6:11b. When I would restore the fortunes of My people. God would like to show favor to His people, but Israel continues in its waywardness.

2. I have recalled all their evil. The evident sense is: let them not think I have done registering all their evil, for there is still more.

Now their deeds have turned them around. The image is of miscreants who have turned their backs on God or have hidden from Him. Now, their evil deeds turn them around and they are exposed to God’s head-on gaze.

3. In their evil they gladden the king. This is best understood as pillorying the king for his complicity with them, delighting in their evil acts.

4. like a burning oven. The simile of the burning oven, which will be elaborated, is chosen because of the association of heat with sexual desire—in Hebrew, as in other languages, to be in heat is one of the idioms for sexual readiness.

The baker ceases from stirring. Because the oven of desire is stoked, the baker is presumed to have finished his task of preparing the dough and now puts it in the heated oven. But the stirring, the kneading, and the fermenting of the dough do not appear to have a further figurative referent.

5. the day of our king. This term has no equivalent elsewhere but probably designates the king’s birthday or a similar celebration for the monarch.

the nobles made him sick with poisoned wine. The court atmosphere roils with vicious conspiracies, the king no better than his murderous nobles. All this may well reflect the recent history of the northern kingdom, which was marked with assassinations and coups.

He had set his hand with the scoffers. Although the meaning is not altogether clear, this probably indicates that the king had been involved with dubious characters, thus providing a motive for his assassination.

6. their hearts like an oven. Now the referent of the oven simile shifts from adulterers to conspirators, hot to carry out their plot against the king.

7. All of their kings have fallen. The plural here does seem to evoke the bloody court history of the northern kingdom.

8. Ephraim among the nations— / it is he who mingles. This is in all likelihood a critique of the repeated quest for foreign alliances on the part of the northern kingdom.

like a loaf / not turned over. The simile now dispenses with the oven and imagines a round flat loaf of bread baked on coals (as present-day Bedouins still bake their pittah), which, not having been turned over, is burned on the bottom and unbaked on the top.

11. like a / foolish senseless dove. It is a dove that lacks the homing instinct a dove (or pigeon—the Hebrew term covers both) should have. Thus Ephraim seeks out Egypt and Assyria.

12. My net. Nets were often used to trap fowl. The metaphor of fowling picks up the foolish dove in verse 11.

I will bind them. The translation reads, with many scholars, ʾeʾsurem for the Masoretic ayesirem, “I will afflict them,” which doesn’t make much sense in context and shows grammatically anomalous vowel-points in the received text.

as their kinfolk listen. The Hebrew is obscure and the translation conjectural.

14. they gashed themselves. The Masoretic Text has yitgoraru, meaning uncertain. This translation reads, with the Septuagint, yitgodadu, the shape of the Hebrew letters for r and d being quite similar. Gashing oneself was a form of imprecating the gods, as in the story of the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18.

15. I braced. The received text says “I afflicted,” yisarti, but this translation, like that of the New Jewish Publication Society, reads instead yisadti, which can mean “to make firm.”

16. to what is worthless. The Hebrew has two unintelligible monosyllabic words, lo’ ʿal (not above?). The translation reads with the Septuagint and the Syriac labliyaʿal.

which is their mockery in the land of Egypt. There is debate over the meaning of this last cryptic clause, but the sense could be that the Egyptians regard the rash angry speech of the Israelite nobles as a butt of mockery. Some think the reference is to an attempt to seek an alliance with Egypt that becomes a target of ridicule.