1. their infants shall be smashed, / and their pregnant women split apart. It is a sad historical fact that such barbaric practices are repeatedly attested to in biblical literature.

3. Take words with you. This slightly odd formulation probably conveys the idea that words are to be the vehicles of repentance—not animal sacrifices or grain offerings but words spoken from the heart.

All crime You shall forgive. The Hebrew word order is “All you shall forgive crime,” which is either a scribal error or nonstandard syntactical usage.

we shall offer our speech instead of bulls. This picks up and explicates “Take words with you.”

5. I will heal their rebellion. God now responds to the words of penitent Israel. Although “heal” may seem an unusual verb to attach to “rebellion,” the condition of “rebellion” is conceived as a sickness. Compare the imagery of illness in Isaiah 1:5–6.

My wrath has turned back from them. This is God’s matching response to Israel’s turning back (verse 3) to Him.

6. I will be like dew to Israel. Twice earlier, the simile of dew was used to evoke Israel’s melting away. Now, with Israel likened to a flowering plant and a tree, the dew is fructifying.

strike root like Lebanon. In the pattern of second-verset intensification common in biblical poetry, the line moves from a flowering bush to a deep-rooted tree. “Lebanon” is a poetic ellipsis for “trees of Lebanon,” a heavily forested region, as the ancient audience would immediately have understood.

8. like the vine they shall blossom. They raise crops—“they shall give life to new grain”—and themselves flourish like the growing vine.

9. I have answered and I espy Him. Some interpreters contend that these words and everything that follows in this verse are spoken by God. But the verb shur, “to espy” or “to make out from a distance,” is more appropriate for Israel to God than the other way around. The comparison, moreover, to a verdant tree is often used for a resurgent Israel or for a righteous person but not for God.

from me your fruit is found. The “you” here would be anyone seeking fruit, which the flourishing Israel can provide.

10. Who is wise and can grasp these things. The language of this concluding verse is entirely constituted of formulas from Wisdom literature. The inevitable conclusion is that this is a coda added by an editor that asks us to contemplate the moral wisdom of this collection of Hosea’s prophecies.

rebels shall stumble on them. While the clause is formulaic (and the noun here could also be represented, as many translations do, as “sinners”), the editorial choice of a formula with “stumbles” makes a nice envelope structure with “stumbled” in verse 2 at the beginning of the prophecy.