Today I started reading Hosea and I noticed something there that I’ve noticed before, but am still interested by. The verses are interesting to me because of an attitude we have today about intelligence. We seem to say of many people, “He (or she) was brilliant, but they were a bad person.” My Poli Sci professor warns us: Richard Nixon was perhaps our smartest president, but intelligence is dangerous (i.e. he used it poorly or was poor of character). Actually I just had a conversation tonight and he brought it up again. Or consider Hitler; he was a great leader, he just used it to rally a horrendous force.

While I agree in many ways with this manner of thinking, I believe we don’t realize enough that it’s merely a cultural understanding. In Hebrew culture (especially in the Proverbs, but also elsewhere, as we find here in Hosea), intelligence is irrevocably linked to morality, character, and a fear of God. This leads to some misunderstandings by modern readers of the Proverbs or Psalms when they encounter the term “fool,” as they assume it refers merely to intelligence. It really means much more. (Check Psalm 14: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.'”)

From Hosea chapter four:

6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge;
because you have rejected knowledge,
I reject you from being a priest to me.
And since you have forgotten the law of your God,
I also will forget your children.

…

14 I will not punish your daughters when they play the whore,
nor your brides when they commit adultery;
for the men themselves go aside with prostitutes
and sacrifice with cult prostitutes,
and a people without understanding shall come to ruin.

In verse six, we see that there are two reasons for God’s rejecting/forgetting Israel: a lack of knowledge and a forgetting of the law. Verse fourteen, if the last line is taken by itself, would seem to be good advice for any modern government, and indeed I think any libertarian Wikileaks proponent condoning an informed populace would quickly agree. But once you look at the verse as a whole, you see that only one line seemingly refers to intelligence as we think of it, while the other four are concerned with moral uprightness. In other words, four-fifths of the exhortation in this verse condemns immoral sexuality, while only one speaks of “understanding,” suggesting a link between the two.

I’m not entirely sure what this means yet, or what application it holds, but maybe we need to keep this in mind more often. Maybe the level of intelligence and persuasion a person holds is not as important as, and perhaps is inextricably linked to, his/her character. Maybe this is related to the idea of integrity as oneness: not isolated intelligence but understanding linked with character. Maybe this would have huge implications to our government if we held our politicians’ and administrators’ moral competence to the same rigorous expectations as we do their technical. Although, maybe we don’t even measure the latter competence as stringently as we should…