18. Ezekiel Chapter 23 is filled with sensual imagery
The book of Ezekiel is one of the major prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, and it contains some of the most explicit imagery in the entire collection of books which comprises the Christian Old and New Testaments. Chapter 23 uses imagery to describe Samaria and Jerusalem as two sisters, Aholah and Aholibah respectively. The sisters are introduced thus: “And they committed whoredoms in Egypt; they committed whoredoms in their youth: there their breasts were pressed, and there they bruised the teats of their virginity”. Aholibah is presented as the worst of the two, “she was more corrupt in her inordinate love than she, and in her whoredoms more than her sister in her whoredoms”.
Ezekiel describes Aholibah multiplying her whoredoms as she grew older “in calling to remembrance the days of her youth, wherein she had played the harlot in the land of Egypt. For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses”. Using the imagery, Ezekiel thus presents the trespasses of the Samaritans and the Israelites, and prepares them for the judgements to come after the God of Israel raises enemies to punish them for their continuing sins against Him. Ezekiel was a major influence on the writer of Revelation, which closes the New Testament, though chapter 23 and its suggestive references is entirely ignored in the later book.
