Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 1

The word of the Lord, that came to Hosea - Hosea, at the very beginning of his prophecy, declares that all this, which he delivered, came, not from his own mind but from God. As Paul says, Paul an Apostle, not of men neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father. He refers all to God, and claims all obedience to Him. That word came to him; it had existed before in the mind of God. It was first God’s, then it became the prophet’s, receiving it from God. So it is said, the word of God came to John (Luke 3:2).

Hosea - that is, “Salvation, or, the Lord saves.” The prophet bore the name of our Lord Jesus, whom he foretold and of whom he was a type. “Son of Beeri, that is, my well or welling-forth.” God ordained that the name of his father too should signify truth. From God, as from the fountain of life, Hosea drew the living waters, which he poured out to the people. With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation (Isaiah 12:3).

In the days of Uzziah ... - Hosea, although a prophet of Israel, marks his prophecy by the names of the kings of Judah, because the kingdom of Judah was the kingdom of the theocracy, the line of David to which the promises of God were made. As Elisha, to whose office he succeeded, turned away from Jehoram (2 Kings 3:13–14), saying, get thee to the prophets of thy father, and to the prophets of thy mother, and acknowledged Jehoshaphat king of Judah only, so, in the title of his prophecy, Hosea at once expresses that the kingdom of Judah alone was legitimate.

He adds the name of Jeroboam, partly as the last king of Israel whom, by virtue of His promise to Jehu, God helped; partly to show that God never left Israel unwarned. Jeroboam I was warned first by the prophet (1 Kings 13), who by his own untimely death, as well as in his prophecy, was a witness to the strictness of God’s judgments, and then by Ahijah (1 Kings 14); Baasha by Jehu, son of Hanani (1 Kings 16); Ahab by Elijah and Micaiah son of Imla; Ahaziah by Elijah (2 Kings 1); Jehoram by Elisha, who exercised his office until the days of Joash (2 Kings 13:14).

So, in the days of Jeroboam II, God raised up Hosea, Amos and Jonah. “The kings and people of Israel then were without excuse, since God never ceased to send His prophets among them; in no reign did the voice of the prophets fail, warning of the coming wrath of God, until it came.” While Jeroboam was recovering for Israel a larger rule than it had ever had since it separated from Judah, annexing to it Damascus (2 Kings 14:28) which had been lost to Judah even in the days of Solomon, and from which Israel had recently so greatly suffered, Hosea was sent to forewarn it of its destruction.

God alone could utter “such a voice of thunder out of the midst of such a cloudless sky.” Jeroboam doubtless thought that his house would, through its own strength, survive the period which God had pledged to it.

“But temporal prosperity is no proof either of stability or of the favor of God. Where the law of God is observed, there, even amid the pressure of outward calamity, is the assurance of ultimate prosperity. Where God is disobeyed, there is the pledge of coming destruction. The seasons when men feel most secure against future chastisement are often the preludes of the most signal revolutions.”

The beginning of the word of the Lord by Hosea or in Hosea - God first revealed Himself and His mysteries to the prophet’s soul by His secret inspiration, and then declared through him to others what He had deposited in him. God enlightened him, and then others through the light in him.

And the Lord said to Hosea - For this thing was to be done by Hosea alone, because God had commanded it, not by others of their own mind. To Isaiah God first revealed Himself as sitting in the temple, adored by the Seraphim; to Ezekiel God first appeared as enthroned above the cherubim in the holy of holies; to Jeremiah God announced that, before he was born, He had sanctified him for this office; to Hosea He enjoined, as the beginning of his prophetic office, an act contrary to man’s natural feelings, yet one by which he became an image of the Redeemer, uniting to Himself what was unholy, in order to make it holy.

Go take to yourself - Since Hosea prophesied some eighty years, he must now have been in early youth, holy, pure, as befitted a prophet of God. Being called so early, he had doubtless been formed by God as a chosen instrument of His will and had, like Samuel, from his first childhood, been trained in true piety and holiness.

Yet he was to unite to himself, as long as she lived, one greatly defiled, in order to win her by this to purity and holiness. In this, he was a little likeness of our Blessed Lord, who, in the Virgin’s womb, to save us, espoused our flesh (in us sinful, in Him all-holy, without motion to sin) and, further, espoused the Church, formed of us who, whether Jews or Gentiles, were all under sin, aliens from God and gone away from Him, serving divers lusts and passions, to make it a glorious Church, without spot or wrinkle (Ephesians 5:27).

A wife of whoredoms - That is, take as a wife one who up to that time had again and again been guilty of that sin. So men of bloods (Psalms 5:6) are “men given up to bloodshedding”; and our Lord was a Man of Sorrows (Isaiah 53:3), not occasional only, but manifold and continual, throughout His whole life. She must, then, amid the manifold corruption of Israel, have been repeatedly guilty of that sin, perhaps as an idolatress, thinking it to be in honor of their foul gods (see notes on Hosea 4:13 and Hosea 4:14).

She was not like those degraded ones who cease to bear children; still, she must have sinned in many ways. So much the greater was the obedience of the prophet. Nor could any other woman so shadow forth the manifold defilements of the human race, whose nature our incarnate Lord vouchsafed to unite in His own person to the perfect holiness of the divine nature.

And children of whoredoms - For they shared the disgrace of their mother, although born in lawful marriage. The sins of parents also descend, in a mysterious way, on their children; sin is contagious and, unless the entail is cut off by grace, hereditary. The mother in this respect portrays man’s revolts before his union with God; the children, our forsaking of God after we have been made His children.

The forefathers of Israel, God tells them, served other gods, on the other side of the flood (Joshua 24:14)—that is, in Ur of the Chaldees, from where God called Abraham—and in Egypt. It was out of such defilement that God took her (Ezekiel 23:3, Ezekiel 23:8), and He says, Thou becamest Mine (Ezekiel 16:8). Whom He makes His, He makes pure; and of her, not such as she was in herself by nature, but as He made her, He says, I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals when thou wentest after Me, in the wilderness (Jeremiah 2:2).

But she soon fell away; and from then on there were among them (as there are now among Christians) the children of God, the children of the promise, and the children of whoredoms, or of the devil.

For the land ... - This is the reason why God commands Hosea to do this thing, in order to shadow out their foulness and God’s mercy. What no man would dare to do (Jeremiah 3:1), except at God’s bidding, God in a manner does, restoring to union with Himself those who had gone away from Him. The land, that is, Israel, and indirectly, Judah also, and, more widely yet, the whole earth.

Departing from - Literally, “from after the Lord.” Our whole life should be, forgetting the things which are behind (Philippians 3:13), to follow after Him, whom here we can never fully attain, God in His Infinite Perfection, yet so as, with our whole heart, fully to follow after Him.

To depart from the Creator and to serve the creature is adultery; as the Psalmist says, Thou hast destroyed all them, that go a whoring from Thee (Psalms 73:27). He who seeks anything outside of God, turns from following Him, and takes to himself something else as his god, is unfaithful, and spiritually an adulterer and idolater. For he is an adulterer who becomes another’s rather than God’s.

So he went - He did not hesitate, nor excuse himself, as did Moses (Exodus 4:18), Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:6), or Peter (Acts 10:4), who were rebuked for it, although mercifully by the All-Merciful. Hosea, accustomed from childhood to obey God and every indication of God's will, immediately did what he was commanded, however repulsive to natural feeling. By this, he became all the more an image of the obedience of Christ Jesus, and a pattern for us to both believe and obey God’s commands, however little they appeal to our own understanding.

Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim - “Gomer” is completion; “Diblaim” is a double lump of figs, which are a symbol of sweetness. These names may mean that “the sweetness of sins is the parent of destruction,” or that Israel, or mankind, had completely forsaken God and were children of corrupting pleasure.

Holy Scripture records that all this was done, and tells us the births and names of the children, as real history. Therefore, we must receive it as such. We must not imagine things to be unworthy of God because they do not appeal to us. God does not dispense with the moral law, because the moral law has its source in the mind of God Himself. To dispense with it would be to contradict Himself.

But God, who is the absolute Lord of all things that He made, may, at His sovereign will, dispose of the lives or things that He created. Thus, as Sovereign Judge, He commanded the lives of the Canaanites to be taken away by Israel, just as, in His ordinary providence, He has ordained that the magistrate should not bear the sword in vain, but has made him His minister, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil (Romans 13:4). So, again, He to whom all things belong, willed to repay the Israelites for their hard and unjust servitude by commanding them to spoil the Egyptian (Exodus 3:22).

He who created marriage commanded Hosea whom he should marry. The prophet was not defiled by taking as his lawful wife, at God’s command, one who was defiled, however hard this was. “He who remains good is not defiled by coming in contact with one evil; but the evil, following his example, is turned into good.” But through his simple obedience, he foreshadowed Him, God the Word, who was called the friend of publicans and sinners (Matthew 11:19); who warned the Pharisees that the publicans and harlots should enter unto the kingdom of God before them (Matthew 21:31); and who now graciously condescends to espouse, dwell in, and unite Himself with, and so to sanctify, our sinful souls.

The acts that God commanded the prophets, and which seem strange to us, must have had an impressiveness for the people in proportion to their strangeness. The life of the prophet became a sermon to the people. Sight impresses more than words.

The prophet, being in his own person a mirror of obedience, also, by his way of life, reflected to the people some likeness of the future and of things unseen. The expectation of the people was heightened when they saw their prophets do things at God’s command which they themselves could not have done.

For example, when Ezekiel was commanded to show no sign of mourning on the sudden death of the desire of his eyes, his wife (Ezekiel 24:16–18); or when he dug through the wall of his house and carried out his belongings in the twilight with his face covered (Ezekiel 12:3–7); the people asked, Wilt thou not tell us what these things are to us, that thou doest so? (Ezekiel 24:19).

No words could so express a grief beyond all power of grieving as Ezekiel’s mute grief for one who was known to be the desire of his eyes, yet for whom he was forbidden to show the natural expressions of grief or to use the customary tokens of mourning.

God Himself declares that the reason for such acts was that, rebellious as the house of Israel was (Ezekiel 12:2), with eyes which saw not, and ears which heard not, they might yet consider such acts as these.

Call his name Jezreel - that is, in its first sense here, "God will scatter." The life of the prophet, and his union with one so unworthy of him, were a continued prophecy of God’s mercy. The names of the children were a life-long admonition of His intervening judgments. Since Israel refused to hear God’s words, He made the prophet’s sons, through the mere fact of their presence among them, their going out and coming in, and the names which He gave them, to be preachers to the people. He depicted in them and in their names what was to be, in order that, whenever they saw or heard of them, His warnings might be forced upon them, and those who would take warning might be saved.

If, with their mother’s disgrace, these sons inherited and copied their mother’s sins, then their names became even more expressive: that, being as they were, they would be scattered by God, would not be owned by God as His people, or be pitied by Him.

I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu - Yet Jehu shed this blood—the blood of the house of Ahab, of Joram and Jezebel, and the seventy sons of Ahab—at God’s command and in fulfillment of His will. How was it then sin?

Because, if we do what is the will of God for any end of our own, for anything except God, we do, in fact, our own will, not God’s. It was not lawful for Jehu to depose and slay the king his master, except at the command of God, who, as the Supreme King, sets up and puts down earthly rulers as He wills. For any other end, and done otherwise than at God’s express command, such an act is sin.

Jehu was rewarded for the measure in which he fulfilled God’s commands, just as Ahab, who had sold himself to work wickedness, yet received a temporal reward for humbling himself publicly when rebuked by God for his sin, and so honoring God amid an apostate people. But Jehu, by cleaving, against the will of God, to Jeroboam’s sin, which served his own political ends, showed that, in the slaughter of his master, he did not act, as he pretended, out of zeal (2 Kings 10:16) for the will of God, but served his own will and his own ambition only.

By his disobedience to the one command of God, he showed that he would have equally disobeyed the other, had it been contrary to his own will or interest. He had no principle of obedience. And so the blood, which was shed according to the righteous judgment of God, became sin to him who shed it in order to fulfill, not the will of God, but his own.

Thus God said to Baasha, I exalted thee out of the dust, and made the prince over My people Israel (1 Kings 16:2), which he became by slaying his master, the son of Jeroboam, and all the house of Jeroboam. Yet, because he followed the sins of Jeroboam, the word of the Lord came against Baasha, for all the evil that he did in the sight of the Lord, in being like the house of Jeroboam, and because he killed him (1 Kings 16:7).

The two courses of action were inconsistent: to destroy the son and the house of Jeroboam, and to do those things for which God condemned him to be destroyed. Furthermore, not only was such execution of God’s judgments itself an offense against Almighty God, but it was sin by which he condemned himself and made his other sins to be sins against the light. In executing the judgment of God against another, he pronounced His judgment against himself, in that he who judged, in God’s stead, did the same things (Romans 2:1). So awful a thing is it to be the instrument of God in punishing or reproving others, if we do not, by His grace, keep our own hearts and hands pure from sin.

And will cause to cease the kingdom of the house of Israel - Not the kingdom of the house of Jehu, but all Israel. God had promised that the family of Jehu should sit on the throne to the fourth generation. Jeroboam II, the third of these, was now reigning over Israel in the fullness of his might.

He restored the coast of Israel from the entering of Hamath (2 Kings 14:25)—that is, from the northern extremity near Mount Hermon, where Palestine joins Syria (and which Solomon only in all his glory had won for Israel)—unto the sea of the plain (the Dead Sea) (2 Chronicles 8:3–4), regaining all that Hazael had conquered (2 Kings 10:32–33) and even subduing Moab (see the note at Amos 6:14), according to the word of the Lord by Jonah the son of Amittan.

He had recovered for Israel Damascus, which had been lost to Judah since the close of the reign of Solomon (1 Kings 11:24). He was a warlike prince, like that first Jeroboam, who had formed the strength and the sin of the ten tribes.

Yet both his house and his kingdom fell with him. The whole history of that kingdom afterward is little more than that of the murder of one family by another, such as is spoken of in the later chapters of Hosea; and Israel, that is, the ten tribes, were finally carried captive, fifty years after the death of Zechariah, Jeroboam’s son. Of so little account is any seeming prosperity or strength.

I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel - The valley of Jezreel is a beautiful and broad valley or plain, stretching from west to east, from Mount Carmel and the sea to the Jordan, which it reaches through two arms, between the Mountains of Gilboa, Little Hermon, and Tabor; and from south to north from the Mountains of Ephraim to those of Galilee. Nazareth lay on its northern side. It is called “the great plain” and “the great plain of Esdraelon” . There God had notably executed His judgments against the enemies of His people, or on His people when they became His enemies. There He gave the great victories over the invading hosts of Sisera (Judges 4:4 and following) and of Midian, with the children of the East (Judges 6:33).

There also He ended the life and kingdom of Saul (1 Samuel 29:1; 1 Samuel 31:1, 1 Samuel 31:7, 1 Samuel 31:10), visiting upon him, when his measure of iniquity was full, his years of defiance, and his persecution of David, whom God had chosen.

Jezreel became a royal residence of the house of Ahab (1 Kings 18:46; 1 Kings 21:1–3; 2 Kings 9:10, 2 Kings 9:25, 2 Kings 9:30; 2 Kings 10:1, 2 Kings 10:11).

There, in the scenes of Ahab’s wickedness and of Jehu’s hypocritical zeal; there, where Jehu drove furiously to avenge, as he alleged, on the house of Ahab the innocent blood which Ahab had shed in Jezreel, Hosea foretells that the kingdom of Israel would be broken. In the same plain, at the battle with Shalmaneser near Betharbel (see the note at Hosea 10:14), Hosea lived to see his prophecy fulfilled.

The strength of the kingdom was there finally broken; the sufferings there endured were one last warning before the capture of Samaria (see the note at Hosea 10:15).

The name of Jezreel blends the sins with the punishment. It resembles, in form and in sound, the name of Israel, and contains a reversal of the promise contained in the name of Israel, in which they trusted. “Yisrael” (as their name was originally pronounced) signifies, “he is a prince with God”; Yidsreel, “God shall scatter.” They who, while they followed the faith for which their forefather Jacob received from God the name of Israel, had been truly Israel, that is, “princes with God,” should now be “Yidsreel,” “scattered by God.”