Hosea 6:7 has been a Reformed proof text of an Adamic covenant: They broke covenant like Adam.
Recent commentary has been skeptical. “Adam” can mean “mankind,” rather than the individual first man.
John Davies (A Royal Priesthood, 202) thinks the older interpretation, however “unfashionable,” has something to commend it: “If Hosea has as part of his shared presupposition pool with his readers the story of GEnesis 2, with Adam as the idyllic priest-king . . . together with the notion that Israel at Sinai was constituted as the new humanity, the true successors of Adam . . . then it makes sense to compare the breach of the Sinai covenant (e.g. Hos. 4.1, 2) with the rebellion in the garden.”
Indeed it does, and, in keeping with Davies’s overall thesis, this might suggest that “grant of priestly status” was precisely the content of Yahweh’s original covenant relation with Adam.
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