Hosea

Hosea 1:1 - ‘The word of the Lord that came to Hosea, the son of Beeri, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel. ‘

Who?

Osee, son of Beeri. To my knowledge we don’t know anything of Beeri, although the name comes from a Hittite name in Genesis 26:34, so it may well have been a “Biblical name”.

Hosea doesn’t sound too familiar to our ears (unless you know a Hosea), but what is another similar sounding Hebrew name? Yeshua

Yeshua, as we know means “The LORD saves”, the “Ye-” portion of that is the first letter of, and representative of the name Yahweh, so that’s “The LORD”.

So without the portion that means “The LORD”, we’re left with Hosea, or “to save”, or simply “salvation”.

When?

in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel.

Who can tell me a bit about Jeroboam? We’ll read about him soon.

How were the kings of Israel in general in those days?

Backstory of northern kingdom’s kings

Okay, so a bit of a back story into what happened after David, and the northern kingdom:

Solomon succeeds David (after a wee bit of conflict with his brother)
Solomon asks God for wisdom to lead the people, which God grants him
Solomon builds the temple
Solomon starts marrying for political marriages (hundreds of them)
He starts following their gods, amassing huge wealth and a huge army, all in stark contradiction to the Torah (read Deuteronomy 17 for more details)
His heart is pulled away from God
God tells Solomon that the kingdom will be split in two due to his actions, but not while he reigns, because of David’s sake
After he dies, his Rehoboam son, rather unwisely, decides to go full tyrant
Jeroboam rises up and leads a rebellion and the northern half of the kingdom (10 of the 12 tribes) splits away
Judah, the southern kingdom made up of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, with Jerusalem as its capital
The rest in the northern kingdom which takes with it the name Israel, and later make Samaria its capital
Soon after Jeroboam rejects the Levites as priests, and seeing as they had no land allotted to them, most of them migrated south to Judah
From here we’ll follow the journey of the northern country of Israel
Jeroboam erects two golden calves to represent God 🤦
So after Jeroboam, Israel goes through a list of kings.
Anybody know how many kings? 19
The book of kings lists them as good or bad based on whether they worshiped God alone, did they cleanse Israel of idolatry, did they remain faithful to the covenant.
How many do you think ended up on the good side of that list? 0/19 (Judah 8/20), which is why their judgement was slower in coming.
We now catch up with Jeroboam the second, the 13th in this messy line, which is where Hosea comes in, he is also the last king of Israel before Israel’s death spiral before exile at the hands of the Assyrians. Let’s read 2 Kings 14:23-28

Message

Into this God gives Israel a very visual prophesy, through Hosea, warning the northern kingdom of Israel before their exile. We’re not going to go into great detail here, but we will do a bit of reading.

Read chapters 1-3

1:1-5
1:6-11
2:1-6
2:7-13
2:8-15
2:16-23
3:1-5

It is a powerful prophecy, showing and acting out a marriage covenant, which is broken by adultery, and then restored / redeemed instead of justly being ended.

Israel has rebelled, God will bring about severe consequences in the form of exile, however God’s love and mercy are greater than their sin, and there will be an offer of redemption, which the repentant will receive.

The rest of the book is a series of exploring these concepts in more depth, mostly through poetry.

The last verse of the book, 14:9, makes it clear that it is not a closed and done prophesy, rather a deep depiction of who God is and what his plan is for us even today: ‘Whoever is wise, let him understand these things; whoever is discerning, let him know them; for the ways of the Lord are right, and the upright walk in them, but transgressors stumble in them.’

So as we dive into this book over the coming weeks and months, let’s always remember that this is for us as well.