For the first time in history a prophet foretold disaster and banishment for a whole people: love of country was already giving place in the heart of Amos to his conviction of the universal jurisdiction of God, and this conviction led him to regard as possible and probable a state of things in which Israel should have no part. Nevertheless, its decadence was to be merely temporary; Jahveh, though prepared to chastise the posterity of Jacob severely, could not bring Himself to destroy it utterly. The kingdom of David was soon to flourish anew: "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. And I will bring again the captivity of My people Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be plucked up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God."* The voice of Amos was not the only one raised in warning. From the midst of Ephraim, another seer, this time a priest, Hosea, son of Beeri,** was never weary of reproaching the tribes with their ingratitude, and persisted in his foretelling of the desolation to come. * Amos ix. 13-15. ** Hoshea (or Hosea) was regarded by the rabbis as the oldest of the lesser prophets, and his writings were placed at the head of their collected works. The title of his book (Hos. i. 1), where he begins by stating that he preached "in the days of Jeroboam, the son of Joash (Jehoash), King of Israel," is a later interpolation; the additional mention of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, is due to an attempted analogy with the title of Isaiah. Hosea was familiar with the prophecies of Amos, and his own predictions show that the events merely foreseen by his predecessor were now in course of fulfilment in his day. The first three chapters probably date from the end of the reign of Jeroboam, about 750 B.C.; the others were compiled under his successors, and before 734-733 B.C., since Gilead is there mentioned as still forming part of Israel (Hos. vi. 8; xii. 12), though it was in that year laid waste and conquered by Tiglath-pileser III. Duhm has suggested that Hosea must have been a priest from the tone of his writings, and this hypothesis is generally accepted by theologians.