Every named figure in the book.
The only writing prophet whose ministry is set entirely in the northern kingdom. Commanded by Yahweh to marry a wife of whoredom and live the marriage in public as a sign. Speaks of God in the language of a wounded husband and a parent who taught a small child to walk. The most personally exposed prophet in the Book of the Twelve. Almost nothing is known of his life beyond what this book records.
Hosea's wife. Bears three children whose names are oracles. Leaves the household by whatever means, and is bought back in chapter 3 for fifteen pieces of silver and a homer and a half of barley. The book records what is done; it does not record what she thought of any of it. Modern readers have rightly noted the cost the figure of the unfaithful wife imposes on her.
Named by God's command after a massacre, after withdrawal of pity, after the dissolution of the covenant formula itself. They grow up in the village under those names. At the end of chapter 1 the names turn: Not-Pitied becomes Pitied; Not-My-People becomes My People; Jezreel, the valley of slaughter, becomes the valley where the heavens answer the earth. Named children, renamed.
The voice that runs through all fourteen chapters — pleading, accusing, remembering tenderly, breaking off mid-judgment. In chapter 11, the parent who taught Ephraim to walk cannot give him up and says so in one of the most unguarded passages in the Hebrew Bible. The source of the later prophetic vocabulary about hesed — steadfast love — and the first extended portrait in Scripture of a God whose love does not let go even when there is reason to.
Called Israel in the formal indictment and Ephraim in the more intimate verses, after its largest tribe. The wife in the marriage figure; the child taught to walk in chapter 11. The cult continues — priests are busy, feasts are kept — but the practical relational knowing of Yahweh has gone out of it. The book's tenderness toward Ephraim is the more startling for being unmistakable. The husband does not stop loving the wife.
Named in chapter 4 as the primary culprits of the knowledge failure: they were supposed to teach knowledge of God and instead grew fat on the people's sins. The people are destroyed for lack of knowledge because the priests rejected it. Their multiplying sanctuaries — the high places, the calves, the altars at Bethel now renamed Beth-aven (house of vanity) — are the visible shape of the failure.
Five kings in thirteen years in Hosea's lifetime — usurpations, assassinations, the political chaos of the last decades of the northern kingdom. The prophet's image for them is foam on water. In chapter 13 Yahweh says: I will be your king — where now is your king, that he may save you? The political history that runs behind the book is one of the shortest, most violent kingship sequences in the Hebrew canon.