1. no exulting. The received text reads ’el-gil, “to exulting,” emended here to ʾal-gil, “no exulting.”

on every new grain threshing floor. These would be sites where pagan rites took place.

2. Threshing floor and winepress know them not. The Masoretic Text shows lo’ yirʿem, “did not shepherd them,” but this translation reads, with the Septuagint, lo’ yedʿaem, “knew them not.” The idea is measure-for-measure justice: the Israelites worshipped alien gods in these places; now threshing floor and winepress will give them no yield.

3. Ephraim shall go back to Egypt. See the third comment on 8:13.

4. all who eat it become unclean. Mourners’ food would be ritually unclean because it has been in contact with the dead.

For their food is for their gullet. In bringing animals to sacrifice, their chief interest is in consuming the meat of the part of the animal that is not devoted to the offering.

5. the appointed day. The Hebrew term is a synonym for “festival.”

6. they go off from destruction. This is one of many obscure phrases in this chapter. Given the reference to Egypt and to the Egyptian city of Memphis in the next two versets, it probably means that they flee the devastation of their own land (by the Assyrians) to take refuge in Egypt, where they die.

7. all your hate. The hatred is directed against the prophet, driving him to distraction.

8. The lookout. Elsewhere in the Prophets, this noun is a synonym for “prophet,” and that would seem to be the case here.

9. as in the days of Gibeah. At Gibeah (Judges 19), the local Benjaminites gang-raped a woman to death, fulfilling what Sodom only sought to do, as the elaborate allusions to the Sodom story there remind us. Gibeah thus becomes the paradigm of a wholly depraved society.

10. Like grapes in the wilderness / I found Israel. The discovery of grapes in the largely barren wilderness is gratifying. Israel at the beginning of its wilderness wanderings could delight God in this way.

when it appears. More literally, “at its first.”

Yet they came to Baal Peor. The cherished Israelites quickly abandoned their God to join in a pagan orgy at Baal Peor (see Numbers 25:1–5.)

a shameful god. The Hebrew boshet means “shame” and is regularly used as a polemic substitution for “Baal,” especially in theophoric suffixes.

like what they loved. The Hebrew is cryptic but may refer to the idols.

11. from birth and from the womb and from conception. This series goes back in time from birth to the womb from which the infant is born to conception nine months earlier. The curse of infertility and child mortality is spelled out in the next verse.

13. a palm frond. The Hebrew tsor seems to refer to “Tyre,” the Phoenician city, but both a talmudic source and many modern scholars link it to a term that means “palm frond,” which makes far better sense as something planted in a meadow. Ephraim was seen by God as a luxuriant plant, but his own actions led to the killing of his sons (or “children”) by invaders.

14. Give them a miscarrying womb / and shriveled breasts. This picks up the curse of dying infants from verses 11–12. Even if the mother doesn’t miscarry, her shriveled breasts will spell doom for the infant.

15. All their evil at Gilgal. The phrase lacks both preposition and verb. Gilgal was where the people demanded of Samuel that he put a king over them (1 Samuel 12). Unless Hosea has some different association with Gilgal in mind, he seems to be saying that the establishment of the monarchy was in itself a rejection of God’s kingship.

All their nobles are knaves. This imitates the Hebrew wordplay, sareyhem sorerim.

16. I will put to death the precious ones of their womb. Once again, the reiterated grim theme of infant mortality is struck.

17. My God shall reject them. Until this point, God has been speaking in the first-person singular. It is possible that this switch to the third person, the prophet now speaking about God, is meant to mark the end of the prophecy. Some critics, basing themselves on the Septuagint, prefer to read “their God.”