It is rather easy to grow up with a naïve idea of God—something like a child’s impression of the adult world—and with a worrying conundrum about His way of doing things. The conundrum is this old one: If God is all-powerful and all-good, why does He not rid the world of evil? (The church too, for that matter?) One of the things that Hosea does for us is to give us, with extraordinary frankness, the other side of that anomaly. God’s side. The child’s idea of his elders is a puzzled