Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 4

Hear the word of the Lord, you children of Israel - The prophet begins here, as it were in a series of pictures, to exhibit the people of Israel to themselves, so that they might know that God did not, without cause, do all this which He denounced against them. Here, at the outset, He summons the whole people, their prophets and priests, before the judgment seat of God, where God would condescend to bring charges against them Himself, and hear if they had anything in their defense. The title “children of Israel” is, in itself, an appeal to their gratitude and their conscience, as the title “Christian” among us is an appeal to us, by Him whose name we bear.

Our Lord says, If ye were Abraham’s children, ye would do the works of Abraham (John 8:39); and Paul, let every one that nameth the name of Christ, depart from iniquity (2 Timothy 2:19).

For the Lord has a controversy - God wills, in all His dealings with us His creatures, to prove even to our own consciences the righteousness of His judgments, so as to leave us without excuse. Now, through His servants, He shows people their unrighteousness and His justice; hereafter our Lord, the righteous Judge, will show it through the book of people's own consciences.

With the inhabitants of the land - God had given the land to the children of Israel on account of the wickedness of those whom He drove out before them. He gave it to them that they might observe His statutes and keep His laws (Psalms 105:45). He had promised that His Eyes should always be upon it from the beginning of the year unto the end of the year (Deuteronomy 11:12). This land, the scene of those former judgments, given to them on those conditions (see Deuteronomy 4:1, Deuteronomy 4:40; Deuteronomy 6:21–25, and so on), the land which God had given to them as their God, they had filled with iniquity.

Because there is no truth, nor mercy - "Truth and mercy" are often spoken of in relation to Almighty God. Truth includes all that is right, and to which God has bound Himself; mercy, all beyond, which God does out of His boundless love.

When God says of Israel, there is no truth nor mercy, He says that there is absolutely none of those two great qualities, under which He comprises all His own Goodness. "There is no truth," none whatever, "no regard for known truth; no conscience, no sincerity, no uprightness; no truth of words; no truth of promises; no truth in witnessing; no making good in deeds what they said in words."

Nor mercy - The word has a wide meaning; it includes all love of one to another, a love issuing in acts. It includes loving-kindness, piety to parents, natural affection, forgiveness, tenderness, beneficence, mercy, goodness. The prophet, in declaring the absence of this grace, declares the absence of all included under it. Whatever could be comprised under love, whatever feelings are influenced by love—of these, there was nothing.

Nor knowledge of God - The union of right knowledge and wrong practice is hideous in itself; and it must be especially offensive to Almighty God, that His creatures should know whom they offend, how they offend Him, and yet, amid and against their knowledge, choose that which displeases Him. And, on that ground, perhaps, He has so created us, that when our acts are wrong, our knowledge becomes darkened (Romans 1:21). The “knowledge of God” is not merely to know some things of God, as that He is the Creator and Preserver of the world and of ourselves. To know things of God is not to know God Himself.

We cannot know God in any respect, unless we are, to that extent, made like Him. Hereby do we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. He that saith, I know Him, and keepeth not His commandments, is a liar and the truth is not in him. Every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love (1 John 2:3–4; 1 John 4:7–8).

Knowledge of God being the gift of the Holy Spirit, he who has no grace, cannot have that knowledge. A certain degree of speculative knowledge of God, a bad man may have, as Balaam had by inspiration, and the Pagan who, when they knew God, glorified Him not as God. But even this knowledge is not retained without love.

Those who held the truth in unrighteousness (Paul says, Romans 1:21, Romans 1:18, Romans 1:28) ended by corrupting it. “They did not like to retain God in their knowledge, and so God gave them over to a reprobate,” or undistinguishing mind, that they could not.

Certainly, the speculative and practical knowledge are bound up together, through the oneness of the relation of the soul to God, whether in its thoughts of Him, or its acts toward Him. Wrong practice corrupts belief, as misbelief corrupts practice. The prophet then probably denies that there was any true knowledge of God, of any sort, whether of life or faith or understanding or love.

Ignorance of God, then, is a great evil, a source of all other evils.

By swearing, and lying ... - Literally, "swearing or cursing," "and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery!" The words in Hebrew are nouns of action. The Hebrew form is very vivid and solemn.

It is far more forceful than if he had said, "They swear, lie, kill, and steal." It expresses that these sins were continual, that nothing else (so to speak) was going on; that it was all one scene of such sins, one course of them, and of nothing else. As we say more familiarly, "It was all, swearing, lying, killing, stealing, committing adultery."

It is as if the prophet, seeing with a sight beyond nature, a vision from God, saw, as in a picture, what was going on all around, within and without, and summed up in this brief picture all that he saw. This it was, and nothing but this, that met his eyes wherever he looked, whatever he heard: "swearing, lying, killing, stealing, committing adultery." The prophet had previously said that the ten tribes were utterly lacking in all truth, all love, and all knowledge of God.

But where there are none of these, there, in all activity, will be the contrary vices. When the land or the soul is empty of the good, it will be full of the evil. They break out—that is, burst through all bounds set to restrain them, as a river bursts its banks and overspreads all things or sweeps everything before it. And blood toucheth blood—literally, "bloods touch bloods." The blood was poured so continuously and in such torrents that it flowed on until stream met stream and formed one wide inundation of blood.

Therefore shall the land mourn — Dumb inanimate nature seems to rejoice and to be in unison with our sense of joy, when bedewed and fresh through rain and radiant with light; and, again, to mourn, when smitten with drought or blight or disease, or devoured by the creatures which God employs to lay it waste for man’s sins. Dumb nature is, as it were, in sympathy with man, cursed in Adam, smitten amid man’s offenses, its outward show responding to man’s inward heart, wasted, parched, desolate, when man himself was marred and wasted by his sins.

With the beasts of the field — Literally, “in the beasts,” etc. God included “the fowl and the cattle and every beast of the field” in His covenant with man. So here, in this sentence of woe, He includes them in the inhabitants of the land, and orders that, since man would not serve God, the creatures made to serve him, should be withdrawn from him. “General iniquity is punished by general desolation.”

Yea, the fishes of the sea also — Inland seas or lakes are called by this same name, as the Sea of Tiberias and the Dead Sea. Yet here the prophet probably alludes to the history of man’s creation, when God gave him dominion “over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heaven, and over every living thing (chaiah)” (Genesis 1:28), in just the inverse order, in which he here declares that they shall be taken away. There God gives dominion over all, from lowest to highest; here God denounces that He will take away all, down to those which are least affected by any changes.

Yet from time to time God has, in chastisement, directed that the shoals of fish should not come to their usual haunts. This is well known in the history of seacoasts; and conscience has acknowledged the hand of God and seen the ground of His visitation. Of the fulfillment Jerome writes: “Whoever does not believe that this befell the people of Israel, let him survey Illyricum, let him survey the Thraces, Macedonia, the Pannonias, and the whole land that stretches from the Propontis and Bosphorus to the Julian Alps, and he will experience that, together with man, all the creatures also fail, which before were nourished by the Creator for the service of man.”

Yet let no man strive, nor reprove another - Literally, “Only let man not strive, and let not man reprove.” God had taken the controversy with His people into His own hands; the Lord, He said, “has a controversy (rib) with the inhabitants of the land” (Hosea 4:1). Here He forbids man to interfere; let man not strive. He again uses the same word. The people were obstinate and would not hear; warning and reproof, being neglected, only aggravated their guilt: so God bids man to cease to speak in His Name. He Himself alone will prosecute them, whose pleading none could evade or contradict. Subordinately, God teaches us, amid His judgments, not to strive or throw the blame on each other, but for each to look to his own sins, not to the sins of others.

For your people are as those who strive with the priest - God had made it a part of the office of the priest, to “keep knowledge” (Malachi 2:7). He had commanded that all hard causes should be taken “to the priest who stood to minister there before the Lord their God” (Deuteronomy 17:8–12); and whoever refused the priest’s sentence was to be put to death. The priest was then to judge in God’s Name. As speaking in His Name, in His place, with His authority, taught by Himself, they were called by that Name, in Which they spoke, אלהים ('elohim') (Exodus 21:6; Exodus 22:8–9), “God,” not in regard to themselves but as representing Him. To “strive” then “with the priest” was the highest willful disobedience; and such was their whole life and conduct.

It was the character of the whole kingdom of “Israel.” For they had thrown off the authority of the family of Aaron, which God had appointed. Their political existence was based upon the rejection of that authority. The national character influences the individual. When the whole polity is formed on disobedience and revolt, individuals will not tolerate interference.

As they had rejected the priest, so they would and did reject the prophets. He does not say they were “priest-strivers” (for they had no lawful priests against whom to strive), but they were like priest-strivers: persons whose habit it was to strive with those who spoke in God’s Name. In fact, He says, let man not strive with those who strive with God. The uselessness of such reproof is often repeated.

He “that reproveth a scorner getteth to himself shame, and he that rebuketh a wicked man getteth himself a blot” (Proverbs 9:7–8). “Reprove not a scorner, lest he hate thee” (Proverbs 23:9). “Speak not in the ears of a fool, for he will despise the wisdom of thy words.” Stephen gives it as a characteristic of the Jews, “Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so do ye” (Acts 7:51).

Therefore shalt thou fall - The two parts of the verse complete each other. “By day and by night they will fall, people and prophets together.” Their calamities will come upon them successively, day and night. They will stumble by day, when there is least fear of stumbling (John 11:9–10); and night will not by its darkness protect them. Evil will come at noon-day (Jeremiah 15:8) upon them, seeing it, but unable to repel it; as Isaiah speaks of it as an aggravation of trouble, thy land strangers devour it in thy presence (Isaiah 1:7); and the false prophets, who saw their visions in the night, will themselves be overwhelmed in the darkness, blinded by moral darkness, perishing in actual darkness.

And I will destroy thy mother - Individuals are spoken of as the children; the whole nation, as the mother. He then denounces the destruction of all, collectively and individually. They were to be cut off, root and branch. They were to lose their collective existence as a nation; and, lest private persons should flatter themselves with hope of escape, it is said to them, as if one by one, thou shalt fall.