Hosea: A Critical and Exegetical Commentary

Hosea: A Critical and Exegetical Commentary. By A. A. Macintosh. ICC. Edinburgh:

T & T Clark, 1997, xciix + 593 pp., $69.95.

In the introduction Macintosh discusses the linguistic problems with the nature of Hosea's dialect of Hebrew and rejects most attempts to explain difficult passages as corruptions. He finds ten early glosses that translate or explain difficult words, numerous dialectical peculiarities in vocabulary, and some unique syntactical constructions (pp. liv-lvii). Macintosh relies heavily on rabbinic commentaries (Rashi, Kimchi, ibn Ezra, ibn Janah) that focus on comparing Hebrew with Arabic and a few Aramaic cognates to solve many of the book's semantic problems. He makes only four consonantal emendations, three changes based on the Dead Sea Scrolls and seven vowel pointing changes. Thus he is textually conservative even while working with some very difficult texts.

Macintosh believes that chaps. 2, 4-8 were delivered orally in public, but that many other chapters contain private prayers (14:2-9) and meditative reflections (chaps. 9-11) that reveal the prophet's systematic and mature evaluation of the nation's problems or complex musings on key theological concepts. He states that "the massive unity of purpose which has been detected in the work is most naturally attributed to a single mind and a single author" (p. lxx), but he does attribute a number of Judah passages to a later Judean redactor (he lists 14 examples on p. lxxi). He believes Hosea's prophetic function was to warn people that if there was no reform, the northern nation of Ephraim would be doomed to destruction. To accomplish this goal Hosea described the failure of the nation's political leaders to provide stability because of several coups d'etat, the corrupt syncretistic religious policy of joining Baalism with the worship of Yahweh, and the people's failure to perceive why their nation was in such big trouble.

In Hosea 1-3 Macintosh concludes ll) that Hosea did marry a promiscuous woman (not a cultic prostitute, as Wolff suggests) and was the father of all three children; (2) that the names of the children given in the text were contrived for literary purposes (they symbolized periods of Israel's political decline) and were not their real names; (3) that chap. 2 was not a divorce case but merely a family quarrel (p. 41); and that the woman in chap. 3 is Gomer. He rejects ibn Ezra and Jerome's allegorical or visionary view of chaps. 1-3 (p. 121). From time to time he reviews numerous interpretations of crux passages: He gives seven possible interpretations of "they will go up from the land" in 2:2 (1:11 in English) and prefers "they will flourish in the land." Macintosh rejects ibn Ezra's view that the positive promises in 2:1-2 (1:10-11 in English) are actually oracles of doom, but heavily depends (in almost every verse) on rabbinic suggestions about the interpretation of difficult words. In discussing the hapax form nblth in 2:12 (2:10 in English) Macintosh refers to BDB, Jerome, ibn Ezra, ibn Janah, Kimchi, Michaelis and the 1904 article by Steininger (p. 59), but no modern authors. Elsewhere in 2:17 (English 2:15), he rejects the common translation of ?nh "to sing" that is supported by Jerome, ibn Ezra and Kimchi, also Rashi and ibn Barun's view that it means "to dwell," as well as Rudolph, Harper and Wolff's suggestion of"to answer," but instead accepts ibn Janah's conclusion that it means "to attend to, occupy oneself with" (pp. 72-73), which is derived from a borrowed Aramaic root. These long discussions are the primary contribution of this commentary.

Macintosh does find a lawsuit beginning in 4:1 and he dates this material to the prosperous time of Jeroboam II. Although his treatment is weak on the structural ordering and logical progression of each section, rhetorical markers and form-critical issues, his careful verse-by-verse exegesis does include a discussion of semantic and syntactical issues to justify his translation (this is where the rabbinic comments are so frequent), a brief discussion of the meaning of the verse (often with an indication of its historical setting-many are dated to the reign of Pekah) and a survey of variant readings in different versions.

In 4:10 he translates the Hiphil "they will play the harlot" (NASB) as a noncausal intransitive reflexive "they have abandoned themselves to promiscuity," based on ibn Janah's Arabic explanation of the common verb smr "to keep" as "cleaving to, devoting themselves to, loving." Many of Macintosh's unique translations challenge present translations, such as the following examples. (1) "Their canopies are canopies of disgrace" at the end of 4:18 instead of "their rulers dearly love shame" (NASB); (2) in 5:12, he sees God compared to an "emaciating disease" rather than a "moth"; (3) in 6:4, he translates "good intentions" rather than "steadfast love." Throughout the commentary the reader will need to judge carefully the merits of these rabbinic interpretations based on Arabic cognates: sometime they are just stated with very little corroborating evidence to convince one of the viability of such suggestions.