NOTES for Hos 7:1-16

Today's reading continues the prophet's denunciation of God's people, but now a new aspect appears in it, directly connected with the theme of judgment. It concerns God's attempts to heal the people spiritually, mentioned in Hosea's preaching (v. 1). It is no surprise that the healing exposed all the people's sins, and so the reaction to it was expected: the people recoil from God, preferring to remain as they are and forgetting God in the hope that in some incomprehensible way everything will work out and He will close His eyes to their sins. But God clearly remembers everything and has no intention of forgetting anything (v. 2).

It would seem that the very thought that God might forget the sins of those He considers His people, or that He could remain indifferent to human sinfulness at all, should seem at least strange to a believer. But in this case the issue is not reflection on the situation; on the contrary, it is completely irrational behavior.

The situation in the Northern (Israelite) Kingdom, where the prophet preached, was highly contradictory in religious terms. On the one hand, the authorities encouraged actual paganism under the guise of double faith (this was the official religious policy of almost all the kings who ever ruled in the North); on the other hand, they wanted to show themselves greater Yahwists than the authorities of neighboring Judah (the Southern Kingdom), where officially no reforms were carried out and Yahwism formally remained in the original form in which it had existed in the still united Israel under David and Solomon. But they did this poorly, for Jeroboam, the founder of the Northern Kingdom, had already broken completely not only with Jerusalem but also with the traditional Levitical priesthood, founding an alternative religious center in Bethel and establishing a new priesthood that had nothing in common with either the Torah or tradition. "Political expediency" prevailed over both, and the prophets who opposed this were persecuted.

At the same time, the authorities could no longer simply abandon the religious policy they were pursuing: every king who ruled the country understood that if he took such a step, he would have to part with the throne. His subjects, in turn, realized that they would have to live in some different way, and many of those who had acquired their wealth not merely by sinful means but by openly criminal ones (vv. 3-5) would most likely lose everything. No one, it appears, was ready for such a development, yet neither the rulers nor their subjects could justify their unwillingness to change, for everyone understood that both the Torah and tradition testified against them. All that remained was to cling to any possibility, even a phantom one, if it seemed to allow them to solve their problems without changing anything in substance (vv. 8-12).

Such a position can only lead to a dead end - both spiritual and political (vv. 13-16). This is what the prophet warns his fellow countrymen about, but neither he nor God Himself can change the choice of those who prefer to cling to their own ways while pushing away God's saving hand.