Therefore will I be unto Ephraim as a moth, and to the house of Judah as rottenness.
Therefore will I be unto Ephraim as a moth - consuming a garment (Job 13:28; Psalms 39:11; Isaiah 50:9).
And to the house of Judah as rottenness. Ephraim, or the ten tribes, are as a garment eaten by the moth; Judah as the body itself consumed by rottenness (Proverbs 5:12-14, "She that maketh ashamed is (to her husband) as rottenness in his bones"). Perhaps alluding to the superiority of the latter in having the house of David and the temple, the religious center of the nation (Grotius). As in Hosea 5:13-14, the violence of the calamity is prefigured by the "wound" which "a lion" inflicts: so here its long protracted duration, and the certainty and completeness of the destruction from small unforeseen beginnings, by the images of a slowly but surely consuming moth and rottenness. At first the evil was less violent, and God's judgments of a gentler kind; but afterward the evil became more desperate, and God's judgments were more severe in consequence. If they had at first been warned by the gentler and slower visitations, they would have escaped those more violent.