Hosea 4:3

4:1-5 Hosea reproves for immorality, as well as idolatry. There was no truth, mercy, or knowledge of God in the land: it was full of murders, 2Ki 21:16. Therefore calamities were near, which would desolate the country. Our sins, as separate persons, as a family, as a neighbourhood, as a nation, cause the Lord to have a controversy with us; let us submit and humble ourselves before Him, that he may not go on to destroy.

(3) The mourning of the land is the judgment of famine, which follows not only upon the living men, but upon all living things (the LXX. have introduced into the enumeration the creeping things of the earth). Even the fishes of the sea are swept away. There is plague on fish as well as murrain on cattle, and starvation of the birds of heaven.

Hosea 4:3 . Therefore shall the land mourn — “Desolation, drought, and dearth shall come upon the whole land; shall consume both men, and beasts, and fowls, and shall even extend itself to the inhabitants of the waters.” A land is said, in Scripture language, to mourn, when it is deprived of its inhabitants, or lies desolate. A great part of the land of Israel was made thus desolate by Tiglath-pileser, and the rest by Shalmaneser. There may also be a reference to the drought foretold by Amos 1:2 , or to the locusts, mentioned chap. Hosea 5:7 . Every one that dwelleth therein shall languish — If any one remain therein, he shall languish for want of the proper necessaries of life. With the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven — Even the beasts and birds shall pine away with want; not only the fruits of the earth, but the herbs and grass also, being eaten up or spoiled by the enemies’ armies. Yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away — The fishes of the rivers and great waters, called seas in the Hebrew language, shall be killed through drought, or so diminished that they shall not supply the wants of this rebellious people: see Zephaniah 1:3 .

Therefore, since their sins are so many and so great, for those very sins already mentioned in the 1st and 2nd verses, shall the land, which the ten tribes did now inhabit, mourn: it is a metaphorical expression, for properly it cannot be spoken of the senseless and inanimate creatures; but as men and women mourn under the loss of their comforts and joys, as they neglect themselves in their habits, and go less neat, so when the sins of the people shall bring an enemy upon the land, when war shall first spoil their cities, towns, vineyards, and oliveyards, and finally shall carry the people captive, all shall run into horrid and saddest state, and into doleful plight. The same expression see in Isaiah 24:4 , and much like Amos 1:2 . Every one that dwelleth therein; no sort of men but had provoked God and sinned, no sort but should be punished; all that continue in the land till these threatened judgments overtake them. Shall languish; shall with grief and vexation pine away; what they see with their eye shall make their heart ache, and faint with greatest dejectedness and despair, as the word imports, Isaiah 16:8 Joel 1:12 . With the beasts of the field: these are elsewhere menaced, Zephaniah 1:2 , which see. God punisheth man in cutting off what was made for man’s benefit and comfort; and it is probable that the tamer cattle were starved for want of grass or fodder, all being eaten up and consumed by the wasting armies.

With the fowls of heaven; the tamer and innocent either killed by enemies, or, offended with stench and noxious air, die or forsake the country, or are devoured by eagles and birds of prey, which in those countries wait on armies. Yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away; whether by drying up the waters of rivers, lakes, and ponds, or by corrupting them with blood and carcasses, or by what other way we know not, he can do it, who saith he will; and we are sure it speaks the greatness of the threatened desolation.

3 . shall the land mourn ] Or, ‘doth … continually mourn’, for the prophet speaks amidst the anarchical and revolutionary scenes which followed upon the death of Jeroboam II. A severe drought is represented as the punishment of Israel’s misdoings. Nature, throughout the prophetic literature, sympathizes with man’s sins and sorrows. Comp. Isaiah 24:3-6 , Amos 8:8 ; Jeremiah 12:4 ; Joel 1:18 (where render at end ‘suffer punishment’). with the beasts …] Better, both, &c. (lit. ‘in’, i.e. whether consisting of … or of …).

Therefore shall the land mourn - Dumb inanimate nature seems to rejoice and to be in unison with our sense of joy, when bedewed and fresh through rain and radiant with light; and, again, to mourn, when smitten with drought or blight or disease, or devoured by the creatures which God employs to lay it waste for man's sins. Dumb nature is, as it were, in sympathy with man, cursed in Adam, smitten amid man's offences, its outward show responding to man's inward heart, wasted, parched, desolate, when man himself was marred and wasted by his sins. With the beasts of the field - Literally, "in the beasts," etc. God included "the fowl and the cattle and every beast of the field" in His covenant with man. So here, in this sentence of woe, He includes them in the inhabitants of the land, and orders that, since man would not serve God, the creatures made to serve him, should be withdrawn from him. "General iniquity is punished by general desolation." Yea, the fishes of the sea also - Inland seas or lakes are called by this same name, as the Sea of Tiberias and the Dead Sea. Yet here the prophet probably alludes to the history of man's creation, when God gave him dominion "over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heaven, and over every living thing (chaiah)" Genesis 1:28, in just the inverse order, in which he here declares that they shall be taken away.

There God gives dominion over all, from lowest to highest; here God denounces that He will take away all, down to those which are least affected by any changes. Yet from time to time God has, in chastisement, directed that the shoals of fishes should not come to their usual haunts. This is well known in the history of seacoasts; and conscience has acknowledged the hand of God and seen the ground of His visitation. Of the fulfillment Jerome writes: "Whose believeth not that this befell the people of Israel, let him survey Illyricum, let him survey the Thraces, Macedonia, the Pannonias, and the whole land which stretches from the Propontis and Bosphorus to the Julian Alps, and he will experience that, together with man, all the creatures also fail, which afore were nourished by the Creator for the service of man."

Verses 3-5. - These verses relate, with much particularity, the sufferings consequent on sins, especially such as are specified in the preceding verses. The montaging of the land mentioned in ver. 3 may be understood either figuratively or literally. If in the former way, there are many Scripture parallels which represent nature in full accord with human feelings, sympathizing with man, now in joy, again in sorrow; for example: "The little hills rejoice on every side;" the valleys "shout for joy, they also sing;" on the other hand, "The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish." But if the expression be taken literally, it conveys a solemn fact, and one in perfect harmony with the entire tone and character of the old economy, according to which moral evil transmutes itself into physical evil, and impresses itself in dismal characters on the face of inanimate nature. The Hebrew commentators seem to understand the statement literally; thus Rashi: "The land shall be laid waste, and there shall be great mourning;" likewise Kimchi: "The land of Israel shall be laid waste and desolated." The latter has this further comment: "After the land of Israel shall have been laid waste, man and beast shall be cut off out of it. But under the beasts of the field the prophet does not mean the wild beasts, but the large domestic animals which dwell with the sons of men, likewise called חיה .

It is also possible that even the beasts that roam at largo are included, for the wild beast does not come to inhabited places that are laid waste, unless they are partially inhabited." He also adds, in reference to the fowls of heaven, "When he speaks of the fowls of heaven, it is because most of the fowls do not dwell in the wilderness, but in inhabited places, where they find seeds and fruits and blossoms of trees. Or the fowls of heaven are mentioned by way of hyperbole to represent the matter in its totality; and, according to this sense, it is used in the Prophet Jeremiah; and it explains itself in like manner in one of these two ways." With the mourning of the land the dwellers therein languish. Nor is this languishing condition confined to rational beings; it comprises the irrational as well, and that without exception. The dominion assigned man at the beginning over the whole creation of God is here reversed in the case of Israel; while the denunciation of wrath has that reversal for its dark background.