Hosea 9: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Hosea tells the northern kingdom of Israel not to celebrate at harvest, because their unfaithfulness to the LORD means the threshing floor, the winepress, and the land itself will be taken from them. They will be carried off to Egypt and Assyria, where their sacrifices cannot be brought to the LORD's house and their food makes them unclean. The chapter recalls Gibeah and Baal-peor as earlier examples of their corruption, and ends with judgments on Ephraim: children lost, a dried-up root, and life as wanderers among the nations.

Claim by Claim

1. 9:1
   • Israel is told not to rejoice with exultation as the other peoples do.
   • Israel has played the harlot, departing from its God.
   • Israel has loved a prostitute's fee on every threshing floor of grain.
2. 9:2
   • The threshing floor and the winepress will not feed them.
   • The new wine will fail her.
3. 9:3
   • They will not dwell in the LORD's land.
   • Ephraim will return to Egypt.
   • They will eat unclean food in Assyria.
4. 9:4
   • They will not pour out wine offerings to the LORD.
   • Their sacrifices will not be pleasing to him.
   • Their sacrifices will be to them like the bread of mourners.
   • All who eat of it will be defiled.
   • Their bread will be for their own appetite.
   • Their bread will not come into the house of the LORD.
5. 9:5
   • A question is asked: what will you do on the appointed day?
   • A question is asked: what will you do on the day of the LORD's feast?
6. 9:6
   • They have gone away from destruction.
   • Egypt will gather them.
   • Memphis will bury them.
   • Nettles will take possession of their treasured things of silver.
   • Thorns will be in their tents.
7. 9:7
   • The days of visitation have come.
   • The days of recompense have come.
   • Israel will know it.
   • The prophet is a fool.
   • The man of the spirit is mad.
   • This is because of the greatness of your iniquity.
   • The hostility is great.
8. 9:8
   • It is stated ambiguously that Ephraim is a watchman with my God, or that the watchman of Ephraim was with my God.
   • The prophet is a fowler's snare on all his ways.
   • There is hostility in the house of his God.
9. 9:9
   • They have corrupted themselves deeply, as in the days of Gibeah.
   • He will remember their iniquity.
   • He will punish their sins.
10. 9:10
    • The LORD found Israel like grapes in the wilderness.
    • The LORD saw their fathers like the first-ripe fruit on a fig tree in its first season.
    • They came to Baal-peor.
    • They consecrated themselves to the shameful thing.
    • They became detestable like the thing they loved.
11. 9:11
    • Ephraim's glory will fly away like a bird.
    • It will fly away from birth, from the womb, and from conception.
12. 9:12
    • Even if they raise their children, the LORD will bereave them so that no man is left.
    • Woe is pronounced on them for when the LORD departs from them.
13. 9:13
    • The LORD saw Ephraim, as he saw Tyre, planted in a pleasant meadow.
    • Ephraim will bring out his children to the slayer.
14. 9:14
    • The LORD is asked to give to them.
    • A question is asked of the LORD: what will you give?
    • The LORD is asked to give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts.
15. 9:15
    • All their wickedness is at Gilgal.
    • There the LORD hated them.
    • Because of the wickedness of their deeds the LORD will drive them out of his house.
    • The LORD will no longer love them.
    • All their princes are rebels.
16. 9:16
    • Ephraim is struck down.
    • Their root is dried up.
    • They will bear no fruit.
    • Even if they bear children, the LORD will kill the beloved fruit of their womb.
17. 9:17
    • My God will reject them.
    • The reason is that they did not listen to him.
    • They will be wanderers among the nations.

Words Worth Explaining

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

9:1

A threshing floor was a flat, hard-packed open area, usually on a windy rise, where harvested grain was beaten out and tossed in the air to separate it from the chaff. It was also where the harvest was stored and celebrated. "Playing the harlot" is the prophets' standard image for worshiping other gods: the nation is pictured as a wife who takes other lovers. The "payment" is the fee paid to a prostitute, here the grain heaped on the floor, which the people credited to Baal, the Canaanite storm god thought to give rain and fertility.

9:2

A winepress was a hollow cut in rock where grapes were trodden, with a channel running into a lower basin to catch the juice. "New wine" is the fresh juice of the year's grape harvest; along with grain and oil it was one of the three staples of the land.

9:3

Ephraim was the largest tribe of the northern kingdom, and Hosea regularly uses its name for that whole kingdom. Going "back to Egypt" means returning to the country Israel had been slaves in (the exodus run backwards. Assyria was the empire to the northeast that conquered the northern kingdom in 722 BC and deported its people. Israel's law marked out which foods could be eaten and how they had to be prepared and drained of blood; in exile, living among foreigners, none of that could be kept, and food itself is called "unclean") that is, unfit to be brought near what is holy.

9:4

Wine offerings were libations: wine poured out at the altar alongside a sacrifice. A death made a household ritually unclean, so food eaten in a house of mourning could not be taken to the sanctuary, and anyone who ate it was barred from worship until they were cleansed. "The house of the LORD" is the sanctuary, the temple or shrine where sacrifices were brought.

9:5

Israel's year was structured around fixed pilgrim festivals when people traveled to the sanctuary with offerings. "The feast of the LORD" often meant the autumn harvest festival, Tabernacles, the largest of them. The question bites because people scattered in exile could keep none of it.

9:6

Memphis was one of Egypt's great cities, on the Nile just south of present-day Cairo, ringed by enormous burial grounds. To be buried there rather than in the family tomb at home was, to an Israelite ear, the picture of dying a stranger far from your own land.

9:7

"Visitation" in older English means an official coming to inspect and call to account, not a friendly call. "The man who speaks by the spirit" translates "man of the spirit," a term for a prophet. The Hebrew here is compressed and readers have long disagreed on who is speaking: it may be Hosea quoting the mockery flung at him, or a verdict passed on prophets who were in fact fools.

9:8

A watchman was the lookout posted on a city wall or tower to spot an approaching army and raise the alarm, a standing picture of what a prophet was for. A fowler was a bird catcher, who hid nets, snares and sticky traps along the paths birds used. The Hebrew of this verse is damaged or unusually obscure, and translations differ over who stands with God and who is laying the traps.

9:9

"The days of Gibeah" points back to the story in Judges 19–21, in which men of the town of Gibeah gang-raped a traveling man's concubine until she died, and the nation tore itself apart in the civil war that followed. It had become shorthand for the worst thing Israel had ever done to itself.

9:10

Finding grapes growing wild in the desert is a stroke of unexpected luck. The early figs, which ripen weeks ahead of the main crop, were a prized delicacy, both images are of something rare and delightful. Baal-peor refers to the incident in Numbers 25, where Israelites joined in the worship of the local Baal at Mount Peor and slept with Moabite women. "That shameful thing" is literally "the Shame": Hebrew writers sometimes substituted the word for shame in place of the name Baal rather than pronounce it.

9:11

The name Ephraim sounds like the Hebrew word for "fruitful," so a threat of childlessness against Ephraim turns the tribe's own name against it. The three terms run backwards through the stages (birth, pregnancy, conception) canceling each in turn.

9:12

In a society with no state support, adult children were a family's only security in old age and the only way its name and land stayed in the family. Losing them all meant not just grief but the erasure of the household.

9:13

Tyre was the Phoenician port city up the coast, immensely rich from sea trade and famous for being unassailable on its island; naming it evokes wealth and security. The Hebrew of this verse is uncertain, and the ancient Greek translation reads it quite differently, so the comparison may originally have been to a palm planted in a meadow rather than to Tyre at all.

9:14

The speaker changes here: the prophet breaks in and addresses God directly, before God resumes speaking in the next verse.

9:15

Gilgal was a sanctuary town near Jericho, the site of Israel's first camp after crossing the Jordan and where Saul was made king. By Hosea's time it was a major place of worship that he attacks repeatedly. "My house" can mean the sanctuary or, more broadly, the land as God's household, the phrase does not settle which. "Princes" here means the officials and leading men of the kingdom, not royal sons.

9:16

The picture is a tree or vine with its root killed off. The same Hebrew word covers the fruit of a plant and the offspring of a womb, so the image of a barren tree and the loss of children are one thought, not two.

9:17

To wander among the nations meant living stateless and landless, outside the protection of any clan or territory, in the ancient world a condition close to defencelessness. The phrase echoes the sentence passed on Cain in Genesis 4.