Biblion Bible Commentary
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Two Sisters
Ezekiel 23:1-27
1 Yahweh’s word came again to me, saying, · WEB
The two kingdoms are given names and treated as one case history, and the younger sister had the older one's ruin in front of her the whole time.
The parable is set up as a family case. Two sisters, daughters of one mother, corrupted in Egypt before the story properly begins — which places the trouble before the exodus, as chapter 20 did. Then they are named: Samaria is Oholah, and Jerusalem Oholibah. Both names are built on the word for a tent or tabernacle, and Jerusalem's carries a possessive that Samaria's does not. Even in the naming, the city with the sanctuary is marked as the one who had more.
The imagery is the harshest in the book, and it is the second chapter in eight to use it. That repetition is deliberate rather than gratuitous. Chapter 16 told the story as a marriage betrayed. This one tells it as a political history, and the lovers are named as empires: Assyria first, with its officers in blue, horsemen and desirable young men, and then Babylon, whose portraits on a wall are enough to send messengers after them. What is being described in the language of infidelity is a foreign policy — alliances sought, tribute paid, gods imported with the treaties.
Oholah's end is reported in a single verse and then used as evidence. She was given into the hands of the very lovers she had doted on, and they stripped her and killed her, and she became a byword among women. The northern kingdom's fall was recent history, thoroughly documented, and its cause was public knowledge.
That is what makes the verdict on the younger sister so severe. Her sister Oholibah saw this, yet she was more corrupt in her lusting than she, and in her prostitution which was more depraved than the prostitution of her sister. Not equally corrupt. More. She had the whole demonstration in front of her — the same policy, the same lovers, the same result — and went further along the same road. Judah's sin in this chapter is not ignorance and not weakness. It is the deliberate repetition of an experiment whose outcome had already been published.
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