Thoughts on Hosea 9-10

Today’s reading: Hosea 9-10; Philemon

It can be easy to forget, given how short the minor prophets’ books tend to be, that they still operated as prophets of God for years and decades of their lives.

I think this has really stuck out to me more this read-through because of this blog. Writing these posts every day forces me to slow down and think about what, if anything, the Lord would have me write about for that day’s reading, and that has put me face-to-face with how repetitive some of these books are. The same points get made over and over, some times in different ways or from different angles, but other times almost being straight repetition. The blog makes me deal with this because I have to ask, “Am I really going to write about the same thing two, three, or even four days in a row? And if it really is the same point being made, why is it being made so repetitively?”

Often the answer is that the same points are being made over and over because the people are not listening or responding, so God is trying over and over to get their attention and call them away from His judgement.

But the other point that is easy to miss, for me at least, is that these books don’t represent the entirety of their ministries. With a book as long as Isaiah or Jeremiah, the sheer length of the book makes it clear that it spans significant time. Or in a book like Ezekiel, where sections are often broken apart by time markers that remind you this was months or years later than the last thing you read. For the minor prophets though, much of the time you get either a single time marker at the beginning of the book, or no time marker at all, and the different oracles in the book aren’t clearly delineated as being from different periods or situations. Add to that that most of these books could comfortably be read in a single sitting and it makes it easy to think you are reading a single teaching/preaching session that was recorded.

But for as much as it can feel that way, that’s simply not how it worked. Even when we have a book like Jonah that is clearly telling a single, unified story, Jonah was a recognized court prophet (2 Kings 14:25). We don’t hear about the rest of his ministry as a prophet, only that he was a prophet, which means there was more to his role for God than the story of his being sent to Nineveh.

As far as Hosea is concerned, the book tells us, from the beginning, just how long of a career he had as a prophet. The book itself may not be filled with time or context markers, but it opens by telling us that he was a prophet under the reigns of kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. This was a long career as a prophet, and those decades of ministry are what is distilled down into the fourteen chapters of Hosea. So what may feel unnecessarily repetitious to us, reading these things all back to back, may have been teachings and judgements pronounced months, years, or even decades apart.

This is something that is easy for me to forget, but helpful to remember for thinking well about what we’re reading and why it’s written and structured the way it is.