God has made marriage the choice symbol of His own relationship with His people. This spiritual parallel lifts family life to a high and significant plane. The love of Christ for His people regulates and defines the love the husband should show to his wife, and the loyalty of the church to Christ indicates the faithful loyalty the wife should show to her husband. Christian husbands and wives owe to Christ the purification of their relations and the sanctification of their homes. God ordained marriage for the lifelong companionship, help, and comfort a husband and wife ought to have for each other. In this covenant of marriage, both husband and wife must commit themselves to each other completely in compassion and understanding. It is a covenant of faith and trust between a man and a woman, a covenant of hope that endures all things, a covenant of love in which both husband and wife empty themselves of self and their own concerns and esteem each other more highly than themselves. It is not surprising that God so often uses marriage to communicate spiritual truths to His people. Indeed, a good marriage that fulfills all the requirements of love and loyalty becomes a never-ending living sermon of the gospel itself. However, a marriage that fails is tragic, contrary to expectation, but nonetheless spiritually instructive. One way or another, there is always a message in marriage.
The message of marriage is an integral part of the prophecy of Hosea. Whereas most prophecies begin with some command for the prophet to prophesy, Hosea begins with the Lord’s instruction for him to marry. God intended for Hosea’s family life to be a symbol—a visible picture or object lesson—of the message he was to preach to Israel. Hosea 3:1, the key verse of the prophecy, explicitly links Hosea’s marriage to Gomer with God’s marriage to Israel: “love a woman ... according to the love of the LORD toward the children of Israel.” It was not unusual for the Lord to instruct His prophets to use some symbolic act to accompany a part of the message. Sometimes those symbolic acts would cause embarrassment, such as Isaiah’s walking around naked and barefoot or Jeremiah’s walking around with a yoke around his neck. Sometimes the symbolic act would cause significant inconvenience, such as Jeremiah’s traveling back and forth to the Euphrates with the linen girdle. Sometimes the symbolic act might even cause some temporary discomfort, such as Ezekiel’s lying on his sides for prolonged periods. But Hosea was unique in that his whole life was symbolic—an object lesson of his message. Any who saw or knew about Hosea’s ordeal could only feel sorry for him.
The Lord was using his whole miserable, tragic experience of personal sorrow and emotional distress to portray a vivid lesson to Israel. Hosea’s constant love and loyalty to Gomer was a beautiful picture of the Lord’s unfailing love and loyalty to Israel. Gomer’s unfaithfulness to Hosea was a tragically clear picture of Israel’s treacherous unfaithfulness to the Lord. Therefore, properly understanding Hosea’s marriage to Gomer is vital to understanding the message of his prophecy, and, contrastingly, understanding the message gives some insight for solving the problems of interpreting his marriage.
The Problem and Proposed Solutions
The crux of the problem of Hosea’s marriage to Gomer concerns the initial command that God gave to the prophet: “Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms” (1:2). On the surface, this creates a moral and ethical dilemma because it seems to counter the clear instructions for marriage that the Lord gave to priests. Leviticus 21:7 prohibits priests from taking “a wife that is a whore,” and verse 13 requires that they “take a wife in her virginity.” If it was a disgrace for a priest to marry a harlot, it would follow that it would be a disgrace for a prophet as well. Not only that, but Deuteronomy 22:20 and 21 sentences any woman who is proven to be unchaste at the time of her marriage to death by stoning. The dilemma, therefore, is twofold: would the Lord lower the standards of marriage for His prophet, who stood as His representative before the people, and would He arbitrarily overlook the impurity of this “wife of whoredoms”?
The proposed solutions to this interpretation problem have been many. The solutions fall into two major categories: those who regard the marriage as hypothetical and those who regard the marriage as literal. The hypothetical view denies a real historical marriage and interprets Hosea’s marriage to be an allegorical or symbolic portrayal of God’s relationship to Israel—a picture of Israel’s spiritual unfaithfulness. Old commentators such as Maimonides, Kimchi, and Calvin as well as modern scholars such as E. J. Young have espoused this view, arguing that an actual marriage would have reflected poorly on God’s holiness and would have greatly hindered Hosea’s ministry. Calvin, for instance, asked: “How could he expect to be received...after having brought on himself such a disgrace?” [1] The main objection to this interpretation is that nothing in the text suggests symbolic language. It is historic narrative that includes seemingly mundane data that would have no symbolic significance unless by strained and fertile imagination.
There are several versions of the actual marriage interpretation. First, the harlot view maintains that Gomer was in fact impure, perhaps a temple prostitute, when Hosea married her. Those holding this view recognize the moral difficulty but suggest that, for the sake of the message, God overruled His previously stated standards. Hosea’s marrying the harlot would emphasize God’s gracious love for an undeserving people. Gomer’s continuing adultery was an affront to Hosea’s kindness as Israel’s was to God’s.
Second, the idolatress view claims that Gomer was an idol worshipper when she married Hosea. The word “whoredoms” would then refer to spiritual rather than sexual fornication. Although this eliminates the surface problem of the prophet’s marriage to a sexually unchaste woman, it creates a no-less-serious problem if the Lord commanded the prophet to marry a blatant unbeliever. The principal truth of the Lord’s prohibition for the people not to intermarry with the Canaanites was not to maintain ethnic separation, but religious separation (Deut. 7:3, 4; Ex. 34:15-16). It parallels the New Testament demand that marriage be “in the Lord” (1 Cor. 7:39). In addition, if Gomer’s harlotry was only spiritual, the details concerning the birth of three children have no direct significance. Although it is not stated unequivocally, there may be a tacit hint in the record that Hosea was not the father of two of the children; whereas concerning Jezreel the text says Gomer “bare him” a son, the reference to “him” or Hosea is missing from the statements concerning Gomer’s bearing Lo-ruhamah and Lo-ammi. If the absence of that statement is significant, it would certainly suggest that Gomer’s sin was more than idolatry.
Third, the proleptic view claims that Gomer was sexually pure at the beginning of the marriage, but soon became unfaithful. Prolepsis is the use of a descriptive word in anticipation of a later occurrence that will make the term appropriate. Accordingly, though pure at the marriage, Gomer was identified as a “wife of whoredoms” in anticipation of what she would become. God, who knows the end from the beginning, could certainly reveal to Hosea what his bride would do before she actually committed acts of fornication. Proponents of this view usually argue that Hosea wrote this prophecy toward the end of his thirty-five-year career, after the events had transpired. Writing these opening chapters as history, he naturally would use language reflecting what he later discovered. God told him to marry this particular woman; when she proved to be unfaithful, Hosea could say that God told him to marry an immoral person. This maintains Gomer’s initial purity and avoids contradiction with legislation from the Pentateuch. Although this view has advantages, it does not do justice to the exact wording of Hosea 1:2. As stated, the text is a direct quotation of what the Lord commanded Hosea at the beginning of the ministry: what Gomer was, not what she would be. [2] Although each of these proposed solutions attempts to address the problem, they seem either to ignore part of the evidence or create a new set of difficulties. There may be a simpler solution that avoids the obvious moral and ethical dilemma (the advantage of the proleptic view) while maintaining the wording of the text as the direct words of the Lord to Hosea at the beginning of his prophetic career (avoiding the principal weakness of the proleptic view). This simple solution is a hybrid view: a cross between the harlot view that takes the initial command at face value and the proleptic view that postpones Gomer’s infidelity.
The answer may be in the significance of the word translated “whoredoms.” This is not the normal word that designates a prostitute; it is an abstract plural that would more likely describe an inner characteristic than an outward behavior. It most likely refers to Gomer’s latent bent toward immorality that surfaced not long after the marriage. God revealed to Hosea up front something about Gomer’s inner self that would potentially jeopardize the sanctity of the marriage. God allowed Hosea to see Gomer in a way that otherwise only He could see: “For the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7). At the beginning of the marriage she was innocent of any physical fornication, but Hosea knew both what she was capable of doing and what she most likely would do. It was just a matter of time before propensity became practice.
In many ways, Gomer was a child of her times. Baal worship had become widespread, along with its sexual promiscuity. Baal was a fertility god; immorality and prostitution played an important part in the cultic rituals. Such immorality, sponsored by the false priests and prophets and practiced in the name of religion, contributed to loose living throughout society. Everywhere Gomer would look there were the evidences of sexual license, and, tragically, there was something in her that answered to what she saw. She had the world in her and ultimately gave way to that propensity to immorality. That she is described as an adulteress in 3:1 indicates that her inner propensity indeed surfaced in outright fornication. She became what she thought about. That the word translated “adulteress” is a piel participle suggests that she was completely enslaved to the licentious behavior.
This “hybrid” interpretation has the marked advantage of viewing Hosea 1:2 as a direct quotation of God’s initial command to Hosea. Though in practice innocent at the time of marriage, Gomer was inwardly biased toward promiscuity. Because she was outwardly pure at the beginning of the marriage, she would not have been a hindrance to Hosea’s acceptance or effectiveness as a prophet. That Hosea knew from the Lord’s instruction her potential for hurting him highlighted the unselfish nature of his love. This is a key link to the spiritual parallel: God loves us in spite of what He knows about us.
This definition of the word “whoredoms” also explains the phrase “take...children of whoredoms.” This does not mean that Gomer already had children when Hosea married her. It is a literary device called zeugma. Zeugma occurs when a single verb grammatically governs two nouns although it logically governs only one. An implicit verb governs the other noun and must be supplied to give the full sense. This simply means that Hosea was to take a wife and have children. These children, like their mother, were characterized by “whoredom.” The idea is that they had an inner bent to evil that made them susceptible to contamination by their environment—just as their mother was. Potentially wayward children only added to the heartbreak of Hosea’s home life.
Parallels between Marriage and Message
To miss the connection between Hosea’s marriage to Gomer and the Lord’s marriage to Israel is to miss the obvious. Hosea 3:1 explicitly makes the parallel: “Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend, yet an adulteress, according to the love of the LORD toward the children of Israel, who look to other gods, and love flagons of wine.” Indeed, at the beginning, the Lord explained His command for Hosea to marry a wife of whoredoms in terms of Israel’s departing from Him: “for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the LORD” (1:2). Though many in the nation were deaf to Hosea’s preaching, even the dullest of them could see Hosea’s grief, sympathize with his sorrow, and wonder at his persistent love. Hosea’s marriage became a living sermon: what Hosea did for Gomer, God did for Israel; what Gomer did to Hosea, Israel did to God. Hosea’s love for Gomer did not make any sense. But that is the very point of the message. God’s love for sinners does not make any sense apart from His free and sovereign grace.
Hosea’s direct preaching to the nations focused on three basic themes. First, God’s relationship to Israel was initiated by divine love. Second, that relationship was spurned by Israel’s sin. Third, that relationship was maintained by divine loyalty. Each theme finds some parallel in Hosea’s home life.
Initiated by Love
Hosea 2:19-20 explicitly states that God proposed marriage between Himself and Israel. Hosea 3:1, 14:4, and 11:1 (father/son image) all draw attention to God’s love. The picture of marriage suggests strong affection between the parties, but the primary focus of God’s love for Israel is more on the inclination of His will and choice. The idea of choice is not foreign to human relationships. A man may know any number of women, but he chooses one to be his wife, the special object of his love. This does not mean that he abhors all other women or that he treats other women unfairly, but it does mean that he rejects all others for the one he has chosen. Similarly, a woman has the prerogative to accept or reject whatever proposals come her way. Prospective husbands do not usually pick their brides by drawing straws; there is usually something about their prospective bride that attracts them and generates love.
Likewise, although God’s love for His elect specifically testifies to His loving choice, the motive for the choice is not found in the attractiveness or worthiness of the chosen. Moses said that God loved Israel, in essence, because He loved them (Deut. 7:7-8). God’s love is totally of grace. The reason and motive of God’s gracious electing love is within Himself, not within the objects of His choice. That is what makes grace amazing. God chose Israel in spite of what they were, not because of what they were. He knew their sin, their weakness, their bent to evil. This fits so well with the suggested interpretation of Hosea’s marriage. God’s love for Israel was not “blind” and neither was Hosea’s love for Gomer. He knew from the beginning her weakness and inner propensity to sin, but nonetheless he loved her with love according to that of the Lord’s.
Spurned by Sin
Israel’s response to God’s love should have been humble gratitude, devotion, and loving obedience. There is some indication that, at least in part, the beginning of Israel’s relationship to the Lord was according to expectation. Jeremiah referred to the former condition of the nation with these words: “Thus saith the LORD; I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals…. Israel was holiness unto the LORD” (2:2-3). Likewise, Hosea 2:15 anticipates the future restoration of the people in a way that suggests previous blessing: “She shall sing there, as in the days when she came up out of the land of Egypt.” If the statement “bare him a son” (Hosea 1:3) does indicate that Jezreel was Hosea’s son, this would suggest that Gomer was faithful at the beginning of the relationship.
However, it did not take long for Israel to reveal its latent idolatrous heart. As soon as Moses was out of sight, they erected the golden calf. Neither was it long before Gomer put Hosea out of sight and revealed her immoral character. If the absence of reference to Hosea is significant in the statements of 1:6 and 1:8, it would seem that her next two children were born through fornication. Hosea 2, using the imagery suggested by Gomer’s fornication, details how the nation had played the harlot in departing from the Lord. Hosea 6:6-7 declares that Israel failed to give the Lord the covenant loyalty He deserved and demanded and that they had overstepped the bounds of the covenant agreement and behaved treacherously against the Lord. The word “treacherous” is significant because it refers to deceitful behavior and frequently designates the violation of marriage. Israel was doing to God just what Gomer did to Hosea. A big part of Hosea’s message to the nation exposed and condemned the sin of forsaking the Lord (4:10-19; 5:2-7; 6:10; 7:4; 11:7).
Maintained by Loyalty
Whereas Israel was bent on backsliding (11:7), God purposed to remain faithful (11:8; 14:4). Whereas Israel’s covenant loyalty was like the passing cloud and dew (6:6), the Lord’s covenant loyalty was central to the relationship He initiated and established (2:19-20). He would not quit His love, and He told Hosea again to love a woman in spite of her actual, not potential, unfaithfulness (3:1). By example and precept, the prophecy of Hosea establishes three important principles about loyalty.
First, discipline is an evidence of loyalty. Love does not overlook sin. Those who have received great privilege from the Lord are in jeopardy of greater punishment (cf. Amos 3:2). Hosea makes clear that sin brings a day of recompense (9:7, 9) and that the consequences of sin are inescapable (8:7; 10:13—the sowing/reaping principle). This chastening is not to destroy, but to restore: “I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offense, and seek my face; in their affliction they will seek me early” (i.e., diligent, earnest seeking). This theme of discipline is most clearly expressed by the obviously symbolic names of the three children. They each speak of necessary judgment: Jezreel, the irony of it (1:4); Lo-ruhamah and Lo-ammi, the tragedy of it (1:6, 9).
The statement concerning Jezreel is somewhat difficult because it seems to contradict 2 Kings 10:30. In the historic narrative, the Lord directly commends Jehu for doing what was right in God’s eyes in fulfilling the Lord’s heart in the execution of Ahab’s house in Jezreel. However, the idea expressed by the Authorized Version that the Lord will “avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu” suggests that now the Lord is punishing Jehu’s house for what in the other text brought commendation. The solution is in the verb translated “avenge.” This word can mean nothing more than to inspect or give attention to something. Although it frequently has the sense of “punish” when it occurs with the preposition translated “upon,” it literally has the idea of seeing the direct object (the blood of Jezreel) on the object of the preposition (the house of Jehu). [3] As Ahab’s dynasty ended in bloodshed, so will Jehu’s house end in bloodshed. The point is that punishment will indeed come to Jehu’s dynasty, but there is no direct blame being put on Jehu. Here is the irony of this judgment: the act of obedience that initiated the dynasty of Jehu will destroy it because of sins as heinous as those associated with Ahab’s house bring the same judgment. The message of the other children is tragically clear. Lo-ruhamah declares that God will not have pity or compassion on the pitiable nation; Lo-ammi declares that God does not regard the sinners of Israel to be His people.
Second, restoration is the goal of loyalty. Just as Hosea was to take Gomer back, so the Lord would take back His people. Chapter 2 reveals the Lord’s threefold plan to bring the nation back to Himself: isolation, impoverishment, and enticement. He would isolate them so that they might learn to recognize His superiority (2:6-7). He would bring them to poverty so that they might learn to depend utterly on Him (2:9-12). He would allure them, persuading them irresistibly to return (2:14-23). Achor, the place of judgment, would become a place of hope. They would recognize God’s mercy and call him Ishi (my husband) instead of Baali (my master). Likewise, Hosea isolated Gomer from her former lovers and enticed her with bridal gifts; once again she would be his. Hosea 2:22-23 also suggests the restoration theme in terms of the children. There was a reversal. “Scattering” (Jezreel) becomes a sowing; “no pity” will receive mercy; “not my people” will become my people.
Third, repentance is the response to loyalty. Without it there could be no enjoyment or experience of reunion. God made the terms of the covenant clear. To repent means simply to return, to reverse directions. Israel had been backsliding, turning away from God (11:7); God called them to turn around and come back to Him (6:1-3; 14:1-3).
He left the door open for the estranged wife to come home. Similarly, Hosea, although keeping the door of their marriage open, placed certain demands on Gomer when he restored her. He demanded that she no longer play the harlot and that she would not be for another man (3:3). That was only reasonable.
Hosea, whose name means salvation, has earned well his reputation for being the tenderest of the prophets, the prophet of grace and love.
Notes
- John Calvin, Commentaries on the Twelve Minor Prophets, trans. John Owen (repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 1:44.
- For other proposals to the difficulties of chapters 1 and 3, see C. Hassel Bullock, An Introduction to the Old Testament Prophetic Books (Chicago: Moody, 1986), 88-93.
- For a similar explanation of the verb construction, see Thomas E. McComiskey, “Hosea,” in vol. 1 of The Minor Prophets, ed. T. E. McComiskey (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1991), 20-21.
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