Canter Bridge

The words bear the weight of scandal:

I will destroy you, O Israel;
who can help you?
Where now is your king, that he may save you?

Where in all your cities are your rulers,
of whom you said, ‘Give me a king and rulers’?
I gave you a king in my anger,
and I took him away in my wrath.

Ephraim’s iniquity is bound up;
his sin is kept in store.
The pangs of childbirth come for him,
but he is an unwise son;
for at the proper time he does not present himself
at the mouth of the womb.

Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol?
Shall I redeem them from Death?
O Death, where are your plagues?
O Sheol, where is your destruction?
Compassion is hidden from my eyes.

Anger vented in this way is anathema to our treasured sensitivities. If they come from a deity, we want nothing to do with him. If they are the words of a self-proclaimed prophet, we know enough to despise him and to proclaim our disdain in measured prose that lets the offence we feel leak out in appropriate dosage.

By staging our ethical tolerances at the center of the action, we miss the true drama of a book like Hosea. We are the poorer for it, if too entranced by our own pose to notice.

The fourteen chapters of Hosea spell out a drama that takes place within the divine soul more passionately than almost any other work in the biblical anthology. As YHWH struggles with serially self-absorbed Israel—and as the book’s editors spell out the implications of this struggle for readers in Judah who had survived the destruction of the Israelite kingdom to their north—one is left stunned by the potency of the instincts that surge at cross current within Israel’s covenanted King.

‘I will destroy you’, he says in the passage quoted, shedding the nuance that often frames the persistent fact of divine anger so that we can at least take its measure and find a sunnier objective beyond the wrathful cloud. The Lord rumbles about in his toolbox of extermination, seeking a tool sharp enough for the awful task to which he has given himself.

Yet Hosea and his editors place this terrible assertion in a most daring place, a juncture from which one can glimpse YHWH struggling with his determination to destroy and its apparent opposite. For Hosea’s YHWH longs also to heal.

The reader who wears his hermeneutic of suspicion pinned to his sleeve may be capable of finding in the words that follow yet more evidence of a colossal Bipolar Lurch. He will find it convenient to dismiss them:

I will heal their disloyalty;
I will love them freely,
for my anger has turned from them.
I will be like the dew to Israel;
he shall blossom like the lily,
he shall strike root like the forests of Lebanon.
His shoots shall spread out;
his beauty shall be like the olive tree,
and his fragrance like that of Lebanon.
They shall again live beneath my shadow,
they shall flourish as a garden;
they shall blossom like the vine,
their fragrance shall be like the wine of Lebanon.

O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols?
It is I who answer and look after you.
I am like an evergreen cypress;
your faithfulness comes from me.
Those who are wise understand these things;
those who are discerning know them.
For the ways of the LORD are right,
and the upright walk in them,
but transgressors stumble in them.

Other readers will find such lines impossible to dismiss. They will stand, rather more reverenced than understood, near the center of one’s understanding as the record of a passionate soul’s insurmountable determination to encircle holy anger with the undying decision to bless, to make fruitful.

To heal.