Contend with your mother! Contend, for she is not my wife, Neither am I her husband; And let her put away her prostitution from her face, And her adulteries from between her breasts;
"For she is not my wife, neither am I her husband ..." As Mays accurately discerned, the husband here "stands for Yahweh; and the wife represents the corporate people of Israel."[4]  However, while admitting that "this sentence has been identified as a declaration of divorce," he insisted that "a divorce would make little sense, because the purpose of the proceedings was to regain the wife."[5]  Smith followed Mays in this, declaring that, "The covenant had been fractured, but not broken!"[6]  These views are of course incorrect, because the new marriage that appears under the triple betrothal in  Hosea 2:19ff absolutely presupposes that the first had been broken utterly.  Practically all of the popular commentators of the present day are very reluctant to allow that God did actually cast off the old Israel, a fact which Paul definitely stated in  Romans 11, only with the exception that "not all of them" were so divorced, the faithful remnant who accepted Christ, of course, being exempted.  Due to the widespread error on this question, a little further notice will be given here.