Hosea 10:7

Hosea 10:7 [As for] Samaria, her king is cut off as the foam upon the water.

Ver. 7. As for Samaria, her king is cut off, as the foam upon the waters] An apt simile (whereof this prophet is full). Her king (not her idols, as some sense it), though gotten into Samaria, a strong city, so well victualled and fortified as to hold out a siege of three years' continuance, yet shall be cut off, or silenced, as Hosea 4:7, "as the foam upon the waters," bulla evanida, more weak than water, whereof it ariseth, and whereby it is wherried away, and cannot resist; or, as a bubble blown up by every small wind, and as easily blown out again; it no sooner appears but it disappears. Lo, such are the greatest kings and kingdoms, when God taketh them in their wickedness. "He cuts off the spirit of princes," Psalms 76:12, he slips them off (so the Hebrew is) as one would slip off a flower between one's fingers; or as one would slip off a bunch of grapes. The kingdoms of the earth are like "foam upon the waters": 1. For their seeming brightness; 2. For their great eminence; 3. For their instability and inability to resist; 4. For their sudden fall and disappearance. The Turkish empire (which hath swallowed up so many glorious empires and renowned kingdoms) laboureth with nothing more than the weightiness of itself; and shall shortly be cut off as foam, and live no otherwise than by fame, as others now do; though for the present it be no whit inferior in greatness and strength to the greatest monarchies that ever yet were upon the face of the earth; the Roman empire only excepted.