How can I give you up?: Hosea in the spiritual imagination of African American 1619 - 1968

This article traces the reception history of the Book of Hosea in African American tradition from 1619 to 1968, offering a close reading of how Hosea's wilderness theology, wounded divine love, and covenantal imagery became central resources for Black spiritual survival and liberationist imagination. Drawing on the methodological frameworks of Wil Gafney's womanist midrash (2017), Albert Raboteau's foundational study of the invisible institution (1978), and James H. Cone's theological analysis of the spirituals (1972), the article argues that African American interpreters did not passively receive Hosea but actively transformed it — making the book's most dangerous theological claims into a grammar of resistance against chattel slavery, its aftermath, and structural racial terror. The analysis proceeds across three historical arcs: the hush-harbour appropriation of Hosea 2:14 as wilderness theology among the enslaved (1619–1865); the reclamation of Gomer as the patron saint of sanctified Black women in the holiness tradition (1865–1940); and the deployment of Hosea 11 as the emotional and ethical grammar of nonviolent resistance in the civil rights movement (1954–1968). A concluding section reflects on the implications of this reception history for womanist biblical hermeneutics and the continuing conversation about divine solidarity in contexts of communal trauma. In each era, Hosea emerges not as a text of judgment but as a love song — dangerous, scandalous, and fiercely protective of a people whom no earthly power could finally claim.