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Ephraim hath given presents (?). Yea, though they give among the nations, now will I remove them, and they shall cease a little from anointing kings and princes! Ephraim hath made many altars to sin; yea, altars serve him to sin. Were I to write for him my laws by thousands, as those of a stranger would they be accounted. They slay burnt offerings for me and eat flesh (?), but the Lord accepteth them not; now will he remember their iniquity, and visit their sins: they shall return to Egypt! [For Israel hath forgotten his Maker, and buildeth temples; and Judah hath multiplied fenced cities; but I will send a fire upon his cities, and it shall devour the palaces thereof.]

§ 10. Ill-timed rejoicing.—In this section Hosea seems to allude to contempt and persecution from which he has had to suffer. Hosea retorts that if his overwrought indignation has seemed folly, and his excited rebuke as madness, this is the people's own fault; it is the nation's guilt which has driven its true spokesman almost beyond the limits of endurance.

Rejoice not, O Israel, in rapture, as the peoples: for thou hast gone astray from thy God, thou hast loved an apostate's hire upon every cornfloor. The floor and the winepress shall not feed them, and the new wine shall fail them. They shall not dwell in the Lord's land; but Ephraim shall return to Egypt, and they shall eat unclean things in Assyria. They shall not pour libations to the Lord, neither prepare for him their sacrifices; their bread shall be unto them as the bread of mourners; all that eat thereof shall be polluted: for their bread shall be only for their appetite; it shall not come into the house of the Lord. What will ye do at the festival, and in the day of the feast of the Lord? For, lo, they are gone up to Assyria; Egypt shall gather them, Memphis shall bury them: their precious things of silver, nettles shall possess them thorns shall be in their tents. The days of visitation are come, the days of recompence are come; Israel shall feel it.

The prophet is a fool, the man of the spirit is mad.' Yea, for the mass of thine iniquity and the greatness of the persecution (?). Ephraim... As for the prophet, the fowler's snare is on all his ways, they have made deep for him the pit in the house of his God (?).

§ 11. Israel as the wild grape.-Hosea loves to contrast the spring-time of Israel's youth with the miseries and guilt of its manhood. Yet it was but soon after the deliverance from Egypt that its apostasy began. 'Baal-peor is put for Beth-peor, the place where Baal-peor was worshipped. The open falling away to this heathen deity was one of the most startling episodes of the period of the wanderings' (Cheyne). But the sin of Baal-peor is no mere sin of the past: it has continued to Hosea's own time, for the whole ritual system is in the prophet's eyes nothing more nor less than a worship of Baal (Wellhausen).

I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness; I saw your fathers like the firstfruits on a fig-tree in her first season.. But they came to Baal-peor, and dedicated themselves to the Shame; and became abominations like their loves. for Ephraim, their glory shall fly away as a bird. Ephraim is smitten, their root is dried up, they shall bear no fruit.

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All their wickedness is at Gilgal; there have I learned to hate them: for the wickedness of their doings I will drive them out of my house; I will love them no more; all their princes are rebellious. My God will reject them, for they have not hearkened unto him; and they shall be fugitives among the nations.

§ 12. Israel as the cultivated vine.-Civilization and prosperity led but to apostasy and sin. And these shall but lead to exile and ruin.

Israel is a luxuriant vine, which freely put forth fruit. As his fruit increased, he increased his altars; the goodlier his land, the more goodly he made his pillars! Their heart is deceitful; they shall bear their guilt: he shall break down their altars, he shall destroy their pillars. Yea, then shall they say, We have no king, because we feared not the Lord; and the king, what can he do for us? They speak words, they swear falsely, they make covenants:

The inhabitants of Samaria shall fear because of the calf of Beth-aven: yea, the people thereof shall mourn over it, and its priestlings shall howl-for its glory, that it is banished from it (?). And it shall be carried unto Assyria for a present to the great king: Ephraim shall get disgrace, and Israel shall be put to shame because of his idol. Samaria is undone; her king is as a chip upon the face of the water.

WICKEDNESS AND DISASTER

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And the high places of Israel shall be destroyed: the thorn and the thistle shall come up on their altars; and they shall say to the mountains, Cover us; and to the hills, Fall on us.

§ 13. Sow righteousness: reap lovingkindness.-Two obscure verses at the opening of this section are here omitted. 'Sow to yourselves righteousness, so shall ye reap lovingkindness': Hosea apparently means that as the seed is, so is the harvest. Where wickedness is sown, disaster is reaped. Where man sows righteousness, God's love and man's love shall be the fruit which he will reap.

Ephraim is an heifer broken in and loving to thresh. But I will come on her fair neck (?): I will yoke Ephraim; Judah (?) shall plough, and Jacob shall harrow. Sow to yourselves righteousness, so shall ye reap lovingkindness; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the Lord, that the fruit of righteousness may come upon you. But ye have ploughed wickedness, ye have reaped disaster; ye have eaten the fruit of lies. Therefore the tumult of war shall arise in thy cities, and all thy fortresses shall be destroyed, [as Shalman destroyed Beth-arbel in the day of battle]: the mother shall be dashed in pieces upon her children. So shall I do unto you, O house of Israel, because of your great wickedness: soon shall the king of Israel utterly be cut off.

§ 14. The wasted training of Israel.-Once more Hosea recalls the past, and more especially the great act of consecration in Israel's history: the redemption from Egypt, the summons to be God's son, a divinely called witness, as the second Isaiah would say, to his unity and his righteousness. But in spite of all God did for Israel, the people refused to hear. Therefore as they will not 'return' in a spiritual sense to God, they shall return in a physical sense to Egypt-a grim play upon words.

Yet even now Hosea makes God hesitate, and even now God declares that his wrath will not end in sheer extermination. It is a great passage about God, though expressed in very human words. The divine wrath is not inconsistent with divine pity. Nay, in all God does, the entire God is operative. But goodness cannot delight in sheer destruction: the God of life and love cannot, even when his sons rebel, delight in ruin and death.

'God does not desire,' as Ezekiel said, 'the death of the sinner,

but rather that he should repent and live.' God has no enemies of any race (here we see more clearly than Ezekiel or Hosea), and he has no favourites in any lower or unrighteous sense of the word. If he suffers evil and suffers sin, he does not do so, we must fain believe, for any other purpose than that the strife and conflict with evil may cause the highest goodness, and that out of sin there may at last be evolved, whether in this life or in another, penitence and return. The very idea of God implies that he is eternally changeless and eternally good. In such more modern and more reflective manner we may re-adapt for our own use and time the thought and language of Hosea.

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and called him from Egypt to be my son (?). The more I called them, the further they went away from me: they sacrificed unto the Baalim, and burnt incense to graven images. But it was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them in mine arms; but they knew not that I tended them (?). I drew them with cords of a man (?), with bands of love, and I was to them as those who lift up the yoke from the cheeks (?), and I bent towards him and gave him food (?). But they shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, for they refused to return. And the sword shall whirl about in their cities, and shall consume their fortresses (?).

My people. ... How can I give thee up, O Ephraim? How can I surrender thee, O Israel? How can I give thee up as Admah, or make thee as Zeboim? My heart is turned within me; my pity burneth. I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger; I will not bring back Ephraim to nothing, for I am God and not man, the holy one in the midst of thee; I come not to utterly consume (?).

[They will follow the Lord; he shall roar as a lion; for he shall roar, and his sons shall hurry trembling from the west (?). They shall hurry trembling like birds from Egypt, and as doves from the land of Assyria, and I will cause them to dwell in their homes, saith the Lord.]

The last paragraph is perhaps an interpolation. For the people are already in exile: the judgement has fallen.

Admah and Zeboim are cities of the Sodom and Gomorrah group. It is to their sudden overthrow and destruction that Hosea refers. The Hebrew of this section is very doubtful. In the first sentence we should perhaps read, 'I called my sons out of Egypt.'

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§ 15. Israel the supplanter and trafficker.-The next section is very difficult. The text is frequently uncertain and corrupt; the sequence of thought very hard to trace. There are several brief allusions to the current stories about the life of Jacob, but Hosea's object in introducing them is far from clear.

Ephraim compasseth me about with lies, and the house of Israel with deceit ; and Judah. . . . Ephraim pursueth wind, and followeth after the east wind: all day long he increaseth lies and falsity; they make a treaty with the Assyrians, and oil is carried into Egypt. The Lord hath a controversy with Israel, and will visit his ways upon Jacob; according to his doings will he requite him.

He supplanted his brother, and by his strength he contended with God: yea, he contended with the angel, and prevailed: he wept, and made supplication unto him: he found him in Beth-el, and there he spake with him. [The Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord is his name. Therefore turn thou to thy God: keep mercy and judgement, and wait on thy God continually.]

As for Canaan, deceitful balances are in his hand: he loveth to defraud. And Ephraim saith, Surely I am become rich, I have gotten me substance: but all his gain shall not suffice for the guilt which he hath sinned. For I the Lord thy God from the land of Egypt will again make thee to dwell in tents, as in the days of the festival (?).

I have spoken by the prophets, and I have multiplied visions, and through the prophets I have used similitudes (?). In Gilead there are iniquity and falsehood; they sacrifice to demons in Gilgal; their altars shall become stone heaps in the furrows of the fields.

And Jacob fled into the plain of Aram, and Israel served for a wife, and for a wife he guarded sheep. And by a prophet the Lord brought Israel out of Egypt, and by a prophet was he guarded. Ephraim hath given bitter provocation, the Lord shall return upon him his reproach.

Israel is sarcastically called Canaan: the rich trafficker or merchant. For 'Canaanite became a synonym for "merchant" as Chaldaean" was a synonym for "astrologer." Hosea uses the word collectively and metaphorically; his Canaan is a degenerate Israel. The sarcasm derives its point from the low repute of the Phoenician merchants for honesty' (Cheyne).