Prophecy, Poetry and Hosea

Gerald Morris

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

Supplement Series 219

Dedicated with their father’s love, to William, Ethan and Grace

Copyright © 1996 Sheffield Academic Press

Published by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd

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19 Kingfield Road

Sheffield S11 9AS

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-85075-599-X

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Chapter 1

Introduction: Genre and Interpretation

Chapter 2

Rhetoric and Poetry

Chapter 3

Repetition and Variation

Chapter 4

Language Falling on Language: Wordplay and Hosea

Chapter 5

Hosea and the Lyrical Plot

Chapter 6

Conclusion: Genre and the Prophets

Appendix

Bibliography

Index of References

Index of Authors

Preface

This study of the literary genre of biblical prophecy was first written in 1993–1994 as my doctoral dissertation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville Kentucky. That form (dissertation) is itself a genre, with its own potential weaknesses (e.g. plodding recitation of past scholarship) and strengths (e.g. freshness of insight and skepticism toward the ‘assured results’ of earlier study). As I wrote the dissertation, I tried to avoid the weaknesses and amplify the strengths of my genre. Since the text that follows is essentially unchanged from the resulting work, I can only hope that I have succeeded.

My desire to offer fresh insights was assisted by the method I chose to follow. I decided to examine the literary qualities of the book of Hosea and to place little stress on the book’s historical underpinnings. I studied Hosea as art, not as artifact. In so doing, I have aligned myself with a much larger trend, of course. The ‘Bible as literature’ movement is surely one of the fastest growing currents in biblical scholarship. Nevertheless, while this trend has produced many excellent studies of biblical narrative, very little has been attempted with the books of the latter prophets. Thus, nearly everything that I could try was in fact a fresh approach.

There are dangers in such a study. To write an informed analysis of the literary nature of Hosea required that I supplement my research in my own academic field, biblical criticism, with research in the world of secular literary theory. Such an interdisciplinary analysis, if it is to be managed in a single book, must greatly compress the two discrete worlds of scholarship, and thus it runs the risk of oversimplification. The advantages of such an approach—such as new perspectives and different interpretations of long-recognized data—make the effort well worth the risk, however.

One more prefatory matter remains. In three chapters of the book of Hosea, the Hebrew verse numbers differ from the English. These are: 2:1–25 (English 1:10–11, 2:1–23), 12:1–15 (English 11:12; 12:1–14), and 14:1–10 (English 13:16, 14:1–9). Where I refer to these chapters—and I refer to these chapters perhaps ...