First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
January 27, 2002

The Covenant of Faithful Love

My name is Gomer, daughter of Diblaim, and I am NOT a whore. The men of Yahweh, with their self-righteous priests, and their scrolls sealed up in clay jars, have dragged my name across the centuries as a byword for faithlessness and shame, my husband among them. It is his version of the story that you read today, my poor, tormented Hosea, but I was never a whore. I was a woman of honor; a faithful servant of the Goddess, an honest wife, and I loved him with all my heart. I never asked him to be anything other than who he was, or to serve any God but the one to whom he had pledged himself. Looking back on it, it seems to me that it was his own littleness that doomed us, or the littleness of that so-called almighty God of his; but I will tell you the story, and you judge.

We had lived in this land throughout all time, my mother and my mother's mother and her mother before her, ever since the goddess whom we serve brought forth all creatures out of the earth which is Her flesh. She whose heartbeat is the rhythm of day and night, whose breathing is seedtime and harvest, gave us all things in abundance, and taught us to live here by honoring Her. On the high hills, where we could see Her beauty stretching around us to the horizon on all sides, we made Her altars, and carved Her images, and rejoiced to give Her pleasure with cakes of raisins and with festivals and with all those rituals which are Hers. We built Her temples, and because She is the Lady of Life and Mother of all things, we served her in many labors. We managed the fields and vineyards that were Hers alone; we pronounced Her word for those who came to consult Her in their difficulties; we considered the welfare of Her community, its people, its herds and flocks, its waters and fields and lands.

To the extent that they would let us, we lived in peace and harmony with the sons of Israel. Descendants of the nomadic desert tribes, they had come among us as refugees and conquerors, bringing with them the holy ark of their God, named Yahweh, a lord of armies, giver of victory and defender in battle. He was a strange Ba'al, -- that was the word we used for male gods -- alone in the heavens with no consort to give fertility to the earth, jealous and sovereign, like a foreign king. Not like my own dear Lady, with Her mother's love, and Her joy in pleasure for the sake of Her children.

I was raised in the temple of the Goddess; my mother was qu'adishtu, a holy woman, living there, managing the property and affairs of the Goddess, and helping to conduct her rites. In fact, I am descended from a long line of qu'adishtu; women of power and importance, who shaped our community, and helped to pass on the wisdom taught us by Her whom we served. It was a good life, rich in connection, satisfying to ambition, but the Goddess sends what She wills, and my destiny lay in part beyond the shrine, subject to the power of that very different deity, Yahweh.

Even my grandmother was not yet alive when evil king Jehu came to power in Israel, 75 years before I was born, but of course she knew people who had been, and the terrible stories came down to us, as they did to everyone. How he treasonously murdered the last king of the Omri dynasty by shooting him with an arrow in the back as he fled down the plain of Jezreel; how he threw poor queen Jezebel out the window to her death; how he brought down on us the wrath of our neighbor and sister kingdom Judah, by assassinating their king Ahaziah and all his brothers while they visited in Israel; how he threatened the citizens of Samaria into sending him the heads of all the royal family members who could have tried to claim the throne, more than seventy of them, heaping them in baskets in the plain of Jezreel; how he staged a mock sacrifice and lured all the Phoenician worshippers of Baal into one temple, and then slaughtered them all, and made the temple site into a latrine.

Jehu was an evil king, worse than ruthless, for he claimed that all this bloodshed grew from his zeal for Yahweh, his eagerness to rid the country of all who did not faithfully worship his God. Yet he had no real reverence; it was all an excuse to dispose of his political opponents, and anyone who might have threatened his hold on the throne. And indeed, he had no power over my Lady, and her shrines in the high places of Bethel and of Dan continued unmolested throughout his reign. Nor did he ever hold the throne of Israel by his own power, for as soon as he was attacked by the army of Syria, under king Hazael, Jehu went running to pay tribute to Shalmaneser, begging the Assyrian king to fight his battles for him. This policy of appeasement kept Jehu on the throne for 28 years, but the common people paid the price in taxes to fund his annual tribute.

Jehu died peacefully in his bed the year my grandmother was born, and passed the kingdom to his son Jo-ahaz. He and his son, Johoash, had rather comfortable and uneventful reigns, for two reasons. Mostly because Syria and Assyria were too busy fighting with each other to pay any attention to what Israel was doing, and partly because although they themselves were worshippers of Yahweh, they did not persecute us, who were followers of the Goddess, or seek to dishonor Her. They are condemned for this, of course, in the records written by the historians of Yahweh, but they were not stupid, and under their leadership, the land was not oppressed.

And then, when my mother Diblaim was a small child, began the golden age of king Jeroboam. It's hard to believe that he could have been that madman Jehu's great grandson, for with him came a time of happiness and prosperity such as we had not known since the almost mythical time of King David. He restored the trade with Phoenicia and other nations which had been cut off by Jehu's massacres; he recaptured land that we had lost, and restored the borders of Israel almost to the extent of Solomon's kingdom. He made the capital city of Samaria a place of beauty and luxury, a center of wealth and culture. He honored the Goddess in her many forms, and her consorts, the Ba'als, and did not go around slaughtering those of us to kept to the old ways, or tearing down our shrines. My Hosea would later say, in his bitterness, that king Jeroboam should have destroyed the altars, and done away with the worship of Ba'al, but he didn't feel that way when I knew him first.

It is hard to live in a world falling apart; there is a terrible sadness in waking day after day to the knowledge that the time of peace and plenty is behind you, and that what lies ahead is ever increasing suffering and disaster. Why my Lady cursed the wombs of all Jeroboam's wives, when his rule was good to Her, I do not pretend to understand. But it was clear almost from the beginning that Zechariah, the king's only son, was in no way fit to rule in his father's place. A nice enough lad, as he grew up, but weak and indecisive; none of his father's intelligence or charm or strength. Someone would be bound to seize the throne from him, or at least try, and whatever the outcome, it would mean bloodshed and unrest and danger. We all tried to push that knowledge out of our minds, in the last years of Jeroboam's reign, because we loved and honored him so. But it hung over us like a faint, distant cloud, and Hosea was always sensitive to that sort of thing.

In fact, that was part of what attracted me to him at first; the way he could draw events and stories together, making sense of the way it all connected, from the beginning to now, and showing you what had to happen next. The oracles of my Goddess are one kind of prophecy; short, cryptic predictions that change as the light changes, depending on which way you turn them. They contain Her wisdom and her warnings, surely, but that is different from the prophets of Yahweh, -- the true ones, anyway -- who always bring the word of their God in the larger context of covenant community.

I met Hosea first in a courtyard in the temple of the Goddess; he was waiting for an answer to a message he had brought about buying flax, and I could see that he was rather ill at ease. I stopped to talk to him, as it becomes us to welcome any visitor to Her gates. Well, you have heard the poetry by which we celebrate the joys of love which are Her gift to us; in later ages they would claim that Solomon wrote it, but it was our verse, and the Goddess's, first. In that early summer they were Hosea's and my words, seemingly written just for us, and every syllable true.

How fine you are, my love, your eyes like the eyes of a dove.

How fine you are, my lover; What joy we have together!

How green is our bed of leaves,

Our rafters of cedar, our juniper eaves!

Oh, for your kiss! For your love More enticing than wine,

For your scent and sweet name For all this they love you.

Take me away to your room, Like a king to his rooms

We'll rejoice there with wine. No wonder they love you!

The loving pleasure which makes all things yield their increase was a mystery that I knew, for sexual union was part of the ritual of the Goddess to sustain the fertility of the earth, and I was one of Her holy servants. But the other mystery, which unites the hearts of lover and lover, each to each in a way that no other can come between, was a new revelation to me, and I rejoiced in it. He was the mirror of my soul, my heart's twin, the beloved for whom I would search the city, radiant as gold and crimson, proud as cedars in the mountains. Had there been a dozen ceremonies, I would have married him by them all, according to the laws of Moses, or the will of the Goddess, or any other formula. He himself would later leave me, and renounce me, but my love for him has never left me, could never leave me, any more than I could tear the heart from my breast and go on living. Any more than I could cease to be qu'adishtu, sacred servant of the Lady of all Living, any more than I could withhold myself from the rituals of Her praise, or from the work of bringing Her strength and blessing to earth in its seasons. And why? Why should I not? What kind of God is it that would punish His people for knowing greater love than His?

But so it was. Hosea tried to understand, but he could never really reconcile himself, even from the beginning, to the knowledge that I belonged to my Lady even before I belonged to him, that I was set apart to a sacred work of great honor. He never really accepted that I could not simply choose his God, as I could take off one cloak, and put on another. In a way, his great prophecies are true; all that happened between us became a reflection of the struggles in the nation, once Jeroboam died.

He saw it coming, Hosea did, in that last year when the king was failing and the vultures began to gather. Our first son was born then, and Hosea said, "Call him Jezreel, for God is preparing a terrible vengeance for all that once happened in Jezreel." It was a shocking thing, as if someone were to say to you, "I'm going to name my child Auschwitz, because someone should pay for what happened there." But in its roots the phrase Jezreel means Yahweh god plants, and it pleased me to think of Yahweh planting a seed in the womb of a servant of the Goddess, so we named our son Jezreel. And then the world fell apart.

Jeroboam died, and Zechariah ascended to the throne, and lasted six months. His assassin, Shallum, ruled for less than one month before he was killed in his turn by Menahem, a shifty little man who raided any city that didn't acknowledge him, and had an unpleasant reputation for eviscerating pregnant women. It was every bit as bad as we had feared that it might be, and on top of that, a new, competent king came to power in Assyria, and he began invasions all along our borders. Menahem's only solution was to hang on to the throne by paying heavy tribute to Assyria, and passing along the cost in additional taxes.

Hosea was frantic. Already we were little more than a vassal state of Assyria, with almost no military power, and a fading sense of cultural integrity. And even more frightening, if Assyria decided they really wanted to conquer us, they had a policy of deporting the whole leadership of a vanquished nation to deep within their own borders, and repopulating the land with colonists from other countries. Once that happens, your connections to your past are irretrievably broken; you can never put the religion and the culture and the traditions back together again.

Hosea would pace the floor at night, trying to think, trying to see the future, trying to understand what had gone wrong, why his god had turned against the nation. And trying to understand, too, why his wife was not meek and obedient like those of his friends, who had married women from the Hebrew tradition. By the time our daughter was born, he had begun to withdraw from me, trying by silence and sulking to force me to abandon my work as a priestess. "Name her Lo Ruhamah," he said bitterly of the baby, -- it means unloved -- "for there is no love from Yahweh. Or from you," he added.

I tried desperately in those years to find a way to show him that who I was for the Goddess in Her rituals took nothing away from my love for him. The men of my own culture had always understood this; a qu'adishtu might be married, in fact it was generally considered a good match, for her prestige and her interests in the temple properties would be inherited by her daughters. But he grew less and less willing to listen, or to try to see; more absorbed in his own pain and his increasing political fanaticism. Finally, one night, all the pieces fell into place for him. "You're nothing but a common harlot," he flung at me. "You sell yourself to your lovers the same way that this whole country sells itself to foreign powers and to strange gods, when Yahweh has called it to be faithful to Him." "But what of the rituals of the Goddess?" I pleaded. "Where would we get our corn and oil, our wool and flax, the bread and water of the land, if it were not for Her blessing?" "Your Goddess has nothing to do with it," he stormed. "Yahweh gives you flax, Yahweh gives you wool, Yahweh gives you the very gold and silver that you use to make your stupid images. Well, there is going to be an end to it, to all your New Moon feasts and your sabbaths and your solemn festivals and your fancy rituals, Yahweh will see to that. And then maybe this country will come to its senses!"

Those ugly, angry words made the final break, and when I sent him word from the temple that his third child was safely delivered, a son, he sent back a message saying "Call him Lo Ammi, -- no people of mine -- for Yahweh says You are not my people, and I am no longer your God." And of course he also meant to say of the child, this is no son of mine.

Meanwhile, he was holding forth in the gates of the city, and on the steps of the temple, proclaiming our marriage as a sign of Yahweh's dealing with faithless Israel, announcing that God would abandon the nation just as Hosea had renounced me, unless they should repent, and turn away from depending upon alliances with foreign powers, and worshipping other gods. To a large extent, I agreed with him; people ought to be faithful to their gods, and when he denounced the political chaos:

"...like an oven the hearts of the princes burn with intrigue;

all night their anger smolders; in the morning it blazes like a flaming fire.

All of them are hot as an oven, and they devour their rulers.

All their kings have fallen, and none of them calls on me, says Yahweh," I cheered.

But when he fantasized about me, and how it might be if he could win me back, I could only weep, both for the tenderness of his love and yearning, and for the stubbornness of his pride, and the jealousy of his god, who refused to understand any other way. Listen:

"...I am going to lure her

and lead her out into the wilderness

and speak to her heart.

I am going to give her back her vineyards,

and make the valley called 'misfortune' a gateway of hope.

There she will respond to me as she did when she was young,

as she did when she came out of the land of Egypt.

When that day comes -- it is Yahweh who speaks (that's what Hosea said, anyway) --

she will call me My Husband,

and no longer will she call me My Ba'al.

I will take the names of the Ba'als off her lips,

their names shall never be uttered again.

When that day comes, I will make a treaty on her behalf

with the wild animals,

with the birds of heaven and the creeping things of the earth;

I will break bow, sword and all battle things in the country,

and make her sleep secure.

I will betroth you to myself for ever,

betroth you with integrity and justice,

with tenderness and love,

I will betroth you to myself with faithfulness,

and you will come to know Yahweh.

When that day comes -- it is Yahweh who speaks, he said --

the heavens will have their answer from me, the earth its answer from heaven.

the grain, the wine, the oil their answer from the earth,

and Jezreel his answer from them.

I will plant him securely in the land;

I will pity Lo Ruhamah,

I will say to Lo Ammi, you are my people,

and he will answer You are my God.

So great will be your day, O Jezreel;

to your brother say, People of Mine,

and to your sister, Beloved.

That reconciliation that he imagined so longingly never happened for us. Years before our beautiful city of Samaria fell to the Assyrian army, and the last king of Israel was led away in chains, my Hosea had died, despairing of both love and prophecy, and had gone to sleep with his ancestors. From my Lady's temple I watched it all in relative safety; the death of my beloved, and then the death of the dream to which he had given his life. What I could not know then was that the tradition to which I had given MY life, the Goddess I had served even at the cost of the only man I ever loved with a human love, would also be erased from the world.

For thousands of years it would seem that Yahweh and his battle-hungry followers had triumphed in the end; that our Goddess had been reduced to a primitive superstition, and we who served her to a kind of dirty joke. But my Lady is a good goddess; even after centuries of neglect, She has not forgotten us; perhaps the time is coming soon when She will be remembered with the honor which is Her due, and we who believed in Her will be understood as the righteous, reverent and spiritually powerful people that many of us were.

I am not sorry that my husband's words have been preserved; they tell a moving and important story of how it was between Israel and the god of their covenant, as they struggled to understand what it meant to be loving and faithful. We struggled too, he and I, and if we failed, I like to think that it was because we were both caught up in forces of history that were far beyond our power to change. Keep the stories alive today, and the words of wisdom, and the poetry that has come down to you; they are the only gifts that we can send forward in time. And I charge you this, for my sake: When you read the stories, and when you tell them, and when you look to them for guidance, hear also MY voice, and the voices of all those not on the winning side, silenced by the dust of ages. For we, no less than they who wrote the records, were by times heroic and foolish, and devout and crafty, and stubborn and generous and proud; and in our own ways we, no less than they, lived our lives in the covenant of faithful love.