y may appear as such, and very glaringly too. He appears
here indeed, and takes what He had in reality given out of His mercy,
but what, according to their imagination, they had received from the
idols as a reward.--The suffix in [Hebrew: wmtiM] refers to the vine
and fig-tree. The gardens of vines and fig-trees carefully tended,
hedged and enclosed round about, are to be deprived of hedges,
enclosures, and culture ([Greek: kathulomanei gar me kladeuomene he
ampelos], _Clem. Alex. Paed._ i. 1, p. 115 Sylb.), to be changed into a
forest, and given over to the ravages of wild beasts; for the words
"and eat them" are by no means to be referred to the fruits only. The
same image of an entirely devastated country is found in Is. vii. 23
ff.; Mic. iii. 12.

Ver. 15. "_And I visit upon her the days of the Baalim, to whom she
burnt incense, and put on her ring and her ornament, and went after her
lovers, and forgat Me, saith the Lord._"

The days of the Baalim are the days consecrated to their worship,
whether they were specially set apart for that purpose, or whether they
were originally devoted to the worship of the Lord, whom they sought to
confound with Baal. _Manger_, and with him, most interpreters, are
wrong in understanding by the days of Baal, "all the time--certainly a
very long one--in which that forbidden worship flourished in this
nation." Such would be too indefinite an expression. When days of
the Baalim are spoken of, every one must think of days specially
consecrated to them,--their festivals. To this must be added, moreover,
the reference to the days of the Lord in ver. 13. In ver. 10, however,
only one Baal, [Hebrew: hbel], is spoken of; here there are several.
This may be reconciled by the supposition that one and the same Baal
was worshipped according to his various modes of manifestation
which were expressed by the epithets. But the plural may also be
explained--and this seems to be preferable--from 1 Kings xviii. 18,
where Baalim is tantamount to Baal and his associates (compare
_Dissertations on the Gen. of the Pent._ vol. i. p. 165); or from Lev.
xvii. 7, where [Hebrew: weiriM] denotes the Goat-idol, [Pg 252] and
others of his kind. The calves, the worship of which was, at the time
of Hosea, the prevailing one throughout the kingdom of the ten tribes,
are, in that case, comprehended in the Baalim.--In the words, "And she
put on her ring and ornament," the figurative mode of expression has
been overloo