What Great of Flesh Actually Meant When Ezekiel Used It

The Phrase That Would Not Be Softened

Ezekiel was not a prophet who made things comfortable. When he wanted to describe Israel's attraction to Egypt, he put it on the body. In Ezekiel chapter 16, speaking in God's voice to Jerusalem, he said: You were licentious with the sons of Egypt, your neighbors, great of flesh.

The phrase is crude. It was meant to be. Ezekiel held the language raw where another prophet might have elevated it into metaphor. He kept the metaphor physical, the physical uncomfortable, and the discomfort instructive.

Vayikra Rabbah, the fifth-century Palestinian midrash on Leviticus, did not soften it either. It brought that phrase into a chapter about planting trees, entering the land, and the covenant that Abraham had made in his own flesh. Egypt became, in the midrash's reading, the place where Israel could forget the mark that had defined them since Abraham.

Before the Midrash Reached Egypt, It Went to an Orchard

Leviticus 19:23-24 commands that when Israel enters the land and plants a food tree, the tree's fruit must remain untouched for three years. In the fourth year the fruit is consecrated, holy to God. Only in the fifth year can it be eaten freely. The untouched fruit of the first three years is called orlah, a word that shares its root with the word for foreskin, for the uncircumcised state, for what is blocked or sealed off from sacred use before its time.

The midrash made the farmer stand in his orchard and count years. A tree can belong to the land and still require waiting before its fruit enters holy use. Desire has to age. Appetite has to be held back. The orchard was teaching Israel that holiness is not possession. It is timing, restraint, and the willingness to leave what you own untouched until the designated moment.

The Mark That Abraham Carried

From the orchard law, the midrash moved to Abraham and his covenant. What Abraham received at Sinai before Sinai, the covenant sealed in his own flesh, was the same principle written on a different surface. The mark of circumcision was the body's version of the orchard law: a declaration that possession does not equal unrestricted use, that the body belongs to its owner in a way that requires acknowledgment of something beyond the body's own appetites.

Abraham carried this mark. His son Isaac carried it. Jacob carried it. The sign was continuous, generation by generation, a visible record of who had entered the covenant and under what terms.

Then Israel went to Egypt. Egypt was the place where the mark could be forgotten. Not removed, but forgotten, which was worse. The neighbors were great of flesh in the way Egypt was great of everything: larger, older, more powerful, more impressive in their appetites. The attraction was not merely physical. It was the attraction of a worldview that measured greatness by scale and recognized no covenant above its own desires.

The Tree That Was Also a Torah

The chapter in Vayikra Rabbah that contains the orchard law also contains a teaching about Torah as a tree of life. The language comes from Proverbs 3:18: She is a tree of life to those who hold fast to her. The midrash reads this image with urgency: the Torah is not an instrument to be used for other purposes. You do not use a tree of life as a spade. You do not treat the covenant as a tool for worldly advancement.

This was the Sodomite use of the world: treating creation as something that owed them something, that existed for their extraction. And it was, in a subtler register, the Egyptian use: treating the body as a measure of greatness rather than as the carrier of a covenant that measured greatness differently.

Melchizedek, the priest-king of Salem who blessed Abraham after the battle of the kings, appears in the same chapter as the one who prepared Abraham for the covenant by reminding him that he was not fighting for conquest. He was fighting within a framework of obligation and return. The bread and wine Melchizedek brought were not tribute. They were instruction about the right relationship between a man's strength and what that strength was for.