"Put the trumpet to your lips! Something like an eagle is over Yahweh's house, Because they have broken my covenant, And rebelled against my law.
"Because they have transgressed my covenant, and trespassed against my law ..."  What is this? if not the Pentateuch and the Decalogue.  Why should God at that particular moment in history have destroyed Israel for idolatry and associated sins, and have refrained from destroying Assyria and all the other pagan nations for doing the very same things?  The only answer lies in the prior existence of God's own sacred covenant with Israel and the specific terms of it spelled out in the Decalogue and the writings of Moses.  It is difficult indeed to refrain from designating the blindness of many scholars in this matter as willful and self-induced.  Without the prior fact of the Law of Moses and the tables of the Decalogue, Hosea's prophecy has no meaning at all.  Furthermore, in this very chapter, as we shall see, Hosea spelled out specific instances in which the sacred covenant had been ignored and disobeyed.  Israel had incurred the greater wrath of God because they had covenanted with the Lord to enter into his plans for redeeming all men in the eventual coming of the blessed Messiah into our world; and, in order to prevent the total frustration of that purpose, God punished and removed the northern kingdom and severely disciplined the southern kingdom.