169 | The prophet and the prostitute

Duncan Reyburn's Unorthodoxy

In a strange but philosophically potent story told in the Hebrew Bible, God gives his prophet Hosea some rather odd instructions. God commands Hosea to take for himself a wife of “whoredom” and to raise “children of whoredom” (Hosea 1:2). Hosea will be committed to a focused point of attention. He will be a symbol of the monogamy that loves and cherishes one woman no matter what. But his wife Gomer will remain promiscuous and inattentive. Because she will always look elsewhere for companionship, she will never love very deeply and she will struggle perpetually to receive love. As we'll explore in this episode, this story is mainly about worship. It symbolises the way meaning is made manifest depending on how we attend to reality. In a sense, attention is reality. What we worship determines what sort of meaning we’ll find.