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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Hosea 2:13 - 2:13
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In this way will the Lord take away from the people their festivals of joy. Hos 2:13. “And I visit upon her the days of the Baals, to which she burned incense, and adorned herself with her ring and her jewels, and went after her lovers; and she hath forgotten me, is the word of Jehovah.” The days of the Baals are the sacred days and festive seasons mentioned in Hos 2:13, which Israel ought to have sanctified and kept to the Lord its God, but which it celebrated in honour of the Baals, through its fall into idolatry. There is no ground for thinking of special feast-days dedicated to Baal, in addition to the feasts of Jehovah prescribed by the law. Just as Israel had changed Jehovah into Baal, so had it also turned the feast-days of Jehovah into festive days of the Baals, and on those days had burned incense, i.e., offered sacrifice to the Baals (cf. Hos 4:13; 2Ki 17:11). In Hos 2:8 we find only הַבַעַל mentioned, but here בְּעָלִים in the plural, because Baal was worshipped under different modifications, from which Beâlı̄m came to be used in the general sense of the various idols of the Canaanites (cf. Jdg 2:11; 1Ki 18:18, etc.). In the second hemistich this spiritual coquetry with the idols is depicted under the figure of the outward coquetry of a woman, who resorts to all kinds of outward ornaments in order to excite the admiration of her lovers (as in Jer 4:30 and Ezek. 22:40ff.). There is no ground for thinking of the wearing of nose-rings and ornaments in honour of the idols. The antithesis to this adorning of themselves is “forgetting Jehovah,” in which the sin is brought out in its true shape. On נאם יהוה, see Delitzsch on Isa 1:24.