This great verse has been very variously rendered. Some have taken it as a promise: _I will deliver ... I will redeem...._ So the Septuagint translated, and St. Paul borrowed, not the whole Greek verse, but its spirit and one or two of its terms, for his triumphant challenge to death in the power of the Resurrection of Christ.[643] As it stands in Hosea, however, the verse must be a threat. The last clause unambiguously abjures mercy, and the statement that His people will not be saved, for God cannot save them, is one in thorough harmony with all Hosea's teaching.[644] An appendix follows with the illustration of the exact form which doom shall take. As so frequently with Hosea, it opens with a play upon the people's name, which at the same time faintly echoes the opening of the chapter. _Although he among his brethren_[645] _is the fruit-bearer_--yaphri', he Ephraim--_there shall come an east wind, a wind of Jehovah rising from the wilderness, so that his fountain dry up and his spring be parched_. He--_himself_, not the Assyrian, but Menahem, who had to send gold to the Assyrian--_shall strip the treasury of all its precious jewels. Samaria must bear her guilt: for she hath rebelled against her God._ To this simple issue has the impenitence of the people finally reduced the many possibilities of those momentous years; and their last prophet leaves them looking forward to the crash which came some dozen years later in the invasion and captivity of the land. _They shall fall by the sword; their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child ripped up._ Horrible details, but at that period certain to follow every defeat in war. FOOTNOTES: [612] xi. 7. [613] This is especially true of vv. 11 and 12. [614] Even in the most detachable portion, vv. 8-10, where the און of ver. 9 seems to refer to the באונו of ver. 4. [615] Viz. in vv. 3 and 15. [616] Beer indeed, at the close of a very ingenious analysis of the chapter (_Z.A.T.W._, 1893, pp. 281 ff.), claims to have proved that it contains "eine wohlgegliederte Rede des Propheten" (p. 292). But he reaches this conclusion only by several forced and precarious arguments. Especially unsound do his pleas appear that in 8_b_ לעשק is a play upon the root-meaning of כנען, "lowly"; that כנען, in analogy to the בבטן of ver. 4, is the crude original, the raw material, of the Ephraim of ver. 9; and that מועד כימי is "the determined time" of the coming judgment on Israel.