Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
The Cup of Your Sister
Ezekiel 23:28-49
28 “For the Lord Yahweh says: ‘Behold, I will deliver you into the hand of them whom you hate, into the hand of them from whom your soul is alienated. · WEB
Judah is handed the cup Samaria drank from, and the chapter's closing charge is that the two sisters kept the Sabbaths while doing all of it.
The sentence is delivered as a drink, and the cup is identified by its previous owner: You will drink of your sister's cup, which is deep and large. Not a different judgment scaled to a different offense, but the same vessel, passed along. The description of drinking it runs past what a metaphor usually bears. Filled with drunkenness and sorrow, drained out, the broken pieces gnawed. A cup finished to the point where the drinker chews the shards is the picture of a judgment with nothing left in reserve.
The reason attached is the same one the book gives everywhere and it is stated in the plainest words: Because you have forgotten me and cast me behind your back. Two images, and the second is physical. Something put behind you is not destroyed or argued with. It is simply out of the field of vision, and that is the book's steady account of how idolatry works.
What follows is the judgment delivered by the lovers, exactly as in the previous chapters. The Babylonians and Assyrians come against her with weapons, chariots and a host of peoples, and the passage says that God will deliver you into the hand of them whom you hate. The instrument is always the alliance. Nothing extra needs arranging, because the arrangement was made by the party now being judged.
And then the charge that closes the chapter, which is easy to read past and should not be. In the same paragraph as the child sacrifice and the defiling of the sanctuary stands this: when they had slaughtered their children to their idols, then they came the same day into my sanctuary to profane it. They kept the calendar. They have profaned my Sabbaths is listed as a separate item, but the sequence in that verse is the accusation. The same day, from the fire in the valley to the courts of the house. The religion never stopped. That is what the chapter finds unbearable, and it is why the imagery is as violent as it is.
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