Disgusting Ezekiel
You also played the harlot with the Egyptians, your [a]lustful neighbors, and multiplied your harlotry to make Me angry. Ezekiel 16:26 NASB
Lustful – The prophets do not mince words. Their messages arrive with explicit, often offensive language. The reason is simple: if you want to rivet the audience’s attention, you need provocative language. And the prophets knew precisely where the most shocking words were to be found—in sexual imagery. Of course, that sort of language offends readers thousands of years later, so the translators do their best to make the prophets civil. Unfortunately, this turns the prophets into modern-day evangelists, not searing founts of accusation.
Let’s take Ezekiel’s sexual-political imagery as an example. The translation “lustful neighbors” is the Hebrew šekenâ-yik bāsār. You will notice the word bāśār in this phrase, a word that is usually translated “flesh.” But in this instance, associated with zānâ (harlot, fornication), the word takes on the same meaning found in passages like Genesis 17:14 and Leviticus 15:2-19.[1] In other words, what Ezekiel says is “your penis neighbors.” It is as offensive as it could be, but it expresses the anger of God in most dramatic language. No one could miss the point. The imagery makes that certain. You probably noticed the little footnote preceding the translation “lustful.” That footnote reads “Lit great of flesh.” It would probably be more in line with Ezekiel’s tone to read this as “big penis neighbors.”
This isn’t the only place where Ezekiel uses offensive sexual imagery to make his point. Unfortunately, translators tend to be quite Victorian when they come across these instances. Perhaps that makes the Bible tolerable for under-age readers, but it removes the intensity of God’s warning to His people. And it makes the passages forgettable. I suggest that if you read Ezekiel’s statement about Israel’s fornication with Egypt in its fuller expression, you would never forget it, but if you read it as provided by the translation, if will soon disappear in the fog of forgetfulness. There’s something about sex that makes us squirm—and entices at the same time. The emotional connection seals the deal. You can’t forget.
The Bible is a book of human behavior in relationship with the divine. It is not an antiseptic instruction manual. It is not “sanitized.” We can make it that way with our Sunday school versions of the stories, of course, but it wasn’t intended to be reduced to spiritual pabulum. The Bible is for adults, and the imagery is sometimes X-rated so that we, as adults, will have a reaction that cements the message. Perhaps that’s why abominable “denotes disgust, not pollution.”[2] “ . . . the pollution phenomenon is rooted in basic psychology . . . The sense that certain objects or actions are disgusting is correlated with a sense that they are contaminating, which is expressed in the language of pollution.”[3] “. . . in the presence of the sacred, all human sexuality is out of place.”[4] That’s why the imagery works so well.
Topical Index: pollution, abomination, disgust, sex, penis, lust, bāśār, Ezekiel 16:26
[1] The medieval Jewish exegete Sforno suggests such in his commentary on Genesis 17:13.
[2] Eve Levavi Feinstein, Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 23.
[3] Ibid., p. 25.
[4] Ibid., p. 31.
