Hosea 6–7

The People’s Insincere Repentance

6The people say, “Let’s return to the Lord! He has hurt us, but he will be sure to heal us; he has wounded us, but he will bandage our wounds, won’t he? ²In two or three days he will revive us, and we will live in his presence. ³Let us try to know the Lord. He will come to us as surely as the day dawns, as surely as the spring rains that water the earth.”

⁴But the Lord says, “Israel and Judah, what am I going to do with you? Your love for me disappears as quickly as morning mist; it is like dew, that vanishes early in the day. ⁵That is why I have sent my prophets to you with my message of judgement and destruction. What I want from you is plain and clear: ^6*I want your constant love, not your animal sacrifices. I would rather have my people know me than burn offerings to me.

⁷“But as soon as they entered the land at Adam,^q they broke the covenant I had made with them. ⁸Gilead is a city full of evil people and murderers. ⁹The priests are like a gang of robbers who wait in ambush for someone. Even on the road to the holy place at Shechem they commit murder. And they do all this evil deliberately! ¹⁰I have seen a horrible thing in Israel: my people have defiled themselves by worshipping idols.

¹¹“And as for you, people of Judah, I have set a time to punish you also for what you are doing.

7“Whenever I want to heal my people Israel and make them prosperous again, all I can see is their wickedness and the evil they do. They cheat one another; they break into houses and steal; they rob people in the streets. ²It never enters their heads that I will remember all this evil; but their sins surround them, and I cannot avoid seeing them.”

Conspiracy in the Palace

³

The Lord says, “People deceive the king and his officers by their evil plots. ⁴They are all treacherous and disloyal. Their hatred smoulders like the fire in an oven, which is not stirred by the baker until the dough is ready to bake. ⁵On the day of the king’s celebration they made the king and his officials drunk and foolish with wine. ⁶Yes, they burned^r like an oven with their plotting. All night their anger smouldered, and in the morning it burst into flames. ⁷“In the heat of their anger they murdered their rulers. Their kings have been assassinated one after another, but no one prays to me for help.”

Israel and the Nations

⁸The Lord says, “The people of Israel are like a half-baked loaf of bread. They rely on the nations around them ⁹and do not realize that this reliance on foreigners has robbed them of their strength. Their days are numbered, but they don’t even know it. ¹⁰The arrogance of the people of Israel cries out against them. In spite of everything that has happened, they have not returned to me, the Lord their God. ¹¹Israel flits about like a silly pigeon; first her people call on Egypt for help, and then they run to Assyria! ¹²But I will spread out a net and catch them like birds as they go by. I will punish them for the evil they have done.^s

¹³“They are doomed! They have left me and rebelled against me. They will be destroyed. I wanted to save them, but their worship of me was false. ¹⁴They have not prayed to me sincerely, but instead they throw themselves down and wail as the heathen do. When they pray for corn and wine, they gash themselves like pagans. What rebels they are! ¹⁵Even though I was the one who brought them up and made them strong, they plotted against me. ¹⁶They keep on turning away from me to a god that is powerless.^t They are as unreliable as a crooked bow. Because their leaders talk arrogantly, they will die a violent death, and the Egyptians will laugh.”