Lord of the Storm and Oracular Decisions: Competing Construals of Storm God Imagery in Hosea 6:1–6

Abstract

The poetry of Hosea employs and engages the religious imagery from the Baʿlu cult in its construal of Israel’s deity, YHWH, as a storm god. The present article focuses on the varied uses of storm god imagery in Hos 6:1–6 and offers a new explanation for the abstruse imagery of verse 5 and for the polemical dynamics at play within 6:1–6. In particular, it treats the final colon of Hos 6:5, which has defied explanation by interpreters: wmšpṭy kʾwr yṣʾ.

Metaphor Research and the Hebrew Bible

“…Elsewhere, the similarities between serpentine and unborn child imagery in Psalm 58 are shown to draw analogically on Mesopotamian religio-magical texts to conceptualize the wicked (Miglio 2015). Lancaster and Miglio (2020) examine how the contrasting metaphorical portraits of Yhwh in Hos. 6.1-6 all draw upon Mesopotamian storm god imagery, demonstrating two competing ideologies.…”

“…Sometimes scholars focus on specific divine metaphors, such as that of planter (Pantoja 2017) or craftsman (Morrison 2017). There are also numerous studies, some of which have already been mentioned, which attend to divine metaphors within a limited corpus (e.g., Cruz 2016; Zimran 2018; Lancaster 2020; Lancaster and Miglio 2020).…”