Hosea's most simple definition of repentance is that of returning unto God. For turning and re-turning the Hebrew language has only one verb—shûbh. In the Book of Hosea there are instances in which it is employed in the former sense;[724] but, even apart from its use for repentance, the verb usually means to return. Thus the wandering wife in the second chapter says, I will return to my former husband;[725] and in the threat of judgment it is said, Ephraim will return to Egypt.[726] Similar is the sense in the phrases His deeds will I turn back upon him[727] and I will not turn back to destroy Ephraim.[728] The usual meaning of the verb is therefore, not merely to turn or change, but to turn right round, to turn back and home.[729] This is obviously the force of its employment to express repentance. For this purpose Hosea very seldom uses it alone.[730] He generally adds either the name by which God had always been known, Jehovah,[731] or the designation of Him, as their own God.[732]
We must emphasise this point if we would appreciate the thoroughness of our prophet's doctrine, and its harmony with the preaching of the New Testament. To Hosea repentance is no mere change in the direction of one's life. It is a turning back upon one's self, a retracing of one's footsteps, a confession and acknowledgment of what one has abandoned. It is a coming back and a coming home to God, exactly as Jesus Himself has described in the Parable of the Prodigal. As Hosea again and again affirms, the Return to God, like the New Testament Metanoia, is the effect of new knowledge; but the new knowledge is not of new facts—it is of facts which have been present for a long time and which ought to have been appreciated before.
Of these facts Hosea describes three kinds: the nation's misery, the unspeakable grace of their God, and their great guilt in turning from Him. Again it is as in the case of the prodigal: his hunger, his father, and his cry, "I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight."
We have already felt the pathos of those passages in which Hosea describes the misery and the decay of Israel, the unprofitableness and shame of all their restless traffic with other gods and alien empires. The state is rotten;[733] anarchy prevails.[734] The national vitality is lessened: Ephraim hath grey hairs.[735] Power of birth and begetting have gone; the universal unchastity causes the population to diminish: their glory flieth away like a bird.[736] The presents to Egypt,[737] the tribute to Assyria, drain the wealth of the people: strangers devour his strength.[738] The prodigal Israel has his far-off country where he spends his substance among strangers. It is in this connection that we must take the repeated verse: the pride of Israel testifieth to his face.[739] We have seen[740] the impossibility of the usual exegesis of these words, that by the Pride of Israel Hosea means Jehovah; the word "pride" is probably to be taken in the sense in which Amos employs it of the exuberance and arrogance of Israel's civilisation. If we are right, then Hosea describes a very subtle symptom of the moral awakening whether of the individual or of a community. The conscience of many a man, of many a kingdom, has been reached only through their pride. Pride is the last nerve which comfort and habit leave quick; and when summons to a man's better nature fail, it is still possible in most cases to touch his pride with the presentation of the facts of his decadence. This is probably what Hosea means. Israel's prestige suffers. The civilisation of which they are proud has its open wounds. Their politicians are the sport of Egypt;[741] their wealth, the very gold of their Temple, is lifted by Assyria.[742] The nerve of pride was also touched in the prodigal: "How many hired servants of my father have enough and to spare, while I perish with hunger." Yet, unlike him, this prodigal son of God will not therefore return.[743] Though there are grey hairs upon him, though strangers devour his strength, he knoweth it not; of him it cannot be said that "he has come to himself." And that is why the prophet threatens the further discipline of actual exile from the land and its fruits,[744] of bitter bread[745] and poverty[746] on an unclean soil. Israel must also eat husks and feed with swine before he arises and returns to his God.
But misery alone never led either man or nation to repentance: the sorrow of this world worketh only death. Repentance is the return to God; and it is the awakening to the truth about God, to the facts of His nature and His grace, which alone makes repentance possible. No man's doctrine of repentance is intelligible without his doctrine of God; and it is because Hosea's doctrine of God is so rich, so fair and so tender, that his doctrine of repentance is so full and gracious. Here we see the difference between him and Amos. Amos had also used the phrase with frequency; again and again he had appealed to the people to seek God and to return to God.[747] But from Amos it went forth only as a pursuing voice, a voice crying in the wilderness. Hosea lets loose behind it a heart, plies the people with gracious thoughts of God, and brings about them, not the voices only, but the atmosphere, of love. I will be as the dew unto Israel, promises the Most High; but He is before His promise. The chapters of Hosea are drenched with the dew of God's mercy, of which no drop falls on those of Amos, but there God is rather the roar as of a lion, the flash as of lightning. Both prophets bid Israel turn to God; but Amos means by that, to justice, truth and purity, while Hosea describes a husband, a father, long-suffering and full of mercy. "I bid you come back," cries Amos. But Hosea pleads, "If only you were aware of what God is, you would come back." "Come back to God and live," cries Amos; but Hosea, "Come back to God, for He is Love." Amos calls, "Come back at once, for there is but little time left till God must visit you in judgment"; but Hosea, "Come back at once, for God has loved you so long and so kindly." Amos cries, "Turn, for in front of you is destruction"; but Hosea, "Turn, for behind you is God." And that is why all Hosea's preaching of repentance is so evangelical. "I will arise and go to my Father."
But the third element of the new knowledge which means repentance is the conscience of guilt. My Father, I have sinned. On this point it might be averred that the teaching of Hosea is less spiritual than that of later prophets in Israel, and that here at last he comes short of the evangelical inwardness of the New Testament. There is truth in the charge; and here perhaps we feel most the defects of his standpoint, as one who appeals, not to the individual, but to the nation as a whole. Hosea's treatment of the sense of guilt cannot be so spiritual as that, say, of the fifty-first Psalm. But, at least, he is not satisfied to exhaust it by the very thorough exposure which he gives us of the social sins of his day, and of their terrible results. He, too, understands what is meant by a conscience of sin. He has called Israel's iniquity harlotry, unfaithfulness to God; and in a passage of equal insight and beauty of expression he points out that in the service of the Ba'alim Jehovah's people can never feel anything but a harlot's shame and bitter memories of the better past.
Rejoice not, O Israel, to the pitch of rapture like the heathen: for thou hast played the harlot from thine own God; 'tis hire thou hast loved on all threshing-floors. Floor and vat shall not acknowledge them; the new wine shall play them false.[748] Mere children of nature may abandon themselves to the riotous joy of harvest and vintage festivals, for they have never known other gods than are suitably worshipped by these orgies. But Israel has a past—the memory of a holier God, the conscience of having deserted Him for material gifts. With such a conscience she can never enjoy the latter; as Hosea puts it, they will not acknowledge or take to[749] her. Here there is an instinct of the profound truth, that even in the fulness of life conscience is punishment; by itself the sense of guilt is judgment.
But Hosea does not attack the service of strange gods only because it is unfaithfulness to Jehovah, but also because, as the worship of images, it is a senseless stupidity utterly inconsistent with that spiritual discernment of which repentance so largely consists. And with the worship of heathen idols Hosea equally condemns the worship of Jehovah under the form of images.
Hosea was the first in Israel to lead the attack upon the idols. Elijah had assaulted the worship of a foreign god, but neither he nor Elisha nor Amos condemned the worship of Israel's own God under the form of a calf. Indeed Amos, except in one doubtful passage,[750] never at all attacks idols or false gods. The reason is very obvious. Amos and Elijah were concerned only with the proclamation of God as justice and purity: and to the moral aspects of religion the question of idolatry is not relevant; the two things do not come directly into collision. But Hosea had deeper and more wide views of God, with which idolatry came into conflict at a hundred points. We know what Hosea's knowledge of God was—how spiritual, how extensive—and we can appreciate how incongruous idolatry must have appeared against it. We are prepared to find him treating the images, whether of the Ba'alim or of Jehovah, with that fine scorn which a passionate monotheism, justly conscious of its intellectual superiority, has ever passed upon the idolatry even of civilisations in other respects higher than its own. To Hosea the idol is an 'eseb, a made thing.[751] It is made of the very silver and gold with which Jehovah Himself had endowed the people.[752] It is made only to be cut off[753] by the first invader! Chiefly, however, does Hosea's scorn fall upon the image under which Jehovah Himself was worshipped. Thy Calf, O Samaria![754] he contemptuously calls it. From Israel is it also, as much as the Ba'alim. A workman made it, and no god is it: chips shall the Calf of Samaria become! In another place he mimics the anxiety of Samaria for their Calf; his people mourn for him, and his priestlings writhe for his glory, why?—because it is going into exile:[755] the gold that covers him shall be stripped for the tribute to Assyria. And once more: They continue to sin; they make them a smelting of their silver, idols after their own modelling, smith's work all of it. To these things they speak! Sacrificing men actually kiss calves![756] All this is in the same vein of satire which we find grown to such brilliance in the great Prophet of the Exile.[757] Hosea was the first in whom it sparkled; and it was due to his conception of the knowledge of God. Its relevancy to his doctrine of repentance is this, that so spiritual an apprehension of God as repentance implies, so complete a metanoia or change of mind, is intellectually incompatible with idolatry. You cannot speak of repentance to men who kiss calves and worship blocks of wood. Hence he says: Ephraim is wedded to idols: leave him alone.[758]