Hosea 13

13: 1 WHEN Ephraim spake, there was trembling; he exalted himself in Israel: but when he offended in Baal, he died. And now they sin more and more, and have made them molten images of their silver, even idols according to their own understanding, all of them the work of the craftsmen: they say of them, Let the men that sacrifice kiss the calves. Therefore they shall be as the morning cloud, and as the dew that passeth early away, as the chaff that is driven with the whirlwind out of the threshing-floor, and as the smoke out of the chimney. Yet I am the LORD thy God from the land of Egypt; and thou shalt know no god but me, and beside me there is no saviour. I did know thee in the wilderness, in the land of great drought. According to their pasture, so were they filled; they were filled, and their heart was exalted: therefore have they forgotten me. Therefore am I unto them as a lion: as a leopard will I watch by the way: I will meet them as a bear that is bereaved of her whelps, and will rend the caul of their heart: and there will I devour them like a lion; the wild beast shall tear them. It is thy destruction, O Israel, that thou art against me, against thy help. Where now is thy king, that he may save thee in all thy cities? and thy judges, of whom thou saidst, Give me a king and princes? I have given thee a king in mine anger, and have taken him away in my wrath. The iniquity of Ephraim is bound up; his sin is laid up in store. The sorrows of a travailing woman shall come upon him: he is an unwise son; for it is time he should not tarry in the place of the breaking forth of children. I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, where are thy plagues? O grave, where is thy destruction? repentance shall be hid from mine eyes. Though he be fruitful among his brethren, an east wind shall come, the breath of the LORD coming up from the wilderness, and his spring shall become dry, and his fountain shall be dried up: he shall spoil the treasure of all pleasant vessels. Samaria shall bear her guilt; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword; their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.

14: 1 O Israel, return unto the LORD thy God; for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity. Take with you words, and return unto the LORD: say unto him, Take away all iniquity, and accept that which is good: so will we render as bullocks the offering of our lips. Asshur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses: neither will we say any more to the work of our hands, Ye are our gods: for in thee the fatherless findeth mercy. I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely: for mine anger is turned away from him. I will be as the dew unto Israel: he shall blossom as the lily, and cast forth his roots as Lebanon. His branches shall spread, and his beauty shall be as the olive tree, and his smell as Lebanon. They that dwell under his shadow shall return; they shall revive as the corn, and blossom as the vine: the scent thereof shall be as the wine of Lebanon. Ephraim shall say, What have I to do any more with idols? I have answered, and will regard him: I am like a green fir tree; from me is thy fruit found. Who is wise, and he shall understand these things? prudent, and he shall know them? for the ways of the LORD are right, and the just shall walk in them; but transgressors shall fall therein.

Chap. 13. The main drift of this chapter is to set forth the sins of Ephraim and their certain consequences in his ruin—intermingled with some rich assurances of God’s love and promises of mercy and help to the penitent.

1. I translate: “When Ephraim spake, there was trembling; he stood high in Israel; but when he sinned in the matter of Baal, he died.” Ephraim, as here used, is the one tribe only, not the whole ten. In the early days of the kingdom the influence of this tribe was very great; the word of Ephraim was law, and was heard with trembling. His sin in the matter of Baal proved the ruin of his influence and of himself.

2. They say.** The priests, who had the management of idol worship, gave the order that the men who offered sacrifice should kiss the calves. This ceremony was one form of expressing their reverence, confidence and affection for these calves. II. C.

3. The tone of indignant derision passes into that of stern wrath. The inflexibility of the purpose to punish is expressed by the accumulation of four several images, all describing utter extermination. The “morning cloud” and “dew” vanish wholly and rapidly in the heat of the sun. (Cf. chap. 6: 4.) The image of “chaff whirled away by the blast from the threshing-floor” occurs repeatedly, as Ps. 1: 4; 35: 5; Isa. 17: 13. The utter dissipation of “smoke” is referred to in Ps. 68: 2. B. C.

They promise themselves safety and satisfaction in the worship of their idols, and that their prosperity will thereby be established; but God tells them that they shall be disappointed, and driven away in their wickedness. This is illustrated by four similitudes. They shall be: 1. As the morning cloud, which promises showers of rain to the parched ground. 2. As the early dew, which seems to be an earnest of such showers; but both pass away, and the day proves as dry and hot as ever; so fleet and transitory their profession of piety was (chap. 6: 4), and so had they disappointed God’s expectation from them; and therefore it is just that so their prosperity should be, and so their expectations from their idols should be disappointed, and so will all theirs be that make an idol of this world. 3. They are as the chaff, light and worthless; and they shall be driven as the chaff is driven with the whirlwind out of the floor (Ps. 1: 4). Nay, 4. They are as the smoke, noisome and offensive; and they shall be driven away as the smoke out of the chimneys, that is soon dissipated and disappears (Ps. 68: 2). No solid, lasting comfort is to be expected anywhere but in God. H.

4. Yet fearful as their doom must be, and great as their guilt had been, the Lord reminds them that He has been their God ever since the nation came out from Egypt. He evinced this relationship to them then, and had done nothing on His part since to change it. H. C.

This and the following verses are an introduction to the gracious promises that follow (verses 9-14 and chap. 14), and import that God will never utterly forget the promises made to their fathers. W. Lorth.

6. The better God made their condition, or, in the prophet’s figure, the better pasture He put them into, the more they were sated; this fulness begat pride; and in their pride they forgat Jehovah. Alas, that this should be the history of so many myriads of sinners! God blesses them (must we say) too much; they become too full; then proud; then they forget God, and become awfully strong in their wickedness! H. C.

Their unworthy ungrateful abuse of God’s favor to them. God not only took care of them in the wilderness, but put them in possession of Canaan, a good land, a large and fat pasture. And (verse 6) according to their pasture, so were they filled. God gave them both plenty and dainties, and they did not spare it, but having been long confined to manna, when they came into Canaan, they fed themselves to the full. And this was no hopeful presage; it would have looked better, and promised better, if they had been more modest and moderate in the use of their plenty, and had learned to deny themselves; but what was the effect of it? They were filled, and their heart was exalted. Their luxury and sensuality made them proud, insolent and secure. It is sad that those favors which ought to make us mindful of God, and studious what we shall render to Him, should make us unmindful of Him, and regardless what we do against Him. We ought to know that we live upon God, when we live upon common providence, though we do not, as Israel in the wilderness, live upon miracles. H.

7,8. The figures to represent swift destruction are multiplied. To “observe,” as the leopard, is to lie in wait and watch as for prey. God represents Himself as doing what is done instrumentally by the Assyrian arms. H. C.

9. In Hosea, havoc has been made among favorite texts. For example, in chap. 13: 9, “O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself; but in Me is thine help,” becomes, “It is thy destruction, O Israel, that thou art against Me, against thy help.” Give it time, and the new text will yield as many good sermons as the old. Chambers.

The common version expresses rich truths with great force. Thou art thine own destroyer; thy God thine only deliverer. The destruction is wholly thine; the salvation altogether Mine. But the strong objection to our received translation is the proposition against before the last word, “thy help.” The English translation makes no account of it; but Hosea does not put in words for nothing. Then also the connecting particle more naturally means because than but. In this construction we miss the strong antithesis, but we get a pertinent sense, and one in harmony with the previous and following context; thus verse 8, The Assyrian power shall devour thee: verse 9, This destruction is all of thine own procuring, because thou wast against Me, against thy only help: verse 10, Where is thy king now, or any one that can save thee? etc. H. C.

Are not the words which here fall from the lips of the Divine Healer like to these? “All others may have forsaken thee, but I have not forsaken. I who know all the saddest secrets of thy soul am willing to take thy cause in hand. Others may despair of thee; thou mayest despair of thyself; but I do not despair. There is balm in My Gilead, and I am wise to heal and mighty to save. In Me, if only thou wilt know it and believe it, in Me is thy help.” Trench.

11. This statement was true of Saul, and no less so of many of the kings in the kingdom of the Ten Tribes. But if we ask for the particular king referred to, no one meets the conditions so well as the last, Hoshea. H. C.

12. “The iniquity of Ephraim is bound up, their sin is hid.” Not that his sin was hid from God, but his sin is hid—that is, it is recorded, it is laid up against a day of reckoning. That this is the meaning is clear by the foregoing words, his iniquity is bound up: as the clerk of the assizes binds up the indictments of malefactors in a bundle, and at the assizes brings out the indictments, and reads them in court, so God binds up men’s sins in a bundle, and, at the Day of Judgment, this bundle shall be opened, and all their sins brought to light before men and angels. Watson.

13. The figure in the first clause suddenly changes. Ephraim is first a mother in her travail pains; then an infant voluntarily retarding his own birth, and thus fearfully imperilling both his own life and the mother’s. No figures drawn from human experience can be more forcible than this—the peril that ensues when “children come to the birth and there is not strength to bring forth.” If, now, to get the full force of this passage as applied to Ephraim, we suppose the son to bring on this danger by his own voluntary, intelligent agency, we shall see the infatuation and very madness which Hosea so temperately describes as being “unwise.” Ephraim is going to the judgment with God in charge of all his sins, and he still lingers under the call to repent, and will not make peace with his offended judge. The primary reference here is to judgments on earth, and very near; yet the principle is even more pertinent and forcible as applied to every sinner going to the final judgment.

14. Ephraim is seen ruining himself by his madness. The figure in the prophet’s mind suggests death in some of its most painful forms; but God interposes, saying, “I will ransom thee from Sheol; I will redeem thee from death.” Sheol, the grave, and death are, of course, personified here, and supposed to be living agents of terrific power over frail mortals. The words as they stand here do not refer to the resurrection, but to salvation from the ruin then impending over Israel; but Paul’s quotation (1 Cor. 15: 55) applies them to the resurrection—the final triumph of our frail mortality over death and the grave, under the power of a resurrection to unfading life and immortality. The words are beautifully applicable to the latter event, and are, therefore, fully used. H. C.

The ultimate grounds on which the prophetic doctrine of the resurrection rests are, first, the knowledge of the living God, who has power even over death and the regions of the dead (Deut. 32: 39; 1 Sam. 2: 6); and proves that He has this power in those cases in which He recalls the dead to life at the request of His prophets. It rests, secondly, upon the importance of human personality, which is called to communion with God. Still it is not of the vanquishing of death in the cases of individuals that prophecy chiefly treats, but of the eternal duration of the Church. This is guaranteed by the eternity of God, who is an inexhaustible source of life even to His perishing people (Isa. 40: 28 sqq.). When the heavens wax old as doth a garment, and are changed as a vesture, He remains the same, and therefore the seed of His servants shall outlast these changes of the universe. And this very fact, that the Church rises again in renewed vigor after apparent destruction, is also represented as her resurrection from death. This is done first in two passages of Hosea—viz., 6: 2 and 13: 14. In the former, the people are introduced as turning to God in their hour of need, and saying, though still in a hesitating manner, “After two days He will revive us, in the third” (i.e., after a short delay) “He will raise us up, and we shall live before Him.” That which is here expressed as the hope of the people, the fulfilment of which cannot be promised in their present state of inconstancy, appears in the second passage as a saying of God. The very variously understood train of ideas from verse 12 onward is as follows: The afflictions of Israel are to be the pangs by which a new nation shall be born. But the people will not suffer this to come to pass. “They are as an unwise son; when the time is come, he does not enter the place of the breaking forth of children.” The anxiety for both mother and child, when it does not come to the birth, forms the transition to verse 14: “I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death. O death, where are thy plagues?