Hosea 8:1 - Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible

HOSEA CHAPTER 8 Destruction is threatened both to Israel and Judah for their impiety and idolatry. The Lord here commands the prophet to publish, as by sound of trumpet, that which God will bring upon apostate Israel, awaken them with the alarm of war. He; the king of Assyria, Shalmaneser, who carried Israel captive. As an eagle; swift, hungry, surmounting all difficulties, and which from above seizeth his prey; so shall the Assyrian army come. Against; or up to, as far as, so some, but it is better as here, against. The house of the Lord; either so called because the Israelites pretended their temples were not idols houses, but houses of Jehovah, and so the prophet for once calls them so, perhaps to intimate to that their sins would bring an enemy against those though they were indeed what they pretend them to be, the house of the Lord; or else by house of the Lord is meant the family of Israel, or the Israelitish church, which till unchurched might be called the house of the Lord: or it may be a sarcasm or irony against their wilful, brutish ignorance, who would not understand what was most plain, that his house was only at Jerusalem; or a softer derision of them, one of whose principal places of worship was Beth-el, which in signification is near the same with this in the text, house of God. They have transgressed my covenant; taken other gods instead of me, turned idolaters. Trespassed against my law: this explains and confirms the former; covenant and law are synonymous, and so are transgressing and trespassing. They have violated the whole law and covenant, and are apostates from their God, rebels against him their King.