NOTES for Eze 23:1-49
The prophet Ezekiel probably had to tell the Jews who came to him very often, perhaps constantly, why what had happened to Jerusalem had happened. Many, though probably not all, of his sermons were included in the book, because each was delivered in the Holy Spirit and contains the word of the Almighty. In chapter 23, which we read today, the prophet again turns to the image of marriage to describe the covenant between God and Israel. After the Assyrians destroyed the Northern Kingdom and laid waste its capital Samaria in 722 BC, the idea spread in Judah that the northerners were so wicked, had separated from Judah, worshipped idols and taken no part in worship at Jerusalem—and that was why catastrophe had overtaken them.
But the prophet Ezekiel says that there is no difference between North and South: both parts of the people behave in the same way towards God. And the image of the two prostitutes described here evokes nothing but revulsion, despite the carefully softened vocabulary of modern translations. With anger and indignation the prophet speaks of the fate of an old whore doomed to die like an animal by a fence; yet for us it is not just the words but their very meaning that seems ‘unfit for polite speech’, and so the whole chapter causes some embarrassment. We can imagine the horror these words aroused in Ezekiel’s hearers, since he was speaking about them and their people!
In the clear and logical structure of Ezekiel’s sermon, it is important to single out one essential idea. The prophet speaks of the Assyrians, who destroyed Samaria, and of the Babylonians (Chaldeans), who brought Judah and Jerusalem to ruin, as a consequence of the two promiscuous sisters’ own actions. This is a manifestation of God’s wrath, which turns the apostates’ own lawlessness against them. But the prophet does not see God’s judgement in this: in this chapter he distinguishes judgement from wrath. It is important to notice this, because we, by contrast, do not know how to distinguish them clearly. The prophet says that judgement upon the dissolute country will come through righteous men who will condemn its crimes.
This concerns the concept of the remnant, traditional in biblical theology: these are the men who have not bowed the knee before idols, as God Himself described them in His revelation to the prophet Elijah (1 Kgs 19:18). They will become the silver purified in the blazing furnace of the Babylonian captivity, spoken of in the preceding chapter. And it is precisely their righteousness that will become the judgement condemning Israel’s crime. At the same time, these words address the captives, called to purify their hearts and be reborn in faith, while, from another perspective, continuing the theme of the Righteous One, the single person who would ‘stand in the breach’ for the people. For the remnant in question is invisible; it has yet to emerge in history. In this connection, within the wider biblical context, the image of the dissolute sisters is set against that of the All-Immaculate Virgin, Mother of the Righteous One: in the book of the prophet Ezekiel we will encounter a thought of Her again, though it too is very deeply veiled. In essence, the entire course of the history of the world’s purification and salvation, as the prophet Ezekiel explains it, is directed towards this: that, in the furnace of purification, the line of Israel’s righteous people should bring forth precisely Her—the One whose purity is worthy of the Almighty.