The Sisters' Harlotry: Samaria and Jerusalem Condemned (part 1)

Study notes

Two sisters share one mother and an early history of entanglement in Egypt, yet each pursues foreign alliances that the passage frames as repeated acts of fornication. Oholah’s path ends in destruction by Assyria; Oholibah intensifies the same choices, first with Assyria and then with Babylon, until the LORD stirs her former lovers against her. The allegory traces how covenant loyalty is violated through desire for imperial power and its gods, how memory of past entanglements fuels further betrayal, and how judgment arrives as the outworking of those very relationships. The sisters’ actions also reach the LORD’s sanctuary and Sabbaths, showing that infidelity in one sphere immediately violates the other.

What is The Sisters' Harlotry: Samaria and Jerusalem Condemned (part 1) about?

The word of the LORD reaches Ezekiel with a fresh image: two women, daughters of one mother, who fornicated in Egypt while still young. Their names are given as Oholah the elder and Oholibah her sister; Oholah stands for Samaria, Oholibah for Jerusalem. Both became the LORD’s and bore him children, yet each turned from that bond. Oholah lusted after the governors and horsemen of Assyria, bestowing her favors on their idols until judgment overtook her. Oholibah watched, then pursued the same path with greater intensity, first toward Assyria and then toward the Chaldeans whose images she saw painted on walls. She sent messengers, welcomed the sons of Babylon to her bed, and later returned in memory to the lewdness of her Egyptian youth. The LORD declares that he will therefore rouse her former lovers against her, bringing them with weapons and chariots to execute judgment. These opening verses establish the charge that the rest of the chapter will unfold: the two cities have treated their covenant with the LORD as a marriage they could break at will, and the consequences now stand ready to fall.

Where does this passage sit in Ezekiel?

Ezekiel 23 follows the long indictment of Jerusalem’s leaders and common people in chapter 22, where blood, idolatry, and Sabbath violation are listed without relief. The new word in 23:1 therefore extends that same catalog by recasting the two capital cities as sisters who share one mother and one early history of Egyptian entanglement. Samaria’s story occupies the first ten verses and ends with her destruction by Assyria; Jerusalem’s longer account then begins with the explicit statement that she “saw” and chose the same path with greater intensity. This pairing creates an internal escalation within the chapter itself: what Samaria did once, Oholibah repeats and multiplies.

The sustained sexual and maternal imagery also reaches back to the earlier allegory of Jerusalem alone in chapter 16. There the city was exposed as an abandoned infant rescued and later betrayed; here the same city appears as one of two sisters who both turned from the husband who had taken them. The repetition of phrases such as “pressed the breasts of her virginity” and “lifted your eyes toward them” binds the two chapters together while shifting the focus from Jerusalem’s origin to the parallel histories of the northern and southern kingdoms.

Within the larger sequence of judgment oracles, chapter 23 prepares for the boiling-pot vision of chapter 24 by naming the very nations—Babylon, Pekod, Shoa, Koa—that will soon besiege the city. The command in 23:36 to “declare to them their abominations” further recalls Ezekiel’s watchman commission in chapters 3 and 33, showing that the long allegory still serves the same task of confronting the people before the final blow falls.

How is the passage structured?

The opening command in 23:1-2 sets two women before Ezekiel without further introduction, then 23:3 immediately anchors their shared history in Egypt. Verse 4 supplies their names and their bond to the LORD, after which the account turns to Oholah alone. Her actions occupy 23:5-8 in a single unbroken sequence of desire, defilement, and retained Egyptian memory. The pivot at 23:9 shifts without warning from description to divine action: the same lovers become agents of her death in 23:10.

Oholibah enters at 23:11 with an explicit comparison to her sister. Her story lengthens through three distinct stages—Assyria in 23:11-13, the wall images and Chaldeans in 23:14-18, and the return to Egypt in 23:19-21—each stage marked by verbs of seeing and sending. The judgment speech that follows in 23:22 begins with the same formula used for Oholah yet expands into a longer catalogue of attackers and weapons. The cup image introduced at 23:31 interrupts the military language and receives its own elaboration through 23:34 before the speech resumes its direct address.

At 23:36 the LORD addresses Ezekiel again, this time with a question that restarts the indictment. The remaining verses move from general charges in 23:37-39 to concrete cultic acts inside the sanctuary in 23:39, then to the detailed preparation scene in 23:40-42. The final two verses collapse the entire history into a single repeated act of prostitution. The structure therefore alternates between extended narrative blocks for each sister and shorter, increasingly direct divine speeches that close each section.

What is the historical background?

The names Oholah and Oholibah point to sanctuary structures. Oholah suggests a tent of her own, while Oholibah suggests my tent is in her. These labels fit the two capital cities whose worship sites stood at the center of the kingdoms’ identity. Samaria’s sanctuary and Jerusalem’s temple each claimed to house the presence of the LORD, yet the sisters’ actions treated those sites as places open to other gods.

Assyrian and Babylonian officials appear in the description with concrete markers of rank. Blue garments, perfect clothing, girdles at the waist, and turbans mark governors, rulers, and horsemen. Such details match the visual record of imperial reliefs that showed military elites in distinctive dress. When Oholibah sees the Chaldeans painted in vermilion on a wall and then sends messengers, the text draws on the actual practice of decorating palace walls with processions of foreign dignitaries. Envoys from Jerusalem would have encountered these images during visits to Babylon.

The political setting placed both cities between two successive empires. Samaria fell to Assyria in 722 BCE after repeated alliances that included recognition of Assyrian deities. Jerusalem later navigated the same choice between Assyria and the rising Chaldean power centered in Babylon. Treaties carried expectations of shared cultic loyalty, so the language of fornication and defilement with idols reflects the religious obligations that accompanied military protection.

Child sacrifice appears as the giving of sons to pass through the fire for the idols. This rite belonged to cults practiced in the region, especially those connected with Phoenician and Canaanite deities. The further claim that the same people entered the sanctuary on the same day highlights the ritual assumption that such acts rendered a person unfit for the LORD’s house. The text treats the violation of that boundary as an additional offense.

The judgment that strips garments, removes articles of beauty, and brings in foreign armies with chariots and wheels corresponds to the documented outcomes of siege warfare in the period. Victorious forces routinely carried off temple treasures and deported populations, actions the passage presents as the direct result of the sisters’ earlier choices.

What does this passage teach about God?

The LORD claims both sisters as his own from the start. They bore sons and daughters to him, yet their fornication began in Egypt and continued without restraint. This bond is not abstract; it carries the weight of exclusive belonging that makes every subsequent alliance an act of betrayal. Oholah’s turn toward the Assyrians and Oholibah’s pursuit of the Chaldeans are described as deliberate choices that defile the one who already possesses them.

God’s response follows the pattern of the broken bond rather than an external code. He gives Oholah into the hands of the very lovers she desired, and he stirs up Oholibah’s former partners against her. The judgment is not arbitrary punishment but the outworking of the relationship she has chosen. When the passage states that the LORD’s soul is alienated from Oholibah just as it had been from her sister, it presents divine revulsion as the direct counterpart to human infidelity.

The sisters’ actions also reach the LORD’s own possessions. They defile his sanctuary on the same day they slaughter their sons for idols and profane his Sabbaths inside his house. The text therefore treats the covenant as two-sided: the people’s bodies and children belong to the LORD, and so do the sanctuary and the Sabbaths. Violation of one sphere immediately violates the other.

The cup that Oholibah must drink is her sister’s cup, filled with drunkenness, sorrow, horror, and devastation. This image shows judgment as participation in the consequences already experienced by Samaria. At the same time the LORD declares he will cause her wickedness and Egyptian fornication to cease, so that she will no longer lift her eyes toward them. The same hand that brings the sword and fire also removes the memory that fueled the betrayal.

Human beings appear here as those who remember or forget. Oholibah multiplies her fornication in order to remember the days of her youth; later she is charged with having forgotten the LORD and cast him behind her back. The passage presents memory as the hinge between fidelity and ruin, and it presents God as the one who both exposes that ruin and determines its end.

What are the interpretive difficulties?

The rendering of Oholah’s action in verse 5 as fornication “under me” leaves open whether the phrase stresses her status as already belonging to the LORD or whether it points to an attempt to replace that bond. The same preposition appears nowhere else in the chapter with this construction, so the choice affects how readers weigh the initial betrayal. A similar ambiguity surfaces in verse 43, where the Hebrew sequence permits either “now she will commit fornication again” or “still she commits her fornication.” Manuscripts offer no decisive variant, yet both senses fit the surrounding description of repeated overtures.

The repeated claim that the LORD’s soul becomes “dislocated” from each sister (verses 17–18) raises a further question about divine emotion. The verb elsewhere describes physical dislocation; here it describes revulsion that follows exposure. The text does not clarify whether this revulsion precedes or follows the decision to hand the women over to their lovers, leaving the precise sequence of divine response unsettled.

When the LORD asks Ezekiel in verse 36 to “judge” the sisters and declare their abominations, the command stands without further instruction on what form that judgment should take. Earlier chapters have already shown Ezekiel performing symbolic acts rather than pronouncing verdicts in court, so the request may simply continue that pattern of public accusation. The passage supplies no indication that the prophet’s words alter the coming events.

Finally, the chapter records no response from either woman and offers no hint of repentance or mitigation. The silence is consistent with the larger movement toward judgment already announced, yet it leaves open whether any future turning remains conceivable within the terms of this oracle alone.

Notes accompany the Anselm Project Bible, an AI translation from the original languages. Tap any verse above for the committee's word-level decisions.