Two Sisters and the Powers They Desired

Chapter 23 is the companion of chapter 16, but it tells a different history. Chapter 16 followed one city from birth through her worship; this follows two sisters through their foreign policy. Jeremiah 3:6–11 had already pictured the two kingdoms as sisters, “backsliding Israel” and “treacherous Judah”.

One mother, two daughters: one people that split into two kingdoms after Solomon’s death (1 Kings 12), north and south. The allegory begins before the split, in Egypt, so the two are sisters from the start rather than rivals who became related.

The unfaithfulness is dated to Egypt, before the covenant at Sinai, as in chapter 20. The verbs for pressing and bruising describe young girls handled by others. The first recorded act of the pattern, the golden calf, was made by a people only weeks out of Egypt.

Leviticus 18:18 forbade a man to marry two sisters, the double marriage Jacob made with Leah and Rachel, and the allegory pictures God in exactly that union. The sisters’ names resemble Oholibamah, a wife of Esau (Genesis 36:2). Samaria is placed first as the elder.

“When she was mine” is literally “under me”, the idiom of a married woman. “Doted” is ‘agav, lust, a word found almost only in this chapter, six times. On Shalmaneser III’s Black Obelisk, Jehu of Israel is shown bowing with tribute, the earliest surviving picture of an Israelite king.

“Blue” is tekhelet, the costly blue-violet dye of the tabernacle hangings and the tassels of Numbers 15:38. “Captains and rulers” are pachot and seganim, both loanwords from the Akkadian titles of Assyrian governors and prefects. Even the vocabulary shows where the admiration was pointed.

“Chosen men” means the elite, the pick of Assyria. The religious side is recorded in 2 Kings 17:16: the northern kingdom “made them molten images... and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served Baal.” Admiration for the empire and its worship arrived together.

Jeroboam’s calves at Bethel and Dan were introduced with Aaron’s words at Sinai, “behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” (1 Kings 12:28; Exodus 32:4). And Samaria’s last king, Hoshea, fell when he sent to So, king of Egypt (2 Kings 17:4).

Shalmaneser V besieged Samaria for three years, and it fell in 722 BC (2 Kings 17:5–6). His successor Sargon II claimed in his inscriptions to have carried away 27,290 of its people. The lovers she courted were the ones who ended her.

The deportees were settled in Halah, on the Habor, and in the cities of the Medes (2 Kings 17:6), and the northern tribes never returned as a people. “Famous among women” is literally “a name among women”: Samaria became a byword, a proverb for what happens to a faithless kingdom.

Jerusalem stood about thirty-five miles south of Samaria and watched it fall. “Inordinate love” is ‘agavah, the noun of the verb “doted” in verse 5. Having a sister’s ruin in plain view only made the younger worse, where it should have been a warning.

Judah’s turn to Assyria came before Samaria fell. When Ahaz was threatened by Syria and Israel, he sent to Tiglath-pileser: “I am thy servant and thy son: come up, and save me” (2 Kings 16:7). “Clothed most gorgeously” means dressed to perfection, in full array.

The verse is a single observation from God: “I saw”. The chapter keeps using the verb: Aholibah saw her sister (verse 11), saw the painted men (verse 14), saw them with her eyes (verse 16). Alongside all her looking stands one look she did not reckon with.

“Pourtrayed” is mechuqqeh, carved or engraved, like the glazed-brick and painted reliefs of Babylonian palaces. “Vermilion” is shashar, a red pigment, the same paint Jeremiah condemned on Jehoiakim’s palace, “ceiled with cedar, and painted with vermilion” (Jeremiah 22:14).

“Dyed attire upon their heads” means flowing, dyed turbans. “Princes to look to” are shalishim, officers, originally the third man in a war chariot. “The land of their nativity” is exactly the phrase Genesis 11:28 uses of Ur of the Chaldees, Abraham’s birthplace: the family had come out of the very place she now longed after.

Zedekiah himself went to Babylon in the fourth year of his reign (Jeremiah 51:59), and he sent envoys to Nebuchadnezzar (Jeremiah 29:3). “As soon as she saw them” is literally “at the sight of her eyes”: the whole courtship began with a picture.

“Her mind was alienated” uses yaqa‘, to be wrenched out of joint, the verb for Jacob’s hip put out of joint as he wrestled (Genesis 32:25). Jehoiakim served Babylon three years and then “turned and rebelled against him” (2 Kings 24:1), and his successors did the same.

God’s mind is now wrenched from her with the same verb as hers was from Babylon. Jeremiah 6:8 had warned in the same word: “Be thou instructed, O Jerusalem, lest my soul depart from thee.” The one who was wronged turns away last, and turns away for good.

In 16:22 Jerusalem “hast not remembered the days of thy youth”, meaning her rescue. Here she does remember her youth, but only the harlotry in Egypt. Her memory is selective and it runs backward, toward Egypt, not toward the God who brought her out of it.

“Paramours” is pilagshim, the ordinary word for concubines, used only here of men. The comparison with donkeys and stallions is deliberately coarse. Jeremiah 5:8 uses horses the same way: “every one neighed after his neighbour’s wife.”

The speech changes from “she” to “thou”, turning to Aholibah directly and preparing for the sentence that follows. The last words repeat the image of verse 3, so the account of the younger sister closes in Egypt, where the chapter opened.

“Raise up” is the verb for rousing someone to action. The lover she turned from comes back against her “on every side”. The siege began on the tenth day of the tenth month of Zedekiah’s ninth year (2 Kings 25:1), the day Ezekiel is told to record in 24:2.

Pekod is the Puqudu, an Aramean tribe east of the Tigris known from Assyrian and Babylonian records, and Jeremiah 50:21 puns on its name. Shoa and Koa are probably the Sutu and Qutu, peoples of the same region. “All the Assyrians” had been absorbed into Babylon’s army after Assyria fell.

“Buckler” is the tall body shield, and the “shield” a smaller round one. “Judge thee according to their judgments” means under Babylonian law for rebel vassals, and that is what happened: Zedekiah was brought to Nebuchadnezzar at Riblah, “and they gave judgment upon him” (2 Kings 25:6).

Cutting off the nose was a known punishment for an adulterous wife: the Middle Assyrian Laws allow a husband to do it, and Assyrian kings boasted of mutilating captives in the same way. “Thy remnant” and “thy residue” both mean whoever survives the previous blow.

“Fair jewels” are literally the vessels or articles of your splendour, and kelim is also the word for the temple vessels. Nebuchadnezzar carried those off in 597 and 586 (2 Kings 24:13; 25:13–17), and Daniel 5:2 shows them on Belshazzar’s table.

The promise concerns Jerusalem as a city. After Gedaliah’s murder the survivors did go down to Egypt anyway, taking Jeremiah with them against his warning (Jeremiah 43:5–7). The chapter’s point is that the city’s long habit of looking to Egypt for rescue will end.

Jeremiah offered Zedekiah a way to live: “If thou wilt assuredly go forth unto the king of Babylon’s princes, then thy soul shall live” (Jeremiah 38:17). He would not, fearing the Judeans who had already gone over. Here he is delivered into those hands anyway, on worse terms.

“All thy labour” is the fruit of all her toil. Deuteronomy 28:33 had warned: “The fruit of thy land, and all thy labours, shall a nation which thou knowest not eat up.” “Naked and bare” is the pair from 16:7, so the two allegories end their sisters in the same condition.

The charge names the nations themselves, “after the heathen”, not their gods alone. Seeking a foreign power’s protection is itself called going a whoring. Isaiah 31:1 had said the same a century before: “Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help.”

The cup of wrath is Jeremiah’s image: “Take the wine cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations... to drink it” (Jeremiah 25:15), and in his list Jerusalem drinks first. Here the cup has a previous owner: Samaria drank it already.

Verses 32 to 34 are a short poem, and many modern Bibles set them as verse. “It containeth much” is literally “much to hold”. The cup is deep, so it takes long to drain, and wide, so there is a great deal in it; the mockery comes from those who watch her drink.

“Astonishment and desolation” is shammah ushemamah, two words from the same root that sound alike, a ringing phrase of horror. This is the last time Samaria is named in the chapter: the sister’s cup is now the only thing left of her.

“Break the sherds” means gnawing the broken pieces once the cup is drained, the last extreme of a drunkard. Isaiah 51:17 pictures Jerusalem having “drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling, and wrung them out”. The breasts of verses 3 and 21, where the harlotry began, are torn in grief.

“Cast me behind thy back” is the charge Ahijah laid on Jeroboam in 1 Kings 14:9, and Nehemiah 9:26 remembers Israel casting God’s law “behind their backs”. Something thrown behind is out of sight while the face looks eagerly elsewhere, toward Assyria, Babylon and Egypt.

The formula changes to “The LORD said moreover unto me”, opening a second indictment of both sisters together. Samaria had fallen over a century and a quarter earlier, yet she is summoned to stand trial beside Jerusalem as though still present.

“Blood is in their hands” appears here and again in verse 45, bracketing the final section. Isaiah 1:15 addressed Jerusalem’s worshippers in the same terms: “when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.” Adultery and bloodshed are the two counts.

Leviticus 19:30 joins the two things violated here: “Ye shall keep my sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary: I am the LORD.” Sacred place and sacred time are named together, and both are broken together. “This they have done unto me” makes God the injured party.

Jeremiah’s temple sermon made the same charge: “Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery... And come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations?” (Jeremiah 7:9–10).

“Paintedst thy eyes” uses kachal, the root of kohl, the dark eye paint, found only here in the Bible. Jezebel “painted her face” with a different word before Jehu arrived (2 Kings 9:30). The guests were sent for “from far”, envoys summoned by messenger.

A “stately bed” is a couch of honour for reclining at a banquet; Amos 6:4 condemns those who “lie upon beds of ivory”. “A table prepared” is the phrase of Psalm 23:5, “Thou preparest a table before me”. The table God would set for his people is set by her for others.

“At ease” is shalev, carefree, from the root of the “abundance of idleness” charged against Sodom in 16:49. Sabeans came from Sheba in southern Arabia, traders who appear as raiders in Job 1:15. Bracelets and crowns are the same gifts God gave the bride in 16:11–12, now given by strangers.

“Old” is balah, worn out, the word for clothes and shoes worn through (Joshua 9:13). She is a garment that adultery has worn thin. The Hebrew of this verse is very obscure, and the King James reads it as God’s astonished question.

“Lewd women” uses zimmah, the word Leviticus 18:17 uses for incest, a deliberate and shameless wickedness. It occurs more often in this chapter than anywhere else in Scripture. The verse names the sisters one last time together, Aholah and Aholibah, as partners in one conduct.

Habakkuk wrestled with the idea that the Chaldeans could be God’s instrument of judgment: “O LORD, thou hast ordained them for judgment” (Habakkuk 1:12), and then protested that they were worse than those they punished. Here they are called righteous only as the ones executing a just sentence.

“To be removed” is za‘avah, a horror, an object of terror. Deuteronomy 28:25 uses the same word: Israel “shalt be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth”. “Spoiled” means plundered, and the “company” that comes up is the assembly that executes the sentence.

“Dispatch” is the verb bara’ in a stem that means to cut down, used of clearing a forest in Joshua 17:15. The swords hack through the city like woodsmen through trees. The children and houses named at the end make the judgment fall on the whole household.

The law often gave a public penalty a teaching purpose: “all Israel shall hear, and fear” (Deuteronomy 13:11; 17:13). “All women may be taught” carries that purpose into the allegory, with the other nations as the women who watch.

The recognition formula here uses the full title, “I am the Lord GOD”, Adonai YHWH, instead of the usual “I am the LORD”. The Book of Ezekiel uses this fuller form only a handful of times (13:9; 24:24; 28:24; 29:16), and it ends this chapter with no word of restoration.