CRITICISM OF EZEKIEL 23

 

One female reader of the Quora website took advantage of a call that the editor sent out for atheists to send in their favorite Bible contradictions. Instead she replied: “I personally like Ezekiel 23:20. It's not really a contradiction though, just misogyny and sexual repression of desire at its Biblical finest.”

It turns out that she is by no means alone in her view of that chapter of Ezekiel (which I urge you to read yourself before proceeding with the commentary below). Some radical scholars have even dismissed the whole book of Ezekiel as being the uncontrolled ravings of a madman. And many others (who, by the way, remain Christians nevertheless) have begun to question the text from a feminist viewpoint. Let's consider this last-mentioned school of Bible criticism first along with some moderating views.

Feminist Interpretations

“Feminist approaches consider the prophetic literature to be intrinsically culturally conditioned against women. This shortcoming, it is argued, is manifest in the negative portrayals of Israel as a wayward, unfaithful wife and in the descriptions of judgment as terrible abuse perpetrated on her (note Jer 3-4; Ezek 16;23; Hos 1-3). At the same time, the God of the prophets is portrayed as a male, a jealous and violent husband...” (M.D. Carroll)

Carroll goes on to characterize this as “a hermeneutics of suspicion that questions texts and encourages resisting the literary strategies of their encoded ideologies, which can be blatantly expressed or subtly disguised as subtexts. This subversive reading 'against the grain' often is done self-consciously from a certain interested position (such as feminism). Primacy is given to the reader as over against any written text, even the Bible...”

Tiemeyer points out: “There are two ways of looking at Ezekiel 16 and Ezekiel 23. One can interpret the text in its historical setting and focus on the underlying tenor of the metaphor – that is on Judah's political alliances and God's anger at Judah's lack of trust in his ability to preserve perspective or concentrate on the vehicle of the metaphor – that is, on the interplay between the man (God) and his wife (Judah). Most feminist scholarship on Ezekiel 16 and Ezekiel 23 approaches the text from this [latter] perspective.”
“Feminist scholars...have taken the words of Hosea 1-3 and Ezekiel 16; 23 as literal descriptions of actual marriage practices. This leads these feminist scholars to condemn the culture, the prophets and the God of these texts as misogynistic. Other scholars...have urged caution in reading the rhetoric of these prophets as literal descriptions of marital practices. When reading powerful texts such as Hosea and Ezekiel, one needs to focus on their powerful use of metaphor in the rhetoric they employ.” And if that latter tack is taken, “we find that the texts are powerful metaphorical pieces that point to the oncoming destruction of a people who have been unfaithful to their covenant with Yahweh.” (Parker)

Greenberg responds to feminist interpretations in the following way: “There can be no doubt that such readings are authentic expressions of the pain and outrage experienced by feminists who search Scripture for reflections of their constructions of reality and meet with Ohilah and Oholibah. The feminist project, promoting a new female reality, necessarily clashes with Scripture – one of the fashioners of the reality to be superseded. At bottom what feminists criticize is not what the texts meant to those who composed and received them in their historical context, but what the text means in today's context...Whether aiming to savage Scripture or to salvage it, feminists are judgmental. They applaud or decry, approve or disapprove. They write to promote a new gender reality.”

Literary Considerations

The above comments point out accurately the limitations of a strictly feminist approach to this chapter.

So let's begin to understand it in its historical and literary context, as we would with any other portion of Scripture. The first thing to admit is that Ezekiel 23 is rather over-the-top in its language. Block says, “If this chapter is recognized as the locus classicus for bawdy vocabulary, it is because it has intensified the sex-related imagery of ch. 16...” One feminist commentator has even called it pornoprophecy. And as hinted at above, this is obviously not to be taken as literal in any way whatsoever. Instead, this chapter has been characterized as a metaphor, allegory, or parable – literary forms known for often going to outrageous extremes in order to get their point across. Just witness some of the NT parables with people building houses on sand, loaning huge amounts of money to servants, killing owners of a field so that they can have it for themselves, going into poverty in order to purchase a pearl, burying money that was meant for investment, etc.

For example, Greenberg speaks of “Oholibah's extraordinary obtuseness, leading her into unheard-of promiscuity, resulting in unprecedented punishment.”

As for the use of sexual imagery to get a point across, two articles in The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery say the following:

“The unfaithfulness of God's people is personified by images of Zion as a barren woman who prostitutes her sexuality, thus frustrating her fertility (Jer 3:1-3; Ezek 23; Hos 9:11,12).”

“In expressing his message of judgment, Ezekiel uses a wide variety of vivid imagery. He employs the language of unfaithfulness. Jerusalem is like an adopted daughter that has rebelled (Ezek 16), Jerusalem and Samaria are like two sisters united in their addiction to prostitution (Ezek 23).”

“The nation (Jerusalem, Samaria, Nineveh) as a shameless, abused and disgraced degenerate prostitute, who is punished by being publically abused and disgraced, is a recurrent metaphor (Jer 13:22,26; Ezek 23; Hos 2:3,9; Nahum 3:5-6).”

Confirming that the main meaning of the chapter does not lie at all in its sexual imagery are the many scholarly analyses which take each verse one by one and identify the historical event in the history of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms which is being described there. It is a sad history of Israel being seduced into running toward one after another foreign country in order to make alliances with it rather than trusting that God would take care of them if they only remained faithful to Him.

But despite the above, I would imagine that some feminist critics would still ask the question: “Why are the negative images always of women in the Bible?” That issue does need facing.

It is first of all best to admit that God is almost always pictured as a man in the Old Testament. And the fact that He later came to earth in the form of a man only reinforces that image. One could, however, argue that the Holy Spirit seems to share more traditionally female characteristics such as offering comfort to those in need. In any case, to refer to God gender-free as “it” is not a good option either because of that pronoun's highly impersonal nature. And to turn God into a goddess instead would have been no better since in biblical times and locales goddesses generally had sexually charged implications and were closely associated with fertility. So if by process of elimination we are stuck with a “masculine” Deity, the proper relationship of His creation to Him is naturally pictured as that of a loyal spouse. And conversely, any fracture of that relationship by the wife must be pictured as adultery or prostitution.

Adding to the appropriateness of that male-female imagery is the fact that cities and nations were generally referred to by using feminine pronouns.

In my reading up on the subject, I came across the comments of one scholar (unfortunately, I can't recall his name) who came up with what I thought was a very helpful slant on the problem. He pointed out that Ezekiel's comments were not directed at all to women and their behavior since they had little or no say on political decisions at that time. Instead, God through the prophet was squarely addressing the male leadership of the straying nations. And to shake them up and get their attention, they were being overtly compared, in the crudest terms possible, not only to women (which alone would probably have been taken as an insult in that predominantly patriarchal society), but actually as utterly shameless, nymphomaniacal prostitutes.

The Whole Counsel of Scripture

It is an accepted tenet of responsible biblical hermeneutics that all of Scripture must be taken into account before making any rash generalizations regarding God's will based on only a few passages. This is especially true in light of the fact that the full revelation of God's will for man took centuries to come about. Thus, let us first consider some other OT passages before making any generalizations concerning the Bible's “sexual repression of female desire.”

Women are sometimes pictured in the OT narratives as being “liberated” sexually, but some are rightly taken as negative examples. Lot's two daughters wait until their father is drunk and then take sexual advantage of him; Jacob's two sister-wives fight over the right to sleep with him and resort to an aphrodisiac; Potiphar's wife takes an undue interest in the young Joseph while he is in slavery; Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute in order to have sex with her father-in-law; and Bathsheba certainly does not put up much of a fight when David summons her to his bedchamber. But, of these examples, the only cases which could be attributed to unrepressed female desire are those of Potiphar's wife and possibly Bathsheba, who may have purposely bathed when she knew David was watching her. Neither case is condoned in the Bible. And the other examples appear not to be due to female sexual desire as much as the wish to have a child at all costs.

But to get a fuller picture of what the OT has to say on the subject, it is best to look at the wisdom literature found there. In the opening chapters of Proverbs, there is no denying that the “loose woman,” a sexually liberated wife who attempts to lure in young men who pass by her door, is intended to be a wholly negative figure in that such men who succumb to her wiles are flirting with disaster. But she is balanced by the even more powerful positive feminine image of Lady Wisdom who urges such men to follow her instead if they wish a long and prosperous life.

A step even further in the direction of sexual liberation is seen in The Song of Songs. Unique for biblical writings, this book appears to concentrate wholly on the acceptable satisfaction of both male and female sexual desires, expressed through rather explicit figurative language. But in this case, the only appropriate means for satisfying such desires is seen to be found in a devoted monogamous relationship.

The New Testament goes even further in giving examples and teachings to go by. Thus, we are treated to the following:

    Jesus' favorable comments regarding the loose woman who anointed his feet,

    His refusal to go along with the Jews' demand that the adulterous woman be stoned,

    His kind treatment of the Samaritan woman at the well who practiced a life of serial monogamy and worse,

    Paul's pronouncement in Galatians in 3:28 regarding the equality of male and female in God's sight,

    the picture of the church as the bride of Christ in Ephesians 5:25-27,

Paul's full recognition of both male and female sexual desire leading to his admonitions to marry rather than give into the desires without a marriage commitment (I Cor. 7:8-9) as well as teaching that any abstaining from sexual relations within a marriage must be of a temporary basis only (I Cor. 7:1-6).

In conclusion, if the woman I quoted at the start of this post who objected to the practice of sexual repression of female desires means by that the Bible teaches that sexual relationships should be confined to those between married parties, then I would have to agree with her. There is certainly no warrant for free sex found in the pages of Scripture.