Apr 03 2008
Notes on Hosea 7:8-12
Due to time constraints the current post will not be as detailed as my previous notes. I hope to correct that in the near future. To read my other notes on Hosea click the link above, under the blog’s title.
Ephraim, he mixes himself among the nations.
Ephraim is a pancake not turned over.
Strangers have devoured his strength,
I will bring them down like the birds of the sky.
I will chastise them, as their congregation has heard.
I seldom quote from commentaries but I liked how the Navarre Bible Commentary summarizes this passage:
The third oracle (7:8-12) is a prophetic denunciation of the policy of making pacts with foreign countries. What the oracle says is very much like what an earlier oracle says (cf. 5:1-15); political alliances with foreigners were never merely that: they always ended with Israel’s religion being contaminated and the Lord being neglected. Here again Hosea uses a parable-that of the “cakes not turned”; the underneath part gets burnt but the top remains uncooked: in other words, the pacts with Assyria and Egypt are useless: they damage one part of Israel and do no good to the other; Israel, like a silly pigeon (cf. v. 11), has gone looking for strange novelties instead of returning to her Lord; now he is going to hunt her and chastise her (v. 12). This passage must have been very vivid to Hosea’s contemporaries; they knew how bad things were going for them, and it was all their own fault. The prophet is not detached from what is happening around him; it grieves him deeply. And when we read these words now, they lead us to check whether personally or collectively we are not as empty-headed as Ephraim; maybe we, too, fail to see the hand of God in the world we live in.
Ephraim, he mixes himself among the nations… Ephraim was the largest of the northern tribes and is often, as here, used to stand for the entire northern kingdom. The prophets often condemned political alliances with pagans, for such alliances entailed swearing oaths to the gods of those peoples. The word for “mixes” is used in Exodus to describe the mixing of oil with flour for the purpose of offering cakes (of bread) as a sacrifice to God. When the prophet describes Ephraim as a (pan)cake not turned, the implication is that it has become a useless sacrifice to other gods.
Devoured his strength…gray hairs… (see Hosea 5:12; Rev 3:17). In seeking its strength in military and political alliances, the kingdom was in fact becoming weak, for its real protector, God, was cast aside, and, in virtue of the covenant, forced to punish them (see Deuteronomy 8:19-20).
They have not returned to Yahweh… Recalls the scathing denunciation of their feigned conversion in chapter 6. Significantly, that condemnation followed immediately upon the critique of their foreign alliances with Egypt and Assyria-the same context as here.
Ephraim is like an easily deceived dove, without understanding… As in Isaiah 1:3 the Hebrew text implies that the lack of understanding is intentional.
