Go Again, Love Her
1 Yahweh said to me, “Go again, love a woman loved by another, and an adulteress, even as Yahweh loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods, and love cakes of raisins.” 2 So I bought her for myself for fifteen pieces of silver and a homer and a half of barley. 3 I said to her, “You shall stay with me many days. You shall not play the prostitute, and you shall not be with any other man. I will also be so toward you.” 4 For the children of Israel shall live many days without king, without prince, without sacrifice, without sacred stone, and without ephod or idols. 5 Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek Yahweh their God, and David their king, and shall come with trembling to Yahweh and to his blessings in the last days.
The second command is harder than the first because he now knows what he is agreeing to, and the price he pays is the price of a slave.
Go again, love a woman loved by another, and an adulteress. The first command was to take a wife of prostitution Hosea 1:2; this one is to love a woman who has already left. And the verb is love, which is not the same instruction as marry.
The comparison is stated in the same sentence rather than left to the reader: even as Yahweh loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods. The prophet's second act of love is explicitly the shape of God's.
The detail in verse 2 is easy to pass over and it is the chapter's hardest fact. I bought her for myself for fifteen pieces of silver and a homer and a half of barley. He pays. And the sum is roughly half the standard valuation of a slave — she had fallen far enough that her price was low, and he paid it anyway, partly in grain.
Verse 3 sets terms that are neither romantic nor punitive: she is to stay, not to prostitute herself, not to belong to another man — I will also be so toward you. The restraint is mutual, and the last clause commits him to the same waiting he asks of her.
Then verses 4 and 5 apply it. Israel will live many days without king, without prince, without sacrifice, without sacred stone, and without ephod or idols — the whole apparatus removed, the legitimate and the illegitimate together, which is the marital seclusion of verse 3 written large.
And afterward they return and seek Yahweh and David their king. A northern prophet names the southern dynasty as the terminus of the return.
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