Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 12:5

"even Jehovah, the God of hosts; Jehovah is his memorial [name]." — Hosea 12:5 (ASV)

Even the Lord God of Hosts, the Lord is His memorial - The word, here translated and written "Lord," is the special and, so to speak, the proper Name of God, that which He gave to Himself, and which declares His Being. God Himself authoritatively explained its meaning. When Moses inquired of Him what he should say to Israel if they asked him, "What is the Name of the God of their fathers?"—the God who, Moses was to tell them, had sent him to them—God said, I Am That I Am...

Thus you shall say, "I Am" (EHYeH) "has sent me to you." And God said again to Moses, "Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, The Lord" (literally, He is, YeHeWeH) "God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This is My Name forever, and this is My memorial to all generations" (Exodus 3:13–15).

"I am" expresses self-existence: He who alone is. "I am that I am" expresses His unchangeableness, the necessary attribute of the Self-existent, who, since He is, always is all that He is.

"To Be," says Augustine, "is a name of unchangeableness. For all things which are changed, cease to be what they were, and begin to be what they were not. True Being, pure Being, genuine Being, no one has, except He who does not change. He has Being to whom it is said, You will change them and they will be changed, but You are the Same.

What is "I am that I am," if not "I am Eternal"? What is "I am that I am," except "I cannot be changed"?

No creature, no heaven, no earth, no angel, "nor Power, nor Throne, nor Dominion, nor Principality." This then being the name of eternity, it is somewhat more than He granted to him as a name of mercy, "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." "That," He is in Himself; "this," to us.

If He willed only to be That which He is in Himself, what would we be? Since Moses understood, when it was said to him, "I am that I am," and "He who is has sent me to you," he believed that this meant much to people; he saw that this was far removed from them.

For "whoever has understood, as one ought, That which is, and which truly is, and, in whatever degree, has even transiently, as by a lightning flash, been irradiated by the light of the One True Essence, sees himself far below, in the utmost distance of removal and unlikeness."

This, the Self-existent, the Unchangeable, was the meaning of God’s ancient Name, by which He was known to the patriarchs, although they had not actually seen His unchangeableness, for theirs was a life of faith, hoping for what they did not see.

The word "He is," when used of Him by His creatures, expresses the same thing that He says of Himself, "I AM." This He willed to be "His memorial forever." This is the way in which He willed that we should believe in Him and think of Him as He who is, the Self-existing, the Self-Same.

The way of pronouncing that Name is lost. The belief has continued, wherever the Lord is named, for by "the Lord" we mean the Unchangeable God. That belief is contradicted whenever people use the name "Jehovah" to speak of God as though the belief in Him under the Old Testament differed from that of the New Testament.

Perhaps God allowed the pronunciation to be lost so that people might not become so familiar with it, as they do with the word "Jehovah," or use it irreverently and in an anti-Christian manner, as some now use other ways of pronouncing it. The Jews, even before the time of our Lord, ordinarily ceased to pronounce it.

In the translations of the Old Testament, and in the Apocrypha, the words "the Lord" were substituted for it. Jewish tradition states that in later times the Name was pronounced in the temple only, by the priests, when pronouncing the blessing commanded by God in the law.

On the great Day of Atonement, it was said that the high priest pronounced it ten times, and that when the people heard it, they fell on their faces, saying, "Blessed be the glorious name of His kingdom forever and ever."

They say, however, that in the time of Simeon the Just (that is, Jaddua who died about 322 B.C.), the high priests themselves stopped using it, for fear that it might be pronounced by some irreverent person.

Our Lord Himself sanctioned the disuse of it (as did the inspired Apostles yet more frequently), since, in quoting places of the Old Testament in which it occurs, He uses instead of it the name "the Lord." It stands, throughout the Old Testament, as the Name which speaks of God in relation to His people: that He always is. And, since He always is, then He is unchangeably to us all that He ever was, "The Same, yesterday and today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8).

He then who appeared to Jacob, and who, in Jacob, spoke to all the posterity of Jacob, was God. This was true whether it was (as almost all the early fathers thought) God the Son, who thus appeared in human form to the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, and in the time of the Judges, under the name of "the Angel of the Lord," or whether it was the Father.

God Almighty thus accustomed humanity to see the form of Man, and to know and believe that it was God. It was He, the prophet explains, "the Lord"—that is, the Self-existent, the Unchangeable, "Who was, and is and is to come" (Revelation 1:4, 1:8)—who alone is, and from whom are all things, "the Fullness of Being, both of His own, and of all His creatures, the boundless Ocean of all which is, of wisdom, of glory, of love, of all good."

The Lord of Hosts - that is, of all things visible and invisible, of the angels and heavenly spirits, and of all things animate and inanimate, which, in the history of the Creation, are called "the host of heaven and earth" (Genesis 2:1), the one host of God. This was the way in which He willed to be kept in mind, thought of, remembered.

On the one hand then, concerning Ephraim’s sin, He did not will to be represented to people’s minds or thoughts by the calves, nor by any other created thing. On the other hand, concerning God’s mercies, since He who revealed Himself to Jacob was the unchangeable God, Israel had no cause to fear if he returned to the faith of Jacob, whom God there accepted. From this it follows: