Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 12:11

"Is Gilead iniquity? they are altogether false; in Gilgal they sacrifice bullocks; yea, their altars are as heaps in the furrows of the field." — Hosea 12:11 (ASV)

Is there iniquity in Gilead? - The prophet asks the question in order to answer it the more peremptorily. He raises the doubt in order to crush it the more impressively. Is there iniquity in Gilead? Alas, there was nothing else. Surely they are vanity, or, strictly, "they have become merely vanity." As he said before, they become abominations like their love. “For such as men make their idols, or conceive their God to be, such they become themselves.”

“As then one who worships God with a pure heart is made like God, so those who worship stocks and stones, or who make passions and lusts their idols, lose the mind of men and become like the beasts which perish.” In Gilgal they have sacrificed oxen. "Gilead" represents all the country on its side, east of the Jordan; "Gilgal," all on its side, west of the Jordan. In both, God had notably shown His mercies; in both, they dishonored God, sacrificing to idols, and offering His creatures as a gift to devils.

Yea, their altars are as heaps in the furrows of the field - Their altars are like the heaps of stones that men clear from plowed land to prepare it for cultivation, as numerous, as profuse, as worthless, as desolate.

“Their” altars they were, not God’s. They did (as sinners do) in the service of devils what, if they had done it to God, would have been accepted, rewarded service.

Very often they sacrificed oxen; they put great ceremony into their religion; they omitted nothing that would give it an empty show of worship. They multiplied their altars, their sins, their ruins; many altars in opposition to His one altar: “rude heaps of stones, in His sight; and such they should become, no one stone being left in order upon another.”

In contrast with their sins and ingratitude, the prophet exhibits two pictures: one, of the virtues of the patriarch whose name they bore and from whom their race began; the other, of God’s love to them in that beginning of their national existence, when God brought those who had been a body of slaves in Egypt to be His own people.