Ezekiel 16:22

And in all thine abominations and thy whoredoms thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth, when thou wast naked and bare, and wast polluted in thy blood.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

16:1-58 In this chapter God's dealings with the Jewish nation, and their conduct towards him, are described, and their punishment through the surrounding nations, even those they most trusted in. This is done under the parable of an exposed infant rescued from death, educated, espoused, and richly provided for, but afterwards guilty of the most abandoned conduct, and punished for it; yet at last received into favour, and ashamed of her base conduct. We are not to judge of these expressions by modern ideas, but by those of the times and places in which they were used, where many of them would not sound as they do to us. The design was to raise hatred to idolatry, and such a parable was well suited for that purpose.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

Borne unto me - me is emphatic. The children of Yahweh have been devoted to Moloch. The rites of Moloch were twofold;

(1) The actual sacrifice of men and children as expiatory sacrifices to, false gods.

(2) The passing of them through the fire by way of purification and dedication.

Probably the first is alluded to in Ezekiel 16:20; the two rites together in Ezekiel 16:21.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

22. not remembered … youth—Forgetfulness of God's love is the source of all sins. Israel forgot her deliverance by God in the infancy of her national life. See Eze 16:43, to which Eze 16:60 forms a lovely contrast (Jer 2:2; Ho 11:1).

Matthew Poole's Commentary

Thou wast so intent upon and delighted in thy lewd courses, thou never thoughtest what once thou wast, or what again thou mightest be.

In all thine abominations, both corporal and spiritual.

Thy whoredoms: this is the same thing charged thus on her, because she would not consider, or lay it to heart.

Thou hast not remembered; thou hast utterly forgotten; it is a form of speech that contains more than the words seem to have in them, she had forgotten herself and her God.

Thy youth; the misery and loathsomeness of thy birth, which is expressed very elegantly.

1. Naked, as contemptible as poverty could make her.

2. Nay, she was nakedness itself, as the word will bear, exposed to all the suffering that can befall such poor helpless wretches.

3. Bleeding to death in a most loathsome, defiled condition, that none would come near her: but, ungrateful, she forgot all.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

And in all thine abominations and thy whoredoms,.... Or idolatries, which were abominable to God, and were many; of which that just mentioned was not one of the least:

thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth; the destitute and forlorn condition then in, and what favours were then bestowed:

when thou wast naked and bare, and wast polluted in thy blood; See Gill on Ezekiel 16:6; See Gill on Ezekiel 16:7; which is mentioned to upbraid the Jews with their ingratitude; they forgetting the miserable condition they were in in Egypt, and what great things the Lord had done for them in bringing them out from thence, and the obligations they were laid under to him: and yet, after all this, to commit such abominable iniquities, and in the midst of them all never once call to mind what they had received from him; which might have been a check to their idolatries, but so it was not.

Geneva Study Bible

And in all thine abominations and thy whoredoms thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth, when thou wast naked and bare, and wast polluted in thy blood.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

22. So absorbed was Jerusalem in her infidelities that she remembered nothing of her early history, “the shame of her youth,” nor the compassion shewed her by Jehovah. On “polluted” cf. Ezekiel 16:6.

Pulpit Commentary

Verse 22. - Thou hast not remembered. The words gain a fuller significance when we recollect those of Ezekiel's master (Jeremiah 2:2). The husband remembered "the love of her espousals;" the faithless wife forgot from what a life of shame and misery she had then been rescued. Ezekiel 16:22

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

The jewellery of gold and silver was used by Israel for צלמי זכר, idols of the male sex, to commit fornication with them. Ewald thinks that the allusion is to Penates (teraphim), which were set up in the house, with ornaments suspended upon them, and worshipped with lectisternia. But there is no more allusion to lectisternia here than in Ezekiel 23:41. And there is still less ground for thinking, as Vatke, Movers, and Hvernick do, of Lingam-or Phallus-worship, of which it is impossible to find the slightest trace among the Israelites. The arguments used by Hvernick have been already proved by Hitzig to have no force whatever. The context does not point to idols of any particular kind, but to the many varieties of Baal-worship; whilst the worship of Moloch is specially mentioned in Ezekiel 16:20. as being the greatest abomination of the whole. The fact that נתן לפּניהם, to set before them (the idols), does not refer to lectisternia, but to sacrifices offered as food for the gods, is indisputably evident from the words לריח ניחח, the technical expression for the sacrificial odour ascending to God (cf. Leviticus 1:9, Leviticus 1:13, etc.). ויּהי (Ezekiel 16:19), and it came to pass (sc., this abomination), merely serves to give emphatic expression to the disgust which it occasioned (Hitzig). - Ezekiel 16:20, Ezekiel 16:21. And not even content with this, the adulteress sacrificed the children which God had given her to idols. The revulsion of feeling produced by the abominations of the Moloch-worship is shown in the expression לאכול, thou didst sacrifice thy children to idols, that they might devour them; and still more in the reproachful question 'המעט, "was there too little in thy whoredom?" מן before תּזנוּתיך is used in a comparative sense, though not to signify "was this a smaller thing than thy whoredom?" which would mean far too little in this connection. The מן is rather used, as in Ezekiel 8:17 and Isaiah 49:6, in the sense of too: was thy whoredom, already described in Ezekiel 16:16-19, too little, that thou didst also slaughter thy children to idols? The Chetib תזנותך (Ezekiel 16:20 and Ezekiel 16:25) is a singular, as in Ezekiel 16:25 and Ezekiel 16:29; whereas the Keri has treated it as a plural, as in Ezekiel 16:15, Ezekiel 16:22, and Ezekiel 16:33, but without any satisfactory ground. The indignation comes out still more strongly in the description given of these abominations in Ezekiel 16:21 : "thou didst slay my sons" (whereas in Ezekiel 16:20 we have simply "thy sons, whom thou hast born to me"), "and didst give them up to them, בּהעביר, by making them pass through," sc. the fire. העביר is used here not merely or lustration or februation by fire, but for the actual burning of the children slain as sacrifices, so that it is equivalent to העביר בּאשׁ למּלך (2 Kings 23:10). By the process of burning, the sacrifices were given to Moloch to devour. Ezekiel has the Moloch-worship in his eye in the form which it had assumed from the times of Ahaz downwards, when the people began to burn their children to Moloch (cf. 2 Kings 16:3; 2 Kings 21:6; 2 Kings 23:10), whereas all that can be proved to have been practised in earlier times by the Israelites was the passing of children through fire without either slaying or burning; a februation by fire (compare the remarks on this subject in the comm. on Leviticus 18:21). - Amidst all these abominations Israel did not remember its youth, or how the Lord had adopted it out of the deepest wretchedness to be His people, and had made it glorious through the abundance of His gifts. This base ingratitude shows the depth of its fall, and magnifies its guilt. For Ezekiel 16:22 compare Ezekiel 16:7 and Ezekiel 16:6.