Hosea 12:7

"He is a trafficker, the balances of deceit are in his hand: he loveth to oppress."

Certain words in this verse are capable of other renditions. Ward rendered it, "A merchant with crooked scales, he loved to cheat."[15] The word "trafficker" is actually "a Canaanite,"[16] a word that came to mean merchant or trader, and especially a deceitful and crooked one. It was originally applied to the old Phoenicians whose reputation for deceitfulness and dishonesty was known all over the world. Homer's Odyssey (XIV, 290,291) mentioned them, and Given thus renders one of the references to them:

"A false Phoenician of insidious mind,

Vers'd in vile arts, and foe to mankind."[17]

Thus, the old Canaanite traders gave humanity a word, in the same sense that the Corinthians did. "To Corinthianize" meant to debauch; and "Canaanite" meant a crooked, false trader. The significance of that old word surfacing here in Hosea is that Israe! had become one in character with the vile Canaanites who preceded him in that land. The spiritual overtones of the passage are this: God had destroyed the Canaanites to permit Israel to occupy the land; now that Israel had become "Canaan," God would displace them also.