My heart recoils within Me
My compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my fierce anger.
I will not destroy Ephraim.
—Hosea 11:8
Little is known about the life of Hosea except that he prophesized in the Northern Kingdom (called Ephraim) in the latter part of the eighth century BCE. This was a period of marked political instability: Four Israelite kings were assassinated in the span of fourteen years, and in 722 BCE the Assyrians conquered the kingdom. Like his older contemporary, Amos, Hosea was disgusted by the behavior he witnessed and predicted that God would exact punishment. But whereas Amos focused on social injustice, Hosea focused on idolatry.
What is idolatry and why is it often described in such dire terms? The Second Commandment prohibits two things: worshiping a god other than the God of Israel and depicting the God of Israel in material form. Although the prohibitions are clear, the reasons behind them are not. Why does God insist on being the only deity to be worshiped? Is it because the other gods do not exist or because the God of Israel is superior to the other gods? And if there are other gods beside the God of Israel, what is so terrible about acknowledging their presence? For example, couldn’t we recognize other gods if we also affirm that the God of Israel is superior to them and the one to whom we owe a special allegiance?
Why, in addition, does God not want to be depicted in material form? Is it because God is not material and therefore cannot be drawn or sculpted, or because God does not want to be worshiped the way polytheistic gods are? If God can be seen, as Exodus 24:9 tells us and the prophets Isaiah (6:1) and Ezekiel (1:26–28) appear to affirm, then in principle wouldn’t it be possible to create a likeness of God? And if we did create one, wouldn’t it serve God’s needs and ours if we bowed down to it?
The medieval philosophers tried to clear up these issues by saying that God is not material and that no other gods exist. For them, the sin of idolatry is an intellectual error: believing in something that does not exist and treating an immaterial being as if it were material. But keep in mind that they were heirs to a rich philosophic tradition that began in Greece and was deepened and broadened by Islamic thinkers in the Middle East. In biblical times, this tradition had not yet started. Biblical thinkers therefore had to develop their own understanding of why the Bible forbids idolatry. (That is why, like monotheism, the concept of idolatry evolved over time.1) To repeat: the Second Commandment tells us that idolatry is a sin but not why. This is the issue on which Hosea would stake his claim as a prophet.
Lacking the theoretical sophistication of the medieval philosophers, Hosea viewed idolatry as a moral failing. He therefore drew a connection between idolatry and adultery; in fact, not just adultery but whoredom—leaving one’s spouse for lovers who pay for sexual favors and offer more money than the spouse can provide:
I will go after my lovers,
Who supply my bread and my water,
My wool and my linen,
My oil and my drink. (2:7)
In Hosea’s mind, there is no more loathsome form of behavior. Just as a husband and a wife take a solemn vow on their wedding day, so Hosea contends, Israel took a solemn vow to remain loyal to God. According to Exodus 19:5, God said to Israel: “If you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant (brit), you shall be My treasured possession among all the peoples.” Though Israel pledged itself to the covenant at Mount Sinai, Hosea charges that the nation has broken the covenant and gone whoring among the pagan gods of the land.2
Were things really this bad? It is difficult to know, because in ancient times “idolatry” could have involved a host of beliefs or practices such as magic, divination, necromancy, worship of local gods, or worship of the true God in material form or in high places. Kaufmann argues that rather than temples, priests, or formal mythologies devoted to other gods, the idolatry of the ancient Israelites consisted mainly of superstition, including the use of amulets, spells, special rites, or belief in satyrs and demons.3
Despite Kaufmann’s claim, it is more likely that the ancient Israelites did worship foreign gods such as Baal and Asherah, because they were prominent in the area and gave the people tangible symbols on which to focus. It is hard to worship a God you cannot see or depict in material form. Since we do not have theological works from this period, we cannot say for sure what people thought. All we know is that Hosea found the people’s behavior abhorrent and viewed it as a rejection of God.
It would be one thing if Hosea drew his analogy between idolatry and adultery in the abstract; what makes his message all the more poignant is that he lived it himself. When God first speaks to him, rather than saying “Take this message to the Israelites,” God says, “Go, get yourself a wife of whoredom and children of whoredom, for the land will stray [play the whore] from following the LORD” (Hosea 1:2). Again, straying by worshiping other gods is compared to straying by having sex outside of marriage.
Generations of commentators have wondered whether God’s command should be taken literally or figuratively. Was Hosea really supposed to marry a woman of ill-repute? According to Maimonides, God never actually said this; the whole experience took place in the prophet’s dream.4 But Hosea’s actions suggest that his interpretation of God’s command was indeed literal: He married a woman named Gomer, who either was a prostitute at the time of the marriage or became one soon thereafter. She bore three illegitimate children, to whom Hosea gave ominous names: Jezreel [God will sow], No-Mercy, and Not My People.5
In ancient Israel, adultery was punishable by death. Thus Hosea would have been within his rights to seek retribution. At 2:4–5 he renounces Gomer, saying:
Rebuke your mother, rebuke her–
For she is not My wife
And I am not her husband—
And let her put away her harlotry from her face
And her adultery from between her breasts.
I will strip her naked
And leave her as on the day she was born;
And I will make her like a wilderness,
Render her like desert land,
And let her die of thirst.
I will also disown her children;
For they are now a harlot’s brood.
The references to wilderness and a desert imply a strong connection between Gomer’s infidelity to Hosea and Israel’s infidelity to God. If the nation does not renounce its attachment to other gods and return to the true God, the land that once flowed with milk and honey will grow barren.
Hosea’s prophecy would be much simpler, and for that reason much less interesting, if it ended here. Israel has gone astray. God has warned the nation to change its ways. If it does not, God’s anger will be as intense as that of a husband whose wife sells her body to other men. The fact is, however, that Hosea’s prophecy now goes into excruciating detail about the agony the husband feels over his wife’s betrayal—and, by implication, that God feels over Israel’s betrayal. On the one hand, there is outrage:
Now I will uncover her shame
In the very sight of her lovers,
And none shall save her from Me.
And I will end all her rejoicing:
Her festivals, new moons, and Sabbaths–
All her festive seasons.
I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees,
Which she thinks are a fee
She received from her lovers;
I will turn them into brushwood,
And beasts of the field will devour them. (2:10–12)
Later, the images become even more violent:
So I am become like a lion to them,
Like a leopard I lurk on the way;
Like a bear robbed of her young I attack them
And rip open the casing of their hearts;
And I will devour them there like a lion,
The beasts of the field shall mangle them. (13:7–8)
In subsequent verses, conflicting emotions are expressed in the space of a few lines. God has called Israel to service, freed it from bondage, offered sustenance in the desert, and led it to the Promised Land—and in return Israel has repaid God by getting in bed with foreign gods and exchanging sexual favors for cheap thrills!6 Despite such outrage, there is the love the husband feels for his wife and that God once felt, and at some level still feels, for Israel. Although we tend to think of love and hate as opposites, at times of crisis or disappointment, they often come together in a feeling of exasperation. Thwarted love can express itself as revulsion, rejection, revenge, or, almost inexplicably, once again as love. In this vein, amid the violence of a lion attacking its prey, Hosea proclaims (2:16–17):
Assuredly,
I will speak coaxingly to her
And lead her through the wilderness
And speak to her tenderly.
I will give her vineyards from there,
And the Valley of Achor as a plowland of hope.
There she shall respond as in the days of her youth,
When she came up from the land of Egypt.
And again at 11:8–9:
How can I give you up, O Ephraim?
How surrender you, O Israel?
How can I make you like Admah,
Render you like Zeboiim?7
I have had a change of heart,
All my tenderness is stirred.
I will not act on My wrath,
Will not turn to destroy Ephraim.
For I am God, not man.
The Holy One in your midst:
I will not come in fury.
Tenderness and rage are the two sides of God’s response to Israel. In the end, tenderness wins out (2:20: “I will take you for my wife in faithfulness”), but there is a great deal of turmoil in the meantime.
While Hosea’s account of God’s response may not be a paragon of logical consistency, emotional outbursts rarely are. The question raised by his account is whether it is legitimate to describe God as suffering the agony of a jilted lover. Can the being who created heaven and earth, who wields limitless power and knows all things, feel the pangs of rejection? Can God feel exasperated enough to lose control and strike out in different directions? Or, is the whole idea that God feels emotion wrong from the start?
If we follow a literal reading of the Bible, God not only feels emotion, but does so with great intensity. At Exodus 32:10, God is so angry with the Israelite nation that God threatens to destroy it and start over. Only a desperate plea from Moses saves the day. Isaiah 30:27–28 tells us that God’s anger burns so hot that God’s lips are like a devouring fire. Isaiah 42:18 goes so far as to say that God will scream like a woman in labor. In addition to anger and anguish, we hear of sadness or regret (Gen. 6:6), jealousy (Exod. 20:5, 34:14), hate (Ps. 5:5, 11:5, Hosea 9:15), compassion (Gen. 19:16), love (Hosea 11:1), and joy (Isa. 62:5). How literally should we take these passages? Does God have lips or let out screams? Even if the answer is no, there is still the deeper question: Is there such a thing as divine pathos? In other words, can God be so affected by human action as to feel distress?
Heschel leaves no doubt about the answer: “An analysis of prophetic utterances shows that the fundamental experience of the prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the divine pathos, a communion with the divine consciousness which comes about through the prophet’s reflection of, or participation in, the divine pathos.”8 In other words, the prophet does not feel anguish alone. Rather, the prophet enters into a relationship with God to share these feelings. Building on this idea, Heschel maintains that God does not judge the world in a state of detachment; rather, God is moved and affected by what happens. If this is right, then God can feel joy or sorrow, pleasure or wrath.9 Despite Heschel’s assurance, the question of divine pathos has troubled people for centuries. Before making up our minds, let us consider the arguments pro and contra.
The claim that God cannot be subject to emotion originates with Aristotle and in the Jewish world finds its highest expression in the thought of Maimonides. We can begin to understand their view by recognizing that our word “pathos” is derived from the Greek word meaning to experience or to suffer, and easily lends itself to the adjective “pathetic.”10 Although some may describe a jilted lover as pathetic, this school of thought argues that it is highly objectionable to apply the word to God.
To carry this line of thinking a step further, note that we are often critical of politicians who resort to appeals to emotion in order to sway their audience. Such appeals typically play on fear, racial prejudice, or other anxieties and shun evidence or sustained argument. When this happens, the audience is put in a passive condition: It is being manipulated rather than informed. In this vein, emotion often stands in contrast to thought or considered judgment. To say that a person’s emotions have gotten the best of him is to say that he has lost control of himself. To this school of thought, it is impossible to say the same thing of God.
The next step is to recognize that emotions are often fleeting and imply that the person who has them is subject to changes in mood. We saw that Hosea’s rhetoric moves from anger to tenderness and back again. Even the most stable person cannot help but feel joy on some occasions and sadness on others. Jewish tradition recognizes that such changes are natural parts of the human condition. On Yom Kippur, we are supposed to afflict our souls with pangs of regret, while a few days later, on Sukkot, we are supposed to rejoice.
There is nothing unusual about changes of mood when we are talking about our own experience. But how, Aristotle asks, can a perfect being undergo this kind of change—or any change? If God is perfect and lacking in nothing, then any change would mean that God becomes better or worse as a result. Neither alternative makes sense. To be sure, the things around God change: People make decisions, new generations take the place of old, empires rise and fall. But as the eternal standard of right and wrong, God’s insight and judgment remain constant.
Maimonides picks up on this line of thinking by agreeing that emotions cloud a person’s judgment. He asks us to consider the example of a judge who must decide whether to grant leniency to a person found guilty of a crime.11 In his opinion, this sort of judgment should be made by looking at legal precedents and examining the moral character of the criminal, not because the judge is suddenly moved by feelings of anger or compassion. Anger or compassion can be aroused by a speaker employing charged rhetoric, whether or not she is sincere. To suppose that God can be moved by these same feelings, that an impassioned plea can sway divine judgment or that God agonizes over decisions, is to take human shortcomings and ascribe them to God.
Furthermore, in Maimonides’ view, the tendency to attribute human characteristics to God constitutes the essence of idolatry. If our ancestors sinned against the Second Commandment by worshiping figures made of wood and clay, then, in his opinion, we, their descendants, sin against it by thinking of God as a glorified human being who feels human emotions and faces human problems.
So certain is Maimonides of this point that he insists that everyone from children on up should be taught that God does not experience emotion and is not subject to change from one moment to the next.12 For him, ascribing emotions to God is tantamount to rejecting everything that Judaism stands for. Another way to see Maimonides’ point is to recognize that when we talk about emotions, we are talking about a plurality of feelings or responses that often follow each other in rapid succession: anger to joy to uncertainty to regret. Yet, Maimonides contends, Judaism teaches first and foremost that God is one. If so, how can God move from one state to another?
Maimonides has a simple explanation for those biblical passages that say that God is angry or jealous: “Know that if you consider the whole of the Torah and all the books of the prophets, you will find that the expressions, wrath, anger, and jealousy, are exclusively used with reference to idolatry.”13 In other words, whenever the Bible says that God is angry, it is not talking about divine psychology but trying to warn us about the evils of worshiping false gods.
If this is so, why doesn’t the Bible just say what it means? Maimonides has a simple answer to this as well: Unlike a philosophical work founded on abstract principles and intended for a highly sophisticated audience, the Bible tells a story intended for the widest possible audience. Though we would be right to demand literal and precise language in the former context, such a demand would be completely out of place in the latter. Suppose someone had told Shakespeare to drop his metaphors and say what he meant in simple terms. It doesn’t take a literary scholar to see that, under those conditions, his plays and poems would lose much of their appeal.
The same is true of the Bible, which often uses metaphors or parables to make its point. As a result, when reading the Bible, we have to ask ourselves whether certain descriptions should be taken literally or figuratively.14 For example, the declaration that God rescued Israel from Egyptian bondage with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm (Ps. 136:12) does not have to mean that God has appendages like a human being; in my view it is simply a metaphorical way of referring to God’s awesome power. Similarly, the attestation that Noah walked with God at Genesis 6:9 does not have to mean that they strolled down a garden path together; to me it means that because Noah was righteous, he found favor with God.
For Maimonides, the same is true of passages that say that God experiences emotion. When the Bible says that God is angry, it does not mean that God has become annoyed, but that when the people turn to other gods, their behavior is intolerable. When God says “I am an impassioned [or jealous] God” (Exod. 20:5), the meaning is not that God is envious of Baal or Asherah, but that if you worship these gods, you have gone terribly wrong and cannot turn to the true God for help.15 Roughly the same is true of mercy or compassion. According to Maimonides, these qualities are not intrinsic features of God that stand opposed to anger or jealousy but features of the world God has created.16 In other words, if you examine nature closely, you will find that God has given every species the means to protect itself, gather food, and reproduce. It is with reference to such acts of generosity that Judaism speaks of God’s mercy and compassion.
The upshot, says Maimonides, is that God does not swing from anger to joy or from vindictiveness to compassion. Nor does God have emotional outbursts similar to those of Zeus or Athena in Greek mythology. If we are to remain faithful to monotheism, Maimonides contends, we cannot take anthropomorphic descriptions of God at face value. Rather, we have to probe deeper and try to discern a message that is compatible with a God who cannot be seen and whose likeness cannot be captured in material form. Anything less, and we will not be worshiping God, but a figment of our imaginations.
As is often the case with disputes of this kind, the other side, in this case Heschel’s side, has arguments in its favor as well. The most obvious one is that Maimonides has to pay a high price for such an austere conception of God: a being whose existence is necessary, whose perfection is absolute, who is unaffected by anything that happens on earth, and who therefore is not subject to change. The main problem with this view is that it understands God as being entirely self-contained. This conflicts with a famous midrash (Sifre Deuteronomy, 346) in which God says: “If you are My witnesses, then I am God . . . but if you are not my witnesses, then, as it were (kivyachol), I am not God.” It is not that God will cease to exist if the people are not witnesses, but that God’s plan for the world will not be complete so long as humans and God are estranged. Thus Heschel’s point: God is moved and affected by what happens on earth, which implies that God can feel emotions like joy or sorrow.
Another problem with the philosophic conception of God has to do with love. Maimonides talks at length about our love for God in the Guide of the Perplexed, but he never talks about God’s love for us. This means that, for Maimonides, our love for God is never reciprocated. One does not have to insist on a literal reading of every passage to point out that God’s love for Israel is a central biblical theme. As we saw, despite God’s anger over social injustice in the prophecy of Amos, God still maintains a special relationship with Israel (“But, I will not wholly wipe out / The House of Jacob—declares the LORD.” [Amos 9:8]). Similarly, in the quotation that opens this chapter, Hosea proclaims that God will never forsake Ephraim: “My heart recoils within Me / My compassion grows warm and tender. / I will not execute my fierce anger. / I will not destroy Ephraim” (11:8).
Behind the defense of divine pathos lies a difference of opinion on how to understand perfection. According to the philosophic conception of God, divine perfection has little or nothing to do with personality. Personality is a distinctly human quality that cannot be ascribed to God without turning God into a glorified human being. By contrast, the prophetic view of God is that a being that does not exhibit some degree of personality—a being that cannot love or recoil when its love is spurned—is by that fact alone less than perfect. For a proponent of the prophetic view, those who deny personality in God are guilty of undermining divine perfection. However exalted God’s knowledge and power, if God cannot feel any degree of love or hate, then God would lack the most important perfection a being can have. In fact, if this were true, humans, who can experience love or hate, would actually be superior to God.
The final step in the defense of divine pathos is to point out how much of religious liturgy consists in praise of God. We praise God for creating the world, freeing us from Egyptian bondage, endowing us with the Torah, and calling us to divine service. When Moses asks to see God’s glory at Exodus 33, he is told that while no one can see God’s face and live, God will cause all of the divine goodness to pass before him and “proclaim . . . the name LORD, and the grace that I grant and the compassion that I show.” God then elaborates on this at Exodus 34, saying that God is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, forgiving of sin, but not willing to clear the guilty.17
This, it can be argued, is one of the most important passages in the Torah because it sets forth what one might call the features of the divine persona. In this way, it reinforces the idea that God is concerned with what happens on earth and does have emotional responses to it. It is this God who experiences the torment of seeing Israel turn toward strange gods. It is this God who is worthy of the highest praise—for absent these features, we would be left with a God for whom such praise would be meaningless.
How should we reconcile these viewpoints? I think we can make progress if we take a closer look at what we mean by anger, mercy, love, and compassion. Consider anger. There is the anger that comes with losing one’s temper, the kind that causes blood pressure to rise, the heart to race, and the mind to stop thinking clearly. This kind of anger often leads to violence or other forms of antisocial behavior. But there is also the kind of anger that comes with seeing someone take advantage of someone else. So far from compromising rational thought, the second kind of anger might be said to be paradigmatic of it, because it is a legitimate reaction to moral outrage. Any morally sensitive person should be disturbed when she sees someone taking advantage of someone else. It was this kind of disturbance that made Amos criticize the people of the Northern Kingdom. Rather than calling this kind of disturbance anger, then, let us call it righteous indignation. We might well conclude that a being who cannot experience such indignation would not qualify as a moral agent.
Similar considerations apply to mercy. There is the mercy one feels after listening to an impassioned speech and the mercy one feels after hearing a guilty person express remorse. Most people can give an impassioned speech or utter the words “I’m sorry.” By contrast, sincere remorse tells us something important about the character of the person who expresses it: The person has accepted responsibility for his actions and will try not to repeat them. As with anger, one response bypasses rational thought, while the other presupposes it.
Moving to love, there is a response based on physical attraction and a response based on affection and admiration. There is compassion based on family or neighborhood affiliation and compassion based on the fact that another person has suffered a misfortune. To be sure, these differences are not always easy to identify, and, in some cases, both reactions may be present. Nonetheless, in my view, we have to take these differences into consideration if we are to resolve the question before us.
Of course, God cannot feel emotion if that means losing control, being swayed by charged rhetoric, or experiencing physical attraction. Heschel comes close to admitting this when he says that the prophets did not conceive of God’s pathos “as a sort of fever of the mind which, disregarding the standards of justice, culminates in irrational and irresponsible action.”18 If so, then the pathos we are talking about is not the normal kind. It does not imply that God can be pathetic or that God undergoes changes of mood in the way humans do.19
The crux of divine pathos is the recognition that God is a moral agent who approves of some things and disapproves of others. There are people whose repentance is sincere and people whose repentance is phony, people who should be given a second chance in life and people for whom some form of punishment is indicated. If God is the ultimate judge of such things, then there are times when God’s judgment is to grant mercy and times when it is to insist on justice. This does not mean that God swings back and forth between them, but that in any given case, certain factors need to be taken into account before a final decision is reached.
According to this way of thinking, Amos was perfectly justified in saying that God abhors abuse of the poor. This does not mean that God gets angry in the way we do, but that in God’s judgment, abuse of the poor is wrong and must stop. Similarly, Hosea was justified in comparing God to a faithful spouse and Israel to an unfaithful one. This does not mean that God experiences a conflict between love and hate, but that however egregious Israel’s infidelity may be at any given point, God’s promise to redeem it remains intact.
In this way, we can side with Maimonides and the philosophic tradition when it says that God does not undergo change. Abuse of the poor was wrong in the past, is wrong now, and will remain wrong as long as people inhabit the earth. Likewise, the promise of redemption remains in place no matter how much we may disregard it. These judgments constitute the bedrock of the prophetic view of the world. But we can also side with Heschel when he says that God is concerned with what we do. None of this implies that God agonizes over judgments or suffers anguish. Rather, it implies that the qualities revealed to Moses in Exodus 34 are legitimate: God is gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in faithfulness, but will exact punishment when the person merits it.
Like Amos, Hosea was a prophet rather than a systematic thinker. From a moral standpoint, he was pointing out the harm done when a person—or, in this case, an entire nation—breaks a promise. As with Hosea and Gomer, or God and Israel, this is not just any promise, but a marriage vow, which is to say an expression of love. The sin involved is terrible—and thereby Hosea uses every rhetorical device at his disposal to make his point. That is why we hear God threatening to attack Israel with all the ferocity of a lion attacking its prey and to lay waste of all its vines and end all of its rejoicing. But in the end, mercy overrides justice—and that is why we also hear that God is anxious to take Israel back and looks forward to the day when Israel will reaffirm its marriage vow.
There is in all of this a fair measure of anthropomorphism. It is hard to imagine how Hosea could have captured the attention of his listeners or readers otherwise. If we were to compare the impact of his message to that of even the most articulate philosopher, who would doubt that the philosopher would suffer by comparison? Even so, systematic thought has a role to play. The comparison between Hosea’s anguish and God’s rests on an analogy, and like all analogies, it can take us only so far. We are not being asked to shed tears for God in the way we might for Hosea. Rather, we are being asked to take action. Consider Hosea 14:2:
Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God, . . .
Say to Him:
“Forgive all guilt
And accept what is good.”
If Israel will abandon its immoral ways, reaffirm the covenant, and accept what is good, all the anguish and threats of destruction will be forgotten. This is another way of saying that the prophets’ anthropomorphic descriptions of God were not aimed at advancing a theory to rival that of the great philosophers—people of whom Hosea and his contemporaries knew nothing—but to bring about a practical result: reconciliation between God and Israel. To the degree that Hosea’s exhortation hastens that result, it does exactly what its author intended.