Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Hosea 11:8
How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? [how] shall I deliver thee, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? [how] shall I set thee as Zeboim? mine heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled together.
8. deliver thee ] Not in the sense of of the Sept., but in that of Symmachus’ . Better, surrender thee.
Admah Zeboim ] Hosea, like the author of Deu 29:23, derives his knowledge of the overthrow of the ‘cities of the plain’ from a tradition independent of that in Genesis 19. For another instance of such independent knowledge, see Hos 12:3-5.
my repentings are kindled together ] Even this inaccurate rendering cannot quite conceal the fine intuition of the prophet. By partly humanizing God’s nature, he as it were divinizes man’s. Human sympathy is but a rill from the mighty stream of God’s tender mercy. A closer rendering would be, I am wholly overcome with sympathy. The Hebrew idiom however is different ‘my sympathies are wholly overcome.’ Almost the same phrase occurs in Gen 43:20, ‘his compassions were overcome towards his brother.’ [The word rendered ‘are overcome’ ( nik’meru) has the closest affinity with the Assyrian kamru ‘to throw down’, referred to in the note on Hos 10:5 in explanation of k’mrm ‘(idolatrous) priests.’] In Jer 15:6 a different but equally anthropomorphic expression is ascribed to Jehovah ‘I am weary of sympathizing.’
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
8 11. The prophet cannot believe in a final rejection of Israel (comp. Hos 13:14). He speaks as if Jehovah had at first contemplated this. Evidently there was a conflict in his own mind between the ideas of justice and love. Justice seemed to demand that all relations between Jehovah and Israel should be broken off; love remonstrated with the assurance of its undecayed healing faculty (Hos 14:4). Both justice and love were divine; hence it seemed that there must be a conflict even in the mind of Jehovah. Let us not however presume to deduce a ‘doctrine’ from Hosea’s description of his mental mood. His final intuition alone is his legacy to the Church; not the inward struggle out of which he triumphantly emerged.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? – o: God is infinitely just and infinitely merciful. The two attributes are so united in Him, yea, so one in Him who is always one, and in whose counsels there is no variableness, nor shadow of turning, that the one doth not ever thwart the proceeding of the other. Yet, in order to shew that our ills are from our own ill-deserts, not from any pleasure of His in inflicting ill, and that what mercy He sheweth, is from His own goodness, not from any in us, God is represented in this empassioned expression as in doubt, and (so to say) divided between justice and mercy, the one pleading against the other. At the last, God so determines, that both should have their share in the issue, and that Israel should be both justly punished and mercifully spared and relieved.
God pronounces on the evil deserts of Israel, even while He mitigates His sentence. The depth of the sinners guilt reflects the more vividly the depth of Gods mercy. In saying, how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboim? He says, in fact, that they were, for their sins, worthy to be utterly destroyed, with no trace, no memorial, save that eternal desolation like the five cities of the plain, of which were Sodom and Gomorrah, which God hath set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire Jud 1:7. Such was their desert. But God says, with inexpressible tenderness, Mine heart is turned within Me literally, upon Me or against Me, so as to be a burden to Him; as we say of the heart, that it is heavy. God deigneth to speak as if His love was heavy, or a weight upon Him, while He thought of the punishment which their sins deserved.
My heart is turned – o: As soon as I had spoken evil against thee, mercy prevailed, tenderness touched Me; the tenderness of the Father overcame the austerity of the Judge.
My repentings are kindled together, – or My strong compassions are kindled. i. e., with the heat and glow of love; as the disciples say, Did not our hearts burn within us? Luk 24:32, and as it is said of Joseph his bowels did yearn Gen 43:30 (literally, were hot) toward his brother; and of the true mother before Solomon, her bowels yearned 1Ki 3:26 (English margin, were hot) upon her son.
Admah and Zeboim were cities in the same plain with Sodom and Gomorrah, and each had their petty king Gen 14:2. In the history of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, they are not named, but are included in the general title those cities and all the plain (Gen 19:25). The more then would Hoseas hearers think of that place in Moses where he does mention them, and where he threatens them with the like end; when the stranger shall see, that the whole land thereof is brimstone and salt and burning, that it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth therein, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboim, which the Lord overthrew in His anger and His wrath Deu 29:22-23. Such was the end, at which all their sins aimed; such the end, which God had held out to them; but His strong compassions were kindled.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Hos 11:8-9
How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?
Gods feeling in the face of mans obstinacy
Many have been the ways adopted by God to communicate His thoughts and reveal His will to the human race. But in all, Divine truths were always represented in a manner most adapted to the constitution of the human mind. Three things suggested by the passage.
I. Man is able to resist God in the dispensations of his mercy. The supposition that man is governed by some Divine fate, that he is a passive being, destitute of a capacity to act in any way besides in accordance with the Divine will, has arisen partly from three sources.
1. Unacquaintance with the nature of the human will Man is so constituted as to be able to exercise authority not only over his own feelings, actions, and character, but also over the heart itself; he can regulate his disposition, so as to turn his whole soul to be a sanctuary to particular objects. Three reasons for this view.
(1) Mankind in general believe that they are free–at liberty to choose any course of action they please.
(2) Our own consciousness. We are conscious that our actual volitions are such and only such as we please to put forth.
(3) Our moral nature implies the same truth.
2. Unacquaintance with Gods moral government–confounding the natural with the moral. God does not rule man with an irresistible force, but with motives of gentleness and love.
3. Misinterpretation of some particular portions of the Word of God.
II. That mans resistance renders it necessary, on Gods part, to give him up.
1. The most applicable means is insufficient for recovering him.
2. The only means is insufficient to recover him.
III. There is an infinite, compassionate reluctance on Gods part to give up man.
1. The relation that exists between God and man renders Him reluctant to give him up. One is a father, the other is a child.
2. Gods knowledge of man renders Him reluctant to give him up.
3. Gods dealings towards man prove that He is infinite in mercy, reluctant to give him up. The most illustrious display of Divine mercy was the sending of Gods only begotten Son into the world. This mercy was displayed also in sending the Holy Spirit. Then if God feels so intensely for those who are strangers and aliens from Him, ought not the same compassionate feeling to characterise His Church universally? And if we are free agents, having control over our dispositions and actions, or endowed with capacity to choose the right and reject the wrong; and if we are the objects of Divine pity, is it not our most incumbent duty to pity ourselves by receiving Gods mercy, and obeying His commandments? (J. A. Morris.)
Justice and mercy in the heart of God
The Bible is pre-eminently an anthropomorphetic book. That is, it represents God through mans emotions, modes of thought and actions. It is in the character of a father that these verses present Him to our notice. No human character can give a full or perfect revelation of Him. Yet it is only through human love, human faithfulness, human justice, that we can gain any conception of the love, faithfulness, and justice of the Eternal.
I. Mercy and justice as co-existing in the heart of the eternal. To give up to ruin, to deliver to destruction is the demand of justice. Mine heart is turned within Me, My repentings are kindled together. This is the voice of mercy. What is justice? It is that sentiment which demands that every one should have his due. What is mercy? A disposition to overlook injuries and to treat things better than they deserve. These two must never be regarded as elements essential]y distinct, they are branches from the same root, streams from the same fountain. Both are but modifications of love. Justice is but love standing up sternly against the wrong, mercy is but love bending in tenderness over the helpless and the suffering. In the heart of God this love assumes two phases or manifestations.
1. Material nature shows that there is the stern and mild in God.
2. Providence shows that there is the stern and the mild in God. The heavy afflictions that befall nations, families, and individuals, reveal His sternness; the health and the joy that gladden life reveal His mercy.
3. The spiritual constitution of man shows that there is the stern and the mild in God. In the human soul there is an instinct to revenge the wrong, often stern, inexorable, and heartless. There is also an instinct of tenderness and compassion. These came from the great Father.
II. Mercy and justice as excited by man in the heart of the Father.
1. The moral wickedness of Ephraim evoked His justice. Human wickedness is always stirring, so to say, the justice of the Infinite heart.
2. The filial suffering of Ephraim evoked His mercy. God calls Ephraim His son, and Ephraim was in suffering, and hence His compassion was turned.
III. Mercy struggling against justice in the heart of the Great Father. Even as the human father finds a struggle between what justice requires, and mercy pleads for, in dealing with his wilful son.
IV. Mercy triumphing over justice in the heart of the Great Father.
1. Mercy has so triumphed in the perpetuation of the race.
2. In the experience of every living man.
3. In the redemptive mission of Christ.
How comes it to pass that mercy thus triumphs? Here is the answer: For I am God, and not man. (Homilist.)
Divine forbearance towards sinners
The long-suffering of God, His patience toward sinners, His unwillingness to punish, His readiness to pardon, form conspicuous parts of the Divine character, as set forth to our view in the sacred writings. The text describes a strong and tender struggle in the mind of God between the opposite and contending claims of justice and mercy: and in the end represents the latter as prevailing, mercy rejoicing against judgment. We are not indeed to suppose that a struggle ever really takes place in the Divine Mind. He does but speak to us after the manner of men. Ephraim had done everything to provoke the Lord to anger. Forgetful of all that He had wrought for them, and of all which they owed to Him, they had left His service, renounced His worship, and had given themselves up to the most shameful idolatries. Mercies and judgments had been employed to reclaim them, but in vain. And now, what could be expected but that they should be dealt with according to their deserts? But no–such is the sovereignty of Divine mercy, that instead God says, How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? Attend–
1. To the debate which is represented between justice and mercy.
2. The determination of the debate. After a long struggle mercy prevails.
3. The ground and reason of this determination: For I am God, and not man. He who is God, and not man, alone could overcome the difficulty.
Draw some profitable reflections.
1. How exactly does the view here given of the Divine mercy and forbearance, in this particular instance, agree with the general representations of them in Scripture. Illustrate times before Flood. Israel in wilderness. The spiritual redemption of man.
2. How greatly do these views increase and aggravate the sinfulness of sin. Sin is rebellion against a just and rightful Sovereign. It is robbery committed against a good and a gracious Master. It is ingratitude to a most kind and bountiful Friend and Benefactor. Sin is despite done to the richest mercy and tenderest compassion. If God were not so very merciful, sin would not be so exceeding sinful. How great must be the guilt of those who disregard the mercy offered in the Gospel I
3. What great encouragement does the subject give to every humbled and penitent sinner! Such are apt to be full of doubts and fears. They cry for mercy, but cannot believe that they shall find it. Was God so unwilling to give up even penitent Ephraim? And will He be unwilling to receive and pardon penitent offenders? Surely He feels for you the tenderest pity. He will meet you with loving-kindness. (E. Cooper.)
The Holy One
The holiness of God is at once a ground why He punishes iniquity, and yet does not punish to the full extent of the sin. Truth and faithfulness are part of the holiness of God. He will keep His covenant. But the unholy cannot profit by the promises of the All-Holy. (E. B. Pusey, D. D.)
How shall I give thee up, Ephraim
There is nothing more inspiring in human history than the long, hard struggle of the Lord against the proclivities of the Jewish people. How this struggle of evil against God arose, what are the conditions of the Divine and the creature nature which render it possible, and render it possible that it should be prolonged, we may never be able to settle. But the fact of the struggle is clear as the sunlight. We are resisting Gods will; we make life a ceaseless struggle against His will. God has created free men; all the burden of their activity, all the possibilities of their development He accepted ill the hour in which He created them free. He parted as it were with a power, a power to rule all things by His decree. A free spirit cannot be ruled by a decree. There is a new sphere of existence created, in which Gods Spirit, in communion with free spirits, alone has power to sustain His sway. And this Spirit may be grieved, wounded, resisted even unto death. Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone, may proclaim that the resources of the Divine patience and love are exhausted. And yet, was that sentence final? Certainly, in Hoseas time, Divine patience was not exhausted. Is it even exhausted yet? The answer is found by considering, with some fulness of detail, the history of the long-suffering of God with His ancient Church. (Baldwin Brown, B. A.)
Gods dealing with sin and sinners
It is important that we acquire and cherish right views of the character of God, and the modes of His dealing with the children of men. We cannot fully comprehend the Divine Being. It may happen that the aspect which is most attractive is just that which we most fail to see. Revelation makes known to us that He is not regardless and indifferent to what takes place on earth, and not unmindful of the welfare of the beings His hands have made. He is the Father of our spirits. We read of God as a God of justice, and we are in danger of thinking of justice as unallied with and untempered by mercy. But He is also merciful. He delighteth in mercy. The aspect of God, brought before us in this text, is that of God reluctant to inflict deserved punishment, suffering deep, disquietude and longing because of the waywardness and sinfulness of men. Man s alienation and rebellion causes grief and regret to God.
I. Gods back wardness to punish sin. The very strength of Gods love for His creatures kindles His indignation against that which works their ruin, whilst regard for His own character and government necessitates the punishment of the ungodly and impenitent. One great difference between Gods anger and mans is this,–whilst mans anger is soon kindled, God is slow to anger, and of great mercy.
II. Gods yearning disquiet for the salvation of men. Of this the words of the text are an earnest expression. (Joseph Shillito.)
God unwilling to abandon the sinner
The making of His creatures happy, according to their capacities of happiness, is highly pleasing to God. The Divine nature is all love and benignity. The sun and light may be as soon separated as God and goodness, the Deity and loving-kindness. If He withdraws His favour from any people, it is all along of themselves, not the least defect of goodness in Him. It is wholly owing to their rendering themselves unmeet to be any longer partakers of His grace and favour. God is always inclined to do good to His creatures, but He is often under the necessity of being very severe. Still, He ever designeth a general good in the judgments He executeth. Mens learning of righteousness is Gods designs in His judgments. Then God inflicts His judgments, not out of free choice, but from constraint, and with a kind of unwilling willingness. In the text we see that, highly as they had incensed the great God against them, He nevertheless makes good, when one would least expect He would, that saying of the son of Sirach, As is His majesty, so is His mercy. In the text He seems to say, How can I find in My heart to be as bad as My word in executing such fearful threatenings? Nothing less than apparent necessity can prevail with the infinitely good God to make His creatures miserable; and this further appears by the following considerations.
1. Gods earnest and most pathetical exciting of sinners to turn and repent, that iniquity may not be their ruin, is of itself sufficient to assure us hereof.
2. Tis Gods ordinary method to give warning to sinners before He strikes. He wants reformation and repentance to stay His hand and prevent the blow. Illustrate by the warning of Noahs ark, and the warnings sent by the prophets, etc. Signs of the times are Gods warnings nowadays.
3. It is Gods usual course to try a wicked people with lighter judgments first, before He brings the heaviest upon them.
4. When God determined to pour down the vials of His vengeance upon a wicked people, He sometimes plainly intimated that He did it not, until their wickedness was come up to such a height as did necessarily call for them.
5. It is likewise apparent that God Almighty is most backward to the destroying of a wicked people, or putting them into miserable circumstances until necessitated, in that He hath again and again declared His being diverted from so doing by such motives as one would think could have but very little influence upon such a Being as He is, or rather none at all. The following are some of these motives.
(1) A mere partial humiliation, one far short of true repentance, as in the case of Ahab and Rehoboam.
(2) The prayers of a few good people. As in Moses intercessions.
(3) The advantages taken by Gods enemies from His destruction of His people (Deu 32:27). Learn from this what strange folly, or even desperate madness, doth lodge in the hearts of sinful men. Will sinners still persevere in this their madness? (E. Fowler, D. D.)
The Gospel in Hosea
Hosea appears again and again to contradict himself. In one line he is denouncing a ruinous and final doom; in the next, with a voice that breaks with tenderness, he is promising a day of golden restoration. Does it not sound like a feeble absurdity to say that both sets of declarations can be fulfilled? Yet fulfilled in some ideal way I believe they are. Surely the prophet recognised that there were positive contradictions in life,–life and death, light and darkness, blessing and cursing, the flame of wrath and the dew of blessing; and leaving these contradictions as he found them, he yet believed that God is a God of love, that mercy shall somehow or somewhere triumph over justice, that God will smite sin, and yet will spare. Hoseas was a real and not a sham message, and it was a message full of comfort; and still more full of comfort was the reason, for I am God, and not man. The deepest consolation of life lies in this, God and not man is the judge. God is the Father of the prodigal. Christ was the friend of publicans and sinners; and in the revelation of God throughout all the Scripture, as in the words of Christ, we find always side by side with the awful certainty of retribution, the unquenchable beams of love and hope. But Hosea had learned his lesson, as so many are forced to learn it, in sorrow and anguish. He tells us his secret in the first three chapters. These explain the varying of emotions in almost every verse of the prophecy; and they also explaln why this prophet seems to see more deeply than all others into the heart of the love of God. The sorrows of life come to us all though they seem to come in different measure; but the point for us to observe is how differently they affect the wise and the foolish The holy submissiveness of Hoseas life taught him the one great lesson without which he would never have become a prophet at all. This lesson, — If the love of man, the love of a husband for a wife, of a father for his child can be so deep, how unfathomable, how eternal must be the love of God! To what sunless depths, to what unfathomed caverns can the ray of that light penetrate I In this is a message of hope for individual souls. (Dean Farrar.)
Moderation in Divine judgments
1. Gods mercy interposing on the behalf of sinners doth produce not only good wishes but real effects to them.
2. Gods mercy towards His sinful people, doth not see it fit to keep off all effects of His displeasure, or leave them altogether unpunished.
3. When a sinful people are under saddest temporal judgments, yet so long as they are in the land of the living, they are bound to reckon that their condition might have been worse if all Gods just displeasure were let out.
4. The Lords moderating of deserved judgments, if it were but to preserve a people from being utterly consumed, is a great proof of Gods mercy, and ought to be acknowledged as such.
5. It is the great mercy and advantage of the Lords sinful people that they have to do with God, not with man, in their miscarriages. (George Hutcheson.)
A fathers solicitude for the erring
A number of years ago, before any railway came into Chicago, they used to bring in the grain from the Western prairies in waggons for hundreds of miles, so as to have it shipped off by the lakes. There was a father who had a large farm out there, and who used to preach the Gospel as well as attend to his farm. One day, when church business engaged him, he sent his son to Chicago with grain. He waited and waited for his boy to return, but he did not come home. At last he could wait no longer, so he saddled his horse and rode to the place where his son had sold the grain. He found that he had been there and got the money for the grain. Then he began to fear that his boy had been murdered and robbed. At last, with the aid of a detective, he tracked him to a gambling den, where he found that he had gambled away the whole of his money. In hopes of winning it back again he had then sold the team and lost that money too. He had fallen among thieves, and, like the man who was going to Jericho, they stripped him, and then cared no more about him. What could he do? He was ashamed to go home and meet his father, and he fled. The father knew what it all meant. He knew that the boy thought he would be very angry with him. He was grieved to think that his boy should have such feelings toward him. That is just exactly like the sinner. He thinks, because he has sinned, God will have nothing to do with him. But what did that father do? Did he say, Let the boy go? No; he went after him. He arranged his business, and started after the boy. He went from town to town, from city to city. He would get the ministers to let him preach, and at the close he would tell his story. I have got a boy who is a wanderer on the face of the earth somewhere. He would describe his boy, and say: If you ever hear of him, or see him, will you not write to me? At last he found that he had gone to California, thousands of miles away. Did that father even then say, Let him go? No; off he went to the Pacific coast, seeking his boy. He went to San Francisco, and advertised in the newspapers that he would preach at such a church on such a day. When he had preached he told his story, in the hope that the boy might have seen the advertisement, and come to the church. When he had done, away under the gallery there was a young man, who waited until the audience had gone out; then he came towards the pulpit. The father looked, and saw it was his son, and he ran to him, and pressed him to his bosom. The boy wanted to confess what he had done, but not a word would the father hear. He forgave him freely, and took him to his home once more. Oh, prodigal, you may be wandering on the dark mountains of sin, but God wants you to come home! The devil has been telling you lies about God; you think He will not receive you back. I tell you He will welcome you this minute if you will come. Say I will arise, and go to my Father. There is not one whom Jesus has not sought far longer than that father. There has not been a day since you left Him but tie has followed you. I do not care what the past has been, or how black your life, He will receive you back. Arise, then, O backslider, and come home once more to your Fathers house. (D. L. Moody.)
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
Verse 8. How shall I give thee up] See Clarke on Ho 6:4, where we have similar words from similar feeling.
Mine heart is turned within me] Justice demands thy punishment; Mercy pleads for thy life. As thou changest, Justice resolves to destroy, or Mercy to save. My heart is oppressed, and I am weary with repenting – with so frequently changing my purpose. All this, though spoken after the manner of men, shows how merciful, compassionate, and loath to punish the God of heaven is. What sinner or saint upon earth has not been a subject of these gracious operations?
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
After such unparalleled abuse of infinite mercy and patience, what could be expected, but unrelenting wrath and fiercest indignation? but here is a wonder above all the rest; bowels troubled, and struggling with anger, and contesting on behalf of most inexcusable sinners. O Ephraim, thou hast deserved to be destroyed for ever, thy sins call for this, and my justice threatens it, I may do it; but my mercy interposeth, and I would rather spare in mercy than destroy injustice, there is still a debate between these two: How shall I give up to justice? saith mercy; and, How shall I not give up (saith justice) into the hands of enemies? Justice must be executed, that I must do, saith God; and mercy shall be magnified, that I will do; but how shall this be done? If I deliver thee, O Israel, to thine enemies, they will utterly destroy, and where then is mercy? If I deliver thee not, thy sins will not be chastised, and where then is justice? If I punish thee, as I punished Admah and Zeboim, with fire from heaven, I do what is just, but then I show no mercy; for these are two of the four cities which suffer the vengeance of eternal fire, of which Gen 19:24.
Mine heart is turned within me: after the manner of man God speaks; we know what it is to have a heart turned from wrath into kindness and compassions, so God speaks of himself here, and Isa 63:15; Jer 31:20.
My repentings are kindled together; still, like a compassionate man, he could wish his threats in again, his bowels are now as in a flame for them.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
8. as Admah . . . Zeboimamongthe cities, including Sodom and Gomorrah, irretrievably overthrown(De 29:23).
heart is turned withinmewith the deepest compassion, so as not to execute My threat(La 1:20; compare Gen 43:30;1Ki 3:26). So the phrase is usedof a new turn given to the feeling (Ps105:25).
repentingsGod speaksaccording to human modes of thought (Nu23:19). God’s seeming change is in accordance with Hissecret everlasting purpose of love to His people, to magnify Hisgrace after their desperate rebellion.
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? [how] shall I deliver thee,
Israel?…. That is, as usually interpreted, into the hand of the enemy, or unto wrath, ruin, and destruction; for, notwithstanding all the sins of this people before observed, and the punishment threatened to be inflicted on them, the Lord is pleased here, and in the following verses, to give some intimations of his goodness, grace, and mercy to them; not to the whole body of them, for they as such were given and delivered up to the enemy, and carried captive, and dispersed among the nations, and were never recovered to this day; but to a remnant among them, according to the election of grace, that should spring from them, for the sake of which they were not all cut off by the sword; but were reserved as a seed for later times, the times of the Messiah, which the prophecy in this and the following words has respect unto; not only the first times of the Gospel, when some of the dispersed of Israel were met with by it, and converted under it; but the last times of it; times yet to come, when all Israel shall be saved; and may be applied to the elect of God, in all ages, and of all nations, The words are generally understood as a debate in the divine mind, struggling within itself between justice and mercy; justice requiring the delivery of these persons unto it, and mercy being reluctant thereunto, pleading on their behalf; and which at last gets the victory, and rejoices against judgment. There is a truth in all this; justice seems to demand that sinners, as such, who have injured and affronted him, be given up to, him, and suffer the curse of the law, according to their deserts, and be delivered unto death, even eternal death, as well as to temporal punishments; and which might be expected would be the case, by the instances and examples of the angels that sinned, and of the men of the old world, and of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah; but mercy cannot bear it, pleads against; it, and asks how can it be done, since these are my children, my dear child, on, pleasant ones, as Ephraim was, my chosen and my covenant ones, and, besides, for whom provision is made in Christ for the satisfactions of justice? But the sense is rather this, “how might” or “could I give thee up; Ephraim? how might” or “could I deliver thee, Israel” e? that is, with what severity might I deal with thee? and how justly and righteously could I do it? since thy sins are so many, and so great;
how shall I make thee as Admah? [how] shall I set thee as Zeboim? two cities that were utterly destroyed by fire from heaven, along with Sodom and Gomorrah, De 29:23; how justly could I have made thee, and put thee in, the same condition and circumstances, as those two cities, and the inhabitants of them, who were so severely punished for their sins, and were never restored again? signifying, that inasmuch as they were guilty of the same or like heinous sins, was he utterly to destroy them, and cut them off from the face of the earth, he should not exceed the due bounds of justice. To this sense Schmidt interprets the words. The design of which is to show the greatness of Ephraim’s sins, as deserving the uttermost wrath and vengeance of God, and to magnify the riches of God’s grace in their salvation, as next expressed; and it is true of all God’s elect, who, considered as sinners in Adam, and by their own transgressions, both before and after conversion, deserved to be treated according to the rigour of justice; but God is merciful to them, according to his choice of them, covenant with them, and provision he has made in Christ, and upon the foot of his satisfaction;
mine heart is turned within me; not changed; for there is no shadow of turning with the Lord, neither in his mind and purposes, which he never turns from, nor can be turned back; nor in his affections for them; as his heart is never turned from love to hatred, so neither from hatred to love; or his love would not be from everlasting, as it is, and he rest in it as he does; but this expresses the strong motion of mercy in him towards his people, springing from his sovereign will and pleasure, and what is elsewhere signified by the troubling, soundings, and yearnings of his bowels towards them; see Jer 31:20; with which compare La 1:20;
my repentings are kindled together; not that repentance properly belongs to God, who is neither man, nor the Son of Man, that he should repent of anything, Nu 23:19; he repents not of his love to his people, nor of his choice of them, nor of his covenant with them, nor of his special gifts and grace bestowed on them; but he sometimes does what men do when they repent, he changes his outward conduct and behaviour in the dispensations of his providence, and acts the reverse of what he had done, or seemed to be about to do; as, with respect to the old world, the making of Saul king, and the case of the Ninevites, Ge 6:6; so here, though he could, and seemed as if he would, go forth in a way of strict justice, yet changes his course, and steers another way, without any change of his will. The phrase expresses the warmth and ardour of his affections to his people; how his heart burned with love to them, his bowels and inward parts were inflamed with it; from whence proceeded what is called repentance among men, as in the case of Jeremiah, Jer 20:9. The Targum is,
“the word of my covenant met me; my mercies (or bowels of mercies) were rolled together.”
e “quam juste et misere desolatum te dabo? dare jure deberem et possem?” Schmidt. So Luther and Tarnovius.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
They deserved to be utterly destroyed for this, and would have been if the compassion of God had not prevented it. With this turn a transition is made in Hos 11:8 from threatening to promise. Hos 11:8. “How could I give thee up, O Ephraim! surrender thee, O Israel! how could I give thee up like Admah, make thee like Zeboim! My heart has changed within me, my compassion is excited all at once. Hos 11:9. I will not execute the burning heat of my wrath, I will not destroy Ephraim again: for I am God, and not man, the Holy One in the midst of thee: and come not into burning wrath.” “How thoroughly could I give thee up!” sc. if I were to punish thy rebellion as it deserved. Nathan , to surrender to the power of the enemy, like miggen in Gen 14:20. And not that alone, but I could utterly destroy thee, like Admah and Zeboim, the two cities of the valley of Siddim, which were destroyed by fire from heaven along with Sodom and Gomorrha. Compare Deu 29:22, where Admah and Zeboim are expressly mentioned along with the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha, which stand alone in Gen 19:24. With evident reference to this passage, in which Moses threatens idolatrous Israel with the same punishment, Hosea simply mentions the last two as quite sufficient for his purpose, whereas Sodom and Gomorrha are generally mentioned in other passages (Jer 49:18; cf. Mat 10:15; Luk 10:12). The promise that God will show compassion is appended here, without any adversative particle. My heart has turned, changed in me ( , lit., upon or with me, as in the similar phrases in 1Sa 25:36; Jer 8:18). , in a body have my feelings of compassion gathered themselves together, i.e., my whole compassion is excited. Compare Gen 43:30 and 1Ki 3:26, where, instead of the abstract nichumm , we find the more definite rachamm , the bowels as the seat of the emotions. , to carry out wrath, to execute it as judgment (as in 1Sa 28:18). In the expression , I will not return to destroy, may be explained from the previous . After the heart of God has changed, it will not return to wrath, to destroy Ephraim; for Jehovah is God, who does not alter His purposes like a man (cf. 1Sa 15:29; Num 23:19; Mal 3:6), and He shows Himself in Israel as the Holy One, i.e., the absolutely pure and perfect one, in whom there is no alternation of light and darkness, and therefore no variableness in His decrees (see at Exo 19:6; Isa 6:3). The difficult expression cannot mean “into a city,” although it is so rendered by the ancient versions, the Rabbins, and many Christian expositors; for we cannot attach any meaning to the words “I do not come into a city” at all in harmony with the context. signifies here aestus irae , the heat of wrath, from , effervescere , just as in Jer 15:8 it signifies the heat of alarm and anxiety, aestus animi .
Fuente: Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament
| The Divine Forbearance. | B. C. 730. |
8 How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I deliver thee, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboim? mine heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled together. 9 I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger, I will not return to destroy Ephraim: for I am God, and not man; the Holy One in the midst of thee: and I will not enter into the city. 10 They shall walk after the LORD: he shall roar like a lion: when he shall roar, then the children shall tremble from the west. 11 They shall tremble as a bird out of Egypt, and as a dove out of the land of Assyria: and I will place them in their houses, saith the LORD. 12 Ephraim compasseth me about with lies, and the house of Israel with deceit: but Judah yet ruleth with God, and is faithful with the saints.
In these verses we have,
I. God’s wonderful backwardness to destroy Israel (Hos 11:8; Hos 11:9): How shall I give thee up? Here observe,
1. God’s gracious debate within himself concerning Israel’s case, a debate between justice and mercy, in which victory plainly inclines to mercy’s side. Be astonished, O heavens! at this, and wonder, O earth! at the glory of God’s goodness. Not that there are any such struggles in God as there are in us, or that he is ever fluctuating or unresolved; no, he is in one mind, and knows it; but they are expressions after the manner of men, designed to show what severity the sin of Israel had deserved, and yet how divine grace would be glorified in sparing them notwithstanding. The connexion of this with what goes before is very surprising; it was said of Israel (v. 7) that they were bent to backslide from God, that though they were called to him they would not exalt him, upon which, one would think, it should have followed, “Now I am determined to destroy them, and never show them mercy any more.” No, such is the sovereignty of mercy, such the freeness, the fulness, of divine grace, that it follows immediately, How shall I give thee up? See here, (1.) The proposals that justice makes concerning Israel, the suggestion of which is here implied. Let Ephraim be given up, as an incorrigible son is given up to be disinherited, as an incurable patient is given over by his physician. Let him be given up to ruin. Let Israel be delivered into the enemy’s hand, as a lamb to the lion to be torn in pieces; let them be made as Admah and set as Zeboim, the two cities that with Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by fire and brimstone rained from heaven upon them; let them be utterly and irreparably ruined, and be made as like these cities in desolation as they have been in sin. Let that curse which is written in the law be executed upon them, that the whole land shall be brimstone and salt, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboim, Deut. xxix. 23. Ephraim and Israel deserve to be thus abandoned, and God will do them no wrong if he deal thus with them. (2.) The opposition that mercy makes to these proposals: How shall I do it? As the tender father reasons with himself, “How can I cast off my untoward son? for he is my son, though he be untoward; how can I find in my heart to do it?” Thus, “Ephraim has been a dear son, a pleasant child: How can I do it? He is ripe for ruin; judgments stand ready to seize him; there wants nothing but giving him up, but I cannot do it. They have been a people near unto me; there are yet some good among them; theirs are the children of the covenant; if they be ruined, the enemy will triumph; it may be they will yet repent and reform; and therefore how can I do it?” Note, The God of heaven is slow to anger, and is especially loth to abandon a people to utter ruin that have been in special relation to him. See how mercy works upon the mention of those severe proceedings: My heart is turned within me, as we say, Our heart fails us, when we come to do a thing that is against the grain with us. God speaks as if he were conscious to himself of a strange striving of affections in compassion to Israel: as Lam. i. 20, My bowels are troubled; my heart is turned within me. As it follows here, My repentings are kindled together. His bowels yearned towards them, and his soul was grieved for their sin and misery, Judg. x. 16. Compare Jer. xxxi. 20. Since I spoke against him my bowels are troubled for him. When God was to give up his Son to be a sacrifice for sin, and a Saviour for sinners, he did not say, How shall I give him up? No, he spared not his own Son; it pleased the Lord to bruise him; and therefore God spared not him, that he might spare us. But this is only the language of the day of his patience; when men have sinned that away, and the great day of his wrath comes, then no difficulty is made of it; nay, I will laugh at their calamity.
2. His gracious determination of this debate. After a long contest mercy in the issue rejoices against judgment, has the last word, and carries the day, v. 9. It is decreed that the reprieve shall be lengthened out yet longer, and I will not now execute the fierceness of my anger, though I am angry; though they shall not go altogether unpunished, yet he will mitigate the sentence and abate the rigour of it. He will show himself to be justly angry, but not implacably so; they shall be corrected, but not consumed. I will not return to destroy Ephraim; the judgments that have been inflicted shall not be repeated, shall not go so deep as they have deserved. He will not return to destroy, as soldiers, when they have pillaged a town once, return a second time, to take more, as when what the palmer-worm has left the locust has eaten. It is added, in the close of the verse, “I will not enter into the city, into Samaria, or any other of their cities; I will not enter into them as an enemy, utterly to destroy them, and lay them waste, as I did the cities of Admah and Zeboim.”
3. The ground and reason of this determination: For I am God and not man, the Holy One of Israel. To encourage them, to hope that they shall find mercy, consider, (1.) What he is in himself: He is God, and not man, as in other things, so in pardoning sin and sparing sinners. If they had offended a man like themselves, he would not, he could not have borne it; his passion would have overpowered his compassion, and he would have executed the fierceness of his anger; but I am God, and not man. He is Lord of his anger, whereas men’s anger commonly lords it over them. If an earthly prince were in such a strait between justice and mercy, he would be at a loss how to compromise the matter between them; but he who is God, and not man, knows how to find out an expedient to secure the honour of his justice and yet advance the honour of his mercy. Man’s compassions are nothing in comparison with the tender mercies of our God, whose thoughts and ways, in receiving returning sinners, are as much above ours as heaven is above the earth, Isa. lv. 9. Note, It is a great encouragement to our hope in God’s mercies to remember that he is God, and not man. He is the Holy One. One would think this were a reason why he should reject such a provoking people. No; God knows how to spare and pardon poor sinners, not only without any reproach to his holiness, but very much to the honour of it, as he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and therein declares his righteousness, now Christ has purchased the pardon and he has promised it. (2.) What he is to them; he is the Holy One in the midst of thee; his holiness is engaged for the good of his church, and even in this corrupt and degenerate land and age there were some that gave thanks at the remembrance of his holiness, and he required of them all to be holy as he is, Lev. xix. 2. As long as we have the Holy One in the midst of us we are safe and well; but woe to us when he leaves us! Note, Those who submit to the influence may take the comfort of God’s holiness.
II. Here is his wonderful forwardness to do good for Israel, which appears in this, that he will qualify them to receive the good he designs for them (Hos 11:10; Hos 11:11): They shall walk after the Lord. This respects the same favour with that (ch. iii. 5), They shall return, and seek the Lord their God; it is spoken of the ten tribes, and had its accomplishment, in part, in the return of some of them with those of the two tribes in Ezra’s time; but it had its more full accomplishment in God’s spiritual Israel, the gospel-church, brought together and incorporated by the gospel of Christ. The ancient Jews referred it to the time of the Messiah; the learned Dr. Pocock looks upon it as a prophecy of Christ’s coming to preach the gospel to the dispersed children of Israel, the children of God that were scattered abroad. And then observe, 1. How they were to be called and brought together: The Lord shall roar like a lion. The word of the Lord (so says the Chaldee) shall be as a lion that roars. Christ is called the lion of the tribe of Judah, and his gospel, in the beginning of it, was the voice of one crying in the wilderness. When Christ cried with a loud voice it was as when a lion roared, Rev. x. 3. The voice of the gospel was heard afar, as the roaring of a lion, and it was a mighty voice. See Joel iii. 16. 2. What impression this call should make upon them, such an impression as the roaring of a lion makes upon all the beasts of the forest: When he shall roar then the children shall tremble. See Amos iii. 8, The lion has roared; the Lord God has spoken; and then who will not fear? When those whose hearts the gospel reached trembled, and were astonished, and cried out, What shall we do?–when they were by it put upon working out their salvation, and worshipping God with fear and trembling, then this promise was fulfilled. The children shall tremble from the west. The dispersed Jews were carried eastward, to Assyria and Babylon, and those that returned came from the east; therefore this seems to have reference to the calling of the Gentiles that lay westward from Canaan, for that way especially the gospel spread. They shall tremble; they shall move and come with trembling, with care and haste, from the west, from the nations that lay that way, to the mountain of the Lord (Isa. ii. 3), to the gospel-Jerusalem, upon hearing the alarm of the gospel. The apostle speaks of mighty signs and wonders that were wrought by the preaching of the gospel from Jerusalem round about to Illyricum, Rom. xv. 19. Then the children trembled from the west. And, whereas Israel after the flesh was dispersed in Egypt and Assyria, it is promised that they shall be effectually summoned thence (v. 11): They shall tremble; they shall come trembling, and with all haste, as a bird upon the wing, out of Egypt, and as a dove out of the land of Assyria; a dove is noted for swift and constant flight, especially when she flies to her windows, which the flocking of Jews and Gentiles to the church is here compared to, as it is Isa. lx. 8. Wherever those are that belong to the election of grace–east, west, north, or south–they shall hear the joyful sound, and be wrought upon by it; those of Egypt and Assyria shall come together; those that lay most remote from each other shall meet in Christ, and be incorporated in the church. Of the uniting of Egypt and Assyria, it was prophesied, Isa. xix. 23. 3. What effect these impressions should have upon them. Being moved with fear, they shall flee to the ark: They shall walk after the Lord, after the service of the Lord (so the Chaldee); they shall take the Lord Christ for their leader and commander; they shall enlist themselves under him as the captain of their salvation, and give up themselves to the direction of the Spirit as their guide by the word; they shall leave all to follow Christ, as becomes disciples. Note, Our holy trembling at the word of Christ will draw us to him, not drive us from him. When he roars like a lion the slaves tremble and flee from him, the children tremble and flee to him. 4. What entertainment they shall meet with at their return (v. 11): I will place them in their houses (all those that come at the gospel-call shall have a place and a name in the gospel-church, in the particular churches which are their houses, to which they pertain; they shall dwell in God, and be at home in him, both easy and safe, as a man in his own house; they shall have mansions, for there are many in our Father’s house), in his tabernacle on earth and his temple in heaven, in everlasting habitations, which may be called their houses, for they are the lot they shall stand in at the end of the days.
III. Here is a sad complaint of the treachery of Ephraim and Israel, which may be an intimation that it is not Israel after the flesh, but the spiritual Israel, to whom the foregoing promises belong, for as for this Ephraim, this Israel, they compass God about with lies and deceit; all their services of him, when they pretended to compass his altar, were feigned and hypocritical; when they surrounded him with their prayers and praises, every one having a petition to present to him, they lied to him with their mouth and flattered him with their tongue; their pretensions were so fair, and yet their intentions so foul, that they would, if possible, have imposed upon God himself. Their professions and promises were all a cheat, and yet with these they thought to compass God about, to enclose him as it were, to keep him among them, and prevent his leaving them.
IV. Here is a pleasant commendation of the integrity of the two tribes, which they held fast, and this comes in as an aggravation of the perfidiousness of the ten tribes, and a reason why God had that mercy in store for Judah which he had not for Israel (Hos 1:6; Hos 1:7), for Judah yet rules with God and is faithful with the saints, or with the Most Holy. 1. Judah rules with God, that is, he serves God, and the service of God is not only true liberty and freedom, but it is dignity and dominion. Judah rules, that is, the princes and governors of Judah rule with God; they use their power for him, for his honour, and the support of his interest. Those rule with God that rule in the fear of God (2 Sam. xxiii. 3), and it is their honour to do so, and their praise shall be of God, as Judah’s here is. Judah is Israel–a prince with God. 2. He is faithful with the holy God, keeps close to his worship and to his saints, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whose steps they faithfully tread in. They walk in the way of good men; and those that do so rule with God, they have a mighty interest in Heaven. Judah yet does thus, which intimates that the time would come when Judah also would revolt and degenerate. Note, When we see how many there are that compass God about with lies and deceit it may be a comfort to us to think that God has his remnant that cleave to him with purpose of heart, and are faithful to his saints; and for those who are thus faithful unto death is reserved a crown of life, when hypocrites and all liars shall have their portion without.
Fuente: Matthew Henry’s Whole Bible Commentary
Here God consults what he would do with the people: and first, indeed, he shows that it was his purpose to execute vengeance, such as the Israelites deserved, even wholly to destroy them: but yet he assumes the character of one deliberating, that none might think that he hastily fell into anger, or that, being soon excited by excessive fury, he devoted to ruin those who had lightly sinned, or were guilty of no great crimes. That no one then might assign to God an anger too fervid, he says here, How shall I set thee aside, Ephraim? How shall I deliver thee up, Israel? How shall I set thee as Sodom? By these expressions God shows what the Israelites deserved, and that he was now inclined to inflict the punishment of which they were worthy and yet not without repentance, or at least not without hesitation. He afterwards adds in the next clause, This I will not do; my heart is within me changed; I now alter my purpose, and my repenting are brought back again; that is it was in my mind to destroy you all, but now a repenting, which reverses that design, lays hold on me. We now apprehend what the Prophet means.
As to this mode of speaking, it appears indeed at the first glance to be strange that God should make himself like mortals in changing his purposes and in exhibiting himself as wavering. God, we know, is subject to no passions; and we know that no change takes place in him. What then do these expressions mean, by which he appears to be changeable? Doubtless he accommodates himself to our ignorances whenever he puts on a character foreign to himself. And this consideration exposes the folly as well as the impiety of those who bring forward single words to show that God is, as it were like mortals; as those unreasonable men do who at this day seek to overturn the eternal providence of God, and to blot out that election by which he makes a difference between men. “O!” they say, “God is sincere, and he has said that he willeth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should be converted and live.” God must then in this case remain as it were uncertain, and depend on the free-will of every one: it is hence in the power of man either to procure destruction to himself, or to come to salvation. God must in the meantime wait quietly as to what men will do, and can determine nothing except through their free-will. While these insane men thus trifle, they think themselves to be supported by this invincible reason, that God’s will is one and simple. But if the will of God be one, it does not hence follow that he does not accommodate himself to men, and put on a character foreign to himself, as much as a regard for our salvation will bear or require. So it is in this place. God does not in vain introduce himself as being uncertain; for we hence learn that he is not carried away too suddenly to inflict punishment, even when men in various ways provoke his vengeance. This then is what God shows by this mode of speaking. At the same time, we know that what he will do is certain, and that his decree depends not on the free-will of men; for he is not ignorant of what we shall do. God then does not deliberate as to himself, but with reference to men. This is one thing.
But we must also bear in mind what I have already said, that the Prophet here strikes with terror proud and profane despisers by setting before their eyes their own destruction, and by showing how little short they were of the lot of Gomorra and other cities. “For what remains,” the Lord says, “but that I should set you as Sodom and Zeboim? This condition and this recompense awaits you, if I execute the judgement which has been already as it were decreed.” Not that God would immediately do this; but he only reminds the Israelites of what they deserved, and of what would happen to them, except the Lord dealt mercifully with them. Thus much of the first part of the verse.
But when he says that his heart was changed, and that his repentings were brought back again, the same mode of speaking after the manner of men is adopted; for we know that these feelings belong not to God; he cannot be touched with repentance, and his heart cannot undergo changes. To imagine such a thing would be impiety. But the design is to show, that if he dealt with the people of Israel as they deserved, they would now be made like Sodom and Gomorra. But as God was merciful, and embraced his people with paternal affection, he could not forget that he was a Father, but would be willing to grant pardon; as is the case with a father, who, on seeing his son’s wicked disposition, suddenly feels a strong displeasure, and then, being seized with relenting, is inclined to spare him. God then declares that he would thus deal with his people.
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
(8) In the depth of despair the prophet delivers himself of one of the most pathetic passages in Hebrew prophecy. On the darkest cloud gleams the bow of promise. A nation so much beloved as Israel cannot be destroyed by Him who has fostered it so tenderly. As the prophet loved his faithless bride, so Jehovah continued to love His people. The how? of this verse expresses the most extreme reluctance. Admah and Zeboim were cities of the plain destroyed with Sodom and Gomorrah, which are often referred to as the type of irremediable catastrophe. (Comp. Isa. 1:9; Isa. 13:19; Mat. 10:15.)
Mine heart is turned within me.Better, against mea violent revulsion of feeling. Divine compassion pleads with Divine justice.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
‘How shall I give you up, Ephraim?
How shall I cast you off, Israel?
How shall I make you as Admah?
How shall I set you as Zeboiim?
My heart is turned within me,
My compassions are kindled together.’
YHWH’s response is a cry from the heart. How could He give up Ephraim, how could He cast off Israel? How could He do to them what He had done to the cities of the plain Admah and Zeboiim whom, along with Sodom and Gomorrah He had destroyed with fire? For this latter see Deu 29:23; Gen 10:19; Gen 14:2-8 with Gen 19:24-25; Gen 19:29. This response was the result of the fact that ‘His heart had turned within Him’. That is, He had ‘changed His mind and purpose’ with regard to final destruction (as opposed to temporary chastisement) and intended at some time to show mercy. And this was because instead of His anger being kindled, it was His compassionate heart that was being kindled to show compassion to His people. But it was a compassion that could only be revealed once Israel had learned its lesson. He could not just overlook what they had done. It was just that because of His very nature as God and not man, and as the Holy and unique One, His judgment was not to be seen as absolutely final.
This cry from the heart of God reveals God’s continual quandary. He longs to show mercy and forgive, but He cannot do so unless it is accompanied by men repenting and turning from their sin. The love of God does not exclude the judgment of God, for God is also ‘Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all’ (1Jn 1:5). Those who would experience His love must first come to His light. God cannot lower His standards however great His love.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
Assurances of God’s Mercy
v. 8. How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? v. 9. I will not execute the fierceness of Mine anger, v. 10. They, v. 11. They shall tremble as a bird out of Egypt,
Fuente: The Popular Commentary on the Bible by Kretzmann
Hos 11:8. How shall I give thee up? &c. The mercy of the Almighty is here pathetically represented as contending with his justice; to shew that he does not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men. Admah and Zeboim were two cities involved in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. We may read, How shall I deliver thee up, Israel? and instead of repentingsrelentings.
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
Reader! pause over those precious words, and ponder well their gracious meaning. Admah and Zeboim, were the cities the Lord destroyed with Sodom and Gomorrah. Deu 29:23 . Now, as the inhabitants of those cities merited punishment, so did Ephraim and Israel, considered in themselves. For, as the Apostle justly reasons upon another occasion, the same doctrine holds equally good here. Are we then better than they? Rom 3:9-20 . But the Lord refers their salvation into himself, and his own unchangeable nature, and unchangeable purposes in Christ. This is the most blessed of all doctrines, and the most gracious to our poor fallen nature. Oh! for grace, to refer all the glory, and all the praise, where alone it is due. The Lord hath himself provided a remedy in the blood and righteousness of his dear Son; and in his own faithful and unchangeable covenant promises, and in the great plan of redemption hath secured the everlasting salvation of his people.
Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Hos 11:8 How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? [how] shall I deliver thee, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? [how] shall I set thee as Zeboim? mine heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled together.
Ver. 8. How shall I give thee up, Ephraim ] Here beginneth the second part of this chapter, full of many sweet evangelical promises, and here, if ever, mercy rejoiceth against judgment, or treadeth on the very neck of it, as St James’s word importeth, Jas 2:18 , from ( cervix ). The Lord seemeth here to be at a stand, or at strife with himself, about the destruction of this people fore warning; which well might have been a guff to swallow them up, and a grave to bury them in for ever, being most worthy to perish, as were the cities which God destroyed in his wrath, Gen 19:23-25 . Howbeit God in the bowels of his mercy yearning and taking pity of his elect among them (for he had reserved seven thousand hidden ones that had not bowed their knees to Baal), spareth to lay upon them the extremity of his wrath, and is ready to save them for his mercy’s sake. Hear how father-like he melts over them:
How should I expose thee, O Ephraim? how should I deliver thee up, O Israel? How should I dispose thee as Admah? how should I set thee as Zeboim] q.d. Justice requires that I should lay thee utterly waste, and even rain down hell from heaven upon thee, as once upon Sodom and her sisters. But mercy interposeth her four “hows” (in the original two only expressed, but the other two necessarily understood, and by interpreters fitly supplied), for such pathetic interrogations as the like are not to be found in the whole book of God, and not to be answered by any but God himself; as indeed he doth to each particular in the following words: “My heart is turned within me,” that is the first answer; the second, “My repentings are kindled together”; the third, “I will not execute the fierceness of my wrath”; the fourth, “I will not return to destroy Ephraim.” And why? First, “I am God and not man”; secondly, the “Holy One in the midst of thee.”
My heart is turned, or turneth itself, within me
Repentings are kindled together
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
NASB (UPDATED) TEXT: Hos 11:8-11
8How can I give you up, O Ephraim?
How can I surrender you, O Israel?
How can I make you like Admah?
How can I treat you like Zeboiim?
My heart is turned over within Me,
All My compassions are kindled.
9I will not execute My fierce anger;
I will not destroy Ephraim again.
For I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst,
And I will not come in wrath.
10They will walk after the LORD,
He will roar like a lion; Indeed He will roar
And His sons will come trembling from the west.
11They will come trembling like birds from Egypt
And like doves from the land of Assyria;
And I will settle them in their houses, declares the LORD.
Hos 11:8 How can I give you up The heart of YHWH is breaking (cf. third set of parallel lines in this verse, cf. Hos 6:4) as His rebellious child turns away from a loyal loving parent. In the OT a child like this could be stoned to death (cf. Deu 21:18-21). How or where do justice and love meet?
How can I surrender you This VERB (BDB 171, KB 545, Piel IMPERFECT) means to deliver up or give over. This word is used only three times in the OT and only in Gen 14:20 with a similar meaning.
Admah. . .Zeboiim These are cities of the Plain were identified and destroyed for their wickedness along with Sodom and Gomorrah (cf. Gen 10:19; Gen 19:24-25; Deu 29:23). They no longer existed; God must judge Israel, but not to extinction.
My heart is turned over within Me This VERB (BDB 245, KB 253, Niphal PERFECT) is the general word for to turn or overturn. It is used to describe God’s overthrow of the cities of the Plain (alluded to in the previous two parallel lines of Hos 11:8) in Gen 19:21; Gen 19:25; Gen 19:29; Deu 29:22. It is not that God has changed His anger toward Israel’s sin and rebellion, but that His love and mercy will provide a future salvation. This is the essence of the new covenant of Jer 31:31-34; Eze 36:22-38, which is based on the character of God, the work of the Messiah, and the wooing of the Spirit, not human performance of an external code. God has changed His ways of dealing with fallen humanity (cf. a second possible meaning of the VERB, TEV, NIV, NET Bible).
All My compassions are kindled This term for compassions (BDB 637) is used in only three places in the OT, Isa 57:18; Zec 1:13; and here. The VERB kindled (BDB 485, KB 481, Niphal PERFECT) means to grow warm or tender, and was originally used of heating fruit in the ground to ripen it (e.g., Gen 43:30; 1Ki 3:26; and here).
Hos 11:9 I will not execute My fierce anger The CONSTRUCT fierce anger (BDB 354 and 60) is also found in Hos 8:5 (e.g., Exo 32:12 at the golden calf of Aaron; Num 25:4 at Israel’s idolatry at Shittim; Num 32:13-15 at Israel’s lack of faith about entering the Promised Land; Jos 7:26 at Achan’s sin at Ai; Deu 13:17 at idolatry of a city and many more).
I will not destroy Ephraim again God chooses to have mercy (cf. Jer 26:3). But this does not mean that they were not punished (cf. Hos 11:10 a; Jer 30:11).
For I am God This is the name El (BDB 42 II). See Special Topic: Names for Deity .
not man This should go without saying (cf. Num 23:19; 1Sa 15:29; Job 9:32), but in our day the physicalness of God is asserted as the model of image and likeness in Gen 1:26-27. God is spirit! God is holy (this context is the only place in Hosea that this characteristic is attributed to YHWH, cf. Hos 11:12).
the Holy One in your midst This (BDB 899, 872) is similar in meaning to the term, Immanuel which means God with us (BDB 769, cf Isa 6:12; Isa 7:14). The Bible begins with God and humans in a garden (cf. Genesis 1-2) together and ends with God and humans in a garden together (cf. Revelation 21-22). The essence of biblical faith is God and His highest creation in fellowship, not only spiritually but physically. Humans were created for fellowship with God (cf. Gen 1:26-27). There was never meant to be a transcendent and immanent distinction. Only human sin caused the need!
NASBAnd I will not come in wrath
NKJVAnd I will not come in terror
NRSV
(footnote)I will not enter the city
TEV, NJBI will not come to you in anger
This ambiguous Hebrew phrase can be understood in several ways depending on the Hebrew root:
1. to burn or to consume (BDB 128)
2. to remove or to destroy (BDB 128)
3. with plus agitation or wrath (BDB 786)
4. MT, and I will not enter the city (VERB BDB 97, OBJECT BDB 746 II), which would link it to Hos 8:14; Hos 10:14, YHWH’s presence demanded judgment
Hos 11:10 He will roar like a lion Roar here does not refer to an act of violence on the part of a wild animal, but a parent calling her little ones home.
And His sons will come trembling from the west There may be a word sound play between YHWH’s fierce anger (BDB 354) and they will come trembling (BDB 353, KB 350, Qal IMPERFECT, used twice, cf. Hos 10:11). This term is used (1) in Gen 42:28 at fear over an act of God; (2) in 1Sa 10:4 at fearful respect of God’s prophet; and (3) in 1Sa 21:1 as fear in the presence of King David. The ADJECTIVE is used of awe and reverence at God’s word in Isa 66:2; Ezr 9:4; Ezr 10:3.
The direction of the coming west (literally the sea) is surprising since Assyria is to the east. Some scholars see Hos 11:10-11 as a return from three directions (i.e., from everywhere, cf. Isa 11:11-12).
1. the islands and coast land at Palestine, Hos 11:10
2. Egypt, Hos 11:11
3. Assyria, Hos 11:11
Hos 11:11 They will come. . .from Egypt. . .from the land of Assyria Many Jews fled Egypt during the Babylonian invasion and exile. God will bring His people home!
I will settle them in their houses This is a reference to one of the promises of God mentioned in the cursing and blessing section of Deuteronomy 27, 28.
Fuente: You Can Understand the Bible: Study Guide Commentary Series by Bob Utley
How . . . ? Figures of speech Erotesis and Pathopoeia. App-6.
Admah . . . Zeboim. Reference to Pentateuch (Gen 10:19; Gen 14:2, Gen 14:8. Deu 29:23). App-92. These places are not mentioned elsewhere.
repentings = compassions.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
repentings
(See Scofield “Zec 8:14”).
Fuente: Scofield Reference Bible Notes
How shall I give: Hos 6:4, Jer 9:7, Lam 3:33, Mat 23:37, Luk 19:41, Luk 19:42
Admah: Gen 14:8, Gen 19:24, Gen 19:25, Deu 29:23, Isa 1:9, Isa 1:10, Amo 4:11, Zep 2:9, 2Pe 2:6, Jud 1:7, Rev 11:8, Rev 18:18
Mine: Deu 32:36, Jdg 10:16, 2Sa 24:16, 2Ki 13:23, Psa 106:45, Isa 63:15, Jer 3:12, Jer 31:20, Amo 7:3, Amo 7:6
heart: Lam 1:20
Reciprocal: Gen 6:6 – repented Gen 10:19 – Sodom Gen 14:2 – Admah Gen 19:29 – that God Gen 43:30 – his bowels Jdg 2:18 – it repented Jdg 21:6 – repented them 1Sa 13:18 – Zeboim 1Ki 3:26 – her bowels 2Ch 30:1 – Ephraim 2Ch 36:15 – because Job 35:15 – in great Psa 90:13 – let it Psa 135:14 – he will repent Son 6:12 – soul Isa 12:1 – though Isa 16:11 – my Isa 30:18 – wait Isa 64:5 – in those Jer 3:19 – How Jer 5:7 – How shall Jer 18:8 – I will Jer 20:16 – as Jer 31:18 – Ephraim Jer 42:10 – for I Jer 50:40 – General Lam 3:32 – General Eze 16:46 – her daughters Eze 18:23 – I any Eze 33:11 – I have Hos 3:1 – according Joe 2:18 – and pity Jon 4:2 – thou art Mic 5:3 – give Zec 1:14 – I am Mat 7:11 – how Mat 18:27 – moved Luk 15:20 – But Luk 17:29 – General Luk 20:13 – What Luk 22:61 – looked Luk 24:47 – beginning Heb 4:15 – we have
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Hos 11:8, The gist of this verse is a lamentation of the Lord over the unfaithfulness of His people. He regrets that he will need to give them up and deliver them into the hands of a foreign nation for punishment. Admah and Zeboim were two of the cities that were destroyed in the days of Lot (Gen 14:2; Gen 19:25). It does not mean that Israel was to be literally destroyed as were those cities, but the rejection was to be as certain. Turned means changed or reversed; repentings means compassion or leniency; kindled means to contract or be reduced. The sentence denotes that Gods attitude is changed toward the people of Israel because of their unfaithfulness.
Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary
Hos 11:8-9. How shall I give thee up, Ephraim To utter destruction? Gods mercy is here pathetically described as contending with his justice, to show that he does not willingly destroy, or even afflict, or grieve, the children of men, Lam 3:33. How shall I make thee as Admah? &c. How shall I give thee up to a perpetual desolation? Admah and Zeboim were two cities which were wholly destroyed, together with Sodom and Gomorrah. My heart is turned within me Or, upon me; so Horsley. My repentings are kindled together Not that God is ever fluctuating or unresolved; but these are expressions after the manner of men, to show what severity Israel had deserved, and yet how divine grace would be glorified in sparing them. Thus Gods compassion toward sinners is elsewhere expressed by the sounding, or yearning, of his bowels, Isa 63:15; Jer 31:20; a metaphor taken from the natural affection which parents have for their children. I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger I will not punish to the utmost strictness of justice; I will not return to destroy Ephraim I will not carry it so far as to make a second destruction of Ephraim; so as to cut off those who escaped the first infliction of my punishments, and thereby wholly destroy them. Conquerors, that plunder a conquered city, carry away the wealth of it, and, after some time, often return to burn it. God will not thus utterly destroy Israel. For I am God, and not man Therefore my compassions fail not; the Holy One in the midst of thee A holy God, and in covenant, though not with all, yet with many among you, and present with you to preserve a remnant to be my faithful servants. And I will not enter into the city As an enraged enemy to destroy your cities, as I did Sodom.
Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
11:8 {f} How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? [how] shall I deliver thee, Israel? how shall I make thee as {g} Admah? [how] shall I set thee as Zeboim? mine heart is turned within me, {h} my repentings are kindled together.
(f) God considers with himself, and that with a certain grief, how to punish them.
(g) Which were two of the cities that were destroyed with Sodom; De 29:23 .
(h) Meaning that his love with which he first loved them positioned him between doubt and assurance in terms of what to do: and in this appears his Fatherly affection, that his mercy toward his own will overcome his judgments, as he declares in the next verse.
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes
B. Another assurance of restoration 11:8-11
As previously, a series of messages assuring Israel’s judgment (Hos 6:4 to Hos 11:7) ends with assurance of future restoration. God would definitely bring devastating judgment on Israel, but His compassion for the nation and His promises to the patriarchs required final blessing after the discipline (cf. Deu 4:25-31).
"These verses are like a window into the heart of God. They show that his love for his people is a love that will never let them go." [Note: Ibid.," p. 214.]
Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)
The Lord asked four rhetorical questions that reveal how hard it was for Him to turn Israel over to an enemy for punishment. They are strong expressions of divine emotion, specifically, love for His chosen people. Admah and Zeboiim were cities that God annihilated along with Sodom and Gomorrah (cf. Gen 10:19; Gen 14:2; Gen 14:8; Deu 29:23). God could not bring Himself to deal with the cities of Israel as He had with those towns. He would not totally destroy them. His heart of judgment was turned upside down into a heart of compassion. All His compassion flamed up in Him as judgment emotions had done before.
"Israel will not be completely ’overturned’ as the cities mentioned here; rather, there will be an ’overturning,’ that is, a change, in Yahweh’s heart." [Note: Wolff, p. 201.]
Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)
11; Hos 2:1-23; Hos 3:1-5
THE SIN AGAINST LOVE
Hos 1:1-11; Hos 2:1-23; Hos 3:1-5; Hos 4:11 ff.; Hos 9:10 ff.; Hos 11:8 f.
The Love of God is a terrible thing-that is the last lesson of the Book of Hosea. “My God will cast them away.” {Hos 10:1-15}
“My God”-let us remember the right which Hosea had to use these words. Of all the prophets he was the first to break into the full aspect of the Divine Mercy to learn and to proclaim that God is Love. But he was worthy to do so, by the patient love of his own heart towards another who for years had outraged all his trust and tenderness. He had loved, believed and been betrayed; pardoned and waited and yearned, and sorrowed and pardoned again. It is in this long-suffering that his breast beats upon the breast of God with the cry “My God.” As He had loved Gomer, so had God loved Israel, past hope, against hate, through ages of ingratitude and apostasy. Quivering with his own pain, Hosea has exhausted all human care and affection for figures to express the Divine tenderness, and he declares Gods love to be deeper than all the passion of men, and broader than all their patience: “How can I give thee up, Ephraim? How can I let thee go, Israel? I will not execute the fierceness of Mine anger. For I am God, and not man.” And yet, like poor human affection, this Love of God, too, confesses its failure-“My God shall cast them away.” It is Gods sentence of relinquishment upon those who sin against His Love, but the poor human lips which deliver it quiver with an agony of their own, and here, as more explicitly in twenty other passages of the book, declare it to be equally, the doom of those who outrage the love of their fellow men and women.
We have heard it said: “The lives of men are never the same after they have loved; if they are not better, they must be worse.” “Be afraid of the love that loves you: it is either your heaven or your hell.” “All the discipline of men springs from their love-if they take it not so, then all their sorrow must spring from the same source.” “There is a depth of sorrow, which can only be known to a soul that has loved the most perfect thing and beholds itself fallen.” These things are true of the Love, both of our brother and of our God. And the eternal interest of the life of Hosea is that he learned how, for strength and weakness, for better or for worse, our human and our Divine loves are inseparably joined.
I.
Most men learn that love is inseparable from pain where Hosea learned it-at home. There it is that we are all reminded that when love is strongest she feels her weakness most. For the anguish which love must bear, as it were from the foundation of the world, is the contradiction at her heart between the largeness of her wishes and the littleness of her power to realize them. A mother feels it, bending over the bed of her child, when its body is racked with pain or its breath spent with coughing. So great is the feeling of her love that it ought to do something, that she will actually feel herself cruel because nothing can be done. Let the sick-bed become the beach of death, and she must feel the helplessness and the anguish still more as the dear life is now plucked from her and now tossed back by the mocking waves, and then drawn slowly out to sea upon the ebb from which there is no returning.
But the pain which disease and death thus cause to love is nothing to the agony that sin inflicts when he takes the game into his unclean hands. We know what pain love brings, if our love be a fair face and a fresh body in which Death brands his sores while we stand by, as if with arms bound. But what if our love be a childlike heart, and a frank expression and honest eyes, and a clean and clever mind. Our powerlessness is just as great and infinitely more tormented when sin comes by and casts his shadow over these. Ah, that is Loves greatest torment when her children, who have run from her to the bosom of sin, look back and their eyes are changed! That is the greatest torment of Love-to pour herself without avail into one of those careless natures which seem capacious and receptive, yet never fill with love, for there is a crack and a leak at the bottom of them. The fields where Love suffers her sorest defeats are not the sick-bed and not deaths margin, not the cold lips and sealed eyes kissed without response; but the changed eyes of children, and the breaking of the “full-orbed face,” and the darkening look of growing sons and daughters, and the home the first time the unclean laugh breaks across it. To watch, though unable to soothe, a dear body racked with pain, is peace beside the awful vigil of watching a soul shrink and blacken with vice, and your love unable to redeem it.
Such a clinical study Hosea endured for years. The prophet of God, we are told, brought a dead child to life by taking him in his arms and kissing him. But Hosea with all his love could not make Gomer a true, whole wife again. Love had no power on this woman-no power even at the merciful call to make all things new. Hosea, who had once placed all hope in tenderness, had to admit that Loves moral power is not absolute. Love may retire defeated from the highest issues of life. Sin may conquer Love.
Yet it is in this his triumph that Sin must feel the ultimate revenge. When a man has conquered this weak thing, and beaten her down beneath his feet, God speaks the sentence of abandonment.
There is enough of the whipped dog in all of us to make us dread penalty when we come into conflict with the strong things of life. But it takes us all our days to learn that there is far more condemnation to them who offend the weak things of life, and particularly the weakest of all, its love. It was on sins against the weak that Christ passed His sternest judgments: “Woe unto him that offends one of these little ones; it were better for him that he had never been born.” Gods little ones are not only little children, but all things which, like little children, have only love for their strength. They are pure and loving men and women-men with no weapon but their love, women with no shield but their trust. They are the innocent affections of our own hearts-the memories of our childhood, the ideals of our youth, the prayers of our parents, the faith in us of our friends. These are the little ones of whom Christ spake, that he who sins against them had better never have been born. Often may the dear solicitudes of home, a fathers counsels, a mothers prayers, seem foolish things against the challenges of a world calling us to play the man and do as it does; often may the vows and enthusiasms of boyhood seem impertinent against the temptations which are so necessary to manhood: yet let us be true to the weak, for if we betray them, we betray our own souls. We may sin against law and maim or mutilate ourselves, but to sin against love is to be cast out of life altogether. He who violates the purity of the love with which God has filled his heart, he who abuses the love God has sent to meet him in his opening manhood, he who slights any of the affections, whether they be of man or woman, of young or of old, which God lays upon us as the most powerful redemptive forces of our life, next to that of His dear Son-he sinneth against his own soul, and it is of such that Hosea spake: “My God will cast them away.”
We talk of breaking law: we can only break ourselves against it. But if we sin against Love, we do destroy her: we take from her the power to redeem and sanctify us. Though in their youth men think Love a quick and careless thing-a servant always at their side, a winged messenger easy of dispatch-let them know that every time they send her on an evil errand she returns with heavier feet and broken wings. When they make her a pander they kill her outright. When she is no more they waken to that which Gomer came to know, that love abused is love lost, and love lost means Hell.
II
This, however, is only the margin from which Hosea beholds an abandonment still deeper. All that has been said of human love and the penalty of outraging it is equally true of the Divine love and the sin against that.
The love of God has the same weakness which we have seen in the love of man. It, too, may fail to redeem; it, too, has stood defeated on some of the highest moral battle-fields of life. God Himself has suffered anguish and rejection from sinful men. “Herein,” says a theologian, “is the mystery of this love that God can never by His Almighty Power compel that which is the very highest gift in the life of His creatures-love to Himself, but that He receives it as the free gift of His creatures, and that He is only able to allow men to give it to Him in a free act of their own will.” So Hosea also has told us how God does not compel, but allure or “woo,” the sinful back to Himself. And it is the deepest anguish of the prophets heart, that this free grace of God may fail through mans apathy or insincerity. The anguish appears in those frequent antitheses in which his torn heart reflects herself in the style of his discourse. “I have redeemed them-yet they have spoken lies against Me. {Hos 7:13} I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness-they went to Baal-Peor. {Hos 9:10} When Israel was a child, then I loved him but they sacrificed to Baalim. {Hos 11:1-2} I taught Ephraim to walk, but they knew not that I healed them. {Hos 9:4} How can I give thee up, Ephraim? how can I let thee go, O Israel? Ephraim compasseth Me with lies, and the house of Israel with deceit.” {Hos 11:8; Hos 12:1}
We fear to apply all that we know of the weakness of human love to the love of God. Yet though He be God and not man, it was as man He commended His love to us. He came nearest us, not in the thunders of Sinai, but in Him Who presented Himself to the world with the caresses of a little child; who met men with no angelic majesty or heavenly aureole, but whom when we saw we found nothing that we should desire Him, His visage was so marred more than any man, and his form than the sons of men; Who came to His own and His own received Him not; Who, having loved His own that were in the world, loved them up to the end, and yet at the end was by them deserted and betrayed, -it is of Him that Hosea prophetically says: “I drew them with cords of a man and with bands of love.”
We are not bound to God by any unbreakable chain. The strands which draw us upwards to God, to holiness and everlasting life, have the weakness of those which bind us to the earthly souls we love. It is possible for us to break them. We love Christ, not because He has compelled us by any magic, irresistible influence to do so; but, as John in his great simplicity says, “We love Him because He first loved us.”
Now this is surely the terror of Gods love-that it can be resisted; that even as it is manifest in Jesus Christ we men have the power, not only to remain as so many do, outside its scope, feeling it to be far-off and vague, but having tasted it to fall away from it, having realized it to refuse it, having allowed it to begin its moral purposes in our lives to baffle and nullify these; to make the glory of Heaven absolutely ineffectual in our own characters; and to give our Savior the anguish of rejection.
Give Him the anguish, yet pass upon ourselves the doom! For, as I read the New Testament, the one unpardonable sin is the sin against our Blessed Redeemers Love as it is brought home to the heart by the power of the Holy Spirit. Every other sin is forgiven to men but to crucify afresh Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. The most terrible of His judgments is “the wail of a heart wounded because its love has been despised”: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem! how often would I have gathered thy children as a hen gathereth her chickens, and ye would not. Behold your house is left unto you desolate!”
Men say they cannot believe in hell, because they cannot conceive how God may sentence men to misery for the breaking of laws they were born without power to keep. And one would agree with the inference if God had done any such thing. But for them which are under the law and the sentence of death, Christ died once for all that He might redeem them. Yet this does not make a hell less believable. When we see how Almighty was that Love of God in Christ Jesus, lifting our whole race and sending them forward with a freedom and a power of growth nothing else in history has won for them; when we prove again how weak it is, so that it is possible for millions of characters that have felt it to refuse its eternal influence for the sake of some base and transient passion; nay, when I myself know this power and this weakness of Christs love, so that one day being loyal I am raised beyond the reach of fear and of doubt, beyond the desire of sin and the habit of evil, and the next day finds me capable of putting it aside in preference for some slight enjoyment or ambition-then I know the peril and the terror of this love, that it may be to a man either Heaven or Hell.
Believe then in hell, because you believe in the Love of God-not in a hell to which God condemns men of His will and pleasure, but a hell into which men cast themselves from the very face of His love in Jesus Christ. The place has been painted as a place of fires. But when we contemplate that men come to it with the holiest flames in their nature quenched, we shall justly feel that it is rather a dreary waste of ash and cinder, strewn with snow-some ribbed and frosty Arctic zone, silent in death, for there is no life there, and there is no life there because there is no Love, and no Love because men, in rejecting or abusing her, have slain their own power ever again to feel her presence.