This paper investigates the material and socio-historical conditions that give rise to the notorious marriage metaphor for the God-Israel relationship, a metaphor capturing the imaginations of Hosea's male audience through a dramatic rhetoric of pain and pleasure. The exegetical method used is ideological criticismdescribed in my chapter in Judges and Method 1 -which performs two interrelated investigations. The extrinsic analysis will highlight the native tributary mode of production in eighth-century Israel and its effect on gender relations, the pluralistic cult, and emergent monolatry with its marginalization of women's popular religion. The intrinsic analysis will underscore the ideological dynamics of the marriage metaphor for God's covenant, the feminization of the ruling hierarchy, and its consequences for the symbolization of women as evil in Hosea.Before turning to the extrinsic analysis, I address first the difficult problems in dating the book of Hosea. The authorship of the book of Hosea is a complex matter that is still disputed. Many scholars insist that most of the book originated with the prophet Hosea himself. 2 Others think that redactional activity was more extensive than previously thought. 3 For the purposes of this article, I will presume the former opinion, that bulk of the oracles
Using Exodus 2 and other references to wet nurses in the Hebrew Bible as a springboard, this article examines the socio-historical conditions of free and enslaved wet nurses in antiquity through a cross-cultural investigation of Graeco-Roman and rabbinic legal and cultural texts. It then analyzes Exodus 2as an example of resistance literature during the Persian period to support anti-colonial resistance within the Jewish community in Yehud against Persian control. The wet nurse represents the resistance of the enslaved class to oppression and genocide.
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