Ezekiel 22:6–12

Ezekiel 22:6 — The princes as paradigm of violence. The indictment opens not with the common people but with the "princes" (Hebrew nesiʾim), the ruling elite who held power as a sacred trust. Their sin is named precisely: they have used their authority to shed blood. The phrase "everyone according to his power" is damning — it suggests that position and strength were not checks on violence but its very engine. For Ezekiel, leadership carries an indelible moral accountability (cf. Ezek 34). When shepherds become predators, the entire social order inverts.

Ezekiel 22:7 — The collapse of the social triangle. Three vulnerable categories appear in rapid succession: parents, foreigners (ger), and orphans and widows. This is not coincidence. The Torah's social legislation is structured precisely around these three groups (Ex 22:21–24; Deut 27:19). By naming them together, Ezekiel invokes the entire covenantal social order and declares it shattered. The "foreigner" (ger) held a legally protected status in Israel; to oppress them was to violate a memory Israel was commanded to keep alive — "you were strangers in Egypt" (Ex 22:21). Contempt for parents strikes at the Fourth Commandment and the vertical structure of authority; abuse of widow and orphan strikes at horizontal bonds of care. Together they describe a community that has lost both piety and mercy.

Ezekiel 22:8 — Liturgical desecration. The sin shifts from the social to the explicitly cultic: God's "holy things" (qodashim, likely referring to the Temple's sacred objects, offerings, and priestly protocols) have been despised, and the Sabbaths profaned. In Ezekiel, Sabbath observance is not merely ritual punctiliousness but a sign of the covenant itself — a recurring marker throughout the book (cf. Ezek 20:12–24). To profane the Sabbath is to sever the sign of relationship with God. Liturgical negligence and social injustice are thus shown to be two faces of the same apostasy.

Ezekiel 22:9 — Slander and ritual impurity. The verse pairs "slanderous men who shed blood" — likely informers who used false testimony to condemn the innocent — with those who "eat on the mountains," a reference to illicit sacrificial meals at pagan high places (cf. Hos 4:13). The juxtaposition is deliberate: bearing false witness and idolatrous worship are allied corruptions, both being perversions of the tongue and the altar, the two primary instruments of covenant life.

Verses 10–11 — Sexual sins as covenant dissolution. The catalogue now enters the most intimate sphere. Uncovering a father's nakedness (v. 10a) echoes the prohibition of Lev 18:7–8 and the curse on Canaan in Gen 9:22. The language of "uncovering nakedness" in Leviticus 18 is covenantal — the chapter frames these sexual prohibitions as the very things that caused the land to "vomit out" its former inhabitants (Lev 18:25). Sexual violation of a menstruant (v. 10b), adultery, incest with a daughter-in-law, and rape of a half-sister (v. 11) collectively rehearse prohibitions from Leviticus 18 and 20, cataloguing Israel's descent into the very practices that were to distinguish them from the Canaanites. Each act violates a boundary — of family, of bodily sanctity, of marital fidelity — that the covenant was meant to safeguard.

Ezekiel 22:12 — Bribery, usury, and forgetting God. The indictment closes with economic crimes: bribery to procure blood-guilt (judicial murder), taking interest (neshekh and tarbit, the two Hebrew terms for exploitative lending prohibited in Ex 22:25 and Lev 25:36), and "greedily gaining from neighbors by oppression." The finale is devastating in its simplicity: "you have forgotten me." This is the root of every item in the catalogue. Forgetting God is not intellectual atheism but existential amnesia — the daily practical abandonment of the One who gave the covenant. All the sins enumerated are symptoms; this forgetfulness is the disease.

Typological and spiritual senses. The Fathers read this passage as a mirror of the soul's interior disorder. Just as Jerusalem's princes were meant to govern justly and instead shed blood, so disordered passions usurp the soul's God-given hierarchy. The five-fold list of sexual sins typologically anticipates the moral exhortations of Paul in Romans 1:24–32, where idolatry cascades into sexual and social disorder. The final verse's "forgotten me" resonates with Augustine's restless heart: the soul's amnesia of God is the source of every disordered love.

Catholic tradition reads this passage through the lens of integral human ecology — the conviction that moral order in society, family, worship, and economics is not compartmentalized but organically unified. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God" (CCC 1700); Ezekiel's catalogue shows what happens when that dignity is systematically denied in every sphere of life simultaneously.

St. Jerome, commenting on related Ezekiel passages, observed that the prophet does not merely list sins but reveals their inner logic: each violation of another person is an implicit denial of God's lordship. St. John Chrysostom, in his homilies on the prophets, similarly connected the oppression of widows and orphans to eucharistic hypocrisy — one cannot approach the altar with integrity while crushing the poor.

The passage anticipates the Church's Social Doctrine, particularly the principles articulated in Rerum Novarum and Centesimus Annus: that unjust wages, exploitation of the vulnerable, and corruption of justice are not merely civil failures but grave sins against God. Pope Francis, in Laudato Si' (§56), echoes Ezekiel precisely when he argues that the same logic that exploits the poor exploits the earth — both spring from forgetting that creation and neighbor belong to God.

The sexual sins of verses 10–11 are illuminated by the Church's theology of the body. John Paul II taught that every sexual violation is an assault on the language of the body, which is meant to express total, faithful, fruitful self-gift. To profane that language — through incest, adultery, or exploitation — is to lie with the body about the nature of God's own covenantal love.

Verse 12's "you have forgotten me" corresponds to what the Catechism calls the "root of sin": turning away from God, the first and greatest commandment, which is the source of every downstream moral disorder (CCC 1849–1850).

This passage confronts the contemporary Catholic with a demanding question: in which categories of this catalogue does my own society — or my own life — appear? The structure of Ezekiel's indictment is strikingly modern in its comprehensiveness. Political leaders who use office for personal gain (v. 6), indifference to immigrants and refugees (v. 7), neglect of liturgical life (v. 8), judicial corruption and exploitative lending practices (v. 12) — these are not ancient curiosities but living headlines.

For the individual Catholic, the closing phrase "you have forgotten me" is the most urgent word. Ezekiel diagnoses not primarily external misconduct but a prior interior rupture. The examination of conscience suggested by this passage is not merely: have I committed these acts? but: in what areas of my daily life have I functionally forgotten God? — in financial decisions, in how I treat people with less power, in my consistency in prayer and Sunday Mass. The passage calls Catholics to recover the integral vision: that justice toward the poor, fidelity in marriage, honesty in business, and reverence in worship are not separate spiritual departments but a single seamless response to the one God we have been called not to forget.