And your elder sister is Samaria, who lived with her daughters to the north of you; and your younger sister, who lived to the south of you, is Sodom with her daughters: This verse identifies Samaria and Sodom as the sisters of Jerusalem. Samaria was the capital city of the northern kingdom of Israel that was defeated and taken into exile by the Assyrians in 722 B.C. Here Samaria is more general and refers to the people of the northern kingdom. Sodom was a city near the Dead Sea that God completely destroyed in the time of Abraham (see Gen 19). The people of Jerusalem thought that Sodom had been the most wicked of cities. For both Samaria and Sodom, her daughters refers to the “villages” (Good News Translation, Contemporary English Version) and provincial towns that depended on the capital city. Geographically Samaria was to the north of Jerusalem, and Sodom was to the south of Jerusalem. The Hebrew text is literally “at your left hand” and “at thy right hand” (so King James Version), which means north and south respectively, because Hebrew refers to the directions from a position of facing east.

Most translations identify Samaria as your elder sister, and Sodom as your younger sister. Historically this is not accurate, because Sodom was destroyed about 1000 years before Jerusalem became the capital city of the nation of Israel, and Jerusalem had already existed for hundreds of years before Samaria was built. A more accurate translation has Samaria as “your larger sister,” and Sodom as “your smaller sister” (so Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch)—the point of comparison is the size of the territory, not the relative age of the cities. Those languages that cannot make this distinction may retain the older/younger terminology and ignore the historical discrepancy as part of the poetic license of the parable.

A model for this verse is:

• Your larger [or, big] sister is Samaria who lived in the north with her villages that are her daughters, and your smaller [or, little] sister Sodom lived south of you with her daughter villages.

Quoted with permission from Gross, Carl & Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on Ezekiel. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2016. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .