Hosea 1:4

"And Jehovah said unto him, Call his name Jezreel; for yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and will cause the kingdom of the house of Israel to cease."

"Call his name Jezreel ..." This town gave its name to the eastern portion of the great plain between Galilee and Samaria, the western part being called Esdraelon. Megiddo, the ancient stronghold of the pre-Israelite Canaanites, from which is derived the name Har-Megiddo, or Armageddon, was also on this plain. The town of Jezreel was where Ahab and Jezebel established their summer residence, and there the shameful murder of Naboth occurred. The place was especially associated with the massacre of Ahab's seventy sons by Jehu who replaced Ahab's dynasty with his own. It was in Jezreel that the dogs licked the blood of Ahab and Jezebel's body was dishonored and eaten by the dogs. What a horrible name to give an innocent little child! But God had a purpose in this. It was the signal that the atrocities of Jezreel were not forgotten and that the divine vengeance was soon to fall upon the whole nation.

"I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu ..." The blood of Jezreel probably refers to all of the many vicious and godless crimes perpetrated there, but the particular application would seem to be to Jehu's inhumane and ruthless murder of the house of Ahab, in which one of the kings of Judah, Ahaziah, was also slain. God, through one of his prophets, had commanded Jehu to destroy the house of Ahab; but the brutal and inhuman manner in which he did it showed that:

"He had been motivated by selfishness and an unholy aim and desire on his part. He had no concern for the will of God, but only for his own will."[20]

Jehu promptly adopted the very sins for which God had decreed the destruction of the house of Ahab. "He took no heed to walk in the way of Jehovah, the God of Israel" (2 Kings 10:31).

"Jezreel ..." The actual meaning of this name, as pointed out by many, is "God sows"; but Given also noted that there also appears to be the perversion of the name Israel in it. Israel to Yisrael to Yizreel to Jezreel, which means literally, "scattered by God," which also, of course, means "God sows," in the sense that God scatters seeds.[21] This type of perverting an ancient and honorable word into one with an opposite meaning is called paronomasia, of which there are many examples. Thus Beth-el (house of God) was called Beth-aven (house of vanity). Attractive as this possibility is, it would seem that the simple historical fact of the shameful massacres at Jezreel is in focus here, for "the blood of Jezreel" is mentioned in the same breath.

"I will cause the kingdom of the house of Israel to cease ..." Not merely a dynasty was to fall but the kingdom itself. The end of the northern kingdom was imminent in the naming of Hosea's firstborn son, Jezreel.