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Messianic Prophecies

Hosea 13:14

This passage comes from the wider catalog — a broader, more lightly curated list than the core set. Both readings are shown as peers; GEBible takes no side.

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Hosea 13:14

I will ransom them from the power of Sheol. I will redeem them from death! Death, where are your plagues? Sheol, where is your destruction? “Compassion will be hidden from my eyes.

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You are destroyed, Israel, because you are against me, against your help.

Where is your king now, that he may save you in all your cities? And your judges, of whom you said, ‘Give me a king and princes?’

I have given you a king in my anger, and have taken him away in my wrath.

The guilt of Ephraim is stored up. His sin is stored up.

The sorrows of a travailing woman will come on him. He is an unwise son; for when it is time, he doesn’t come to the opening of the womb.

I will ransom them from the power of Sheol. I will redeem them from death! Death, where are your plagues? Sheol, where is your destruction? “Compassion will be hidden from my eyes.

Though he is fruitful among his brothers, an east wind will come, the breath of Yahweh coming up from the wilderness; and his spring will become dry, and his fountain will be dried up. He will plunder the storehouse of treasure.

Samaria will bear her guilt; for she has rebelled against her God. They will fall by the sword. Their infants will be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women will be ripped open.”

The counter-reading

How this passage is read within its own context.

On the critical reading, Hosea 13:14 is textually and rhetorically ambiguous, and in the judgment context of Hosea 13 (Ephraim's coming destruction) its questions may be ironic — summoning Death and Sheol as agents of punishment rather than pledging rescue. Many scholars read the verse as a death-sentence, not a salvation-promise. The Septuagint renders the questions as promises, and Paul (1 Corinthians 15:55) follows that promissory reading. On this view, building a resurrection prophecy on the verse may invert its likely original direction, since the salvation sense enters through the Greek interpretive tradition rather than the Hebrew judgment oracle.

The fulfillment reading

How this passage is read as pointing to the Messiah.

On the fulfillment reading, Hosea 13:14's questions about ransoming from Sheol and Death function as a promise of God's ultimate power over death, a sense supported by the Septuagint's promissory rendering. Interpreters connect this to God's redemptive intent across the OT and see death's defeat demonstrated definitively in Christ's resurrection. Paul's triumphant use of the verse in 1 Corinthians 15:55 is taken as disclosing the passage's deeper import: God's sovereignty over death, whether voiced as threat or promise, culminating in the risen Christ. Some in this tradition treat the verse's very ambiguity as providential, its dual sense mirroring judgment on sin and the promise of life.

How the New Testament uses this passage

Each entry names how the New Testament author draws on the passage — a direct quotation, an allusion, an echo, or a typological reading. An echo or an allusion is not the same as a prediction; the label says which is which.

  • 1Corinthians 15:55-57 Direct quotation

    1 Corinthians 15:55 quotes Hosea 13:14's taunt ('O Death, where is your...') as an explicit citation, though Paul's wording follows a Greek form differing from the MT.