Commentary on Hosea, Joel and Amos 1.13.1–2.0.1

Verses 1, 2. — “When Ephraim spoke, horror seized Israel; and he sinned in Baal and died. And now they have added to sinning, and have made for themselves a molten image of their silver, like the likeness of idols; it is all the work of craftsmen. To these they say, Sacrifice, you men who worship calves.” He brought in mention of what they had committed since the time of the division of the tribes, but in the order that indignation rather than narrative required. For in the present passage he calls Ephraim Jeroboam, the leader of the division, who decreed that the people should venerate the images of heifers. Afterward Ahab with Jezebel took up the worship of the idol Baal, a profanity that Jehu is read to have avenged with fitting severity. So this consecration of idols both began first among the people and lasted until the last time. But while the order of the history is as we have said, the invective has now changed part of it. “When Ephraim spoke,” that is, when Jeroboam called them to the worship of demons, “horror seized Israel.” For it at once took up the fear of superstition and dreaded it as if it were a true divinity; or else it took on the zeal for worship by which it deserved to be [punished] by the eternal judge. Not content to have done this, it bowed its neck to other sacrileges too, and, embracing the institutions of Baal, felt also the experience of calamities; yet it took up no zeal for amendment from the ruin of those who had fallen by various inroads of enemies, or when, under Jehu’s vengeance, the idol itself was destroyed with its worshipers. “No feeling of correction,” he says, “could be roused in them by these things. But now,” he says, “they have added to sinning, and have made for themselves a molten image of their silver, like the likeness of idols”: not, certainly, that after the times of Ahab they began to venerate images of calves, but that they are said to have added what they did not abandon even after chastisement. For profanity itself could not be continuous unless it were increased by rebellious pursuits. “It is all the work of craftsmen,” he says; “to these they say, Sacrifice, you men who worship calves.” He repeated this, already aired through the whole book, not without reason, but so that the sense might be this: “Although the novelty of things may win over the incautious lightly, yet as time examines them they surely grow cheap, and continual veneration is shown only to those things that are strong in sure marks. But here, when long age as well as reason had uncovered the worthlessness and emptiness of the work, namely that the divinities of the nations have, I do not say no power, but not even any form except what the hand of craftsmen skilled in shaping gave them, the profane people nevertheless listens gladly to the voices of soothsayers, who command that men pray to calves lacking reason and sense, serving them with offerings of prayers and victims.”

Verse 3. — “Therefore they shall be like the morning cloud, and like the morning dew that passes away, like dust snatched by a whirlwind, and like smoke from a chimney.” Above he had said that his blood would be on his own head and his reproach would be repaid to him; and now he has repeated the same, or heaped it up with a curse: since they had subjected themselves to the utmost folly, transferring the honor of God to images of cattle, they too would perish so vilely as smoke, as dust, as dew, as morning mists are consumed by the rays of the sun.

Verse 4. — “But I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt; and you shall know no God but me, and there is no savior besides me.” These verses connect with what precedes, so that the sense is this: “When I shook the yoke of domination from your necks, and happily made my majesty known to you, when you were in bondage, by those illustrious miracles, I also established this with an absolute word: that you, a nation always intent on my worship, should never submit to any other as God, since you would not find another who could give you salvation; for then you were seen to have been bound to elements that serve.”

Verse 5. — “I knew you in the wilderness, in the land of solitude.” “But why should I now be moved by your sacrileges as if they were new,” he says, “when in that very time of your liberation I always found you such as you are now revealed to be, that is, ungrateful and insolent?” In taking care to add “in the land of solitude,” he certainly wished it to be understood that examples did not always corrupt them, since they sinned even in those places where they had no one to imitate.

Verse 6. — “According to their pastures they were filled, and they were satisfied, and they lifted up their heart, and they forgot me.” “The whole nation,” he says, “contended with my benefits not in devotion but in wickedness.” To make this easily clear, he links these things to those times as well, and by the course of the invective he runs back to the present age from which he began, yet in a brief passage of speech he brings in mention of that sentence which was uttered in the Song of Deuteronomy at the declaration of blessed Moses: “The beloved was filled and fattened and kicked, so as to make for you new gods, like barley bread, whom their fathers did not know.” “For according to their pastures they were filled,” he says, “and they were satisfied, and they lifted up their heart, and they forgot me.” He set out this series of sins first, to show that the vengeance he was about to bring was not stirred by passion but fortified by justice and reason. For there follows:

Verses 7, 8. “And I will be to them like a lioness, like a leopard on the road of the Assyrians. I will meet them like a bear robbed of her cubs, and I will tear open the inner parts of their liver, and I will consume them there like a lion; the beast of the field shall tear them.” He teaches that the calamities the barbarity of the enemy would bring are and happen at his command; nor does he disdain to explain his warning by images of wild beasts, which he knows suit, if not his own nature, then the misery of the condemned. Elegantly, when he had placed a bear too among the gaping jaws of lions, he sharpened its savagery by the goads of bereavement, so that the comparison he brought in might nowhere fall short: “Like a bear,” he says, “robbed of her cubs. And I will tear open the inner parts of their liver, of those who inflicted similar losses on me. For when I was forming this people as my children with much care, and shaping their hearts, as it were, by licking them, they bereaved me of offspring not only longed for but also carefully raised, by committing those crimes that required the ruin of the whole nation.”

Verses 9–11. — “Your destruction, Israel: only in me is your help. Where is your king? Now above all let him save you in all your cities; and your judges, of whom you said, Give me a king and princes. I will give you a king in my fury, and I will take him away in my indignation.” A sentence fit for a question, and one that only the rule of piety can resolve. For it is said in God’s person: “Your destruction, Israel: only in me is your help.” Yet the sure defense of the faithful is precisely when confidence of deliverance is placed in God. And this is what the blessed prophet accuses throughout the book in the profaned conduct of the people: that they trusted not in God’s defense but in that of their friends. How then, as if the order were reversed, does he now announce to Israel that manifest ruin hangs over it because its safety lay in the power of God alone? The distinction must therefore be noticed that illuminates what was thought ambiguous: for he is not mocking here the faith of a people that placed the hope of its joy in the power of God alone (which certainly, since it had not done so, had given offense), but declared that so much of blows hung over it that no help could be brought except by divine power alone. So, “Your destruction hangs over you, Israel,” he says; “only in me is your help.” If you consider this carefully, you will see that it is put not only not absurdly, but even according to ordinary usage of human speech. For hence it is that when we wish to describe someone overwhelmed by a grave illness or a hopeless calamity, we say that his hope is in God: indicating, certainly, not the disposition of his mind but the weight of the disaster pressing him down. “Undoubted destruction, then,” he says, “will seize you, from which no one but the Almighty could rescue you; and since you have made him hostile to you by your crimes, it remains that you be snatched away by gaping destruction.” To make this sense shine out, he added: “Where is your king? Now above all let him save you in all your cities; and your judges, of whom you said, Give me a king and princes.” According to prophetic custom, he reproaches the peoples also with the error they committed when, withdrawing from the priestly commonwealth, they desired a king. Since they had taken that up in emulation of the neighboring nations, when things went badly the counsels that preceded are also convicted, as if he said: “This madness of yours is old: thinking that you can provide for yourself better than I. From the beginning of this opinion you asked that princes be given you in the likeness of the other nations. Now, then, let the fruit of your counsel appear, and let the industry of kings defend you against my indignation. These powers sought by your ambitions ought surely to teach you what good they are.” But let us pass on to the rest. “I will give you a king in my fury, and I will take him away in my indignation.” Some have taken the king given in fury to be Jeroboam, who was the author of the separation of the tribes, and understood the one taken away in indignation to be Hoshea, under whom Israel was captured. Although this could indeed be admitted, yet since both are pronounced in the future tense (“I will give you a king, and I will take him away”), the sentence can be understood with a handier brevity: that the Israelite prince is declared to be taken away, and the Assyrian to be given. Then, in prophetic manner, after the burden of condemnation he added what its cause was. [Verse 12.] “The iniquity of Ephraim is bound up; his sin is hidden”: that is, the crimes he committed over long times, uninterrupted by any virtues but heaped up in a deadly progression, stood in the memory of the judge as if kept under some seal; and by their repayment, I say, it came about that, losing the marks of freedom, they were subjected to the harshest servitude, and felt those pains and anguish that women usually experience in childbirth.

Verse 13. — “He is an unwise son, for now he will not stand in the breaking forth of children.” Above too he argued with the same figures, that adversity would bear witness to Israel’s folly once it was laid bare, and the ugliness of its deserts, which had for a while lain hidden under prosperity, would at last be exposed when hardships convicted it. “So that you are a son, and not a wise one, is proved by grave testimony, since at the time when the enemy broke in you did not deserve to stand.” And since by the name of folly he marked the profanity to which the ten tribes, as he charges from the beginning of the book, enslaved themselves with all their zeal, and for which folly the storm of captivity seized them, he opportunely passes to Judah, and shows it not only by name but by the judgment of its deeds, so as to show at the same time what end awaited wise sons, as he had made known that of the one who remained foolish. So the prophetic discourse moves to the more prosperous things granted under King Hezekiah by great miracles, and says: Verses 14, 15. — “From the hand of death I will free them; from death I will redeem them. I will be your death, O death; I will be your bite, O hell. Consolation is hidden from my eyes, for he divides among brothers. The Lord will bring a burning wind coming up from the desert, and it will dry up his veins and lay waste his spring; and he will plunder the treasure of every desirable vessel.” First, as usual, he announces the joys of liberation by promising prosperity; afterward, with the same pleasure, he heaps up punishments. So, “From the hand of death I will free them”: that is, “When they come into such a difficult situation that death seems to have laid hands on them and to hold them, then I will come as deliverer.” This was expressed especially by the prayer of blessed Hezekiah, who said that a day of affliction and reproach had come, since the children had come to the birth and there was no strength to bring forth. When, then, they were pressed by the Assyrian forces, and the enemy had shut the city in by siege, destruction so threatened that it seemed at any moment about to devour the wretches. But since they obtained divine help by just prayers, he performed that great miracle: when one hundred eighty thousand Assyrians had been destroyed as the angel struck, the longed-for deliverance shone out for the godly, according to what the holy songs had sung beforehand: “This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and delivered him out of all his troubles; the Lord will send his angels round about those who fear him, and will deliver them.” “Death,” then, and “hell” are the names given to the Assyrian king and his whole army, which the divine sentence promises to destroy; and having first sounded the crash of vengeance, he adds in his usual way the cause that moved that indignation. “Consolation,” he says, “is hidden from my eyes, for he divides among brothers.” He took on the bearing and words of a mourner to increase the Assyrian’s crime, and, as if in the person of Judah, more anxious for its brothers, that is, the Israelites whom Sennacherib had led into captivity, than for its own calamity, he says that his eyes were so wet with tears that they could not receive consolation, because the proud and savage king had brought about a sad separation among the brothers by carrying off the ten tribes into captivity to the region of Media. Here the careful reader may ask why this feeling, mourning the departure of its brother, is ascribed to the tribe of Judah, when the prophet, speaking above of the same matter, reproached it with the ungodliness of rejoicing. For when he had said, “Ephraim shall be in desolation,” he said, “In the day of desolation among the tribes of Israel I have shown faithfulness: the princes of Judah have become like those who take the boundary; upon them I will pour out my wrath like water.” Since there they are said to have rejoiced at the expulsion of their brothers, because they thought the boundaries of their fields enlarged, how are they now presented as mourning the expulsion of their brother without any consolation? This can be resolved by a twofold explanation. Because, as I have often said, the speech is not about individual persons but about whole multitudes, we understand that in that multitude there were various characters as well, so that some things are uttered in the person of the godly, others in that of the ungodly. Consequently we gather that there were some there whom the expulsion of their brothers saddened, but more whom the extension of their borders delighted. But let us now see the other mode of explanation, which will hold good for the judge in such a way as to seem fitted to causes rather than to persons. Let this be the voice of kinship, which the prophet set near the end of the book, that is, grieving at the calamity of an expelled brother and calling down due retribution on the enemies; while that which gave some even pleasure looks to the crime of fratricides; so that the sense is this: there were some in whom profanity had confounded not only laws but even the rights of nature, so that at the captivity of their brothers, which they ought to have pitied, they preferred to glory. “The Lord will bring a burning wind coming up from the desert, and it will dry up his veins and lay waste his springs, and he will plunder the treasures of every desirable vessel.” He calls the burning wind from the desert the angel who would destroy the Assyrian army in a single night: not that angels are believed to dwell in the desert, whom the authority of the Gospel shows always to behold the face of the Father; but because, on account of the speed of the vengeance (for one hundred eighty-five thousand are reported to have been slain in one night), he took the likeness of fire, and brought in mention of the desert so that the whole column would seem to have been consumed by a breath rather than by any labor. So too blessed David had said: “Who makes his angels spirits, and his ministers a burning fire.” So now he marked that this burning would be summoned from places made uninhabitable by the heat of the sun, to destroy the Assyrian tinder and veins, that is, the king with his army and his stock. “And he will plunder the treasure,” and so on. If you consider the custom of the prophets, who do not observe the inflection of tenses very anxiously and carefully, he seems to have denoted the wealth King Sennacherib had gathered from his triumphs: that he was consumed by the inflammation foretold because he had done many things cruelly and his plunder had not satisfied his greed; and now he is forced to vomit up whatever he had earlier devoured by iniquity.

Verse 1. — “Let Samaria perish, because she has provoked her Lord to bitterness,” and so on. A little before he had said, “Consolation is hidden from my eyes, because he divides among brothers,” and had shown the feeling with which he pitied Israel; but now, having described the slaughter of the Assyrian, he flares up against Samaria again. He did this certainly not from inconstancy but from the gravity of the sentence. For after he had shown both the goodness and the power of the true God, who had consumed the proud king as if with no effort, and that he was so ready to defend the godly that he would bring vengeance on great nations for their joy, he rightly wished, as if inflamed, that Samaria would perish, which by its crimes had brought it about that this so good Lord was not its defender but its assailant; as if he said: “When I look at the benefits of our ruler, who is eternal, I shudder more and more at the crime of Israel, which labored to be without such a protection.” Verse 2. — “Return, Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have fallen in your iniquity.” The speech proceeds in a wonderful sequence. He had cried out something that served to aggravate Samaria’s sin; but since he had done this in pity rather than in cursing, he brings at least second remedies to heal the wound: since they would not embrace the defenses of continual devotion, let them take up the helps of repentance and amendment. “If, then, even dangers make you better, O Israel, return to the Lord your God, from whom you ought never to have turned; and, cursing the very fact that you had fallen in your iniquity, take up the offerings of confession.” For this is what he says:

Verse 3. — “Take words with you, and return to the Lord, and say to him: Take away all iniquity, and accept the good”: for you alone can remove the guilt by which we are weighed down. What the good is that he begged God to accept, the following verse shows: “And we will render the calves of our lips.” For so the holy songs also taught, that we should offer to God a sacrifice of praise, because praise offered from a pure heart is pleasing to him above a young calf that puts forth horns and hoofs. “Speak out, then, Israel, against yourself to the Lord your injustices, of which you desire to deserve forgiveness.” But let us hear what he adds to these.

Verse 4. — “Assyria will not save us; we will not mount on horses, nor will we say any more, Our gods, to the works of our hands; for you will have mercy on the people that is in you.” What he says, “Assyria will not save us,” seems taken from the example of Judah. For the history of Kings tells that when the Assyrian general named Rabshakeh, sent by King Sennacherib, had come to compel and terrify those shut up in Jerusalem, among the other things he proclaimed boastfully and proudly about the Assyrians he added that Sennacherib was ready to bring out two thousand horses for which the whole army of Judah could not supply riders: with what madness, then, were they stirring up against themselves the forces of so great a prince? If they wished to provide for their safety, they should surrender to the rule of one who was no less generous to his subjects than severe to the stubborn. But the inhabitants of Jerusalem, placing the confidence of their deliverance in the power of God alone, silently despised the boasting of the enemy’s threats. So the discourse of the one warning now instructs Israel too by the example of Judah’s confidence: that, corrected by long servitude, it may now begin to imitate the devotion that its brother showed at the time of the Assyrian siege. “Nor will we say any more,” he says, “Our gods, to the works of our hands.” That is, “we will cease to venerate images made by the hand of craftsmen, since we have learned, with our brother as witness, that you, the good judge, do not cease to have mercy on the people that remains in your worship.” Now hear what our God returns for this offering of your confession.

Verses 5–8. — “I will heal their breaches; I will love them freely, for my fury is turned away from them. I will be like dew to Israel; he shall blossom like the lily, and his root shall break forth like Lebanon. Those who sit in his shade shall return; they shall live on wheat, and they shall blossom like the vine; his memorial shall be like the wine of Lebanon.” By various comparisons he describes the sweetness of liberation, the marks of freedom, and the pleasantness of cultivated fields, which, just as they are covered with great squalor when the enemy is rampaging, so, when the security of peace sets the industry of cultivators to work, show richness and beauty everywhere. “So, Israel, when the prosperity I have promised has driven away your captivity, the beauty of freedom and the sweetness of joy will so fill and clothe you that meadows will be seen dripping not with any common shoots but with lilies and roses: for my mercy and my grace will flow down on you like dew, so that, putting off all filth, you receive the ornaments of [renewal]. Lest you doubt that this can happen to you because of its greatness, it goes before you in your brother, that is, in Judah, who is to be freed from the hands of the Assyrians. Such glory, then, as freedom, longed for indeed but hardly hoped for, will bring to him, such glory will await you too, if you show yourself worthy to receive it.” For you will live on wheat and blossom like the vine, which, brought out of Egypt, had occupied Palestine with wide borders; and your memorial will be like the wine of Lebanon: that is, the fragrance of your glory will be as great as that of the best wine produced on Mount Lebanon.

Verse 9. — “Ephraim, what have I to do any more with idols? I will hear and direct him like a green fir tree; from me your fruit is found.” “Since this is so,” he says, “as our discussion has fully taught, namely that the only way of salvation is the one that the worship and religion of our divinity has opened, set at least a limit to your profanity, whose beginning you ought never to have felt; cling with all faith and devotion to the one Lord who is true; and do not think that his truth is to be held down in a lie, so as to ascribe the incommunicable name to idols. But know what you have learned not only from commandments but from the very voice of events: that I am the only one whose worshipers enjoy eternal happiness, as his deserters are overwhelmed by eternal miseries. For I am the one who hears suppliants, who can and usually does heal the broken, straighten the twisted, make the barren fruitful, find the perishing, raise the dead, and lift those I have quickened to such a height that they seem to have grown from palms or brambles into firs and cypresses.” Verse 10. — “Who is wise, and understands these things? Who is understanding, and will know them? For the ways of the Lord are right, and the just shall walk in them; but transgressors shall fall in them.” Rightly he concluded his book with wonder, having shown its usefulness both by commandments and by examples. At the same time, to teach that the whole cause of sins and miseries came from folly, he praised the wise man who, weighing all that has been discussed, recognizes the usefulness and end of the holy ways: that the just walk through them with severity, while all transgressors fall, by committing sacrileges and enduring exiles. It should be noted, however, that these passages too, which I have explained, as far as our capacity allowed, according to the history foretold by the prophet, can also serve to signify greater things. For what was said of Sennacherib, “I will be your death, O death; I will be your bite, O hell,” can also be taken of a greater matter, as the teacher of the Gentiles shows. For when he was speaking to the Corinthians to make the resurrection plain, he said: “Where, O death, is your sting? Where, O death, is your victory? But thanks be to God, who has given us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Cor 15). For he, like a burning wind, since he came to cast fire on the earth, is said to have come up from the desert, because he sprang from the womb of the Virgin, to whom, according to the laws of nature, [no] man had come as a cultivator; and he made the veins of death and its spring dry up, so that it would have no right to claim a second time those whom the Redeemer had once raised to eternal joys. For by the sacrament of his incarnation the dew of grace came down on the fields of the churches, so that vines and lilies fruitful in various virtues sprang up everywhere, and the happiness of the multiplying of the faithful was as great as that of a field glorying in grain, fruits, and flowers. And so “those who sit in his shade shall return,” that is, various nations will long to rest under the protection of the Church, so as to obtain nourishment of bodily and spiritual strength in wine and wheat. So the liberation fulfilled under Hezekiah may be unfolded more fully and more pleasingly from the freedom that Christ has handed on. “Who is wise, and will understand these things? Who is understanding, and will know them?” Namely, that the Lord is set for the fall and rising of many; and that none walk confidently on his paths, on which the followers of crimes fall, except those who confess with their whole heart that Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, and strive with prayers and pursuits to become one spirit with him.

When I approached these prophetic writings, hidden places, or, if I might say it more fittingly, groves, as an inquirer bold indeed, but bound by the props of religion rather than of rashness, and I considered, if I were to be allowed to enjoy meanings clear not with a common light but venerable with a hidden splendor, which edition I should choose (for there are several), I marked the last, which is called “according to the Hebrew,” because in it the integrity of expressions is greater, conveying either the feeling of one teaching or of one threatening. By the evidence of that translation, then, we have found that the order of the Twelve Prophets among the Hebrews is different from the one contained in the more common edition. Because not all the prophets have titles set before them indicating their times, it is by no means uncertain in what ages each of them prophesied, since tradition handed down commends that the teaching of those who are read without titles flourished under the same kings as those prophets before them who are furnished with titles. So you will see whether blessed Joel, whom we read after holy Hosea, is proved to be his contemporary among contemporaries: suffering the cruelty and insults of the same kings, accusing the same sacrileges of a raging people, announcing the same torments hanging over the guilty.