|
The Biblical
People Called,
GOMER
In History and Prophecy
The Book of Hosea contains an
important and little-understood parable concerning the House of
Israel. God commanded, “Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and
children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom,
departing from the LORD.” (Hos 1:2) Israel had joined
herself to foreign gods and practices, becoming unfaithful to Yahweh,
who likened her practices to harlotry. As a prophetic demonstration of
this, Hosea married a harlot named ‘Gomer’ representing ten-tribed
Israel. Scott’s Bible Commentary says, “Gomer was an
Israelite.” (IV:704, Hos. 1:2) The prophet and his harlot wife,
Gomer, subsequently had three children, all of whose names were also
prophetic: Jezreel (meaning “scattered”), Lo-Ruhamah (“not
pitied”), and Lo-Ammi (“Not My People”). God explained the
prophetic meaning of the children’s names: “I… will cause to
cease the kingdom of the house of Israel... I will no more have mercy
upon the house of Israel; but I will utterly take them away… ye are
‘not my people’, and I will not be your God.” (Hos. 1:4, 6,
9) In prophetic parable, God revealed that Israel would be conquered
and scattered out of Palestine throughout the world.
Fortunately, Israel’s divorce and estrangement from God was not
permanent. The prophet Hosea revealed that the time was coming when God
would have pity on ‘not pitied’ (2:23). Israel would be
remarried to Yahweh and call Him husband: “thou
shalt call me Ishi [husband]; and shalt call me no
more Baali… And I will betroth thee unto me for ever… I will even betroth
thee unto me in faithfulness: and thou shalt know the LORD.”
(Hosea 2:16, 19, 20)
This Spiritual remarriage would be through ‘Gomer’ coming to know
the Lord by faith in Christ, Who was God in the flesh. (John 1:1, 18)
Hosea’s prophecy of Israel’s
conversion was reconfirmed
by the Apostle Paul in the New Testament: “Yet the
number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which
cannot be measured nor numbered; and it shall come to pass, that in the
place where it was said unto them, Ye are ‘not my people’ [Lo-Ammi],
there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God.” (Hos.
1:10, Romans 9:26) Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and the sons of
the Living God are Christians. How was this fulfilled in history?
Scholars have established that the people called ‘Gomer’ were the
ancestors of the early European tribes called Gamir, Cimmerians, or
Celts. (Appendix 3) McClintock & Strong’s Encyclopedia
says that Gomer, “formed a great branch of the south-eastern
population of Europe.” (III:920) In fulfillment of Hosea’s
prophecies, they became the nations of “Christendom,” Christ’s
Kingdom on earth, within a few short centuries after Messiah’s First
Coming.
The story of Israel dispersed, lost, and later restored is beautifully
told in Christ’s Parable of the Prodigal (or Lost) Son in Luke 15. The
Father in the parable is God our Heavenly Father, and the two sons
represent the Houses of Israel and Judah. The lost son, Israel, indeed
returns and is restored to his Father, who prepares a feast representing
the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. The illustrations on the opposite page
graphically represent Israel lost and Israel restored.
Some confusion is caused by a non-Hebrew ‘Gomer’ mentioned in Gen.
10, but that individual lived well over a thousand years before the
Gomer representing Israel of Hosea’s prophecies. Further, the tenth
chapter of Genesis is a geographic representation of nations, rather
than racial, and is allegorical rather than literal. We believe in
taking the Bible literally whenever possible, interpreting allegorically
only when a literal explanation cannot apply, such as is the case here.
It has been shown by scholars that the national relationships found in
Genesis chapter ten do not fit a literal, racial interpretation. For
example, well-respected scholar Dr. Henry Sayce says, “The
tenth chapter of Genesis is ethnographical rather than ethnological. It
does not profess to give an account of the different races of the world
and to separate them one from another according to their various
characteristics. It is descriptive merely, and such races of men as fell
within the horizon of the writer are described from the point of view of
the geographer and not of the ethnologist. The Greeks and Medes, for
example, are grouped along with the Tibarenian and Moschian tribes
because they all alike lived in the north; the Egyptian and the
Canaanite are similarly classed together, while the Semitic Assyrian and
the non-Semitic Elamite are both the children of Shem. We shall never
understand the chapter rightly unless we bear in mind that its main
purpose is geographical. In Hebrew, as in other Semitic languages, the
relation between a mother-state to its colony, or of a town or country
to its inhabitants, was expressed in a genealogical form. The
inhabitants of Jerusalem were regarded as ‘the daughter of
Jerusalem,’ the people of the east were ‘the children’ of the
district to which they belonged.”
(Dr. A. H. Sayce, Races
of the Old Testament, pp. 65-66)
Dr. Sayce points out that this is the reason the South Arabian tribe of
Sheba is listed twice in Genesis 10, once under the designation of Ham
in verse 7, and again listed under Shem in verse
28. The tribe of Sheba originated in the south, but later spread a
colony far to the north which clashed with Assyria in the days of
Tiglath-Pilesar and Shalmanesar. (ibid.,
p. 65-66) Sayce remarks, “When,
therefore, we are told that ‘Canaan
begat Zidon his first-born, and Heth,’ all that is meant is that the
city of Sidon, and the Hittites to whom reference is made, were alike to
be found in the country called Canaan. It does not follow that there was
any ethnological kinship between the Phoenician builders of Sidon and
the prognathous Hittites
from the north. Indeed, we know from modern research that there was
none.”
(ibid., p. 66)
Sayce, in fact, reproduces Egyptian drawings of both Phoenicians and
Hittites, showing graphically that there was a dramatic
difference in physical features (and therefore origins) between these
two peoples. Similarly, Assyria, Elam, and Babylonia (Arphaxad) were
called brethren, “not because the natives of them claimed
descent from a common father, but because they occupied the same quarter
of the world.” ( ibid.,
p. 66-67) Ancient races portrayed on Egyptian monuments are shown by
Dr. Sayce in the box above. Clockwise from left top, are a king of the
Hittites (with pigtail), Hittite soldiers, an Israelite, and a chief of
Ganata or Gath, showing Phoenician-Canaanite features.
(ibid.,Sayce frontispiece)
|
