Sacrificial Feasts In Homer's 'Hosea'

Honor and glory are two important things for the heroes of Greece. Greek heroes live all their life to pursue honor and glory, and they always want the society to know their reputation. Honor and glory create many epic wars which take the lives of many people, and it exists at every stage. One of them is the fall of Troy, and it is “a thing… whose glory shall perish never” (Homer, Iliad 2.324). For the Greeks, they always appreciate the personal honor, family honor and the honor of the country, so they always try to do everything to achieve that goal. Even they want that after they die, the honor and the glory of them will persist forever. Honor and glory prove a hero, so those are the foundations for everything in the Iliad of Homer.

Homer is believed to have lived around 8th century B.C. Ironically, Homer’s life coincides with the earliest known manuscript of the Holy Bible, the Codex Amiatinus. Although Homer possibly lived during the rise of very significant biblical prophets such as Amos, Hosea, Zachariah, Isaiah and Jonah, Homer writes his epic poem, The Odyssey, in a strictly pagan method. Both The Odyssey and the Holy Bible praise the virtue of hospitality; however, it is evident that the Ancient Greeks and the Hebrews have contrasting motivations for hospitality. Therefore, it is no surprise that Odysseus’ voyage home was epically arduous.

Hosea may have been one with tender-hearted prophets toward Israel. He had many titles as a prophet, “the prophet of the broken heart;” “the weeping prophet;” and the prophet of “Israel’s zero hour,” because “the nation had sunk to

Reflecting back to the Bible during the time of captivity, the spiritual condition of the people had mixed results. Many of them rebuked God and idolized other gods to help them restore their lives. The Israelites also fell into spiritual slothfulness and disobeyed the laws of marriage and their loyalty to God. However, some rejoiced, “The sons of Israel who returned from exile and all those who had separated themselves from the impurity of the nations of the land to join them, to seek the Lord God of Israel, ate the Passover. And they observed the Feast of Unleavened Bread seven days with joy, for the Lord had caused them to rejoice, and had turned the heart of the king of Assyria toward them to encourage them in the work of the house of God, the God of Israel” (Ezra 6:21-22). Then many fell from God’s realm and didn’t trust what was in store for them so they did not want to leave the place they were once captive, so they became part of the community.

In Homer's book “The Odyssey” our epic hero Odysseus needs to travel back to ithaca after nearly 20 years away from home at the battle of troy. This is relatable to modern day life because we all have to usually experience a struggle to get to the ones we love, and usually we also have to sacrifice a lot to get what we think we deserve. So that is how I think “The Odyssey” and real life can relate.

In one of the most ancient forms of literature - 9th Century B.C. 850 – The sausage being one of the oldest forms of processed foods is already mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey „ As when a man besides a great fire has filled a sausage with fat and blood and turns it this way and that and is very eager to get it quickly roasted...” By - 1st Century A.D. - Gaius, the cook of Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar (54 -68) is credited with inventing the first wiener. It seemed that a roast pig had not been cleaned properly before cooking. Gaius slit its belly and out popped the intestines puffed up and hollow.

The problems arose when God asked Hosea to marry a prostitute because it symbolized an unfaithful wife compared to unfaithful people. The symbol of the marriage is negative and showed their current standing with God. There are four areas this can be reviewed. First, the Lord actually commanded Hosea to marry a prostitute, which he indeed did. Next, Gomer was not a prostitute physically, she was a Baal worshiper and , as such, was spirtually unfaithful. Whether she was physically unfaithful is not important, Third, Gomer was a virgin when Hosea married her, but she became unfaithful after marriage. Later,when Hosea looked backed upon the experience, he realized that she already had this tendancy when he married her. Finally, the whole story

Aeneas, known as the Trojan hero who fled Troy’s collapse and traveled to Italy with the Aeneads collective that he recruited to become the progenitors of the Romans, is known for his ambivalence and compassion as a character. Compared with the other Achillean heroes from epic poetry of the same era––typically known for being strong-willed, decisive and bold––the first thing that we come to learn about Aeneas is in fact his wish to die rather than bear his heroic responsibility: “Triply lucky, all you men / To whom death came before your fathers’ eyes / Below the wall at Troy! Bravest Danaan, / Diomedes, why could I not go down / When you had wounded me, and lost my life

Hosea married a woman with the characteristics that God had instructed him. In Hosea 1:2 God says, “Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord” So, Hosea married a woman, Gomer, who was a prostitute and who bore 2 sons, Jazreel and Lo-Ammi, and a daughter Lo-Ruhamah. Gods instruction of marriage for Hosea is suggestive of the fact that Gomer was a prostitute because God describes her as a “promiscuous” and an “adulterous” woman. Further indication that may suggest that Gomer was a prostitute in Hosea 3:3 where Hosea says, “…you must not be a prostitute...”

The example that I chose, that shows the Israelites unfaithfulness and how God responded is in Judges 2:10-16 NIV. In this chapter we can see a generation that grew up that did not know God or the things He had done to their ancestors (Judges 2:10,NIV). This new generation, "did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served Baal(v.11). In Exodus 34:14, God is described as a jealous God and in Judges 2:14, He is angered with their action of worshipping and following other gods. First we see God responding by giving them into the hands of their enemies, whom they were nolonger able to resist. In verse (14), we are seeing God repeating the same thing He did with the Israelites as His instruments to judge the people of

word of the Lord: thus says the Lord, Tomorrow about this time a measure of choice meal shall be sold for a shekel, and two measures of barley for a shekel, at the gate of Samaria’) that one ephad of barley was worth one shekel, thus making the total value of the silver and the barley thirty shekels. The price of a slave was thirty shekels (Exod 21:32 ‘if the ox gores a male or female slave, the owner shall pay to the slave-owner thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned’), it is possible to infer that Hosea paid thirty shekels to a person (possibly the paramour) to whom Gomer, in her ramshackle state, had sold herself.

God develops many special relationships with His people throughout the Old Testament. Another word to describe the relationship between God and his people is covenant. The word covenant goes into the details of the relationship. Within the five books of the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), Historical books, Poetical books, and the Prophet books, one may pick up on the relationships being developed between God and humanity. God has an unconditional love for His people; He is always faithful to them. On the other hand, humanity has more of a conditional relationship with God. Humanity continuously falls short, making the love seem “conditional,” but are given a choice to either follow God into a relationship and receive love and benefits of the covenant or not. “No child of the covenant who presents to Him a faithless and insincere heart shall be included in its blessings.” Going off the idea of love being unconditional and conditional, this paper focuses on how the Old Testament is about God, humanity and their relationship.

Hosea obeyed the will of God, went to court Gomer, and they were married. At first it was heaven on earth. Hosea loved this girl. You can't read this prophecy without seeing that. They must have been wonderfully happy together, and then they had their first child. It was a boy, as God had said. Bear in mind that it was the result of adultery on Gomer's part. Hosea's heart was filled to bursting, and he went to God for the name of this boy. "What should we name the boy?" To his surprise, God picked the name Jezreel. Now Jezreel means "cast-away" and was a name of shame in Israel. He represented the hypocrisy and adultery of Israel, and he was a foreshadowing of what was to come in divine discipline

Hosea began his preaching ministry by marrying Gomer. Gomer, the prostitute of Samaria and daughter of Diblaim, was representative of all that was wrong with Israel (Tenney Vol. 2). Many of the Israeli people did not solely follow Yahweh. Instead, many practiced polytheism and worshiped Yahweh when it was most convenient. Some scholars believe that Gomer was actually a temple prostitute that was a sex slave for the worship or Baal (Tenney Vol. 3). What scholars do agree on is that Hosea’s marriage to Gomer is symbolic of God’s relationship with His people. Despite the sin, specifically idolatry, in the lives of the people of Israel, God still loved them. In the same way that Hosea took back his wife, so God has taken back his people.

In this book, there is an ongoing story of adultery, fornication, and betrayal between God and Israel portrayed through the relationship between the prophet Hosea, and his wife Gomer. There are a few different views on the actual relationship between Hosea and Gomer, the first of which is that Gomer was already a harlot when Hosea took her as his wife. This one I would think is the most widely accepted, simply because it's the literal description of the book, and people tend to lean towards literal definitions more frequently than not, just look at how people of the world have torn apart the book of Revelation!