Hosea 1

1 : 1 THE word of the LORD that came unto Hosea the son of Beeri, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel.

2. When the LORD spake at the first by Hosea, the LORD said unto Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredom and children of whoredom : for the land doth commit great whoredom,

3 departing from the LORD. So he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim; and she 4 conceived, and bare him a son. And the LORD said unto him, Call his name Jezreel; for yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and will cause 5 the kingdom of the house of Israel to cease. And it shall come to pass at that day, that I 6 will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel. And she conceived again, and bare a daughter. And the Lord said unto him, Call her name Lo-ruhamah: for I will no more have 7 mercy upon the house of Israel, that I should in any wise pardon them. But I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by the LORD their God, and will not save 8 them by bow, nor by sword, nor by battle, by horses, nor by horsemen. Now when she had 9 weaned Lo-ruhamah, she conceived, and bare a son. And the Lord said, Call his name Lo- ammi: for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God.

10. Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered; and it shall come to pass that, in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God. 11 And the children of Judah and the children of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall 12:1 appoint themselves one head, and shall go up from the land: for great shall be the day of Jezreel. Say ye unto your brethren, Ammi; and to your sisters, Ruhamah.

2. Plead with your mother, plead; for she is not my wife, neither am I her husband: and let her put away her whoredoms from her face, and her adulteries from between her breasts; 3 lest I strip her naked, and set her as in the day that she was born, and make her as a wilder- 4 ness, and set her like a dry land, and slay her with thirst; yea, upon her children will I have 5 no mercy; for they be children of whoredom. 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 6 me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink. Therefore, be- hold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and I will make a fence against her, that she shall 7 not find her paths. And she shall follow after her lovers, but she shall not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them: then shall she say, I will go and return to 8 my first husband; for then was it better with me than now. For she did not know that I gave her the corn, and the wine, and the oil, and multiplied unto her silver and gold, which 9 they used for Baal. Therefore will I take back my corn in the time thereof, and my wine in the season thereof, and will pluck away my wool and my flax which should have covered 10 her nakedness. And now will I discover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and none 11 shall deliver her out of mine hand. I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feasts, her 12 new moons, and her sabbaths, and all her solemn assemblies. And I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees, whereof she hath said, These are my hire that my lovers have given me: 13 and I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall eat them. And I will visit upon her the days of the Baalim, unto which she burned incense; when she decked herself with her earrings and her jewels, and went after her lovers, and forgat me, saith the LORD. 14 Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfort- 15 ably unto her. And I will give her her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope: and she shall make answer there, as in the days of her youth, and as in the 16 day when she came up out of the land of Egypt. And it shall be at that day, saith the 17 LORD, that thou shalt call me Ishi; and shalt call me no more Baali. For I will take away the names of the Baalim out of her mouth, and they shall no more be mentioned by their name. 18 And in that day will I make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven, and with the creeping things of the ground: and I will break the bow and 19 the sword and the battle out of the land, and will make them to lie down safely. And I will betroth thee unto me for ever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in 20 judgement, and in lovingkindness, and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto me in faith- 21 fulness: and thou shalt know the LORD. And it shall come to pass in that day, I will an- 22 swer, saith the LORD, I will answer the heavens, and they shall answer the earth; and the 23 earth shall answer the corn, and the wine, and the oil; and they shall answer Jezreel. And I will sow her unto me in the earth; and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy; and I will say to them which were not my people, Thou art my people; and they shall say, Thou art my God.

3:1 And the LORD said unto me, Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend and an adulteress, even as the LORD loveth the children of Israel, though they turn unto other gods, and

2 love cakes of raisins. So I bought her to me for fifteen pieces of silver, and an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley: and I said unto her, Thou shalt abide for me many days; thou shalt not play the harlot, and thou shalt not be any man’s wife: so will I also be toward thee. For the children of Israel shall abide many days without king, and without prince, and without sacrifice, and without pillar, and without ephod or teraphim: afterward shall the children of Israel return, and seek the LORD their God, and David their king; and shall come with fear unto the LORD and to his goodness in the latter days.

Chap. 1. The book opens with events peculiar to Hosea’s prophetic ministry—the taking of a wife whose lewdness symbolized the infidelity of the nation to God, their Maker and Husband; and the birth and naming of children whose names were significant before the people of their relations to Jehovah. The special command of the Lord in this case assumes that the thing required was a hardship—a thing that no good man would be likely to do save under a positive command from God and for a very special purpose. In this view of it the transaction cannot be regarded as immoral in the prophet. Hence the moral objection against it as a reality loses its force.

1. The reader may wisely peruse the history of the period covered by these reigns as recorded 2 K. 14: 23 to 18: 12, and also in 2 Chron., chaps. 26-31. The record is a dismal one—revolutions, anarchy, conspiracies, universal idolatry and outbreaking wickedness. H. C.—During the reigns of the four kings of Judah here named, there reigned over Israel Jeroboam II., Zachariah, Shallum, Menahem, Pekahiah, Pekah and Hoshea. The whole space of time thus marked out must, according to the chronological statements in Kings, have been more than sixty years; while that latter part of Jeroboam’s reign, which overlapped the commencement of Uzziah’s, could not have exceeded twenty-five.

2. The connection of thought seems to be this: “Go, take for thy wife one who will prove a common prostitute, making thyself thus like Me as married to this nation; and then see what will be the results of such a connection.” The sequel shows what the results would prove: the nation should be ruined in Jezreel; should cease to be regarded with affection; should cease to be Jehovah’s people. The principal design is to announce prophetically the disastrous consequences which would flow from Israel’s unfaithfulness to her God. B. C.

It is well to note carefully that the Lord gave the reasons for this remarkable command—viz., because the land had become wholly adulterous and apostate from God. Of course, adultery here means specially idolatry. By the worship of idols the people had put other gods before Jehovah. They had faithlessly broken their solemn covenant to fear and serve the Lord alone. This covenant can find no better symbol among human relations than that by which one man and one woman “become no longer fwaim, but one flesh.” The marriage relation, closer and more endearing than any other, comes nearest to a perfect symbol of the covenant relation between God and His chosen people. It is therefore used with great beauty and force. The fact is humiliating to the people of God that this symbol should find its most abundant occasion for use, not on the bright side of this marriage relation, but on the dark—the shameful infidelities and apostates of the people in the times of Hosea, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The same idea, and mostly on its bright side, underlies the forty-fifth Psalm, and (as the Jews must have understood it) the Book of Canticles; but its fuller development waited till flagrant sin called it forth. To Hosea was allotted this bitter affliction—a wife unfaithful to her marriage vows—that he might be a living representative of the great sin of the people against their Divine Husband; and also, that his own experience of domestic wrong and wretchedness might give him a keener sense of the cruel guilt of the nation’s idolatry, and might help him to sympathize with the feelings of Jehovah under such abuse. These trials in the prophet’s mission have a vital bearing on the question of his essential honesty. No selfish motive could have moved him to such a life-work. To rebuke sin in an age of such outbreaking and universal wickedness, and to be subjected to such domestic affliction for the sake of more vividly illustrating the apostasy of Israel from their God involve and imply an honest, self-sacrificing devotion to the will of God, and quite preclude the supposition of his being an impostor. H. C.

4. Call his name Jezreel. Each one of the three children represents Israel viewed in some particular phase, which is described in the name given to the child. The point in this instance is, that Israel is now regarded no longer as “Israel,” Prince with God, but as “Jezreel,” the home of murders and idolatries; where Ahab and Jezebel had lived, whose crimes had merited the sanguinary retribution inflicted by Jehu. That the child is so named imports that Israel, as ruled over by the house of Jehu, had become no better than Jezreel had been, full of idolatry and bloodshed. B. C.

6. “Lo-ruhamah” is literally “not compassionated”—not a subject of mercy. This use of the negative Lo implies not merely the absence of mercy, but the presence of wrath. Here it means that the people had incurred Jehovah’s frown. He would not any more show mercy to the people of the Ten Tribes in such form as to arrest and turn aside His impending, long-deserved judgments. On the contrary, He “would utterly take them away” into captivity.

8, 9. “Lo-ammi” signifies not my people, and as said above of Lo-ruhamah, it implies that they are in a state of positive rejection. God was about to disown them—so utterly had they rejected Him by their abounding persistent idolatry, by forsaking the worship of God, and by most flagrant immoralities. How impressive to Hosea must have been all the scenes and sounds of his household! Often as he spake or heard spoken the names of these two children, the thought came: No mercy! Not my people! A like testimony it must have borne to the people among whom he was sent as the prophet of the living God.

10,11. Here is a sudden transition from extreme judgment to the fulness of mercy. “The Lord keepeth not His anger forever.” Remarkably is it His method, whether by prophet or apostle, to blend threatening with promise, and to follow the sternest denunciations with outbursts of pity and love. The general sense of the passage is: God hath not forsaken His Church utterly and forever. Notwithstanding this ruin now coming on Israel, the Lord shall yet have a people, countless as the sands, united also and prosperous, the true Israel and Judah. That Israel and Judah “gather together and appoint themselves one head,” looks by historical allusion to the sad history of the recent past, since the revolt under Jeroboam, and means to say that in this good time coming, that sore breach shall be healed, the rival kingdoms become one, and “Ephraim no more envy Judah, nor Judah vex Ephraim.” The Church of God, in those times, shall be one in love, and strong in its union. The “day of Jezreel” is here the day of the Lord’s sowing, or, in our English idiom, planting His people—with reference to the etymology of the word Jezreel. Looking historically to the planting in Canaan under Joshua, it means that

God will do a similar thing again. Great shall be the day when the Lord thus lays anew the foundations of His Zion, and rebuilds Jerusalem—plants His people in their new estate, and puts a new face upon His earthly kingdom. It does not necessarily follow that this planting is the locating of His ancient people in the land of Canaan. Paul (Rom. 9: 25, 26) quotes this very passage from Hosea to prove that the “vessels of mercy” to whom God “makes known the riches of His glory,” are “not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles.” That is, he assumes that in this very passage Hosea embraces Gentile Christians under the name Israel. This ought to be decisive. Finally, we have the great fact that just at the point where the Israel of the Ten Tribes was being cast off for their hopeless idolatry and incurable corruption, a larger, richer promise is made to the “children of Israel” than the literal Israel ever had before or since, or ever can have. Moreover, what time the old Israel became lost to history, a new Israel appears; Gentiles come into the Church of God; the world opens to the mission of the Gospel, and lies at the feet of the Prince of Peace: and so His Israel becomes as the sand of the sea; His people are the “sons of the living God;” old antipathies give place to the oneness of love; under their one head, they come up from their last house of bondage, and great beyond all former thought is “the day of Jezreel.” H. C.

10. Sons of the living God.** The Bible reveals a God who sees men and who hears their prayer; who pities them that fear Him, and loves them that trust Him; who protects by His power and guides by His providence them that rely upon Him; who gives wisdom to them that ask it and strength to them that have no might; who provides for all absolute wants; who lifts away the unnecessary burden of anxious care; who imparts courage of heart and fortitude of will to bear every burden and to discharge every duty; who comforts in sorrow and promises victory even in death. All that the human heart craves to fit it for the life of earth is met in the God of the Bible. Every element of spiritual worship in man is evoked by Him, and every spiritual want of man is supplied by Him. There are to be found in Him mercy for the guilty, pardon for the penitent, peace for the troubled, comfort for the sorrowful, guidance for the ignorant, strength for the weak, hope for the despondent, and life for the dying. By all the facts and analogies of the laws of correlation and correspondence in the lower

realms of life, we must confess that a God who is to the heart of man what bread and water are to the body, and who is to the soul of man what light is to the eye, must be the living and true God, to believe in whom is peace, to know whom is power, and to love whom is life. W. W. McLane.