In a strange but philosophically potent story told in the Hebrew Bible, God gives his prophet Hosea some rather odd instructions. 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.
To be clear, the story is not, as literalists may initially assume, about sexual ethics. Rather, it is mainly a story about worship. It symbolises the way meaning is made manifest depending on how we attend to reality. In a sense, attention is reality. Clearly, Hosea must brace himself for the consequences of his doomed marriage to a loose woman.
Gomer will abandon him to go after other lovers. She will do so on the false assumption that those men provide for her, even though it is her husband who remains the source of shelter Hosea will have to constantly seek her out and bring her home. Gomer will constantly betray him. She will regard his attention as something to resent and not trust. His loyalty will be to her as disposable as her own capacity for love. His personal drama reflects a much larger story, the implications of which are universal.
Hosea, as husband and father, is a symbol of God—the origin point of the real, the reason for the intelligibility of all things, and the highest principle and ideal of existence. Gomer is a symbol of the nation of Israel, the people of God, who in this story are cast as rebels against the real. They stand against the intrinsic intelligibility of things. For the promiscuous mind, intelligibility is always stitched together out of bits and pieces; it must, apparently, be mainly posited or imposed on what is found.
