Hosea And Ezekiel Analysis

Prophets, inspired teachers or proclaimers of the will of God, hold a very special place through out religions and their history. Although there is so much to tell of that on male prophets, little can be said on female prophets. Taking this information even farther, females when describe in prophetic literature is very lack luster. Specifically in Hosea and Ezekiel, women are shown bound to the covenant between Israel and God similar to that of a marriage between a husband and a wife.
As explained in Prophecy and the Prophets in Ancient Israel: Female Prophets in the Ancient Near East, “a ‘female prophet’ is a woman who either (a) transmits a deity’s message, which had not been requested by the addressee or any other human… or (b) is referred
First, the metaphor of Jerusalem as a woman provides a powerful means for Ezekiel to explore his concern with the ritual pollution of the temple. If the city is a woman, then the temple is a symbolic vagina and womb, precisely those places most violated by the woman’s sexual infidelity. Second, the symbolic defilement of Jerusalem’s “womb” implies a shaming of her “husband.” For this reason the marriage metaphor is an apt vehicle for describing the loss of honor to which Jerusalem’s infidelity subjected Yahweh. The depiction of Yahweh expunging his own shame by punishing (including shaming) the unfaithful Jerusalem thus serves to reinterpret the destruction of the city as a positive event, one that reestablished the honor and potency of Yahweh. This metaphoric refurbishment of Yahweh’s honor not only would have allowed Ezekiel’s readers to avoid the shame of acknowledging their god’s humiliation and defeat, but also would have allowed male Judeans to expunge their own shame by transferring it to the personified women, Jerusalem. A final aspect of Ezekiel’s use of the marriage metaphor, one closely, related to the metaphor’s function as a means of expunging Yahweh’s shame, it its use to establish symbolic control over the female. (Galambush,