Ezekiel 16 - Introduction

The foundling child who became the faithless wife

The prophet continues to pursue his demonstration of the inevitableness of Jerusalem's destruction. In ch. 13, 14 he swept away the delusive hopes with which the prophets of Israel filled her imagination; and in ch. 15 he shewed how little the fact that Israel was the people of the Lord was fitted to inspire confidence, as other prophets had shewed before him (Amos 3:2). In the present passage it is the positive proof of the necessity of Israel's destruction that he exhibits her persistent unfaithfulness to Jehovah through all her history, and her forgetfulness of his goodness. He has to "shew to Jerusalem all her abominations" (Ezekiel 16:2). This is done in the allegory of the foundling child who became the faithless wife of her benefactor. Though marked by a breadth with which modern taste is unfamiliar the allegory is powerful. And when the details are forgotten and only the general conception remains in the mind, the prophet's creation is felt to be artistically beautiful as well as true. An outcast infant exposed in the open field and weltering in its blood was seen by the pitying eye of a passer by. Rescued and nourished she grew up to the fairest womanhood, and became the wife of her benefactor, who lavished on her all that could delight and elevate. But the ways into which he led her were too lofty to be understood, and the atmosphere around her too pure for her to breathe; the old inborn nature (her father was the Amorite and her mother a Hittite) was still there beneath all the refinements for which it had no taste, and at last it asserted itself in shameless depravity and insatiable lewdness.

This moral history of Israel has these divisions:

(1) Ezekiel 16:1. The exposed infant adopted and reared to womanhood.

(2) Ezekiel 16:8. The foundling, now grown up to be a fair woman, taken in marriage by her benefactor.

(3) Ezekiel 16:15. Her numerous infidelities.

(4) Ezekiel 16:35. Punishment of the adulterous wife.

(5) Ezekiel 16:59. Her receiving again.