12 The guilt of Ephraim is stored up, his sins are kept on record. 13 Pains as of a woman in childbirth come to him, but he is a child without wisdom; when the time arrives, he doesn’t have the sense to come out of the womb. 14 “I will deliver this people from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death. Where, O death, are your plagues? Where, O grave, is your destruction? “I will have no compassion, 15even though he thrives among his brothers. An east wind from the Lord will come, blowing in from the desert; his spring will fail and his well dry up. His storehouse will be plundered of all its treasures. 16 The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.”
In verse 12, God addresses Israel once again as Ephraim. The nation’s sin has been great, and God has not forgotten it. The Israelites may have thought that, because they were the chosen people, they would never be punished, but this is not the case. In the next verse, the situation of Israel is compared to that of a badly positioned fetus. Without modern medicine, such a baby would die. Obviously a baby is not responsible for this situation, but here Hosea leaves logic and asserts that Israel has shown great lack of wisdom which has brought on its tragedy and so it will die. There is no hope here.
But then, suddenly, in verse 14, the tone changes, and hope returns. In 1 Corinthians 15:55, Paul cites the second part of this verse and sees it as referring to Christ. He is the one who will deliver us from death. Paul tells us that the wages of sin are death and Israel certainly paid that price. But through God’s gift of Christ to us, he has reversed this. The old covenant led to death for those who rebelled against God, but the new one defeats death. Jesus paid the price of the covenant curses once and for all, so they are no longer effective. As a result, we too will be resurrected and live with God as his children.
In verse 15, we return to Israel’s immediate dark situation and see that God’s withdrawal of assistance will have other effects. He will no longer bless the land which will dry up. Israel is like a plant without water. The storehouse that God established for his people (a metaphorical representation of the blessings he gave them) will be emptied by the Assyrians. The people trusted in themselves and thought they had a naturally rich country. They forgot how much they owed to God. As Douglas Stuart writes: “by detaching themselves from their only real source of life, the Israelites guaranteed their own death as a nation.” This should be a warning to all of us. We often forget about God and think that the gifts we receive come from our own abilities, either us personally or own nation’s. It’s easy to forget all the good things God gives us every day.
This passage ends on the horrors that Israel will experience from the Assyrian attack which will be so brutal that even babies and pregnant women will be killed. Indeed, historically, the siege of Samaria lasted for three years and the city must have suffered terribly. According to the annals of the Assyrian king Sargon II, they took captive 27,290 Israelites. This almost certainly destroyed the economy of the country and so farming stopped. Wild animals probably then moved in. By New Testament times, only a minority of the city’s inhabitants were ethnic Israelites and many of these had married people from other places. This lack of racial purity and their refusal to recognize Jerusalem as the only place to worship God (along with other religious differences) led to Jews from Judah despising the Samaritans (as these descendants were called).
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