CHAPTER 2 Nov. 5 
Punishment and Restoration 
Say to your brothers, ‘Ammi! [My people]!’ and to your sisters, ‘Ruhamah! [I will have mercy!]’. 2Contend with your mother! Contend, for she is not my wife, neither am I her husband; and let her therefore put away her prostitution from her face, and her adulteries from between her breasts; 3lest I strip her naked, and make her bare as in the day that she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and kill her with thirst. 4Indeed, on her children I will have no mercy; for they are children of unfaithfulness; 5for their mother has played the prostitute.  She who conceived them has done shamefully; for she said, ‘I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink’. 6Therefore behold, I will hedge up your way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she can’t find her way. 7She will follow after her lovers, but she won’t overtake them; and she will seek them, but won’t find them.  Then she will say, ‘I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than now’. 8For she did not recognize that it was I who gave her the grain, the new wine, and the oil, and multiplied to her silver and gold, which they used for Baal.  9Therefore I will take back My grain in its time, and My new wine in its season, and will pluck away My wool and My linen which should have covered her nakedness. 10Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one will deliver her out of My hand. 11I will also cause all her celebrations to cease: her feasts, her new moons, her Sabbaths, and all her solemn assemblies. 12I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees, about which she has said, ‘These are my wages that my lovers have given me; and I will make them a forest’, and the animals of the field shall eat them. 13I will visit on her the days of the Baals, to which she burned incense, when she decked herself with her earrings and her jewels, and went after her lovers, and forgot Me, says Yahweh. 14Therefore behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. 15I will give her vineyards from there, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope; and she will respond there, as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt. 16It will be in that day, says Yahweh, that you will call Me ‘my husband’, and no longer call Me ‘my master’. 17For I will take away the names of the Baals out of her mouth, and they will no longer be mentioned by name. 18In that day I will make a covenant for them with the animals of the field, and with the birds of the sky, and with the creeping things of the ground. I will break the bow, the sword, and the battle out of the land, and will make them lie down safely. 19I will betroth you to Me forever. Yes, I will betroth you to Me in righteousness, in justice, in loving kindness, and in compassion. 20I will even betroth you to Me in faithfulness; and you shall know Yahweh. 21It will happen in that day, I will respond, says Yahweh, I will respond to the heavens, and they will echo down to the earth; 22and the earth will respond to the grain, and the new wine, and the oil; and they will respond to Jezreel. 23I will sow her to Me in the earth; and I will have mercy on her who had not obtained mercy; and I will tell those who were not My people, ‘You are My people;’ and they will say, ‘You are my God!’.

Commentary

2:3 Lest I strip her naked… and kill her- The punishment for a prostitute, a punishment which she should’ve had at the start. But instead of this punishment, Hosea had married her. We are perhaps nervous to equate our sinfulness, our rebellion, our unfaithfulness, with Gomer’s prostitution. But this, surely, is what we are intended to do, and to thereby perceive the extent of God’s patient love toward us, to the end that that grace and goodness might lead us to repentance. Because Hosea had so loved this woman, he had legitimate feelings of anger- as does God, having loved us so much. Hosea was the wounded lover, the betrayed man. And these are exactly the feelings of God over the unfaithfulness of His people. The threat to strip her naked was what was done in the case of divorce for adultery. "She is not my wife, neither am I her husband" (2:2) is a verbatim quotation from various Babylonian divorce formulas, and was later incorporated into the Talmud as a divorce formula. Likewise the threat to withdraw her clothing, her "wool and linen” (2:9) likely refers to the obligation a husband had to his wife. Yet for all this talk of divorce, Hosea keeps wanting Gomer to return to him; in his heart he keeps coming back to her. This was an exact reflection of God's feelings for His people. Hosea did everything for this worthless woman. He gave her “the grain, the new wine, and the oil, and multiplied to her silver and gold, which they used for Baal” (2:8). He was a wealthy man, and yet gave it all to his wife, who in turn blew it all with her boyfriends on Baal worship. It’s like the millionaire marrying a worthless woman who manipulates him into giving her his money, which she blows down at the casino day by day, and sleeps with the guys she hangs out with down there. But “she did not recognize that it was Me who gave her” all these things (2:8)- i.e. she didn’t appreciate it. And so Hosea decides that he will withdraw this generosity from her, and then, he surmises, “she will say, ‘I will go and return to my first husband’” (2:7). This was Hosea’s hope, and in his own mind, he put these words in her mouth. The hopefulness of Hosea was a reflection of the love he had for her. And all this speaks eloquently of the hopefulness of the Almighty Father who thought “surely they will reverence My Son” when He sent Him. And the purposeful anti-climax of the parable is that no, they don’t and won’t reverence His Son, and even worse, they kill Him. In the same way as Hosea had this plan to get Gomer to “return” to him, so God likewise planned that “afterward the children of Israel shall return, and seek Yahweh” (3:5). Both God and Hosea thought that their beloved would return if they distanced themselves from her (5:15). But it didn’t work out like this. Both God with Israel and Hosea with Gomer ended up pleading with her to return (14:1); “yet they do not return to Yahweh their God, nor seek Him, for all this” (7:10). It was and is a tragedy. In our preaching to Israel and to humanity generally, we are pleading with them to accept this most unusual love. The pain of God, the way He is left as it were standing there as a tragic figure, like Hosea was, of itself inspires us to plead with people all the more passionately; and to respond ourselves, to be the loving woman to Him the ultimately faithful man.