3. Your origins and your birthplace are from the land of the Canaanite. The point is that the people of Israel is not to think of itself as altogether unique—it is just one of the Canaanite peoples (Amorites and Hittites are ethnic groups repeatedly numbered among the seven that constitute the population of Canaan). One wonders whether this statement might reflect a historical tradition that the origins of Israel were not in a Hebrew slave population escaped from Egypt but among the indigenous peoples of Canaan. That, in fact, is the view of modern scholarship.

4. your navel cord was not cut. This emphasis on addressing the physical care of the newborn prepares us for the focus on the physicality of the mature woman who will develop from this infant.

nor were you rubbed with salt. There was a practice—still sometimes observed among Bedouins—of rubbing the baby’s body with a mixture of olive oil and salt in the belief that it toughened the tender skin.

5. you were flung out into the field in the disgust you caused. It is hard to relate these details of the neglect of the newborn babe to the actual history of Israel, except, perhaps, through some general sense that the origins of the people were humble and unpromising. The point seems to be that God now takes up the neglected and rejected child and nurtures her, bringing her to flourishing womanhood.

6. wallowing in your blood. This would be the blood of childbirth that had not been wiped away.

In your blood live. Despite being covered with blood, you will now live. There may be a suggestion that the future history of Israel will be marked by bloodshed but that the people will nevertheless survive. The repetition of these words might be a scribal duplication.

7. Myriad. Although many interpreters understand this simply to mean “growing” or “sprouting,” the set meaning of the Hebrew term is “myriad,” and this surely could be a reference to the proliferation of the people, the allegory of the daughter slipping from the allegorical vehicle to its tenor or referent, the history of Israel. This will occur again at another point in the prophecy.

your hair. The context suggests that this is pubic hair.

8. your time was the time for lovemaking. The infant girl has passed puberty, and God (seen before as a kind of foster father) will now take her as His bride—“I . . . vowed to you and entered a covenant with you . . . and you became Mine.” But the focus on her sexuality will then be given an explosive development.

9. And I washed you in water and rinsed your blood from upon you. These acts appear to repair the neglect of the infant, as though the blood of birth were still on her. But the blood now may well be the blood from the onset of menstruation.

10. I dressed you in embroidered cloth. In the allegory, this whole catalogue of finery refers to the splendor of Jerusalem and its Temple that God bestowed on His people.

15. And you trusted in your beauty and played the whore. The image of unfaithful Israel as a whore betraying her Spouse by dalliance with alien gods is common in the Prophets, appearing in Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. No other prophet, however, focuses at such length and so concretely as does Ezekiel on the physical aspects of promiscuity. One detects here an expression of Ezekiel’s distinctive psychology, which appears to involve some sort of morbid obsession with the female body in its sexual aspect. The word “whore” and its derivatives are repeated again and again.

you spilled out your whoring upon every passerby. Because of the unusual choice of the verb “spill out,” the reference may well be to vaginal secretions as a metonomy for “whoring.” Such a reference is made explicit in verse 36.

16. tapestried high places. This is a crossover from allegorical vehicle to tenor: the woman Zion was adorned in finery; here she takes embroidered cloth to decorate the altars of pagan worship.

Such things should never be. The Hebrew wording at this point is somewhat cryptic, so the translation is an educated guess.

17. made for yourself male images and played the whore with them. The whoring is again the following of a pagan cult, but in the allegorical vehicle there is a suggestion of autoeroticism in this playing with male—probably phallic—images.

18. covered them. That is, covered the idols.

My oil and My incense. The oil and incense that should have been used for the worship of YHWH in the Temple were devoted to pagan deities.

20. And you took your sons and your daughters. Child sacrifice, which on the evidence of the Prophets was actually practiced in ancient Israel, is regarded as one of the greatest obscenities of the pagan cult.

24. mounds . . . a height in every square. These structures are different from the hilltop altars or “high places” mentioned so frequently, but they are clearly constructed sites for pagan worship.

26. the Egyptians, your big-membered neighbors. As is often the case of different peoples living in proximity, fantasies spring up about the sexual potency or endowments of the neighboring group. Here, the prophet excoriates the lasciviousness of the Daughter of Zion by asserting that she was drawn to the Egyptians by the supposed large size of their male members. This complements the image of playing the whore with phallic icons.

27. the Philistine girls shocked by your lewd way. Even the young women of Philistia, reputed to be far from virtuous, are shocked by your lasciviousness.

29. but even in this you were not sated. This reiterated emphasis clearly suggests that the Daughter of Zion is what used to be called a nymphomaniac, before that term was discredited.

30. How hot was your ardor. The meaning of both the adjective and the noun is not altogether clear. This translation follows Greenberg’s philological analysis and adopts his English rendering of the phrase. The heat of ardor is certainly in keeping with the thematic emphasis of the prophecy as a whole.

31. for you scorned a whore’s pay. You did not give yourself to other men for pay, which at least would have had a commercial logic, but gratuitously, out of sheer perversity.

32. instead of her husband. Some construe this phrase to mean “while under her husband’s authority.”

33. you gave your pay to all your lovers and bribed them to come to bed with you. The unbridled lust of Israel is such that she paid to get sex from all her alien lovers. This reduces them to gigolos and may imply that she has lost her extraordinary beauty through all her whoring.

36. your wetness poured out and you laid bare your nakedness in your whoring. The initial noun nehushteikh resembles the Hebrew word for “bronze” (hence the New Jewish Publication Society renders it as “brazen effrontery”). But contemporary scholarship has made a convincing case that it is an Akkadian loanword that means “vaginal lubrication.” This not only fits the focus on the bodily manifestations of female sexuality, but also is likely because of Ezekiel’s location in Babylonia, where Akkadian was used—he might well have been inclined to borrow a term for which there was no good Hebrew equivalent.

as by the blood of your children that you gave to them. The wording of this reference to child sacrifice, the greatest of pagan abominations, loops back to the wallowing in blood of the infant Daughter of Zion, which is now seen as a foreshadowing of her future behavior.

37. I will . . . lay bare your nakedness to them, and they shall see all your nakedness. This is a piece of measure-for-measure justice: she has spread her legs for every passerby; now she will be shamefully exposed to all eyes, not only to her former lovers but to those whom she despised.

38. women who shed blood. Here, again, there is a shuttling between tenor and vehicle. “Adulteress” belongs to the figurative representation of paganism as whoring, whereas the bloodshed refers literally to child sacrifice.

39. they shall strip your garments from you . . . and leave you stark naked. This was in fact a known punishment for an adulteress in many regions of the ancient Near East. The allegorical reference would be to the stripping away of the splendor of Jerusalem, razed by its conquerors, and to the divestment of national sovereignty.

40. stone you and hack you to pieces. This was an actual practice: stoning to death followed by mutilation of the corpse.

42. My jealousy. Given the whole context of sexual betrayal, the Hebrew qinʾah surely means “jealousy” and not “passion,” as many have claimed.

44. Like mother, like daughter. The point of invoking this proverb here is that Israel’s waywardness is a long-standing practice, not something invented by the current generation. Authorized by the convention of representing cities and nations as women, Ezekiel continues through this section of the prophecy in his sharply gender-focused denunciation, invoking mothers and daughters and sisters.

45. Your mother is a Hittite and your father is an Amorite. This line from the very beginning of the prophecy is repeated here because Ezekiel will go on to say that the people of Judah resembles its neighbors in evil, only it is worse than they.

46. your big sister is Samaria. “Big” and “little” here refer not to age but to the size of the territory of each of these kingdoms.

she and her daughters. The Hebrew builds on an untranslatable pun: “daughters” also means the villages or hamlets around a city, the implied metaphor being that the city is the mother.

on your left . . . on your right. Left and right are, respectively, north and south, the imagined point of orientation being someone facing the east (one word for “east” also means “front” or “forward”).

48. surely Sodom and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done. The idea that Israel could turn into Sodom had some currency early in biblical literature (compare Judges 19 and Isaiah 1). Ezekiel, however, pushes the notion further by contending that Israel is worse than Sodom. In verse 49, it is explained that Sodom’s crime consisted in neglecting the needy through her complacent satisfaction with her own affluence. This scarcely accords with the representation of the Sodomites as vicious sexual predators in Genesis 19, but the prophet probably wants to reserve sexual misbehavior exclusively for his castigation of his own people.

51. and you made your sister look innocent. Zion’s offenses are compounded by the fact that they were so unspeakable that even the crimes of her neighbors to the north and south came to look innocent by comparison.

52. bear your disgrace for advocating for your sister. This is a rhetorical conceit: by setting a standard of evil that her neighbors could not equal, Judah became an inadvertent advocate for them.

55. And your sisters, Sodom and her daughters . . . and Samaria and her daughters shall be restored to their former state, and you and your daughters shall be restored to your former state. The prophet now gives his argument another peculiar twist. “Restoring the former state” (the idiom that appears in verse 55) is equally used to express the national restoration of the people of Israel after its punishment. Here, however, in keeping with “your mother is a Hittite and your father is an Amorite,” this restoration is not unique for Judah but part of a general pattern in the region.

56. a word of scorn. More literally, “a rumor.”

57. [you are] a disgrace to the daughters of Aram. The bracketed words do not appear in the Hebrew but are necessary for intelligibility and may have been dropped in scribal transmission. Some critics emend “Aram” to “Edom” (graphically similar in Hebrew) because the Edomites became eager allies of the Babylonian invaders.

60. But I on My part will recall My covenant with you. Even though Israel has been a faithless, adulterous wife, God remains committed to the everlasting covenant He has sealed with His people.

61. though they are not of your covenant. This clause reflects two rather cryptic Hebrew words, and the sense is uncertain.

63. you shall be unable to open your mouth. The literal sense is “you shall have no opening of the mouth.”