Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 11:2

"The more [the prophets] called them, the more they went from them: they sacrificed unto the Baalim, and burned incense to graven images." — Hosea 11:2 (ASV)

As they called them, so they went from them - The prophet changes his tone, no longer speaking of that one first call of God to Israel as a whole, by which He brought out Israel as one man, His one son; which one call he obeyed. Here he speaks of God’s manifold calls to the people, throughout their whole history, which they as often disobeyed, and not only disobeyed, but went in the opposite direction. “They called them.” Whether God employed Moses, or the judges, or priests, or kings, or prophets, to call them, it made no difference. Whenever or by whomever they were called, they turned away in the opposite direction, to serve their idols.

They proportioned and fitted, as it were, their disobedience to God’s long-suffering: “Then chiefly they threw off obedience, despised their admonitions, and worked themselves up the more frantically to a zeal for the sin which they had begun.” “They,” God’s messengers, “called; so,” in like manner, “they went away from them. They sacrificed to Baalim,” that is, their many Baals, in which they cherished idolatry, cruelty, and fleshly sin: So “when Christ came and called them in many ways, as in the great day of the feast, If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink, the more diligently He called them, the more diligently they went away from Him, and returned to their idols, to the love and possession of riches and houses and pleasures, for the sake of which they despised the truth.”