Ezekiel 20:29 - Exposition

What is the high place , etc.? Bamah, in the plural Bamoth, was the Hebrew for "high place." At first it was applied to the hill on which some local sanctuary stood ( 1 Samuel 9:12 ; 1 Kings 3:4 ), but was gradually extended, after the building of the temple as the one appointed sanctuary, to other places which were looked upon as sacred, and which became the scenes of an idolatrous and forbidden worship. Ezekiel emphasizes his scorn by a conjectural derivation of the word, as if derived from the two words ba ("go") and mah ("whither"); or , perhaps, What comes? . Taking the words in their ordinary sense, they seem to express only a slight degree of contempt. "What, then, is the place to which you go?"—what is the "whither" to which it leads? But I incline (with Ewald and Smend) to see in the word "go into" the meaning which it has in Genesis 16:2 and Genesis 19:31 , and elsewhere, as a euphemism for sexual union. So later the word "Bamah" becomes a witness that those who worship in the high place go there (as in Genesis 19:30 ) to commit whoredom literally and spiritually. Its name showed that it was what I have called "a chapel of prostitution" ( Genesis 16:1-16 :24, 25).