Hoseachapter 9
17 verses · KJVHosea book hub →
Key verse
All their wickedness is in Gilgal: for there I hated them: for the wickedness of their doings I will drive them out of mine house, I will love them no more: all their princes are revolters.
It stands in Cast away, wanderers among the nations, verses 15 to 17.
The chapter
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
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.
The rest of the history, and what it meant to them
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
Where the chapter sits
Hosea 9 falls in The LORD's controversy with Israel (chapters 4–14). Oracles against the northern kingdom's idolatry, political faithlessness, and corruption, closing with the great call ‘O Israel, return unto the LORD thy God’ (14:1).
Before it: The marriage and the children, chapters 1–3.
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. No joy at the threshing floor; Egypt will bury them
1. (vv. 1-2)
Hosea 9:1
“As other people - With feastings, triumphs, and sacrifices of thanksgiving. A reward - Such as is given by adulterers to lewd women; thou hast loved to see thy floor full, and hast said thy idols gave thee this plenty.”
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765)evangelical
3 more voices on this verseWhat preachers and commentators have said about this verse, in their own words.
Hosea 9:1
“Rejoice not, O Israel, for joy, as other people - Literally, “rejoice not to exultation,” so as to bound and leap for joy (as in Job 3:22). The prophet seems to come across the people in the midst of their festivity and mirth, and arrests them abruptly stopping it, telling them, that had no cause for joy.”
Hosea 9:1
“Though he may not openly put forth his hand, though he may not pursue us, we ought yet to anticipate his wrath; for it is the proper office of faith, not only to find out from present punishment that God is angry, but also to fear, on account of any prevailing vices, the punishment that is far distant.”
John Calvin· Commentaries (1554)reformed
Hosea 9:1
“Other people were idolaters, but that sin was not, in them, going a whoring from God, as it was in Israel that had been married to him. Note, The sins of those who have made a profession of religion and relation to God are more provoking to him than the sins of others.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Hosea 9:2
“The floor and winepress shall not feed them - God turneth away wholly from the adulterous people, and telleth others, how justly they shall be dealt with first for this. “Because she loved My reward, and despised Myself, the reward itself shall be taken away from her.” When the blessings of God have been abused to sin, He, in mercy and judgment, takes them away. He cut them off, in order to show that He alone, who now withheld them, had before given them.”
Rejoice not, O Israel, for joy: , as other people opens the chapter by forbidding the harvest festival's usual gladness, because the reward Israel loved on every cornfloor was credited to Baal in the nation's own telling rather than to the Lord. The threshing floor and the winepress, the very places the false thanksgiving was offered, are named as the places that will fail to feed the nation, judgment landing exactly where the sin was committed. The bench reads the whole unit as an answer to the fertility cult behind Israel's worship, the true giver of grain and wine withdrawing what the false gods had been credited with supplying.
2. (vv. 3-4)
Hosea 9:3
“They shall not dwell in the Lord's land,.... The land of Israel, or Canaan; which, though all the earth is the Lord's, was peculiarly his; which he had chosen for himself, and for this people; where he had his temple, and caused his Shechinah or divine Majesty to dwell in a very special manner, and where his worship and service were performed. So the Targum calls it the land of the Shechinah or majesty of the Lord. Sometimes it is called Immanuel's land, where the Messiah Immanuel, God with us, was to be born, and dwell, and where he did.”
2 more voices on this verse
Hosea 9:3
“They shall not dwell in the Lord’s land. The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof - Yet He had chosen the land of Canaan, there to place His people; there, above others, to work His miracles; there to reveal Himself; there to send His Son to take our flesh. He had put Israel in possession of it, to hold it under Him on condition of obedience.”
Hosea 9:3
“It was a great sin and folly to rebel against God, and go a whoring from him, in such a land as this, to deal unjustly in a land of uprightness, Isa. xxvi. And it was a sad and sore judgment to be driven out from such a land as this; it was like driving our first parents out of the garden of Eden, and almost amounted to an exclusion out of the heavenly Canaan.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Hosea 9:4
“As the bread of mourners - By the law, a dead body, and every thing that related to it, the house where it lay, and the persons who touched it, were all polluted and unclean, and whatever they touched was considered as defiled. See Deu 26:14; Num 19:11, Num 19:13, Num 19:14. For their bread for their soul - The bread for the common support of life shall not be sanctified to them by having the first-fruits presented at the temple.”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
2 more voices on this verse
Hosea 9:4
“Having collected the fruit of the vine into the wine-vats, they offered the firstlings as a libation to the demons, and not to the God who gave them. They also offered loaves of bread as firstfruits of the harvest—except that the sacrifice will become for them defiled and impure, he says, and the offerings will be considered as mourning breads (that is, disgusting, impure and odious). For what reason? For the law considered unclean anyone who approached a dead body either by blood relationship or rather by the very touching of the body.”
Cyril of Alexandria· written before 444· COMMENTARY ON HOSEA 4:96patristic
Hosea 9:4
“Wine-offerings - These were appointed to be offered with the morning and evening sacrifice, the sacrifice representing Christ, and pardon by him; the wine-offering, the spirit of grace: the sacrifice repeated, daily continued their peace and pardon.”
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765)evangelical
They shall not dwell in the Lord’s land: reverses the promise at the root of Israel's identity, exile pictured as a return to Egypt in one direction and captivity in Assyria in the other, both a forfeiture of the inheritance. Unclean food in a foreign land matters because worship and diet were bound together under the law, so exile itself becomes ritual defilement, a people unable to stay clean even if they wished to. Verse four extends the same logic to sacrifice, offerings made in exile counted as the bread of mourners, food touched by death and so polluting rather than pleasing, unable to come into the house of the Lord because no house will be left to bring it to.
3. (vv. 5-6)
Hosea 9:5
“What will ye do in the solemn day? - Man is content to remain far from God, so that God do not show him, that He has withdrawn Himself from him. Man would fain have the power of drawing near to God in time of calamity, or when he himself likes. He would fain have God at his command, as it were, not be at the command of God. God cuts off this hope altogether. he singles out the great festivals, which commemorated His great doings for His people, as though they had no more share in those mercies.”
1 more voice on this verse
Hosea 9:5
“Golgotha in Syriac is the same with Gilgal in Hebrew, and therefore he thinks this may have reference to the putting of Christ to death at Golgotha, which was the greatest sin of the Jewish nation, and of which it might truly be said, All their wickedness was summed up in that. And no wonder that the people did wickedly, both in worship and conversation, when 4.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Hosea 9:6
“For, lo, they are gone - Many of them fled to Egypt to avoid the destruction; but they went there only to die. Memphis - Now Cairo, or Kahira, found them graves. The pleasant places for their silver - The fine estates or villas which they had purchased by their money, being now neglected and uninhabited, are covered with nettles; and even in their tabernacles, thorns and brambles of different kinds grow. These are the fullest marks of utter desolation.”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
What will ye do in the solemn day: , and in the day of the feast of the Lord asks a question with no answer available, since exile will strip Israel of the very land, temple and calendar the feasts depended on. Verse six answers with the mechanics of the coming disaster, Egypt gathering up the fugitives and Memphis burying the dead, foreign soil becoming Israel's cemetery rather than her ally. The pleasant places once filled with hoarded silver are left to nettles and thorns, wealth and worship both reclaimed by wilderness, the reversal of every blessing named in the law.
B. The prophet is a fool, they say, in the day of visitationvv. 7-9
The days of visitation are come: announces that judgment has finally arrived rather than merely being threatened, and the people answer by calling the prophet a fool and the spiritual man mad, blaming the messenger for the message. Verse eight turns the charge back on the nation itself, the watchman of Ephraim was with my God, yet a snare of a fowler in all his ways, and hatred in the house of his God, describing a corruption that reaches even the shrine meant to guard against it. Their corruption is measured against Gibeah, the outrage of Judges nineteen that nearly ended the tribe of Benjamin, a byword the prophet uses deliberately to say Israel has returned to its worst historical low.
Hosea 9:7
"The days of visitation have come, the days of retribution have come: know, O Israel, a foolish prophet, a spiritual madman because of the multitude of your iniquity, and the multitude of your madness." LXX: "The days of vengeance have come, the days of your retribution have come, and Israel shall be afflicted as a raving prophet, a man who had the Spirit, because" "the multitude of your iniquities, your madness has multiplied."
Jerome· written before 420· Commentary on Hosea 9:7patristic
2 more voices on this verse
Hosea 9:7
“The days of visitation are come - The false prophets had continually hood-winked the people, promising them that those days would never come. “They had put far away the evil day” Amo 6:3. Now it was not at hand only. In God’s purpose, those “days” were “come,” irresistible, inevitable, inextricable; days in which God would visit, what in His long-suffering, He seemed to overlook, and would “recompense each according to his works.” Israel shall know it - Israel would not know by believing it; now it should “know,” by feeling it.”
Hosea 9:7
“The day of God's judgments is both a day of visitation, in which men's sins are enquired into and brought to light, and a day of recompence, in which men's doom will be passed, and a reward given to every man according to his work; the strict visitation is in order to a just retribution.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Hosea 9:8
"Ephraim the spy with my God: the prophet is a snare of ruin" "above all his ways: insanity in the house of his God, deeply they have sinned: as in the days of Gabaa, their iniquities will be remembered, and their sins will be visited." LXX: "Ephraim the spy with God the prophet: a twisted snare over all his ways, insanity" "they have fabricated in the house of God: they have been corrupted according to the days of the hill: " "their iniquities will be remembered, and they will be avenged for their sins."
Jerome· written before 420· Commentary on Hosea 9:8-9patristic
Hosea 9:9
“They have deeply corrupted themselves - Literally, “they have gone deep, they are corrupted.” They have deeply immersed themselves in wickedness; have gone to the greatest depth they could, in it; they are sunk in it, so that they could hardly be extricated from it; and this, of their own deliberate intent; they contrived it deeply, hiding themselves, as they hoped, from God. As in, the days of Gibeah - When Benjamin espoused the cause of “the children of Belial” who had worked such horrible brutishness in Gibeah toward the concubine of the Levite.”
1 more voice on this verse
Hosea 9:9
“Every tribe is now as bad as the tribe of Benjamin then was, and therefore may expect to be brought as low as that tribe then was. They shall therefore be reckoned with for their fathers' sins: He will remember their iniquity and visit their sins, the iniquity they have by kind and by entail, the sin that runs in the blood; the sin of the father shall now be visited upon the children.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
C. Grapes in the wilderness, then Baal-peor
1. (v. 10)
Hosea 9:10
“I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness - While they were faithful, they were as acceptable to me as ripe grapes would be to a thirsty traveler in the desert. I saw your fathers - Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Caleb, Samuel, etc. As the first ripe - Those grapes, whose bud having come first, and being exposed most to the sun, have been the first ripe upon the tree; which tree was now in the vigor of youth, and bore fruit for the first time. A metaphor of the rising prosperity of the Jewish state.”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness: recalls the exodus generation as a discovery precious to God, sweet fruit found where none was expected, and the fig tree's firstripe fruit repeats the same image of a gift prized above the ordinary harvest. The turn is immediate and total, they went to Baal-peor, and separated themselves unto that shame, the incident of Numbers twenty-five where Israel joined itself to Moabite worship at the very edge of the promised land. The last clause states the principle plainly, their abominations were according as they loved, worship shaped by affection rather than command, so a people who loved a shameful thing became as shameful as what they loved.
2. (vv. 11-14)
Hosea 9:11
“As for Ephraim, their glory shall fly away, like a bird - Ephraim had parted with God, his true Glory. In turn, God would quickly take from him all created glory, all which he counted glory, or in which he gloried. When man parts with the substance, his true honor, God takes away the shadow, lest he should content himself therewith, and not see his shame, and, boasting himself to be something, abide in his nothingness and poverty and shame to which he had reduced himself. “Fruitfulness,” and consequent strength, had been God’s special promise to Ephraim.”
2 more voices on this verse
Hosea 9:11
“Their glory - Their children or posterity, which was the glory of Israel. Shall fly - It is proverbial, and speaks a sudden loss of children. From the birth - As soon as born.”
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765)evangelical
Hosea 9:11
“Ephraim is as strong and rich as ever Tyre was, and as proud and secure. The Chaldee paraphrase gives this sense of it, The congregation of Israel, while they observed the law, was like to Tyrus in prosperity and security.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Hosea 9:12
“Not a man left - There shall be a total extirpation of them. When I depart - To compleat their misery, I will depart from them. It is sad to lose our children, but sadder to lose our God.”
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765)evangelical
Hosea 9:13
“Ephraim, as I saw Tyrus, is planted in a pleasant place - Or (better) “as I saw (her) toward Tyre,” or “as I saw as to Tyre.” Ephraim stretched out, in her dependent tribes, “toward” or “to” Tyre itself. Like to Tyrus she was, “in her riches, her glory, her pleasantness, her strength, her pride,” and in the end, her fall. The picture is that of a fair tree, not chance-sown, but “planted” carefully by hand in a pleasant place. Beauty and strength were blended in her.”
1 more voice on this verse
Hosea 9:13
“Note, It is a great alloy to the comfort parents have in their children that they know not what they have brought them forth and brought them up for, perhaps for the murderer, or, which is worse, to be themselves the plagues of their generation.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Hosea 9:14
“Give them, O Lord: what wilt thou give? - There is an uncommon beauty in these words. The prophet, seeing the evils that were likely to fall upon his countrymen, begins to make intercession for them; but when he had formed the first part of his petition, “Give them, O Lord!” the prophetic light discovered to him that the petition would not be answered and that God was about to give them something widely different.”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
1 more voice on this verse
Hosea 9:14
“Rather let them have no children than have them to be made miserable; for the same reason, when a total ruin was coming on the Jewish nation, Christ said, Blessed is the womb that never bore and the paps that never gave suck, Luke xxiii.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
their glory shall fly away like a bird: Ephraim's glory is pictured flying away like a bird from three points at once, from the birth, and from the womb, and from the conception, a judgment reaching back before life even begins. Even children raised past infancy give no security, though they bring up their children, yet will I bereave them, and Ephraim's own pleasant planting, compared to Tyrus at the height of her prosperity, is said to bring forth children only to the murderer rather than to a future. The prophet's own prayer in verse fourteen matches the judgment's severity, give them, O Lord, a miscarrying womb and dry breasts, one of the harshest lines in the book, and the bench reads it as the prophet's grief voiced as intercession rather than as his own wish.
D. Cast away, wanderers among the nationsvv. 15-17
All their wickedness is in Gilgal: names the site where Saul was made king, which the bench reads as marking where Israel's monarchy first began drifting from obedience, so the Lord's hatred there is dated to a specific historical wound rather than a vague general charge. I will love them no more answers Hosea's own children's names from chapter one, Lo-ruhamah's withheld mercy spoken again here in the Lord's own voice against a nation that will not turn. The chapter closes on Ephraim smitten, root dried up, no fruit, and the final verdict, my God will cast them away, and they shall be wanderers among the nations, a sentence the bench connects to the covenant curses of Deuteronomy twenty-eight finally falling due.
Hosea 9:15
“Or, as "love" is mentioned immediately after, the reference may be to the Hebrew mode of divorce, the husband (God) putting the wife (Israel) out of the house. princes . . . revolters--"Sarim . . . Sorerim" (Hebrew), a play on similar sounds.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
3 more voices on this verse
Hosea 9:15
"All their wickedness is at Gilgal: for there I hated them." LXX similarly. In Gilgal, Saul was anointed as king, with Samuel announcing God's anger to the people. (1 Kings 10) "There," he said, "I had them skinned, and they asked for a human king, and withdrew from my authority. Whether it was because Galgala is a place of idolatry, where they committed all kinds of sin.
Jerome· written before 420· Commentary on Hosea 9:15patristic
Hosea 9:15
“In Gilgal, where all their wickedness is, there I hated them. There, where the abominations of sin are committed, there God abominates the sinners. In Gilgal he had bestowed many tokens of his favour upon their ancestors, but now that is the place where he hates them for their base ingratitude.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Hosea 9:15
“All their wickedness is in Gilgal - “Gilgal,” having been the scene of so many of God’s mercies, had been, on that very ground, chosen as a popular scene for idol-worship (see the note above at Hos 4:15).”
Hosea 9:16
“Ephraim is smitten - The thing being determined, it is considered as already done. Their root is dried up - They shall never more be a kingdom. And they never had any political form from their captivity by the Assyrians to the present day. Yea, though they bring forth - See the note on Hos 9:11-12 (note).”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
1 more voice on this verse
Hosea 9:16
“The figures "root," "fruit," are suggested by the word "Ephraim," that is, fruitful (see on Ho 9:11, 12). "Smitten," namely, with a blight (Ps 102:4).”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
Hosea 9:17
“My God will cast them away,.... With loathsomeness and contempt, having sinned against him, and done such abominable things; cast them out of their own land, as men not fit to live in it; cast them out of his sight, as not able to endure them; cast them away, as unprofitable and good for nothing; reject them from being his people; no more own them in the relation they had stood in to him; nor show them any more favour, at least until the conversion of them in the times of the Messiah.”
2 more voices on this verse
Hosea 9:17
“My God hath cast them away - “My God” (he saith) as if God were his God only who clave to him, not their’s who had, by their disobedience, departed from Him. “My God.” “He had then authority from Him,” whom he owned and who owned “him,” and who bade him so Speak, as though God were “his” God, and no longer their’s.”
Hosea 9:17
“Note, When others disown God, and are disowned by him, it is a very great satisfaction to good people that they can call God their God, can cheerfully own him and see themselves owned by him--all revolters, all ruined, yet God is my God. The fruit of this displeasure, in the cutting off and abandoning of their posterity, which is the judgment here threatened again and again.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
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 →
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; Carl Friedrich Keil, The Twelve Minor Prophets; Edward Bouverie Pusey, The Minor Prophets: A Commentary; Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible; John Gill, Exposition of the Old Testament; John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible.