Ezekiel 16:23-34

Her infidelities with strangers from abroad, i.e. her alliances with idolatrous nations and adoption of their religious rites: Egypt (Ezekiel 16:23), Assyria (Ezekiel 16:28), and Chaldea (Ezekiel 16:29 seq.). Hosea already stigmatized foreign alliances as whoredoms; it is not, however, so much the political aspect of these alliances as their religious consequences that Ezekiel reprobates. Such alliances were followed by the fashions and worship of the nations with which they were formed (Isaiah 2:5 seq.). Naturally also when Israel became subject to the great eastern empires, the overwhelming influence of these states, with their customs and religions, was widely felt. The gods which had given them universal empire were introduced and worshipped. There appears to have been a great invasion of foreign idolatry in Judah in the declining years of the state, and the kingdom sank to a level in this respect to which the North had never fallen.