Prophet
Hosea
He is the first of the two minor prophets.
Hosea showed either with the word or with the life to the people of Israel that the Lord is always moved by his infinite mercy.
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Hosea Prophet
Hosea, whose name means "the Lord saves" or "the Lord comes to help", lived in the kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BC. The prophet Hosea opens the series of so-called minor prophets in the Bible. Through his personal drama, one basically describes the faithfulness and love of the God of Israel towards his people; all this is reported through his sad marriage affair, marked by the betrayal and abandonment of his wife Gomer, a prostitute, who leaves Hosea to return to prostitution. This causes an immense wound and immense pain in the prophet, but not the impossibility of continuing to love her, until she reaches the point of paying a share of money for her ransom, forgiving her and accepting her again at home, with a promise of mutual fidelity. The parallelism of the relationship between God and the people of Israel is evident in all this.
In his preaching the prophet thunders against the Israelite ruling class, guilty of unjust choices, and against the priestly class which, acting with religious infidelity towards the laws of God, had led the people to bewilderment, injustice and violence.
In the time of Hosea, Israel had settled in the land of Canaan, where the worship of the fertility, for agricultural purposes, of the god Baal reigned who, united with Baalat, guaranteed impulse and vitality to all creation and to the plant world. On the basis of this conception, some rites celebrated in the various temples were established, in which the sacred coupling between man and woman was foreseen in order to increase one's own fertility and that of the plant world. Agriculture was therefore linked to these religious rites. The Jews were slowly learning to be peasants and believed that the success of the peasants of Canaan stemmed from their worship of Baal. So to be a good farmer one had to worship Baal! But then a big question arose: did the faith of the past still have a reason to be? When in doubt, one ended up mixing everything up a bit, putting Jahvé and Baal together: they had not understood that the fecundity of nature is a "gift" from God and not the "result" of certain religious rites!
In this context, Hosea intervenes who, instead of fighting the confused faith of the people, instead of accusing and preaching moralistic sermons, proposes a "new language", says a new word to help people overcome the crisis of faith, and this is the great and amazing news: after all the people did not need to be reproached, but to discover something new about God. In order for the people to respond to God, Hosea senses that they needed to know him better. Precisely because faith is linked to life, a right image of God prepares a right answer.
In chapter 2, Hosea professes: "Accuse your mother, accuse her, for she is no longer my wife and I am no longer her husband! Remove the marks of her prostitution from her face and the marks of her adultery from her breast; otherwise I will undress her completely naked and I will make her as she was when she was born and I will make her a desert, like an arid land, and I will make her die of thirst. I will not love her children, because they are children of prostitution. Their mother has covered herself with shame. She said: "I will follow my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool, my flax, my oil and my drinks." The scene represents a popular method of judgment, where the children themselves they accuse the mother, in this case the sons of Hosea who accuse Gomer, the harlot wife. Let's not lose sight of the very first meaning of this parable: Israel must realize that it has sacrificed its faith, that of the fathers, to the religion of Baal, in exchange for secure agricultural prosperity ns of language are very animated and passionate: "So behold, I will block her path with thorns and enclose her enclosure with barriers and I will not find her paths again. She will chase her lovers, but she will not reach them, she will look for them without finding them. Then she will say: "I will return to my husband from before because I was happier than now". The conclusion reveals Gomer's dry and jealous love, willing to return for sheer convenience and not out of love!
Hosea continues: "She did not understand that I gave her grain, new wine and oil and lavished upon her the silver and gold they used for Baal. Therefore I too will return to take back my grain, in due time, my wine, new in his season; I will take back the wool and linen that were to cover his nakedness. Then I will discover her shame in the eyes of her lovers and no one will take her out of my hands. Saturdays, all her solemnities. I will devastate her vines and her figs, of which she said: "Here is the gift that my lovers have given me." I will reduce her to a scrub and a pasture of wild animals of the Baals, when she burnt their perfumes, she adorned herself with rings and necklaces and followed her lovers while she forgot me! Oracle of the Lord. Therefore, behold, I will draw her to me, I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart.
The desert was a place of encounter and purification. God wants to free his people from Baal, from alienation, and he does so by retracing the desert (the Exodus), the place of first love: "I will make her vineyards for her and I will transform the valley of Acor into a door of hope. There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as when she came out of the land of Egypt. And it will happen on that day - oracle of the Lord - that you will call me My Husband, and you will no longer call me My Master. I will take the names of the Baals out of her mouth, which will no longer be remembered".
The whole relationship between God and man is seen in the light of the drama of human love. Here then is the true conversion that is not possible as long as God is known as master: it is necessary to meet him as love. "At that time I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the earth and the birds of the sky and with the reptiles of the soil; bow and sword and war I will eliminate from the land; and I will make them rest peacefully. I will make you my bride forever, you I will make my bride in justice and in law, in benevolence and in love, I will betroth you to me in faithfulness and you will know the Lord".
Man's infidelity does not stop God's love, on the contrary it manifests his mercy. God wants to save us, in him love wins; he loves us as the bridegroom loves the bride. And this image makes us understand even better what sin is: it is like adultery, a sin against love, from which, however, we can free ourselves and redeem ourselves by returning to the source of the First love and remaining faithful to it forever.
