The other prophets of this period agree with Isaiah (Lamentations iv. 20), only Hosea is peculiar in this as in other points.  He appears to have regarded the kingdom as such as an evil; in more than one expression he makes it the antithesis of the rule of Jehovah.  But we have to remember that this judgment of his is based entirely on his historical experience.  In the kingdom of the ten tribes the supreme power was constantly being seized by usurpers, so that instead of being the pillar of order and law it was the plaything of parties and the occasion of incessant disturbances.  It is this North-Israelite kingdom that Hosea has in view; and he reprobates it for no other reason than that, in the three hundred years of its existence, it has not approved itself, and does not approve itself in the present time of need.  He does not proceed as on a priori theory, he does not apply as his rule a pattern of the theocratic constitution given antecedently to any historical development.  There can be no doubt that it never entered his head that the form God desired the community to take was not a thing to be determined by circumstances, but had been revealed at Mount Sinai. 1

***************************************** 1.  He even speaks with favour of David and the kingdom of Judah, but I consider all such references in Hosea (as well as in Amos) to, be interpolations.  In i. 7 there is a reference to the deliverance of Jerusalem under Hezekiah. *****************************************

XI.I.4.  Nor did the theocracy exist from the time of Moses in the form of the covenant, though that was afterwards a favourite mode of regarding it.  The relation of Jehovah to Israel was in its nature and origin a natural one; there was no interval between Him and His people to call for thought or question.  Only when the existence of Israel had come to be threatened by the Syrians and Assyrians, did such prophets as Elijah and Amos raise the Deity high above the people, sever the natural bond between them, and put in its place a relation depending on conditions, conditions of a moral character.  To them Jehovah was the God of righteousness in the first place, and the God of Israel in the second place, and even that only so far as Israel came up to the righteous demands which in His grace He had revealed to him.  They inverted the order of these two fundamental articles of faith.  “If your sins are as scarlet, how should they be reckoned white as snow?  If they are red like crimson, how should they be as wool?  If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land, but if ye refuse and rebel, ye must eat the sword, for the mouth of Jehovah hath spoken it.”  Thus the nature of the conditions which Jehovah required of His people came to the very front in considering His relations with them:  the Torah of Jehovah, which originally, like all His dealings, fell under the category of divine aid, especially in the doing of justice, of