Hosea 11:5

"They shall not return into the land of Egypt; but the Assyrian shall be their king, because they refused to return to me."

The critics quickly hail this verse as a contradiction of "they shall return to Egypt" in Hosea 8:13; but, of course, the word was used figuratively in that place and literally here, as many of the best commentators have pointed out. It is totally irresponsible to harmonize(!) the two places by reversing the meaning in this verse as in the New English Bible, "But they shall go to Egypt, the Assyrian shall be their king." It is this type of emending texts that discredits the people doing it "The Hebrew in its most obvious meaning here reads a negative, `He shall not return.'...They will not go back to Egyptian bondage, but fall to the Assyrian conqueror."[7] Smith accepted the New English Bible rendition, but corrected their error in his interpretation:

"If they want Egypt, then Egypt they shall have. But it shall not be the old literal Egypt, but rather another bondage in which Assyria shall be their king."[8]

Butler and others have followed Keil in seeing that, "Egypt is a type of the land of bondage; but here the typical interpretation is precluded, especially by the correspondence in which the words stand to Hosea 11:1b.[9] The point of this is that in Hosea 11:1b the coming up of Israel out of Egypt was undeniably a literal thing; and since a literal return to Egypt was never intended by God, the reference here absolutely required a similar literal implication, hence the negative. "They shall not return to Egypt," that is, "not to that Egypt."