Bargaining Hosea’s Children
Male-as-provider and woman-as-dependent
Transfigured identity
- The identity of the community =. the basis for a restored “national” identity.
“Transbodied” defined.
Transcending bodied limits imposed by cultural concepts and categories of “body” and the restrictions therein embodied.
“Bodied limits”
- Is not an objective assessment.
- Is an identification of the boundaries that distinguish subject and object at the heart of hierarchies of power.
Transbodied relationships blur distinctions/limits between gender, role, identity.
Hosea reimagines “Israel” through metaphors that rewrite identity.
Themes of transformation /transfiguration:
- The wifely body of Israel/Judah is also the offspring fathered by Yahweh;
- The mother is Israel-as-woman in Hosea, but also the land;
- The continued existence of the body requires Yahweh’s presence and “seed”;
- There remains a fluidity to the identity of the body: Israel as woman, child, land, husband within a masculine hierarchy headed by Yahweh.
Israel becomes feminine.
Yahweh is the fertile male.
Francis Landy
The problematization of metaphor in Hosea is augmented by its theme of social and political entropy. The metaphors of the book communicate disintegration; they can either do this mimetically, through their lack of coherence, or paradoxically, through interpreting chaos, giving it a structure.
Entropy highlights disintegration of traditional identity
Israel-as-woman is transfigured in the wilderness
- “Wilderness” = absence of institution and structure
Imperial politics = birthing pains?
“Family” as foundation
Hos 13:5
- Implies public exposure
- Absence of institutional support
- Loss of the basis for national identity
Sexual “knowing” as providing
Or, understanding the responsibility to provide for someone.
Yahweh-as-land
Israel-as-woman
- Must be fenced in
- Must be walled off
- These reestablish boundaries of identity in the wilderness.
Transbodied children?
Prostituting children?
- Hos 1:2 compared with Ex 34:15-16
- Deut 31:16
- Lev 17: 7
All seem to refer to “prostituting after” as seeking other providers.
Or, “children of…”
“Children of prostitution” emphasizes the possibility of a new transfiguration.
Transbodied meaning in the children
Neither entirely positive nor negative
the children symbolize consequence of infidelity and possibility of life.
They are children!
Andersen and Freedman
A calculated ambivalence is built into the names in the accompanying interpretations in Hosea, so that at the end of c. 2 there is a complete reversal of meanings: out of the disaster which will overrun the country there will come renewal of life and restoration of good things to fulfill the original intention and basic desires of the deity.
Jezreel as “center”?
Jezreel as a metaphor of process
"God sows" (Jezreel) implies possibility
Yahweh-as-husband/provider
Pity on the “Day of Jezreel”
Restoration as the end of transfiguration?
Separation
- Lo-Ruhamah indicates separation of the people from provision.
- Lo-Ammi indicates separation of the people from national identity.
Rejected children transbodied
Transbodied ideal
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By Jeremiah Cataldo
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