Social Disorder and the Trauma of the Earth Community: Reading Hosea 4:1-3 in Light of Today's Crises

Abstract

The world currently faces terrible issues of corruption, conflicts, political instabilities, violence and injustices causing traumatic experiences for humans and nature. Likewise, Hos 4:1-3 offers a link between the corruption of the Israelite society and the wounds of the Earth community. These three verses are generally read as a genre, in which Yahweh brings a lawsuit against the people of Israel. However, scholars mostly focus on the crimes and fate of humans, and ignore or silence the expression of trauma of the Earth as mourning and its non-human members as languishing. Using the framework of trauma studies, the insights of "Cosmic Covenant" from the book of Murray (1992) and the Earth Bible principles of interconnectedness and voice, this article aims to explore a unique aspect of Hosea's rhetoric of trauma establishing the relationship between people's misdeeds and the wounds of the natural world.