Abstract

Opinions regarding the exact dating of the activity of the prophet Hosea
go mainly in two directions. One group of scholars puts it in the middle of
the 8th century B.C., while the other prefers the next decades. Even though
the difference is not huge, it is nonetheless very important. Both groups
rely exclusively on the data given in the Book of Hosea and the knowledge
about the history of the Divided Monarchy as it is presented in the Hebrew
Bible. Until recently, another source of information was neglected, namely
the Neo-Assyrian texts and sources. Taking them seriously into consideration,
the solution given by, among others, Nadav Na’aman seems the most
plausible. The early prophecies of Hosea should be connected with Israel’s
disastrous defeat in its struggle with Assyria, which ended with the loss of
large parts of its territory and the first big wave of forced deportations to
Mesopotamia. The activity of the prophet Hosea should therefore be dated
at the very beginning of the last decade of the Northern Kingdom (731-723
B.C.), hence in the context of the reign of king Hoshea, son of Elah.
But quite differently to Na’aman, who suggests that the early scroll
containing the message of the prophet was written in the North, possibly
a short time after 720 B.C. when the Northern Kingdom collapsed, the
author of this article avers that the “first edition of the book” was written
in Mesopotamia at the very beginning of the process of consolidation of
the Assyrian Diaspora. It means that the prophet Hosea was one of the
Israelites who were deported to Mesopotamia by the Assyrians during the
first wave of deportations. More than a hundred years later, his message
was reinterpreted from a pro-Judaean (or pro-Jerusalem) perspective by the
deportees who were brought to Mesopotamia by the Babylonians. The final
elaboration of Hosea’s message, as we know it from the Book of Hosea, was
made in the Persian, or possibly even in the Hellenistic period.