Hosea 2:3

Lest I strip her naked, and set her as in the day that she was born,.... Alluding to the case of an infant when born, which comes naked into the world; and referring to the state and condition of the

Lest I strip her naked, and set her as in the day that she was born, and make her as a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and slay her with thirst.

Lest: this little word suggests great hopes; if this treacherous wife will cease her lewdness, and become chaste, she may be forgiven; it reserves room for repentance and reconciliation, without these it threatens. Strip her naked; as was usually done by incensed husbands, divorcing impudent adulteresses: see ,39 23:26. So God will strip her of all her ornaments which he gave; so he did gradually by Israel’ s enemies the Assyrians, till at last by Shalmaneser she was stripped to the skin, and led away captive; God east her out thus by him. And set her as in the day that she was born: it is not much material to fix the period of this birth, but it is enough God threatens, as sometimes we do, an extreme, poor, desolate, and comfortless condition, by a kind of proverbial speech, as naked as ever born. And make her as a wilderness: this phrase may somewhat intimate the time of Israel’ s birth, viz. between their going out of Egypt and the giving of the law, or their entering upon their travels in the wilderness. Their state was poor enough then, now it shall be as bad, or worse; they shall be as the wilderness, barren and desolate, affording nothing for life or delight, much less for profit: whereas adulteresses ordinarily hunt after profit and delights, God will punish adulterous Israel with denying both to her, she shall be like the wilderness, horrid and starving. And set her like a dry land: this is much the same with the former, and added to confirm and illustrate it. And slay her: all this shall be done to the end she may be destroyed: of old God led his people through the. wilderness to a city of habitation, now he will make them as the wilderness that they may perish in it. With thirst: a miserable end, surely, thus to be scorched up with parching heat! so will God’ s wrath burn up these wicked, idolatrous Israelites.

Hosea 2:3 Lest I strip her naked, and set her as in the day that she was born, and make her as a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and slay her with thirst.Ver. 3. Lest I strip her naked] Deus ideo minatur ut non puniat. God therefore threateneth, that he may not proceed to punish. Here he doth not so much direct as threaten, as conditionally terrify, from the pernicious effect or sad issue of their adulteries, a full and final desolation, after an utter deprivation of God’ s gifts and graces, shadowed under a fourfold metaphor. 1. Of stripping her of all her borrowed beauty, those jewels, and that comeliness that he had put upon her. 2. Of reducing her to her first forlorn condition wherein he found her, Ezekiel 16:6, viz. in her blood, in her blood, in her blood, as it is there said and set out for greater emphasis. 3. Of laying her waste as a wilderness (by the incursions and hostilities of cruel enemies), or, as in the wilderness (so some read it, by understanding the particle in) that is, as in the wilderness of Arabia, where they were put to great straits when they came out of Egypt. The very first handful God gave them there was bitterness and thirst. It was by Marah that they came to Elim, &c. 4. Of afflicting and punishing her with the most miserable and insufferable kind of death; "I will slay her with thirst," which is worse than to be slain with hunger. All which is foretold, with some hope nevertheless of grace and forgiveness, if she return and seek the Lord; as by the word lest is secretly given to understand: Lest I strip her naked] As a jealous husband snatcheth away with indignation the clothes and ornaments that he had bestowed upon his adulterous wife. The Lord threateneth the wanton women of Zion to make naked their secret parts, Isaiah 3:17, so that their shame should be seen, Isaiah 47:3, even all their nakedness, Ezekiel 16:37, to discover their skirts upon their face, as Nahum 3:5. Thus the great whore of Babylon is threatened with nakedness, Revelation 17:16. And this we see already performed upon her in part, as Mr Philpot barely told Chadsey in that vehement expression of his, "Before God, you are bare breeched in all your religion": he uttereth it somewhat more grossly. There was a base custom in Rome, that when any woman was taken in adultery, they compelled her (for a punishment) openly and beastly to play the harlot: ringing a bell while the deed was doing, that all the neighbours might be made aware. This the good Emperor Theodosius took away, and made better laws for the punishment of adultery.

(3) Set her . . .—Reduce Israel to the destitute exposed condition in which she struggled into being in Egyptian bondage, and endured the wanderings and terrors of the wilderness. Probably we have here an allusion to the custom of female infanticide, which still prevails very widely in the East, as it did in the ancient world, the child being simply abandoned to death on the day that she was born. (Comp. Ezekiel 16:4.)

Verse 3. Lest I strip her naked] Lest I expose her to infamy, want, and punishment. The punishment of an adulteress among the ancient Germans was this: "They shaved off her hair, stripped her naked in the presence of her relatives, and in this state drove her from the house of her husband." See on Isaiah 3:17; and see also Ezekiel 16:39; Ezekiel 23:26. However reproachful this might be to such delinquents, it had no tendency to promote their moral reformation. And set her like a dry land] The Israelites, if obedient, were promised a land flowing with milk and honey; but, should they be disobedient, the reverse. And this is what God here threatens against disobedient Israel.

3. Lest I strip her naked …] So far the punishment of the adulteress agrees with that customary among the Germans (Tac. Germ. §§ 18, 19). But the punishment of the Hebrew adulteress is not intended to stop here; death was the penalty she had to fear—death by strangling, according to the Rabbinical explanation of Lev 20:10, Deuteronomy 22:22, death by stoning, according to Ezekiel in a passage which alludes to the present (Ezekiel 16:39-40, comp. John 8:5). But the prophet speaks here of neither form of punishment, but of death by thirst in the desert. The meaning of the allegory is, that the people of N. Israel shall be put to open shame, and deprived of the rich temporal blessings vouchsafed to them. At the beginning of Israel’s history, we see her, as it were, a homeless wanderer in the wilderness, with nothing either in her nature or in her surroundings to promise a longer existence than was enjoyed by many another of the Semitic pastoral tribes (comp. Ezekiel 16:5), and the close of her history, says the prophet, shall present an exactly similar picture. Observe in passing how nearly the ideas of ‘land’ and ‘people’ cover each other in the mind of Hosea. In fact, in the mythic stage of religion (from which Hosea’s countrymen had not as yet for the most part emerged), it was the land which was imagined as in direct relation to the deity, the people being only so related in virtue of their dwelling in the land. They were in fact the children of the land (comp. Ezekiel 14:15 ‘bereave it,’ viz. the land); nationality, land, and religion were three inseparable ideas. Hence, though Hosea begins with the figure of disclothing, he glides insensibly into forms of expression appropriate to a land. ‘Lest I make her as the wilderness, and set her as a dry land, and slay her with thirst.’ The latter expression could of course be used of a wanderer in the desert, but was also allowable of a desolate region (see Ezekiel 19:13, and comp. Koran 30:18).

Lest I strip her naked - “There is an outward visible nakedness and an inward, which is invisible.