Hosea 11:12

But the northern kingdom did not vanish from history until the king of Israel conspired with the king of Egypt and refused to pay further tribute to Assyria. Then began the three years’ siege followed by the total dispersion of the northern kingdom. Ephraim (Israel) thus vanished. Judah — the Jews, the “remnant of Israel”—had begun the concentration of land in the hands of the few, as Isaiah said, “Adding house to house and field to field.” Presently there was in Jerusalem a temple of Baal alongside the temple of Yahweh. This reign of terror was ended by a monotheistic revolt led by the boy king Joash, who crusaded for Yahweh for thirty-five years.

The Israelitish consciousness took origin in the hill country of Ephraim; the later Jewish consciousness originated in the southern clan of Judah. The Jews (Judahites) always sought to defame and blacken the record of the northern Israelites (Ephraimites).

“Well did the Prophet Jeremiah describe many mortals when he said: ‘You are near God in the mouth but far from him in the heart.’ And have you not also read that direful warning of the prophet who said: ‘The priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money. At the same time they profess piety and proclaim that the Lord is with them.’ Have you not been well warned against those who ‘speak peace to their neighbors when mischief is in their hearts,’ those who ‘flatter with the lips while the heart is given to double-dealing’? Of all the sorrows of a trusting man, none are so terrible as to be ‘wounded in the house of a trusted friend.’”

Hosea faithfully continued the moral warnings of Amos, saying of God, “It is my desire that I chastise them.” But the Israelites regarded it as cruelty bordering on treason when he said: “I will say to those who were not my people, ‘you are my people’; and they will say, ‘you are our God.’” He continued to preach repentance and forgiveness, saying, “I will heal their backsliding; I will love them freely, for my anger is turned away.” Always Hosea proclaimed hope and forgiveness. The burden of his message ever was: “I will have mercy upon my people. They shall know no God but me, for there is no savior beside me.”

National egotism, false faith in a misconceived promised Messiah, and the increasing bondage and tyranny of the priesthood forever silenced the voices of the spiritual leaders (excepting Daniel, Ezekiel, Haggai, and Malachi); and from that day to the time of John the Baptist all Israel experienced an increasing spiritual retrogression. But the Jews never lost the concept of the Universal Father; even to the twentieth century after Christ they have continued to follow this Deity conception.

The real undoing of Judah was effected by a corrupt and rich ring of politicians operating under the rule of a boy king, Manasseh. The changing economy favored the return of the worship of Baal, whose private land dealings were against the ideology of Yahweh. The fall of Assyria and the ascendancy of Egypt brought deliverance to Judah for a time, and the country folk took over. Under Josiah they destroyed the Jerusalem ring of corrupt politicians.

By this time Yahweh’s temple at Shiloh was discredited, and all the worship of the nation was centered at Jebus in the gorgeous royal chapel. The northern kingdom returned more to the worship of Elohim. They enjoyed the favor of the Pharaohs, who later enslaved Judah, putting the southern kingdom under tribute.

“Yahweh is the God of my salvation; therefore in the divine name will I put my trust. I will trust in the Lord with all my heart; I will lean not upon my own understanding. In all my ways I will acknowledge him, and he shall direct my paths. The Lord is faithful; he keeps his word with those who serve him; the just shall live by his faith. If you do not well, it is because sin lies at the door; men reap the evil they plough and the sin they sow. Fret not yourself because of evildoers. If you regard iniquity in your heart, the Lord will not hear you; if you sin against God, you also wrong your own soul. God will bring every man’s work to judgment with every secret thing, whether it be good or evil. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.

Desperately Joshua sought to hold the concept of a supreme Yahweh in the minds of the tribesmen, causing it to be proclaimed: “As I was with Moses, so will I be with you; I will not fail you nor forsake you.” Joshua found it necessary to preach a stern gospel to his disbelieving people, people all too willing to believe their old and native religion but unwilling to go forward in the religion of faith and righteousness. The burden of Joshua’s teaching became: “Yahweh is a holy God; he is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions nor your sins.” The highest concept of this age pictured Yahweh as a “God of power, judgment, and justice.”

Under the leadership of their sheiks and priests the Hebrews became loosely established in Palestine. But they soon drifted back into the benighted beliefs of the desert and became contaminated with the less advanced Canaanite religious practices. They became idolatrous and licentious, and their idea of Deity fell far below the Egyptian and Mesopotamian concepts of God that were maintained by certain surviving Salem groups, and which are recorded in some of the Psalms and in the so-called Book of Job.