Hosea 4:12

My people ask counsel at their stocks Lit., -My people he asketh counsel at his wood." Jehovah alone can give oracular -counsel"; not the teraphim, nor yet the bull-images of Jehovah. The latter did, indeed, seem to the Israelites to bring Jehovah near to their consciousness, but it was not the true Jehovah, who could not be represented by images (Hosea 8:6) and hated the rites of the Israelitish worship (Hosea 9:15); Hosea therefore calls them -wood"; comp. Habakkuk 2:19; Jeremiah 2:27; Jeremiah 10:8. There is a touch of melancholy in -my people"; comp. Isaiah 3:12.

their staff declareth unto them -Declareth", with reference to secret things, as Isaiah 43:9; Isaiah 44:7. The -staff" is probably the diviner's wand; so in Ezekiel 21:21 the king of Babylon combines consultation of the teraphim with divination by arrows, which is merely another form of rhabdomanteia (Sept. substitutes -wands", ῥάβδον, for -arrows"). Wands were one of the recognized instruments of soothsaying, in both East and West; see Pococke, Specimen Historiae Arabum, p. 327; Azraki, The Chronicles of the city of Mecca, Arabic and German by Wüstenfeld, 1. 73; Herodotus iv. 67; Tacitus, Germ.10. Pococke however thinks -staff" is synonymous with -stocks", and that a staff is meant which had an idol carved at the top.

the spirit of whoredoms i.e. an impulse prompting them to whoredom (in the literal sense, to avoid tautology); comp. -spirit of perverseness" (Isaiah 19:14), -spirit of uncleanness" (Zechariah 13:2), -spirit of jealousy" (Numbers 5:14).