Introduction to Hosea

It is truly a worthwhile endeavor to grasp Old Testament history. I don't mean knowing stories from the Old Testament, but having in your mind the historical flow of the OT, especially in the divided kingdom. Knowing who wrote the book, the condition of the people to whom he wrote it can help us when we read the minor prophets.


Chronologically, Hosea is the fourth (possibly fifth, depending on where Joel falls) in the minor prophets. Hosea came right after Amos, but the Israel Hosea knew was not the same as when Amos preached. Amos prophesied in the height of Israel’s financial prosperity but foretold of their downfall. Hosea lived in the fruit of their cow-worshiping, lawless religion of false gods. 

 First, B.H. Carroll and then George Allen Smith, which was quoted by Baxter’s Explore the Book.

“The period covered by his prophetic utterances was undoubtedly the darkest in the whole history of the kingdom of Israel. Political life was characterized by anarchy and misrule. The throne was occupied by men who obtained possession by the murder of their predecessors and the people were governed by military despotism. Zechariah was slain after a reign of six months; Shallum, after only one month. A dozen years later Pekahiah was assassinated by Pekah, who met the same fate at the hands of Hoshea. All these were ungodly rulers, and the morals of the nation were sinking to the lowest ebb. The conditions were terrible in the extreme; luxurious living, robbery, oppression, falsehood, adultery, murder, accompanied by the most violent intolerance of any form of rebuke.”
--B.H. Carroll


“It is not only , as in Amos, the sins of luxurious, of them that are at eas in Zion, which are exposed; but also literal bloodshed, highway robbery with murder, abetted by the priests. Amos looked out on foreign nations across a quiet Israel; his views of the world are wide and clear; but in the Book of Hosea the dust is up, and into what is happening beyond the frontier we get only glimpses. There is enough, however, to make visible another great change since the days of Jeroboam. Israel’s self-reliance is gone. She is as fluttered as a startled bird; ‘thy call Egypt; they go to Assyria’ (7:2). But everything is hopeless; kings cannot save; for Ephraim is seized by the pangs of a fatal crisis.”


“There could be no greater contract (than Hosea) to that fixture of conscience which renders the Book of Amos so simple in argument, so firm in style. Amos is the prophet of law: he sees the Divine processes work themselves out, irrespective of the moods and intrigues of the people, with which, after all, he was little familiar. So each of his paragraphs moves steadily forward to a climax, and every climax is doom – the captivity of the people to Assyria. You can divide the book by these things; it has its periods, strophes and refrains. It marches like the host of the Lord of hosts. But Hosea had no such unhampered vision of great laws. He was too familiar with the rapid changes of his fickle people; and his affection for them was too anxious. His style has all the restlessness and irritableness of hunger about it – the hunger of love.”
--George Adam Smith

Proverbs 25:11 A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.


**This was first published a couple years ago
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Douglas Newell IV