Hosea 12

The wind seems to work as a symbol for Israel’s effort to find allies. They flipped between Assyria and Egypt. If the message of the prophets says anything, it says Israel’s security is in God’s hands. It has nothing to do with peace treaties, wartime alliances, or military might.

The east wind blows into Israel from the deserts of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. It’s a miserably blistering wind in the summer.

Jacob is a real person. But here, he’s a symbol of the Jewish people, including the southern Jewish nation of Judah. In 12:3, however, Jacob refers to the man. Jacob was the father of 12 sons whose families grew into what became the 12 tribes of Israel.

Genesis 25:22-34.

Genesis 32:24.

The messenger may have been an angel. The Hebrew word is mal’āk. It can mean messenger, human ambassador, angel, celestial being.

This was Jacob’s famous dream, in which he saw angels going up and down a staircase to the sky. God stood at the top. Genesis 28:10-22.

“LORD,” usually printed in all capital letters, is a name of God that appears around 7,000 times in many English editions of the Christian Bible. That makes it the most common way of referring to God. The lower-case “Lord” is a translation of the Hebrew word Adonai. It refers to God as our master, our life coach, or the boss. He’s in charge of us, and we try to obey him. “LORD” is the spelling most Bibles use when the writer refers to the name of God. Moses asked God what his name was, and God said Moses should tell the Israelite ancestors of the Jews that his name is “I AM” (Exodus 3:14). In the original Hebrew language, the name is spelled with only consonants—no vowels. It’s an ancient shorthand, to save hides used to make scrolls. The name is YHWH. Without knowing which vowels, most scholars have settled on YAHWEH, pronounced YAH-way. God’s name is so sacred to many Jews that they refuse to speak it. Instead, they’ll use names that describe the character of God, such as Adonai, which means “my Lord.” They won’t even write the name. In English, they’ll spell the name G-d.

It’s a presumption that Hosea is saying Ephraim is as bad as the Canaanites were. The text simply says, literally, “Kᵉnaʽan (Hebrew word) uses dishonest scales.” Canaan can mean the location of what became Israel and Judah. Or it can mean: merchant, trader, traveling salesman. Hosea may have meant only that Ephraim was crooked. Or he may have meant to say Ephraim was as crooked as a nation that God decided to erase from the map. It makes sense because what happened to Canaan also happened to Israel first and Judah later.

Jews commemorated the exodus out of slavery in Egypt by building small huts or setting up tents and living in them for seven days during the Feast of Tabernacles (Leviticus 23:33-44). Jews not only used this time to reflect on where they came from, in times of occupation, by Greeks or Romans, they looked forward to the day they would be freed again.

It’s unclear why Hosea picked on the cities of Gilead and Gilgal. Possibly they had a well-known infamous reputation at the time.

Jacob went to the town of Haran, in what is now Turkey, along Syria’s northwestern border. It was about a 500-mile (800 km) trip. At 20 miles a day, that’s about three to four weeks.