EXPOSITION
The section on which we now enter, with its companion picture in Ezekiel 23:1-49; forms the most terrible, one might almost say the most repellent, part of Ezekiel's prophetic utterances. We have, as it were, his story of the harlot's progress, his biography of the Messalina of the nations. We shudder as we read it, just as we shudder in reading the sixth satire of Juvenal. The prophet speaks, like the satirist, of things which we have learnt, mainly under the teaching of Christian purity, to veil in a reticent reserve, with a Lucretian and Dante-like vividness. The nearest parallel, indeed, which literature presents to it is found in the 'Epistola ad Florentinos' of the latter poet. We need to remember, as we read it, that his standard was not ours, that those for whom he wrote had done or witnessed the things which he describes, that there was in them no nerve of pudicity to shock. He did not write virginibus puerisque, but for men to whom the whole imagery was a familiar thing. It is obvious, however, that the interpreter lives under ether conditions than the prophet, and cannot always follow him in the minuteness of his descriptions.
The thought that underlies Ezekiel's parable, that Israel was the bride of Jehovah, and that her sin was that of the adulterous wife, was sufficiently familiar. Isaiah (Isaiah 1:21) had spoken of the "faithful city that had become a harlot." Jeremiah (Jeremiah 2:2) had represented Jehovah as remembering "the kindness of her youth, the love of her espousals." What is characteristic of Ezekiel's treatment of that image is that he does not recognize any period in which Israel had been as a faithful wife. But even here he had a forerunner in Hosea, who, in order that his own life might be itself a parable, was ordered to take to himself "a wife of whoredom," one, i.e; whose character was tainted before her marriage (Hosea 1:2). Ezekiel would seem to have dwelt upon that thought, and to have expanded it into the terrible history that follows.