Hosea 2:14

Hebrew Bible

12 I will destroy her vines and fig trees, about which she said, ‘These are my wages for prostitution that my lovers gave to me!’I will turn her cultivated vines and fig trees into an uncultivated thicket, so that wild animals will devour them. 13 I will punish her for the festival days when she burned incense to the Baal idols; she adorned herself with earrings and jewelry, and went after her lovers, but she forgot me!” says the Lord. 14However, in the future I will allure her; I will lead her back into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. 15 From there I will give back her vineyards to her and turn the ‘Valley of Trouble’ into an ‘Opportunity for Hope.’ There she will sing as she did when she was young, when she came up from the land of Egypt. 16 At that time,” declares the Lord, “you will call me, ‘My husband’; you will never again call me, ‘My master.’

Isaiah 54:6

Hebrew Bible

4 Don’t be afraid, for you will not be put to shame. Don’t be intimidated, for you will not be humiliated. You will forget about the shame you experienced in your youth; you will no longer remember the disgrace of your abandonment. 5 For your husband is the one who made you—the Lord of Heaven’s Armies is his name. He is your Protector, the Holy One of Israel. He is called “God of the entire earth.” 6Indeed, the Lord will call you back like a wife who has been abandoned and suffers from depression, like a young wife when she has been rejected,” says your God. 7 “For a short time I abandoned you, but with great compassion I will gather you. 8 In a burst of anger I rejected you momentarily, but with lasting devotion I will have compassion on you,”says your Protector, the Lord.

 Notes and References

"... An important feature of Nehemiah’s prayer is that the foundation for God’s provision for his people in the Wilderness is his compassion (9:19). The root µjr has the connotation of strong, even visceral emotion. The word in both noun and verb forms is always used of a superior toward an inferior, such as a father toward a child (Psalm 103:13, for example), but most often God is the subject. This is not sentimentality, but rather the suspension of wrath and restoration of a relationship. The verb is used in Isaiah 55:7, for example, to describe the restoration of relationship after a person has repented of sin and turned toward God: He receives a “pardon.” This statement of God’s love and compassion stands at the center of the prayer, between descriptions of the rebellion of the people of Israel in the Wilderness. The word is often coupled in the Hebrew Bible (Hosea 2:21; 11:8). Hosea 2 is a clear use of the term as part of the marriage metaphor. In fact, when it is in the singular then the two terms are to be understood together as a “demonstration of mercifulness.” Because of his compassion, the Lord did not abandon his people in the Wilderness. The verb (“abandon”) is common in the Hebrew Bible, but is related to the Akkadian ezêbu, to divorce. The word has this sense in Isaiah 54:6; 60:15; and 62:4. Combined with this, Nehemiah 9:19 might be described as employing a marriage metaphor for the Wilderness period. Both words appear again in the climax of Nehemiah’s prayer ..."

Long, Phillip J. The Origin of the Eschatological Feast as a Wedding Banquet in The Origin of the Eschatological Feast as a Wedding Banquet in the Synoptic Gospels: an Intertextual Study (pp. 121-122) Andrews University, 2013

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