For Teaching

Ezekiel 23: What the Passage Says

191 claims across 49 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Ezekiel 23 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

The LORD gives Ezekiel a long, graphic parable about two sisters, Aholah and Aholibah, who are named as Samaria and Jerusalem. Both sold themselves in Egypt when they were young; then Aholah chased after Assyria and its idols and was handed over to the Assyrians, and Aholibah went further still, chasing Assyria and then Babylon. Because of this, the Lord GOD says he will bring Aholibah's former lovers against her to strip her, mutilate her and kill her children, and will bring an assembly against both sisters to stone them and burn their houses. The chapter also charges both sisters with child sacrifice and with defiling the sanctuary and the Sabbaths, and ends with the sentence carried out so that they will know he is the Lord GOD.

Claim by Claim

23:1
- The word of the LORD came to Ezekiel again.
- The LORD spoke to him, saying the following.
23:2
- God addressed the prophet as son of man.
- There were two women.
- The two women were daughters of one mother.
23:3
- The two women prostituted themselves in Egypt.
- They prostituted themselves in their youth.
- In Egypt their breasts were squeezed.
- In Egypt the nipples of their virginity were handled.
23:4
- The name of the elder woman was Oholah.
- The name of her sister was Oholibah.
- The two women became God's.
- The two women bore sons and daughters.
- Oholah is Samaria.
- Oholibah is Jerusalem.
23:5
- Oholah prostituted herself while she belonged to God.
- Oholah lusted after her lovers.
- Her lovers were the Assyrians.
- The Assyrians were near to her.
23:6
- The Assyrians were clothed in blue.
- They were governors and prefects.
- All of them were desirable young men.
- They were horsemen riding on horses.
23:7
- Oholah gave her prostitution to the Assyrians.
- They were the choicest of the sons of Assyria.
- She defiled herself with all the idols of everyone she lusted after.
23:8
- Oholah did not abandon the prostitution she began in Egypt.
- In her youth men had lain with her.
- They had handled the nipples of her virginity.
- They had poured out their lust upon her.
23:9
- Therefore God delivered Oholah into the hand of her lovers.
- God delivered her into the hand of the sons of Assyria.
- She had lusted after the Assyrians.
23:10
- The Assyrians uncovered Oholah's nakedness.
- They took her sons and her daughters.
- They killed her with the sword.
- She became a byword among women.
- They executed judgments upon her.
23:11
- Her sister Oholibah saw this.
- Oholibah was more corrupt in her lust than her sister.
- Oholibah's prostitution exceeded her sister's prostitution.
23:12
- Oholibah lusted after the sons of Assyria.
- They were governors and prefects.
- They were near to her.
- They were dressed in full splendid clothing.
- They were horsemen riding on horses.
- All of them were desirable young men.
23:13
- God saw that Oholibah had defiled herself.
- Both sisters took the same way.
23:14
- Oholibah added to her prostitution.
- She saw men portrayed on a wall.
- The figures were images of Chaldeans.
- The images were engraved in vermilion.
23:15
- The pictured men wore belts on their loins.
- They had flowing turbans on their heads.
- All of them looked like officers.
- They resembled the Babylonians.
- They were Chaldeans.
- Chaldea was the land of their birth.
23:16
- Oholibah lusted after them at the sight of her eyes.
- She sent messengers to them in Chaldea.
23:17
- The Babylonians came to her into the bed of love.
- They defiled her with their lust.
- She was defiled by them.
- Her soul then turned away from them in disgust.
23:18
- Oholibah uncovered her prostitution.
- She uncovered her nakedness.
- God's soul turned away from her in disgust.
- God's soul had turned away from her sister in the same way.
23:19
- Oholibah multiplied her prostitution.
- She remembered the days of her youth.
- In her youth she had prostituted herself in the land of Egypt.
23:20
- Oholibah lusted after their lovers.
- The flesh of those lovers was like the flesh of donkeys.
- Their emission was like the emission of horses.
23:21
- Oholibah revisited the lewdness of her youth.
- In Egypt her nipples were handled.
- This was done for the sake of the breasts of her youth.
23:22
- God addressed Oholibah.
- This is what the Lord GOD says.
- God will rouse up her lovers against her.
- Her soul had turned away from those lovers in disgust.
- God will bring them against her from every side.
23:23
- Those brought against her include the Babylonians.
- They include all the Chaldeans.
- They include Pekod, Shoa, and Koa.
- They include all the Assyrians with them.
- All of them are desirable young men.
- They are governors and prefects.
- They are officers and men of renown.
- All of them ride on horses.
23:24
- They will come against her with chariots and wagons and wheels.
- They will come with an assembly of peoples.
- They will set buckler and shield and helmet against her all around.
- God will set judgment before them.
- They will judge her according to their own judgments.
23:25
- God will set his jealousy against her.
- They will deal with her in fury.
- They will remove her nose and her ears.
- Her remnant will fall by the sword.
- They will take her sons and her daughters.
- Her remnant will be devoured by fire.
23:26
- They will strip her of her clothes.
- They will take her beautiful ornaments.
23:27
- God will make her lewdness cease from her.
- God will end her prostitution begun in the land of Egypt.
- She will not lift up her eyes to them.
- She will not remember Egypt any more.
23:28
- This is what the Lord GOD says.
- God will deliver her into the hand of those she hates.
- God will deliver her into the hand of those from whom her soul turned away in disgust.
23:29
- They will deal with her in hatred.
- They will take all that she labored for.
- They will leave her naked and bare.
- The nakedness of her prostitution will be uncovered.
- Her lewdness and her prostitution will be exposed.
23:30
- These things will be done to her because she prostituted herself after the nations.
- These things will be done to her because she was defiled with their idols.
23:31
- She walked in the way of her sister.
- God will give her sister's cup into her hand.
23:32
- This is what the Lord GOD says.
- She will drink her sister's cup.
- The cup is deep and wide.
- She will become an object of laughter and derision.
- The cup holds much.
23:33
- She will be filled with drunkenness and sorrow.
- The cup is a cup of horror and desolation.
- It is the cup of her sister Samaria.
23:34
- She will drink the cup and drain it.
- She will gnaw its broken pieces.
- She will tear her own breasts.
- God says that he has spoken it.
- This is the declaration of the Lord GOD.
23:35
- This is what the Lord GOD says.
- She has forgotten God.
- She has cast God behind her back.
- Therefore she must bear her own lewdness and her prostitution.
23:36
- The LORD spoke further to Ezekiel.
- God addressed him as son of man.
- God asked whether he would judge Oholah and Oholibah.
- God told him to declare their abominations to them.
23:37
- They have committed adultery.
- Blood is on their hands.
- They have committed adultery with their idols.
- They made their sons pass through the fire to the idols.
- Those sons had been borne to God.
- The sons were passed over to be devoured.
23:38
- They have also done this to God.
- They defiled God's sanctuary on that same day.
- They profaned God's sabbaths.
23:39
- They slaughtered their children to their idols.
- On that same day they came into God's sanctuary to profane it.
- They did this inside God's house.
23:40
- They sent for men who came from far away.
- A messenger was sent to those men.
- The men came.
- For them she washed herself.
- She painted her eyes.
- She adorned herself with ornaments.
23:41
- She sat on a stately bed.
- A table was prepared before it.
- She set God's incense and God's oil on that table.
23:42
- The sound of a carefree crowd was with her.
- Men were brought in from the wilderness along with men of the common multitude.
- The Hebrew leaves it ambiguous whether those brought from the wilderness were Sabeans or drunkards.
- They put bracelets on the women's hands.
- They put beautiful crowns on the women's heads.
23:43
- The speaker spoke concerning the woman worn out in adulteries.
- The speaker asked whether they would now commit prostitution with her and she with them.
- The wording of this saying is obscure.
23:44
- They went in to her as men go in to a prostitute.
- In that way they went in to Oholah and to Oholibah.
- Oholah and Oholibah are called lewd women.
23:45
- Righteous men will judge them.
- They will judge them with the judgment for adulteresses.
- They will judge them with the judgment for women who shed blood.
- The two women are adulteresses.
- Blood is on their hands.
23:46
- This is what the Lord GOD says.
- God will bring up an assembly against them.
- God will give them over to terror and to plunder.
23:47
- The assembly will stone them with stones.
- The assembly will cut them down with their swords.
- They will kill their sons and their daughters.
- They will burn their houses with fire.
23:48
- God will make lewdness cease from the land.
- All women will be disciplined by this.
- They will not act according to your lewdness.
23:49
- They will place your lewdness upon you.
- You will bear the sins of your idols.
- You will know that I am the Lord GOD.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

23:1: "The word of the LORD came again unto me" is Ezekiel's standard formula for marking the start of a new message. LORD printed in small capitals stands for the personal name of Israel's God in the Hebrew text, a name Jewish tradition avoided pronouncing aloud; where the Hebrew has the ordinary word for master, English Bibles print "Lord" in normal type.
23:2: "Son of man" translates a Hebrew phrase meaning simply "human being" or "mortal." It is the way God addresses Ezekiel throughout the book, over ninety times, and it marks the prophet as an ordinary man being spoken to by God. The two women are explained in verse 4: they stand for two capital cities, and through them two kingdoms. After the death of Solomon the single kingdom of Israel split in two, which is why the prophet calls them sisters born of one mother.
23:3: Israel's prophets regularly spoke of the bond between God and the nation as a marriage, so that worship of other gods, and treaties with foreign powers that came with obligations to their gods, could be described as adultery or prostitution. Ezekiel pushes this stock image much further than any other prophet; the Hebrew of this chapter is deliberately coarse and was meant to shock its hearers. "Egypt" and "their youth" refer to the period when the Israelites lived in Egypt before the exodus, treated here as the nation's childhood.
23:4: The two names are made from the Hebrew word for "tent," which can mean a tent-shrine or place of worship. Aholah means roughly "her own tent" and Aholibah "my tent is in her", a contrast that fits Jerusalem, where the temple stood, against Samaria's rival sanctuaries. The two names also simply sound alike, as sisters' names might. Samaria was the capital of the northern kingdom, Israel; Jerusalem was the capital of the southern kingdom, Judah.
23:5: Assyria was the empire based in northern Mesopotamia (modern northern Iraq) that dominated the region from roughly the ninth to the late seventh century BC. The northern kingdom paid it tribute and courted its favor before Assyria finally destroyed Samaria. "Lovers" throughout this chapter means foreign powers sought as allies or overlords, together with their gods and religious practices.
23:6: Blue and purple cloth was dyed with a costly extract from a Mediterranean sea snail and was worn by officials and the wealthy. The color itself signaled rank.
23:7: "Defiled" is a worship word rather than a hygiene word. To be defiled meant to be in a state that barred you from approaching God's sanctuary until you were purified.
23:9: This points to real history. Assyria, the very power the northern kingdom had courted, captured Samaria in 722 BC and deported its population.
23:10: Stripping a convicted adulteress naked in public was a recognized legal humiliation in the ancient Near East, which is why the image recurs through this chapter. The event behind the verse is the Assyrian capture of Samaria in 722 BC, after which the population was deported and the northern kingdom ceased to exist. "A byword" means a name people used as a warning or an insult.
23:11: "Inordinate love" means desire past all limits. Judah had watched the northern kingdom destroyed roughly a century earlier and, in Ezekiel's telling, learned nothing from it.
23:12: This matches the record. Judah's King Ahaz appealed to Assyria for military help against his neighbors, and paid for it in tribute and in imported religious practice.
23:14: The Chaldeans were a people of southern Babylonia; from 626 BC a Chaldean dynasty ruled the Babylonian Empire, so "Chaldean" and "Babylonian" are used here as interchangeable terms. Vermilion is a bright red pigment. Assyrian and Babylonian palaces were decorated with painted and glazed wall reliefs showing rows of soldiers and officials, often picked out in red, pictures Judeans could have seen on embassies or on imported goods.
23:15: The sash and the wound cloth headdress were marks of rank in Babylonian dress, the equivalent of a uniform and insignia.
23:16: Sending messengers means sending a diplomatic embassy to ask for alliance or to offer submission. Judah's kings did this repeatedly in Ezekiel's lifetime, playing Babylon and Egypt against each other.
23:17: Behind the image is the political history: Judah became a vassal of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar in 605-597 BC, then turned against its overlord and rebelled.
23:19: Judah's later kings sought Egyptian military help against Babylon; the appeal to Egypt is the "return to youth" the passage keeps describing.
23:20: "Flesh" and "issue" are euphemisms in the Hebrew for the genitals and for semen. The comparison to donkeys and stallions is a crude way of speaking of the Egyptians' size and potency, and stands for the military power Judah hoped to gain from them.
23:21: "Paps" is an old English word for breasts.
23:22: This is the turn of the chapter: the empire Judah courted for protection becomes the army that destroys it. Babylon besieged Jerusalem and burned it in 586 BC.
23:23: Pekod, Shoa and Koa are peoples living east of the Tigris who were subject to Babylon; they appear in Assyrian and Babylonian records as the Puqudu, Sutu and Qutu. "Pekod" also sounds like the Hebrew verb meaning "to punish," a pun the hearers would have caught.
23:24: The Hebrew word rendered here as "weapons" (KJV: "wheels") is uncertain; it may name a kind of vehicle or a siege engine. The two shields are different pieces of equipment: a small round buckler carried on the arm, and a large shield that covered the whole body.
23:25: Cutting off the nose and ears was a real punishment for adultery in Egyptian and Mesopotamian law, and Assyrian and Babylonian armies inflicted it on prisoners. The threat is legal as well as military: the sentence fits the crime the chapter has been describing.
23:26: Stripping prisoners of clothing and valuables was ordinary practice for a conquering army, and stripping a woman in public was the recognized shaming of a convicted adulteress. The two pictures are being held together on purpose.
23:29: "Labour" here does not mean the work itself but everything the work produced: property, savings, stored harvest.
23:30: "The heathen" in the King James simply means the other nations, the peoples who were not Israel. It carries no comment on their character; modern translations render the same word as "the nations".
23:31: The cup is a standard prophetic image: a drink handed to someone that they must swallow whole, meaning the fate assigned to them. A nation staggering under disaster is pictured as a person reeling drunk. "Her cup" is the fate that already fell on Samaria in 722 BC.
23:32: "Had in derision" means treated as a joke.
23:33: "Astonishment" in 1611 English means stunned horror, not pleasant surprise.
23:34: Gashing or beating the breast was a recognized gesture of violent grief and mourning. The Hebrew of this line is difficult and has been read in several ways; the sense of self-inflicted injury in despair is clear even where the wording is not.
23:35: "Cast me behind thy back" is an idiom for deliberately putting something out of sight so you do not have to think about it.
23:36: The prophet is being told to act as a prosecutor, reading out the charges. "Abominations" translates a Hebrew word for practices regarded as detestable and unfit to come near God, most often used of idol worship.
23:37: "Passing through the fire" is the standard biblical phrase for child sacrifice, carried out in the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem and associated with the god Molech. Israel's law forbade it, and the books of Kings record two of Judah's own kings, Ahaz and Manasseh, doing it.
23:38: "My holy place" and "my house" mean the temple in Jerusalem. The offense is partly one of ritual purity: contact with a corpse made a person unclean and barred from the temple for days, so going in on the same day as a killing was a double violation. The Sabbath was the seventh day, set apart from all work and treated as a public sign of belonging to God.
23:39: Making the sanctuary unclean was more than bad manners. Anyone who had been near a dead body was barred from the temple until purified, so walking in straight from killing a child was a direct assault on the entire system of worship.
23:40: Eyes were painted with kohl, a black powder applied around the lids, ordinary cosmetics, listed here as part of a woman preparing for a lover. The washing, painting and jewelry are the standard sequence.
23:41: A dining couch, on which guests reclined to eat. The incense and oil are called God's because they were the materials prescribed for temple worship; the picture is of consecrated goods laid out on a banquet table for foreign guests instead.
23:42: The KJV reads the Hebrew word as "Sabeans," people from Sheba in Arabia; the same consonants can be read as "drunkards," which is how most modern translations take it. The text is genuinely ambiguous. The crowns are the garlands or headbands worn by guests at a feast.
23:43: "Old in adulteries" means worn out by years of it.
23:45: "Righteous men" here means lawful judges acting properly. Under Israel's law the penalty for both adultery and murder was death, and stoning by the assembled community was the usual method, which is what verse 47 describes. The invading army is being cast as the court's executioner.
23:46: The Hebrew word covers both a lawfully assembled community carrying out a sentence and a mob; the double sense is deliberate, since the executioners here are a foreign army.
23:47: Stoning was the legal method of execution, carried out by the whole community so that no single person carried the responsibility for the death. Behind the picture stands the actual siege of Jerusalem, in which houses were burned and families killed.
23:48: Public execution was meant to work as a deterrent, and Israelite law repeatedly gives that as its reason: everyone else will hear about it and be afraid to do the same.
23:49: "To bear" or "carry" sin is a legal idiom meaning to take on the liability for it and suffer the penalty, not merely to feel guilty.

Read Ezekiel 23