Hoseachapter 1
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Key verse
The word of the Lord that came unto Hosea, the son of Beeri, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel.
It stands in Go take a wife of whoredom, verses 1 to 3.
The chapter
Chapter summary
The word of Jehovah comes to Hosea in the last decades of the northern kingdom, and the first command is a marriage: 'Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredom.' Gomer bears three children whose names are the sermon: Jezreel, blood to be avenged; Lo-ruhamah, 'that hath not obtained mercy'; and Lo-ammi, 'ye are not my people.' Yet the chapter refuses to end there: Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, and where it was said 'Ye are not my people' it shall be said 'Ye are the sons of the living God' (1:10): Paul quotes it in Romans 9, Peter echoes it in 1 Peter 2.
Context
Prophecy · Hosea · Hosea overview
The world behind this chapter
Hosea 1The history
Marriage in Israel began with a payment, not a proposal. The groom's family handed over a bride-price to the woman's father, witnesses were present, and the agreement was legally binding before the couple ever lived together. God telling a prophet whom to marry was therefore an instruction with a price tag and a public contract attached.
The rest of the history, and what it meant to them
Children were named to say something. A name was a sentence about the family, the moment, or the future, and it was spoken aloud a hundred times a day by neighbours. Naming a son Jezreel, a daughter Not-Pitied, and a second son Not-My-People meant the whole village heard the message every time Hosea called his children in from the street.
Jezreel was a place before it was a name. The broad valley cutting across the north was Israel's best farmland and its main battlefield, and a generation earlier Jehu had launched his coup there, wiping out Ahab's house in a bloodbath that also took the king of Judah. The dynasty ruling in Hosea's day was Jehu's, four generations on.
Jeroboam II's reign was the high-water mark. Assyria was distracted, the trade roads were open, and the kingdom's borders were the widest they had been since Solomon. To an Israelite farmer in these years, talk of the kingdom ending would have sounded like weather forecasting for a country that had never seen rain.
What it meant to them
Hearers were being told that the very victory their royal house was founded on, Jehu's slaughter at Jezreel, was a debt still owed, and that the bow of Israel would be broken in the same valley.
Then the sentence turns over inside itself. Not-My-People becomes sons of the living God, and the number of them becomes sand on the seashore. The same generation that heard the divorce papers read heard the promise that the marriage would not finally end.
Sources cited
- John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews, Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament
- Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions
Where the chapter sits
Hosea 1 falls in The marriage and the children (chapters 1–3). Hosea marries Gomer; their three children are named as sermons, Jezreel, Lo-ruhamah, Lo-ammi. The marriage enacted is the marriage preached.
The marriage commanded. ‘Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms.’
After it: The LORD's controversy with Israel, chapters 4–14.
The whole shape of Hosea→The structure of this chapter
The heads below are this chapter's scenes. The numbered points under each are its verses.
A. Go take a wife of whoredom
1. (v. 1)
Hosea 1:1
"The word of the Lord that came to Hosea the son of Beeri." LXX similarly. The word of the Lord, which was in the beginning with God the Father, and the Word was God, came to Hosea the son of Beeri, so that he too might make God known as a prophet, with the Savior saying: "If those to whom the word of God came are called gods, and the Scripture cannot be broken: 'Whom the Father has sanctified' and sent into the world, you say I blaspheme because I said, 'I am the Son of God' " (John 10:35-36).
Jerome· written before 420· Commentary on Hosea 1:1patristic
3 more voices on this verseWhat preachers and commentators have said about this verse, in their own words.
Hosea 1:1
“The word of the Lord that came unto Hosea,.... Whose name is the same with Joshua and Jesus, and signifies a saviour; he was in some things a type of Christ the Saviour, and prophesied of him, and salvation by him; and was the instrument and means of saving men, as all true prophets were, and faithful ministers of the word are: to him the word of the Lord, revealing his mind and will, was brought by the Spirit of God, and impressed upon his mind; and it was committed to him to be delivered unto others.”
Hosea 1:1
“Jonah the prophet had promised success to Jeroboam II from God, not for the king's merit, but from God's mercy to Israel; so the coast of Israel was restored by Jeroboam II from the entering of Hamath to the sea of the plain (2Ki 14:23-27).”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
Hosea 1:1
“Jotham succeeded his father, and reigned sixteen years; and though it be a probable conjecture, that the beginning of his reign is to be counted from the time he undertook the government, after his father, being smitten with leprosy, was ejected from the society of men, it is yet probable that the remaining time to the death of his father ought to come to our reckoning.”
John Calvin· Commentaries (1554)reformed
The word of the Lord that came unto Hosea: Hosea dates his own ministry by the kings who reigned during it, four kings of Judah's line but only one king of Israel, Jeroboam the son of Joash, whose long and prosperous reign the prophet's message will unmask as a hollow peace. The span named runs from Israel's late prosperity under Jeroboam II into the kingdom's final collapse, a stretch the commentators set near eight decades. Beeri, the father named, is otherwise unknown to the text, and the silence is left as silence rather than filled in.
2. (vv. 2-3)
Hosea 1:2
“Gomer is called "a wife of whoredoms," anticipatively. children of whoredoms--The kingdom collectively is viewed as a mother; the individual subjects of it are spoken of as her children.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
Hosea 1:3
“So he went - He did not demur, nor excuse himself, as did even Moses Exo 4:18, or Jeremiah Jer 1:6, or Peter Act 10:4, and were rebuked for it, although mercifully by the All-Merciful. Hosea, accustomed from childhood to obey God and every indication of the will of God, did at once, what he was bidden, however repulsive to natural feeling, and became, thereby, the more an image of the obedience of Christ Jesus, and a pattern to us, at once to believe and obey God’s commands, however little to our minds.”
Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms: The command itself is the first sermon: Hosea is told to marry a wife of whoredoms because the land has committed great whoredom in departing from the Lord, the marriage acting out the nation's own unfaithfulness before a word of rebuke is spoken. The commentators divide on whether Gomer was already given to harlotry when Hosea took her or whether the whoredom names what she would become, with Calvin and the older writers generally reading the marriage as a real event rather than a parable staged only in vision. Bought or married, Gomer the daughter of Diblaim is treated by the text with the plainness of a family record, and the son she bears opens the naming that carries the rest of the chapter.
B. Jezreel, Lo-ruhamah, Lo-ammi: three names of judgment
1. (vv. 4-5)
Hosea 1:4
“But how comes the same action to be both rewarded and punished? Very justly; the matter of it was good; it was the execution of a righteous sentence passed upon the house of Ahab, and, as such, it was rewarded; but Jehu did it not in a right manner; he aimed at his own advancement, not at the glory of God, and mingled his own resentments with the execution of God's justice.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Hosea 1:5
“I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel - The valley of Jezreel is a beautiful and a broad valley or plain, stretching, from West to East, from Mount Carmel and the sea to the Jordan, which it reaches through two arms, between the Mountains of Gilboa, little Hermon, and Tabor; and from South to North from the Mountains of Ephraim to those of Galilee. Nazareth lay on its northern side. It is called “the great plain” (1 Macc. 12:49), “the great plain of Esdraelon” (Judith 1:8).”
Call his name Jezreel: The child's name reaches back to Jehu's bloodbath at Jezreel, the very massacre by which Jehu had carried out the Lord's own sentence on the house of Ahab in 2 Kings 9 and 10, now itself brought to account. The commentators read the charge as falling not on the act of judgment but on Jehu's excess and his self-serving cruelty in carrying it out, a distinction Hosea's contemporaries would have felt keenly since Jehu's own dynasty still sat on Israel's throne. The bow of Israel broken in the valley of Jezreel names the coming military collapse, fulfilled within the generation when Assyria ended the northern kingdom.
2. (vv. 6-7)
Hosea 1:6
“And she conceived again, and bare a daughter,.... One of the weaker sex; denoting the weaker state of the kingdom of Israel after Jeroboam, as Kimchi thinks; Zachariah his son reigning but six months, and Shallum the son of Jabesh, his successor, reigned but one month, 2Ki 15:8, and God said unto him, call her name Loruhamah; which signifies, "she hath not obtained mercy": and what follows explains it to the same sense.”
3 more voices on this verse
Hosea 1:6
“Call her Lo-ruhamah - לא רהמה, “Not having obtained mercy.” This also was a prophetic or typical name; and the reason of its imposition is immediately given: For I will no more have mercy - כי לא אושיף עיד ארחם ki lo osiph od arachem, “For I will no more add to have mercy upon the house of Israel.” This refers to the total destruction of that kingdom.”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
Hosea 1:6
Lo-ruhamah--that is, "not an object of mercy or gracious favor." take . . . away--Israel, as a kingdom, was never restored from Assyria, as Judah was from Babylon after seventy years. MAURER translates according to the primary meaning, "No more will I have mercy on the house of Israel, so as to pardon them."
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
Hosea 1:6
“If pardoning mercy is denied, no other mercy can be expected, for that opens the door to all the rest. Some make this to speak comfort: I will no more have mercy upon them till in pardoning I shall pardon them, that is, till the Redeemer comes to Zion to turn away ungodliness from Jacob. The Chaldee reads it, But, if they repent, in pardoning I will pardon them.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Hosea 1:7
“For He says to Hosea the prophet, "I will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel, but will altogether be their enemy. But I will have mercy upon the children of Judah, and will save them in the Lord their God." Here God the Father gives the name of God, without any ambiguity, to the Son, in Whom also He chose us before countless ages. "Their God," He says, for while the Father, being Unoriginate, is independent of all, He has given us for an inheritance to His Son.”
Hilary of Poitiers· written before 367· ON THE TRINITY 4:37patristic
2 more voices on this verse
Hosea 1:7
“I will have mercy on the house of Judah - For to them the promises were made in David, and of them, according to the flesh, Christ was to come. Israel, moreover, as being founded in rebellion and apostasy, had gone on from bad to worse. All their kings clave to the sin of Jeroboam; not one did right in the sight of God; not one repented or hearkened to God.”
Hosea 1:7
“Judah is only incidentally mentioned to form a contrast to Israel. by the Lord their God--more emphatic than "by Myself"; by that Jehovah (Me) whom they worship as their God, whereas ye despise Him. not . . . by bow--on which ye Israelites rely (Ho 1:5, "the bow of Israel"); Jeroboam II was famous as a warrior (2Ki 14:25).”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
Call her name Lo–ruhamah: The daughter's name, not pitied, revokes the mercy that had shielded Israel even in her sin, the Lord stating the reversal outright, I will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel. Judah is set apart and spared in the same breath, saved not by bow, nor by sword, nor by battle, by horses, nor by horsemen, which the commentators tie forward to Sennacherib's siege lifted in a single night by the angel of the Lord rather than by Judah's own arms in 2 Kings 19. The two houses stand side by side under one prophecy, mercy withdrawn from one and reserved without cause for the other.
3. (vv. 8-9)
Hosea 1:8
“Now when she had weaned ... - Eastern women very commonly nursed their children two, or even three (2 Macc. 7:27) years. The weaning then of the child portrays a certain interval of time between these two degrees of chastisement; but after this reprieve, the last and final judgment pictured here was to set in irreversibly.”
Hosea 1:9
“Call his name Lo-ammi - that is, “not My people.” The name of this third child expresses the last final degree of chastisement. As the “scattering by God” did not involve the being wholly “unpitied;” so neither did the being wholly “unpitied” for the time involve the being wholly rejected, so as to be no more His people. There were corresponding degrees in the actual history of the kingdom of Israel. God withdrew his protection by degrees. Under Jeroboam, in whose reign was this beginning of Hosea’s prophecy, the people was yet outwardly strong.”
1 more voice on this verse
Hosea 1:9
“But our being cast out of covenant is owing purely to ourselves and our own folly. The breach is on man's side: You are not my people, and therefore I will not be your God; if God hate any, it is because they first hated him. This was fulfilled in Israel when they were utterly taken away into the land of Assyria, and their place knew them no more.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Now when she had weaned Lo–ruhamah: The weaning notice marks time between the second child and the third, whose name completes the sentence begun in the first two, not my people, undoing at a stroke the covenant formula given at the exodus, ye shall be my people and I will be your God, and setting Israel formally outside the relation Sinai had established. The commentators note the weight of I will not be your God set against the covenant name itself, the Lord unsaying his own word to a people who had unsaid theirs first. The three children stand together as a sentence read aloud over the northern kingdom, judgment and its ground both named before a word of hope interrupts it.
C. Yet as the sand of the sea, sons of the living Godvv. 10-11
the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea: The judgment sentence is answered in the same breath it closes, the very words not my people turned into sons of the living God, and Paul takes up the reversal at Romans 9:25-26 as the pattern for God's calling of the Gentiles, a use the New Testament makes of the text which the notes carry as Paul's own reading rather than a horizon Hosea himself states. The children of Israel promised as the sand of the sea recalls the Abrahamic promise itself, and the day of Jezreel, God sows, turns the name that opened the chapter as a sentence of blood into a name of planting and increase. Judah and Israel gathered together under one head look past the divided kingdoms to a future reunion, which the older commentators read messianically and the historical-critical bench reads as restoration language, positions the text leaves named rather than settled.
Hosea 1:10
“Some think that these promises will not have their accomplishment, at least not in full, till the general conversion of the Jews in the latter days, which is expected yet to come, when the vast incredible numbers of Jews, that are now dispersed as the sand of the sea, shall be brought to embrace the faith of Christ and be incorporated in the gospel-church.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Hosea 1:10
Hosea 1:11
“Then shall the children of Judah and the children of Israel be gathered together - A little image of this union was seen after the captivity in Babylon, when some of the children of Israel, i. e., of the ten tribes, were united to Judah on his return, and the great schism of the two kingdoms came to an end.”
3 more voices on this verse
Hosea 1:11
"They come up out of the land," namely, they will live the life of the saints as well, "for great is the day of Jezreel." Indeed, great is the day of Christ, when he will raise to life all the dead. In fact, he will descend from heaven and sit on his glorious throne. "And he will give everyone according to his works."
Cyril of Alexandria· written before 444· COMMENTARY ON HOSEA 1:9patristic
Hosea 1:11
“Thus Judah and Israel were gathered together; yet this was but a type of the much more celebrated coalition between Jews and Gentiles, when, by the death of Christ, the partition-wall of the ceremonial law was taken down. Christ died, to gather together in one all the children of God that were scattered abroad, John xi.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Hosea 1:11
“One head - Zerubbabel, who was appointed by Cyrus, yet with full approbation of the people. And so Christ is appointed by the Father, head of his church, whom believers heartily accept. Come up - Literally out of Babylon, spiritually out of captivity to sin and to Satan.”
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765)evangelical
This page carries no textual note on Hosea 1. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
Sources for this chapter
The summary
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.
The exposition
Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible; Albert Barnes, Notes on the Old Testament; Carl Friedrich Keil, The Twelve Minor Prophets; Edward Bouverie Pusey, The Minor Prophets: A Commentary; John Calvin, Commentaries on the Twelve Minor Prophets; John Gill, Exposition of the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible.
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