H S E A pathetic exhortation he speaks to a nation which looks to Assyria for help and victory (xiv. 3). The received chronology of the kings of Judah and Israel is notoriously precarious, and a comparison of the Assyrian monuments and eponytn lists with the Biblical /lata makes it probable that the period from the accession of Zachariah, son of Jeroboam II., to the fall of Samaria must be shortened by as much as twenty years, and that the interregnum which is commonly supposed to have followed Jeroboam s death must also be cancelled. This correction may be held to remove one difficulty in the title of our book, which on the current chronology assigns to Hosea some sixty years of prophetic activity. On the other hind, most Assyriologists agree that the expedition of Sennacherib, which fell in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah (2 Kings xviii. 13), took place in 701 B.C. In that case Hezekiah did not come to the throne till after the fall of Samaria (722-719), which the book of Hosea predicts as a future occurrence (ch. xiii. 16) another argument against the authority of the title. There is still, however, a large element of uncertainty in the reconstruction of Hebrew chronology by the aid of the monuments. One date bear ing on our book may be taken as certain, viz., the war of Tiglith Pileser with Pekah in 734, and, according to our argument, Hosea committed his prophecies to writing before that year. 1 A more exact determination of the date of the book has been sought by comparing viii. 9, 10, with the statement on the monuments that Tiglath Pileser received tribute from King Menahem (Minhimmi) of Samaria in 738 B.C. That Minhimmi of the monuments is the Menahem of the Bible there seems no good reason to doubt, in spite of the objections of Oppert and G. Smith. But it cannot be assumed that tribute was paid by him in 738 for the first time. The narrative in 2 Kings xv. 19 seems to indicate that the relations of Menahem to Assyria began earlier in his reign, 2 perhaps not long after his acces sion, which may be dated with probability c. 750 B.C. To sum up, the first part of Hosea s prophetic work, corresponding to chaps i.-iii., lay in the years of external prosperity immediately preceding the catastrophe of the house of Jehu in or near the year 750. The second part of the book is a summary of prophetic teaching during the subsequent troublous reign of Menahem, and must have been completed before 734 B.C. Apart from the narrative in chaps i.-iii., to which we shall presently recur, the book throws little or no light on the details of Hosea s life. It appears from ix. 7, 8, that his prophetic work was greatly embarrassed by opposition, " As for the prophet, a fowler s snare is in all his ways, and enmity in the house of his God." The enmity which had its centre in the sanctuary probably proceeded from the priests (comp. Amos vii.), against whose profligacy and profanation of their office our prophet frequently declaims perhaps also from the degenerate prophetic guilds which had their seats in the holy cities of the northern kingdom, and with whom Hosea s elder contemporary Amos so indignantly refuses to be identified (Amos vii. 14). In chap. iv. 5 Hosea sesms to comprise priests and prophets in one condemna tion, thus placing himself in direct antagonism to all the 1 Some writers, including Dr Pusey, claim a later date for the book, identifying Shalman in x. 14 with Shalmaneser IV., the successor of Tiglath Pileser. This identification is altogether arbitrary. If Beth- Arbel is Arbela beyond Jordan (Onom., ed. . Lagarde, p. 88), the reference, as Schrader lias shown (Keilinschr. und A. T., p. 283), may be equally well to Shalmaneser III., or to a king Shalamanu of Moab, who appears on the monuments as a tributary of Tiglath Pileser. - See on the whole chronology of the period, Schrader, Keilin- srhriften und A. T., Giessen, 1872 ; ld.,Keilinschriften vnd Geschichts- f t-schung. ibid., 1878; G. Smith, Assyrian Ei>ony,n Canon, London, 1*75 ; Wellhausen s article in Jbb. f. Deutsche Theol, 1875, pp. 607 6/. ; Oppert, Salome", et scs Su-ccesscurs, Paris, 1877. leaders of the religious life of his nation. Under such circumstances, and amidst the universal dissolution of social order and morality to which every page of his book bears testimony, the prophet was driven to the verge of despair(ix. 7),and onlythe sovereign conviction of Jehovah s infinite love and tender compassion to His people, even in their faithlessness and sin, upheld him in the sure hope of the final repentance and restoration of Israel, which finds such exquisitely pathetic expression in the closing sentences of his prophecy. The hypothesis of Ewald, that he was at last compelled by persecution to retire from the northern kingdom, and composed his book in Judea, rests mainly on an improbable exegesis of several passages, and derives no valid support .from the fact that the prophet, to whom the ideal unity of all the tribes of Jacob and the legitimate sovereignty of the house of David are cardinal doctrines, follows the house of Judah with constant interest and growing acquaintance with its internal condition. The most interesting problem of Hosea s history lies in the interpretation of the story of his married life (chaps. i.-iii.). We read in these chapters that God s revelation to Hosea began when in accordance with a divine command he married a profligate wife Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim. Three children were born in this marriage and received symbolical names, illustrative of the divine purpose towards Israel, which are expounded in chap. i. In chap, ii. the faithlessness of Israel to Jehovah, the long-suffering of God, the moral discipline of sorrow and tribulation by which He will yet bring back His erring people and betroth it to Himself for ever in righteousness, love, and truth, are depicted under the figure of the relation of a husband to an erriug spouse. The suggestion of this allegory lies in the prophet s marriage with Gomer, but the details are worked out quite independently, and under a rich multi plicity of figures derived from other sources. In the third chapter we return to the personal experience of the prophet. His faithless wife had at length left him and fallen, under circumstances which are not detailed, into a state of misery, from which Hosea, still following her with tender affection, and encouraged by a divine command, brought her back and restored her to his house, where he kept her in seclusion, and patiently watched over her for many days, yet not readmitting her to the privileges of a wife. In these experiences the prophet again recognizes a parallel to Jehovah s long-suffering love to Israel, and the discipline by which the people shall be brought back to God through a period in which all their political and religious institutions are overthrown. Throughout these chapters personal narrative and prophetic allegory are interwoven with a rapidity of transition very puzzling to the modern reader ; but an unbiassed exegesis can hardly fail to acknowledge that chaps, i. and iii. narrate an actual passage in the prophet s life. The names of the three children are symbolical, but Isaiah in like manner gave symbolical names to his sons, embodying prominent points in his prophetic teaching (Shear-jashub, Isa, vii. 3, comp. x. 21 ; Maher-shalal-hash-baz, viii. 3). And the name of Gomer bath Diblaim is certainly that of an actual person, upon which all the allegorists, from the Targum, Jerome, and Ephrem Syrus downwards, have spent their arts in vain, whereas the true symbolical names in the book are perfectly easy of interpretation. 3 That the ancient inter preters take the whole narrative as a mere parable is no more than an application of their standing rule that every thing in the Biblical history is allegorical which in its literal sense appears offensive to propriety (comp. Jerome s proem to the book). But the supposed offence to propriety 3 Theodoras Mops, remarks very justly, /ecu rl> uvo/j.a /ecu rbv Trarfpa fyei, cos yurj Trdfffj.a liv n Sixo iy rb ty6fj.tvot>, Icrropia 8e aT]6r/s
ruv Trpayi^drciif.
