⁷ “Therefore here I am hedging your way about with thorns; and I will heap up a stone wall against her, so that her own roadways she will not find.

Hos. 2:6-8, marginal reading.

8. Thus, whom did Jehovah purpose to discipline, but without reversing what decision of his?

⁸ According to those words, Jehovah purposed to discipline the people of the ten-tribe kingdom of Israel. Not that this would save the kingly rule of the nation, for Jehovah would not reverse what he said earlier in Hosea’s prophecy: “I must cause the royal rule of the house of Israel to cease. And it must occur in that day that I must break the bow of Israel in the low plain of Jezreel.”​—Hos. 1:4, 5.

9. (a) Who could benefit from the disciplinary action against the kingdom of Israel? (b) At what event did the marriage covenant between Israel and Jehovah terminate?

⁹ Still, there were individual Israelites who could benefit from the disciplinary treatment given to the apostate nation. Take, for instance, those seven thousand Israelites that had not bent the knee to Baal. (1 Ki. 19:18; Rom. 11:1-5) Let us not overlook this fact: When Jehovah caused the kingdom of Israel to cease and let the surviving Israelites be deported to Assyria in 740 B.C.E., he did not cancel his marriage covenant with the whole nation of Israel. When, in 607 B.C.E., Jehovah let Jerusalem be destroyed and the surviving Jews be carried into exile in Babylonia, he did not abolish the Mosaic Law covenant by which twelve-tribe Israel had entered into marriage relationship with him as Heavenly Husband. The legal marriage relationship between Jehovah and all Israel was not blotted out until Jewish leaders had Jesus Christ put to death in 33 C.E.​—Col. 2:14.

10. How did the “passionate lovers” of the kingdom of Israel fall her, but who could benefit from Jehovah’s disciplinary action?

¹⁰ Although the ten-tribe kingdom of Israel sought help from worldly nations that had been her passionate lovers, Jehovah’s time for holding an accounting with Israel came mercilessly upon her. She could find none of her eagerly sought “lovers” capable of helping her. As if by an impenetrable thornbush thicket, she was hedged off from procuring efficient help.