Hosea 10:5

"The inhabitants of Samaria shall be in terror for the calves of Beth-aven; for the people thereof shall mourn over it, for the glory thereof, because it is departed from it."

"The calves of Beth-aven ..." We reject as irresponsible the affirmation that the plural "calves" here is inaccurate, "because probably only one image was set up in each place,"[11] or that, "The plural was used here with indefinite generality."[12] In the first place, as Hailey pointed out, there were two of these calves, one at Dan, the other at Bethel; and, furthermore, it cannot be ruled out that the original two set up by Jeroboam I had later been augumented by the addition of others, most probably one in Samaria (see under Hosea 8:6, above), and possibly many smaller idols patterned after the large ones in many other places. One may not suppose that the craftsmen of Ephesus were the ones who invented the business of making little gods like the big ones and getting rich selling them to the people, as in Acts 19:23. Also, the word Beth-aven, which was applied contemptuously to the city of Bethel earlier, is not Bethel proper. What is denoted by this word here, is "The place of Vanity," a title equally applicable to every pagan shrine in the whole country. Thus it was altogether proper and fitting that the plural should have been used here. However, he immediately pinpointed their mourning over one in particular.

The fact of the people's really worshipping that calf-god thing is very evident here. They would not have been terrified merely by the loss of some art object.

"Calves..." "This word is in the feminine gender, in order to express contempt for those idols Jeroboam had set up."[13] They were she-bulls! The Hebrew text of the Old Testament has "heifers."[14] There is also a hint here of the homosexuality that surfaces later in the chapter.

"The people thereof shall mourn over it ..." Some ancient renditions of this place give "priests" instead of people, "using a peculiar word derived from black garments, showing that the priests were pagan and not God's priests who ministered in white garments."[15]