Hosea 9:10

"I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness; I saw your fathers as the first-ripe in the fig-tree at its first season: but they came to Baal-peor, and consecrated themselves unto the shameful thing, and became abominable like that which they loved."

"Like the grapes in the wilderness ... as the first-ripe in the fig tree ..." This is a reference to the early favor which was found from God in the lives of the early patriarchs of Israel. Men of the stature of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were among the noblest ever to grace the ranks of mankind.

"But they came to Baal-peor ..." What Hosea is doing in these repeated references to historical events is to show that Israel's rejection of God and rebellion against his law are nothing new at all, but part and parcel of the nation's total history. In that history, nothing was ever any more shameful than the debacle at Baal-peor. Not long after Sinai and the Exodus, and while still wandering in the wilderness, the pagan nations, under the leadership of Balak, king of Moab, and acting upon the advice of Balaam, took strong counter-action against Israel as a protest and challenge of the strict moral code of the Decalogue, especially in the matter of sexual license. The daughters of Moab, who were very attractive to the Israelites, invited them to the feast of their god Baal, in which the sexual rites of the old fertility god were the dominant feature. The principal judges of Israel accepted the invitation, and presumably the social leaders of the whole nation did likewise. The ploy was 100 percent successful. In the popular sense, Israel preferred Baalism to their own covenant with Jehovah. See Numbers 25:1-9. A strong effort was made by Moses to stamp out the fire, but it never really succeeded. They put to death 24,000 people for committing adultery in that so-called "worship" service! including one thousand of the judges and leaders of the people who had encouraged it. This is a pertinent comment on what the service of Baal, as mentioned in the Old Testament, really meant. One can only be amused at the efforts of present day commentators to gloss over this gut-lust motivation in all Baal-worship. Anyone familiar with paganism knows that there was little else involved in it, except the collateral sins of drunkenness, feasting, and entertainment.

In this verse, Hosea announced that the king of Moab, whose campaign against Israel started in the times of the wilderness wanderings, had at last succeeded in destroying Israel. The beginning and the end of Israel's rebellion against God was Baal-peor.