Commentarium In Oseam

COMMENTARY ON HOSEA.

BOOK ONE.

CHAPTER ONE.

Verses 1 and 2. — The word of the Lord, which came to Hosea son of Beeri in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam son of Joash, king of Israel. The beginning of the Lord's speaking in Hosea. By the custom, indeed, of those who narrate events done in various times, with the kings also mentioned, it seems to have been brought about that we might know in whose age the history was woven. Yet it was far more necessary for the prophets to observe this, because although they do not pursue the task of history in a simple manner—namely, to commemorate the things that were done—but also by the impulse of those prophesying they announce things to come; nevertheless, since they declare them as coming not by chance but by judgment, and they argue according to the will of that prince whose violated laws and often polluted ceremonies they lament, they rightly set down at the front of the work, in order, the names and ages of the kings, so that, learning from the teaching of history what was committed in their times, we may acknowledge that they had great and worthy causes for their invective. And so it is contained in the annals of Kings and Paralipomenon that when these whose names have been set forth before were reigning, the whole people of the Jews was indeed defiled with the cults of idols; yet the ten tribes, which from the division made under Jeroboam were called Israel, were both squalid with the utmost sacrileges and pressed by calamities hanging over them.

Accordingly he made mention of four kings of Judah, namely those whose times his prophecy reached, and of one who had reigned on the side of Israel. But when he had begun his prophecy, those whom he named were presiding over those regions. Yet not long afterward the dominion at Samaria came to an end. For Zachariah son of Jeroboam, who was already in the sixth month holding the throne by succession, was destroyed by civil sedition, that is, by the rebellion of Shallum. But Shallum, after he had reigned one month at Samaria, Menahem son of Gadi came up and, renewing the rebellion, destroyed the said tyrant who had preceded him. And he himself for ten years, under a rule that was more like a tumult than a reign, served the king of the Assyrians, who was called Pul, under a lavish burden of tribute, so that his destitution was plain to see. So then already upon that portion of the ten tribes the whirlwinds of stirred-up calamities were rushing in. And thus, while the kingdom still remained among the Jerusalemites, the announced captivity carried off the ten tribes. After therefore the peoples of Samaria had migrated to the borders of Assyria, the holy Hosea, residing in the region of Judah, looked upon the time of King Hezekiah, famous for its miracles, and under him also exercised the office of prophesying. Therefore the destruction that was already threatening Israel he named by the prince of only one part of it, under whom he had begun to prophesy.

But what he set down, "The beginning of the Lord's speaking in Hosea," seems clearly to show that he himself was first taken up for this kind of discourse—not that there were no prophets before, since the same history of the kings records the deeds and words of the blessed Elijah and Elisha and very many others—but that, whereas each of them was commanded to commit to writing for everlasting remembrance what he foretold, Hosea was the first to take up this task. Nor indeed do we deny that the blessed David and the most wise Solomon, with the Gospel and the Apostles as witnesses, were lawful prophets and handed down their words in writing; but nevertheless the skilled reader will notice that there is no small difference between those men and the writings of these whom we now attempt to explain. For those men, although they said certain things about the captivity of the people, nevertheless foretold, as it were, with calm minds—that is, trembling at no nearness of evil—the things which they had once seen would come to pass. But these men, placed amid the very final crashes, with hearts altogether stunned, inasmuch as they were made partakers even of the calamities, set forth the whole matter as it were with tearful lamentations, and portray the offense of our Lord, who is compelled all too reluctantly to take vengeance; imploring indeed at times the aid of divine compassion, but otherwise pursuing the order of calamities as it were with a tragic pen.

So then let us recognize that the beginning of those seers who were marked out by this special designation, so as to be called prophets, was taken up by the blessed Hosea, who, conspicuous for the holiness of his conduct and lineage, undertook such a task of preaching as to bear the person both of the redeemer and of the judge, as will appear more clearly throughout the whole work.

Verses 2, 3, 4, 5. — And the Lord said to Hosea: Go, take to yourself a wife of fornications and children of fornications, because the land will surely fornicate away from the Lord. And he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore a son. And the Lord said to him: Call his name Jezreel, for yet a little while, and I will visit the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and I will make the kingdom of the house of Israel cease, and on that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel. We must note the custom, or rather the dignity, of holy men: that after they have ascended to such a height of honor that our Lord uses their tongue as the pen of a scribe, not only their words but also their deeds are clothed with prophetic honor, and they apply themselves to declaring and teaching mysteries either by speaking or by acting. So then, at the very beginning of the address, he says that the holy founder commanded the blessed Hosea, having disregarded both the splendor of his rank and of his blood, to join himself in marital union with a most vile woman and one commonly prostituted.

Nor did he stop at merely enduring the name of a wife, but he was disturbed by an equal share of insult against himself, so that he might be believed the father of uncertain offspring, as though he had raised the children of another's obscenity.

Nor has it escaped me how great the contention of learned men has been in opinion concerning this passage, so that whole regions disagree over its assertion. For Palestine and Egypt and all others who are most moved by the authority of Origen deny that this marriage was literally instituted by the prophet Hosea. But just as many things are narrated as having been done by the prophets in the spirit, so they say that these nuptials with a harlot were fulfilled only in word. For neither did he seek the reckoning of that time, so that against the institutes of the sacred Law, which he was denouncing, he would declare that intercourse with a harlot is wicked, and Hosea, advancing to preach, would play the wanton, and about to exercise censure upon sins, he himself first would commit what the whole people were consequently to be accused of. But how unsuitable it would be, if for the defense of a disgrace he should object the person of the one commanding, asserting namely that he indeed, as far as pertains to his own morals, had foully abhorred that foulness of consort, but had yielded to the authority of that Lord who had destined him to accuse the peoples. It would seem altogether that he had brought forward material for mockery rather than for dread, who thought that the obscenities of others were to be argued from his person, whom he himself proclaimed the author of the disgrace committed by him.

The question is also asked by what similar example, whether of precept or of deed, this is supported throughout the whole law—namely, wherever our Lord commanded something to be done contrary to the precepts, whose transgressors he was surely pursuing with the calamities announced through the prophets. To teach this, if the command of slaughter given to blessed Abraham is brought forward, we shall be reminded by the very outcome of the deed—although it was issued before the times of the law—that it was not the savagery of the killing but devotion and faith that was chosen in the father's mind. For he was offering his only son, who had the promises, to whom it had been said, "In Isaac shall your seed be raised up for you" (Gen. 21:12), showing that God is able to raise up even from the dead. Yet just as his fixed faith was protecting him against the fear of a promise being frustrated, so God did not allow the parent's devotion to run on to the child's destruction, but checked the hand of the one about to sacrifice, a commendation of proven virtue being interposed. "It has become clear," he says, "that I wished to make public only this: that nothing is more important to you than my love or my honor. Now spare the blood, which it was neither lawful to shed by another nor fitting for you to shed. And yet, lest you seem deprived of the priest's office, behold, a ram stands by for you, its horns caught in the briars, whose life, just as it was able to bring present aid for the son's release, so it will also deserve to signify the future mystery.

In the matter of the blessed Hosea, however, not only the command but also the fulfillment and the union practiced over many periods seems able to be defended neither by the honesty of the deed nor by the authority of the precept. To this is added that in these very figures the prophetic order was not preserved. For to signify the tribes, which, owing as it were under God's marriage-bond and fellowship, had burst forth into adulteries, that is, sacrileges, a prostitute woman is taken, who nevertheless, being noble, may receive chaste offspring from the union, not from a shameful but from a reverend husband, that is, the prophet, and in honor of the marriage, forgetful of former baseness, may be brought to completion more by fruitfulness than by lust. How, then, will this woman, who is distinguished by such great marks, be proven to figure the person of that nation which, before the marriage, did not shrink from the vices of obscenity, but when it had first been established in the sacred fellowship of its Lord, is described as having pursued foulness? By these and many other arguments they contend to teach that the prophet was not carnally united with the prostitute.

To this, on the other side, the Syrians, and those who think that this marriage was fulfilled carnally, rely especially on the testimony of the names. For by these the woman is clearly made public, and both her parents and the region, and the business of the union is proved by the offspring of ages. But whatever he took care to add contrary to the custom of his own morals through obedience ought to be recalled to the devotion of the prophet rather than to any violation of the law undertaken by him. Although that work of honesty could also be defended by reason, that is, that he had transferred the woman from the profession of a prostitute to the office of a chaste wife for the rest of her life. Contending therefore among themselves with a dispute of this kind, they rendered both opinions suspect, when in truth it seems both more concise and safer, and more suited to the signification of things, if the matter is believed to have been done spiritually, so that just as the blessed Jeremiah is described as not departing from the borders of Judea, yet as having buried his linen garment in the region of the Parthians; as the holy Ezekiel, placed in the midst of the Babylonian captivity, is brought in as a spectator in the temple of Jerusalem, beholding, though situated far elsewhere, certainly only the images of places and acts: so also the blessed Hosea, about to signify the deeds of many ages, through fitting images saw both the sequence of faults and of punishments.

By the testimony of this gift, inclined as it is toward any opinion whatsoever, the reverence due the prophet becomes evident—he whom, of course, the Creator of things in his own person is mocked for having brought in, so that from the deeds of the man the reasoning of divine judgments also may be gathered, and a necessary bond may stand between the eternal Lord and the faithful servant, such that the estimation of each, as it were, is cut apart; and if the prophet's action must be washed away, an excuse may seem to be provided for divine goodness as well. But if the obedience of our testimony is overwhelmed and driven off by whatever majesty, having surpassed all things, assigns to itself also, for minds well-pleasing to it, such authority that they are taught to need human examination not at all. This indeed the censure of the Apostle Paul also declares when he says: But to me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by a human day, but I do not even judge myself; for I am conscious of nothing against myself: but he who judges me is the Lord (1 Cor 4:4). Under one and the same reverence, therefore, both the Creator's command and the prophet's action have stood firm.

But the sequence and order of the words must be carefully noted, since it points rather to that meaning by which the mixture would not seem to have been fulfilled corporally. Go, he says, take for yourself a wife of fornications and children of fornications, because the land will surely fornicate away from the Lord. And yet that time was not touching the beginnings of the sacrilege, which he accuses under the name of fornication, but already its very last days. For from the times of Jeroboam especially the corruption of religion had begun, and the worship of the cows had been commended to the peoples, which persisted without interruption through many ages. But now in these days, in which the office of prophecy is imposed on the blessed Hosea, not transgressions but rather vengeances begin to arise. Which indeed disagrees with that signification which the harlot taken into marriage seemed to show, indicating that insult which the Lord was going to bear for a long time. Now therefore let us see what the order of the declaration contains.

Go, take for yourself a wife of fornications and children of fornications, because the land will surely fornicate away from the Lord. And he went and took Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore a son. And the Lord said to him: Call his name Jezreel, for yet a little while and I will visit the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and I will make the kingdom of the house of Israel cease, and in that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel. This manner of speech is found frequently throughout the sacred volumes from our God, whereby he accuses sacrileges under the name of fornication. For since God was known in Judaea, he had chosen one nation to join to himself, and had taken her as it were in the likeness of a wife—with the tablets of the law as the intermediary—by instructing whom he might beget children; those he calls chaste who keep the inviolate laws of religion, but on the contrary those foul and polluted who have violated the covenants of sacred worship through the infection of errors and the pursuit of heresy. By this image he has assuredly expressed both the greatness of his love toward the pious and the vehemence of his severity with which he pursues these impious ones, because he rises up to take vengeance not only as a censor or a judge, but as a husband raging with indignation.

But since the passage runs its course toward understanding this by its own tenor, it must be asked what he accomplished by the preparation of so great a figure. For what need was there that this not be contained in a simple narrative, but that the prophet be commanded—whether in body or only in images—to enter into union with a harlot? In this place, certainly, for those who think piously and deeply, there occurs the depth both of divine kindness and of prophetic dignity. For our God, who interweaves his providence with human affairs, indeed consults for the common good of mortals, but as though he considers them to be men only who have attained reverence from the virtues of their conduct, he shows himself to be moved by their judgments, and then by precepts, then by images he hastens especially to instruct them. So then, either willing to show this which I have set forth—namely, that he has the most serious regard for holy men, and does not make light of their complaints—or certainly because he is accustomed to be softened by the prayers of the saints, when it is time for him to begin to bring forth vengeance: he first sets out before them the matters by which he has been kindled, so that by the explanation of the minds he may remove the obstacles of intervention, and those whom he could find to be delayers of his sentence, he first establishes on his own side, and exhorts them to be angry with him.

In you is that which, when the blessed Moses had sent out scouts of the land of Promise from each of the twelve tribes, and all the rest, except two, on their return had terrified the cowardly people, also shook the blessed Moses himself when sedition arose. But when he had fled to the tabernacle, the glory of the Lord appeared, it says, and showing how much he valued him, and how far he preferred him to all those peoples, it says, Let me alone, that I may destroy this people, and make you into a nation much greater than this one (Exod. 32). From these words, the holy man, understanding what power he had with him, at once softened the indignation of the judge. So too, when the destruction of the Babylonian captivity was imminent in the time of the Jerusalemites, he led the prophet Ezekiel, by the contemplation of the Spirit at least, through the inner sanctuaries that had once been venerable, so that, seeing how the people sinned, he would cease to wonder if so great a change were made to the contrary, that a nation recently exalted by singular veneration should perish most vilely.

Thus, then, to the blessed Hosea also, through whom the exile that was imminent for the people was announced—for which, clearly, neither the merits of his ancestors would avail anything, nor the intercessions of the prophets avail anything—a preparation of the same business is indicated: so that in his own example he may feel and weigh whether God can or ought to endure that heap of insults. Therefore, he says, take on the person of a kindly man, but one who has long endured harlot-like ways in his wife, and take up children who are either held to be of uncertain parentage or are more consistently attributed to another's obscenity, and test whether you can have continued patience, and whether you believe there is a singular remedy for the old pain, if you are freed by divorce from that woman whom you would never have corrected through benefits, however many. Whether, therefore, the commanded union lies in the affections of the mind alone, or also in the affairs of a filthy body, it seems to regard the honor of the prophet, who, in order to indicate faithfully the severity of the judge, feels the taste of the injury with which God was afflicted, and again, as if an obligation were created for inflicting vengeance on the impious, [he bears] this very thing, that for the sake of signifying the matter, the prophet endured an indignity unworthy of himself. Therefore, since the cause of the parable we have mentioned seems to have been adequate, let us now follow its order.

Take, he says, for yourself a wife of fornication, and children of fornication: because the land will surely commit fornication against the Lord. This doubling belongs to the idiom of Hebrew speech—doing he will do, speaking he will speak, and the rest in this manner. So, then, also "committing fornication it will commit fornication." Now a distinction could be applied to this expression, but the shortcut that comes from the custom of the Scriptures is not to be neglected. Note, indeed, that by the name of fornication he calls not so much the time of the transgression to be entered into as of the captivity already to be undergone. Nor is this inconsistent. For since the obscenity of profane minds made the material for damnation, therefore by the name of its cause the punishment is signified, so that we may say the people committed fornication when it is condemned for fornication—which indeed in the present passage he teaches also had great occasion. For since it is clear that punishment is not the same as guilt—inasmuch as the one is opposed to what is honorable, the other to wantonness—and it is sufficiently established that the definition of things can by no means be confounded by the sharing of names, and that therefore punishment is what guilt is: not at all without reason did he pronounce the people a fornicator at the time when it was about to undergo the evils of captivity.

But because he knew that that very chastisement would advance people according to the diversity of their minds—some being made better by affliction, others worse by shamelessness—he rightly says that both on account of the impiety they were perpetrating in their own territories they would suffer punishments, and in the very time of captivity some would receive the marks of correction, but others the proofs of crime, according to that which he threatens elsewhere: You served in your land gods whom your fathers did not know; you will serve foreign gods in a land not your own. Therefore, because the harlot celebrated that profanity which the free people had perpetrated, even amid punishments she is foretold as a fornicatress.

But the first son, whom the harlot, so to speak, bore, is introduced by the very name of the region over which captivity impends. For he says, Call his name Jezreel. By this word the valley adjacent to Samaria was designated. Through the appellation, then, of this place, they announce what the region is going to suffer. Then follows: For yet a little while, and I will visit the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and I will make the kingdom of the house of Israel to cease: and in that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel. The time, he says, of exacting vengeance presses on, and for this reason, against the kingdom of Samaria, which is indicated by the name of Jezreel, the neighboring valley, as I said, wrath arises. Let there be born, then, in your mind an offspring destined for punishment, so that you may know that what you see, so to speak, ordained against your own is to be accomplished against my sons.

For he avenges the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu. For the explanation of this, a twofold sense would occur according to the custom of the law, unless the following context establishes one of them. For up to the family of Ahab, who was the husband of Jezebel, the offspring of Jeroboam ruled. But when Ahab had become foul with the crimes both of his own and of his wife, whose will he served, Elisha the prophet, by the command of God, raised up Jehu the son of Nimshi to take up the kingdom. He, moved by severity for like causes, destroyed by slaughter the entire family of Ahab and Jezebel, and all the priests and ministers of the idol Baal alike. In return for this service of vengeance, it was promised to him that his descendants would preside over the Israelite kingdom up to the fourth generation. But because both Jehu himself and his sons or grandsons, by not forsaking the sacrileges of Jeroboam, lost the marks of their own devotion, by which they had persecuted the worshippers of Baal—that is, clinging to the calves of Samaria to be worshipped, and serving the various crimes of their conduct, as the worship of profanity demands—against these too, namely the descendants of Jehu, who had destroyed the family of Ahab, it is said that wrath rises, so that he might avenge the blood of those who had been slain by them: not because the slaughter had been unjust, but because those who had done it, through the imitation of crimes, had lost the glory of judgment: and by pursuing the same things as those whom they had destroyed, they had passed over into the number and fellowship of the guilty.

And so those whom the sword of the wicked had destroyed would seem worthy of vengeance—a coloring which we would easily show to be frequented even in the Scriptures.

Therefore, I say, the prophetic verse could be explained in two ways: namely, this one which we have set forth before, and the other which will follow, if the progress of the work did not rather establish that one. For by the name of Jezreel he wished to indicate the people itself; but by the name of Jehu, the kingdom of the people—that is, the time has now come that the people of Israel, who are either to be conquered in the valley of Jezreel, or have a royal city situated in that same valley, so that those who have a king coming from the stock of Jehu may begin to experience the force of the vengeance that is owed. Finally, in confirmation of this understanding he added: And I will make the kingdom of the house of Israel to cease, and in that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel. Visitation, then, he called the punishment; but rest, the end of the empire—and to indicate both more plainly, he said: I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.

Verse 6. — And she conceived again, and bore a daughter, and he said: Call her name, Without mercy: because I will no longer have mercy on the house of Israel, but I will forget them with forgetfulness. Because he had determined that the outcome of things should precede the images, which were to be their judges, a daughter is described as having been born, who received the name of another's calamity, that is, Without mercy. For, he says, I will no longer have mercy on the house of Israel, but I will forget them with forgetfulness. In these words the weight of a twofold sentence is contained. For he does not say only, In the time of miseries I will deny mercy, but that I will not permit them even to return into my memory. For it would be a consolation, even in the last faintness, if at any time he should take up the memory of those whom he had cast off. But now, that the threatened commination may grow harsh, he promises that both things will be present to him: both the memory of those to be condemned, and the fullest forgetfulness of the condemned.

Which indeed, since it could kindle envy of cruelty in the ears of a wise servant (if something of this sort were turning over, if not in speech, then at least in thought: whence into that benignity which is the cause of all things there flowed so much bitterness, that you do not forget the charges, if you forget the accused; and you are inquisitive about the offender, if never mindful of the afflicted; I fear lest the salvation even of the penitent be despaired of, if forgetfulness of the fallen creeps into so great a ruler): therefore he added immediately that he had not cast aside care, but had applied the balance of the debt of examination, that is, that he seems to forget only those who even after blows do not think of amendment.

Verse 7. — Because I will no longer add to have mercy on the house of Israel, but with forgetfulness I will forget them. And I will give [mercy to the house of] Judah, and I will save them in the Lord their God, and I will not save them by bow and sword and in war and in horses and in horsemen. When, he says, I have subjected the people of Samaria, defiled by transgression, to calamities and destructions, and have so permitted them to be vile for their guilt that I seem to have utterly forgotten them; then those standing in the part of Judah, and placing the hope and confidence of their salvation in the observances of religion, I will not only protect, but will also vindicate with a wondrous newness: so that it may be plainly clear that they were by no means fortified by arms but by merits, nor did they attain victory by battle line but by piety.

But that time he announces in which, when Hezekiah was ruling among the Jerusalemites, Sennacherib king of the Assyrians came with a great army to besiege that city, and there, having spoken many things in contempt of God and of the sacred religion, he stirred up the divine sentence against himself, and in a single night all his forces fell, with an Angel striking them down. For after losing one hundred and eighty-five thousand warriors, he himself is described as having fled to his own region with a few and perished there (4 Kings 19). But let us look at the rest as well.

Verse 8. — She weaned, he says, her who was without mercy, and she conceived and bore a son and said: Call his name, You are not my people, because you are not my people, and I will not be your God. The title has indicated that the blessed Hosea remained and prophesied up to the times of Hezekiah. Whatever, therefore, is read as having been done throughout the whole age of his prophecy, this he briefly marks out in its very beginning, so that through the whole volume he may already have laid bare the sequence and order of the events. When, therefore, the profanity of the ungrateful nation had impelled our God to take up the work of vengeance, he declared that he would punish the guilty, and would so leave them in their miseries that he would seem to have utterly forgotten them.

But lest forgetfulness, once received into the sacred breast, should stir fear even in the pious, He at once signified that He was employing forgetfulness not from fault but from judgment, since merit made the distinction among those related, and when the Israelites were given over to destruction, He protected the peoples of Judah, who were of course adhering to the worship of His own religion, more by miracles than by weapons. Although this was to be disclosed at the opportune time, yet because that very portion of the Jewish people did not please by continual devotion, but, as other prophets reproach them, blazed up into the worship of idols, it likewise suffered a similar sentence and was transferred from its territories, with the Babylonian prevailing. Yet concerning that captivity, the recall was promised by the prophecy of almost all the prophets, and fulfilled under Cyrus king of the Persians.

Therefore the speech of blessed Hosea now declares both times. But to signify the Israelite captivity, a daughter is introduced who was to be called Not-Obtaining-Mercy. In figure of Judah, however, a child is introduced whose name is Not-My-People. Among the images of the children, however, it is mentioned of the girl alone that she was weaned: namely, to show that in the ten tribes the sentence of the captivity brought upon them had, as it were, grown strong. For in truth the captivity of the ten tribes is read to have been much longer, and therefore the advancement of age is signified by the girl's weaning. But the third, who last promises the captivity of Judah, received the name Not-My-People.

For as long as Judah remained within its own borders, there was a multitude that was called the people of God; but after the storm of captivity uprooted even it, that people, once set apart from the confusion of the Gentiles, seemed to have perished. And therefore He says: You are not my people, and I will not be your God: that is, this mark by which you were formerly distinguished will be taken from you, so that you are not called the people of God throughout the whole world, and I am not called your prince or your God; for it is just that you who have corrupted by the pursuits of sin the institutions of the sacred law which separated you from foreign nations, should also be deprived of that honor by which you were distinguished.

But having briefly declared these things from the side of severity, he passes over to prosperous things, which the dispensation to be reverenced fulfilled in events just as he wove them together in prophetic utterance.

Vers. 10, 11. — For, he says, the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which is without measure and shall not be numbered. And it shall be in the place where it is said to them, You are not my people; it shall be said to them, Children of the living God. And the children of Judah and the children of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint for themselves one head, and they shall ascend from the land, because great is the day of Jezreel.

But by these sacred utterances he promises the return of the people from the Babylonian captivity, whose mighty splendor is described also in other prophets, but especially in the blessed Isaiah; and this splendor is assuredly of value for commending God's mercy and for the consolation and strengthening of the faithful, to whom, when they endured a share in that calamity contrary to the honor of their merits, for the sake of the community of their nation, the consolations of hope were being offered, depending, that is, on the expectation of prosperous things. For these are said to be so great that they require even a newness of terms. For when they slipped from joyful things into sorrowful ones, they ceased to be called the people of God, as though poured out into the worthlessness of the remaining nations. But when the time of liberation has come, by so great a succession is the change brought back from sorrowful things into joyful ones, that the restoration of their former dignity does not suffice, but the distinctions of their terms are increased. For the number of the faithful will exceed like the sand, in whom such splendor of reverence and grace will shine forth that, with God containing all things, they are called not now a people, but sons.

For when they have been corrected by the anguish of the servitude just mentioned, they will be joined to him as by blood, so also by love; and that separation especially, which was for them a great cause of both sins and crises, they will avoid, and rejoicing in one ruler, they will ascend with eagerness to the Temple of God, and they will be established in such a state of happiness that they will confess that the great day of Jezreel has been: that is, either that time when adversities began, and of which the Prophet said above, I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel. And the liberated people will call this to mind, so that its joys may grow by comparison: or certainly it will cry out that the interpretation of Jezreel itself applies to it; for it is expressed in our speech as the seed of God, and the sense becomes as follows: When the time of captivity is dissolved, there will be such a scope of exultation that the great day is said to have shone upon the children of God. But this festivity, as the other prophets, so especially the blessed David, sets forth in that song: I rejoiced in those things which were said to me, We will go into the house of the Lord. Our feet were standing in your courts, Jerusalem, to confess to your name, O Lord. For there they sat, seats in judgment, seats over the house of David. Pray for the things that are for the peace of Jerusalem.

Therefore, according to the course of the history that the prophetic declaration contained, he briefly indicated everything that he was going to do: namely, that the ten tribes, corrupted under Jeroboam as their leader, were carried off when the Assyrian took them captive; but that Judah, which trusted in his God, was pitifully delivered under King Hezekiah; and afterwards, even that tribe itself, having followed in the footsteps of its brother's impiety, was permitted to fall under Babylonian dominion; yet the promised liberty would again break its chains, and the brothers, no longer separated from one another but standing together under one ruler, would celebrate the honor of God in the inner sanctuaries of his Temple. But the happiness of that time would be so great that it would be a pleasure even to remember adversity, and to call it the great day of Jezreel, that is, that time of the captivity that was brought upon them, whose occasion had created so much exultation. They will therefore set over themselves one head, and they will ascend from the land. Concerning which time the blessed David also says, From the ends of the earth I cried to you when my heart was troubled; you exalted me upon a rock. You led me because you became my hope. It must also be noted that the blessed Paul took the promise of this passage as referring to the multitude of the faithful flowing together to the preaching of the Gospel, asserting namely that the proclamation of evangelical piety surpassed the narrow confines of one nation.

And not only from the Jews, who were once called the people of God, but also from the Gentiles, who had lived in manifold error, would hosts come together to receive the dignity of the divine mark, as he says in Hosea: I will call my people that which was not my people, and her beloved that which was not beloved. And it shall be that in the place where it was said to them, You are not my people, there they shall be called sons of the living God (Rom. 9:25). The teacher of the Gentiles therefore shows that in the time of the gospel the promise of this blessedness was fulfilled: not, of course, to deny that which the text of the whole prophecy inculcates—namely, that the release of the Babylonian captivity also was promised—but to show what rule of understanding we ought to preserve in the prophetic books: that is, when under the narration of Jewish affairs something greater is brought forth than the mediocrity of a single nation could contain, we should recognize that it was fulfilled in part in that people, and also, through theoria, that it applies to others as well, that is, to all the Gentiles.

Theoria is, as the learned have held, a considered perception of things more excellent, generally set out in brief outlines or causes. Therefore that recall of the Jews from Babylon according to history, and this liberty conferred through faith in Christ signified according to allegory, would not properly be so called, since the prophetic discourse has solidly promised both, so that the preceding modest state might intimate the later heaps. For what had first been spoken by way of exaggeration, afterward the greatness of the events scarcely equaled. And so the captivity that was then announced and terrified the people of the Jews, and the liberty afterward restored that raised them up, bore before them the signs of another captivity and liberty as well, which are much more grievous: namely, that of which the Apostle says, We were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together in Christ. For coming as one stronger, he bound that enemy of the human race who had oppressed the guilty by a long domination, plundered all his vessels, and by the restoration of liberty dissolved the captivity of the nations, and ennobled the redeemed with the gifts of grace, so that we, who once were strangers and sojourners, suddenly having obtained mercy as his people and nation, might be called a chosen race, and a priestly and royal one.

Thus, then, what Hosea had declared concerning the times of Babylon, Paul transferred to the affairs of the Savior—not, indeed, as though the prophet were opposing or resisting the direction in which he is led as one following after, but as greatly favoring the apostolic understanding through the tenor of the prophecy, whereby he taught that both the gifts and the joys which had already been begun in that age were increased here almost even to the consummation. But up to this point the prophet's discourse proceeded on this tenor, that whatever matters and times he was about to speak of, he briefly indicated.

Now, however, he returns to the order of the censure or complaint he had undertaken, which he arranged with foresight and providence, lest what availed for the display of prophecy should begin to be detrimental to saving doctrine. For since by the impulse of prophesying he had touched upon those things which were to follow long afterward in later times, and was substituting the confidence of declaring for the credit of both adversities and prosperities—lest, I say, by this very thing he should seem to extinguish both the merit and the vow alike, since indeed the zeal of correction would not profit to be undertaken, with the necessity of punishment once pressing upon him who foretold; nor would the desire of prosperities again seem to be, since it was in every way to be rendered for the truth of the one declaring. Therefore the discourse is directed to the peoples, and we are summoned into the communion of judgment, that they themselves may proceed with intent eyes to examine their mother—namely, the multitude of their parents, with whose crimes God had been provoked—and her by divine admonition

...to admonish with the clemency that is His wont, or to remove the threatened torments if the accused sees fit to flee to correction. Therefore they ought not to despair of salvation if they are made better by fear, since the Master of merits presides as the eraser of sins that have been blotted out, and He is delighted far more by indulgence shining upon them than by bitter severity.

CHAPTER II.

Verse 2. — Judge your mother, judge her, for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband. A mighty bulwark (he says) of my kindness is your deliverance; and therefore the shameful deeds of your parent are exposed, by which she has been driven from my fellowship, but so shameful that she cannot be absolved even by you who judge. Yet because we assess not one person but the whole nation by the present reckoning, we hope that there are some whose hearts the declared severity may move to better endeavors, and therefore wait to see what He will do. Let her put away her fornications from her face, and her adulteries from the midst of her breasts.

Verse 3. — Lest perhaps I strip her naked, and set her as in the day of her birth. That is, she had cast away from her face the modesty that is wont to be a hindrance to shamefulness, and had hardened her face in the profession of her foulness. Now therefore let her take up the opposite affections, and, having put off impudence, clothe her brow with shame; let her know that she has not done this with her lips alone, as if content with the surface, but let her cast out the poison drawn from the midst of her breasts, so that she may be cleansed at once in her whole heart. But if she neglects to do this, I will gird myself for works of severity, and such as I exercised in that time when she was being born to me as a people. He indicates, moreover, the departure of the Synagogue from the land of Egypt, namely at which time she had received neither the ornaments nor the garments of the legal institutions, nor did she abound in certain insignia of vestments, but as regards the price of her manners, standing in the same vileness as the Egyptians, she was yet preserved by great miracles for the sake of the honor of her fathers alone. Finally, because they resisted the precepts of God, now by forwardness, now by sloth, they are read to have been consumed all together even in the solitude of the wilderness, nor besides the two men Jesus and Caleb, out of six hundred thousand men marching in military array, did anyone enter into the land of Promise.

This is what the Lord of all things now threatens through the prophet: that unless that nation cleanses the secrets of its heart and, having made a change for the better, makes progress, nothing can procure help for it—not the fact that through so many ages it lived set apart from other nations, nor the institutions of the Law, nor that it flowed with spiritual gifts. In this, of course, the sentence presses upon their crimes, just as he says: neither in that age, when it went out from Egypt and rejoiced in its recent adoption as it were, did anything profit the wretched people, so as not to perish as if stripped of all privileges. The Apostle Paul, knowing this meaning, unfolds it at length to the Corinthians. All, he says (1 Cor. 10), used the same miracles freely, the same spiritual foods, and drank the same fountains bursting forth from the rock; and yet, he says, not all of them, nor even many, pleased God, but in that age of exile they shuddered at various sins and perished by various torments. Showing why these things should be remembered, he says: They were written for our instruction, that we might not imitate the pursuits of those whose ruins we read of. Therefore our Lord discloses the affection of his care through this prophet, and warns that that people should come to its own aid with hasty amendment, and expel from the midst of the breasts—that is, from the heart—the impiety which is called fornication, lest it experience the severity whose execution is delayed by difficulty.

For whether he proceeds to consume the impious with vengeance, the multitude of those who strike will not be able to resist; or whether, for the honor of innocence or by the merits of amendment, they entrust the children of the punished to safety, even the accumulation of calamity sent before will be able to create no impediment. Therefore, so that the prophet might briefly indicate all this, he kept the same order in the example as in the prophecy: and just as in that very lilino he marked out the whole age in which he prophesied by the commemoration of kings, so too he showed what the business of his preaching contained: namely, the captivity, first of Israel, then of Judah; thereafter the concord of the same peoples, with captivity dissolved, and their gathering to the worship and temple of the true God, with liberty restored. Yet of this return such a scope would be described as would avail for the signification of a greater matter, that is, would sound forth the liberties and likewise the generosity of the Gospel: which, transcending vows by gifts, would call not only a people but also sons of God, whom it had freed from deadly servitude.

Therefore, briefly running through these matters, he returned to the assembly with words suited to the times, and as though to sons, he set before her the task of the mother who must be rebuked and taught: that she who had taken no care for the holiness that was to be guarded might at least take care to seize hold of penitence, and might not think that, against the evidence of her character, she was defended by nobility of blood alone, since adoption would profit nothing to those whom devotion did not also fortify. For, so that he might gather future things from past things, let her consider the outcome of those hosts of the Egyptians, who had been wondrously led out of Egypt: whose iniquity was certainly not defended by the dignity of their ancestors, as we have said, and whose destruction created no obstacles for their children, who were to be led to the promised joys. Thus, he says, this order of judgments shall also be preserved in your own cleansing now: that those who are squalid with sacrileges may be overwhelmed by their own outcomes, and that their descendants, who by their own purpose have differed from the pursuits of their parents by better studies, may either obtain the freedom of the desperate, or be increased more abundantly by the successes of prosperities. Since these vicissitudes of times, he says, assign a reckoning of divine providence and just dispensation—of sad things, that is, as well as of joyful things—let us now carry out that which the present cause demands.

He therefore warns them to anticipate the mass of damnation hanging over them, as much by the zeal of correcting themselves as by the groan of repentance, lest, when he has begun to rage of his own accord, this whole nation, as if distinguished by no privileges ever, perish in utter destruction: lest perhaps I strip her naked, and set her as in the day of her birth, and make her like a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and kill her with thirst, [Verse 4] and I will not have mercy on her children, because they are children of fornications, because their mother has played the harlot, she who conceived them has been put to shame. Because he had once introduced the remembrance and likeness of the departure from Egypt, he ran through the description of those same places, naming indeed a wilderness, and a pathless land destitute of the solace of springs; and again taking up words concerning the occasions, having recalled the vastness of the desert, he added also the peril of thirst. I will kill them, he says, with thirst, not because the people led out of Egypt and worn down by want was consumed, but because (as the Apostle says) they drank from the spiritual rock that followed (1 Cor. 10), that is, the power of the leader, not the condition of the region, supplied cups to the camps. Which if it had indeed failed, the people would have been destroyed by the first peril of thirst.

Declaring the same thing, that the wicked are brought into similar straits, and that his clemency will not come to meet them, since even the offspring of such people confess by imitation of their vices that their parents are shameful to them, and both sons blush for their parents and parents for their sons; he promises that their children will perish.

Verses 5, 6, 7. — Because she said, "I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink," and therefore, behold, I will hedge up your way with thorns, and I will hedge it with a wall, and she will not find her paths, and she will follow after her lovers, and she will not overtake them, and she will seek them, and she will not find them. He who from the beginning of the book has fitted the person of a harlot to a profaned nation, also pursues the rest with lofty description, and brings it to the speech of a prostitute, which she is certainly convicted of having borne, if not on her lips, yet in her deeds. And so, according to the custom of the Scriptures, those things which any impious people can say by consequence of a depraved life, because they have said them to themselves and aloud, are refuted. Therefore also this shameless woman (he says) puts a face of usefulness over the pursuit of shameful acts, so that she may falsely claim that her lovers follow her for the sake of generosity rather than for the sake of disgrace; for she commends them as having supplied her with grain, wool and linen, and oil and drink: that is, food and clothing overflowing even to delights.

By these words, indeed, he adds to the sins of sacrilege the crime of an ungrateful mind as well; yet he also seems to introduce that which is even now on the lips of the profane: among various opinions, namely, that there is no stronger testimony of the true religion than what the voice of the prosperous brings forth. Therefore he declares that she goes after the pursuit of her lovers, suppresses the outrage in silence, and fabricates, as it were, more honorable causes by which to entice. But he calls them lovers—either the nobles of the Gentiles, in whose pursuit she was profaned, or the very gods of the nations, worthy of laughter rather than veneration—to whom this woman, namely the Synagogue, forgetful of the Law and of the true and only God, submitted. Let adversities, he says, succeed her hopes, and let them be entangled in unforeseen anguish. First, that no opportunity be available to her of entering into a covenant with those Gentiles whom she most desires, and that in her adversities she not use the help of those at whose prosperity she sinned by their example. And so I will hedge her way with thorns, and not only with briars but also with walls, so that the paths she once trod she can no longer enter. All these things he has accordingly woven together, looking to the person of the woman whom he introduced as following, by hidden paths as it were, the author of her outrage. Not, indeed, because the people of Israel secretly mingled with the profane nations, but because the figure, transferred from a woman (as we have often said), required this order of description.

When, therefore, avenging severity begins to confront her, and all those whom she loved can bring no help to her anguish, then, stirred no longer by reason but by anguish, she will begin to remember her former happiness.

And she will say, I will go and return to my former husband, for it was better with me then than now. [Verse 8.] And she did not know that I gave her grain, wine, and oil, and multiplied silver for her, and gold, which they made for Baal. If at least, raised up by the dangers of circumstances, she resolves to return to her former husband, how is it consistently added: And she did not know that I gave her grain, and wine, and oil? The sense is therefore of this kind, by which the harmony of the prophetic utterances is vindicated. Because at the first appearance of chastisement this woman suffers what all who pursue vain things suffer: that is, terrified by the frustration of her vows, not through amendment of judgment but through the levity of a fickle mind, she attempts to seek what she would have rejected; and she promises herself subject to God only to this end, that she may escape the impending, as it were, losses of prosperity, according to that which blessed David reproaches: When he slew them, they sought him: and they returned before the dawn, and came to him, but their heart was not right with him, nor were they counted faithful in his covenant (Psalm 34).

Since, therefore, the guilt of that people remains—a people who, like cattle, were roused not at all by the teaching of the word but by the lash of the whip—my anger will not be softened on this account, because she said: I will go and return to my former husband. But I will lead her on into long trials of plagues, because she neglected to know and to declare that all these things could be given by no one except by me, by whom surely they were also created. Therefore, what is said—And she did not know that I gave her grain and wine and oil—looks to the blame of her willful slowness, according to that saying of David: He refused to understand, that he might do good. And so she will begin, amid the perils of hardships, to confess what she had previously neglected to know: namely, that I alone am the one by whom sustenance is provided, I who also created the very substance of men. Because I gave her grain and wine and oil, and gold, which they had made into Baals. Not only furnished, therefore, but even more abundantly supplied, she abused my gifts for crimes, and to my insult she fashioned idols from the wealth she had received from me. For this reason I too—whose dispensation the prophet, praising it, used to sing with understanding: With the holy you will be holy, and with the innocent man you will be innocent, and with the perverse you will be perverted—will at last take up the office of censure, so that from the ungrateful I may withdraw what had been bestowed, and the wealth itself may obtain a certain benefit of liberation when it is withdrawn from the uses of the profane.

Therefore he says distinctly [Verse 9], "I will take away my grain in its time and my wine in its time," because there is not one gathering of crops; rather, each thing is brought in at different seasons of the year, and therefore summer will deny the harvest, autumn the vintage, winter withdraws their mutability, and there will come (he says) a certain liberation for created things, if what is undeserved is not (?) to them: "and I will free my wool and my linen, with which they covered her shame." For he alluded elegantly to the woman's world, because she had woven together the whole body, in which there are certain shameful parts, so as even to adorn it. Yet he seems acutely to show that for the most part, under prosperity, the foulness of the guilty lies hidden; if again a worthy poverty overtakes them, their merits too, which had lain hidden, are exposed.

Verse 10. — "And now I will reveal her folly in the eyes of her lovers." That is, those very men who, having been increased, either stood as partners in her crime, the consequence of events will compel to confess that nothing is more foolish than this nation, which neither directed its counsels nor corrected its dangers, but provoked with the crimes of an ungrateful mind that Lord whose power, containing all things, it has experienced in its adversities as much as in its prosperities. "I will reveal, therefore, her folly in the eyes of her lovers, and no man shall rescue her from my hand.

That is, there will be none of the princes, whose concern is the profanation of the age, who can defend her from my indignation; not that anyone would dare to do this, but because the discourse is woven together by way of a likeness of a woman and men, therefore he says that when divine indignation has struck her, her lovers will be unable to help her, nor to bring any consolation to the miseries by which she is to be overwhelmed.

Verse 11. — I will take away all her joy, her solemnity, her new moon, her sabbath, and all her festival seasons. He has set down the names of the festivals in which she rejoiced most greatly, when the whole region reveled in dances, songs, and banquets; which luxury certainly did not flourish except when the people enjoyed the interest of deep peace. All these things, he says, will be changed into their opposites, and with the cessation, mourning will be brought in; captivity will occupy the seasons of the festivals; the leisure of the sabbath will be filled by the toil of wretched servitude; and not only will liberty be changed by such great captivity, but also the fertility of the lands will be changed into mournful sterility.

Verse 12. — For I will corrupt her vine and her fig tree, of which he said, "These are my wages, which my lovers gave me"; and I will make her a forest, and the beast of the field shall devour her. He has set forth what the losses of her portions would accomplish—that is, when the unremitting frustration of cultivation has followed upon its diligence, the countryside will lay bare its former pleasantness, with squalor succeeding it, and the whole region will become more like haunts of wild beasts than cultivated fields—that is, it will be judged fitter for beasts than for men. And because it was the scarcity of those who cultivated this face that would bring this about, he has elegantly expressed that the beasts of the field are to feed on her fruits. Of its own accord, he says, it cast off the light of reason, and after satiety and fattening the beloved kicked; and that most shameless people so favored its own error that it dared to ascribe to its corrupters the joys of peace and the abundance of things, whose continuance I had promised it if it had been chaste and devoted. Therefore, as I have said, this will be the first part of the vengeance, that it be stripped of the joys and the abundance which it did not use well, and that it know that he who could afterward take them away in anger had first conferred them in kindness. I will make her, he says, a forest, and the beast of the field shall devour her. I will permit, he says, that she be consumed by a hostile incursion, and thus be protected by no defense of my providence, just as the farmer encloses neither a forest nor the lairs of wild beasts with laborious hedges.

And because he seemed to have pronounced a true sentence, he joins again the reason for his own admonition, so that he may teach that whatever he thundered forth, he brought forth more from justice than from anger.

Verse 13. — And I will visit, he says, upon her the days of Baalim, in which she burned incense, and was adorned with her earring and her necklace, and went after her lovers, and forgot me, says the Lord. Not now, he says, is she engaged in the beginnings of sinning, so that it might be believed she must be cleansed by the progress of time: long ago our patience contended with her wickedness, and yet we advanced nothing toward her amendment, since she has grown old in her profaneness. Therefore, lest long impunity defile even the reputation of the judge, and I seem to foster what I permit to flourish so long, although late, yet at last I will gird myself for the work of vengeance, so that I may blot out even those days in which she served Baalim, that is, the idol of shame, adorned besides with necklaces. But because he made mention not only of necklaces but also of earrings, we can indeed say that he has named a few out of many of the things with which women are adorned. Yet the passage allows that we may bring something from the deeper meanings, that is, that by the name of earrings obedience seems to have been shown. And because at that time the people of the Jews alone had received the precepts of the law, which they were to obey, they rightly wore, as it were, the ornaments of earrings. But after they were deceived by an unclean error, so as to be subjected to the rites of idols, let us think that this very thing is now especially reproached.

As if he were saying: The gold and silver that the earth, by my creation, had brought forth, and that the synagogue, by my generosity, had received, and the abundance of other things besides, she, grown impious, turned to the worship and adornment of idols; and that distinguished mark of obedience, in which alone she excelled among the other peoples, she handed over to shameful rites. And thinking that she remained in that beauty in which she once had been, she followed after her lovers with such confidence that forgetfulness of our divine majesty wholly came upon her.

Verses 14–17. — Therefore behold, I will allure her, and lead her into the wilderness, and speak to her heart, and give her her vinedressers from that same place, and the valley of Achor to open up hope; and she shall sing there according to the days of her youth and according to the days of her ascent from the land of Egypt. And it shall be in that day, says the Lord, she shall call me My husband, and shall no longer call me Baalim. And I will take away the names of Baalim out of her mouth, and she shall remember their names no more. The order of the prophetic utterance must be carefully noted. Whenever there is need for it to announce torments and to show the desert of divine severity, it immediately joins the causes that deserved this; and, not content to have enumerated the sins of mortals, it sets forth the joys of the prosperity that will follow, showing that our God in a manner takes up that brief overlooking of guilt for forgiveness into the provision of reconciliation.

By this argument, however, just as divine clemency is praised, so human iniquity is brought low: the magnitude of this iniquity, evidently, brings it about that the Lord of such great goodness is sometimes stirred to anger. After he had therefore declared that a cessation was to be brought upon all joys, and that no one would come to meet the wretched with either aid or sound, he immediately set forth the crimes of the people, that is, the causes of his indignation, and recounting their magnitude and their age, he showed that his censure ought to be suspected by no one on account of excess, since if it be compared with the quantities or the ages of the crimes, it must have its sparingness excused, must have its slowness excused. But not by this one color alone, I say, does he commend the clemency that is sweet and familiar to him; even concerning the bringing in of prosperity, which clings to the blows, he marks out this same thing, and describes it with so much greater a circuit, as one who wished not only to compensate but even to excuse what he struck. Therefore, when he had said that he would set her in a thicket, so that the beasts of the field might devour her—that is, with all the fortifications of the kingdom and the cities cut off, she would be handed over to the power of the enemy (a censure, as once in Egypt, of clayey servitude, of insult or of hardship)—she who, in her pursuit of idols, had forgotten her God: nevertheless, because he himself, the merciful and compassionate, was acting, after the term of captivity he announces the joys of return.

And because he had made mention above of the liberation from Egypt, asserting that this too must be conferred upon the Israelite peoples in the likeness of that liberation, he now runs through the same example, more fully indeed, but the same. "Behold," he says, "I will suckle her, and I will speak to her heart: and I will give her vinedressers from that same place, and the valley of Achor to open up hope": because he calls the birth of the Synagogue the time of the liberation from Egypt; the suckling also seems to point to the food of manna. But the speaking directed to the heart indicates the promulgation of the law, which formed the hearts of its hearers. But what "I will give her vinedressers from that same place, and the valley of Achor to open up hope" signifies, take note. Before the people entered the Land of promise, spies were sent and brought back an outstanding fruit of the vine, that is, a cluster of such magnitude that one bearer could not sustain it. But after they occupied the most opulent city, namely Jericho, by a wondrous victory, a man from the tribe of Judah, by name Achar, son of Charim, stole something from the spoil that had been consecrated to burning. And when the happiness of the victors was hindered by sudden reverses, with strong men brought forward, he is tracked down from the brand of the anathema; and when he had brought out all that he had hidden, with the people stoning him, he is read to have been killed and buried in the valley of Achor (Josh. 7). And this expiation availed so greatly for pleasing God better, that thereafter he obtained triumphs without bloodshed.

And so that valley, for those receiving new fields, appeared as a hope of happiness, which guilt had closed off to those who came before. With these things therefore recalled, which were known to have been done at that time, he promises that even the return of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity will be so joyful. Then it follows: And she shall sing there according to the days of her youth, and according to the days of her going up from the land of Egypt. For just as then, with the waves cut apart, they crossed through the sea by a dry path, and Mary the sister of Moses, taking up musical instruments, sang the praises of God beforehand with choirs following: in this manner, going out from the Assyrian captivity, they were singing, not indeed to destroy some Jericho, or to find a cluster of grapes again; but for whom times succeed that must be rejoiced in, so that they may seem to have obtained that glory which they had had under Moses and Joshua.

Yet consider how the memory of this history is joyful, namely both as an example of sorrows and of joys. For he had said above: lest perhaps I strip her naked, and set her as in the day of her birth, and make her like a wilderness, and set her like a land impassable, and kill her with thirst. Namely in the likeness of those whose bodies, as the Apostle Paul says, were laid low in the desert (Heb. 3:17). But now, when he was promising that servitude would be ended, and the joys to come from liberty, there is a recalling of those same times in which, to be sure, the glorious liberation had been praised with sacred songs.

Of that happiness, that is, which was to be felt after the Babylonian captivity, the sweetness consoled the Jews, while its greatness marked out the peoples to be gathered to the preaching of the Gospel. But those who sing a new song to God (for he has made his salvation known to the world, and before the sight of the nations he has revealed his righteousness), and that servitude by which we were subjected to sins and unclean spirits he dissolved by gratuitous pardon and sanctification, so that, freed from iniquities, we might serve righteousness, and having become a people of acquisition, we might shine with the marks of the divine lineage, having from our own body, from our own people, I say, vine-dressers, either yielding to us in the mysteries the grace of a mighty cluster, or pointing out the very art and industry by which the vineyard of God is cultivated. At that time, therefore, when these things which we have enumerated came to pass as desired, how great was the usefulness of the chastisement sent before, he also made public the amendment of morals. For with the whole heart, he says, she will be joined to me, so that she will no longer reverence me by way of interposition, but will bestow on me continuous worship, on me a continuous affection: and she will call her husband and lord only me: and no longer will she ascribe my name to the Baalim, that is, to idols. Concerning this word Baalim, indeed, the tradition of the Jews wished to devise some meaning.

But it appears that this is the more solid interpretation, through which the whole sequence runs, namely that he promises that the names of idols are to be taken away from the mouth of the corrected nation, and that he alone is to be called God and Lord. But by saying, *He will no longer remember their name*, he has signified either the correction, which is both [complete] and full, or he looked to that which he had set down above, *She went after her lovers, and forgot me, says the Lord*. Therefore, shutting off this vice by chastisement, it will pass over into the contrary affection, so that it may lay aside the zeal of profaneness in full forgetfulness.

Verses 18–20. — *I will strike a covenant for her in that day with the beast of the field, and with the bird of heaven, and with the creeping thing of the earth: I will break the bow and the sword and war from the earth, and I will make them sleep confidently. I will betroth you to me forever, and I will betroth you to me in judgment and justice, and in mercy and compassions. And I will betroth you to me in faith, and you shall know that I am the Lord.* It is, he says, a consequence that she who lay subject, injured by blows, being corrected, may be polished with all good things. And therefore, just as our indignation had rendered all creatures not only adverse but even hostile to her, so again our placation may make the same creatures benevolent and favorable. *I will therefore strike a covenant for her with the beast of the field*, so that neither the savagery of wild beasts may ravage the fruits of the fields, nor the multitude of birds may seize their vineyards or olive groves, nor may the poisons of serpents spread through the limbs of the weary.

All these things, it says, will cease at the time of deliverance, but they are taught by the blows that are brought upon them in the days of plagues. With these disasters wars also will cease, so that within their ancestral borders they may sleep and rest confidently, fearing neither invasions nor ambushes. I will betroth you to me forever—that is, instructed by the things themselves you will recognize that that separation by which you were afflicted came about not by my fault but by your own. Moreover, that I am ready for you to remain my bride forever—that is, if you are such as the chastening judgments have now made you, the ancient covenant will be preserved for you forever. For thus I make the agreement, that you remain in our fellowship, so that the judgments brought near may test your righteousness. Or if creeping negligence has wounded you, and yet you have asked remedy from me with the whole extent of your weeping, I will nonetheless betroth you to me in mercy and in compassion; when you have truly perceived these things as faithful and steadfast (for this is what he says, I will betroth you in faith), you will proclaim with due eagerness that I am the Lord. We have set forth all this in such a way that, if we transfer it to the calling of the Gospel, it will stand more clearly fulfilled. For beautiful in form beyond the sons of men (Ps. 44).

He took to himself as queen her whom he betrothed to himself as a partner of his bridal chamber in honor of virginity—she from whose lips grace was poured out and gave salvation to the world; he took her to himself in injustice, which he gave her by justifying her; he took her to himself in judgment, when he chose her who would legitimately labor; he took her to himself in mercy and in compassions, when he forgave past debts, and he betrothed her in faith, by which either with the heart one believes unto righteousness, or with the mouth confession is made unto salvation (Rom. 10:10); or because it is not doubtful that for those who love the Lord all things work together unto good (Ibid. 8:28). Verses 21–24. — And it shall be in that day, I will hear, says the Lord, from the heavens, and they shall hear the earth, and the earth shall hear the grain, the wine, and the oil; and these shall hear Jezreel. And I will sow her for myself in the earth, and I will have mercy on her who was Without mercy. And I will say to Not my people, You are my people; and he himself shall say, You are my God. He extends the sequence of the promised vow, and through various figures he composes a schema familiar to the sacred volumes, so that the elements may desire to perform their own work for one another for the sustenance of human frailty, and yet cannot unless the Creator grants it. He indeed promises that in that time, when, being placid, he has driven away adversities, he will abundantly supply all things; prosperity will indeed begin to falter if the liberty sought for so many ages should lack abundance.

But this sweetness of joys, as we have said, he also shut off in that age, when the captivity of Babylon was dissolved; and it was restored more abundantly in the time of the Apostles, when the whole multitude of believers used the sober abundance of things in such a way that they had one soul and one heart (Acts 2). And then first the equality preached to all the wise shone forth, so that in so great a gathering of disciples no one was raised up by riches, no one cast down by poverty; but just as there was one harmony of all in virtue, so possession was by common right. For none of them said that anything of what they possessed was his own; but when all things were common to them, even the prices of fields were offered at the feet of the Apostles, so that distribution might be made according to the needs of each. And because the state of the spiritual people was contained within the history of the Jewish people, he returns to those names from which the prophecy had begun, and says: The earth will hear the wheat, the wine and the oil, and these will hear Jezreel, that is, the people, by the name of the valley in which he was overcome.

He showed that the nation itself—whose sins, which he was going to punish, he expressed above—I say, not in the same persons but persisting in the same tribes, and expiated by the lashes of plagues, he, being propitiated, takes to himself as his own censor, and as it were sows the diverse seeds of the commandments even in good ground, so that through the abundance of succeeding prosperities, even that day of Jezreel, on which the calamity was brought in, may be reckoned to have been precious and desirable. For he says: I will have mercy now on her whose name I had shuddered at a little before, and I will call my people, who had been a deserter of me, and had justly fallen away to those who opposed me. And in turn, confidence will be conferred on them, that they may call me the true and only Lord. But after the proclamation of prosperities has been brought forth thus far, he again brings his discourse back to the state of the present time; for it follows:

CHAPTER III.

Vers. 1–5. — And the Lord said to me: Go yet, love a woman beloved of a friend, and an adulteress, as the Lord loves the children of Israel, and they look to strange gods, and love the husks of grapes. And I dug her for myself with fifteen pieces of silver, and a cor of barley, and half a cor of barley, and I said to her: For many days you shall wait for me, you shall not commit fornication, and you shall not be to a man, but I also will wait for you. For many days the children of Israel shall sit without a king, and without a prince, and without sacrifice, and without altar, and without ephod, and without teraphim.

And after these things the children of Israel shall return, and shall seek the Lord their God, and David their king, and they shall fear the Lord and his goodness in the last days. For the beginning of the prophecy—the captivity of that people, with the prophet promising their return in turn—he taught here, as at the outset. The prophet had taken up sorrowful things from the person of God, but was announcing them as already imminent, and, guided by the same Holy Spirit, wove his oracle as it were from opposites. For when he had roared with fierce threats, he immediately added joyful things by which he might cherish the wounded, so that the people might either grow accustomed to hearing sorrowful things, or might show that the Lord himself is delaying and, as we said above, lingering in his purpose, though he is about to take vengeance. By this he teaches at the same time that they should never despair of salvation under such a judge—one so ready to pardon, surely, that by the calm things he relates amid adversities he seems deliberately to excuse what he had been angry about.

So the Prophet begins, lest she lay aside the love she had bestowed on the shameful woman at the first offense, but with that woman's shamelessness she may contend by professed kindness, and whether in the matter itself or in what seems to follow from it, with the Spirit alone revealing it, she may know that that harlot could be induced at a small price, not only to be content with the prophetic fellowship, but even to abstain from the company of him and of others alike, as one who is able to show that she prostituted herself more from the necessity of procuring a livelihood than from the pursuit of lust; and finally, if even a slender sustenance were provided, she would easily do without the pleasure of shameful conduct. By this example, surely, the cause of the Synagogue is rendered the worse, in that she did not keep that agreement even when compelled by abundance, which some prostitute or other fears even under excessive frugality. We grant, then, he says, time to those who err, that they may either break forth in tears unto correction, or at last succumb to severe punishment. These now, preferring precious things to vile ones, forget their own God and follow after strange ones, no otherwise than if, having despised the grapes, they gathered the husks fit for pigs rather than for men.

Thus first the measure of the cor is named, containing thirty modii. Second he says: half a cor of barley, thereby establishing by covenant that the office of continence is procured by the woman, after the image of that condition which the Synagogue will suffer in the Babylonian captivity, where indeed enduring exile, but under the hope of return, she will cling neither lawfully to God nor to idols, but will live as if stripped of every consolation. For on this account he says, you shall not commit fornication, and you shall not be for a husband, but I also will wait for you. Jews, or those who follow them, contend that this passage pertains to the judgment of the present time: namely, that those expelled from Jerusalem have indeed none of the insignia of the priestly office which the prophet enumerates, promising that they will be without king, without prince, without sacrifice, without altar, without Ephod and without Teraphim: yet they hold that they retain pledges of return, that is, the voice of God, who had promised that he too would wait for them. But the proofs of all the nations adopted into faith in Christ convict them of being deceived or of deceiving in this opinion. For after they refused to believe the Gospel of Christ, the vineyard was taken from them and entrusted to other cultivators, who would render its fruit in its season (Ps. 1).

Therefore in that age in which they served the Babylonians, the nation and God are rightly said to have awaited each other—not because the whole people was immune from the profanities of the Gentiles, which are imputed to them even by other holy leaders, but because there was there a mixture of righteous men, and because a better offspring than their parents would obtain the joys of liberation. On account of the bread of these, God promises that he would certainly wait, that is, that he would not immediately adopt any other nation in place of the one driven out, until it should return, made better by chastisement, as we also said above, and receiving back the ornaments of the ancient high priesthood which it had lost, in the thronging of the faithful it should encircle the horns of the altar with a ring, rendering to God the vows which its lips had distinguished, and they shall fear at his goodness in the last day (Psalm 65). He then set forth the cause of its very expulsion, namely that through it the afflicted nation might become accustomed to abstinence from profane things, until, chastised by lawful blows, it should deserve to be admitted once more into fellowship, from which a pious and joyful offspring should come forth.

CHAPTER IV.

Verses 1–2. — Hear the word of the Lord, children of Israel, for the Lord has a judgment against the inhabitants of the earth, for there is no truth, and there is no mercy, and there is no knowledge of God in the earth. Cursing, and lying, and murder, and theft, and adultery have overflowed, and blood has touched blood. What the reason would be that, in the very onset of the threat, he should also speak of those prosperous things which were to come after a long age, I have warned again and again, that is, so that either the people destined for exile might have consolation, or the clemency of the author might lie open, who comes to exact vengeance as though unwilling. By this design, therefore, having also spoken of future things, he returns, as he had done above, to the age of present things, and examines the merits of the people to be punished, so as to resolve the question which the plea of divine piety had raised. For a thought of this kind would fittingly arise, if the fixed sentence remained, that the captivity brought upon them be resolved, and the return of the glorious one come to pass. Why was freedom not continued, or what could have been the extent of the faults that would kindle the mind of our governor to such great severity? Necessarily, therefore, an enumeration of crimes is subjoined, so that the gravity of the avenger may appear. Hear, then, he says, the word of the Lord, children of Israel, for he does not refuse to enter into conflict with you, and to set forth the account of his judgments and of your merits—he to whom the blessed David says, that you may be justified in your words, and may overcome when you are judged.

Hear, I say, the word of the Lord, children of Israel—you yourselves, who are the very ones concerned, judge; and seeing the pursuits of the peoples of which we complain, if any understanding remains in you, hasten to confession and repentance. For there is no truth, and there is no mercy, and there is no knowledge of God in the land. Not, he says, as if they sin at some interval, so that a certain mixture of punishments and virtues might seem to have been made, but they have yielded to the worst vices to such a degree that no trace of uprightness appears anywhere—no faith, I say, in testimonies, no justice in judgments, no piety has remained in rites. Why do I say that hearts are free from the fear of God, when oblivion of His very name occupies all, and cruelty and lust contend with one another, when, with outrages rushing in and crimes flooding over, there is restraint neither from shame nor from bloodshed, but they join curses to lies, murders to frenzies, adulteries to sacrileges? They have filled every place of the once-holy region with slaughters, so that through the multitude of the slain blood is mingled with blood. That this was said not by exaggeration but by truth, history discloses. For those are the very times in which also the blessed Elijah, when asked by God what he was doing in the wilderness, answered with grief: Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have destroyed your altars, and I am left alone, and they seek my life (3 Kings 19).

The people were therefore corrupted by such great profanity that they strove to destroy utterly, by the final slaughter, every pious person—that is, the worshipers of God. And this abominable corruption of religion, since it had indeed nothing for which the price of pleasure might be sought, nevertheless promised impunity both to shameful and to savage deeds. Therefore the worshipers of the Baalim and of the cows, the adulterer of Jezebel, served by shedding the blood of the pious.

Verse 3. — For this the earth shall mourn, and all who dwell in it shall grow weak: in the beast of the field and the bird of the sky, but also the fish of the sea shall be gathered. Having set forth the causes of his indignation, he accordingly cries out that the earth itself is to be covered with griefs, just as it is covered with crimes. If impunity had befallen these crimes, so many and so great, even providence would be denied. Therefore every cultivator of the region shall grow weak in the beast of the field and in the bird of the sky. The divine word is accustomed to call the beasts of the field also the herds and the flocks. Therefore, he says, when scarcity of crops and fruits has pressed upon them, a failure and lack of cattle will also follow. Nor is this truly the end of the distress: but even the fish shall be gathered, that is, they shall fail so as to be absent, so that not even in the waters can sustenance be found.

Verses 4 and 5. — Yet let no one judge, and let no man be accused. For your people are like those who contradict the priest. And you shall fall by (??), and the prophet also shall fall with you. If, he says, while the state stood, some guilty persons perished by the sentence of judges, one would certainly be accused and another would accuse: censure would indeed exercise its own function upon those within. By this it is shown at the same time that the corruption of crimes, like a disease or a pestilence, had not possessed the whole people all at once; but as some pursued shameful things, so very many pursued honorable things. But when iniquity, as if conspiring, has possessed nearly all, which the prophet Hosea laments happened in his own times, then deservedly both teaching and censure will cease, so that the punishment poured out upon the impious may rage. Therefore under the appearance of a precept, the force of a judgment is expressed. Yet let no one judge, and let no man be accused, that is, no one will judge, nor will anyone be accused: for you must be laid waste by hostile fury, not erased by the sentences of judges. For your people are like those who contradict the priest; you shall fall, and the prophet also shall fall with you. The prophet sets down this "like" not for a judgment, but for a comparison. Therefore you will see nothing new in the vengeance, but what you practiced in sins, you will recognize in punishments. For your people resisted the priest, that is, you withdrew from the true high priesthood by pursuing idols.

You have therefore contradicted the priest, he says, when you rejected the sacred ceremonies, when you spurned the saving warnings and precepts that form good character; and you handed yourself over to impious leaders and likewise to profane prophets. Deservedly, then, the sentence now sent forth will envelop both, so that you too may fall together with your prophets, that is, with your soothsayers.

Verse 6. — In the night I made your mother silent. My people has fallen silent, because it has not had knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you, so that you may not serve me in the priesthood; and you have forgotten the law of your God, and I also will forget your children. It is an idiom of the Scriptures, according to what I have frequently noted, that since the address is directed to a people, it seems to be addressed now by its own name, now by the name of a parent, whose daughter it is. And therefore, when he had said, You shall fall today, and the prophet shall fall with you—that is, the time of your devastation has come, and you who once ceased from learning and speaking righteousness will now also cease from profane speech—he added, In the night I made your mother silent. But this is not to be taken as though he permitted her to speak by day and only to be silent at night.

But he wished to express the accumulation of the silence that had been pronounced, and therefore, to show that she had fallen mute when destruction rushed in, he brought in the mention of night, as if he were saying, "I will so clothe her with outpoured grief, just as night is accustomed to cover the lands, so that just as the condition of a dark time brings in a general and common silence, so this crowd of elders, whom I called your mother, which a little before was resounding with garrulous profanity, may fall silent under the night of adverse times." Then, following the established order, after he had resounded with terror, he adds the cause of the commotion: "My people has fallen silent because it did not have knowledge." It was just (he says) that the lips of my people be closed in mournful silence, since they were unwilling to learn by speaking. Therefore, because he said that knowledge was lacking to the people, lest you refer it to some necessity, he immediately shows what he had accused. "Because you have rejected knowledge, I will also reject you, so that you may not serve me in the priesthood; and because you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children." You were unwilling (he says) to understand, so as to act well (Ps.

but having meditated iniquity in your bed, you dared, at your own will, to tear apart the members of my law among yourselves, so that, neglecting the part of justice, you might retain the institutions of sacrifices: therefore a fitting frustration will go to meet your perversity, so that there may be no license to offer sacrifices for one who had no care to pursue virtues: a harsh silence will loom over you, you who drove away salutary warnings from your ears. You have forgotten me; I too will forget your children, so that she who has suffered a voluntary blindness in duties may experience the most bitter bereavement of her offspring. This is indeed to be understood in such a way that we do not think that people, given over to idols, served the true God, even by the offering of sacrifices, since this was especially the cause of consecrating calves in the region, lest through the offering of sacrifices an occasion be given them of approaching the temple. A twofold understanding must therefore be adopted, so that it may be set down either under that condition, as if we were saying: Even if you were to fulfill the parts of the priesthood gravely, nothing would indeed avail for your defense, whom the foulness of your morals accused: but consequently you would also lose those narrow and ridiculous consolations of your superstition, you who have lost the aids of merits.

Or certainly, because there were among those tribes, dwelling scattered about, both prophets and lawful priests, and some even from the common people had been accustomed to offer their little gifts, and through this they believed they could obtain impunity for their crimes: against these too, under the person of the people, he threatens that when open captivity has broken in, they will be stripped even of the supports of that reputation by which they reckoned themselves generous toward the Lord, even at intervals.

Verse 7. — According to the multitude of them, so have they sinned against me: I will change their glory into ignominy. As if by set purpose and with expended zeal the people set themselves to contend against my benefits, so that the more abundant I had been in giving, the more insane this one appeared in abusing them. Finally, when I had raised him up by the successes of offspring, so that advancing as a cultivator he filled the expanses of the widest lands, he was matching his deeds to crimes reaching out to my reproach. Plainly so that he might seem to fear lest the members of the people should be more numerous than their crimes. Therefore, because they placed their glory in the multitude as much of their deeds as of their soldiers, with ignominy succeeding I will change it: so that, namely, they may be brought to the utmost fewness, with their hardships consuming them.

Verse 8. — They shall eat the sins of my people, and they shall lift up their souls to their iniquity. This must be read as a reproach: that is, the priests, or those who were ministers of idols, and who claimed by this means to offer sacrifice to God, or the princes together with the peoples who had taken up the pursuit of deadly error, among the other things they did that deserved punishment, also usurped the terms that came from the tradition of the law. For just as the Samaritan tribes observed circumcision and the sabbaths, though serving idols, so too we must believe that those soothsayers usurped certain institutions of the law. By the institution of blessed Moses, then, there were various kinds of offerings, among which was also this one that was offered for sin. From it, after the fatty parts of the meal were consumed by fire, the remaining members fell to the priests for food. And because by these rites God was propitiated, the high priests were said to eat—that is, to consume—the sins of the people for whom they prayed; according to which manner, the soothsayers, in order to promise impunity for various offenses through the profits of their own gain, said that they consumed the sins of the people. This, then, God now through the prophet, under the voice and countenance of indignation, censures: as if he were saying.

Behold the prodigies who, seeking fame not from any noble deeds but from crimes alone, have by their misuse of words profaned the ordinances of the revered law—promising, namely, to the deluded people that if they offered sacrifices by their hands, they would at once become innocent and would attain to the negligence of sins. And so they lifted up, that is, consoled, and made the souls of the guilty to be proud, in which they allowed nothing of compunction to remain.

Therefore, because neither the teacher has learned to speak nor the disciple to hear what pertains to salvation, but the guilt that pollutes has made both equal, the sentence that follows will justly arrange them as well, so that they receive the fruit of their labors without deceit, and priest and people suffer one destruction. But we can create a more accessible understanding in this place if we also introduce the person of Judah, whom he names a little later.

So, since with a serious admonition he also chastises that very tribe—though as yet less guilty, yet not entirely cleansed—he seems already to have brought in that point as well, namely that the priests eat the victims offered for sins, and his meaning becomes something like this: But why wonder that the tribes, withdrawing from the worship and fear of God and enslaved to the honoring of idols, are defiled with various crimes, when even that part of the people which seems still to maintain the mystic ceremonies is stained with a similar error, and corrupt priests flatter the sinners—namely, that through the offering of the victims, which they themselves devour, impunity should fall to them? They were lifting up with these consolations the minds that the consciousness of their crimes was weighing down; and what the priests most shamelessly promised, the people most willingly heard. Therefore even in the time of calamity there will be no distinction between the people and the priests, but those who lived promiscuously will also perish vilely.

Verses 9 and 10. — I will visit upon him his ways, and I will repay him his thoughts. They shall eat, and not be satisfied: they have committed fornication, and have not ceased. When, he says, the censure of vengeance has begun to exert itself, those measures of sorrows which they themselves had brought about in their sins shall be fulfilled, so that they may experience in punishments what they perpetrated in desires. For they committed fornication, either by pursuing obscenities or profanities, nor were they ashamed of the foulness they had taken up, so that those who had fallen from their first station might at least think of secondary remedies, and might cease to repeat what ought not to have happened, and thus the cessation applied might imitate abstinence from error. But when they had committed fornication, they did not cease. Therefore what they practiced in vices, let them experience in penalties, so that they may eat and not be satisfied—that is, they may be filled with afflictions, but so not cease to drain them that they seem to endure a kind of hunger. For when you hear of fornication, do not suppose it to be a slight indulgence of that bodily pleasure, but, he says, violating the covenants of the sacred treaty, they abandoned the almighty Lord into whose fellowship they had been adopted.

And therefore they were deprived of the light of understanding, not considering after what insignia of religion, into what kinds of rites they had fallen, which folly of opinions would assuredly never have crept into their minds had not drunkenness and gluttony procured it; and saying that they were wise in Me, they became fools, so much so that they sought the gift of prophecy from dry sticks, and a staff would indicate to each one what was to come: this kind of profanity the Greeks call rhabdomantia. The spirit of profanity, therefore, which they call fornication, deceived them, so that they departed from the true God and were mingled with many and various demons, surely in the mouth and on the forehead of adulterers.

Verse 13. They sacrificed upon the tops of the mountains, and upon the hills they burned incense: under the oak and the poplar and the terebinth, because its shade was good. Not only, he says, did they err, who despised divine institutions and followed the fables of old women, so that they were moved not only by sticks smoothed for some deception, but even by little hills a bit more elevated, or by the shadows of trees a bit more dense, and believed that there was the greatest divinity where they had seen something pleasant. And so they sacrificed on the summits of the mountains, which the history frequently accuses when it speaks of the kings.

He did this or that, yet he did not take away the high places, but the people still sacrificed in the high places; here, however, he adds that the people also burned incense under the oak, and, explaining the cause of wonder, he added: Because its shade was good. Rejecting the creator of light and radiance, truly as sons of darkness, they were captivated by the shadows of the grove. Let us therefore hear what punishment this madness deserves.

Verse 14. — Therefore your daughters will commit fornication, and your brides will be adulteresses. I will not visit upon your daughters when they have committed fornication, nor upon your brides when they have committed adultery. You have committed, he says, shameful deeds, and you have not ceased from the work, so that if not those whom you should have perceived as innocent, at least those whom the guilty usually perceive as enticements—that is, so that honorable men would be ashamed of the violation of modesty they had committed—but in harmful works you have confirmed your boldness, pursuing to such an extent the things that were disgraceful that you preferred the shadows of logs and stones to the creator of all the elements. Therefore let the infliction of the final calamity discharge this impiety, in such a way that, by a wondrous kind of vengeance, the punishment is shaped to the likeness of the faults, and is the harsher because it has not experienced prior censure: for your brides and daughters will be subjected to the lust of the conquerors, and before some judges neither husbands nor parents will denounce that disgrace. Otherwise the whole outrage will be consumed in shame, so that nothing of it remains for guilt.

As if sharply, then, having denied the charge of shameful conduct, he concluded that nothing is more bitter than to have been placed under the condition of a servitude of this kind, in which you continue to see the utmost disgrace of your closest kin and do not dare to accuse it. Therefore, since he had foreseen that this is the last of miseries—which, indeed, only captivity could bring about—he immediately added the cause of such great upheaval by repeating what had been said before. For they themselves consorted with harlots and sacrificed with the effeminate, and the people, not understanding, will be beaten. They do not know, he says, how much grief I shall experience from the perversity of her who once acted in my fellowship; therefore, in the disgrace of their own kin, they will recognize the magnitude of their former crimes: so that those who followed after the effeminate and the prostitutes, from whom I had received the worship of demons, may be torn apart by obscene enemies who abuse them, feeling in the insults which the victorious tyrants have brought upon them the fruits of their voluntary folly.

BOOK TWO.

CHAPTER IV (continued)

Verse 15. — If you commit fornication, Israel, let Judah at least not offend. Do not enter into Galgala, and do not go up to Bethaven; and do not swear, As the Lord lives, for like a heifer that has gone astray, Israel has turned aside: now the Lord will seek them out as a lamb in the open country. Although the censure of this prophecy shows that all the tribes have been defiled with the worship of idols, nevertheless it denounces the worse condition of Israel, and one that seems more capable of damnation than of correction: for it not only kept the audacity of profanation within its own borders and customs, but also sought the contamination of its brother as though it were some profit. This, indeed, the prophet proves to be the zeal of one inciting to crimes, when he declares to Israel that Judah at least should not offend; for no care of brotherly compassion had been laid upon him, that he might be admonished to be diligent, but under this form of a precept he also lashes that crime, that he had preferred to make Judah more like himself, rather than that he himself should think anything of amendment.

And the sense becomes as follows: O you Israel, who, having followed the leader of error—that is, Jeroboam—have withdrawn from the fellowship of your brother, namely Judah, for no other reason than that there might be no opportunity for you to breathe and to return to better things, through the honor of the temple and the celebration of sacred days—do not safeguard the pact of your lineage or of your guilt; and you who refused to preserve praiseworthy concord, hold to the dismissal you once undertook, and do not steal your way back into the profession of a brotherhood you have rejected by the cunning of a corrupter, but, content at least with your own plague, allow the innocence of your associate to remain, and cease to invite him to that state into which you will weep to have come. For now imprudence rages all the more, if those for fear of whose remedy you chose separation, with them you enter into fellowship out of love of sacrilege. Keep at least that feeling for yourself which is accustomed to be born in those who sin, namely that you be ashamed of your shameful offense. Why, that is, do you exclude from yourself the slight solace, so that you seem deceived? For the ascent will not escape guilt; yet it indicates that there is some distinction between the unwary and the shameless, in that boldness makes some hateful, while fear makes others pitiable. But you, since you suffer no one to be immune from your foulness, what else do you confess than that you are most guilty, not by error, but by a spontaneous and detestable judgment? If you commit fornication, Israel, let Judah at least not offend.

Why, I ask, do you join this error to the former ones, so that you think you will perish with less pain if you perish with many rather than with few? Why, prodigal of your own goods, do you also contaminate the rights of your brother? Why do you wish the whole race to be wrapped in one tomb? Allow some portion of your blood to survive, by whose support you may be helped and by whose example you may be reformed. If you commit fornication in Israel, at least let not Judah transgress: do not enter into Gilgal, and do not go up to Bethaven, and do not swear, As the Lord lives. How he commanded Judah not to transgress, as Israel did, he made clear through what follows, by forbidding them to go up to Gilgal and Bethaven—places joined to the tribe of Judah—in the zeal of mixing religion, and to swear, As the Lord lives; which is to be understood thus: because in those same places, as in Samaria, they had consecrated calves, and had also ascribed to them the name of the true God, and would swear by their name and divinity, therefore he now commands that, since from the vicinity of Judah the people were flocking there—namely to Bethaven and Gilgal—these should cease to go up there and to swear, As the Lord lives, that is, in those places consecrated by the consent of the people, lest Judah, deceived by this familiarity of words, should himself first begin not to shudder at the calves, and then also to swear.

But this too he seems to show, that the impiety of the people was confounding them, so that those who were serving the calves were also worshipping the true Lord, their own Judas, as it were; in whatever matters they would swear, and they would bind their oaths by the invocation of that name, judging it best, as it were, to venerate both names with equal honor—unless they were persuading even those who had remained in the faith to worship this as well, and to take up the worship of the calves, while the reverence of the former religion, I say, remained: as if we seem to have made not so much a change of devotion as a certain addition. But this, undertaken against the precepts of the law, was without doubt polluting the wretched with accumulated profanity. Do not, therefore, frequent those places, which you have made most celebrated by sacrilegious rites, with such zeal that even the hearts of Judah are poisoned by your crime. For let Judah look back, if he has not yet wholly withered away, to see what state Israel has come to; and then he will recognize what also threatens himself, unless he takes care.

Verse 16. — For as a wanton heifer Israel has turned aside, now the Lord will feed them like a lamb in a broad place. The comparison drawn from a heifer is entirely apt, so that the very appearance of the sin, and the swelling of those sinning, and the lowing of those perishing might be signified. In the worship, he says, of the calves, having shaken off the yoke of my law, the audacity of Israel sinned, and it turned aside from the paths of virtue, believing that by its change it would enjoy its rich goods; but such a frustration of its vows followed upon the impious, that from the mass, as it were, of a bull they descended to the smallness of a lamb. Thus the whole nation, which trusted in its strength, saw its glory changed with disgrace following after, and, placed under the shepherd's rod, restrained with as great ease as a lamb is wont to be. Nor is this only so, but just as a lamb led into vast places, both weak and alone, deprived of the comfort of its mother as well as of the flock, fears whatever it has seen, whatever it has heard: so too the nation, subjected to savage enemies, will be forced to walk through a wilderness. Yet divine providence did not abandon it altogether, for which reason he says, Now God will feed them; but so that by the teaching of the calamity imposed it may understand and confess that neither were the precepts of the sacred law contemptible, nor were its own crimes unpunished, nor its desires fruitful, he adds.

Verses 17–19. — Ephraim is a partaker with idols: let him alone. Their banquet is separated; they have committed fornication with fornication; its protectors have loved to bring disgrace; the spirit has bound him in his wings, and he shall be confounded by his sacrifices. After the prophetic word has dealt with Israel concerning desolation, and has announced to him his end, because he had not been a hearer of his [words], it next turns, intending to warn, to Judah. Lest the censure directed at Israel should seem to have exempted Judah from guilt—Judah, who assuredly would never have been corrupted except by voluntary assent—for that reason he presses upon him too with like vigor. You have seen, he says, that Ephraim, withdrawing his ungrateful and wretched neck from the yoke of my law, has determined to be a partaker with idols. Therefore you shall join yourself to him by no treaty, but let him alone, and cut yourself off from him in the whole scope of your pursuits as well as of your places. Otherwise, if any fellowship binds you to him, calamity too—doubtless a just one—will seize you. Do you wish to lick up the contagion of profanity? Surround yourself with the rampart of continual separation; never enter into either public treaties or private banquets with the sacrilegious. For what fellowship has light with darkness? What agreement has the temple of God with idols?

They have committed fornication with fornication, and lest you think this happened to those deceived by error, its protectors loved to bring disgrace; with devoted zeal and burning love they follow profanities, and they do not sin only among the common people, but from the leaders down to the lowest they are pervaded by deadly profanity. Therefore never mingle with their mindset and assembly, if the sacraments of the pure faith delight you. For indeed, O tribe of Judah, for the aid of your judgment, the swift damnation of such people has been provided in advance, lest you, seeing the destruction of the guilty delayed, should also become uncertain in your judgment of merits. While you are still unharmed, a sudden storm will seize Samaria like the wind, and they will be confounded by their sacrifices—that is, they will be ashamed, and they will confess the vanity of their hope, who promised themselves freedom and security in those victims which they offered to idols. But the wings of the spirit, by which the nation, bound fast, will depart, he set down according to the common opinion, which is accustomed to furnish the images of winds with feathers. So he speaks thus: Those who have followed sacrileges will be utterly destroyed, and will be carried away to various exiles by the whirlwind of captivity, so that they may be seen to have leaned upon the wings of the winds. But when we read these things, we ought to consider how lightly the senseless people esteemed the voices of the prophets.

For when the priests and kings, and even the common multitude, had conspired together in open error, no opportunity of rebuking or preaching was granted to the few spiritual and poor men; but, as another Scripture testifies, they were called seized ones, and were publicly held up as monstrosities for mockery. Yet these men, lacking both wealth and goods alike, were counted worthy to enter into converse with God, and, as it were from the throne of the heavens, to pronounce sentence upon souls that were laid low and cleaving to the ground.

CHAPTER V.

Verses 1–2. — Hear this, he says, you priests, and give heed, house of Israel, and house of the king, listen, because judgment is for you. For undoubtedly you all go on to sacrileges, and in sinning you have made no distinction such as you had in your ranks. Now therefore, whether you who are exalted by priestly or by royal dignity, or the whole multitude of Israel, since destruction is now at hand, it is fitting that you understand that you perish not because of your own merits, but because of the judge's equity. For you have perpetrated two things that seemed to be contrary, namely, that you became both a snare and a net, stretched out thus on the summit of a mountain, as if in a place of watch. But the sacrifices which it would befit one to offer to the ruler of the holy things, and which were to be carried as if by conveying smoke to the heights above — these you, having changed the order, have sunk into the depths.

But this is what I charge against the priests and kings: that when they had obtained that place among the people, so that they should be revered no less for their uprightness and religion than for their power and dignity, and should have stirred up their subjects to what was right as much by speech as by example, they on the contrary provided either a conciliation for crimes or a pattern of them; and retaining from their former height only this, that they appeared far removed from what they had done, they stretched out snares and nets by which the unhappy crowd might be caught, and by that same perversity, he says, you turned sacrifices into the deep, that is, as it were to the underworld. Or what, when you sacrificed them either to demons or to the Manes? Therefore, because through love of sinning you have confounded the order of acting, so that a certain ambition appeared among some of you, and through ignorance of discerning, receive what follows.

I will be the instructor of all of you, so that by the teaching of vengeance you may learn what, having despised instruction, you did not know. [Verse 3.] I know Ephraim, and Israel is not hidden from me, because now Ephraim has fornicated, Israel is contaminated: they will not give their thoughts to return to the Lord their God, because the spirit of fornication is in the midst of them, and they have not known the Lord. With how great obstinacy, he says, Israel has sinned, no one knows better than I, who see the inner parts of sins. Nor is there any part of the inmost being that can escape my sight.

Inspecting him, then, carefully in his entirety, I recognized that he is now utterly fornicated and utterly polluted. And lest you should think this was said as an excuse for past sins, he immediately made plain in the words that follow what he wished to be indicated by such an assertion. For he says: [Verse 4] They will not give their thoughts, that they may return to the Lord their God, because the spirit of fornication is in the midst of them, and they have not known God. Therefore, after the receiving of sin, with compunction dissembled and admitted into the breast, not only the usurpation of the crime, but also the forgetfulness of amendment, is so preferred before the preceding errors that this iniquity alone is judged either first or greatest. They will not give, he says, their thoughts, that we may return to the Lord their God, because the spirit of fornication is in the midst of them. The cause why they thought nothing of amendment, he showed to be this: that the unclean spirit himself, the demon, or the love of sacrileges, was dwelling in their midst. For if they sinned only at intervals, the unclean spirit would be believed to be drawing near to them. But now, since they spend all the time of their life in crimes, rightly the author of sacrileges is said to be not near them, but in their midst. With him, then, sitting in their breasts, they think nothing of amendment, and therefore they are subjected to destruction.

Verse 5. — The arrogance of Israel, he says, will answer to his face, and Israel and Ephraim will rush into their own iniquity; Judas also will rush with them. By the likeness of hardworking country folk, to whom abundance often answers, he says that these too will straightway receive the reward of their endeavors. Deservedly, he says, will their diligence answer, that is, so that those who arrogated the most to themselves on account of their crimes may blush for shame under calamities.

Verses 6–7. — With their flocks and with their herds they will go to seek the Lord, and they will not find him: he has been taken away from them: they have transgressed against the Lord, because they have begotten alien sons; now the harvest will devour them with their offspring. When he had said above that it befits the justice of the judge that those who had given themselves over to crimes should also endure wages worthy of them, he joined Judas to Israel, whom, though somewhat later, he knew would come into a like guilt. But after he commended the justice of the examination, he returns to the distinction of times, and pursues the deeds of that Israel which he knew would presently perish. And first indeed, when he had said that Judas too was to be mingled with Israel in calamity, he added what looked rather to Judas, who held the temple consecrated to God. For although he was polluted with idols, he nevertheless also offered sacrifices to God; and since he cared little for correcting his ways, he thought he would gain help from continual immolation.

Therefore, he says, with their flocks and their herds they will go to seek the Lord, and they will not find him: he has been taken away from them. But he put "they will go" for "they were going"; for by the inflection of the past tense the reproach of the defiled man is exposed. Going forward, then, in the callus of superstition rather than of religion (for thus the offering of victims is reckoned, if the care of virtues is lacking in them), they could not find God, to whom no one is led except by the path of full devotion. "He has been taken away from them"—not that God could be taken away, but that his help so nowhere met them as if it seemed utterly taken away from them. Afterward, however, turning his voice to Ephraim, that is, to the Samaritans, he lashes out at another kind of transgression, which nevertheless shows the antiquity of the impiety committed. Namely, that they so despised the statutes of the law as even to be mingled with profane nations through marriages, striving utterly and hastening to strip off the name of their own race and to be anything else at all, though they were called the people of God. "They have transgressed in the Lord, because they have begotten alien children." He says they conceived such hatred of my name that they believed they could be snatched from threats or freed from troubles if their offspring had migrated into the number of other nations. Wherefore "now the harvest shall devour them with their shoots": he shows the near and impending calamity by the name of the harvest, in which he promises that both the sprouts and the fruits are to be cut down by one sword.

Verses 8–9. — Blow the horn in Gabaa, and the trumpet in Bama, wail in Bethaven, behind Benjamin. Ephraim shall be in desolation, etc. Because he had foretold that they were to be consumed in a short time, and he knew that the weight of the sentence was coming into effect and advancing without any delay, as though the things were already accomplished, he ordered it to be announced through those cities which were most frequented, with horns blowing and with resounding lamentations, that desolation was seizing all of Ephraim. But all the places he mentioned — that is, "behind Benjamin," which was a tribe bordering on the region of Judah, and Gabaa and Rama and Bethaven — we gather were near the territories of Judah. Since, therefore, the calamity of these, which came first, ought to have made them anxious, by the very example of fear it advanced them not at all toward amendment, but even provided increases of sinning; and so he vehemently reproaches them, and says that by this they appeared worse, by which they ought to have been made better, even for the sake of humanity itself.

Verse 10. — For the princes of Judah have become like those who remove a boundary; upon them I will pour out my wrath like water. That is, in the time of the Assyrian captivity, which drove the ten tribes from their territories, the princes of Judah, who ought to have been moved to weeping by their brothers' calamity and diligently to have considered the beauty of their conduct, lest they too should slip into similar misfortunes—they not only felt nothing of fear or compunction, but even made public a fratricidal spirit, rejoicing, evidently, that territories had been added to them by their brother's expulsion. Therefore on the day of desolation, that is, at the time when the Israelite tribes were driven back from their territories, he showed the faith (that is, the faithfulness) of Judah: whose hidden desire the occasion laid bare. And so in Levi he had the divisions of brothers, such that he even said these advantages had been his own: which is indeed of such great guilt that it compelled the indignation of the avenger to be increased. For it follows: Upon him I will pour out my wrath like water: that is, after he had said "I will pour out," he plainly added "like water." Judah, he says, appeared worse through the crime of this exultation. And therefore he will be submerged by a flood of punishments, because when among other benefits our clemency had also granted him this, that the destruction of Ephraim should be devoted to his fear and correction, he abused it for the increase of his wantonness, and believed that his brother's examples had been provided for him not as warnings but as adjoining estates.

Verse 11–15. — Ephraim has borne calumny, crushed by judgment, because he began to go after filth. And I am like a moth to Ephraim, and like rot to the house of Judah. And Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah his bond. And Ephraim went to Assur, and sent to the king his protector: and he himself will not be able to heal you, nor will he be able to loose the bond from you. For I am like a lioness to Ephraim, and like a lion's cub to the house of Judah — I, I will go and seize and take away, and there will be none to rescue. Going, I will return to my place, until you fail and seek my face. God gravely sets himself forth as offended, because Judah received no compunction from his brother's condemnation, but remaining, he insulted the exile, rejoiced, and brought forth his own in whatever slaughter. This sin, therefore, God so gravely promised that he would not bring wrath near, but would pour it out utterly like water. And because through the increase of punishments he had made Judah seem more harmful — since he was, with vengeance flooding in, to be laid waste — he continued to develop the figure he had taken up. And he says that the guilt of Judah is graver, so that Israel, compared with him, seems to have borne calumny. And the sense becomes this: If the reckoning of merits demanded the evil of captivity, why did Judah, both stained with the customs of the nations and infected with hatred of his brother, put off the force of vengeance? But if after so many crimes he did not yet deserve to be cast out, was not he who was captured oppressed by calumny rather than by the justice of the one who teaches?

Ephraim has borne calumny, crushed by judgment. He took care to explain what it means to bear calumny, that is, to be oppressed not by the judge's equity but by his power. And he refers to the same sense in what he says, He began to go after filth. For in the preceding passages he had reproached Israel both for the multitude and for the antiquity of its sins; but when he stirred up the charge against Judah—namely, that he sought profit from his brother's captivity and felt joy in it—and judged that this outweighed the other crimes, he added the rest in the same tenor, saying that Ephraim was also circumvented in judgment, and that he himself had the beginnings of error. As if he were saying: You, Judah, have made public such great cruelty of your mind that in the crimes for which Israel is condemned you appear more horrible and more ancient. Hence the measure of my judgment will be sharpened according to the difference of merits, so that I may consume Ephraim like a moth, but you like an adhering rot. For it is well known with how much lesser destruction those things which the moth gnaws are consumed than those which the rot pervades. And Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah his bond: that is, you will both see and endure the vengeance destined for your pursuits, and it will not profit you to seek help from various kings; but by the facts you will confess that they have provided you only examples of corruption, not also aids of salvation.

And Ephraim went to Assyria, and sent to the avenging king, and he himself will not be able to heal you, nor will he be able to loose the bond from you. For I am like a lioness to Ephraim, and like a lion's cub to the house of Judah. To both peoples he promised that he would meet them in the guise of a lion, but with a fierceness greater than the appearance he had not shown, he kept it in the sex, so that to the one he said he appeared as a lioness, but to the other as a lion. And he fulfilled the likeness he had taken up by saying: I, I will seize, and I will go, and I will take away, and there is none who can rescue. Going, I will return to my place, until you fail and seek my face. There is no one, he says, among the shepherds who dares to rescue the prey seized by me; but despising the tumult of the rustics, I will put forth my strength, until the desire of my indignation is fulfilled. But I will return to my place—he has set this in place of the lair, to which a lion, unafraid, is accustomed to withdraw. Now this will be, until you, wearied by hardships and griefs, seek, he says, my face: which indeed, beyond the rule of the image of the lion that was taken up, is plainly brought in from the truth of the matter. Otherwise, as far as the comparison is concerned, who, being weary, would wish to look upon that face, against which not even a strong man could have stood?

Therefore, when he had expressed the indignation he had taken up, through the famine of the lion, he now added concerning the majesty of his own person that he would not come to deliver them unless the people, making progress, had desired his face by that very bruising, and had begun to seek remedy from him alone by whom they had felt the punishment inflicted.

CHAPTER VI.

Verses 1–3. — In their tribulation they will rise early to me. Come, and let us return to the Lord, for he himself takes hold, and will heal us: he will strike, and will cure us. He will give us life after two days, on the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight, and we shall know, and we shall follow on, that we may know the Lord: his going forth is prepared as the dawn, and he will come to us as the early and the late rain upon the earth. He had said that, like a lion advancing to the hunt, he would rage against the profane people, exercising, that is, the office of vengeance, which, once stirred up, had begun to crush the impious, and would not cease from the infliction of punishments until they had betaken themselves to seeking the Lord with the whole compass of their prayers thereafter. But since there is a great distinction in the very profession of supplication, and they offer one thing, struck only by terror, but another, corrected with fear and also with reason, he took care to express what weight there is in each, so that although one appearance of both might be seen, we would nonetheless understand that they rest on different roots: the one, namely, of mere disturbance, the other also of correction, of virtue.

Since, therefore, he had said that he would by no means come forth to help unless that people, yielding to chastisement, turned themselves to the seeking of his face, he necessarily proceeds to set forth what manner of supplication he awaited, and first he runs through under mockery the words of that supplication which he shows to be reprobate for its levity—that is, the supplication which fawns with words alone, when it is found destitute of the weight of deeds; whose character and kind even the sacred psalm accuses. When he slew them, he says, they sought him, and turned back before dawn, and came to him: but their heart was not right; in their tribulation they rose early to me. Come, and let us return to the Lord, for he himself has begun and will heal us; he will strike and will cure us. He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight; we shall know and follow on, that we may know the Lord: his going forth is prepared as the dawn, and he will come to us as the early and the late rain upon the earth. When, he says, you begin to seek me, I shall not be pleased by that prayer which you carry on your lips, nor if you praise my power and clemency together, saying that I am so ready to forgive that I forestall vows with benefits, nor will I suffer the blow I have brought to remain through the space of two days, but on the third day I shall come to give life. And we shall live in his sight, flourishing in the felicity of the life which he has given.

Let us know and examine him who drives out the nights of our anguish and sorrows like the light of morning, and who steals in upon us, bestowing abundance like the early and the late rain. Those things, I say, which you are accustomed to sing without amendment of morals, I will despise. But consider the things I shall recount.

Truly. 4. — What shall I do to you, Ephraim? What shall I do to you, Judah? Your mercy (which, by your promised songs, you were saying would be present with you, so that I may use your own images) has vanished like a morning cloud, and like the dew of twilight, when the sun comes, it has dried up: that is, that which I had been accustomed to spare you is consumed by the heat of my indignation, so that there is nothing left from which you may obtain relief from evils. Nor does this happen for the reason that it is mine, but because your purpose has not been changed. For I am justice; and keeping the laws of clemency equally, I had been unwilling to punish those whom I had terrified. But you, not even moved by the declaration of plagues, have forced the terrors to pass into effect.

Verse 5. — Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of my mouth, and your judgments shall go forth as light, that is, I have brought near the axes of prophetic threats, and I have described the evils to be inflicted with such heaps that anyone would easily be terrified by the mere hearing of it. But since the elaborate array of terror could not restrain your folly, it is necessary that those things be brought in which it did not profit to have made known. Therefore your judgments shall go forth as light, so that no one may now be ignorant of what you deserve, nor may the deformity of your speech, under some appearance of religion—which you had in the sacrifices you offered—be softened away. Moreover, while the outcome of things hangs in suspense, let it shine forth that I sought from you good dispositions rather than costly victims, and that he was acceptable to me who was diligent in helping his neighbor through mercy rather than in instructing the altar through sacrifice, and who preferred the knowledge of God, his commandment, to all sacrifices. You therefore, who, despising to learn these things, have thought nothing of morals, nothing of virtues, but have supposed that I, whom you provoked with long-continued deeds, could be appeased by the gifts of praises and victims—understand at least from the perils of things how great is my severity. The mercy which you praised without deserving it has passed away like a morning cloud; but the judgments by which, once convicted, you are delivered over, shall shine like the full light of day.

Verse 7. — But they themselves, like Adam, have transgressed the covenant; they have dealt treacherously against me. By the established order of the discourse he proceeds, so that after he has threatened punishments, he may add the substance of them, that is, the faults by which the offense was aroused. Hence here too, after he promised that vengeance would be manifest, he added the charge by which they were bound. And to set forth its weight, he recalled an ancient example. Here indeed the prophet's manner of expression is to be noted, as in many such places, bringing the light of explanation. He says that they, like Adam, have transgressed the covenant: there they have dealt treacherously against me. Not, of course, that these appear to have committed transgression in Paradise; but since he had said that they, like Adam, had transgressed the commandment, he added that they sinned there; doubtless in the same likeness, by doing wrong; which nevertheless requires a keen understanding. For Adam, even if he was a violator of the commandment, is yet read to have supplicated no idols, nor to have perpetrated any of those crimes of which Israel is accused. From what source, then, is the people dwelling in the highest wickedness compared to that first man? Assuredly for no other reason than that, even if they are not equally sacrilegious, they are nevertheless taught to be equally ungrateful.

For just as Adam, who had been brought into Paradise so that he might enjoy the resources of its labors, when no ground for distress had yet arisen and no complaint had been raised, preferred to fulfill the command of the seducer rather than of the Creator; and the seductive promise of falsehood prevailed more with him than the Creator's precept, which was attended by so many gifts and so many miracles—a precept that had conferred the use of all things, with the exception of one single fruit—and immediately, as a transgressor of the command, he began to experience exile, and exchanged the highest happiness for the lowest captivity, so that his sin thereafter punished the fields by denying them their fertility—in this same manner the people of Ephraim, who enjoyed the resources of the land as though the pleasantness of Paradise, finding no ground for offense, that is, nothing for which to complain against God's indulgence and generosity, as though they labored under hatred of the virtues alone, preferred errors to the truth, and, despising the religion that was salutary, fell away to the worship of idols. They are therefore said to have fallen into the same guilt, since they are seen to have imitated the condition of him with whom they share it, and they are struck by the great envy of ungrateful nations, who preferred to their Maker, who lavishly confers all good things, the author of no gift at all, and one so skilled only in overthrowing.

Verses 8–9. — Gilead is a city of those who make an idol, undermined by bloodshed; and like the jaws of robbers, it shares with the priests who kill travelers on the road from Shechem, because they have committed a crime in the house of Israel. Because, as we have often said, he reproves not any single person but the people, at one time he runs through in a general discourse the things that were done, at another he enumerates the cities in which individual cities sinned, as it were, more than the rest. Although, therefore, that whole region was defiled and horrifying with the worship of idols, yet there were undoubtedly certain places that had gathered to themselves more sacrilege in proportion as they had possessed more renown, whether from the opportunities of trade or from the multitude of inhabitants. From these, then, he introduces both Gilead and Shechem as cities distinguished for their profanations. Gilead, he says, is the chief city of those who fashion idols, exulting no less in zeal for cruelty than in profanity. For just as robbers' jaws, so its citizens gape for the blood of the innocent. For those who served the persuasions of their priests, that is, of their soothsayers, if anyone wished to ascend to the temple of God, they attacked him on the way, turning him away from the God he had sought and dragging him into fellowship with their own error; and if they made little progress by persuasion, they conducted the matter even by slaughter. On account of this he says, Sharing with the priests who kill on the road those going up from Shechem, because they have committed a crime.

First, indeed, they themselves by falling into sacrilege, and then because they were not content with their own downfall, but also led others into a similar ruin, either by persuasion or by compulsion. A crime rightly proclaimed, namely that they had such zeal for impiety that they even strove to instill it in the unwilling and reluctant.

Verse 10. — In the house of Israel I have seen a horrible thing; there are the fornications of Ephraim: Israel is contaminated. To teach that the whole region had been profaned, he recalls even the different places, and just as above he said that the Gileadites, in the manner of robbers, rushed upon travelers to lead them away from the right path, so now he proclaims that he has seen a horrible thing in the house of Israel, whether in Samaria or in the whole region, that is, that the entire people of Ephraim, without exception, is stained with sacrileges. Since he had often already said that punishment hangs over these crimes, now, content with the mere enumeration of their merits, he passes to Judah, and warning him, so that he may know that the severity of the judge cannot be corrupted, but that he too, unless he hastens to correct himself, will receive the wages of similar calamities.

Verse 11. — But also, Judah, set a harvest for yourself, when I turn back the captivity of my people. Do not think, O tribe of Judah, that you will be free from condemnation, because within your borders, as it were, the people of Israel subsists in captivity. That one had indeed gone before you in iniquities; it followed that he should also go before you in miseries. But you, whom he accompanies in shameful deeds, follow him likewise in calamities, yet you are to be judged worse, because nothing is reckoned to you for the fact that he was condemned first. Set a harvest for yourself, therefore, when I turn back the captivity of my people. See, he says, do not doubt that when the time of due vengeance has come, the captivity which my people—that is, his brothers—have now endured, with justice declaring it, will be turned back upon you, so that you too may likewise reap, because just as those who sow in tears of repentance carry back sheaves of joys, so those who pursue polluted joys will gather a harvest of sorrows and lamentation.

CHAPTER VII.

Verse 1. — When I would have healed Israel, the iniquity of Ephraim was revealed, and the malice of Samaria, because they wrought a lie: and the thief entered in, spoiling, the robber outside. He carefully takes pains to show how ready he is to forgive; and that, as though unwillingly, he assumes the role of the avenger, if justice allowed, he would much more and much more gladly use the bread of gentleness. When, therefore, I had conceived, as it were, an impulse of indulgence, he says, and was meditating to rise up to succor the wretched, I gathered my eyes a little, that I might see those whom I was about to set free. And behold, against my face the host of the iniquities which Ephraim had committed leaped forth, as it were of those crying out, that no one would go spared in such matters, than with the stain of justice, since they were imbued with such great hatred of the truth that with unceasing zeal they ever built up deadly lies. When I would have healed Israel, he says, the iniquity of Ephraim was revealed, and the malice of Samaria, because they wrought a lie. But besides the various vices of their manners, he lashes the sacrilege under the name of a lie, as above that of obscenity. For they devised whom they might venerate as gods, who had ceased to worship the true God: and thus they are shown to have wrought a lie, who ascribed the divine name to idols.

Hence also the teacher of the Gentiles says: God delivered them over to the desires of their heart, to uncleanness, so that they might dishonor their own bodies in themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen (Rom. 1:24). The greatness of the crime they committed, therefore, settled my deliberation, in which I was thinking to spare them, and did not permit those who had fabricated lies to the insult of the sacred truth to escape. Then into all their inner chambers the knowing plunderer entered, with the security of a conqueror and entering with the diligence of one raging, so that, of the things that were to be plundered, he would neither leave anything behind through negligence nor disdain anything through abundance. Therefore the name of thief and of robber ravaging within and without was applied to him as a likeness, so that you would understand the enemy compared to him to be not trembling but swift.