What Does Ezekiel 16:25 Mean?
You built your high place at the head of every road, and made your beauty a recoiling thing, and spread your feet open to every passerby, and multiplied your harlotries.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Thou hast built thy high place at every head of the way, and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred, and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thy whoredoms.THE KEY
The Hebrew word for “way” grows from “to tread,” tying every road’s head to the repeated footfall and exposure in the verse.
THE MEANING
The verse places a high place at the head of every road, then describes exposure to each passerby and a multiplying of whoredoms. It says that this repeated public display turns what is beautiful into something treated with abhorrence. Its language is harsh and shaming, holding the cost of that exposure in view.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that repeated exposure leaves beauty untouched: here, beauty is made an object of abhorrence.
THE ROOT
תַּזְנוּתַיִךְ
taznuteik
GROWS FROM
זנה
z-n-h
To commit sexual infidelity; to act as a prostitute.
“harlotries” in this verse is taznuteik. The word belongs to the זנה (zanah) family, and the verse says these acts are multiplied. The image is not of one encounter but of a pattern repeated until sexual exposure governs the scene.
ALSO GROWS
zanah: To commit fornication; to act as a prostitute.
זָנָה
The verb names the action beneath the verse’s plural charge.
zonah: A prostitute.
זוֹנָה
This noun from the same root gives the verse’s sexual imagery a person-shaped form.
דֶּרֶךְ
derek
GROWS FROM
דרך
d-r-k
To tread or step; a way is ground made into a route by passage.
The root ties the road to the act of treading it. Beside “every one that passed by” and the image of opened feet, “the head of every way” becomes a place of repeated footfall and public exposure.
ALSO GROWS
darak: To tread, step, or march.
דָּרַךְ
This verb makes the road’s connection to repeated movement audible in the verse.
midrakh: A footprint or place for treading.
מִדְרָךְ
This branch keeps the focus on ground marked by the movement of feet.
תִּפְאַרְתֵּךְ
tif'artekh
GROWS FROM
פאר
p-ʾ-r
To adorn or beautify; by extension, to make splendid or glorious.
This word carries the sense of visible splendor or adornment alongside beauty. The verse’s turn is that the splendor is not simply lost: it is made contemptible through the repeated exposure described here.
ALSO GROWS
pa'ar: To adorn, beautify, or glorify.
פָּאַר
The verb reveals the active sense beneath the beauty named in the verse.
tif'arah: Adornment, splendor, or beauty.
תִּפְאָרָה
This noun shows that the word-family includes outward display as well as beauty.
THE PATTERN
Scripture depicts sexual unfaithfulness as an exposure that can stain or dishonor what it touches.
Lift your eyes to the bare heights, and see where you have not been lain with. You sat upon the roads for them, like the Arabian in the wilderness, and you have soiled the land with your harlotry and your evil.And now I will uncover her disgrace before the eyes of her lovers, and no one will snatch her from my hand.Flee the selling of bodies. Every shortcoming that a person does is outside the body; but the one who sells bodies misses the mark against his own body.THE THREAD
A voice calls out in the wilderness, Clear the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a raised road for our God.The shared Hebrew word is דֶּרֶךְ (derek, “way”). Here, a high place stands at the head of every way; Isaiah speaks of a way prepared and made straight. The road itself becomes part of the revelation: a route can be crowded by repeated exposure or cleared for passage.
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