The book of Hosea is a damning indictment of the sin of Israel in forsaking God and an extended description of the judgement upon them because of their disobedience.

Hosea 1:2 begins with an unusual statement that it is the land which has committed great ‘whoredom’ (zanah). Throughout the book of Hosea it is clear that the earth has become caught up in the sin of the people who inhabit it and commit bloodshed upon it. ‘The land mourns’ (v.3). There is a moral and spiritual identification between earth and the people who reside upon it.

Raped, by artist Käthe Kollwitz is an etching made as part of the graphic cycle The Peasants Revolt. Kollwitz was sympathetic towards the conditions of the urban working class, and conscious of ‘the connection of poverty, exploitation, and homelessness on both mother and child’ (Betterton 1996: 38). This image depicts the aftermath of a rape, showing a woman supine on the ground of a herb garden. A barely visible child looks on from behind the fence, camouflaged behind the leaves, stem, and head of a wilting sunflower.

The earth, with its abundance of fruit and vegetation, possesses the symbolic tropes of fecundity and fertility associated with the female. Kollwitz subverts these tropes as the violated woman becomes overtaken by the earth: her body sunken into the ground where she was sinned against. Dehumanized and anonymous, her face is hidden behind brassica leaves, and her legs entangled with sunflower stems. ‘It seems as if the chaotic vines themselves threaten to consume the victim’s body and draw her into the earth’ (Kets de Vries 2016: 14). Within Western painting history the naked female body represents the untouchable gazed upon object, but this objectified woman has been both touched and violated (Betterton 1996 37).

As the book of Hosea unfolds we understand more of the sin—against people, and against the land—with which Israel is being charged. In Hosea 9 and 10, their sin is compared to the atrocious acts committed at Gibeah; a reference to the nameless woman who is raped, cut into twelve pieces, and sent to the tribes of Israel (Judges 19). This record of violence towards an unnamed woman recalls the violence Kollwitz depicts in this etching, and in particular violence against anonymous women and children.

References

Betterton, Rosemary. 1996. An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body (London: Routledge)

Kearns, Martha. 1976. Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press)

Kets de Vries, Henriëtte. 2016. Kathe Kollwitz and the Women of War: Femininity, Identity, and Art in Germany During World Wars I and II (New Haven: Yale University Press)

Prelinger, Elizabeth. 1992. Käthe Kollwitz (Kollwitz Reconsidered) (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art)