First Reading · Hosea
Back to the desert, and a new word for husband
Where we are
Hosea is the prophet whose marriage became his message: told to marry a woman who would be unfaithful, and to name the children Jezreel, Not-Pitied and Not-My-People. Chapter 2 is the lawsuit that follows — a divorce proceeding in which Yahweh strips his wife, blocks her roads with thorns and takes back the grain, the wine and the oil she credited to her lovers. Today's verses are what happens after the demolition, and they are the single most extravagant promise in the Twelve.
What happens
"I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart. She shall respond there as in the days of her youth, when she came up from the land of Egypt. On that day, says Yahweh, she shall call me 'My husband,' and never again 'My baal.'... I will espouse you to me forever: I will espouse you in right and in justice, in love and in mercy; I will espouse you in fidelity, and you shall know Yahweh."
What to notice
Ve-dibbarti al-libbah — and I will speak upon her heart — is an idiom, and its other uses give it away. Shechem speaks to the heart of Dinah after wronging her; Boaz's kindness makes Ruth say he has spoken to the heart of his servant; Joseph speaks to the heart of his brothers when they are terrified of him. It is the language of reassuring somebody who has every reason to expect the worst. Not seduction, not negotiation — the voice you use with a person braced for punishment.
And the destination is a place with nothing in it. After a chapter about vineyards, grain and wool, the reconciliation happens in the midbar. Israel's founding memory runs through the wilderness, and the point of going back there is that the desert has no other suppliers in it. The lovers she credited with the harvest do not operate in that country. He does not take her home; he takes her to the beginning.
Then a word is deleted from the language. Tiqre'i ishi ve-lo tiqre'i li od ba'ali — you will call me ishi, my man, and no longer ba'ali. Both are ordinary Hebrew for "my husband." The difference is that ba'al also means owner — the master of a house, a slave or a field — and it is the name of the storm god Israel kept going back to. A word that meant husband, proprietor and rival deity in the same breath is retired outright, and the surviving word is the one with no property in it. The next verse says he will remove the names of the baals from her mouth entirely.
The last two verses are a betrothal, not a reconciliation. Ve-erastikh li le-olam — I will betroth you to me forever — said three times, and eras is the technical verb for the legal engagement that precedes the wedding, not for taking back a wife. The husband of a woman who has left him does not propose to her again from the start; he takes her back. This oracle refuses that. It begins the whole process over, and it pays a bride-price: tsedeq and mishpat, rightness and judgement; chesed and rachamim, loyalty and womb-deep compassion; and finally emunah, steadiness. The groom brings no cattle. The dowry is a list of his own qualities, and the last one — the only one paid singly, in the third and final betrothal — is reliability.
The sentence ends on ve-yadaat et-Yahweh, and you shall know Yahweh — yada, the same verb the Bible uses for a husband knowing his wife. Observant Jews recite these two verses every weekday morning while winding the tefillin strap around the finger like a ring. The oracle has been kept as a daily wedding for two and a half thousand years.
Responsorial Psalm
Every day, and then the formula
Where we are
Psalm 145 is an alphabetic acrostic and the only psalm the Psalter itself titles tehillah, a praise — the word that gives the whole book its Hebrew name. Jewish liturgy recites it three times a day as the Ashrei, on the strength of a rabbinic saying that whoever prays it three times daily is assured of the world to come.
The selected verses
Psalm 145:2-3. "Every day will I bless you, and I will praise your name forever and ever. Great is Yahweh and highly to be praised; his greatness is unsearchable."
Psalm 145:4-5. "Generation after generation praises your works and proclaims your might. They speak of the splendour of your glorious majesty and tell of your wondrous works."
Psalm 145:6-7. "They discourse of the power of your terrible deeds and declare your greatness. They publish the fame of your abundant goodness and joyfully sing of your justice."
Psalm 145:8-9. "Yahweh is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness. Yahweh is good to all and compassionate toward all his works."
What to notice
The acrostic is a claim in itself: from aleph to tav, the whole alphabet is enlisted, which is the Hebrew way of saying that praise uses up the entire available language. And the psalm knows it will not be enough — li-gdullato ein cheqer, to his greatness there is no searching out. The alphabet is exhausted and the subject is not.
The verbs of transmission are unusually thick here. Dor le-dor yeshabach maasekha — generation shall laud your works to generation — and then a run of speech verbs: they will declare, recount, pour out (yabbiu, literally bubble up, the word for a spring), sing. Four verses in a row about talking, and the psalm never says who the audience is. The praise is a chain of handovers.
And then verse 8 quotes Sinai. Channun ve-rachum Yahweh, erekh appayim u-gdol-chased — the thirteen-attribute formula of Exodus 34:6, the sentence Israel returns to whenever it needs to say what Theos is like. Erekh appayim is literally long of nostrils — a Hebrew idiom for slow to flare — and rachum is built on rechem, the womb. Two of Hosea's five betrothal-gifts are in this verse. The psalm and the prophet are drawing on the same short list.
Gospel · Matthew
Two daughters
Where we are
Jesus is still at the table, still answering the question about fasting, when an official interrupts. Matthew has compressed Mark's long, doubled narrative into nine verses — everything not load-bearing is gone — and what he keeps is the interleaving: one story starts, another cuts across it, then the first resumes.
What happens
An official comes and kneels: "My daughter has just died. But come, lay your hand on her, and she will live." Jesus rises and follows with his disciples. On the way a woman suffering haemorrhages for twelve years comes up behind and touches the tassel of his cloak, saying to herself, "If only I can touch his cloak, I shall be cured." He turns, sees her, and says, "Courage, daughter! Your faith has saved you." At the official's house he finds the flute players and the crowd in tumult, and says, "Go away! The girl is not dead but sleeping." They ridicule him. When the crowd is put out, he takes her by the hand and she arises. Word of this spreads through all that land.
What to notice
Matthew changes the request. Mark's Jairus says his daughter is at the point of death, and the news that she has died arrives later, as a blow. Matthew's official says arti eteleutēsen — she has just now died — before he asks for anything. Matthew's version has no deathbed rescue in it at all; the man kneels down in front of a rabbi and asks him, straightforwardly, to undo a death that has already happened.
The woman does not touch his cloak; she touches the kraspedon — the tassel. Numbers 15:38 commands the fringe on the corners of the garment as a physical reminder of the commandments, and Matthew uses the word again in chapter 14, where the sick of Gennesaret beg to touch the same thing. She reaches for the part of the clothing that is not clothing but Torah, and she does it from behind, where she will not have to explain herself.
The reason for the approach from behind is in Leviticus 15. A woman with a flow outside her period is unclean for as long as it lasts; every bed she lies on and everything she sits on is unclean, and whoever touches them must wash and is unclean until evening. Twelve years of that is not primarily a medical description. It is a description of twelve years in which she could not touch anyone without consequences, and in which the ordinary transmission ran one way: from her, outward.
Then Matthew reverses the physics without comment. She touches; nothing is transmitted to him; something is transmitted to her. He turns and calls her thygater, daughter — the only time in the Gospels he addresses a woman that way — and the word lands in the middle of a story about somebody else's daughter. Twelve years of bleeding and, in Mark's telling, a twelve-year-old girl. The two lives are the same length.
The flute players are not scene-setting. Rabbinic law held that even the poorest man in Israel must provide at his wife's funeral not less than two flutes and one wailing woman; professional mourners were engaged as a matter of course. Their presence means the arrangements have already been made and the household has moved on to the public part. Which is why the response to she is not dead but sleeping is katagelaō — they laughed him down. These are people with a job to do and a body to prove it.
And the last act is a touch again, in the other direction: ekratēsen tēs cheiros autēs, he took hold of her hand. Corpse-contact is the most serious ritual impurity in the Torah, a seven-day defilement requiring the ashes of the red heifer. In the space of nine verses Matthew has had Jesus receive the touch of a woman with a flow of blood and give the touch of a hand to a corpse — the two contacts a scrupulous man would work hardest to avoid — and reports no defilement in either direction.
Today's readings are all about who is allowed to touch whom, and what happens when the rule is broken from the right side.
Hosea's oracle should be a scandal and mostly is not, because familiarity has sanded it down. Deuteronomy 24 forbids a man to take back a wife who has been another man's. Hosea's Yahweh does not take her back — he starts the paperwork over, betrothing a woman he was married to, in the desert, with a bride-price of five virtues and a promise to delete a word from her vocabulary. And what he does first, before any of the legal language, is speak upon her heart: the thing you say to somebody who is waiting to be punished.
Psalm 145 supplies the character reference. Channun ve-rachum, erekh appayim ve-gdol chesed — gracious, womb-compassionate, long of nostrils, great in loyalty. Two of Hosea's betrothal gifts are in that line, and the psalm treats the formula as the settled property of Theos, recited daily, handed down generation to generation. It is the sentence Israel keeps in its pocket.
The Gospel puts the whole thing into contact between bodies. A woman who has been ritually untouchable for twelve years reaches for the tassel that carries the commandments, and is called daughter; a girl whose funeral musicians have already been hired is taken by the hand. In the purity system as Leviticus lays it out, contamination flows from the impure to the pure — that is the direction the rules exist to manage. Matthew shows both contacts and reports the flow running the other way, and then adds one detail that keeps the story from becoming a general principle: Jesus turns around. He does not let the healing stay anonymous. Whatever passed between them, he makes her stand in it and be addressed, which is precisely what twelve years of impurity had made impossible.
A Question to Sit With
The woman had worked out, over twelve years, the exact minimum contact that might do it: from behind, one hand, the fringe rather than the man. It is the arithmetic of someone who has learned to take up as little room as possible, and it would have worked — she was
healed before he turned around. What he added was to make her visible and to call her
daughter. Where have I settled for the version of a thing that can be got at from behind, without
being seen, because being addressed directly would cost
more than I can imagine paying? And what would it be like to be turned toward, and spoken
upon the heart, by someone who was not going to punish me?