[403] Stade, _Gesch._, I. 577; Cornill, _Einleitung_, who also would exclude _no king and no prince_ in iii. 4.
[404] This objection, however, does not hold against the removal of merely _and David_, leaving _their king_.
[405] ii. 7, 11, 14, 17 (Heb.). In i. 4 B-text reads Ἰούδα for יהוא while Q^{mq} have Ἰηου.
[406] In determining the date of the Book of Hosea the title in chap. i. is of no use to us: _The Word of Jehovah which was to Hosea ben Be'eri in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam ben Joash, king of Israel._ This title is trebly suspicious. First: the given reigns of Judah and Israel do not correspond; Jeroboam was dead before Uzziah. Second: there is no proof either in the First or Second Section of the book that Hosea prophesied after the reign of Jotham. Third: it is curious that in the case of a prophet of Northern Israel kings of Judah should be stated first, and four of them be given while only one king of his own country is placed beside them. On these grounds critics are probably correct who take the title as it stands to be the work of some later Judæan scribe who sought to make it correspond to the titles of the Books of Isaiah and Micah. He may have been the same who added chap. i. 7. The original form of the title probably was _The Word of God which was to Hosea son of Be'eri in the days of Jeroboam ben Joash, king of Israel_, and designed only for the First Section of the book, chaps, i.-iii.
[407] vii. 7. There are also other passages which, while they may be referred, as they stand, to the whole succession of illegitimate dynasties in Northern Israel from the beginning to the end of that kingdom, more probably reflect the same ten years of special anarchy and disorder after the death of Jeroboam II. See vii. 3 ff.; viii. 4, where the illegitimate kingmaking is coupled with the idolatry of the Northern Kingdom; xiii. 10, 11.
[408] x. 3, 7, 8, 15.
[409] ix. 15.
[410] vi. 8, 9.
[411] vii. 1.
[412] vii. 11.
[413] x. 6.
[414] xiii. 12 f.
[415] The chronology of these years is exceedingly uncertain. Jeroboam was dead about 743; in 738 Menahem gave tribute to Assyria; in 734 Tiglath-Pileser had conquered Aram, Gilead and Galilee in response to King Ahaz, who had a year or two before been attacked by Rezin of Aram and Pekah of Israel.
[416] 2 Kings xv. 8-16. It may be to this appearance of three kings within one month that there was originally an allusion in the now obscure verse of Hosea, v. 7.
[417] 2 Kings xv. 17-22.
[418] Or prince, שׂר: cf. Hosea's denunciation of the שׂרים as rebels.
[419] Isa. vii.; 2 Kings xv. 37, 38.
[420] Some have found a later allusion in chap. x. 14: _like unto the destruction_ of (?) _Shalman_ (of ?) _Beth' Arbe'l_. Pusey, p. 5 _b_, and others take this to allude to a destruction of the Galilean Arbela, the modern Irbid, by Salmanassar IV., who ascended the Assyrian throne in 727 and besieged Samaria in 724 ff. But since the construction of the phrase leaves it doubtful whether the name Shalman is that or the agent or object of the destruction, and whether, if the agent, he be one of the Assyrian Salmanassars or a Moabite King Salman _c._ 730 B.C., it is impossible to make use of the verse in fixing the date of the Book of Hosea. See further, p. 289. Wellhausen omits.
[421] v. 1; vi. 8; xii. 12: cf. W. R. Smith, _Prophets_, 156.
[422] Cf. W. R. Smith, _l.c._
[423] Cf. W. R. Smith, _Prophets_, 157: Hosea's "language and the movement of his thoughts are far removed from the simplicity and self-control which characterise the prophecy of Amos. Indignation and sorrow, tenderness and severity, faith in the sovereignty of Jehovah's love, and a despairing sense of Israel's infidelity are woven together in a sequence which has no logical plan, but is determined by the battle and alternate victory of contending emotions; and the swift transitions, the fragmentary unbalanced utterance, the half-developed allusions, that make his prophecy so difficult to the commentator, express the agony of this inward conflict."