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13. The Lord's Anger Against Israel

¹ When Ephraim spoke, people trembled;
   he was exalted in Israel.
   But he became guilty of Baal worship and died.
² Now they sin more and more;
   they make idols for themselves from their silver,
cleverly fashioned images,
   all of them the work of craftsmen.
It is said of these people,
   “They offer human sacrifices!
   They kiss Or “Men who sacrifice / kiss calf-idols!”
³ Therefore they will be like the morning mist,
   like the early dew that disappears,
   like chaff swirling from a threshing floor,
   like smoke escaping through a window.

    ⁴ “But I have been the LORD your God
   ever since you came out of Egypt.
You shall acknowledge no God but me,
   no Savior except me.
⁵ I cared for you in the wilderness,
   in the land of burning heat.
⁶ When I fed them, they were satisfied;
   when they were satisfied, they became proud;
   then they forgot me.
⁷ So I will be like a lion to them,
   like a leopard I will lurk by the path.
⁸ Like a bear robbed of her cubs,
   I will attack them and rip them open;
like a lion I will devour them—
   a wild animal will tear them apart.

    ⁹ “You are destroyed, Israel,
   because you are against me, against your helper.
¹⁰ Where is your king, that he may save you?
   Where are your rulers in all your towns,
of whom you said,
   ‘Give me a king and princes’?
¹¹ So in my anger I gave you a king,
   and in my wrath I took him away.
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,
    ¹⁵ even 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 Hebrew texts this verse (13:16) is numbered 14:1.

But he afterwards adds, I will rend, or will tear, the inclosure of their heart. They who understand the enclosure of the heart to be their obstinate hardness, seem to refine too much on the words of the Prophet. We know, indeed, that the Prophets sometimes use this mode of speaking; for they call that a hard heart, or a heart covered with fatness, which is not pliant, and does not willingly receive sound doctrine. But the Prophet rather alludes to the savageness of the bear, when he says, I will rend or tear in pieces the membrane of the heart, and will devour you as a lion. For it is the most cruel kind of death, when the lion with his claws and teeth aims at the heart itself and tears the bowels of man. The Prophet therefore intended to set forth this most cruel kind of death. “I will therefore,” he says, “tear asunder the pericardium, or the enclosure of the heart.” I do not at the same time say, that the Prophet does not allude to the hardness of the people, while he retains his own similitude.

And the beast of the field shall rend them He speaks now without a similitude; for God means that all the wild beasts would be his ministers to execute his judgement. “I will then send all the beasts of the field to rend and tear them, so that nothing among them shall remain safe.” We now see the purport of this passage, and to what use it ought to be applied. If we are by nature so slothful, yea, and careless, and when God does not stir us up, we indulge our own delusions, we ought to notice those figurative representations which tend to shake off from us our tardiness and show to us how dreadful the judgement of God is. For the same purpose are those metaphors respecting the eternal fire and the worm that never dies. For Gods seeing the feelings of men to be so torpid has in Scripture applied those things which may correct their sluggishness. Whenever then God puts on a character not his own, let us know that it is through our fault; for we suffer him not to deal with us according to his own nature, inasmuch as we are intractable. Let us go on —