Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 8:13

"As for the sacrifices of mine offerings, they sacrifice flesh and eat it; but Jehovah accepteth them not: now will he remember their iniquity, and visit their sins; they shall return to Egypt." — Hosea 8:13 (ASV)

They sacrifice flesh for the sacrifices of My offerings, and eat it; but the Lord accepts them not - As they rejected God’s law, so God rejected their “sacrifices,” which were not offered according to His law.

They, doubtless, thought much of their sacrifices; and this the prophet perhaps expresses by an intensive form: “the sacrifices of My gifts, gifts,” as though they thought that they were always giving. God accounted such sacrifices, not being hallowed by the end for which He instituted them, as mere “flesh.”

They “offered flesh” and “ate” it. Such was the beginning, and such the only end. “He” would “not accept them.” No, on the contrary, “now,” while they were offering the sacrifices, God would indeed show that He “remembered” the sins for which they were intended to atone.

God seems to man to forget his sins when He forbears to punish them; to “remember” them when He punishes.

They shall return to Egypt - God had commanded them to return no more to Egypt (Deuteronomy 17:16) of their own accord. But He had threatened that, on their disobedience, the Lord would bring them back to Egypt by the way of which He spoke to them, You shall see it no more again (Deuteronomy 28:68).

Hosea also foretells to them that they (that is, many of them) should go to Egypt and perish there (Hosea 9:3; Hosea 9:6). From there also, as from Assyria, they were to be restored (Hosea 12:11).

Most probably then, Hosea means to threaten an actual return to Egypt, as we are told that some of the two tribes went there, in defiance of the express command of God (Jeremiah 42–43). The main part of the ten tribes was taken to Assyria, yet as they were, even under Hosea, conspiring with Egypt (2 Kings 17:4), those who could, it is likely, took refuge there.

Alternatively, just as future deliverance, temporal or spiritual, is foretold under the image of the deliverance out of Egypt, so, on the contrary, the threat, they shall return to Egypt, may be, in a figurative sense, a cancelling of the covenant by which God had promised that His people should not return. This implies a threat of renewed bondage, “like” the Egyptian, and an abandonment of them to the state from which God once had freed them and had made them His people.