1. Come let us return to the LORD. These words, until the end of verse 3, are the speech of the Israelites, imagining that their present suffering will be of brief duration and that God will heal their wounds and revive them. God’s angry rejoinder begins in verse 4.

3. like the latter rain He will shower the earth. As often happens in the Bible, there is a pun hiding close to the surface. God’s instruction to humankind (the word translated as “shower” also means “instruct”) is life-giving, like the rain. But the verb for “teach” or “instruct,” yoreh, is also a homonym of the noun that means “former rain,” often paired with malqosh, “latter rain.” One should also note that in these two lines God is compared first to the sun, then to the rain—both giving life to earth.

4. like a morning cloud, / like early dew. These two similes pick up the invocation of vivifying rain in the speech of the Israelites (verse 3), but with the meaning turned entirely around: the moisture-bearing clouds and dew quickly dissipate, like the purported trust of the Israelites.

5. your prophets. Given the two verbs of destruction, these would have to be false prophets.

like light. The Masoretic Text lacks the particle that means “like,” but this single letter, kaf, has probably been dropped through haplography because the immediately preceding Hebrew word ends in a kaf.

7. like humankind. This sounds a bit odd, but it may express the idea that humankind has a proclivity for treachery, as David Kimchi proposed. Others emend keʾadam to beʾadam, “in Adam” (or Admah), construing the word as a place-name. This would make better sense of “there” in the second verset.

9. They murder on the road to Shechem. This is a bitter irony because Shechem was supposed to be one of the towns of refuge where an unintentional manslaughterer could flee.

11. Judah, too, He sets a harvest for you. This whole clause is puzzling. One reading proposed by a number of interpreters is that God has prepared a harvest of retribution for offending Judah. In any case, this looks like an orphaned verset because there is no matching second verset. The three Hebrew words that follow in the canonical chapter division in all likelihood belong to the beginning of the next chapter, and that is how they are treated in this translation.