Ezekiel13chapter 13

Whitewash is a building term with teeth. Mud-brick walls were coated with lime plaster to seal and smarten them. A good plaster coat over shoddy brick and bad mortar looks perfect until the first heavy rain, and then the wall comes down all at once. Ezekiel says the prophets are the plasterers, and God is sending the rain, the hailstones and the wind.

The other image is a wall breach and a hedge. When a wall was broken, someone had to go up into the gap and rebuild it. These prophets never did. They neither repaired the breach nor stood in it — the two things a watchman's colleagues were for.

The women in the second half are practising something more specific than bad preaching. They sew bands for people's wrists and make veils for heads of every size, and they hunt souls with them. Mesopotamian magic worked exactly this way: knotted cords, bindings and amulets used to bind or release a person, backed by incantations, and the ritual texts describing them fill tablets. The payment named — handfuls of barley and scraps of bread — tells you the clientele was poor and the trade was steady.

The charge against both groups is the same one: they say the LORD declares, and the LORD has not spoken. In Israel that was not a professional failing. It was a capital offence under the Law, because a nation that cannot tell a real word from a manufactured one cannot be led at all.