Hosea14chapter 14

Hosea 14:1-3

O Israel, return unto the Lord thy God, for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity, opens the book's closing appeal, and verse 2 gives Israel the very words to bring, take away all iniquity, and receive us graciously, so will we render the calves of our lips. Henry and Gill both read that last phrase as praise offered in place of animal sacrifice, the lips doing what the altar once did, an idea the writer of Hebrews later takes up as the fruit of our lips (Heb 13:15). Verse 3 renounces the three false securities named across the book in one breath, Assyria's army, Egypt's horses, and the idols called our gods, closing with the plain reason, for in thee the fatherless findeth mercy.

Hosea 14:4-7

I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely, for mine anger is turned away from him, answers the appeal without one condition attached, the healing offered before any repayment is named. The dew, the lily, the roots of Lebanon, the spreading olive tree, and the corn and vine of verse 7 gather nearly every image of quiet, unforced growth the Hebrew Bible owns into four verses, a deliberate reversal of the drought and blight of chapter 13. Pusey reads the return of the Lebanon fragrance in verse 7 as answering the withered fountain of 13:15 point for point, judgment's picture undone by grace's.

Hosea 14:8

Ephraim shall say, What have I to do any more with idols, gives the restored nation its own renunciation in its own mouth, the same turn away from Baal that opened chapter 13 now spoken freely rather than forced. The verse then shifts speaker without warning, I have heard him, and observed him, I am like a green fir tree, from me is thy fruit found, and the commentators divide over the voice: some hear Ephraim still speaking of the Lord in the third person before the last line turns to the Lord's own answer, others hear the Lord speaking throughout, the evergreen tree standing over against the idols that cannot bear fruit at all. Either reading lands on the same point, that Ephraim's fruit now comes from the Lord and not from Baal.

Hosea 14:9

the ways of the Lord are right: The book's last verse steps outside the prophecy to address the reader directly, who is wise, and he shall understand these things, prudent, and he shall know them, a colophon in the manner of the wisdom writers rather than a prophetic oracle. For the ways of the Lord are right, and the just shall walk in them, but the transgressors shall fall therein, states in one sentence what the fourteen chapters behind it have shown at length, that the same word which is life to the obedient is a stumbling block to the rebellious. The bench reads it as an invitation back over the whole book, urging a second reading rather than a first.