I am requested to answer the following question:

      How may we reconcile Hos. 1:2, 3 and 2:1-3 with God's law of unity and with his law of monogamous marriage?   E.

      As I understand the first three chapters of Hosea, there is nothing in them to be reconciled to God's law. True, if the command to Hosea, "Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredom and children of whoredom," stood by itself, we should understand that the wife to be taken was already guilty of whoredom, and that she already had children born to her while leading this life. But the latter implication is forbidden by the fact that the children evidently referred to were born, as the rest of the chapter shows, after the marriage, and they were all the legitimate children of Hosea. The idea advanced by some writers, that he had doubts about some of them being his, is absolutely groundless. There is not a hint of anything of the kind in the text. If, then, the children whom he was to take, were to be his own, and not the offspring of sin, why are they and their mother called "a wife of whoredom and children of whoredom"? The reason is plainly given in the text: "For the land doth commit great whoredom, departing from Jehovah." While the people to which the woman Gomer belonged, and to which tier children when born belonged, was given to whoredom against God, and she and her children were no exceptions to this, she was a wife of whoredom, and they children of whoredom in the same sense that all the people were.

      The married life of Hosea, let it he distinctly noted, as it is described in the first chapter, continuing till the birth of the third child, is without blemish. [398]

      The address of Jehovah in the second chapter, beginning with the words, "Plead with your mother, plead: for she is not my wife, neither am I her husband," is addressed, as its contents clearly indicate, to individual Israelites with reference to the nation personified as their mother. She had committed adultery, but Gomer, the wife of the prophet, had not.

      The third chapter opens with these words: "And Jehovah said to me, Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend, and an adulteress, even as Jehovah loveth the children of Israel, though they turn unto other gods, and love cakes of raisins. So I bought her to me for fifteen pieces of silver, and a homer of barley, and a half homer of barley: and I said to her, Thou shalt abide for me many days; thou shalt not play the harlot, and thou shalt not be any man's wife: so will I be toward thee."

      Here the prophet is plainly told, not to marry, but to love a woman who was at the time an adulteress. She was a slave, as is implied in his buying her for money and some barley. He keeps her from the embraces of other men, but he does not make her his own wife. He promises that he will be toward her as he requires her to be toward other men. The case is plainly this, that he loves an abandoned woman sufficiently to buy her out of slavery, and to guard her against a return to the life from which he had rescued her. Her former bad life and her rescue from it are made symbols of Israel's coming misery and her rescue from it; for Jehovah goes on to say: "For the children of Israel shall abide many days without king, and without prince, and without sacrifice, and without pillar, and without ephod or teraphim: afterward shall the children of Israel return, and seek Jehovah their God, and David their king; and shall [399] come with fear unto Jehovah and to his goodness in the latter days."

      It suits the whim of certain interpreters to assume that this woman of the third chapter is Gomer, who had abandoned her husband after the birth of her third child, had been reduced to such misery in her reckless life as to be sold as a slave, and that the prophet was required to love her again and remarry her. But there is not the slightest hint that she was the same woman; and the absence of an allusion to her as such, which certainly would have appeared in the text if such had been the conception of the writer, is sufficient proof that she was not.

      The conceit which is floating around among certain writers, that Hosea learned the love of God for his people by the infelicities of his own household, and his foolish weakness in recalling and loving again a wife so utterly degraded, is a specimen of sentimental froth. It has been whipped up in the interest of the denial that the Book of Deuteronomy had as yet been written, from which especially Hosea could have learned how God loved Israel.

[SEBC 398-400]