The Prophet Called a Fool

The harvest setting of chapter 9's opening is probably the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot), the great autumn ingathering that was simultaneously a feast of present plenty and a memorial of the wilderness years. The prophet's command not to rejoice like the nations cuts at the feast's dual character: the very reason to rejoice (the harvest Yahweh gives) is the reason the rejoicing is compromised (the harvest has been attributed to Baal, as chapter 2 had said). The forecast of exile — return to Egypt, eating unclean food in Assyria — is a precise inversion of the Exodus. What Yahweh did in bringing the people out of Egypt will be undone. The agricultural vocabulary continues: Ephraim will strike his roots dry; he shall bear no fruit.

The passage on the prophet in verses 7–9 is unusual in the prophetic literature for its self-referential quality. Hosea places himself in the category of watchman — a figure with both lookout and accountability functions — and then describes the cost of the office. The prophet is called a fool and a madman because the community whose corruption he names does not want the name. The deep corruption compared to Gibeah invokes the nadir of the book of Judges — the event that nearly destroyed the tribe of Benjamin — and uses it as a benchmark for the present. The closing references to Baal Peor (the episode in Numbers 25 where Israel began to worship Baal and committed sexual immorality with Moabite women) and Gilgal (a major northern cult site) locate the present apostasy in a long history of transgression.