by
Damien F. Mackey
The
following section on the prophet Isaiah, on Hosea, is taken from Volume 2, pp.
87-89, of my postgraduate university thesis:
A Revised
History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its
Background
….
Amos was called
to leave Judah and testify in the north against the injustices of Samaria. (Cf.
Micah 1:2-7). Most interestingly, Amos was to be found preaching in the
northern Bethel, which I have identified with Bethulia of [the Book of Judith] (refer
back to pp. 71-72 of this volume). Not unexpectedly, Amos’ presence there at
the time of Jeroboam II was not appreciated by the Bethelite priesthood, who
regarded him as a conspirator from the southern kingdom (Amos 7:10). Being the
man that he was, though, Amos would unlikely have been frightened away by
Jeroboam’s priest, Amaziah, when he had urged Amos (vv.12-13): ‘O seer, go,
flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never
again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is the temple
of the kingdom’. Still, Amos may not have settled permanently in the north at
this time, but may have waited until the fall of Jeroboam II and his régime in
Israel and the onset of the long interregnum there.
Presumably Amos
had chosen Bethel/Bethulia in which to settle because there, more than likely,
he had Simeonite ancestors. Judith’s husband Manasseh would later be buried
near Bethulia “with his ancestors” (Judith 8:3). This town would thus have been
one of those locations in which the migrant Simeonites of king Asa of Judah’s
reign (more than a century earlier) had chosen to settle; perhaps re-naming the
place Bethul [Bethel] after a Simeonite town of that name in south western
Judah (Joshua 19:4).
Thus Amos of
Bethulia would become Merari, father of Judith; the name Amos (Amoz), or
Amaziah, perhaps being linguistically transformable into Amariah, hence Merari,
in the same way that king Uzziah of Judah was also called Azariah (1 Chronicles
3:12). We saw that Jewish legend names Judith’s father as Beeri. Now the names
Beeri and Merari are very similar if Conder’s principle, “supposing the
substitution of M for B, of which there are occasional instances in Syrian
nomenclature” (as quoted back on p. 70), be allowable here. This vital piece of
information, that Judith’s father was Beeri, now enables for the prophet Hosea,
an exact contemporary of Isaiah in the north, whose father was also Beeri
(Hosea 1:1), to be identified with Isaiah.
If these
connections are valid, then Isaiah must therefore have accompanied his father
to the north and he, too, must have been prophesying, as Hosea, in the days of
Jeroboam II (Hosea 1:1). His prophesying apparently began in the north [S.
Irvine notes that Budde has dated the “inaugural call of Isaiah” to 740 BC. Isaiah, Ahaz, and the Syro-Ephraimitic
Crisis, p. 4, n. 11]: “When the Lord first spoke through Hosea ...” (1:2).
He would continue prophesying right down to the time of king Hezekiah (cf.
Hosea 1:1; Isaiah 1:1). The names Isaiah and Hosea are indeed of very similar
meaning, being basically derived from the same Hebrew root for ‘salvation’ [… yasha]
-
“Isaiah” (Hebrew … Yeshâ‘yâhû)
signifies: “Yahweh (the Lord) is salvation”.
-
“Hosea” (Hebrew … Hoshaya) means
practically the same: “Yahweh (the Lord) is saviour”.
We can now
easily connect Isaiah with Uzziah (var. Osias) [of the Book of Judith] through
Hosea (var. Osee).
Hosea’s/Isaiah’s Family
Though no doubt
young, the prophet was given the strange command by God to marry an ‘unfaithful’
woman: “‘Go, take yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry, for
the land commits great harlotry by forsaking the Lord’. So he went and took
Gomer the daughter of Diblaim …” (Hosea 1:2-3). Biblical scholars have agonised
over the type of woman this Gomer might have been: adulteress? harlot?
temple-prostitute? But essentially the clue is to be found in the statement
above that she was a citizen of the ‘land of great harlotry’: namely, the
northern kingdom of Israel.
A further
likeness between Isaiah and Hosea was the fact that ‘their names’ and those of ‘their’
children were meant to be, in their meanings, prophetic signs. Thus:
-
The prophet Isaiah tells us: “Behold, I and the children whom the Lord has given
me are for signs and portents ...” (Isaiah 8:18).
-
Similarly, the names of the children of the prophet Hosea were meant to be prophetic
(Hosea 1:4, 6, 9).
[C.] Boutflower,
who has written perceptively on Isaiah’s children, has rightly noted the prophetic
significance of their names and those of Hosea’s children, without however connecting
Isaiah and Hosea as one [The Book of
Isaiah I-XXXIX, p. 49]: “Isaiah like Hosea had three known children, all of
whose names were prophetic”. It is most unlikely, one would have to think, to
have two great prophets contemporaneously operating over such a substantial
period of time, and each having three children whose names were prophetic. The
fact is I believe that it was just the one prophet, who may possibly have had
six children in all. And Irvine has, in the course of his detailed study of the
so-called Isaianic Denkschrift [‘personal memoir’] (Isaiah 6:1-9:6) of the
Syro-Ephraimitic crisis, written extensively on the chronological significance
of Isaiah’s children and their names in connection with this crisis for Judah [op. cit., pp. 141-147, 162-171, 180-184,
192-195, 229-230, 256-258.] I also appreciate Irvine’s concern for scholars to
study the prophets (thus Isaiah) according to the “historical events and
politics” of their time [ibid., p.
1].
Whilst this
Simeonite family was not descended from the prophetic line, as Amos himself would
testify to the priest of Bethel (7:14), it was certainly a ‘family’ from the
point of view of its striking the same prophetic chord. Commentators have
recognised a similar strain in the writings of Amos, Micah, Hosea and Isaiah,
whilst having no idea of what was - at least, as far as I see it - their proper
(father-to-son) relationship. Thus [P.] King has written, in regard to the
prophet Micah [“Micah”, The Jerome
Biblical Commentary, 17:7]: “... the influence [upon Micah] of Isaiah, also
Hosea and Amos, is evident”. But it was rather Micah, as Amos, I suggest, who
was doing the ‘influencing’; he upon his son Isaiah/Hosea.
