CHAPTER 16

¹And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, ²“Man, make known to Jerusalem her abominations. ³And you shall say, Thus said the Master, the LORD to Jerusalem: Your origins and your birthplace are from the land of the Canaanite. Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. ⁴As to your birth, on the day of your birth, your navel cord was not cut nor were you washed smooth in water nor were you rubbed with salt nor were you swaddled. ⁵No eye had pity on you to do even one of these to show mercy to you, but you were flung out into the field in the disgust you caused on the day of your birth. ⁶And I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, and I said to you, ‘In your blood live,’ and I said to you, ‘In your blood live.’ ⁷Myriad as the plants of the field I made you, and you grew and came of age and put on the finest jewels. Your breasts were ripe and your hair sprung up, but you were stark naked. ⁸And I passed by you and saw you, and, look, your time was the time for lovemaking. And I spread My skirt over you and covered your nakedness, and vowed to you and entered a covenant with you, said the Master, the LORD, and you became Mine. ⁹And I washed you in water and rinsed your blood from upon you and rubbed you with oil. ¹⁰And I dressed you in embroidered cloth and shod you in ocher-dyed leather and turbaned you in linen and covered you with silk. ¹¹And I bedecked you with jewels and put bracelets on your arms and a necklace round your neck. ¹²And I put a ring on your nose and earrings on your ears and a splendid diadem on your head. ¹³And you were bedecked with gold and silver, and your attire was linen and silk and embroidered cloth. Fine flour and honey and oil you ate, and you became very, very beautiful and fit to be a queen. ¹⁴And a name for you went out among the nations for your beauty, for it was consummate through My splendor that I set upon you, said the Master, the LORD. ¹⁵And you trusted in your beauty and played the whore with your name, and you spilled out your whoring upon every passerby—his it was. ¹⁶And you took from your garments and made yourself tapestried high places and played the whore on them. Such things should never be. ¹⁷And you took your splendid ornaments, from My gold and from My silver that I gave to you, and made for yourself male images and played the whore with them. ¹⁸And you took your embroidered garments and covered them, and My oil and My incense you set before them. ¹⁹And My bread that I gave you, the fine flour and honey and oil that I fed you, you set before them as a fragrant odor, and so it was, said the Master, the LORD. ²⁰And you took your sons and your daughters whom you had born Me and sacrificed them to these as food. And as though your whorings were not enough, ²¹you slaughtered My sons and gave them over to these. ²²And with all your abominations and your whorings you did not recall the days of your youth when you were stark naked, wallowing in your blood you were. ²³And it happened after all your evil—woe, oh woe to you—said the Master, the LORD, ²⁴that you built yourself mounds and made yourself a height in every square. ²⁵At every crossroad you built your height, and you befouled your beauty and spread your legs for every passerby and multiplied your whorings. ²⁶And you played the whore with the Egyptians, your big-membered neighbors, and multiplied your whorings to vex Me. ²⁷And, look, I set My hand on you and cut back your daily portion and gave you into the gullet of those who hate you, the Philistine girls shocked by your lewd way. ²⁸And you played the whore with the Assyrians insatiably, and you played the whore with them, yet were not sated. ²⁹And you multiplied your whorings as far as the trader-land, Chaldea, but even in this you were not sated. ³⁰How hot was your ardor, said the Master, the LORD, when you did all these, the acts of a willful whore, ³¹Building your mound at every crossroad and making your height in every square, but you were not like a whore, for you scorned a whore’s pay. ³²Adulteress, who takes strangers instead of her husband! ³³To every whore they give pay, but you, you gave your pay to all your lovers and bribed them to come to bed with you in your whoring all around. ³⁴And you became the contrary of women in your whoring, and after you none will play the whore so, when you gave a whore’s pay and no whore’s pay was given you but the contrary. ³⁵Therefore, whore, listen to the word of the LORD. ³⁶Thus said the Master, the LORD: Inasmuch as your wetness poured out and you laid bare your nakedness in your whoring with your lovers and with all the foul things of your abominations, as by the blood of your children that you gave to them, ³⁷therefore I am about to gather all your lovers to whom you were sweet, and all whom you loved with all whom you hated, and I will gather them against you from all around and lay bare your nakedness to them, and they shall see all your nakedness. ³⁸And I will condemn you with the punishment of adulteresses and women who shed blood and give you over to blood, wrath, and jealousy. ³⁹And I will give you into their hand, and they shall wreck your mound and raze your heights, and they shall strip your garments from you and take your splendid ornaments and leave you stark naked. ⁴⁰And they shall bring up a crowd against you and stone you and hack you to pieces with their swords. ⁴¹And they shall burn your houses in fire and inflict punishment upon you before the eyes of many women, and I will stop you from being a whore, nor whore’s pay shall you give anymore. ⁴²And I will let My fury against you come to a rest, and My jealousy of you shall turn away, and I will be tranquil and no longer be vexed. ⁴³Inasmuch as you did not recall the days of your youth nor quake before Me in all these things, I on My part, look, I have set out your way first, said the Master, the LORD. Have you not done lewdness in addition to all your abominations? ⁴⁴Look, whoever pronounces a byword says about you, ‘Like mother, like daughter.’ ⁴⁵You are your mother’s daughter, showing contempt for her husband and her children. And you are your sister’s sister, who showed contempt for their husbands and their children. Your mother is a Hittite and your father is an Amorite. ⁴⁶And your big sister is Samaria—she and her daughters—who dwells on your left, and your little sister who dwells on your right is Sodom and her daughters. ⁴⁷Did you not go in their ways and perform their abominations? Very soon, you will have acted more ruinously than they in all your ways. ⁴⁸By My life, said the Master, the LORD, surely Sodom and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done. ⁴⁹Here was the crime of Sodom and her daughters: the pride of satiety of bread and the ease of tranquillity she and her daughters had, and she did not support the hand of the poor and the needy. ⁵⁰And they were haughty and performed abominations before Me, and I removed them when I saw it. ⁵¹And Samaria, barely half your offenses she committed, and you did more abominations than these, and you made your sister look innocent through all your abominations that you performed. ⁵²Even you, bear your disgrace for advocating for your sister through your offenses in which you were more abominable than they and they more innocent than you. And even you, be shamed and bear your disgrace for making your sister look innocent. ⁵³And I will restore their fortunes, the fortunes of Sodom and her daughters and the fortunes of Samaria and her daughters, and the fortunes of your captives in their midst, ⁵⁴so that you bear your disgrace and be disgraced by all that you have done in giving comfort to them. ⁵⁵And your sisters, Sodom and her daughters, shall be restored to their former state, and Samaria and her daughters shall be restored to their former state, and you and your daughters shall be restored to your former state. ⁵⁶Was not Sodom, your sister, a word of scorn in your mouth on the day of your pride, ⁵⁷before your evil was exposed? Now [you are] a disgrace to the daughters of Aram and all her environs, to the daughters of the Philistines who loathe you all around. ⁵⁸You have borne your lewdness and your abominations, said the LORD. ⁵⁹For thus said the Master, the LORD: I will do unto you as you have done when you despised the oath to violate the covenant. ⁶⁰But I on My part will recall My covenant with you in the days of your youth and establish for you an everlasting covenant. ⁶¹And you shall recall your ways and be ashamed when you receive your big sisters and your little sisters and I give them to you as daughters, though they are not of your covenant. ⁶²And I Myself will establish the covenant with you, and you will know that I am the LORD. ⁶³So that you recall and be shamed, and you shall be unable to open your mouth again because of your disgrace when I atone for you for all that you have done,” said the Master, the LORD.

CHAPTER 16 NOTES

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3. Your origins and your birthplace are from the land of the Canaanite. The point is that the people of Israel is not to think of itself as altogether unique—it is just one of the Canaanite peoples (Amorites and Hittites are ethnic groups repeatedly numbered among the seven that constitute the population of Canaan). One wonders whether this statement might reflect a historical tradition that the origins of Israel were not in a Hebrew slave population escaped from Egypt but among the indigenous peoples of Canaan. That, in fact, is the view of modern scholarship.

4. your navel cord was not cut. This emphasis on addressing the physical care of the newborn prepares us for the focus on the physicality of the mature woman who will develop from this infant.

nor were you rubbed with salt. There was a practice—still sometimes observed among Bedouins—of rubbing the baby’s body with a mixture of olive oil and salt in the belief that it toughened the tender skin.

5. you were flung out into the field in the disgust you caused. It is hard to relate these details of the neglect of the newborn babe to the actual history of Israel, except, perhaps, through some general sense that the origins of the people were humble and unpromising. The point seems to be that God now takes up the neglected and rejected child and nurtures her, bringing her to flourishing womanhood.

6. wallowing in your blood. This would be the blood of childbirth that had not been wiped away.

In your blood live. Despite being covered with blood, you will now live. There may be a suggestion that the future history of Israel will be marked by bloodshed but that the people will nevertheless survive. The repetition of these words might be a scribal duplication.

7. Myriad. Although many interpreters understand this simply to mean “growing” or “sprouting,” the set meaning of the Hebrew term is “myriad,” and this surely could be a reference to the proliferation of the people, the allegory of the daughter slipping from the allegorical vehicle to its tenor or referent, the history of Israel. This will occur again at another point in the prophecy.

your hair. The context suggests that this is pubic hair.

8. your time was the time for lovemaking. The infant girl has passed puberty, and God (seen before as a kind of foster father) will now take her as His bride—“I . . . vowed to you and entered a covenant with you . . . and you became Mine.” But the focus on her sexuality will then be given an explosive development.

9. And I washed you in water and rinsed your blood from upon you. These acts appear to repair the neglect of the infant, as though the blood of birth were still on her. But the blood now may well be the blood from the onset of menstruation.

10. I dressed you in embroidered cloth. In the allegory, this whole catalogue of finery refers to the splendor of Jerusalem and its Temple that God bestowed on His people.

15. And you trusted in your beauty and played the whore. The image of unfaithful Israel as a whore betraying her Spouse by dalliance with alien gods is common in the Prophets, appearing in Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. No other prophet, however, focuses at such length and so concretely as does Ezekiel on the physical aspects of promiscuity. One detects here an expression of Ezekiel’s distinctive psychology, which appears to involve some sort of morbid obsession with the female body in its sexual aspect. The word “whore” and its derivatives are repeated again and again.

you spilled out your whoring upon every passerby. Because of the unusual choice of the verb “spill out,” the reference may well be to vaginal secretions as a metonomy for “whoring.” Such a reference is made explicit in verse 36.

16. tapestried high places. This is a crossover from allegorical vehicle to tenor: the woman Zion was adorned in finery; here she takes embroidered cloth to decorate the altars of pagan worship.

Such things should never be. The Hebrew wording at this point is somewhat cryptic, so the translation is an educated guess.

17. made for yourself male images and played the whore with them. The whoring is again the following of a pagan cult, but in the allegorical vehicle there is a suggestion of autoeroticism in this playing with male—probably phallic—images.

18. covered them. That is, covered the idols.

My oil and My incense. The oil and incense that should have been used for the worship of YHWH in the Temple were devoted to pagan deities.

20. And you took your sons and your daughters. Child sacrifice, which on the evidence of the Prophets was actually practiced in ancient Israel, is regarded as one of the greatest obscenities of the pagan cult.

24. mounds . . . a height in every square. These structures are different from the hilltop altars or “high places” mentioned so frequently, but they are clearly constructed sites for pagan worship.

26. the Egyptians, your big-membered neighbors. As is often the case of different peoples living in proximity, fantasies spring up about the sexual potency or endowments of the neighboring group. Here, the prophet excoriates the lasciviousness of the Daughter of Zion by asserting that she was drawn to the Egyptians by the supposed large size of their male members. This complements the image of playing the whore with phallic icons.

27. the Philistine girls shocked by your lewd way. Even the young women of Philistia, reputed to be far from virtuous, are shocked by your lasciviousness.

29. but even in this you were not sated. This reiterated emphasis clearly suggests that the Daughter of Zion is what used to be called a nymphomaniac, before that term was discredited.

30. How hot was your ardor. The meaning of both the adjective and the noun is not altogether clear. This translation follows Greenberg’s philological analysis and adopts his English rendering of the phrase. The heat of ardor is certainly in keeping with the thematic emphasis of the prophecy as a whole.

31. for you scorned a whore’s pay. You did not give yourself to other men for pay, which at least would have had a commercial logic, but gratuitously, out of sheer perversity.

32. instead of her husband. Some construe this phrase to mean “while under her husband’s authority.”

33. you gave your pay to all your lovers and bribed them to come to bed with you. The unbridled lust of Israel is such that she paid to get sex from all her alien lovers. This reduces them to gigolos and may imply that she has lost her extraordinary beauty through all her whoring.

36. your wetness poured out and you laid bare your nakedness in your whoring. The initial noun nehushteikh resembles the Hebrew word for “bronze” (hence the New Jewish Publication Society renders it as “brazen effrontery”). But contemporary scholarship has made a convincing case that it is an Akkadian loanword that means “vaginal lubrication.” This not only fits the focus on the bodily manifestations of female sexuality, but also is likely because of Ezekiel’s location in Babylonia, where Akkadian was used—he might well have been inclined to borrow a term for which there was no good Hebrew equivalent.

as by the blood of your children that you gave to them. The wording of this reference to child sacrifice, the greatest of pagan abominations, loops back to the wallowing in blood of the infant Daughter of Zion, which is now seen as a foreshadowing of her future behavior.

37. I will . . . lay bare your nakedness to them, and they shall see all your nakedness. This is a piece of measure-for-measure justice: she has spread her legs for every passerby; now she will be shamefully exposed to all eyes, not only to her former lovers but to those whom she despised.

38. women who shed blood. Here, again, there is a shuttling between tenor and vehicle. “Adulteress” belongs to the figurative representation of paganism as whoring, whereas the bloodshed refers literally to child sacrifice.

39. they shall strip your garments from you . . . and leave you stark naked. This was in fact a known punishment for an adulteress in many regions of the ancient Near East. The allegorical reference would be to the stripping away of the splendor of Jerusalem, razed by its conquerors, and to the divestment of national sovereignty.

40. stone you and hack you to pieces. This was an actual practice: stoning to death followed by mutilation of the corpse.

42. My jealousy. Given the whole context of sexual betrayal, the Hebrew qinʾah surely means “jealousy” and not “passion,” as many have claimed.

44. Like mother, like daughter. The point of invoking this proverb here is that Israel’s waywardness is a long-standing practice, not something invented by the current generation. Authorized by the convention of representing cities and nations as women, Ezekiel continues through this section of the prophecy in his sharply gender-focused denunciation, invoking mothers and daughters and sisters.

45. Your mother is a Hittite and your father is an Amorite. This line from the very beginning of the prophecy is repeated here because Ezekiel will go on to say that the people of Judah resembles its neighbors in evil, only it is worse than they.

46. your big sister is Samaria. “Big” and “little” here refer not to age but to the size of the territory of each of these kingdoms.

she and her daughters. The Hebrew builds on an untranslatable pun: “daughters” also means the villages or hamlets around a city, the implied metaphor being that the city is the mother.

on your left . . . on your right. Left and right are, respectively, north and south, the imagined point of orientation being someone facing the east (one word for “east” also means “front” or “forward”).

48. surely Sodom and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done. The idea that Israel could turn into Sodom had some currency early in biblical literature (compare Judges 19 and Isaiah 1). Ezekiel, however, pushes the notion further by contending that Israel is worse than Sodom. In verse 49, it is explained that Sodom’s crime consisted in neglecting the needy through her complacent satisfaction with her own affluence. This scarcely accords with the representation of the Sodomites as vicious sexual predators in Genesis 19, but the prophet probably wants to reserve sexual misbehavior exclusively for his castigation of his own people.

51. and you made your sister look innocent. Zion’s offenses are compounded by the fact that they were so unspeakable that even the crimes of her neighbors to the north and south came to look innocent by comparison.

52. bear your disgrace for advocating for your sister. This is a rhetorical conceit: by setting a standard of evil that her neighbors could not equal, Judah became an inadvertent advocate for them.

55. And your sisters, Sodom and her daughters . . . and Samaria and her daughters shall be restored to their former state, and you and your daughters shall be restored to your former state. The prophet now gives his argument another peculiar twist. “Restoring the former state” (the idiom that appears in verse 55) is equally used to express the national restoration of the people of Israel after its punishment. Here, however, in keeping with “your mother is a Hittite and your father is an Amorite,” this restoration is not unique for Judah but part of a general pattern in the region.

56. a word of scorn. More literally, “a rumor.”

57. [you are] a disgrace to the daughters of Aram. The bracketed words do not appear in the Hebrew but are necessary for intelligibility and may have been dropped in scribal transmission. Some critics emend “Aram” to “Edom” (graphically similar in Hebrew) because the Edomites became eager allies of the Babylonian invaders.

60. But I on My part will recall My covenant with you. Even though Israel has been a faithless, adulterous wife, God remains committed to the everlasting covenant He has sealed with His people.

61. though they are not of your covenant. This clause reflects two rather cryptic Hebrew words, and the sense is uncertain.

63. you shall be unable to open your mouth. The literal sense is “you shall have no opening of the mouth.”