Hosea 2:10

"And now will I uncover her shame before her lovers, and no one shall tear her out of my hand." The ἅπ. λεγ. נבלוּה, lit., a withered state, from נבל, to be withered or faded, probably denotes, as Hengstenberg says, corpus multa stupra passum, and is rendered freely in the lxx by ἀκαθαρσία. "Before the eyes of the lovers," i.e., not so that they shall be obliged to look at it, without being able to avoid it, but so that the woman shall become even to them an object of abhorrence, from which they will turn away (comp. Nah 3:5; Jer 13:26). In this concrete form the general truth is expressed, that "whoever forsakes God for the world, will be put to shame by God before the world itself; and that all the more, the nearer it stood to Him before" (Hengstenberg). By the addition of the words "no one," etc., all hope is cut off that the threatened punishment can be averted (cf. Hos 5:14). This punishment is more minutely defined in Hos 2:11-13, in which the figurative drapery is thrown into the background by the actual fact. Hos 2:11. "And I make all her joy keep holiday (i.e., cease), her feast, and her new moon, and her sabbath, and all her festive time." The feast days and festive times were days of joy, in which Israel was to rejoice before the Lord its God. To bring into prominence this character of the feasts, כּל־משׂושׂהּ, "all her joy," is placed first, and the different festivals are mentioned afterwards. Châg stands for the three principal festivals of the year, the Passover, Pentecost, and the feast of Tabernacles, which had the character of châg, i.e., of feasts of joy par excellence, as being days of commemoration of the great acts of mercy which the Lord performed on behalf of His people. Then came the day of the new moon every month, and the Sabbath every w…

The scope of this chapter seems to be much the same with that of the foregoing chapter, and to point at the same events, and the causes of them. As there, so here, I. God, by the prophet, discovers sin to them, and charges it home upon them, the sin of their idolatry, their spiritual whoredom, their serving idols and forgetting God and their obligations to him (Hos 2:1, Hos 2:2, Hos 2:5, Hos 2:8). II. He threatens to take away from them that plenty of all good things with which they had served their idols, and to abandon them to ruin without remedy (Hos 2:3, Hos 2:4, Hos 2:6, Hos 2:7, Hos 2:9-13). III. Yet he promises at last to return in ways of mercy to them for his own sake (Hos 2:14), to restore them to their former plenty (Hos 2:15), to cure them of their inclination to idolatry (Hos 2:16, Hos 2:17), to renew his covenant with them (Hos 2:18-20), and to bless them with all good things (Hos 2:21-23).