Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 63:1 (Spring 2001)
Article: Matthew And Hosea: A Response To John Sailhamer
Author: Dan G. McCartney

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WTJ 63:1 (Spring 2001) p. 97

Matthew And Hosea:
A Response To John Sailhamer

Dan G. McCartney

Peter Ennsa

The vexing problem of Matt 2:15 and Hos 11:1 is well known, and another look at it is always worthwhile. John Sailhamer claims to have found a solution by portraying Matthew’s use of Hos 11:1 as essentially in harmony with the modern grammatical-historical method.

To be sure, Sailhamer has properly reminded us that Hosea was writing within a Hebrew prophetic tradition that had at least an incipient messianism right from the start, and that Matthew shared that tradition. Further, Sailhamer has reminded us that references to the exodus are always fraught with the significance of both past and future, since God is both the God who saved and the God who will save. In addition, Sailhamer rightly refuses simply to dismiss Matthew’s hermeneutic as arbitrary, and also rightly wishes to aver both the semantic integrity of both Hosea and Matthew, and the historical referentiality of those texts which claim to report as well as evaluate events.

Nevertheless, as attractive and as well-presented as Sailhamer’s solution might appear to be, it poses a number of serious difficulties which render the argument questionable in the current debate over the apostolic use of the OT.

First, claiming to follow the lead of B. S. Childs, Sailhamer’s argument rests on the foundation that Hosea is thinking in chapter 11 not just of the past, but of the way the past acts as an indicator of the future activity of God. This may be an accurate way of reading this section of Hosea, although it would need to be more clearly argued in order to support his argument to follow. But even if we took such a reading for granted, the connection between Hosea and Matthew is still not as direct as Sailhamer contends.

a) First, Hosea does not actually say anything explicit about the Messiah, or anything that could be easily construed as such. It is only by Sailhamer’s extensive manipulation (i.e., his own midrash) that a messianic assumption can be worked into Hosea. If Hosea himself had intended to say something about Messiah, surely he could have said it more clearly than by a convoluted and mysterious play on an alleged subvocalized theme in the Pentateuch.

b) This is not to deny that the Pentateuch evinces an eschatological and even messianic trajectory. But it appears to us that our ability to see this trajectory from our Christian vantage point cannot be used to argue that the trajectory

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