In these experiences the prophet again recognizes a parallel to Yahweh's long-suffering love to Israel, and the discipline by which the people shall be brought back to God through a period in which all their political and religious institutions are overthrown. Throughout these chapters personal narrative and prophetic allegory are interwoven with a rapidity of transition very puzzling to the modern reader; but an unbiassed exegesis can hardly fail to acknowledge that chs. i. and iii. narrate an actual passage in the prophet's life. The names of the three children are symbolical, but Isaiah in like manner gave symbolical names to his sons, embodying prominent points in his prophetic teaching (Shear-jashub, Isa. vii. 3, comp. x. 21; Maher-shalal-hash-baz, viii. 3). And the name of Gomer bath Diblaim is certainly that of an actual person, upon which all the allegorists, from the Targum, Jerome and Ephraem Syrus downwards, have spent their arts in vain, whereas the true symbolical names in the book are perfectly easy of interpretation.[4] That the ancient interpreters take the whole narrative as a mere parable is no more than an application of their standing rule that everything in the Biblical history is allegorical which in its literal sense appears offensive to propriety (comp. Jerome's proem to the book). But the supposed offence to propriety seems to rest on mistaken exegesis and too narrow a conception of the way in which the Divine word was communicated to the prophets.[5] There is no reason to suppose that Hosea knowingly married a woman of profligate character. The point of the allegory in i. 2 is plainly infidelity after marriage as a parallel to Israel's departure from the covenant God, and a profligate wife ([Hebrew: eshet znunim]) is not the same thing with an open prostitute ([Hebrew: zonna]). The marriage was marred by Gomer's infidelity; and the struggle of Hosea's affection for his wife with this great unhappiness--a struggle inconceivable unless his first love had been pure and full of trust in the purity of its object--furnished him with a new insight into Yahweh's dealings with Israel. Then he recognized that the great calamity of his life was God's own ordinance and appointed means to communicate to him a deep prophetic lesson. The recognition of a divine command after the fact has its parallel, as Wellhausen observes, in Jer. xxxii. 8.