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Prophet's Wife

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A historical novelist myself, of course I was intrigued to learn that an unfinished novel by Milton Steinberg had been discovered and was going to be published. The author of As A Driven Leaf, the brilliant story of a Talmudic sage struggling with his faith in 2nd-Century Roman Palestine, had died in March 1950 at the age of forty-six. So for nearly 60 years, his myriad fans could only sigh and sadly wonder what great literature his untimely death had deprived us of.

I eagerly accepted the offer to read, and review, a galley of his new work, "The Prophet's Wife." Like "As A Driven Leaf," "The Prophet's Wife" is also taken from Jewish holy texts - in this case the biblical Book of Hosea. But the Talmud contains only a few tantalizing mentions of Elisha ben Abuyah, Steinberg's first protagonist, while the Bible devotes fourteen chapters to his second, the Prophet Hosea.

Hosea lived in Northern Israel in the 8th century BCE, during the end of the First Temple period. The most intimately portrayed of biblical prophets, Hosea is told by God to marry a harlot, Gomer, which he does. Their marriage will symbolize the relationship between God and Israel, where the Northern Kingdom has betrayed God by whoring after other gods and violating the commandments that God has given her.

The bible tells us of Hosea and Gomer's divorce, which mirrors God's rejection of the Northern Kingdom, soon to be destroyed by the Assyrians and its population exiled [hence, the Ten Lost Tribes]. But God commands Hosea to take Gomer back, although the couple must refrain from marital intimacy. Despite this, Gomer apparently gives up her lovers, for after much preaching of God's anger to the sinning Israelites, Hosea concludes his prophecy that one day Israel will indeed repent and thus God will renew the covenant and take Israel back in love.

The Prophet's Wife begins with a prologue in which an unidentified man nervously approaches a rostrum in Samaria's city square. Angry and disgusted with its sinful inhabitants, the man forces himself to climb up and address the people, "The word of the Lord thou shalt know, that came unto me, Hosea son of Beeri." After introducing our hero, already a grown man, already a prophet, Chapter One takes us back a generation to describe Beeri, pious and prosperous, and his household. The child Hosea makes his appearance in Chapter Two, after a chilling depiction of his oldest brother's cruelty and a brief display of his middle brother, Iddo's growing proficiency with arms. Hosea manifests neither of these traits, and Steinberg paints a poignant portrait of a boy who is acutely sensitive and compassionate to those around him.

The elder brother soon receives his just desserts, and Iddo, after avenging the death, runs off to be a soldier. But before he leaves, he dances provocatively with beautiful young Gomer during the festivities of Sukkot. However it is Hosea who becomes smitten with Gomer, the niece of a local ne'er-do-well. Here Steinberg's story diverges from the biblical, as Hosea marries the virgin Gomer with no intervention from God.

Hosea, now a scribe for the king, must travel throughout the Northern Kingdom. Here Steinberg's masterful writing makes the reader one with Hosea as he is increasing confronted with, and revolted by, the corruption and idolatry of the land's inhabitants. We also share Hosea's longing for home and his shock when he does return only to find his brother Iddo in bed with Gomer. This is where Steinberg excels, forcing the reader to whipsaw between Hosea's myriad emotions - outrage, betrayal, pain - along with the sorrow of knowing that he must put aside the wife he still loves.

Despising his own cowardice, Hosea cannot bring himself to denounce the adulterers and have them executed. He moves out, taking his children with him. He tries to devote himself to his scribal duties, but suffers humiliation from his colleagues when Iddo makes Gomer his concubine. Then suddenly, there is an attack against the king, sending Hosea to grab a bow to help defend the palace. But who is leading the rebels and promptly shoots an arrow straight at Hosea? His brother Iddo.

Abruptly, Steinberg's stirring words stop, to be followed by essays by Rabbi Harold Kushner and novelist Norma Rosen, who posit how they imagine that The Prophet's Wife should have ended. The switch from Steinberg's vivid prose to these cerebral commentaries is like replacing a full-bodied glass of wine with a cup of weak, tepid tea.

I was aware that Steinberg had left The Prophet's Wife unfinished, but that advance knowledge did little to assuage my disappointment and frustration. Surely the climatic scene would have been Hosea's encounter with God, and I was keenly anticipating how Steinberg would have written it. Yet Kushner and Rosen say nothing of this, concentrating instead on what kind of relationship Hosea and Gomer would, or should, end up with. Kushner seems confident that Hosea will go to become a prophet, never to reconcile with Gomer. "God may be able to forgive a chastened and repentant Israel, but Hosea ... is not capable of bestowing such forgiveness." Rosen creates a feminist, and happier, ending. Hosea and Gomer do reconcile, and the pair share his prophetic travels.

Steinberg has written another beautiful and moving novel, one that delves deep into Hosea's mind and heart. The historical novelist's task is to take the reader on a mental vacation back to a time and place that is otherwise inaccessible, while simultaneously providing a compelling story populated with fascinating characters. If the novelist manages to educate the readers, as well as entertain them, so much the better. In The Prophet's Wife, Steinberg admirably fulfills all these tasks.

On every page Hosea's 8th-century world is brought vividly to life. We see through Hosea's eyes why the Northern Kingdom deserved to be destroyed. And not just through his eyes - we share all Hosea's senses. The feel of a drunkard's slimy hands; the seductive tinkling of harlot Gomer's ankle bells as she walks past him; the vile smell of whores' perfume on men leaving a brothel; the taste of Hosea's own vomit after being forced to watch animals being sacrificed to Baal. Yet despite never giving us Gomer's point of view, Steinberg lets us experience her thoughts and feelings through Hosea. We know her shame and guilt, and that deep inside she loves Hosea too. The Prophet's Wife allows those readers familiar with the bible to understand how Hosea and Gomer's relationship so well symbolizes that of God and Israel.

And this is why I believe that it is probably just as well that The Prophet's Wife remained unpublished until now. Rabbi Steinberg died just after details of the Holocaust in Europe had demoralized the Jewish world. Surely his likely audience would have recognized a parallel between the destruction of European Jewry and God using Assyria to annihilate the ten tribes of Northern Israel. Publishing a novel on the Prophet Hosea, who warned the Northern Kingdom that God would destroy them as punishment for their sins, could be seen as tantamount to saying that the Holocaust occurred because of its victim's sins - a view that Steinberg undoubtedly found abhorrent.

Today, sixty years later, when the shadow of the Holocaust no longer so completely darkens the Jewish world, we can read The Prophet's Wife with sufficient distance between Northern Israel's fate in the 8th century and that of Europe's Jews in the 20th. So I gladly welcome this final work in Steinberg's corpus, frustratingly incomplete as it is. However my review would also be incomplete without this historical novelist's version of how The Prophet's Wife should end.

Obviously Steinberg intended for Hosea to kill Iddo, and thus Hosea achieves justice and revenge, as well as acclamation as a hero. Coming back to the biblical story, which neither mentions Iddo nor a revolt against the king, Hosea now receives the call from God, Who tells Hosea to take Gomer back, that their marriage will embody the covenant between God and Israel.
Hosea returns home to his patrimony to find that Gomer is still there, continuing to manage the family estate that Iddo had neglected. She begs Hosea's forgiveness and beseeches him not to force her back to harlotry. Hosea shares God's words with her, and she swears that she has repented all the evil she did Hosea, and henceforth will be the most faithful of wives. They remarry, but Hosea, determined to remain pure to receive God's word, will not cohabit with her. Gomer soon finds that she is pregnant, and Hosea, realizing that this child would be Iddo's heir otherwise, claims the pregnancy as his own, thus fulfilling the Bible's text that gives the couple three children. The final scene, a mirror of the opening, shows Hosea climbing onto the town rostrum [perhaps with Gomer watching from afar]. Only this time we hear the words that God has put in his mouth, including those that Jews read twice a year on Tisha B'Av and Shabbat Shuva:

Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God,
For you have fallen because of your sin.
Take words with you and return to the Lord.
Say to Him: "Forgive all guilt and accept what is good"
... [then] I will heal their affliction,
Generously will I take them back in love.

At the time of his premature death in 1950, Milton Steinberg, respected rabbi and author of the acclaimed As a Driven Leaf, left the unfinished manuscript of a second novel. After sixty years, The Prophet's Wife has finally been published.

Set in the days before the Assyrian invasion of the northern kingdom of Israel, The Prophet's Wife revolves around the life of Hosea, one of the earliest literary prophets and the one about whose personal life we know the most. Hosea talks in the book named for him about how he married a woman who betrayed him with other men, yet took her back as God would do with unfaithful Israel.

As in his other novel, Steinberg gives us a vivid re-imagining of ancient Israelite life and customs, as well as a very human portrait of Hosea, the scholarly yet unappreciated son of his pious father, and Hosea's erring wife Gomer. Steinberg's stately prose brings to mind the cadences of the Tanakh, yet is never inaccessible to the modern reader.

The editors of The Prophet's Wife have made the bold and unconventional decision to leave it in its unfinished state, ending at a pivotal point in its subject's life, adding two very different essays by modern scholars speculating on how Steinberg would have finished the book if he had lived. The reader, as well, can come up with his or her own ending for Hosea and Gomer's story.

As A Driven Leaf is a book I reread every few years. I do not expect to be doing same with The Prophet's Wife. But Steinberg did succeed in brigning the prophetic tradition to life in a uniquely Jewish way. Too often the prophets are the exclusive province of Christianty and one of the great aspects of this book is the way that Steinberg makes the prophetic tradition accessible to Jews, and frames them in a specifically Jewish way. I was captured by the story of Hosea and Gomer and the accompanying essays helped bring Steinberg and the book's cultural heritage to life. How could anyone have tried to finish writing this book? The ending, though necessarily abrupt, is intriguing and in many ways more profound than any other ending could have been. I had chills when I read it.

This is an amazing and tragic book - I think the other reviewers have summarized this well, that it is a dramatized version of the life of Hosea, the Biblical prophet, whose story of his unfaithful wife Gomer was used as a metaphor for G-d's love for the people Israel (who were equally unfaithful, though in different ways). I was surprised to find that this is every bit as good as A Driven Leaf, the author's classic novel of Talmudic times, especially since this is a first, unfinished draft. And yes, this works not only as a midrash that will either please or scandalize religious Jews - but also as a great, gripping drama, which could appeal to anyone, believer or atheist alike. The tragedy of the story is heightened by the tragedy of the author, who died before finishing it. My opinion remains that someone should have completed the book (it was unfinished when Steinberg died, relatively young), but even as a substantial fragment, it is one of the greatest novelizations of Biblical times ever written, and Steinberg was one of our greatest writers.

If you read the initial review posted, you know the plot of this unfinished novel. It is still worth reading.

I am a fan of As a Driven Leaf. I read it for the first time almost forty years ago. From time to time, I have reread it. I introduced it to my wife and she enjoyed it also. Yet, upon rereading recently, it did not hold my interest.

This book was different. The Prophet's Wife has a vibrancy as we relive partially the lives of two prophets, Amos and Hosea. You could feel the weight of prophecy on Amos' shoulder. More of us need to feel the hand of God on us in this way.

You could also feel Hosea's pain, a third child of a father who could not love him the way he deserved because of his first and second born. You can feel how the romance grows between Hosea and Gomer. Gomer is intoxicating but does not initially love Hosea. Hosea loves with her initially with this understanding, hoping against hope. We have all known people like this.

Rabbi Steinberg portrays Gomer both as honest and ambiguous. Since the novel is complete, we will never know what his final judgment was since appearances may be deceiving.

I too wish Rabbi Steinberg was allowed to complete this novel. By presenting Hosea as a man who loves and hates, a man of a full range of feelings and thoughts, he brings the text alive and teaches us Torah today in this unfinished novel.

Unfortunately, Milton Steinberg's highly acclaimed last work didn't live up to my expectations. The Note from Publisher and Foreward at the beginning of the book was fascinating and stirred my curiosity. Rabbi Steinberg's biography and his sudden and tragic death (at age 46) while writing this manuscript created an aura of excitement as well. The fact that sixty years later, friends and scholars gathered together to edit and publish his untold story set the stage for an incredible reading experience. Well, the process of the book's inception was far greater than the book itself. Though Steinberg's writing shows glimpses of brilliance, the plot felt more like an author's first draft - sluggish and cumbersome. Adding to the frustration, the story just hits its stride, and the book abruptly ends in the middle of a tension-packed scene. The "Readers Guide" that follows tries to guess at Steinberg's possible endings but respectfully declined to create the ending in story form. Understandably, since an author's voice - especially one with writing as distinctive as Rabbi Steinberg - is difficult to duplicate. However, when I turned the last page, I felt - unsatisfied, disappointed, frustrated. The only reason I give this book 3 stars instead of 1, is the sheer beauty of Steinberg's prose.

The prohet's wife is a very goodbook and I am enjoying reading it.
Sheilla

This book is excellent and so too is the extensive review. However, we should add one point that I am sure that both the author and the reviewer knew.

This story should not be taken literally. It is not reasonable to think that God would require a prophet to marry someone who is unsuitable for him.

There are two main possibilities. First, the story was never meant to be understood literally, but only as a parable. Or, perhaps the facts did occur, but not by a divine dictate. Hosea did what he did on his own, and later reflected on what he did and saw in his single life experience a message for his people.