husband

Where the authorities disagree

Whether the two words differ at all.

1. They are synonyms, and the pasuk is about the idol. Radak, Abarbanel and Maharsha: after the exile the Jews will repent so completely that they will not use baali of Hashem at all, because they will want distance from the homonymous Baal, chief of the Canaanite pantheon, whom the prophets laboured to break them of. So they will use its synonym ishi instead, and the shift is lexical. The Yerushalmi (Avodah Zarah 3:6) that the Baal idol was shaped like the male member, and Rav Hirsch (to Bamidbar 23:13) that baal is kin to the Greek phallus through the interchange of bes and feh, give the avoidance a thematic edge: the Jews will not use the word even in its plain sense of husband.
2. They differ, and the pasuk is about the relationship. Everyone below.

How they differ, among those who say they do. The readings converge but are not the same.

• Ownership against partnership. Rabbi Yochanan (Kesubos 71b) has the Jews relating to Hashem "like a bride in her father-in-law's home, not like a bride in her father's home." Rashi supplies each half in a different place: to the Gemara there, that ishi implies conjugality and marriage; to Hoshea, that baali implies lording and awe. Maharsha puts the two together, and Rashi's first edition, quoted in the Shittah Mekubetzes to Kesubos 71b, shows that this was Rashi's intent. So baali is bare ownership, of the sort by which the owner of an ox is the baal hashor (Shemos 21:28), and answers to the betrothed bride still in her father's house, acquired but with no reciprocity; ishi is intimate familiarity and a two-way bond, the bride already living in her husband's family's home, neither partner lording over the other. Malbim (to Hoshea 2:18) reads it much the same way.
• Covenant against informality. Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik (1820 to 1892): ishi is a formal union of man and wife that expects fidelity, while baali is a pair in an informal relationship with no covenantal expectation of monogamy, which is how the idolatrous Jews of Hoshea's day understood their tie to Hashem and how they left themselves free to serve other gods beside Him.
• Acquisition against one flesh. Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Chaver (1789 to 1853) holds that even baali carries an expectation of loyalty. The difference is that baali says only that the groom has acquired the bride so that she can no longer be wed to another, while ishi says the two have joined to become one flesh, which is Adam's point in naming her ishah, "for this was taken from ish" (Bereishis 2:23).
• Union against the act. Maharal (Netzach Yisrael ch. 47): ish implies a united connection between the spouses, and the letters bear it, since the yud of ish and the hey of ishah are the first two letters of the Sheim. Baal he derives from bo'el, the man as the active party in the act, the woman passive, and that imbalance is what Hoshea's vision anticipates correcting.
• Provider against beloved. The Vilna Gaon (to Devarim 21:13): Hashem bestows His abundance for two reasons, as benevolent Master of the Universe and because He loves Yisrael as a man loves his wife. Under baal they served Him for the influx of good He bestows, which is close to the idolatrous idea of a god as a mechanical source of benefits owed no relationship; under ish they will relate to Him as the One who loves them. Elsewhere (to Hoshea 2:18) he derives baal from be'ilah and so reads it as a way of approaching marriage fixed on its sensual pleasures. See also his comments to Bereishis 2:23, Shir HaShirim 1:17, and Tikkunei Zohar, Tikkun 30.
• Initiating against sharing. Rav Hirsch (to Bereishis 20:3, Tehillim 28:4), on the interchange of bes and peh, makes baal kin to paal, action: an action is how a man controls a situation to reach his object, and baal is accordingly the one who initiates, lording over a subdued vassal, against the partner who only receives. Rabbi Yehoshua Steinberg of the Veromemanu Foundation adds that the same is hinted in bala, swallowing, whose root bes-lamed-ayin is a metathesis of baal, bes-ayin-lamed, which catches the aggressive side of a nature that would acquire possessions and people alike by swallowing them up. Rav Hirsch reads Hoshea from the other side: under baali the Jews saw themselves humbled and downtrodden before Him, and afterwards they regain their confidence and walk in His path as partners, unsubjugated, which is ishi.
• Already happened, not still coming. Rabbi Meir Emden (1717 to 1798), son of Rabbi Yaakov Emden (1698 to 1776), does not read the vision as future at all. At Sinai Hashem held the mountain over them like a barrel (Shabbos 88a), so that their acceptance was not free of duress, and that is baali, a coercive owner who forced the Torah on them. In the days of Achashverosh they repented and took the Torah on willingly, "the Jews fulfilled and accepted upon themselves" (Esther 9:27), and from then on He was their loving ish.