That aI remember all their wickedness;
Now their own deeds have surrounded them;
They are before My face.
Like an oven heated by a baker—
He ceases stirring the fire after kneading the dough,
Until it is leavened.
Princes have made him sick,1 inflamed with awine;
He stretched out his hand with scoffers.
While they lie in wait;
1Their baker sleeps all night;
In the morning it burns like a flaming fire.
And have devoured their judges;
All their kings have fallen.
aNone among them calls upon Me.
But he does not know it;
Yes, gray hairs are here and there on him,
Yet he does not know it.
| << Hosea 7:3 | Hosea 7:5 >> |
Hosea 7:4
They are all adulterers - The prophet continues to picture the corruption of all kinds and degrees of people. "All of them," king, princes, people; all were given to adultery, both spiritual, in departing from God, and actual, (for both sorts of sins went together,) in defiling themselves and others. "All of them" were, (so the word means,) habitual "adulterers." One only pause there was in their sin, the preparation to complete it. He likens their hearts, inflamed with lawless lusts, to the heat of "an oven" which "the baker" had already "heated." The unusual construction "burning from the baker" instead of "heated "by" the baker" may have been chosen, in order to express, how the fire continued to burn of itself, as it were, (although at first kindled by the baker,) and was ever-ready to burn whatever was brought to it, and even now was all red-hot, burning on continually; and Satan, who had stirred it, gave it just this respite, "from the time when he had kneaded the dough" , until the leaven, which he had put into it, had fully worked, and the whole was ready for the operation of the fire.
The world is full of such people now, ever on fire, and pausing only from sin, until the flatteries, whereby they seduce the unstable, have worked and penetrated the whole mind, and victim after victim is gradually leavened and prepared for sin.
Other Barnes' Notes entries containing Hosea 7:4:
| << Hosea 7:3 | Hosea 7:5 >> |
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