The Expositor's Bible: The Book of the Twelve Prophets, Vol. 1 / Commonly Called the Minor

To thy mouth with the trumpet! The Eagle is down upon the house of Jehovah![548] Where the carcase is, there are the eagles gathered together. For—to sum up the whole crisis—they have transgressed My covenant, and against My law have they rebelled. To Me they cry, My God, we know Thee, we Israel! What does it matter? Israel hath spurned the good:[549] the Foe must pursue him.

It is the same climax of inevitable war to which Amos led up his periods; and a new subject is now introduced.

2. Artificial Kings and Artificial Gods.

The curse of such a state of dissipation as that to which Israel had fallen is that it produces no men. Had the people had in them "the root of the matter," had there been the stalk and the fibre of a national consciousness and purpose, it would have blossomed to a man. In the similar time of her outgoings upon the world Prussia had her Frederick the Great, and Israel, too, would have produced a leader, a heaven-sent king, if the national spirit had not been squandered on foreign trade and fashions. But after the death of Jeroboam every man who rose to eminence in Israel, rose, not on the nation, but only on the fevered and transient impulse of some faction; and through the broken years one party monarch was lifted after another to the brief tenancy of a blood-stained throne. They were not from God, these monarchs; but man-made, and sooner or later man-murdered. With his sharp insight Hosea likens these artificial kings to the artificial gods, also the work of men's hands; and till near the close of his book the idols of the sanctuary and the puppets of the throne form the twin targets of his scorn.

They have made kings, but not from Me; they have made princes, but I knew not. With their silver and their gold they have manufactured themselves idols, only that they[550] may be cut off—king after king, idol upon idol. He loathes thy Calf, O Samaria, the thing of wood and gold which thou callest Jehovah. And God confirms this. Kindled is Mine anger against them! How long will they be incapable of innocence?—unable to clear themselves of guilt! The idol is still in his mind. For from Israel is it also—as much as the puppet-kings; a workman made it, and no god is it. Yea, splinters shall the Calf of Samaria become.[551] Splinters shall everything in Israel become. For they sow the wind, and the whirlwind shall they reap. Indeed like a storm Hosea's own language now sweeps along; and his metaphors are torn into shreds upon it. Stalk it hath none: the sprout brings forth no grain: if it were to bring forth, strangers would swallow it.[552] Nay, Israel hath let herself be swallowed up! Already are they become among the nations like a vessel there is no more use for. Heathen empires have sucked them dry. They have gone up to Assyria like a runaway wild-ass. Ephraim hath hired lovers.[553] It is again the note of their mad dissipation among the foreigners. But if they thus give themselves away among the nations, I must gather them in, and then shall they have to cease a little from the anointing of a king and princes.[554] This wilful roaming of theirs among the foreigners shall be followed by compulsory exile, and all their unholy artificial politics shall cease. The discourse turns to the other target. For Ephraim hath multiplied altars—to sin; altars are his own—to sin. Were I to write for him by myriads My laws,[555] as those of a stranger would they be accounted. They slay burnt-offerings for Me and eat flesh.[556] Jehovah hath no delight in them. Now must He remember their guilt and make visitation upon their sin. They—to Egypt—shall return....[557] Back to their ancient servitude must they go, as formerly He said He would withdraw them to the wilderness.[558]

3. The Effects of Exile.

Rejoice not, O Israel, to the pitch of rapture like the heathen, for thou hast played the harlot from thy God; a harlot's hire hast thou loved on all threshing-floors.[559] Threshing-floor and wine-vat shall ignore[560] them, and the new wine shall play them false. They shall not abide in the land of Jehovah, but Ephraim shall return to Egypt, and in Assyria they shall eat what is unclean. They shall not pour libations to Jehovah, nor prepare[561] for Him their sacrifices. Like the bread of sorrows shall their bread[562] be; all that eat of it shall be defiled: yea, their bread shall be only for their appetite; they shall not bring it[563] to the temple of Jehovah. He cannot be worshipped off His own land. They will have to live like animals, divorced from religion, unable to hold communion with their God. What shall ye do for days[564] of festival, or for a day of pilgrimage to Jehovah? For lo, they shall be gone forth from destruction,[565] the shock and invasion of their land, only that Egypt may gather them in, Memphis give them sepulture, nettles inherit their jewels of silver, thorns come up in their tents. The threat of exile still wavers between Assyria and Egypt. And in Egypt Memphis is chosen as the destined grave of Israel; for even then her Pyramids and mausoleums were ancient and renowned, her vaults and sepulchres were countless and spacious.

But what need is there to seek the future for Israel's doom, when already this is being fulfilled by the corruption of her spiritual leaders?

The days of visitation have come, have come the days of requital. Israel already experiences[566] them! A fool is the prophet, raving mad the man of the spirit. The old ecstasy of Saul's day has become delirium and fanaticism.[567] Why? For the mass of thy guilt and the multiplied treachery! Ephraim acts the spy with my God. There is probably a play on the name, for with the meaning a watchman for God it is elsewhere used as an honourable title of the prophets. The prophet is a fowler's snare upon all his ways. Treachery—they have made it profound in the very house of their God.[568] They have done corruptly, as in the days of Gibeah. Their iniquity is remembered; visitation is made on their sin.

These then were the symptoms of the profound political decay which followed on Israel's immorality. The national spirit and unity of the people had disappeared. Society—half of it was raw, half of it was baked to a cinder. The nation, broken into factions, produced no man to lead, no king with the stamp of God upon him. Anarchy prevailed; monarchs were made and murdered. There was no prestige abroad, nothing but contempt among the Gentiles for a people whom they had exhausted. Judgment was inevitable by exile—nay, it had come already in the corruption of the spiritual leaders of the nation.

Hosea now turns to probe a deeper corruption still.

4. "The Corruption that is through Lust."

The generation to which Hosea belonged practised a periodical unchastity under the alleged sanctions of nature and religion. And, although their prophet told them that—like our own apostates from Christianity—they could never do so with the abandon of the Pagans, for they carried within them the conscience and the memory of a higher faith, it appears that even the fathers of Israel resorted openly and without shame to the licentious rites of the sanctuaries. In an earlier passage of his book Hosea insists that all this must impair the people's intellect. Harlotry takes away the brains.[569] He has shown also how it confuses the family, and has exposed the old delusion that men may be impure and keep their womankind chaste.[570] But now he diagnoses another of the inevitable results of this sin. After tracing the sin, and the theory of life which permitted it, to their historical beginnings at the entry of the people into Canaan, he describes how the long practice of it, no matter how pretentious its sanctions, inevitably leads not only to exterminating strifes, but to the decay of the vigour of the nation, to barrenness and a diminishing population.

Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel, like the first fruit on a fig-tree in her first season I saw your fathers. So had the lusty nation appeared to God in its youth; in that dry wilderness all the sap and promise of spring were in its eyes, because it was still pure. But they—they came to Ba'al-Peor—the first of the shrines of Canaan which they touched—and dedicated themselves to the Shame, and became as abominable as the object of their love. Ephraim—the Fruitful name is emphasised—their glory is flown away like a bird. No more birth, no more motherhood, no more conception![571] Blasted is Ephraim, withered the root of them, fruit they produce not: yea, even when they beget children I slay the darlings of their womb. Yea, though they bring up their sons I bereave them, till they are poor in men. Yea, woe upon themselves also, when I look away from them! Ephraim—again the Fruitful name is dragged to the front—for prey, as I have seen, are his sons destined.[572] Ephraim—he must lead his sons to the slaughter.

And the prophet interrupts with his chorus: Give them, O LORD—what wilt Thou give them? Give them a miscarrying womb and breasts that are dry!

All their mischief is in Gilgal—again the Divine voice strikes the connection between the national worship and the national sin—yea, there do I hate them: for the evil of their doings from My house I will drive them. I will love them no more: all their nobles are rebels.[573]

And again the prophet responds: My God will cast them away, for they have not hearkened to Him, and they shall be vagabonds among the nations.

Some of the warnings which Hosea enforces with regard to this sin have been instinctively felt by mankind since the beginnings of civilisation, and are found expressed among the proverbs of nearly all the languages.[574] But I am unaware of any earlier moralist in any literature who traced the effects of national licentiousness in a diminishing population, or who exposed the persistent delusion of libertine men that they themselves may resort to vice, yet keep their womankind chaste. Hosea, so far as we know, was the first to do this. History in many periods has confirmed the justice of his observations, and by one strong voice after another enforced his terrible warnings. The experience of ancient Persia and Egypt; the languor of the Greek cities; the "deep weariness and sated lust" which in Imperial Rome "made human life a hell"; the decay which overtook Italy after the renascence of Paganism without the Pagan virtues; the strife and anarchy that have rent every court where, as in the case of Henri Quatre, the king set the example of libertinage; the incompetence, the poltroonery, the treachery, that have corrupted every camp where, as in French Metz in 1870, soldiers and officers gave way so openly to vice; the checks suffered by modern civilisation in face of barbarism because its pioneers mingled in vice with the savage races they were subduing; the number of great statesmen falling by their passion, and in their fall frustrating the hopes of nations; the great families worn out by indulgence; the homes broken up by infidelities; the tainting of the blood of a new generation by the poisonous practices of the old,—have not all these things been in every age, and do they not still happen near enough to ourselves to give us a great fear of the sin which causes them all? Alas! how slow men are to listen and to lay to heart! Is it possible that we can gild by the names of frivolity and piquancy habits the wages of which are death? Is it possible that we can enjoy comedies which make such things their jest? We have among us many who find their business in the theatre, or in some of the periodical literature of our time, in writing and speaking and exhibiting as closely as they dare to limits of public decency. When will they learn that it is not upon the easy edge of mere conventions that they are capering, but upon the brink of those eternal laws whose further side is death and hell—that it is not the tolerance of their fellow-men they are testing, but the patience of God Himself? As for those loud few who claim licence in the name of art and literature, let us not shrink from them as if they were strong or their high words true. They are not strong, they are only reckless; their claims are lies. All history, the poets and the prophets, whether Christian or Pagan, are against them. They are traitors alike to art, to love, and to every other high interest of mankind.

It may be said that a large part of the art of the day, which takes great licence in dealing with these subjects, is exercised only by the ambition to expose that ruin and decay which Hosea himself affirms. This is true. Some of the ablest and most popular writers of our time have pictured the facts, which Hosea describes, with so vivid a realism that we cannot but judge them to be inspired to confirm his ancient warnings, and to excite a disgust of vice in a generation which otherwise treats vice so lightly. But if so, their ministry is exceeding narrow, and it is by their side that we best estimate the greatness of the ancient prophet. Their transcript of human life may be true to the facts it selects, but we find in it no trace of facts which are greater and more essential to humanity. They have nothing to tell us of forgiveness and repentance, and yet these are as real as the things they describe. Their pessimism is unrelieved. They see the corruption that is in the world through lust; they forget that there is an escape from it.[575] It is Hosea's greatness that, while he felt the vices of his day with all needed thoroughness and realism, he yet never allowed them to be inevitable or ultimate, but preached repentance and pardon, with the possibility of holiness even for his depraved generation. It is the littleness of the Art of our day that these great facts are forgotten by her, though once she was their interpreter to men. When she remembers them the greatness of her past will return.

5. Once More: Puppet-Kings and Puppet-Gods.

A wanton vine is Israel; he lavishes his fruit:[576] the more his fruit, the more he made his altars; the goodlier his land, the more goodly he made his maççeboth, or sacred pillars. False is the heart of them: now must they atone for it. He shall break the neck of their altars; He shall ruin their pillars. For already they are saying, No king have we, for we have not feared Jehovah, and the king—what could he do for us? Speaking[577] of words, swearing of false oaths, making of bargains—till law[578] breaks out like weeds in the furrows of the field.

For the Calf of Beth-Aven the inhabitants[579] of Samaria shall be anxious: yea, mourn for him shall his people, and his priestlings shall writhe for him—for his glory that it is banished from him. In these days of heavy tribute shall the gold of the golden calf be safe? Yea, himself shall they pack[580] to Assyria; he shall be offered as tribute to King Pick-Quarrel.[581] Ephraim shall take disgrace, and Israel be ashamed because of his counsel.[582] Undone Samaria! Her king like a chip[583] on the face of the waters! This may refer to one of the revolutions in which the king was murdered. But it seems more appropriate to the final catastrophe of 724-1: the fall of the kingdom, and the king's banishment to Assyria. If the latter, the verse has been inserted; but the following verse would lead us to take these disasters as still future. And the high places of idolatry shall be destroyed, the sin of Israel; thorn and thistle shall come up on their altars. And they shall say to the mountains, Cover us, and to the hills, Fall on us. It cannot be too often repeated: these handmade gods, these chips of kings, shall be swept away together.

Once more the prophet returns to the ancient origins of Israel's present sins, and once more to their shirking of the discipline necessary for spiritual results, but only that he may lead up as before to the inevitable doom. From[584] the days of Gibeah thou hast sinned, O Israel. There have they remained—never progressed beyond their position there—and this without war overtaking them in Gibeah against the dastards.[585] As soon as I please, I can chastise them, and peoples shall be gathered against them in chastisement for their double sin. This can scarcely be, as some suggest, the two calves at Bethel and Dan. More probably it is still the idols and the man-made kings. Now he returns to the ambition of the people for spiritual results without a spiritual discipline.

And Ephraim is a broken-in heifer, that loveth to thresh.[586] But I have come on her fair neck. I will yoke Ephraim; Judah must plough; Jacob must harrow for himself. It is all very well for the unmuzzled beast[587] to love the threshing, but harder and unrewarded labours of ploughing and harrowing have to come before the floor be heaped with sheaves. Israel must not expect religious festival without religious discipline. Sow for yourselves righteousness; then shall ye reap the fruit of God's leal love.[588] Break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek Jehovah, till He come and shower salvation[589] upon you.[590] Ye have ploughed wickedness; disaster have ye reaped: ye have eaten the fruit of falsehood; for thou didst trust in thy chariots,[591] in the multitude of thy warriors. For the tumult of war shall arise among thy tribes,[592] and all thy fenced cities shall be ruined, as Salman beat to ruin Beth-Arbel[593] in the day of war: the mother shall be broken on the children—presumably the land shall fall with the falling of her cities. Thus shall I do to you, O house of Israel,[594] because of the evil of your evil: soon shall the king of Israel be undone—undone.

The political decay of Israel, then, so deeply figured in all these chapters, must end in utter collapse. Let us sum up the gradual features of this decay: the substance of the people scattered abroad; the national spirit dissipated; the national prestige humbled; the kings mere puppets; the prophets corrupted; the national vigour sapped by impurity; the idolatry conscious of its impotence.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE FATHERHOOD AND HUMANITY OF GOD

Hosea xi.

From the thick jungle of Hosea's travail, the eleventh chapter breaks like a high and open mound. The prophet enjoys the first of his two clear visions—that of the Past.[595] Judgment continues to descend. Israel's Sun is near his setting, but before he sinks—

Across these confused and vicious years, through which he has painfully made his way, Hosea sees the tenderness and the romance of the early history of his people. And although he must strike the old despairing note—that, by the insincerity of the present generation, all the ancient guidance of their God must end in this!—yet for some moments the blessed memory shines by itself, and God's mercy appears to triumph over Israel's ingratitude. Surely their sun will not set; Love must prevail. To which assurance a later voice from the Exile has added, in verses 10 and 11, a confirmation suitable to its own circumstances.

The early history of Israel was a romance. Think of it historically. Before the Most High there spread an array of kingdoms and peoples. At their head were three strong princes—sons indeed of God, if all the heritage of the past, the power of the present and the promise of the future be tokens. Egypt, wrapt in the rich and jewelled web of centuries, basked by Nile and Pyramid, all the wonder of the world's art in his dreamy eyes. Opposite him Assyria, with barer but more massive limbs, stood erect upon his highlands, grasping in his sword the promise of the world's power. Between the two, and using both of them, yet with his eyes westward on an empire of which neither dreamed, the Phœnician on his sea-coast built his storehouses and sped his navies, the promise of the world's wealth. It must ever remain the supreme romance of history, that the true son of God, bearer of His love and righteousness to all mankind, should be found, not only outside this powerful trinity, but in the puny and despised captive of one of them—in a people that was not a state, that had not a country, that was without a history, and, if appearances be true, was as yet devoid of even the rudiments of civilisation—a child people and a slave.

That was the Romance, and Hosea gives us the Grace which made it. When Israel was a child, then I loved him. The verb is a distinct impulse: I began, I learned, to love him. God's eyes, that passed unheeding the adult princes of the world, fell upon this little slave boy, and He loved him and gave him a career: from Egypt I called him to be My son.

Now, historically, it was the persuasion of this which made Israel. All their distinctiveness and character, their progress from a level with other nomadic tribes to the rank of the greatest religious teachers of humanity, started from the memory of these two facts—that God loved them, and that God called them. This was an unfailing conscience—the obligation that they were not their own, the irresistible motive to repentance even in their utmost backsliding, the unquenchable hope of a destiny in their direst days of defeat and scattering.

Some, of course, may cavil at the narrow, national scale on which such a belief was held, but let them remember that it was held in trust for all mankind. To snarl that Israel felt this sonship to God only for themselves, is to forget that it is they who have persuaded humanity that this is the only kind of sonship worth claiming. Almost every other nation of antiquity imagined a filial relation to the deity, but it was either through some fabulous physical descent, and then often confined only to kings and heroes, or by some mystical mingling of the Divine with the human, which was just as gross and sensuous. Israel alone defined the connection as a historical and a moral one. The sons of God are begotten not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.[596] Sonship to God is something not physical, but moral and historical, into which men are carried by a supreme awakening to the Divine love and authority. Israel, it is true, felt this only in a general way for the nation as a whole;[597] but their conception of it embraced just those moral contents which form the glory of Christ's doctrine of the Divine sonship of the individual. The belief that God is our Father does not come to us with our carnal birth—except in possibility: the persuasion of it is not conferred by our baptism except in so far as that is Christ's own seal to the fact that God Almighty loves us and has marked us for His own. To us sonship is a becoming, not a being—the awakening of our adult minds into the surprise of a Father's undeserved mercy, into the constraint of His authority and the assurance of the destiny He has laid up for us. It is conferred by love, and confirmed by duty. Neither has power brought it, nor wisdom, nor wealth, but it has come solely with the wonder of the knowledge that God loves us, and has always loved us, as well as in the sense, immediately following, of a true vocation to serve Him. Sonship which is less than this is no sonship at all. But so much as this is possible to every man through Jesus Christ. His constant message is that the Father loves every one of us, and that if we know[598] that love, we are God's sons indeed. To them who feel it, adoption into the number and privileges of the sons of God comes with the amazement and the romance which glorified God's choice of the child-slave Israel. Behold, they cry, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.[599]

But we cannot be loved by God and left where we are. Beyond the grace there lies the long discipline and destiny. We are called from servitude to freedom, from the world to God—each of us to run a course, and do a work, which can be done by no one else. That Israel did not perceive this was God's sore sorrow with them.

The more I[600] called to them, the farther they went from Me.[601] They to the Ba'alim kept sacrificing, and to images offering incense. But God persevered with grace, and the story is at first continued in the figure of Fatherhood with which it commenced; then it changes to the metaphor of a humane man's goodness to his beasts. Yet I taught Ephraim to walk, holding them on Mine arms,[602] but they knew not that I healed them—presumably when they fell and hurt themselves. With the cords of a man I would draw them, with bands of love; and I was to them as those who lift up the yoke on their jaws, and gently would I give them to eat.[603] It is the picture of a team of bullocks, in charge of a kind driver. Israel are no longer the wanton young cattle of the previous chapter, which need the yoke firmly fastened on their neck,[604] but a team of toiling oxen mounting some steep road. There is no use now for the rough ropes, by which frisky animals are kept to their work; but the driver, coming to his beasts' heads, by the gentle touch of his hand at their mouths and by words of sympathy draws them after him. I drew them with cords of a man, and with bands of love. Yet there is the yoke, and it would seem that certain forms of this, when beasts were working upwards, as we should say against the collar, pressed and rubbed upon them, so that the humane driver, when he came to their heads, eased the yoke with his hands. I was as they that take the yoke off their jaws;[605] and then, when they got to the top of the hill, he would rest and feed them. That is the picture, and however uncertain we may feel as to some of its details, it is obviously a passage—Ewald says "the earliest of all passages"—in which "human means precisely the same as love." It ought to be taken along with that other passage in the great Prophecy of the Exile, where God is described as He that led them through the deep, as an horse in the wilderness, that they should not stumble: as a beast goeth down into the valley, the Spirit of the Lord gave him rest.[606]

Thus then the figure of the fatherliness of God changes into that of His gentleness or humanity. Do not let us think that there is here either any descent of the poetry or want of connection between the two figures. The change is true, not only to Israel's, but to our own experience. Men are all either the eager children of happy, irresponsible days, or the bounden, plodding draught-cattle of life's serious burdens and charges. Hosea's double figure reflects human life in its whole range. Which of us has not known this fatherliness of the Most High, exercised upon us, as upon Israel, throughout our years of carelessness and disregard? It was God Himself who taught and trained us then;—

Those speedy recoveries from the blunders of early wilfulness, those redemptions from the sins of youth—happy were we if we knew that it was He who healed us. But there comes a time when men pass from leading-strings to harness—when we feel faith less and duty more—when our work touches us more closely than our God. Death must be a strange transformer of the spirit, yet surely not more strange than life, which out of the eager buoyant child makes in time the slow automaton of duty. It is such a stage which the fourth of these verses suits, when we look up, not so much for the fatherliness as for the gentleness and humanity of our God. A man has a mystic power of a very wonderful kind upon the animals over whom he is placed. On any of these wintry roads of ours we may see it, when a kind carter gets down at a hill, and, throwing the reins on his beast's back, will come to its head and touch it with his bare hands, and speak to it as if it were his fellow; till the deep eyes fill with light, and out of these things, so much weaker than itself, a touch, a glance, a word, there will come to it new strength to pull the stranded waggon onward. The man is as a god to the beast, coming down to help it, and it almost makes the beast human that he does so. Not otherwise does Hosea feel the help which God gives His own on the weary hills of life. We need not discipline, for our work is discipline enough, and the cares we carry of themselves keep us straight and steady. But we need sympathy and gentleness—this very humanity which the prophet attributes to our God. God comes and takes us by the head; through the mystic power which is above us, but which makes us like itself, we are lifted to our task. Let no one judge this incredible. The incredible would be that our God should prove any less to us than the merciful man is to his beast. But we are saved from argument by experience. When we remember how, as life has become steep and our strength exhausted, there has visited us a thought which has sharpened to a word, a word which has warmed to a touch, and we have drawn ourselves together and leapt up new men, can we feel that God was any less in these things, than in the voice of conscience or the message of forgiveness, or the restraints of His discipline? Nay, though the reins be no longer felt, God is at our head, that we should not stumble nor stand still.

Upon this gracious passage there follows one of those swift revulsions of feeling, which we have learned almost to expect in Hosea. His insight again overtakes his love. The people will not respond to the goodness of their God; it is impossible to work upon minds so fickle and insincere. Discipline is what they need. He shall return to the land of Egypt, or Asshur shall be his king (it is still an alternative), for they have refused to return to Me....[607] 'Tis but one more instance of the age-long apostasy of the people. My people have a bias[608] to turn from Me; and though they (the prophets) call them upwards, none of them can lift them.[609]

Yet God is God, and though prophecy fail He will attempt His Love once more. There follows the greatest passage in Hosea—deepest if not highest of his book—the breaking forth of that exhaustless mercy of the Most High which no sin of man can bar back nor wear out.

Such a love has been the secret of Hosea's persistence through so many years with so faithless a people, and now, when he has failed, it takes voice to itself and in its irresistible fulness makes this last appeal. Once more before the end let Israel hear God in the utterness of His Love!

The verses are a climax, and obviously to be succeeded by a pause. On the brink of his doom, will Israel turn to such a God, at such a call? The next verse, though dependent for its promise on this same exhaustless Love, is from an entirely different circumstance, and cannot have been put by Hosea here.[611]

CHAPTER XIX

THE FINAL ARGUMENT

Hosea xii.-xiv. 1.

The impassioned call with which last chapter closed was by no means an assurance of salvation: How am I to give thee up, Ephraim? how am I to let thee go, Israel? On the contrary, it was the anguish of Love, when it hovers over its own on the brink of the destruction to which their wilfulness has led them, and before relinquishing them would seek, if possible, some last way to redeem. Surely that fatal morrow and the people's mad leap into it are not inevitable! At least, before they take the leap, let the prophet go back once more upon the moral situation of to-day, go back once more upon the past of the people, and see if he can find anything else to explain that bias to apostasy[612] which has brought them to this fatal brink—anything else which may move them to repentance even there. So in chaps. xii. and xiii. Hosea turns upon the now familiar trail of his argument, full of the Divine jealousy, determined to give the people one other chance to turn; but if they will not, he at least will justify God's relinquishment of them. The chapters throw even a brighter light upon the temper and habits of that generation. They again explore Israel's ancient history for causes of the present decline; and, in especial, they cite the spiritual experience of the Father of the nation, as if to show that what of repentance was possible for him is possible for his posterity also. But once more all hope is seen to be vain; and Hosea's last travail with his obstinate people closes in a doom even more awful than its predecessors.

The division into chapters is probably correct; but while chap. xiii. is well-ordered and clear, the arrangement, and in parts the meaning, of chap. xii. are very obscure.

1. The People and Their Father Jacob.

In no part even of the difficult Book of Hosea does the sacred text bristle with more problems. It may well be doubted whether the verses lie in their proper order, or, if they do, whether we have them entire as they came from the prophet, for the connection is not always perceptible.[613] We cannot believe, however, that the chapter is a bundle of isolated oracles, for the analogy between Jacob and his living posterity runs through the whole of it,[614] and the refrain that God must requite upon the nation their deeds is found both near the beginning and at the end of the chapter.[615] One is tempted to take the two fragments about the Patriarch (vv. 4, 5, and 13 f.) by themselves, and the more so that ver. 8 would follow so suitably on either ver. 2 or ver. 3. But this clue is not sufficient; and till one more evident is discovered, it is perhaps best to keep to the extant arrangement.[616]

As before, the argument starts from the falseness of Israel, which is illustrated in the faithlessness of their foreign relations. Ephraim hath compassed Me with lies, and the house of Israel with deceit, and Judah ...[617] Ephraim herds the wind[618] and hunts the sirocco. All day long they heap up falsehood and fraud:[619] they strike a bargain with Assyria, and carry oil to Egypt, as Isaiah also complained.[620]

Jehovah hath a quarrel with Israel[621] and is about to visit upon Jacob his ways; according to his deeds will He requite him. In the womb he supplanted his brother, and in his man's strength he wrestled with God.[622] Yea, he wrestled with the Angel and prevailed; he wept and besought of Him mercy. At Bethel he met with Him, and there He spake with him[623] (or with us—that is, in the person of our father)....[624] So thou by thy God—by His help,[625] for no other way is possible except, like thy father, through wrestling with Him—shouldest return: keep leal love and justice, and wait on thy God without ceasing.[626] To this passage we shall return in dealing with Hosea's doctrine of Repentance.

In characteristic fashion the discourse now swerves from the ideal to the real state of the people.

Canaan! So the prophet nicknames his mercenary generation.[627] With false balances in his hand, he loves to defraud. For Ephraim said, Ah but I have grown rich, I have won myself wealth.[628] None of my gains can touch me with guilt which is sin.[629] But I, Jehovah thy God from the land of Egypt—I could make thee dwell in tents again, as in the days of the Assembly in Horeb—I could destroy all this commercial civilisation of thine, and reduce thee to thine ancient level of nomadic life—and I spake to the prophets: it was I who multiplied vision, and by the hand of the prophets gave parables. If Gilead be for idolatry, then shall it become vanity! If in Gilgal—Stone-Circle—they sacrifice bullocks,[630] stone-heaps shall their altars become among the furrows of the field. One does not see the connection of these verses with the preceding. But now the discourse oscillates once more to the national father, and the parallel between his own and his people's experience.

And Jacob fled to the land[631] of Aram, and Israel served for a wife, and for a wife he herded sheep. And by a prophet Jehovah brought Israel up from Egypt, and by a prophet he was shepherded. And Ephraim hath given bitter provocation; but his blood-guiltiness shall be upon him, and his Lord shall return it to him.

I cannot trace the argument here.

2. The Last Judgment.

The crisis draws on. On the one hand Israel's sin, accumulating, bulks ripe for judgment. On the other the times grow more fatal, or the prophet more than ever feels them so. He will gather once again the old truths on the old lines—the great past when Jehovah was God alone, the descent to the idols and the mushroom monarchs of to-day, the people, who once had been strong, sapped by luxury, forgetful, stupid, not to be roused. The discourse has every mark of being Hosea's latest. There is clearness and definiteness beyond anything since chap. iv. There are ease and lightness of treatment, a playful sarcasm, as if the themes were now familiar both to the prophet and his audience. But, chiefly, there is the passion—so suitable to last words—of how different it all might have been, if to this crisis Israel had come with store of strength instead of guilt. How these years, with their opening into the great history of the world, might have meant a birth for the nation, which instead was lying upon them like a miscarried child in the mouth of the womb! It was a fatality God Himself could not help in. Only death and hell remained. Let them, then, have their way! Samaria must expiate her guilt in the worst horrors of war.

Instead of with one definite historical event, this last effort of Hosea opens more naturally with a summary of all Ephraim's previous history. The tribe had been the first in Israel till they took to idols.

Whenever Ephraim spake there was trembling.[632] Prince[633] was he in Israel; but he fell into guilt through the Ba'al, and so—died. Even now they continue to sin and make them a smelting of their silver, idols after their own model,[634] smith's work all of it. To them—to such things—they speak! Sacrificing men kiss calves! In such unreason have they sunk. They cannot endure. Therefore shall they be like the morning cloud and like the dew that early vanisheth, like chaff which whirleth up from the floor and like smoke from the window. And I was thy God[635] from the land of Egypt; and god besides Me thou knowest not, nor saviour has there been any but Myself. I shepherded[636] thee in the wilderness, in the land of droughts—long before they came among the gods of fertile Canaan. But once they came hither, the more pasture they had, the more they ate themselves full, and the more they ate themselves full, the more was their heart uplifted, so they forgat Me. So that I must be[637] to them like a lion, like a leopard on the way I must leap.[638] I will fall on them like a bear robbed of its young, and will tear the caul of their hearts, and will devour them like a lion—wild beasts shall rend them.[639]

When He hath destroyed thee, O Israel—who then may help thee?[640] Where is thy king now? that he may save thee, or all thy princes? that they may rule thee;[641] those of whom thou hast said, Give me a king and princes. Aye, I give thee a king in Mine anger, and I take him away in My wrath! Fit summary of the short and bloody reigns of these last years.

Gathered is Ephraim's guilt, stored up is his sin. The nation is pregnant—but with guilt! Birth pangs seize him, but—the figure changes, with Hosea's own swiftness, from mother to child—he is an impracticable son;[642] for this is no time to stand in the mouth of the womb. The years that might have been the nation's birth are by their own folly to prove their death. Israel lies in the way of its own redemption—how truly this has been forced home upon them in one chapter after another! Shall God then step in and work a deliverance on the brink of death? From the hand of Sheol shall I deliver them? from death shall I redeem them? Nay, let death and Sheol have their way. Where are thy plagues, O death? where thy destruction, Sheol? Here with them. Compassion is hid from Mine eyes.

This great verse has been very variously rendered. Some have taken it as a promise: I will deliver ... I will redeem.... So the Septuagint translated, and St. Paul borrowed, not the whole Greek verse, but its spirit and one or two of its terms, for his triumphant challenge to death in the power of the Resurrection of Christ.[643] As it stands in Hosea, however, the verse must be a threat. The last clause unambiguously abjures mercy, and the statement that His people will not be saved, for God cannot save them, is one in thorough harmony with all Hosea's teaching.[644]

An appendix follows with the illustration of the exact form which doom shall take. As so frequently with Hosea, it opens with a play upon the people's name, which at the same time faintly echoes the opening of the chapter.

Although he among his brethren[645] is the fruit-bearer—yaphri', he Ephraim—there shall come an east wind, a wind of Jehovah rising from the wilderness, so that his fountain dry up and his spring be parched. He—himself, not the Assyrian, but Menahem, who had to send gold to the Assyrian—shall strip the treasury of all its precious jewels. Samaria must bear her guilt: for she hath rebelled against her God. To this simple issue has the impenitence of the people finally reduced the many possibilities of those momentous years; and their last prophet leaves them looking forward to the crash which came some dozen years later in the invasion and captivity of the land. They shall fall by the sword; their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child ripped up. Horrible details, but at that period certain to follow every defeat in war.

CHAPTER XX

"I WILL BE AS THE DEW"

Hosea xiv. 2-10.

Like the Book of Amos, the Book of Hosea, after proclaiming the people's inevitable doom, turns to a blessed prospect of their restoration to favour with God. It will be remembered that we decided against the authenticity of such an epilogue in the Book of Amos; and it may now be asked, how can we come to any other conclusion with regard to the similar peroration in the Book of Hosea? For the following reasons.

We decided against the genuineness of the closing verses of Amos, because their sanguine temper is opposed to the temper of the whole of the rest of the book, and because they neither propose any ethical conditions for the attainment of the blessed future, nor in their picture of the latter do they emphasise one single trace of the justice, or the purity, or the social kindliness, on which Amos has so exclusively insisted as the ideal relations of Israel to Jehovah. It seemed impossible to us that Amos could imagine the perfect restoration of his people in the terms only of requickened nature, and say nothing about righteousness, truth and mercy towards the poor. The prospect which now closes his book is psychologically alien to him, and, being painted in the terms of later prophecy, may be judged to have been added by some prophet of the Exile, speaking from the standpoint, and with the legitimate desires, of his own day.

But the case is very different for this epilogue in Hosea. In the first place, Hosea has not only continually preached repentance, and been, from his whole affectionate temper of mind, unable to believe repentance impossible; but he has actually predicted the restoration of his people upon certain well-defined and ethical conditions. In chap. ii. he has drawn for us in detail the whole prospect of God's successful treatment of his erring spouse. Israel should be weaned from their sensuousness and its accompanying trust in idols by a severe discipline, which the prophet describes in terms of their ancient wanderings in the wilderness. They should be reduced, as at the beginning of their history, to moral converse with their God; and abjuring the Ba'alim (later chapters imply also their foreign allies and foolish kings and princes) should return to Jehovah, when He, having proved that these could not give them the fruits of the land they sought after, should Himself quicken the whole course of nature to bless them with the fertility of the soil and the friendliness even of the wild beasts.

Now in the epilogue and its prospect of Israel's repentance we find no feature, physical or moral, which has not already been furnished by these previous promises of the book. All their ethical conditions are provided; nothing but what they have conceived of blessing is again conceived. Israel is to abjure senseless sacrifice and come to Jehovah with rational and contrite confession.[646] She is to abjure her foreign alliances.[647] She is to trust in the fatherly love of her God.[648] He is to heal her,[649] and His anger is to turn away.[650] He is to restore nature, just as described in chap. ii., and the scenery of the restoration is borrowed from Hosea's own Galilee. There is, in short, no phrase or allusion of which we can say that it is alien to the prophet's style or environment, while the very keynotes of his book—return, backsliding, idols the work of our hands, such pity as a father hath, and perhaps even the answer or converse of verse 9—are all struck once more.

The epilogue then is absolutely different from the epilogue to the Book of Amos, nor can the present expositor conceive of the possibility of a stronger case for the genuineness of any passage of Scripture. The sole difficulty seems to be the place in which we find it—a place where its contradiction to the immediately preceding sentence of doom is brought out into relief. We need not suppose, however, that it was uttered by Hosea in immediate proximity to the latter, nor even that it formed his last word to Israel. But granting only (as the above evidence obliges us to do) that it is the prophet's own, this fourteenth chapter may have been a discourse addressed by him at one of those many points when, as we know, he had some hope of the people's return. Personally, I should think it extremely likely that Hosea's ministry closed with that final, hopeless proclamation in chap. xiii.: no other conclusion was possible so near the fall of Samaria, and the absolute destruction of the Northern Kingdom. But Hosea had already in chap. ii. painted the very opposite issue as a possible ideal for his people; and during some break in those years when their insincerity was less obtrusive, and the final doom still uncertain, the prophet's heart swung to its natural pole in the exhaustless and steadfast love of God, and he uttered his unmingled gospel. That either himself or the unknown editor of his prophecies should have placed it at the very end of his book is not less than what we might have expected. For if the book were to have validity beyond the circumstances of its origin, beyond the judgment which was so near and so inevitable, was it not right to let something else than the proclamation of this latter be its last word to men? was it not right to put as the conclusion of the whole matter the ideal eternally valid for Israel—the gospel which is ever God's last word to His people?[651]

At some point or other, then, in the course of his ministry, there was granted to Hosea an open vision like to the vision which he has recounted in the second chapter. He called on the people to repent. For once, and in the power of that Love to which he had already said all things are possible, it seemed to him as if repentance came. The tangle and intrigue of his generation fell away; fell away the reeking sacrifices and the vain show of worship. The people turned from their idols and puppet-kings, from Assyria and from Egypt, and with contrite hearts came to God Himself, who, healing and loving, opened to them wide the gates of the future. It is not strange that down this spiritual vista the prophet should see the same scenery as daily filled his bodily vision. Throughout Galilee Lebanon[652] dominates the landscape. You cannot lift your eyes from any spot of Northern Israel without resting them upon the vast mountain. From the unhealthy jungles of the Upper Jordan, the pilgrim lifts his heart to the cool hill air above, to the ever-green cedars and firs, to the streams and waterfalls that drop like silver chains off the great breastplate of snow. From Esdraelon and every plain the peasants look to Lebanon to store the clouds and scatter the rain; it is not from heaven but from Hermon that they expect the dew, their only hope in the long drought of summer. Across Galilee and in Northern Ephraim, across Bashan and in Northern Gilead, across Hauran and on the borders of the desert, the mountain casts its spell of power, its lavish promise of life.[653] Lebanon is everywhere the summit of the land, and there are points from which it is as dominant as heaven.

No wonder then that our northern prophet painted the blessed future in the poetry of the Mountain—its air, its dew and its trees. Other seers were to behold, in the same latter days, the mountain of the Lord above the tops of the mountains; the ordered city, her steadfast walls salvation, and her open gates praise; the wealth of the Gentiles flowing into her, profusion of flocks for sacrifice, profusion of pilgrims; the great Temple and its solemn services; and the glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, fir-tree and pine and box-tree together, to beautify the place of My Sanctuary.[654] But, with his home in the north, and weary of sacrifice and ritual, weary of everything artificial whether it were idols or puppet-kings, Hosea turns to the glory of Lebanon as it lies, untouched by human tool or art, fresh and full of peace from God's own hand. Like that other seer of Galilee, Hosea in his vision of the future saw no temple therein.[655] His sacraments are the open air, the mountain breeze, the dew, the vine, the lilies, the pines; and what God asks of men are not rites nor sacrifices, but life and health, fragrance and fruitfulness, beneath the shadow and the Dew of His Presence.

Return, O Israel, to Jehovah thy God, for thou hast stumbled by thine iniquity. Take with you words[656] and return unto Jehovah. Say unto Him, Remove iniquity altogether, and take good, so will we render the calves[657] of our lips; confessions, vows, these are the sacrificial offerings God delights in. Which vows are now registered:—