and speak home to her
heart And it shall be in that day that thou shalt call Me, My
husband and I will betroth thee to Me forever in righteousness and
in justice, and in leal love and in mercies and in faithfulness; and
thou shalt know Jehovah."
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