Ezekiel 16 · The Lantern

Jerusalem’s Unfaithfulness

And the word of the LORD came to me, saying:

Son of man, make Jerusalem know her abominations,

and say: Thus says the Lord GOD to Jerusalem: Your origins and your birth are from the land of the Canaanite; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite.

And as for your birth, on the day you were born your cord was not cut, and you were not washed in water for cleansing, and you were not rubbed with salt at all, and you were not swaddled at all.

No eye pitied you, to do any of these for you, to spare you; but you were cast out into the open field, in the loathing of your soul, on the day you were born.

And I passed by you and saw you writhing in your blood, and I said to you in your blood: Live! And I said to you in your blood: Live!

A myriad, like the growth of the field, I made you; and you grew and became great and came to full adornment. Breasts were formed and your hair had grown — and you were naked and bare.

And I passed by you and saw you, and see, your time was the time of love; and I spread my wing over you and covered your nakedness. And I swore to you and entered into a covenant with you, the utterance of the Lord GOD, and you became mine.

And I washed you in water and rinsed your blood from you, and I anointed you with oil.

And I clothed you in embroidered work and shod you in fine leather, and I bound you about with fine linen and covered you with silk.

And I adorned you with ornament: I put bracelets on your hands and a chain on your throat.

And I put a ring on your nose and earrings on your ears and a crown of beauty on your head.

And you were adorned with gold and silver, and your clothing was fine linen and silk and embroidered work. Fine flour and honey and oil you ate; and you became very, very lovely, and you prospered into royalty.

And your name went out among the nations for your loveliness, for it was complete in the majesty I had set on you, the utterance of the Lord GOD.

But you trusted in your loveliness and whored on your name, and poured out your whorings on everyone passing by — let it be his.

And you took from your garments and made for yourself patched high places, and you whored on them — things not coming and not to be.

And you took the vessels of your beauty from my gold and from my silver that I had given you, and you made for yourself male images, and you whored with them.

And you took your embroidered garments and covered them, and my oil and my incense you set before them.

And my bread that I gave you — fine flour and oil and honey I fed you — you set before them for a soothing aroma. And so it was, the utterance of the Lord GOD.

And you took your sons and your daughters whom you bore to me, and you sacrificed them to be devoured. Was your whoring a small thing,

that you slaughtered my sons and gave them up, passing them over to them?

And in all your abominations and your whorings you did not remember the days of your youth, when you were naked and bare, writhing in your blood.

And it was, after all your evil — woe, woe to you, the utterance of the Lord GOD —

that you built yourself a mound and made yourself a height in every square.

At every head of the road you built your height, and you made your loveliness abhorrent and spread your legs to everyone passing by, and multiplied your whorings.

Possessing these things, she is of great beauty, but she is corrupted by the divisions of heretics and foreign religious systems.

What then has persuaded you to contradict each other and to procure to yourselves so great a disgrace? You cannot give any good account of it; this supposition only remains, that all you do is but outward profession and pretense.… And you make nothing of accusing the Fathers, and you complain outright of the expressions as being unscriptural; and, as it is written, "opened your…

She will sit by the waters of loneliness, her pitcher laid aside, and open her legs to every one who passes by and be polluted to the crown of her head. It would have been better for her to have submitted to the yoke of marriage, to have walked in level places, than to aspire to loftier heights and fall into the depths of hell.

And you whored with the sons of Egypt, your neighbors, great of flesh, and multiplied your whoring to provoke me.

And see, I stretched out my hand against you and cut back your portion, and gave you to the will of those hating you, the daughters of the Philistines, who were humiliated by your depraved way.

And you whored with the sons of Assyria because you were not satisfied; and you whored with them, and even then you were not satisfied.

And you multiplied your whoring toward the land of Canaan, toward Chaldea; and even with this you were not satisfied.

How sick is your heart, the utterance of the Lord GOD, that you do all these things, the work of a domineering whoring woman —

building your mound at the head of every road and making your height in every square. And you were not like a whore, in scorning a fee.

Ecclesiastics who are leaders in the church build the house of God, the church, in their own way of life as well as those of their faithful, and their work is the building of God.

Or according to the Septuagint: You were not like a prostitute gathering wages, but you gave what you should have received, so that you would not be protected by the help of those with whom you fornicated and followed demons, but rather, oppressed by various captivities, you would feel your calamities.

These Gentile peoples through their desire of worldly eloquence, through the brothels of the schools, through senseless disputation at the meeting places of the philosophical sects, dissipated the property of God the Father. By their conjectures they exhausted everything there was in the line of speech, knowledge, reason and judgment.

The adulterous wife, who takes strangers instead of her husband!

To all whores they give a gift, but you gave your gifts to all your lovers and bribed them to come to you from all around for your whorings.

And in you it was the opposite of other women in your whorings: no one whored after you, and in your giving a fee, and no fee was given to you — so you were the opposite.

Judgment on Jerusalem

Therefore, whore, hear the word of the LORD.

Thus says the Lord GOD: Because your lust was poured out and your nakedness uncovered in your whorings with your lovers, and because of all the idols of your abominations, and for the blood of your sons that you gave to them —

therefore see, I am gathering all your lovers with whom you took pleasure, and all whom you loved along with all whom you hated; and I will gather them against you from all around, and I will uncover your nakedness to them, and they will see all your nakedness.

And I will judge you with the judgments of adulteresses and shedders of blood, and I will give you the blood of wrath and jealousy.

And I will give you into their hand, and they will demolish your mound and tear down your heights, and strip you of your garments and take the vessels of your beauty, and lay you naked and bare.

And they will bring up an assembly against you and stone you with stones and cut you through with their swords.

And they will burn your houses with fire and do judgments on you before the eyes of many women; and I will make you cease from whoring, and you will give a fee no more.

And I will let my wrath rest on you, and my jealousy will turn aside from you; and I will be quiet and will not be provoked again.

But if, chastised, you do not come to your senses, if, rebuked, you are not amended, if, scourged, you despise it, know that, if you have so far advanced in sinning, his jealousy will depart from you, and that will be said to you which through the prophet Ezekiel is said to Jerusalem: "therefore my jealousy shall depart from you, and I will be angry over you no more".

Mighty is the wrath of the Lord when he is not angry with us here, for, then, he reserves us like a calf for slaughter. In fact, he says to Jerusalem, "Many are your sins and many your iniquities, but I will not be vexed with you." In other words, when you were only an adulteress, I loved you with a jealous love; but when you had many lovers, I despised you, and I will not be v…

Like a skillful physician, who has tried all saving cures and sees there is no remedy left which can be applied to their disease, the Lord is, as it were, overcome by their iniquities and is obliged to desist from his kindly chastisement. And so he denounces them saying: "I will no longer be angry with you, and my jealousy has departed from you."

Because you did not remember the days of your youth and enraged me with all these — see, I too have set your way on your head, the utterance of the Lord GOD; and you will not do this depravity on top of all your abominations.

See, everyone who uses a proverb will use this proverb about you, saying: Like the mother, her daughter.

You are the daughter of your mother, who loathed her husband and her sons; and you are the sister of your sisters, who loathed their husbands and their sons. Your mother was a Hittite and your father an Amorite.

And your elder sister is Samaria, she and her daughters, who dwells to your left; and your sister younger than you, who dwells to your right, is Sodom and her daughters.

And you did not walk in their ways or do according to their abominations — as if that were too little — but you were more corrupt than they in all your ways.

As I live, the utterance of the Lord GOD, Sodom your sister, she and her daughters, has not done as you have done, you and your daughters.

See, this was the iniquity of Sodom your sister: pride, fullness of bread and untroubled quiet were hers and her daughters, and she did not strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

Often having a fullness and an abundance of bread is the cause of arrogance. But often the sin of pride also arises over spiritual gifts, and discernment is needed to distinguish the one from the other.

And again, through meat and luxuries the Sodomites also were polluted with an unclean matter, and pleasures and the love of the belly brought them unto that limitless wickedness, even as the prophet of God maketh known concerning them, "This was the iniquity of thy luxurious sister Sodom, who was satisfied with bread, and dwelt at ease;" for by reason of being filled with bread…

The soul … that devotes herself to the recollection of profitable things finds rest in her freedom; her cares are small, and she repents of nothing. She takes forethought for virtue, she bridles the passions, she keeps guard upon excellence, and thus she enjoys growth [that is unhindered], joy free of solicitude, a good life and a perilless haven.

And they were haughty and did abomination before me, and I removed them when I saw it.

And Samaria did not sin half your sins; and you multiplied your abominations more than they, and you made your sisters righteous by all the abominations you did.

You too, bear your humiliation, you who intervened for your sisters. By your sins, in which you acted more abominably than they, they are more righteous than you. And you too, be ashamed and bear your humiliation, in that you made your sisters righteous.

The more we come very near to God the more we come near the beatitude; and when we have sinned, we shall be far from it and very near terrible and very great punishments.

(Verse 52.) So you also bring your own confusion, having surpassed your sisters in your sins, acting more wickedly than them ((Other version: against them)): for they have been justified by you.

It is one thing to have an action set forth as praiseworthy in itself and another to have it extolled in comparison with something worse than itself. We rejoice in one way when a sick person is cured and in another when he improves a little. Even in the sacred Scriptures, Sodom is spoken of as justified in comparison with the crimes of the people of Israel.

And 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 own captives among them,

so that you bear your humiliation and are humiliated by all you have done, in comforting them.

It is plain that the just and good God of the law and the gospels is one and the same and that he does good with justice and punishes in kindness, since neither goodness without justice nor justice without goodness can describe the dignity of the divine nature.

Consider and observe, my hearer, that if God had given a hope to Sodom and to its fellows, he would not have overthrown them with fire and brimstone, the sign of the last day of the world, but would have delivered them over to one of the kingdoms to be chastised.

For of whom is it doubted that among three sinners, rather sinners, a gentile, a heretic, and a churchman, he is more deserving of greater punishments, who is deserving of greater dignity? For the powerful, as we have said, endure torments powerfully (Wisdom 6:7). But he who is least deserving is deserving of mercy.

And your sisters, Sodom and her daughters, will return to their former state, and Samaria and her daughters will return to their former state; and you and your daughters will return to your former state.

And Sodom your sister was not a report in your mouth in the day of your pride,

before your evil was uncovered, as at the time of the reproach of the daughters of Aram and all those around her, the daughters of the Philistines, who despise you from all around.

Your depravity and your abominations — you have borne them, the utterance of the LORD.

The Covenant Remembered

For thus says the Lord GOD: And I will do to you as you have done, you who despised the imprecation, breaking the covenant.

But I myself will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish for you an everlasting covenant.

And you will remember your ways and be humiliated when you receive your sisters, those older than you and those younger than you; and I will give them to you as daughters, though not from your covenant.

And I myself will establish my covenant with you, and you will know that I am the LORD,

so that you remember and are ashamed, and never again have an opening of the mouth because of your humiliation, when I make atonement for you for all you have done, the utterance of the Lord GOD.

Ezekiel16

Jerusalem’s Unfaithfulness

Judgment on Jerusalem

The Covenant Remembered