NOTES for Hos 6:3
Which knowledge of God the prophet talks about? Is God not inconceivable? Can man’s reason be able of enveloping what cannot be enveloped, to know the unknowable? It is interesting that the call of Hosea has practically no relations with the intellectual abilities and the activities of man. For biblical authors, man is whole, indivisible on mind, feeling etc., that is why the knowledge of God is a not rational action, and entry into relationship with Him by all the essence of man.
Such is in particular the meaning of the word da' at, used here by the prophet. Knowledge is not a definitive result, but a process; "to know" and " to follow on to know" are various stages of the same process, various descriptions of the same thing. But this process is directed, according to the word of the prophet, not to pull us to God, but so that He comes to us. We cannot understand in our climate all the power of the comparison used by Hosea; only the inhabitants of warm and dry countries are in the state to evaluate this image: "He shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth".