Commentary on Hosea, Joel and Amos 1.8.1–1.8.6

Verses 1–3. — “Let the trumpet be in your throat, like an eagle over the house of the Lord, because they have transgressed my covenant and broken my law. They called on me: My God, we Israel know you. Israel has cast off the good; the enemy shall pursue him.” I pointed out in earlier parts too that the manner of prophetic speech should be noted: whenever it has sounded a heavy threat, it either at once adds the causes of indignation or brings forward similar examples, so as to defend its judgments from the charge of injustice and prove that they agree with justice in everything. So now too, after he has unfolded the faults and calamities of the people of Israel, and shown that they were horrible not only for their harshness but also for their long duration, lest it should seem that the crimes were indeed rebuked but the tribe of Judah was valued more lightly, which, though not with such great errors, had nevertheless been defiled with similar ones, he suddenly brings in the mention of its captivity too, which, it was known, would be fulfilled many years later. He says, “Let the trumpet be in your throat”: that is, let your throat cry out like a trumpet, because a fierce plunderer is coming like an eagle upon the house of God, that is, the temple situated in Jerusalem. Not that the holiness of the place and the power of the divinity that used to appear there could not defend it, but because, by its own words, its inhabitants transgressed the covenant that had been struck between God and men: that is, they violated the pacts of religion by serving the images of the Gentiles. And the sense is this: “Understand how great is the gravity of the judge: even that tribe which for some time kept the ceremonies of the law while you transgressed, which in the time of Sennacherib was delivered by the greatest miracle, which enjoys the conspicuous and venerable help of the altar and the temple, even that tribe, I say, I did not delay to strike once it had slipped into your ways. For the mere boasting of names is cold and of no use for defense, and judges the one who flaunts it guilty of impudence rather than religion.” That is, though defiled by profane pursuits, they still dare to say, “Our God, free us, who alone in the whole world have known you and glory in the name of Israel given by you.” For with a good judge works weigh more than words; and therefore the people of Israel, which has cast off its good, that is, the holy worship of religion, will lie subject to its pursuing enemies.

Verse 4. — “They have reigned, and not by me; they have been princes, and I did not know it. Of their silver and their gold they have made idols for themselves, that they might perish.” “This madness of a stubborn people toward me,” he says, “is old: long ago it hastened to throw off my rule. As if it were not enough that, like the other nations round about, it decided to obey kings rather than priests, so too in a short time it abandoned even the reverence with which it had asked a king of me, and, longing to stand wholly outside our dominion, it made princes for itself whom neither the choice of priests or prophets ennobled nor their blessing consecrated, but who took up the rights of the court as if without my knowledge. And so, holding a chain of crimes, they spent their votes on all the most undeserving and their riches on images.” “Your silver and gold they have made into idols for you, that they might perish.” Of these he had said above, “And I multiplied silver and gold, which they made into Baals.” So when they had been enriched by my generosity, they sacrilegiously misused what was granted, fashioning playthings from the ornaments of houses and shrines. “Of their silver and their gold they have made idols for themselves, that they might perish.” A manner of speaking should be noted that the authority of the holy books frequently uses, where what is a consequence is placed as if it were the purpose. That is, “they made idols for themselves that they might perish,” although they did not make images out of eagerness to perish; but because they made them, they deserve to perish.

Verses 5, 6. — “Your calf has been cast off, Samaria; my fury is kindled against them. How long will they be unable to be cleansed? For it too is from Israel: a craftsman made it, and it is not God.” In every verse there is a complaint full of indignation. “That you fell by your own willful iniquity,” he says, “O nation ungrateful for the benefits of your Maker, is proved above all by the testimony of adversity. Granted that abundance of goods and security blunted the edge of your discernment, and you thought that divinity was present in images of cattle (for you saw that even neighboring nations believed this); at least when you exchanged joy for sorrow, and the victorious enemy laid waste those shrines in which you had placed your confidence, and at his pleasure (though he was serving my indignation, mine whom you had abandoned) the calves you had consecrated were either thrown down or melted, you ought to have shuddered at the crime of your opinion, so as to feel that no help could come to you from images of dumb cattle that had not saved themselves either from mockery or from destruction. And to go over what was done: you, I say, O people, knew that you had given those images their material, you had given them their shape, and therefore you understood that you impiously called them gods, who existed by your favor, and to whom you could give not life but form. Yet even if you had spent all that time which flowed away in luxurious leisure in these drunken rites as well, at least after the misery that followed had proved the emptiness of such worship, you ought at once to have taken care for amendment, to have fanned the dulled fire of reason by pressing experiences, and to have put off the filth in which you were clothed.” Since you did not do this, the prophet rightly cries out: “How long will they be unable to be cleansed? For it too is from Israel: a craftsman made it, and it is not God; for the calf of Samaria will be among the spiders’ webs.”

Verse 7. — “For they shall sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind; there is no standing stalk in them; the shoot shall yield no flour; and if it does yield, strangers shall eat it.” “If imitation had not disturbed your counsels,” he says, “you would judge that those were not gods whom you knew to have been put together by a craftsman’s hand. Then came the inroad of the enemy; your divinities perished with their worshipers, and could delay the ravagers no more than spiders’ threads. Yet even against these dangers you held out with obstinacy and folly, and took no care to cast off the filth of such profanities. Rightly, then, such tearful frustration will follow your prayers and all your labors that you will seem to have sown not grain but wind, and to have reaped not ears but a whirlwind: that is, nothing fruitful or firm will remain with you, as happens with a stalk whose height, through some injury of the weather, has not produced a full ear. So you too, I say, will gain no profit from your labors, nor will any diligence in cultivation answer you; but even if something of the remnants of your former fertility begins to appear, it will all come into the power of your enemies.”

Verses 8–10. — “Israel has been swallowed up; now he has become among the nations like an unclean vessel. For they have gone up to Assyria, a wild ass alone by himself; Ephraim has given gifts to his lovers. But they have also hired the nations with a fee; now I will gather them, and they shall rest a little from the burden of the king and the princes.” By constant repetition he sharpens what he threatens, so that a long description of adversities may whet the sense of fear, if by any means the guilty may be frightened and corrected before they are punished. So he now brings in the very condition of the captive people, and consistently calls it “swallowed up,” since it is placed under the will of those who consume it, and nothing more remains for its slaughter than what the savagery of the victors, sated by success, has granted. “Israel has been swallowed up,” he says; “he has become among the nations like an unclean vessel.” The surface of the sentences jars; but as to the sense, what precedes is explained by what follows. He showed what he meant by “swallowed up”: one whose whole strength had been drained, and who could easily be consumed by slaughter if the wrath of the rulers demanded that too. But they make up for raging less by adding insults, and so they do not kill everyone, so that they may always have someone to loathe, and may seem rather to have begrudged the comfort of death than to have conferred the benefit of life. For they kept the wretches not to enjoy the light but to bear contempt. And so he says, “Israel has become among the nations like an unclean vessel,” which other translators have rendered “a chamber pot.” “Israel,” he says, “was never assigned an honorable office, so that after the marks of freedom and dominion he might at least be ranked liberally among slaves; but like a vessel made for the needs of nature, he was filled with the filth of insults.” And having well mentioned the condition of the nations, he heaped up the injury by saying, “Israel has become among the nations like an unclean vessel.” As if he said: “Alas, alas, how [lamentable], how great a reversal, that the people which alone, by the teaching of the holy law, had learned to distinguish clean from unclean, and was therefore set apart from all the nations so that no contagion might pollute it, is now proved unclean by the judgment even of those nations which have been filthy with the squalor of every outrage from the first years of life to the last.” So “he has become among the nations like an unclean vessel. For they have gone up to Assyria, a wild ass alone by himself.” That is, they will suffer what we have said at the hands of the Assyrian, to whom they will see such eminence of strength granted that whoever comes to him is said to have “gone up.” “A wild ass alone by himself” is to be referred to Ephraim: that is, “a wild ass alone by himself: Ephraim has given gifts to his lovers.” “The people of the Jews,” he says, “which endured no foreign rule, but like a wild ass knew neither yoke nor burdens, of whom blessed David had sung in praise of God, ‘He who makes those of one way of life dwell in a house’ (that is, he made them, strong in a singular institution, dwell in the land of promise): this people, I say, which, free of human condemnation, was subject only to divine commands, is now so angered and saddened that it would think itself happy if even an honorable servitude came its way.” “He has given gifts to his lovers. But they have also hired the nations with a fee: now I will gather them.” When the crowd of the ten tribes deserved to be chastised for its profanities, the prophets announced and promised them the dominion of the Assyrians. But the Jews, showing toward the threats the same spirit as the tribes, were stubborn in everything, and preferred to hire even the Egyptians for a fee rather than be subjugated to the Assyrians, to whom the divine sentence was subjecting them. This, then, is what he says: that with the purpose of committing immorality they wanted to try the Egyptians as lovers, and sent them gifts of their own accord, and promised to bring them yearly payments if by their help the Assyrians were driven off and the threat of the prophets defeated. So he said, “Since they have hired the nations with a fee,” that is, the Egyptians, “now I will gather them into captivity,” that is, “I will drag them off and hand them over to the announced dominion of the Assyrian nation.” “I will gather them,” he says, so that no one might seem to escape. “And they shall rest a little from the burden of the king and the princes.” This seems added with mockery, so as to call “rest” the captivity that had been inflicted. That is, they will recognize how much they have achieved by their counsels and pursuits when they have been gathered, when they have gone into exile in foreign fields: ceasing, that is, to pay either the tributes ordered by the Assyrians or those given of their own accord to the Egyptians, they will carry out the commands of their masters with all their strength, so that they confess that their ceasing to pay tribute turned out to increase their evils.

Verses 11–14. — “Because Ephraim multiplied altars for sinning, his altars have become for him an offense. I will write for them my laws manifold, which were counted as foreign. Bring sacrifices, bring them: they will sacrifice flesh and eat it; the Lord will not accept them; now he will remember their iniquities and visit their sins: they shall return to Egypt. And Israel forgot his Maker and built shrines. And Judah multiplied fortified cities, and I will send fire on his cities, and it shall devour their houses.” He shows by what chain of sinning [Israel] had called in the help of the Egyptians: by resisting holy counselors in everything, so that as it had scorned the prophets when they taught, so it scorned them when they threatened; and not only scorned but even attacked them, and, as far as it could, convicted them of falsehood, if by hiring the Egyptians it could drive back the Assyrians. Now blessed Hosea rightly, listing the evils of captivity to come, runs through punishments and offenses alike, deplores the altars multiplied by Ephraim for idols, and complains that the altars had become a crime for him. As if he said: “The care of divine things was surely instituted so that altars might cleanse those whom outrages had defiled; but now deadly things so entangle the wretches that they were never more gravely defiled than at the altars.” “I will write for them my laws manifold, which were counted as foreign. By fleeing to the nations,” he says, “and seeking to mix with their rites, the ungrateful nation thought it would be freed from the burdens of our law. But since my censure is ready to crush the profane mouths of the stubborn with bit and bridle, the outcome itself will show that contempt of the commandments is not unpunished for them. For I will write for them my laws manifold, which were counted as foreign.” He expressed what he was going to do in the manner of a judge, who usually reads a written sentence from a document. “My laws, then, which were long ago promulgated and are contained especially in the book of Deuteronomy, I will write against them manifold”: that is, “I will carry them out and heap them up.” “For you,” to mention a few things of many, the discourse is concluded in this way: “But if you will not hear the voice of the Lord God, to keep and do all his commandments and ceremonies which I command you today, these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall you be in the city, cursed in the field; cursed your barn, cursed your remnants; cursed the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your land, the herds of your cattle and the flocks of your sheep. Cursed shall you be coming in, and cursed going out.” These laws, then, he threatens to multiply against the profane peoples. “They bring sacrifices, and they will sacrifice flesh and eat it: the Lord will not accept them; now he will remember their iniquity.” The people of Samaria, that is, the ten tribes, had despised the sacrifices that were to be offered to the true God no less than his judgments and commandments. The tribe of Judah, however, not yet defiled by its sister’s ungodliness, had nevertheless cast off the [right] care of sacrifices. So the prophecy goes on to join them in the quality of their conduct, and under the accusation of Israel passes to Judah, to reproach it, as he has already done above, because, giving no thought to justice of conduct, they placed their hope of salvation only in offering victims; and he brings in, as it were, the voice of people urging one another, “Bring, bring sacrifices,” and at once answers, “The Lord will not accept them; now he will remember their iniquities.” The gravity of the judge must surely be considered: for he says that he is brought to remember their iniquity especially when they, conscious of having despised and neglected justice, thought they would be protected by offering victims, since gifts are pleasing only when offered not by enemies but by friends. Indeed it is nearer to insult if you bestow trifling gifts on one whom you have provoked by crimes, in the manner not of a suppliant but of a donor. “So that sentence fits you which the fratricide Cain [received]: that you sacrifice flesh and consume it yourselves, since the Lord does not accept it.” Why not, since he prefers obedience to sacrifice, and the care of justice more than burnt offering? “Now therefore above all,” he says, “he hastens vengeance, when you place your confidence of deliverance in shedding the blood of cattle. Now he visits the sins of all who turn to Egypt in mind and with money”; for the whole of Israel, that is, Judah as well as Ephraim, so forgot its own Creator that, when they had made him most hostile to them, they took no care for amendment, but spent their wealth and labor partly in renewing fortifications, partly in hiring nations, as if they did not know what the holy song had declared: “Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it. Unless the Lord guards the city, he watches in vain who guards it.” So their ungodliness grew to such a point that, when they had moved the almighty judge to anger, they nonetheless thought they would be happy by their own industry, if they had built many fortifications against the eruptions of enemies, and so would remain happy not only without God’s help but even with God fighting against them. “Therefore,” he says, “a fitting frustration will strike them, so that they seem shut in by their fortifications rather than defended; and a raging flame will consume all such houses.” Since this is so, that is, since no difficulty hinders the justice of God and no fraud deludes it: