To Reap the Whirlwind

Thy calf, O Samaria, hath cast thee off; mine anger is kindled against them: how long will it be ere they attain to innocency?
For from Israel was it also: the workman made it; therefore it is not God: but the calf of Samaria shall be broken in pieces.
For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.

-- Hosea 8: 5-7 (KJV)

It's been over 640 pages in the standard King James Version since God laid down his commandment against "graven images," and 628 since the incident of the original golden calf; yet here we are again, with Israel setting up a golden calf in Samaria.

The prophet Hosea had his work cut out for him, since he preached in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, where graven images were both more plentiful and better tolerated than in Judah. Idolatry, just one of Israel's many sins, comes sharply into focus in this passage from chapter 8, in which Yahweh, speaking through Hosea, declares his anger suitably kindled. He pledges to smash the calf into pieces and cause Israel to be swallowed up by its enemies. The Israelites' actions call forth an opposite and much greater reaction: they have, in Hosea's memorable phrase, "sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind."

Israel, in other words, has planted the seeds of its own destruction by worshiping false gods, who will bring only grief, barenness, and conquest. Hosea's proverbial metaphor stresses both Israel's responsibility for its fate and its pathetic ignorance -- the idolators think their sins merely a puff of wind, and they have no idea what a whirlwind these will yield.

Though Wyclif first planted the phrase into English in the fourteenth century, it didn't yield a whirlwind of quotations until the nineteenth, after Sir Walter Scott revived it in his novel The Black Dwarf (1816). (In 1857, Henry Buckle coined an eloquent variant: "to see whether they who raised the storm could ride the whirlwind.") By the turn of this century, the phrase had become a certified cliché, with little of its original force, meaning something like "to get more than you bargained for," but that's rarely of whirlwind proportions.

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!