Bible Strands
Ezekiel 16:25
At the head of every street you built your lofty shrines and degraded your beauty. With increasing promiscuity, you spread your legs to all who passed by.
Berean Standard Bible
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Study note
Setting — God speaks through Ezekiel to personified Jerusalem during a prophetic allegory detailing her covenant unfaithfulness and impending judgment.
The words — רֹאשׁ (rosh, "head") and רָמָה (ramah, "high place") mark the precise locations where the city erected illicit altars.
The thread — The text echoes Jeremiah 3:2's call to view the barren heights of violation and Ezekiel 16:31's repetition of building mounds at street heads, while Genesis 38:14 provides a cultural parallel for strategic placement at thoroughfares.
Why it lands — The passage states that Jerusalem physically constructed shrines at every major intersection and publicly degraded her covenant identity through widespread sexual immorality. It demands recognition that spiritual infidelity manifests as deliberate, public rebellion that provokes divine wrath.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Hebrew words
King James Version
Thou hast built thy high place at every head of the way, and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred, and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thy whoredoms.
Cross-references
- Jeremiah 3:2 “Lift up your eyes to the barren heights and see. Is there any place where you have not been violated? You sat beside the highways waiting for your lovers, like a nomad in the desert. You have defiled the land with your prostitution and wickedness.
- Ezekiel 16:31 But when you built your mounds at the head of every street and made your lofty shrines in every public square, you were not even like a prostitute, because you scorned payment.
- Genesis 38:14 she removed her widow’s garments, covered her face with a veil to disguise herself, and sat at the entrance to Enaim, which is on the way to Timnah. For she saw that although Shelah had grown up, she had not been given to him as a wife.
- Genesis 38:21 He asked the men of that place, “Where is the shrine prostitute who was beside the road at Enaim?” “No shrine prostitute has been here,” they answered.
- Proverbs 9:14 She sits at the door of her house, on a seat in the heights of the city,
- Isaiah 3:9 The expression on their faces testifies against them, and like Sodom they flaunt their sin; they do not conceal it. Woe to them, for they have brought disaster upon themselves.
- Jeremiah 2:23 “How can you say, ‘I am not defiled; I have not run after the Baals’? Look at your behavior in the valley; acknowledge what you have done. You are a swift young she-camel galloping here and there,
- Jeremiah 6:15 Are they ashamed of the abomination they have committed? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen; when I punish them, they will collapse,” says the LORD.
- Ezekiel 16:15 But because of your fame, you trusted in your beauty and played the harlot. You lavished your favors on everyone who passed by, and your beauty was theirs for the asking.
- Ezekiel 23:9 Therefore I delivered her into the hands of her lovers, the Assyrians for whom she lusted.