But Hosea does not attack the service of strange gods only because it is unfaithfulness to Jehovah, but also because, as the worship of images, it is a senseless stupidity utterly inconsistent with that spiritual discernment of which repentance so largely consists. And with the worship of heathen idols Hosea equally condemns the worship of Jehovah under the form of images.
Hosea was the first in Israel to lead the attack upon the idols. Elijah had assaulted the worship of a foreign god, but neither he nor Elisha nor Amos condemned the worship of Israel's own God under the form of a calf. Indeed Amos, except in one doubtful passage,[750] never at all attacks idols or false gods. The reason is very obvious. Amos and Elijah were concerned only with the proclamation of God as justice and purity: and to the moral aspects of religion the question of idolatry is not relevant; the two things do not come directly into collision. But Hosea had deeper and more wide views of God, with which idolatry came into conflict at a hundred points. We know what Hosea's _knowledge of God_ was--how spiritual, how extensive--and we can appreciate how incongruous idolatry must have appeared against it. We are prepared to find him treating the images, whether of the Ba'alim or of Jehovah, with that fine scorn which a passionate monotheism, justly conscious of its intellectual superiority, has ever passed upon the idolatry even of civilisations in other respects higher than its own. To Hosea the idol is an _'eseb, a made thing_.[751] It is made of the very silver and gold with which Jehovah Himself had endowed the people.[752] It is made only _to be cut off_[753] by the first invader! Chiefly, however, does Hosea's scorn fall upon the image under which Jehovah Himself was worshipped. _Thy Calf, O Samaria!_[754] he contemptuously calls it. _From Israel is it also_, as much as the Ba'alim. _A workman made it, and no god is it: chips shall the Calf of Samaria become!_ In another place he mimics the _anxiety of Samaria for their Calf; his people mourn for him, and his priestlings writhe for his glory_, why?--_because it is going into exile_:[755] the gold that covers him shall be stripped for the tribute to Assyria. And once more: _They continue to sin; they make them a smelting of their silver, idols after their own modelling, smith's work all of it. To these things they speak! Sacrificing men_ actually _kiss calves!_[756] All this is in the same vein of satire which we find grown to such brilliance in the great Prophet of the Exile.[757] Hosea was the first in whom it sparkled; and it was due to his conception of _the knowledge of God_. Its relevancy to his doctrine of repentance is this, that so spiritual an apprehension of God as repentance implies, so complete a _metanoia_ or _change of mind_, is intellectually incompatible with idolatry. You cannot speak of repentance to men who _kiss calves_ and worship blocks of wood. Hence he says: _Ephraim is wedded to idols: leave him alone_.[758]
There was more than idolatry, however, in the way of Israel's repentance. The whole of the national worship was an obstacle. Its formalism and its easy and mechanical methods of _turning to God_ disguised the need of that moral discipline and change of heart, without which no repentance can be genuine. Amos had contrasted the ritualism of the time with the duty of civic justice and the service of the poor:[759] Hosea opposes to it leal love and the knowledge of God. _I will have leal love and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offerings._[760] It is characteristic of Hosea to class sacrifices with idols. Both are senseless and inarticulate, incapable of expressing or of answering the deep feelings of the heart. True repentance, on the contrary, is rational, articulate, definite. _Take with you words_, says Hosea, _and_ so _return to Jehovah_.[761]