Hosea11chapter 11

Hosea 11:1

When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt looks back to the exodus as an act of fatherly love toward a nation still in its infancy, the calling out of Egypt naming Israel corporately as God's son (Ex 4:22-23). Matthew 2:15 quotes the verse of the infant Jesus carried back from Egypt after Herod's death, reading Israel's exodus as a pattern Messiah himself relives and completes, the true Son succeeding where the son of Hosea's day failed. The bench states this as Matthew's own reading of the text, the exodus recapitulated in the one greater than Israel.

Hosea 11:2-4

As they called them, so they went from them: the more the Lord called through Moses and the prophets, the further Israel walked into Baal worship, love answered with idolatry through the whole span of the nation's history. Verses 3-4 turn tender, the Lord as the parent who taught Ephraim to walk, took him by the arms, and healed him without his even knowing whose hand it was, drawing him with cords of a man and bands of love, the gentlest possible language for covenant discipline, lifting the yoke off the jaws and laying meat before him like a father feeding a child rather than a farmer driving an ox.

Hosea 11:5-7

He shall not return into the land of Egypt reads with the readings named: some of the bench take it literally against a flight to Egypt for help, others read it as Egypt standing for the old bondage now to be exchanged for a new one under Assyria, since they refused to return to the Lord who called them. The sword shall abide on his cities pictures the coming invasion consuming what their own counsels built, and my people are bent to backsliding names a settled posture rather than a single lapse, called to the most High yet none exalting him, the plea met with silence.

Hosea 11:8-9

How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I deliver thee, Israel? is the emotional summit of the book, the Lord naming Admah and Zeboim, the two lesser cities destroyed with Sodom and Gomorrah (Deut 29:23), as the fate Ephraim deserves and then recoiling from pronouncing it, mine heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled together. I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger does not cancel the judgment already announced in the chapters around it but restrains it from becoming annihilation, for I am God, and not man grounding the restraint in the difference between divine and human anger, the Holy One who will not simply cast off what he has loved.

Hosea 11:10-12

They shall walk after the Lord: he shall roar like a lion turns the lion figure from threat to summons, the same roar that elsewhere announces judgment (Amos 1:2, 3:8) here calling the children home trembling as a bird out of Egypt and a dove out of Assyria, the two lands of exile named as the two directions the gathering will come from. The chapter closes with Ephraim's lies and Israel's deceit set against Judah, who yet ruleth with God and is faithful with the saints, the bench reading this not as flattery of Judah's own conduct elsewhere condemned but as a comparative statement standing at this point in the record.