Commentary on Hosea, Joel and Amos 1.7.1–1.7.8

Verse 1. — “When I wished to heal Israel, the iniquity of Ephraim was uncovered, and the wickedness of Samaria, for they have worked a lie; and the thief has come in, plundering, the robber outside.” He takes care to show how ready he is to pardon, and that he takes on the person of an avenger as if unwillingly, and would far more gladly use the parts of gentleness if justice allowed. “When I had conceived, as it were, an impulse of indulgence,” he says, “and was thinking of rising to help the wretched, I turned my eyes a little to see those whom I was about to free. And behold, a troop of the iniquities that Ephraim had committed leapt into my face, crying out, as it were, that no one would spare such people without a stain on justice, since they were so steeped in hatred of the truth that they always built deadly lies with earnest zeal.” “When I wished to heal Israel,” he says, “the iniquity of Ephraim was uncovered, and the wickedness of Samaria, for they have worked a lie.” Besides various vices of conduct, he attacks sacrilege under the name of a lie, as above under the name of obscenity. For those who ceased to worship the true God invented gods to venerate; and so those who ascribed the divine name to images are shown to have worked a lie. Hence the teacher of the Gentiles too says: “God gave them up in the desires of their hearts to uncleanness, so that they dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.” “The greatness of the crime they committed, then, dissolved my deliberation by which I was thinking of sparing them, and did not let those who had fashioned lies to insult the holy truth escape. Then a skilled plunderer entered all their inner rooms, coming in with the security of a victor and the thoroughness of a thief, so as to leave nothing of what was to be plundered through negligence and to scorn nothing through abundance.” So he used the likeness and the name of a thief and a robber laying waste within and without, so that you might understand the enemy compared to him as not timid but swift.

Verse 2. — “And lest they say in their hearts that I have remembered all their wickedness.” This verse is inserted to commend moderation. The rest belongs to the context that follows (that is, “The thief has come in, plundering, the robber outside”): “Now their devices have surrounded them; they have been done before my face. And lest they say in their hearts that I have remembered all their wickedness, I will set out even some part of the profanity they committed, so that they may understand that their punishments are far less than their deserts.” Enemies surrounded them, and, having taken possession of everything by right of victory, searched through everything as thoroughly as if thieves had broken into the inner rooms of houses or robbers into the open fields. “Their devices have surrounded them, which have been done before my face,” as he had said above, “When I wished to heal Ephraim, the wickedness of Samaria was uncovered.” In accordance with what blessed David confesses in the person of the same people: “You have set our iniquities before you, our age in the light of your face; and all our days have failed, and we have failed in your wrath.” “You are bound, then, by your own crimes; you bear the weight of your own devices. You fashioned lies about gods, but in the truth of pains.” Let us hear what the things are that he said were uncovered.

Verses 3–7. — “In their wickedness they made the king glad, and the princes in their lies. They are all adulterers, like an oven heated by the baker; the city rested a little from the mixing of the leaven, until the whole was leavened. The day of our king: the princes began to rage with wine; he stretched out his hand with mockers. For they made their heart like an oven while he lay in wait for them; all night the one baking them slept; in the morning he himself was kindled like a flame of fire. They were all heated like an oven, and they devoured their judges.” He recalls the festival and time whose course is contained in the history of Kings. For when, through the folly of Rehoboam, the departure of the people had been accomplished, and Jeroboam had begun to rule the ten tribes, “he said,” it says (1 Kgs 12:26 ff.), “in his heart: Now the kingdom will return to the house of David, if this people goes up to offer sacrifices in the house of the Lord in Jerusalem. And having devised a plan, he made two golden calves and said to them: Behold your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. And he set one in Bethel and the other in Dan, and this thing became a sin; for the people went to worship the calf as far as Dan. And he made shrines on the high places, and priests from the lowest of the people, who were not of the sons of Levi. And he appointed a feast in the eighth month, on the fifteenth day of the month, like the feast that was celebrated in Judah. And going up, he likewise made an altar in Bethel, to sacrifice to the calves he had made. He appointed in Bethel priests of the high places he had made. And he went up onto the altar he had built in Bethel on the fifteenth day of the eighth month, which he had devised from his own heart, and made a feast for the children of Israel.” Since Scripture tells that King Jeroboam, caring only for his own power, drove out by a light invention the worship of the true God, commended to the people by so many miracles and so many ages, and that the whole nation so obeyed the profanities of the court as to show all the more plainly that it had held nothing of the observance of truth, the prophet describes a kind of contest in ungodliness between flatterers and rulers, each trying to outdo the other in crimes. So the tribes made glad, by their contempt for religion, the king who distrusted his own position if the people went up to the worship of the temple, and they took from his mind the scruple of fear. “And the princes in their lies”: that is, they made either the king’s attendants or his relatives rejoice in their lies, and brought such fervor to their deadly inventions that they seemed to burn like an oven with fire set under it. Or else, as leaven is usually hidden in the mass that is leavened and in a short time the whole turns sour, so the iniquity of one man calling them to depravity penetrated and infected all the tribes. Thus, falling away from the profession of virtue, so as to be horrible in the occasion of their ungodliness, they began to call that time “the day of their king,” to be celebrated with games and banquets: the time, I say, when the life or the security of their king had come to them. Such a festival was then seized by drunkenness, so that not only all the common people but also the nobles, whom he calls the princes of the nation, began to rage with wine. The king himself, the defiler of that dignity and the fabricator of sacrilegious error, “stretched out his hand with mockers,” who stroked him with professed flattery; so that, since they had prepared their hearts like an oven to blaze with the fire of ungodliness set under it, “he slept all night baking them”: that is, he did not remove the kindled fire, but, as if the furnace had been packed with wood, he let himself sleep securely, knowing that all night long their drunkenness and profanity would bake them through. Nor did his expectation deceive the craftsman: for with every light of reason extinguished, they were found at dawn so seething with crimes that they plainly surpassed their judges, that is, those whom they had had as teachers of ungodliness. “All their kings have fallen, and there is none among them who calls to me.” Why then do you wonder if all are forced to undergo torments, when all have committed crimes in such a way that not one, I do not say of the common people, but even of the nobles, was found to escape the fall of public ungodliness?

Verse 8. — “Ephraim himself was mixed among the peoples.” Above, running through the parts, he had shown the transgressing nation, marking that the people obeyed its kings and then that the princes fell together with the commoners, so that there was no one to take the part of an intercessor; now in the following verse he indicated this very thing fully and briefly, saying, “Ephraim himself was mixed among the peoples.” That is, not one or another, a few or even many of those descended from the stock of Israel, inserted themselves into the errors of the nations; but Ephraim, as much of him as there was, mingled with the profane nations, and was eager to abolish the very name for which he had been famous and to be counted rather under the name of the Gentiles. Since this desire always broke out to his harm, and he was not made more correct by affliction, the prophet, to mark him as foolish in the midst of extreme miseries, offered a fitting image: “Ephraim has become a cake baked in the ashes, which is not turned. Strangers have eaten his strength, and he did not know it.” “Like a small loaf, not made by the baker’s art but put together hastily by a hungry man, which, laid under the embers, happens not to be turned but to be baked on one side only, the other remaining raw: so,” he says, “when frequent affliction had struck his strength, he nonetheless remained in his zeal for ungodliness, so that he may be called both raw, because untamed, and burnt, because he groaned under the wasting.” He kept the metaphor, so that, having fitted the foolish and [deaf] people to a cake under the ashes that is not turned, he also called its ravagers its devourers. For he says:

Verse 9. — “Strangers have eaten his strength, and he did not know it”: that is, the discernment of good and evil that he did not have from meditation on virtue he did not gain from the blows inflicted either. But he did not know those who were consuming his strength, and with marvelous stupidity loved his own ruin. Nor indeed, which is the last kind of learning, did he come to his senses even after experience; but in the folly he had embraced in his earliest age he persisted “up to his grey hairs,” that is, up to the time of old age. He stresses that the grey hair did not merely appear but bloomed and spread, that is, to show that it had not just drawn near but had, as it were, filled out the years of old age; and yet the ignorance of wrong and right, scarcely excusable in little children, lasted to the very end. We have already noted above that he calls the infancy and youth of the people the time when it came out of Egypt and occupied the land of promise; its prime, the middle time when it reigned in that region; and its old age, the years of captivity, whose end the prophet calls renewal, in which, with its youth restored like the eagles’, it would seem to fly.

Verses 10, 11. — “And the pride of Israel shall be humbled to his face; and they have not returned to the Lord their God, nor sought him in all this. And Ephraim has become like a dove that is deceived, without heart.” The prophets freely change the tenses, provided that attention to what is said can fit them to the sense. So here he put “shall be humbled” for “the pride of Israel was humbled to his face”: that is, it became apparent even to himself how ugly he was. Losing the beauty of his former security, he saw himself filthy with the sores of wretched servitude, and not even so did he seek again the God whom he knew he had offended. “Ephraim has become like a dove that is deceived, without heart.” What he called above folly lasting into old age he now calls simplicity, plainly open to the frauds of seducers. We, however, ought to remember that all the likenesses which divine speech is accustomed to take from creatures can be used for blame as well as for praise: as now the prophet likened blameworthy folly to doves, which the Lord in the Gospel named for their praiseworthy innocence: “Be wise as serpents,” he says, “and simple as doves.” “Ephraim has become like a dove that is deceived, without heart.”

Verse 12. — “They called on Egypt, they went to Assyria. And when they have set out, I will spread my net over them, and bring them down like a bird of the air; I will strike them according to the report of their assembly.” Deprived of the help of God whom they had abandoned, and now beaten by frequent losses, as the history of the kings tells, they asked help from the Egyptians to protect them against the Assyrians. But feeling nothing more than the loss of their money, they were carried off by those to whom the divine sentence had subjected them. This is what he says: when they called on the Egyptians, they went to the Assyrians, because, since the Egyptians could do nothing to help, the Assyrians removed them to the regions of Media. And because he had called Ephraim a dove, which he also calls a bird of the air, he keeps the metaphor and says that he will bring it down and cover it with a net: that is, “You have indeed transgressed my rule and abandoned it, yet you will not stand outside my judgment when captured; but the fixed dominion of my power will hang over you even when you have moved to other fields. So do not think that by this removal you are finished with all dangers. See, I foretell that there too you will suffer the net of my vengeance, and you will not be able to escape my indignation unless you correct the pursuits by which it was roused.”

Verses 13–16. — “Woe to them, for they have withdrawn from me; they shall be laid waste, for they have transgressed against me; and I redeemed them, and they have spoken lies against me. They did not cry to me in their heart, but they howled on their beds; over wheat and wine they chewed the cud; they withdrew from me. And I taught them and strengthened their arms, and against me they devised wickedness. They turned back to be without a yoke; they became like a deceitful bow. Their princes shall fall by the sword, for the fury of their tongue. Such is their derision in the land of Egypt.” “It is necessary,” he says, “that those who have withdrawn from me and transgressed the statutes of my law should be harassed by pressing calamity. Not content to have done this once, they resisted all the remedies of my judgments that I applied to heal them, and as if they were offended by gifts and benefits, they contended against my kindness with the crime of an ungrateful mind. For as from the time in Egypt, so often at other times too, they protested even against the voices of events, and when they had been freed from anguish, they repaid true remedies with false services.” This is what he says: “They spoke lies against me”: that is, “they submitted to me not with the heart but with the edge of their lips.” To show this more plainly he added: “They did not cry to me in their heart, but they howled on their beds.” For where the affection of a sincere mind is lacking, a supplication poured out by the drunken is rightly called howling. Then he consistently added, “Over wheat and wine they chewed the cud; they withdrew from me. When I had bestowed abundance of all crops, so that they passed from banquet to banquet renewed, they, like cattle in whom chewing the cud is natural, went over the foods they called for again, either praising or renewing them, as if they knew nothing better, and constantly withdrew from me, who was the giver of that very abundance.” “And I taught them and strengthened their arms, and against me they devised wickedness. When the time came,” he says, “for them to go out to war, I fulfilled the office of a vigorous leader, so that their arms were strengthened for combat and they tasted the sweet glory of victory. But they, misusing my benefits against me, at once exercised the firmness of heart they had gathered in contempt of the law; and because they had thrown off the yoke of the enemy, they refused to be subject to me also, saying by the voice of their works, ‘Our lips are our own; who is our lord?’” “They became like a deceitful bow”: that is, they had so much perversity that they seemed a deceitful bow, which by a monstrous fraud would direct its arrows against the very one by whose hands it was drawn. “So these men,” he says, “turned the boldness they had conceived against their enemies by my favor into contempt and insult of us.” “Their princes shall fall by the sword, for the fury of their tongue. Such is their derision in the land of Egypt.” This can be understood in two ways. Either, having listed their crimes in various ages, he declared it most right that princes should perish with the people, and that what their derision was in the land of Egypt (that is, the people that despised the threats of the prophets, waiting for help from the Egyptians) should come to know a fitting end; and so, after the list of blows, “Such is their derision in the land of Egypt,” that is, the ruin of princes and peoples, seems added as a taunt by the one who convicts them. Or else, because he had said, “They turned back to be without a yoke,” that is, they had withdrawn their necks from God’s law and desired to be freed from his dominion: “They did not begin to want this now for the first time,” he says, “but even when placed in Egypt, before they were freed from Pharaoh’s rule, they resisted Moses and Aaron with like ungodliness. Therefore their princes will fall by the sword, who so violated the law of God by the atrocity of their blasphemy that they seemed not so much to err as to rage.”