The Adult(ery) Episode

Or I will remove the name of the Baals from her mouth. Well, the names, the names of the Baals.

The names of the Baals.

Yeah. Thunder and Lightning.

Donner and Blitzen. All right.

If the left one don’t get you, then the right one will. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How go things today, Dan?

Things go well for me. You’re back under the weather, I think, a little bit.

A little bit. I’m on the end of it.

I’m guessing that our listeners will forgive a little bit of nasal resonance coming out of your—.

Hopefully, yeah. I think sometimes it can make the baritone a little more pleasing, a little sexier.

All right, all right, there was that. Sexy, everybody.

Well, when I was a missionary, there was a time I called into the mission office— I was in the mission home, I was in the offices, I was the financiero, I was the financial secretary for several months. And I had a great relationship, still do, with my mission president’s wife, Julie. She was wonderful. We all called her La Hermana. But one day I called in, I had a cold, and I was like, “Is the president there? " And she was like, “Who is this? " I was like, “Elder McClellan. " She’s like, “Your voice sounds really sexy, Elder McClellan. " And that made me deeply uncomfortable.

Wow, there you go. I like it.

But shout out to Julie. She’s awesome.

What did you call her? La esposa? What did you call her?

La hermana.

Yeah. The woman. The sister.

Oh, the sister. That’s what it is.

Yeah. Ah, um, and so, uh, yeah, anyway, moving beyond my extreme discomfort with that.

Yeah, yeah, let’s, uh, let’s carve into a show. I think we can do it. Uh, today we’re gonna be, uh, doing a couple of fun segments. And we’re keeping it sexy. Uh, I think, uh, I think we’re gonna keep the theme sex-themed throughout the entire show.

We’re bringing sexy way back, way back, way back to 2,800 years almost.

Yeah, exactly. We’re going, we’re going as far back as you, as we can comfortably go. Uh, the first thing we’re gonna do, we’re gonna, we’re gonna do an It’s the Law. We haven’t done one of these for a little while.

And that’s going to be one of the top 10 of all of the commandments.

Yeah, of all the Ten Commandments, this is one of them.

It is one of them. And it is the one about adultery. So that’ll be fun. And then there’s an unassuming book just sort of buried in the middle of the Hebrew Bible called Hosea.

Hosea. We don’t talk about it a lot. A lot of people don’t know what’s going on with Hosea, unless of course they’re scholars of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, in which case they know Hosea is a big deal.

And we’re going to talk about why Hosea is a big deal.

Yeah, yeah. Beyond just how often it references sex work.

But if Hosea was a person, it would come up to you at a party and say, “I’m kind of a big deal. " So, all right, that joke has levels.

So anyway, yeah, that’ll be our chapter and verse in the second half of the show. But first off, it’s the law.

Breaking the law, breaking the law. Or as the great poet said, scraping the jaw, scraping the jaw.

Oh, okay.

That was— I can’t do that laugh anymore. My voice does not. Do the crack with the laugh.

You can’t do the— you can’t beavis?

No, not as much as I used to be able to. When I was younger, I could do that. Yeah, I can’t.

All right. So here’s the thing we’re talking about. I don’t even know which of the Ten Commandments it is.

I guess this is verse— it’s Exodus 20 , verse 14. Right. And there’s a Just depends on how you count. Yeah, this is a little inside baseball, but I have taught primary multiple times in my—.

That’s the child classes in Mormondom. Yeah.

Yes. And my students come out of there knowing more than their parents do about the Bible.

No one’s surprised to hear that.

No, no, no, no, no. And one of the things, one year I was like, guess what? All y’all, you’re memorizing the Ten Commandments. And those kids came out of there knowing the Ten Commandments. And I used a little, I don’t even remember what you call it, an initialism where you have a little narrative that you, and for the Mormons, I would say, why I never see President Monson at Salt Lake. And so you got worship, you got idols, you got the name, You got the Sabbath, and then P is for parents, and then Monson is murder, at is adultery, Salt Lake is steal, lie, and then Salt Lake City, C is covet. If you can remember that, you can remember all 10 Commandments. So why I never see President Monson at, so that’s the 7th Commandment. Yeah.

According to a Protestant numbering of the 10 Commandments.

That’s right. As we have discussed, there are many different ways that you can enumerate the commandments, and 10 is not really a very good number for them.

No, no, you could count more than that. Although we’ve already talked about how Exodus 34 is the only place where it actually refers to the set of commandments as 10.

And it’s not these ones.

And it’s not these ones. No, it’s the, you shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk and stuff like that.

Yeah, something about yeast and bread and who knows, the festival of stuff like that.

Yeast.

I don’t know. It’s just crazy.

There is a reference in, I think, Deuteronomy 3 or 4 where it talks about these 10 things, and then Deuteronomy 5 recounts the Ten Commandments almost exactly as we find in Exodus 20 . Right. But yeah, you could divide it into a few different numbers. So We got number 7. It’s 2 short words in Hebrew, lo tinaf. I mean, nuff said, right? Or nuff said. Zing! Yeah, but, and that literally means you shall not commit adultery.

Okay. And that sounds straightforward. It sounds easy. It sounds like, oh, We now know what that means. And here’s the thing, I don’t think we do. And the reason that I don’t think we do, and I’ll let you elucidate this quite a lot, but what I notice, and maybe other astute listeners may have caught this as they did their own Bible study, or as they listened to our show and heard stories about all of these characters and whatever, The Bible’s totally fine with a lot of things that we consider adultery now.

Yes, yes. The Bible doesn’t seem to care much when guys are out there getting their thang wet. And well, as long as— As long as it’s not with someone who belongs to another man.

Right.

And that’s—.

Yeah, that seems to be the crux of it, right? It’s a property rights issue. As much as anything.

It is a property rights issue. A lot of people want to make this about— there’s no parity here. It is very much a case of women are the property of men. And a man who is betrothed to a woman or married to a woman, that contractual relationship is considered sacrosanct in that society because that’s the relationship that facilitates procreation. And so that’s what carries the society on, strengthens it, perpetuates it, protects it, all that kind of stuff. And so, uh, the adultery is really a violation of those property rights, which is why a woman is prohibited from having any and all premarital or extramarital sex, period. A man is not.

Right.

As long as the woman is not betrothed or married to someone else. So a man is legally not prohibited from going out and having sex with a sex worker or with a woman who is not betrothed or married to someone else, whether he’s married or not. And that’s what a lot of people—.

Though there are some sort of legalistic things that can happen. The Bible does delineate Again, whoever this woman is, if she is not married, she is likely the property now of her father.

Father, right.

And her sexual inexperience is a commodity that he owns.

Absolutely.

So if someone were to sleep with— if a man, married or otherwise, is to sleep with a woman he is violating her father’s rights in that respect, right?

Yes. Now this is for an Israelite girl. So this is a freeborn Israelite or a Judahite. Because if she’s a foreigner or if she is an enslaved girl or something like that, it doesn’t really matter. But it matters if she is eligible for proper Israelite marriage because her father then stands to benefit financially from that transaction. And so yes, it’s a violation of his property rights. It’s not as serious a violation. So we see in Exodus 22:16 , we see in Deuteronomy 22:28 and 29, that Exodus 22:16 uses a word that a lot of scholars translate seduce. So it’s not clear that it is non-consensual. There is some coercion going on, maybe. It might be sexual assault, it might not be. Deuteronomy 22:28 and 29 is clearly sexual assault. No matter what an apologist tells you, it is about sexual assault.

They will make up all kinds of crap about the verb tafas and say it just means to handle, it just means he’s handling her, you know, it’s consensual. And that’s garbage. Every time the object of the verb is a person, it means force. So anyway, in those two cases, the perpetrator owes the father an elevated bride price, and then he is required to marry the girl because she’s damaged goods now she’s no longer eligible for proper Israelite marriage. And so the—the penalty is like, well, you—you broke it, you bought it. Right.

And then since we’re using fairly rough terminology for all of this.

Can we make it clear that this is not our feeling?

No, no, no, no, no, no.

This is. But this literally is exactly how the Bible treats scenarios.

Yes, because the—and, and when you look in Deuteronomy 22:28 and 29, and the verses that lead up to it, 22 through—22 is one, 23 through 27 is another segment. When you look at these things, the problem is that this has violated someone’s rights, which is why if the woman is betrothed or married, the penalty for the assaulter is death. If she’s not betrothed or married, it’s that elevated bride price, and it’s—you’ve got to marry her, you’re never allowed to divorce her. Her father can reject the marriage, however, and just take the money, right? But what that indicates is that the severity of the punishment depends upon who is asserting rights over the woman’s procreative capacities and sexual availability. Is it a husband, in which case death—is it cake or death? You get death or you get the wedding cake from marrying this girl. It’s a case of cake or death.

One wonders if Eddie Izzard had this in mind.

I would not be surprised. Eddie Izzard is a genius on several levels, so it would not surprise me in the least. However, yeah, you’re absolutely right. This is—this is a question of property rights, and adultery comes down to property rights. It is not a moral—it is not a fundamentally moral question. It’s a question of property rights, right? Which is why, you know, if a guy’s married, he can go out and have sex with some—with a sex worker. That’s—she’s not eligible for proper Israelite marriage. Nobody owns her.

So we’ve talked about this multiple times where heroes of the Bible—people who are good, considered good, upstanding men of the Bible have gone out and partaken of sex work with no problem, including every—well, not with no problem. So every now and then it’s his daughter-in-law tricking him. But the problem isn’t that he partook of a sex worker’s wares.

Right.

It’s, you know, that’s never an issue.

Yeah. So there’s quite an asymmetry here going on regarding responsibilities related to sex.

And the propriety of sex. Because people today like to think of sex as this holy—like not full of holes, but there are holes involved, but in this sanctified thing. Where this is, you know, this is the power that grants life and stuff like that. No, not in the Hebrew Bible. Yeah, the Bible. Sex was just an everyday part of life.

And, and we’re talking about like the big dogs of the Hebrew Bible. Abraham has the whole thing with Hagar. Yeah. So, you know, he’s got a wife. She’s not producing.

And so, you know, he sleeps with her—her maidservant, right? Is that—that’s basically it?

Enslaved girl, yeah.

Jacob has a whole bunch of—he’s got Leah and Rachel and sleeps with their maidservants as well.

Yep. You got Judah, who messed up with the daughter-in-law because he wouldn’t give his other son to her because he thought she was the black widow. And she tricked him into impregnating her, and he was like, “Una buena. You got me.” “Ah, you. That was a good trick.” “Well played.” Yeah, so, and in none of these cases is anyone treating sex as if it is some sacrosanct kind of experience that, you know, that God has placed these boundaries around outside of questions of property rights.

Right.

So adultery is a very different thing in the Hebrew Bible. It is not what we talk about when we talk about adultery today.

Right.

When Jesus says, “Any man who looks on a woman to lust after her has committed adultery already with her in his heart,” that is a significant renegotiation of what’s going on here.

Well, we should dive into that because it does seem like the New Testament does have a modified version of, or a modified view, yes, of what adultery is and what it means.

Yes. And that is primarily the product of Greco-Roman society.

Because we have the introduction of Greek philosophy, one, and then Greco-Roman family conventions, household conventions and norms and things like that, where it was still—men had a lot more freedom than women still, but those who were a little more philosophically oriented asserted a bit more parity between the sexes related to sexual activity because sexual desire began to be seen as one of the baser urges of the corrupt flesh. And particularly through a Platonic lens where you have the world of the divine and the world of the flesh, and you were really trying to transcend the world of the flesh to commune with and hopefully one day return to the world of the divine. This is where the idea of the logos, the word, Jesus as the word, this is what it’s based on.

This is what Paul is talking about an awful lot. But as a result of this, sex was seen as something dirty.

Right. And, you know, we’ve talked about this, you know, they talk about it as carnal, as being of—yeah, like you say, it becomes this thing of two realms where one group of things is sort of of the body and of the earth. And that’s the lesser things. And then there are the things of the spirit and of the divine. And that’s the things to which one is supposed to aspire. Yeah. Which, yeah, I mean, I disagree, but that’s the Greeks for you. What are you going to do?

Yeah, it’s all Greek to them. Now, and something that you have in Greco-Roman period Judaism is this whole spectrum of approaches to the propriety of sex. And we’ve talked about this before, where there were some hardliners who talked about sex as something that was only ever appropriate for procreation. And so it was totally inappropriate when it was not explicitly for the sake of procreation. So, you know, past menopause, sorry, man, y’all are retired. You know, your wife is menstruating. You know, that’s already out. She’s pregnant right now. Sorry, you’re going to have to take matters into your own hands. Or not. But there were those who said, and even when you are engaged in intercourse for the sake of procreation, you’re not allowed to enjoy it because to enjoy it is to mess around in the filth of fleshly desire.

And so you’re supposed to be above that. You’re supposed to be just doing your husbandly duty. With a stoic face. Right. Maybe a little bead of sweat drips off your nose or whatever, but otherwise you are stone-faced.

It is your joyless exertion that is required of you.

And then you had others who were a little more lenient, who were like, “Eh.” If they’re past the period of being able to have kids, it’s no big deal. But otherwise, you know, you’re supposed to stay away from doing it when it’s not explicitly for procreation. So you had this whole spectrum of approaches to the propriety of sex, but for the most part, it was considered something that we are better leaving behind. And this is the approach of Paul. This is the approach of the author of the Gospel of Matthew , who has Jesus say, you know, there are those who are born eunuchs, there are those who are made eunuchs by men, and there are those who make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. And this is a hard saying. And yeah, it is.

I agree. That is a hard—Yeah, that’s rough.

And he says that anyone who can accept it, accept it. Basically saying the real ones are going to be celibate and perhaps even—And this led to self-castration among a lot of early Christians. And a lot of people don’t know that one of the first rules they laid down—they did three things at the Council of Nicaea, 325 CE.

Yeah, sorry.

So the sexual ethic was just—it was motivated by Greek philosophy and Greco-Roman societal conventions. So when we look at how Paul and Jesus and other folks are talking about sex in the New Testament, it’s very different from the Hebrew Bible.

And it’s influenced by Greek philosophy. And that’s-

It’s so important. You know, you, you love it. You talk a lot about, uh, univocality is your word, about how people—anyone who assumes that the entirety of the Bible from, uh, from Genesis to Revelation is, uh, is going to be in, uh, in harmony with each other, uh, you’re, you’re just gonna be—you’re, you’re just missing the depth and the breadth of this book, this—or rather, this huge series of books. It’s not a book, it is many books over centuries. And yeah, of course there are going to be philosophical and legal and moral innovations over that much time.

Absolutely. And I think it does so much violence to the text to force it into these strictures and say, no, not allowed to say that, it’s not allowed to do that, it has to say this, right? It’s so—the book is so much more fascinating and so much weirder when you allow it to operate on its own terms. And so it’s so much cooler. I think—I mean, let it do its thing.

I think you and I really embrace—I think most of our listeners really embrace the weirdness that you’re discussing. But I do think that that might be why it’s so uncomfortable for a lot of people, because they want this book to be holy and pure. Like, they want to be able to look to it and have it just be the exalted, perfect word of God so that they don’t have to think about it.

So that it’s not challenging, so that it’s just easy and nice.

And it just sits there as the transcendent and unassailable authority for your identity politics. They want it to change everybody else. You don’t want it to change you. You just want to leverage it as the “change everybody” bludgeon to go make everybody else fall in line with your thinking, whatever that thinking happens to be.

Yeah, and then you go and you compare the story of David and, you know, Bathsheba and all of his wives and all of his concubines and whatever with the Matthew quote of Jesus about, yeah, if you look at a woman lustfully, you’ve already committed adultery. Those are two very different perspectives.

Yeah, yeah. And that’s also Matthew saying you have to obey the Law of Moses, only I’m ratcheting it up. I’m ratcheting up some of the laws, right?

Yeah, you have to obey the Law of Moses, but we’re redefining all of it. We’re redefining it.

So your righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees. So yeah, it is. And when you look at the stories about King David, you know, what does Nathan compare David’s adultery to? He compares it to stealing some farmer’s lamb.

Right.

And eating it. And it’s like, well, it’s a person that you have effectively raped.

It’s a human being.

And also you had the farmer killed in that particular metaphor. Yeah.

And, and, and what is it about again? His property.

Property rights.

Yeah. It wasn’t because there was something, you know, morally wrong about this particular phallus in this particular area. It wasn’t that this—and later, the more Holiness Code laws, that’s where you have this idea that these actions generate this metaphysical contamination that gets out on the land and pollutes the land, and the land can only handle so much before it’s going to vomit you out. You do get this idea that there is this metaphysical aspect to these sins. But for the folks who wrote Samuel, no, it’s just that she belonged to somebody else. He violated somebody else’s property rights. And as king, that’s a no-no. Nobody cares about Bathsheba in that text.

Right. Yeah.

It’s problematic as all get out.

Well, not maybe not for them. Maybe not for David, but it’s problematic for us.

Yes, it should be problematic for all y’all out there. And this brings up— this is only tangentially related to our topic, but it is something that has me fuming. Somebody, somebody on Twitter or X or whatever the hell people want to call it these days. Recently, like X, my algorithm on X is so effed right now, if I can say that.

I thought everybody’s was. That’s why I left.

All I get is these Christian nationalists and freaking Elon, and it just irritates me to no end. However, somebody posted something, said in response to something about divine command ethics. They said the universe goes unchanged if someone rapes. Without God, morals have no meaning. And I responded to this, God of the Bible doesn’t really seem to care about rape. It’s not even punished unless it’s a free Israelite girl, then it’s only a property crime against her husband, in which case it’s the death penalty, or her father, in which case he pays an elevated bride price. Foreign and enslaved girls could be violated at will. Somebody who’s evidently been following me on Twitter for some time took issue with my statement and just wanted to complain about it. And what they retreated to was 1 Corinthians 7:1-5 .

I don’t know if you have this passage memorized, but I don’t. This is something that a lot of people have appealed to. Where it says the husband’s body is not his own, the wife’s body is not her own. They should render unto each other due benevolence, which is basically a way to say you owe your spouse their conjugal rights. And so this person commented, people have no right to arbitrarily refuse intimacy in marriage. Parentheses, 1 Corinthians 7:1-5 , close parentheses. And I’ve seen this verse come up a lot recently. This is apologetics for marital rape, right? This is insisting that there’s no such thing as marital rape because a wife’s body is not her own in marriage and that her husband has a right to her body. And that is so abominable.

Yeah, it is on its face obviously wrong.

Yeah, it’s disgusting, but it is something that an awful lot of Christians on social media seem to think is perfectly fine.

And if you are in a worldview where, if you’re participating in a society or a worldview where that is seen as okay, you need to sit a few plays out. You need to come to grips with the fact that that is rape apologetics. Yeah, there is no circumstance in which a woman’s right to her bodily autonomy is forfeited to a man ever. And it does not matter if you are Paul, who prided himself in being celibate anyway. He wasn’t even on the field for any of this, so I don’t care what he has to say. But yeah, I loathe when people bring up 1 Corinthians 7:1-5 .

Well, it’s just, yeah, I mean, and I have seen both women and men online quoting that idea and saying, you know, the, the, and it’s all— what’s funny is that the way you said it, I, I don’t know that I knew the scripture that was— that they were referencing when they did it, but the way you said it made it sound like the man— the woman also has the right to just demand sex.

Well, that’s how— man, yeah, that’s how, that’s how men make it sound okay. It’s like, it’s reciprocal, it’s reciprocal, right? Right, it’s reciprocal. She can demand it too. Yeah. Now, I will say there are not a ton of women out there who are like, I’m not getting it enough, sweetie. But that’s not true. There are women out there like that.

I was going to say, I know a lot of old, over 40 women. And yeah, there are plenty of them who would like more sex. But not one of them has ever considered demanding it as their right from their partner.

Or maybe not even demanding it, just taking it.

Right.

Like they don’t even act like that is something that they’re thinking about. NRSVUE says this, “But because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife what is due her, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.”

And I think a lot of those apologists would attack us and say, who are we to say that the Bible’s morality is wrong or that the Bible’s definition of what’s okay isn’t correct. And yet they would be the first ones to say, “No, you can’t have 3 wives and 4 concubines.” No, you can’t do that.

And however many sex slaves you want. Right, right. Yeah, we’ve rejected, we’ve come to the consensus that we reject so much of the Bible’s, not just sexual ethic, but just ethic in general, that the notion that it bears any authority in and of itself that is absolute is absolutely laughable. It’s all negotiable. And people can get as upset about that as they want. That does not change the fact.

And it must be negotiated. Yes. You have to. And so, like, taking the position that, well, one part of the Bible says that I get to maritally rape my wife, yeah, as you say, you’re doing apologetics for rape now. Yeah, maybe back off of that one. That’s probably—that’s a loser right there.

And that’s an auto-block response for me. So yeah, sorry, that was a bit of a tangent that took—

No, no, it was important. And I’m glad that we went there. Well, all right, there you go. That’s the law. Please feel free to ignore it or to redefine it as pleases your morality. Let’s move on to our chapter and verse. In this week’s chapter and verse, we’re going to Hosea. Hosea is a prophet, and this is his book. It is. It’s an interesting one. As I was reading it, and it’s not one of, you know, usually when you and I do a whole book, yeah, it’s usually a one chapter. It’s a one chapter, maybe two, three chapters. This one has 14 chapters. So yes, it’s a little—

And what you’re getting, the 30,000-foot view, right? We’re in comfort plus, but we’re getting the 30,000-foot view.

And what drives me bonkers about it and what was so hard for me was as I was reading it is that it keeps saying the same damn thing over and over and over and over. But it uses a lot of metaphor. It uses a lot of symbolism, and it gets, for my money, quite confusing in the process.

So I don’t know.

So dive in.

Well, let’s set the stage first.

That’s what I was going to say.

We’re in the 8th century, and this may mean absolutely nothing to many of you. Maybe you have no framework for thinking about this. But if we have pre-exilic Israel and post-exilic Israel, and the exile is in the middle, the exile is 6th century.

Pre-exilic is everything prior to that. 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th brings you traditionally to Saul and David and Solomon. Okay. We’re not going to worry about everything after the exile. This is the 8th century. The Northern Kingdom of Israel still exists. The Southern Kingdom of Judah is there. And both of them are thriving. You have a king in the Northern Kingdom, Jeroboam II, who reigns for about 40 years. You have a king in the Southern Kingdom of Judah named Uzziah, who reigns for about 40 years. And as a result of the unusually long reigns of these two kings, there is a lot of prosperity. There is trade going on, there is building going on, there is population growth going on. There is concentration of wealth, and this is what actually catalyzes a lot of the prophetic literature that comes from the 8th century. Micah, Amos, Isaiah, Hosea—these are 8th century prophets, and we’ve talked about it before, one of their main problems is with all the wealth and the prosperity and the suffering of the poor and the needy and the afflicted and the foreigner.

And Hosea is no exception. Hosea 6:6 is the famous, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice,” that Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew quotes twice, tells his challengers, “Go and learn what that means.”

So Hosea is one of a bunch of prophets who pop up in the 8th century right when people are getting really wealthy to chew them out for social injustices that are going on. So Hosea is from the Northern Kingdom, and the Northern Kingdom is going to be destroyed in 722 BCE. The Assyrians come in and they take away the 10 tribes of Israel, and they are assimilated into Assyria and later Babylon, and they disappear. And they are functionally gone.

And so there are fragments of those populations that became part of the Southern Kingdom of Judah. But the lost 10 tribes of Israel is a reference to what happens in 722 BCE. Right. Hosea is writing between around 750 BCE and around 720 BCE. So he’s talking about this.

Now, scholars say this is a thing that’s happening in real time for Hosea, for the—.

Yes, for the prophet Hosea. Now, scholars are in pretty widespread agreement that a good chunk of Hosea does go back to somebody and a poetic prophet who was writing in the 8th century BCE. So there’s disagreement about exactly how much of it is from the middle of the 8th century and how much of it is, you know, the end of the 8th century or into the 7th century, or maybe post-exilic in origin. You know, some people think there are some Deuteronomistic revisions going on here and there. Some people think that the author of Hosea and the particular ideological school that produced Hosea might be responsible for the later production of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic histories because of the close relationships between the two. So we don’t have a real clear idea about what is genuine and what is not, but most scholars think that probably the majority of it is genuine.

Okay. So that’s a good thing to note.

As so much of this book ends up not being authentic to what it claims to be.

Yeah. So verse 1 starts off, the word of the Lord that came to Hosea son of Beeri in the days of King Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah, and in the days of King Jeroboam son of Joash of Israel. So we got 4 kings. His tenure overlaps with the reigns of 4 different kings. Starting—.

You had just said that we had kings with long reigns, but like I guess, so he’s presiding prophet over all of these, the reigns of all these kings.

Yeah, so Uzziah is reigning from around 787-775 to around 740-735, something like that. And so Hosea is like the last 15-ish years of Uzziah’s reign. Jotham is 15 years, Ahaz is 20 years, and then Hezekiah is batting clean up there. And so Hosea’s mainly towards the beginning of Hezekiah. And then in the days of King Jeroboam, son of Joash, he just mentions Jeroboam, which is odd because he reigns from 790-ish to 750-ish. So he’s ignoring the Northern Kingdom for the rest of the existence of the Northern Kingdom down to 722 when it gets destroyed.

And just so that I’m clear, the Northern Kingdom is Israel and the Southern Kingdom is Judah. Is that correct?

That is correct, yes. Now, the Northern Kingdom, the capital is Samaria. So that’s why, I don’t know if you recall when you read through Hosea, there was a lot of mention of Samaria.

Right.

But Hosea also refers to the Northern Kingdom as Ephraim.

Yeah, there are so many— Yes, Ephraim confused the crap out of me. Had to look that one up.

And yes, I didn’t know that Samaria was a capital city rather than another kingdom. I was confused about that.

It’s spoken of as a region, But yeah, and that’s why when you get down to the New Testament, they’re like, don’t go through Samaria. Don’t go through there. Stay away from there. Stay away from Samaria. And then we get to verse 2. I remember several years ago I sat down, I was like, I’m going to translate the book of Hosea . And I stopped at verse 2.

You didn’t make it very far.

No, but I had a lot of other things getting in the way. Here’s what the NRSV-UE says. When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take for yourself a wife of prostitution. " Yeah. “And have children of prostitution, for the land commits great prostitution by forsaking the Lord. " So, and I’m just going to pull up the Hebrew real quick of Hosea 1:2 . Instead of the words of Hosea, “Lech kach lecha,” “take for yourself,” “eshet zenunim,” so “a wife of,” and then it’s the plural, “prostitutions,” “sex workings. " It’s probably an abstract plural, meaning it’s referring to the abstraction.

The idea of prostitution.

So it’s unclear if the idea is marry a woman who’s a sex worker or marry a woman who is characterized by promiscuity or marry a woman who was born of sex work. Like, there are a variety of different ways to interpret this, and it’s not exactly clear what is going on.

Well, and also none of the interpretations, none of the potential interpretations make it any better. It’s still wildly confusing why the Lord is saying this to Hosea. Like, why do you want Hosea— Basically, it turns out that the Lord is just saying, “Hey, take this kind of wife because it’ll be useful for my metaphor.” Yeah, yeah.

You’ll love this. The payoff is great. But there’s also an interesting thing. It says, “Take for yourself a woman of prostitution and children of prostitution.” So it’s not clear that it’s saying have children with this woman, but adopt the children that have been born to this woman as an outcome of her sex work. Um, like, it’s unclear what’s going on here. Not the kind of thing that you would expect from a prophet in our day and age, unless maybe for some Christian nationalist, this is exactly the kind of thing you would expect.

Pete Hegseth or something coming in strong with something weird. I would say here, one of the things that’s really interesting for me, I’m glad that you mentioned trying to translate this because one of the ways that I sometimes explore a biblical text for this show is that I listen to a recording of someone who has done a recording of the Bible, but, you know, nobody’s done that for the NRSVUE. So they’re usually reading out of the King James Version.

So I’m listening to the King James Version while I’m following along with the NRSVUE, just to sort of, you know, that way I can see the differences and whatever. And I’ll tell you what, Hosea, frequently it’s just like that— those translation differences are off the rails.

It is so hard to follow. It is like I have to pause and go, wait, what did he just say? What does this say? So yeah, the King James Version of verse 2 says, in the beginning of the word of the Lord by Hosea, or the beginning of the word of the Lord by Hosea, and the Lord said to Hosea, go take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms, for the land hath committed great whoredom. Departing from the Lord.

Yeah. And it’s such an odd thing to do because it seems like the— I’m imagining Hosea being like, uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay. Yeah. Couldn’t I just write down that I did this?

Right?

Since it seems like the impact is in other people finding out about it. And so I could just write down that I did this. God’s like, no, you have to go do it.

You have to actually do it.

I don’t think you’re understanding me. It doesn’t seem meaningful until I tell other people about it. And I could just tell them about it. Like, you really want me to do this and then just write down that I did it and then publish that.

You and I need to write a biblical sitcom. I don’t know why we— that’s not on our plate yet. Anyway, we’re going to crowdfund that eventually.

Yeah. So he went and he took Gomer, daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son. So this makes it sound like— no, the text is saying have children of sex work, promiscuity, prostitution, whoredoms, whatever. And whether this means because that was her profession, or maybe it means this is going to characterize them, maybe they’re going to grow up to engage— the son is going to engage in sex work. I don’t know.

But I mean, it seems reasonable to just say that because their mother was a sex worker, they are the children of sex workers, and there’s a stigma that just sort of follows them because of that or something.

Maybe. You would think that since he’s the one who is the father, that that would— doesn’t his prophethood kind of cover a multitude of sex work? But I don’t know. “And the Lord said to him, name him Jezreel.” And that’s the valley in the northern kingdom of Israel that was very prominent. That’s where they got a lot of their wealth from.

Oh, okay.

“For a little while I will—” That’s like one of the, um, agriculturally, that’s one of the richest areas in all of Israel is the Jezreel Valley. Okay. Uh, “For a little while I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel. On that day I will break the bow of Israel in the Valley of Jezreel.” And we have talked about Jehu getting slain in— by— in— yeah, in the Northern Kingdom.

I will not save them by bow or by sword or by war or by horses or by horsemen. When she had weaned Lo-Ruhamah, she conceived and bore a son. Then the Lord said, “Name him Lo-Ammi.” Which means, “Not my people.” “For you are not my people and I am not your God.” So rough names for these kids to grow up with. Right.

Yeah, they’re going to get— Not only rough names, but that’s some rough stuff that God is pronouncing. Yeah. You said that Hosea, wait. Hosea is an Israelite or a Judahite?

Probably from the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

Probably. Okay. So God is saying to a guy from Israel, screw Israel. Israel sucks. I’m not going to save Israel. I’m going to save Judah, but Israel’s going down. Yeah.

That’s rough. Yeah. It’s not great. And yeah, to be like, name your kid— name your kid, “Your nation is going to be destroyed.” Yeah.

Name your kid, “Israel sucks.” And just have them walk around with that and let people ask questions.

And it goes on like that. Chapter 2, I think, is overwhelmingly poetry. Chapter 1 is some narrative, but Chapter 2 is when we get into the poetry and that’s where things get really interesting. But I think— where is it? I think it’s verse 16. Yeah, 16. We have the poetry, and then we get into more names. The poetry is all about Baal. This is one of the main things. The point of this is Israel is God’s wife. Israel is worshiping other gods, and that is metaphorized as adultery. So this is what is going on with Hosea and Gomer, that, you know, wife of prostitution or sex workings, and that’s what’s going on between God and Israel. And Baal is kind of the main antagonist in all of this poetry. And then verse 16 says, “On that day,” says the Lord, “you will call me,” and then NRSV says, “My husband.” Ishi is how it reads in Hebrew.

“And no longer will you call me Baali,” which means “my Baal.” Now, this is a play on words, because the Hebrew word Baal can mean husband. It can mean lord, master, husband. Don’t read into any of that, or read into it. Yes, the husband was the lord or master, But Baali was probably a title that could be used to refer to Adonai, the God of Israel, because it would mean “my master.” And so when we look in Samuel and Kings and things like that, one of Saul’s sons is named Esh-baal, which would mean “man of Baal” or “man of the Lord” or “master.” It could be a title for the God of Israel. It all gets very confusing.

Can I just say, name your gods a name rather than a title because otherwise it just becomes a weird thing.

Yeah. So this play on words is saying, don’t call me that anymore because that reminds me of Sancho over here. And says instead, call me my husband. And then verse 17, for I will remove the name of the Baals from her mouth. And they shall—.

I, you know, let me tell you something. I read that and, uh, I was hoping we would pass over it so that I didn’t have to giggle at it. I mean, removing Baals from your mouth is, uh, yes, the names of the Baals.

The names of the Baals. Yeah, Thunder and Lightning.

Um, Donner and Blitzen.

All right, if the left one don’t get you, then the right one will.

Um, Oh my gosh, we have descended, my friends.

16 Tons. Oh, and they shall be mentioned by name no more. So we’re still dealing with that.

I am confused about the plurality of the names of the Baals.

Yes, this is something that’s interesting that you find it in Judges, you find it in Hosea, you find it in a couple of places. Which is where you have the Baals and the Asherahs. And there are a couple different ways this could be interpreted. One way is to understand each individual Baal or Asherah to mean the local manifestation, kind of like you have the Virgin of Guadalupe and you have the Virgin of this other place over here and you have the Virgin of this other place over here. And that’s supposed to reflect the fact that there was a manifestation of the Virgin in a specific way to respond to a specific need. And you have that in the ancient West Asian kind of ritual landscape.

Another explanation is that the word Baal had become lexicalized as a kind of generic reference to a foreign deity. Right. So the Baals just means all those foreign deities.

The lords, the masters, the gods of all of the lands.

And the Asherahs would mean the female deities of all these lands. And they’re both being associated with fertility deities and rituals and things like that, because that’s one of the ways that you can make them sound as gross as possible.

They’re the naughty dirty gods.

Yes, because if you need something to be dirty, then it’s about sex. And that’s why Mary Magdalene became a sex worker, is because she was inaccurately conflated with a sinful woman in another chapter in Luke. And then Pope Gregory the Great was like, well, she’s hugely sinful. What does that mean? Well, that means she was a sex worker, obviously. So, so then Mary Magdalene became a sex worker. But so, so yeah, there’s a lot of fertility stuff being attributed to the Baals and the Asherahs, which probably wasn’t accurate. But, but we basically get two different kinds of promises here. God is using this metaphor to say, I’m going to punish my wife. My wife. And there are all these accusations about how the wife has been unfaithful and all this.

But, and again, the wife is Israel in this metaphor. Yes.

Yes. In another part of the story, the son is Israel in the metaphor. So it gets complicated.

It keeps throwing itself around. It is hard to follow. I got to say, like, if you’re reading it, just so like so much of the Bible, as you read it, you can either do the glaze over and just get through it sort of reading. Yeah. And just hope you get something out of it that’s meaningful to you, or you can like really buckle down and try to understand it. And that is a chore. Yeah. Good luck.

Godspeed. But there’s— and mainly when you look through all the poetry and all the metaphors, Hosea is basically representing God as saying, look, you hurt me, you cut me deep, and I kind of want to end things, but I love you too much. So I’m going to ultimately restore our relationship. And there are folks who divide Hosea into three segments: chapters 1 through 3, 4 through 11, and then 12 through 14. And the second and third segments, they kind of focus on a bunch of accusations and then end with a promise of restoration. And then chapter 14 ends with the call to repentance and a promise of restoration.

So a promise of restoration, but not before I’m gonna really mess you up. Yeah, yeah. Like, there’s this, there’s this whole like, yes, you, you cheated on me, you’re awful, you went and got your, your barley and your wine from another dude, and, uh, and I’m pissed off about it, and I’m gonna wreck you. You beat some other dude’s wheat, um, in his threshing floor, and then, uh And then maybe I’ll let you back in. Yeah. It doesn’t sound— I’m just going to say it. It doesn’t sound like a healthy marriage.

No, no. It’s an abusive marriage where God has all the control and is a jealous, spiteful master or Lord or husband. Yeah. And it gets worse and you go to Jeremiah or the Book of Revelation where then you’ve got a bunch of shaming and sexual abuse and stuff like that that is going on as a result of the infidelity of the metaphorical wife. Yeah. So it can get worse, but yeah, that’s the main thrust of the metaphor in Hosea that Israel has been an unfaithful wife. God is torn, but ultimately God’s love for Israel is going to win out in the end. And so even though there’s going to be the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, even though there’s going to be the Babylonian exile, ultimately there will be restoration.

And this brings up an issue that people have been wrestling with since the Babylonian exile is, when is the restoration actually happening? When, you know, people have been reading Hosea ever since, and Christians who read Hosea today are still looking forward to this restoration, and they’re appropriating it for themselves. You know, the followers of Jesus are now Israel. There’s that supersessionism. But, um, and, and when you look through all the prophecies about restoration, and even later texts that are like, we almost got there but not quite, but it’s coming, it’s right around the corner. You know, Daniel thinks it’s gonna happen in the mid-160s BC, any minute now.

Oh, it’s going to happen on September 23rd. Oh, it’s going to happen—no, it was September 25th. No, actually, it’s going to be in October. Um, yeah, the, um, the restoration never seems to happen the way it is, uh, it is prophesied. So this is something that, that people are, are continuously looking forward to. And this is why, I think we’ve talked about this before, maybe we haven’t focused on it, but the Christian Old Testament ends with Malachi, because it’s, “The great and the terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to the children and the hearts of the children to the parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse. And I will send you the prophet Elijah.” And this is a convenient segue into the Gospel of Matthew introducing Jesus as the fulfillment of all this stuff. But if you go into a Jewish Bible, it ends at the end of 2 Chronicles 36 .

Thus says King Cyrus of Persia, “The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Let any of those among you who are of his people, may the Lord their God be with them. Go up.” So this is, this is the realization of restoration, not the final one, but it is the Jewish arrangement of Hebrew Bible text ends with this, I think intentionally, in order to close the book on a partial fulfillment and an expectation of return and restoration in the future, which is ultimately what Hosea is looking forward to. And unfortunately, Gomer and Lo-Ruhamah and Lo-Ammi and Jezreel never got to see it.

Yeah. Hopefully they were not teased too maliciously. I mean, I think that the—I like the idea of restoration being the takeaway. Even if it never actually happens, it’s just a nicer takeaway. The reason that you and I—I’m just going to spill this really quickly and then we’ll close it up. But the reason that you and I are actually doing a Hosea episode is because we had a patron write into us who had said that he or she had gone to some sort of evangelical meeting that he or she had been invited to in college. And they went to the church and basically got harangued when they got there by this reading of Hosea that compared everyone in the room to whores.

So I feel like there’s one—there are different potential takeaways here, and it does make sense that someone’s takeaway from Hosea would be about prostitution because Hosea was obsessed with sex workers. Yeah, yeah. You couldn’t shake a stick at Hosea without him calling somebody a whore.

He’s the little old lady around the board table in Tommy Boy who goes, “And that’s when the whores come in.” And David Spade goes, “Kind of like her idea.” The very last verse of Hosea 14:9 , very famous verse. A lot of scholars think this is actually written by the people who collected and published Hosea’s writings rather than by Hosea himself. And it says, “Those who are wise understand these things, those who are discerning know them, for the ways of the Lord are right and the upright walk in them, but transgressors stumble in them.” So it does end with a, you know, choose the right kind of—

Walk upright, don’t stumble. Yeah.

But yeah, you can focus—it is easy to get lost in the sauce of fornications and sex workings and zenunim. But I think the point there is really Hosea is trying to say, “You are such disgusting people, but God loves you so much that God is going to bring you back into the fold eventually. Once you get your crap together. Just get it together.”

Yeah. Put it in a backpack. Turns out that it is not within human nature to ever actually get it together. So alas, we’ll be waiting on that restoration for a long, a good long while.

Yeah, he needed to adopt the eternal perspective. The getting together will only be gotten together in the great beyond. In the great getting together. Yes, once we have shuffled off this mortal coil, then we will get all the coils together. All right, friends.

Well, there you go. There’s your Hosea for the day. Go out there and commit some adultery if you want to.

We’re not, we’re not fans of it, but, but far be it from us to prohibit anybody there.

Yeah, we’re not moralizing here. That’s not our job. We don’t— all right, thank you so much for joining us. If you would like to become a part of how we actually make this thing happen, you can go and become one of our patrons over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. It’s where you can sign up for, to, at whatever level whatever makes you comfortable. But you know, if you give us just a little bit of your money, you can get an early and ad-free version of every episode. You can get access to the, uh, the after party. That’s bonus weekly content. Um, thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show. We’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

The Adult(ery) Episode

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology