She Did Not Know That I Gave
6 Therefore behold, I will hedge up your way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she can’t find her way. 7 She will follow after her lovers, but she won’t overtake them; and she will seek them, but won’t find them. Then she will say, ‘I will go and return to my first husband, for then it was better with me than now.’ 8 For she didn’t know that I gave her the grain, the new wine, and the oil, and multiplied to her silver and gold, which they used for Baal. 9 Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my new wine in its season, and will pluck away my wool and my flax which should have covered her nakedness. 10 Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one will deliver her out of my hand. 11 I will also cause all her celebrations to cease: her feasts, her new moons, her Sabbaths, and all her solemn assemblies. 12 I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees, about which she has said, ‘These are my wages that my lovers have given me,’ and I will make them a forest, and the animals of the field shall eat them. 13 I will visit on her the days of the Baals, to which she burned incense when she decked herself with her earrings and her jewels, and went after her lovers and forgot me,” says Yahweh.
The judgment is a hedge of thorns designed to make pursuit fail, and its stated purpose is a sentence she says to herself.
The first act of judgment in verse 6 is obstruction rather than punishment: I will hedge up your way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she can't find her way.
Verse 7 gives the intended result, and it is not suffering but a conclusion. She will chase her lovers and not overtake them, seek and not find — then she will say, I will go and return to my first husband, for then it was better with me than now.
The motive in that sentence is unmistakably self-interested. She returns because the alternative is worse, and the book records the calculation without correcting it. What the thorn hedge produces is a comparison, and the comparison is enough to start her back.
Verse 8 supplies the diagnosis the whole chapter rests on: she didn't know that I gave her the grain, the new wine, and the oil. Not that she refused to acknowledge it — that she did not know. Ignorance is the book's recurring charge Hosea 4:6.
So the withdrawal in verses 9 to 12 is instructional rather than merely retributive. Taking back grain, wine, wool and flax makes visible who owned them, and the vines she called my wages that my lovers have given me are turned into forest.
Verse 11 removes the religious calendar as well — feasts, new moons, Sabbaths, solemn assemblies — which is a striking thing to include among the losses, since these were his own appointments and she was keeping them.
And verse 13 names the injury in the last three words: she went after her lovers and forgot me.
settled What this mark means