Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Wife Who Paid Her Lovers
Ezekiel 16:23-43
23 “‘“It has happened after all your wickedness—woe, woe to you!” says the Lord Yahweh— · WEB
The charge is unfaithfulness, and the detail that makes it unique is economic: this woman paid rather than being paid.
The imagery in this section is the hardest in the prophets to read, and it is deliberate. The subject is a marriage covenant broken, and the language chosen is the language of a wife's infidelity rather than of a servant's disobedience. That choice carries the argument. A servant who fails has broken a contract. A wife who leaves has broken something that was never a contract, and the grief in the passage is of the second kind.
What the chapter adds to the standard charge is an accountancy that has no parallel. Prostitution is a trade, and the whole point of a trade is payment. People give gifts to all prostitutes; but you give your gifts to all your lovers, and bribe them, that they may come to you on every side. The verdict on it is flat: You are different from other women. Judah's idolatry gained nothing whatever. It was paid for out of Judah's own treasury, in tribute and temple gold, to nations who then invaded her.
That is a serious observation about idolatry in general, and it is the reason the imagery is used at all. What is being described is not the pursuit of pleasure or of profit. It is an arrangement in which the party doing the pursuing pays for the privilege of being used, and keeps paying. How weak is your heart, the passage says, which is a stranger and more accurate diagnosis than wickedness.
The worst verse is the shortest. Among the things given to the lovers were the children: sons and daughters borne to God and then passed through the fire Ezekiel 16:20–21. And the sentence attached asks a question rather than making a charge — was your prostitution a small matter? The judgment that follows is executed by the lovers themselves, who are gathered against her, which is what happened historically and is the pattern the book keeps returning to. The nations Judah paid are the instrument of what Judah paid them for.
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