Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
The Foundling
Ezekiel 16:1-22
1 Again Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, · WEB
Jerusalem's history is told as the rescue of an abandoned newborn, and every good thing she later spent was something she had been given.
The parable opens by denying the city its pedigree. An Amorite was your father, and your mother was a Hittite. Jerusalem had been a Canaanite town before David took it, and the sentence is historically exact. It is also a refusal of the one argument the city most relied on. Whatever standing Jerusalem had did not come from its stock.
The picture that follows is of a newborn left to die. The navel is uncut. The child is unwashed, unsalted, unwrapped. Salting and swaddling were the ordinary first care of an infant, so their absence says the baby was not merely poor but unwanted. Then the verse that names it: you were cast out in the open field, because you were abhorred in the day that you were born. Exposure was a real practice and the text does not soften it.
What happens next is the whole gospel of the chapter, and it is one word repeated. Somebody passes by, sees the child in her blood, and says Though you are in your blood, live! — and says it twice. Nothing is said about the child's promise or beauty. She has neither yet. The only thing operating in the verse is the will of the passer-by, and the command is simply to live.
Then a second passing, years later, and a covenant: a garment spread over her, a pledge, and you became mine. What follows is an inventory, and it should be read as one. Washed, anointed, embroidered clothing, leather sandals, fine linen and silk, bracelets, a chain, a nose ring, earrings, a crown. Fine flour, honey and oil to eat. Renown among the nations for a beauty that is immediately attributed: for it was perfect, through my majesty which I had put on you.
Every item on that list reappears in the next section as something she spent on other gods — the gold and silver made into images, the embroidered clothing draped on shrines, the flour and oil and honey set before them. That is why the inventory is given at such length. The indictment is not that she had nothing and wanted more. It is that there was nothing she gave away which had not first been put on her by the one she left.
settled What this mark means