Hosea in Rabbinic Literature

Abstract Rabbinic exegetes use the theme of repentance to construct narratives in the book of Hosea. They diverge in the identity of the repenting character. For Targum Jonathan, Israel repents. The narrative is rewritten to introduce possibilities for Israel to repent even when the biblical text seems to foreclose them. For the Talmud in Pesachim, Hosea repents for doubting Israel. This Talmudic passage rewrites the story so that all the threatened or described violence of the book of Hosea was only spoken by God to Hosea in order to convince him to reject this violence as impossible. In Numbers Rabbah, God repents to Israel for acts of jealousy and rejection. This midrashic reworking undoes the logic of male jealousy in the biblical text by imagining jealousy, human and Divine, as both comedic and regrettable. In Genesis Rabbah, the theme of repentance that Rabbis find in different ways in the book of Hosea is linked back to Hosea’s ancestor Reuben and Reuben’s contemplation of his own sin in selling Joseph. All of these ways of thinking about repentance, which are never reconciled, are ways of thinking through the troubling problems of the book of Hosea.