Bible Strands
Ezekiel 16:32
You adulterous wife! You receive strangers instead of your own husband!
Berean Standard Bible
Follow its threads on the canvas →
Study note
Setting — God speaks through Ezekiel to Jerusalem in the midst of a prophetic allegory condemning the nation's idolatry and broken covenant. The oracle targets the political and spiritual alliances the city has cultivated while neglecting its marital vows to Yahweh.
The words — The Hebrew הָ/מְּנָאָ֑פֶת (ha./me.na.'A.fet) reads literally as "the adulterous," and תַּ֣חַת (Ta.chat) means "in place of." These terms establish the structural charge that foreign powers and idols have been positioned where the covenant husband belongs.
The thread — The adultery metaphor for covenant violation appears in Jeremiah 3:8, where God issues a divorce certificate to faithless Israel. The same text warns in Jeremiah 2:28 that self-made gods cannot rise up to provide salvation when trouble comes.
Why it lands — The passage requires the reader to acknowledge that substituting human or foreign systems for covenant loyalty constitutes direct treason. It demands a clear-eyed assessment of which alliances and loyalties are actively displacing divine authority.
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
But as a wife that committeth adultery, which taketh strangers instead of her husband!
Cross-references
- Jeremiah 2:28 But where are the gods you made for yourselves? Let them rise up in your time of trouble and save you if they can; for your gods are as numerous as your cities, O Judah.
- Jeremiah 2:25 You should have kept your feet from going bare and your throat from being thirsty. But you said, ‘It is hopeless! For I love foreign gods, and I must go after them.’
- Jeremiah 3:8 She saw that because faithless Israel had committed adultery, I gave her a certificate of divorce and sent her away. Yet that unfaithful sister Judah had no fear and prostituted herself as well.
- Jeremiah 3:20 But as a woman may betray her husband, so you have betrayed Me, O house of Israel,” declares the LORD.
- Ezekiel 16:8 Then I passed by and saw you, and you were indeed old enough for love. So I spread My cloak over you and covered your nakedness. I pledged Myself to you, entered into a covenant with you, and you became Mine, declares the Lord GOD.
- Ezekiel 23:37 For they have committed adultery, and blood is on their hands. They have committed adultery with their idols. They have even sacrificed their children, whom they bore to Me, in the fire as food for their idols.
- Ezekiel 23:45 But righteous men will sentence them to the punishment of those who commit adultery and bloodshed, because they are adulteresses with blood on their hands.
- Hosea 2:2 Rebuke your mother, rebuke her, for she is not My wife, and I am not her husband. Let her remove the adultery from her face and the unfaithfulness from between her breasts.
- Hosea 3:1 Then the LORD said to me, “Go show love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress. Love her as the LORD loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love to offer raisin cakes to idols.”
- 2 Corinthians 11:2 I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. For I promised you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ.