We are already aware, however, that Hosea did not count this as God's final revelation to His people. Doom is not doom to him, as it was to Amos, but discipline; and God withdraws His people from their fascinating land only that He may have them more closely to Himself. He will bring His Bride into the wilderness again, the wilderness where they first met, and there, when her soul is tender and her stupid heart broken, He will plant in her again the seeds of His knowledge and His love. The passages which describe this are among the most beautiful of the book. They tell us of no arbitrary conquest of Israel by Jehovah, of no magic and sudden transformation. They describe a process as natural and gentle as a human wooing; they use, as we have seen, the very terms of this: _I will woo her, bring her into the wilderness, and speak home to her heart.... And it shall be in that day that thou shalt call Me, My husband, ... and I will betroth thee to Me for ever in righteousness and in justice, and in leal love and in mercies and in faithfulness; and thou shalt know Jehovah._[722]
[663] i. 2.
[664] iv. 6.
[665] iv. 1.
[666] v. 4.
[667] ii. 10.
[668] xi. 3.
[669] iv. 6.
[670] vi. 6.
[671] ii. 22.
[672] viii. 2.
[673] ידע.
[674] The Latin _videre_, _scire_, _noscere_, _cognoscere_, _intelligere_, _sapere_ and _peritus esse_.
[675] Cf. the Greek οἰδα from εἰδειν.
[676] vi. 9.
[677] See above, pp. 258, 275; and below, p. 323.
[678] viii. 5: cf. xxix. 3 (Eng. 4), _Jehovah did not give you a heart to know_.
[679] Job xix. 13: still more close, of course, the intimacy between the sexes for which the verb is so often used in the Old Testament.
[680] xix. 25: cf. Gen. xx. 6.
[681] viii. 9.
[682] viii. 5: cf. Hosea ix. 7.
[683] ix. 21.
[684] 1 Sam. ii. 12. A similar meaning is probably to be attached to the word in Gen. xxxix. 6: Potiphar _had no thought_ or _care for anything_ that was in Joseph's hand. Cf. Prov. ix. 13; xxvii. 23; Job xxxv. 15.
[685] Gen. iii. 7.
[686] Gen. iii. 5; Isa. vii. 15, etc.
[687] iv. 14, לא־יבין עם: if the original meaning of בין be to _get between_, _see through_ or _into_, so _discriminate_, _understand_, then intelligence is its etymological equivalent.
[688] vii. 11. See above, p. 321, _n._ 4.
[689] vii. 9.
[690] iv. 1.
[691] v. 4.
[692] For exposition of this chapter see above, pp. 256 ff.
[693] iv. 11, 12, LXX.
[694] iv. 14 f. See above, pp. 258 f.
[695] vii. _passim_.
[696] iv. 4-9. Above, pp. 257 f.
[697] vi. 1 ff. See above, pp. 263 ff.
[698] vi. 4.
[699] iv. 6. See above, p. 257.
[700] See above, pp. 97 f. On the other doubtful phrase, viii. 12--literally _I write multitudes of My Torah, as a stranger they have reckoned it_--no argument can be built; for even if we take the first clause as conditional and render, _Though I wrote multitudes of My Torôth, yet as those of a stranger they would regard them_, that would not necessarily mean that no Torôth of Jehovah were yet written, but, on the contrary, might equally well imply that some at least had been written.
[701] Or _was overcome_.
[702] xii. 4-6. See above, p. 302. LXX. reads _they supplicated Me ... they found Me ... He spoke with them_. Many propose to read the last clause _with him_. The passage is obscure. Note the order of the events--the wrestling at Peniel, the revelation at Bethel, then in the subsequent passage the flight to Aram. This however does not prove that in Hosea's information the last happened after the two first.
[703] שׁדה, _field_, here used in its political sense: cf. _Hist. Geog._, p. 79. Our word _country_, now meaning territory and now the rural as opposed to the urban districts, is strictly analogous to the Hebrew _field_.