o
have disappeared altogether, and when His punitive justice seems alone
to be in active exercise. For the latter is by no means to be excluded,
inasmuch as there is no suffering which does not, at the same time,
proceed from it, and no punishment which is inflicted solely on account
of the reformation.

Ver. 10. "_And she, she does not know that I gave her the corn, and the
must, and the oil, and silver I multiplied unto her, and gold which
upon Baal they spent._"

The prophet, starting anew, here returns to a description of her guilt
and punishment; and it is only from ver. 16 that he expands what, in
ver. 9, he had intimated concerning her conversion, and her obtaining
mercy. The words, "She saith," in that verse, belong thus to a period
more remote than the words, "She does not know," in the verse before
us. The things which are here enumerated were, in the case of Israel,
in a peculiar sense, the gift of God. He bestowed them upon the
Congregation as her Covenant-God, as her husband. They are thus
announced as early as in the Pentateuch; compare, _e.g._, Deut. vii.
13: "And He loveth thee, and blesseth thee, and multiplieth thee, and
blesseth the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn,
thy must, and thy oil;" xi. 14: "And I give the rain of your land in
due season, and thou gatherest in thy corn, thy must, and thy oil." It
is certainly not accidental that Hosea enumerates the three objects,
just in the same order in which they occur in these two passages. By
the celebration of the feasts, and by the offering of the first-fruits,
the Israelites were to give expression to the acknowledgment, [Pg 242]
that they derived these gifts of God from His special providence--from
the covenant relation. The relative clause [Hebrew: ewv lbel] is
subjoined, as is frequently the case, without a sign of its relation,
and without a _pron. suff._, which is manifest from the preceding
substantive. Several interpreters, from the Chaldee Paraphrast down to
_Ewald_, give the explanation, "which they have made for a Baal,"
_i.e._, from which they have made images of Baal, and appeal to viii.
4: "Their silver and their gold they have made into idols for
themselves." But we must object to this opinion on the following
grounds. 1. [Hebrew: ewh], with [Hebrew: l] following, is a religious
_terminus technicus_, with the sense of, "to make to any one," "to
appropriate," "to dedicate," as appears from its frequent repetition in