Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 9:3

"They shall not dwell in Jehovah`s land; but Ephraim shall return to Egypt, and they shall eat unclean food in Assyria." — Hosea 9:3 (ASV)

They shall not dwell in the Lord’s land. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof - Yet He had chosen the land of Canaan, there to place His people; there, above others, to work His miracles; there to reveal Himself; there to send His Son to take our flesh. He had put Israel in possession of it, to hold it under Him on condition of obedience. On the contrary, God had denounced to them again and again: “if your heart turn away, so that you will not hear, but shall be drawn away, you shall not prolong your days upon the land, where you pass over Jordan to possess it” (Deuteronomy 30:17–18).

The fifth commandment, “the first commandment with promise” (Ephesians 5:2), still implies the same condition, “that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you.” God expressly stipulates that the land is His: “The land shall not be sold forever, for the land is Mine, for you are strangers and sojourners with Me” (Leviticus 25:23). It was then an aggravation of their sin that they had sinned in God’s land. It was to sin in His special presence. To offer its first-fruits to idols was to disown God as its Lord and to own His adversary. In removing them, then, from His land, God removed them from occasions of sin.

But Ephraim shall return to Egypt - He had broken the covenant, on which God had promised that they should not return there (see above the note at Hosea 8:13). They had resorted to Egypt against the will of God. Against their own will, they should be sent back there, in banishment and distress, as in former times, and in separation from their God.

And they shall eat unclean things in Assyria - So in Ezekiel, “The children of Israel shall eat their defiled bread among the Gentiles, where I will drive them” (Ezekiel 4:13). “Not to eat things common or unclean” was one of the marks by which God had distinguished them as His people. While God owned them as His people, He would protect them against such necessity. The histories of Daniel, of Eleazar and the Maccabees (Daniel 1:8; Daniel 2:0; 2 Maccabees 6, 7) show how sorely pious Jews felt the compulsion to eat things unclean.

Yet this Israel had doubtless done in his own land, if not in other ways, at least in eating things offered to idols. Now then, through necessity—indeed, they were to be forced—for their sustenance to eat things unclean, such as were, to them, all things killed with the blood in them, that is, as almost all things are killed now. Those who had willfully transgressed God’s law would now be forced to live in the habitual breach of that law, in a matter which placed them on a level with the pagan.

People who have no scruple about breaking God’s moral law feel keenly the removal of any distinction that places them above others. They had been as pagan; they were to be in the condition of pagan.