The Eighth Century

The eighth century BC is the century the prophetic books begin. Before it there are prophets in the narratives, Elijah and Elisha and Nathan and Micaiah, but no books under their names. From roughly 760 onwards you get written collections, and four of them belong to this hundred years.

The setting for the first two is a boom. Jeroboam II reigned in the northern kingdom for about forty years in the first half of the century, and Uzziah in Judah for a comparably long stretch; between them they presided over the widest borders and the most money Israel had seen since Solomon, largely because Assyria was temporarily distracted. Excavations at Samaria have produced carved ivory inlays from this period, the sort of luxury Amos mocks when he speaks of beds inlaid with ivory and of stone houses (Amos 6:4; 5:11). Prosperity is the context of the earliest prophetic books, not catastrophe, which is exactly why they were so unwelcome.

Amos is a Judean, from Tekoa, south of Bethlehem, and he goes north to preach at Bethel, the royal sanctuary, which is roughly like a foreign critic turning up at a state cathedral. Amos 1:1 dates him to Uzziah and Jeroboam II, two years before an earthquake that the editor evidently expected readers to remember. Excavators have found substantial earthquake damage in this general period at several sites, Hazor among them, and it is often linked to this verse, though tying a specific stratum to a specific year is not something archaeology can do cleanly. Amos 7:14 gives his famous answer to the priest Amaziah, who tells him to go home: '"I was not a prophet," Amos replied, "nor was I the son of a prophet; rather, I was a herdsman and a tender of sycamore-fig trees."' The Hebrew has no verb at all, so it can be read as I was not or I am not, which changes whether he is denying the office or denying only that he was trained for it. The BSB prints the past tense in its text, as the quotation here shows, and its footnote gives the other: "Or I am not." Both readings are defensible and old.

Hosea works in the north too, and slightly later, running into the chaos after Jeroboam's death when four kings of Israel were assassinated inside a single generation. Micah of Moresheth, a country town in the Judean lowlands, and Isaiah son of Amoz, who moves in Jerusalem court circles, both work under Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, with Isaiah's call set in the year Uzziah died. So you have two preaching in the north and two in Judah, three Judeans and one northerner, an insider and outsiders, a farmer and a courtier, saying overlapping things. The overlap is the point. These are not four idiosyncratic voices but one indictment coming from four directions.

One connection to file away. Micah 3:12, 'Zion will be plowed like a field, Jerusalem will become a heap of rubble, and the temple mount a wooded ridge,' is quoted word for word a century later in Jeremiah 26:18 by elders defending Jeremiah's life. It is usually said to be the only place in the prophetic books where one prophet is quoted by name in another, and it shows that these collections were circulating, remembered, and used as legal precedent.

Read these four passages together, in this order, and you have the theological centre of the century. Amos 5:21 to 24: 'I hate, I despise your feasts! I cannot stand the stench of your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer Me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them.' Isaiah 1:11 to 17: 'I am full from the burnt offerings of rams,' and then the reason, 'Your hands are covered with blood,' and then the remedy, 'Learn to do right; seek justice and correct the oppressor. Defend the fatherless and plead the case of the widow.' (The BSB footnote at the end of verse 17 offers another reading of the middle clause: "Or and encourage the oppressed.") Hosea 6:6: 'For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.' Micah 6:6 to 8, which runs through an escalating auction of offerings, up to a firstborn child, and lands on 'to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.'

The specifics matter more than the slogan. Amos 2:6 to 8 describes selling the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and lying down on garments taken in pledge, which the Torah forbids keeping overnight. Amos 8:5 catches merchants waiting for the sabbath to end so they can resume trading with a shrunk ephah, an inflated shekel and dishonest scales. Micah 2:1 to 2 has men lying awake devising how to seize a neighbour's field and inheritance. Isaiah 5:8 pronounces woe on those who add house to house and join field to field until no place is left. This is not general moral disapproval. It is a specific and repeated charge of the legal and economic dispossession of small landholders by people who then went to worship.

So what exactly does God refuse? There is a real and old division here. One reading takes the rejection at face value and in principle: the prophets opposed the sacrificial system itself, and the elaborate priestly legislation is a later development that they never knew. Amos 5:25 is the strongest text for this, asking whether Israel brought sacrifices and offerings during the forty years in the wilderness, and Jeremiah 7:22 is stronger still. Be careful with that verse in the BSB, which prints 'I did not merely command them about burnt offerings and sacrifices.' The word merely is the translators' addition, with no footnote; the Hebrew says in plain words that God did not speak to them or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices (this lesson's own rendering). With merely, the verse already says what the second reading below says, that sacrifice was never the main point. Without it, the verse says what this first reading says, that God never commanded sacrifice at all. So the BSB has taken a side here, and a student should know that. Wellhausen's reconstruction depended on the stronger reading, and it is not a fringe position.

The other reading takes these as relative negations, a known Hebrew way of ranking two things by denying the lesser. Hosea 6:6 is the clearest case, because Jesus quotes it twice in Matthew and the sense there is plainly a priority rather than an abolition; and Isaiah 1 gives its own reason for the refusal, which is bloody hands, not incense. On this reading the target is worship offered by people whose daily practice contradicts it, which is worse than useless because it recruits God as a character reference. Most current scholarship takes this line, and the pastoral force is greater, not lesser: God is not indifferent to liturgy, he is unwilling to be used as an alibi.

Teach the disagreement, and then teach what neither side denies. In all four books the standing of a community's worship is decided somewhere other than in the sanctuary. That is uncomfortable in exactly the direction a seminary student needs to be made uncomfortable, because it is very easy to become professionally competent at the part God says he can do without.

Hosea 1:2 opens with a command no pastor would give: 'Go, take a prostitute as your wife and have children of adultery, because this land is flagrantly prostituting itself by departing from the LORD.' The BSB's wording settles a question the Hebrew leaves open. The Hebrew is literally a wife of whoredoms, and whether that describes what Gomer already was or what she would become is argued. He marries Gomer daughter of Diblaim. Three children are born and each is given a name that is an oracle: Jezreel, after a valley where blood was shed; Lo-ruhamah, No Mercy; Lo-ammi, Not My People, which cancels the covenant formula of Exodus in two Hebrew words. Chapter 2 is then an extended legal complaint against the wife, in which the threatened punishments include stripping her naked and hedging her in with thorns. Chapter 3 sends the prophet to love an adulteress again, buying her for fifteen shekels of silver and a quantity of barley.

How to read it has been argued for as long as there have been readers. The literal reading takes it as biography: a real marriage, a real betrayal, and a prophet whose domestic life became the sermon. The vision reading treats it as something experienced and reported rather than enacted; Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, lists Hosea's marriage among the prophetic actions that took place in vision, and some other medieval Jewish commentators took the same route. A third reading calls it a parable composed to be told, on the analogy of Isaiah's vineyard song. And a fourth possibility is that chapters 1 and 3 report the same woman at two stages, which the Hebrew of 3:1 permits but does not require, since the Hebrew word can mean woman or wife and carries no your. The BSB's main text reads 'Go show love to your wife again,' which takes the first view; its footnote, 'Or Go show love to a woman who is loved by another,' keeps the second.

None of these can be proved, and a teacher should say which considerations pull which way. The specificity of the names, including Gomer's father, argues for a real marriage. The relentless fit between every detail and the theological point argues for shaping. The vision reading is often suspected of squeamishness, and it is worth noting that the same suspicion was raised against it in the Middle Ages. What none of the readings changes is the function: the covenant is being described as a marriage in which one party has been persistently and publicly unfaithful, and God is described as a husband who will not file.

Now the honest difficulty, which should not be skipped. The metaphor puts God in the position of the wronged husband and Israel in the position of the punished wife, and the punishments in chapter 2 are the punishments of ancient shaming. Renita Weems, in Battered Love, argued that this imagery has done real harm in real households, because it hands anyone who wants it a divine pattern for the humiliation of an unfaithful woman, and because the wife in the text never speaks for herself: her words at 2:5 and 2:7 come only as the aggrieved husband reports them. Other scholars have pressed the same point. A teacher who reads Hosea 2 aloud to a congregation containing survivors of domestic violence and offers no comment has made a pastoral decision, whether or not he noticed making it.

The answer is not to drop the metaphor, because the metaphor is where the book's tenderness comes from. It is to read to the end of it. In chapter 2 the wilderness into which the wife is driven becomes the place where God speaks tenderly to her and she answers as in the days of her youth; the names are reversed, and Not My People becomes My People. Chapter 11 abandons the marriage image for a parent teaching a toddler to walk, and then says the line the whole book exists to say: 'My heart is turned within Me; My compassion is stirred! I will not execute the full fury of My anger; I will not destroy Ephraim again. For I am God and not man - the Holy One among you - and I will not come in wrath.' The point of not being a man, here, is precisely that he does not do what an aggrieved husband would do.

The politics of the century are simple to state and brutal to live through. Tiglath-pileser III came to the Assyrian throne in 745 and turned a periodically expanding kingdom into a machine for annexation and mass deportation. In 735 to 732 Rezin of Damascus and Pekah of Israel tried to force Judah into an anti-Assyrian coalition and besieged Jerusalem to install a compliant king; this is the crisis behind Isaiah 7, where Isaiah tells Ahaz to stand still and Ahaz instead buys Assyrian help, as 2 Kings 16:7 records. Damascus fell in 732. Samaria fell in 722 after a siege begun under Shalmaneser V, and the northern kingdom ceased to exist. Amos and Hosea had said it would.

Judah survived another century, and the defining moment of that survival is 701 BC. Hezekiah joined a revolt after Sargon II's death. Sennacherib came west, and 2 Kings 18 to 19, repeated at Isaiah 36 to 37, describes the campaign: fortified cities taken, a huge indemnity paid, an Assyrian officer shouting propaganda in Hebrew at the wall of Jerusalem, Hezekiah in sackcloth, Isaiah promising that the king of Assyria will not enter the city, and then the angel of the LORD striking 185,000 in the Assyrian camp overnight.

Sennacherib left his own account. It survives on several hexagonal clay prisms, the best known being the Taylor Prism, bought by Colonel Robert Taylor around 1830 and in the British Museum since 1855, inscribed around 691, with near-duplicates in Chicago and Jerusalem. It says he took forty-six of Hezekiah's walled cities, deported a large population, cut Judah down and gave territory to Philistine kings, and, in the line everyone quotes, that he shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem, his royal city, like a bird in a cage. It lists tribute received at Nineveh, including thirty talents of gold. The siege of one of those cities is carved in relief on the walls of his palace at Nineveh, showing Lachish under assault, and the excavated siege ramp at Lachish is still there.

Be precise about what this does and does not establish, because students are routinely taught one of two overstatements. It confirms a great deal: Sennacherib campaigned in Judah, Hezekiah was king, the devastation of the countryside was real, heavy tribute was paid, and the gold figure of thirty talents matches 2 Kings 18:14 exactly. It also contains a loud silence. Assyrian royal inscriptions exist to advertise conquest, and this one does not claim to have taken Jerusalem, does not install a puppet on Judah's throne, and does not describe Hezekiah being removed. A bird in a cage is what you write when you have surrounded a city and then gone home. What the prism does not confirm is the biblical explanation. It says nothing about losing an army, which is exactly what it would not say. The 185,000 is unverified, the silver figures differ between the two sources, 800 talents against 300, which may reflect different weight standards or the counting of other valuables, and the deportation total of more than 200,000 on the prism is generally thought inflated. Two further points belong to the same reckoning. Second Kings 19:9 mentions Tirhakah king of Cush, who is the pharaoh Taharqa, and Taharqa did not take the throne until about 690, which led William Foxwell Albright and John Bright, among others, to propose two separate Judean campaigns by Sennacherib. Most scholars now hold to one campaign and explain the title as applied in advance to a man who was then a prince or commander. The two-campaign case is a minority view but it is a serious one and it was proposed to solve a real problem. And the murder of Sennacherib by his own sons in 2 Kings 19:37 did happen, in 681, confirmed by Assyrian and Babylonian sources; the narrative places it after his return without claiming it followed at once, and there were in fact twenty years between.

The theological aftershock matters most, because it sets up the next lesson. Jerusalem was not taken, and a conviction hardened in the city that it could not be taken, that the temple made it safe. Isaiah's own oracles had said something much more conditional than that. A hundred years later Jeremiah will stand in the temple gate and have to attack the belief that 701 seemed to prove.