Ephraim Is a Half-Baked Cake

The political setting of chapter 7 is the final chaotic decades of the northern kingdom, when the Jehu dynasty had run its course and the throne changed by assassination — six kings in the last twenty years of Israel's existence, four of them killed by their successors. The chapter names the disease of the court explicitly: they are all adulterers (using the marriage metaphor to describe political betrayal as well as religious); the baker does not need to stir the fire on the day of the king, when the princes become sick with the heat of wine and the king joins the scoffers. Conspiracy and assassination are described in terms of a slowly heating oven — the conspirators wait through the night, then strike.

The three images of the chapter do related diagnostic work from different angles. The half-baked cake diagnoses incompleteness and self-ignorance: Ephraim is partly one thing and partly another, and does not know it is being consumed from both sides. The silly dove diagnoses the foreign-policy disorder: to call on Egypt and go to Assyria is not strategy but panic, and the LORD is not in either direction. The treacherous bow diagnoses unreliability: the instrument does not do what its maker made it to do. All three images share a feature: the subject does not know what it is. Gray hairs and not knowing it. Strangers devouring and not knowing it. The not-knowing is the same daat failure chapter 4 diagnosed at the level of the priesthood; here it surfaces as national self-ignorance at the political level.