Hosea 9:17

My God will cast them away. .. and they shall be wanderers among the nations.

Divine severities for a nation

1. It is a judgment to have an unsettled spirit. A spirit wandering up and down, unable to settle to anything, sometimes in this place, sometimes in that, sometimes in this way, and sometimes in another, this is a judgment of God. The wandering of men’s appetites and desires works them a great deal of vexation.

2. Those who are cast away out of God’s house can have no rest; they go about like the unclean spirit, seeking rest, but can find none. The Church of God and His ordinances are God’s rest. But you will say. May not men be wanderers; that is, may they not be cast out of their habitations and countries, and wander up and down, and yet not be cast off from God? There is no evil in wandering if we carry a good conscience with us. But there it is, “They shall be wanderers among the nations.” It was a great judgment of God for Israel to be scattered among the nations, for they were a people that were separated from the nations, and not to be reckoned among the nations; they were God’s “peculiar treasure.” This curse is upon the Jews to this very day,--how are they wanderers among the nations! (Jeremiah Burroughs.)

Wanderers among the nations.

The lost ten tribes

The words of the prophet imply an abiding condition. He does not say, “They shall wander,” but “They shall be wanderers.” Such was to be their lot; such has been their lot ever since; and such was not the ordinary lot of those large populations whom Eastern conquerors transported from their own land. The transported population had a settled abode allotted to it, whether in the capital or the provinces. Sometimes new cities or villages were built for the settlers. Israel at first was so located. Perhaps on account of the frequent rebellions of their kings the ten tribes were placed amid a wild, warlike population, “in the cities of the Medes.” When the interior of Asia was less known, people thought that they were still to be found there. The Jews fabled, that the ten tribes lay behind some mighty and fabulous river, Sambatyon, or were fenced in by mountains. Christians thought that they might be found in some yet unexplored part of Asia. Undeceived as to this, they still asked whether the Afghans or Yezides, or the natives of North America were the ten tribes, or whether they were the Nestorians of Kurdistan. So natural did it seem that they, like other nations so transported, should remain as a body near or at the places where they had been located by their conquerors. The prophet says otherwise. He says, their abiding condition shall be, “they shall be wanderers among the nations”; wanderers among them, but no part of them. Before the final dispersion of the Jews at the destruction of Jerusalem “the Jewish race,” Josephus says, “was in great numbers throughout the whole world, interspersed with the nations.” Those assembled at the Day of Pentecost had come from all parts of Asia Minor, but also from Parthia, Media, Persia, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Egypt, maritime Lybia, Crete, and Italy. Wherever the apostles went in Asia or Greece they found Jews, in numbers sufficient to raise persecution against them. The Jews, scoffing, asked whether our Lord would go to the dispersion among the Greeks. The Jews of Egypt were probably the descendants of those who went thither after the murder Of Gedaliah. The Jews of the North, as well as those of China, India, Russia, were probably descendants of the ten tribes. From one end of Asia to the other, and onward through the Crimea, Greece, and Italy, the Jews, by their presence, bare witness to the fulfilment of the prophecy. Not like the wandering Indian tribe, who spread over Europe, living apart in their native wildness, but, settled among the inhabitants of each city, they were still distinct, although with no polity of their own, a distinct, settled, yet foreign and subordinate race. “Still remains unreversed this irrevocable sentence as to the temporal state and face of an earthly kingdom, that they remain still ‘wanderers,’ or dispersed among other nations, and have never been restored, nor are in any likelihood of ever being restored to their own land, so as to call it their own. If ever any of them hath returned thither, it hath been but as strangers.” (E. B. Pusey, D. D.).