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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
My people: the divorce was not yet issued out, the ten tribes yet were in some sense Ammi. Are destroyed; not only in the prophetic style, are, because ere long they shall most certainly be destroyed, but in the course of the history it is plain in matter of fact; many of them were cut off by Pul king of Assyria, 2Ki 15, and many were destroyed by the bloody and cruel tyranny of Menahem, and more were ruined in their estates by exactions and impositions. The civil wars, the seditions, the usurpations of some and the deposing of others, were things the prophet Hosea lived to see, and I believe speaks of here as things that had already destroyed many.
For lack of knowledge of God, his law, his menaces, his providences, and government of the world. Had they known his holy nature, his jealousy for his own glory, his hatred of sin and his power to punish it, had they known their God, they would either have forborne to sin, or repented of what sins they had committed, and so prevented his wrath. Because thou: the prophet now turns his words from the people to the priests among them. The people’s ignorance was much from the ignorance and profane humour of their priests, and this the prophet doth tacitly charge on the priests, to whom he speaks as to one particular person:
Thou, who callest thyself, art accounted by the people, and goest under the name of a priest.
Hast rejected knowledge: strange perverseness! they who should direct others, who should be teachers, are and will be ignorant, will not know, reject knowledge; detestest to know, as the Chaldee paraphrase.
I will also reject thee; with equal dislike I will reject time, I will destroy your church constitution, and with that I will destroy your priesthood; and I will do this with detestation and abhorrence too.
Thou hast forgotten the law of thy God: O Israel, and you, O priests, you have all sinned together, slighted and disrespected the law, broken all the precepts of it, set up other gods, other worship, other priests than the law directs.
I will also forget; I will pay thee in thy own coin, I will forget, i. e. slight and disregard.
Thy children; the people of Israel, the whole kingdom of the ten tribes; both those pretended priests and their ghostly children with them.