Oholah and Oholibah
pejorative personifications given by the prophet Ezekiel to Samaria and Jerusalem in respectively
In the Hebrew Bible, Oholah (אהלה ’Āholāh) and Oholibah (אהליבה ’Āholîḇāh) (or Aholah and Aholibah in the King James Version and Young's Literal Translation) are pejorative personifications given by the prophet Ezekiel to the cities of Samaria in the Kingdom of Israel and Jerusalem in the kingdom of Judah, respectively. They appear in chapter 23 of the Book of Ezekiel.
There is a pun in these names in the Hebrew. Oholah means "her tent", and Oholibah means "my tent is in her."
The Hebrew prophets frequently compared the sin of idolatry to the sin of adultery, in a reappearing rhetorical figure. Ezekiel's rhetoric directed against these two allegorical figures depicts them as lusting after Egyptian men in explicitly sexual terms in Ezekiel 23:20–21:
And she doted upon concubinage with them, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses. Thus thou didst call to remembrance the lewdness of thy youth, when they from Egypt bruised thy breasts for the bosom of thy youth.
Ezekiel 23:44
A hapax legomenon, אשת (’iššōṯ), is translated as "women", though it is different than the normal plural form of אשה (’iššāh, 'woman'), which is נשים (nāšîm). Paul Mankowski writes "'He went in to her as to a harlot, indeed they have gone in to Oholah and Oholibah אשת of wickedness.' The easiest and perhaps correct solution to the difficulty of the anomalous אשת in this verse is to assume the text is corrupt and emend it."
Catharism
In the divergent theology of the Cathars, the heterodox Christian movement thriving in the 12th to 14th centuries, Oholah and Oholibah inspired the belief that the Cathar Invisible Father had two spiritual wives, Collam and Hoolibam.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Oholah and Oholibah” as pejorative personifications given by the prophet Ezekiel to Samaria and Jerusalem in respectively. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as pejorative personifications given by the prophet Ezekiel to Samaria and Jerusalem in respectively. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3429299. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Oholah and Oholibah” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.