Return, O Israel, to the LORD

The call to return in chapter 14 is unusual among prophetic closing chapters for giving Israel the words of the return rather than merely demanding it. The supplied prayer functions as a kind of liturgical script: here is what the return sounds like; here is what you say when you come back. The renunciation of Assyria and of horses (Egyptian military technology, sought in the foreign alliances chapters 5 and 7 had condemned) and of the work of human hands is the negative side of the return — the clearing away of what has replaced the covenant relationship. The positive offering is the calves of our lips, a phrase that the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint) reads as the fruit of our lips, and that the Letter to the Hebrews picks up as the sacrifice of praise. Words as the substance of the return; the prayer itself as the offering.

The LORD's response is agrarian and precise. Dew in the Levant is not occasional moisture but the difference between summer survival and summer death for crops that cannot be irrigated. The lily is the wildflower that appears in spring across the hills of the Carmel and the Jezreel Valley. The cedars of Lebanon are the largest trees in the prophet's geographic world. The vine returns as the image of flourishing — the same vine that chapter 10 indicted for multiplying altars is now the image of a people restored to its proper condition, bearing fruit that is not immediately redirected to apostasy. The closing verse — Whoever is wise, let him understand these things — is in the genre of wisdom-book closing formulas (cf. Psalm 107's closing). Its presence at the end of a prophetic book is distinctive. The book of Hosea does not end with 'thus says the LORD.' It ends with the book addressing whoever is reading it, noting that the same path is the path of walking and the path of stumbling, and leaving the distinction to the reader.