CHAPTER XVI

_A PEOPLE IN DECAY: 1. MORALLY_

HOSEA iv.-vii 7.

Pursuing the plan laid down in the last chapter, we now take the section of Hosea's discourse which lies between chap. iv. 1 and chap. vii. 7. Chap. iv. is the only really separable bit of it; but there are also slight breaks at v. 15 and vii. 2. So we may attempt a division into four periods: 1. Chap. iv., which states God's general charge against the people; 2. Chap. v. 1-14, which discusses the priests and princes; 3. Chaps. v. 15-vii. 2, which abjures the people's attempts at repentance; and 4. Chap. vii. 3-7, which is a lurid spectacle of the drunken and profligate court. All these give symptoms of the moral decay of the people,--the family destroyed by impurity, and society by theft and murder; the corruption of the spiritual guides of the people; the debauchery of the nobles; the sympathy of the throne with evil,--with the despairing judgment that such a people are incapable even of repentance. The keynotes are these: _No troth, leal love, nor knowledge of God in the land. Priest and Prophet stumble. Ephraim and Judah stumble. I am as the moth to Ephraim. What can I make of thee, Ephraim? When I would heal them, their guilt is only the more exposed._ Morally, Israel is rotten. The prophet, of course, cannot help adding signs of their political incoherence. But these he deals with more especially in the part of his discourse which follows chap. vii. 7.

1. THE LORD'S QUARREL WITH ISRAEL.

HOSEA iv.

_Hear the word of Jehovah, sons of Israel!_[495] _Jehovah hath a quarrel with the inhabitants of the land, for there is no troth nor leal love nor knowledge of God in the land. Perjury_[496] _and murder and theft and adultery!_[497] _They break out, and blood strikes upon blood._

That stable and well-furnished life, across which, while it was still noon, Amos hurled his alarms--how quickly it has broken up! If there be still _ease in Zion_, there is no more _security in Samaria_.[498] The great Jeroboam is dead, and society, which in the East depends so much on the individual, is loose and falling to pieces. The sins which are exposed by Amos were those that lurked beneath a still strong government, but Hosea adds outbreaks which set all order at defiance. Later we shall find him describing housebreaking, highway robbery and assassination. _Therefore doth the land wither, and every one of her denizens languisheth, even to the beast of the field and the fowl of the heaven; yea, even the fish of the sea are swept up_ in the universal sickness of man and nature: for Hosea feels, like Amos, the liability of nature to the curse upon sin.

Yet the guilt is not that of the whole people, but of their religious guides. _Let none find fault and none upbraid, for My people are but as their priestlings._[499] _O Priest, thou hast stumbled to-day: and stumble to-night shall the prophet with thee._ One order of the nation's ministers goes staggering after the other! _And I will destroy thy Mother_, presumably the Nation herself. _Perished are My people for lack of knowledge._ But how? By the sin of their teachers. _Because thou_, O Priest, _hast rejected knowledge, I reject thee from being priest to Me; and as thou hast forgotten the Torah of thy God, I forget thy children_[500]--_I on My side. As many as they be, so many have sinned against Me._ Every jack-priest of them is culpable. _They have turned_[501] _their glory into shame. They feed on the sin of My people, and to the guilt of these lift up their appetite!_ The more the people sin, the more merrily thrive the priests by fines and sin-offerings. They live upon the vice of the day, and have a vested interest in its crimes. English Langland said the same thing of the friars of his time. The contention is obvious. The priests have given themselves wholly to the ritual; they have forgotten that their office is an intellectual and moral one. We shall return to this when treating of Hosea's doctrine of knowledge and its responsibilities. Priesthood, let us only remember, priesthood is an intellectual trust.

_Thus it comes to be--like people like priest_: they also have fallen under the ritual, doing from lust what the priests do from greed. _But I will visit upon them their ways, and their deeds will I requite to them. For they_--those _shall eat and not be satisfied_, these _shall play the harlot and have no increase, because they have left off heeding Jehovah_. This absorption in ritual at the expense of the moral and intellectual elements of religion has insensibly led them over into idolatry, with all its unchaste and drunken services. _Harlotry, wine and new wine take away the brains!_[502] The result is seen in the stupidity with which they consult their stocks for guidance. _My people! of its bit of wood it asketh counsel, and its staff telleth to it_ the oracle! _For a spirit of harlotry hath led them astray, and they have played the harlot from their God. Upon the headlands of the hills they sacrifice, and on the heights offer incense, under oak or poplar or terebinth, for the shade of them is pleasant._ On _headlands_, not summits, for here no trees grow; and the altar was generally built under a tree and near water on some promontory, from which the flight of birds or of clouds might be watched. _Wherefore_--because of this your frequenting of the heathen shrines--_your daughters play the harlot and your daughters-in-law commit adultery. I will not come with punishment upon your daughters because they play the harlot, nor upon your daughters-in-law because they commit adultery._ Why? For _they themselves_, the fathers of Israel--or does he still mean the priests?--_go aside with the harlots and sacrifice with the common women of the shrines_! It is vain for the men of a nation to practise impurity, and fancy that nevertheless they can keep their womankind chaste. _So the stupid people fall to ruin!_

(_Though thou play the harlot, Israel, let not Judah bring guilt on herself. And come not to Gilgal, and go not up to Beth-Aven, and take not your oath_ at the Well-of-the-Oath, Beer-Sheba,[503] _By the life of Jehovah!_ This obvious parenthesis may be either by Hosea or a later writer; the latter is more probable.[504])

_Yea, like a wild heifer Israel has gone wild. How now can Jehovah feed them like a lamb in a broad meadow?_ To treat this clause interrogatively is the only way to get sense out of it.[505] _Wedded to idols is Ephraim: leave him alone._ The participle means _mated_ or _leagued_. The corresponding noun is used of a wife as the _mate_ of her husband[506] and of an idolater as the _mate_ of his idols.[507] The expression is doubly appropriate here, since Hosea used marriage as the figure of the relation of a deity to his worshippers. _Leave him alone_--he must go from bad to worse. _Their drunkenness over, they take to harlotry: her rulers have fallen in love with shame, or they love shame more than their pride._[508] But in spite of all their servile worship the Assyrian tempest shall sweep them away in its trail. _A wind hath wrapt them up in her skirts; and they shall be put to shame by their sacrifices._

This brings the passage to such a climax as Amos loved to crown his periods. And the opening of the next chapter offers a new exordium.

2. PRIESTS AND PRINCES FAIL.

HOSEA v. 1-14.

The line followed in this paragraph is almost parallel to that of chap. iv., running out to a prospect of invasion. But the charge is directed solely against the chiefs of the people, and the strictures of chap. vii. 7 ff. upon the political folly of the rulers are anticipated.

_Hear this, O Priests, and hearken, House of Israel, and, House of the King, give ear. For on you is the sentence!_ You, who have hitherto been the judges, this time shall be judged.

_A snare have ye become at Mizpeh, and a net spread out upon Tabor, and a pit have they made deep upon Shittim;_[509] _but I shall be the scourge of them all. I know Ephraim, and Israel is not hid from Me--for now hast thou played the harlot, Ephraim, Israel is defiled._ The worship on the high places, whether nominally of Jehovah or not, was sheer service of Ba'alim. It was in the interest both of the priesthood and of the rulers to multiply these sanctuaries, but they were only traps for the people. _Their deeds will not let them return to their God; for a harlot spirit is in their midst, and Jehovah_, for all their oaths by Him, _they have not known. But the pride of Israel shall testify to his face; and Israel and Ephraim shall stumble by their guilt--stumble also shall Judah with them._ By Israel's pride many understand God. But the term is used too opprobriously by Amos to allow us to agree to this. The phrase must mean that Israel's arrogance, or her proud prosperity, by the wounds which it feels in this time of national decay, shall itself testify against the people--a profound ethical symptom to which we shall return when treating of Repentance.[510] Yet the verse may be rendered in harmony with the context: _the pride of Israel shall be humbled to his face. With their sheep and their cattle they go about to seek Jehovah, and shall not find_ Him; _He hath drawn off from them. They have been unfaithful to Jehovah, for they have begotten strange children_. A generation has grown up who are not His. _Now may a month devour them with their portions!_ Any month may bring the swift invader. Hark! the alarum of war! How it reaches to the back of the land!

_Blow the trumpet in Gibeah, the clarion in Ramah;_ _Raise the slogan, Beth-Aven: "After thee, Benjamin!"_[511]

_Ephraim shall become desolation in the day of rebuke! Among the tribes of Israel I have made known what is certain!_

At this point, ver. 10, the discourse swerves from the religious to the political leaders of Israel; but as the princes were included with the priests in the exordium (ver. 1), we can hardly count this a new oracle.[512]

_The princes of Judah are like landmark-removers_--commonest of cheats in Israel--_upon them will I pour out My wrath like water. Ephraim is oppressed, crushed is_ his _right, for he wilfully went after vanity._[513] _And I am as the moth to Ephraim, and as rottenness to the house of Judah._ Both kingdoms have begun to fall to pieces, for by this time Uzziah of Judah also is dead, and the weak politicians are in charge whom Isaiah satirised. _And Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah his sore; and Ephraim went to Asshur and_[514] _sent to King Jareb--King Combative, King Pick-Quarrel_,[515] a nickname for the Assyrian monarch. The verse probably refers to the tribute which Menahem sent to Assyria in 738. If so, then Israel has drifted full five years into her "thick night." _But He cannot heal you, nor dry up your sore. For I_, Myself, _am like a lion to Ephraim, and like a young lion to the house of Judah. I, I rend and go My way; I carry off and there is none to deliver._ It is the same truth which Isaiah expressed with even greater grimness.[516] God Himself is His people's sore; and not all their statecraft nor alliances may heal what He inflicts. Priests and Princes, then, have alike failed. A greater failure is to follow.

3. REPENTANCE FAILS.

HOSEA v. 15-vii. 2.

Seeing that their leaders are so helpless, and feeling their wounds, the people may themselves turn to God for healing, but that will be with a repentance so shallow as also to be futile. They have no conviction of sin, nor appreciation of how deeply their evils have eaten.

This too facile repentance is expressed in a prayer which the Christian Church has paraphrased into one of its most beautiful hymns of conversion. Yet the introduction to this prayer, and its own easy assurance of how soon God will heal the wounds He has made, as well as the impatience with which God receives it, oblige us to take the prayer in another sense than the hymn which has been derived from it.[517] It offers but one more symptom of the optimism of this light-hearted people, whom no discipline and no judgment can impress with the reality of their incurable decay. They said of themselves, _The bricks are fallen, let us build with stones_,[518] and now they say just as easily and airily of their God, _He hath torn_ only _that He may heal_: we are fallen, but _He will raise us up again in a day or two_. At first it is still God who speaks.

_I am going My way, I am returning to My own place,_[519] _until they feel their guilt and seek My face. When trouble comes upon them, they will soon enough seek Me, saying_:[520]--

"_Come and let us return to Jehovah:_ _For He hath rent, that He may heal us,_ _And hath wounded,_[521] _that He may bind us up._ _He will bring us to life in a couple of days;_ _On the third day He will raise us up_ again, _That we may live in His presence._ _Let us know, let us follow up_[522] _to know, Jehovah;_ _As soon as we seek Him, we shall find Him._[523] _And He shall come to us like the winter-rain,_ _Like the spring-rain, pouring on the land!_"

But how is this fair prayer received by God? With incredulity, with impatience. _What can I make of thee, Ephraim? what can I make of thee, Judah? since your love is like the morning cloud and like the dew so early gone._ Their shallow hearts need deepening. Have they not been deepened enough? _Wherefore I have hewn_ them _by the prophets, I have slain them by the words of My mouth, and My judgment goeth forth like the lightning._[524] _For leal love have I desired, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings._

That the discourse comes back to the ritual is very intelligible. For what could make repentance seem so easy as the belief that forgiveness can be won by simply offering sacrifices? Then the prophet leaps upon what each new year of that anarchy revealed afresh--the profound sinfulness of the people.

_But they in human fashion_[525] _have transgressed the covenant! There_--he will now point out the very spots--_have they betrayed_[526] _Me! Gilead is a city of evildoers: stamped with bloody footprints; assassins_[527] _in troops; a gang of priests murder on the way to Shechem. Yea, crime_[528] _have they done. In the house of Israel I have seen horrors: there Ephraim hath played the harlot: Israel is defiled--Judah as well._[529]

Truly the sinfulness of Israel is endless. Every effort to redeem them only discovers more of it. _When I would turn, when I would heal Israel, then the guilt of Ephraim displays itself and the evils of Samaria_, these namely: _that they work fraud, and the thief cometh in_--evidently a technical term for housebreaking[530]--while _abroad a crew_ of highwaymen _foray. And they never think in their hearts that all their evil is recorded by Me. Now have their deeds encompassed them: they are constantly before Me._

Evidently real repentance on the part of such a people is impossible. As Hosea said before, _Their deeds will not let them return._[531]

4. WICKEDNESS IN HIGH PLACES.

HOSEA vii. 3-7.

There follows now a very difficult passage. The text is corrupt, and we have no means of determining what precise events are intended. The drift of meaning, however, is evident. The disorder and licentiousness of the people are favoured in high places; the throne itself is guilty.

_With their evil they make a king glad, and princes with their falsehoods: all of them are adulterers, like an oven heated by the baker,..._[532]

_On the day of our king_--some coronation or king's birthday--_the princes were sick with fever from wine. He stretched forth his hand with loose fellows_,[533] presumably made them his associates. _Like an oven have they made_[534] _their hearts with their intriguing._[535] _All night their anger sleepeth:_[536] _in the morning it blazes like a flame of fire. All of them glow like an oven, and devour their rulers: all their kings have fallen, without one of them calling on Me._

An obscure passage upon obscure events; yet so lurid with the passion of that fevered people in the flagrant years 743-735 that we can make out the kind of crimes described. A king surrounded by loose and unscrupulous nobles: adultery, drunkenness, conspiracies, assassinations: every man striking for himself; none appealing to God.

From the court, then, downwards, by princes, priests and prophets, to the common fathers of Israel and their households, immorality prevails. There is no redeeming feature, and no hope of better things. For repentance itself the capacity is gone.

* * * * *

In making so thorough an indictment of the moral condition of Israel, it would have been impossible for Hosea not to speak also of the political stupidity and restlessness which resulted from it. But he has largely reserved these for that part of his discourse which now follows, and which we will take in the next chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[495] כי formally introduces the charge.

[496] Lit. _swearing and falsehood_.

[497] Ninth, sixth, eighth and seventh of the Decalogue.

[498] Amos vi. 1.

[499] iv. 4. According to the excellent emendation of Beck (quoted by Wünsche, p. 142), who instead of ועמככמריב proposes ככמריו ועמי, for the first word of which there is support in the LXX. ὁ λαός μου. The second word, כמר, is used for priest only in a bad sense by Hosea himself, x. 5, and in 2 Kings xxiii. 5 of the calf-worship and in Zech. i. 4 of the Baal priesthood. As Wellhausen remarks, this emendation restores sense to a passage that had none before. "Ver. 4 cannot be directed against the people, but must rather furnish the connection for ver. 5, and effect the transference from the reproof of the people (vv. 1-3) to the reproof of the priests (5 ff.)." The letters יכהן which are left over in ver. 4 by the emendation are then justly improved by Wellhausen (following Zunz) into the vocative הכהן and taken with the following verse.

[500] The application seems to swerve here. _Thy children_ would seem to imply that, for this clause at least, the whole people, and not the priests only, were addressed. But Robertson Smith takes _thy mother_ as equivalent, not to the nation, but to the priesthood.

[501] A reading current among Jewish writers and adopted by Geiger, _Urschrift_, 316.

[502] Heb. _the heart_, which ancient Israel conceived as the seat of the intellect.

[503] Wellhausen thinks this third place-name (cf. Amos v. 5) has been dropped. It certainly seems to be understood.

[504] But see above, p. 224.

[505] So all critics since Hitzig.

[506] Mal. ii. 4.

[507] Isa. xliv. 11.

[508] The verse is very uncertain. LXX. read a different and a fuller text from _Ephraim_ in the previous verse to _harlotry_ in this: "Ephraim hath set up for himself stumbling-blocks and chosen Canaanites." In the first of alternate readings of the latter half of the verse omit הבו as probably a repetition of the end of the preceding word; the second alternative is adapted from LXX., which for מגיניה must have read מגאונה.

[509] So by slightly altering the consonants. But the text is uncertain.

[510] _Note on the Pride of Israel._--גאון means _grandeur_, and is (1) so used of Jehovah's majesty (Micah v. 3; Isa. ii. 10, 19, 21; xxiv. 14), and (2) of the greatness of human powers (Zech. x. 11; Ezek. xxxii. 12). In Psalm xlvii. 5 it is parallel to the land of Israel (cf. Nahum ii. 3). (3) In a grosser sense the word is used of the rank vegetation of Jordan (Eng. wrongly _swelling_) (Jer. xii. 5; Zech. xi. 3: cf. Job xxxviii. 11). It would appear to be this grosser sense of _rankness_, _arrogance_, in which Amos vi. 8 takes it as parallel to _the palaces of Israel_ which _Jehovah loathes and will destroy_. In Amos viii. 7 the phrase may be used in scorn; yet some take it even there of God Himself (Buhl, last ed. of Gesenius' _Lexicon_).

Now in Hosea it occurs twice in the phrase given above--וענה בפניו ישראל גאון (v. 5, vii. 10). LXX., Targum and some Jewish exegetes take ענה as a ל״ו verb, _to be humbled_, and this suits both contexts. But the word בפניו _to his face_ almost compels us to take ענה as a ל״י verb, _to witness against_ (cf. Job xvi. 8; Jer. xiv. 7). Hence Wellhausen renders "With his arrogance Israel witnesseth against himself," and confirms the plaint of Jehovah--the arrogance being the trust in the ritual and the feeling of no need to turn from that and repent (cf. vii. 10). Orelli quotes Amos vi. 8 and Nahum ii. 3, and says injustice cleaves to all Israel's splendour, so it testifies against him.

But the context, which in both cases speaks of Israel's gradual decay, demands rather the interpretation that Israel's material grandeur shows unmistakable signs of breaking down. For the ethical development of this interpretation, see below, pp. 337 f.

[511] Probably the ancient war-cry of the clan. Cf. Judg. v. 14.

[512] Yet ver. 9 goes with ver. 8 (so Wellhausen), and not with ver. 10 (so Ewald).

[513] For צו read שׁוא.

[514] Wellhausen inserts _Judah_, with that desire to complete a parallel which seems to me to be overdone by so many critics. If Judah be inserted we should need to bring the date of these verses down to the reign of Ahaz in 734.

[515] Guthe: "King Fighting-Cock."

[516] See _Isaiah I.-XXXIX._ (Expositor's Bible), pp. 242 ff.

[517] Cheyne indeed (Introduction to Robertson Smith's _Prophets of Israel_) takes the prayer to be genuine, but an intrusion. His reasons do not persuade me. But at least it is clear that there is a want of connection between the prayer and what follows it, unless the prayer be understood in the sense explained above.

[518] Isaiah ix. 10.

[519] Cf. Isaiah xviii. 4.

[520] _Saying_: so the LXX. adds and thereby connects chap. v. with chap. vi.

[521] Read ויִךְ.

[522] Literally _hunt_, _pursue_. It is the same word as is used of the unfaithful Israel's pursuit of the Ba'alim, chap. ii. 9.

[523] So by a rearrangement of consonants (נמצאהו כשחרנו) and the help of the LXX. (εὑρήσομεν αὐτόν) Giesebrecht (_Beiträge_, p. 208) proposes to read the clause, which in the traditional text runs, _like the morn His going forth shall be certain_.

[524] Read יֵצֵא כָאוֹר מִשְׁפָּטִי.

[525] Or _like Adam_, or (Guthe) _like the heathen_.

[526] The verb means to prove false to any contract, but especially marriage.

[527] Read מחכי.

[528] In several passages of the Old Testament the word means unchastity.

[529] Here the LXX. close chap. vi., taking 11 _b_ along with chap. vii. Some think the whole of ver. 11 to be a Judæan gloss.

[530] Cf. Joel ii. 9, and the New Testament phrase _to come as a thief_.

[531] v. 4.

[532] The text is unsound. Heb.: "like an oven kindled by the baker, the stirrer (stoker or kneader?) resteth from kneading the dough until it be leavened." LXX.: ὡς κλίβανος καιόμενος εἰς πέψιν κατακαύματος ἀπὸ τῆς φλογός ἀπὸ φυράσεως στέατος ἑῶς τοῦ ξυμωθῆναι αὐτό--_i.e._ for ישבת they read לחבת אש. Oort emends Heb. to אפהו הם בוער, which gets rid of the difficulty of a feminine participle with תנור. Wellhausen omits whole clause as a gloss on ver. 6. But if there be a gloss it properly commences with ישבת.

[533] LXX. μετατοιμῶν??

[534] LXX. _kindled_, בָּעְרַוּ. So Vollers, _Z.A.T.W._, III. 250.

[535] Lit. _lurking_.

[536] Massoretic Text with different vowels reads _their baker_. LXX. Εφραιμ!