Hosea’s Wife (Chs. 1, 3). 

        Hosea’s call came through God’s command about his marriage (the R.V. mg. is preferable in 1:2) and therefore presumably when he was a young man just out of his teens. The apparently natural interpretation of 1:2, that he was commanded to marry an immoral woman, perhaps a qedeshah  can hardly be sustained.

        1. Had Hosea known that Gomer was an immoral woman, there would hardly have been surprise or heart-break, when she returned to her old life.

        2. An immoral woman could not have served as a picture of Israel, when she came out of Egypt (2:15; 9:10).

        3. Since “children of whoredom” looks to the future, for they were not yet born, “a wife of whoredom” should do so too.

        God will have commanded Hosea to marry Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim (the name is not likely to have any allegorical meaning). As the tragedy ran its course, Hosea will have realized God’s purpose in His command and His foreknowledge of its consequence. So 1:2 is the prophetic interpretation of God’s command won through experience. The older view based on Jewish tradition was that the whole story is merely an allegory.

        We cannot say how many, if any, of Hosea’s children were legitimate, but the time came when Gomer left him for her lover. Either in sheer love or at God’s command he did not divorce her — if he had, on the basis of Deut. 24:1-4 (cf. Jer. 3:1) he could not have taken her back. Then came the time (3:If) when he looked her up again and found her treated as a slave, perhaps sold by her paramour, who had tired of her. Hosea bought her back for one-and-a-half homers of barley, in value fifteen shekels of silver (translate in 3:2, “…even an homer of barley…”), i.e. half price as damaged goods (cf. Exod. 21:32).

        Though the prophet’s message is God’s word and he speaks for God, yet in ways we cannot grasp the message must first become part of the prophet (cf. p. 101). Nowhere in the Old Testament is the love of God more dearly and tenderly ex­pressed than in Hosea, and that will be because no prophet experienced the heart-break of unrequited and faithless love as Hosea did. Hosea, like all God’s messengers, had to experience his message before he could give it to others.