Starting Again

Although Gomer is not named, this is another development in the Hosea and Gomer story. How can we get into this? If, as I sometimes do, you share your quiet time with your partner, you could try a version of this. Two Old Testament scholars, John Goldingay (Fuller Theological Seminary) and Gillian Cooper (St. John’s College), tried role-playing Hosea and Gomer with a real marriage-guidance counselor.

One of the features of Hosea they were trying to confront was the silence of Gomer. There aren’t many books of the Bible that are written from the viewpoint of a woman, although Ruth, Esther and the nativity stories come close; even then, the voice of the woman is usually limited to dialogue rather than composition. (The Magnificat [Luke 1:46-55] is one glorious exception.) In rescuing Gomer from the silence of Scripture, another perspective opens up. Gillian Cooper as Gomer begins one exchange like this: “Now if your God felt about Israel the way I feel about my children, it would make the whole thing very different. When you talk about the Lord and Israel in relation to you and me, I can imagine the conditions attached to the relationship. But the thing that makes my relationship with the children so different is that there are no conditions.” That comes out of her resentment at their names in chapter 1, but it also gives us a sense of how we might engage with some of the more difficult parts of Scripture.

After all, isn’t the language of prostitution, in our own time, not just in biblical times, heavily loaded against the woman? There are far more disrespectful terms for the woman than there are for the man. As followers of Jesus, well-known for the unrespectable company he kept, we must do better than the stereotypes.

When did God “buy” you back to himself? How so?