The means which God took to impress Himself upon the heart of His people were, according to Hosea, the events of their history. Hosea, indeed, also points to another means. _The Torah of thy God_, which in one passage[699] he makes parallel to _knowledge_, is evidently the body of instruction, judicial, ceremonial and social, which has come down by the tradition of the priests. This was not all oral; part of it at least was already codified in the form we now know as the Book of the Covenant.[700] But Hosea treats of the Torah only in connection with the priests. And the far more frequent and direct means by which God has sought to reveal Himself to the people are the great events of their past. These Hosea never tires of recalling. More than any other prophet, he recites the deeds done by God in the origins and making of Israel. So numerous are his references that from them alone we could almost rebuild the early history. Let us gather them together. The nation's father Jacob _in the womb overreached his brother, and in his manhood strove with God; yea, he strove with the Angel and he overcame_,[701] _he wept and supplicated Him; at Bethel he found Him, and there He spake with us--Jehovah God of Hosts, Jehovah is His name_.[702] _... And Jacob fled to the territory_[703] _of Aram, and he served for a wife, and for a wife he tended sheep. And by a prophet Jehovah brought Israel up out of Egypt, and by a prophet he was tended._[704] _When Israel was young,_[705] _then I came to love him, and out of Egypt I called My son._[706] _As often as I called to them, so often did they go from Me:_[707] _they to the Ba'alim kept sacrificing, and to images offering incense. But I taught Ephraim to walk, taking him upon Mine_[708] _arms, and they did not know that I nursed them._[709] ... _Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel, like the firstfruits on an early fig-tree I saw your fathers; but they went to Ba'al-Peor, and consecrated themselves to the Shame._[710] ... _But I am Jehovah thy God from the land of Egypt, and gods besides Me thou knowest not, and Saviour there is none but Me. I knew thee in the wilderness, in the land of burning heats. But the more pasture they had, the more they fed themselves full; as they fed themselves full their heart was lifted up: therefore they forgat Me._[711] ... _I Jehovah thy God from the land of Egypt._[712] And all this revelation of God was not only in that marvellous history, but in the yearly gifts of nature and even in the success of the people's commerce: _She knew not that it was I who have given her the corn and the wine and the oil, and silver have I multiplied to her._[713]
This, then, is how God gave Israel knowledge of Himself. _First_ it broke upon the Individual, the Nation's Father. And to him it had not come by miracle, but just in the same fashion as it has broken upon men from then until now. He woke to find God no tradition, but an experience. Amid the strife with others of which life for all so largely consists, Jacob became aware that God also has to be reckoned with, and that, hard as is the struggle for bread and love and justice with one's brethren and fellow-men, with the Esaus and with the Labans, a more inevitable wrestle awaits the soul when it is left alone in the darkness with the Unseen. Oh, this is our sympathy with those early patriarchs, not that they saw the sea dry up before them or the bush ablaze with God, but that upon some lonely battle-field of the heart they also endured those moments of agony, which imply a more real Foe than we ever met in flesh and blood, and which leave upon us marks deeper than the waste of toil or the rivalry of the world can inflict. So the Father of the Nation came to _find_ God at Bethel, and there, adds Hosea, where the Nation still worship, God _spake with us_[714] in the person of our Father.