Allure Her into the Wilderness
14 “Therefore behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. 15 I will give her vineyards from there, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope; and she will respond there as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt. 16 It will be in that day,” says Yahweh, “that you will call me ‘my husband,’ and no longer call me ‘my master.’ 17 For I will take away the names of the Baals out of her mouth, and they will no longer be mentioned by name. 18 In that day I will make a covenant for them with the animals of the field, and with the birds of the sky, and with the creeping things of the ground. I will break the bow, the sword, and the battle out of the land, and will make them lie down safely.
The turn arrives with no repentance in front of it, and the place chosen for the courtship is the one the threat had promised.
Therefore behold, I will allure her. The connective is the problem and the point. The same word that introduced the thorn hedge Hosea 2:6 and the stripping now introduces a courtship, and nothing has happened in between except the withdrawal.
The verb means to persuade or entice — the language of a suitor, used here of a wronged husband toward the wife he has just described in a lawsuit. And what follows is speak tenderly to her, literally to speak to her heart.
The location is the reversal. Verse 3 had threatened to make her like a wilderness; verse 14 takes her into the wilderness to court her. The same word, first as sentence and then as setting, because the wilderness is where the relationship began.
Verse 15 makes that explicit — as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt — and then does something unexpected with a place name. The valley of Achor was where Israel's first sin in the land was punished; it becomes a door of hope.
Verse 16 turns on a single word, and it needs the Hebrew to see. She will call him my husband and no longer my master — and the word behind the second is baali, which is the ordinary term for a husband-as-owner and also the name of the god this book fights for fourteen chapters. One word, two referents, and the promise is that she will stop using the term that sounds like the rival's name.
Verse 18 widens the peace past the marriage — a covenant with the animals, the bow and sword broken out of the land.
settled What this mark means