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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Ezekiel 23:22 - 23:22
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Punishment of the Harlot Jerusalem
Eze 23:22. Therefore, Oholibah, thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Behold, I raise up thy lovers against thee, from whom thy soul has torn itself away, and cause them to come upon thee from every side; Eze 23:23. The sons of Babel, and all the Chaldeans, rulers, lords, and nobles, all the sons of Assyria with them: chosen men of graceful deportment, governors and officers together, knights and counsellors, all riding upon horses. Eze 23:24. And they will come upon thee with weapons, chariots, and wheels, and with a host of peoples; target and shield and helmet will they direct against thee round about: and I commit to them the judgment, that they may judge thee according to their rights. Eze 23:25. And I direct my jealousy against thee, so that they shall deal with thee in wrath: nose and ears will they cut off from thee; and thy last one shall fall by the sword: they will take thy sons and thy daughters; and thy last one will be consumed by fire. Eze 23:26. They will strip off thy clothes from thee, and take thy splendid jewellery. Eze 23:27. I will abolish thy lewdness from thee, and thy whoredom from the land of Egypt: that thou mayest no more lift thine eyes to them, and no longer remember Egypt. Eze 23:28. For thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Behold, I give thee into the hand of those whom thou hatest, into the hand of those from whom thy soul has torn itself away: Eze 23:29. And they shall deal with thee in hatred, and take all thy gain, and leave thee naked and bare; that thy whorish shame may be uncovered, and thy lewdness and thy whoredom. Eze 23:30. This shall happen to thee, because thou goest whoring after the nations, and on account of thy defiling thyself with their idols. Eze 23:31. In the way of thy sister hast thou walked; therefore I give her cup into thy hand. Eze 23:32. Thus saith the Lord Jehovah, The cup of thy sister thou shalt drink, the deep and broad one; it will be for laughter and for derision, because it contains so much. Eze 23:33. Thou wilt become full of drunkenness and misery: a cup of desolation and devastation is the cup of thy sister Samaria. Eze 23:34. Thou wilt drink it up and drain it, and gnaw its fragments, and tear thy breasts (therewith); for I have spoken it, is the saying of the Lord Jehovah. Eze 23:35. Therefore thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Because thou hast forgotten me, and hast cast me behind thy back, thou shalt also bear thy lewdness and thy whoredom. - As Jerusalem has given herself up to whoredom, like her sister Samaria, she shall also share her sister's fate. The paramours, of whom she has become tired, God will bring against her as enemies. The Chaldeans will come with all their might, and execute the judgment of destruction upon her. - For the purpose of depicting their great and powerful forces, Ezekiel enumerates in Eze 23:23 and Eze 23:24 the peoples and their military equipment: viz., the sons of Babel, i.e., the inhabitants of Babylonia, the Chaldeans - the ruling people of the empire at that time - and all the sons of Asshur, i.e., the inhabitants of the eastern portions of the empire, the former rulers of the world. There is some obscurity in the words פְּקֹוד וְשֹׁועַ , which the older theologians have almost unanimously taken to be the names of different tribes in the Chaldean empire. Ewald also adopts this view, but it is certainly incorrect; for the words are in apposition to וְכָל־כַּשְׂדִּים, as the omission of the copula ו before פְּקֹוד is sufficient to show. This is confirmed by the fact that שֹׁועַ is used, in Isa 32:5 and Job 34:19, in the sense of the man of high rank, distinguished for his prosperity, which is quite in harmony with the passage before us. Consequently פְּקֹוד is not to be taken in the sense of visitation or punishment, after Jer 50:21; but the meaning is to be sought in the verb פָּקַד, to exercise supervision, or lead; and the abstract oversight is used for overseer, or ruler, as an equivalent to פָּקִיד. Lastly, according to Rabbins, the Vulgate, and others, קֹועַ signifies princes, or nobles. The predicates in Eze 23:23 are repeated from Eze 23:6 and Eze 23:12, and קְרוּאִים alone is added. This is a word taken from the Pentateuch, where the heads of the tribes and families, as being members of the council of the whole congregation of Israel, are called קְרוּאֵי or קְרוּאֵי מֹועֵד, persons called or summoned to the meeting (Num 1:16; Num 16:2). As Michaelis has aptly observed, “he describes them sarcastically in the very same way in which he had previously described those upon whom she doted.”
There is a difficulty in explaining the ἁπ. λεγ.. הֹצֶן - for which many MSS read חֹצֶן - as regards not only its meaning, but its position in the sentence. The fact that it is associated with רֶכֶב וְגַלְגַּל would seem to indicate that הֹצֶן is also either an implement of war or some kind of weapon. At the same time, the words cannot be the subject to וּבָאוּ; but as the expression וּבִקְהַל עַמִּים, which follows, clearly shows, they simply contain a subordinate definition of the manner in which, or the things with which, the peoples mentioned in Eze 23:23, Eze 23:24 will come, while they are governed by the verb in the freest way. The attempts which Ewald and Hitzig have made to remove the difficulty, by means of conjectures, are forced and extremely improbable. נָתַתִּי לִפְּנֵיהֶם, I give up to them (not, I place before them); נָתַן, as in 1Ki 8:46, to deliver up, or give a thing into a person's hand or power. לִפְנֵי is used in this sense in Gen 13:9 and Gen 24:51. - In Eze 23:25, Eze 23:26, the execution of the judgment is depicted in detail. The words, “they take away thy nose and ears,” are not to be interpreted, as the earlier expositors suppose, from the custom prevalent among the Egyptians and other nations of cutting off the nose of an adulteress; but depict, by one particular example, the mutilation of prisoners captured by their enemies. אַחֲרִית: not posterity, which by no means suits the last clause of the verse, and cannot be defended from the usage of the language (see the comm. on Amo 4:2); but the last, according to the figure employed in the first clause, the trunk; or, following the second clause, the last thing remaining in Jerusalem, after the taking away of the sons and daughters, i.e., after the slaying and the deportation of the inhabitants - viz. the empty houses. For Eze 23:26, compare Eze 16:39. - In Eze 23:27, “from the land of Egypt” is not equivalent to “dating from Egypt;” for according to the parallel מִמֵּךְ, from thee, this definition does not belong to זְנוּתֵךְ, “thy whoredom,” but to הִשְׁבַּתִּי, “I cause thy whoredom to cease from Egypt” (Hitzig). - For Eze 23:28, compare Eze 16:37; for Eze 23:28, vid., Eze 23:17 above; and for Eze 23:29, see Eze 23:25 and Eze 23:26, and Eze 16:39. - Eze 23:31 looks back to Eze 23:13; and Eze 23:31 is still further expanded in Eze 23:32-34. Judah shall drink the cup of the wrathful judgment of God, as Samaria has done. For the figure of the cup, compare Isa 51:17 and Jer 25:15. This cup is described in Eze 23:32 as deep and wide, i.e., very capacious, so that whoever exhausts all its contents must be thoroughly intoxicated. תִּהְיֶה is the third person; but the subject is מִרְבָּה, and not כֹּוס. The greatness or breadth of the cup will be a subject of laughter and ridicule. It is very arbitrary to supply “to thee,” so as to read: will be for laughter and ridicule to thee, which does not even yield a suitable meaning, since it is not Judah but the nations who laugh at the cup. Others regard תִּהְיֶה as the second person, thou wilt become; but apart from the anomaly in the gender, as the masculine would stand for the feminine, Hitzig has adduced the forcible objection, that according to this view the words would not only anticipate the explanation give of the figure in the next verse, but would announce the consequences of the שִׁכָּרֹון וְיָגֹון mentioned there. Hitzig therefore proposes to erase the words from תִּהְיֶה to וּלְלַעַג as a gloss, and to alter מִרְבָּה into מַרְבָּה : which contains much, is very capacious. But there is not sufficient reason to warrant such critical violence as this. Although the form מִרְבָּה is ἁπ λεγ.., it is not to be rejected as a nomen subst.; and if we take מִרְבָּה לְהָכִיל, the magnitude to hold, as the subject of the sentence, it contains a still further description of the cup, which does not anticipate what follows, even though the cup will be an object of laughter and ridicule, not so much for its size, as because of its being destined to be drunk completely empty. In Eze 23:33 the figure and the fact are combined - יָגֹון, lamentation, misery, being added to שִׁכָּרֹון, drunkenness, and the cup being designated a cup of devastation. The figure of drinking is expanded in the boldest manner in Eze 23:34 into the gnawing of the fragments of the cup, and the tearing of the breasts with the fragments. - In Eze 23:35 the picture of the judgment is closed with a repetition of the description of the nation's guilt. For Eze 23:35, compare Eze 16:52 and Eze 16:58.