Metaphor and masculinity in Hosea

Abstract

The metaphors in Hosea are rich and varied, relating to gendered and non gendered image fields, including female, male, parent-child, sickness and healing, hunting, animal, agriculture, plant, and natural phenomena. This study looks at the rhetorical use of metaphor in Hosea through the lens of masculinity studies, which provides a means to elucidate connections between the images and to analyze their cumulative rhetorical effect. In masculinity studies, as in feminist studies, gender is not assumed, but is analyzed as a social construct, especially with respect to the ways in which power and social structure relate to gender. To analyze the rhetoric of both the gender and non-gender imagery I use a model developed by the cognitive anthropologist James Fernandez. Culture can be conceived in terms of social space, in which people occupy different places. People use metaphors to position and to move one another within this space. Real social space is complex, determined by a large number of factors, but a simple, yet powerful, conception of social space can be defined by just three axes: activity, potency, and goodness. These axes reveal how the metaphors in Hosea rhetorically relate the audience, represented by Ephraim/Israel, and YHWH to a particular construction of masculinity. Masculinity as defined here includes the political, military, economic, and sexual connotations of potency, protection and provision for one’s dependents, and honor, comprising honesty, justice, and fulfillment of obligations. Hosea critiques the actions of the male audience, especially in the political sphere, by using images of judgment found in Assyrian treaty curses, many of which address issues of masculinity. Those who break treaties are subject to reduction in masculine status in relation to the suzerain. Hosea uses the imagery to reinforce YHWH’s masculinity and dominance, while undermining the masculinity of the audience. The rhetoric of the text attempts to bring the audience into an appropriately subordinate position with respect to YHWH and to shape their actions and attitudes accordingly. Although the imagery largely reinforces masculine norms, it contains some subversive elements, which begin to destabilize the norms of hegemonic masculinity.