Healing Exposes a Court Heated by Lies, Intoxication, and Conspiracy

When I would have healed Israel, the theft was already in the street

When I would have healed Israel, then the iniquity of Ephraim was discovered, and the wickedness of Samaria: for they commit falsehood; and the thief cometh in, and the troop of robbers spoileth without. They consider not that I remember all their wickedness: now their own doings have beset them about; they are before my face.

Healing is attempted and interrupted. The court is pleased: they make the king glad with their wickedness, and the princes with their lies. Concealment is a fantasy. The deeds surround them.

The oven is desire banked overnight, then a king's day, then fallen rulers

They are all as an oven heated by the baker, who ceases from raising after he hath kneaded the dough, until it be leavened. In the day of our king the princes have made him sick with bottles of wine; he stretched out his hand with scorners. The baker sleeps; the fire waits; morning burns as a flaming fire. They are all hot as an oven, and have devoured their judges; all their kings are fallen: there is none among them that calleth unto me.

After Jeroboam II the northern throne lurched through conspiracy and assassination. The poem does not name which king died at which feast. The oven is not a diagnosis of addiction, mental illness, or every political fight. It is a picture of concealed heat that consumes a leadership system from inside while no one calls to God.