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.