"Was it only sacrifices and offerings ye brought me in the wilderness During forty years, O house of Israel? 15 But now ye lift up the shrine of your king, And an image of your God which ye have made for your- And so I will carry you into exile beyond Damascus,"1 The Lord2, 3 Jehovah hath sworn by himself: 20 "I abhor the glory of Jacob, His palaces I hate, And I will deliver up the city and its contents; 25 "Do horses run upon crags? Does one plough the sea with oxen? That ye have turned justice into poison And the fruit of righteousness into wormwood. Who rejoice in that which is not, 30 Who say: Have we not taken for ourselves horns by our own strength?” "Yea, behold I am raising up against you, O house of Israel, a nation; And they shall crush you, From the entrance to Hamath1 35 Unto the stream of the Arabah";5 It is the oracle of Jehovah, God of hosts. With these words of bitterness upon his pen we must leave our prophet. It was not given to any one of the Old Testament teach I *Beyond Damascus: a plain reference to the Assyrians, whose lands lay beyond Damascus in the region of the Euphrates. 2 Amos 6: 8a, c, e, 11b, c, 12, 13, 14a, c, b. 3 In this selection the prophet again reiterates the sacred oath of Jehovah that he will destroy the nation and compares the insincerity and conceit of their present life to the insecurity of horses running upon crags, or an attempt to plow the sea with He again alludes most clearly to the coming of the Assyrian. oxen. 4 Hamath: mark the boundaries of Jeroboam's great kingdom. 5 Arabah: the channel through which flowed the Jordan and the valley in which the Dead Sea lay, running down to the extreme southern end of the kingdom. ers to see all of God. Amos reveals him to us on a grander scale than his predecessors conceived-Jehovah of Hosts, the commander of the armies of the world, all powerful, perfect in justice, disciplining, chastising, teaching men of all nations the great moralities. As we see his message thus, Amos rises before us a Titanic figure clothed in a majesty which is the reflection of his own thought of Jehovah. But we must not lose sight of what Israel saw, a simple, stern shepherd of the Judean hills, strangely, even foolishly, interpreting the God who was showering his blessings upon them. It is not alone in the Israel of the days of Amos that the apostles of great reforms have been misinterpreted and scoffed at or ignored.1 I Having gained a picture of the prophet Amos and his ideals of justice and righteousness, as well as his conception of God, raise with yourself the following questions: Was the work of Amos likely to repel people from Jehovah or to draw them to him? If it was a repellant message, did Amos feel that in delivering it, he would bring the people to his conception of Jehovah? Was his conception of Jehovah a misconception? If so, how was he better than the people to whom he delivered the message, who also misconceived Jehovah? Is it the privilege of every reformer to try to change customs or conditions to conform to his higher ideals, even though he knows that the latter are limited, and that the people coming after him will have still higher and better ideals? CHAPTER VIII HOSEA, THE INTERPRETER OF JEHOVAH'S LOVE No student of these pages will have failed to realize in some degree in his own life that experience brings knowledge, and that character develops in accordance with our understanding of the lessons of life. In this chapter we have the story of a man who rose out of bitter personal experience to new heights of spiritual vision, and of knowledge of the character of Jehovah, while many of those with whom he pleaded sank into spiritual bewilderment, and deeper ignorance of the true character of their God. Reference to chap. vii of the present volume, and to II Kings 15:8-25 shows us a veritable reign of terror in Israel following the long and prosperous period of Jeroboam II, during which we have seen Amos uttering his brave denunciations. Zechariah, the son of Jeroboam, succeeded him at his death and within six months was assassinated by a conspirator, who was himself, before a month had passed, the victim of Menahem of Tirzah. The latter established himself more firmly than his immediate predecessors by the slaughter of all whose loyalty he doubted, and by the payment to Assyria of an enormous tribute which he exacted from the people. Thus he was able to hold the throne until his death, ten years later. His son remained in power but little over a year, dying by the hand of a conspirator from across the Jordan, Pekah of the land of Gilead. This last usurpation occurred about 736 B.C., and marks the latest probable limit of the work of the prophet whose career falls in this period. We cannot read even so brief a summary of conditions in Israel without being assured that her old confidence, so marked in the reign of the great Jeroboam II, must have given place to full consciousness of the dangers which threatened the nation from within and from without. Her princes, fawning upon the majesty of Assyria, paying heavy tribute, and apparently having ground for hope of continued existence only in the maintenance of friendly relations with that great power, yet weakly countenanced appeals to Egypt, some foolishly dreaming that that fast-decaying empire might, if supported by the countries of the eastern Mediterranean coast, overcome the younger, more vigorous nation of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Thus divided against itself as to foreign policy, and utterly demoralized as to its internal government, the political fate of Israel should have been easy to foresee. But with the glories of Jeroboam's reign but a decade behind them, princes and people clung to the belief that their confusion was only temporary. They saw no cause for national decay in the immoral life of the people and in the intrusion of these immoralities into the very heart of their religion. The old sites of Canaanitish worship which had been appropriated to the worship of Jehovah were surrounded with associations of the ancient Baalism of Canaan, and the people were too blind to see that the rites and ceremonies which were the accompaniment of worship at these high-places were out of harmony with the character of Jehovah. Images were found in all these centers, images through which the people had been accustomed to worship Jehovah. How easy to turn from these to the images which represented the gods of Assyria and Egypt! Only the prophets in this period saw that there could be no true worship of Jehovah through such symbols, and that the people were frequently worshiping not the spiritual God represented by the image, but the image itself in which they believed that power dwelt. This realization marks an important stage in the development of Israel's religion. It was the beginning of the long struggle against imageworship which ended only with the destruction of the nation. I It is necessary to recall the ancient custom of worshiping the gods on elevations, mountains, hills, the sanctuaries upon which were popularly called "high-places." Probably the best sites had been already appropriated to religious worship when the Hebrews entered the kingdom, and it was only natural when the worship of Jehovah became the national religion that these same high places should be consecrated to him. At the same time the common people would be continually reminded of the old gods and there would be constant inclination to continue at these scenes the forms of the old worship, although addressed to a God of another name. In the worship at these sanctuaries images had been freely used, and many people, as well as officiating priests, failed to understand the importance of the second commandment, "Thou shalt not make unto thee graven images," and to realize that only in absolute prohibition of these instruments, so long associated with other religions, could Jehovahworship establish itself in the land. In the midst of religious confusion and political anarchy, highborn, well-bred, perhaps a priest of Jehovah (although this is suggested only by his remarkable familiarity with internal conditions in the priesthood of his day) we find Hosea the prophet, who came to his work through a strange experience of shame and sorrow. The tragedy of his life is related by himself and is frankly made the basis of his new realization of the character of Jehovah. In brief it is as follows: Wedding in early manhood, in purest love, Gomer, the woman of his choice, he finds her unfaithful to him. After years of forbearance with her waywardness, years in which we can imagine the prophet enduring the shame of publicity in his family disgrace, as well as the agony of wounded affection, she left him with three children, to whom in the bitterness of his soul he had given names symbolic of his sorrow. Years elapsed. Hosea's faithful love ripened and deepened into an infinite tenderness and patience, which embraced not only his erring wife, but the whole people of Israel. At last Gomer, having gone from bad to worse, reached the slave market, where Hosea, walking in the market-place, came upon her, bound and shackled. Overwhelmed with pity and love, and trembling with the hope of her redemption, he purchased her, restored her to his home and to a probation the end of which should be, if all went well, restoration to the high office of wife and mother. To a man of such fidelity and power to forgive came, out of the depth of his sorrow, the call to reinterpret Jehovah to his people.1 The text of no other book of the Bible has suffered so much as that of the book of Hosea. Its broken and incoherent sentences testify, however, not only to the loss of old material and to the insertion of new, but to the passion and sorrow of the writer, torn with conflicting emotions of sympathy with his people in their national disasters, and anger at their faithlessness and blindness. I Some scholars regard the story of Hosea's life-tragedy as an allegory through which he tries to develop his teaching concerning the character of God. It hardly seems, however, that a mere allegory could have so permeated his thinking that it would form the basis of practically every utterance. The history of thought shows many instances of great truths born of deep experiences, and to regard the story as a simple statement of the facts of Hosea's life seems the most rational way to interpret the deep feeling with which the whole book vibrates. |