Whether Hosea ever alludes to Judah in his genuine prophecies is very doubtful. Some of the references are obvious interpolations (cf. i. 7), and for one reason or another, nearly all of them are suspicious: in vi. 4, e.g., the parallelism (cf. _v_. 10) suggests that _Israel_ should be read instead of _Judah_. But there can be no doubt that the message of Hosea is addressed in the main, if not exclusively, to northern Israel. It is her land that is _the_ land, i. 2, cf. 4, her king that is "our king," vii. 5, the worship of her sanctuaries that he exposes, and her politics that he deplores. If Amos is the St. James of the Old Testament, Hosea is the St. John. It is indeed possible to draw the contrast too sharply between Amos and Hosea, as is done when it is asserted that Amos is the champion of morality and Hosea of religion. Amos is not, however, a mere moralist; he no less than Hosea demands a return to Jehovah, iv. 6, 8, v. 6, but he undoubtedly lays the emphasis on the moral expression of the religious impulse, while Hosea is more concerned with religion at its roots and in its essence. Thus Hosea's work, besides being supplementary to that of Amos, emphasizing the love of God where Amos had emphasised His righteousness, is also more fundamental than his. There is something of the mystic, too, in Hosea: in all experience he finds something typical. The character of the patriarch Jacob is an adumbration of that of his descendants (xii.), and his own love for his unfaithful wife is a shadow of Jehovah's love for Israel (i.-iii.). His message to Israel was a stern one, probably even sterner than it now reads in the received text of many passages, e.g., xi. 8, 9. He represents Jehovah as saying to Israel: "Shall I set thee free from the hand of Sheol? Shall I redeem thee from death? Hither with thy plagues, O death! Hither with thy pestilence, O Sheol! Repentance is hidden from mine eyes," xiii. 14. But it is too much to say with some scholars that the sternness is unqualified and to deny to the prophet the hope so beautifully expressed in the last chapter. There were elements in Hosea's experience of his own heart which suggested that the love of Jehovah was a love which would not let His people go, and ch. xiv. (except _v_. 9) may well be retained, almost in its entirety, for Hosea. His passion, though not robust, like that of Amos, is tender and intense, xi. 3, 4: as Amos pleads for righteousness, he pleads for love (Hos. vi. 6), _hesed_, a word strangely enough never used by Amos; and it is no accident that the great utterance of Hosea--"I will have love and not sacrifice," vi. 6--had a special attraction for Jesus (Matt. ix. 13, xii. 7). JOEL