Verse 8 offers great difficulties on any interpretation.  The supplement ‘shall say’ is questionable, and it is doubtful whether Ephraim is the speaker at all, and whether, if so, he speaks all the four clauses, and who speaks any or all of them, if not he.  To the present writer, it seems best to take the supplement as right, and possible to regard the whole verse as spoken by Ephraim, though perhaps the last clause is meant to be God’s utterance.  The meaning will then come out as follows.  The penitent Israel again speaks, after the gracious promises preceding.  The tribal name is, as usual in Hosea, equivalent to Israel, whose penitent cry we heard at the beginning of the passage.  Now we hear his glad response to God’s abundant answer.  ’What have I to do any more with idols?’ He had vowed (verse 3) to have no more to do with them, and the resolve is deepened by the rich grace held forth to him.  Hosea had lamented Ephraim’s mad adherence to ‘his idols’ (iv. 17), but now the union is dissolved, and by penitence and reception of God’s grace, he is joined to the Lord, and parted from them.  His renunciation of idolatry is based, in the second clause, on his experience of what God can do, and on his having heard God’s gracious voice of pardon and promise.  If a man hears God, he will not be drawn to worship at any idol’s shrine.

Further, in the third clause, Ephraim is joyfully conscious of the change that has passed on him, in accordance with the great promises just spoken, and with grateful astonishment that such verdure should have burst out from the dry and rotten stump of his own sinful nature, exclaims, ‘I am like a green fir-tree.’  That is another reason why he will have no more to do with idols.  They could never have made his sapless nature break into leafage.  But what of the fourth clause—­’From Me is thy fruit found’?  Can we understand that to mean that Ephraim still speaks, keeping up the image of the previous clause, and declaring that all the new fruitfulness which he finds in himself he recognises to be God’s, both in the sense that, in reality, it is produced by Him, and that it belongs to Him?  He comes seeking fruit, and He finds it.  All our good is His, and we shall be happy, productive, and wise, in proportion as we offer all our works to Him, and feel that, after all, they are not ours, but the works of that Spirit which dwells in penitent and believing hearts.  Some have thought that this last clause must be taken as spoken by God; but, even if so taken, it conveys substantially the same thought as to the divine origin of man’s fruitfulness.