Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 4:11

"Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the understanding." — Hosea 4:11 (ASV)

Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart — (Literally, “takes away”). Wine and fleshly sin are pictured as blended together, to deprive man of his affections, reason, and understanding, and to leave him brutish and irrational.

In all the relations of life toward God and man, reason and will are guided by the affections. And so, in God’s language, the “heart” stands for the “understanding” as well as the “affections,” because it directs the understanding; and the understanding, bereft of true affections and under the rule of passion, becomes senseless.

Besides the perversion of the understanding, each of these sins blunts and dulls the fineness of the intellect; much more, both combined. The drunken dullness of the confirmed sensualist is a cumulative state, to which each act of sensual sin contributed. Pagans saw this clearly, although, without the grace of God, they did not act on what they saw to be true and right.

This drunken dullness of Israel, which destroyed their understanding, was the basis of their next folly: they ascribed to “their stock” the role of God. “Corruption of morals and superstition” (it has often been observed) “go hand in hand.”