What Great of Flesh Actually Meant in Ezekiel

Ezekiel says something about Egypt that the rabbis of the Talmud could not let go of. “You were licentious with the sons of Egypt, your neighbors,” he writes, “great of flesh” (Ezekiel 16:26). The phrase arrives in the middle of a long accusation against Israel, comparing the nation to an unfaithful wife. But that phrase, “great of flesh,” sits there like a stone in the road. What does it mean?

Abraham in Joseph's Time, drawn from Vayikra Rabbah 25:7, records the debate. Vayikra Rabbah is a fifth-century Palestinian Midrash organized around the weekly Torah portions of Leviticus. When the rabbis reach Leviticus 19, with its laws about holiness and forbidden relationships, Ezekiel's phrase becomes a key that opens the discussion.

Rabbi Levi bar Sisi asks first: Does “great of flesh” mean the Egyptians had some kind of bodily difference? One leg, and Israelites had three? The absurdity of that reading is the point. If not anatomy, then what?

Rabbi Levi proposes that the phrase is a coded reference to circumcision. “They were all uncircumcised.” Egypt, neighbor and seducer, had not entered the covenant. They were “great of flesh” in the sense of being full of that which the covenant demands be removed. When Israel followed Egypt's ways, when she was “licentious” with Egypt's sons, she was not just making a political alliance or an aesthetic choice. She was aligning herself with uncircumcision, with the world outside the brit, the covenant.

This is what makes Abraham's presence in this passage significant. The entire discussion pivots around what it means to belong to the covenant community, and Abraham is its founding moment. In (Genesis 17:10-14), God commands circumcision as the sign of the covenant, an everlasting mark between Abraham's descendants and God. When Ezekiel looks at Israel's dalliance with Egypt and says “great of flesh,” the rabbis hear the echo of Genesis. Israel has gone back to what they left behind.

But Rabbi Berekhya and Rabbi Simon, citing Rabbi Shmuel ben Rabbi Nahman, offer another reading. “Great of flesh” could be, in their view, anatomically literal: a reference to physical endowment. The rabbis include this interpretation with a kind of honesty about scripture that can startle modern readers. The text says what it says. They are not embarrassed to read it.

Then the discussion moves to a verse from the Book of Joshua: “He circumcised Israel at the hill of the aralot” (Joshua 5:3). The word aralot means foreskins. Rabbi Levi reads this not merely as a location name but as a physical description. The hill of the foreskins: the place on the body that resembles a hill when the covenant mark has not been made. The image is purposely earthy. The rabbis are saying that covenant identity is not metaphorical. It lives in the body. It cannot be philosophized away.

This is the deeper argument the Midrash is making through Ezekiel's strange phrase. Israel's problem was not simply that they imitated foreign nations. The problem was that they were drawn toward what the Midrash Rabbah traditions consistently identify as the world before covenant. Before Abraham. Before the founding mark.

The rabbis of Vayikra Rabbah were writing in a world where Jewish identity was constantly being challenged, debated, and redefined. Who belongs? What makes you part of the covenant? Their answer, reading through Ezekiel and back to Joshua and Genesis, was physical and irrevocable. The mark on the body is the signature on the contract. And going licentious with the uncircumcised is not just a moral failure. It is an erasure of who you are.

Joseph, who lived in Egypt and never forgot who he was, is the counterexample the Midrash implies but does not say. He was surrounded by “great of flesh” Egypt for years. He did not become it. The title of this source text, “Abraham in Joseph's Time,” points to exactly that tension: the covenant made with Abraham, tested in Egypt by Joseph, and then broken by the nation Ezekiel is weeping over.