Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 10:14

"Therefore shall a tumult arise among thy people, and all thy fortresses shall be destroyed, as Shalman destroyed Beth-arbel in the day of battle: the mother was dashed in pieces with her children." — Hosea 10:14 (ASV)

Therefore a tumult shall arise among your people—literally, “peoples.” Such was the immediate fruit of departing from God and trusting in human beings and idols. They trusted in their own might and the multitude of their people. That power would, through internal division and anarchy, become their destruction.

As in the dislocated state of the Roman Empire under the first emperors, so in Israel, the successive usurpers arose out of their armies, armies, “the multitude of their mighty ones,” in whom they trusted. The “confused noise” of “war” would first “arise in” the midst of their own “peoples.”

They are spoken of not as one, but as many—“peoples,” not, as God willed them to be, one people. For they had no principle of oneness or stability, having no legitimate succession of either kings or priests, as they had made kings, but not through God. Each successor had the same right as his predecessor—the right of might—and provided an example, precedent, and sanction for the murderer of himself or of his son.

All your fortresses shall be spoiled—literally, “the whole of your fortresses shall be wasted.” He speaks of the whole as one. Their fenced cities, which cut off all approach, would become one waste. They had forsaken God, their fortress and deliverer, and so He gave up their fortresses to the enemy, so that all and each of them were laid waste. The confusion, begun among themselves, prepared for destruction by the enemy. Of this he gives one awful type.

As Shalman spoiled (or wasted) Beth-Arbel in the day of battle— “Shalman” is, no doubt, “Shalmaneser king of Assyria,” who came up against Hoshea early in his reign, and he became a servant to him and brought him a present (2 Kings 17:3). “Shalman” being the characteristic part of the name, the prophet probably omitted the rest for the sake of rhythm. “Beth-Arbel” is a city that the Greeks, similarly retaining only the latter and characteristic half of the name, called Arbela.

Of the several cities called Arbela, the one celebrated in Grecian history was part of the Assyrian empire. Two others—one “in the mountain-district of Pella,” and so on the east side of Jordan, the other between Sepphoris and Tiberias (and so in Naphtali)—must, together with the countries in which they lay, have fallen into the hands of the Assyrians in the reign of “Tiglath-pileser,” who took—Gilead and Galilee, all the land of Naphtali (2 Kings 15:29), in the reign of Pekah.

The whole country east of Jordan, being now in the hands of Shalmaneser, his natural approach to Samaria was over the Jordan, through the valley or plain of Jezreel. Here was the chief wealth of Israel and the most suitable field for the Assyrian horse.

Over the Jordan then, from where Israel itself came when obedient to God, from where came the earlier instruments of God’s chastisements, undoubtedly came the host of Shalmaneser, along the “great plain” of Esdraelon. “In that plain” also lay an “Arbela,” “nine miles from Legion.”

Legion itself was at the western extremity of the plain, as Scythopolis or Bethshean lay at the east.

It was about fifteen miles west of Nazareth, and ten miles from Jezreel. Beth-Arbel must accordingly have lain somewhere in the middle of the valley of Jezreel. Near this Arbela, then, Israel must have sustained a decisive defeat from Shalmaneser. For the prophet does not say only that he spoiled Beth-Arbel, but that he did this in a day of battle. Here Hosea, probably in the last years of his life, saw the fulfillment of his own earlier prophecy: God brake the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel (Hosea 1:5).

The mother was dashed to pieces on the children—It was an aggravation of this barbarity that first the infants were dashed against the stones before their mother’s eyes, then the mothers themselves were dashed upon them. Syrians (2 Kings 8:12), Assyrians, Medes (Isaiah 13:16), Babylonians (Psalms 137:8–9) used this barbarity. India has borne witness to us recently how pagan nature remains the same.

It may be that in the name “Betharbel,” the prophet alludes to the name “Bethel.” As “Betharbel” (i.e., “the house,” or perhaps the idolatrous “temple of Arbel”) did not rescue the city, but was rather the cause of its destruction, so too would it be for Bethel.

The holy places of Israel, the memorials of the free love of God to their forefathers, were pledges to “them,” the children of those forefathers, that as long as they continued in the faith of their fathers, God the Unchangeable would continue those same mercies to them.

When they “turned” Bethel, “the house of God,” into Bethaven, “house of vanity,” then it became, like Betharbel (literally, “house of ambush of God”), the scene and occasion of their desolation.