Hosea’s Prophetic Imagination: Metaphor and Rhetoric in the Context of Communal Trauma

Walter Brueggemann’s work on the Hebrew Bible prophets generally and on the book of Hosea specifically focused on rhetoric, metaphor, and imagination. His emphases on the role of prophetic metaphor in the construction of views of God and on the debate over contested communal identity provide the starting point for this essay. I place these insights into dialogue with emerging work on trauma hermeneutics and Hosea, especially the concept of communal trauma. The imaginative power of Hosea’s rhetoric and metaphors comes into new perspective when seen within the struggle for theological identity and defining practices that follows experiences of communal trauma like the emergence of expanding Neo-Assyrian imperialism assumed by the book’s literary setting.