Ezekiel 23

Heads up: there’s a lot of sex talk in this chapter. It’s not really about sex and adultery. It’s a metaphor about unfaithfulness toward God. The adulteress sisters are Samaria and Jerusalem, capitals of the northern nation of Israel and the southern nation of Judah. By this time, the northern nation was gone, wiped out by Assyrian invaders from what is now northern Iraq in 722 BC. Judah was about to experience the same. Babylonian invaders would erase Judah from the world map.

Prostitution here and in many other places in the Bible works as a metaphor, representing people who are unfaithful to God by worshiping idols.

The sister’s names refer to tents. What tent, no one seems to know. Tent of a herder, which many women in Bible times were? Or maybe it was the marriage-bed tent of the overnight honeymoon. Perhaps less likely, maybe it was the tent worship center that ancestors of the Jewish people used before King Solomon built the first Temple. Hebrew ancestors of today’s Jewish people carried it from place to place in the time of Moses. Oholah (oh HO lah) means “her tent.” Oholibah (oh HO la BAH) means, roughly, “she’s my tent.” That one sounds personal.

Samaria was capital of the northern Jewish nation of 10 tribes, known as Israel. The southern tribes took the name of the largest tribe: Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem. Some scholars say editors later added to the Bible text “Samaria” and “Jerusalem” to help readers figure out what the writer was talking about.

They came. We’re talking uncomfortably about ejaculation.

Assyrians defeated the northern tribes of Israel in 722 BC and deported the survivors. They never came back in numbers large enough to resurrect the northern nation. They became infamous as the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Chaldea was in what is now southern Iraq, near the north shores of the Persian Gulf. The pictures that Ezekiel described were probably ones he had seen on walls throughout Babylon’s empire. They created a lot of art in bas-reliefs. These are images that are slightly raised above the background surface, which is often stone.

The metaphor probably refers to messengers the kings in Samaria and Jerusalem sent to other nations to recruit allies. Prophets usually opposed that. They argued for trusting in God instead of fickle allies.

Apologies. Who knew this was in the Holy Bible? Putting ancient words into easy-reading English isn’t always that easy, or safe. These are shocking word pictures. But they are describing something equally shocking: the end of the last Jewish kingdom.

Observant Jews in Bible times devoted their first child to the Lord (Exodus 13:2).

One of the Ten Commandments was the order to treat the Sabbath day as a day of rest and worship (Exodus 20:8).

Ezekiel doesn’t say how Jerusalem defiled the Temple. Perhaps commoners went inside the sanctuary, where only priests were allowed. Maybe they sacrificed to idols there in the courtyard or on the Jewish altar just outside the sanctuary.

Observing the Sabbath as a day of rest and worship became one of the ways to recognize that a person was Jewish. Sabbath observance became one of many distinctive characteristics of God’s people.

There was a sacred scent reserved for inside the Temple. It included “aromatic spices and herbs: stacte, onycha, galbanum, and pure frankincense” (Exodus 30:34-35). Priests burned these as incense producing the fragrant, earthy aroma permitted only in the Temple sanctuary.

That’s not quite “Turn the other cheek,” as Jesus later instructed (Matthew 5:39). Some Christians would argue that what God is expressing here is a matter of justice not a matter of petty anger… (See rest of note at Ezekiel 15:28).