Hosea 2:2

Plead with your mother, plead,.... The congregation of Israel, as the Targum; the body of the Jewish nation, which, with respect to individuals, was as a mother to her children; see Matthew 21:37,

Plead with your mother, plead: for she is not my wife, neither am I her husband: let her therefore put away her whoredoms out of her sight, and her adulteries from between her breasts; Plead with your mother, plead - expostulate.

Plead; argue the case, state it aright between me and your mother, then debate it fully; lay open either my displeasure, how great it is, or the effects of it already upon the house of Israel, or my menaces against them for the future, by my prophet Hosea: and next recollect the carriage of your mother of Israel; consider her sins, her lewdness, her adulteries, her unthankfulness, how notorious, how long, how multiplied and aggravated. With your mother; the synagogues, the whole body of the people Israel, which were emblemized in Gomer, the wife of whoredoms. Plead; ye that are sons or daughters of God amidst this degenerate, idolatrous nation, you that have any resentments for your Father, debate, or at least deal plainly with her, who is called your mother, and say how little right she hath to be called my wife, and how little reason I have to own myself her Husband. She is not my wife; in point of right she is not, for by her adulteries she hath dissolved the marriage covenant, and so abolished the relation, though in point of fact she is not cast off utterly; I have not sued out the divorce, nor turned her out of doors. but yet for all that she is no wife, nor hath any right to the honour, maintenance, or love of a wife. Neither am I her husband; I do not account myself bound by any covenant of marriage to love, maintain, comfort, or protect her; nor will I long do it, if by her continued lewdness she still violate her faith, and abuse my patience. Tell idolatrous Israel, that her God will deal with her as an abused husband will deal with an unreclaimed adulterous wife. Let her therefore put away her whoredoms; when you have pleaded, then make an offer to her yet once more, counsel, persuade, entreat, and encourage her to do what becomes a wife that would not be divorced; try if you can prevail with her to cast aside and to remove from her all evil practices and inclinations, to cast off spiritual whoredoms, which all her idolatrous practices are accounted to be. Out of her sight; either remove the idols, their temples, priests, and gaudy rites, for ever out of her sight, as they did, ; or else cease from her whorish looks, her unchaste and immodest framing her face and gestures. And her adulteries, idolatries, which are spiritual adulteries, from between her breasts: by an immodest and lascivious manner of framing the breasts, and laying them open, these kinds of women here alluded to did entice adulterers; and so were idolatrous Israelites grown impudent in their idolatries, and courted others in shameless manner to turn idolaters also.

Hosea 2:2 Plead with your mother, plead: for she [is] not my wife, neither [am] I her husband: let her therefore put away her whoredoms out of her sight, and her adulteries from between her breasts;Ver. 2. Plead with your mother, plead] Here of right begins the second chapter (the former verse being not so fitly separated from the former chapter), and it is nothing else but a commentary upon the first, as Pareus well noteth. For the prophet here proceedeth in accusing the people of disloyalty and ingratitude: whereupon he denounceth a divorce and punishment: and then foretelleth their repentance and return into favour with God under the kingdom of the Messiah. Now the end wherefore both the accusation and the promise is here reiterated, is not so much to confirm what had been before affirmed, as to set forth the means whereby this cast off people was to be at length added unto the Church: viz. partly by external means (as sharp sermons and sore afflictions), and partly by the internal grace of the Spirit of God, and good affiance of his love sealed up to them, by various spiritual and temporal favours conferred upon them; as so many love tokens. Come we now to the words of this verse; where Oecolampadius begins the chapter: Plead with our mother, plead It is verbum forense, saith Mercer; an expression borrowed from pleaders at the bar: q.d. Be in good earnest with her, rebuke her roundly and openly, according to the nature of her offence: that she may be sound in the faith, and ashamed of her perfidiousness. What though she be your mother, and in that respect to be honoured by you, yet she is a perverse rebellious woman, as Saul once said of his son Jonathan’ s mother, 1 Samuel 20:30 (how truly I inquire not: malice little regards truth, so it may gall or kill), and therefore to be barely and boldly told her own. Besides, we cannot better show our respect to parents than by seeking their souls’ health, and by dealing fairly but freely with them therein. Not as Walter Mapes (sometime Archdeacon of Oxford) did by his mother Church of Rome: for relating the gross simony of the Pope in confirming the election of Reginald, bastard son of Jocelin, Bishop of Sarum, into the see of Bath, he thus concludes his narration, Sit tamen Domina materque nostra Roma baculus in aqua fractus: et absit credere quae vidimus: yet let our lady and mother Rome be as a stick put into the water, which seems to be broken, but is not so: and far be it from us to believe our own eyes against her. Was this charity? or stupidity rather? Charity may be ingenuous, but not servile and blockish. It is not love, but hatred (if Moses may judge), to suffer sin in a dearest friend to pass uncontrolled, Leviticus 19:17.

(2) Plead with your mother . . .—Contend, or plead in judgment. Let the awakened conscience of the present generation rise up in judgment with the nation as a whole. By “mother” we are to understand the nation Israel, viewed as a collective abstract; and by the “children” (Hosea 2:4) the inhabitants who are units in the total aggregate. Ammi and Ruhamah without the negative prefix, show that this awakening of conscience has given them back their privileges. Render, That she may put away her whoredoms from her face: i.e., her meretricious guiles, her unblushing idolatry, her voluptuous service of gods that are no God. This strong image was constantly on the lips of the prophets, and had been burned by cruel sorrow into the very heart of Hosea. It acquired portentous meaning in the hideous impurities of the worship of Baal-peor and Ashtoreth, against which the Jehovah worship was a tremendous protest.

Verse 2. Plead with your mother] People of Judah, accuse your mother, (Jerusalem,) who has abandoned my worship, and is become idolatrous; convince her of her folly and wickedness, and let her return to him from whom she has so deeply revolted.

2–7. The prophecy begins with a solemn admonition on the faithless conduct of Israel towards her Divine Bridegroom. The dramatis personæ are the same as in chap. 1; only, whereas in chap. 1 the husband, wife, and children, are both historical persons and significant symbols, in chap. 2 they are obviously pure allegories. Israel becomes the adulterous wife, and Jehovah the aggrieved husband. The individual Israelites are the children. The appeal of Jehovah to the latter implies that they have not altogether given way to their inherited propensities; they can still be expected, at least in some cases, to cooperate for the extinction of a corrupt worship. Comp. 1 Kings 19:18 ‘seven thousand in Israel … which have not bowed unto the Baal’.

Plead with your mother, plead - The prophets close the threats of coming judgments with the dawn of after-hopes; and from hopes they go back to God’s judgments against sin, pouring in wine and oil into the wounds of sinners.

The faithlessness of Israel, Hosea 2:2-5.2. Plead [“Contend”] — The urgency of the appeal is indicated by its repetition.