Judean Hills viewed from the Dead Sea by Kreecher at Russian Wikipedia – Transferred from ru.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4241172

Ezekiel 6

¹ The word of the LORD came to me: ² O mortal, set your face toward the mountains of Israel, and prophesy against them, ³ and say, You mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord GOD! Thus says the Lord GOD to the mountains and the hills, to the ravines and the valleys: I, I myself will bring a sword upon you, and I will destroy your high places. ⁴ Your altars shall become desolate, and your incense stands shall be broken; and I will throw down your slain in front of your idols. ⁵ I will lay the corpses of the people of Israel in front of their idols; and I will scatter your bones around your altars. ⁶ Wherever you live, your towns shall be waste and your high places ruined, so that your altars will be waste and ruined, your idols broken and destroyed, your incense stands cut down, and your works wiped out. ⁷ The slain shall fall in your midst; then you shall know that I am the LORD.

⁸ But I will spare some. Some of you shall escape the sword among the nations and be scattered through the countries. ⁹ Those of you who escape shall remember me among the nations where they are carried captive, how I was crushed by their wanton heart that turned away from me, and their wanton eyes that turned after their idols. Then they will be loathsome in their own sight for the evils that they have committed, for all their abominations. ¹⁰ And they shall know that I am the LORD; I did not threaten in vain to bring this disaster upon them.

¹¹ Thus says the Lord GOD: Clap your hands and stamp your foot, and say, Alas for all the vile abominations of the house of Israel! For they shall fall by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence. ¹² Those far off shall die of pestilence; those nearby shall fall by the sword; and any who are left and are spared shall die of famine. Thus I will spend my fury upon them. ¹³ And you shall know that I am the LORD, when their slain lie among their idols around their altars, on every high hill, on all the mountain tops, under every green tree, and under every leafy oak, wherever they offered pleasing odor to all their idols. ¹⁴ I will stretch out my hand against them, and make the land desolate and waste, throughout all their settlements, from the wilderness to Riblah. Then they shall know that I am the LORD.

The sign-acts of the previous two chapters have been directed against the city of Jerusalem, but now the judgment is expanded to the mountains of Israel. The city of Jerusalem, the temple, the Davidic king, and the land have all been pillars upon which the people’s false sense of security rested. Just as chapters four and five were directed against Israel, now the focus shifts to the land. In this chapter we also begin to see the reason for the fractured relationship between God and God’s people. The worship at the high places of other gods by the people has broken the LORD’s heart and led to this broken relationship.

This oracle begins with the characteristic address to the prophet as mortal (literally son of man) and then immediately proceeds to what Daniel Block calls the ‘hostile orientation formula’ (Block, 1997, p. 34) when Ezekiel is instructed to ‘set his face towards’ the mountains of Israel. It may derive from the idea that a person delivering a curse must be facing the object of cursing[1] or it may generally refer to the common practice of facing the one who you are addressing. Yet, Ezekiel’s address of the mountains of Israel from the exile in Babylon would’ve been merely directional like the Islamic practice of facing Mecca to pray. The command to set one’s face towards an place, person or object is universally used throughout the book of Ezekiel to denote the LORD’s hostility towards the object that the face is set towards.

The religious problems of the people of Judah are not concentrated only in the temple. The high places (Hebrew bamot) have existed throughout Israel’s time in the land and although there are positive references in the time prior to the construction of the temple, the majority of references are viewed from the perspective of the author of 1 and 2 Kings as a source of embarrassment once Solomon’s temple is built. Yet even Solomon constructed high places late in his reign. Josiah’s attempts to purge the nation of Israel of these high places ends with his death and the worship at these high places resumed shortly afterwards. Most of the high places noted in the scriptures are not out in the wilderness places but are in inhabited areas where the people could easily access them.

The altars, incense stands, and idols in these high places indicate the misdirected faith of the people of Israel. Altars and incense stands can be used properly in the worship of the LORD in the temple, but they can also be used in the worship of these other images for other gods. Daniel Block argues that the word often translated idols or images should be harsher:

Modern sensitivities prevent translators from rendering the expression as Ezekiel intended it to be heard, but had he been preaching today, he would probably have identified these idols with a four-letter word for excrement.[2] (Block, 1997, p. 226)

The continued presence of these high places, altars, incense stands, and idols have left the LORD brokenhearted (NRSV crushed) at the way Israel has failed to be faithful to God. Like in the Genesis narrative of the flood (Genesis 6-7) when God is sorry to have created humanity, the result is the same: God resolved to blot out (expunge) humanity in Genesis and here the towns and high places will be ruined (expunged).[3]

God’s words may be harsh in this portion of Ezekiel, but they are not without hope. There is a future for a remnant and a possibility for renewal, but the renewal will occur in a new place. For this renewal to happen the people must remember the LORD and know the LORD. When the pillars on which the peoples’ false sense of security are broken down the people will remember their God and they will loathe their previous unfaithfulness. The words of this prophecy are clearly aligned with the curses of Leviticus 26:30-33 and the consequences of disobedience long delayed have not been spoken in vain.

The God of Israel is a passionate God who desperately wants to abide among the people, but this God will not be taken for granted. The land, the temple, the city, the stable line of Davidic kings are all conditioned on loyalty to the LORD as articulated in the covenant. The painful words of the heartbroken God of the people of Israel may be difficult to hear, and the loss of the land, the death of many of the people, and the need for the remnant to begin again as strangers in a strange land must have been challenging. Yet, Ezekiel’s words do not seem to change the direction of the people until after the

[1] For example the actions of Balaam in Number 22-24.

[2] Block’s argument is based on the practice of looking at the words a new word is constructed from. If the hypothesis of Block and others is correct the images or idols are representative of ‘shitgods.’ Ezekiel is responsible for 39 or the 48 occurrences in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Hebrew word gillum which is what is translated idols or images here.

[3] The same Hebrew verb maha is used in both Genesis 6-7 and here.