Hebrew Word Study – Wail – Yalal – Yod Lamed Lamed

Hosea 7:13-14: “Woe unto them! for they have fled from me: destruction unto them! because they have transgressed against me: though I have redeemed them, yet they have spoken lies against me. (14) And they have not cried unto me with their hearts when they howled upon their beds, they assemble themselves for corn and wine and they rebel against me.”

Let’s say you get one of those letters from the IRS and you know you are really in trouble. What do you do?  Well, you do what any self respecting born again, evangelical Christian would do, you pray and you pray earnestly.  “O Lord, I know I don’t go to church as much as I should, you know that, and I only pray to you when I am in trouble, and boy am I in trouble now…”  That little prayer is the best illustration I can think of for Hosea 7:14.  It is a perfect example of crying unto God, but not with his heart. 

In the Book of Hosea, the prophet Hosea is prophesying to the Northern Kingdom during the reign of Jeroboam II in the 8th century BC. This is the time just before they were taken into captivity by the Assyrians.   Jeroboam encouraged the worship of Baal, the god of the Assyrians in the hopes of appeasing the Assyrians.   He also tried to gain a little more security by introducing calf worship, the god of Egypt in the hope of winning an alliance with Egypt to fight off the Assyrians.  But when famine hit the land, guess who they turned to?  The same one you turn to when all your other gods fail you. 

This is where Hosea comes in.  He married an unfaithful woman and was really in love with this woman, but she would run off with other men.  Hosea would take her back when she became destitute but no sooner does she find herself in a good condition, than she runs off with another man.   This is so like the Northern Kingdom.  Hosea 7:14 does not say that God does not answer the prayer of the people when they cry out to Him.  What is being expressed is that no sooner does He come to their rescue than they transgressed against Him. Actually, the word for transgressed is sur which in its Semitic root means to withdraw. Once things start going well, problems resolved, and the IRS is paid off, and you tend to withdraw from God. You don’t need him so much anymore.  Sur is also in an imperfect form and should be translated as a future tense.  Hence, we would render this as: “They assemble themselves for corn and wine, but they will withdraw from me. Once they get what they need, then they forget about God again.

The key problem with this whole matter is not that they are calling out to God in times of trouble.  In fact, David says in Psalms 119 that if it were not for his affliction, he would not have sought the Lord.  It is not that the call is insincere.   The verse says that they howled from their bed.  It seems that the worst moments of your struggles or problems come in the middle of the night when you are trying to sleep.  The word howled  in Hebrew is yalal which means to “wail.”  It is spelled “Yod, Lamed, Lamed.”  The two Lameds picture someone in bed with their arms raised up to God crying out in tears to God.  The Yod indicates that their attention is directed to God.  So, such people are crying out to God with their attention focused on God, but still, the Bible says that they do not call upon Him with their hearts.

Yesterday I did a study on the word heart and there I discovered that it is the heart that makes its connection with God.   But surely someone sitting up in bed, in tears with his arms raised to heaven, crying out to God, giving Him his full attention must be crying from his heart.  According to Hosea 7:14, apparently not.   You know, two people in a  relationship whether friendship or marriage will have times when one will say or do something that hurts the other person.  The one that gets hurt can wail, cry or moan and call out to the other person declaring their hurt. The other person may try to offer comfort or apologize, but often that other person is hurting as well and may not be able to communicate.   The person who gets hurt is so focused on his own hurt that he won’t even consider that the one who did hurt him is also hurting and thus there is no communication. 

If God loves us as much as we are told in Scripture and he is perfect in His love, then it stands to reason when we hurt, He will also hurt.  If we are truly crying out to God with our hearts, we will have a connection with God and when we do we will feel His hurt as well.    Too often we just lash out at God, “How could you do this to me.”  or “Why don’t you do something.”   We are so focused on our hurt that we don’t stop to consider that God may be hurting as well and what he really wants to do is to take us in His arms, speak soothingly to us and comfort us, but like a spoiled child, we push Him away and tell Him to do something or we will go to some other God, like Israel in the Book of Hosea.   Such a reaction is not calling to Him with our hearts, it is calling to Him with our minds and hurting souls. 

If we do not realize that God hurts when we hurt and go to Him to allow Him to do what His love longs to do, hold us, comfort us, soothe us, then we will not make the connection with Him and if it is our hearts that make that connection, then we are not crying to Him with our hearts.

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