Hosea 2:3

Lest: this little word suggests great hopes; if this treacherous wife will cease her lewdness, and become chaste, she may be forgiven; it reserves room for repentance and reconciliation, without these it threatens. Strip her naked; as was usually done by incensed husbands, divorcing impudent adulteresses: see Ezekiel 16:38,39 Ezekiel 23:26. So God will strip her of all her ornaments which he gave; so he did gradually by Israel's enemies the Assyrians, till at last by Shalmaneser she was stripped to the skin, and led away captive; God east her out thus by him. And set her as in the day that she was born: it is not much material to fix the period of this birth, but it is enough God threatens, as sometimes we do, an extreme, poor, desolate, and comfortless condition, by a kind of proverbial speech, as naked as ever born. And make her as a wilderness: this phrase may somewhat intimate the time of Israel's birth, viz. between their going out of Egypt and the giving of the law, or their entering upon their travels in the wilderness. Their state was poor enough then, now it shall be as bad, or worse; they shall be as the wilderness, barren and desolate, affording nothing for life or delight, much less for profit: whereas adulteresses ordinarily hunt after profit and delights, God will punish adulterous Israel with denying both to her, she shall be like the wilderness, horrid and starving. And set her like a dry land: this is much the same with the former, and added to confirm and illustrate it. And slay her: all this shall be done to the end she may be destroyed: of old God led his people through the. wilderness to a city of habitation, now he will make them as the wilderness that they may perish in it. With thirst: a miserable end, surely, thus to be scorched up with parching heat! so will God's wrath burn up these wicked, idolatrous Israelites.