Book of the Twelve

In which I share some work I did a few years ago

Book of the 12 - Week 2

First, a little bit about prophets: I was listening to a podcast, probably the Bible for Normal People, and the guest being interviewed said something about “You know how people talk about who they want to meet in heaven? The prophets generally aren’t among those people because I can’t imagine they would be very pleasant people to meet.” Let’s take an imaginary trip for a minute. Close your eyes and imagine this scene, you are in your car, or your doing dishes or whatever you do when you pray, and God says to you, “Listen, I have something I need you to say, so once you’ve gotten where you’re going/dried your hands, email Jeremy and tell him that you have a VERY IMPORTANT announcement that you need to make on Sunday. I’ve worked this out, he’ll just say fine, then on Sunday I’ll tell you what to say.” You do this and meet curiosity from Jeremy but not resistance. Sunday comes and you get up to make your announcement and it is this: “Listen, people of St Paul’s in Duxbury, God says that you are too comfortable. You have too many things and they are interfering with your relationship with God and leading you into idolatry. You are too busy worshiping your things, your kids, your job, your comfort to be effective in worshiping God and God is tired of it. God is calling you to repent. To do what Jesus told the rich young ruler and sell all your possessions, give it to the poor, pick up your cross and follow him! Repent! Change your ways or God says he will remove his presence from you!” You then go on to detail how God told you that the people can repent and that if the people repent and change their ways, God will come among them bringing great restoration and closer, more loving relationships between the people and with God. Now, you can imagine that this will go over like a lead balloon. Several folks will likely recommend that you get your meds checked, but some may hear you and say “you know, you could be right.” Generally, though, you would probably not get the best reception. People, generally speaking, don’t want to hear “you’re doing it wrong,” even if change could possibly bring about something positive. Why? Control. People like to feel like they are in control of their lives and the change that comes about, even if they aren’t. The idea of “I’m doing ok here. I don’t need to do things differently. I’m ok with the amount of God/church/whatever in my life. I don’t need more. I don’t have a problem with the things they are talking about, so they aren’t talking about me.” The prophets were sent among the people of Israel to say similar things. In their case, they were firmly ensconced in their pride and either dismissed the prophets outright as crazy people, or were so far from God that what the prophets were saying didn’t make a dent.

Content and Background from Reading

Hosea: 

Hosea, son of Beeri, prophesied against Jeroboam II, who was king in Israel. He was active from approximately 753 to 715 BCE. 

A little about Jeroboam II: Jeroboam II was one of the kings of Israel, and possibly one of the worst, despite the fact that during his reign, he expanded Israel’s territory. During his reign, he introduced worship of God in the Samarian temples at Dan and Bethel in the form of golden calves (Amos 5). (pause for irony, no bad jokes about how they just popped out of a fire) While Jeroboam’s reign was “successful” in terms of wealth accumulation and territorial expansion, there was also rampant oppression and ill treatment of the poor, which brought the ire of both Hosea and Amos. God promises punishment and destruction for the systemic treatment of the “least of these”, unless the people repent and change their ways.

The most well known component of the book of Hosea are the first several chapters on Hosea’s marriage. God commands Hosea to take a “wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom”(1:2), which, being a good prophet, he does. After having three children together, Hosea’s wife, Gomer, jets and goes to live the life of adultery, which could have been as a religious prostitute in the Caananite Baal cults. The important part of the story, in my opinion, happens in chapter 3 when God tells Hosea to go and find Gomer and reconcile with her. He pays her slave price and takes her back. This relationship is symbolic of God’s relationship with Israel. God, the faithful husband, pursues Israel, the faithless wife, in order to reconcile with his people. In the later part of the book of Hosea, the prophet speaks about the incorporation of pagan practices with worship of God. “Hosea’s sketch is not unlike Paul’s picture of pagan practices in Roman 1:21, for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him….” To fail to thank God means to attribute blessings incorrectly to some other source, or even to oneself. This constitutes a denial of God’s sovereignty and grace” (LaSor 267). Hosea is a story of how God’s love and mercy overcomes despite sin, disobedience, and idolatry.

As I was doing my reading and research on Hosea, the thing that stuck out most to me was the stress on “knowledge” and “knowing”. The Hebrew word in this context is “YADA (YA-da)” which implies relational knowledge, not just acknowledgement of fact. John Goldingay discusses the difference between these as “Yes, officer, I know the speed limit is 45 but I may have been going just a hair faster….” and knowing another person, such as a good friend or partner. This relational knowledge requires commitment and engagement from both parties, not just to continue to remain in relationship but also to accept, with love and compassion, changes that can come over time because people change. While God doesn’t change, our perception and knowing of God does as we learn new things and discover new insight.   

Joel:

Scholars are unsure of the date of Joel’s writing, most seem to think the writer of Joel had access to the work of some of the other prophets and date his work as postexilic. So we can’t point to a specific historic king or people group that he prophesied against the way we can with the other prophets. Joel’s heavy emphasis on either the figurative or literal swarms of locusts that thoroughly destroy everything they can chomp. “To Joel a disaster of such magnitude can mean only that the day of the Lord, God’s final reckoning with his people and the nations, is near. In the insect invasions and drought which followed, the prophet sees the harbinger of the dreaded day of darkness forecast by Amos, Zephaniah, and Obadiah. In order to sense the connection, one must remember that the Hebrews were able to see the general in the particular. Each instance of God’s judgment contained the facets of all judgment…”(LaSor 378).  Joel discusses the way that the people can cope with their calamity by gathering together to call upon God together in chapter 2, as they are unable to sacrifice as they have nothing to give, coming together to lament and call for God’s attention to their plight through genuine repentance, brings about their full-scale restoration, which Joel details God bringing about.

Amos: 

Amos was prophesying at around the same time as Hosea against Jeroboam II. Through poetic language in the first chapters of the book, he creates concentric circles, closing in on Israel which has merited the judgment of God for its sins. As I mentioned earlier, Amos’s concern is the oppression and ill treatment of the poor by the wealthy and powerful at the time. “The rich had summer and winter palaces crammed with ivory inlaid art and furniture, great vineyards for choice wine, and precious oils for hygiene and perfume. The women, fat and pampered “cows of Bashan,” drove their husbands to injustice so that they might live in luxury. Justice was a commodity to be purchased, even in the towns that housed the sacred shrines, such as Bethel and Gilgal, but where Yahweh was no longer present” (LaSor 245). Not to be overlooked in Amos’s call for justice for the poor, is his insight into the character of God, and that his call for justice comes from his recognition of God’s relationship to the world. The God who is creator of the world and all nations holds them accountable for their actions, this holds particularly true for the people of Israel, with whom God entered into a special covenant relationship. The family of Jacob was set apart from the other nations of the world to have and maintain their relationship with God and show God’s character to the world as a nation of priests. With this relationship and status as God’s chosen people came responsibility, “the people’s sins are related to the law of Yahweh. This is not readily apparent, for Amos does not cite chapter and verse nor quote exact words. Nevertheless, the elements of the law are present, including care of the poor and needy, administration of justice, use of just weights in commerce, and, above all, the obligation to worship Yahweh alone” (LaSor 252). Only through recommitment and upholding their covenant commitments can the people of Israel avert the disaster that Amos foresaw and come into the blessing that God promised. 

As the time that Amos was prophesying was a time of prosperity for certain among the people, he was speaking to those in power to change their ways and return to the ways of Yahweh.

Theme for the Week:

Marriage/Covenant Relationship - Yahweh/Israel

The covenant between Yahweh and the people of Israel began with God’s promise to Abraham to make his descendants more numerous than the stars in Genesis. It continues when God changes Jacob’s name to Israel (God-wrestler) in Exodus. The identification of the people of Israel as Yahweh’s chosen people particularly came from the meeting between Moses and Yahweh on Mt Sinai, in Exodus 20 God gives the people of Israel the basis of the covenant relationship, which starts with (if you don’t know the song) “#1, we’ve just begun God should be first in your life, #2’s the idol rule, those graven images aren’t nice”. As we read through the prophets, we find much of the accusation that the prophets make against the people is one of idolatry and thus not putting God first. So, the Israelites are rescued from slavery in Egypt and begin their trek to Sinai, where they will meet with God. “God [up to this point] has been very clear. God never says, “Ok, I’ll be your God IIIIIIF you do x and y.” Rather, God said, “I am your God, and you are my people. That’s just how it is. Now, here is how you live into that reality”(Enns 109). The details of the covenant into which the Isralites entered with God are given in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Something that I recently heard that stood out to me about this is that God had already saved the Israelites. They had been delivered. These laws were given not to tell them how to be saved, but as how to demonstrate that they were saved and were the chosen people of Yahweh. There were consequences in place throughout, though if the covenant was broken, i.e. the people would lose their hold on the land that God gave them.

Relationship status with God: It’s complicated. Admittedly, since becoming a mom myself, my view of God has shifted a lot toward Divine Parent as opposed to intimate, life long partnership of a marriage relationship which we see particularly in Hosea (though, one could argue that parenthood is also in some ways an intimate life long partnership), and in New Testament language in which the church is called the “Bride of Christ”. Hosea is not the only prophet who was instructed by God to take a “wayward wife”. Jeremiah and Isaiah were also instructed to do so. I don’t know much about Jeremiah or Isaiah’s wives, however I think a strong argument can and should be made that these relationships were metaphorical for the covenant relationship between God and his people. No one, however, wants to be married to their parent, which leads to the complication. How do we make the shift back to God as life partner as well as Divine Parent? I will say, I argued with a former classmate of mine, who did not have children, who was freaked out about the idea of “God as intimate friend”, when the professor referenced Song of Songs as metaphorical. This classmate couldn’t let go of the idea of intimacy as anything other than marital relations. My argument was that as a parent of a small child that I am intimately involved in all aspects of my child’s life and intimately acquainted with my child’s body. The amount of intimacy as a parent changes over the course of a child’s life, as it should. When we think about our relationships with God, our Divine Parent, as those relationships mature, should they not become more intimate rather than less?    

Hosea and Gomer. The story of Hosea and Gomer is tragic and the punishment language involved in the telling of their story can be triggering for those who have experienced violence or know someone who has. In chapter 3 of Hosea, as I mentioned earlier, we get the main point of the story that God’s primary goal is reconciliation. God instructs Hosea to go and find Gomer, who has been sold into slavery, pay her bond debt, redeeming her, and bringing her home to be his wife again. This fits directly into the metanarrative of the Bible. What is that? The metanarrative of the Bible can be described as “Creation, Rebellion, Redemption, Reconciliation, Renewal” or, as I like to think about “Order, Disorder, Reorder.” God commands the creation of this relationship, one of the parties (Gomer) rebels; she is redeemed by Hosea who pays her bond price, freeing her from slavery; terms are put in place by Hosea for reconciliation to be effected. We don’t know if Gomer lived up to the terms of reconciliation. We definitely know the Israelites did not. This disobedience and not living up to God’s expectations for his chosen people is what the prophets are warning the people against. What they are calling the people to do is to remember that they are God’s people and that by following his laws that is how they demonstrate that. At the same time, the prophets of the Book of the 12 are also emphasizing God’s faithfulness in his constant pursuit of his people. Judgment never had the last word between God and his people, as God was constantly seeking reconciliation with and the renewal of relationship with his people. This is just as true now as it was then.