Commentary on Hosea, Joel and Amos 1.9.1–1.9.11

Verse 1. — “Do not rejoice, Israel, do not exult,” because you have departed from the covenant of the law by sacrilegious pollution. That is, do not think that your mingling with the other nations will go unpunished. For the ambition of such a flight does not set you free into the vain liberty you had wished for, but only subjects you to severe vengeance.

Verses 2, 3. — “You have loved a wage above all the threshing floors of wheat. The threshing floor and the winepress shall not feed them, and the wine shall deceive them. They shall not dwell in the land of the Lord.” “Do not, I say, O our nation, rejoice shamelessly; but know that you will see all your wishes turned into their opposites. For not only in the duties of religion, but also in every action you have shown yourself base and intemperate. You have loved a wage above all the threshing floors of wheat: that is, you judged nothing better, nothing more lovable, than the richness of the land and spending on the belly. Therefore the whole richness of crops and fruits will be taken from you; and to torture your wishes the more, the vintage that long looked promising will perish by sudden storms, so that, to your grief, it will seem not only damaged but even to have lied. But why do I mention lesser losses, when exile follows on your want, and you will be given no opportunity to cultivate your ancestral soil? Yet you will not be able to wonder at the greatness of this calamity as if complaining. For you are convicted of having been a willing deserter of this land in your pursuits: you desired both the crimes and the help of the Assyrians and the Egyptians. With what impudence, then, would you lay hold of the fertility of this land, whose distinctive marks you spat out both in rites and in conduct? You will go away, driven to where, corrupted beforehand, you wished to go. And having set out to Egypt in your wish, and to Assyria in captivity, you will endure such want that you will eat polluted and chance foods with grief.”

Verse 4. — “They shall not pour out wine to the Lord, and their sacrifices shall not please him; they are like the bread of mourners: all who eat it shall be defiled; for their bread, their own souls, shall not enter the house of the Lord.” He now describes the evils of captivity, and says that when their abundance has been changed into extreme poverty, nothing of happiness or consolation will meet them, and they will spend all their time in mourning, since they will not be allowed to offer sacrifice to God or to hope for any expiation of their faults: the offices by which we think we will please God. “All their offering, then, fitter for funeral rites than for feasts, will defile rather than purify those who approach it; for their bread, their own souls, shall not enter the house of the Lord.” The same sentence is pressed as before, when sacrifices rejected by God are said to belong to those who offered them. “So now too,” he says, “I have rejected the offerings of those whom, moved by the excess of their crimes, I have driven even from their ancestral soil: that bread which they do not deserve to bring into the house of God will go to their own funeral meal.”

Verses 5, 6. — “What will you do on the solemn day, on the day of the Lord’s feast? For see, they have set out from devastation: Egypt shall gather them, Memphis shall bury them. Nettles shall inherit the desirable things of their silver; the burr shall be in their tents.” Although blessed Hosea’s chief aim is to run through the deeds of the ten tribes and to dwell on enlarging their crimes or setting out their calamities, yet by the power of prophecy he also touches on what would happen to the tribe of Judah. And since he knew that the people of Jerusalem, though somewhat later, would suffer things like the Samaritans because their deserts were equal, he also mentions the temple and sacrifices, attributing to the whole nation, as it were, what applies chiefly to the two tribes. So, having said that they had lost the comfort of the offerings by which they thought themselves purified, he developed the figure that arose. And because the loathed cessation of such services grows harshest on those days when a joyful festival used to be celebrated, he says, “What will you do on the day of the Lord’s solemn feast?” That is, what darkness, what bitterness, what anguish of mind will fill you, when you spend that day of the Lord’s festival, which the gathering and singing of the people had once made glorious and sweet to you, as exiles, unwillingly, in chains and in barbarian servitude? And since on the occasion of Ephraim he also marked, as we have said, what was to come upon Judah, there follows: “For see, they have set out from devastation: Egypt shall gather them, Memphis shall bury them.” “When the dominion of the enemy has laid waste their region,” he says, “it will happen to all the tribes, as punishment carries it out, as they earlier committed in sinful desire: that as one part was led to the Assyrians, so Egypt will gather another part, and the land of Memphis will receive and consume them.” That this happened after the victory of Nebuchadnezzar, who overthrew the people of Jerusalem, to those Jews whom the Babylonians had left as cultivators of the fields, both blessed Jeremiah and the history of Kings tell. As for what he adds, “Nettles shall inherit the desirable things of their silver,” that this happens in the course of captivity, would that reading alone had taught us, and not experience as well. For it is well known that houses built at great expense have been covered by woods when their inhabitants failed, and that very often hoards of gold and silver buried in the ground have been lost in lasting oblivion when those who hid them were killed.

Verse 7. — “The days of visitation have come, the days of retribution have come. Know, Israel, that you [called] the prophet a fool, the spiritual man insane, because of the multitude of your iniquity, and the multitude of your madness.” “It would have been better for reason rather than calamity to teach you discernment. But since, as if wholly without reason, you demanded whips and goads, now at least, when the time of your visitation, that is, of your condemnation, has come, wake up, so that you may understand what you deserve, and confess that such hard wages are owed to your pursuits, which you see you have earned by despising your spiritual teachers. For you had broken out to such fury that the prophets, who spoke at the will of the Holy Spirit and announced, out of zeal for your fathers, what awaited you (in case the fear announced beforehand might prevent vengeance from finding anyone to punish), you said not only foresaw nothing more than others, but were even deprived of human reason and moved by madness rather than revelation.” The history of Kings also shows that, through the abundance of profanity, the prophets used to be called so at that time. For when a certain prophet, sent by blessed Elisha, had come to Ramoth Gilead to anoint Jehu as king, the nobles sitting around said to Jehu, “What does this fanatic want?” (2 Kgs 8). So completely had the authority of the divine word fallen out of use among them that they judged the precepts of virtue to be not merely beggarly but raving. Shuddering at the magnitude of this crime, the pardoner cries out like a judge: “Because of the multitude of your iniquity, and the multitude of your madness.” As if he said, “This is not a simple error but a multiplied madness: to despise as fools and madmen spiritual teachers, strong in prophetic splendor, at the very time when they themselves suffered such a lavish poverty of good sense that they thought those things gods which they had cast in metal.”

Verse 8. — “Ephraim is a watchman with my God; the prophet has become a snare of ruin on all his ways; madness in the house of his God.” Some have thought that by the name Ephraim Jeroboam is meant here, who, it is known, came from the tribe of Ephraim and was zealous for the cult of the temple, and for this reason incurred the displeasure of Solomon; but after he obtained rule over the tribes he became the author of profanities, leading the hearts of his subjects over to the worship of heifers. So they think that Jeroboam is called by the name Ephraim, and was said to watch with God because he first had care for religion and diligently looked to what was right. “But he who was once a prophet,” I say, “so suddenly fell away to depravity that he was made a ruin and a snare for his followers. Why not, when the greatest madness was abroad in the house of the God he had chosen?” But this passage can be explained more briefly thus: having taken up a complaint about the insults to the prophets, he added this in the same vein, as if he said: “O people, subjugated to profane rites, to the heap of your iniquity you added insults to spiritual teachers, so as to call the prophets of God insane and spiritual teachers fools: a madness that broke out from the greatness of your iniquity. For you sometimes dared to enter into a kind of contest with their promises, and to say, ‘See, let us both take up the office of watching together, and observe whether all those things come which these men announce to us.’ And you added that prophets ought to be considered nothing other than an enemy’s snare, fashioned for the ruin of wretched citizens. And so, joining blasphemy to insults, you said that the madness of the prophets was in the house of God.” The invective that follows proves this opinion to be of the greatest sacrilege.

Verse 9. — For he cried out: “They have sinned deeply, as in the days of Gibeah. He will remember their iniquity and visit their sins.” “The deed,” he says, “is not such that the censure of the judge could forget it.” And since he had mentioned ancient history, he says, “He will remember their iniquity”; and he will avenge, he says, the present insult to the prophets no less severely than if he were bringing to examination that crime which they committed before the age of the kings, when judges ruled the Jewish nation. At that time a certain Levite, returning to his own dwelling place, turned aside, as the day was already growing dark, into a city of the tribe of Benjamin called Gibeah. Finding no host there, he sat down in the public square with his own wife; but the depraved youth of the city, not content with refusing lodging, seized the priest’s wife for obscene use, and practiced such insolent foulness that the abused woman lost her life as she had lost her chastity. The next day the Levite rose, laid the corpse of his dead wife on his beast, cut it into pieces, and sent them through all the tribes of that nation, so that, learning the cause of so savage a spectacle, they might take up common vengeance. So, declaring war on the men of Gibeah unless they handed over the guilty, they destroyed them, barely overcome, in a third battle, so that of the whole tribe of Benjamin no more than five hundred men are reported to have survived. The prophet set the present sin, which they were committing by calling spiritual men fools and madmen, alongside that crime. The equating of the faults commends reverence for the prophets: he shows that their honor, violated even by bold words, amounts to no less guilt than what that public obscenity, at once bloody and incestuous, once incurred.

Verse 10. — “I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness; like the first fruits of the fig tree at its top I saw their fathers. But they went in to Baal-peor, and were estranged in confusion, and became abominable like the things they loved.” He gathers into one what was done at various times, so as to make equal, as we have said, the guilt of violated religion and that of insult to the prophets. He digressed into praise of the fathers, through which reproach of the degenerate sons might grow, and it might appear from what height of holiness they had descended into what depths of crime. “When the nature of mortals,” he says, “was squalid and covered with the dense brambles of ungodliness, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob showed the judgments of a noble mind, bearing the sweetness of due confession toward God as if bearing grapes or figs. Their faith and virtue I did not despise for their fewness, but judged worthy of honor and grace all the greater as they scorned more examples of the profane nations. Like a vine sprouting in a vast wilderness, like early figs whose sweetness stirs the appetite before their season, so I gathered them into my bosom with due care, so that nothing of their fruits or their praises might be lost. But when I, who was Lord of all things, had chosen to be called their God, and went on to multiply their offspring, the degenerate people, forgetting both its evils and its Creator, went in to the worship of those idols which had consecrated only obscenities: to Baal-peor, that is, whom they said had the figure of Priapus.” This is shown by the history of the book of Numbers: following the counsel of Balaam, the women of the Midianites, instructed, went out to meet the army of Israel in the dress and gestures of harlots, so that, when they had roused them to the desire of lust, they would not give them the opportunity of sexual immorality until they had defiled themselves with the sacrifice of their idol Baal-peor. Then such a plague rose against the people that twenty-three thousand perished together in one day. So confusion seized the obscene, so that they became no less abominable to God than the idols themselves, by following which they had sinned. It is not, then, that the people of the age whom the prophet Hosea addresses are said to have sinned at Baal-peor; but because the memory of antiquity is brought in, and the nobility of the holy fathers praised, what their descendants committed in various ages is set out, so that it may appear whom those now accused resemble; as if it were said to them: “See into what disgraces the illustrious stock has flowed. See those who so forgot their fathers’ dignity that, whereas their forebears deserved to be chosen for salvation by a lasting gift, these afterward, with folly and obscenity contending in them, worshiped Priapuses and calves.”

Verses 11, 12. — “Ephraim has flown away like a bird; their glory from birth, and from the womb, and from conception. And if they bring up their children, I will make them childless among men. But woe to them when I depart from them.” “Ephraim,” he says, “has flown away like a bird.” He had already said above, “Ephraim has become like a dove that is deceived, without heart. They called on Egypt, they went to Assyria.” So this people, which would not distinguish between the godly and the ungodly but became abominable like the images themselves, will rightly be carried into captivity with such speed that it seems not so much to have walked as to have flown. Yet it will suffer not only the whips of exile; a preceding calamity of want and disease will consume the swarms of its children, so that childlessness will punish hearts that fruitfulness once lifted up. “Their glory,” he says, “from birth, and from the womb, and from conception. And if they bring up their children, I will make them childless among men.” That is, when they had provoked the eternal judge with their crimes, caring nothing for appeasing him, they were nevertheless eager to multiply their families, counting it their happiness and glory if they could see their children married and see and hear them bearing children. “There, then, I will strike them where they most rejoiced: they will not be allowed to bring up the children born to them, or if they happen to bring them up, the children will die, until the offspring they long desired is brought by failure to the squalor of desolation; and so they will feel that, while it cannot go well with those whom I abandon, it goes much worse with those against whom I fight.”

Verses 13, 14. — “Ephraim, as I saw, was Tyre, founded in beauty; and Ephraim shall bring out his children to the slayer. Give them, Lord: what will you give, Lord? Give them a womb without children, and dry breasts.” We read in other prophets too a description of the pleasantness and crowds of the city of Tyre, so that the song of blessed Ezekiel called it a harlot, because of the multitude of songs with which the whole city resounded at night in luxury. Since here he had threatened the people with the change of Samaria, to increase the sense of grief he marvels at its beauty in prosperity, as if he said: “No one rightly understands the greatness of this calamity, by which the Jews left their borders with their offspring consumed, unless he considers what went before; for then he will notice how great the change for the worse was, when he thinks how they formerly bloomed with the flower of joy. Ephraim,” he says, “as I saw [or: as he saw], was Tyre: a seething people, overflowing with riches, loud with games, ringing with songs, whose site smiled so on those coming from the shore and from the mainland that its very foundations could be said to have been set in a kind of beauty. But this city, I say, flowing with delights but providing itself no defense of justice and religion, he commanded to bring out its children to slaughter and to suffer the will of raging enemies, since it had trampled on the commands of our law.” Changing the tenses in the inflection, he mentions things that were still to happen under Nebuchadnezzar as if they had already been done. “Ephraim,” then, that is, Samaria and the multitude of the other tribes, was so crushed by the terror of the avenger that it would almost prepare to offer its offspring to the slayers itself: which it is said to have done not by acting but by deserving. From the custom of the Scriptures, there is a kind of figure of one hesitating, and announcing in the form of a question what is coming: “Give them, Lord: what will you give them? A womb,” he says, “without children, and dry breasts.” “Let this plague condemn them, and let them know that they are to be destroyed by slaughter.” For above he had said that if they brought up children they would at once suffer their loss; now he added dry breasts, and a portentous barrenness to be laid on women, so that even the renewal of the peoples whom captivity had devoured might be despaired of.

Verses 15–17. — “All their wickedness is in Gilgal, for there I hated them, because of the malice of their devices. I will cast them out of my house; I will not love them any more; all their princes are rebels. Ephraim is struck; their root is dried up; they shall bear no fruit. And if they bear children, I will slay the beloved fruit of their womb. My God will cast them off, because they did not hear him, and they shall be wanderers among the nations.” In Gilgal especially they are said to have worshiped idols, and so he declares that all their wickedness was gathered there, for which he testifies that he hated them. Some have thought, however, that the prophet recalled this place because of Saul. For in Gilgal Saul received the rule of that nation. Since the nation had sinned under Jeroboam’s leadership, when he consecrated the calves, he therefore, on the occasion of the present guilt, also accuses that origin of the error, when the people, tired of the rule of priests, desired to be under kings like the neighboring nations. So he says, “All their wickedness is in Gilgal”; as if he said, “The ungodliness that has now devoured them had its causes there and took its beginning there, where they transferred the commonwealth from priestly to royal rule.” But while this sense would seem subtler, the other is clearer and stronger: in the course of the address he has begun, he accuses the worship of idols in Gilgal and in other places, for whose error the just judge threatens to cast them out of his house; and to this sentence he adds another that burns more: “I will not love them any more.” This the daughter named Without Mercy signified at the beginning as something to come. He announces that the tribes will be cast out of his house, that is, out of the land of promise, because as far as the temple was concerned they had long ago departed from it through the deadly inventions of King Jeroboam. He promises, then, that the severity by which the profane are cast out of their own borders will remain fixed upon them, so that it seems not to be tempered by the coming of any mercy. And since this showed the heavy weight of the punishment, he at once added its cause, which was great: “For all their princes,” he says, “are rebels.” He put this not to mark only the nobles as fallen into sin, but so that no doubt would remain about the iniquities of the common people, since not one even of the princes had been found who did not withdraw from the worship of God. The remaining verses repeat the sentence set down a little before, by which he had threatened them with both loss of children and barrenness. “Ephraim is struck; their root is dried up; they shall bear no fruit. And if they bear children, I will slay the beloved fruit of their womb. My God will cast them off, because they did not hear him, and they shall be wanderers among the nations.” “Captivity will swallow them,” he says, “and a manifold and various calamity will consume their offspring, than which nothing is sweeter to parents.”