Oriental Women

by Edward B. Pollard

The domestic life of the prophet Hosea furnishes perhaps the best illustration of the condition and dark possibilities of womanhood in Israel during this era of religious lapse and of consequent moral decay. When religion sanctions prostitution at the altar, profligacy is not unnatural. Hosea had married one Gomer, daughter of Diblaim. Soon she forgets her marriage vows and gives herself to a life of shame. Hosea, not then a prophet, more than once tried to reclaim the erring wife of his love; but she again falls into evil ways. His home is destroyed; and as he thinks of the meaning of this fatal blow to his domestic happiness, he can but see in it a divine call to go forth to correct a condition of society which could foster such vice and make such sorrows possible. The whole meaning of his ministry, as he starts out with his children as object lessons of his and the people's great humiliation, is but an enlarged reproduction of his own bitter experience.

That the god and his land were related as husband and wife, was a very familiar conception in Israel, as well as with the nations round about. Even Isaiah proclaimed that the land of the Hebrew should be called Beulah, that is, "married," a land wedded to Jehovah, in pure and abiding love. But it remained for the worship of Baal, which means both "lord" and "husband," to fasten upon Israel the basest practices between the sexes, as a part of the worship of the god to whom the land was married.

Hosea sees in his own poignant grief an epitome of Israel's relation of apostasy from Jehovah. She should have been a wife of purity, keeping her covenant vows with her Lord, but instead, she had gone away to consort with other gods and was playing the harlot against her first love. Repeated efforts had failed to reclaim her, and now she is given up to horrible vice as she sacrifices her virtue at the altar of Baal. It is a fearful arraignment, hot with his own experiences and saturated with tears. The words of Hosea are themselves the best representation of society of the day, as we speak under the figure of his own bitter grief:

"Plead with your mother, plead, for she is not my wife and I am not her husband. Let her therefore put away her whoredoms out of her sight and her adulteries from between her breasts." This is the earnest plea for a purified Israel and a redeemed womanhood.

The day is to come, says the prophet with the broken heart, when "she shall follow after her lovers but she shall not overtake them. Then shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than now." "For she did not know," says Hosea for Jehovah, "that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal." And looking forward to a day when the sensual worship of Baal which so debauched womanhood, should be no longer known in Israel, the prophet, again as the mouthpiece of Jehovah, still carrying out the same figure of wedlock, says to Israel: "And I will betroth thee unto me forever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in loving kindness, and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness; and thou shalt know Jehovah. And it shall come to pass in that day that I will hear, saith Jehovah, I will hear the heavens, and they shall hear the earth; and the earth shall hear (with) the corn, and the wine, and the oil."

It was only after the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in B. C. 586, and the consequent exile of the Hebrews, that this nature worship which so endangered womanly virtue was exterminated.

During the long, synchronous reign of Uzziah, King of Judah, and of Jeroboam II., King of Israel, in the eighth century before the Christian era, prosperity both at home and abroad had given the people of both kingdoms great wealth. The Syrians had for a long series of years been a breakwater against the growing power of Assyria. In the meantime, there was unsurpassed opportunity for internal development, commercial expansion, and the accumulation of wealth. Riches had led to luxury, and commerce had made the people more hospitable to foreign ideals, both social and religious.

It was in the reign of Uzziah's successor, Jotham, that a new and eloquent voice was lifted up on behalf of reform, calling the people back to the ideals of the fathers and of the prophets. This new force in Jerusalem was the young Isaiah, whose striking vision in the year King Uzziah died caused him to give up a profane life for the prophet's office; and upon none of the Hebrew prophets do the condition and character of woman seem to have made so deep an impress. Among the very earliest of his public utterances, so far as they have been preserved to us, is that severe arraignment of the women of Jerusalem for their wanton haughtiness, their wasteful extravagance, their love of show, their self-indulgence and vice. Thus in detail does the prophet draw for us the moving picture of female pride: "Moreover, the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing (or tripping delicately) as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: therefore, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts. In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments (anklets) about their feet, and their cauls (net works), and their round tires like the moon (crescents), the chains (or ear pendants), and the bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets (head tires), and the ornaments of the legs (ankle chains), and the headbands, and the tablets (or smelling boxes), and the earrings, the rings, and the nose jewels, the changeable suits of apparel (festal robes), and the mantles, and the wimples (probably, shawls), and the crisping pins, the glasses (hand mirrors), and the fine linen, and the hoods (or turbans), and the vails. And it shall come to pass that instead of sweet smell (of Oriental spices) there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle, a rent; and instead of well set hair, baldness; and instead of a stomacher, a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty. Thy husbands shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war. And her gates shall lament and mourn; and she being desolate, shall sit upon the ground."

In this period, the women as they went along scented the air with the perfume from the boxes that hung at their girdles; they lolled idly and luxuriantly upon ivory beds and silken cushions sprinkled with perfume, and they gossiped to the sound of music.

In predicting the great disaster and slaughter that were to come upon the people through the Assyrian invasion, made successful by the effeminacy of the people, the prophet discloses not only the dire extremity to which the people were to be reduced, but reveals the feminine ideal among the Hebrews, already alluded to in this volume, namely, that which makes motherhood the aim of every Hebrew woman and the absence of it a calamity. In that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, "We will eat our own bread and wear our own apparel; only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach." Widowhood and celibacy were equally sources of deepest grief among the women of Israel, and both were to be among the results of the luxury and vice of the land.