e may live; for then will Jahweh the God of
osts be with you, as ye have said. Hate the evil and love the good, and establish right in the gate: it may be that Jahweh the God of Hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph’? These last words suggest the question whether perhaps, after all, the closing part of the Book of Amos did not contain originally something of a consoling outlook for a remnant of the Northern kingdom, without prejudice to the condemnatory judgment passed on the mass of the people.
(0) Amos, at Jahweh’s command, travelled from Judah to Bethel, and, when he had discharged his Divine commission, returned to his home. Hosea, on the other hand, was a citizen of the Northern kingdom, and hence could not but feel quite a personal interest, different from the herdsman of Tekoa, in the Divine decree of condemnation on this kingdom. In fact we are face to face, on every page of Hosea, with the tragic lot of a man who is selected by God to proclaim to his own people and his native land the well-deserved and inevit- able final catastrophe, and who, amidst all his acquiescence in the justice of the Divine judgment, is filled with bitter sorrow at their destruction, With him, too, the possibility of repentance and amendment on the part of the people before the judgment falls is not wholly excluded, as when he cries, in 10!f «Sow in righteousness, and ye shall reap according to the measure of love ; plough your fallow ground, for it is time to seek Jahweh, that he may come and teach you righteousness.’ Still more express are the terms of this exhortation in 14°", where, at the same time, a confession of sin is put in the mouth of the people, which straight- way (v.°™) calls forth a Divine promise of restora- tion. But this very fact shows that judgment is already executed, and that we are here listening to a later speaker, who believes that after wrath the time for pity is come again. Hosea himself looked for the outpouring of wrath as a thing of the future. Like Amos, he thinks of it as ac-
complished by means of a hostile invasion (WES),
RELIGION OF ISRAEL
which makes the land a desolation (5° 108; also 28 should certainly be explained in the same sense), while the people themselves have to go into captivity to Egypt and Assyria (8! 9% 115). But, certain as all this is to happen, seeing that ‘the iniquity of Ephraim is laid up and hidden [with God for future punishment],’ 13”, it is ultimately only a purifying, not a destroying, judgment that God purposes with him, For He is God and not man, that He should be hurried away by fury to destroy Ephraim entirely (119). On the contrary, He means, as Hosea has already explained in another connexion (2'), by the wasting of the land and the exile of the people to bring about a salutary change: ‘The valley of trouble shall be to her a door of hope, so that she shall there [in exile] be again submissive as in the days of her youth, when she went forth out of Egypt.’ Then shall the names of the baals (2!%- (6) #-) be no more on the lips of the people; everything that can harm shall be destroyed, the old intimate relation with Jahweh returns again to the basis of right and justice, kindness and love; nor are outward bless- ings—corn, must, and oil—wanting to complete this happy state of things.
Strong objection has recently * been taken to the genuineness of this whole passage (Hos 2"), It has been proposed to set it down as one of those later additions whereby for after-generations (especially in Judah) the cheerlessness of an un- pitying series of denunciations of judgment was sought to be alleviated. Only in that case we must go further, and (with Marti) pronounce chapter 3 also a later addition. For so long as the wife of 3!is held—and this still appears to us the only natural view—to be Gomer bath-Diblayim, taken back by Hosea in spite of her unfaithful- ness, the conduct of the prophet teaches quite ex- pressly that this very wife of his is a type of the nation which, in spite of all its ingratitude and all its unfaithfulness, is not to be cut off from the pitying and pardoning love of Jahweh.
(c) The case of Isaiah, once more, gives much plausibility to the assertion that the pre-exilic prophets were messengers only of woe. At his very call the Divine commission is given him (6%) to produce in the people by his preaching the ex- treme of hardening, so that all understanding and repentance, nay more, all escape, may be rendered impossible for them. But here, again, we have to remark that an entirely literal interpretation of this Divine saying is neither psychologically con- ceivable nor reconcilable with the actual ministry of Isaiah. It is true that the mass of the people is hopelessly marked for judgment: with this terrible conviction the prophet is profoundly in- spired. But this does not prevent a small band of faithful ones from grouping themselves around the prophet—a band which, when the judgment comes, 1s to remain under the protection of its God. These are the ‘disciples’ (Is 81%), among whom (or ‘by whose help’) the Divine revelation rejected by Ahaz and the mass of the people is to be sealed ; so, too, the ‘sons’ of y.'8 should per- haps be understood, not of the prophet’s sons liter- ally but of these same disciples. But, at all events, Isaiah gave to one of his own sons the name Sh€ar-jadshib, ‘a remnant shall return,’ and there- by gave expression to his hope that the coming judgment did not signify the destruction of all.+ Again, Isaiah, after his unfavourable verdict on the value of the people’s offerings, exhorts them thus (1!°); ‘Wash you, make you clean. Put away your evil deeds out of sight. Learn to do good, strive after right. Set violent doers in the