The Pulpit Commentary — Joshua — Section 40

Ho is not good, but somewhat Ieee abominable than his predecessors. We are not told in what this diminution of wickedness consisted. We may cenjecture that when the golden calves were carried away, the one at Dan by Tiglath-Pileser, and the one at Bethel by his son Shalmaneser, Hoshea did not set them up again, nor enforce the policy of the arch-apostate, of preventing his subjects from going up to J ernsalem to worship. It is not said of him, as of nearly all of his predecessors, that "he departed not from the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin." Even had Hoshea been like his contemporary Hezekiah, we may doubt whether the fate of Israel would have been averted. There is a point in the character of nations, as of individuals, at which gravitation acts irretrievably, and at which there is no possibility of redemption in the natural order of thing~- God may work a miracle of grace and turn the course of nature, but we have no right to expect Him to- do so, even in answer to prayer, any more than to expect Him in answer to prayer to stop the avalanche which we have set rolling; and in this case there would seem to have been no prayer. If this is true of character, much more is it true of the natural results of character, the miseries which follow in the train of persistent wrong-doing. Repentance may be granted, but it may come too late to avert any of the temporal consequences of sin. "The case is become desperate: and poverty and sickness, remorse and anguieh, infamy and death, the effects of their own doings, overwhelm them, beyond possibility of remedy or escape" (Butler, 'Analogy' I. ii.). Or, as the contemporary prophet Hosea testifies (eh. vii. 1, 2), "When I would heal Israel, then the iniquity of Ephraim is discovered, and the wickedness of Samaria: for they commit falsehood; and the thief cometh in, e.nd the troop ofrobbers spoileth without. And they consider not in their hearts that I remember all their wickedness ; now their own doings have beset them about; they are before My face." The next nrse seems to imply that, whereas in former times it was the kings that" made Israel to sin," in this last reign it is the people that take the lead in iniquity.- "They make the king glad with their wickedness, and the princes with their lies." Thus the unrighteousness of sovereigns and their subjects acts and reacts one upon the other. Israel's wounds were incurable (Micah i. 9), her cup of iniquity, bloodshed, idolatry, and impurity was full, and the only cleansing that remained was that they and their sins should be swept away together. Although the reign of the last king was morally superior to that of the others, yet politically the monarchy preserved its irregular character to the last. Like exactly half his predecessors, Hoshea was an adventurer, who gained the throne by the slaughter of his sovereign. In nineteen kings we have nine different dynasties, four of which end with the conspirator who founded it; among the whole nineteen "not one calling upon the Lord'' (Hosea•vii. 7), And thus the Lord was ever giving Israel a king in His anger, and ta.king him a.way in His wrath (eh. xiii 11). The last terrible end did not come without warning. Over and above the permanent declarations of the Law, and the frequent denunciations of specially commissioned prophets, two lighter calamities heralded the coming of the final blow. In the last reign but one, Tiglath-Pileser (B.c. 740) had carried into captivity the three tribes east of Jordan (1 Chron. v. 26), "ancl Galilee, ancl 1111 the land of Naphtali" (2 Kings xv. 21J). At the beginning of Hoshea's reign Shalmaneser made nn attack on Phcenicia and terrified the new king of Samaria into becoming tribu- tary without a contest. All Phcenicia was conquered except Tyre ; and its success in holding out perhaps encouraged Hoshea to endeavour to throw off the yoke which xlvi INTRODCCTION TO THE HISTORICAL BOOKS: