The Rain and the Teacher

A reader asked what the commentators say about a single verse in Hosea, and the answer turned into something larger than the verse. It begins with one Hebrew word that means three things at once, and it ends with a Man standing up at a feast.

The verse, and the word at the end of it

“Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the LORD, till he come and rain righteousness upon you” (Hosea 10:12).

Three commands, all of them plural and all of them active. Zir’u, sow. Qitsru, reap. Niru, break up. Adam Clarke will not let the third one be gentle: “Do not be satisfied with a slight furrow; let the land that was fallowed (slightly ploughed) be broken up again with a deep furrow.” Keil is more exact still: the noun is nir, land never cultivated at all, so the command is to put a plough into ground that has never had one.

And Albert Barnes catches what the middle clause actually says. The Hebrew is le-phi chesed, literally according to the mouth of mercy: “not in proportion to what you have sown, nor what justice would give, but beyond all deserts, in the proportion of mercy… which becometh the mercy of God, which is boundless.” You sow by measure. You reap by His.

But the word this letter is about is the last one, and in the Hebrew it is yoreh.

Yarah: the arrow, the teacher, the rain

The root is yarah, Strong’s H3384, and it appears eighty times. What it means depends on what is being released, and Scripture uses all three senses without embarrassment.

It is what an archer does. On Gilboa, “the archers hit him” (1 Samuel 31:3); Jonathan says “I will shoot three arrows on the side thereof” (1 Samuel 20:20).

It is what a teacher does. Samuel, refusing to abandon a people who had just rejected him: “God forbid that I should sin against the LORD in ceasing to pray for you: but I will teach you the good and the right way” (1 Samuel 12:23). Solomon prays that God would “teach them the good way wherein they should walk” (1 Kings 8:36).

And it is what rain does.

One picture holds all three: something released from above and sent at a mark. Which is why the word for the Law is built on this root. Torah is not named “rule” or “code”; it is named from the verb for shooting and for teaching, and it occurs 220 times. It is also why the Bible’s ordinary word for sin is missing the mark. The Law is an aim before it is a fence.

Moses said it first, and Isaiah kept it

The fusion is not a later flourish. It stands at the opening of the song Moses sang over Israel before they crossed:

My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass Deuteronomy 32:2

Teaching is rain. Not like rain in a decorative sense; the verse gives it four weathers, rain and dew and small rain and showers, and lets the doctrine be all of them. Isaiah takes the same equation and turns it into a promise about the reliability of God’s word: “as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth… so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void” (Isaiah 55:10-11).

So Hosea’s last clause reads two ways

If yarah means both, then “till he come and yoreh righteousness upon you” can be rendered rain righteousness or teach righteousness, and the Hebrew does not decide between them.

Calvin saw it and said so. In his commentary he gives the Latin as pluere faciat justitiam, cause righteousness to rain, and then adds in the same breath: “although the more received version is, may he teach you righteousness.” He does not pretend the question is settled.

The Greek Old Testament went the other road entirely. Where our Bibles have the rain, the Septuagint has “light for yourselves the light of knowledge,” and that is the Hosea the Greek Fathers were reading. Origen quotes it three separate times. Gregory Nazianzen builds on it: “let us kindle for ourselves the light of knowledge. This will be done by sowing unto righteousness.” Ephraim the Syrian pairs it with the woman sweeping for her lost coin. John Cassian makes it a whole method of the spiritual life:

There is then no way of arriving at spiritual knowledge but this which one of the prophets has finely described: “Sow to yourselves for righteousness: reap the hope of life. Enlighten yourselves with the light of knowledge.” First then we must sow for righteousness, that is, by works of righteousness we must extend practical perfection; next we must reap the hope of life… and so we shall succeed in enlightening ourselves with the light of knowledge. John Cassian, Conferences

So a whole tradition of Christian teaching about illumination grew out of a clause that is not in the Hebrew, because a translator seven centuries before Christ took yarah as instruction rather than weather. Both are in the word. Neither is an invention.

And Joel does the same thing

“Be glad then, ye children of Zion… for he hath given you the former rain moderately” (Joel 2:23). The Hebrew there is ha-moreh li-tsedaqah, and moreh is the noun from the same root. It appears seven times in Scripture. Three of them mean the early rain. Four of them mean a teacher: “thine eyes shall see thy teachers” (Isaiah 30:20), “who teacheth like him?” (Job 36:22), “the voice of my teachers” (Proverbs 5:13).

Which means Joel’s clause reads, with equal warrant, he hath given you the former rain for righteousness or he hath given you the Teacher of Righteousness. Two prophets, one construction, and our translators chose the weather both times.

Second Temple Judaism did not choose the weather. The community that left us the scrolls named its founder from exactly this phrase, the Moreh Tsedeq, the Teacher of Righteousness. They read a season as a man.

The feast where the rain was decided

Now hold that beside a feast, because Scripture ties one of the three pilgrim feasts directly to rainfall, and it does so in a promise about the nations:

And it shall come to pass, that every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall even go up from year to year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles. And it shall be, that whoso will not come up… even upon them shall be no rain. Zechariah 14:16-17

Tabernacles is the feast of the coming rain. It falls at the turn of the agricultural year, when the early rain, the moreh, is what stands between a nation and famine. Israel’s own rabbinic record says as much: the Mishnah lists the four times the world is judged and states that “on the festival of Sukkot they are judged concerning water,” that is, the rainfall of the coming year (Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:2).

And the rite that grew up around it was a water rite. A golden vessel was filled from the pool of Siloam, carried up through the Water Gate, and poured out on the altar (Mishnah Sukkah 4:9). Our own commentators know it. Clarke, on the last day of the feast, says it was “probably when they went to draw water from the pool Siloam” that what follows happened.

What follows

In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. John 7:37-38

He stands at the feast where Israel is judged concerning water, on the day water drawn from Siloam is poured out on the altar, and offers Himself as the drink. And John, who was there, supplies the meaning in the next sentence: “But this spake he of the Spirit” (John 7:39).

Notice also the citation, because it is a famous difficulty and it points the same way. “As the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” quotes no verse that exists in those words. The nearest thing to it in the Old Testament is four verses above the passage we just read: “living waters shall go out from Jerusalem” (Zechariah 14:8). Same chapter as the keeping of Tabernacles and the withholding of rain. He was not reaching for a proof text. He was standing inside one.

Where this lands

A single Hebrew root carries the arrow, the teacher and the rain, and gives the Law its name. Moses opened his last song by calling his doctrine rain. Isaiah promised a word that comes down like rain and does not go back empty. Hosea and Joel each ended a call to repentance with a phrase that means either He will rain righteousness on you or He will send you the Teacher of Righteousness, and Scripture never resolves the pun, because it did not need to.

The West heard the rain. The East heard the teaching. A community by the Dead Sea heard a man coming. And then a Man stood up at the feast of the early rain, on the day the water was poured, and said if any man thirst, let him come unto me, and the apostle standing there wrote down that He meant the Spirit.

Which leaves Hosea’s three imperatives exactly where he left them. Sow. Reap. Break up the fallow ground, and not with a slight furrow. The rain is His to send and always was. The ground is yours.

Related: The Spirit Isn’t Always Tidy, Take Not Thy Holy Spirit From Me and its Going Deeper, where John 7:39 is worked at length, What the Word Says. Hebrew and Greek verified word by word against the Berean translation tables held in our own database, with Strong’s numbers given so any reader can check them. Commentary quoted verbatim from the public-domain editions in our library. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. The two Mishnah citations are quoted from the William Davidson digital edition of the Koren Noé Talmud, with commentary by Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, made freely available by Sefaria under CC BY-NC; we quote and credit rather than host.