Hosea

This essay begins by examining structure and cohesion in Hosea. It then reviews major themes and ideas in the book, including the marriage metaphor, the parent–child image, and the themes of the Exodus, wilderness, and “knowledge of God.” The essay concludes with a look at three contested issues: redaction in Hosea, the book as a product of Persian Yehud, and the Baal cult as an object of the prophet’s criticism. Challenging common views that the book addresses religious apostasy or syncretism, it suggests that some of Hosea’s criticisms of the cult may be essentially denunciations of foreign alliances which were ratified by ritual measures.

Playing favourites: Israel and Judah in the marriage metaphor of Jeremiah 3

The depiction of Yhwh’s marriage to Rebellious Israel and Treacherous Judah in Jeremiah 3 has resisted interpretation in terms that cohere with the text’s surroundings or our wider historical and theological understanding of the entities named by the text. Though commentators consistently identify the sisters as the northern and southern kingdoms, they are obliged to engage in interpretive gymnastics to explain the text’s preference for Israel, the northern kingdom. This article examines recent interpretations and their underlying assumptions, then reviews immediate and wider evidence for the entities called Israel and Judah, en route to a new proposal for their identification and significance in this passage. It proposes that the apparent incoherence of the allegory and its relationship with the surrounding material may be resolved by the recognition that Israel is meant to signify the community exiled to Babylonia, while Judah represents those left behind in the land.

Feminism and Solidarity on the Left: Rethinking the Unhappy Marriage Metaphor

In the context of efforts to revive and reconfigure the left, fraught solidarity relations between feminism and other left forces are again under the political spotlight. This article revisits the widespread use of the ‘unhappy marriage’ metaphor to characterise these relations, given that metaphors play a significant role in structuring political discourse and action. We argue that the metaphor has been used in uncritical and limiting ways, and turn to feminist reconfigurations of the institutions of marriage to develop a more expansive, reflexive conceptual lens. We then apply this lens to three case studies of left organising in Scotland around the time of the 2012–2014 Scottish independence referendum, showing that the expanded marriage metaphor captures a more complex story of solidarity relations. Nonetheless, aspects of the marriage metaphor remain irredeemable, and we end with a call for the continued development of alternative frameworks that imagine political solidarity differently.

The Calvinist Couplet

The article provides the first modern analysis of one of the bestselling transatlantic evangelical poems of the eighteenth century, the Scottish minister Ralph Erskine’s Gospel Sonnets. The article argues that the importance of the marriage metaphor and rhyme in the poem provided a specific meaning to the form of the couplet in eighteenth-century transatlantic evangelicalism—a form often associated with an outdated understanding of a monolithic enlightenment. In the case of Erskine, it produced the Calvinist couplet. What the author terms “espousal poetics” designates the much larger presence and purpose of the marriage metaphor in the emerging revivalist community: to fuse the paradoxes of a sound Calvinist theology with poetics.

Feminist Interpretation of the Prophets

The chapter explores four issues pertinent to feminist interpretation of the prophets: the gender-biased focus on male prophets, the pornoprophetics debate, the female embodiment of the Divine in prophetic speech, and a re-evaluation of religious activities of women that were misnamed as sacred prostitution and family cult. In its assessment of the debate on the marriage metaphor in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea, it argues for a double reading that carves out the metaphor’s original socio-historical context and its possibly detrimental impact on modern readers. The feminist interpretations presented are deconstructive with regard to gender hierarchy in the texts and their androcentric reading, as well as constructive with regard to female prophetic and cultic activity.