Commentary on Hosea, Joel and Amos 1.11.1–1.11.6

Verse 1. — “As the morning passes, the king of Israel has passed away; for Israel was a child, and I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” He had already said above, “Samaria has made its king pass away like foam on the face of the water.” And now he took care to repeat the same, saying, “As the morning passes, the king of Israel has passed away”: that is, “By sinning you desired the kingdom of your nation, and by sinning you also destroyed it; and all the pomp of your arrogance has grown old, because the royal power that you desired in imitation of the neighboring nations provided you no defense without my help.” This is why the prophet also warned you: “Do not trust in princes, nor in the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation. Their spirit goes forth, and it will return to its earth; on that day all their thoughts will perish.” So the honors of those kings did you no good, just as your support did them none. All that they seemed able to do, or to live, was consumed with such speed that it appeared no longer than the morning twilight, which is narrowed by the departure of night and the rising of day, according to what we read in a like case in blessed David: “When sinners sprang up like grass, and all who work iniquity appeared, it was that they might perish forever and ever.” So the rule of Israel collapsed, with vengeance clinging to its crimes, so that it seemed not so much to have flourished as to have appeared for a moment. “For Israel was a child, and I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” Blessed Matthew, the writer of the Gospel, took the last part of this verse for the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, showing that it was done by God’s plan that Joseph and Mary went to Egypt to escape the fury of Herod, who was persecuting our Redeemer in his infancy. For it was necessary that what the prophet had declared be fulfilled: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” The text of the prophecy shows that it was said of the people; apostolic authority has shown that it can also be transferred to the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the marks of divine goodness that had been given to the Jews were also conferred, and more abundantly, on us, together with graces. The sequence of the explanation, however, shows the force of a censor, who brings in the mention of past nobility so as to burn severely those whom he complains have degenerated. Having listed the crimes and announced the punishments, he suddenly brings in the memory of their past dignity, as if he said, “Oh grief! Oh tears! What kind of men is this, held in such worthlessness?” Then, as if he had received an answer, he cries out: “For Israel was a child, and I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. This is the one,” he says, “whom I wept to see reaping pain after sowing ungodliness, whom I announce is to be laid waste as Salmana was consumed by Gideon. This, I say, is the one who caused his kingdom to be abolished, so that it passed as quickly as the time of dawn can last. This, I say, is the one who, descended from the stock of the saints, had been consecrated to me at his very beginnings, and among so many nations scattered through the whole world was chosen as the one people to be called Israel; whose merits I anticipated in affection, calling him my child, my son, I say; and I laid such honor on him when he was still being brought out of Egypt that it was made known both by words and by deeds that in my eyes there was as great a difference between this people and the Egyptian mob as there usually is between the best of sons and the worst of slaves. Since, then, already at that time, beyond all the miracles of his liberation and the sweetness of that freedom, he had received from me this mark of honor, to be called my son, he has now sunk so far into the depths of profanity that, forgetting me and himself alike, he obeys only the worshipers of demons.” To prove how little religion and reason remained in the mind of this people, they did not apply elaborate inventions by which to seduce them, but called them like cattle prepared for slaughter, and drew them where they wished with an easy sign. [Verse 2.] “They sacrificed to the Baals and offered sacrifice to images”: that is, when called to the worship of various idols, which they were to serve with various rites, they followed with such ease that they were convicted of having desired such an occasion. Verse 3. — “And I was like a foster father to Ephraim; I carried them in my arms, and they did not know that I cared for them.” The two verses interposed have broken off the sequence of the simple narrative, and so have made it difficult to understand. But what he says, “Like a foster father to Ephraim I carried them in my arms,” answers the sentence set before: “O Israel was a child, and I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” After this, inserting what crimes they committed, he returns to the order of recalling their fickleness. This seems to serve to attest the surges of his indignation: that the speech he began should not run on in one course, but that even at the time when things done long ago are being recalled, the force of present complaint should break out, as if unable to bear even a brief concealment. So when he had begun to touch on their ancient honors, to aggravate the guilt of a degenerate people, both that he loved him with spontaneous kindness and that he graced him with the name of son, he suddenly cried out that they had [opened] their ears to the raving ministers of demons, and followed them so quickly that they caused no trouble in assenting. If you set aside for a moment what is uncertain, as we have said, from the impulse of complaint, what follows will have a clear connection with what went before: that is, “For Israel was a child, and I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son; and I was like a foster father to Ephraim, I carried them in my arms, and they did not know that I cared for them”; as if he said: “The profanity of this people is not new, for it showed me signs of an ungrateful mind at its very beginnings. For when I had called it my son, I added to my benefits caresses as well, and like a most indulgent foster father I exercised care for my little one. Why not, since I did not let him feel the hardships of the vast wilderness, nor be troubled by the toil of a new and long journey?”

Verse 4. — “Like his cord,” that is, his allotment. As when, through the sin of Adam the first man, [mankind] fell from happiness, Adam who had been made the cultivator and dweller of paradise so as to feed on riches gained without labor, so this people received food and drink not acquired by human means but procured only by miracles; “and so I bound him only with the bonds of love and the reins of the commandments. For this alone, that they might walk safely, I set their mouths in order, showing that I had bent down to their rest so that they might enjoy fitting rest and pleasure: since they did not feel a power pressing them down, but one walking with them through vast places in that need, they had the yoke lifted up, that is, removed, as we see happen with carts, whose yokes are raised when they are unloosed. Yet that people, regarding neither my providence nor my indulgence, by which it was to be both formed and healed, always set against me a resisting spirit, until by stubborn impudence it came to the state in which it now is.”

Verses 5–7. “He shall not return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria himself shall be his king, because they would not turn. The sword has begun in his city, and it shall consume his chosen ones and devour their heads. And my people shall hang upon my return; but a yoke shall be laid on them together, which shall not be taken away.” Above he had said, “They called them; so they went away from their face”; but now he says, “they would not turn”: that is, “those who readily obeyed those who called them away from piety have not been driven even by various afflictions to come back from evil to better things. For when, having lost their wealth, they strove to change their servitude so as to be subject to the Egyptians rather than the Assyrians, they did not deserve to obtain even this, since the sentence that came from our mouth is immovable: that for the time being they would serve no masters but the Assyrians.” So vengeance, once begun, will advance to its work, so that the sword breaks through the cities, iron and flame alike lay waste the whole nobility, and the enemy plunder everything that the rich usually hold dear. “So this people, once mine, deprived of all strength and all comforts, will hang on my return with slow expectation, begging with late prayers and unwelcome groans that I deign to become its helper. But a yoke shall be laid on them together, which shall not be taken away.” “It will prove by events that its tears were ineffective, because I will not unfix this decree, which, compelled by its many crimes, I have at last ordered to go into effect.” And because he had said that the decree stood, and that they would at once come under the yoke of Assyrian captivity, he takes on also the figure of one deliberating about what vengeance to consume the guilty with, and puts forward the example of cities that fire brought down from heaven destroyed.

Verses 8–9. “How shall I give you up like Admah, set you like Zeboiim? My heart is turned within me; my fullness is troubled together. I will not carry out the fury of my anger, and I will not turn to destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not enter the city.” By recalling what was done long ago, he shows that the Israelites could be, and deserved to be, consumed no less than the Sodomites; yet that he, mindful of the benefits he had conferred in honor of their holy fathers even on their undeserving children, does not wish these to be revoked so far as to consume them by a slaughter poured out completely. And so he declares that he is moved and shaken as if by a father’s feeling, and has taken up a kind of repentance for having threatened Israel, even in the form of deliberation, with the ruin of the Sodomites; and he at once adds, “I will not carry out the fury of my anger, and I will not turn to destroy Ephraim.” That is, “I will not change my mercy into indignation so far as to let none of the Israelites survive. For I am God and not man,” whose kindness, flowing with abundant veins, offense cannot exhaust, or whose plan, which rejoices, I will say once, in firmness, the fault of the ungrateful does not change. This the teacher of the Gentiles also briefly indicated, saying, “For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.” “I say, then,” he says, “has God rejected his people,” that is, the one he foreknew? He will never allow it to be destroyed in the manner of the ungodly nations. And now, then, when he had announced due blows to the polluted columns, he shows that he still has in mind those to whom he will be sparing. “The Holy One in your midst,” he says, “and I will not enter the city.” When Jerome wished to explain this verse, he went on to list those who are read to have founded cities, and said that Cain first procured for himself the defense of a city, and that afterward several men notable for crimes were founders of cities; and so God, commending the reverence proper to holiness, said that he would beware of entering a city. And in this way he went on to assert that all holy men, and those who devote their life to philosophy, avoid the throng of cities and love the solitude of the mountains. Who could consider such a coloring of explanation without laughing? For here our God, in saying that he will not enter the city, did not declare that he shudders at cities in general: he of whom we read, “The Lord loves the gates of Zion above all the tents of Jacob,” and, “God is in her midst; she shall not be moved: God will help her with his countenance.” But since he had brought in the memory of Sodom and the neighboring cities, which, as we read in the book of Genesis, he entered in order to destroy them, and had said, “How shall I give you up, Ephraim? How shall I fight against you, Israel? How shall I give you up like Admah, set you like Zeboiim?”, and had at once added, “I will not carry out the fury of my anger, and I will not turn to destroy Ephraim,” he consistently added, “For I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not enter the city”: that is, “I chose you out of all peoples to preside over with a special divine care, and I decreed and promised this in honor of your fathers, who lived most acceptable to me: that even if you deserved my offense by violating the holy law, I would visit your iniquities, but I would not wholly take away my mercy so as to let you be consumed by slaughter and the memory of your name be utterly abolished. And since I am God and not man, whose decree no change overturns, I move indeed in your midst, conspicuous in eternal holiness, by which I rise up as chastiser against your sins, and I do not violate the covenants struck with your fathers; yet I will by no means enter your cities as I entered the gates of Sodom when it was to be destroyed.” And since he had brought in speech from the side of prosperity, he was not content to say that the Israelites would not perish like other nations, but in his mercy he runs through what else he had ordained for them, and brings in mention of that time when, the captivity ended, they would be brought back to their ancestral soil.

Verses 10, 11. — “They shall walk after the Lord; he shall roar like a lion, for he himself shall roar, and the children of the sea shall tremble. And they shall fly like a bird from Egypt, and like a dove from the land of the Assyrians; and I will settle them in their houses, says the Lord.” “What wonder is it,” he says, “if our goodness moderates vengeance when it is hottest, when at this very time I am already shaping the joys of the liberation to be granted, and do not wish it hidden with what majesty I plan both to free them from barbarian servitude and to call them back to their ancestral region? The time will come, I say, when, as I take up the work of vengeance, the children of the sea, that is, the crowd of hostile nations, will be terrified and scatter no less than the waters of the Red Sea were divided when Israel crossed, flowing back on the prince of the Egyptians by the same power of command by which they had shortly before been held back for the safety of the godly.” So returning like flocks of doves, both from Egypt, where the Israelites had fled after the Babylonian triumph, and from the region of the Assyrians, where Sennacherib had carried them off, they will fill their former nests, that is, their ancestral regions, with a stable dwelling.

Verse 12. — “Ephraim has surrounded me with trafficking, and the house of Israel with deceit. But Judah went down as a witness with God, and faithful with the holy ones.” [Here begins chapter 12. — Verse 1. —] “Ephraim feeds on the wind and follows the burning heat. All day long he multiplies lying and devastation; and he made a covenant with the Assyrians, and carried oil to Egypt.” Having touched, in a brief digression, on the joys of liberation amid the roars of threat that the circumstances of that time required, he returns to the sequence of the action he had begun and pursues the pursuits of Ephraim as one inflamed, as it were, or indignant: taking care, as I have often noted, to add to the punishments announced the kinds and magnitudes of the faults, so as to leave nothing to reproach in his anger and to show that those punishments were brought forward not by a fault but by judgment. So the things inserted by way of digression will give the present verse an easy connection with what went before, namely, “A yoke shall be laid on them, which shall not be taken away.” “Ephraim has surrounded me with trafficking, and the house of Israel with deceit”: that is, like some bad trader, the people rejoiced in the fraud it had worked on me, and thought it was mocking me when it prayed; not because it knew that my mercy comes to the help of the afflicted did it confess its error in the time of blows, but because its heart was not right with me, it did not faithfully promise amendment, like that Pharaoh who, as soon as he breathed again from calamities, ran back to his outrages. Or else, as the prophet reproached in the earlier part of the book, because they enslaved to the worship of idols the gold and silver and other things pertaining to food or to adornment which they had received from God, he wished the same to be understood now too, complaining that Ephraim had traded to his insult: when, that is, it lied that it had obtained from idols everything it had received from God. But while the ten tribes, under the kings named in the title, were filthy with these iniquities we have mentioned, Judah, still somewhat unlike its brother, “went down as a witness with God, and faithful with the holy ones.” That is, following its religious leader Hezekiah, it strove to show the majesty of divine protection and the faithfulness of the promise, and placed its confidence of safety in his strength even amid extreme miseries. And so, having deserved to be freed by a wonderful defense, it showed both that its fathers had not been deceived in worshiping this one God with their whole mind, and that it could not be covered by the flood of captivity, rejoicing as it did in a truthful defender. So both peoples came to fitting ends: Judah, having followed the true God, came out a witness to its holy fathers and to miracles; while the Samaritans, as they abandoned the truth and worshiped false gods, are shown to feed on the winds and follow the burning heat, that is, vanities and ruin. For, abandoning the defense of God, which was to be obtained by merits, not by money, they bought help now from the Assyrians, now from the Egyptians, sending money to the Assyrians and oil, that is, the gifts of a fertile soil, to the Egyptians: by one kind he signified many. Let us hear, then, what followed.