Gomer and Her Children

This Will Be a Safe Space, by Lakwena Maciver

Vergewaltigt (Raped), from the Bauernkrieg (The peasants' revolt) series, by Käthe Kollwitz

Hosea 1

Commentaries by Sarah White

Works of art by Frida Kahlo, Käthe Kollwitz and Lakwena Maciver

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Their Lives are Our Lives

Commentary by Sarah White

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In Hosea 1, we see the personal story of a particular family become a stand-in for the larger relationship between YHWH and Israel.

This is a familial story of a husband, wife, and three children, whose lives—involuntarily—are chosen to speak out symbolically about a reality far wider than their own personal circumstances. Domestic events take on significance for a shared social imagination.

During the Covid-19 pandemic and its lockdowns, Lakwena Maciver created paintings within and for her home. The work This Will Be A Safe Space was made for her two young boys. Using declarations of promise, encouragement, and warning, this was Lakwena’s way of singing over her children and speaking tenderly to them: pointing them to their ultimate security in God.

The words Lakwena prays over her sons stand not just against the threat of disease, but whatever confusion, hostility, or oppression lurks in the wider world. The home becomes a space of transformation, empowerment, resistance, and identity formation. As these works were subsequently exhibited in a public gallery (Hastings Contemporary), they demonstrated how the identity of a particular family can become a more general declaration to the community surrounding them. The paintings act like public banners with clear, instructive, and declarative sentences which directly address the viewer. The words function as language, not just as shapes or images, and are designed to be read out loud and heard.

The seven statements within Lakwena’s painting include repetitions of God’s promises to protect, deliver, surround, and guard (e.g. Psalm 32:7). As Lakwena paints these prayers over her children, they articulate her earthly maternal love and point to the greater reality of God’s love for them.

The words declared over Gomer’s three children, and Lakwena’s two sons, have the power to define their identity and shift reality.

The three children born of Gomer in Hosea, and the identities placed upon them, are chosen to embody God’s judgement on Israel. At birth, Gomer’s children are named by God ‘Not Loved’ and ‘Not My People’. By contrast with the words offered by Lakwena to her children, these words show that God’s mercy and compassion have been withdrawn from an entire nation. The lives of this individual family are elided with the life of Israel as a whole.

Yet, there is hope that in time, and with repentance, the nation (like Gomer’s children) will have new words spoken over them (Hosea 2:23).

References

Ibrahim, Alif. 2021. ‘Lakwena on Using Painting to Find Paradise, 2 February 2021’, www.itsnicethat.com [accessed 25 September 2022]

Moughtin-Mumby, Sharon. 2008. Sexual and Marital Metaphors in Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Somers, Xanthe. 2021. ‘Lakwena-Maciver’, www.nataal.com [accessed 25 September 2022]

A Broken Heart

Commentary by Sarah White

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The celebrated twentieth-century Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was married to muralist Diego Rivera. Theirs was a tumultuous relationship with numerous affairs, the most significant of which was Rivera’s relationship with Frida Kahlo’s sister, Cristina. Memory (or The Heart) was painted partly in response to this adultery.

Kahlo’s chest is represented here as pierced, revealing that the interior of her body has been hollowed out. She is now empty and punctured: a two-dimensional husk of her former self. Tears stream down her face but she is unable to wipe them away as her hands have disappeared. She has been strung up from the sky by fragile vein-like threads, suspended in grief.

The painting subtly communicates the deep despair and helplessness of marital and wider familial breakdown, and the emptiness which comes with the most intimate of relationships being betrayed and broken. Her heart has been ripped from her body and has swollen up in grief: it now leaks out blood which seeps into the landscape and drains into the ground underneath.

The piercing of Kahlo’s chest is thought to allude to the ecstasy of St Teresa of Avila, and her experience of the intensity of God as lover as she describes being pierced in the heart ‘by the arrow of Divine Love’ (Grimberg 1990–91: 3). She describes an angel or cherub plunging her body with a hot spear and ‘[w]hen he drew it out, I thought he was carrying off with him the deepest part of me; and left me all on fire with the great love of God’ (ibid).

Hosea 1 centres on this idea of YHWH as lover (of Israel), using the metaphor of marriage to convey the pain inflicted by Israel’s unfaithfulness. YHWH has bound himself to Israel in an intimate, covenant union of enduring love. Yet Israel has betrayed this love and committed adultery through idolatry (worshipping other Gods). They have rejected and abused the love of the God who created, sustains, and protects them; who rescued and fought for them. As God was faithful, they have been faithless. And generations of later readers of this text may recognise this faithlessness as theirs too. Hosea 1 metaphorically describes God’s withdrawal of love from Israel because of this unfaithfulness and their breaking of the covenant relationship, but with the final promise of mercy and restoration.

References

Ankori, Gannit. 2002. Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation (Westport: Prager)

Grimberg, Salomon. 1990–91. ‘Frida Kahlo’s “Memory”: The Piercing of the Heart by the Arrow of Divine Love’, Woman's Art Journal, 11.2: 3–7

Kettenmann, Andrea. 2003. Kahlo 1907–1954: Pain and Passion (Cologne: Taschen)

The Land Mourns

Commentary by Sarah White

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The book of Hosea is a damning indictment of the sin of Israel in forsaking God and an extended description of the judgement upon them because of their disobedience.

Hosea 1:2 begins with an unusual statement that it is the land which has committed great ‘whoredom’ (zanah). Throughout the book of Hosea it is clear that the earth has become caught up in the sin of the people who inhabit it and commit bloodshed upon it. ‘The land mourns’ (v.3). There is a moral and spiritual identification between earth and the people who reside upon it.

Raped, by artist Käthe Kollwitz is an etching made as part of the graphic cycle The Peasants Revolt. Kollwitz was sympathetic towards the conditions of the urban working class, and conscious of ‘the connection of poverty, exploitation, and homelessness on both mother and child’ (Betterton 1996: 38). This image depicts the aftermath of a rape, showing a woman supine on the ground of a herb garden. A barely visible child looks on from behind the fence, camouflaged behind the leaves, stem, and head of a wilting sunflower.

The earth, with its abundance of fruit and vegetation, possesses the symbolic tropes of fecundity and fertility associated with the female. Kollwitz subverts these tropes as the violated woman becomes overtaken by the earth: her body sunken into the ground where she was sinned against. Dehumanized and anonymous, her face is hidden behind brassica leaves, and her legs entangled with sunflower stems. ‘It seems as if the chaotic vines themselves threaten to consume the victim’s body and draw her into the earth’ (Kets de Vries 2016: 14). Within Western painting history the naked female body represents the untouchable gazed upon object, but this objectified woman has been both touched and violated (Betterton 1996 37).

As the book of Hosea unfolds we understand more of the sin—against people, and against the land—with which Israel is being charged. In Hosea 9 and 10, their sin is compared to the atrocious acts committed at Gibeah; a reference to the nameless woman who is raped, cut into twelve pieces, and sent to the tribes of Israel (Judges 19). This record of violence towards an unnamed woman recalls the violence Kollwitz depicts in this etching, and in particular violence against anonymous women and children.

References

Betterton, Rosemary. 1996. An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body (London: Routledge)

Kearns, Martha. 1976. Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press)

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)

Prelinger, Elizabeth. 1992. Käthe Kollwitz (Kollwitz Reconsidered) (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art)

The Womb of Compassion

Comparative commentary by Sarah White

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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)

Next exhibition: Hosea 2