Hosea's Marriage and Ministry to Israel

The event

Hosea's ministry opens with one of the strangest and most moving commands in all of prophecy: "Go, take to yourself a wife of harlotry... for the land commits great harlotry, forsaking the LORD." Hosea married Gomer, and their relationship — her unfaithfulness, his pursuit and eventual repurchase of her — became a living parable of Israel's own repeated turning away from the God who had redeemed her from Egypt.

Ministering primarily to the northern kingdom of Israel from around the last days of Jeroboam II through the kingdom's collapse, Hosea watched the nation lurch through political instability and idolatry even as prosperity masked the rot underneath. His oracles swing between scalding indictment and breathtaking tenderness, often in the same breath — "How can I give you up, Ephraim?... My heart is turned over within Me, all My compassions are kindled."

Hosea's language of covenant love — "I will betroth you to Me forever" — gave later Scripture some of its richest marital imagery for God's relationship with His people, and his line "out of Egypt I called My son" is applied by Matthew's Gospel to the child Jesus, tying Israel's story directly to the Messiah who would fulfill it.

Scripture references

• Hosea 1-3
• Hosea 11:1-11