What Does Hosea 13:2 Mean in the King James?
And now they sin more and more, and have made them molten images of their silver, and idols according to their own understanding, all of it the work of the craftsmen: they say of them, Let the men that sacrifice kiss the calves.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The calves receive a kiss because people have poured their own understanding into the things they shape.
THE MEANING
The missing multiplies as human understanding gives silver a form, then devotion turns toward what those hands have made. The verse brings the whole cycle into view: people shape an image, and the image receives their kiss.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie is that something made from your own understanding can become the source you need; the verse shows it remains the work of human hands, even when it receives devotion.
THE ROOT
מַסֵּכָה
massekhah
GROWS FROM
נסך
To pour out; by extension, to cast metal or pour a libation.
“molten images” in this verse is massekhah. The word carries the act of pouring inside the image: silver is poured into a human-given form. The same root names a libation poured out, letting the making of the image and ritual offering touch at the root.
ALSO GROWS
nasakh: To pour out or cast metal.
נָסַךְ
The image is a poured form, so the verse shows devotion attaching to something given shape by human hands.
nesekh: A drink offering poured out.
נֶסֶךְ
The shared root lets the act of making the image echo the act of ritual pouring.
תְּבוּנָם
tevunam
GROWS FROM
בין
To discern, perceive, or understand.
The word links understanding with discernment: seeing and distinguishing. Here that discernment becomes the design for an image, and the thing conceived by the mind becomes the thing receiving the kiss.
ALSO GROWS
bin: To perceive or distinguish.
בִּין
It shows understanding as an act of discernment that can shape what a person treats as worthy of devotion.
tevunah: Understanding or discernment.
תְּבוּנָה
This is the related noun behind “their understanding,” the measure by which the image is formed.
לַחֲטֹא
laḥato
GROWS FROM
חטא
To miss, fail, or go wrong.
“sin” in this verse is laḥato. The verse describes the missing as something that keeps increasing. Its growth is visible in the repeated making and honoring of what human hands have formed.
ALSO GROWS
chata: To miss or fail; to do wrong.
חָטָא
It is the verb behind the verse’s “sin more and more,” rendered here through the project’s established sense of missing.
chatta’t: A sin or an offering associated with sin.
חַטָּאת
The related noun shows the same root can name both the missing and a ritual response to it.
THE PATTERN
What human hands form can become the object toward which human devotion turns.
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands.Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.THE THREAD
And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.The same Hebrew noun, מַסֵּכָה (massekhah, “molten image”), names the calf and the images in Hosea. The root keeps the cycle in view: something poured and shaped by human hands receives the devotion of the hands and mouths that made it.
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