The pairing with Parashah Vayishlach, whose best known episode is Jacob wrestling through the night with a mysterious being and receiving the name Israel in consequence, striving with God and prevailing, rests on Hosea's direct recollection of exactly that struggle, describing Jacob as one who strove with a divine being in his manhood and wept as he sought its favor.
Hosea places that memory alongside the moment God spoke with the nation at Bethel, the same site named in the parashah as the location of Jacob's earlier ladder dream on his outward journey, drawing a continuous line from the individual patriarch's formative encounters with the divine to the whole nation's later relationship with God, a deliberate collapsing of one man's biography into the identity of an entire people descended from him.
The haftarah's harsher material on Ephraim's deceit and false balances stands in pointed contrast to Jacob's own struggle and eventual blessing, since the parashah's Jacob wrestles honestly and openly for a blessing he earns through genuine effort, while the haftarah's current generation is accused of seeking advantage through deception rather than through the kind of costly, direct struggle their own ancestor once undertook.