Texts in Conversation
Ezekiel 23 describes Jerusalem’s political unfaithfulness using shocking and vulgar sexual imagery. The Greek Septuagint translation, while similar in emphasis, reflects an effort to soften the sexual language, likely due to discomfort with its tone.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Ezekiel 23:20
Hebrew Bible
19 Yet she increased her prostitution, remembering the days of her youth when she engaged in prostitution in the land of Egypt. 20 She lusted after her lovers there, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of stallions. 21 This is how you assessed the obscene conduct of your youth, when the Egyptians fondled your nipples and squeezed your young breasts.
Date: 600–501 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
LXX Ezekiel 23:20
Septuagint
19 And you did multiply your fornication, so as to call to remembrance the days of your youth, in which you engaged in prostitution in Egypt, 20 and you did dote upon the Chaldeans, whose flesh is as the flesh of the donkeys, and their members as the members of horses. 21 And you did look upon the iniquity of your youth, the things which you did in Egypt in your lodgings, where were the breasts of your youth.
Date: 100–1 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... the ancient versions seem to have exercised some form of censorship on the Hebrew text of Ezekiel. The LXX had three different translators producing a very uneven Greek text that lacks consistency in the treatment of its key terms and message. Moreover, the book being replete with Akkadianisms and Aramaisms it was relatively easy to mistranslate whenever the statements became too dangerous and was deemed that the invective needed to be toned down. An example is the expression māʾ ʾamulâ libbātēk “How filled with anger I am against you,” in Ezekiel 16:30 that none of the versions translated correctly, though the Akkadian-Aramaic idiom (libbāti malû and מלא לבתך “filled with anger”) was well-known in the Aramaic of Daniel 3:19 and in Hebrew of Esther 3:5 ..."
Daniel Bodi, “When YHWH's Wife, Jerusalem, Became a Strange Woman: Inversion of Values in Ezekiel 16 in Light of Ištar Cult,” in Foreign Women—Women in Foreign Lands: Studies on Foreignness and Gender in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East in the First Millennium BCE, ed. Angelika Berlejung and Marianne Grohmann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 77–108.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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