CHAPTER XX
MINOR PROPHETS
The Minor Prophets—so called not in depreciation, but because their books are smaller than those of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—form in the Jewish Bible one book, in which are brought together oracles in the name of various prophets from the eighth century B.C. (Amos, Hosea) to the fifth (Haggai, Zechariah), and one anonymous book (Malachi). As in the collections which bear in their titles the names of Isaiah and Jeremiah, so in the collection of the Twelve, prophecies have been attributed, by error or conjecture or accident, to prophets to whom they do not belong, and additions and alterations have been made by compilers or editors. The extent of this alien matter differs in different books; Hosea, for example, seems to contain little of it, while in Micah it is considerable.
Hosea.—In our Bibles, in which the Minor Prophets stand and are counted individually, the first is Hosea. This position, which it has also in the Hebrew Bible, may have been given the book, partly on account of its age, partly on account of its length; but it might also claim it by reason of its worth, for Hosea is one of the greatest of the prophets, not in Minor company alone, but in the canon. No other contributed so much, through his own words and through his great successors, Jeremiah and the Deuteronomists, to deepen and spiritualize the conception of religion.
Hosea was an Israelite who began to prophesy to his countrymen in the reign of Jeroboam II., probably about 750 B.C., and after Jeroboam's death witnessed at least the beginning of that procession of assassinations and revolutions through which the kingdom hurried to meet its fate; but it does not appear from his book that he lived to see the invasion of Tiglath-Pileser and the loss of Gilead and Galilee in 734 B.C. in which his own predictions of impending doom had so signal a verification. Their complete fulfilment came in 721, when Sargon made an end forever of the kingdom of Israel, and deported many of the people of Samaria to remote quarters of his empire.
The Book of Hosea opens with chapters out of the prophet's experience with his unfaithful wife, in which he sees a counterpart and symbol of God's experience with Israel. This discovery of this significance in the tragedy of his life is what made him a prophet. He saw then that it was for this he had been led to marry a woman who turned out a gross adulteress. When he drove her from his house, when later he bought her out of the servitude into which she had sunk, and by seclusion and a discipline at once firm and kind tried to win her back by love to virtue, that, too, was an apologue of God's dealing with his people (see specially Hos. i. 2-9; iii. 1-5). He is the first, apparently, to use the metaphor adultery, or fornication, for religious defection. The oracle, ii. 2-23, translates it into its historical terms and discloses Hosea's construction of the religious history of Israel. The root of Israel's apostasy was the belief that the gods of the soil of Canaan, the baals, gave the corn and the wine and the oil which in reality its own God, Jehovah, bestowed. Therefore he will take away all these, which she deems the gift of the baals, the wages of her prostitution, and will lead the people into the desert of exile. But he will be with them there to comfort and encourage, and Israel will return to its first love as in the early days when it was alone with God in the desert of the exodus. Then the old relation will be restored, never to be broken, and the gifts in the new betrothal are uprightness and justice and charity and kindness of heart and faithfulness and the knowledge of God (Hosea's word for religion). That will be the golden age! (See Hos. ii. 18-23.)
When the Jew says his Shema or the Christian his Great Commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might," it is Hosea's great thought he is repeating. Hosea interprets God's dealing with his people by his faith in God's inextinguishable love. Outraged love may smite harder than offended righteousness, but its blows are remedial, not retributive or expiatory; its aim not to satisfy justice, but to recover the erring. The exile, which for Amos is the final vindication of God's righteousness in the death of the sinful nation, is for Hosea a chastisement which leads to repentance and restoration. He is therefore the author of that ideal of a golden age of godliness and uprightness and happiness, beyond the impending judgment or the present oppression, which is one of the leading motives of the so-called messianic prophecy.
The rest of the book (cc. 4-14) consists of a collection of oracles, without titles, and often without obvious boundaries. They contain an appalling picture of the sins of the nation as a whole and of all classes of society; kings and princes, priests and prophets and people—all are corrupt. The theme of the whole may be read in Hos. iv. 1 f.: "There is no truth, nor charity, nor knowledge of God (religion) in the land; naught but swearing and breaking faith and murder and theft and adultery." Therefore ruin yawns before the nation. Yet God will not destroy utterly; all the pathos of the divine love finds words in such passages as xi. 8 ff., "How can I give thee up, Ephraim?" or xiv. 1 ff., "O Israel, return unto the Lord thy God."