Hosea 9 - ESV - Bible Reading / Study Notes

Hosea 9

The Lord Will Punish Israel

9:1   Rejoice not, O Israel!
    Exult not like the peoples;
  for you have played the whore, forsaking your God.
    You have loved a prostitute’s wages
    on all threshing floors.
2   Threshing floor and wine vat shall not feed them,
    and the new wine shall fail them.
3   They shall not remain in the land of the LORD,
    but Ephraim shall return to Egypt,
    and they shall eat unclean food in Assyria.
4   They shall not pour drink offerings of wine to the LORD,
    and their sacrifices shall not please him.
  It shall be like mourners’ bread to them;
    all who eat of it shall be defiled;
  for their bread shall be for their hunger only;
    it shall not come to the house of the LORD.
5   What will you do on the day of the appointed festival,
    and on the day of the feast of the LORD?
6   For behold, they are going away from destruction;
    but Egypt shall gather them;
    Memphis shall bury them.
  Nettles shall possess their precious things of silver;
    thorns shall be in their tents.
7   The days of punishment have come;
    the days of recompense have come;
    Israel shall know it.
  The prophet is a fool;
    the man of the spirit is mad,
  because of your great iniquity
    and great hatred.
8   The prophet is the watchman of Ephraim with my God;
  yet a fowler’s snare is on all his ways,
    and hatred in the house of his God.
9   They have deeply corrupted themselves
    as in the days of Gibeah:
  he will remember their iniquity;
    he will punish their sins.
10   Like grapes in the wilderness,
    I found Israel.
  Like the first fruit on the fig tree
    in its first season,
    I saw your fathers.
  But they came to Baal-peor
    and consecrated themselves to the thing of shame,
    and became detestable like the thing they loved.
11   Ephraim’s glory shall fly away like a bird—
    no birth, no pregnancy, no conception!
12   Even if they bring up children,
    I will bereave them till none is left.
  Woe to them
    when I depart from them!
13   Ephraim, as I have seen, was like a young palm¹ planted in a meadow;
    but Ephraim must lead his children out to slaughter.²
14   Give them, O LORD—
    what will you give?
  Give them a miscarrying womb
    and dry breasts.
15   Every evil of theirs is in Gilgal;
    there I began to hate them.
  Because of the wickedness of their deeds
    I will drive them out of my house.
  I will love them no more;
    all their princes are rebels.
16   Ephraim is stricken;
    their root is dried up;
    they shall bear no fruit.
  Even though they give birth,
    I will put their beloved children to death.
17   My God will reject them
    because they have not listened to him;
    they shall be wanderers among the nations.

Footnotes

[1] 9:13 Or like Tyre
[2] 9:13 Hebrew to him who slaughters

Commentary

v1-3: Israel rejoices in her feasts, celebrating wealth and prosperity, but neglecting God. Although there is rejoicing today, tomorrow brings famine and exile.

v4-6: Isaiah criticised the empty ritual of Judah, but here even the comfort of familiar things, sacrifices and feast days, is removed. Whilst ritual can be an enemy of truth, it can also be a reminder of truth; and Israel was to lose even that.

The reference here seems to be to the Feast Of Tabernacles, when the harvest had been gathered in, the beginning of the eternal kingdom, new heavens and new earth.

v7-8: The days of punishment arrive; Israel begins to reap what she sowed (8.7). The godly man is considered insane, the prophet a fool, as the vast majority rejected the ways of the Lord. Hosea is expecting to be respected, hsi message accepted. How wrong he was! It is one thing to be rejected by the pagans, but quite another to be rejected by 'the people of God.'

v9: Reminders from the past (1), Gibeah, Judg 19; the desperate corruption of earlier times; every man did what was right in his own eyes; the people had fallen from the good times under Joshua, and lived in decadence and anarchy. God sent judgments as the people were repeatedly attacked by surrounding nations, and became subject to foreign powers.

v10: Reminders from the past (2), Baal-Peor, Num 25; Ps 116.8. Israel made a promising start, like grapes in the wilderness, the first figs on a fig-tree, promising more fruit to follow. But they loved an idol, and became like the idol; what we worship governs our behaviour.

v11-14: Glory flying away; fruitlessness, children lost; they will diminish, but not increase, Deut 28.38-42.

v15-16: Reminders from the past (3), 1 Sam 11. At Gilgal, the people desired a king, and rejected the Lord; setting in train the monarchy of Israel. At times this was godly, under David and Solomon; at times it was influential, under Omri and Ahab; but for Israel, this was the route into much wickedness.

v17: Summary of the chapter; the people will be cast away because of their disobedience; real and severe consequences happened before, and would happen again.