Ezekiel 23:20
For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses. For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.
Ezekiel 23 belongs to a chapter that exposes the fearful and awful sins of Judah and Israel. The chapter sets forth those sins in deliberately degrading terms, presenting Samaria and Jerusalem, that is backsliding Israel and Judah, under the figures of lewd, adulterous women and harlots. Their doting on the Assyrians and Babylonians represents Israel and Judah turning from God to foreign powers and ways. Forsaking God and seeking help from Egypt, and turning to Babylon and to Egypt instead of God, is portrayed as rebellious spiritual fornication and corrupt desire for illicit lovers, even while God earnestly pleads with His children to turn to Him.
In this way the verse shows that God's covenant people commit spiritual fornication when they abandon God and follow the world, and the imagery marks the people and their influence as spiritually corrupt. The corrupt woman is a symbol of a corrupt church, opposite to a pure woman as a symbol of a true church. The sexual unfaithfulness is a figure for spiritual apostasy meaning an unlawful connection with idolatrous or false religious groups, rather than cooperation with civil government over temporal matters.
The chapter is searching moral instruction and includes predictions of the last days, and because of its figure it is best read in private, although some passages in it are fit to be read anywhere. The verse belongs together with Ezekiel 22 as part of Ezekiel 16-32, a section that rebukes sin in its awful wickedness as apostasy. The verse rebukes the claim that the Lord's way is unjust by showing that God will judge each person according to that person's ways, applying a just and consistent standard rather than allowing different rules for different people.