Yahweh’s Dilemma
If we, with our limited knowledge, have difficulty understanding relationships, why people to behave as they do, where we stand in relation to them, what is going on around us and how best to achieving the right response, Hosea seems to suggest that Yahweh had similar problems. Another example, perhaps, of the way Jesus was ‘tempted in all points’ as we are.
To begin with Yahweh is baffled by the way people behave. After all he has done (vv 3-4) he really cannot believe what he sees in front of him (v 2). Did these people, like so many of us, so take things for granted that they never really stopped to pause and consider a few basic questions. Where had they come from? How had they got there? Whose vision and direction made it possible? Who rescued them when they were in trouble and stroked their brow when they were desperate for reassurance? Yet not only do they fail to respond to him but half the time they are rushing off in the opposite direction.
But then the next minute Yahweh himself seems to be in a different mood, either reflecting, prophetically and remorsefully, on what is happening to them (vv 6-7) or is going to happen to them (v 5), or else he is actually contemplating certain punishments to mete out to them (vv 5-7) if they don’t mend their ways, only to swing back at vv 8-9 with the realisation that in no way can he let them down or give them up. (For what happened to Admah and Zeboiim see Gen 10:19 and 14: 2, 8).
So what brought about the change? One suggestion finds a clue in v 1 where Yahweh accepts the father/son relationship. Once that happened v 9 was inevitable, suggesting that many problems in other societies might be eased once we cease to think of the next generation as ‘them’ who in some sense belong to us and begin to think of even our own offspring as us, for if his people can reciprocate by an acknowledgement of filial dependence, then such a sense of unity may set us off on the road to healing.