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The article above will complement my replies to Tim Simmons’ attempt to explain away the inconsistent views of Jehu's massacre of the royal family of Israel as they were stated in 2 Kings 10:30 and Hosea 1:4, because Mr. Abrams recognizes something that Simmons seemed unaware of. People in biblical times interpreted misfortunes as indications that they had done something to displease their gods, so when calamities and disasters struck their nation, biblical writers invariably saw these as signs of the displeasure of their god Yahweh. That famines, pestilence, earthquakes, and foreign invasions happened in a natural order of things through no fault of those who suffered their consequences was a concept completely foreign to the Israelite mind thus, when the kingdom that had been united under David and Solomon divided after Solomon's death, the writer of 1 Kings had to look for an explanation, and so he attributed the breakup to Yahweh's displeasure with Rehoboam's continuation of Solomon's harsh labor policies. Harsh policies of a king could indeed cause enough discontent to trigger a civil revolt, but the revolt would be the choice that citizens had made and not what a god had decided. First Kings 12:24, however, claims that Yahweh said that the division of the kingdom that resulted when the northern tribes rallied around Jeroboam was "of me."

"Yahweh did it because of such and such" was always the way that biblical writers interpreted history, so, as Abrams explained, those who recorded Israelite history would put retroactive spins on national misfortunes to put the blame for them on something that someone had done to anger Yahweh. Thus, as noted in the first part of my reply to Simmons, the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar was attributed to the evil reign of Manasseh, even though Judah had just experienced an unprecedented religious revival under Josiah, who was described as the most righteous king ever to reign. That the Babylonians defeated Judah for the simple reason that the military might of Babylonia far exceeded Judah's was a concept completely foreign to the Israelite mind. Yahweh was the god of gods, and the Israelites were his "chosen people," so if another nation conquered Judah there had to be a reason for it. Manasseh became that reason.

Hosea claimed that he prophesied "in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam, the son of Joash, king of Israel" (1:1). This Jeroboam was the 3rd-generation successor of Jehu's dynasty, so he was the father of Zechariah, the 4th-generation king descended from Jehu, whose brief reign before his assassination allegedly fulfilled the prophecy that Jehu's sons would reign over Israel for four generations (2 Kings 10:30 15:10-12). If Hosea was truthful in saying that he prophesied in the days of Ahaz and Hezekiah of Judah, then his reference to the end of the "house of Jehu" (1:4) would be another case of retrospective prophecy that Mr. Abrams spoke about.

To determine this requires a tedious analysis of biblical chronology, but such an analysis will show that Ahaz of Judah reigned till 716 BC, which would have been six years after the fall of the northern kingdom [Israel] to the Assyrians in 722 BC. Upon his death, Ahaz was succeeded by his son Hezekiah, who reigned until 687 BC or 35 years after the Assyrians had taken the 10 northern tribes into captivity. One can begin with the account of Jeroboam II's assassination in 2 Kings 15:10-12 and see that he was succeeded by his assassin Shallum in the 39th year of Azariah [who was alternately called Uzziah] of Judah (2 Kings 15:13). Shallum was in turn assassinated by Menahem in the 39th year of Azariah (vs:14-17). Menahem reigned for 10 years (v:17) and was succeeded by his son Pekariah in the 50th year of Azariah (v:23). Pekariah was assassinated by Pekah in the 52nd year of Azariah (vs:25-27). Pekah reigned for 20 years (v:27) until Hoshea assassinated him in the 20th year of Jotham of Judah, who had succeeded his father Azariah/ Uzziah (v:30).

Hoshea was the last king of the northern kingdom, for in his 9th year, the Assyrians captured Samaria and took the Israelites into a captivity from which they never returned. Hoshea began his reign in the 12th year of Ahaz of Judah (2 Kings 17:1), so if the prophet Hosea's dating was accurate and he did indeed prophesy through the reigns of Uzziah [Azariah], Jotham, Ahaz, and Ahaz's successor Hezekiah [all kings of Judah], then the fall of the "house of Jehu" in the assassination of Zechariah [Jehu's 4th-generation descendant] had happened long before the book of Hosea was written, so whatever Hosea "prophesied" about the fall of the house of Jehu would have been written from the retrospective advantage of knowing what had already happened in the northern kingdom. We have no reason to think that Hosea's interpretation of his nation's history would have been any different from the perspective of other prophets and writers, who always saw national calamities and disasters as the result of Yahweh's displeasure with the actions of someone prominent in the nation. His reference to the destruction of the house of Jehu "for the blood of Jezreel" uttered in the same verse that prophesied that Yahweh would also "cause the kingdom of the house of Israel to cease" (1:4) is reasonable evidence that Hosea had found in Jehu a scapegoat that he could blame for the calamities that had already befallen the northern kingdom.

Indeed, if Simmons will study the book of Hosea carefully, he should see indications that the prophet was writing retrospectively. From chapter 5:8 through 6:6, Hosea showed an awareness of the Syro-Ephramite war with Judah during the reign of Ahaz (2 Kings 16), and he later "prophesied" the fall of Israel, which had already happened when the Assyrians invaded in 722 BC and took the Israelites into captivity (2 Kings 18).

13:9-16 I will destroy you, O Israel who can help you? Where now is your king, that he may save you? Where in all your cities are your rulers, of whom you said, "Give me a king and rulers"? I gave you a king in my anger, and I took him away in my wrath. Ephraim's iniquity is bound up his sin is kept in store. The pangs of childbirth come for him, but he is an unwise son for at the proper time he does not present himself at the mouth of the womb. Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from Death? O Death, where are your plagues? O Sheol, where is your destruction? Compassion is hidden from my eyes. Although he may flourish among rushes, the east wind shall come, a blast from Yahweh, rising from the wilderness and his fountain shall dry up, his spring shall be parched. It shall strip his treasury of every precious thing. Samaria shall bear her guilt, because she has rebelled against her God they shall fall by the sword, their little ones shall be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women ripped open.

This is the kind of passage that biblicists love to call amazing prophecy, but the chronological analysis done above shows that if Hosea was truthful in the dating of his "prophecies," then the northern kingdom [Ephraim] had fallen to Assyria long before this book was completed. With that kind of retrospective advantage, anyone could make amazing prophecies.

In his article, Simmons presented six "problems" that he saw in any interpretation that found inconsistency in 2 Kings 10:32 and Hosea 1:4. I addressed four of those problems in my first reply, so there are just two more of his points to answer, which in reality turned out to be just one point.

The misleading phrase and "literary liberty": Simmons’ argument here was actually a familiar one with a slightly different slant. He claimed that the Hebrew word paqad could mean punish or avenge but that it didn't necessarily convey that sense. It could mean visit. This is a variation of the same argument that Robert Turkel, a.k.a. James Patrick Holding, used to "explain" the problem of Hosea 1:4. Those who want to see my detailed reply to Turkel can access it here.

I'm far from being an expert in Hebrew, but my research of the word paqad indicates that it could indeed mean visit or remember and conveyed neither a positive nor negative sense of visiting or remembering until it was used. Then the context determined whether it was positive or negative in its meaning. The best way to show this is to quote examples of both uses. Here are some examples of where the visiting or remembering was positive in its meaning by conveying a "visiting" that brought some kind of reward or benefit.

Genesis 50:24-25 And Joseph said unto his brethren, I die: and God will surely visit [paqad] you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. And Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit [paqad] you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence.
Exodus 13:19 And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him: for he had straitly sworn the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit [paqad] you and ye shall carry up my bones away hence with you.

Genesis 21:1-2 And Yahweh visited [paqad] Sarah as he had said, and Yahweh did unto Sarah as he had spoken. For Sarah conceived, and bare Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which God had spoken to him.

Exodus 3:15-16 And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, Yahweh God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations. Go, and gather the elders of Israel together, and say unto them, Yahweh God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, appeared unto me, saying, I have surely visited [paqad] you, and seen that which is done to you in Egypt....

Exodus 4:31 And the people believed: and when they heard that Yahweh had visited [paqad] the children of Israel, and that he had looked upon their affliction, then they bowed their heads and worshipped.

Ruth 1:6 Then she [Naomi] arose with her daughters-in-law, that she might return from the country of Moab: for she had heard in the country of Moab how that the Lord had visited [paqad] his people in giving them bread.

1 Samuel 2:21 And Yahweh visited [paqad] Hannah, so that she conceived, and bare three sons and two daughters. And the child Samuel grew before Yahweh.
Psalm 106:4 Remember me, O Yahweh, with the favour that thou bearest unto thy people: O visit [paqad] me with thy salvation That I may see the good of thy chosen, that I may rejoice in the gladness of thy nation, that I may glory with thine inheritance.

I could quote many other examples, but these are sufficient to show that when paqad was used positively, the contexts in which it was used easily determined its meaning. The following examples will show that the same was true when paqad was used negatively to convey a "visiting" that brought some kind of punishment or curse.

Leviticus 18:25 And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit [paqad] the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomits out her inhabitants.
Psalm 89:30-32 If his children forsake my law, and walk not in my judgments If they break my statutes, and keep not my commandments Then will I visit [paqad] their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes.

Jeremiah 14:10 Thus saith Yahweh unto this people, Thus have they loved to wander, they have not refrained their feet, therefore Yahweh doth not accept them he will now remember their iniquity, and visit [paqad] their sins.

Amos 3:13-15 Hear ye, and testify in the house of Jacob, saith the Lord GOD, the God of hosts, That in the day that I shall visit [paqad] the transgressions of Israel upon him I will also visit [paqad] the altars of Bethel: and the horns of the altar shall be cut off, and fall to the ground. And I will smite the winter house with the summer house and the house of ivory shall perish, and the great houses shall have an end, saith Yahweh.

Exodus 20:5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I Yahweh thy God am a jealous God, visiting [paqad] the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me....

Lamentations 4:22 The punishment of thine iniquity is accomplished, O daughter of Zion he will no more carry thee away into captivity: he will visit [paqad] thine iniquity, O daughter of Edom he will discover thy sins.

That the meaning of Hebrew homographs like paqad could be easily determined by context should come as no surprise to those of us who speak English, because our own language is rich in homographs. When we encounter mean in a written text, we are able to determine its definition by its context. If, for example, one who speaks English reads, "Hitler was a mean person," he doesn't spend a lot of time wondering if the writer meant that Hitler was an unkind person or just an average person. Although the word mean can convey both senses, one fluent in English is able to determine immediately, by its usage, what the writer's intended meaning was.

We have no reason to think that Hebrew was any different, yet we encounter inerrantists who constantly try to explain away biblical discrepancies by arguing that key words in the problem passages could have meant something different from how they have been translated in various English versions. Such a tactic is to be expected in biblicists like Robert Turkel, but I am disappointed that a skeptic, which Simmons claims to be, would resort to the same tactic for no apparent reason except to give an appearance of open-mindedness. The context of Hosea 1:4 is just as clear as those of the passages cited above, which show that a "visiting" was being done in order to administer punishment. Jews should certainly be able to read and understand their own scriptures, and the English translation of the Jewish Publication Society rendered Hosea 1:4 like this: "And the Lord instructed him, `Name him [Hosea’s son] Jezreel for, I will soon punish the House of Jehu for the bloody deeds at Jezreel and put an end to the monarch of the House of Israel.'"

Notice that this Jewish translation used the English word punish to convey the sense of paqad as it was used in the passage in dispute. If Simmons will read the preface to this version, he will see that it was done by a rather distinguished panel of Hebrew scholars, who should have known what they were doing. I feel the same way about Simmons as I do biblical inerrantists who try to base arguments on the dubious premise that they know more about how the Bible should have been translated than did the hundreds of scholars who worked on the various translation committees.

Simmons argued that visit was a more correct translation of paqad, and so Hosea 1:4 should have been rendered, "I will visit the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu," but this is nothing more than a quibble, because it would still be an example of a negative usage of paqad like the examples I quoted above. When Amos, for example, said that Yahweh would "visit the transgressions of Israel upon him" (3:14), he meant that Israel would be punished for its transgressions, and the Jewish Publication Society translated it exactly that way: "(W)hen I punish [paqad] Israel for its transgressions, I will wreak judgment on the altar of Bethel."

Simmons cited Hosea 2:13 as an example of where the KJV used visit to translate paqad, but as anyone can see by the context, the word was being used to convey the sense of punishment: "And I will visit [paqad] upon her [Israel] the days of Baalim, wherein she burned incense to them, and she decked herself with her earrings and her jewels, and she went after her lovers, and forgot me." The word was used in the obvious sense of visiting punishment on Israel, and the JPS so rendered the verse: "I will punish [paqad] her for the days of the Baalim."

Hosea used paqad six other times, and each time it conveyed a negative sense of punishment. Space won't allow me to quote them, but they can be found at Hosea 4:9,14 8:13 9:7,9 12:2. Even the KJV used punish to translate paqad in some of these verses, but the JPS version, without exception, used punish in every verse to convey in English the idea of paqad, and the context of each verse shows that the word was being used in its negative sense.

Simmons' "literary liberty" argument was rather ambiguous, but the best I could determine, he was arguing that the prophet was just speaking ironically when he said that Yahweh would avenge or visit the blood of Jezreel on the house of Jehu. Simmons seem to see this as just Hosea's ironic way of saying that the house of Jehu would be destroyed by killing Jehu's last descendant "in the very place" where Jehu had massacred the house of Ahab, i. e., in the valley of Jezreel. "That's irony, folks," Simmons concluded, but there is a serious flaw in the irony he sees. There is no textual evidence in the Bible that the house of Jehu was destroyed in the same place where Jehu's massacre occurred. To the contrary, the Bible suggests that Zechariah, the last king of the house of Jehu, was assassinated in Samaria. He succeeded his father Jeroboam II and "reign[ed] over Israel in Samaria six months" (2 Kings 15:8) until he was assassinated by Shallum (v: 10). Shallum then reigned in Samaria for only a month (v:13) when he was in turn assassinated by Menahem, who reigned in Samaria for 10 years (v:17).

Samaria was the capital of the northern kingdom, which was built by King Omri on a hill that he had bought for two talents of silver and named Samaria (1 Kings 16:24). Ahab, Ahaziah, Jehoram, and even Jehu and his successor sons also reigned in Samaria (1 Kings 16:29 22:51 2 Kings 3:1 10:36 13:1 13:10 14:23 15:8). Samaria was located about 25 miles south of Jezreel, which was the capital of Solomon's 4th administrative district (1 Kings 4:12) and was later used as a royal retreat by the northern kings after the division of the kingdom. Jehu's massacre of the Israelite royal family occurred here because Jehoram had been wounded in a battle with the Syrians and was taken to Jezreel to recover (2 Kings 8:28-29), but Samaria was the capital of the northern kingdom. Since Zechariah, the last king in the lineage of Jehu, reigned in Samaria for only six months, it is doubtful that he was killed in Jezreel, "the very place" where Jehu had massacred the house of Ahab, and it is pure speculation on Simmons' part to say that he was. There goes the irony that Simmons thought he had found.

Simmons may argue that Samaria was used in a provincial sense rather than in reference to the city by that name, but it was the consistent style of the writer of Kings to say that such and such a king of Judah had reigned in Jerusalem, so there is no reason to think that he was not using the same style when he said that such and such a king of Israel had reigned in Samaria.

Finally, Simmons claimed that Jehu's sons had become wicked kings no better than the kings from the house of Ahab, whom Jehu had destroyed, and so Hosea was simply saying that Yahweh intended to bring upon Jehu's house the same kind of destruction that Jehu had brought upon the house of Ahab. It was all for the sake of irony, of course, but not because Jehu had done anything wrong. I would need another article to discuss all the holes in this speculative theory, so I will just briefly state two flaws in it: (1) There isn't even a suggestion in the record of Zechariah's assassination [2 Kings 15:10] that Shallum had conducted a massacre anywhere on the scale of Jehu's massacre at Jezreel. The text simply says that Shallum "struck him [Zechariah] in front of the people and killed him." (2) The Bible has examples of many kings whom Yahweh selected only to have them turn out to be bad eggs, so why would he have been any more ticked off with Jehu's sons than any of the others?

The more reasonable view of Hosea 1:4 is simply that the prophet was looking for someone to blame retrospectively for the misfortune that had befallen Israel, and he found his scapegoat in Jehu.