Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 13

When Ephraim spoke trembling - that is, probably, "there was 'trembling'": "Ephraim was once very awe-inspiring, so that, while he spoke, the rest of the tribes were ready to tremble." The prophet contrasts two conditions of Ephraim, of prosperity and destruction. His prosperity he owed to the undeserved mercy of God, who blessed him for Joseph’s sake; his destruction, to his own sin. There is no period recorded "when Ephraim spoke trembling," that is, in humility. Pride was his characteristic, almost as soon as he had a separate existence as a tribe (see the note at Hosea 5:5). Under Joshua, it could not manifest itself, for Ephraim gained honor when Joshua, one of themselves, became the captain of the Lord’s people. Under the Judges, their pride appeared. Yet God tested them by giving them their hearts’ desire.

They longed to be exalted, and He satisfied them, if by this means they would serve Him. They had the chief power and were a "terror" to Judah. "He exalted himself," (or perhaps "he was exalted") "in Israel; but when he offended in Baal he died;" literally, "and he offended in Baal and died."

He abused the goodness of God; his sin followed as a consequence of God’s goodness to him. God raised him, and he offended. The alliance with a king of Tyre and Sidon, which brought in the worship of Baal, was a part of the worldly policy of the kings of Israel (1 Kings 16:31, see Introduction). As if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, he took to wife the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Zidonians, and went and served Baal and worshiped him. The twenty-two years of Ahab’s reign established the worship. The prophets of Baal became 450; the prophets of the kindred idolatry of Ashtoreth, or Astarte, became 400. Baal had his one central temple, large and magnificent (2 Kings 10:21–22 and 2 Kings 10:25), a rival of that of God.

The prophet Elijah thought the apostasy almost universal; God revealed to him that He had "reserved" to Himself seven thousand in Israel. Yet these were all the knees which had not bowed to Baal, and every mouth which had not kissed him (1 Kings 19:18).

And died - Death is the penalty of sin. Ephraim "died" spiritually. For sin takes away the life of grace and separates from God, the true life of the soul, the source of all life. He "died more truly, than he who is dead and at rest." Of this death, our Lord says, Let the dead bury their dead (Matthew 8:22); and Paul, She who liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth (1 Timothy 5:6). He "died" also as a nation and kingdom, being sentenced by God to cease to be.

And now they sin more and more – Sin draws on sin. This seems to be a third stage in sin:

1. Under Jeroboam, was the worship of the calves.
2. Then, under Ahab, the worship of Baal.
3. Thirdly, the multiplying of other idols (see 2 Kings 17:9–10), penetrating and pervading the private life, even of their less wealthy people.

The calves were of gold; now they made them molten images of their silver, perhaps plated with silver. In Egypt, the mother of idolatry, it was common to gild idols made of wood, stone, and bronze. The idolatry, then, had become more habitual, daily, and universal.

These idols were made of their silver; they themselves had had them molten out of it. Avaricious as they were (see the note above 2 Kings 12:7–8), they lavished their silver to make them their gods. According to their own understanding, they had had them formed. They employed ingenuity and invention to multiply their idols.

They despised the wisdom and commands of God who forbade it. The rules for making and coloring the idols were as detailed as those that God gave for His own worship. Idolatry had its own vast system, making the visible world its god and picturing its operations, in contrast to the worship of God its Creator. But it was all their own understanding: the conception of the idol lay in its maker’s mind. It was his own creation. He devised what his idol should represent, how it should represent what his mind imagined; he debated with himself, rejected, chose, changed his choice, modified what he had decided upon—all according to his own understanding. Their own understanding devised it; the labor of the craftsmen completed it.

All of it the work of the craftsmen – What man could do for it, he did. But man could not breathe into his idols the breath of life; there was then no spirit, nor life, nor any emanation from any higher nature, nor any deity residing in them. From first to last it was all man’s work; and man’s own wisdom was its condemnation. The thing made must be inferior to its maker. God made man, inferior to Himself, but lord of the earth and all things in it; man made his idol of the things of earth, which God gave him. It too then was inferior to its maker, man. He then worshiped in it the conception of his own mind, the work of his own hands.

They say of them – Strictly, of them (that is, of these things, such things as these), they say, Let the men that sacrifice kiss the calves. The prophet gives the substance or the words of Jeroboam’s edict, when he said, It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem, behold your gods, O Israel. “Whoever would sacrifice, let him do homage to the calves.” He would have calf-worship to be the only worship of God. Error, if it is strong enough, ever persecutes the truth, unless it can corrupt it. Idol-worship was striving to extirpate the worship of God, which condemned it. Under Ahab and Jezebel, it seemed to have succeeded.

Elijah complains to God in His own immediate presence: the children of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, thrown down Your altars, and slain Your prophets with the sword; and I, even I, only am left, and they seek my life, to take it away (1 Kings 19:10, 1 Kings 19:14). Kissing was an act of homage in the East, done upon the hand or the foot, the knees or shoulder. It was a token of divine honor, whether to an idol (1 Kings 19:18 and here) or to God (Psalms 2:12). It was performed either by actually kissing the image or, when the object could not be approached (as the moon), by kissing the hand (Job 31:26–27) and so sending, as it were, the kiss to it. In the Psalm, it stands as a symbol of worship, to be shown toward the Incarnate Son, when God should make Him King upon His holy hill of Zion.

Therefore they shall be as the morning cloud - There is often a fair show of prosperity, apart from God; but it is short-lived. “The third generation,” says the pagan proverb, “never enjoys the ill-gotten gain.” The highest prosperity of an ungodly state is often the next to its fall. Israel never flourished so much as under Jeroboam II.

Bright and glistening with light is “the early dew;” in an hour it is gone, as if it had never been. Glowing and gilded by the sun is “the morning cloud;” while you admire its beauty, its hues have vanished.

“The chaff” lay in one heap “on the floor” with the wheat. Its owner casts the mingled chaff and wheat against the strong wind; in a moment, the chaff is “driven by the wind out of the floor.” While every grain falls to the ground, the chaff—light, dry, worthless, unsubstantial—is hurried along, unresisting, the sport of the invisible wind, and itself is soon seen no more.

The “smoke,” one seemingly solid, full, lofty column, ascends, swells, billows, and vanishes.

In form, the smoke is as solid when about to be dispersed and seen no more, as when it first issued “out of the chimney.” “It is raised aloft, and by that very uplifting swells into a vast globe; but the larger that globe is, the emptier. For from that unsolid, unbased, inflated greatness it vanishes in air, so that its very greatness injures it. The more it is uplifted, extended, and diffused on all sides into a larger compass, so much the poorer it becomes, and fails, and disappears.”

Such was the prosperity of Ephraim: a mere show, destined to vanish forever. In the image of “the chaff,” the prophet substitutes the “whirlwind” for the wind by which people in the East used to winnow, in order to picture the violence with which they would be whirled away from their own land.

While these four emblems, in common, picture what is fleeting, two of them—the “early dew” and the “morning cloud”—are emblems of what is in itself good but passing. The other two—the chaff and the smoke—are emblems of what is worthless. The dew and the cloud were temporary mercies from God that would cease for them, “good in themselves, but to their evil, soon to pass away.” If the dew has not, in its brief space, refreshed the vegetation, no trace of it is left. It gives way to the burning sun. If grace has not done its work in the soul, its day is gone.

Such dew were the many prophets granted to Israel; such was Hosea himself, most brilliant, but soon to pass away. The chaff was the people themselves, to be carried out of the Lord’s land; the smoke represented “its pride and its errors, whose disappearance was to leave the air pure for the household of God.”:

“So it is written: As the smoke is driven away, so you shall drive them away; as wax melts before the fire, so the ungodly shall perish before the presence of God (Psalms 68:2); and in Proverbs: As the whirlwind passes, so is the wicked no more; but the righteous is an everlasting foundation (Proverbs 10:25).

Although they live and flourish regarding the life of the body, yet spiritually they die, indeed, and are brought to nothing, for by sin mankind became nothing.

Virtue makes a person upright and stable; vice makes one empty and unstable. Thus Isaiah says, the wicked are like the troubled sea, which cannot rest (Isaiah 57:20); and Job says, If iniquity is in your hand, put it far away; then you shall be steadfast (Job 11:14–15).”

Yet - (literally, and) I am the Lord your God from the land of Egypt. God was still the same God who had sheltered them with His providence ever since He had delivered them from Egypt. He had the same power and will to help them. Therefore, their duty was the same, and their destruction arose not from any change in Him, but from themselves. “God is the God of the ungodly, by creation and general providence.”

And you shall - (that is, you ought to) know no God but Me, for (literally, and) there is not a Saviour but Me. “To be God and Lord and Saviour are incommunicable properties of God. Therefore, God often claimed these titles for Himself from the time He revealed Himself to Israel. In the song of Moses, which they were commanded to rehearse, He says, See now that I, I am He, and there is no God with Me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal; neither is there any that can deliver out of My hand (Deuteronomy 32:39).

Isaiah repeats this same message: Is there a God besides Me? Yea there is no God; I know not any (Isaiah 44:8); and There is no God else besides Me, a just God and a Saviour; there is none else. Look unto Me and be ye saved, for I am God and there is none else (Isaiah 45:21, Isaiah 45:2); and, I am the Lord, that is My Name; and My glory will I not give to another; neither My praise to graven images (Isaiah 42:8).

“That God and Saviour is Christ: God, because He created; Saviour, because, being made Man, He saved. For this reason He willed to be called Jesus, that is, Saviour.

Truly, beside Him, there is no Saviour; neither is there salvation in any other, for there is none other name under heaven, given among men, whereby we must be saved (Acts 4:12). “It is not enough to recognize in God this quality of a Saviour. It must not be shared with “any other.” Whoever associates with God any power whatever to decide on human salvation makes an idol and introduces a new God.”

I did know you in the wilderness - “God so knew them, as to deserve to be known by them. By “knowing” them, He showed how He ought to be acknowledged by them.” “As we love God, because He first loved us,” so we come to know and own God, having first been owned and known by Him. God showed His knowledge of them, by knowing and providing for their needs; He knew them “in the wilderness, in the land of great drought,” where the land yielded neither food nor water.

He supplied them with the “bread from heaven” and with “water from the flinty rock.” He knew and owned them all by His providence; He knew in approbation and love, and fed in body and soul those who, having been known by Him, knew and owned Him: “No slight thing is it, that He, who knows all things and men, should, by grace, know us with that knowledge according to which He says to that one true Israelite, Moses, “you have found grace in My sight, and I know you by name” (Exodus 33:17). This we read to have been said to that one; but what He says to one, He says to all, whom now, before or since that time, He has chosen, being foreknown and predestinate, for He wrote the names of all in the book of life. All these elect are “known in the wilderness,” in the land of loneliness, in the wilderness of this world, where no one ever saw God, in the solitude of the heart and the secret of hidden knowledge, where God alone, beholding the soul tried by temptations, exercises and tests it, and accounting it, when “running lawfully,” worthy of His knowledge, professes that He “knew it.” To those so known, or named, He Himself says in the Gospel, “rejoice, because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20).