Hosea tells us next to nothing about his personal life. The one detail that he does share — God commanding him to marry a prostitute to symbolize Israel’s disloyalty to God, and his subsequent marriage to Gomer, who bears him three children — may be more metaphor than history. Hosea had a series of prophetic revelations during the reigns of the Judean kings Uzziah (769-733 B.C.E.), Jothan, Ahaz, and Hezekiah (758-698 a.c.E.), and the Israelite kings Jeroboam II and Menahem (784-737 B.C.E.). Hosea attacks the people for being disloyal to God and worshiping the Canaanite god Baal. He berates the kings of Israel for foreign entanglements, another sign of disloyalty to God; and warns all the people that rigorous adherence to cultic ritual is meaningless if one’s treatment of other people is exploitative and immoral. The sages of the Talmud say that Hosea was a contemporary of fellow prophets Isaiah, Amos, and Micah, and that of the four Hosea is the greatest (Pesach 87a).
