Biblical scholar Ehud Ben Zvi reminds readers of the socio-historical context in which Hosea was composed. In his article Observations on the marital metaphor of YHWH and Israel in its ancient Israelite context: general considerations and particular images in Hosea 1.2, Ben Zvi describes the role of the Gomer in the marriage metaphor as one of the "central attributes of the ideological image of a human marriage that was shared by the male authorship and the primary and intended male readership as building blocks for their imagining of the relationship."