Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
The City of Blood
Ezekiel 22:1-16
1 Moreover Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, · WEB
The indictment is read out as a list of offenses committed inside the city, and the repeated words are in you.
The charge sheet is unusual in form. It is not a description of a nation's character but a schedule of specific crimes, and almost every line begins the same way — in you, among you, in the middle of you. The city is being treated as the scene, and the effect of the repetition is that of an address being read out at a trial.
What is listed runs from the top of society downward. Princes who use their power to shed blood. Father and mother treated with contempt. The foreigner oppressed. The fatherless and the widow wronged. Holy things despised and Sabbaths profaned. Slander used to get men killed. Bribes taken so that blood could be shed lawfully. Interest and increase taken from neighbors, and gain made by oppression. The list is a fair summary of the ten commandments broken in company, and it interleaves the sacred and the social without marking any transition between them.
The sexual offenses in the middle of the list are given in the same flat register as the financial ones, and they are family offenses — a father's nakedness uncovered, a daughter-in-law defiled, a sister humbled, a neighbor's wife taken. The point of grouping them with bribery and interest is that they are all breaches of trust by people with access. Nothing here is done by strangers.
The summary clause is four words long and it is the hinge of the passage: and have forgotten me. Everything above it is what forgetting looks like in practice. And the judgment is described as a scattering with a purpose — I will purge your filthiness out of you — followed by a sentence that puts the whole chapter in a public frame: You will be profaned in yourself in the sight of the nations. Then you will know that I am Yahweh.
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