Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 2:4

"Yea, upon her children will I have no mercy; for they are children of whoredom;" — Hosea 2:4 (ASV)

I will not have mercy upon her children – God visits the sins of the parents upon the children, until the consequent curse is cut off by repentance. God enforces His own word “lo-ruhamah, Unpitied,” by repeating it here, “lo-arahem,” “I will not pity.” Reproaches, which fall upon the mother, are always felt with special keenness.

This is why Saul called Jonathan (1 Samuel 20:30), Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman. Therefore, the more to arouse them, God says, for they are the children of whoredoms, evil children of an evil parent, just as John the Immerser calls the hypocritical Jews, ye generation of vipers (Matthew 3:7).

“This they were, from their very birth and swaddling-clothes, never touching any work of piety, nor cultivating any grace.”

Just as of Christ, and of those who, in Him, are nourished up in deeds of righteousness, it is said, I was cast upon Thee from the womb; Thou art my God from my mother’s belly; so, conversely, of the ungodly it is said, The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies.

And just as those who live honestly, as in the day and in the light, are called children of the day and of the light, so those who live a defiled life are called the children of whoredoms.

“To call them ‘children of whoredoms’ is the same as saying that they too are incorrigible or unchangeable. For of such, Wisdom, after saying, ‘executing Thy judgments upon them by little and little,’ added immediately , ‘not being ignorant that they were a naughty generation, and that their malice was bred in them, and that their cogitation would never be changed, for it was a cursed seed from the beginning.’

All this is expressed here briefly by the phrase ‘that they are the children of whoredoms,’ meaning that their ‘malice’ too was inbred, and that they, as much as the Amorite and Hittite, were a ‘cursed seed.’

Yet, in saying this, he did not blame the nature which God created, but he vehemently reproves the abuse of nature—that malice, which cleaves to nature but was not part of it, was by custom changed into nature.”