For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.
This verse comes from Ezekiel's shocking allegory about two sisters representing Israel and Judah's unfaithfulness to God. The crude language is intentional—Ezekiel uses graphic sexual imagery to show how grotesque spiritual adultery looks to God. The "lovers" are foreign nations and false gods Israel was pursuing instead of trusting the one true God. This isn't about literal anatomy but about how far Israel had gone in chasing relationships that promised power but delivered degradation.
God, this verse is hard to read and harder to apply to myself. Open my eyes to the ways I've prostituted myself to lesser loves. Thank you for speaking ugly truth instead of polite lies. Help me choose you—not because I should, but because you alone offer the life I keep trying to find elsewhere. Amen.
Let's not sanitize this. The verse is deliberately vulgar because that's exactly what betrayal feels like to the betrayed—obscene, stomach-turning, impossible to pretty up. When Ezekiel writes this, he's trying to wake up people who've grown numb to their own unfaithfulness. They'd dressed up their political alliances and religious compromises in respectable language, but God cuts through the euphemisms and shows them what their choices actually look like: pathetic, desperate, dehumanizing. Before you recoil too far, consider your own lovers. Not literal affairs, but the relationships and pursuits you've used to replace God's place in your life. The approval you lust after on social media, the security you chase through overwork, the comfort you seek in substances or shopping or success. We dress these up too—"building my platform," "providing for my family," "self-care." But what does the spiritual infidelity underneath actually look like? What if God sees past our sanitized explanations to the same pathetic grasping Ezekiel describes? The good news is that this graphic wakeup call comes in the middle of a book where God refuses to abandon his wayward people, no matter how grotesque their betrayals.
Why would Ezekiel use such graphic sexual language to describe spiritual unfaithfulness, and what does this tell us about how God views betrayal?
What are your "lovers"—the things you've pursued for life, security, or identity instead of God?
How do we sanitize our spiritual infidelity with respectable language, and what would happen if we named it truthfully?
What does it mean that God speaks this harsh truth while still refusing to abandon his people?
What would it look like to renounce your current "lovers" and return to exclusive trust in God—not just as a rule, but as the only relationship that won't ultimately degrade you?
For she lusted after her lovers [there], whose flesh is like the flesh of donkeys and whose issue is like the issue of horses.
AMP
and lusted after her lovers there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose issue was like that of horses.
ESV
'She lusted after their paramours, whose flesh is [like] the flesh of donkeys and whose issue is [like] the issue of horses.
NASB
There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
NIV
For she lusted for her paramours, Whose flesh is like the flesh of donkeys, And whose issue is like the issue of horses.
NKJV
She lusted after lovers with genitals as large as a donkey’s and emissions like those of a horse.
NLT
That whetted her appetite for more virile, vulgar, and violent lovers—stallions obsessive in their lust.
MSG