Hosea’s First Analogy: The Oven

In Hosea chapter 7, the prophet Hosea uses common household knowledge and tools of his time to illustrate the social conditions.

In the short twenty years after the death of Jeroboam II, the Northern Kingdom experienced political turmoil, with four kings successively murdered and usurped (2 Kings 15:8-30). Whether they were the killers or the killed, the revolutionaries or the overthrown, no one called upon God. Each acted according to their own will, single-mindedly seeking to seize or consolidate power through human conspiracy and violence.

[Hosea 7:3-7] “By their wickedness they make the king glad, and by their lies the officials. They are all adulterers, burning like an oven whose baker stops stirring the fire from the kneading of the dough until it is leavened. On the day of our king’s feast, the officials became sick with the heat of wine; he stretched out his hand to mockers. For with hearts like an oven they approach their plotting; all night long their baker sleeps, but in the morning it blazes up like a flaming fire. All of them are hot as an oven, and they devour their rulers. All their kings fall; none of them calls upon me.”

The word “oven” (火炉) in the original Hebrew refers to the clay oven (tannur) commonly used in ancient Middle Eastern homes, made of clay and fueled by dry grass or brushwood. Here, Hosea uses the oven to symbolize the repeated coups in the Northern Kingdom of Israel after Jeroboam II’s death (2 Kings 15:8-30). Dough needs all night to rise, so “the baker stops stirring the fire from the kneading of the dough until it is leavened,” letting the smoldering fire burn in the oven. In the morning, the fire is stoked to heat the oven walls, leaving embers. Then, the dough is pressed onto the inner wall of the oven, baking both sides simultaneously, ready in minutes. The phrase “stops stirring the fire” here metaphorically represents the political conspiracies in the Northern Kingdom of Israel brewing in secret, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. The baker waits all night for the dough to rise, as if “sleeping all night long,” and in the morning, can finally “blaze up the fire” and start baking. This illustrates how the rebels waited for the right moment, taking advantage of royal feasts to get the king and officials drunk, and then killing them.