The Kind of Knowing the Bible Is Talking About
Part 2 of a seven-part series on Hosea 4:6 and the knowledge of God
By Rev. Promise Ave | promiseave.org
Let me introduce you to two people. Both would be called knowledgeable about God by anyone who met them, and yet they could hardly be more different. The first can settle any argument about chapter and verse, recite the kings of Israel in order, sketch the covenants on a whiteboard, and tell you what the Hebrew is doing behind a dozen famous texts. The second would lose that contest badly, fumbling the dates and mixing up the prophets, and yet there is something in the way this person prays, forgives, waits, and gives that makes you suspect they have been somewhere the first has only read about. We feel the difference between them almost at once, even when we cannot put a name to it. Hebrew had no trouble naming it. It carried a single word for the gap between those two people, and that word sits at the dead centre of the verse we are walking through.
The previous post left us holding a question we could not yet answer. Hosea watched a whole people quietly come undone and traced the undoing to a missing knowledge, but what had actually gone missing, when the nation still had its priests, its scrolls, its festivals, and a religious calendar packed from one end of the year to the other? The answer is folded inside one small Hebrew word, and once you see what that word is carrying, the verse stops sounding like a complaint about poor education and starts sounding like something far closer to home.
A word with a startling reach
Underneath everything stands the verb יָדַע (yada, “to know”). In English, “know” lives mostly in the head. We know a phone number, we know the capital of a country, we know that water boils at a certain temperature. The Hebrew verb refuses to stay in the head. When Genesis says that Adam “knew” his wife and she conceived, it reaches for יָדַע (yada, “to know”), and nobody imagines the writer means Adam had collected some facts about her. The word is describing the most complete union two people can share. The same verb turns up when a craftsman knows his trade in his hands, when a shepherd knows his flock one animal at a time, when a friend is known and trusted across decades of shared weather. To know, in this language, is to be bound up with, involved in, changed by. It is the vocabulary of participation rather than the vocabulary of the filing cabinet.
So when the noun that grows out of this verb, דַּעַת (da’ath, “knowledge”), is used of God, it brings the whole weight of that intimacy with it. The knowledge of God in Hebrew is not a folder of true statements about Him. It is the lived, sustained, relational acquaintance of a creature with its Creator, the kind you can only have by spending yourself in the relationship over time. It is also knowledge that runs in both directions, the mutual acquaintance of two parties bound in covenant, a knowing that is answered by being known. You can no more acquire it by collecting doctrines than you can acquire a marriage by reading the wedding certificate. This is the knowledge Hosea said his people were perishing without, and suddenly the diagnosis stops being strange. People do not waste away for want of facts; they waste away for want of the thing the facts were only ever meant to lead them into.
Not knowledge in general, but the knowledge
There is a detail in the Hebrew that pins this down. When the prophet first named the problem a few lines earlier, he did not say the land was short on knowledge in some vague, general sense. He said there was no דַּעַת אֱלֹהִים (da’ath elohim, “knowledge of God”) in the land. The thing in short supply was not religious information broadly speaking. It was God Himself, known. And when the same word returns in our verse, the prophet attaches the definite article to it, “the knowledge,” as if to say: you understand which knowledge I mean, the one we have been talking about, the knowing of God that everything else was built to serve.
A few chapters later Hosea makes the point unmistakable. Speaking for God, he says, “For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” Read that slowly, because it rearranges the furniture. The very people accused in our verse were busy at the altar. The smoke was rising, the offerings were being made, the machinery of worship was running. And God says, in effect, that He never wanted the machinery for its own sake. He wanted to be known. The sacrifices were always meant to be the expression of a relationship, not a substitute for one. What the priests had let slip through their fingers, the living דַּעַת אֱלֹהִים (da’ath elohim, “knowledge of God”), was precisely the thing God prized above everything they were still dutifully producing.
How a busy, religious people could starve
This is why a nation crammed with religious activity could still be wasting away, and it is why the diagnosis reaches across three thousand years and lands in our own laps. Activity is not union. A person can stand in the right building, say the right words, keep the right calendar, and remain a stranger to the One it is all addressed to.
Think of the difference between studying a map of a city and actually walking its streets after dark until your feet know the turns without being told. The map-reader can describe the city accurately and still be lost the moment they arrive. Or think of the gap between holding a thick file of facts about a person, their history, their habits, their opinions, and the slow accumulation of shared meals and hard conversations and ordinary Tuesdays that makes you able to say, truthfully, that you know them. The file is real. It is just not the same kind of thing as the relationship, and no amount of adding to the file ever quietly turns into the relationship. A cook who has memorised a recipe to the last gram is not yet the cook whose hands know when the dough is ready by its feel. Knowledge of that second kind is earned only by being in it.
There is even a quiet trap buried here. The more we accumulate about God, the easier it can become to feel we have already dealt with Him, when in truth we have only catalogued Him. Knowledge held at arm’s length can work as a kind of insulation, letting us discuss the One we are quietly avoiding, admire truths we are not living, and grow fluent in a language we seldom speak to His face. Familiarity with the subject slips into the seat reserved for fellowship with the Person, and the substitution is convincing precisely because the information really is true. Israel’s priests were not heretics. They could have passed any examination on the Torah. Their tragedy was that they had turned a relationship into a syllabus.
Here is where it presses on us. The danger Hosea named is not that we know too little about God. For many of us the danger runs the other way. We can gather true statements about God for years, stack up sermons and studies and verses, and mistake the growing archive for growing nearness. The question the prophet forces on us is not “how much do I know about God?” but the far more searching “how well do I actually know God?” The first question is answered by recall. The second is answered by the shape of a life, by whether the things we say we believe have travelled the long road from the head into trust, into the way we treat people, into obedience that flows out of love rather than fear. If your intake of teaching is not slowly becoming intimacy, if it is filling a folder rather than deepening a friendship, then by Hosea’s measure you can be remarkably well informed and still be running low on the one thing that keeps a soul from quietly going under. Relational knowing shows itself in small, unglamorous places: in prayer that has become honest conversation rather than performance, in a growing instinct for what pleases Him, in trust that holds steady when the explanations run out, in obedience offered the way you would do a kindness for someone you love rather than the way you would satisfy an inspector. None of that registers on a quiz, and all of it is the evidence the prophet is actually looking for.
That is not a reason to despise study. The facts matter, because you cannot love a God you have entirely misunderstood. It is a reason to refuse to let study become the destination. The information was always meant to be a road, and a road is only as good as the place it takes you.
Where this leads next
If the knowledge that had drained out of Israel was this living acquaintance with God, then a hard question presses forward on its own. Someone was supposed to carry that knowing to the people and hand it on. Who was it, and what happened to them? Hosea has an answer, and it is uncomfortable, because he does not begin by blaming the ordinary farmer in the field or the mother at the well. He turns and points at the very people whose whole reason for existing was to keep this knowledge alive and pass it down the generations. That is where the next post is going.
For the full word-by-word exegetical analysis of Hosea 4:6, including detailed treatment of every significant Hebrew word, see the complete study available on promiseave.org.
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