SLIDETH BACK AS A BACKSLIDING HEIFER

The words translated ‘sliding back’ and ‘backsliding’ in verse 16 speak properly of stubbornness and rebellion. Indeed, Hosea himself uses the root word later to describe the leaders in Israel who ‘revolt’ against God and His word, 9. 15. The opening expres­sion of verse 16 is therefore more accurately rendered, ‘Israel is stubborn (rebellious), like a stubborn (rebellious) heifer’.

A heifer is a young cow, in particular one which has never had a calf. Such are notoriously obstinate and difficult to man­age. And a ‘stubborn heifer’ was a fitting picture of Israel’s spiritual condition and attitude in Hosea’s day. For both the rul­ers and the people were headstrong, determined to go their own way. They refused to submit to God’s authority, whether as enshrined in His law or as voiced through His prophets.

It has been well said that ‘the difference between persever­ance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t’. And, seen against the background of God’s law, the image of the stubborn heifer is that of a people whose idolatrous practices proclaimed a very loud ‘won’t’. Dating from the northern kingdom’s beginning in the days of Jeroboam, the nation had worshipped before the ‘two calves of gold’ at Dan and Beth-el, 1 Kgs. 12. 28, 29. And, it is to Beth-el, ‘the House of God’, that the prophet refers in verse 15 under the derogatory name ‘Beth-aven’, ‘the House of Iniquity’. Refusing to be subject to the yoke of God’s covenant, the people played the spiritual ‘harlot’, engaging in counterfeit worship before the calf-idol there. Perhaps with this in his mind, Hosea accuses those who dared represent the Lord under the form of a ‘calf’ of themselves acting the part of an obstinate young cow!

It is likely that the latter part of verse 16 should be taken as a rhetorical question, ‘Can the Lord now feed them as a lamb in a large meadow?’ With biting sarcasm the prophet declares that, if the people insisted on acting as a stubborn and unmanageable young cow, they could not expect the Lord to treat them as if they were acting as an obedient and submissive sheep! The only appropriate treatment for an obstinate and rebellious heifer was for her to be tied up; hence the inevitability of the exile.