Hosea 9:15

Ah their wickedness [is] in Gilgal,.... A place in the ten tribes, where the covenant of circumcision was renewed in Joshua's time; the first passover was kept in the land of Canaan, and the people

All their wickedness is in Gilgal: for there I hated them: for the wickedness of their doings I will drive them out of mine house, I will love them no more: all their princes are revolters.

All; the chief, or sum, or beginning: Gilgal is not to be understood exclusive to other places, for every city was full, there was all kind of sin elsewhere. Their wickedness, in rejecting God and his government. Here Saul was made king, and Samuel was rejected. Here they begun to turn the remarkable blessings God gave them in this place into a superstitious and hypocritical veneration of the place, and began their will-worship and idolatries. If all the impiety of Ephraim may be reduced to their horrible degeneracy and corruption in state and church, here it began, and so all was here. Gilgal; where Israel first pitched their tents after they passed over Jordan: see . There I hated them; as there they began to sin so notoriously, there also I began to show that I hated them for the wickedness of their doings; for the continued wickedness which from their first beginning there they have propagated to other places, and increased daily, and with obstinacy. I will drive them out; as men thrust out of their houses one that is altogether unworthy to dwell longer with them. Of mine house; by a synecdoche, the house for land; or, out of their house, which though theirs for use, was yet God’ s propriety; and when God casts Ephraim out of his house, he sends him into captivity. I will love them no more; I will cease to express any more love to thee; it is a meiosis, I will add no more love to them, i.e. I will add to hate them and punish them, I will leave them in the hand and under the fury of their enemies in a strange land. All their princes, their kings and rulers, both civil and ecclesiastical, are revolters; are and have been idolaters ever since the division in Jeroboam son of Nebat, not one of their kings but were idolaters, and obstinate and perverse in it also.

Hosea 9:15 All their wickedness [is] in Gilgal: for there I hated them: for the wickedness of their doings I will drive them out of mine house, I will love them no more: all their princes [are] revolters.Ver. 15. All their wickedness is in Gilgal] We have had the prophet’ s prayer: follows now the Lord’ s answer in this and the following verse, where we have the former threats repeated, to show that God was unchangeably resolved upon their ruin; and that, first, for their idolatry, secondly, for their other vile practices, thirdly, for the apostasy of their princes: all this here. Their idolatry was the worse, because committed at Gilgal, where God had done much for their forefathers; The quality of the place adds much to the greatness of the sin, "In the land of uprightness they will deal unjustly," Isaiah 26:10, "the faithful city is become a harlot," Isaiah 1:21; Isaiah 5:7, he looked for judgment, but behold a scab. The devil desireth to set himself up in such places as have been formerly eminent for God’ s sincere service, as Gilgal once was, 1 Samuel 10:8; 1 Samuel 11:15; for the ark of the covenant was there, which these idolaters had not. So in the holy land (as they still call it), which is possessed by Mahometans and Papists: so Wittenberg, where Luther first began to reform, is now deformed by divers errors and heresies, as Polanus observeth. Wilkinson against the Familists reports the like of Colchester in Essex. For there I hated them] Angry I was with them before, and grieved for their other misdoings; but their idolatry hath enraged me with a holy hatred of them, and that there, where I showed greatest love to their forefathers. God thinks the worse of such places wherein idolaters rest and roost; like as he thinks the better of the towns and houses where his faithful servants inhabit, as Isaiah 49:16, their walls are ever before him. For the wickedness of their doings, I will drive them out] Revenge and expulsion is the next effect of hatred. There is a great deal of other wicked doings where idolatry (that wickedness with a witness, as it is herd styled) is set up. Surely of this abominable thing we may well say, as St James doth of discord, "Where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evll work," James 3:16. But God will not endure such doings in his house: David would not in his, Psalms 101:7. Solomon entertained Jeroboam into his house and service, because he saw the young man was suitable for the work, 1 Kings 11:28, but he proved a mischief to and against his house. Many today scruple not to entertain and harbour such as are serviceable, though otherwise their religion be either a Popish puppet and calf worship, or a flat irreligion. These have little of God in them.

(15) Gilgal.—On Gilgal as a seat of idolatrous worship, see Hosea 4:15. “My house” here, and in Hosea 8:1 (“Jehovah’s house”), is interpreted by Wünsche and Nowack, with considerable show of reason, to mean the “holy land,” Canaan. This interpretation is confirmed by the use of the Assyrian word Bîtu, corresponding to the Hebrew bêth “house.” The term seems to have blended the conception of a people and the territory they occupied. (See Schrader, Keilinschriften und das alte Testament, p. 540, where the examples are cited Bît-Am-ma-na “Ammon,” Bît-A-di-ni, “Beth-Eden.”) Similarly, Egypt is called in Exodus 20:2, “the house of slaves.” We are reminded by the word “house” of the domestic episode (Hosea 1-3): Ephraim, like an adulterous wife, is turned out of house and home (comp. Hosea 3:4), and is no longer Jehovah’s people (Hosea 1:9).

Verse 15. All their wickedness is in Gilgal] though we are not directly informed of the fact, yet we have reason to believe they had been guilty of some scandalous practices of idolatry in Gilgal. See Hosea 4:15. For there I hated them] And therefore he determined, "for the wickedness of their doings, to drive them out of his house," so that they should cease to be a part of the heavenly family, either as sons or servants; for he would "love them no more," and bear with them no longer.

10–17. But not only in the days of Gibeah; from the very first, the nation trespassed against Jehovah. Awful shall be the judgment for the continued infidelity—so awful, that Hosea can hardly bear to contemplate it. He seems uncertain whether extermination or dispersion will be the penalty, but concludes with an announcement of the latter.

All their wickedness is in Gilgal - “Gilgal,” having been the scene of so many of God’s mercies, had been, on that very ground, chosen as a popular scene for idol-worship (see the note above at Hosea 4:15).