God’s Bride

Investigating chosenness in the book of Genesis, we see a relatively coherent picture take shape. I wouldn’t go so far as to say, however, that we find a fully articulated doctrine of the election. For example, some verses present the election as conditional on the behavior of Abraham and his descendants,[1] while others present it as eternal and unconditional.[2] Various questions remain. How exactly is the election supposed to achieve its ends? If God is perfect, why would He need, or in any way desire, an adversarial relationship with a people called upon to protest His proclamations?[3]

Putting gaps, conflicts, and questions aside, we did see the outline of something beginning to make some sense. According to this emerging theory, Abraham wasn’t chosen because he was uniquely worthy, but because somebody had to be chosen. The idea was to create, from his progeny, a nation that would bring blessing to the whole world. It would do so, perhaps in mystical ways that transcend our human understanding, but also – and most importantly – by setting the world an ethical example. Its example would be rooted in the values of tzedek and mishpat (however exactly those words should be translated), and by existing as a nation like no other. Unlike other nations, it would shun the notions of legacy and dynasty, dedicating its glory exclusively to God. It would qualify its relationship with its “homeland,” relating to it as a holy land. This nation would be destined to live a somehow liminal existence, enabling it to serve as a social critic against the conventions of any given age, and as a constructive adversary even to God.[4]

If this picture accounted for all the Biblical data, we could then get to work, filling in the gaps, addressing the tricky questions, and uncovering, and hopefully finding ways to make sense of, its various presuppositions. But we haven’t accounted for all of the data. So far, we’ve only looked at the book of Genesis. Moving into subsequent books, we discover numerous competing pictures of chosenness. Conflict between these various Biblical presentations will be a major source of the philosophical difficulties lying in store for us, downstream. In this lesson, and over the next few weeks, we will continue our exploration of chosenness in the Bible, not book by book, but thematically.

A Love Affair with a People

Moses declares:

Remember the days of old,

Consider the years of ages past;

Ask your parent, who will inform you,

Your elders, who will tell you:

When the Most High gave nations their homes

And set the divisions of humanity,

[God] fixed the boundaries of peoples

In relation to Israel’s numbers.

For the Lord’s portion is this people;

Jacob, God’s own allotment.

[God] found them in a desert region,

In an empty howling waste.

[God] engirded them, watched over them,

Guarded them as the pupil of God’s eye.[5]

When were the Jews elected? In Genesis 12, the election occurs in the days of Abraham, in Charan. These verses, by contrast, tell a different story. God found us, apparently, in the desert. Not as one prototypical couple – Abraham and Sarah – but as a fully formed people. A people wandering without a land, and without a God; discovered by a God who had no people. He embraced them as the pupil of His eye.

At the same time, we’re told that when God divided the nations and apportioned them their lands, He somehow did this with the nation of Israel, and the size of its population, in mind. Thus, on the one hand, it looks as if the election was planned from the beginning, or at least from when the “Most High gave nations their homes”; yet, on the other hand, it looks as if the election occurred almost by chance. God happened upon a Godless people, lost in the wilderness (presumably after the Exodus. When else did the Israelites wonder in the wilderness?), and took pity on them, making them His “portion” – His personal “allotment.”

What does it mean to be a personal allotment? God allots a land to every nation, before taking the nation of Israel as His own. Are we supposed to be to God like a land is to a nation? This perhaps gives more salience to the idea that, when we built the Tabernacle in the wilderness, we did so in order that God would dwell in our midst.[6] A literal reading of Exodus 25:8 implies that God’s plan is to dwell within the Jewish people themselves, once the Tabernacle is built – much like a nation dwells within a land.[7] This is a metaphor to which we will return in subsequent lessons.

Earlier in the book of Deuteronomy, we find one of the Bible’s most explicit descriptions of the motivation behind the election. Moses tells us:

For you are a people consecrated to the Lord your God: of all peoples on earth, the Lord your God chose you to be His treasured people. It is not because you are the most numerous of peoples that the Lord set His heart on you and chose you – indeed, you are the smallest of peoples; but it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath He made to your fathers that the Lord freed you with a mighty hand and rescued you from the house of bondage, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt.[8]

These verses refer to God’s promises to Abraham, way back in the book of Genesis. But here, the chosenness of the people is not presented as a result of anything that Abraham, or the other forefathers and foremothers, did, nor because God had some plan in mind. They are not chosen to be a light unto the nations, an example, or a blessing. They are chosen because of an oath that God made to their forefathers. But even that is presented as a secondary reason. The primary reason is that God simply fell in love with them! Indeed, these verses use two words for God’s love, both ahava and cheshek, the second being associated with an erotic love.

When did God fall in love with Israel? Was it in the days of the forefathers, such that His love was the cause of the oath that He swore? Was it later? Is there a distinction between His love for the individual forefathers and mothers in the book of Genesis, and His love for the people as a whole? Whatever the answers to these questions, the verses here (i.e., Deuteronomy 7:6-8) seem clear on one point: God chooses us primarily because He loves us.

Speaking about these verses, Jon Levenson writes:

The exodus from Egypt, the most obvious and reiterated demonstration that the LORD has chosen Israel, was owing neither to an accumulation of merit on Israel’s part nor to some ethical message that the LORD wanted to teach the world. It was not even owing to the best-known message of modern times – that slavery is immoral… Instead, here the exodus is seen as owing to the LORD’s covenantal oath to the patriarchs.[9]

Those covenantal oaths carried with them “all kinds of moral and theological expectations”[10] – as we discovered in our exploration of chosenness in the book of Genesis – but the motivation for God’s having chosen the people of Israel, according to Moses in Deuteronomy, “lies in his mysterious act of passion for her.”[11] The covenant at Sinai, in this way of seeing things, is transformed into a marriage.

Does God fall in love with other peoples too, and marry them as well? The question is particularly pertinent, within the world of this metaphor, when we recognize that marriage in ancient Israel was polygamous. But take note of two considerations. First, polygamy is rarely, if ever, presented by the Bible in a positive light. Sarah’s idea that Abraham should take a concubine led to domestic conflict. Isaac only had one wife. Jacob’s polygamy (itself a result of Laban’s duplicity) was the primary source of the rivalry between the tribes of Israel. Etc. Second, polygamy doesn’t tend to be a live option for a man who is passionately in love with his wife. To the extent that God is presented as passionately in love with Israel, the notion that He might have “other wives” is hard to maintain, without doing violence to the metaphor.[12]

The Election as an Eternal Marriage

God’s love affair with Israel is only hinted at in Deuteronomy. The image is made more vivid in later books. God’s erotic love for Israel is, for example, the central motif behind Song of Songs. The notion that God chose Israel, in His passion for them, to be His wife, is developed further by Jeremiah[13] and extensively by Hosea.[14] In those books, the metaphor of Israel as God’s bride takes on various dark tones. When Israel chases after other gods, she can be described as an unfaithfulwife. In fact, in Jewish law, if a woman has an extra-marital affair, she becomes forbidden to her husband. They must divorce. She may never remarry her ex-husband or marry the paramour with whom she was unfaithful.[15] This clearly raises the concern that the election – modelled upon a marriage – is highly contingent. If the Jewish people is unfaithful, then she will forever lose her status as the elect. Moreover, if a man divorces his wife, the pair can only remarry if, in the interim, the woman didn’t have another husband.[16] Thus we read in the book of Jeremiah:

To say as follows:[17] If a man divorces his wife, and she leaves him and gets married to another man, can he ever go back to her? Would not such a land be defiled? Now you have whored with many lovers: can you return to Me? – says GOD.^[18]

It lies beyond the scope of this study to address the ethical concerns that could be raised about these laws of marriage. They seem to treat a wife as a private possession, “defiled” by the “use” of others. They restrict her sexual freedom without restricting the parallel freedom of her husband, who is at least theoretically allowed to marry multiple women. These questions deserve attention, but not here. What’s relevant to our project is the disturbing implication that God has announced the election to have been irretrievably terminated.[19] So much for the eternal covenant! God goes on to say that He has, indeed, divorced the Kingdom of Israel,[20] and that the unfaithful Kingdom of Judah was even worse.[21] More than merely conditional, the election seems to be entirely over.

But then Jeremiah continues to speak – first addressing Israel in the North, but then making it clear, in verse 18, that he’s discussing a process that will reunify the “House of Judah” and the “House of Israel.” He says:

Turn back, O Rebel Israel – declares God. I will not look on you in anger, for I am compassionate – declares God; I do not bear a grudge for all time. Only recognize your sin; for you have transgressed against the eternal your God and scattered your favors among strangers under every leafy tree, and you have not heeded Me – declares God. Turn back, rebellious children – declares God. Since I have espoused you, I will take you, one from a town and two from a clan, and bring you to Zion.[22]

What’s going on? Are we God’s bride, such that when we are unfaithful, or when He divorces us – as any husband apparently should, when betrayed – we are cast out forever? No! Instead, Jeremiah switches to a different metaphor. We are God’s children. Just as a loving father always leaves a door open for even the most rebellious of children to return, so too, God awaits our return. The door is always open. And though we may be decimated in the exile, while God awaits our return – such that even if only one person from a town, and two from a clan, will remain – those who do remain, and do return, will be welcomed home, brought back into the embrace of the God who first elected them.

There are two lessons we can draw from this chapter. First, Biblical metaphors depicting the relationship between Israel and God are limited. That’s why the Bible reaches for multiple metaphors. Something about God’s passion for Israel, and the commitments that they make to each other, is best described by the metaphor of marriage. Moreover, our backsliding, within this metaphor, is powerfully recast as marital infidelity. That image beautifully captures something of the moral severity of our unfaithfulness to God. But unlike the legal institution of marriage between two human beings, the relationship between God and Israel can never be wholly severed. There may be times when one party – namely, the people of Israel – will be derelict in fulfilling the role they have been called upon to play. But there is always a route back. The calling is eternal, even when we fail to live up to it. To capture that element of the relationship, the metaphor of marriage is inapt. Another metaphor, in which God is Israel’s father, and Israel is His firstborn,[23] then moves to center-stage.

Secondly, we learn from this chapter of Jeremiah that, if we insist on sticking with the metaphor of marriage, then the marriage between God and Israel is governed by a different law and logic than the marriage between humans. Comparing us to an unfaithful wife, the chapter begins with a rhetorical question, “Can the Jews return to God?” But, in contrast to a human marriage, the resounding answer of the chapter is, “yes, they can!”[24]

Indeed, there are passages of the Bible that proceed along these lines: they compare God to a husband, and Israel to an unfaithful wife, but describe God’s passion as so overwhelming that He takes her back anyway. Addressing Israel as His wife, God says, “For a little while I forsook you, but with vast love I will bring you back.”[25] We can be estranged from our Heavenly Husband, even to the extent that He can describe us (or some of us), sometimes, as divorced from Him.^[26] And yet, we are always called upon, to return to Him, such that we can never really say the relationship was wholly severed.[27] That we can in some sense be divorced, and in some other sense never be divorced, explains how Jeremiah can say what he said, while Isaiah can continue to ask, with incredulity, “Where is the bill of divorce of your mother whom I dismissed?”[28] Jeremiah claims that the divorce has already occurred; Isaiah implies that it never did. They’re both right. The relationship can be severed, but never irreparably so.

Revocation of the election is therefore sometimes raised as a threat, but is never presented as a permanent reality, as the Christian scholar of the Hebrew Bible, Horst Dietrich Preuss, notes:

This is shown by statements that expressly deny the thought of a possible rejection of the nation (Jer. 31:37; 33:19-22; cf. 2 Kings 21:14 with 1 Sam. 12:22). And even where the category of curse must become the leading theme of the exilic explanation of history (Deut. 28:15ff.), other intonations are heard on its periphery, including, for example, those of the possibility of a return (Deut. 30: Iff.; cf. Lam. 5:21) and new obedience. The idea of rejection is not frequently encountered in the Old Testament, and it is even on occasion emphatically denied.[29] However, the idea is still brought into consideration as a possibility. It already appears in Hosea as a threat issued on the basis of an offense (Hos. 4:6; and 9:17). And it is found as a question in Lam. 5:22 (cf. Jer. 14:19), as Lamentations on the whole brings into the expression of prayer the problems of the exile, the guilt of Israel/Judah, the justified punishment of [the Lord], but also the hope in a new beginning (cf., e.g., Lam. 2:20ff.; 5:Iff.).[30]

Jewish law could be thought to encode this insight in how it treats apostates. On the one hand, they are estranged from the community and treated, in many ways, as if they were not Jewish at all. For instance, a male apostate couldn’t be counted in a minyan (a prayer quorum). It’s as if their personal election has been revoked. But unlike gentiles, a Jewish apostate is under an obligation to return to a life of Jewish observance. A Jew can be estranged from her identity, but never wholly removed from it. Likewise, the people of Israel can be estranged from God and from the romantic union that should bind them, but that union is never wholly removed – at least in the sense that there exists an ongoing invitation to return.[31]

A Liminal Bride

Given what we’ve seen thus far, the Biblical story of God falling in love with, and marrying, the Jewish people might help us to resolve some of the tension we found in the book of Genesis. Is the election conditional or unconditional? Looked at through the lens of Jeremiah – as a somewhat unorthodox marriage – we can say that it’s conditional in one sense, and unconditional in another. The election of the Jewish people always exists as a calling. That is to say, they are always called upon to act as only the elect must act. But when they fail to live up to that calling, there’s a sense in which the election is frozen, or in abeyance.

There’s another sense in which the metaphor of Israel as God’s wife meshes with what we saw in the book of Genesis. We discovered that a major element of Israel’s election is bound up with her liminality. It is because she is somehow removed from the other nations of the world that she can function as a counter-cultural social critic. That message comes to the fore in paradoxical ways in the book of Hosea.

The first time God speaks to Hosea, He tells him to marry a prostitute.[32] He isn’t merely to marry her. He is commanded to fall in love.[33] More specifically still, God wants Hosea to fall in love with a prostitute with two qualities. First, she needs to be a woman with a history of adultery. Second, there must be men on the scene, currently, who love her.[34] Before Hosea can proceed with being a prophet, he has to fall in love with a woman like that.

Israel has been an unfaithful wife to God. To use a metaphor that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel took too literally for the philosophical taste of some, Hosea can only function as a prophet if he is able to feel God’s pain.[35] God has chosen a people and freed them from slavery. He’s fallen in love with them, but they don’t love Him back; at least, not exclusively. At least, not with devotion. To be God’s prophet, Hosea must know what that feels like. Of course, the analogy isn’t perfect. Though there are other men who love Hosea’s wife, there are no other gods competing for Israel’s attention. We are monotheists, after all! But, even if there are no other actual gods, there are at least many fake gods that might seem attractive to Israel, and whose priests might be actively seeking Jewish converts.

A question not often asked, but clearly made salient by Hosea, is this: Was Israel virtuous when God first fell in love with her, or was she already morally compromised? God doesn’t tell Hosea to fall for a virtuous woman. He could have done that, and then somehow tempted Hosea’s virtuous wife into infidelity in order to make the point to the prophet. Admittedly, that wouldn’t be ethical. But how ethical was it of God to place Hosea in this situation in the first place? So troubling is the book that some commentators were convinced that the central story was only an allegory.[36] God wouldn’t really command a person to fall in love with a woman in this situation. So, let’s relate to the story, for the sake of argument, as pure allegory. Then we can ask why, in the allegory, isn’t the prophet commanded to fall in love with a virtuous woman, who will later go astray? Alternatively, God could merely cause Hosea to think that she had gone astray. That would still allow Hosea some insight into how God feels when Israel acts unfaithfully.

God doesn’t do that in the book of Hosea, I would suggest, because it isn’t what happened between God and Israel. Hosea must know from the outset what he’s getting himself into. He needs to know what sort of woman Gomer (his wife-to-be) is, and he has to fall for her – warts and all. The logic of the allegory implies that God knew exactly what type of people Israel was before He fell for them. A perplexing and even profane question emerges. Why does God fall in love with a prostitute in the first place?

The best answer I can muster, in response to our frankly bizarre question, is that there’s something liminal about a prostitute. Gomer is not the only Biblical prostitute; perhaps we can learn something about what makes Gomer, or the liminal person, attractive to God, by comparing her to Rahav – also a prostitute, and a character whose liminality comes across clearly.

Rahav lives in the walls of the city – a physical metaphor for her social liminality.[37] The walls of a city are obviously the most vulnerable place to be. They are built as a defense against attackers, so if you live inside those walls, you’re the first to be attacked. When Joshua sends spies to scout out the city of Jericho, they go to Rahav’s house – to the brothel.[38] It’s a clever place to go. The prostitute knows the secrets of every section of society. The walls have heard it all. And if you find a spy in a brothel, you can’t tell anyone – not without admitting that you’ve also been to the brothel.

The people of Jericho had heard that the Israelites were coming. They may have been afraid, but they had no plan to surrender, or to worship the God of Israel.[39] Instead, they were prepared to fight. All except for Rahav. Rahav the prostitute. By her actions, in helping the spies, she showed that she was different from the people of her town. And thus, when the walls came tumbling down, her house only – her brothel – remained.[40]

Living on the margins of society means that a person is exposed to specific sorts of temptations, from which other people are protected. Living on the margins of society, a person is subjected to the hatred and disdain of others. And yet, living on the margins of society is also sometimes the very cause of a person achieving a particularly penetrating insight, and a sense of justice. Perhaps Rahav’s position on the margins of society is what allowed her to see what everybody else in Jericho was somehow failing to see; that God was with the children of Israel and it would be wrong to fight them. This liminality, that causes a person to live in the face of all sorts of temptations, is also what gives a person a distinctive perspective from which to see what others fail to see. Perhaps the same was true of Gomer.

The liminality of the chosen, as presented in the book of Hosea, is both a liability and the very thing that initially makes the chosen attractive to God. The worrying implication, of course, is that if Jews were ever to lose their liminality, they would lose something of that which attracted God to them in the first place. To use the language of the last lesson, if we lean too heavily into the resident aspect of our resident-alienation, we risk becoming alienated from God Himself.

Kohelet claims that “God seeks [or perhaps even chooses] the pursued.”[41] The word “pursued,” in this context, means to be hounded, victimized, and/or chased by someone who intends to harm you. People don’t tend to be liminal by choice (though it’s not impossible). People tend to be liminal because they have been marginalized, disenfranchised, and “pursued” by others. Rav Huna elaborated, in the name of Rav Yosef:

God always chooses the pursued. You find that when a righteous person pursues a righteous person, God chooses the pursued. When a wicked person pursues a righteous person, God chooses the pursued. When a wicked person pursues a wicked person, God chooses the pursued. Even when a righteous person pursues a wicked person, God nevertheless chooses the pursued. [42]

The same Midrash then brings various examples: Noah was pursued by his generation, Abraham by Nimrod, Isaac by the Philistines, Jacob by Esau, Joseph by his brothers, Moses by Pharaoh, David by Saul, and Saul by the Philistines. In each case, the Bible explicitly describes the person who was pursued as “chosen,” or in some other way selected by God.[43] This list of examples concludes with the people of Israel themselves: “Israel is pursued by the nations of the world, and the Holy one Blessed be He, chose Israel, as it says, ‘And He chose you to be a treasured people’ (Deuteronomy 14:2).”[44]

But what happens if we’re no longer pursued? What happens when we become a strong nation in our own land, able to pursue our enemies and to defend ourselves? What happens if we manage to remove the shackles of liminality that others had imposed upon us? Will God no longer love us (God forbid)? And aren’t we commanded to pursue those who would seek to do us harm?[45] Does God turn on us, as soon as we fulfill that command and chase our pursuers? Surely not. Tentatively, I would suggest that it suffices if we retain some element of the sensibility of the liminal, or the pursued, even in safety and security. If we strive to be resident-aliens, without giving up on either side of that dichotomy, we can maintain what it is that God first fell in love with.

New Difficulties

The liminality of God’s bride meshes with the liminality of the chosen in the book of Genesis, who struggle with God and with man and who stand on one side of the river when the whole world stands on the other side.[46] The unconditional calling of the marriage – which is always present, but not always lived up to – helps resolve some of the tension found in the book of Genesis. But in almost every other respect, the image of God’s falling in love with and marrying Israel stands in tension with the story of the election presented in the book of Genesis.

Where Genesis suggests that God chose the Jewish people to be a blessing to others, the marriage model implies that God chose the Jewish people because He fell in love with them. What’s more, we stipulated in lesson 1 that we would relate to God in this series as completely perfect and wholly just. But if God fell in love with just one people, and made them His bride for all eternity, then it would seem as if God is guilty of favoritism. Indeed, Amos says that the Jews are the only people that God has known – using the word for knowledge that often implies erotic intimacy.[47] God’s relationship with Israel is exclusive. Is that fair? Would a perfectly just God have favorites?

What about the narrative frame of the Bible? That frame implies that, whatever role God bestows upon the people of Israel, is bestowed because of His overriding concern for each and every human being. If God fell passionately in love with us, and not with others, how can we avoid the Jewish supremacism against which the narrative frame of the Bible seems to protest?

At this juncture, our job is to accumulate Biblical data. It is important, as we do so, to be aware of the philosophical problems that the data is generating – problems to which we must return. But in the meantime, there’s more data to mine.

[1] For example, Genesis 18:19.

[2] For example, Genesis 17:7.

[3] God celebrates the fact that Jacob wrestles with God, and the people of Israel are named in honor of this character trait; Genesis 32:29.

[4] This paragraph summarizes what we learned in lessons 7 and 8.

[5] Deuteronomy 32:7-10.

[6] Exodus 25:8 – see also Exodus 29:45.

[7] I owe this insight to Quincey Barret.

[8] Deuteronomy 7:6-8.

[9] Jon Levenson, “Miscategorizing Chosenness,” in Shelley L. Birdsong and Serge Frolov (eds.), Partners with God: Theological and Critical Readings of the Bible in Honor of Marvin A. Sweeney (Claremont: Claremont Press, 2017), pp. 327-343, 335-336.

[10] Ibid., p.336.

[11] Ibid.

[12] I will cite Amos 3:2 in the final paragraph of this lesson. That verse indicates that God’s erotic relationship with the Jewish people is, indeed, exclusive.

[13] Jeremiah Chapter 3.

[14] Throughout the entire book of Hosea.

[15] The exact exegesis by which these prohibitions are derived from the book of Numbers (Chapter 5) is a matter of debate in the Mishna, Tractate Sota 5:1.

[16] Deuteronomy 24:1-4.

[17] The verse is ambiguous – is God speaking these words, or is the question one that people were asking, in the times of Jeremiah?

[18] Jeremiah 3:1. Another way to parse this verse would end, “Now you have whored with many lovers. [But, nevertheless] “Return to me!” says God.” That way of parsing the verse is consonant with what we’ll eventually gather from this chapter of Jeremiah. Consequently, either reading works just as well for our purposes.

[19] At least on the provisional parsing of the verse, as I’ve translated it. See the previous footnote.

[20] Jeremiah 3:8.

[21] Jeremiah 3:11.

[22] Jeremiah 3:12-14.

[23] Exodus 4:22.

[24] Or, on the alternative parsing discussed in footnote 18, God declares that we should return as soon as the possibility is raised that we were unfaithful and were therefore divorced.

[25] Isaiah 54:7. See also verses 6-8. Having punished Israel for her unfaithfulness in Hosea 2:15, God promises to remarry her forever, once she repents, in Hosea 2:16-22.

[26] Jeremiah 3:8.

[27] Of course, we might insist that God calls on all sinners to return to Him, not just Jewish sinners. This might be one of the lessons that we learn, for example, from the book of Jonah. Nevertheless, to the extent that there was a passionate and exclusive love between Jews and God, then (within the contours of this metaphor) Jewish sinners are called back to a union different from the relationship between God and gentiles. Gentile sinners, like Jewish ones, are called upon to return to righteous ways, but not to a passionate union such as exists between God and Israel. This is, at least, how things seem when looked at through the lens of the metaphor that treats the election as a passionate marriage.

[28] Isaiah 50:1.

[29] See for example, Leviticus 26:11, 26:44; 1 Samuel 12:22; and Isaiah 41:9.

[30] Horst Dietrich Preuss, Old Testament Theology, vol. 2 (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), p. 266.

[31] See Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, “Brother Daniel and the Jewish Fraternity,” in his Leaves of Faith, volume 2 (Jersey City: KTAV Publishing House, 2004), pp. 57-84. Take note of the following words: “As an epithet, the term “Jew” remains applicable to any individual who was ever endowed with Jewish status – even to a meshumad [somebody who converted to another faith]. Hence, he is obligated to pursue a Torah life, and should he decide to return, he would perhaps require no new conversion” (Ibid, p, 66). Moreover, even if he would require something akin to a conversion back to Judaism, he is – unlike any gentile – under an obligation to undergo such a conversion.

[32] Hosea 1:2.

[33] Hosea 3:1 – here, I am assuming that the woman referred to in this verse is identical to the one referred to in Hosea 1:2.

[34] Hosea 3:1.

[35] Rabbi A. J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001). One prominent critic of Rabbi Heschel’s anthropopathism was Rabbi Eliezer Berkowitz. See his paper, “Dr. A. J. Heschel’s Theology of Pathos,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 6 (1964), 67–104.

[36] See Radak to Hosea 1:2, s.v. vayomer Hashem el Hoshea lekh kach lekha eshet zenunim.

[37] Joshua 2:15.

[38] Joshua 2:1.

[39] Joshua 2:9-10.

[40] Joshua 6:17.

[41] Ecclesiastes 3:15.

[42] Vayikra Rabba 27:5.

[43] Ibid., citing (in this order) Genesis 7:1, Nehemia 9:7, Genesis 26:28, Psalms 135:4, 81:6, 106:23, 78:70, I Samuel 10:24.

[44] Vayikra Rabba 27:5.

[45] BT Sanhedrin 73a derives this Biblical obligation from Leviticus 19:16 (with reference also to Deuteronomy 22:26). BT Sanhedrin 72a-b derives permission to launch a pre-emptive defense, in certain situations, from Exodus 22:1.

[46] Genesis 32:29.

[47] Amos 3:2.