Ezekiel 23:22–29

Ezekiel 23:22 — "I will raise up your lovers against you" The oracle opens with a reversal of desire. The nations Oholibah (Jerusalem/Judah) had lusted after — pursuing alliances and adopting their gods — will become her instruments of punishment. The verb "raise up" (Hebrew ʿûr, to arouse, stir up) echoes the language of divine sovereignty over history: God does not merely permit Babylon's aggression but actively orchestrates it. The phrase "from whom your soul is alienated" is poignant — Jerusalem's passionate pursuit of foreign powers had already curdled into estrangement and mutual exploitation, yet she continued the ruinous courtship.

Ezekiel 23:23 — The Catalogue of Enemies The list is precise and cumulative: Babylonians, Chaldeans, Pekod (an Aramean tribe east of the Tigris), Shoa and Koa (nomadic peoples of the same region), and Assyrians. By including Assyria alongside Babylon, Ezekiel collapses past and present judgment into a single terrifying procession — these are the very "desirable young men" Jerusalem had ogled (v. 12). The phrase "all of them desirable young men, governors and rulers…riding on horses" deliberately echoes her earlier seduction (vv. 6, 12), now returning as executioners. The beauty she coveted becomes the face of her destruction.

Ezekiel 23:24 — "I will commit the judgment to them" This verse is theologically startling: God delegates judicial authority to pagan nations. The phrase "they will judge you according to their judgments" does not mean their law supersedes God's; rather, Babylon becomes an unwitting instrument of divine justice — a theme Ezekiel shares with Jeremiah (Jer 25:9, where Nebuchadnezzar is called God's "servant"). The military arsenal listed — chariots, wagons, bucklers, shields, helmets — conveys overwhelming, inescapable force, stripping away any illusion that Judah's own military alliances or defenses could protect her.

Ezekiel 23:25 — Divine Jealousy and Mutilation "I will set my jealousy against you" is the interpretive key to the whole passage. Hebrew qinʾāh (jealousy/zeal) is not petty possessiveness but the fierce, exclusive love of the covenant. It is the same word used in the Decalogue ("I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God," Ex 20:5). The mutilation described — removal of nose and ears — was an ancient Near Eastern punishment inflicted on adulterous women and battlefield captives. Ezekiel employs this culturally recognizable penalty as a metaphor for national humiliation and the loss of royal honor. The taking of sons and daughters represents exile's most devastating human cost, the severance of the future.

Ezekiel 23:26 — Stripping of Clothes and Jewels The stripping of garments and jewelry reverses the bridal investiture of Ezekiel 16:10–13, where God himself clothed Jerusalem in splendor. What was given in covenant love is now reclaimed in covenant judgment. The jewelry (Hebrew tiph'eret, "ornaments of beauty") likely refers both to literal plunder and to the temple treasure and royal insignia that would be carried to Babylon (2 Kgs 25:13–17).

Ezekiel 23:27 — The Purifying Purpose: Egypt Removed from Memory Here the oracle's purpose shifts from retribution to restoration. "Thus I will make your lewdness to cease" — the punishment has a telos. The specific mention of Egypt is significant: Israel's spiritual adultery is traced all the way back to pre-Exodus entanglement with Egyptian idols (cf. Ez 20:7–8; 23:3). The exile, devastating as it is, will accomplish what prophetic preaching could not: it will sever the people's nostalgic attachment to pagan religious culture.

Ezekiel 23:28–29 — Delivered into the Hands of Those You Hate The bitter irony is complete. God will "deliver" (Hebrew nātan) Jerusalem into the hand of enemies — a verb normally used for God handing enemies over to Israel (Ex 23:31; Josh 10:8). Now the formula is inverted. Oholibah will be left "naked and bare" — the shame of public exposure that she invited through her promiscuity. The phrase "the nakedness of your prostitution will be uncovered" deliberately uses the legal language of Leviticus 18 (where "uncovering nakedness" refers to illicit sexual union), casting the Babylonian conquest as the exposure of a long-concealed crime.

Typological/Spiritual Sense In the allegorical sense, Oholibah is the soul that pursues created goods, worldly alliances, and false securities with the devotion owed to God alone. The "lovers" who return in wrath represent the disordered attachments that, when God withdraws his protective grace, become agents of the very ruin they promised to prevent. Augustine's Confessions is a sustained meditation on precisely this dynamic: "our heart is restless until it rests in Thee" — and the restlessness, unchecked, becomes catastrophic (Conf. I.1).

Catholic tradition illuminates this passage through at least three distinct lenses.

1. The Covenant as Spousal Theology The Catechism teaches that God's covenant with Israel "is compared to a marriage" and that Israel's idolatry is "a breaking of the covenant and a kind of adultery" (CCC 2380 note; cf. CCC 218–221). Ezekiel 23 is the most fully developed expression of this spousal metaphor in the Old Testament. The Church Fathers saw in this oracle a foreshadowing of Christ's own jealous love for the Church: Origen (Commentary on Ezekiel, Hom. VII) reads Oholibah's judgment as a warning to the Church against accommodating herself to the spirit of the world. Pope St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body grounds the spousal analogy in the very structure of creation, arguing that conjugal fidelity images the divine fidelity — and its violation images the rupture sin introduces into every human relationship with God.

2. Divine Wrath as Purifying Love St. Thomas Aquinas clarifies that divine "anger" is not a passion in God but denotes the effect of justice upon those who resist it (ST I, q. 19, a. 11). The Council of Trent affirmed that temporal punishments can be medicinal, not merely retributive (Session XIV, on Penance). The mutilation, stripping, and exile of Oholibah, read through this lens, are not naked vengeance but the drastic surgery required when the soul has become wholly attached to what destroys it. St. John of the Cross (Dark Night of the Soul, Book II) employs strikingly similar language for the purging of disordered affections in the spiritual life.

3. God's Sovereignty Over Secular History That pagan Babylon serves as God's instrument aligns with the Catholic understanding, expressed in Gaudium et Spes §26, that God's providential governance extends through all of history, including political and military events, toward the ultimate good of his people. This does not baptize imperialism but insists that no human power acts outside God's ultimate governance.

This passage confronts contemporary Catholics with an uncomfortable question: what are the "lovers" I have pursued in place of God? In a culture saturated with competing allegiances — wealth, national identity, ideological tribes, digital validation — the logic of Oholibah is disturbingly familiar. We court the very things that promise security or pleasure, only to find that disordered attachments eventually enslave rather than satisfy.

Concretely, the stripping in verse 26 invites examination of conscience: what "jewels and garments" — status, possessions, curated identities — have I accepted as gifts of God's covenant love, only to deploy them in service of idols? The Sacrament of Reconciliation is precisely the moment when, rather than waiting for external catastrophe to expose our "nakedness," we willingly uncover it before God and receive mercy rather than judgment.

For parishes and communities, the passage warns against the institutional temptation to seek cultural legitimacy through alliances with prevailing ideologies — echoing the bishops' own warnings about the Church becoming too accommodated to Caesar. Ezekiel's word is pastoral: return before the lovers return as executioners.