Immoral Conduct
The moral criterion
has the sanction of Jesus of Nazareth (Mt 7 16) and has been
advocated in a number of variable forms. But it was not original with Jesus; on
the contrary, the prophet Jeremiah often appealed to this criterion in rejecting
the words of his opponents, and Micah links this standard with institutional
prophecy (3 11). The charges of adultery and lying appear together
in one oracle of Jeremiah (23 14) and drunkenness is added by Isaiah
(28 7).
However, there are
instances dealing with so-called false prophets where these questionable acts are
absent (the opponents of Micaiah ben Imlah; Hananiah), so that this standard is
not capable of use in all cases. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that even the
true prophets were on occasion guilty of what must be considered immoral
behavior. The most striking example is the marriage of Hosea to a prostitute,
an incident that has prompted more scholarly attempts at explanation than
almost any other in the Old testament. Numerous hypotheses have been put
forward, none of which has been completely satisfactory, although the trend now
seems to be to treat the marriage as a symbolic action revealing little if
anything about the prophet’s domestic situation.
The allegorical interpretation
suffers from the absence of a symbolic meaning for the name Gomer and the
presence of minute details about the weaning of the second child and the ransom
price. Nevertheless, the incident was allegorized in chapter two, where Gomer represents
Israel and Hosea, God. Some have wished to see reference to two different women
in the account, the woman of chapter three being a common prostitute, and the
purity of Gomer being affirmed by viewing “a woman of harlotries” (ʾēšet zĕnûnîm) in 1 2 as a religious
designation without physical connotations. Perhaps the most often advanced view
is that Gomer was a good woman at marriage and subsequently proved false to her
husband, the description of the divine commission being retrospective. It should
be noted that this view fails to preserve God’s honor, for from the ethical
standpoint it would be more just for God to inform Hosea what kind of wife he
was getting, rather than keeping the knowledge from him. Others have viewed
Gomer as a cultic prostitute, explaining the price paid for her as payment for
loss of revenue to the sanctuary at which she provided her services. However,
the use of ʾēšet zĕnûnîm instead of qedešā
(cultic prostitute) makes this view difficult to accept.
The most natural interpretation
is to see Gomer as a common harlot, and to view the entire episode as the
prophet’s obedience to divine command. The marriage was intended as a symbolic
action, its purpose to depict the relationship between Israel and God as one
that began as a marriage between the holy God and sinful nation but was
dishonored by Israel, who must be isolated and forbidden “sexual union”, hence
destroyed. This means that the message of Hosea was not the result of a tragic
domestic experience, nor does the analogy of love move from what man is like to
a conclusion as to the nature of God, a basic weakness of the view that stresses
the formative influence of the marriage upon the message of Hosea.
However one
understands the marriage of Hosea, he must wrestle with the fact that it is
offensive to one’s moral sensitivity. Even those who interpret “woman of
harlotry” as a religious designation cannot avoid this problem, for Hosea makes
it abundantly clear that physical adultery accompanied religious apostasy to
Canaanite religion. The simple fact remains that Hosea married a harlot and
that he felt certain that God commanded him to do so . . . deceit appears
elsewhere as a factor in early prophetic literature. Micaiah ben Imlah used deceit
so often that the king had to rebuke him by saying, “how many times shall I
adjure you that you speak to me nothing but the truth in the name of the Lord”
(I Kings 22 16). Similarly, Elisha advised Hazael to tell Ben-hadad
the king of Assyria, that he would recover from an illness, although assuring
Hazael that the Lord had sown him that Ben-haded would surely die (II Kings 8 7-15).
Hazael obeyed the prophet, slew the king the next day, and reigned in his
place. The prophet Elisha is also said to have cursed some children from Bethel
for mocking him and it is reported that two she-bears promptly killed forty-two
of them (II Kings 2 23 f.).
Another example is an
“immoral” prophet, one who is expediently silent, is recorded II Chr 25 14-16,
where a prophet is said to have been sent to rebuke Amaziah for restoring to
gods of other peoples, but stops when the king asks why he should be put to
death, even if getting in the last word.
In this context it
may be observed that Jeremiah’s accusation that false prophets steal oracles
overlooks the obvious dependence of his own message upon Micah, Isaiah’s upon
Amos, and Ezekiel’s upon Hosea. Furthermore, the passages common to Isaiah and
Micah, as well as Jeremiah and Obadiah, imply borrowing from one another, or
from an unknown source (compare Isa 2 2-4 and Mc 4 1-4;
Ob 1-9 and Jer 49 7-22; Joel 4 16 Jer 25 30
Am 1 2; Mic 1 10-15 and Isa 10 27b-32; Mic 2 1-3
and Isa 5 8-10).
Although the moral
criterion must be rejected, it is admitted that “false prophets” often failed
to live up to the higher morality of an Amos, Isaiah or Ezekiel. The most
serious charge against these false prophets was their conspiracy of silence, a
failure to speak out against wrong (Hos 4 5). (James L. Crenshaw, Prophetic
Conflict: Its Effect Upon Israelite Religion [Atlanta: Society of Biblical
Literature, 2007], 56-60)