Hosea 2:5

For their mother hath played the harlot,.... Or committed idolatry; which is the reason why she is to be pleaded with, and why the Lord will not own her as his wife, or be a husband to her; and why

For their mother hath played the harlot: she that conceived them hath done shamefully: for she said, I will go after my lovers, that give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink.

For: this demonstrates the truth of the charge, and justifieth the severity of the punishment. Their mother: see . Played the harlot; doted on idols, worshipped them, and brought forth and educated children for diem. She hath done shamefully: this practice, in the best circumstances it can be put, was dishonourable as well as dishonest; but here is an aggravation of it, it was done with shameless impudence, and openly avowed, with a whore’ s forehead, . She said; she took lip resolutions, declared them, stood to them, none could alter her course. I will go after: when they came not to her, she will go to them. Impudent adulteress! forsaken, thou courtest and wooest. My lovers: this spoken as if they loved her better than her Husband loved her; a high degree of impudence. These are the idols she worshipped, and the idolaters she associated and traded with. That give me my bread, & c.: whereas every mercy she enjoyed was God’ s gift to her, and a fruit of his covenant love and faithfulness towards her; yet she denies (like an impudent strumpet) all his kindness, and in a manner chargeth him with such hardness and ill usage, that she had starved if her idols and idolatrous friends had not maintained her, and gives out, the bread she ate, and water she drank, and the clothes she wore, all was of their kindness. This is shameful indeed, and the prophet hath set it forth to the life: and now is there not good reason why a Husband so abused should without pity cast off such a mother, such children, and leave them to live on their chosen lovers, or to perish under the hatred of their despised God?

Hosea 2:5 For their mother hath played the harlot: she that conceived them hath done shamefully: for she said, I will go after my lovers, that give [me] my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink.Ver. 5. For their mother hath played the harlot] Being a "wife of whoredoms," Hosea 1:2 therefore I will not have mercy upon her children, but will root out all her increase, Job 31:12. Either she shall commit whoredom, and not increase, Hosea 4:10; or if she do, it is for mischief she shall bring forth children to the murderer: or at least she shall bequeath them a fearful legacy of sin and punishment, worse than that leprosy that Gehazi left to his posterity, or that Joab left to his, 2 Samuel 3:29 : lameness and gonorrhoea, &c. It is a dangerous thing to keep up the succession of a sin in the world, and to propagate guilt from one generation to another: it is a great provocation. When the wickedness of such is ripe in the field (and they have filled up the measure of their fathers’ sins), God will not let it shed to grow again: but cuts it up by a just and seasonable vengeance. Let parents therefore break off their sins and get into God’ s favour; if for nothing else, yet for their poor children’ s sake: labouring to mend that by education which they have marred by propagation and evil example. And let children of wicked parents (as they tender their own eternal good) take God’ s counsel, Ezekiel 20:18; Ezekiel 20:30 : Are ye polluted after the manner of your fathers? and commit ye whoredom after their abominations? Oh, walk ye not after the statutes of your fathers: neither observe their judgments, nor defile yourselves with their idols. True it is men are wondrous apt to dote upon their fathers’ doings, and are hardly drawn off from their vain conversation received by tradition from their ancestors, 1 Peter 1:18. A bore maiori discit arare minor (Ovid). Prescription is held authority sufficient. Me ex ea opinione quam a maioribus accepi de cultu deorum nullius unquam movebit oratio, saith Cicero, No man shall ever dissuade me from that way of divine worship that my forefathers lived and died in. It is reported of a certain monarch of Morocco, that having read St Paul’ s Epistles, he liked them so well that he professed that were he then to choose his religion, he would, before any other, embrace Christianity. But every one ought, said he, to die in his own religion: and the leaving of the faith wherein he was born was the only thing that he disliked in that apostle. Thus he. Sed toto erravit coelo, Antiquity must have no more authority than what it can maintain. Eμοιαρχειαεστον ‘Iησουςο Cριστος, Mine antiquity (said Ignatius) is Christ Jesus, who said not to the young man, Do as thy forefathers, but Follow thou me.

(5) For their mother hath played . . .—We might render, with Ewald, yea, their mother hath played . . . This would more easily account for the change of person (“your “. . . “their “), which is, however, very frequent in Hebrew prophecy. The next “for” introduces a parenthetical clause—“her lovers”—a word used in a bad sense. The aggravation of her shame is that she seeks them, and not they her. She attributes to these idol-gods all those temporal benefits which theocratic history shows to have been Jehovah’s gift, and the consequence of loyalty to Him. The modern analogue of this sin of Israel is the use of “Fortune,” “Nature,” “Destiny,” “Impersonal Law,” and even “Humanity,” as the giver of all good things, as though it were superstitious or heretical to speak of God as the giver.

Verse 5. That give me my bread] See the note on Jeremiah 44:17-18, where nearly the same words are found and illustrated.

5. I will go after my lovers …] Israel, then, had given up the true Jehovah for ‘lovers’ (i.e. not, as the Targum explains it, and as the phrase often means, especially in Ezekiel, the neighbouring peoples whose favour was courted by the Israelites, but, as Hosea 2:10; Hosea 2:15 suggest, the Baalim). mine oil and my drink] Rather, drinks (as margin), i.e. wine and various fermented liquors made from fruits such as the date, the mulberry, the fig, and the dried raisin (see Tristram, Natural Hist. of Bible, p. 412). Observe the influence of the primitive idea that the land (rather than the people) was in mystic relation to Jehovah; see on Hosea 2:21-22.

She that conceived them hath done shamefully, literally, hath made shameful - The silence as to “what” she “made shameful” is more emphatic than any words.