‘I am a God and Not a Human Being’: The Divine Dilemma in Hosea

Samuel E. Balentine

‘What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ The question posed by Tertullian (ca. 155–240 CE) marks a longstanding divide between reason and faith, theology and philosophy. To look toward Greece for philosophical insight into the nature and character of God, Tertullian argued, leads to heresy.1 A num- ber of recent works, including some by biblical scholars, have mounted a new (renewed) challenge to Tertullian’s supposition.2 Perhaps inadvertently, these emerging philosophical approaches to the Hebrew Bible have intersected with a growing number of studies that explore lexical and thematic connections between the Old Testament and Greek literature during what Walter Burkert describes as the ‘orientalizing period’ (ca. 750–650 BCE), the ‘formative epoch of Greek civilization.’3

1 The context for Tertullian’s question is instructive: ‘Unhappy Aristotle! Who invented for these men dialectics, the art of building up [arguments] and pulling [them] down; an art so evasive in its propositions, . . . so productive of contentions—embarrassing even itself, retracting everything, and really treating of nothing! . . .[W]hen the apostle would restrain us, he expressly names philosophy as that which he would have us be on our guard against. Writing to the Colossians, he says: ‘See that no one beguile you through philosophy and deceit after the tradition of men’. . . . He had been at Athens, and had in his interviews [with the philosophers] become acquainted with that wisdom which pretends to know the truth, while it only corrupts it. . . . What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord can there be between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians?’ (Prescriptions Against Heretics, 7.15–22). 2 For the purposes of this paper, see especially, J. Gericke, The Hebrew Bible and Philosophy of Religion, Atlanta 2012; Y. Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, Cambridge 2012; J. Barton, Ethics in Israel, Oxford 2014; S. Sekine, Philosophical Interpretations of the Old Testament (BZAW, 458), Berlin 2014. 3 W. Burkert, Die orientalisierende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literatur, Heidelberg 1984; ET: The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (transl. M. Pinder, W. Burkert), Cambridge/London 1992. The literature on this ‘orientalizing period’ is extensive. In addition to multiple works by Burkert, see especially B. Janowski et al. Religionsgeschichtliche Beziehungen zwischen Kleinasien, Nordsyrien und dem Alten Testament (OBO, 129), Freiburg 1993; M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, Oxford 1997. Burkert notes that reading the Hebrew Bible alongside the Greek classics was commonplace well into the eighteenth century. For a variety

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004337695_005 Samuel E. Balentine - 9789004337695 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:36PM via free access ‘I am a god and Not a Human Being’ 55

This paper seeks to contribute to this larger conversation about Athens and Jerusalem. My focus on Hos 11:9 relocates Tertullian’s question: What does Hosea have to do with Homer (or Hesiod)? More specifically, I invert the logic of the question. If Hos 11:9 is the answer to some sort of divine dilemma— and not a human,’ that is, ‘I am this kind of god but not ( אֵ ל ”,I am God (or “a god‘ that kind of god’—then what were the presenting metatheistic and metaethi- cal questions about divinity that shaped the world of this text? My exploration comprises three parts: 1) a god’s ‘El-ness’; 2) transcultural distinctions between divine and human portfolios; and 3) the interface between divine moralizing and moralizing about the divine.

1 A God’s ‘El-ness’

The Book of Hosea comprises a metanarrative of Israel’s history from an eighth century Judean perspective.4 Beginning with a review of the exodus from Egypt and the covenant between God and Israel, it tracks major episodes of Israel’s violation of covenant demands, God’s punishment, focused in the fall of the state, and the promise of restoration at some future but undefined time. From a structural standpoint, chapter 11 occupies the space between punishment and restoration. It begins with a rehearsal of the past, when God called the people out of Egypt, led them with bonds of love through the wilderness and into the land of Canaan, but was spurned by their decision to love other gods (vv. 1–4). It then summarizes God’s consequent and immanent judgment, manifest in Israel’s subjugation by Assyria (vv. 5–7), which, however, will not be the end, for as the last verses of the chapter announce, God resolves to rescind the judg- ment and restore the relationship (vv. 10–11). Verses 8–9 are the pivot between judgment and restoration. Why does God decide to move from ‘burning anger’

of reasons—philological, ideological, and theological—it was thought important to sever the link between Indo-European languages and Semitic languages, and more fundamen- tally between East and West (The Orientalizing Revolution, 1–6). For a critique of essential- ist arguments about racial distinctions between Greek and Semitic languages and cultures, see S. Arvidson, Aryan Idols. Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, Chicago/ London, 2006; C. López-Ruiz, When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East, Cambridge 2010, 1–22. 4 E. Ben Zvi, Hosea (FOTL, 21A/1), Grand Rapids/Cambridge 2005, 228. Cf. J.M. Bos, who argues for a date in the late sixth or early fifth century BCE but does not address Hos 11:8–9 (J.M. Bos, Reconsidering the Date and Provenance of the Book of Hosea: The Case for a Persian- Period Yehud [LHBOTS, 580], New York/London, 2013).

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-The answer has some ?(1:8)(נִכְמְ רּו נִ חּומָ י) ’to burning ‘compassion (חֲ רֹון אַּפִ י) ’.( י אִ ׁש) not a mortal ( אֵ ל) thing to do with God’s El-ness: ‘Because I am a god (אֱלֹוהַ and) אֵ ל The standard approach to understanding the Hebrew word uses cognate forms in other Semitic , אֱ ֹל הִ י ם and אֵ לִ י ם ,and its two plural forms languages (Akkadian ilu/ilanu; Ugaritic ʾil/ʾilm) to construct what Mark Smith calls the ‘historiography about divinity’ in the ancient Near East.5 The basic contours of the history that moves from notions of multiple gods in ancient Near Eastern literatures to one-god theism in ancient Israel, from conceptual- izing El and Yhwh as different deities to collapsing them into a single divine figure, are well known and need not be rehearsed here.6 It is sufficient for my purposes to note that Hosea scholars have long understood the message of this book to revolve around the prophet’s indictment of the northern kingdom for worshipping the Canaanite deities El and Baal.7 Scott Chalmers succinctly states this position: ‘Just as Hosea proclaims that it was Yahweh, not Baal, that lavished grain and wine and oil on Israel in 2.10, in Hosea 11–13 the prophet insists that it was Yahweh, not El, who appeared to Jacob and who brought Israel up from Egypt.’8 Hosea’s insistence that Yhwh alone is the true God,9 that is, the true El, has usually been understood to reflect Israel’s movement toward one-god theism during the eighth to the sixth centuries, when vassalage to Assyria required

5 M.S. Smith, God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World, Grand Rapids/Cambridge 2008, 149; cf. idem, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, Grand Rapids 2002 (second edition); The Memoirs of God: History, Memory, and the Experience of the Divine in Ancient Israel, Minneapolis 2004. 6 Recent studies describe a three-step process in Israel’s movement toward monotheism: convergence, differentiation, and accommodation. For a summary of the discussion, see R.P. Bonfiglio, ‘God and Gods,’ in: S.E. Balentine (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Bible and Theology, vol. I, Oxford 2015, 412–26. 7 In Hos 1–3, the focus is on Baal; in 4–11 on El. For a concise overview, see J.A. Dearman, The Book of Hosea (NICOT), Grand Rapids/Cambridge 2010, ‘Appendix 1: Baal in Hosea,’ 349–51. For a dissenting view, see B. Kelle, Hosea 2: Metaphor and Rhetoric in Historical Perspective, Atlanta 2005, 137–52. 8 R.S. Chalmers, The Struggle of Yahweh and El for Hosea’s Israel, Sheffield 2008, 241–242 (emphasis original). Chalmers argues (87–91) that Hosea’s ‘El polemic’ is directed not toward past sins of Baal worship at Baal-peor (Num 25) but instead at present apostasy in Bethel, where Hosea’s opponents misidentify Yhwh’s compassion as that of ‘the kindly one, El, the compassionate’ (ltpn ʾil dpʾid; e.g., KTU 1.4.IV.58; 1.6.III.4, 10,14; 1.16.V.23). ;11–12:10 ;9 ,11:3 ;אנכי) ’Chalmers notes the importance of the repeating personal pronoun ‘I 9 13:4–5), which is strategically located at places where there is potential confusion about the identity (or agency) of the deity, thus his translation of 11:8: ‘For I and I alone am ʾēl and not a mortal, the Holy One in your midst’ (ibid., 78).

Samuel E. Balentine - 9789004337695 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:36PM via free access ‘I am a god and Not a Human Being’ 57 absolute loyalty to the Assyrian king, who embodied the will of the imperial Assyrian god.10 To subvert Assyrian hegemony,11 so the argument goes, Israel separated itself not only from the gods of its overlord but also from its own polytheistic heritage, what Patrick Miller has called the ‘the gods in Yahweh’.12 From this perspective, God’s El-ness emerges out of and responds to transcul- tural god-talk in Mesopotamia and Canaan. Another way of understanding God’s El-ness is more philosophically oriented.13 One may frame the issue so as to clarify the essential (as opposed to accidental or contingent) characteristics of a god. In other words, rather than asking ‘who is a god?’, which focuses on the matter of identity, we may ask ‘what is a god?’, or to use the language of divinity in the Hebrew Bible and other Baal, Hadad, Shamash, and Yhwh 14’? אֵ ל ancient Near Eastern texts, ‘what is an may each be Els, but what essential qualities do they share that distinguish them conceptually from other entities in the ancient world? Gericke proposes if and only אֵ ל a philosophical formulation of the issue: ‘For any entity x, x is an if a, b, c, and so on.’15 No attempt to formulate a definitive list of the essential properties of El-ness is likely to go unchallenged. If only because of the limitations imposed by this paper, I will not risk the effort here (but see below, section II). Nonetheless,

10 M.S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts, New York/Oxford 2001. On the same issue considered from the perspec- tive of both the ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman period, see M.L. West, ‘Toward Monotheism,’ in: P. Athanassiadi, M. Frede (eds), Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Oxford 1999, 21–40. 11 On the important contrast between cross-cultural exchange that unintentionally dif- fuses shared motifs and ideologies and that which intentionally subverts them, see E. Otto, ‘Assyrian and Judean Identity: Beyond the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule,’ in: D.S. Vanderhooft, A. Winitzer (eds) Literature as Politics, Politics as Literature. Essays on the Ancient Near East in Honor of Peter Machinist, Winona Lake 2013, 339–47. Cf. P. Machinist on the ‘inversion’ of Assyrian royal inscriptions in First Isaiah (‘Assyria and Its Image in the First Isaiah,’ JAOS 103 [1983], 221–226; idem, ‘Final Response: On the Study of the Ancients, Language, and the State,’ in: S. Sanders (ed.), Margins of Writing, Origin of Cultures (OIS, 2), Chicago 2006, 291–300). 12 P.D. Miller, The Religion of Ancient Israel, London/Louisville 2000, 25–28. 13 In the following paragraphs, I draw upon the work of Gericke, The Hebrew Bible and Philosophy of Religion, especially chapters 10–11. 14 Cf. Smith, Origins of Monotheism, 102–103; idem, ‘Like Deities, Like Temples (Like People),’ in: J. Day (ed.), Temple and Worship in Biblical Israel (JSOTSup, 422), London/New York 2005, 3–27; M.S. Smith, W.T. Pitard, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle. Vol. II. Introduction with Text, Translation and Commentary of KTU/CAT 1.3–1.4 (VTS, 114), Leiden/Boston 2009, 66–67. 15 Gericke, Hebrew Bible and Philosophy of Religion, 265.

Samuel E. Balentine - 9789004337695 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:36PM via free access 58 Balentine let me extrapolate from the work of those who have explored the ‘what is a god?’ question one important consideration that has thus far been missing from the standard commentaries on Hos 11:9. If one looks for a fully ‘generic concept of godhood’ that has bearing on Israel’s religious and cultural devel- opment in the eighth to the sixth centuries, then the arc of transcultural cul- tural discourse should include Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Greece. There is now an abundance of evidence for the traffic of commerce and ideas between the ancient Near East and Greek cultures during the Mycenaean and Minoan periods, roughly 1450–1050 BCE.16 Moreover, we know that the expansion of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, especially from the time of Tiglath-Pileser III, put not only Israel and Judah at risk, but also Greek cities in Asia Minor.17 If the Gilgamesh Epic can justifiably be called the ‘Odyssey of the Babylonians,’18 then we should at least allow for a similar interface between Hosea’s El-God and Homer’s Zeus-god, especially because we know that at least by the time of Philo (first- or second-century CE), El-god traditions were explicitly identified with Kronos-Zeus traditions.19 In short, we may suppose that in the cultural koiné20 of the Late Bronze-Early Iron period generic god-talk, arcing from West

16 For an early but frequently neglected assessment by Cyrus Gordon, see ‘Homer and the Ancient Near East,’ in: C.H. Gordon, G. Rendsburg, The Bible and the Ancient Near East, New York/London 1997 (originally published in 1965). Since the 1980s, study of the inter- connectedness of Mesopotamian, Northwest Semitic, and Greek mythologies and reli- gious systems has steadily increased. The following may be singled out: M. Bernal, Black Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece: 1785–1985, London 1987; idem, Black Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. 2: the Archaeological and Documentary Evidence, New Brunswick 1991; W. Burkert, Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture, Cambridge 2004; West, The East of Helicon; C. López-Ruiz, Gods, Heroes, and Monsters: A Sourcebook of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern Myths, Oxford 2013. 17 On the dynamics of the Mesopotamian expansion to the East and the Greek expansion to the West in the Late Bronze period, see West, The East Face of Helicon, 606–30. 18 A. Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels, Chicago 1949. On the influ- ence of the intellectual history of the ancient Near East, see now M. Van De Mieroop, Philosophy Before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia, Princeton 2015. 19 Eusebius, Preparatio evangelica, 1.10.44. For text and translation, see H.W. Attridge, R.A. Oden, Jr., Philo of Byblos. The Phoenician History: Introduction, Critical Text, Trans­ lation, Notes (CBQMS, 9), Washington 1981, 62–63. Herodotus, the putative fifth century ‘father of history,’ concluded that nations identify the same gods by different names. For example, the Egyptians call Zeus Ammon (Histories, 2.42) and the Scythians call Zeus Papaios (Histories, 4.59). 20 C. López Ruiz uses the phrase ‘cultural koiné’ to describe ‘the common cultural fea- tures both in broad categories and in specific details . . . [that] existed in the ancient

Samuel E. Balentine - 9789004337695 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:36PM via free access ‘I am a god and Not a Human Being’ 59 to East, provided a common conceptualization of what it meant to equate Baal, Yhwh, and Zeus with divinity.

2 Transcultural Distinctions Between Divine and Human Portfolios21

but it , י אִ ׁש and an אֵ ל Hos 11 presupposes a generic distinction between an does not make explicit what properties differentiate one from the other. Pre- sumably, there were certain assumptions about what constitutes divinity in the ancient Near East, and no doubt we could compile a reasonable list of these assumptions if that were the objective.22 Whatever essential proper- ties of divinity may be on that list, they would necessarily derive from observable

Mediterranean during the Bronze Age’ (When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East, Cambridge/London 2010, 179; cf. M. Finkelberg, Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition, Cambridge 2005). The use of this lan- guage identifies my approach as an intertextual one. I suggest Hosea and Homer draw on a common stream of traditions (written or unwritten) about divinity. It is virtually impossible to know for certain whether one text is clearly earlier than the other, therefore I posit only a synchronic relationship between Hosean and Homeric concepts of divinity. (Although, see B. Louden [Homer’s Odyssey and the Near East, Cambridge 2011, 12–13] on the likelihood that Old Testament writers were influenced by Greek culture, at least by the middle of the sixth century, rather than the other way around.) For a survey of the current impasse between diachronic and synchronic approaches to intertextuality, see G.D. Miller, ‘Intertextuality in Old Testament Research,’ CBR 9 (2010), 283–309. 21 I borrow the term ‘portfolio’ from J.K. Davies, who argues that the ‘tidiness and conve- nience’ of names for god, such as Zeus, Siva, or Yahweh, is best understood as ‘shorthand for portfolios or packages of attributed imagined powers, but they, and especially the overwhelmingly anthropomorphic way in which the Greeks [and the Hebrews] visual- ized their gods, can all too easily tempt us to speak and think of them as ‘persons’ in ways which, if adopted incautiously, send ontologically misleading messages. We have there- fore to reach round the name to the portfolio, and to the men and women in whose minds that portfolio had a meaning if we are to be able to trace the ways in which the ‘profile’, or ‘person’, or imputed personality of this or that god, or set of gods, changes in the course of generations’ (‘The Moral Dimension of Pythian Apollo,’ in: A.B. Lloyd [ed.], What is a God? Studies in Greek Divinity, London 1997, 44). 22 M. Smith, for example, discusses a number of possible ways to address the question ‘What is an ilu [god]?’ (The Origins of Biblical Monotheism, 6–9). Numerous studies of Greek literature pursue the same question, although they are rarely referenced by biblical schol- ars. In addition to the standard introductions to Greek religion, which typically discuss the nature of Greek divinity, see, for example, E. Ehnmark, The Idea of God in Homer, Stockholm 1935; K. Hack, God in Greek Philosophy to the Time of Socrates, New York 1931, and the collection of essays in Lloyd (ed.), What Is a God?

Samuel E. Balentine - 9789004337695 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:36PM via free access 60 Balentine human characteristics that have been conceptualized as supra-human, which is to say, supernatural, transcendent. Human beings are mortal, gods are immortal; human power is limited; divine power is (or seems to be) unlimited; humans do not have all wisdom, gods do, and so on. In a fundamental sense, all gods, insofar as humans can conceive of them, are human constructions. They are imagined anthropomorphic perfections. Conversely, humans at their very best are but theomorphic imperfections.23 There is, however, a curious tension between gods and humans at just this point. Humans seem inevitably to aspire to divinity. They want to live forever, to know everything, control everything, in essence, to transcend all human limitations. Indeed, such aspirations, which are always thwarted by the gods, are at the heart of most cosmogonies in the ancient world, including the creation stories in Genesis. Gods, on the other hand, do not typically aspire to be more like humans. They do not yearn to die or to be vulnerable to any of the instabilities that afflict humans, such as age, illness, or fatigue. Because their power knows no limits, they have no need for courage. Because they have all knowledge, it is pointless for them to seek wisdom. Gods do whatever they do without constraint or assessment, therefore human concepts like right and wrong, just and unjust, are irrelevant to their world. Nothing about the nature of human life, therefore, would be attractive to a god. They might admire one human virtue or another, but only because they found it entertaining from a spectator’s perspective. As long as the spectacle held their attention they might watch, but they would not be tempted to give up their place in the divine audience.24 Within the Near Eastern nexus of this fundamental distinction between the divine and the human, there is nothing unusual or special about Presumably, no one 25’.( י אִ ׁש) Hosea’s Yhwh-god saying, ‘I am not a mortal hearing these words in an eighth century world would have thought otherwise. It is not the denial of mortality that is curious. It is instead the implicit god, which necessarily- אֵ ל affirmation that because Yhwh is a certain kind of

23 So, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘A man is a god in ruins,’ Nature, Boston 1836. 24 On the activity of humans on earth as ‘ein Schauspiel für die Götter,’ see H. Fränkel, Die homerischen Gleichnisse, Göttingen 1977, 32–33. 25 Hos 11:9 is often compared with other texts that contrast God with some aspect of human- ity, principally Num 23:19, 1 Sam 15:29; and Ezek 28:2 (cf. Isa 31:3). The texts in Numbers and 1 Samuel contrast God’s reliability or consistency with that of a mortal: God will not change his mind or deceive. (Num 22–24 indicates that Yhwh was readily identified as El inside and outside Israel, at least as early as the ninth century.) The Ezekiel text reports Yhwh’s rebuke of the King of Tyre, whose pride leads him to claim divinity: ‘You have .(cf. v. 9 ;28:2 ; אֵ ל) and not a god ( אׇ דׇ ם) but you are a mortal . . . ( אֵ ל) said ‘I am a god

Samuel E. Balentine - 9789004337695 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:36PM via free access ‘I am a god and Not a Human Being’ 61 means he is not human, he will not come against in Israel in wrath.26 What are the metatheistic assumptions behind such an assertion?27 Two considerations merit attention. 1). Perhaps the rhetorical strategy of this verse, like that of the chapter as a whole, is to utilize anthropomorphic language, which is always a necessary conduit for god-talk, to emphasize that this Yhwh-god loves, feels anger, and grieves like any normal parent, but is not bound by parental norms when it comes to deciding whether to forgive or to punish.28 This is a reasonable read- ing of the verse, and some version of it has characterized much of Hosea com- mentary at least since the Patristic period.29

in v. 9b is ambiguous and can be read either ל ֹא The waw affixed to the negative particle 26 I will not come‘ וְ ,לֹא אָ בֹוא ּבְעִ יר conjunctively or disjunctively. MT, LXX, and Vulgate read into the city,’ which contextually would seem to mean, ‘I will not come into the city to execute my anger’ (but see F.I. Anderson, D.N. Freedman, Hosea [AB, 24], Garden City II, ‘inflame,’ thus, ‘I will not become עיר may be from the root עיר ,Alternatively .(589 ,1983 enraged’ (H.W. Wolff, Hosea [Hermeneia], Philadelphia 1974, 193). 27 Gericke defines metatheistic assumptions as ‘presuppositions regarding the divine condi- tion, a term that encompasses the totality of the experience of being divine’ (The Hebrew Bible and Philosophy of Religion, 276; cf. ibid., ‘What’s a God? Preliminary Thoughts on Meta-theistic Assumptions in Old Testament Yahwism(s),’ Verbum et Ecclesia 27 [2006], 856–7). 28 The issue of anthropomorphic language to describe divinity in the ancient world is too complex to be addressed in this context. In a forthcoming paper, I will contrast anthro- pomorphic language used in the Hebrew Bible with that applied to Zeus and the gods in Homeric literature. One striking difference may be noted preliminarily. Hosea is a prime example of what is overall a positive embrace of Yhwh’s fundamental humanness. That God loves like a parent or a spouse is considered a good illustration of divine tender- ness and compassion. Homer and to a lesser degree Hesiod use similar anthropomorphic language to describe Zeus, and while their intentions may have been positive, they were roundly criticized and condemned by their readers, especially Xenophanes, Plato, and Aristotle. See, for example, Longinus, who strongly criticized Homer for making ‘the men in the Illiad gods and the gods men.’ What is necessary, Longinus countered, was to repre- sent the gods as ‘pure and truly great and unalloyed [with anthropormorphism]’ (On the Sublime, 9.8–9). To the degree that such consternation was not likely limited to Aegean cultures in the eighth to sixth centuries, we may speculate that something similar lies in the background of Hosea’s attempt to assure his readers that, on the one hand, God is like a mortal (e.g., Hos 11:1–4), and on the other, that God is not like a mortal (11:9). 29 E.g., Jerome: ‘I will not act according to the passion of my anger, nor will I be charged entirely from my compassion in order to ruin Ephraim. For I do not smite to destroy for good, but rather to correct. My cruelty is an opportunity for penitence and piety. For ‘I am God and not man.’ Whereas a man punishes to destroy, God reproaches to emend’ (PL 25, 920). Cf. Cyril of Alexander: ‘I will not destroy Ephraim entirely even though he

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Such a reading, however, does not explain why God should be indecisive about how to deal with Israel (see Hos 6:4), or why God experiences such a tumult of conflicting emotions,30 or why, whatever action God may be con- The conventional . אֵ ל sidering, the decision has anything to with being an explanation would be that Hosea’s author intends to draw a sharp contrast between two different gods, the Canaanite god El and the Israelite God Yhwh. But would such a contrast have been necessary? That there was temptation toward Baal worship in Israel during the eighth century seems plausible.31 But was there reason to believe that the gods of Canaan were typically internally conflicted when it came to executing punishment? Was there some Canaanite tradition known to Hosea’s audience in which El or Baal would be described as saying to himself, ‘Should I do X or should I do Y?’ Was it supposed that a Canaanite El would feel internal constraint before exercising divine power in the human world? I see no evidence that such internal musing, let alone

became wicked. For what reason? Did they not deserve to suffer this? Yes, he says, but I am God, not a man, that is to say, good, not one conceding victory to the angry emotions, for such passion is merely human’ (PG 71, 273 A). On Patristic interpretations, see E.J. Pentuic, Long-Suffering Love. A Commentary on Hosea with Patristic Annotations, Brookline 2008. Dearman represents the continuation of this line of interpretation: ‘Yhwh will not . . . carry out a judgment that from a human point of view is expected and deemed necessary. He is divine, not human, and thus free to act in ways that transcend human limitations (and also human points of view).’ (The Book of Hosea, 290; cf. J.P. Kakkanattu, God’s Enduring Love in the Book of Hosea, Tübingen 2006). ,turn over‘ ,הפך in Hos 11:8 (2×) connotes self-accusation. The verb י אֵ ְך The interrogative 30 overthrow’ signals that God’s heart is at war with itself. The same verb, used with refer- ence to the question whether God should treat Israel like Admah and Zeboiim, occurs in Gen 19:25, 29 to describe God’s treatment of sinful Sodom and Gomorrah. Critical analysis of Genesis 18–19 confirms, however, that an original report of God’s decision to punish was complexified by the insertion of the report that Moses insisted God think more care- fully about divine intentions (Gen 18:22–31). The net result of this addition to the text is the suggestion that God was not internally conflicted about the decision but should have been. For a recent effort to reclaim Genesis 18–19 as the hermeneutic lens for inter- preting Hos 11:8–9, see F. Lindström, ‘ “I am God and not Human” (Hos 11,9): Can Divine Compassion Overcome our Anthropomorphisms?,’ SJOT 29 (2015), 135–61. 31 But see Kelle, who argues that there is no evidence, biblical or extra-biblical, to support the conventional assumption of widespread Baal worship in the eighth century. In his overlord’ in Hosea‘ ,בעל view, it is more likely that the infrequent references to the term (7× total, four of which are in Hos 2) are metaphors signaling Israel’s unwise and disloyal political alliances (Hosea 2, 137–52). If, as Kelle maintains, there was no reason in Hosea’s world to confuse Yhwh’s El-ness with Baal’s El-ness, then we have another reason to look elsewhere for the context of the god-talk in Hos 11:9.

Samuel E. Balentine - 9789004337695 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:36PM via free access ‘I am a god and Not a Human Being’ 63 internal conflict, was in any way characteristic of Canaanite deities. Indeed, quite to the contrary, Ugaritic texts typically focus on conversations between the gods, not between the gods and humans, and while El may on occasion ask for the help or cooperation of other gods, there are no indications that El or Baal lacks either sufficient wisdom or resolve when it comes to exercising divine power.32 2). If, however, we expand the horizons of transcultural god-talk in the eighth to the sixth century beyond Israel’s eastern and northern neighbors, then we may look to the west and to notions of divinity in Homeric Greece.33 The El-god in Greece is Kronos; Zeus, his son, is generically analogous to Baal.34 Zeus’s portfolio includes superior power—in ancient Greece as in all cultures a powerless god is a contradiction35—but not unlimited power. He may dis- pense both good and evil without constraint, capriciously so if he wants, but his power is always subordinate to fate or destiny (μοῖρα). The one thing the gods cannot do is to protect the living from death.36 Athena spells out her limitation in conversation with Telemachus: ‘Death that is common to all not even the gods themselves can ward off even from a man they love, whenever the fell fate (μοῖρα) of pitiless death strikes him down’ (Odyssey, 3.239). The gods have the advantage over mortals of knowing in advance what Moira

32 The machinations of the deities in the Baal Cycle, especially of Baal and Mot, are perhaps most representative of the gods’ ‘typical’ behavior. The questions posed by El in the story of Kirta (CTA 14–16 = KTU 1.14–16; cf. the similar situation of Dan’il in the Aqhat Epic), ‘Who among the gods will heal Kirta,’ is somewhat different, but in this instance the issue is who will execute El’s decision that Kirta be healed, not whether the healing should be executed. 33 An increasing number of biblical scholars are examining textual and thematic connec- tions between biblical texts of various genres and pre-Socratic Greek texts, e.g., J. Van Seters, In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History, New Haven 1983; S. Mandell, D.N. Freedman, The Relationship between Herodotus’ History and Primary History, Atlanta 1993); F.A.J. Nielsen, The Tragedy in History: Herodotus and the Deuteronomistic History (JSOTSup, 251), Sheffield 1997; J.W. Wesselius, The Origin of the History of Israel: Herodotus’s Histories as Blueprint for the First Books of the Bible (JSOTSup, 345); Sheffield 2002; P. Niskanen, The Human and Divine in History: Herodotus and the Book of Daniel (JSOTSup, 396), London, 2004); Louden, Homer’s Odyssey and the Near East, with essays on connections between Odyssey and Gen 18–19 (30–56), Jonah (164–79), and 1 Sam 28 (197–221), for example. 34 For the equivalence of Canaanite El to Greek Kronos traditions in different sources throughout antiquity, see López-Ruiz, When the Gods Were Born, 158–67. 35 Cf. J.K. Davies, ‘The Moral Dimension of Pythian Apollo,’ in What is a God?, 43–64. 36 In Hesiod’s genealogy of the gods, Night begets both ‘black Fate’ (Μόρον, μέλαιναν) and ‘Death’ (Κῆρα) (Theogony, 211).

Samuel E. Balentine - 9789004337695 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:36PM via free access 64 Balentine has determined. They may exercise their power to protect mortals from a premature death, as when Poseidon counsels Aeneas to walk away from the fight with Peleus, lest his death move him beyond what fate has decreed (Iliad, 20.336: ὑπὲρ μοῖραν), but once the end has come, the gods must give way as fate takes its course. At this pivotal moment between a mortal’s life and death, Homer describes the Greek gods as facing a dilemma not unlike that which Hosea imagines for Yhwh. The moment when Zeus must decide whether he might save Hector from death at the hand of Achilles provides apt illustration. Seeing that the end is near, Zeus is filled with sorrow (Iliad, 22.168–169), because Hector had always served him loyally. Zeus asks the other gods if there is any way they can change the outcome. Athena answers for all: ‘A mortal man, doomed long since by fate (αἴσῃ), are you minded to free from dolorous death? Do it; but be sure we other gods do not at all assent to it’ (22.178–179). Conceding the inevitable, Zeus pretends that he was only joking. He lifts up the ‘golden scales’ (χρύσια τάλαντα) of justice, the balance for Hector sinks down toward the realm of death, and Apollo leaves him to his defeat (22.209–210).37 The thematic similarities between Homer’s Zeus-god and Hosea’s Yhwh/ El-god make at least one difference between the two stand out. Zeus is a spec- tator, looking on from a distance as judgment decreed becomes judgment enacted. He may (or may not) grieve the situation, but he has no power to change the outcome.38 Yhwh looks on as his own judgment against Israel becomes too grievous to enact. Israel’s sin is clear and its judgment is in order, but on Yhwh’s scales of justice divine compassion outweighs divine anger.39 Hosea identifies Yhwh as an El-god, but in this particular case there is reason to wonder if his primary objective is to differentiate Yhwh from Zeus rather than Baal.

37 For similar references to the ‘(golden) scales’ of the gods’ justice, see Iliad, 8.69; 16.659. 38 Cf. Iliad, 20.20–22, which describes Zeus as contently looking on from Olympus as the Greeks and Trojans slaughter each other: ‘I care for them, even though they die. Yet for myself I will remain here sitting in a fold of Olympus, from which I gaze and give my mind enjoyment (ἔνθ’ ὁρόων φρένα τέρψομαι).’ 39 Dearman usefully connects the description of Yhwh’s (com)passion in Hos 11 to Exod 34:6–7, which he describes as ‘one of Hosea’s base texts’ (Hosea, 291).

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3 Divine Moralizing, Moralizing about the Divine: ‘I am a god and not a mortal, and therefore I exercise justice in this way, not that way’

The context for this affirmation is Hosea’s certainty that the fall of the northern state of Israel is immanent. Israel was not of course the first nation state in the ancient world to collapse. Sumer, Babylon, Ugarit, and Troy are but some of the most obvious examples, each disappearing from the historical map long before Israel. How does one account for such momentous historical events? Hosea is a prophet, a spokesperson for divinity, and so we should expect him to view the fall of Israel from a religious perspective. Homer and Hesiod are poets, not reli- gious specialists; we should not be surprised that they have little or no interest in analyzing the gods’ involvement in the fall of Troy. Even so, when it comes to thinking about how an eighth century prophet tries to explain divine justice, I suggest reading Hosea alongside pre-Socratic literature can be instructive. The preface to Hesiod’s Theogony celebrates the birth, powers, and preroga- tives of the gods. The Muses invite Hesiod to join them in praising the gods for their contributions to two specific areas of human life, law and ethics: ‘they [the Muses] glorify all the laws (νόμους) and cherished ethics (ἤθεα κεδνὰ) of the immortals’ (Theogony, 66).40 What Hesiod meant by the use of the terms νόμους and ἤθεα is open to question. It is likely that the former refers to ordi- nances, written or (more likely) oral, which provide external norms for public behavior. ἤθεα, by contrast, which ultimately develops into the Aristotelian concept of ‘ethics,’ refers principally to the personal norms that guide life in more private settings, such as the household and family.41 Hesiod was cer- tainly not the first to use the theogonic genre to tie together the origin of the world and the birth of the gods, but he may well have been the first to single out explicitly ‘law’ and ‘ethics’ as the essential divine responsibilities to which all others are subordinate. Moreover, the Proem introduces ‘law’ and ‘ethics’ before the genealogy of gods, thus suggesting, albeit obliquely, that the gods did not create the moral order of the cosmos but instead received and sus- tained it. Here we may have the earliest iteration of the Euthyphro Dilemma: is something moral because the gods command it, or do the gods command something because it is moral?42

40 Theogony, 66: πάντων τε νόμους καὶ ἤθεα κεδνὰ ἀθανάτων κλείουσιν. 41 E.A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, Cambridge/London 1963, 62–63; M.L.West, Hesiod: Theogony, Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary, Oxford 1966, 178. 42 On the Euthyphro Dilemma as a hermeneutic for assessing ancient Israel’s pre-Socratic moral philosophy, see Barton, Ethics in Ancient Israel, 12, 94, 260.

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Nevertheless, having introduced law and ethics, public ordinances and personal values, as essential to Greek notions of divinity, Hesiod devotes very little attention to either in any of his work. The same holds true for Homeric writings.43 Homer does however use soliloquy as a form of divine speech, although only of Zeus and only in two places (Iliad, 17.201–208, 443–455). The infrequency of these soliloquys may signal Homer’s reluctance to talk about the private thoughts of the gods,44 which in itself would differentiate him from Hosea, but even when Homer permits himself to characterize the divine thought process, his Zeus appears to think very differently from Hosea’s Yhwh. When Zeus ‘spoke to his own heart’—about Hector’s immanent death (17.201–208), about Achilles’s horses, who mourn the death of Patroclus, their charioteer (17.443–455)—he expresses regret about unfolding events, but he has no desire to change the outcome.45 By contrast, Hosea’s God seems caught between what his own divine ‘law’ requires and what his heart demands (‘my heart revolts against me,’ 11:8), between the execution of public justice and fidelity to private or personal values.46 Unlike Homer, Hosea does not shrink from describing God’s moment of emotional turmoil; he exploits it.47 In doing so, he provides readers with an education in divine moralizing. Presumably

43 For the discussion, see West, Hesiod, 178. 44 Homer shows no such reluctance in constructing soliloquies for human characters (e.g., Iliad 11.404–10 (Odysseus); 17:91–105 (Hector); 18:6–14 (Antiolochus); 20.344–352 (Achilles); 21.54–63 (Achilles); 22.98–130 (Hector); 22.297–305. See E. Minchin, ‘The Words of God: Divine Discourse in Homer’s Illiad,’ in: A. Lardinois et al. (eds), Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy and Religion (Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World, 8), Leiden 2011, 17–36. 45 Minchin, ‘The Words of God: Divine Discourse in Homer’s Iliad,’ 27–28. 46 In what has become the standard work on Old Testament ethics, E. Otto describes the development from Recht, explicit or actual laws that are subject to the legal process, and Ethos, the ethical ideals or principles that guide individual behavior (Theologische Ethik des Alten Testaments [Stuttgart 1994]). Barton has demonstrated why Otto’s focus on legal and (to a lesser extent) wisdom materials to the exclusion of narrative, prophetic, psalmic, and other biblical genres is an insufficient basis for assessing ethics in Israel (Ethics in Israel, e.g., 14–40). 47 Lindström argues that interpretations accenting a ‘God against God’ understanding of this text run the risk of ‘transforming the pain of God into an internal transaction, with which it is difficult to sympathize and to feel involved’ (‘I am God and Not Human (Hos 11,9)’ 139). Perhaps so, but if the generative cultural context was the importance of distinguishing between generic conceptualizations of divinity in the eighth to the sixth century BCE, then the existential difficulty may be more modern (note the ‘our’ in the title of Lindström’s article) than ancient.

Samuel E. Balentine - 9789004337695 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:36PM via free access ‘I am a god and Not a Human Being’ 67 all El-gods superintend law and ethics, but none do so, Hosea insists, like Israel’s El-god. We may suppose that at least two models for divine moralizing (and mor- alizing about the divine) were well known in Hosea’s world. The dominant model followed by Hosea’s pre-exilic prophetic contemporaries (Amos, Micah, First Isaiah) was based on a quid pro quo principle deeply engrained in Deuteronomic law: if X is the crime, then Y is the punishment. The more egregious the offense, the more severe is the punishment. Hosea clearly rec- ognizes the usefulness of this model and appropriates it for explaining God’s judgment of Israel, which he conveys in places with such violent language that the ‘stench of death’ permeates the entirety of his message, the words of com- passion in 11:8–9 notwithstanding.48 Homeric literature exemplifies a second model for understanding the moral character of divinity that would also have been well known in Hosea’s world. Israel’s eastern and western neighbors lived in multi-god cultures, where pri- mary El-gods oversee justice without being credited or criticized for its execu- tion, which is the responsibility of other, lower ranking, deities. In Hesiod’s genealogy of the gods, Dike is the personification of justice and the daughter of Zeus and Themes (Theogony, 901). Her assignment is to confront and over- come injustice, Adikia, the daughter of Eris.49 Zeus remains above the fray of any collateral damage that mortals may experience in the process. Human suf- fering is irrelevant to divine sublimity. Hosea does not embrace this model as such, although he would almost certainly have been aware of its appeal, espe- cially as evidenced in wisdom traditions both inside and outside Israel.50 The presenting metaethical question is which of the two models for divine moralizing, the Deuteronomic or the Homeric, provides the better hermeneu- tic for reading Hosea? We should begin by refusing to eliminate the complexity of this issue by settling for either-or choices. Dilemmas are dilemmas pre- cisely because choices between multiple options are difficult to make. A god’s dilemma, if we may put it this way, will not likely be resolved by any mortal’s solution. Conversely, any attempt at moralizing about divinity will reflect the

48 For examples of violent divine punishment, see Hos 2:3 [MT v.5], 4:5; 5:12, 14; 6:5; 9:12,16; 10:14; 11:6; 13:7–8. 49 As depicted in the sixth century amphora in the Kunsthistorische Museum, Vienna, where Dike beats Adikia with a mallet; cf. Pausanias, Description of Greece 5.18.2. 50 A prime example is Job 38–42, where divine majesty and mystery appears invulnerable to human misery. On Job and the sublime, see C. Newsom, The Book of Job: a Contest of Moral Imaginations, Oxford 2003, 234–58; S.E. Balentine, Job (Smyth and Helwys Bible Commentary), 2006, 625–706.

Samuel E. Balentine - 9789004337695 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:09:36PM via free access 68 Balentine unavoidable limitations of human thought. Let me simply stipulate that the author of Hosea knows and likely engages both these models in various ways. Why will Israel fall? A part of Hosea’s answer is that Israel has sinned and God has justly punished; divine moralizing is an exercise in quid pro quo thinking. Why will Israel fall? A part of Hosea’s answer is that God has punished because neither God’s justice nor God’s righteousness will be compromised; divine moralizing does not render human suffering meaningless or irrelevant, but it does relativize it. I suggest that Hosea draws upon transcultural portfolios of generic divin- ity, including available paradigms for divine moralizing, to construct an alter- native approach to thinking about what the El-god known as Yhwh is doing in his world. Hosea looks inside the god’s mind, examines a thought process, imagines a cognitive connection between an immortal’s mind and his heart. What or where in Hosea’s world is the template for doing such a thing? The God for whom Hosea speaks is an El-god like others known to him, possessed of immortality, superior power, and unequalled wisdom, but when Hosea looks inside Yhwh’s mind to find the key to understanding why he acts as he does, he does not focus on any of these generic attributes of divinity. Instead he speaks of Yhwh’s compassion.51 On the one hand, Hosea anthropomor- phizes this compassion in order to stress God’s freedom to transcend all human limitations.52 In doing so, he follows common practice. How can one think about divinity without the aid of anthropological moorings? On the other, Hosea imagines that this Yhwh-God can transcend even divine limitations, a kind of self-transcendence, which Hosea depicts as divine compassion exceed- ing divine anger. Yhwh is both more than human-like and more than God-like.

51 For an additional indication of how deeply (pre)philosophical Hosea’s thinking is at this point, see the nineteenth century debate between Kant and Schopenhauer concern- ing whether natural law or moral law is the better foundation for ethics. Criticizing the Kantian notion of moral imperatives, Schopenhauer argued instead that the only genu- ine moral incentive for ethical behavior is compassion: ‘It is the everyday phenomenon of compassion, of the immediate participation, independent of all ulterior consider- ations, primarily in the suffering of another, and thus in the prevention or elimination of it: for all satisfaction and all well-being and happiness exist in this. It is simply and solely this compassion that is the real basis of all voluntary justice and genuine loving- kindness.’ In introducing his argument for the importance of compassion, Schopenhauer notes that ‘philosophers of every age and land . . . and all gods, Oriental and Occidental, owe their existence’ to a careful consideration of this most fundamental human virtue (A. Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, trans. E.F.J. Payne, with an Introduction by D.E. Cartwright, Indianapolis/Cambridge 1995, 38, 144). 52 Cf. Otto, Theologische Ethik, 111.

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In Hosea’s world, we might say that Yhwh is not only more El than any other El but also more Yhwh than Yhwh. My attempt to understand what Hosea seems to be doing exhausts itself in redundancy, but in my defense how exactly does one describe a God who is able to transcend divinity without forsaking divinity?53 Divine dilemmas can only exacerbate human dilemmas. We may extend this intellectual exercise one step farther. In providing his audience an education in divine moralizing, Hosea himself is at the same time moralizing about the divine. He moralizes about divine behavior by showing how divinity, peculiarly manifest in Yhwh, moralizes about itself. In a pre- Socratic world, where the formal conceptualization of philosophy (love of learning) is as yet unarticulated, Hosea’s author is already doing pre-moral, philosophical work. What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? Almost certainly the question is more ours than Hosea’s. On the one hand, we may feel constrained to dismiss the question, not because we agree with Tertullian that it is the height of heresy to ask it, but because we regard it as simply irrelevant in the modern world. On the other hand, we may know all too well that bridging theology and philoso- phy pushes us to the farthest limits of what is humanly possible. But even here, we may find that Athens and Jerusalem are joined in common cause:

My child, you have gone your way To the outermost limits of daring And have stumbled against Law enthroned.

The words are from Sophocles (Antigone), but if we did not already know the attribution, we might well think they were biblical.

53 See above, n. 28. It is worth pondering whether the Greek ranking of mortals and immor- tals—highest gods, ordinary gods, heroes, ordinary mortals (who proceed though similar stages, gold to silver to iron; e.g., Hesiod, Works and Days, 106–201)—may in some way bespeak a sort of divine transcendence. If so, the transition from ordinary gods to ordi- nary mortals via a heroic age seems more a lessening or loss of divinity than a heightening of divinity.

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