This is the second place in the library where the gloss and the Strong’s tag on one word disagree, after Amos 8:8. The gloss reads thorns. The tag is H1698, דֶּ֫בֶר, dever — pestilence, plague — which is how this same tag is glossed everywhere else it appears. The reading line follows the tag, as the Amos case settled: where the two halves of the interlinear contradict each other, the lemma is the better witness.

A second word in the same line is disputed. אֱהִי is tagged H0165, the interrogative where?, and that is how most modern versions read it: Where are your plagues, O death? The King James read it instead as a form of I will be — O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction — which turns a taunt into a promise.

That difference governs the whole verse. Read as questions, the two opening lines expect the answer no, and the closing clause — compassion will be hidden from My eyes — follows naturally. Read as declarations, they are a pledge of rescue, and the closing clause has to be softened or read as a separate thought.

The Septuagint translated the line as a taunt and used its own vocabulary (δίκη, a penalty; κέντρον, a sting), and it is the Greek wording, not the Hebrew, that Paul draws on at 1 Corinthians 15:55, joined there to Isaiah 25:8. What Hosea meant by it in the eighth century and what it came to carry later are separate questions, and this note does not settle either.