Hear ye this, O ye priests - God, with the solemn threefold summons, arraigns anew all classes in Israel before Him, not now to repentance but to judgment. Neither the religious privileges of the priests, nor the multitude of the people, nor the civil dignity of the king, should exempt any from God’s judgment. The priests are, probably, the true but corrupted priests of God, who had fallen away to the idolatries with which they were surrounded, and, by their apostasy, had strengthened them. The king, here first mentioned by Hosea, was probably the unhappy Zechariah, a weak, pliant, self-indulgent, drunken scoffer , who, after eleven years of anarchy, succeeded his father, only to be murdered.
For judgment is toward you - Literally, “the judgment.” The kings and the priests had hitherto been the judges; now they were summoned before Him, who is the Judge of judges, and the King of kings. To teach the law was part of the priest’s office; to enforce it, belonged to the king. The guilt of both was enhanced, in that they, being so entrusted with it, had corrupted it. They had the greatest sin, as being the seducers of the people, and therefore have the severest sentence. The prophet, dropping for the time the mention of the people, pronounces the judgment on the seducers.
Because ye have been a snare on Mizpah - Mizpah, the scene of the solemn covenant of Jacob with Laban, and of his signal protection by God, lay in the mountainous part of Gilead on the East of Jordan. Tabor was the well-known Mountain of the Transfiguration, which rises out of the midst of the plain of Jezreel or Esdraelon, one thousand feet high, in the form of a sugar-loaf. Of Mount Tabor it is related by Jerome, that birds were still snared upon it. But something more seems intended than the mere likeness of birds, taken in the snare of a fowler. This was to be seen everywhere; and so, had this been all, there hath no ground to mention these two historical spots. The prophets has selected places on both sides of Jordan, which were probably centers of corruption, or special scenes of wickedness. Mizpah, being a sacred place in the history of the patriarch Jacob Genesis 31:23-49, was probably, like Gilgal and other sacred places, desecrated by idolatry. Tabor was the scene of God’s deliverance of Israel by Barak Judges 4. There, by encouraging idolatries, they became hunters, not pastors, of souls Ezekiel 13:18, Ezekiel 13:20. There is an old Jewish tradition , that lyers-in-wait were set in these two places, to intercept and murder those Israelites, who would go up to worship at Jerusalem. And this tradition gains countenance from the mention of slaughter in the next verse.