Hosea 9:15

Hosea 9:15 (NKJV)

¹⁵ “All their wickedness is in Gilgal,

For there I hated them.

Because of the evil of their deeds

I will drive them from My house;

I will love them no more.

All their princes are rebellious.

Gilgal was a site near Jericho that was an important religious center in the time of Samuel. Faithlife Bible.

Gilgal had become a center of idolatry. Marriage and divorce provide the background for the language used here. The Lord would reject (hate) His unfaithful wife, drive her from His house (the land), and remove His protective care (love) from her.NKJ Bible.

Gilgal of the Bible may not be a city at all but a type of place.

What basic beliefs drew you into a new, spiritual or religious life? These are your “stones of Gilgal,” to which you can return again and again to steel yourself for the battles of life that you must fight both within your own mind and heart and in your relationships with your fellow human beings.

There may come a time when, as Jesus says, “our yoke will be easy and our burden light” ( Matthew 11:29–30) in living a spiritual life. But especially in the early days, it is a battle. And we fight that battle using those simple, basic true beliefs that first introduced us to a spiritual life. They represent our Gilgal.

For each one of us, the stones of Gilgal, taken from the River Jordan where the feet of the priests had stood, represent the “sacred circle” of basic beliefs, or teachings of truth, that provided the miraculous passage through our own spiritual Jordan from our former ways of spiritual enslavement and death to our new ways of spiritual life.

In the very same way, later on in our own spiritual journey we must move on to a higher, more complex and nuanced understanding of the Bible, of Jesus Christ, and of the meaning of a spiritual life. We must move from the Gilgal of a basic understanding of spiritual life to a more developed and complex Jerusalem of mature spiritual life.

When we do reach that stage of our journey, those simple, basic truths will no longer be enough for us. If we are unwilling to journey higher in our spiritual life, but remain stuck in those old, simple, black-and-white laws, our “Gilgal” can become a place of corrupt idol worship, as it had become when the prophets Hosea and Amos railed against it (Hosea 9:15–17, 12:11–14; Amos 4:4–6, 5:1–6).

Even so, it all starts in Gilgal. It all starts out with those first, fundamental true teachings that introduced us into a spiritual life. And the final mention of Gilgal in the Bible is a poignant reminder by the prophet Micah of the simplicity and faith of our early beginnings with God (Micah 6:1–5).

No matter how fancy and developed our spiritual beliefs and practices may become, those basic beliefs that were the starting point of our spiritual journey are never out of date. Even if we no longer spend our days in them, they still form the foundation of our spiritual life. The journey starts with the stones of Gilgal because we need a lasting foundation of basic principles of truth on which to build the superstructure of a mature, well-developed spiritual life.

Stones appear prominently throughout the Bible—and they embody a deeper spiritual meaning. Wherever they appear with a positive connotation, we can think of them as representing bedrock truths on which we can safely found our beliefs and our life.

In the Old Testament, one the most vivid examples of this correspondential meaning of stones is the fact that the Ten Commandments were written by the finger of God on two stone tablets. The Ten Commandments are the most central and sacred laws given in the Old Testament. So much so that they were placed in the ark of the covenant, which occupied the most holy place in the ancient Jewish Tabernacle, and later in the Temple. They were written in stone to signify that these commandments embody basic, everlasting laws of divine truth for us to live by.

In the New Testament, when the apostle Peter said of Jesus, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16), Jesus said of Peter’s statement, “on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” (He also made a play on words with the name “Peter,” which means “rock” in Greek.) For Christians, the belief that Jesus is the Messiah (Hebrew for “anointed one”) or Christ (Greek for “anointed one”) and the Son of God, is the bedrock truth of the entire Christian faith.

From these and many other examples of stones in the Bible, we can understand that the stones of Gilgal represent the simple, basic beliefs, or truths, that form the foundation of our spiritual faith and life.

The word gilgal does have a meaning in Hebrew.The word gilgal in Hebrew is related to the word galal, which means “to roll.” Galal is often used to refer to rolling heavy objects such as stones. So in Hebrew the related word gilgal means a wheel or circle, or something that rolls. In particular, it seems to refer to a circle of stones, or to a circular altar.

Though the gilgals certainly have a strong ritual significance in the Bible, they have an equally strong association with military conquest, and with new beginnings.

It paints a picture of Gilgal as:

1 A place of new beginnings.

2 A base camp for many battles of the Israelites against their enemies.

3 A sacred site that eventually became corrupted, but was still important in Israel’s history.

Gilgal was the first place that the Israelites camped in the Holy Land after crossing the Jordan River on dry land. When the entire nation had finished crossing over the Jordan, the Lord said to Joshua: “Select twelve men from the people, one from each tribe, and command them, ‘Take twelve stones from here out of the middle of the Jordan, from the place where the priests’ feet stood, carry them over with you, and lay them down in the place where you camp tonight.’”The people came up out of the Jordan on the tenth day of the first month, and they camped in Gilgal on the east border of Jericho. Those twelve stones, which they had taken out of the Jordan, Joshua set up in Gilgal, saying to the Israelites, “When your children ask their parents in time to come, ‘What do these stones mean?’ then you shall let your children know, ‘Israel crossed over the Jordan here on dry ground.’ For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you crossed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, which he dried up for us until we crossed over, so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty, and so that you may fear the Lord your God forever.” (Joshua 4:1–9, 19–24)