Hoseachapter 9
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Speaks with:Hosea 10×4Hosea 2×3Hosea 9×3Isaiah 5×2Hosea 4×2Hosea 8×3
Summary
Chapter summary
Rejoice not, Israel: the festival joy is bought with harlot's hire on every threshing-floor. Exile is coming and it will taste like uncleanness, no wine-press, no drink-offerings poured to Jehovah, bread eaten as the bread of mourners in Assyria. 'The days of visitation are come'; Israel calls the prophet a fool and the man of the spirit mad. Their fathers came to Baal-peor and consecrated themselves to the shameful thing, 'and became abominable like that which they loved.' So Ephraim's glory flies away like a bird, no birth, no womb, no conception. Their root is dried up; they shall bear no fruit.
Context
Prophecy · Hosea — Hosea overview
- A. 1–6 No joy at the threshing floor; Egypt will bury them
- B. 7–9 The prophet is a fool, they say, in the day of visitation
- C. 10–14 Grapes in the wilderness, then Baal-peor
- D. 15–17 Cast away, wanderers among the nations
The outline
A.No joy at the threshing floor; Egypt will bury themvv. 1 to 6
Read vv. 1 to 6 →B.The prophet is a fool, they say, in the day of visitationvv. 7 to 9
Read vv. 7 to 9 →C.Grapes in the wilderness, then Baal-peorvv. 10 to 14
Read vv. 10 to 14 →D.Cast away, wanderers among the nationsvv. 15 to 17
Read vv. 15 to 17 →
The world behind this chapter
Hosea 9The history
The scene is a real party. After the grain was threshed and winnowed, the harvest festival was held at the threshing floor itself — a flat, hard-packed circle on a windy ridge — with food, wine, music, and dancing that ran for days. Hosea walks into it and says: do not rejoice.
Exile is described in terms of food, and the detail is precise. In Assyria they would eat unclean food, and their sacrifices would be like the bread of mourners — food in a house where someone had died was ritually defiled, and anyone eating it was unfit to enter the sanctuary. Deportation did not just move people. It made ordinary obedience impossible.
Assyrian deportation policy is well documented in their own inscriptions and reliefs. Populations were marched hundreds of miles and resettled among strangers, deliberately mixing groups so no exiled people could organise. Hosea's mention of Egypt as a second destination reflects the other direction refugees ran.
Two memories are dragged up as precedent. Baal-peor was where Israel joined in Moabite worship on the way into the land and thousands died in the plague that followed. Gibeah was the town whose crime in the days of the judges nearly destroyed the tribe of Benjamin. Hosea says the nation has been like this from the beginning.
What it meant to them
The hardest sentence is that God found Israel like grapes in the wilderness — a delighted, surprised discovery — and that they went to Baal-peor and consecrated themselves to shame. The complaint is not disappointment in a bad people. It is grief over a people who had once been a delight.
For hearers at a festival, the announcement that the days of punishment had come and the prophet was called a fool and a madman told them exactly how the message was landing while it was being delivered.
Sources cited
- John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews, Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament
- James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Hosea 9. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.