4. Like Moses, the master of the prophets, so the prophet Hosea also learned in hard spiritual struggle to know the divine attribute of mercy and lovingkindness. His own wife had proved faithless, and had broken the marital covenant; still his love survived, so that he granted her forgiveness when she was forsaken, and took her back to his home. Then, in his distress at the God-forsaken state of Israel through her faithlessness, he asked himself: "Will God reject forever the nation which He espoused, because it broke the covenant? Will not He also grant forgiveness and mercy?" The divine answer came to him out of the depths of his own compassionate soul. Upon the crown of God's majesty which Amos had beheld all effulgent with justice and righteousness, he placed the most precious gem, reflecting the highest quality of God--His gracious and all-forgiving love.(296) Whether the priority in this great truth belongs to Hosea or Moses is a question for historical Bible research to answer, but it is of no consequence to Jewish theology.
5. Certainly Scripture represents God too much after human fashion, when it ascribes to him changes of mood from anger to compassion, or speaks of His repentance.(297) But we must bear in mind that the prophets obtained their insight into the ways of God by this very process of transferring their own experience to the Deity. And on the other hand, we are told that "God is not a man that He should lie, neither the son of man that He should repent."(298) All these anthropomorphic pictures of God were later avoided by the ancient Biblical translators by means of paraphrase, and by the philosophers by means of allegory.(299)
6. According to the Midrashic interpretation of the passage from the Pentateuch quoted above, Moses desired to ascertain whether God ruled the world with His justice or with His mercy, and the answer was: "Behold, I shall let My _goodness_ pass before thee. For I owe nothing to any of My creatures, but My actions are prompted only by My grace and good will, through which I give them all that they possess."(300) According to Judaism justice and mercy are intertwined in God's government of the world; the former is the pillar of the cosmic structure, and the latter the measuring line. No mortal could stand before God, were justice the only standard; but we subsist on His mercy, which lends us the boons of life without our meriting them. That which is not good in us now is to become good through our effort toward the best. God's grace underlies this possibility.