Hosea 9:7

‘The days of visitation are come,

The days of recompense are come,

Israel will know it, the prophet is a fool,

The man who has the spirit is mad,

For the abundance of your iniquity,

And because the enmity is great.'

For what they would now face would not be ‘days of assembly' and ‘days of YHWH's feasts'. They would rather be ‘days of visitation' by an angry God, and ‘days of recompense' for their sins. The plural of ‘days' indicates that it was to be no short judgment. And then Israel will know the truth about what was to happen and would recognise that their false prophets who had prophesied peace and security were fools, and that the man who had professed to have ‘the spirit of prophecy' and had encouraged them in their ways, had been mad. For this false spirit of prophecy compare 1 Kings 22:22; Micah 2:11. And this would occur because of the fullness of their iniquity, and because, to some extent without their necessarily realising it, their enmity with YHWH as He really was had been great.

Some see here an indication that it was Hosea who was called ‘a fool' and ‘mad', and that might well have been so. This may indeed have given him the idea. But the real point here is that the people had been misled by false prophets.