Bible Strands
Ezekiel 16:5
No one cared enough for you to do even one of these things out of compassion for you. Instead, you were thrown out into the open field, because you were despised on the day of your birth.
Berean Standard Bible
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Study note
Setting — God speaks through Ezekiel to Jerusalem, detailing the city’s abandoned condition immediately after enumerating the birth rites omitted in verse 4. The declaration marks the transition from describing human neglect to introducing divine intervention.
The words — חָסָה (cha.sah) means “to look with compassion,” combined with עַיִן (ayin), “eye,” to form the idiom “to cast an eye of compassion.” לְחֻמְלָה (le.chum.lah) specifies the motive as “for compassion.”
The thread — The pattern of finding a neglected people in desolation parallels Deuteronomy 32:10, where God locates and guards a group in a barren wilderness. This establishes a scriptural trajectory from abandonment to sovereign preservation.
Why it lands — The text states that no human agent provided care or mercy at birth, making the subsequent command to “Live” entirely unearned. It requires the reader to acknowledge that life and favor originate from divine initiative, not human compassion or merit.
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
None eye pitied thee, to do any of these unto thee, to have compassion upon thee; but thou wast cast out in the open field, to the lothing of thy person, in the day that thou wast born.
Cross-references
- Deuteronomy 32:10 He found him in a desert land, in a barren, howling wilderness; He surrounded him, He instructed him, He guarded him as the apple of His eye.
- Genesis 21:10 and she said to Abraham, “Expel the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac!”
- Exodus 1:22 Then Pharaoh commanded all his people: “Every son born to the Hebrews you must throw into the Nile, but every daughter you may allow to live.”
- Numbers 19:16 Anyone in the open field who touches someone who has been killed by the sword or has died of natural causes, or anyone who touches a human bone or a grave, will be unclean for seven days.
- Lamentations 4:3 Even jackals offer their breasts to nurse their young, but the daughter of my people has become cruel, like an ostrich in the wilderness.
- Isaiah 49:15 “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or lack compassion for the son of her womb? Even if she could forget, I will not forget you!
- Jeremiah 9:21 For death has climbed in through our windows; it has entered our fortresses to cut off the children from the streets, the young men from the town squares.
- Jeremiah 22:19 He will be buried like a donkey, dragged away and thrown outside the gates of Jerusalem.
- Lamentations 2:11 My eyes fail from weeping; I am churning within. My heart is poured out in grief over the destruction of the daughter of my people, because children and infants faint in the streets of the city.
- Lamentations 2:19 Arise, cry out in the night from the first watch of the night. Pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord. Lift up your hands to Him for the lives of your children who are fainting from hunger on the corner of every street.