The phrase very likely carries a double meaning:1
Actual, physical sexual immorality, which may or may not have resulted in financial gain (i.e., breaking the seventh and tenth commandments)
Religious or spiritual adultery,
abandoning of worship of the one true God for the idols and myths of paganism
(i.e., breaking the first and second commandments)
Hwang shows that Hosea cleverly combines these meanings in his pronouncing God’s judgment against Israel. What makes this combination so profound was that the Canaanite religion (or Baal worship) brought explicit sexual acts into worship. Israel’s religious infidelity would have therefore very likely included sexual promiscuity.2
Hosea’s reference to the land
might simply provide the location for Israel’s infidelity. On the other hand it might function as another way of speaking about Israel. However, Hwang says we should go further, seeing the imagery as an allusion to the Canaanite religion’s emphasis on place or the land.
3 This is because the Canaanite religion was a kind of fertility cult. Service of the baals was rendered with the expectation that the Canaanite gods would make the land more fruitful. This would mean that Israel’s relationship to the land was itself unhealthy and sinful, distorted by worship of the baals.
2 When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea, “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD.”