Trigger Alert: Sex, violence and complicated theology feature in today’s chapter and post. While this brutal war wages, with so much blood and so much trauma, Ezekiel’s rage and pain feels even more fragile, and even more compelling as a call to what we need to cease, and how we can begin to heal.
“Ezekiel 16, verse 17 is referring to a strap-on dildo and Ezekiel is referencing the emasculation of God by the collective body of Israel who is assuming the phallic, penetrative role in the divine-human relationship.”
This jaw-dropping, must-be-read-twice quote is from Prof. Tamar Kamionkowski’s furious and fascinating reflection on today’s chapter in which she explores
“a story about cultural upheavals, social disintegration and theological crises, all expressed through the breakdown of one of the most fundamental cultural and social institutions: marriage, and at its root, gender roles.”
There’s a lot going on in Ezekiel’s chapter 16, and while some of its verses are notorious and even made it into the Passover Hagaddah - the context is hardly known and the disturbing misogynist aspects of this ‘text of terror’ demand a closer critical read.
Kamionkowski’s essay in good old Zeek Magazine is recommended, and we’ll quote a few paragraphs from it, as she both helps to retell the harsh imagery as narrative, while offering her compelling perspective and thoughts on her relationship with Ezekiel and what he stands for.
“Metaphor serves as a powerful tool for Yahweh and his prophets throughout the entire Hebrew Bible. Often, these metaphors serve to inform Jerusalem of how she has disappointed Yahweh. Unfortunately, a remarkable number of these metaphors characterize Jerusalem as an unfaithful wife, a prostitute, or as a woman who has otherwise displeased the men in her life. The book of Hosea paints Jerusalem as an unfaithful prostitute to whom Yahweh is shackled and who has born children outside of this union. The book of Jeremiah again portrays Jerusalem as unfaithful, but also adds that this infidelity is akin to wickedness. As such, Jerusalem has become wicked in her negligence of Yahweh’s will. The book of Ezekiel, however—specifically chapter sixteen of this book—expands on the metaphor of the unfaithful wife in a different and more troubling way.”
“Scene One: Ezekiel tells the story of an outcast infant (the people of Israel) who is left wallowing in her own blood in an open field. God passes by and recites: “live in spite of your blood” and then continues on to his next order of business. Miraculously, the young girl survives. When she reaches puberty, God takes note of her again. He “enters” into a covenant with her, washes off her blood, and clothes her. He lavishes upon her great riches and alters her status from outcast to royalty.
Scene Two: Wife Israel is then accused by husband God of infidelity: she spreads her legs to any guy who passes by, she takes the gifts that her husband gave her and shares them with her lovers, and she forgets that it is her husband who brought her out of the ghetto. She even refuses gifts from her lovers, instead offering them gifts for her sexual satisfaction.
Scene Three: Husband God, filled with rage, assembles all of her lovers and strips her naked before them. He abandons her while the mob of men molest, rape and mutilate wife Israel. Only once she is wallowing in her own blood, as she had been as the outcast infant, does husband God take her back.”
This horrific unfolding drama begins with an act of kindness, goes through vicious violence and abuse, into some sort of forgiveness and what may just be a battered truce?
Some of us may be familiar with the way this story starts -- as this text made it into the Seder, a reminder of the Hebrew nation’s humble beginning and the eternal struggle to rise from blood, born and reborn:
The young baby girl somehow survives, then growing old and beautiful enough to become her savior’s consort, cleaned up and dressed up like a regal queen. She’s become so radiant that her beauty would attract many other suitors and she would turn none of them away.
Not surprisingly, most classical commentaries gloss over what exactly Ezekiel is referring to here and why he considers this lurid detail essential to what will become a much more brutal depiction of Jerusalem as a deviant wayward wife.
“..I was able to discover the meanings of the linguistic oddities in Ezekiel’s text, and to find parallels in Mesopotamian literature. As I dug deeper, I realized that Ezekiel did not just depict wife Jerusalem as being unfaithful. The abomination of wife Jerusalem is that she was attempting to pass for a male (i.e. aggressive, independent), that she was crossing gender boundaries and upsetting the world order. Her behaviors were less characteristic of an adulterous wife and more appropriate to a woman who was asserting her selfhood and independence–behavior associated with masculinity in Ezekiel’s world. In Ezekiel 16, the wife Jerusalem wears the dildo, wields the phallus.
Her transgendering is the ultimate transgression.
I return to my companion Ezekiel and ask: “What is so troubling you?” He answers me: “We failed as men to protect Jerusalem and our families. We have been shamed by the Babylonian conquerors. We are in a strange new land where women play roles in public life. Why would God take away our manhood? If we have become emasculated, does it mean that women have usurped the phallus?”
Ezekiel chapter 16 begins and ends in a fantasy of an all-powerful God and a completely submissive wife. However, the material embedded within this frame reveals a different dynamic. The center of the story expresses a much more volatile, chaotic relationship– one in which God does not have full control and in which wife Israel is not completely submissive.
This radical admission is made even more radical by the metaphor in which it is expressed.
The use of the marriage metaphor beckons us to read this text on more than one level. As we explore the power relationships between male and female, we are, in fact, exploring the power relationships between God and Israel.
Israel is both female and male – female in relation to God, and male within the realm of human society. Israel is at once powerful and utterly powerless. The male community, symbolically portrayed as a female, betrays its own maleness in Ezekiel 16. The marriage metaphor is not simply a vehicle, or a vessel for conveying a theological message. Ezekiel’s use of the marriage metaphor embodies an outbreak of chaos.
This is a story about cultural upheavals, social disintegration and theological crises, all expressed through the breakdown of one of the most fundamental cultural and social institutions: marriage, and at its root, gender roles.”
What’s so compelling about this radical reading of Ezekiel is that it takes us from the historical and political polemics into the body, the home, the domestic and the essential. Ultimately - it’s about intimacy and relationships. I am moved by this creative reading and other contemporary Feminist, Queer and critical readers of our heritage that help us unpack what’s at the root of so many layers of oppression and trauma, and how through honest relationships with past and present participants in the conversation - we can forge better, healthier new prophetic paths.
“At first, I was consumed with a desire to expose the horrors of this prophet’s so-called sacred text. But, over the past twenty-five years, Ezekiel has become my (textual) partner and companion. This dark figure from the Babylonian Exile is, I admit, an unlikely and unusual choice of companion for someone who has traversed the pathways of Jewish feminism; yet somehow this biblical figure chose me as much as I found him. My relationship with Ezekiel has led me to understand my journey from anger to compassion, from suspicion to cautious embrace. My experiences as a Jewish woman- whether in the realm of Jewish living and practice; professional Jewish leadership; or Jewish learning and scholarship- are mirrored in the ways in which I have engaged with this prophet.”
May we lean into more relationships even with the voices we find challenging - within ourselves, in our shared text, even the most terrifying ones, and in each other’s trust - towards less bad blood and more loving living.
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