The days of visitation have come. The days of reckoning have come. Israel will consider the prophet to be a fool, And the man who is inspired to be insane, Because of the abundance of your sins, And because your hostility is great.
"The prophet is a fool, the man that hath the spirit is mad ..." Note that in this parallelism, the second clause does not speak of the Holy Spirit.  The prophet and seer in view here are therefore false.  As Hailey said, "The deceitfulness of the false prophet and the iniquity of the people go hand in hand."[17]  We believe that the finding of scholars to the effect that these words represent some kind of audience response to the denunciations of the prophet is incorrect.  The words here are not the denunciation of the true prophet by the Ephraimites, but the denunciation of them by the true prophet Hosea.  This is made perfectly clear in  Hosea 9:8, following; and the reason that so many of the commentators cannot understand what verse 8 means is that they have missed the meaning here.