Exegetes find themselves in the biblical texts they study. How could it be otherwise? The linguistic turn has taught us that the mind constructs the meaning of a text through the ‘encyclopaedia’ of the language in which the text is written and the ‘horizon’ of the reader, i.e. her or his cultural and biographical background. James M. Bos reveals his biographical background in the preface of his doctoral dissertation. It was completed at the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. He is an academic who submitted his writing at an institution bearing the name of a state, probably in order to secure a career and earn his living. He thinks the same must have been true for the prophet Hosea, because ‘…unless one assumes that Hosea was ‘financially independent’ (and thus a member of his society's elite), he needed to be able to earn a living’ (p. 23). However, it is improbable that Hosea was an employee of the Israelite administration because of his critique of the religious and political establishment. Where did Hosea and his disciples receive their training? ‘Where did they get the writing materials? How did they earn a living? … Thus, in order to maintain an Israelite origin for the text of Hosea in the eighth century, one must ask whether it was possible for someone to be highly literate outside of the circles of the state administration’ (p. 24).
The main thesis of the dissertation is that the book of Hosea was composed by scribes perhaps in the service of the High Priest in Jerusalem in early Persian times (about 540–440 BC). ‘The Judahite priesthood would have benefited from propaganda opposing a monarchy (as well as propaganda opposing competing cult sites to the north). In this post-monarchic setting, then, one might expect to find literature that was critical of the kings of the past and opposed to a genuine attempt to reinstitute the monarchy, for the latter would necessarily mean a reduction in the socio-political power and prestige of the priesthood’ (p. 38f).
In contrast to mainstream biblical scholarship which holds that sayings of the prophet Hosea are the kernel of the book, that was ‘subsequently brought to Judah where it was redacted and preserved’ (p. 16), Bos follows scholars who developed a ‘new paradigm’. This ‘new paradigm’ dates almost everything in the Old Testament to the post-monarchic period.
The dissertation has shortcomings, the most important being a synchronic approach ignoring the ‘high likelihood that some earlier written sources were utilized by the author(s) in composing the book’ (p. 29). It is all about authorship. It is certainly the case that the book of Hosea was given its final form during the Persian Period by scribes at the temple of Jerusalem. Bos does not address the question of why these scribes made Hosea part and parcel of the Book of the Twelve, in which the headings of Haggai and Zechariah clearly state their origin in Persian times, whereas they put a heading to Hosea that dates the prophet to the second half of the 8th century. Neither does he take into account the fact that Hosea mostly consists of poetry. Poetic compositions were transmitted orally. Another concept of authorship can very well lead to the conclusion that the prophet was the author, i.e. the origin, of oral poetry that was memorized by himself or his disciples and written down later.
Bos neither develops his argument from an interpretation of coherent passages of the biblical text nor quotes from the ancient Near Eastern texts he refers to, but rather relies on secondary literature with hypothetical reconstructions of history. The significance of the temple at Bethel may serve as an example of his method. According to biblical texts this sanctuary goes back to the patriarch Jacob/Israel (Gen 28) and later became a national shrine of the northern Kingdom (1 Kings 12). Although the temple of Bethel may have continued to be in use after the northern Kingdom became an Assyrian province in 722 BC (2 Kings 17:28), there is no evidence of the temple in the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Period. Bos refers to this lack of archaeological evidence (p. 71f fn 4, 74 fn 14). Nevertheless he relies on an article arguing that Bethel supplanted Jerusalem as a religious centre during in the 6th century. This is mere guesswork (cf. Jer 41:4–7 for the intention to worship in the ruins of the Jerusalem temple).
Bos uses Deuteronomy in order to date covenant theology and Hosea. He correctly observes that the oracles of judgement presuppose the concept of a covenant between Yhwh and Israel that can be broken (p. 132f). The problem he does not mention is that Hosea labels the relationship between Yhwh and Israel as a covenant only once (Hos 8:1). This prophetic silence about the covenant has made some scholars think that the concept of covenantal obligations to God was invented in order to explain the Babylonian exile as a punishment for the broken covenant. The scarce use of the term covenant in prophetic books is one reason why these scholars date the elaborate covenant theology in Deuteronomy to be exilic or post-exilic. Bos argues that Hosea must be dependent on Deuteronomy, because ‘the punishments ‘predicted’ are all curses known from the Deuteronomistic covenant’ (p. 136). This is not correct. Hosea does not contain curses but rather calamity described using motifs that were common in the curse sections of ancient Near Eastern treaties. Curse motifs were part of a language coined to speak about calamity. With this we come to another shortcoming: some of the premises are wrong.
It is not true that there were no covenants between deities and people elsewhere in the ancient Near East. A Phoenician incantation on an amulet from the 7th century BC found at the north Syrian site of Arslan Tash mentions a covenant that the god Asshur made with the people among whom the author lived. It is also not true that literacy was confined to state or temple administration. At Oxford, Michael C. A. Macdonald has done research on documents dating from the beginning of the 1st millennium BC onwards that were incised on palm-leaf stalks and sticks and have been discovered on the Arabian Peninsula. Ezekiel 37:16 may be referring to this form of writing. Such palm-leaf stalks were a cheap means for archiving prophetic oracles like on modern file cards.
We know from Assyrian sources how concerned the state administration was about the violent deaths of king Sargon and king Sennacherib. They were conceived as a divine punishment. It was crucial to find out what had aroused the god's wrath. One can hardly underestimate the shock provoked by the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom among their southern kin in Jerusalem. They saw it as a divine punishment. Scribes in 8th century Judah may have received either the prophet Hosea himself or some of his disciples among the refugees and edited a draft of the book of Hosea in order to warn their king and people and avoid divine judgment.
Apart from containing some good observations, above all the covenantal structure of Hosea's prophecy, the dissertation reveals the heap of hypotheses the ‘new paradigm’ is built on.
