Hosea 8

Early Jewish scholars associated the eagle with King Nebuchadnezzar, of Babylon. His army leveled the Jerusalem Temple in 586 BC, along with the rest of Jerusalem. Jewish survivors were deported to the Babylonian Empire, headquartered in the capital city of Babylon, in what is now southern Iraq. This passage is tough to interpret. Some scholars say the Hebrew words in this verse have been messed with—“corrupted” is the scholarly term. They say the verse makes more sense if God is the one coming like an eagle to punish the Jews.

The northern Jewish nation of Israel didn’t want their people worshiping in Jerusalem, capital of the southern Jewish nation of Judah. The first northern king, Rehoboam, didn’t want the kingdoms to reunite because if they did, he’d be out of a job. God gave David’s family the dynasty rights to rule, Rehoboam wasn’t a relative. He was a rebel who launched the coup that split the nation. He ordered two gold-covered calf idols. He put one in Bethel and the other at Dan (1 Kings 12:28-30).

Bible writers sometimes used “wind” as a symbol of foolish behavior (Ecclesiastes 1:14, 17; Proverbs 11:29). If Hosea had that in mind, the verse might have meant something like this: “Plant your seeds of foolishness, harvest a disaster.”

King Hoshea in 732 BC jumped into a treaty with Assyria, bad guy terrorists of the ancient Middle East. They impaled captives and bragged about it with stone engravings on their palace walls (now in the British Museum). A few years later, he bailed on Assyria and asked Egypt to take them back into the alliance (see possible link in 8:13).

“Ephraim” is another name for the Northern Jewish nation of Israel. It was the dominate tribe. The first northern king came from Ephraim. It’s a tribe located at the center of what had been the united nation of Israel, before the split. Ephraim’s southern border was just half a day’s walk north of Jerusalem.

Hosea might have meant, “I brought you out of slavery in Egypt, and now I’m sending you back as rejects.” In that case, Egypt might have been a metaphor for Assyria or Babylon, where most exiled Jews went. Or Hosea might have meant, “I’m kicking you out of your country and you’ll get exiled into Egypt.” Some did flee to Egypt. One group took the prophet Jeremiah with them (Jeremiah 43). And that’s the last we hear of him in the Bible.