Haftorah Vayetzeh

This week is Parshah Vayetzeh, and the Haftorah is Hosea 11:7-14:10. Let me quote directly from the wikipedia entry on the Book of Hosea: “hosea is so funny and wow this is stupid and i have no idea why someone would write anything about hosea. ” That part has only been there for twelve hours or so at this point; before that it talked more about Hosea being a prophet to the Northern Kingdom, where Isaiah was a prophet to the Southern Kingdom.

In our reading, Hosea is describing the wrath of the Divine, because Ephraim (that is, the Northern Kingdom, Samaria) has become rich and corrupt and all manner of bad. And the Lord is wrathful. The thing that stands out in first reading (or at least first close reading, as I assume I have actually read this passage many times, even if I don’t remember it) is the imagery of the Angry Beast. The Lord’s anger is fierce, charon, a word meaning something like burning, and only used to describe the wrath of the Divine (See Isaiah 13:9, Behold, the day of the LORD cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.). The Lord will roar like a lion (11:10), and the people will tremble like a dove. The Lord will be like a lion again, and also like a leopard (13:7). Also like a bear, a lion and a wild beast (13:8). But the Lord will heal them and make them whole again. The lord will be like the dew, and Israel will be like the lily (14:5), the olive tree (14:6), the corn (14:7), the vine (14:7), and a cypress tree (14:8). It’s a lovely set of images, first the bewildering herd of beasts, and then the fecund garden. A rhetorical one-two.

A step back, though, leads to a problem: Ephraim may have become a garden, but it did not rejoin the people Israel. The Assyrians took the Northern Kingdom, and the ten tribes of the north (led by Ephraim, and often referred to simply as Ephraim) were dispersed. There are lots of stories about what happened to them, but essentially, they are gone, gone. It’s not even a remnant-shall-remain situation. Gone.

Hosea, earlier on, marries a harlot who has a son, who Hosea names not my people. Well, there are three children: the boy Jezreel (which should be translated as Waterloo, more or less, and from the French side), the girl not pitied, and the boy not my people. And the fate of Ephraim is there: military disaster, oppression and dispersal. Not my people. And they don’t exist, now.

One of the things running through the whole Scripture is a sort of blurring between individual mortality and tribal continuity. Israel is a person, and a tribe; Levy is a person, and a tribe. Judah (or Jew) is a person, and a tribe. Israel dies and is buried, but Israel continues. And in that, it’s not just the name, there’s a sense that Abraham and Isaac, Joseph and Moses, Hosea and Isaiah, continue through the continuation of the tribe. That’s our immortality. But Ephraim does not continue.

The conclusion of Hosea is moving, and lovely, but it isn’t so much true.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.