Notes on Hosea

Hosea 11:8 –
How can I give you up, O Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, O Israel?
How can I make you like Admah?

Admah (or Adamah – earth) was one of the pentapolis of the Vale of Siddim.It was destroyed along with Sodom and Gomorrah.It is supposed by some to be the same as the “Adam” of Joshua 3:16, the name of which still lingers in Damieh, a ford of the Jordan river.
(Easton’s Bible Dictionary 1897)

Note on Hosea 14:9. (NKJV)

Who is wise?
Let him shall understand these things.
Who is prudent?
Let him know them.
for the ways of the LORD are right;
The righteous walk in them,
but transgressors stumble in them.

Prudent in the Hebrew text is a verb נָב֖וֹן nā·ḇō·wn – from the root word בִּין bin – to separate mentally (or distinguish).
Prudentia – seeing ahead – the ability to govern/discipline oneself by the use of ones reason.

‘Highly intelligent and perceptive people’ as Alasdair MacIntyre says can still display ‘great silliness’.The process of understanding leads to knowledge but it is in wisdom – not simply intelligence or perceptiveness – that one is lead too understand through the virtue of prudence.On the virtues I am with Aristotle that the virtues are interdependant of each other and for each virtue there are two corresponsing vices ie courage lies between rashness and timidity, justice between doing injustice and suffering injustice, liberality between prodigality and meaness just as humilty if not kept in balance by prudence ie the ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of ones reason, it is open to fall fowl to its corresponding vices on one end of the scale being a lack of confidence the complete opposite of pride.

An interesting note made by MacIntyre on the translation – “In Latin ,as in ancient Greek, there is no word correctly translated by our word ‘moral’…Certainly ‘moral’ is the etymological descendant of ‘moralis’.But ‘moralis’, like its Greek predecessor ‘ethikos’ means ‘pertaining to character’ where a mans character is nothing other than his set of dispositions to behave systematically in one way rather than another…In these early uses ‘moral’ contrasts  neither with such expressions as ‘prudential’…The word to which it is closest in meaning is perhaps simply practicle”

St Jerome…
“When we approach the Eucharistic Mystery, if a crumb falls to the ground we are troubled. Yet when we are listening to the word of God and God’s word and Christ’s flesh and blood are being poured into our ears yet we pay no heed, what great peril should we not feel?”
(In Psalmum 147:CCL 78, 337-338, Verbum Domini – Pope Benedict XVI)

Isaiah 10:13 (NKJV)

“By the strength of my hand I have done it,
and by my wisdom, for I am prudent;
…15)Shall the axe boast over him who hews with it,
or the saw magnify itself against him who wields it?
As if a rod should wield him who lifts it,
or as if a staff should lift him who is not wood!