Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 8:1

"[Set] the trumpet to thy mouth. As an eagle [he cometh] against the house of Jehovah, because they have transgressed my covenant, and trespassed against my law." — Hosea 8:1 (ASV)

The trumpet to your mouth! So God commands the prophet Isaiah, “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up your voice like a trumpet” (Isaiah 58:1). The prophets, as watchmen, were set by God to give notice of His coming judgments (Ezekiel 33:3; Amos 3:6). As the sound of a war-trumpet would startle a sleeping people, so God would have the prophet’s warning burst upon their sleep of sin. The ministers of the Church are called to be “watchmen.” They too are forbidden to keep a cowardly silence when “the house of the Lord” is endangered by the breach of the covenant or violation of the law. If fear of the wicked or false respect for the great silences the voice of those whose office it is to “cry aloud,” how shall such cowardice be excused?

He shall come as an eagle against the house of the Lord. The words “he shall come” are inserted for clarity. The prophet beholds the enemy speeding with the swiftness of an eagle, as it darts down upon its prey. “The house of the Lord” is, most strictly, the temple, as being “the place which God had chosen to place His name there.”

Next, it is used for the kingdom of Judah and Jerusalem, among whom the temple was; where God says, “I have forsaken Mine house, I have left Mine heritage; I have given the dearly-beloved of My soul into the hands of her enemies” (Jeremiah 12:7), and, “What hath My beloved to do in Mine house, seeing she hath wrought lewdness with many?” (Jeremiah 11:15). Yet the title of “God’s house” is older than the temple, for God Himself uses it of His whole people, saying of Moses, “My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all Mine house” (Numbers 12:7). And even the ten tribes, separated as they were from the Temple-worship, and apostates from the true faith of God, were not yet counted by Him as wholly excluded from the “house of God.” For God, below, threatens that removal, as something still to come: “for the wickedness of their doings I will drive them out of My house” (Hosea 9:15).

The eagle, then, coming down “against or upon” the house of the Lord, is primarily Shalmaneser, who came down and carried off the ten tribes. Yet since Hosea, in these prophecies, also includes Judah, “the house of the Lord” is most probably to be taken in its fullest sense, as including the whole people of God, among whom He dwelt, and the temple where His Name was placed. The “eagle” then also includes Nebuchadnezzar, whom other prophets also call an eagle (Ezekiel 17:3, Ezekiel 17:12; Jeremiah 48:40; Habakkuk 1:8); and (since, throughout, the principle of sin is the same and the punishment the same) it includes the Roman eagle, the ensign of their armies.

Because they have transgressed My covenant. “God, whose justice is always unquestionable, usually makes clear to people its reasonableness.” Israel had broken the covenant which God had made with their fathers, that He would be to them a God, and they to Him a people. The “covenant” they had broken chiefly by idolatry and apostasy; the “law,” by sins against their neighbor. In both ways they had rejected God; therefore God rejected them.