When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, "Go, take to yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness, because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the Lord." So he married Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son. (Hosea 1:2-3)
Hosea is a contemporary of Isaiah, living eight centuries before Christ in the generation just before - or the generation of - the conquest of the Northern Kingdom by the Assyrians.
Many commentators on Hosea argue that Gomer as an Israelite, a proto-Samaritan, a resident of the Northern Kingdom, is ipso facto adulterous. The Hebrew is zawnuwn.
In this reading, Gomer is not necessarily a sexual whore. Much worse she is a spiritual whore. The religious practices of the Northern Kingdom tended to be syncretic, combining the Levitical tradition with rituals drawn from non-Jewish sources.
The case is also made that Gomer was a cult prostitute, a priestess of a fertility goddess such as Qedesha. As such she would have been both spiritually and sexually promiscuous.
Gomer is a Hebrew name meaning "to end, come to complete end." The name serves to reinforce the consequences of being unfaithful.
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