An Exposition of the Prophecy of Hosea

An Exposition of the Prophecy of Hosea is Jeremiah Burroughs’s large, practical exposition of Hosea, completed after his death by Thomas Hall and Edward Reynolds. The work treats Hosea as a prophetic diagnosis of covenant unfaithfulness in Israel and repeatedly presses the text into the conscience of the church and the individual believer. Burroughs does not handle Hosea merely as an ancient record of the northern kingdom. He reads the prophet’s charges of spiritual adultery, idolatry, corrupt worship, pride, prosperity, forgetfulness of God, and resistance to correction as enduring spiritual realities that expose the danger of backsliding.

A governing concern of the exposition is the worship of God. Hosea’s condemnation of Israel’s multiplied altars, calves, self-chosen religious practices, and mixture of true and false worship becomes the basis for sustained teaching on worship according to God’s Word. Burroughs repeatedly distinguishes outward religious activity from worship that God actually accepts, showing how zeal, custom, tradition, or sincerity cannot make unauthorized worship pleasing to God. This makes the book especially relevant to questions about idolatry, superstition, false worship, obedience in worship, and the authority of Scripture in ordering the church’s service to God.

The commentary also develops Hosea’s covenant framework. Israel has forsaken the God to whom she belonged, and Hosea’s marriage imagery exposes sin as covenant treachery rather than mere rule-breaking. Burroughs follows the prophet’s movement between threatened judgment and promised mercy, emphasizing the seriousness of apostasy while also tracing God’s willingness to receive the returning sinner. Themes of repentance, humiliation, restoration, divine mercy, and the danger of presuming upon past privileges recur throughout the exposition. The work therefore helps readers asking how backsliding begins, why religious privilege does not protect an unfaithful people, how God deals with persistent sin, and what genuine return to God looks like.

Because the commentary works verse by verse, it also ranges widely across Christian experience. Burroughs develops practical observations on prosperity and spiritual decline, trusting in human strength, alliances with the world, hypocrisy, hardness under correction, misuse of outward ordinances, the fear of God, faithfulness under affliction, and the difference between the appearance of religion and spiritual reality. Hosea’s imagery of sowing and reaping, the empty vine, the unfaithful wife, the wandering heart, and the promised restoration of Israel becomes material for doctrinal, pastoral, and experiential application.

The book’s biblical center is Hosea itself. The exposition follows the prophet across all fourteen chapters, though Burroughs died before completing the work and the final portions were supplied by other Puritan expositors. Within Hosea, the commentary gives especially sustained attention to the opening marriage and naming signs, the controversy over Israel’s worship, the repeated warnings against idolatry and apostasy, the call to sow righteousness and seek the Lord, and the closing summons to return to God. Other biblical texts are used extensively to explain and apply Hosea, but they function in support of the exposition rather than as separate book studies.

For readers, this is both a commentary on Hosea and a sustained study of spiritual backsliding, idolatry, worship, repentance, covenant accountability, judgment, and mercy. It is particularly useful for those seeking to understand why a people can remain outwardly religious while inwardly departing from God, how false worship grows, how prosperity can feed forgetfulness, and how prophetic warnings are meant to lead God’s people back to faithful worship and renewed obedience.