HOSEA vii. 8-x.
Moral decay means political decay. Sins like these are the gangrene of nations. It is part of Hosea's greatness to have traced this, a proof of that versatility which distinguishes him above other prophets. The most spiritual of them all, he is at the same time the most political. We owe him an analysis of repentance to which the New Testament has little to add;[537] but he has also left us a criticism of society and of politics in Israel, unrivalled except by Isaiah. We owe him an intellectual conception of God,[538] which for the first time in Israel exploded idolatry; yet he also is the first to define Israel's position in the politics of Western Asia. With the simple courage of conscience Amos had said to the people: You are bad, therefore you must perish. But Hosea's is the insight to follow the processes by which sin brings forth death--to trace, for instance, the effects of impurity upon a nation's powers of reproduction, as well as upon its intellectual vigour.
So intimate are these two faculties of Hosea, that in chapters devoted chiefly to the sins of Israel we have already seen him expose the political disasters that follow. But from the point we have now reached--chap. vii. 8--the proportion of his prophesying is reversed: he gives us less of the sin and more of the social decay and political folly of his age.
HOSEA vii. 8-viii. 3.
Hosea begins by summing up the public aspect of Israel in two epigrams, short but of marvellous adequacy (vii. 8):--
_Ephraim--among the nations he mixeth himself:_ _Ephraim has become a cake not turned._
It is a great crisis for any nation to pass from the seclusion of its youth and become a factor in the main history of the world. But for Israel the crisis was trebly great. Their difference from all other tribes about them had struck the Canaanites on their first entry to the land:[539] their own earliest writers had emphasised their seclusion as their strength;[540] and their first prophets consistently deprecated every overture made by them either to Egypt or to Assyria. We feel the force of the prophets' policy when we remember what happened to the Philistines. These were a people as strong and as distinctive as Israel, with whom at one time they disputed possession of the whole land. But their position as traders in the main line of traffic between Asia and Africa rendered the Philistines peculiarly open to foreign influence. They were now Egyptian vassals, now Assyrian victims; and after the invasion of Alexander the Great their cities became centres of Hellenism, while the Jews upon their secluded hills still stubbornly held unmixed their race and their religion. This contrast, so remarkably developed in later centuries, has justified the prophets of the eighth in their anxiety that Israel should not annul the advantages of her geographical seclusion by trade or treaties with the Gentiles. But it was easier for Judæa to take heed to the warning than for Ephraim. The latter lies as open and fertile as her sister-province is barren and aloof. She has many gates into the world, and they open upon many markets. Nobler opportunities there could not be for a nation in the maturity of its genius and loyal to its vocation:--
_Rejoice, O Zebulun, in thine outgoings:_ _They shall call the nations to the mountain;_ _They shall suck of the abundance of the seas,_ _And of the treasure that is stored in the sands._[541]
But in the time of his outgoings Ephraim was not sure of himself nor true to his God, the one secret and strength of the national distinctiveness. So he met the world weak and unformed, and, instead of impressing it, was by it dissipated and confused. The tides of a lavish commerce scattered abroad the faculties of the people, and swept back upon their life alien fashions and tempers, to subdue which there was neither native strength nor definiteness of national purpose. All this is what Hosea means by the first of his epigrams: _Ephraim--among the nations he lets himself be poured out_, or _mixed up_. The form of the verb does not elsewhere occur; but it is reflexive, and the meaning of the root is certain. _Balal_ is to _pour out_, or _mingle_, as of oil in the sacrificial flour. Yet it is sometimes used of a mixing which is not sacred, but profane and hopeless. It is applied to the first great confusion of mankind, to which a popular etymology has traced the name Babel, as if for Balbel. Derivatives of the stem bear the additional ideas of staining and impurity. The alternative renderings which have been proposed, _lets himself be soaked_ and _scatters himself_ abroad like wheat among tares, are not so probable, yet hardly change the meaning.[542] Ephraim wastes and confuses himself among the Gentiles. The nation's character is so disguised that Hosea afterwards nicknames him Canaan;[543] their religion so filled with foreign influences that he calls the people the harlot of the Ba'alim.