“Behold every one who uses proverbs will use a proverb against you, saying, ‘As is the mother, so is her daughter.' You are your mother's daughter, who loathes her husband and her children, and you are the sister of your sisters, who loathe their husband and their children. Your mother was a Hittite and your father an Amorite, and your elder sister is Samaria, who dwells at your left hand, she and her daughters, and your younger sister who dwells at your right hand is Sodom and her daughters.”
These verses present a miserable picture of humanity, with its fightings and squabbles, its hatreds and prejudices, its racialism, and its constant enmity of man against man, and nation against nation, each hating the other. And the proverb thus applies, ‘like mother, like daughter'. The ‘mother' of Jerusalem and Israel was a Hittite, whose husband was an Amorite. But they all hated each other. The relationships must be accepted loosely as representing inter-relationship and connection. We do not need to ask who their husbands were in the other cases for we are not told. It is a parable and no application is made. It simply means anyone associated with them.
All the inhabitants of Canaan had been constantly at war with each other, as the Amarna letters reveal to us. There was no love lost between them. They regularly loathed each other (read the correspondence). Thus the Hittites loathed the Amorites, (their ‘husband'), who had long dwelt alongside them, and they loathed the Israelites, and they loathed the Sodomites. And the Samaritans hated everyone around them, and the Sodomites had originally loathed the Hittites and Amorites, and the pre-Israelites. The point is that everyone hated everyone.
The names were carefully selected. The Amorites and the Hittites were of those Canaanites who were utterly condemned by Yahweh for their evil and licentious ways (the first two names in Deuteronomy 20:17, see also Ezekiel 7:1-5; and note 1 Kings 9:20; 2 Chronicles 8:7). The people of Samaria were the northern tribes of Israel who demonstrated what they were by being carried off into captivity for their extreme sinfulness (2 Kings 17:6-18). The Sodomites were a byword for sin, licentiousness and complacency. Yet all of them were to be seen as better than Jerusalem, (the heart of every Israelite in Jerusalem would be appalled at the thought), as she was revealed by her behaviour.
In view of the stated fact that the husband of the Hittite was an Amorite it is doubtful if we can associate the ‘husbands' with God (as in the previous parable) as some seek to do. It is indeed very questionable whether Ezekiel would see God as the husband of the wicked Sodomites. The ‘daughters' would be their related towns and villages. (Such are regularly called ‘daughters' in Joshua and elsewhere. Ezekiel 16:48 seems to exclude reference to ‘daughters' as signifying children offered as sacrifices).