An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 164: Bruised teats and horse-like emissions (Ezekiel 21-25)

Ezekiel 21-25
Bruised teats and horse-like emissions.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT
For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Ezekiel 21

“And say to the land of Israel, Thus saith the LORD; Behold, I am against thee, and will draw forth my sword out of his sheath, and will cut off from thee the righteous and the wicked.”

This chapter is largely a lot of repetition about God unsheathing His sword, and sharpening and “furbishing” it to use against the people of Israel, which we kind of knew about anyway. Once again Ezekiel is given the task of imparting this information, with some kind of hand-clapping demonstration. There’s some fairly unusual use of repetition within the verses as well “Say, A sword, a sword is sharpened, and also furbished” and “I will overturn, overturn, overturn, it” which gives some force to the language.

The chapter ends with threats against the Ammonites as well, but they only get a few verses tacked onto the end.

Ezekiel 22

“Son of man, the house of Israel is to me become dross: all they are brass, and tin, and iron, and lead, in the midst of the furnace; they are even the dross of silver.”

More threats to Israel, who will be melted in a metaphorical furnace because they are “dross”. My understanding of smelting is that the dross is the impurities that smelting helps remove, rather than what you put in in the first place. It’s not mentioned in this chapter, which is all about destruction, but surely the act of smelting metal, applied as a metaphor to a reaving of the people, is that the impurities will be burned away or drawn off, so what is left is the pure form of the metal; thus the immanent punishments threated by God are not purely destructive but have the ultimate effect of creating something pure and strong out the other side. If that is the intent of the metaphor, it might have been good to have made it more explicit, unless it is later on.

The other thread of this chapter is a list of the various transgressions, some involving incest and adultery, some involving violence and lack of charity and mercy to the weak, some involving failure to keep religious observations. Now, whilst I would argue that to “put no difference between the holy and profane” isn’t a crime that warrants invasion and enslavement by a foreign power as punishment, even as a non-believer I can see the purpose in ritual practices that make a religious act something that stands apart from the everyday, otherwise what is the point of doing it? This can be done with secular events to some degree as well, from a simple “no screens during family meals” policy to dress codes for social events, these bracket and separate the event from the general routine and highlights it as something with its own importance. Probably not worth killing somebody if they disobey it though.

Ezekiel 23

“And they committed whoredoms in Egypt; they committed whoredoms in their youth: there were their breasts pressed, and there they bruised the teats of their virginity.”

Ezekiel’s off on one of his favourite rants, likening Samaria and Jerusalem to two whores, that he calls Aholah and Aholibah. The two nations dealing with other nations such as Egypt and Assyria, and particularly engaging in idolatry with some of the gods of these countries, is likened to the two metaphorical women “committing whoredom” with a string of lovers. As with the previous time he did this, Ezekiel waxes at length (nearly 50 verses) about lewdness and nakedness and “bruised teats”, as well as the infamous verse about paramours “whose issue is like the issue of horses”.

Although the metaphor works, to a point, the whole comes across as a fairly nasty misogynist rant – I’m left with the impression of Ezekiel standing on a street corner with spittle flecking his beard shouting “Whores!” at all the passing women. There are 16 mentions of whoredom or whoring, 7 lewdness, 5 mentions of breasts or “teats”, 4 nakedness and 3 harlots, but it feels like a lot more.

Ezekiel 24

“Wherefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Woe to the bloody city, to the pot whose scum is therein, and whose scum is not gone out of it! bring it out piece by piece; let no lot fall upon it.”

Some more mad metaphorical acts from Ezekiel. The first is to make the world’s most disgusting-sounding stew as some kind of metaphor that Jerusalem will be boiled up in its own iniquities, or something. The second is not to act in mourning even when his own wife dies, as some kind of metaphor about the Israelites not being able to mourn when they are destroyed, and yet “ye shall not mourn nor weep; but ye shall pine away for your iniquities, and mourn one toward another”. So you won’t mourn, but you’ll mourn?

This is not one of Ezekiel’s better chapters.

Ezekiel 25

“And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them”

The Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites and Philistines all get a bunch of threats laid upon them for either directly acting against Israel, or indulging in schadenfreude at the troubles of Israel (for what else is “thou hast clapped thine hands, and stamped with the feet, and rejoiced in heart with all thy despite against the land of Israel”). It seems a bit rich in one sense for God to decide to destroy these nations for not helping or acting against Israel when He has decided to do just that, I suppose it’s a case of them taking on God’s role for themselves. I think we’ve established quite well by this point that God doesn’t have to explain Himself to puny humans or conversely that trying to see the will of God in geo-political situations is a losing game. Whichever, let’s move swiftly on.