Therefore shall a tumult arise among thy people - Literally, “peoples.” Such was the immediate fruit of departing from God and trusting in human beings and idols. They trusted in their own might, and the multitude of their people. That might should, through intestine division and anarchy, become their destruction. As in the dislocated state of the Roman empire under the first emperors, so in lsrael, the successive usurpers arose out of their armies, armies , “the multitude of their mighty ones,” in whom they trusted. The “confused noise” of “war” should first “arise in” the midst of their own “peoples.” They are spoken of not as one, but as many; “peoples,” not, as God willed them to be, one people, for they had no principle of oneness or stability, who had no legitimate succession, either of kings or of priests; who had “made kings, but not through” God. Each successor had the same right as his predecessor, the right of might, and furnished an example and precedent and sanction to the murderer of himself or of his son.
All thy fortresses shall be spoiled - Literally, “the whole of thy fortresses shall be wasted.” He speaks of the whole as one. Their fenced cities, which cut off all approach, should be one waste. They had forsaken God, their “fortress and deliverer,” and so He gave up their fortresses to the enemy, so that all and each of them were laid waste. The confusion, begun among themselves, prepared for destruction by the enemy. Of this he gives one awful type.
As Shalman spoiled - (or wasted) Beth-Arbel in the day of battle “Shalman” is, no doubt, “Shalmaneser king of Assyria,” who came up against Hoshea, early in his reign, “and he became a servant to him and brought him a present 2 Kings 17:3. Shalman” being the characteristic part of the name , the prophet probably omitted the rest, on the ground of the rhythm. “Beth-Arbel” is a city, which the Greeks, retaining, in like way, only the latter and characteristic half of the name, called Arbela .
Of the several cities called Arbela, that celebrated in Grecian history, was part of the Assyrian empire. Two others, one “in the mountain-district of Pella” , and so on the East side of Jordan, the other between Sepphoris and Tiberias , (and so in Naphthali) must, together with the countries in which they lay, have fallen into the bands of the Assyrians in the reign of “Tiglath-pileser,” who “took - Gilead and Galilee, all the land of Naphtali” 2 Kings 15:29, in the reign of Pekah. The whole country, East of Jordan, being now in the hands of Shalmaneser, his natural approach to Samaria was over the Jordan, through the valley or plain of Jezreel. Here was the chief wealth of Israel, and the fittest field for the Assyrian horse. Over the Jordan then, from where Israel itself came when obedient to God, from where came the earlier instruments of God’s chastisements, came doubtless the host of Shalmaneser, along the “great plain” of Esdraelon. “In that plain” also lay an “Arbela,” “nine miles from Legion” . Legion itself was at the Western extremity of the plain, as Scythopolis or Bethshean lay at the East .
It was about fifteen miles West of Nazareth , and ten miles from Jezreel . Beth-Arbel must accordingly have lain somewhere in the middle of the valley of Jezreel. Near this Arbela, then, Israel must have sustained a decisive defeat from Shalmaneser. For the prophet does not say only, that he “spoiled Beth-Arbel,” but that he did this “in a day of battle.” Here Hosea, probably in the last years of his life, saw the fulfillment of his own earlier prophecy; and “God brake the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel” Hosea 1:5.
The mother was dashed to pieces on the children - It was an aggravation of this barbarity, that, first the infants were dashed against the stones before their mother’s eyes, then the mothers themselves were dashed upon them. Syrians 2 Kings 8:12, Assyrians , Medes Isaiah 13:16, Babylonians Psalms 137:8-9, used this barbarity. India has borne witness to us of late, how pagan nature remains the same.
It may be that, in the name “Betharbel,” the prophet alludes to the name “Bethel.” : As “Betharbel,” i. e., “the house,” or it may be the idolatrous “temple of Arbel,” rescued it not, but was rather the cause of its destruction, so shall Bethel. The holy places of Israel, the memorials of the free love of God to their forefathers, were pledges to “them,” the children of those forefathers, that, so long as they continued in the faith of their fathers, God the Unchangeable, would continue those same mercies to them. When they “turned” Bethel, “the house of God,” into Bethaven, “house of vanity,” then it became, like Betharbel, literally, “house of ambush of God,” the scene and occasion of their desolation.