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This chapter summarizes the conclusions to Part II of the study. The books of Zephaniah and Nahum were written to support Josiah's program of religious reform and national restoration. Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, and Micah were redacted to support Josiah's program, and Jeremiah reformulated original Josian oracles to account for the later Babylonian exile. Habakkuk was written to address the problem of theodicy in the aftermath of Josiah's death.

This chapter presents the historical circumstances that gave birth to the story of the Ten Lost Tribes in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. The two most important elements in this chapter are the imperial deportations and the prophetic culture that “processed” them into a divine punishment understood to be an overall exile of an entire nation. The chapter tells how the rise of the Assyrian Empire to world dominance during the 8th century BCE resulted in the destruction of the Israelite kingdom in Northern ancient Palestine and the deportation of several tens of thousands of its subjects to the eastern provinces of the Empire. This was an uncommon occurrence in the ancient Near East as other small kingdom and nations were deported as well. However, this particular deportation was recorded in the Bible. The chapter then describes how prophets in Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judea‐most notably Hosea, Amos, and Isaiah turned the deportation into a divine punishment enacted by God through Assyria. Most crucially, Isaiah (and he was followed by other prophets such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel) promised that the tribes would return. When they did not, their search began.

In Hosea, the interaction between God, humanity, and non-human creation does not permeate the whole book as thoroughly as in Amos. Nevertheless, the instances where such interaction is clearly articulated form a significant part of the whole book. These are the poetic oracle sandwiched between Hosea's two sign-act ‘marriages’ (Hosea 2), and the accusation against priest and people in Hosea 4. This chapter discusses these texts and explores Hosea's extensive use of figurative language, in particular, imagery of the natural world.

At first glance, American Universalism seems to have been one of the clearest manifestations of the rational spirit of the revolutionary era, and with its bold assertion of salvation for all, the Universalist movement was shocking even in an atmosphere charged with challenges to orthodox Calvinist doctrines. In the nineteenth century, Universalists became even more closely identified with rationalistic dissent. Drawing upon eighteenth-century evangelical Calvinism on the one hand and Enlightenment liberalism on the other, Universalism emerged as an attempt to nourish piety through rational conviction. Reason, Universalists argued, dictated that a benevolent God would redeem all of creation; the doctrine of universal salvation was God’s way of influencing human affections and turning naturally self-centred human beings to the love of God and the greater creation. This chapter traces the early development of the movement and the notable figures involved.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Universalist movement gained both momentum and attention. Although still a small minority, Universalists stirred up widespread controversy with their improved version of Calvinism. They faced massive opposition, even persecution, with almost all who denounced them united in a single fundamental criticism: their teaching ignored the basic lesson that all people were responsible before God for their actions, that goodness would be rewarded, and evil punished. Universalists responded by trying to show that “the larger hope” of their faith transcended such “carnal”concerns and was conducive to social concord, and for at least a generation after the turn of the century, the Universalist vision represented a genuine challenge to the religious and moral norms that accommodated the needs of a burgeoning capitalist society. However, the movement as a whole did not continue to sustain and develop the sort of spirituality that was reflected in Hosea Ballou’s teaching; the communal piety of early Universalism proved an unsatisfactory foundation, and the movement ultimately moved toward the moralism against which its early adherents had struggled. Ironically, the form of non-moralistic spirituality that gained lasting recognition in American religious history was not the popular preaching of Universalism but the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which while sharing certain themes with early Universalism, ultimately reflected a profoundly different orientation that was more closely in line with the broader tendencies of nineteenth-century American culture.

By the 1850s, when their denomination faced serious conflicts over its identity and direction, most Universalists tended to regard Hosea Ballou as a grandfatherly figure, a benign symbol of their heritage, and his death in 1851 occasioned a genuine out‐pouring of grief among his spiritual heirs, who respected him as a great religious reformer. However, for a growing number of adherents, the doctrine of universal salvation was becoming less the crucial core of a saving faith, as it had been for Ballou, than a call to orderly moral reform in the light of the brotherhood and perfectibility of humanity. This shift, in many respects a natural consequence of restorationist belief, manifested itself not only in theology but also in the participation of Universalists in various programs of social reform and in the expanding roles of women within the church. There was, nevertheless, no inherent or inevitable connection between Universalism and reform activity. Indeed, a survey of their involvement in social organizations and movements beyond their church shows that nineteenth-century Universalists shared few, if any, common assumptions about the social imperatives of their faith.

Biblical scholarship tends to focus on the reconstruction of the oracles of the eighth‐century prophet, Hosea ben Beeri, and the exilic or postexilic redaction of his book. Nevertheless, there is considerable evidence that the book was edited in the seventh century b.c.e. to support Josiah's reform. An analysis of the contents and structure of the book points to its concern to oppose Israel's relationship with Assyria and Egypt, key enemies of Judah in the time of Josiah, and to reunite Israel and Judah under the reign of a Davidic monarch.

Continues the examination begun in the previous chapter, this time focusing on Chs. 13–27, which contain the ‘oracles against the nations’ (13–23) and the so‐called ‘Isaiah Apocalypse’ (24–27). Presents the case for Deutero‐Isaianic influence in the former group of chapters and assesses recent studies (such as that by B. Gosse) that challenge this hypothesis. Parallels both within the Book of Isaiah and in other Old Testament books (such as Hosea, Joel, Jeremiah, Genesis, and Amos) are then assessed in a search for evidence of the hand of Deutero‐Isaiah in the second group of chapters.

The necessity for parental discipline to instill virtue in children raises the possibility that God employs evil for similar purposes. This popular understanding of evil and the possibilities inherent to this approach to theodicy permeate the Bible and Deutero-canonical literature. Sirach 4:11–19 introduces a personification of divine wisdom as disciplinarian, while Wis Sol 11:15–12:27 stresses God’s measured and timely punishment of the wicked. Biblical precedent for such divine discipline is found in a liturgy of wasted opportunity in Amos 4:6–11 and in a poignant revelation of God’s pain in Hos 11:1–7.

This chapter starts with a survey of probable examples of neo-Assyrian influence on various parts of the Bible (psalms, Deuteronomy, Moses story, history-writing, early forms of the Tower of Babel story and Isaiah 14 Babylon oracle, reshaping of Proverbs, etc.) and consideration of the probable background of this sort of hybrid influence in documented processes of Neo-Assyrian enculturation of elites in subject peoples. This sort of impact of empire is distinguished from the ripples of effect of trauma of Assyrian attacks and deportation seen particularly in earlier literary prophecy. The latter portion of the chapter looks at particular methodological problems in identifying early material in Hosea and Jeremiah, before going on to discuss the extent of early material in Amos and the way in which identifiable early material in Micah and especially Isaiah may reflect a Judean outgrowth of the impulse given by the Amos collection.

This chapter adopts criteria developed in chapter 15 (on Proverbs) to assess the extent to which two other purportedly Solomonic books, Song of Songs and Qohelet, might contain early pre-exilic materials. The conclusion is that the evidence for this is better for Song of Songs than for Qohelet. Though elements of Song of Songs may have been added over time, it shows unambivalent dependence on New Kingdom period Egyptian love poetry, and appears to have been the source of several formulations found in Hosea and Deuteronomy. In contrast, the main link of Qohelet to a demonstrable non-Israelite tradition, its links to the song of the alewife in the Old Babylonian edition of Gilgamesh, is relatively isolated. In addition, Qohelet’s orientation to monarchal institutions and other indicators suggest a more likely post-exilic date.

This chapter presents an essay on the absence of the term covenant in the Book of Lamentations. It suggests that this is not surprising because the term was never mentioned by pre-exilic prophets, and prior to Jeremiah only Hosea mentioned it, and only twice. Some biblical scholars have suggested that the notion of covenant played no role in the centuries between the early nomadic period and the advent of Deuteronomic theology and that it was the notion of Israel as Yahweh's people which was preserved and extended.

The first‐century Jewish understanding of ‘resurrection’ implied bodily resurrection. St. Paul did not mention that the tomb of Jesus was empty, because that was obviously implied by his claim that Jesus was risen. That Christians believed from the earliest days that women disciples had found the tomb empty on the third day (a Sunday) after Jesus’ burial is evidenced by the fact that all Christians subsequently celebrated the Eucharist on a Sunday. Their use of the phrase ‘on the third day’ to date the Resurrection was not due to the fact that Hosea prophesied a resurrection for Israel on the third day; rather they used Hosea's phrase to describe what they believed on other grounds to be the date of Jesus’ Resurrection.

This chapter analyzes the competition to define the meaning and purpose of animal sacrifice among various ancient cultural producers. These include: Greek, Roman, and Jewish philosophers, Hebrew Bible writers, Jewish sectarians, and Greek and Roman comic writers. Each of these various groups took positions on the meaning and purpose of sacrifice based on their conceptions of the nature of the universe and the nature of the divine. These thinkers are engaged in a competition to defend their interpretation of sacrifice against what they see as the errors of their rivals. Later Christian positions of sacrifice must be understood within the context of this debate.

This chapter describes the significance of the Apostle Paul's traumas within Christianity as a whole. The writings of Paul left a model of Christian suffering to millennia of Christians who followed him. The chapter also shows that a right relationship with God is created by faith rather than law. Judaism is not bothered with the deep contradictions of Paul surrounding righteousness, works, and the law. Comparison between Paul and Hosea is also presented.

This chapter presents a critique and alternative to Freud’s history of Moses, which relies on a monograph by the biblical scholar Ernst Sellin. A close examination of Sellin’s argument exposes its flaws, but also poses the possibility of a different response to Freud’s questions. Rather than seek to uncover a secret (or latent) history of Moses in the prophetic books, their plain (or manifest) sense provides ample evidence for the fashioning of monotheism and Jewish subjectivity by the prophets’ “Mosaic discourse.” To reformulate Freud, not Moses but Mosaic discourse created the Jews.

This chapter describes how the success of the Northern Kingdom of Israel was ruined by the Assyrians, an empire based in northern Mesopotamia. It discusses Hosea's picture of the Israeli people and Hosea's images of God as an Assyrian-like monarch punishing a disobedient people. It illustrates how Hosea's Israel did not survive.

This chapter examines how Black and Afro-Native ethnologies published in the 1830s and early 1840s resisted the racist visual cultures of comparative anatomy, including craniology and ethnology. The ethnologies of Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and James W. C. Pennington challenged the tethering of the black body to visual representations of pathology in both science and popular culture through the production of a counter-archive of visual culture, as well as through ekphrastic re-visions of the Black, Native American, and Afro-Native body.

The U.S. Army marches on Wilmington in two wings, one up the eastern peninsula and other up the west bank of the Cape Fear. Ironclad monitors provide artillery support form the river itself. Nine regiments of USCT attack the entrenched line at Sugar Loaf, but cannot breach it. Across the river, local blacks act as scouts, and under their guidance 6,500 troops commanded by Maj. Gen Jacob D. Cox are able to flank the rebel positions at Fort Anderson and Town Creek, forcing an evacuation of the Sugar Loaf position directly across the river as well. On Washington’s Birthday, Wilmington surrenders to US. troops.