Lo-Ammi: Not My Son

Read Hosea 1:2–10

In the eleventh chapter of the book that bears his name, the prophet Hosea depicts God as a loving parent who is spurned by her child. I say her child because the imagery in the passage is overwhelmingly maternal. God loves her child Israel. She teaches him to walk and provides him with caring discipline. She bends down to feed him. God is a loving mother who has been rejected by her wayward son.

In chapters 1 and 2, however, God is depicted as a wronged husband. Israel in this metaphor is God’s wife, and she has been unfaithful. Hosea characterizes God in very human terms, lashing out at and tearfully pleading with his adulterous spouse by turns. In both chapter 11 and chapter 1, God has been rejected by one who is supposed to love him (and her).

Hosea knows something about rejection by a loved one. In the first couple of chapters of the book we hear about his marriage to a woman named Gomer, who is either a reformed prostitute who doesn’t stay reformed or just a serially unfaithful wife. The prophet’s anguish at her infidelities, which he is unable to beat out of her (though not for a lack of trying) leads him to doubt the paternity of the couple’s three children. He goes so far as to name his youngest child Lo-Ammi, or “Not my son,” which one might imagine scars the young tyke’s psyche just a tad. Yeah, Hosea has some issues of his own. Neither partner is blameless in this dysfunctional marriage.

In the course of time it dawns on Hosea that his domestic problems intersect with his profession as a prophet. He begins to look at his unhappy union with Gomer as a metaphor for God’s relationship with Israel. Even though God delivered them from bondage in Egypt, gave them the land of Canaan to possess, and provides for them abundantly from farm and flock, Israel is ungrateful, choosing to run after other lovers. The nation’s adultery takes the form of idolatry; specifically, the worship of the Canaanite fertility gods Asherah and Baal. Hosea encapsulates Israel’s ingratitude with this verse from chapter 2: “She did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine, and the oil, and who lavished upon her silver and gold that they used for Baal” (Hos 2:8)

Hosea sees such a kinship between Israel’s unfaithfulness and Gomer’s that he claims that God deliberately told him to marry her in the first place, as a way of hammering home God’s point about Israel. “Go,” God supposedly tells the prophet, “take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord” (v. 2). With this, Hosea steps over the line. We must not take his claim literally. It doesn’t sound like the character of the God whom Jesus came to reveal. Not to me, anyway.

These passages of the book of Hosea serve as cautionary tales for us who seek to interpret the Bible responsibly. As I have said many times before, and even alluded to in the last paragraph, my preferred method of interpreting the Bible is to look at it through the lens of Jesus Christ, whose character as revealed in his life, death, and resurrection and the continuing witness of the Holy Spirit can be used as a touchstone by which we can test the validity of the Scriptures. If the depiction of God does not measure up to what we know of God through God’s revelation in the person of Jesus, we are bound to reject its claim to be God’s Word. As Baptist theologian Frank Tupper once said in the midst of a controversy over the inerrancy of Scripture, “God has given us a perfect Word. His name is Jesus.”

Hosea is also a cautionary tale because it reminds us that misguided zeal can cause real damage in the world. From slaveowners justifying their “peculiar institution” by referring to scattered Bible passages to politicians and Supreme Court justices using their sense of theological rightness and biblical fidelity to deny many American women autonomy over their own bodies, the harm is genuine. Put yourself for a moment in Lo-ammi’s sandals. Imagine how you would feel growing up with a father who somehow thought he could get back at your mother by naming you “Not my son.” It’s the kind of thing that in our modern world can send a child to either the therapist or the cabinet that holds the loaded revolver

Let us commit ourselves to being responsible readers and interpreters of the Bible. Let us be diligent in seeking out the Word of God sometimes buried in its pages. And let our portrayals of God be life-giving instead of the opposite.

Grace and peace,
bob