Hosea 10: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Hosea speaks against Israel's worship at its many altars and sacred stone pillars: the more the land produced, the more shrines the people built, and now those altars will be torn down. The calf idol at Beth-aven will be carried off to Assyria as tribute, Samaria's king will be swept away, and the hilltop shrines will be overgrown with thorns. In the middle of the warning, Hosea calls the people to sow righteousness and break up unplowed ground while there is still time to seek the LORD. The chapter closes with war rising against Israel's strongholds and the king of Israel cut off.

Claim by Claim

1. 10:1
   • Israel is a vine, described by a word that means either luxuriant and spreading or emptied out
   • Israel brings forth fruit for himself
   • In proportion to the abundance of his fruit, he increased the number of his altars
   • In proportion to the goodness of his land, they made fine sacred pillars
2. 10:2
   • Their heart is divided
   • Now they will be held guilty
   • He will break down their altars
   • He will destroy their sacred pillars
3. 10:3
   • Now they will say that they have no king
   • They will say that they have no king because they did not fear the LORD
   • They will ask what a king could do for them
4. 10:4
   • They have spoken words
   • They swear false oaths when making a covenant
   • Judgment springs up like a poisonous weed in the furrows of the field
5. 10:5
   • The inhabitants of Samaria will be in dread over the calves of Beth-aven
   • The people of the calf will mourn over it
   • Its idolatrous priests will rejoice over it
   • The mourning and rejoicing are over its glory
   • Its glory has departed from it into exile
6. 10:6
   • The calf itself will be carried to Assyria
   • The calf will be carried as a present to king Jareb
   • Ephraim will receive shame
   • Israel will be ashamed of his own counsel
7. 10:7
   • Samaria's king is cut off
   • Samaria's king is like foam on the surface of the water
8. 10:8
   • The high places of Aven will be destroyed
   • The high places of Aven are the sin of Israel
   • Thorn and thistle will grow up on their altars
   • They will say to the mountains, Cover us
   • They will say to the hills, Fall on us
9. 10:9
   • Israel has sinned since the days of Gibeah
   • They stood there
   • The battle in Gibeah against the children of iniquity did not overtake them
10. 10:10
    • It is the LORD's desire to chastise them
    • Peoples will be gathered against them
    • The gathering will happen when they bind themselves in their two furrows
11. 10:11
    • Ephraim is a trained heifer
    • Ephraim loves to thresh grain
    • The LORD passed over her fair neck
    • The LORD will make Ephraim ride
    • Judah will plow
    • Jacob will break up his clods
12. 10:12
    • They are commanded to sow for themselves in righteousness
    • They are commanded to reap according to mercy
    • They are commanded to break up their fallow ground
    • It is time to seek the LORD
    • They are to seek the LORD until he comes
    • The LORD will rain righteousness upon them
13. 10:13
    • They have plowed wickedness
    • They have reaped iniquity
    • They have eaten the fruit of lies
    • You trusted in your own way
    • You trusted in the multitude of your mighty men
14. 10:14
    • A tumult will arise among your people
    • All your fortresses will be plundered
    • Shalman plundered Beth-arbel in the day of battle
    • A mother was dashed in pieces upon her children
15. 10:15
    • Bethel will do this to you
    • It is done because of your great wickedness
    • In the morning the king of Israel will be utterly cut off

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

10:1

Sacred stone pillars were upright standing stones set up at a place of worship to mark it as holy ground; they were a normal feature of Canaanite religion and were repeatedly banned in Israel's law. The word translated 'spreading' can also mean 'luxuriant' or, as the King James took it, 'empty', the Hebrew root suggests a vine running wild and putting all its strength into itself.

10:2

"Their heart is divided" uses heart in its older sense of the will and loyalties, not the emotions; the accusation is double-mindedness, not confused feelings. In the King James, to "spoil" something is to plunder or wreck it, a word from warfare.

10:3

Hosea preached in the northern kingdom's last decades, when kings were assassinated one after another and the throne was effectively worthless. The line is Israel talking itself out of caring: no king, and no reason to want one.

10:4

The 'agreements' are most likely political treaties, Israel's rulers in this period swore alliances with Egypt and Assyria and broke them. The image in the second half is deliberately jarring: legal verdicts sprout like a rank poisonous weed in the neat furrows a farmer has just plowed. The King James 'hemlock' stands for a bitter or poisonous plant; the exact species is uncertain.

10:5

Samaria was the capital city of the northern kingdom, called Israel or Ephraim, as distinct from the southern kingdom of Judah with its capital Jerusalem. Beth-aven means 'house of wickedness' or 'house of nothing'; it is Hosea's mocking nickname for Bethel, whose name means 'house of God'. The calf was a golden bull-calf image set up at Bethel by King Jeroboam when the northern tribes broke away, so that his people would not travel south to Jerusalem to worship.

10:6

Assyria was the dominant empire of the day, based in what is now northern Iraq; smaller kingdoms bought its protection with tribute, and it deported the populations of states it conquered. The King James 'king Jareb' treats the Hebrew as a personal name; it is more probably a title or a pun, 'the great king' or 'the king who contends', and no Assyrian king named Jareb is known. Ephraim was the largest tribe of the north, and prophets often use its name for the whole northern kingdom.

10:7

"Cut off" is a King James way of saying taken away for good.

10:8

Hilltop shrines were open-air worship sites, usually on high ground, with an altar, a stone pillar and often a sacred pole or tree. 'Aven' here is a shortened form of Beth-aven, the mocking name for Bethel in verse 5. Calling on the mountains to fall on you is a cry for a quick death rather than capture, the same words are quoted later in Luke 23:30 and Revelation 6:16.

10:9

Gibeah was a town in Benjamin, the site of an atrocity described in Judges 19–21: a traveling woman was gang-raped and killed there, and the resulting war nearly wiped out the tribe of Benjamin. Hosea treats it as the point where Israel's corruption began. The second half of the verse is ambiguous in Hebrew and can be read either as a statement ('the battle did not overtake them') or as a question expecting the answer yes, as the plain rendering takes it.

10:10

The Hebrew behind 'their double sin' is uncertain; the King James read the same consonants as 'their two furrows', an image from plowing, while other ancient copies point to 'their two wrongs' or 'their double guilt'. 'Tied up' or 'bound' refers to being yoked like an animal or fettered like a prisoner of war.

10:11

Treading out grain was the easy job: an ox walked loose over the cut stalks on a threshing floor to separate the grain, and by law it was not to be muzzled, so it could eat as it worked. Plowing was the hard job, done under a yoke. The point of the contrast is a shift from light work to heavy labor. 'Jacob' is another name for Israel, taken from the ancestor of the twelve tribes.

10:12

The word rendered 'faithful love' is Hebrew *hesed*, the loyalty owed within a binding relationship: it covers kindness, steadfastness and keeping faith, and no single English word carries all of it. 'Unplowed ground' translates 'fallow ground': land left uncultivated long enough to harden and grow over, which has to be broken up before it can take seed.

10:14

Neither Shalman nor Beth-arbel can be identified with certainty; Hosea is citing an atrocity his hearers would have remembered, as we might name a recent massacre. Shalman may be a shortened form of the Assyrian royal name Shalmaneser, or a Moabite king known from Assyrian records. Killing mothers and children when a town fell was standard practice in ancient warfare and is named here as the horror it was.

10:15

Bethel, whose name means 'house of God', was the northern kingdom's chief shrine and the home of the calf image of verse 5. Some ancient copies read 'house of Israel' here instead. 'When the day dawns' translates a phrase that can mean either at daybreak or, more loosely, in a single morning: that is, suddenly and completely.