_With their evil they make a king glad, and princes with their falsehoods: all of them are adulterers, like an oven heated by the baker,..._[532] _On the day of our king_--some coronation or king's birthday--_the princes were sick with fever from wine. He stretched forth his hand with loose fellows_,[533] presumably made them his associates. _Like an oven have they made_[534] _their hearts with their intriguing._[535] _All night their anger sleepeth:_[536] _in the morning it blazes like a flame of fire. All of them glow like an oven, and devour their rulers: all their kings have fallen, without one of them calling on Me._ An obscure passage upon obscure events; yet so lurid with the passion of that fevered people in the flagrant years 743-735 that we can make out the kind of crimes described. A king surrounded by loose and unscrupulous nobles: adultery, drunkenness, conspiracies, assassinations: every man striking for himself; none appealing to God. From the court, then, downwards, by princes, priests and prophets, to the common fathers of Israel and their households, immorality prevails. There is no redeeming feature, and no hope of better things. For repentance itself the capacity is gone. * * * * * In making so thorough an indictment of the moral condition of Israel, it would have been impossible for Hosea not to speak also of the political stupidity and restlessness which resulted from it. But he has largely reserved these for that part of his discourse which now follows, and which we will take in the next chapter. FOOTNOTES: [495] כי formally introduces the charge. [496] Lit. _swearing and falsehood_. [497] Ninth, sixth, eighth and seventh of the Decalogue. [498] Amos vi. 1. [499] iv. 4. According to the excellent emendation of Beck (quoted by Wünsche, p. 142), who instead of ועמככמריב proposes ככמריו ועמי, for the first word of which there is support in the LXX. ὁ λαός μου. The second word, כמר, is used for priest only in a bad sense by Hosea himself, x. 5, and in 2 Kings xxiii. 5 of the calf-worship and in Zech. i. 4 of the Baal priesthood. As Wellhausen remarks, this emendation restores sense to a passage that had none before. "Ver. 4 cannot be directed against the people, but must rather furnish the connection for ver. 5, and effect the transference from the reproof of the people (vv. 1-3) to the reproof of the priests (5 ff.)." The letters יכהן which are left over in ver. 4 by the emendation are then justly improved by Wellhausen (following Zunz) into the vocative הכהן and taken with the following verse. [500] The application seems to swerve here. _Thy children_ would seem to imply that, for this clause at least, the whole people, and not the priests only, were addressed. But Robertson Smith takes _thy mother_ as equivalent, not to the nation, but to the priesthood. [501] A reading current among Jewish writers and adopted by Geiger, _Urschrift_, 316.