Thou Shalt Abide

“Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom...”

In a Bible filled with “bad girls gone good,” one exception stands out for doing the opposite. Her name is Gomer, daughter of Diblaim. Married early in life to Hosea, an Old Testament prophet who loved her with a passion that suffuses the very Scriptures themselves, if there was ever a woman who should have had every reason to stay true to God, it was Gomer. Yet the story of her faithlessness, betrayal, and eventual flight from her husband Hosea -even abandoning her three children in the process- was so sordid that God Himself used her as an eternal metaphor for Israel’s fall into idolatry.

The God of Israel was always a God of redemption, but what would it take to redeem a prophet’s wife who had become a harlot?