Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 10:5

"The inhabitants of Samaria shall be in terror for the calves of Beth-aven; for the people thereof shall mourn over it, and the priests thereof that rejoiced over it, for the glory thereof, because it is departed from it." — Hosea 10:5 (ASV)

The inhabitants of Samaria shall fear because of—(that is, for) the calves of Beth-aven. He calls them in this place “cow-calves,” perhaps to denote their weakness and helplessness. So far from their idol being able to help “them, they” will be anxious and troubled for their idols, for fear that these should be taken captive from them. The “Bethel (House of God)” of the patriarch Jacob was now turned into “Bethaven, the house of vanity.” This, from its old sacred memories, was a more celebrated place of the calf-worship than Dan. Hosea then gives to the calf of Bethel its precedence, and ranks both idols under its one name, as “calves of the house of vanity.”

For the people thereof shall mourn over it—They had set up the idols instead of God; so God calls them no longer His people, but “the people of the calf” whom they had chosen for their god, just as Moab was called the people of Chemosh (Numbers 21:29), its idol. They had joyed in it, not in God; now they, “its people” and its priests, would “mourn over” it, when it was unable to help itself, much less them. Both their joy and their sorrow showed that they were without excuse, that they had gone willingly after the king’s commandment, serving it of their own free will out of love, not out of fear of the king, and serving God purely neither out of love nor fear.

For the glory thereof, because it is departed from it—The true glory of Israel was God; the Glory of God is in Himself. “The glory of the calves,” for whom Ephraim had exchanged their God, was something quite external to them: the gold of which they were made and the rich offerings made to them. Both together became an occasion of their being carried captive. They mourned, not because they had offended God by their sin, but for the loss of that dumb idol, whose worship had been their sin and which had brought these heavy woes upon them. Impenitent even under chastisement! The prophet does not mention any grief for “the despoiling of their country, the burning of their cities, the slaughter of their people, their shame.” One only thing he names as moving them.

Even then their one chief anxiety was not that God had departed from them, but that their calf—in which they had set their “glory,” on which they so frantically relied, on which they had lavished their substance, their national distinction and disgrace—was gone. Without the grace of God, people mourn not their sins, but their idols.