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Biblion Bible Commentary

Read the introduction to Hosea · About this commentary

I Am God, and Not Man

Hosea 11:8-12

8 “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I make you like Zeboiim? My heart is turned within me, my compassion is aroused. · WEB

Four questions with no answer are followed by a reason for mercy that a human court could not use.

How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? Two questions, and then two more naming the towns destroyed with Sodom: how can I make you like Admah? How can I make you like Zeboiim?

None of the four is answered, and none is rhetorical in the usual sense. They are the sound of a decision being resisted from inside — and they come one verse after my people are determined to turn from me Hosea 11:7 and two chapters after I will love them no more Hosea 9:15.

Verse 8 then reports something about God in language the book has used of nobody else: my heart is turned within me, my compassion is aroused. The verb for turning is shuv, the book's word for repentance, applied here to God's own inward movement. The nation would not turn; something in God does.

And verse 9 gives the reason, which is the theological center of Hosea and possibly of the prophets. I will not execute the fierceness of my anger. I will not return to destroy Ephraim — and then: for I am God, and not man.

That is not the argument a reader expects. Nothing is said about Israel improving, and nothing about a substitute. The ground of the mercy is the difference between God and a wronged husband, who would be entitled to walk away and would be thought reasonable for doing it. Being God is given as the reason for not destroying — the opposite of how power usually argues.

The clause that follows keeps it from sentiment: the Holy One among you. It is holiness, not indulgence, that produces this.

And verse 11 has them coming home like a dove out of the land of Assyria — the silly dove of chapter 7 Hosea 7:11, flying the right way at last.

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