Haftorah Bemidbar

Parshah Bemidbar, the beginning of Numbers, has for its Haftorah Hosea 2:1-22; the numbering is different in the Christian Old Testament than in the Tanakh, just to confuse you all. Here’s the text:

Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered; and it shall come to pass, [that] in the place where it was said unto them, Ye [are] not my people, [there] it shall be said unto them, [Ye are] the sons of the living God. Then shall the children of Judah and the children of Israel be gathered together, and appoint themselves one head, and they shall come up out of the land: for great [shall be] the day of Jezreel.

Say ye unto your brethren, Ammi; and to your sisters, Ruhamah. Plead with your mother, plead: for she [is] not my wife, neither [am] I her husband: let her therefore put away her whoredoms out of her sight, and her adulteries from between her breasts; Lest I strip her naked, and set her as in the day that she was born, and make her as a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and slay her with thirst. And I will not have mercy upon her children; for they [be] the children of whoredoms. For their mother hath played the harlot: she that conceived them hath done shamefully: for she said, I will go after my lovers, that give [me] my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink.

Therefore, behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and make a wall, that she shall not find her paths. And she shall follow after her lovers, but she shall not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find [them]: then shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then [was it] better with me than now. For she did not know that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold, [which] they prepared for Baal. Therefore will I return, and take away my corn in the time thereof, and my wine in the season thereof, and will recover my wool and my flax [given] to cover her nakedness. And now will I discover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and none shall deliver her out of mine hand. I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feast days, her new moons, and her sabbaths, and all her solemn feasts. And I will destroy her vines and her fig trees, whereof she hath said, These [are] my rewards that my lovers have given me: and I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall eat them. And I will visit upon her the days of Baalim, wherein she burned incense to them, and she decked herself with her earrings and her jewels, and she went after her lovers, and forgat me, saith the LORD.

Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her. And I will give her her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope: and she shall sing there, as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt. And it shall be at that day, saith the LORD, [that] thou shalt call me Ishi; and shalt call me no more Baali. For I will take away the names of Baalim out of her mouth, and they shall no more be remembered by their name. And in that day will I make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven, and [with] the creeping things of the ground: and I will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the earth, and will make them to lie down safely. And I will betroth thee unto me for ever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in lovingkindness, and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness: and thou shalt know the LORD.

I’m not a big fan of Hosea. It is, I’ll admit, an arresting image, the marriage to the harlot, the children with their names of ill-omen. I can’t help, somehow, thinking of the kids going to school, the little boy called Not-mine and the girl Not-loved, the other kids in the class taunting them, or ostracizing them, the mother a harlot, the father a lunatic. Of course, you can take the whole story as fiction, that Hosea wrote as if he had married a harlot, to make the literary point. But somehow, I have the feeling that he made that point with his life. And his wife’s life, and the lives of his children (by the way, you might take the name Jezreel as naming the kid Gettysburg or Verdun, something like that, although with Jezreel there’s the added and hopeful pun that the name of the valley means The Divine sowing, because of the fertility of the land). There’s a ruthlessness to the prophets, a sense that whatever pain they inflict on themselves or others in the passing along of the message of the Divine is not only acceptable but to be desired. As I say, I’m not a big fan.

I do, however, like the image of the Divine betrothing himself to us, not only in righteousness (b’tzedek) not only in judgement (b’mishpat), not only in lovingkindness (b’chesed), not only in mercy (b’racham), but even in faithfulness (b’emunah).

The first place that we see emunah in the Scripture is in Exodus 17:12, in the story of the battle against the Amalekites. While Moses raised his hand, remember, the Israelites were winning, but when Moses lowered his hand, the Amalekites would gain the upper hand. But Moses’ hands were heavy and the day was long, so Aaron and Hur went to him, one on each side, and held his hands up for him. And his hands were steady until the sun went down. What we see here as steady in the KJV, or steadfast in Young, is emunah, sometimes translated as true or, as in Hosea, faithful. The Divine betrothes himself to us in emunah, in steadfastness. As Aaron and Hur held the hands of Moses, so does the Divine hold up our hands, to achieve victory over our generation’s Amalekites. But so, to, do we hold up the hands of the Divine, in steadiness, in our our lovingkindness, in our own judgement, in righteousness, and even in mercy.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.