Cookies
Cookies are required for this website to present certain basic features. Click to CONSENT or DECLINE their use.
Send Deletion Request
As a matter of policy, we do not share your information with anybody, and we will not send you marketing emails unless you give us consent. However, we do retain personal information, both to identify users and fulfill orders.
This form will submit a request to delete your personal information from your customer data, including name, address, phone, fax, email address and IP address. We will then anonymize your account, retaining only your order history. We also welcome your feedback if you would like to tell us more. Feel free to contact us with questions at SBLServices@sbl-site.org
This reading of Hosea explores the book from a feminist, psychoanalytical, and poetic perspective. What is God doing with a prostitute? How does the theme of prostitution relate to the abjection of the woman as the other and the fantasy of sexual ecstasy, precisely because she escapes patriarchal order? Where is the prophet situated in the dialectic of rage and desire that both seduces and condemns Israel?
The prophet’s voice is both masculine and feminine and poetically embodies the sensuality of wayward Israel. The ambiguity of voice is also that of the prophet’s role, which is both to nurture Israel, as on its exodus from Egypt, and to be the trap that destroys it. The problematic of voice and prophetic function is evident in the vivid dissection of Israel’s social institutions, whose disintegration is inversely related to the centrality of the discussion in the structure of the book and in the violent swings from despair to impossible hope.
The focus on immediate and uncontrollable entropy, manifest in extended tangled metaphors, that occupies the center of the book is framed in the outer chapters by intertextual references to Israel’s primordial vision and the romantic distantiation of the Song of Songs, in which the erotic and poetic contradictions of the book find their perhaps ironic resolution.
This is an extensive revision of the 1995 edition.
Francis Landy is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.
Click here for the hardback edition.
The SBL is the North American distributor for Sheffield Phoenix Press. Customers outside of North America can purchase this book directly from Sheffield Phoenix by clicking here.
© 2018, Society of Biblical Literature. All Rights Reserved.
