I’ve long been struck by the total lack of polemic in Amos against Ba’al and other deities, a polemic that typifies his close contemporary Hosea, and which will be taken up by the later prophetic tradition and eventually come to characterize much other Biblical literature (in particular the Deuteronomic material). It is now becoming clear to me that the same can be said of Isaiah of Jerusalem, whose emphases resemble those of Amos (a fellow Judahite prophet). What’s more, there are only two mentions that I’ve found in Isaiah of Asherim (often translated as “sacred poles”), and neither passage seems to polemicize against the objects themselves or the deity they may have represented.
While there may have been earlier traditions that Hosea built upon, it seems to me that, more than anything else, we owe the Biblical notion of YHWH as a jealous God, husband of the nation who tolerates no rivals, to the unique perspective of a prophet whose understanding was shaped by his own unhappy marital experience.
The title of this post, of course, alludes to both Hosea’s experience and to the absence of polemic against Ba’al in the writings of his contemporaries. Ba’al, after all, means husband in Hebrew, even today in modern Hebrew.
As always, I invite readers whose expertise on the Hebrew Bible is greater than my own to chime in and perhaps point out evidence I have missed. One of the great things about blogging about the Bible is the opportunity both to share scholarly perspectives with a wider audience, and at the same time to interact with other scholars and get input and feedback from those both with similar and with very different areas of expertise.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In