 32. Just looking at the translations I have in my personal library, old and new KJV, old and new RSV, old and new American Standard, Darby (English and French versions), Biblia de las Americas in Spanish, old and new Webster, NIV, Green, NAB, TEV, TLB, and the old and new versions of the standard Spanish RV translation see 'was a husband to'; Leeser, Young, Jerome, three Italian versions, four German versions, two French versions, the Spanish RVA, and the 1993 World translation into Russian understand it as 'was a lord over'; the standard Russian translation proceeds with 'continued to lead'; CEV gets 'was God to' and the standard German translation wrestles 'must subdue' from that verb form. We can compare these various hypotheses with how the Holy Spirit Himself translates it in Hebrews 8:9. There He uses the Greek word that means 'rejected'. It is also worth noting that the translations made closer to Jeremiah's own time and culture, the Peshitto and the Septuagint, also understand the verb in that sense. And in modern times, the Bible in Basic English (a relatively unknown translation) alone of the 33 post-Vulgate translations I've consulted and mentioned in this footnote, has accepted the Holy Spirit's word for the correct sense of the verb here. The problem is not a hard one linguistically. It's just that, for the most part, I'm sorry to say, Christianity, even the best of Christian scholarship, has not done very well at following the Lord.
"And on that day,"is the Lord's oracle, "You'll call Me Ishi. You won't call Me Ba'ali any more, because I will take away the idolatrous name of Ba'al from your mouth and your memory." (Hosea 2:18-19). This text seems to include a promise about the Hebrew language which has not yet been fulfilled. Ba'al is still a common noun in modern Hebrew. More importantly, although Baal is no longer worshipped and there is of course no longer a confusion of the Lord with Baal, as there was in Israel in Hosea's time, most of our people don't yet perceive themselves as part of the Lord's bride. (The "-i" suffix is the Hebrew equivalent of 'my', so verse 18 contrasts two ways of saying "my Husband" in Hebrew.)
On another level of midrash (interpretation/application), the primary
meaning of the Hebrew word
For your Makers is your Husbands.
Most translations, understandably, translate that first line with singular nouns. The plurals there are unusual grammatically and don't seem to "fit", either in Hebrew or in English. God is usually treated as singular in both languages. But God's Spirit gives us a grammatical surprise, a hint that although God is One, His Oneness is infinite, not simplistic. It is a Oneness that includes a complex Inner Nature, which theologians have attempted to describe as a "plurality of persons".