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.