Hosea ben Beeri

Hosea is a bit like a failed Job--not a goat-among-sheep who is punished and suffers and plays out his existential crisis, but a holy man who is punished and exults in it and makes it his identity and is insufferably holy about it. Sulky God is like "oh yeah you gonna get married Hosea well you might as well just marry a WHORE because Israel as a whole is just a WHORE" and so Hosea takes on the role of God (Job, yet also god, whoooaa, deep mysteries) and marries a WHORE (this book has easily the highest incidence of "play the whore" in the whole Bible, by the way) but instead of being longsuffering or raging about it he identifies with his abuser, and so he has kids and calls them "Jezreel" ("God soweth," but remember also a city whose soil was sown with blood in Ahab's time, the one where Jezebel was fed to fogs) and "she is not yours" and self-flagellating names like that because they're the children of a WHORE and as Israelites basically all WHORES themselves, and God's bad children but also his (... WHORE) bride, and actually maybe the coolest (which is what I'm here for) way to see Hosea is as the crackpot performance artist who made his whole life an extended metaphor for Israel's covenant with God (and that of his poor wife, the marriage covenant as a canvas on which the divine covenant is microcosmed and played out, need it be said misogynistically).… (lisätietoja)