14 Amos & Hosea

• Major Prophets
• Minor Prophets

• Isaiah
• Jeremiah
• (Lamentations)
• (Baruch)
• Ezekiel
• Daniel

• Hosea
• Joel
• Amos
• Obadiah
• Jonah
• Micah
• Nahum
• Habakkuk
• Zephaniah
• Haggai
• Zechariah
• Malachi

• They are the longest books of the prophets.
• They concern famous prophets by vocation.

They are shorter than the books of the Major Prophets.

navi

• one who has been called
• one who proclaims

It comes from the Greek word prophetes, meaning "one who speaks for" another, or "an interpreter" of the will of God.

• God's spokesmen
• the conscience of Israel
• the spiritual guides of their people

Keep up your end of the covenant, and God will keep up his end of the covenant.

Northern Kingdom (Israel)

Southern Kingdom (Judah)

• Early Prophecy
• Classical Prophecy
• Post-Exilic Prophecy

• Moses is called a "prophet," but he is more like the pattern and model of all prophets.
• Samuel is typically seen as the last judge and the first prophet, who inaugurates the time of the prophets.
• When Samuel anoints Saul as king, a tension begins that will continue until the fall of Jerusalem: the struggle between prophet and king.
• Elijah is the prototypical prophet of the time of the kingdoms.

It begins with the appearance of Amos.

its fearless revelation of the moral will of the Lord, the God of Israel's covenant

It begins during the Babylonian exile with Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Second Isaiah.

• the third Isaiah
• Haggai
• Zechariah
• Malachi
• Obadiah
• Joel
• sections of Zechariah

Prophecy disappears, but its tradition continues in wisdom literature from about 200 BC.

750 BC (Amos and Micah) to ca. 450 BC (Ezekiel and Obadiah)

in the middle decades of the 8th Century BC (700s)

• Both kingdoms came under heavy pressure from the Assyrian empire, the one great superpower between 900 and 600 BC.
• Assyria aggresively expanded its power under the kingship of Tiglath-pileser III (745-728).

• The death of two great kings: Jeroboam II in the North (786-c.750) and Uzziah/Azariah in the South (783-742).
• Pro- and anti-Assyrian parties struggled for control of the kingdoms.
• Injustice abounded, including the expropriation (dispossession) of patrimonial domain by the state, indentured service, and military conscription (compulsory enrollment).

The written word of the Law came to outweigh the spoken word of the prophet, so prophecy fell into disuse and even disrepute.

• The prophets spoke for the Lord and said rather little about themselves.
• Prophets often took up the cause of the marginal and dispossessed members of society. They often offended the influential and powerful.
• The prophet's proclamation of the "word of God" was sometimes dramatic and extraordinary. The prophets were masters of symbolic action.

• These books contain the words of the prophets to which they are attributed, but also other materials that are about or in the tradition of the prophet.
• Later generations occasionally added new applications and comments.

• Jews see the prophets as emphasizing the covenant and Torah as the basis for the life of individual and of the religious community. They defined the prophetic role as that of preaching and passing on the posterity the original Mosaic revelation.
• Christians understand the primary role of the OT prophets as predicting the new reality in Christ and the Church. Prophetic foreshadowing serves to bind together past and future in one uninterrupted history of salvation.

a simple shepherd and "dresser of sycamore trees"

760-745 BC

in the Southern kingdom of Judah

to the Northern kingdom of Israel, specifically to Bethel

Jeroboam II (786-750)

Amos preached divine judgment against those in mighty places, including priests and kings.

He was the priest at Bethel who ousted Amos from the Northern kingdom and sent him back home to the kingdom of Judah.

• He prophesies against six nations, enemies of Israel.
• He prophesies agaisnt Judah, the enemy of Israel to the South.
• He prophesies against Israel

Ephraem

their fellos Israelites

• oppression of the poor--including selling the poor into slavery when they cannot pay their debts
• unrestrained profanation of religion--cult prostitution of Canaanite Baal worship
• abuse of religion

They understood it as the day when the Lord would fight for them and deliver or redeem them.

It is to be a day fo darkness, not light.

Amos' preaching of "the day of the Lord" as a day of darkness, not light.

An apocalypse is a "revelation," usually pertaining to a crisis, that "reveals" truths about the past, present, and/or future in highly symbolic terms.

Daniel and Revelation. They write of catastrophic, disastrous, or world-ending events.

It reflects hope in the intervention of God in history.

It ends with a glimmer of Messianic hope and the restoration of Israel.

in the Northern Kingdom

in the Northern Kingdom; he was the only purely northern prophet

He was active during the final years before the Kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians.

745-722

Hosea is a younger contemporary of Amos.

• This was a desperate time when the Israelites were vainly struggling to preserve their security and integrity as a nation against the Assyrians, either through war or through appeasement with heavy tribute.
• The Israelites are seeking theri security and pleasure from pagan nations and their gods. These are the lovers that the Israelites are pursuing, thereby forsaking the Lord.

• Politically, the Northern Kingdom is also suffering from interior instability, as assassinations and coups caused a rapid succession of 6 kings in the final 20 years of the Northern Kingdom.
• Religiously, Baal worship, introduced officially by Ahab's queen Jezebel, was still rampant.

It included imitative magic whereby sexual acts by both amle and female temple prostitutes were understood to arouse Baal, who then brough rain to make Mother Earth fertile--represented by a female consort, Asherah or Astarte.

It was guaranteed by a marriage between the land and the divinity, Baal.

This marriage was reproduced symbolically in cult prostitution at the shrine of the fertility god.

They adopted the practice of Canaanite fertility rituals in order to guarantee abundant harvests.

They did not completely abandon the Lord, but they combined the worship of Baal with their worship of the Lord. They engaged in syncretism.

a combination of opposing religious beliefs or practices into a new conglomerate whole typically marked by internal inconsistencies

the Baals

Because by serving the Baals, often with sexually illicit practices, Israel breaks its marriage covenant with the Lord and commits adultery and prostitution.

It is filled with compassion for the people, but also with suffering and disappointment.

• He condemns the empty pomp (vain display) of Israel's purely external worship.
• He condemns the pride of the people in its wealth and power.

Hosea does not condemn the sacrificial system itself, but the hypocrisy and aberrations in the cult that tended toward identifying the Lord with pagan fertility gods.

The real test is whether or not one follows the moral law given by the Lord.

because its lack of attention to the covenant

He looked forward to a Messianic Age, where there would be a new covenant in righteousness.

He was told by God to marry a prostitute. Thus, he married a prostitute named Gomer.

It illustrates God's relationship with the nation of Israel. Just as Gomer proved to be an unfaithful wife, so too did Israel prove to be an unfaithful people.

She was a prostitute, although we can't be sure whether she was a cult prostitute or a commercial prostitute.

NO. Reconciliation with an adulteress is just as abominable as marrying one in the first place.

stoning

Through his marriage, Hosea witnesses the development of both a theology of marriage and a theology of the relationship between the people Israel and God.

The kingdom of God is being likened to a wedding, wherein the Church is the Bride and God/Christ is the Groom.

• Jezreel
• Lo-Ruhamah (Not-pitied, Not-loved)
• Lo-Ammi (Not-my-people)

Since Hosea's wife, Gomer, was a prostitute, these children may not even be Hosea's.

It symbolizes the downfall of Jehu's dynasty because of the bloody deeds committed at Jezreel, where Jehu coordinated the extermination of all Ahab's family.

It means "not-pitied" or "not-loved". It symbolizes the reversal of God's attitude toward Israel because His mercy has been spurned and trust in his deliverance replaced by confidence in arms and allainces.

It means "not-my-people". It symbolizes the broken covenant between God and his people Israel because Israel had rejected God.

because God will also fetch his people back and erase the names of the Baals from their memory