Tag Archives: Babylonian Exile

Ezekiel 24 The Painful Judgment of God

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By John Singer Sargent – This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the National Gallery of Art. Please see the Gallery’s Open Access Policy., CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81473181

Ezekiel 24:1-14 The Boiling Pot

1 In the ninth year, in the tenth month, on the tenth day of the month, the word of the LORD came to me: 2 Mortal, write down the name of this day, this very day. The king of Babylon has laid siege to Jerusalem this very day. 3 And utter an allegory to the rebellious house and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: Set on the pot, set it on, pour in water also;
4 put in it the pieces, all the good pieces, the thigh and the shoulder; fill it with choice bones.
5 Take the choicest one of the flock, pile the logs under it; boil its pieces, seethe also its bones in it.
6 Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: Woe to the bloody city, the pot whose rust is in it, whose rust has not gone out of it! Empty it piece by piece, making no choice at all.
7 For the blood she shed is inside it; she placed it on a bare rock; she did not pour it out on the ground, to cover it with earth.
8 To rouse my wrath, to take vengeance, I have placed the blood she shed on a bare rock, so that it may not be covered.
9 Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: Woe to the bloody city! I will even make the pile great.
10 Heap up the logs, kindle the fire; boil the meat well, mix in the spices, let the bones be burned.
11 Stand it empty upon the coals, so that it may become hot, its copper glow, its filth melt in it, its rust be consumed.
12 In vain I have wearied myself; its thick rust does not depart. To the fire with its rust!
13 Yet, when I cleansed you in your filthy lewdness, you did not become clean from your filth; you shall not again be cleansed until I have satisfied my fury upon you.
14 I the LORD have spoken; the time is coming, I will act. I will not refrain, I will not spare, I will not relent. According to your ways and your doings I will judge you, says the Lord GOD.

Before addressing the content of this allegory or metaphor[1]it is necessary to address the dating of this portion of Ezekiel. If the dating is done according to the pattern of the rest of the dates of Ezekiel then the time from the beginning of the siege until Ezekiel is notified that the siege has ended is almost three years. We know that the siege of Jerusalem lasted roughly eighteen months and it is unlikely that it would have taken another eighteen months for the information about the fall of Jerusalem to reach Ezekiel. Yet, it is not surprising that the dating changes since the same date is referenced in both 2 Kings and Jeremiah.

And in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, on the tenth day of the month, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came with all his army against Jerusalem, and laid siege to it; they built siegeworks against it all around. So the city was besieged until the eleventh year of King Zedekiah. On the ninth day of the fourth month the famine became so severe in the city that there was no food for the people of the land. 2 Kings 25:1-3, see also Jeremiah 39: 1-3.

Whether Ezekiel changes his dating scheme based on the command to write down the name of the day by the LORD, or whether a later scribe corrects Ezekiel’s dating scheme to reflect the standard dating practice, the siege of Jerusalem begins in the ninth year of King Zedekiah’s reign in the tenth day of the tenth month of the year. The prophesied siege has finally begun. The words of Ezekiel are finally occurring in a way that the people can now see that there has been a prophet among them.

Ezekiel has frequently built upon previously used images and throughout this metaphor he pulls together the image of the pot previously used in chapter eleven and the bloody city from chapter twenty-two. There is a poetic quality to the image, and it is possible that Ezekiel is utilizing a cooking ditty that gets repurposed into this image, taking something familiar and using it in an uncomfortable manner to warp the preconceived notions of the hearer. But even if this is utilizing a song about a cooking pot, this is no ordinary meal being prepared. The copper pot indicates either a cultic use or court use because most people at this time would use clay pots.

The translation of the corruption of the pot as rust is problematic because copper does not rust. Copper when it oxidizes turns green and so if the corruption is with the pot then a better translation would be corruption that would need to be smelted away if the pot is to be clean. Yet, the more likely indication is that the meat is corrupted rather than the pot and that rather than the content of the pot being choice cuts of the choicest animal of the flock what they ended up with is putrid flesh. (Block, 1997, p. 777) This resonates with the imagery of chapter eleven where the leaders view themselves as the choice meat safe within the pot, while the LORD indicates that they are rotten.

Ezekiel, along with Jeremiah and others, has been challenging the Zion theology that viewed the temple and Jerusalem as guarantees of the LORD’s protection for the people. In this theology the exiles were the ones discarded while those remaining in the city were the choice cuts who are safe. Now with the beginning of the siege the pot which once offered safety is now heated until it glows. If this was being used for either consumption or cultic use the law would expect the blood of the sacrificed animal to be poured out on the ground, but the blood is in the pot and everything in the pot is heated to the point where the corruption is consumed. The blood still testifies to the violence committed in the city and there is no beginning without the contents of the pot being consumed. There can only be a new beginning once there is an ending. God has spoken and now those words are realized. It is only in retrospect that the people can understand that a prophet has been among them. It is only after the destruction of the city and in the time of exile that a new beginning can occur. For Ezekiel, the judgment of this time is just and yet this journey will take a difficult toll on him personally as well as any loss he may feel at the destruction of the city he grew up in and the temple he had been trained to serve in.

Ezekiel 24: 15-27 A Tragic Final Sign

15 The word of the LORD came to me: 16 Mortal, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes; yet you shall not mourn or weep, nor shall your tears run down. 17 Sigh, but not aloud; make no mourning for the dead. Bind on your turban, and put your sandals on your feet; do not cover your upper lip or eat the bread of mourners. 18 So I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died. And on the next morning I did as I was commanded.

19 Then the people said to me, “Will you not tell us what these things mean for us, that you are acting this way?” 20 Then I said to them: The word of the LORD came to me: 21 Say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord GOD: I will profane my sanctuary, the pride of your power, the delight of your eyes, and your heart’s desire; and your sons and your daughters whom you left behind shall fall by the sword. 22 And you shall do as I have done; you shall not cover your upper lip or eat the bread of mourners. 23 Your turbans shall be on your heads and your sandals on your feet; you shall not mourn or weep, but you shall pine away in your iniquities and groan to one another. 24 Thus Ezekiel shall be a sign to you; you shall do just as he has done. When this comes, then you shall know that I am the Lord GOD.

25 And you, mortal, on the day when I take from them their stronghold, their joy and glory, the delight of their eyes and their heart’s affection, and also their sons and their daughters, 26 on that day, one who has escaped will come to you to report to you the news. 27 On that day your mouth shall be opened to the one who has escaped, and you shall speak and no longer be silent. So you shall be a sign to them; and they shall know that I am the LORD.

Even though the book of Ezekiel is one of the longer books in the bible we know very little biographical information about the prophet: we know that he was thirty years old at the time of his call[2], that he was a part of the initial group of exiles in Babylon, that he is a priest and the son of Buzi, and now we learn that he is married. Being a thirty year old male we may have assumed he was married but in this time of upheaval it is likely that many traditional markers in the personal life of individuals may be delayed. Now that we have learned that he has a wife described here as the delight of his eyes it helps provide some answers to how the prophet was able to become the living sign that God required him to be. Presumably when Ezekiel portrays the siege of Jerusalem with his body for over four hundred days it would be his wife who ministered to him and cared for him. Throughout the book of Ezekiel, the prophet has been obedient in contrast to the disobedience of the people and only protests when he is asked to do something that makes him unclean or when he feels that all of Israel is being destroyed. Now Ezekiel who has occupied the space between a heartbroken God and the disobedient people endures his own personal heartbreak with no set of listening ears to hear his grief. Ezekiel has often been a living sign for the people of Israel and his actions have cost him physically, but now his family becomes one final sign before the destruction of Israel, and he is unable to collapse in mourning because of the imperative of his mission from God.

Ezekiel is addressed as Mortal[3] and then told that with ‘one blow’ God is taking away his wife and he is not to mourn of weep. The term translated ‘one blow’ elsewhere has referred to death from a plague, but here it conveys the suddenness of the death. There was no indication that Ezekiel’s wife is sick before this announcement but in the span of a day his wife is dead. The lack of the standard actions associated with mourning is a noticeable departure from the expected activity and it makes people demand an explanation from the prophet. Throughout the book the prophet has been both the medium and the messenger, but one last time he is both the physical sign to the people and the one to explain the sign. Instead of mourning and covering the upper lip,[4] he is to dress and carry on in a normal manner. In Leviticus Aaron and his sons Eleazar and Ithamar were not allowed to mourn Aaron’s two sons who offered an ‘unholy fire’ before the LORD and were killed (Leviticus 10: 6-7) and later this becomes the expected practice for the high priest (Leviticus 21: 10-12). In the absence of the temple, now perhaps we are to see the prophet as the new high priest for the people. The ‘stronghold, joy, and delight of the people’ (the city and temple) in addition to their sons and daughters of the people are being taken away and the prophets will become the new center of faith at the beginning of a new era in Babylon.

Ezekiel embodies obedience throughout his ministry, and this has come at a high cost. This portion of Ezekiel’s life resonates with Abraham’s call to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. Yet, unlike Abraham’s offering in Genesis 22 there is no lamb to take the place of the beloved one.  Ezekiel pays a steep price for the privilege of serving as God’s agent charged with carrying the difficult message of the judgment on Jerusalem, the leaders of Israel, the temple, and the land. Daniel Block argues that he pays a price higher than any other recorded prophet. (Block, 1997, p. 793)

Why does God ask such a high price from God’s most faithful people? This is a difficult question without one simple answer, but this is a question that any reading of the scriptures does prompt. Prophets like Ezekiel and Jeremiah often find themselves caught between the people who God loves and the God who the people have rejected, and they become living witnesses to the tension in this broken relationship. I’ve often told my community that “God sends God’s very best in the hope that the people God loves will return.” This thought is captured in Jesus’ parable of the wicked tenants (Matthew 21: 33-46, Mark 12: 1-12, Luke 20: 9-19) where the house master (NRSV landowner) continually sends servants to tenants who resist them, eventually sending the Son. This is an opportunity for the tenants, but it means that the servants (or slaves) of God suffer abuse. Some prophets have protested the treatment they have received, but Ezekiel throughout these twenty-four chapters that lead to the exile has demonstrated a quiet obedience to God’s will. The book of Ezekiel does not consider sharing the emotional struggle of the prophet worthy of space (and any speculations we make are merely speculations) in contrast to the essential task of communicating the word of God to a resistant people.

The first half of Ezekiel has been leading to this point where the consequences of the disobedience of the people of Israel occur in the siege of Jerusalem by Babylon. This is a difficult portion of scripture to read but the people valued these difficult words enough to preserve them as a continual witness to warn against the loss of the covenantal dimension of the relationship between the people of God and the God of Israel. Ezekiel will be an influence on several later prophets as well as the New Testament, particularly Revelation. As we continue in this book the focus shifts from Judah to the nations. The LORD the God of Israel is not merely the God of Israel. Ezekiel like many prophets will have messages for many other nations and as the next eight chapters of Ezekiel will concern Ammon, Moab, Edom, Philistia, Tyre, and Egypt. Now that the forces of Babylon are on the march these nations which conspired with Judah will not be exempt from the judgment of King Nebuchadrezzar (and by extension the LORD).

[1] This is the Hebrew masal which can be translated parable, proverb, allegory or metaphor.

[2] Presuming the initial dating of the thirtieth year is Ezekiel’s thirtieth year, see chapter one.

[3] Literally son of man, as throughout the book. This is God’s characteristic address to the prophet Ezekiel.

[4] Elsewhere in the bible this is a sign of shame (Micah 3:7) and perhaps communal mourning, but this passage assumes that this is also a common practice symbolizing bereavement.

The Babylonian Empire

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Most readers of the Bible do not have much exposure to the history of the region 2,600 years ago, but this time is critical for much of the Hebrew Scriptures (or Old Testament). One of my Hebrew Bibles professors used to joke that if you were taking an exam on the Hebrew Scriptures and did not know the answer that the Babylonian exile was a solid guess. This is the time period that the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel address and it is where 2 Kings concludes the Deuteronomic History[1] and shortly before 2 Chronicles ends its narration.[2] This becomes a time of redefinition for the Jewish people where the stories and writings are collected together to form a unified tradition to hand on to their descendants away once the temple, Jerusalem, and the Davidic kings no longer reign.

When talking about the Babylonian Empire in relation to scripture, it is actually the Second Babylonian Empire or the Neo Babylonian Empire. The Babylonians were also known as Chaldeans in scripture and historical references, and you will occasionally see this time referred to as the Chaldean Empire. Babylon begins its rise after the coronation of King Nabopolassar in 626 BCE and the rise of Babylonian power coincides with the collapse of the Assyrian Empire in 612 BCE.[3] In 605 BCE King Nebuchadrezzar II (or Nebuchadnezzar II) succeeded his father Nabopolassar as king. Shortly before his father’s death Nebuchadrezzar II won a critical victory over Pharoah Neco II’s Egyptian Army at the battle of Carchemish ensuring Babylonian power over the Levant (the region bordering the Eastern Mediterranean Sea which includes Israel/Judah).

Neo-Babylonian_Empire_under_Nebuchadnezzar_II By IchthyovenatorSémhur (base map) – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=105732621

In 601 BCE Babylon marched into Egypt to counter rising Egyptian influence in the Levant and this campaign ultimately failed in 599 BCE but did end Egyptian power in the Levant. During this war King Jehoiakim (or Jehoiakim) in Judah allied his country with Egypt[4] and Nebuchadrezzar after leaving Egypt turned his forces towards Jerusalem. In 598/597 BCE Jerusalem surrenders to Babylon, King Jehoiakim is taken captive to Babylon along with many of the elites of the land. This is the exile that Ezekiel is experiencing as he prophesies, and this is also the setting at the beginning of the book of Daniel. King Zedekiah is left in charge of Jerusalem as a puppet king of the Babylonian empire.

Egypt continued to be a regional force and both Jeremiah and Ezekiel point to the influence of Egypt in the decision of King Zedekiah to refuse to pay tribute in 589 BCE. In 587 BCE Ammon, Edom, and Moab all come together to form a mutual alliance against Babylon, but in 586 Babylon responds. Jerusalem is destroyed, and the Kingdom of Judah ends in 586 BCE with the survivors being taken captive in Babylonia. After the defeat of Judah, Babylon would continue to be militarily active ensuring the submission of the region under Babylonian control and repelling Egyptian influence. The Babylonian Empire would maintain control over the region until they were conquered by Cyrus the Great and the Persian Empire in 539 BCE.

[1] The books starting in Joshua and running through 2 Kings in most Christian bibles (excluding Ruth) which called the Deuteronomic history by scholars because they theologically follow the book of Deuteronomy.

[2] 2 Chronicles has two final verses which point to the end of the Babylonian exile under the Persian King Cyrus.

[3] The Assyrian Empire is responsible for the capture of Samaria and the ending of the Kingdom of Northern Israel in 721 BCE.

[4] Jehoiakim had been appointed by Pharoah Neco II so Judah’s alliance with Egypt against Babylon is not surprising.

Ezekiel 14 Unfaithful Elders, Deceived Prophets, and Representative Righteous Ones

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Ezekiel 14: 1-11

1 Certain elders of Israel came to me and sat down before me. 2 And the word of the LORD came to me: 3 Mortal, these men have taken their idols into their hearts, and placed their iniquity as a stumbling block before them; shall I let myself be consulted by them? 4 Therefore speak to them, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: Any of those of the house of Israel who take their idols into their hearts and place their iniquity as a stumbling block before them, and yet come to the prophet — I the LORD will answer those who come with the multitude of their idols, 5 in order that I may take hold of the hearts of the house of Israel, all of whom are estranged from me through their idols.

6 Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord GOD: Repent and turn away from your idols; and turn away your faces from all your abominations. 7 For any of those of the house of Israel, or of the aliens who reside in Israel, who separate themselves from me, taking their idols into their hearts and placing their iniquity as a stumbling block before them, and yet come to a prophet to inquire of me by him, I the LORD will answer them myself. 8 I will set my face against them; I will make them a sign and a byword and cut them off from the midst of my people; and you shall know that I am the LORD.

9 If a prophet is deceived and speaks a word, I, the LORD, have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand against him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel. 10 And they shall bear their punishment — the punishment of the inquirer and the punishment of the prophet shall be the same — 11 so that the house of Israel may no longer go astray from me, nor defile themselves any more with all their transgressions. Then they shall be my people, and I will be their God, says the Lord GOD.

Elders from among the exiles again approach Ezekiel and sit down before him. These elders, the text informs us, are coming to Ezekiel to consult the LORD, but the text also indicates that these elders who are seeking the LORD’s guidance have been unfaithful to their God. Ezekiel is brought into the LORD’s musings about how to respond to these elders who approach the prophet of the Lord GOD while still taking idols into their heart. The LORD’s deepest desire is for repentance among the people and so the LORD responds to these elders even though he views their divided loyalties as making their corrupted hearts unwilling to hear and repent.

As Daniel Block notes the parallels between the text dealing with these elders who have idols on their heart and the persistent problems of idolatry leading to the judgment in Jerusalem in Ezekiel 8:1-11:25 are numerous. (Block, 1997, pp. 422-423) The shared problem of idolatry both in Judea and in exile leads to a common response from God. The initial portion of the chapter lets us overhear Ezekiel being invited into God’s musings about how to respond to the elders’ approach to Ezekiel for consultation. The idolatry of the elders in God’s view would be enough reason to deny these elders a hearing and to only respond to any appeals with silence, but despite the repeated experience of Israel not hearing and responding to the words God imparts through the prophets, God still desires to take hold of their hearts and wrest their allegiance away from these idols they hold close.

These elders likely worshipped the LORD the God of Israel alongside other gods. This was a recurring problem in the story of Israel. The first commandment indicates that the people are to have no other gods before the LORD. Most modern readers would understand the first commandment to point to a practice of giving one’s sole allegiance to the LORD, but the practices reflected in the telling of Israel’s story point to multiple times where the LORD was one among several options that the people worshipped. They may have considered their practices faithful by putting the LORD in the first but not exclusive position, but continuation of the Ten Commandments and the witness of the prophets make clear that the expectation of the God of Israel is exclusive devotion rather than being a first among many for the people.

The LORD desires the people to repent and turn their hearts to their God. The LORD answers in hope that they may turn, but continuing in these idolatrous practices will not go unpunished. Even those in exile are not exempt from further judgment. There is a window into a hopeful future where the people no longer go astray from their God or defile themselves with breaking the commandments of God, but at this point it remains a hopeful future for those who emerge from this time of judgment. There will be those who persist in their unfaithfulness and they will at least be excluded from the community of the faithful (although in the context of Ezekiel being cut off from the community may also include death) but there is a window for a remnant.

The deceived prophets who speak brings up a difficult set of reflections upon Ezekiel’s view of God. As mentioned in my reflection, A Split in the Identity of God, in the prophets there is an all-encompassing view of God being responsible for everything, and so even false prophets are reflected on in light of God being responsible for their activity. There are narratives where there are deceived prophets[1]and whether this deception is a test for the leaders to determine if they will remain faithful, they are still uncomfortable passages. Here the prophet who is deceived and the people who are deceived are both punished, but later generations of faith would be uncomfortable with a God who deceives. For example, Martin Luther when talking about the Ten Commandments would state:

It is true that God tempts no one, but we ask in this prayer that God would preserve and keep us, so that the devil, the world and our flesh may not deceive us or mislead us into false belief, despair, and other great and shameful sins, and that, although we may be attacked by them, we may finally prevail and gain the victory. (Luther, 1978, p. 38)

Yet, Luther and all Christians shaped by the New Testament cosmology where the deceiving forces are now forces actively aligned against God, while in Ezekiel God is still the all-encompassing cause for all that the people of God encounter.

Ezekiel 14: 12-23

12 The word of the LORD came to me: 13 Mortal, when a land sins against me by acting faithlessly, and I stretch out my hand against it, and break its staff of bread and send famine upon it, and cut off from it human beings and animals, 14 even if Noah, Daniel, and Job, these three, were in it, they would save only their own lives by their righteousness, says the Lord GOD. 15 If I send wild animals through the land to ravage it, so that it is made desolate, and no one may pass through because of the animals; 16 even if these three men were in it, as I live, says the Lord GOD, they would save neither sons nor daughters; they alone would be saved, but the land would be desolate. 17 Or if I bring a sword upon that land and say, ‘Let a sword pass through the land,’ and I cut off human beings and animals from it; 18 though these three men were in it, as I live, says the Lord GOD, they would save neither sons nor daughters, but they alone would be saved. 19 Or if I send a pestilence into that land, and pour out my wrath upon it with blood, to cut off humans and animals from it; 20 even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live, says the Lord GOD, they would save neither son nor daughter; they would save only their own lives by their righteousness.

21 For thus says the Lord GOD: How much more when I send upon Jerusalem my four deadly acts of judgment, sword, famine, wild animals, and pestilence, to cut off humans and animals from it! 22 Yet, survivors shall be left in it, sons and daughters who will be brought out; they will come out to you. When you see their ways and their deeds, you will be consoled for the evil that I have brought upon Jerusalem, for all that I have brought upon it. 23 They shall console you, when you see their ways and their deeds; and you shall know that it was not without cause that I did all that I have done in it, says the Lord GOD.

A second message comes to Ezekiel which addresses the land. I have reflected on the connection between the people of God and the land in The Connection Between Humanity and the Earth in Scripture, and here the land sins against God as a consequence of the unfaithfulness of the people. Now humans and animals are cut off from the land, leaving it a desolate ruin. Even if there were multiple paragons of righteousness present among the people they could not reverse the judgment coming upon the land as a whole. The righteous, like those ‘moaning and groaning’ over the state of Jerusalem in Ezekiel 9: 4-6 will be set apart, but they cannot save others by their righteousness in this declaration.

Abraham intercedes with God on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah asking if God will sweep away the righteous with the unrighteous. Abraham starts with asking God to spare the city on behalf of fifty righteous and eventually bargains God down to ten righteous being all that is required to save the city. (Genesis 18: 22-33) Yet, on encountering Sodom the LORD only spares Abraham’s relative Lot and his family. The comparison in this story paints the land of Judah as more unredeemable than Sodom, since the presence of three of the most righteous people wouldn’t even be able to redeem their own family, but only themselves. God is determined to send these four agents of judgment: famine, wild beasts, sword, and pestilence against the land yet surprisingly survivors will emerge. There is a hope beyond judgment and there will be a remnant to rebuild the covenant people.

Job by Leon Bonnat (1880)

There is some debate around the person Daniel among the righteous named in this passage. Noah (Genesis 6-9) and Job are both biblical figures from the distant past who are both acclaimed as righteous men who stand out in their generations. Noah is before the people of Israel are constituted but as one saved from an unrighteous generation he could be a symbol for hope. Job is from the land of Uz as reflected in the poetic book of Job who goes through a time of extreme testing and remains faithful to God. Scholars believe the book of Daniel to be written much later than the book of Ezekiel and this has led some scholars to believe that the person referred to here must be Dan’el the grandfather of Methuselah and may have a tradition of being a wise judge in Phoenician and north Canaanite tradition. (Block, 1997, p. 448) Yet, the book of Daniel relates the story of Daniel who would be a younger contemporary of Ezekiel in the exile in Babylon and many of the early stories in the book occur during the reign of Nebuchadrezzar. It is plausible that Daniel, even at this early stage, has become a symbol of what faithfulness to God in the midst of the Babylonian empire looked like.

The unfaithfulness of the people of Judah has wounded the land and brought about their own devastation. Yet, the Lord GOD will save some even with the faithlessness of the people and the land. In Ezekiel’s view the action of the LORD is justified even if harsh. Yet, even within the wrath expressed in Ezekiel there is a space of grace that prevents the people from being completely destroyed by the famine, wild bests, sword, and pestilence that is unleashed upon the land.

[1] 1 Kings 13 where the man of God from Judah who speaks out against the altar at Bethel and then an old prophet at Bethel deceives this man of God by declaring that an angel of the LORD has given him a message and 1 Kings 22 where Micaiah talks about a spirit who with the LORD’s permission deceives the prophets of King Ahab.

Ezekiel 13 Against the False Prophets

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Window on a whitewashed wall, Djerba, Tunisia By LBM1948 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113677551

Ezekiel 13

Ezekiel 13: 1-16 Proclamation Against Male False Prophets

1 The word of the LORD came to me: 2 Mortal, prophesy against the prophets of Israel who are prophesying; say to those who prophesy out of their own imagination: “Hear the word of the LORD!” 3 Thus says the Lord GOD, Alas for the senseless prophets who follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing! 4 Your prophets have been like jackals among ruins, O Israel. 5 You have not gone up into the breaches, or repaired a wall for the house of Israel, so that it might stand in battle on the day of the LORD. 6 They have envisioned falsehood and lying divination; they say, “Says the LORD,” when the LORD has not sent them, and yet they wait for the fulfillment of their word! 7 Have you not seen a false vision or uttered a lying divination, when you have said, “Says the LORD,” even though I did not speak?

8 Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: Because you have uttered falsehood and envisioned lies, I am against you, says the Lord GOD. 9 My hand will be against the prophets who see false visions and utter lying divinations; they shall not be in the council of my people, nor be enrolled in the register of the house of Israel, nor shall they enter the land of Israel; and you shall know that I am the Lord GOD. 10 Because, in truth, because they have misled my people, saying, “Peace,” when there is no peace; and because, when the people build a wall, these prophets smear whitewash on it. 11 Say to those who smear whitewash on it that it shall fall. There will be a deluge of rain, great hailstones will fall, and a stormy wind will break out. 12 When the wall falls, will it not be said to you, “Where is the whitewash you smeared on it?” 13 Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: In my wrath I will make a stormy wind break out, and in my anger there shall be a deluge of rain, and hailstones in wrath to destroy it. 14 I will break down the wall that you have smeared with whitewash, and bring it to the ground, so that its foundation will be laid bare; when it falls, you shall perish within it; and you shall know that I am the LORD. 15 Thus I will spend my wrath upon the wall, and upon those who have smeared it with whitewash; and I will say to you, The wall is no more, nor those who smeared it — 16 the prophets of Israel who prophesied concerning Jerusalem and saw visions of peace for it, when there was no peace, says the Lord GOD.

The authentic prophets of God already have difficult roles when they are given an unpopular message of judgement to deliver to the people of God, and their role is made significantly more challenging when false prophets appear delivering a message of peace when there is no peace. Although there are significant differences between the society and worldview of Ezekiel’s time and our own, both times struggle to separate truth from opinion. In our own time different news sources present a completely different version of reality based on the political narrative the network holds. Likewise, a person can go to different congregations and receive drastically different interpretations of faith, some that would be unrecognizable as Christianity’s traditional beliefs.[1] As quote attributed the former senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan says, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.” But when the facts in question are competing divine messages from God how are the people to discern the true prophet from the foolish and senseless prophets who have seen nothing and speak from their own spirit?

From our canonical standpoint we know that Ezekiel is the true prophet bearing the word of the LORD while his opponents are those who have envisioned falsehood and lying divination. Yet, in this time where Ezekiel and Jeremiah were declaring the judgment upon the temple, Jerusalem, the land, and the Davidic line of kings other prophets gave reasonable sounding reassurances of peace because of the covenant status of the people, the temple, the Davidic king, the land, and the favored position of Jerusalem with God. Jerusalem had been spared once before from the Assyrians, and these popular prophets proclaimed that deliverance would come once again. The guidance in Deuteronomy only allows a prophet’s truth to be evaluated in retrospect:

You may say to yourself, “How can we recognize a word that the LORD has not spoken?” If a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD but the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a word that the LORD has not spoken. The prophet has spoken presumptuously; do not be frightened. Deuteronomy 18: 21-22

Yet, Deuteronomy also indicates that the prophet who either speaks in the name of another god or the prophet who speaks a word that the LORD has not given them will die. (Deuteronomy 18: 20) Here the LORD declares, through Ezekiel, the judgment of these foolish prophets who have spoken what they have not heard and declared what they have not seen.

Although the NRSV declares the prophets as senseless, the Hebrew word (nabal) is normally translated foolish. As Daniel Block describes this word:

The adjective nābāl is used in wisdom literature of a special kind of fool: one who is arrogant (Prov. 30:32), crude of speech (Prov. 1:17), spiritually and morally obtuse (Job 2:10), a scoundrel (Job 30:8). In the Psalms the nābāl denies (14:1; 53:2 [End. 1]) and blasphemes God (74:22). (Block, 1997, p. 400)

Syrian Jackal (Canis aureus syriacus) in Tel Aviv By Jan Ebr – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/114837596, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116759612

These foolish prophets have not received a divine vision, unlike Ezekiel, and are following their own human spirit rather than being directed by the spirit of God. These prophets are like jackals who inhabit the ruins of foreign cities in Isaiah[2] and in the ruins of Jerusalem in Micah 1:8. These foolish prophets rather than building up and defending the people have helped to bring about their downfall. The true prophet should have stood in the breach or helped to repair the wall literally or metaphorically. Instead, they stood in a position of privilege inside the city and away from the danger of conflict on the wall during the siege. Yet, instead of reinforcing the divine message or recalling people to the covenant they have resisted the true prophets like Ezekiel, and provided the illusion of peace where there was no peace.

The problem with these foolish prophets is not that they proclaim a message of peace, Ezekiel will later proclaim a message of peace and hope, but that they are not sent from God, and they do not understand the time. It is unclear whether these prophets are in Jerusalem or being encountered by Ezekiel in exile, although it is clear that Jeremiah encountered prophets who declared peace in contrast to his message of Babylon’s impending invasion and God’s judgment:

For from the least of them to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for gain; and from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. Jeremiah 6:13-14[3]

These prophets have provided cosmetic treatments to cover up the flaws in the walls that will not endure the storm to come. These false prophets have contributed to a future where Jerusalem will have her foundations laid bare like Samaria[4] was by the Assyrians. These prophets have contributed to a cover up of the flaws in Jerusalem and have contributed to the fall of the city.

The judgment on these foolish prophets is to revoke their place among the people. Not only will they lose their place in the council of the people, but they will also be removed from the register of Israel and be exiles from the land. Like the jackals they were compared to earlier, they will be the castoffs living among the ruins and not fit to cohabitate with the rest of society. They may be popular at the moment, but history will remember Ezekiel and Jeremiah. The countless false prophets will lose their place in society and history.

One final note before proceeding to the next section which deals with women who are distracting from Ezekiel and other true prophets, is that although most interpreters assume these prophets are acting in the name of the LORD, and the ones mentioned above do seem to be referencing the God of Israel, a large part of the judgment upon Israel is due to their unfaithfulness both to the covenant but also their worship of other gods. It is clear that there were multiple gods worshipped in various ways throughout Judah at this time, and many probably considered this pluralistic worship alongside the worship of the LORD acceptable. There may have been prophets speaking and declaring on behalf of other (false) gods and with the unpopular nature of the harsh messages of Jeremiah and Ezekiel it made these alternative messages even more palatable.

Ezekiel 13: 17-23 Proclamation Against Female False Prophets

17 As for you, mortal, set your face against the daughters of your people, who prophesy out of their own imagination; prophesy against them 18 and say, Thus says the Lord GOD: Woe to the women who sew bands on all wrists, and make veils for the heads of persons of every height, in the hunt for human lives! Will you hunt down lives among my people, and maintain your own lives? 19 You have profaned me among my people for handfuls of barley and for pieces of bread, putting to death persons who should not die and keeping alive persons who should not live, by your lies to my people, who listen to lies.

20 Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: I am against your bands with which you hunt lives; I will tear them from your arms, and let the lives go free, the lives that you hunt down like birds. 21 I will tear off your veils, and save my people from your hands; they shall no longer be prey in your hands; and you shall know that I am the LORD. 22 Because you have disheartened the righteous falsely, although I have not disheartened them, and you have encouraged the wicked not to turn from their wicked way and save their lives; 23 therefore you shall no longer see false visions or practice divination; I will save my people from your hand. Then you will know that I am the LORD.

The target of Ezekiel in the second half of this condemnation of false prophets is against ‘the daughters of your people’ who like the male prophets speak from their own heart/imagination.[5] These women, who Ezekiel does not call prophets (although they are prophesying) are sewing something on peoples’ arms and making something for peoples’ heads. Any reconstruction of this scene involves speculation since the references are too obscure to give us an accurate picture of what Ezekiel is protesting against, although it would have been clear in his time. It is not even clear whether these women are in Jerusalem/Judea or in exile with Ezekiel (or perhaps both). Although the law has clear prohibitions against divination and augury as practiced in the surrounding culture[6] it is also likely that these practices did occur among the people at this time of crisis. When a crisis arises people often seek certainty and there will always be those who are vulnerable to those who promise protection or control.

One interpretation of the actions of these women is that they are creating bands and phylacteries, veils, or amulets that have the divine name upon them as a ward against evil times. Although this practice would bear the name of the LORD, it would be utilizing the name of God in a way that other nations invoke their deities. This context would make sense of the statement that these women ‘have profaned me’ and the barley and bread is their payment for these articles of clothing. It is also possible that these bands and veils/amulets may be utilizing other entities as a form of protection. From Ezekiel’s view these women are not prophets and are not only snake oil salespeople, but their practices have actively caused the innocent to die and the wicked to prosper. Their actions represent the opposite of Ezekiel’s call in Ezekiel 3: 16-21 where Ezekiel is responsible to confront the wicked to get them to turn from their ways. Now these daughters of Israel by the lies they tell, and the people who listen to their lies are enabling those who should not live to live, while those who should not die are dying.

There are women prophets in the story of Israel and there are women who resist the ways of the LORD. Although it is possible that as Katheryn Pfister Darr suspects, “that Ezekiel has, in effect, “demonized” these women unfairly.” (NIB VI: 1203)[7] I am less suspicious than she is in her interpretation here. Women have been demonized by men in positions of authority and the line between magic and authority was murkier in the past, but like the male prophets in the first half of the chapter the issue is not that they are prophesying-it is that they were not sent by God and their actions are furthering the injustice in the society.

[1] I would include Christian nationalism and the prosperity gospel among these common belief systems that are alien to traditional Christian theology, although they have emerged at various points throughout history.

[2] Isaiah 13:22, 34:13

[3] See also Jeremiah 8 :10-11, 14:13-24, 23: 16-22.

[4] Echoing the language of Micah 1:6.

[5] The word in Hebrew is “inner mind or heart” rather than the more modern concept of imagination. In verse three the male prophets are led by their own ruach (spirit, wind, breath).

[6] Leviticus 20:6, Deuteronomy 18: 10-14

[7] Referencing Nancy R. Bowen, “The Daughters of Your People: Female Prophets in Ezekiel 13: 17-23,” JBL 118 (199) 420.

Ezekiel 12 Judgment on the Leaders and People of Jerusalem

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New, unlaid mudbricks in the Jordan Valley, West Bank Palestine, (2011) By Whiteghost.ink – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16303999

Ezekiel 12

Ezekiel 12: 1-16 Zedekiah’s End Enacted

1 The word of the LORD came to me: 2 Mortal, you are living in the midst of a rebellious house, who have eyes to see but do not see, who have ears to hear but do not hear; 3 for they are a rebellious house. Therefore, mortal, prepare for yourself an exile’s baggage, and go into exile by day in their sight; you shall go like an exile from your place to another place in their sight. Perhaps they will understand, though they are a rebellious house. 4 You shall bring out your baggage by day in their sight, as baggage for exile; and you shall go out yourself at evening in their sight, as those do who go into exile. 5 Dig through the wall in their sight, and carry the baggage through it. 6 In their sight you shall lift the baggage on your shoulder, and carry it out in the dark; you shall cover your face, so that you may not see the land; for I have made you a sign for the house of Israel.

7 I did just as I was commanded. I brought out my baggage by day, as baggage for exile, and in the evening I dug through the wall with my own hands; I brought it out in the dark, carrying it on my shoulder in their sight.

8 In the morning the word of the LORD came to me: 9 Mortal, has not the house of Israel, the rebellious house, said to you, “What are you doing?” 10 Say to them, “Thus says the Lord GOD: This oracle concerns the prince in Jerusalem and all the house of Israel in it.” 11 Say, “I am a sign for you: as I have done, so shall it be done to them; they shall go into exile, into captivity.” 12 And the prince who is among them shall lift his baggage on his shoulder in the dark, and shall go out; he shall dig through the wall and carry it through; he shall cover his face, so that he may not see the land with his eyes. 13 I will spread my net over him, and he shall be caught in my snare; and I will bring him to Babylon, the land of the Chaldeans, yet he shall not see it; and he shall die there. 14 I will scatter to every wind all who are around him, his helpers and all his troops; and I will unsheathe the sword behind them. 15 And they shall know that I am the LORD, when I disperse them among the nations and scatter them through the countries. 16 But I will let a few of them escape from the sword, from famine and pestilence, so that they may tell of all their abominations among the nations where they go; then they shall know that I am the LORD.

Ezekiel’s sign-acts are designed, by the nature of their strangeness, to garner attention. In a world before internet influencers who attempt to draw attention to themselves for fame and money, prophets like Ezekiel did outlandish and sometimes destructive acts to call attention to a message God wants the people to talk about and share. Especially for a message which will need to be transmitted (in a world without telephones, new reports, or even a newspaper or regular mail) from the exiles in Babylon to the people of Jerusalem requires it to be memorable and significant. Ezekiel’s action of preparing an exile’s baggage, digging a hole in the wall of his house, entering the house with the baggage through the hole he created and then exiting at night by the same whole leaves his curious neighbors seeking an explanation for these actions, an explanation that he communicates from the LORD.

Throughout the passage the contrast between sight and the lack of sight, light, and darkness, “presents a fascinating study in perception and blindness.” (Block, 1997, p. 365) Christian readers will be familiar with Jesus using identical language to Ezekiel’s description of Israel as those “who have eyes to see but do not see, who have ears to hear but do not hear.” This type of language occurs multiple times in the prophets and the psalms. Ezekiel’s older contemporary Jeremiah says in Jerusalem:

Hear this, O foolish and senseless people. Who have eyes, but do not see, who have ears, but do not hear. (Jeremiah 5:21)[1]

And in the psalmist’s protest against idols:

Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. Psalm 115: 4-6

Like Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel’s message attempts to reach people who are blind and deaf to the implications of these divine messages. Yet Ezekiel’s actions are audacious enough to attract the curiosity of his fellow exiles even if they do not lead to repentance. As stated when Ezekiel is called, when these audacious sign-acts and words come to fruition the people will know that a prophet has been among them whether they hear or refuse to hear. (Ezekiel 2:5)

Ezekiel prepares his exile’s baggage[2] and visibly places it on they outside of his house and then proceeds to dig a hole in the wall of his house.[3] The exiles may have interpreted his actions positively as an end to their exile and a return to their homes in Judah. Yet, Ezekiel’s actions of preparing his baggage, digging through the wall, placing his baggage on the inside, and then departing through the hole in the wall at night will be interpreted the next morning for those who are curious enough to see the prophet’s action and hear its interpretation.

The interpretation involves the people still in Jerusalem and in particular king Zedekiah. Zedekiah is never named in Ezekiel and is referred to here as prince (Hebrew navi) rather than king (Hebrew melek). Zedekiah is the target of prophecy for the first time in Ezekiel. Prior to this Ezekiel only referred to the exile of King Jehoichin and the elders acting unfaithfully in Jerusalem. The temple, the city of Jerusalem and the land have all received judgment, but now the appointed leader in Jerusalem is singled out. The prophet Jeremiah had extensive interactions with Zedekiah in Jerusalem (Jeremiah 32-34, 37-38) and narrates the ending of Zedekiah twice in the book of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 39, 52). 2 Kings shares an identical description of Zedekiah’s end:

Then a breach was made in the city wall; the king with all the soldiers fled by night by the way of the gate between the two walls, by the king’s garden, though the Chaldeans were all around the city. They went in the direction of the Arabah. But the army of the Chaldeans pursued the king, and overtook him in the plains of Jericho; all his army was scattered, deserting him. Then they captured the king and brought him up to the king of Babylon at Riblah, who passed sentence on him. They slaughtered the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, then put out the eyes of Zedekiah; they bound him in fetters and took him to Babylon. 2 Kings 25: 4-7

The actions of Jeremiah foreshadow the actions of Zedekiah fleeing Jerusalem through a hole in the wall with the sword following him. Ezekiel’s prophecy indicates that the LORD is the one casting his net and setting a snare for Zedekiah and Babylon is merely the instrument.[4] The king does leave by a hole in the wall, is quickly captured, and then is taken to Babylon blinded. As the prophet indicates he is taken to Babylon, but he does not see it.

We live in an age where even many biblical scholars are skeptical of prophecy as prediction. Many scholars of the historical critical and source criticism school view prophesies which foretell later events as “prophecy after the fact” which are included in the compilation of the words of the prophets which may have occurred at a later date. This idea would have been foreign to the early readers of scripture who viewed the prophet as one who receives and transmits divine oracles in both word and action. The prophets’ predictions normally speak in generalities, but it is expected (as we will see in the resistance in the remainder of the chapter) that prophets would communicate coming events. Blinding captives was a widespread practice among the Babylonians, but believability based on common practices is not necessary for a prophet. A true prophet was a person who received a message or insight from God whose knowledge is not limited to the present and whose actions may include the actions through another nation as an instrument of God’s judgment or salvation.

Ezekiel 12: 17-20 Portraying a Traumatized People

17 The word of the LORD came to me: 18 Mortal, eat your bread with quaking, and drink your water with trembling and with fearfulness; 19 and say to the people of the land, Thus says the Lord GOD concerning the inhabitants of Jerusalem in the land of Israel: They shall eat their bread with fearfulness, and drink their water in dismay, because their land shall be stripped of all it contains, on account of the violence of all those who live in it. 20 The inhabited cities shall be laid waste, and the land shall become a desolation; and you shall know that I am the LORD.

In the next visual picture, the prophet demonstrates the traumatic nature of the events for those impacted by the LORD’s judgment of Jerusalem. One of the symptoms of prolonged stress and trauma is uncontrollable shaking, and in the public act of eating and drinking[5] and again the sign must be memorable enough to be communicated from Ezekiel’s position in exile to the remnant in Jerusalem. The judgment of the LORD echoes the covenant curses of Leviticus 26:43:

For the land shall be deserted by them, and enjoy its sabbath year by lying desolate without them while they make amends for their iniquity, because they dared to spurn my ordinances, and abhorred my statutes.[6]

Within Hebrew thought there is a connection between the people and the land, and the disobedience of the people has a negative impact on the land. In Leviticus the land is given a sabbath to recover from the damage incurred by the unfaithfulness of the people, but in Ezekiel the focus is on the impact on the people who will bear the fearful consequences of violence committed in the land.

Ezekiel 12: 21-28 The Time of Judgment is At Hand

21 The word of the LORD came to me: 22 Mortal, what is this proverb of yours about the land of Israel, which says, “The days are prolonged, and every vision comes to nothing”? 23 Tell them therefore, “Thus says the Lord GOD: I will put an end to this proverb, and they shall use it no more as a proverb in Israel.” But say to them, The days are near, and the fulfillment of every vision. 24 For there shall no longer be any false vision or flattering divination within the house of Israel. 25 But I the LORD will speak the word that I speak, and it will be fulfilled. It will no longer be delayed; but in your days, O rebellious house, I will speak the word and fulfill it, says the Lord GOD.

26 The word of the LORD came to me: 27 Mortal, the house of Israel is saying, “The vision that he sees is for many years ahead; he prophesies for distant times.” 28 Therefore say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: None of my words will be delayed any longer, but the word that I speak will be fulfilled, says the Lord GOD.

Although the God presented throughout the book of Ezekiel is a God whose judgment will not be delayed much longer, the character of the God of Israel throughout scripture is a God who desires repentance. The patience of God in continuing to send prophets to warn the people of the consequences of their actions has continued to meet resistance from a people who no longer hear or see. The two proverbs that the LORD responds to in this final portion of the chapter speak to the belief among the speakers that the visions of the prophets come to nothing or they are for distant times. Unfortunately, what these proverb speakers fail to realize is that the time of judgment being delayed is closing and they will soon see these prophecies of doom fulfilled.

Throughout the bible, the patience of God has allowed an opportunity for the wicked to turn from their ways. This patience often has a cost for the righteous, the society, and as mentioned above even the land and God’s costly patience is not infinite. Prophets throughout the bible have encountered rejection[7] as well as dealing with false prophets[8] who often echoed royal or popular desires. The combination of divine patience and conflicting message made it difficult for the population to take the challenging message of Jeremiah and Ezekiel as seriously as they merited. This combination of factors has led to the illusion that God’s judgment will either not come or will be delayed for a future generation to deal with. Ezekiel attempts to communicate with a people who no longer listen with the urgency of the prophecy he has received.

[1] Similar language is used in Isaiah 6:9-10, 43: 8.

[2] Literally “container of exile.” Probably a sort of knapsack to carry the essentials for a long journey. This would be familiar to the exiles who prepared similar baggage for their journey from Jerusalem to Babylon.

[3] The Hebrew qir used here is the word for the wall of a house. Homa is the Hebrew word for a defensive wall. The act of digging through the wall is reasonable because most structures in Babylon used bricks made from dried mud. (Block, 1997, p. 370)

[4] The same claim will be advanced with nearly identical wording in Ezekiel 17: 20.

[5] Eating in the ancient world was normally a communal activity not a private one, and the LORD using this as a prophetic sign act implies an audience to observe the sign act.

[6] A similar stripping of the land will occur in 32:15 (referring to Egypt) and 33:28(referring to Judah). Zechariah 7:10 uses the image of a desolated land in a similar way, while Jeremiah uses the image of a desolate land as the place where God will in the future will know joy and prosperity (Jeremiah 33:10) as he narrates a hopeful future after the exile.

[7] For example, the man of God from Judah (1 Kings 13) the prophets killed by Jezebel (1 Kings 18:4) and later the threat to Elijah (1 Kings 19) Zechariah (2 Chronicles 24: 20-22)

[8] The prophets may have been aligned with other gods like the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18 or simply proclaim a message that did not come from the God of Israel like Hananiah in Jeremiah 28.

Ezekiel 11 Judgment on Jerusalem and Hope for the Exiles

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A smaller pithos, probably not semi-subterranean, as the decorative bands cover the entire body. There is a rope decoration around the neck; however, the body features distributed fasteners for handling via a rope harness. From Knossos, Crete 2004 Shared by CC 2.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pithos#/media/File:Aardewerk_knossos.JPG

 

Ezekiel 11: 1-13 The Judgment of the Jerusalem Leaders

1 The spirit lifted me up and brought me to the east gate of the house of the LORD, which faces east. There, at the entrance of the gateway, were twenty-five men; among them I saw Jaazaniah son of Azzur, and Pelatiah son of Benaiah, officials of the people. 2 He said to me, “Mortal, these are the men who devise iniquity and who give wicked counsel in this city; 3 they say, ‘The time is not near to build houses; this city is the pot, and we are the meat.’ 4 Therefore prophesy against them; prophesy, O mortal.”

5 Then the spirit of the LORD fell upon me, and he said to me, “Say, Thus says the LORD: This is what you think, O house of Israel; I know the things that come into your mind. 6 You have killed many in this city, and have filled its streets with the slain. 7 Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: The slain whom you have placed within it are the meat, and this city is the pot; but you shall be taken out of it. 8 You have feared the sword; and I will bring the sword upon you, says the Lord GOD. 9 I will take you out of it and give you over to the hands of foreigners, and execute judgments upon you. 10 You shall fall by the sword; I will judge you at the border of Israel. And you shall know that I am the LORD. 11 This city shall not be your pot, and you shall not be the meat inside it; I will judge you at the border of Israel. 12 Then you shall know that I am the LORD, whose statutes you have not followed, and whose ordinances you have not kept, but you have acted according to the ordinances of the nations that are around you.”

13 Now, while I was prophesying, Pelatiah son of Benaiah died. Then I fell down on my face, cried with a loud voice, and said, “Ah Lord GOD! will you make a full end of the remnant of Israel?”

In George Orwell’s famous short story Animal Farm the new leadership of the fictional farm ruled over by the animals quickly devolves as the pigs adopt the role of leaders. Napolean and the rest of the pigs soon take over the farmer’s house as their home and office. Instead of being compatriots who uphold the principles of animalism in the book, they become new masters willing to sell other animals for profit. Proverbs warns of the dangers of a dramatic change in leadership in its own manner:

Under three things the earth trembles; under four it cannot bear up: a slave when he becomes king, and a fool when glutted with food; an unloved woman when she gets a husband, and a maid when she succeeds her mistress. Proverbs 30: 21-23

The situation in Jerusalem that Ezekiel is visiting in this spiritual vision shows us the twenty-five men who are the new leaders in Jerusalem now that many of the leaders, priests, and counselors have been exiled to Babylon. Jaazaniah and Pelatiah and the remaining leaders who exercise authority in the absence of the exiles view themselves as safe within the city walls. In their view God’s judgment has fallen upon the exiles and they are now outside the pot, while they are the prime cuts left on the inside. To use a different metaphor, the city is now their oyster and they mean to extract the pearl of great price for their own profit.

When we think of the pot as a metaphor, it often is a place of difficulty rather than safety since pots are primarily used as instruments of cooking in modern kitchens. The image in Ezekiel is likely viewing the pot as a sealed vessel used for the storage of meat and other items, like the pithos in the image above, rather than primarily a vessel for cooking. (NIB VI: 1186) With the city walls functioning as the metaphorical pot that will keep the meat (these officials) safe they have run the city as ‘false shepherds’ as Ezekiel will later describe in Ezekiel 34: 1-10. The officials’ comments that “the time is not near to build houses” may indicate that building materials are needed to secure the city walls, but another insidious possibility is that these new officials are appropriating the property and wealth of the exiles and exploiting their new power to confiscate the property of the vulnerable within the city, as verse six seems to indicate. In the LORD’s view their actions have been death dealing to the very people they were entrusted to protect. They used their apparent safety and the power vacuum to enrich themselves at the expense of others, but their safety was an illusion.

God reverses their metaphor; they were the meat safe in the pot but now God has determined they are the spoiled portion that needs to be removed from the pot. These officials were probably exempted by their position from serving in the conflict around the walls, but now God promises to take them outside the walls and to expose them to the sword they have previously avoided. Like the pigs in Animal Farm who end the story indistinguishable from the surrounding farmers, these officials have acted like the nations around Israel. They have not cared for the vulnerable in the city, nor the exiles from their own people. As the prophet Micah would declare of leaders in his time, they became the butchers of the people:

And I said: Listen, you heads of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel! Should you not know justice?—you who hate the good and love the evil, who tear the skin off my people, and the flesh off their bones; who eat the flesh of my people, flay their skin off them, break their bones into pieces, and chop them up like meat in a kettle, life flesh in a cauldron. Micah 3: 1-3

Throughout these chapters God has declared judgment upon the temple, the city, and the nation because of their unwillingness to live according to the way of God’s covenant. These leaders may have escaped the effects of the famine and conflict temporarily, but now they too will experience the consequences of their unjust actions while they were leading the people. Pelatiah, whose name means YHWH reserves a remnant, dies while Ezekiel is prophesying. Ezekiel protests to God that God is making a full end to the remnant of Israel.[1] Ezekiel’s protest results one of the first windows of hope in the book of Ezekiel.

Ezekiel 11: 14-21 Hope for the Exiles

14 Then the word of the LORD came to me: 15 Mortal, your kinsfolk, your own kin, your fellow exiles, the whole house of Israel, all of them, are those of whom the inhabitants of Jerusalem have said, “They have gone far from the LORD; to us this land is given for a possession.” 16 Therefore say: Thus says the Lord GOD: Though I removed them far away among the nations, and though I scattered them among the countries, yet I have been a sanctuary to them for a little while in the countries where they have gone. 17 Therefore say: Thus says the Lord GOD: I will gather you from the peoples, and assemble you out of the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel. 18 When they come there, they will remove from it all its detestable things and all its abominations. 19 I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them; I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, 20 so that they may follow my statutes and keep my ordinances and obey them. Then they shall be my people, and I will be their God. 21 But as for those whose heart goes after their detestable things and their abominations, I will bring their deeds upon their own heads, says the Lord GOD.

Ezekiel is the first prophet to a people in exile, and it is to the exiles that this vision of hope is imparted. The people of Jerusalem may have viewed the exiles as those removed far from the LORD, but the LORD imparts through the prophet that these are the ones who the hopeful future will come through. Although they have been removed from the physical presence of the temple, now the LORD promises to be their sanctuary in this time of exile. As Psalm 90, attributed to Moses, declares about the LORD, “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.” (Psalm 90:1) Their exile will not be forever, and they will be regathered by their God and returned to the land. There have been little windows into hope in the previous texts (Ezekiel 5:3, 6: 8-10) but those slivers of hope were surrounded by seas of darkness. In a further reversal, although the LORD has given up on those dwelling in Jerusalem, the remnant of the people is already in exile. The LORD will not abandon the land of Israel or the people.

This is the first time that Ezekiel will utilize the image of a ‘heart’ transplant: replacing a stony heart with a fleshy one. The heart in Hebrew thought is the organ of will, not emotions, so perhaps this is as much about a fleshy mind as a fleshy heart. Yet, Ezekiel will diagnose the problem with Israel as a heart problem, and only by replacing the sick and hard heart can there be a new life that is responsive to the LORD’s covenant and ordinances. This people of obedient and fleshy hearts will return and purify the land from the idols and detestable things that are present during this time. This renewed land and renewed people allow for the reestablishment of the covenant as the rearticulation of the covenant formula indicates: “Then they shall be my people, and I will be their God.”  As the prophet Jeremiah could state in a similar manner:

I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me for all time, for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make an everlasting covenant with them, never to draw back from doing good to them, and I will put the fear of me in their hearts, so that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing good to them, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and soul. (Jeremiah 32: 39-41)

Yet, for any who would not embrace this new future with a new heart and new faithfulness, their wicked deeds will not be exempted from the judgment Ezekiel proclaims.

Ezekiel 11: 22-25 The End of the Vision

22 Then the cherubim lifted up their wings, with the wheels beside them; and the glory of the God of Israel was above them. 23 And the glory of the LORD ascended from the middle of the city, and stopped on the mountain east of the city. 24 The spirit lifted me up and brought me in a vision by the spirit of God into Chaldea, to the exiles. Then the vision that I had seen left me. 25 And I told the exiles all the things that the LORD had shown me.

The LORD has left Jerusalem. Ezekiel never sees the glory of God move further than the mountains east of the city, although it has appeared to him in his exile in Babylon. Daniel and Revelation will assume that the presence of God is in heaven, but for Ezekiel God’s presence stops here and the vision ends with Ezekiel being returned to the exiles. Now the prophet shares this vision, both its terror and its hope, with these exiles, presumably starting with the elders of Judah who were seated in his house when the vision began.

Ezekiel has seen in this vision a people who worship other gods, but also a people whose misdirected worship has caused them to be an unjust society. The officials leading both the civic and religious life of Jerusalem have done violence to the city. Jerusalem as it stands is irredeemable in the LORD’s eyes, and it will require beginning fresh with a remnant already in exile. During this exile the LORD will be their sanctuary, will put a new and willing heart within them. I am reminded of the words of Psalm 51:

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and sustain in me a willing spirit. Psalm 51: 10-12

Yet, Psalm 51 is a prayer for individual renewal while Ezekiel’s vision is the recreation of a covenant people from the remnant in exile in Babylon whose clean hearts will lead to a clean land.

[1] Most English translations make this a question, but in Hebrew there is no interrogative. Rather than a question, Ezekiel is here protesting the perceived totality of God’s judgment on Israel. (NIB VI: 1187)

Ezekiel 7 A Three Alarm Crisis

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Jerusalem is on Fire from the Art Bible (1896)

Ezekiel 7

The word of the LORD came to me: 2 You, O mortal, thus says the Lord GOD to the land of Israel:

An end! The end has come upon the four corners of the land.
3 Now the end is upon you, I will let loose my anger upon you; I will judge you according to your ways, I will punish you for all your abominations.
4 My eye will not spare you, I will have no pity. I will punish you for your ways, while your abominations are among you. Then you shall know that I am the LORD.
5 Thus says the Lord GOD: Disaster after disaster! See, it comes.
6 An end has come, the end has come. It has awakened against you; see, it comes!
7 Your doom has come to you, O inhabitant of the land. The time has come, the day is near — of tumult, not of reveling on the mountains.
8 Soon now I will pour out my wrath upon you; I will spend my anger against you. I will judge you according to your ways, and punish you for all your abominations.
9 My eye will not spare; I will have no pity. I will punish you according to your ways, while your abominations are among you. Then you shall know that it is I the LORD who strike.
10 See, the day! See, it comes! Your doom has gone out. The rod has blossomed, pride has budded.
11 Violence has grown into a rod of wickedness. None of them shall remain, not their abundance, not their wealth; no pre-eminence among them.
12 The time has come, the day draws near; let not the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn, for wrath is upon all their multitude.
13 For the sellers shall not return to what has been sold as long as they remain alive. For the vision concerns all their multitude; it shall not be revoked. Because of their iniquity, they cannot maintain their lives.
14 They have blown the horn and made everything ready; but no one goes to battle, for my wrath is upon all their multitude.
15 The sword is outside, pestilence and famine are inside; those in the field die by the sword; those in the city — famine and pestilence devour them.
16 If any survivors escape, they shall be found on the mountains like doves of the valleys, all of them moaning over their iniquity.
17 All hands shall grow feeble, all knees turn to water.
18 They shall put on sackcloth, horror shall cover them. Shame shall be on all faces, baldness on all their heads.
 19 They shall fling their silver into the streets, their gold shall be treated as unclean.
Their silver and gold cannot save them on the day of the wrath of the LORD. They shall not satisfy their hunger or fill their stomachs with it. For it was the stumbling block of their iniquity. 20 From their beautiful ornament, in which they took pride, they made their abominable images, their detestable things; therefore I will make of it an unclean thing to them.
21 I will hand it over to strangers as booty, to the wicked of the earth as plunder; they shall profane it.
22 I will avert my face from them, so that they may profane my treasured place; the violent shall enter it, they shall profane it.
23 Make a chain! For the land is full of bloody crimes; the city is full of violence.
24 I will bring the worst of the nations to take possession of their houses. I will put an end to the arrogance of the strong, and their holy places shall be profaned.
25 When anguish comes, they will seek peace, but there shall be none.
26 Disaster comes upon disaster, rumor follows rumor; they shall keep seeking a vision from the prophet; instruction shall perish from the priest, and counsel from the elders.

27 The king shall mourn, the prince shall be wrapped in despair, and the hands of the people of the land shall tremble. According to their way I will deal with them; according to their own judgments I will judge them. And they shall know that I am the LORD.

My father was a firefighter when I was growing up, and the number of alarms would determine the number of trucks that would be sent to a reported fire. Larger disasters required more trucks and firefighters available to fight the fire or rescue trapped people and they would attempt to dispatch the appropriate response for the situation. The structure of chapter seven sounds three distinct alarms for this disaster which is coming upon the land of Israel and threatens not only Jerusalem, but all the towns of Judea with survivors having to flee to the mountains in powerlessness and humiliation. Yet, for the people hearing these three alarms from the prophet there are no rescuers to deliver them.

Before dealing with the alarms that we encounter in Ezekiel 7, I want to take a moment to recall the character of the LORD as articulated in Exodus 34:

5 The LORD descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name, “The LORD.” 6 The LORD passed before him, and proclaimed,

“The LORD, the LORD,
a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
7 keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,
 forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,
yet by no means clearing the guilty,
but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children
and the children’s children,
to the third and the fourth generation.”

The elements of this list, sometimes called the thirteen attributes of God, are critical to understanding the character of the God of Israel. Within this identity is a God who is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness who forgives, but there is also the caution that God will not clear the guilty. Ezekiel understands that God has been slow to anger, has continually sought to show Israel steadfast love and faithfulness but Israel has responded with disobedience for generations. Israel has failed, within the prophecies of Ezekiel, to be a light to the nations and now God will no longer clear the guilty who are continuing to corrupt the people of God and to violate God’s covenant.

The first alarm occurs in the first four verses of the chapter when Ezekiel is to declare the end for the land and the people. This is similar to the language of Amos 8:2 where the LORD declares an end for the people of Samaria:

The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never pass them by again.

Amos declared to the northern kingdom that their grace period was running out, and now Ezekiel from exile warns the people of Judah that their grace period has also expired. In the past God may have overlooked their failures to live according to the covenant but now the curses in the law are being enacted. (Block, 1997, p. 249)

A second alarm resounds in verses five through nine. The flow is broken by indicating God speaks a second time at the beginning of verse five. Six words describe the impact of the curse which the people’s continued disobedience have awakened: disaster, end, doom, the time, the day, and the tumult. The language is similar to Zephaniah 1: 14-16, and it is possible that Ezekiel may have been familiar with this prophet from forty to fifty years earlier. Regardless of the similarities, the announcement of this alarm does not give any chance for return, for the time when the wrath of God will unfold upon the nation will be soon. The punishment is for the purpose of removing the abominations from among the people and they will realize that this is the action of their God in response to their long running disobedience.

The final alarm begins in verse ten as many of the words that described the impact of the curse are now repeated along with additional descriptions. The arrival of the day and doom twists the imagery of the budding rod which declared Aaron as God’s chosen high priest (Numbers 17) into a rod of violence and wickedness. In the time where this rod is blooming the normal actions of buying and selling have become meaningless for the land and the marketplace have all been invaded and there is no expectation of returning to one’s home. A sentinel sounds the horn to alert the people to defend their homes, but no one prepares to fight. Conflict destroys those outside the city while famine and sickness ravage those behind the walls. The only refuge is the mountains where the people wail over their fate. Their panic is so complete that their hands have become weak, and they even lose control over their bladders[1]. There is no buying oneself out of this situation and gold and silver are thrown away as unclean[2] things. God has turned away and the worst of the nations comes to put an end to the disobedience of the people. No one can change the unfolding of this curse. The visions of the prophets fail, the priest no longer have instruction (torah) to give, the elders have no counsel, the king mourns, and the princes are without hope. Every corner of the land is stricken by this long-delayed judgment and in the end the people will know the LORD.

These words were hard to hear when they were first spoken or read, and they are difficult today. Many Christians want the God of steadfast love and faithfulness but do not want a God who judges them if they are the ones guilty of disobedience. Many modern people have an agnostic view of God, where God will neither do good or ill. For the prophets this would be the definition of foolishness. There is always a risk when a people focus on the grace of God that the sense of awe and wonder becomes diminished, and both cynicism and self determination replace obedience and respect. The patience of God in the past for Judah has led to complacency among the people in Ezekiel’s time. These words of Ezekiel point to a process of undoing the pillars that the people of Israel’s false security rested upon. In the end the prophecy of Ezekiel envisions a people who once again know the LORD and whose abominations and idols have been removed.

[1] The NRSV’s all knees turn to water is misleading. The imagery here is losing control of the bladder in a state of panic, or crudely pissing oneself in fear. (NIB VI: 1167)

[2] The Hebrew nidda denotes bodily secretions, especially menstrual blood which was considered a source of uncleanness in the Levitical ideas of purity. (NIB VI: 1167)

Ezekiel 5 An Image of Jerusalem’s Destruction

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Jerusalem is on Fire from the Art Bible (1896)

Ezekiel 5: 1-4

1 And you, O mortal, take a sharp sword; use it as a barber’s razor and run it over your head and your beard; then take balances for weighing, and divide the hair. 2 One third of the hair you shall burn in the fire inside the city, when the days of the siege are completed; one third you shall take and strike with the sword all around the city; and one third you shall scatter to the wind, and I will unsheathe the sword after them. 3 Then you shall take from these a small number, and bind them in the skirts of your robe. 4 From these, again, you shall take some, throw them into the fire and burn them up; from there a fire will come out against all the house of Israel.

An uncomfortable prophet becomes the embodiment of an uncomfortable message. The God of Israel has transformed from being the protector of Jerusalem to being actively engaged in the scattering and death of the people of Jerusalem. This culmination of the sign-act which through lying on one side, eating a restrictive diet, constructing a model of the siege and now the shaving of the prophet’s hair by a sword has deconstructed the identity of the prophet to demonstrate the destructive forces that are being unleased on Jerusalem. Ezekiel among the prophets has the greatest concern for ritual purity in relation to the Levitical understanding of a priest. Near the end of the book of Ezekiel he will note that priests are not to shave their heads (Ezekiel 44: 20) and this follows the prohibition of shaving bald spots on their heads or shaving the edges of their beards in mourning for all priests (Leviticus 21: 5, see also Deuteronomy 14: 1 where this practice is extended to all people). As before the command of the LORD pushes Ezekiel past the boundaries of what is expected of a priest and perhaps removes him from the role of the priesthood to serve as a strange prophet with a message that embodies the LORD’s disgust at what Israel has become.

Priests were prohibited from shaving their heads, even in the act of mourning but the use of a sharp sword as the instrument may point to the experience of shaving as a mark of dishonor or humiliation as part of a military defeat. Jerusalem is facing a military catastrophe as the continued image of the siege demonstrates. Ezekiel has already been instructed to cook his food in a way that violated his understanding of faithfulness to God’s law, and yet here Ezekiel does not protest. Ezekiel has been commanded to be obedient in contrast with the people. The implication is that the prophet does shave his head and beard, weighs his hair, and divides it in thirds according to the instructions. Two thirds of the city are represented destroyed either within or outside the city by the burning or striking of the representative thirds and the remnant remains under threat of God unsheathing the sword after them. Only a small number is bound to the prophet in order to remain safe.

Ezekiel 5: 5-17

5 Thus says the Lord GOD: This is Jerusalem; I have set her in the center of the nations, with countries all around her. 6 But she has rebelled against my ordinances and my statutes, becoming more wicked than the nations and the countries all around her, rejecting my ordinances and not following my statutes. 7 Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: Because you are more turbulent than the nations that are all around you, and have not followed my statutes or kept my ordinances, but have acted according to the ordinances of the nations that are all around you; 8 therefore thus says the Lord GOD: I, I myself, am coming against you; I will execute judgments among you in the sight of the nations. 9 And because of all your abominations, I will do to you what I have never yet done, and the like of which I will never do again. 10 Surely, parents shall eat their children in your midst, and children shall eat their parents; I will execute judgments on you, and any of you who survive I will scatter to every wind. 11 Therefore, as I live, says the Lord GOD, surely, because you have defiled my sanctuary with all your detestable things and with all your abominations — therefore I will cut you down; my eye will not spare, and I will have no pity. 12 One third of you shall die of pestilence or be consumed by famine among you; one third shall fall by the sword around you; and one third I will scatter to every wind and will unsheathe the sword after them.

13 My anger shall spend itself, and I will vent my fury on them and satisfy myself; and they shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken in my jealousy, when I spend my fury on them. 14 Moreover I will make you a desolation and an object of mocking among the nations around you, in the sight of all that pass by. 15 You shall be a mockery and a taunt, a warning and a horror, to the nations around you, when I execute judgments on you in anger and fury, and with furious punishments — I, the LORD, have spoken — 16 when I loose against you my deadly arrows of famine, arrows for destruction, which I will let loose to destroy you, and when I bring more and more famine upon you, and break your staff of bread. 17 I will send famine and wild animals against you, and they will rob you of your children; pestilence and bloodshed shall pass through you; and I will bring the sword upon you. I, the LORD, have spoken.

If you are making this journey with me through Ezekiel it quickly becomes uncomfortable to hear these harsh words of judgment from God directed at Jerusalem recorded in these first five chapters. This strange prophet’s declarations are unfamiliar to most people who are used to a less judgmental version of Christianity. As Katheryn Pfisterer Darr can state,

Ezekiel has a difficult time securing a place in mainstream Christianity. With a few well-known exceptions (e.g., the valley of dry bones vision in 37: 1-14), his oracles seldom make their way into lectionary readings and sermons, for they are deemed too severe, too complex, and too painful to set before our congregations and Bible study groups. And Ezekiel makes us uncomfortable—a sentiment we surely share not only with his original audience in exile, but also with two and a half millennia of his interpreters, both Jewish and Christian. Among the early rabbis, for example, we find the opinion that reading the book’s beginning and ending was too dangerous to be undertaken by anyone younger than thirty years of age. (NIB VI:1129)

This particular prophetic unit is, “one of the harshest that is delivered to the nation anywhere in Tanakh. It remains difficult to read, even as we are removed by so many generations.” (Ganzel, 2020, p. 54) Yet, even with the harshness and difficulty of reading Ezekiel I still believe it has something to teach us about a passionate God and a people who were once a treasured possession, a holy people, and a nation of priests (Exodus 19: 5-6) but now are viewed as impure and disgusting.

Jerusalem has ceased to be Zion, the home of God. Their privileged status has been forfeited at this time in their story with God, and Ezekiel is concerned with both pronouncing the change of status but also communicating the cause for this change. Throughout the first five chapters we have heard the charge that the people have rebelled against God’s statutes and ordinances. They were intended to be a witness to the righteousness of God revealed to them by the covenant. Instead, they failed to even live up to the righteousness of the nations[1] (ordinances of the nations in NRSV) and this is the root of the LORD’s anger with his people.

Ezekiel frequently uses the language of purity/impurity from the law, particularly Leviticus. Ezekiel uses the terms ‘detestable things’ (Hebrew shikkutzim) and ‘abominations’ (Hebrew to’evot) for the first of more than eighty uses throughout his prophecies. Detestable things typically refer to impure creatures which are forbidden as food, but in Ezekiel they normally refer to the idolatrous practices which have defiled the temple and the people. Abominations in the law are things that is, “hateful, disgusting, or worthy of condemnation.” (Ganzel, 2020, p. 51) and throughout Ezekiel these are the items that defile the bond between husband and wife, the land, the temple, Sabbath, and even God’s name. For Ezekiel these detestable things and abominations corrupt the people, the land, and even the temple making them impure and disgusting to God. The treasured possession is polluted, the holy people are unholy, and the nation of priests have become idolatrous.

The judgment echoes the language of the curses in the law[2] as well as what is found in other prophets.[3] It also remembers the cannibalism that is reported during the siege of Samaria under Ben-Hadad as referenced in 2 Kings 6: 24-41. Ezekiel adds to the reports of eating children or other residents with the reversal of children eating parents. The stress and starvation of siege warfare can make people abandon their humanity in the struggle to survive. Yet, for Ezekiel the Babylonians are not the primary oppressors of Jerusalem. The Babylonians are merely their God’s deadly arrows of famine and destruction.

The God presented by the prophets has a surprisingly human range of emotions from passionate love to anger. Years ago, when I was working through Jeremiah I realized this was the language of a broken-hearted God. God is grieving the loss of what could have and perhaps should have been with the people. Is God reacting rationally, absolutely not, God is reacting emotionally in Ezekiel. This is a painful text which causes us to ask difficult questions. What would cause God the heartbreak which leads to this rage? What actions cause God’s people to go from treasured possessions to detestable things and abominations? How do we explain the disasters within our lives, our churches, and our society and does God have a role in those disasters? What are the ‘idols’ that we trust instead of the God we claim to worship? What are the obligations of our identity as the people of God? All challenging questions without easy answers. The prophet finds himself caught between a rebellious people and a passionate God. He occupies that uncomfortable place of faithfulness is a time a judgment. Yet, even the prophet’s faithfulness may look like disobedience to the strict ideas of purity. There are no easy answers in Ezekiel. The first half of the book leads us unrelentingly to the destruction of Jerusalem, and it is only in the second half where the hope for the surviving remnant can be voiced.

[1] Hebrew mishpat haggoyim this would be a strong condemnation from the perspective of a law observant Hebrew. The righteousness of the Gentiles would be an oxymoron to the Jewish people who viewed themselves as the bearers of God’s vision of righteousness. Ezekiel argues they would not even maintain the standard of those outside the covenant.

[2] Leviticus 26: 29, Deuteronomy 28: 53-57

[3] Isaiah 9:20-21; 49:26 (although here it refers to Israel’s enemies); Jeremiah 19:9; Zechariah 11:9

  Ezekiel 4 The Siege of Jerusalem Portrayed

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Jerusalem is on Fire from the Art Bible (1896)

Ezekiel 4

1 And you, O mortal, take a brick and set it before you. On it portray a city, Jerusalem; 2 and put siegeworks against it, and build a siege wall against it, and cast up a ramp against it; set camps also against it, and plant battering rams against it all around. 3 Then take an iron plate and place it as an iron wall between you and the city; set your face toward it, and let it be in a state of siege, and press the siege against it. This is a sign for the house of Israel.

4 Then lie on your left side, and place the punishment of the house of Israel upon it; you shall bear their punishment for the number of the days that you lie there. 5 For I assign to you a number of days, three hundred ninety days, equal to the number of the years of their punishment; and so you shall bear the punishment of the house of Israel. 6 When you have completed these, you shall lie down a second time, but on your right side, and bear the punishment of the house of Judah; forty days I assign you, one day for each year. 7 You shall set your face toward the siege of Jerusalem, and with your arm bared you shall prophesy against it. 8 See, I am putting cords on you so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have completed the days of your siege.

9 And you, take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them into one vessel, and make bread for yourself. During the number of days that you lie on your side, three hundred ninety days, you shall eat it. 10 The food that you eat shall be twenty shekels a day by weight; at fixed times you shall eat it. 11 And you shall drink water by measure, one-sixth of a hin; at fixed times you shall drink. 12 You shall eat it as a barley-cake, baking it in their sight on human dung. 13 The LORD said, “Thus shall the people of Israel eat their bread, unclean, among the nations to which I will drive them.” 14 Then I said, “Ah Lord GOD! I have never defiled myself; from my youth up until now I have never eaten what died of itself or was torn by animals, nor has carrion flesh come into my mouth.” 15 Then he said to me, “See, I will let you have cow’s dung instead of human dung, on which you may prepare your bread.”

16 Then he said to me, Mortal, I am going to break the staff of bread in Jerusalem; they shall eat bread by weight and with fearfulness; and they shall drink water by measure and in dismay. 17 Lacking bread and water, they will look at one another in dismay, and waste away under their punishment.

Ezekiel has eaten and ingested the scroll that was given to him by the LORD and now he becomes the physical embodiment of the words of lament, morning, and woe. Previous prophets have used ‘sign-acts’ to convey a message. There is a societal expectation that prophets will do strange actions to convey a symbolic meaning: whether it is Ahijah the Shilonite tearing the new garment he was wearing into twelve pieces and handing ten to Jeroboam to indicate God was handing ten tribes to Jeroboam to reign over (1 Kings 11 29-39) or Zedekiah son of Chenaanah making horns of iron[1] (1 Kings 22: 11) Elisha having King Joash strike the ground with arrows to symbolize victory (2 Kings 13: 14-19), Isaiah walking around naked and barefoot for three years (Isaiah 20. Jeremiah burying and retrieving a loincloth, breaking an earthenware jug, or wearing a yoke[2] (Jeremiah 13: 1-11; 19: 1-13; 27) Hosea’s relationship with his wife becomes an enactment of God’s relationship with Israel (Hosea 1-3) or Zechariah’s creation of a crown to put on the high priest Joshua (Zechariah 6). Yet, Ezekiel makes this type of visual prophecy a central part of his ministry to the people. ‘Sign-acts’ are a part of the modus operandi of the prophet Ezekiel as he embodies the word of God he is given. The nature and duration of the acts assumes an audience. These actions are public actions which are designed to provoke reaction, discussion, and communication.

The actions as commanded by the LORD would take over the prophet’s life for over a year. As Ellen Davis writes, “The prophet so consumed the divine word that finally his life…was important only to illustrate it might well claim to speak for YHWH.” (Davis, 1989, p. 70) Ezekiel is going to feel the pain of his people in his body as he prefigures the action of the siege, the length of exile, and the meager rations that those remaining in Jerusalem will encounter. His strange actions will be observed by his fellow exiles, but they will ultimately be communicated through family, social, political, and religious networks to those in Judah. Although he is already in exile in Babylon and will not endure the siege like those in Jerusalem his actions will embody the pain that is coming upon the people as a result of their hardheaded and hard-hearted ways of resisting the LORD’s covenant.

Ezekiel and Jeremiah both are attempting to deconstruct the “four pillars upon which Judah’s (false) sense of security was built.” (Block, 1997, p. 162) Jeremiah was working among those still in Judah as Ezekiel began his work among the exiles. The four pillars centered on the LORD the God of Israel’s covenant with Israel, God’s commitment to the land, God’s commitment to Jerusalem and the temple, and finally God’s promises to David. The covenant that the LORD entered into with the people at Sinai provided divine protection but included the obligation of faithfulness to the commands and ordinances of the covenant. Although there is an understanding of God being the creator of the heavens and the earth there was also the expectation of their God as the sovereign tied to a specific land and having an interest in defending the territory of Israel. Frequently the Israelites used the framework of the surrounding nations view of their ‘territorial deities’ to shape their imagination of their LORD. Jerusalem and the temple were viewed as special because they were the place that was a residence for the name of God, and the turning away of Sennacherib and the Assyrian threat during the time of King Hezekiah and the prophet Isaiah had reinforced this belief of “Zion’s inviolability.” (Block, 1997, p. 163) Lastly there was the covenant with David in 2 Samuel 7 where the LORD would guarantee the Davidic dynasty. The message both Jeremiah and Ezekiel received demonstrated the fallacy of the trust the people placed on God’s protection of the people, the land, the city/temple, and the king because the people did not attend to the commandments and ordinances that were a part of the covenant. Due to the disobedience and rebellion of the people their LORD was oriented against them and was allowing the punishment to fall first on his prophet and then on the people.

Ezekiel’s sign-act begins with taking a presumably wet slate or brick of clay and inscribing a visual representation of Jerusalem upon it. Archeologists have unearthed similar tablets and bricks depicting other cities in this region of Babylon. (NIB VI: 1143) Then this representation of Jerusalem is placed under siege by building a siege wall to isolate the city, setting up ramps (most cities are built on hills and surrounded by walls thus requiring ramps to assault) encamping a representative army around it and placing battering rams around the city. Siege in the ancient world worked in a double fashion, it isolated the city from sources of food, water, supplies, and reinforcements and it actively worked to destroy the walls that protected the city and to hasten the end of the siege. The iron griddle or iron plate separates the prophet from the city, but also may indicate God’s separation from the city. The prophet can demonstrate the siege but is powerless to prevent its happening.

The prophet is then called to bear the iniquity or punishment of the people of Israel and Judah for a number of days representing the years of punishment. Ezekiel’s act of bearing the iniquities of the people does not serve an atoning function like the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16: 21) but instead becomes a demonstration of the consequence of the long-endured stubbornness of the people. The three hundred ninety days (representing three hundred ninety years) of punishment for Israel presents several questions for an interpreter: who is represented by Israel, when are the three hundred ninety years of disobedience and when does the judgment of Israel begin? Israel (Samaria) and Judah separated in 922 and Assyria conquers Northern Israel in 721 BCE (a period of two hundred years) so one may question if the Israel here refers to Samaria or some unified vision of Israel which includes Judah. Perhaps Samaria’s disobedience has continued until this time and that would bring it closer to the period of three hundred ninety years. 1 Kings would indicate from its perspective the northern kingdom of Israel was disobedient to the LORD from its foundation with no ruler who did what was right in the eyes of the LORD. This three hundred ninety years may also harken back to Israel’s history in Egypt and its eventual liberation, and Ezekiel may be imagining a new exodus event in the people’s future. The forty days of Judah is easier to relate to the experience of exile in Babylon, but it also follows the pattern of Israel’s history when the people wandered in the wilderness for forty years for their disobedience.

According to the number of days in which you spied out the land, forty days, for every day a year, you shall bear your iniquity, forty years, and you shall know my displeasure. Number 14: 34

The action of laying on the right side for three hundred ninety days bound in cords and then a further forty days on the left side sounds impossible to accomplish, but Ezekiel is physically putting his body on the line as an image for the people. It is worth remembering that at the end of the previous chapter Ezekiel We are not given the complete details of how the prophet enacted this, but this repeated action would attract curiosity from the exiles and would probably be communicated to the residents of Judah.

During this extended embodiment of Judah’s punishment, the prophet is on a highly restricted diet: roughly six hundred fifty grams of water a day and about one thousand calories of a bread-like cake. This is a nutrient and calorie poor diet which probably gave the prophet little energy to do anything beyond lying around in the warm climate of Babylon. This siege diet which represents “scraping the bottom of each of the storage barrels.” (Block, 1997, p. 184) creates a cake that a third century experiment recorded by the Babylonian Talmud (Erubin 81a) demonstrated that a dog would refuse. (NIB VI: 1148) Yet the only thing the prophet resists is the command to bake the cake over human excrement. This may go back to the provisions in Deuteronomy that required the people to bury their excrement outside the camp. (Deuteronomy 23: 12-13) This request for God to amend his command is the first time the prophet speaks in the book, and God grants the request to allow cow chips to be used instead. Other than this request it appears that Ezekiel obediently embodies God’s commands. He becomes a visual representation of the words of God and an image of a suffering servant bearing the punishment of his people.

Ezekiel used the language of the covenant to challenge the four pillars that the people of Jerusalem have placed their misguided belief in their safety from the Babylonians or any other invasion. The language of ‘the staff of bread’ echoes the language of Leviticus 26:26 where the result of disobedience results in a situation where bread is doled out by weight and those who eat are not satisfied. Ezekiel’s diet would put him in a significant caloric deficit until the end of his ordeal. The upcoming siege of Jerusalem will be an experience of extreme hunger and starvation for many in Jerusalem and they, like the prophet who is embodying this dark future, will waste away as the days crawl on and the food dries up.

[1] Zedekiah was a false prophet, but he illustrates the cultural expectations of a prophet.

[2] Hananiah breaking of Jeremiah’s yoke was also a ‘sign-act’ even though performed by a false prophet.

Ezekiel 2 A Prophet’s Call and a Message to be Consumed

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Russian icon of the Prophet Ezekiel holding a scroll with his prophecy and pointing to the “closed gate” (18th century, Iconostasis of Kizhi monastery, Russia)

Ezekiel 2

1 He said to me: O mortal, stand up on your feet, and I will speak with you.2 And when he spoke to me, a spirit entered into me and set me on my feet; and I heard him speaking to me.3 He said to me, Mortal, I am sending you to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me; they and their ancestors have transgressed against me to this very day.4 The descendants are impudent and stubborn. I am sending you to them, and you shall say to them, “Thus says the Lord GOD.” 5 Whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house), they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.6 And you, O mortal, do not be afraid of them, and do not be afraid of their words, though briers and thorns surround you and you live among scorpions; do not be afraid of their words, and do not be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house. 7 You shall speak my words to them, whether they hear or refuse to hear; for they are a rebellious house.

8 But you, mortal, hear what I say to you; do not be rebellious like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you. 9 I looked, and a hand was stretched out to me, and a written scroll was in it. 10 He spread it before me; it had writing on the front and on the back, and written on it were words of lamentation and mourning and woe.

The narration of Ezekiel’s encounter with the LORD the God of Israel continues with this calling of the prophet as a messenger from the God of Israel to God’s rebellious people. In the midst of the bright and visually overwhelming living creatures, wheels, crystal dome, throne, and the fiery appearance of the LORD in a human like form combined with the sound like thunder and mighty waters the prophet has assumed the proper position of a mortal in the presence of the divine, prostrate on the ground. Ezekiel’s response reflects the practice of ancient royal courts where those summoned would prostrate themselves before the sovereign until they were commanded to rise when the sovereign is ready to address them. Ezekiel is cognizant of the distinction between himself as a mortal servant of the LORD and the overwhelming and powerful divine one who addresses him.

Ezekiel is referred to throughout the book as ‘son of man’ (Hebrew ben-adam, NRSV ‘mortal’). This is the primary way the prophet is addressed throughout the book, and it occurs ninety-three times. Adam in Hebrew is the general word for ‘man’ or ‘human’ and while Ezekiel is both a son of Adam, and a son of man, the NRSV and other translations that render this as ‘mortal’ do capture the way the term distinguishes Ezekiel from the LORD who is addressing him. This ‘son of man’ terminology will be used in a very different way in the book of Daniel (Daniel 7:13) and in the gospels by Jesus as a figure who is commissioned to come from heaven, but here it is a very mortal prophet who finds himself before the throne of God in a foreign land being commissioned as an emissary of God’s word to the people of Israel.

Ezekiel was a passive observer of the approach of the divine chariot in the previous chapter, and remains a passive if obedient vessel throughout this chapter of commissioning. When commanded to rise and stand on his feet, a ruach (spirit, wind, breath) enters into him and places him on his feet enabling the prophet to stand in the overpowering presence of the divine. It could be that a breath of God enters into the prophet, or a spirit of God, or a wind that lifts the prophet upon his feet, and the flexibility of the Hebrew allows for all of these senses to be true simultaneously. Yet, the action begins with the word and the ruach of the God of Israel who speaks and lifts up this son of man.

Ezekiel is commissioned to go to the people of Israel. Israel now refers to what remains of the people of Israel and Judah in the aftermath of the Assyrian dispersion of the Northern Kingdom of Israel (or Samaria), the portions of Judah still in the land around Jerusalem as well as the Judeans in exile in Babylon (where Ezekiel finds himself). It is likely that in the aftermath of the Northern Kingdom’s and Judah’s brief renaissance under Josiah that there was a reclamation of the identity of the people as the people of Israel as well as aspirations of reclaiming these lands that once belonged to the northern tribes. Yet this people of Israel at the time of Ezekiel is a nation (Hebrew goy) of rebels. The Hebrew word goy is normally used in a pejorative sense, the nations (or Gentiles) are the goyim. As Daniel Block highlights:

When the word is used of this nation, it tends to carry a pejorative sense, highlighting Israel’s indistinguishability from other nations and Yahweh’s rejection of Israel. Apart from faith in and fidelity to Yahweh, Israel is just another “heathen” nation. (Block, 1997, p. 118)

The nation of Israel is impudent (literally hard of face) and stubborn (literally hard of heart). Their external actions and the internal state of their heart and mind.[1] Later in Ezekiel 36:26 the remedy to this hardness of heart will be God’s action of placing within the people a ‘heart of flesh.’ For now, Ezekiel is warned that he is going to a people who have set their face and their will against their God and who continue in this rebellion. The people of Israel have become a house of rebellion and the renaming of Israel in this way recalls the way the eighth century BCE prophets Amos and Hosea renamed Bethel (house of God) to Beth-aven (house of iniquity). [2]

Ezekiel’s commission is not dependent on convincing this hard faced and hard-hearted people, but in faithfully delivering the messages that the LORD God hands on to him. When the words Ezekiel delivers come to pass the people will realize they have had a prophet in their midst. The prophets whose words are recorded in scripture were probably not well received as they delivered words of lamentation, mourning, and woe in their time, and it is only afterwards when their words proved true and the words of the prophets made sense of the experience of the people that they were accepted. Yet, within Deuteronomy, this is the only way to recognize a true prophet.

You may say to yourself, “How can we recognize a word that the LORD has not spoken?” If a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD but the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a word that the LORD has not spoken. The prophet has spoken presumptuously; do not be frightened by it. Deuteronomy 18: 21-22

It is only once a prophet’s words prove true that the people can recognize a true prophet has been in their midst, but they are still accountable for their response to these prophets who speak in the name of the LORD.

Ezekiel’s words will not be popular among the exiles or the remnant in Jerusalem and the only protection the prophet has will come from the God who sends him. The briers, thorns, and scorpions which surround the prophet are symbols of the prophet’s protection. Many scholars view the ‘scorpions’ introduced with the ‘briars and thorns’ as a mixed metaphor and wonder if the ‘scorpions’ refers to a ‘scorpion plant’ of thorny appearance or stinging quality. (Block, 1997, p. 121) But Katheryn Pfister Darr points to two incantations in Maqlȗ, a Babylonian series of rituals for warding off the effects of sorcery:

I am the spike of a thornbush; you cannot step on me! I am the stinger of a scorpion; you cannot touch me. Maqlȗ III. 153-154 (NIB VI: 1123)

Even though it may mix plant and animal imagery, the poetic sense of the prophets is elastic enough to encompass two elements like this to point to the divine protection which surrounds this prophet who delivers an unpleasant word to a rebellious people. This mortal who bears the divine word is not to be afraid of mortal words of looks.[3] The people have already rejected the LORD who sends the prophet, so the prophet should not expect a receptive audience for the words he is called to bear.

The elaborate description of the approach of the divine presence and the commissioning of this son of man to carry the message to the rebellious house of Israel have prepared us to approach the message itself. As mentioned above Ezekiel has been a passive recipient of the vision and this calling, but he (unlike Israel) has not actively resisted the LORD’s instructions. But immediately before receiving this message he is to bear, Ezekiel is warned not to be infected by the disease which the people he is sent to have, a refusal to listen and obey. The prophet Jeremiah received the word of God when the words were placed in his mouth:

Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me, “Now I have put my words in your mouth.” Jeremiah 1:9

Yet, for Ezekiel the words are written on a scroll he is given to eat. Katheryn Pfister Darr humorously remarks, “Yahweh’s touch bestows divine words that Jeremiah must proclaim. Yet one does not surmise that God literally stuffs words down his throat.” (NIB VI: 1124) But that is what will happen to the passive prophet who will soon open his mouth to receive that which is normally inedible. The scroll is full of writing, front and back, and there is no place to add or any ability for the prophet to modify the text of lamentation, mourning, woe.[4]

With the presented scroll something has changed in the nature of prophecy. Instead of a personal address by God the prophet is given a scroll to consume, and as Walther Zimmerli can state “It has become a book.” (NIB VI: 1125) The prophet who will be given this scroll to consume will become the written prophecy, and it is likely that many of Ezekiel’s recorded words may have been distributed in primarily written form. Ezekiel is a prophet in a new situation and time, he is separated from the temple and Jerusalem and charged with ministering to a people divided between Jerusalem and exile. Like the apostle Paul in the early Christian church many of his messages will have to be in a written form to minister to these two dispersed communities. Due to the identity of those taken into exile, being the notables of the land, there was probably a higher concentration of literate individuals. Yet, even messages that were directed to the remnant in Jerusalem would be primarily addressed to the priestly and ruling remnant in Jerusalem. I’m indebted to Ellen Davis for these reflections on the character of Ezekiel in her study of Ezekiel as a prophet navigating a new location by utilizing, “a style of prophecy which the immediate audience selected for him by Nebuchadnezzar’s army was especially qualified to understand, if not appreciate.” (Davis, 1989, p. 44) Writing is both a solution to communicating with a separated community, but now this prophet who will become the embodiment of the scroll he consumes will also recreate the content of the scroll he consumes as a written text that can remain a witness for a generation which can understand Ezekiel’s position as a prophet bearing God’s word who is finally ready to receive this word. As Ellen Davis can insightfully state, “Preserved as a text, God’s word is no longer frustrated by the intransigence of any generation; it can wait until such time as it may be heard.” (Davis, 1989, p. 61)

[1] In Hebrew though the heart is the organ of will and decision, not emotion. When someone’s heart is set on something it means they have set their will on gaining or following something. In Hebrew the emotions are the realm of the stomach and guts.

[2] See Amos 5:5-6 where the prophet still uses Bethel but condemns the injustice of the place and Hosea 4:15, 5:8, 10:5 where the name is intentionally changed. This can be confusing since Beth-aven also refers to a different location in Joshua 7:2; 18:12 and 1 Samuel 13:5; 14:23

[3] The idea of ‘looks’ from the people may refer to the idea of cursing a person with an ‘evil eye’. Words, rituals, and actions had a different significance in ancient cultures than we often grant them today, and a word or evil eye or other ‘looks’ were looked upon in ancient societies as powerful things.

[4] The three Hebrew words behind lamentation, mourning, and woe are qina “lament, dirge” which is often associated with funerals, hegeh an onomatopoeic expression of moaning and groaning, and hi which is only used here in scripture and may be another onomatopoeic expression for a cry of pain. (Block, 1997, p. 125)