However it provides: ‘Howbeit each kingdom made gods in their personal, and placed them into the homes of the excessive locations which the Samaritans had made,’ and it then paints a apprehensive photograph of the harassed paganism into which the northern nation collapsed. the way the north had worshipped Yahweh had regularly been suspect in Judah. This doubt approximately northern orthodoxy mirrored the department of the Israelites which happened on the time of the access into Egypt, and which used to be by no means relatively healed after the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan. within the eyes of Jerusalem and its clergymen, the northerners had consistently mingled with the pagans. the autumn and dispersal of the northern country, and the intermarriage of the ISRAELITES / seventy one remnant with extraterrestrial beings, used to be used to disclaim the Samaritans their unique Israelite historical past. From this element onwards, their declare to join the selected humans, and to inhabit the Promised Land in complete righteousness of ownership, was once by no means back stated by way of the Jews. but the north left a legacy to the south, which used to be to supply the germ of the recent part of the faith of Yahweh, flowering within the south over the last days of outdated Jerusalem. whilst Samaria fell, a few literate refugees escaped the deportations and got here south, the place they have been acquired and resettled in Jerusalem. one in all them introduced with him the writings of an imprecise prophet referred to as Hosea, which have been then positioned into form through a southern hand. 204 Hosea have been prophesying and writing at the eve of the destruction of the northern country. He was once the 1st Israelite to understand truly that army and political failure was once an inevitable punishment visited at the selected humans by way of God as a result of their paganism and ethical failings. In a brilliantly written and infrequently poetic textual content, he anticipated the autumn of Samaria. God could holiday in items their idols: ‘For they've got sown the wind, and so they shall attain the whirlwind. ’ And to all of the sinful worshippers of Yahweh he warns: ‘Ye have ploughed wickedness, ye have reaped iniquity. ’205 Hosea is a mysterious determine, and in many ways his writing is likely one of the so much impenetrable within the complete Bible. His tone is usually darkish and pessimistic. He had the ability, which used to be to develop into attribute of such a lot of Jewish writers, to show the experience of getting suffered, but to have retained an inextinguishable spark of wish. He can have been a reformed drinker and womanizer. He laments: ‘Whoredom and wine and new wine remove the guts. ’206 Sexuality particularly arouses his extreme loathing. He says that God instructed him to marry the whore Gomer, and feature kids by way of her—Gomer status either for the ritual prostitutes of the pagan temples and for Israel herself, who left her actual husband, Yahweh, to fornicate with Baal. He denounces the entire associations of the north: certainly he thinks the north shouldn't ever have existed in any respect, because Israel and Judah have been safely one. Political strategies have been dead; Jehu’s purge was once depraved. The prepared priesthood used to be a scandal: ‘as troops of robbers look ahead to a guy, so the corporate of clergymen homicide within the approach via consent: for they dedicate lewdness’.