Hosea 1:4 Jehu and Jezreel
"...I will soon punish the house of Jehu for the massacre at Jezreel" Hosea 1:4
Jehu, the 10th king of divided Israel, has one of the more colorful accounts of the Jewish kings in the Old Testament, if you want to hear more about it than you should attend our worship service this Sunday, July 9th at 10:30AM.
In Summary. Jehu was anointed by God to become the next king of Israel as a punishment for the dynasty of Omri/Ahab. The means by which Jehu accomplishes this task are exquisitely gory (Tarantino eat your heart out) and recorded in 2nd Kings 9-10. At one point Jehu demands that local officials behead all 70 royal princes (descendants of the house of Ahab), collect the heads in baskets, and then send them to Jezreel. When the severed heads arrive, Jehu puts them at the gate of the city and goes on to execute everyone from the house of Ahab, attendants included, “leaving no survivor” (2 Kings 10:1-11)
Jehu is regarded more positively than most/all other Israelite kings. His actions against the house of Ahab are recounted positively by the biblical accounts – the Chronicler says he was “executing judgment on the house of Ahab” (2nd Chronicles 22:8). Jehu is not mentioned again in the Canon except for the verse in the title of this post, Hosea 1:4. Surprisingly, the words of God to Hosea seem to condemn the house of Jehu for what happened at Jezreel. In what way are the words of Hosea 1:4 related to the actions of Jehu or his dynasty, and what do they have to do with Jezreel (a lush valley in northern Israel)?
Well here, briefly, are some options
1: Jehu was bloodthirsty.
This explanation is easily dismissed as an anachronism. The world of ancient kings and dynasties are very bloody. God, in the Old Testament, works through these human means to achieve his ends. God’s prophets do things like call down bears upon jeering youths, and they predicted the bloody demise of Jezebel at the hand of Jehu recorded in 1 Kings 9. Furthermore the prophet Hosea himself goes on to speak of the coming judgment upon Israel in these words “I will attack them and rip them open. Like a lion I will attack them; a wild animal will tear them apart.” Therefore “bloodthirsty” will not suffice as an explanation for 1:4
2: Jehu went too far.
The majority of interpreters read Hosea 1:4 as a condemnation of the intent or extent of Jehu’s purge of Ahab’s household. Those who take this position will either point to the household attendants who are executed in 2 Kings 10:11, or to the unwritten/imagined “malicious heart” or "ambitious heart" of Jehu when executing his mission. It is essentially a variant of the argument above and its validity suffers for some of the same reasons. It is tempting to apply a 21st century ethic of political change to this narrative, and to much of the Old Testament. However, God’s word is absent of any indication that such an imposition is valid. In fact, the anachronistic imposition of a 21st century ethic upon the Old Testament is manifestly a recipe for moral outrage and theodicic inanity.
The most significant critique to this explanation is the dissonance between its claim and the accounts of the canonical historians. The authors of Kings and Chronicles regard Jehu’s actions positively – or neutrally at worst. Their account of Jehu’s actions at Jezreel simply do not align with the “punishment” due the house of Jehu as a result of those actions according to Hosea 1:4.
3: Hosea 1:4 should be translated differently.
This is the position I take. I must admit that it is the minority position in biblical scholarship and Bible translations (anyone familiar with the author of this blog post knows he’s a total sucker for these). I think that Hosea 1:4 says something completely different than the way that it reads in the NIV; I think that the passage should read “…And I will bring the bloodshed of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu.” This explanation’s strength is its “fit” with the characterizations of Jehu’s actions in the rest of scripture. Its weakness is its dependence on the equivalent of a double-backflip in its account of (drumroll please) Hebrew grammar.
With this reading, the name Jezreel, given to Hosea’s first son, is a prediction that the house of Jehu will soon suffer the gory demise that it once subjected the house of Omri/Ahab to. In it’s defense I’ll offer this explanation of Hosea 1:4 by Duane Garrett in the New American Commentary.
God explains the name by saying that he will soon punish the house of Jehu and bring Israel to an end. As the NIV (and most versions) translate it, however, there is something troubling about the statement “because I will soon punish the house of Jehu for the massacre at Jezreel.” The problem is that elsewhere in the Bible the prophetic word commends Jehu for his zeal in finishing off the dynasty of Omri and in particular for the slaughter of the priests of Baal (2 Kgs 10:30). In fact, Jehu had obeyed a word from the LORD (2 Kgs 9:7).52
Why now would the dynasty be punished for the same act? Modern readers, offended by the sheer volume of blood Jehu spilled, perhaps do not find this troubling,53 and some scholars even suggest that Hosea’s pronouncement represents a major step forward in the evolution of Israel’s understanding of God: the religious pogrom once commended by the prophets now stands condemned. But, as Andersen and Freedman remark, such analysis “seems detached from the realities of the ninth-eighth centuries B.C.E. in the Near East.”54 Hosea himself described the wrath of God in the goriest of terms (e.g., 13:7–8), and he certainly does not distance himself—even a little bit—from his predecessors Elijah, Elisha, and the other prophets.55
Another possibility is that Jehu was right to destroy the house of Omri but that the way he went about it was overly zealous and bloodthirsty. One might compare this to Isa 10:5–12, in which God condemns Assyria for the arrogant manner in which it went about fulfilling its God-given task of punishing the nations. But this too fails for two reasons. First, Hosea never accuses Jehu of having too much pride or of being overly zealous—he simply mentions the “bloodshed of Jezreel.” Second, again in 2 Kgs 10:30 God unconditionally approves of what Jehu did at Jezreel. This is something we never hear about the exploits of Assyria.
We must take another look at the phrase “because I will soon punish the house of Jehu for the massacre at Jezreel.” In all probability this misrepresents what the Hebrew means here. The word translated “punish” pāqad has a wide variety of meanings (“attend to,” “appoint,” “visit,” “muster,” etc.), and its specific meaning in any verse is dependent on context. In some cases, to be sure, it can be translated “punish,” as when “I will visit their iniquity upon them” means “I will punish them for their iniquity.”56 We should not conclude from this, however, that pāqad is the semantic equivalent to the English “punish.” In addition, this verse is unusual in that it is the only verse in the Bible with this particular construction, using pāqad with dāmîm (“bloodshed,” “massacre,” NIV) as its object. Nothing in the text requires that we understand this to mean “punish” in the sense that the house of Jehu would receive retribution for what he did to the house of Omri at Jezreel. Rather, it seems to mean “visit upon” in the sense that God would bring upon Jehu’s dynasty the same violent destruction that befell Omri’s dynasty.57 It should be translated, “And I will bring the bloodshed of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu.”
This is not punishment for Jehu’s zeal in the slaughter at Jezreel; rather it is punishment for not learning the lesson of Jezreel. Jehu himself had been the agent of God’s fury and personally had seen how terribly it fell upon an apostate dynasty. But he and his household went on to repeat the apostasy of the Omrides and their predecessors (2 Kgs 10:31; 13:1). God visited the bloodshed of Jezreel on the house of Jehu because, in the final analysis, his dynasty’s rule was little better than that of Jeroboam I or of Ahab and Jezebel. Jehu’s actions at Jezreel were, if anything, the main reason God did not eliminate his dynasty sooner (2 Kgs 10:30).
Duane A. Garrett, Hosea, Joel, vol. 19A, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1997), 56–57. (emphasis mine)
Thanks for Reading
Author: Joel Nielsen