Hosea 7:14

"And they have not cried unto me with their heart, but they howl upon their beds: they assemble themselves for grain and new wine; they rebel against me."

The New English Bible version of this verse should be noted: "For all their howling on their pallets and gashing of themselves over corn and new wine, they are turning away from me." This is another difficult passage, as regards the MT, and the New English Bible is perhaps as good a guess as any as to what the place actually says. The picture is a scene from the pagan worship of Baal at a place like Bethel, where the beds beside the altars were the site of the orgiastic type of worship they practiced. The gashing of themselves as they cried to Baal was a bona fide practice of paganism. There is an excellent Biblical picture of this sadistic behavior in 1 Kings 18:25-30, where the prophets of Baal cut themselves with knives and wailed before their idol-god. How deplorable it was that after so short a time, God's people had taken up the same heathenism. In so doing they had turned away from the true God who cannot be worshipped by such pagan rites.