The book of Hosea holds out astonishing divine promises for the restoration of northern Israel. In the rest of the Hebrew Bible, however, the salvation-historical focus narrows to Judah, seeming to leave out its northern counterpart after its destruction and exile (2 Kgs 17). Has the divine promise of restoration for northern Israel been enveloped by the Hebrew Bible’s larger literary-theological focus on Judah? I argue that the account of Jesus and the Samaritan woman (John 4) is an intra-canonical testimony that YHWH has not forgotten Samaria but remains concerned for the remnants of the scattered northern tribes.
Scholars have noted some correspondences between Hosea and John 4, usually paralleling the Johannine theme of Jesus as the bridegroom and Hosea/Gomer (Pitre 2014; Ruben 2018). However, there has not yet been a wider, inter-canonical exploration of literary, historical, and theological interconnections from the perspective of a modern linguistic theory of coherence. The framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) fruitfully situates the semiotics of intra-canonical coherence (Lemke 1985; Porter 2017).
Using a lens of intertextuality rooted in SFL (Turner 2018; 2023), I argue that John 4 hints at an inner-canonical divine tribute to the restoration promises for northern Israel in Hosea. On the one hand, the promise to restore northern Israel must await the ultimate eschatological of God’s people (Rom 9–11). On the other hand, the NT/OT canon seems to bring the spiritual/social alienation of Samaria into intentional focus as a signal that YHWH has not forgotten his words of promise through Hosea. I argue that John 4 may be read as a kind of penultimate eschatological fulfillment of YHWH’s promises to northern Israel.
Exploring parallels between the theological, literary, and historical horizons of Hosea and John 4, I use an SFL-based intertextual method to reveal intra-canonical connections between YHWH/Hosea’s pursuit of northern Israel and Jesus’s pursuit of the Samaritan woman in John 4.
Overall, I demonstrate how a reader-oriented concept of coherence grounded in SFL’s theory of context enables the connection between God’s startling promise of reversal of Samaria’s ill fortunes (Hos 13:15–14:1) and Jesus’s mission to the Samaritan woman as a kind of divine down payment on the ultimate eschatological hope of life with God (Hos 14:2–9). The intertextual juxtaposition of the passages suggests a geographically concrete yet theologically partial fulfillment of Hosea’s message in which an un-peopled woman left in spiritual exile becomes “my people” (Hos 2:25). Jesus’s offer of relationship to the Samaritan woman at a time when Jews had “no dealings with” the mixed-race descendants of the Assyrian-resettled residents of northern Israel create a literary-theological resonance that brings together soteriological hope with the ethics of ethnic reconciliation (2 Kgs 17:24–41; John 4:26).