Frida Kahlo, Käthe Kollwitz, and Lakwena Maciver make work about the complexity of familial relationships. Sometimes, more specifically, about children: the inability to bear children, and the consequences of evil for the life of the born and unborn.

Thus, these artists and their work can provoke reflection on the familial bonds and experiences described in Hosea 1, and how these relate to the character of YHWH.

The character of Gomer is a complicated one, but a reality that is less spoken of is her identity as mother, and her role in bearing children who carry God’s promises of judgement and mercy. The womb in biblical Hebrew is associated with the metaphor of compassion. As Phyllis Trible notes, the Hebrew racham, meaning compassion or mercy, comes from the root word for womb, rechem (Trible 1986: 33). The womb and the symbols it carries in biblical Hebrew ‘are for us points of departure in a continuing journey to explore the image of God as female’:

[T]he female organ becomes a moral and theological event … in Biblical traditions an organ unique to the female becomes a vehicle pointing to the compassion of God. (Trible 1986: p.38)

Kahlo was startlingly explicit in other paintings about her miscarriages and the damage to her body after the bus accident which prevented her from being able to bring a child to term. Here, she addresses a related issue: the fractures in the very relationship that might have nurtured the children she could not have.

Kollwitz, meanwhile, directly pictures a child caught up in the sidelines of a fictional war. The etching is inspired by the poverty and violence of both past and present events, particularly the German peasant’s rebellion of 1522–25 which was catalysed by intolerable conditions of labour. The lives of children in these situations bear the consequences of an evil much larger than—and going far beyond—their own individuality.

When Hosea comes to name the first child born of Gomer, God commands that he is to be called Jezreel. Jezreel historically, was a site of blood and massacre, but the word also means ‘God sows’: indicating the potential of redemptive life to come.

Driven in part by her role as a mother, Lakwena’s practice carries an urgent desire and burden to speak prophetically into the lives of her own children and to the younger generation of society more broadly, addressing cultural issues of identity and free speech. There is a concern in her paintings to speak truth to her children and to culture. The declarations in the paintings act as messages and promises to both future and past generations.

It is not clear which, if any, of the three children Gomer bears belongs to her husband Hosea, but even if they are the result of adultery they are still children with value and dignity, made in the image of God, and born from Gomer’s womb. Their lives, like any new life, are a grace of God. However, in the allegorical account of Hosea 1, it is, in part, these children who are chosen to bear the inherited consequences of someone else’s sin as they are given identities and names from birth which invoke judgement. Gomer’s children unwittingly embody and announce both God’s judgement and compassion on Israel—as a result of the nation’s sin, and God’s mercy towards his people.

At the end of Hosea 1, YHWH repeats the promise to multiply the Israelites as much as the ‘sand on the seashore’ (v.10). This promise comes after the conception and birth of Gomer’s three children, and it is a declaration which is represented in the life of these children. In the Hebrew Bible, the womb becomes one of the vehicles for the promises of God to be fulfilled.

The second child, the only daughter of Gomer’s that we are told of, is the one named ‘lo ruhama’ (‘Not pitied’ (Hosea 1:6)). Although for a moment YHWH closes the womb of compassion, this little girl returns to the womb of mercy with the promise of being a child of the living God.

As Wil Gafney notes, it is also this daughter whom we are told was weaned (presumably by Gomer), and so the very daughter who was named ‘Not pitied’ is the one who does receive maternal love in the close contact of the mother’s breast. This child is given life and is cared for. Here, in Gomer’s mother-love for her daughter, Gafney sees God’s presence. And in that presence, we might glimpse a mercy that will outlast all the broken bonds, shattered relationships, and violent self-serving of Hosea’s time and ours.

References

Gafney, Wil. 2018. ‘When Gomer Looks More Like God, 24 September, 2018’, Womanists Wading in the Word, available at https://www.wilgafney.com/2018/09/24/when-gomer-looks-more-like-god/ [accessed 3 October 2024]

Kets de Vries, Henriëtte. 2016. Kathe Kollwitz and the Women of War: Femininity, Identity, and Art in Germany During World Wars I and II (New Haven: Yale University Press)

Trible, Phylis. 1986. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality 2 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press)