Ezekiel is surely the strangest of all the prophets. Well before the appearance of the so-called writing prophets in the middle of the eighth century B.C.E., figures known as prophets, neviʾim, at least as they are represented in the narratives, were identified as people given to ecstatic states when they were inhabited by the divine spirit. All of the prophets appear to have felt that they heard God speaking, the speech sometimes accompanied by visual revelations, in what would have amounted to paranormal experiences. Prophets were sometimes perceived as altogether transgressing the borders of sanity. “The prophet is witless, / the man of spirit crazed,” Hosea proclaims, having in mind the way Israel’s waywardness had driven the prophet to wild distraction. Yet even against this background, Ezekiel is an extreme case.
He was a Jerusalem priest, in all likelihood part of the group of an exiled elite that was deported to Babylonia with King Jehoiachin in 597 B.C.E., a decade before the destruction of Jerusalem and the more general exile. His entire activity as a prophet took place in Babylonia, with many of the prophecies introduced by a careful notation of day, month, and year. (Although biblical scholars, as they are wont to do, once sought to ascribe many of these prophecies to a later period, the current consensus is that they were in fact composed by Ezekiel, probably on the dates he cites, but of course the editing could have been done considerably later.) Unlike Jeremiah, who was also from a family of priests, Ezekiel often exhibits distinctively priestly concerns—with purity and impurity, with the Temple and its architectural configurations, and with the regimen of sacrifices. But what most distinguishes Ezekiel is that so much of the prophesying is conducted in a condition that looks like God-intoxicated derangement. He is by no means a master of literary craft, like Isaiah, and most of his prophecies are composed in prose that exhibits a weakness for repetition. His power as a prophet stems from the hallucinatory vividness and utter originality of his visions.
The book begins with the grand theatrical effect of his vision of the divine chariot—fire flashing, radiance all around, the face of a different living creature on each of the four sides of a dazzling structure with mysterious wheels beneath that appears to hover in the air. Elsewhere in the Bible, “the glory of the LORD” designates an overpowering radiant manifestation of God’s presence, but we are told that it cannot really be seen. When Moses asks God to show him His glory, God tells him that he cannot look upon it head-on but, hidden in the crevice of a rock, may glimpse only its afterglow as it passes by. Ezekiel, by contrast, is vouchsafed a full and detailed vision of the divine apparatus, which he calls “the glory of the LORD.” There is nothing quite like this elsewhere in the Bible, and Ezekiel’s first chapter would accordingly become the inspiration for the development of Jewish mysticism in Late Antiquity.
There are quite a few arresting visions in Ezekiel’s book, the most memorable of them being the vision of exiled Israel’s national restoration in the Valley of the Dry Bones (chapter 37). This was a man whose mind swarmed with potent images, many of them cast as figures in allegories, which are the most effective vehicle of his prophecies. One senses that these images were not contrived or invented but manifested themselves imperatively in the imagination of the prophet. While the idea of the spirit descending on an elected person is common in biblical literature, including many of the narratives, again and again in this book the prophet attests to being seized, sometimes violently, by the spirit. In Hebrew, as in several other languages, the same word means both “spirit” and “wind,” but for Ezekiel the latter meaning is often salient, even if the former sense may also be implied: repeatedly, he is “borne off” by the wind to a place of vision (often Jerusalem), or, in tandem with this idea, the heavy “hand of the LORD” comes down on him, as in the beginning of the vision of the Dry Bones, “The hand of the LORD was upon me, and He took me out by the wind of the LORD and set me down in the valley.”
All this powerful seizure by visionary experience is associated in Ezekiel with a variety of bizarre behaviors that would seem to reflect some kind of psychological disturbance. Other prophets feel they are commanded by God to perform symbolic-prophetic acts. Jeremiah, for example, is enjoined to go down to the potter’s workshop, to purchase a plot of land, and to do other acts that are more or less ordinary actions which are given symbolic or illustrative significance. But the acts that Ezekiel reports God has ordered him to carry out are not normal ones: he eats a scroll, he constructs a model of Jerusalem with a brick and an iron pan, he lies on one side for three hundred ninety days and then forty days on his other side without the capacity to turn over. This last instance is the most egregious. It is fairly plausible that Ezekiel actually did this, and lying on one side for more than a year in “bonds,” he says, imposed by God looks very much like an extreme symptom of hysterical paralysis.
Among the themes of Ezekiel’s prophecies, the most striking expression of neurosis is his troubled relation to the female body. Real and symbolic bodies become entangled with each other. In biblical poetry, a nation, and Israel in particular, is quite often represented as a woman. God’s covenant with Israel—see Jeremiah 1—is imagined as a marriage, and so the bride Israel’s dalliance with pagan gods is figured as adultery or whoring. This is a common trope in biblical literature, but the way Ezekiel articulates it is both startling and unsettling.
The most vivid instance of this psychological twist in Ezekiel is the extended allegory of whoring Israel in chapter 16. The allegory here follows the birth of the nation in Canaan—represented with stark physicality in the image of the infant girl naked and wallowing in the blood of afterbirth, then looked after by a solicitous God—to her sexual maturity and her betrayal of God through idolatry. The focus throughout is on Israel as a female sexual body. Thus, the prophet notes (as does no other biblical writer) the ripening of the breasts and the sprouting of pubic hair. The mature personification of the nation is a beautiful woman, her beauty enhanced by the splendid attire God gives her (this is probably a reference to national grandeur and to the Temple). Yet, insatiably lascivious, she uses her charms to entice strangers to her bed: “you spilled out your whoring” (given the verb used and the unusual form of the noun, this could be a reference to vaginal secretions) “upon every passerby.” Israel as a woman is even accused of harboring a special fondness for large phalluses: “you played the whore with the Egyptians, your big-membered neighbors.” She is, the prophet says, a whore who asks no payment for her services. “You befouled your beauty,” he inveighs, “and spread your legs for every passerby.” All this concern with female promiscuity is correlative with Ezekiel’s general preoccupation with purity and impurity.
It is of course possible to link each of these sexual details with the allegory of an idolatrous nation betraying its faith. But such explicitness and such vehemence about sex are unique in the Bible. The compelling inference is that this was a prophet morbidly fixated on the female body and seething with fervid misogyny. What happens in the prophecy in chapter 16 is that the metaphor of the lubricious woman takes over the foreground, virtually displacing the allegorical referent. Ezekiel clearly was not a stable person. The states of disturbance exhibited in his writing led him to a series of remarkable visionary experiences, at least several of which would be deeply inscribed in the Western imagination, engendering profound responses in later poetry and in mystical literature. At the same time, there is much in these visions that reminds us of the dangerous dark side of prophecy. To announce authoritatively that the words one speaks are the words of God is an audacious act. Inevitably, what is reported as divine speech reaches us through the refracting prism of the prophet’s sensibility and psychology, and the words and images represented as God’s urgent message may sometimes be distorted in eerie ways.
1And it happened in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth of the month, that I was among the exiles by the Kebar Canal, and I saw divine visions. 2On the fifth of the month, which was the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin, 3the word of the LORD came to Ezekiel son of Buzi the priest in the land of the Chaldeans, by the Kebar Canal, and the hand of the LORD was upon him there. 4And I saw, and, look, a storm wind was coming from the north, a great cloud, and fire flashing, and radiance all round it, and from within it like the appearance of amber from within the fire. 5And from within it the likeness of four living creatures, and this was their look—the likeness of a human being they had. 6And each had four faces and four wings to each of them. 7And their legs were straight legs, and the soles of their feet like the soles of a calf’s foot, and they glittered like the look of burnished bronze. 8And there were human hands beneath their wings on their four sides. And the faces and the wings of the four of them 9were joined to each other. Their wings did not turn as they went; each went straight ahead. 10And the likeness of their faces—the face of a human and the face of a lion on the right of the four of them, and the face of a bull to the left of the four of them, and the face of an eagle to the four of them. 11And their faces and their wings were separated from above for each—two were joined for each and two covered their bodies. 12And each went straight ahead: wherever the spirit was to go, they would go; they did not turn as they went. 13And the likeness of the creatures, their look, was like burning coals of fire, like the look of torches going back and forth among the creatures, and the fire had a radiance, and from the fire lightning came forth. 14And the creatures were racing back and forth like the look of sparks. 15And I saw the creatures, and look, one wheel was on the ground by the creature on its four sides. 16The look of the wheels and their fashioning were like chrysolite, and a single likeness the faces of them had, and their look and their fashioning as when a wheel is within a wheel. 17On their four sides as they went they would go. They did not turn as they went. 18As for their rims, they were high and they were fearsome, and their rims were filled with eyes, all round the four of them. 19And when the creatures went, the wheels went with them, and when the creatures lifted up above the ground, the wheels lifted up. 20Wherever the spirit was there to go, there they went [there the spirit to go], and the wheels lifted up along with them, for the spirit of the creature was in the wheels. 21When they went, they would go. When they stood still, they would stand still, and when they lifted up above the ground, the wheels would lift up along with them, for the spirit of the creature was in the wheels. 22And there was a likeness over the heads of the beasts—a platform like the appearance of the fearsome ice stretched over their heads above. 23And beneath the platform their wings stood straight and toward each other, each had two covering them, covering their body. 24And I heard the sound of their wings like the sound of many waters, like the sound of Shaddai, as they went, like the sound of an uproar, like the sound of an armed camp. When they stood still, their wings grew slack. 25And there was a sound above the platform that was over their heads. When they stood still, their wings slackened. 26And above the platform that was over their heads, it was like the look of sapphire stone—the likeness of a throne, and above the likeness of the throne, like a human form upon it above. 27And I saw like the appearance of amber, like the look of fire within it all round—from the look of his loins above and from the look of his loins below I saw like the look of fire with radiance all round. 28Like the look of the rainbow that is in the clouds on a day of rain, this was the look of the radiance all round, the look of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And I saw and fell on my face and heard a voice speaking—
CHAPTER 1 NOTES
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1. in the thirtieth year. What this refers to has stumped scholars. One proposal is that it is the thirtieth year of Ezekiel’s life.
divine visions. Or, “visions of God.” But most of the vision here is devoted to the divine “chariot,” with the figure of God introduced only toward the end, so “divine” may be a more apt translation.
2. the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin. He was exiled with a substantial group of Judahites, by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 B.C.E., when Judah was reduced by Babylonia to a vassal state. The clear implication is that Ezekiel was among those deported to Babylonia in 597. The beginning of his prophecy overlaps with the last decade of Jeremiah’s prophecy; he would have been a generation younger, Jeremiah having begun his mission in the 620s.
3. the word of the LORD came to Ezekiel. Since the book begins in the first person and then continues here in the first person, this third-person reference to the prophet may reflect an editorial intervention.
4. a storm wind was coming from the north, a great cloud, and fire flashing, and radiance all round it. These accoutrements of epiphany are traditional in the Bible: in many different texts, from Exodus to Psalms, God reveals himself in fire and lightning and cloud. Nevertheless, this prophecy is strikingly innovative in form. First, it combines the pyrotechnic paraphernalia of divine revelation with imagery evidently borrowed from sundry Mesopotamian sources—the wheeled throne, the four faces of the creatures like the four faces of the Babylonian god Marduk, the iconic animals. Isaiah in his dedication scene (Isaiah 6) glimpses the skirts of God’s robe filling the Temple and sees seraphim, but there is no direct description of God and no elaborate imagining of a celestial vehicle. One should also note that this elevated vision is cast in prose, but it is a visibly poetic prose marked by hypnotic cadences. The words do not scan as poetry, yet some of the diction is poetic. The reiterated term for “radiance,” nogah, for example, ordinarily appears only in poetic texts. Thus, Ezekiel has devised a prophetic prose-poetry that has scant precedents.
like the appearance. The preposition here could also mean “the color of.”
amber. This translation adopts one traditional equivalent for the Hebrew ḥashmal, but its precise identity is elusive. It would seem to be some sort of precious stone that is orange, yellow, or reddish in color.
5. likeness. This word, demut, and its complementary term, marʾeh, “look” or “appearance,” are insisted on again and again in this vision as well as in several visions that follow. The prophet wants to make clear that his report of what he has seen is of something that can be represented only by analogy: these are likenesses, appearances, analogs of things known to humankind, but not literally those things.
8–9. And the faces and the wings of the four of them were joined to each other. As the vision proceeds, it becomes progressively difficult to sort out visually what these creatures and the moving composite they make up look like. (Two and a half millennia of exegetes have labored in vain to work out all the details.) A certain bewilderment may well have been Ezekiel’s intention. There are abundant repetitions of phrases through the passage, some of them probably quite deliberate in order to create an incantatory effect, although at least a couple of them seem to be the product of scribal inadvertence.
10. lion … bull … eagle. These are all heraldic beasts associated with royalty or divinity. The fourth face is human.
11. two covered their bodies. Evidently, for modesty as with the wings of the seraphim in Isaiah 6.
14. sparks. The Hebrew bazak appears only here, but it clearly indicates some sort of flashing light. In rabbinic Hebrew, it serves as a synonym for “lightning.”
16. as when a wheel is within a wheel. The most likely reference is to concentric wheels.
18. they were high and they were fearsome. More literally, “they had height and they had fearsomeness.” The fearsome aspect of the wheels may be because they are then said to be studded, nightmarishly, with eyes. The meaning of the eyes remains mysterious. Some commentators claim they were a manifestation of all-seeing divine omniscience. Perhaps the primary effect is that they are disorienting and disturbing: these are wheels like none ever encountered by human gaze.
19. when the creatures went, the wheels went with them. The wheels are not physically attached to the creatures, but their movements are synchronized with them through a shared “spirit.”
20. [there the spirit to go]. This bracketed phrase, with its tenuous syntactic connection with the rest of the sentence, definitely looks like a mistaken scribal repetition.
21. when they lifted up above the ground, the wheels would lift up along with them. This four-sided moving structure, with wheels below and a kind of platform above, is what led tradition to call it a “chariot,” merkavah. To moderns, it may seem like a bizarrely composite hovering helicopter.
22. a platform. The Hebrew raqiʿa indicates a flat, pounded-out surface (it is derived from a verbal root that means to “pound” or “to stomp”). In Genesis 1, it is the word used for the vault of the heavens (more traditionally, “firmament”), so here it figures as a constructed equivalent of the sky. Structurally, the raqiʿa amounts to a beaten slab.
24. many waters. This phrase, recurring often in biblical literature, refers to the primordial sea or deep, with mythological overtones. Compare, for example, Psalm 93:4.
like the sound of an uproar, like the sound of an armed camp. All this emphasis on sound, after the exclusive focus on visual elements, sets the stage for God’s speech, which is introduced at the end of the chapter.
28. the look … of the glory of the LORD. Never before in biblical literature has God’s “glory,” kavod, been given such visual realization.
1And He said to me, “Man, stand on your feet and I shall speak with you.” 2And a spirit entered me as He spoke to me and stood me on my feet, and I heard what was spoken to me. 3And He said to me, “Man, I am sending you to the Israelites, to the rebellious nations that have rebelled against Me, they and their fathers have revolted against Me to this day. 4And to the brazen-faced hard-hearted sons I am sending you, and you shall say to them, ‘Thus said the Master, the LORD.’ 5As for them, whether they listen or not, they are surely a house of rebellion, but they shall know that a prophet has been in their midst. 6As for you, man, do not fear them and do not fear their words, for they are thorns and thistles to you, and among scorpions you dwell. Do not fear their words and do not be terrified by them, for they are a house of rebellion. 7And you shall speak My words to them, whether they listen or not, for they are a house of rebellion. 8As for you, man, listen to what I speak to you. Be not rebellious like the house of rebellion. Open your mouth and eat what I give you.” 9And I saw, and, look, a hand was stretched out to me, and, look, in it was the scroll of a book. 10And He unrolled it before me, and it was written on both sides and written in it—dirges, lament, and woe.
CHAPTER 2 NOTES
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1. Man. The Hebrew ben-ʾadam, “human being,” is the characteristic form through which God repeatedly addresses Ezekiel. As several commentators have noted, it places the prophet in an antithetical relation to the “creatures” of the divine chariot, who are not mortal humans. The translation avoids rendering the term as “son of man” because, after the Gospels, that designation took on Christological connotations.
2. And a spirit entered me as He spoke to me and stood me on my feet. Ezekiel is thus like the wheels in the divine vision, which are inhabited by a spirit that directs them. Ezekiel appears to exert less human agency than the other prophets, and that could well be a manifestation of his distinctive psychology as prophet.
and I heard what was spoken to me. Some understand this as “one speaking to me.” The Hebrew shows a reflexive form of the verb “to speak,” with no visible subject, perhaps reflecting reticence about saying “God.”
3. the rebellious nations. The designation of the Israelites as “nations” in the plural is peculiar. Some think it refers to the tribes, but they are not elsewhere called “nations.” Perhaps the plural is meant to encompass both the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. While the northern kingdom had long been destroyed, the verbal phrase “have rebelled against Me” invokes past actions, and Ezekiel may also be imagining a virtual presence of the vanished kingdom, as Jeremiah sometimes does.
4. Thus said the Master, the LORD. This is the so-called messenger-formula with which many prophecies begin. No words of prophecy follow, though the last words of this chapter indicate the content of the prophecy.
5. but they shall know that a prophet has been in their midst. The anticipation, shared by Isaiah and Jeremiah, that the people may not heed the prophet, is parsed in a different way here: perhaps the people will choose to ignore the prophet’s admonitions, but they will not escape a strong and troubling sense of the urgent authenticity of his message.
6. thorns and thistles. Many translations render the first term as “nettles” (only an approximate meaning is known), but the Hebrew shows a forceful alliteration—saravim, salonim—that deserves to be emulated in the English.
8. Open your mouth and eat what I give you. Other prophets are bid to perform symbolic acts, but this one is extreme, and characteristic of Ezekiel. He has just been told not to be rebellious like his countrymen; now he is asked to show his total submission by ingesting a scroll. Again, this appears to reflect Ezekiel’s aberrant psychology. God does not inform him what he is to eat until the mysterious hand appears with the scroll.
10. it was written on both sides. As Menachem Haran has noted, this means the scroll was papyrus, not parchment, because the way animal skins were prepared for scrolls in this period precluded writing on both sides. It would, of course, be considerably easier to ingest papyrus than parchment.
1And He said to me, “Man, what you find, eat. Eat this scroll and go speak to the house of Israel.” 2And I opened my mouth and He fed me this scroll. 3And He said to me, “Man, your belly you shall feed and your innards you shall fill with this scroll that I give you.” And I ate, and it became sweet as honey in my mouth. 4And He said to me, “Man, come! Go to the house of Israel and speak to them My words. 5For not to a people of an unfathomable language and an obscure tongue do I send you—but to the house of Israel. 6Not to many peoples of impenetrable language and obscure tongue whose words you would not understand. Surely had I sent you to them, they would have listened to you. 7But the house of Israel does not want to listen to you, for they do not want to listen to Me, for all the house of Israel are hard-browed and hard-hearted. 8Look, I have made your face hard against their faces and your brow hard against their brows. 9Like diamond harder than flint I have made your brow. You shall not fear them and shall not be terrified by them, for they are a house of rebellion.” 10And He said to me, “Man, all My words that I shall speak to you—take into your heart and with your ears listen, 11and come! go to the exiles, to the sons of your people, and speak to them and say to them: Thus said the Master, the LORD, whether they listen or not.” 12And a wind lifted me, and I heard behind me the sound of a great roar: “Blessed be the LORD’s glory from its place,” 13and the sound of the creatures’ wings touching each other and the sound of the wheels over against them and the sound of a great roar. 14And a wind lifted me and took me, and bitter did I go, with an incensed spirit, and the hand of the LORD was strong upon me. 15And I came to the exiles at Tel Abib who dwelled by the Kebar Canal, where they dwelled, and I sat there seven days, desolate in their midst. 16And it happened at the end of seven days that the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 17“Man, I have made you a lookout for the house of Israel. When you hear a word from My mouth, you shall warn them from Me. 18When I say to a wicked man, ‘You are doomed to die,’ and you have not warned him and have not spoken to warn the wicked man against his wicked ways to keep him alive, that wicked man shall die for his crime but his blood I will requite of you. 19As for you, when you warn the wicked man and he does not turn back from his wickedness and from his wicked way, it is he who shall die for his crime and you, you shall have saved your own life. 20And when the righteous man turns back from his righteousness and does wrong, and I put a stumbling block before him, he shall die, for you did not warn him. For his offense he shall die, and his righteousness shall not be recalled, but his blood I will requite of you. 21And you, when you have warned the righteous man not to offend and he has not offended, he shall surely live, for he has taken warning, and you, you shall have saved your own life.”
22And the hand of the LORD was upon me there, and He said to me, “Arise, go out to the valley, and there will I speak to you.” 23And I arose and went out to the valley, and, look, the LORD’s glory was standing there, like the glory I had seen by the Kebar Canal, and I fell on my face. 24And a spirit entered me and stood me on my feet and spoke to me and said to me, “Come, shut yourself within your house. 25And now, man, they have put cords on you and bound you with them, that you not go out in their midst. 28And your tongue I will make cleave to your palate that you be mute, and you shall not be a reprover to them, for they are a house of rebellion. 27But when I speak to you I will open your mouth, and you shall say to them: ‘Thus said the Master, the LORD: Who listens shall listen, and who does not shall not, for they are a house of rebellion.’”
CHAPTER 3 NOTES
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3. Man, your belly you shall feed and your innards you shall fill with this scroll. Such specification indicates that the prophet is not merely meant to chew the papyrus scroll but to swallow and digest it. It seems quite likely that Ezekiel believed he had been commanded to perform this difficult symbolic act and in fact carried it out. His report that the taste of the papyrus in his mouth was sweet as honey leads one to infer that he was a person susceptible to aberrant or perhaps abnormal states.
5. a people of an unfathomable language and an obscure tongue. The literal sense is “deep of language and heavy of tongue.” Elsewhere in Prophetic texts, the unintelligibility of the language of the conquerors is part of their fearsome aspect. Here, it becomes part of an a fortiori statement: had the prophet been sent to peoples speaking a barbaric foreign tongue, they would have listened to him; but when he is sent to the Israelites, addressing them in their shared mother tongue, Hebrew, they refuse to listen because of their stubbornness.
but to the house of Israel. The “but” is merely implied in the Hebrew.
8. I have made your face hard against their faces and your brow hard against their brows. Rimon Casher has proposed that the repetition throughout these verses of ḥazak (“hard,” and elsewhere usually “strong”) may be a play on the root of Ezekiel’s name, yeḥezqʾel (“God will make strong”).
9. You shall not fear them … for they are a house of rebellion. The causal logic here is that because they are rebels, they are destined to be punished by God, and so there is nothing to fear from them, however they may threaten the prophet.
12. And a wind lifted me. We repeatedly see this prophet as a passive subject of prophecy, being lifted, borne off, stood on his feet, by divine powers.
Blessed be the LORD’s glory from its place. One often proposed emendation reads instead of barukh, “blessed,” berum, “in the rising of,” which yields not a line of dialogue but a narrative report about the divine chariot: “When the LORD’s glory rose up from its place.” This emendation is encouraged by the fact that in paleo-Hebrew script the letters mem and kaf look fairly similar, so a scribe could easily have erred. The emended reading flows more smoothly into the next verse and a half reporting the ascent of the divine chariot, but the Masoretic Text has been retained in this translation because it has become prominently enshrined in the Hebrew liturgy.
14. bitter did I go, with an incensed spirit. The prophet’s disturbed emotional state reflects his troubled sense that the prophetic mission will be very arduous, perhaps impossible.
15. Tel Abib. Though this looks like a Hebrew name, “mound of the sprouting season,” and modern-day Tel Aviv drew the name from here, it is actually Akkadian and means “mound of the flood.”
where they dwelled. This might be a scribal duplication.
17. lookout. The lookout or watchman, as can be inferred from the appearance of the term in narrative contexts, was someone posted on an elevation to look for the approach of hostile forces. Thus, the prophet is appointed to look out for imminent disaster triggered by Israel’s bad behavior and to warn them, as a watchman would.
18. but his blood I will requite of you. This is a much grimmer formulation of the burden of prophecy than that given to other prophets: Ezekiel is obliged to work under an imminent death sentence if he fails to adequately warn the transgressors.
22. the valley. Although some render this as “plain,” the Hebrew term clearly derives from a verbal stem that means “rift” or “split,” and it refers to a valley—in the case of Jordan, the riverbed and the surrounding banks.
23. the LORD’s glory was standing there. Repeatedly in Ezekiel, “the LORD’s glory” (or “majesty”) refers to the divine “chariot” described in chapter 1.
24. And a spirit entered me and stood me on my feet. As before, Ezekiel is a virtual puppet of the divine spirit. This is an idea that will be picked up in Daniel.
shut yourself within your house. Some have seen this as a contradiction of the previous injunction to the prophet to “warn” Israel, compounded by the fact that in the next verse God says He will impose a condition of complete muteness on the prophet. But such oscillations should not surprise us, especially if we assume that all these divine instructions have some relation to the psychology of this particular prophet. In that case, at one moment he feels an absolute imperative to reprove the people, a responsibility he needs to carry out on the pain of death. At another moment, despairing of the very possibility of in any way changing the course of action of these stubborn rebels against God, he shuts himself up in his house and sinks into a condition of total silence.
25. they have put cords on you and bound you with them. Since the prophet has already shut himself up in his house, it is unclear why anyone would feel the necessity to bind him in cords in order to prevent him from going outside. Perhaps this statement should be construed as a metaphor: “they” (the people) have through their actions imposed on the prophet a condition of isolated withdrawal, as though they had bound him with cords.
1And you, man, take you a brick and put it before you and incise on it the city of Jerusalem. 2And you shall lay a siege against it and build against it a siege-work and throw up a ramp against it and set an armed camp against it and put against it battering rams all round. 3And you, take you an iron pan and make it an iron wall between you and the city. And you shall set your face toward it, and it shall be besieged, and you shall lay siege against it. It is a sign for the house of Israel.
4And you, lie down on your left side and put the guilt of the house of Israel upon it. For the number of days that you lie on it you shall bear their guilt. 5As for Me, I have made for you the years of their crime as the number of days, three hundred ninety days, and you shall bear the guilt of the house of Israel. 6And you shall complete these and lie down again on your right side and bear the guilt of the house of Judah forty days, each day for a year I have made it for you. 7And to the siege of Jerusalem you shall set your face with your arm laid bare, and you shall prophesy against it. 8And, look, I have put cords on you, that you not turn over from side to side until you complete the days of your siege. 9And you, take you wheat and barley and beans and lentils and millet and emmer and put them in a single vessel and make them into bread for yourself the number of days that you lie on your side, three hundred ninety days you shall eat it. 10And your food that you shall eat, by weight, twenty weights a day, from one day to the next you shall eat it. 11And water by measure you shall drink, the sixth of a hin, from one day to the next you shall drink. 12And a barley loaf you shall eat, and it shall be baked on the turds of human excrement before your eyes. 13And the LORD said, “Thus shall the Israelites eat their bread defiled among the nations where I will scatter them.” 14And I said, “Alas, O Master, LORD, look, my throat is undefiled, and carrion and torn animal carcasses I have not eaten from my youth until now, nor has foul meat come into my mouth.” 15And He said to me, “Look, I give you cattle dung instead of human turds, and you shall make your bread upon that.” 16And He said to me, “Man, I am about to break the staff of bread in Jerusalem, and they shall eat bread by weight and in disgust, and water by measure and in desolation they shall drink, 17so that they want for bread and water and each man and his brother be desolate, and they shall rot in their guilt.”
CHAPTER 4 NOTES
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1. take you a brick and … incise on it the city of Jerusalem. Bricks were the building material of choice in the Mesopotamian valley, whereas stone was more commonly used in the mountainous region of Judah. (Compare the use of bricks in the story of the Tower of Babel, Genesis 11.) The incising would have been done before the firing of the brick. A brick with a depiction of the Babylonian city of Napur was actually discovered in an archaeological dig.
2. And you shall lay a siege against it. This appears to be a model of a siege with the appropriate siege-works, not an image also incised on the brick. The proclivity for symbolic acts is brought to an elaborate extreme here.
3. an iron wall between you and the city. Now, in the playing with models and symbols, Ezekiel takes on the role of God (!), estranged from the city, a condition represented by the interposed iron wall.
4. For the number of days that you lie on it you shall bear their guilt. This is another instance in which the borderline between symbolic act and psychological aberration in Ezekiel is blurred. If, as seems likely, he actually performed this act, he would have been in a state of paralysis (hysterically induced?), lying on one side, for almost thirteen months. The idiom “bear guilt” has several different meanings in biblical usage, but the most likely one here is that the prophet symbolically takes on himself the guilt—the word can also indicate “punishment”—of his offending people.
5. three hundred ninety. This number of years, if one calculates from the erection of the Temple around 970 B.C.E., takes us forward to 580 B.C.E., which falls within the period of Ezekiel’s prophecy in Babylonia. Moshe Greenberg observes that, in accordance with the viewpoint of the Deuteronomist, the existence of the “high places” outside of Jerusalem throughout this period would define the entire span of nearly four centuries as a time when guilt was incurred.
6. lie down again on your right side and bear the guilt of the house of Judah forty days. Forty is a formulaic number, but it is difficult to reconcile it with the figure of 390 or to imagine what it could refer to historically. Many scholars plausibly conclude that the lying on the right side is a secondary interpolation, and that “the house of Israel” in verse 5 refers to the entire people of Israel, and then is made to indicate the northern kingdom only by this inconvenient add-on that introduces a reference to the southern kingdom. Surely more than a year would have been enough for the prophet to continue in this paralytic state.
7. your arm laid bare. The bared arm is a token of the use of force.
8. I have put cords on you. As in 3:25, these are not literal cords: the prophet, feeling unable to move from this position lying on his side, understands that he has been immobilized by God.
9. wheat and barley and beans and lentils and millet and emmer. Although one American Christian group actually markets bread purportedly made from this recipe, it is in fact siege bread, made not from wheat but from a combination of grains and legumes because of the lack of sufficient wheat supplies. The Talmud reports an experiment in which the bread was made with these ingredients and a dog would not touch it.
10. twenty weights a day. By some calculations, this is no more than eight ounces—a very scant daily ration.
12. it shall be baked on the turds of human excrement before your eyes. Dried animal dung was commonly used for fuel, but not human excrement. Thus the baking manifests the condition of the exiles constrained to live in an “unclean” (or “defiled”) land, which is how foreign territory was conceived. The “your” of “your eyes” is plural and is addressed to the exiles, not the prophet.
14. my throat is undefiled. While the prohibition against consuming the meat of carrion and animals torn up by predators is incumbent on all the people, Ezekiel as a priest would have taken special care to preserve the condition of ritual purity.
15. cattle dung instead of human turds. Seeing the prophet’s visceral revulsion, God offers a compromise, but the bread is still baked on filth.
16. break the staff of bread in Jerusalem. Bread is a “staff” because it supports or sustains life, and in biblical Hebrew, as in many other languages, it is a synecdoche for food in general. The obvious reference is to the condition of near starvation in time of siege, and so this element of the prophecy is linked with the model siege of verses 1–3. The phrase “break the staff of bread” is taken from the dire prediction of disaster in Leviticus 26 if Israel abandons God’s ways, and other phrases from that passage in Leviticus are invoked here.
1And you, man, take you a sharp blade, a barber’s razor, take it for yourself, and pass it over your head and your beard, and take you a scales and divide it. 2A third you shall burn in fire within the city when the days of the siege are done. And you shall take a third and strike it with a blade all round her, and a third you shall scatter to the wind. And a sword will I unsheathe after them. 3And you shall take from there a bit and wrap it in the skirts of your garment. 4And from it you shall take more and fling it into the fire and burn it in fire. From it fire shall go out to the whole house of Israel. 5Thus said the Master, the LORD: This is Jerusalem, in the midst of the nations I set her, with lands all round her. 6And she rebelled against My laws for wickedness more than the nations, and against My statutes more than the lands that are all round her. For they spurned My laws and did not follow My statutes. 7Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: Inasmuch as you have raised a clamor more than the nations that are all round you, My statutes you did not follow, My laws you did not keep, and like the laws of the nations that are all round you, you did not do. 8Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: Look, I on My part am now against you, and I will carry out judgments in your midst before the eyes of the nations. 9And I will do what I have not done and the like of which I will not do again because of all your abominations. 10Therefore, fathers shall eat sons within you and sons shall eat their fathers, and I will perform judgments against you and scatter your remnant to every wind. 11Therefore, as I live, said the Master, the LORD, because you have defiled My sanctuary with all your disgusting things and with all your abominations, I on My part will surely shear, and My eye shall not spare, and I, too, will show no pity. 12A third of you shall die by pestilence and come to an end within you by famine, and a third shall fall by the sword all round you, and a third will I scatter to every wind, and I will unsheathe the sword after them. 13And My anger shall come to an end, and I will put to rest My wrath against them, and I will repent, and they shall know that I the LORD have spoken in My passion when I bring to an end My wrath against them. 14And I will make you a ruin and a reproach among the nations that are all round you, before the eyes of every passerby. 15And she shall be a reproach and a revilement, an object lesson and a fright to the nations all round you when I carry out judgments in anger and in wrath and in chastisements of wrath. I the LORD have spoken. 16When I let loose My deadly arrows—famine—against them, which become a destroyer, which I will let loose against them to destroy them, and famine will I add against them and break their staff of bread. 17And I will let loose against you famine and vicious beasts, and they shall bereave you, and pestilence and bloodshed shall pass through you, and the sword will I bring against you. I the LORD have spoken.
CHAPTER 5 NOTES
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1. a sharp blade. The noun ḥerev usually means “sword.” The choice of the term here, as several commentators have noted, is in order to point forward to the use of the same word in the sense of “sword” near the end of the next verse.
2. A third you shall burn in fire within the city. The city in question is the design of the city that has been incised on the brick. The destruction of the cut hair in three equal parts is thus a continuation of the symbolic modeling of the destruction of Jerusalem.
5. This is Jerusalem. In this speech, God is pointing to the image of the city incised on the brick and expounding its meaning.
6. she rebelled against My laws. The noun mishpatim can mean “judgments,” “laws,” “rules.” The English equivalent “laws” is used here because “judgments” is not right for the context, but as the passage continues, the cognate shefatim, which means “judgments” in the sense of “punishment,” is insisted on.
7. raised a clamor. The verb strongly implies rebellion.
like the laws of the nations that are all round you, you did not do. This is an extreme element in Ezekiel’s castigation of Judah. The surrounding nations, though they had no covenant with God, observed at least some basic guidelines or laws (mishpatim, also “judgments”) of civilized behavior, but even these minimal constraints on behavior you ignored.
10. fathers shall eat sons within you and sons shall eat their fathers. Although the horror of cannibalism in time of siege is frequently invoked in the Bible—see especially Leviticus 26, an important intertext to this one—the idea of reciprocal cannibalism between the generations is an added ghastly twist.
11. your disgusting things and with all your abominations. Both terms are repeatedly used in the Bible for pagan idols. Ezekiel has in mind the fact that more than once idols were actually introduced into the Jerusalem sanctuary. The language here and again further in this passage borrows from the denunciations in Deuteronomy 32, the so-called Song of Moses.
12. I will unsheathe the sword after them. In the bleakly schematic terms of Ezekiel’s prophecy of the three thirds, after a third die by pestilence and famine and a third fall to the sword, the third who flee (“scatter[ed] to every wind”) will also perish by the sword. The unusual usage of the preposition “after” is intended to indicate that the scattered ones are in flight, pursued by the sword.
13. My anger shall come to an end. This is a qualified consolation. God’s anger will come to an end only after He has thoroughly devastated the people.
passion. The Hebrew qinʾah has a core meaning of “jealousy” (and in English we speak of “jealous passion”), a sense not altogether irrelevant here because God is so often imagined as Israel’s spouse.
15. judgments. Here shefatim is used. In verse 8 the cognate mishpatim is used in the same sense as shefatim, which means “punishment.”
16. deadly. More literally, “evil.”
17. against you. The switch from third person (plural) to second person (still plural), or the other way around, is fairly common in biblical usage.
vicious beasts. Again, the literal sense is “evil beasts.” Such attacks by beasts of prey would occur because the countryside of Judah would be devastated and depopulated, allowing dangerous carnivores to proliferate.
bloodshed. The Hebrew says merely “blood,” which constitutes a somewhat unusual employment of the word.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, set your face to the mountains of Israel and prophesy to them, 3And say, ‘Mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Master, the LORD. Thus said the Master, the LORD, to the mountains and to the hills, to the gullies and to the valleys: I am about to bring the sword against you, and I will destroy your high places, 4and your altars shall be desolate and your incense stands broken, and I will make your slain fall in front of your vile things. 5And I will put the corpses of the Israelites in front of your vile things, and I will scatter your bones all round your altars. 6Through all your settlements the towns shall be reduced to ruins and the high places made desolate so that your altars lie in ruins and be desolate, and your vile things shall be broken and destroyed and your incense stands be cut down, and your handiwork wiped out. 7And the slain shall fall in your midst, and you shall know that I am the LORD. 8And I will leave some of you, when you are fugitives of the sword among the nations, when you are scattered in the lands. 9And your fugitives shall recall Me among the nations where they were captive, that I have broken their whoring heart that swerved from Me and their eyes whoring after their vile things, and they shall loathe themselves for the evils that they did, for all their abominations. 10And they shall know that I, the LORD, not for nothing did I speak to them this evil.’”
11Thus said the Master, the LORD: “Strike with your palm and stamp with your foot and say, Alack! for all the evil abominations of the house of Israel. Who by the sword, by famine, or by pestilence shall fall. 12He who is far off by pestilence shall die, and he who is near by the sword shall fall, and he who remains and is besieged, by famine shall die, and I will bring My wrath to an end against them. 13And you shall know that I am the LORD when their slain are in the midst of their vile things all round your altars on every high hill, on all the mountaintops, and under every lush tree and under every leafy oak, the places where they offered a pleasing odor to all their vile things. 14And I will stretch out My hand against them and make the land an utter desolation from the desert to Diblah through all their settlements. And they shall know that I am the LORD.
CHAPTER 6 NOTES
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2. set your face to the mountains of Israel. The apostrophe to the mountains and the hills and the valleys that begins in the next verse amounts to a rhetorical displacement of an address to the people of Israel that worshipped idols in these nature settings. The sword that is about to come against the mountains and hills is actually directed, in a metonymic slide, against the places of pagan worship and finally against the worshippers.
3. high places. These elevated altars were often placed on hilltops outside towns, but they could also be located in valleys (hence the “the gullies and the valleys” earlier in this verse).
4. I will make your slain fall. The metonymic slide is completed here: “your high places” could still refer to the hills and mountains, but “your slain” means the slain of the people of Judah.
5. your vile things. As elsewhere, this is a pejorative (even probably excremental) epithet for idols.
scatter your bones all round your altars. This act renders the area ritually impure.
8. And I will leave some of you. The Hebrew merely says “And I will leave” and it is textually problematic. It is absent in the Septuagint, and its deletion yields a smooth-reading sentence here: “When you are fugitives of the sword among the nations, when you are scattered in the lands, your fugitives shall recall Me… .”
9. I have broken their whoring heart. The Hebrew appears to say “I am broken,” nishbarti. Many interpreters, medieval and modern, understand this to mean, “I am brokenhearted,” but there are no other instances where the verb “to break” is used elliptically in this manner to mean “brokenhearted.” Either this is a case in which the passive form takes an active sense, or, more likely, it is a scribal error for the active form, shavarti, triggered by the similar form of the immediately preceding verb nishbu, “were captive.”
12. He who is far off … he who is near … he who remains. This tripartite division spells out the meaning of the symbolic prophetic act of dividing the hair into three parts (5:1–4).
I will bring My wrath to an end. The verb “bring to an end,” kilah, is susceptible to two interpretations, but these come down to the same idea: it means either “I will utterly implement all My wrath” or “having entirely carried out the aims of My wrath, it will come to an end, be spent.”
13. where they offered a pleasing odor to all their vile things. The formulation incorporates a pointed polemic contradiction: the “pleasing odor” is the standard phrase for incense, presumed to be pleasing to the gods, or to God; but a stench attaches itself to gilulim, “vile things,” because of the association of the term with dung.
14. an utter desolation. In the Hebrew, this sense is conveyed by joining two different nouns derived from the same root, shemamah and meshamah.
Diblah. This is probably the same site as Riblah, the town on the edge of Syrian territory where Nebuchadnezzar set up headquarters during his campaign against Judah and surrounding lands. The desert here marks the south and Diblah the far north.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying: 2“And you, man, thus said the Master, the LORD, concerning the country of Israel:
upon the four corners of the earth.
3Now the end is upon you,
and I have let loose My wrath against you
and exacted judgment of you by your ways
and laid upon you all your abominations.
4And My eye shall not spare you
nor will I show pity,
for your ways will I lay upon you,
and your abominations shall be in your midst,
and you shall know that I am the LORD.
5Thus said the Master, the LORD:
6One evil, an evil about to come,
the end has come, is roused against you, yes, it comes!
7The gyre has come round against you,
O dweller in the land.
The time has come, the day is near,
an uproar, no cheers in the mountains.
8Now soon I will pour out My anger against you,
and bring My wrath to an end against you,
And judge you by your ways
and lay upon you all your abominations.
9And My eye shall not spare,
nor will I show pity,
by your ways I will lay upon you
and your abominations shall be in your midst,
and you shall know that I am the LORD.
10Here is the day, here it comes,
the gyre has turned around,
the staff blooms, arrogance flowers.
11Outrage rises as a staff of wickedness—
not of them nor of their crowd,
not of them, and no lament in them.
12The time has come, the day arrived.
Let not the buyer rejoice nor the seller mourn,
for there is wrath against all her crowd.
13For the seller to his sold goods shall not come back,
for the vision against all her around shall not turn back,
each alive in his crime shall not hold fast.
14They have sounded the horn and readied all things,
but none goes to the battle,
for My wrath is against all her crowd.
15The sword is outside,
pestilence and famine within.
Who is out in the field by the sword shall die,
and he in the town, famine and pestilence consume him.
16And their refugees flee
and come to the mountains,
they all moan in their crime.
17All hands go slack,
18And they shall gird sackcloth,
and shudders cover them.
On every face is shame,
and all their heads are shaven.
19Their silver they fling into the streets,
and their gold becomes unclean.
Their silver and their gold cannot save them
on the day of the wrath of the LORD.
Their gullets shall not be sated
nor their innards shall they fill,
for a stumbling block their crime has become.
20And their lovely ornaments of which they were proud,
they made of them images of their loathsome abominations,
therefore will I make them unclean.
21And I will give them into the hand of strangers as booty
and to the wicked of the earth as spoils, and they shall defile her.
22And I will turn My face from them,
and they shall defile My treasure,
and brutes shall enter her and defile her.
23Forge a chain,
for the land is filled with blood-justice
and the city is filled with outrage.
24And I will bring the most evil of nations,
and they shall take hold of your homes;
and I will end the pride of the strong,
and their sanctuaries shall be defiled.
25Terror comes!
They shall seek peace and it shall not be.
26Disaster upon disaster shall come,
and rumor after rumor shall be.
And they shall seek vision from a prophet,
but teaching shall be gone from the priest
and counsel from the elders.
27The king shall mourn,
and the prince don desolation.
The hands of the people of the land shall panic.
By their way will I do with them,
and by their judgments will I exact judgment of them.
And they shall know that I am the LORD.
CHAPTER 7 NOTES
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2. An end, the end has come / upon the four corners of the earth. This is the first prophecy in Ezekiel unambiguously cast as poetry. Perhaps Ezekiel sensed an appropriate match between the incantatory force of the poetic medium and the apocalyptic reach of the prophetic message (note the hypnotic insistence on “the end” at the very beginning of this prophecy). Although what follows concentrates on the judgment of the people of Israel, “the four corners of the earth” embraces the entire world, as if to say: the catastrophe about to overtake Israel will engulf all humanity.
3. exacted judgment. Though the verb relates to the root concept of “judgment,” its sense in context is close to “punish.”
4. you shall know that I am the LORD. This is a virtual refrain in Ezekiel. The idea behind it is that until now the people, pursuing its refractory ways, behaved as though YHWH did not exist, but as they bear the terrible punishment for their acts, they will be forced to recognize His existence and power.
7. the gyre. The Hebrew tsefirah is a rare term. It has most plausibly been linked by both medieval and modern commentators with a root that indicates something round, here perhaps a cycle of time. Because of the unusualness of the Hebrew term, this translation uses “gyre” (the same element one finds in “gyroscope”), a word famously deployed by the poet W. B. Yeats for an apocalyptic turn in the cycle of time.
no cheers in the mountains. Following many interpreters, this translation understands hed as a shortened variant form of heydad, the cry of joy of grape harvesters.
10. the staff blooms, arrogance flowers. As has often been noted, this is a sardonic reversal of the blooming of Aaron’s staff (Numbers 17:23), which was a sign of divine election.
11. not of them nor of their crowd, / not of them, and no lament in them. The Hebrew is one long string of fused phonemes, perhaps a sign that the text has been garbled, perhaps an intended poetic effect. It sounds like this: lo’-meihem weloʾ meihamonam weloʾ mehameihem welo’-nohah bahem.
12. Let not the buyer rejoice nor the seller mourn. In ordinary circumstances, the buyer would rejoice at having acquired something he wanted and the seller mourn for having lost something he was obliged to part with. Now, however, all exchanges of property become meaningless because everyone is about to be swept up in the general destruction.
13. though they be still alive. The Hebrew here is a little obscure.
14. readied all things. Given the sounding of the horn and the reference to battle in the next verset, this means readied weapons for war.
16. like doves of the valleys. There is a species of dove that nests among the rocks and crevices of valleys. Greenberg proposes that geʾayot, “valleys,” puns on hogot, the moaning sound made by doves.
17. all knees run with water. This refers to urinating in terror. The line thus neatly illustrates the general pattern in which the second verset in a line concretizes or intensifies what is stated in the first verset: “slack hands” is a very common idiom for weakness, but then we see the shameful evidence of fear in urine running down the knees.
18. all their heads are shaven. As elsewhere, the shaving of the head is a sign of mourning, prohibited to the Israelites, but much in evidence in the language of poetry.
19. Their silver they fling into the streets. This is in keeping with the pointlessness of buying and selling in verse 12. Wealth is now utterly useless because, as the next line goes on to say, it cannot save them.
22. and they shall defile My treasure. Since the defiling by “brutes” that follows has a feminine object, God’s “treasure” is in all likelihood the city of Jerusalem, regularly represented as a feminine singular.
23. blood-justice. The collocation mishpat-damim in the Hebrew is unusual, but the parallel with “outrage” (others, “violence”) clearly indicates it is a perversion of justice that victimizes the innocent. The plural form of “blood” used here almost always indicates unjust or murderous violence.
25. Terror comes! The word for “terror,” qefadah, is unusual but appears to relate to a root that means “to bristle.” Note that “comes,” a verb prominent at the beginning of this prophecy, is repeated as a kind of key word, stressing the terrible imminence of the end.
26. rumor after rumor. These are clearly rumors of disaster.
vision from a prophet, / … teaching … from the priest / … counsel from the elders. These are the three sources of authority in ancient Israelite society: the prophet is the vehicle of vision; the priest offers instruction, perhaps from a written text; the elders, with their accumulated wisdom, proffer counsel. In the dire end-time, a manifestation of the punishment of the people will be that all sources of authority and guidance will be taken away.
27. don desolation. After the mourning of the king, we might have expected the formulaic “don sackcloth,” so “desolation” comes as a small but striking surprise. Ordinarily, of course, princes would put on regal raiment.
by their judgments. The multipurpose mishpatim can also mean something like “practices” or “modes of behavior.”
1And it happened in the sixth year in the sixth month on the fifth of the month, I was sitting in my house, and the elders of Judah were sitting before me, and the hand of the Master, the LORD, fell upon me there. 2And I saw and, look, a likeness like the look of fire, from the look of his loins and below fire, and from his loins and above like the look of brilliance, like the color of amber. 3And He reached out the form of a hand and took me by a lock of my head, and a wind bore me between the earth and the heavens and brought me to Jerusalem through divine visions to the entrance of the gate of the inner court facing northward where the icon of the provoking provocation is set. 4And, look, there was the glory of the God of Israel like the sight that I had seen in the valley. 5And He said to me, “Man, raise your eyes toward the north.” And I raised my eyes toward the north, and, look, from north of the altar gate, this icon of provocation was in the entranceway. 6And He said to me, “Man, do you see what abominations they are doing, which the house of Israel are doing here to go far from My sanctuary? And you will yet see greater abominations.” 7And He brought me to the entrance of the court, and I saw, and, look, there was a hole in the wall. 8And He said to me, “Man, pray, break through the wall.” And I broke through the wall, and, look, there was an entrance. 9And He said to me, “Come and see the evil abominations that they are doing here.” 10And I came and saw and, look, every form of creeping thing and beast, disgusting things, and all the foul things of the house of Israel were incised on the wall all around. 11And seventy men of the elders of Israel, with Jaazaniah son of Shaphan standing in the midst of them, were standing before these, each with his incense pan in his hand, and a dense cloud of incense was rising. 12And He said to me, “Do you see, man, what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the dark, each in the chambers of his sculpted images, for they say, ‘The LORD does not see us. The LORD has abandoned the land.’” 13And He said to me, “You shall yet see greater abominations that they are doing.” 14And He brought me to the entrance of the gate of the house of the LORD that was to the north, and, look, women were sitting there keening for Tammuz. 15And He said to me, “Do you see, man? You will yet see greater abominations than these.” 16And He brought me to the inner court of the house of the LORD, and, look, between the great hall and the altar were some twenty-five men, their backs to the LORD’s temple and their faces eastward, and they were bowing down eastward to the sun. 17And He said to me, “Do you see, man? Is it too light a thing for the house of Judah to do the abominations they have done here that they should fill the land with outrage and repeatedly vex Me? And here they are reaching out the vine branch to My nose. 18And I on My part will act in wrath and My eye shall not spare them nor will I show pity, and they shall call out in My hearing with a loud voice but I will not listen to them.”
CHAPTER 8 NOTES
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1. in the sixth year. This would be the sixth year of Jehoiachin’s exile (and Ezekiel’s), or 591 B.C.E.
the hand of the Master, the LORD, fell upon me. The usual idiom is “came [or was] upon me.” This more physical formulation is scarcely accidental: as before, Ezekiel is a passive vessel acted upon vigorously, almost violently, by God.
2. a likeness like the look. As in the vision of the celestial chariot, Ezekiel is careful to interpose a whole set of qualifying terms indicating that what he sees in the vision is not the thing itself but a resemblance or analogical image of things familiar to humankind.
like the look of fire. The Septuagint, instead of ʾesh, “fire,” reads ʾish, “a man.”
3. a wind bore me between the earth and the heavens and brought me to Jerusalem. The sense of the prophet as the passive object of divine action continues here. The basis of this whole vision appears to be some sort of hallucinatory experience in which the prophet, who has very recently been lying immobilized for more than a year, senses that he is physically borne off to Jerusalem, if only in a divine vision. As an exiled priest, the Temple there was very much on his mind, and now he envisages, or is made to witness, the pagan abominations practiced in this holy space.
the gate of the inner court. “Court” is implied in an ellipsis in the Hebrew.
the icon of the provoking provocation. The unusual word for “icon,” semel, is an appropriate borrowing from the Cannanite, where it indicates the statue of a god. The prophet refuses to name a particular god but instead uses an elliptical epithet of opprobrium, “the provoking provocation.” The verbal stem from which that designation derives suggests “jealousy,” which makes sense here because God is a “jealous” God, indignant when Israel goes whoring after other deities.
7. there was a hole in the wall. This is the oddest moment in Ezekiel’s vision of the abominations in the Temple. It suggests a kind of prophetic voyeurism. There is a hole through which he might almost peek into the vile pagan rites practiced within the chambers of God’s temple. In order actually to see them, however, he must enlarge the hole and break through the wall.
10. every form of creeping thing and beast, disgusting things, and all the foul things of the house of Israel were incised on the wall. There is an effective segue here from living creatures prohibited as food and regarded with disgust to the “foul things”—which is to say, idols—equally felt to be disgusting by the prophet. It is questionable whether there was a practice of incising the images of pagan gods on the temple walls, but it is a forceful representation of how deeply paganism had penetrated into the most sacred space of the nation.
11. seventy men of the elders of Israel. This assembly of the canonical seventy elders, evidently led by one of the eminent figures of the court aristocracy, amounts to the group’s celebrating a kind of black mass, at least in the eyes of the prophet.
dense cloud. The first of these two nouns, ʿatar, appears only here, but it is probably related to a Syriac word that means “fume.” As elsewhere, when two synonymous nouns are joined in the construct form, the effect is an intensification of their meaning, hence “dense cloud” in this translation. Compare the very similar construction in Exodus 19:9, ʿav-he ʿanan, “the utmost cloud.”
12. Do you see, man, what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the dark. Although the elders go on to say that the LORD does not see them, they may be hedging their bets or are perhaps fearful that some groups in the community of Judah—certainly prophets such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel—would vehemently object to what they are doing. The fact that they worship strange gods in their private chambers seems to contradict the pagan assembly in the Temple depicted here. Perhaps as a rule they practice their pagan rites in the darkness of their chambers but here have exceptionally joined together to celebrate the cult of strange gods within an inner hall of the Temple, still hidden from the eyes of the general populace but not from the prophet, who has enlarged the hole in the wall so that he can see everything.
14. women were sitting there keening for Tammuz. Tammuz is a deity imported from Babylonia (the Akkadian name is Dumuzi). Like Adonis, he is a vegetation god thought to die and descend into the underworld after the dying of vegetation at the end of the spring. Women in ancient Near Eastern societies were assigned the role of keening for the dead, and so they took over the cultic function of keening for Tammuz.
16. bowing down eastward to the sun. Worship of the sun god and other astral deities, because of Assyrian influences, became widespread in the last two centuries of the First Commonwealth.
17. reaching out the vine branch to My nose. The Masoretic Text says “their nose,” but this is an explicit “scribal correction,” introducing a kind of euphemism in order not to say something offensive relating to God. But the meaning of the expression is elusive. The attempt by some to link zemorah, “vine branch,” with a homonymous root that means “strength” is far-fetched—the clear meaning of the word is “vine branch.” Some have imagined, perhaps fancifully, that it reflects the worship of a phallic deity. But, as Greenberg observes, the prophet at this point has moved on from pagan rituals to a condemnation of moral turpitude—“they … fill the land with outrage.” The most reasonable assumption is that the branch extended toward the nose is some sort of insulting gesture.
1And he called out to me in a loud voice, saying, “Bring near those appointed over the city, each with his weapon of destruction in his hand.” 2And, look, six men were coming by the way of the upper gate, which faces to the north, and each had his mace in his hand, and a man in their midst was dressed in linen with a scribe’s case at his waist. And they came and stood by the bronze altar. 3And the glory of the LORD had ascended from the cherub on which it had been to the threshold of the house, and He called out to the man wearing linen with a scribe’s case at his waist. 4And the LORD said to him, “Pass through the city, in the midst of Jerusalem, and trace a mark on the foreheads of the men groaning and moaning over all the abominations done in her midst.” 5And to these He said in my hearing, “Pass through the city after him and strike, let your eye not spare, nor show pity. 6Elder, young man and virgin, little ones and women you shall slay, destroying. But do not approach any man upon whom is the mark. And from My sanctuary you shall begin.” 7And they began with the elders who were in front of the house. 8And He said to them, “Defile the house and fill the courts with corpses. Go forth.” And they went forth and struck in the city. 9And it happened as they were striking that I remained, and I fell on my face and cried out and said, “Woe, O Master, LORD, are You destroying all the remnant of Israel as You pour out Your wrath on Jerusalem?” 10And He said to me, “The crime of the house of Israel and Judah is very, very great, and the land is filled with bloodguilt and the city filled with injustice, for they have said, ‘The LORD has abandoned the land, and the LORD does not see.’ 11And I on My part, My eye shall not spare nor will I show pity. I will bring their ways down on their head.” 12And, look, the man dressed in linen with the case at his waist brought back word, saying, “I have done as You have charged.”
CHAPTER 9 NOTES
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1. those appointed. Though the Hebrew term suggests “officials,” or “appointed ones,” Greenberg notes that this same root is also associated with punishment or retribution, and so he renders it more grimly as “executioners.”
2. mace. This specification of the identity of the “weapons of destruction” points to an especially bloody and brutal implementation of the command of destruction—not with sword thrusts, but with the bashing of heads.
a man in their midst was dressed in linen. This makes a total of seven, the sanctified number. He wears linen like the priests (in Daniel, by extension, angels will be dressed in linen).
a scribe’s case. He will use his pen and ink to make the marks on the foreheads of those to be saved.
4. trace a mark on the foreheads. The word for “mark,” taw, is the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In paleo-Hebrew script, the form of this letter was an X. The saving mark on the forehead recalls the mark that saves Cain from retribution.
groaning and moaning. The translation imitates the Hebrew sound-play, haneʾenaḥim wehaneʾenaqim.
5. let your eye not spare, nor show pity. These fierce phrases are a refrain through this whole large prophecy, repeatedly attached to God, but here to His agents.
6. Elder, young man and virgin, little ones and women you shall slay. Although other prophets foresee a comprehensive disaster that will sweep over the entire people, Ezekiel is distinctive in imagining an active undertaking of genocidal killing by executioners commanded by God.
7. the elders who were in front of the house. Presumably, these are the paganizing elders, previously seen within the Temple, who now have come out in front of it.
8. Defile the house and fill the courts with corpses. Corpses intrinsically defile a place. The command to defile the Temple is shocking, but as Greenberg notes, it has already been defiled by the abomination of idol worship and hence is no longer a fit place for the worship of YHWH.
9. are You destroying all the remnant of Israel. Some interpreters have taken this to contradict the saving of those marked on the forehead. In fact, it makes emotional sense: Ezekiel, confronted in his vision with the bloody spectacle of the Temple courts filled with corpses, and men, women and children bludgeoned to death with maces everywhere, is devastated and feels as if the entire people were being wiped out.
10. The crime of the house of Israel and Judah is very, very great. Ezekiel’s God is perhaps the most implacable of the many versions of God in the Hebrew Bible.
1And I saw and, look, on the platform that was upon the heads of the cherubim—like the sapphire stone, like the look of the likeness of a throne was seen upon them. 2And He said to the man dressed in linen, and said, “Come between the wheels beneath the cherubim and fill your hands with fiery coals from between the cherubs and cast them over the city.” And he came in before my eyes. 3And the cherubim were standing at the right side of the house as a man enters, and the cloud filled the inner court. 4And the glory of the LORD rose up over the cherub on the threshold of the house and filled the house, and the house was filled with the radiance of the glory of the LORD. 5And the sound of the cherubim’s wings could be heard as far as the outer court, like the sound of El Shaddai when He speaks. 6And it happened when He charged the man dressed in linen, saying, “Take fire from within the wheelwork from among the cherubim,” he came and stood by the wheel. 7And the cherub reached out his hand from between the cherubim to the fire that was between the cherubim and carried it and gave it into the hands of the man dressed in linen, and he took it and went out. 8And there appeared on the cherubim the form of a human hand beneath their wings. 9And I saw, and, look, there were four wheels by the cherubim, a single wheel by each cherub, and the look of the wheels was like the color of chrysolite. 10And their look, a single likeness for the four of them, as a wheel is within a wheel. 11When they go, to their four sides they do go, they do not turn as they go, but to the place where the head turns, toward it they go, they do not turn as they go. 12And all their flesh and their backs and their hands and their wings and the wheels were filled with eyes all round the four of them, their wheels. 13As to the wheels, in my hearing they were called wheelwork. 14And each one had four faces. The face of one was a cherub’s face, and the face of the second was a human face, and of the third, a lion’s face, and of the fourth, an eagle’s face. 15And the cherubim rose up—these were the creatures that I had seen by the Kebar Canal. 16And when the cherubim went, the wheels went along with them, and when the cherubim lifted their wings to rise from the ground, the wheels did not turn either from alongside them. 17When they stood still, they, too, stood still, and when they rose, they, too, rose, for the spirit of the creatures was in them. 18And the glory of the LORD went forth from the threshold of the house and stood over the cherubim. 19And the cherubim lifted their wings and rose from the ground before my eyes as they went forth, and the wheels were opposite them. And they stood still at the entrance of the eastern gate of the LORD’s house. And the glory of the God of Israel was upon them from above. 20These were the creatures that I had seen beneath the God of Israel at the Kebar Canal, and I knew that they were cherubim. 21Each one had four faces, and each one had four wings, and a likeness of human hands was beneath the wings. 22And the likeness of their faces—these were the faces that I had seen by the Kebar Canal, the same look. Each straight ahead they did go.
CHAPTER 10 NOTES
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1. like the look of the likeness of a throne. Ezekiel’s proclivity for interposing words negating the literalness of the nouns attached to the divine apparition is especially pronounced here.
2. cast them over the city. Throwing the fiery coals over the city is obviously either a symbolic prefiguration or the actual implementation of the fiery destruction that will engulf Jerusalem.
5. El Shaddai. This is an archaic—and hence usually poetic—designation of God that emphasizes His terrific power, though the etymology of the second word is disputed.
6. he came and stood by the wheel. Since in the next verse it is one of the cherubim who gives him the fiery coals, the man dressed in linen stops short of carrying out the command. David Kimchi plausibly suggests that he was afraid to reach into the wheelwork.
7. gave it into the hands of the man. No explanation is offered as to how his hands would not have been scorched. Contrast Isaiah 6:6, where a seraph needs tongs for the fiery coal.
12. four of them, their wheels. The ostensible apposition here looks awkward and “their wheels” may not belong. It must be said that there are several junctures in this description of the celestial chariot where the text looks garbled. This might even reflect a confusion on the part of the ancient scribes about what precisely was going on in this bewildering vision.
13. As to the wheels … they were called wheelwork. The puzzling fact is that both ʾofanim, “wheels,” and galgal, “wheelwork,” mean “wheel.” This translation follows Greenberg and the New Jewish Publication Society version in using “wheelwork” for the collective noun galgal, but that may be no more than a strategy of desperation.
14. The face of one was a cherub’s face. The description here diverges from the description in chapter 1. There, each of the creatures had four different faces. Here each appears to have four similar faces with the differences showing from one creature to the next. The face of the bull, moreover, in chapter 1 is replaced here by the face of a cherub (unless, as some have claimed, cherubs had bull faces). These discrepancies may derive from the fact that Ezekiel had two parallel but not entirely identical visions of the same celestial apparatus, or they may reflect struggles in the process of transmitting this difficult vision.
15. these were the creatures. Though the Hebrew uses a singular noun, the context requires understanding it as a collective noun.
22. the same look. The Hebrew here sounds odd: marʾeyhem weʾotam would be literally “their looks and them.” The translation is thus somewhat speculative.
1And the wind bore me and brought me to the eastern gate of the house of the LORD facing eastward, and, look, in the entrance of the gate were twenty-five men, and I saw in their midst Jaazaniah son of Ezer and Pelatiah son of Benaiah, officials of the people. 2And He said to me, “Man, these are the men plotting wrongdoing and devising evil counsel in this city, 3thinking, ‘Soon is not the time to build houses. It is the pot and we are the meat.’ 4Therefore prophesy concerning them, prophesy, man.” 5And the spirit of the LORD fell upon me, and He said; “Say, thus said the LORD: So have you thought and what comes to your mind I know. 6You have left many slain in this city and filled its streets with the slain. 7Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: Your slain that you put within it, they are the meat and it is the pot, and you will I bring out from within it. 8You feared the sword, and a sword I will bring against you, said the Master, the LORD. 9And I will bring you out from within it and give you into the hand of strangers and exact punishment from you. 10By the sword you shall fall, at the border of Israel I will punish you, and you shall know that I am the LORD. 11It shall not be a pot for you nor shall you live within it as meat. At the border of Israel I will punish you. 12And you shall know that I am the LORD in Whose statutes you did not go and My laws you did not do, but like the laws of the nations that were all round you did you do.” 13And it happened as I prophesied that Pelatiah son of Benaiah died, and I fell on my face and cried out in a loud voice and said, “Woe, O Master, the LORD, You are making an utter end of the remnant of Israel.”
14And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 15“Man, your brothers, your next of kin, and all the house of Israel to whom the dwellers of Jerusalem have said, ‘Go away from the LORD. To us the land has been given as an inheritance.’ 16Therefore, say, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Though I have taken them far away among the nations and though I have scattered them among the lands and became for them but a bare sanctuary in the lands where they came, 17therefore say, Thus said the Master, the LORD: I will gather you from the peoples and bring you together from the lands where you were scattered, and I will give you Israel’s soil. 18And they shall come there and take away from it all its disgusting things and all its abominations. 19And I will give them a single heart, and a new spirit I will put in your midst, and I will take away the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh. 20So that they go by My statutes and keep My laws and do them, and they shall be a nation for Me and I will be their God. 21But those whose heart goes after their disgusting things and their abominations, I have laid their ways on their head, said the Master, the LORD.” 22And the cherubim lifted their wings, with the wheels alongside them, and the glory of the LORD was over them from above. 23And the glory of the LORD ascended from the midst of the city and stood on the mountain that is east of the city. 24And a wind bore me and brought me to Chaldea, to the exiles, in the vision, in the divine spirit, and the vision that I had seen ascended away from me. 25And I spoke to the exiles all the words of the LORD that He had showed me.
CHAPTER 11 NOTES
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1. twenty-five men. These are evidently the same twenty-five mentioned in 8:16 who were worshipping the sun.
3. Soon is not the time to build houses. The plotters belong to the party resisting Babylonia, and so they think that all efforts should be channeled into constructing fortifications, not building houses.
It is the pot and we are the meat. The sense of this rather odd metaphor is: it (the city) is the pot that contains us, and we are the good meat within the pot. But the metaphor undermines its own arrogant assertion because meat in a pot over a fire is destined to be cooked and consumed.
6. You have left many slain in this city. The preceding account of the turpitude of these Jerusalemites concentrated on their attachment to idolatry. Now, however, they are castigated as murderers.
7. Your slain … they are the meat and it is the pot, and you will I bring out from within it. God now reverses the self-congratulatory metaphor of the perpetrators of crime. Their victims are the true elite (“the meat”), and the victimizers will be cast out of the pot (that is, the city) as matter unfit for consumption.
10. By the sword you shall fall, at the border of Israel. The miscreants will be cast very far from the city in which they thought they might find safety. What the prophet may have in mind concretely is that they will flee Jerusalem in the face of the Babylonian invaders, only to be caught and killed at the border.
12. like the laws of the nations that were all round you did you do. Here the reference appears to be to idolatry. One should keep in mind that the Hebrew mishpatim means both “laws” and “practices” or “behavior.”
13. Woe, O Master, the LORD, You are making an utter end of the remnant of Israel. This sentence could also be construed as a tormented question (Are you making …?). It may seem puzzling that Ezekiel should be distressed over the death of Pelatiah, who is after all one of the ringleaders of the men “devising evil counsel.” All we know about Pelatiah is that he was some sort of high-ranking official, but this may have been enough to make his sudden death a cause of distress for the prophet. That is, if the leaders of the people suddenly begin to drop off in this fashion, is God about to wipe out the whole people?
15. your brothers, your next of kin. The designation “next of kin” is adopted from Greenberg. The literal sense is “your redemption people,” that is, the people who because of their kinship are legally obliged to redeem property that has been somehow alienated from a person. (Compare the “redeeming kin” in the Book of Ruth.) The mention in the next verse of God’s having “taken them far away among the nations” indicates that these are the exiles. The self-satisfied residents of Jerusalem want to dissociate themselves from their exiled brothers, claiming exclusive rights to the land: “Go away from the land. To us the land has been given as an inheritance.”
16. but a bare sanctuary. The Hebrew expression miqdash meʿat was taken by later tradition as a reference to the synagogue, but this text well antedates the institution of the synagogue. The idea seems to be that in the exile, in the absence of a temple, God provides only minimal indications—perhaps through prophecy?—of His continuing closeness to Israel.
17. Israel’s soil. Here, and in the next chapter, the reference seems to be to the land, but the suggestion of soil to be tilled in the Hebrew term is worth retaining.
19. give them … put in your midst. As elsewhere, the switching back and forth between third person and second person reflects ancient Hebrew usage.
21. But those whose heart goes after their disgusting things. The beginning of this clause in the Masoretic Text reads, incomprehensibly, “But to the heart [weʾel lev] of their disgusting things.” The translation reflects a widely accepted emendation grounded in the Targum Yonatan, weʾeleh ʾaḥarey.
24. in the vision, in the divine spirit. By stipulating these phrases, Ezekiel again emphasizes that all the sights he has been vouchsafed to see in Jerusalem were a visionary experience, not a bodily one. Since the same noun, marʾeh (literally, “what is seen”), is then used for the celestial chariot that rises into the sky above the prophet, the implication is that it, too, is not a literal, physical entity, but a visionary reality that reveals something about the nature of the deity.
1And the word of the LORD came to me saying, 2“Man, in the midst of the house of rebellion you dwell, who have eyes to see but do not see, ears to hear but do not hear, for they are a house of rebellion. 3And you, man, make for yourself exile’s gear and go into exile by day before their eyes, and go into exile from your place to another place before their eyes. Perhaps they will see that they are a house of rebellion. 4And you shall take out your gear as exile’s gear by day before their eyes. And you, you shall go out at evening before their eyes as the going out to exile. 5Before their eyes, break through the wall and take out your gear through it. 6Before their eyes you shall shoulder the burden. In the gloom you shall take it out. Your face you shall cover and you shall not see the land, for I am making you a portent for the house of Israel.” 7And so did I do as I was charged. I took out my gear as exile’s gear by day, and at evening I broke through the wall by hand in the gloom. I took it out, I shouldered the burden before their eyes. 8And the word of the LORD came to me in the morning, saying, 9“Man, have not the house of Israel, the house of rebellion, said to you, ‘What are you doing?’ 10Say to them, Thus said the Master, the LORD: The prince is this burden in Jerusalem and all the house of Israel who are in their midst. 11Say, I am your portent. As I have done, so it will be done to them. In exile in captivity they shall go. 12And the prince who is in their midst shall shoulder the burden in the gloom, and he shall go out, they shall break through the wall to bring out gear through it. His face he shall cover, so that he not see the land with his eyes. 13And I will cast My net over him, and he shall be caught in My toils. And I will bring him to Babylonia, to the land of the Chaldeans, but he shall not see it, and there shall he die. 14And all that is around him, his allies and all his divisions, I will scatter to every wind, and the sword I will unsheathe after him. 15And they shall know that I am the LORD when I disperse them among the nations and scatter them in the lands. 16And I will leave of them a handful of men from the sword, from the famine, and from pestilence, that they may recount all their abominations among the nations where they have come. And they shall know that I am the LORD.”
17And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 18“Man, your bread you shall eat quaking, and your water you shall drink in upheaval and in unease. 19And you shall say of the people of the land, Thus said the Master, the LORD, concerning the dwellers of Jerusalem on the soil of Israel: their bread they shall eat in unease, and their water they shall drink in desolation, so that its land be desolate of what fills it, because of the outrage of all who dwell in it. 20And the settled towns shall be in ruins, and the land shall be a desolation, and you shall know that I am the LORD.”
21And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 22“Man, what means this proverb for you on the soil of Israel, saying, ‘Long days will pass and vision will vanish’? 23Therefore, say to them, Thus said the Master, the LORD: I have put an end to this proverb, and they shall no longer recite it in Israel. Rather, speak to them, ‘The time has drawn near for every vision to come about.’ 24For there shall no longer be any empty vision or soothing divination within the house of Israel. 25For I the LORD, I will speak the word that I speak and it shall be done. It shall no longer be drawn out, but in your days, O house of rebellion. I will speak a word and do it, said the Master, the LORD.” 26And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 27“Man, look, the house of Israel say, ‘The vision that he sees, of many days hence and of faraway times he prophesies.’ 28Therefore say to them, Thus said the LORD: All My words shall no longer be drawn out. I will speak a word and it shall be done,’” said the Master, the LORD.
CHAPTER 12 NOTES
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2. who have eyes to see but do not see, ears to hear but do not hear. The people’s resistance to the prophetic message is a recurrent theme in the prophecies (see especially Isaiah’s dedication scene, Isaiah 6). But this clause also recalls the language of Psalm 115:5–6, where it is applied to idols—as if to say, these stupidly obtuse people are no better than dumb carvings of wood.
3. exile’s gear. These would be the basic implements of daily survival wrapped up in a pack and carried on the shoulder. Assyrian bas-reliefs depict precisely this image of exiles driven off by Assyrian troops.
go into exile … before their eyes. Ezekiel is addressing a group of exiles in Babylonia in the late 590s B.C.E., but his symbolic act prefigures a much more comprehensive exile that in fact will take place in 586.
4. you shall go out at evening. Although this looks like a contradiction of his going out into exile by day, the intention may be to suggest the encompassing nature of the departure into exile—by day, yomam, and in the evening, ba ʿerev, as well.
5. break through the wall. This peculiar detail is an odd echo of the prophet’s breaking through the wall of the Temple in 8:8 in order to witness the abominations performed inside. Perhaps an equivalence is suggested between discovering the shame within the chambers and the shame of exile outside. There may be an intimation here of something surreptitious in the flight into exile. Perhaps more pertinent, he is asked to do damage to the house he is leaving, with no expectation that he will return to it.
6. Your face you shall cover and you shall not see the land. Some interpreters take this as a gesture of hiding because of the humiliation of exile. The second clause, however, suggests that the aim is to cover the eyes so that the exile will not look on the homeland he is forced to abandon.
10. The prince is this burden. The Hebrew shows a pun: hanasiʾ, “the prince” (etymologically, “the one borne up”), and hamasa’, “the burden.”
13. he shall not see it. Many interpreters, medieval and modern, take this as a reference to the last Judahite king, Zedekiah, who was blinded before he was brought to Babylonia (the medieval exegetes see this as a prophecy that was fulfilled, the moderns as a prophecy ex eventu, after the fact). Even if this clause does refer to Zedekiah’s fate, it does not follow that the preceding verses about the exile of the king reflect that fate, because the terms are rather general. Even the wording here could simply stem from the prophet’s knowledge that it was a common practice to blind vassal kings who had rebelled.
22. what means this proverb for you. The “you” is plural in the Hebrew, so in contrast to other passages that begin with the vocative “man,” it is not the prophet but the people that is addressed.
Long days will pass and vision will vanish. Time will go on, and the prophet’s vision of impending doom will not come to pass.
23. The time has drawn near for every vision to come about. This reversal of the popular proverb that dismisses prophecy has in view the prophecies of doom pronounced by Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and a few others, “every vision” being a kind of ellipsis for prophecies of doom.
24. For there shall no longer be any empty vision or soothing divination. It now emerges that the people, while rejecting the prophecies of imminent disaster, embraced false prophets who assured them nothing amiss would happen. This is a theme emphatically displayed in Jeremiah.
25. It shall no longer be drawn out. This translation reproduces the literal force of the Hebrew, which obviously means “to be delayed.”
27. of many days hence and of faraway times he prophesies. This is a somewhat different formulation of dismissal of the prophecy from the proverb cited in verse 22. According to the proverb, with the passage of time it will be seen that the prophecy is entirely groundless. Here, the deniers say that these predictions of doom may someday be fulfilled, but that time is so distant that it is of no concern to them. Ezekiel, we should recall, is at this point prophesying no more than five years before the final destruction of the kingdom of Judah, so in fact his prediction will come about very soon and not in “faraway times.”
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, prophesy to the prophets of Israel who prophesy, and say to these prophets out of their own heart, Listen to the word of the LORD. 3Thus said the Master, the LORD: Woe to the scoundrel prophets who follow their own spirit and have seen nothing. 4Like foxes among the ruins, O Israel, your prophets have become. 5You did not go up in the breaches and build a barrier around the house of Israel to stand in battle on the day of the LORD. 6They saw empty visions and false divinations, saying, ‘the LORD said,’ when the LORD did not send them, and they expected to fulfill their word. 7Why, you have seen an empty vision and a false divination you have spoken, saying, ‘the LORD said,’ when I did not speak. 8Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: Inasmuch as you have spoken emptiness and have seen false visions, therefore, here I am against you, said the Master, the LORD. 9And My hand shall be against the prophets who see empty visions and perform false divinations. They shall not take part in the council of My people and shall not be written in the writ of the house of Israel and shall not come to the soil of Israel. And you shall know that I am the LORD. 10Surely because they misled My people, saying, It is well, when it was not well. The people was building a mere partition, and they daubed it with plaster. 11Say to the daubers of plaster that it will fall. When pounding rain comes—and you—hailstones fall and a storm wind that splits things apart, 12and, look the wall shall fall. Why, it shall be said to you, Where is the plaster that you daubed? 13Therefore, Thus said the Master, the LORD: I will split things apart with a storm wind in My wrath, and pounding rain in My anger shall there be and hailstones in wrath for utter destruction. 14And I will wreck the wall on which you daubed plaster and bring it down to the ground, and its foundation shall be laid bare. And it shall fall and you shall be utterly destroyed within it, and you shall know that I am the LORD. 15And I will exhaust My wrath upon the wall and upon those who daubed it with plaster, and I will say to you: the wall is gone and those who plastered it are gone, 16O prophets of Israel who prophesy concerning Jerusalem and see a vision of well-being for her when there is no well-being, said the Master, the LORD. 17And you, man, set your face toward the daughters of your people who babble prophecy out of their own heart, and prophesy about them. 18And you shall say, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Woe, you who sew cushions for all the joints of the arms and make padding for the head of every stature to entrap lives. Would you entrap the lives of My people and your own lives preserve? 19And you profane Me to My people with handfuls of barley and morsels of bread to proclaim death for people who will not die and to proclaim life for people who will not live, as you lie to My people, who listen to lies. 20Therefore thus said the LORD: Here I am against your cushions with which you entrap lives like birds. And I will tear them from your arms and set free the people whom you entrapped like birds. 21And I will tear off your cushions and save My people from your hands, and they shall no longer be in the toils in your hand. And you shall know that I am the LORD. 22Inasmuch as you have struck the heart of the innocent man with lies, when I did not cause him grief, and strengthened the hands of the wicked man to preserve him that he turn not back from his evil way to preserve his life. 23Therefore, no longer shall you see empty visions and no longer perform divinations, and I will save My people from your hands, and you shall know that I am the LORD.”
CHAPTER 13 NOTES
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2. prophets out of their own heart. The idiom “out of their own heart,” which occurs elsewhere, indicates things that are purely a person’s invention.
3. follow their own spirit. Greenberg renders “spirit” here as “whims.” It is obviously a parallel to “their own heart” in verse 1.
5. the breaches. This image picks up the simile of the foxes among the ruins from the previous verse: foxes could make their way through the breach in the stone walls protecting vineyards and planted fields to wreak havoc within. Thus, the prophets, who should have protected the people, are themselves predators.
to stand in battle on the day of the LORD. As elsewhere in the Prophets, “the day of the LORD” is the day when God comes to exact retribution from Israel for its offenses. The prophets, then, in this battle metaphor, should have defended Israel and warded off punishment from God by warning the people about its waywardness.
9. shall not come to the soil of Israel. This phrase is an indication that Ezekiel is excoriating a group of false prophets in the Babylonian exile.
10. The people was building a mere partition. The subject of the verb in the Hebrew is simply “it,” but its antecedent has been introduced in the translation in order to avoid confusion. The Hebrew word ḥayits, represented in this translation as “mere partition,” occurs only here; however, it patently derives from a root that suggests demarcating inside from outside. Both the etymology and the context indicate that it is a rather flimsy barrier, hence the addition of “mere” in the translation.
they daubed it with plaster. Many interpreters conclude that the word for “plaster,” tafel (elsewhere a term for “insipid”), designates an inferior form of plaster, mixed with straw. But smearing plaster over a wall—especially if it is a shaky wall—would scarcely strengthen it against breaches, no matter what kind of plaster was used.
11. When pounding rain comes—and you. The “and you” definitely looks out of syntactic place and may reflect a scribal error.
13. Thus said the Master, the LORD. Rimon Kasher proposes that Ezekiel’s constant use of this introductory formula could be polemic: Ezekiel has been sent by God and is faithfully quoting God’s actual words, in contrast to the false prophets.
split things apart. The splitting verb is chosen in reference to the wall.
hailstones. The Hebrew ʾelgavish is not the usual word for “hail” and may reflect poetic diction.
15. I will exhaust My wrath. The Hebrew employs the same verbal stem that appears in “utter destruction” and “utterly destroyed.”
17. daughters of your people who babble prophecy out of their own heart. Having dealt with the male prophets, Ezekiel now is commanded to turn to the women. They are not so much prophets as soothsayers or fortune-tellers, and consequently the verb for prophesying is used here in the reflexive conjugation, which has the connotation of going into ecstatic fits, a nuance represented in this translation by the addition of “babble.”
18. cushions … padding. We have only an approximate sense of the meaning of both these nouns, and the same is true of their function. They appear to be the trappings of rites of divination performed by these women, but the specifics remain elusive.
all the joints of the arms. This same phrase in Jeremiah means “armpits,” but here the whole arm seems to be involved, as verse 21 indicates.
19. with handfuls of barley and morsels of bread. These are used in the superstitious ritual, either as instruments of divination—in Mesopotamia, flour was cast on water for this purpose—or as offerings to the gods.
22. to preserve his life. This is the same verb that is used in verse 19 in the sense of “proclaim life.” These soothsaying women, instead of making baseless proclamations about who is destined to live, should have been warning the wicked man to turn back from his path of evil in order to save his life.
1And men of the elders of Israel came to me and sat down before me. 2And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 3“Man, these men have brought to mind their foul things, and the stumbling block of their crime they have set before them. Shall I respond in an oracle to them? 4Therefore, speak to them and say to them, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Every man of the house of Israel who brings to mind his foul things and puts before him the stumbling block of his crime and comes to the prophet, I the LORD will answer him as he comes with his many foul things, 5so as to catch the house of Israel in their thoughts, as they all have fallen back from Me with their foul things. 6Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Turn back, and turn away from your foul things, and turn your face away from all your abominations. 7For every man of the house of Israel and of the sojourner who sojourns in Israel who falls back from Me and brings to mind his foul things and puts the stumbling block of his crime before him and comes to the prophet to ask an oracle of him, I the LORD will answer him Myself. 8And I will set My face against that man and desolate him as a sign and a byword, and I will cut him off from the midst of My people, and you shall know that I am the LORD. 9And the prophet who will be enticed and will speak a word, it is I the LORD Who enticed that prophet, and I will reach out My hand against him and destroy him from the midst of My people. 10And they shall bear their punishment, he who seeks an oracle and the prophet, with like punishment. 11So that the house of Israel no longer stray from Me nor be defiled by all their transgressions, and they shall be My people, and as for Me, I will be their God, said the Master, the LORD.”
12And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 13“Man, when a land offends against Me, to commit betrayal, I will stretch out My hand against her and break her staff of bread and let loose against her famine and cut off from her man and beast. 14And these three men shall be within her, Noah, Daniel, and Job. They in their righteousness shall save their lives, said the Master, the LORD. 15Should I send vicious beasts through the land and they bereave her and she become a desolation with no passerby because of the beasts, 16these three men within her—by My life, said the Master, the LORD—shall surely save neither sons nor daughters. They alone shall be saved, and the land shall be a desolation. 17Or should I bring the sword against that land and say, The sword shall pass through the land and I will cut off from her man and beast, 18these three men within her—by My life, said the Master, the LORD—shall not save sons and daughters but they alone shall be saved. 19Or should I let loose pestilence against that land and pour My wrath on her in blood to cut off from within her man and beast, 20and Noah, Daniel, and Job are within her—by My life, said the Master, the LORD—they shall surely save neither son nor daughter. They in their righteousness shall save their lives. 21For thus said the Master, the LORD: How much more so when I have let loose against Jerusalem My four evil scourges, the sword and famine and vicious beasts and pestilence, to cut off from her man and beast. 22And, look, there shall be left in her a remnant that is brought out, sons and daughters. Here they are going out to you. And you shall see their way and their deeds and be consoled for the evil that I brought upon Jerusalem, all that I have brought upon her. 23And they shall console you when you see their way and their deeds, and you shall know that not for naught did I do all that I did against her,” said the Master, the LORD.
CHAPTER 14 NOTES
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1. came to me and sat down before me. The only reason they would come to the prophet would be to hear an oracle from him. This very expectation enrages Ezekiel because he is aware that while seeking instructions about the intentions of YHWH—hedging their bets, one might say—their thoughts are taken up with other gods.
3. their foul things, and the stumbling block of their crime. It is characteristic of Ezekiel’s polemic style that he often will not bring himself to refer to false gods as “gods” or “idols” but instead substitutes pejorative epithets—gilulim, “foul things,” a word that recalls the Hebrew term for “turds,” and “stumbling block of their crime.” (For this reason, translations that render gilulim as “idols” or “fetishes” dilute the force of the original.)
Shall I respond in an oracle to them? The verb darash is the technical term for inquiry of an oracle, which is precisely what the elders have come to do.
7. I the LORD will answer him Myself. The “answer” that God says He will deliver is not the communication of an oracle but withering punishment.
9. And the prophet who will be enticed and will speak a word, it is I the LORD Who enticed that prophet. The theology behind this statement is somewhat convoluted. The evident idea is that these false prophets have habitually been speaking “out of their own heart,” which surely suggests human initiative. Given that behavior, God will now proceed to “entice” (or “seduce”) such a prophet to continue pronouncing false prophecies so that he will be ripe for punishment.
11. they shall be My people, and as for Me, I will be their God. This recurring statement expresses Ezekiel’s expectation that after the national cleansing of terrible retribution, Israel’s wholeness will be restored.
14. Noah, Daniel, and Job. It is now clear to all scholars that here Daniel does not refer to the protagonist of the Book of Daniel. One should note that the consonantal text allows us to pronounce this name as Danʾel. In the Ugaritic Epic of Aqhat, there is a righteous judge named Danʾel. These three figures, then, are three legendary righteous men, none belonging to the people of Israel. Job’s presence among the three reflects the fact that a story about a righteous man named Job was current in the region well before the composition of the Book of Job. The non-Israelite identity of the three is in keeping with the generalizing force of the declaration, “when a land offends against Me,” which is to say, any land.
16. these three … shall surely save neither sons nor daughters. In Ezekiel’s implacable moral vision, God follows a more stringent standard of justice than he does in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. There, he agreed to save the cities of the plain if there were ten righteous men within them, and in the implemented destruction, Lot was able to save his two daughters. Here, only the three righteous men will survive, and their own children will perish.
21. How much more so. This formula for an a fortiori condition, ʾaf ki, is applied here because if any offending land is subject to the unremitting scourge of divine punishment, an offending Jerusalem, which was God’s chosen city, will all the more be punished.
22. there shall be left in her a remnant that is brought out, sons and daughters. This is the surprise turn of God’s compassion for Israel. By all rights, since the sons and daughters of all other lands would not be spared, we might expect that Jerusalem’s sons and daughters would perish. God, however, will not allow the covenanted people to be utterly destroyed, and so, after the terrible devastation, the sons and daughters survive to go out of the city and join the earlier exiles in Babylonia as the nucleus of national regeneration.
23. And they shall console you when you see their way and their deeds. Although many claim that ʿalilot, “deeds,” has a negative sense in Ezekiel, the present context invites the opposite inference: the exiles will be consoled when they see these sons and daughters behaving as Israelites should and thus bringing hope for the future. There may even be an intended contrast between the paganizing elders of the previous prophecy and the young exiles here.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, what will come of the vine stock, the vine branch, of all the trees of the forest? 3Will wood be taken from it to use for any task? Will a peg be taken from it to hang upon it any vessel? 4Look, it is given to the fire to be consumed, its two ends the fire consumes and its inside is reduced to ash. Can it serve for any task? 5Look, when it was whole, it could be used for no task. How much more so when fire consumes it and it is reduced to ash. Could it still be used for any task? 6Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: Like the vine stock among the trees of the forest that I give to the fire to consume, so have I given the dwellers of Jerusalem. 7And I will set My face against them. From the fire they shall come out, but the fire shall consume them. And you shall know that I am the LORD when I set My face against them. 8And I will make the land a desolation inasmuch as they have betrayed,” said the Master, the LORD.
CHAPTER 15 NOTES
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1. And the word of the LORD came to me. In this instance, the formula introduces a parable instead of the usual message of castigation. Because the borders of the parable are quite distinct, the chapter concludes with the end of the parable, not attaching to it any other kind of prophecy. This makes the present chapter the shortest in the book.
2. the vine stock. The Hebrew ʿets-hagefen could mean either “wood of the vine,” as some versions represent it, or “tree of the vine.” The grapevine, of course, is not exactly a tree, though its branches are made of woodlike material. The point of the parable is that, unlike the wood of real trees, the branches of the vine cannot be made into anything. This translation adopts from Greenberg “vine stock” as a solution.
4. it is given to the fire to be consumed. You can’t make anything out of vine branches, but you can feed a fire with them if they are sufficiently dry.
5. How much more so. The logic of the a fortiori statement is evident: if the branches were useless for anything when they were whole, once they are burned there is nothing left of them except ashes.
6. Like the vine stock … so have I given the dwellers of Jerusalem. Given the aggressively didactic purpose of this parable, its meaning is now clearly spelled out. Comparisons of Israel to a vineyard or a vine were traditional (see the Parable of the Vineyard in Isaiah 5), but here the comparison is tilted hard against Israel. Just as the vine is useless in comparison to the wood of real trees, the people of Israel has demonstrated its own worthlessness by its treacherous behavior, and hence all that it is good for is to be consumed by fire. The fire is quite literal because conquered cities were put to the torch.
7. From the fire they shall come out. The critical consensus is that the first fire is the partial destruction of Jerusalem when Jehoiachin was exiled in 597 B.C.E. A greater destruction is to come.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, make known to Jerusalem her abominations. 3And you shall say, Thus said the Master, the LORD to Jerusalem: Your origins and your birthplace are from the land of the Canaanite. Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. 4As to your birth, on the day of your birth, your navel cord was not cut nor were you washed smooth in water nor were you rubbed with salt nor were you swaddled. 5No eye had pity on you to do even one of these to show mercy to you, but you were flung out into the field in the disgust you caused on the day of your birth. 6And I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, and I said to you, ‘In your blood live,’ and I said to you, ‘In your blood live.’ 7Myriad as the plants of the field I made you, and you grew and came of age and put on the finest jewels. Your breasts were ripe and your hair sprung up, but you were stark naked. 8And I passed by you and saw you, and, look, your time was the time for lovemaking. And I spread My skirt over you and covered your nakedness, and vowed to you and entered a covenant with you, said the Master, the LORD, and you became Mine. 9And I washed you in water and rinsed your blood from upon you and rubbed you with oil. 10And I dressed you in embroidered cloth and shod you in ocher-dyed leather and turbaned you in linen and covered you with silk. 11And I bedecked you with jewels and put bracelets on your arms and a necklace round your neck. 12And I put a ring on your nose and earrings on your ears and a splendid diadem on your head. 13And you were bedecked with gold and silver, and your attire was linen and silk and embroidered cloth. Fine flour and honey and oil you ate, and you became very, very beautiful and fit to be a queen. 14And a name for you went out among the nations for your beauty, for it was consummate through My splendor that I set upon you, said the Master, the LORD. 15And you trusted in your beauty and played the whore with your name, and you spilled out your whoring upon every passerby—his it was. 16And you took from your garments and made yourself tapestried high places and played the whore on them. Such things should never be. 17And you took your splendid ornaments, from My gold and from My silver that I gave to you, and made for yourself male images and played the whore with them. 18And you took your embroidered garments and covered them, and My oil and My incense you set before them. 19And My bread that I gave you, the fine flour and honey and oil that I fed you, you set before them as a fragrant odor, and so it was, said the Master, the LORD. 20And you took your sons and your daughters whom you had born Me and sacrificed them to these as food. And as though your whorings were not enough, 21you slaughtered My sons and gave them over to these. 22And with all your abominations and your whorings you did not recall the days of your youth when you were stark naked, wallowing in your blood you were. 23And it happened after all your evil—woe, oh woe to you—said the Master, the LORD, 24that you built yourself mounds and made yourself a height in every square. 25At every crossroad you built your height, and you befouled your beauty and spread your legs for every passerby and multiplied your whorings. 26And you played the whore with the Egyptians, your big-membered neighbors, and multiplied your whorings to vex Me. 27And, look, I set My hand on you and cut back your daily portion and gave you into the gullet of those who hate you, the Philistine girls shocked by your lewd way. 28And you played the whore with the Assyrians insatiably, and you played the whore with them, yet were not sated. 29And you multiplied your whorings as far as the trader-land, Chaldea, but even in this you were not sated. 30How hot was your ardor, said the Master, the LORD, when you did all these, the acts of a willful whore, 31Building your mound at every crossroad and making your height in every square, but you were not like a whore, for you scorned a whore’s pay. 32Adulteress, who takes strangers instead of her husband! 33To every whore they give pay, but you, you gave your pay to all your lovers and bribed them to come to bed with you in your whoring all around. 34And you became the contrary of women in your whoring, and after you none will play the whore so, when you gave a whore’s pay and no whore’s pay was given you but the contrary. 35Therefore, whore, listen to the word of the LORD. 36Thus said the Master, the LORD: Inasmuch as your wetness poured out and you laid bare your nakedness in your whoring with your lovers and with all the foul things of your abominations, as by the blood of your children that you gave to them, 37therefore I am about to gather all your lovers to whom you were sweet, and all whom you loved with all whom you hated, and I will gather them against you from all around and lay bare your nakedness to them, and they shall see all your nakedness. 38And I will condemn you with the punishment of adulteresses and women who shed blood and give you over to blood, wrath, and jealousy. 39And I will give you into their hand, and they shall wreck your mound and raze your heights, and they shall strip your garments from you and take your splendid ornaments and leave you stark naked. 40And they shall bring up a crowd against you and stone you and hack you to pieces with their swords. 41And they shall burn your houses in fire and inflict punishment upon you before the eyes of many women, and I will stop you from being a whore, nor whore’s pay shall you give anymore. 42And I will let My fury against you come to a rest, and My jealousy of you shall turn away, and I will be tranquil and no longer be vexed. 43Inasmuch as you did not recall the days of your youth nor quake before Me in all these things, I on My part, look, I have set out your way first, said the Master, the LORD. Have you not done lewdness in addition to all your abominations? 44Look, whoever pronounces a byword says about you, ‘Like mother, like daughter.’ 45You are your mother’s daughter, showing contempt for her husband and her children. And you are your sister’s sister, who showed contempt for their husbands and their children. Your mother is a Hittite and your father is an Amorite. 46And your big sister is Samaria—she and her daughters—who dwells on your left, and your little sister who dwells on your right is Sodom and her daughters. 47Did you not go in their ways and perform their abominations? Very soon, you will have acted more ruinously than they in all your ways. 48By My life, said the Master, the LORD, surely Sodom and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done. 49Here was the crime of Sodom and her daughters: the pride of satiety of bread and the ease of tranquillity she and her daughters had, and she did not support the hand of the poor and the needy. 50And they were haughty and performed abominations before Me, and I removed them when I saw it. 51And Samaria, barely half your offenses she committed, and you did more abominations than these, and you made your sister look innocent through all your abominations that you performed. 52Even you, bear your disgrace for advocating for your sister through your offenses in which you were more abominable than they and they more innocent than you. And even you, be shamed and bear your disgrace for making your sister look innocent. 53And I will restore their fortunes, the fortunes of Sodom and her daughters and the fortunes of Samaria and her daughters, and the fortunes of your captives in their midst, 54so that you bear your disgrace and be disgraced by all that you have done in giving comfort to them. 55And your sisters, Sodom and her daughters, shall be restored to their former state, and Samaria and her daughters shall be restored to their former state, and you and your daughters shall be restored to your former state. 56Was not Sodom, your sister, a word of scorn in your mouth on the day of your pride, 57before your evil was exposed? Now [you are] a disgrace to the daughters of Aram and all her environs, to the daughters of the Philistines who loathe you all around. 58You have borne your lewdness and your abominations, said the LORD. 59For thus said the Master, the LORD: I will do unto you as you have done when you despised the oath to violate the covenant. 60But I on My part will recall My covenant with you in the days of your youth and establish for you an everlasting covenant. 61And you shall recall your ways and be ashamed when you receive your big sisters and your little sisters and I give them to you as daughters, though they are not of your covenant. 62And I Myself will establish the covenant with you, and you will know that I am the LORD. 63So that you recall and be shamed, and you shall be unable to open your mouth again because of your disgrace when I atone for you for all that you have done,” said the Master, the LORD.
CHAPTER 16 NOTES
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3. Your origins and your birthplace are from the land of the Canaanite. The point is that the people of Israel is not to think of itself as altogether unique—it is just one of the Canaanite peoples (Amorites and Hittites are ethnic groups repeatedly numbered among the seven that constitute the population of Canaan). One wonders whether this statement might reflect a historical tradition that the origins of Israel were not in a Hebrew slave population escaped from Egypt but among the indigenous peoples of Canaan. That, in fact, is the view of modern scholarship.
4. your navel cord was not cut. This emphasis on addressing the physical care of the newborn prepares us for the focus on the physicality of the mature woman who will develop from this infant.
nor were you rubbed with salt. There was a practice—still sometimes observed among Bedouins—of rubbing the baby’s body with a mixture of olive oil and salt in the belief that it toughened the tender skin.
5. you were flung out into the field in the disgust you caused. It is hard to relate these details of the neglect of the newborn babe to the actual history of Israel, except, perhaps, through some general sense that the origins of the people were humble and unpromising. The point seems to be that God now takes up the neglected and rejected child and nurtures her, bringing her to flourishing womanhood.
6. wallowing in your blood. This would be the blood of childbirth that had not been wiped away.
In your blood live. Despite being covered with blood, you will now live. There may be a suggestion that the future history of Israel will be marked by bloodshed but that the people will nevertheless survive. The repetition of these words might be a scribal duplication.
7. Myriad. Although many interpreters understand this simply to mean “growing” or “sprouting,” the set meaning of the Hebrew term is “myriad,” and this surely could be a reference to the proliferation of the people, the allegory of the daughter slipping from the allegorical vehicle to its tenor or referent, the history of Israel. This will occur again at another point in the prophecy.
your hair. The context suggests that this is pubic hair.
8. your time was the time for lovemaking. The infant girl has passed puberty, and God (seen before as a kind of foster father) will now take her as His bride—“I … vowed to you and entered a covenant with you … and you became Mine.” But the focus on her sexuality will then be given an explosive development.
9. And I washed you in water and rinsed your blood from upon you. These acts appear to repair the neglect of the infant, as though the blood of birth were still on her. But the blood now may well be the blood from the onset of menstruation.
10. I dressed you in embroidered cloth. In the allegory, this whole catalogue of finery refers to the splendor of Jerusalem and its Temple that God bestowed on His people.
15. And you trusted in your beauty and played the whore. The image of unfaithful Israel as a whore betraying her Spouse by dalliance with alien gods is common in the Prophets, appearing in Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. No other prophet, however, focuses at such length and so concretely as does Ezekiel on the physical aspects of promiscuity. One detects here an expression of Ezekiel’s distinctive psychology, which appears to involve some sort of morbid obsession with the female body in its sexual aspect. The word “whore” and its derivatives are repeated again and again.
you spilled out your whoring upon every passerby. Because of the unusual choice of the verb “spill out,” the reference may well be to vaginal secretions as a metonomy for “whoring.” Such a reference is made explicit in verse 36.
16. tapestried high places. This is a crossover from allegorical vehicle to tenor: the woman Zion was adorned in finery; here she takes embroidered cloth to decorate the altars of pagan worship.
Such things should never be. The Hebrew wording at this point is somewhat cryptic, so the translation is an educated guess.
17. made for yourself male images and played the whore with them. The whoring is again the following of a pagan cult, but in the allegorical vehicle there is a suggestion of autoeroticism in this playing with male—probably phallic—images.
18. covered them. That is, covered the idols.
My oil and My incense. The oil and incense that should have been used for the worship of YHWH in the Temple were devoted to pagan deities.
20. And you took your sons and your daughters. Child sacrifice, which on the evidence of the Prophets was actually practiced in ancient Israel, is regarded as one of the greatest obscenities of the pagan cult.
24. mounds … a height in every square. These structures are different from the hilltop altars or “high places” mentioned so frequently, but they are clearly constructed sites for pagan worship.
26. the Egyptians, your big-membered neighbors. As is often the case of different peoples living in proximity, fantasies spring up about the sexual potency or endowments of the neighboring group. Here, the prophet excoriates the lasciviousness of the Daughter of Zion by asserting that she was drawn to the Egyptians by the supposed large size of their male members. This complements the image of playing the whore with phallic icons.
27. the Philistine girls shocked by your lewd way. Even the young women of Philistia, reputed to be far from virtuous, are shocked by your lasciviousness.
29. but even in this you were not sated. This reiterated emphasis clearly suggests that the Daughter of Zion is what used to be called a nymphomaniac, before that term was discredited.
30. How hot was your ardor. The meaning of both the adjective and the noun is not altogether clear. This translation follows Greenberg’s philological analysis and adopts his English rendering of the phrase. The heat of ardor is certainly in keeping with the thematic emphasis of the prophecy as a whole.
31. for you scorned a whore’s pay. You did not give yourself to other men for pay, which at least would have had a commercial logic, but gratuitously, out of sheer perversity.
32. instead of her husband. Some construe this phrase to mean “while under her husband’s authority.”
33. you gave your pay to all your lovers and bribed them to come to bed with you. The unbridled lust of Israel is such that she paid to get sex from all her alien lovers. This reduces them to gigolos and may imply that she has lost her extraordinary beauty through all her whoring.
36. your wetness poured out and you laid bare your nakedness in your whoring. The initial noun nehushteikh resembles the Hebrew word for “bronze” (hence the New Jewish Publication Society renders it as “brazen effrontery”). But contemporary scholarship has made a convincing case that it is an Akkadian loanword that means “vaginal lubrication.” This not only fits the focus on the bodily manifestations of female sexuality, but also is likely because of Ezekiel’s location in Babylonia, where Akkadian was used—he might well have been inclined to borrow a term for which there was no good Hebrew equivalent.
as by the blood of your children that you gave to them. The wording of this reference to child sacrifice, the greatest of pagan abominations, loops back to the wallowing in blood of the infant Daughter of Zion, which is now seen as a foreshadowing of her future behavior.
37. I will … lay bare your nakedness to them, and they shall see all your nakedness. This is a piece of measure-for-measure justice: she has spread her legs for every passerby; now she will be shamefully exposed to all eyes, not only to her former lovers but to those whom she despised.
38. women who shed blood. Here, again, there is a shuttling between tenor and vehicle. “Adulteress” belongs to the figurative representation of paganism as whoring, whereas the bloodshed refers literally to child sacrifice.
39. they shall strip your garments from you … and leave you stark naked. This was in fact a known punishment for an adulteress in many regions of the ancient Near East. The allegorical reference would be to the stripping away of the splendor of Jerusalem, razed by its conquerors, and to the divestment of national sovereignty.
40. stone you and hack you to pieces. This was an actual practice: stoning to death followed by mutilation of the corpse.
42. My jealousy. Given the whole context of sexual betrayal, the Hebrew qinʾah surely means “jealousy” and not “passion,” as many have claimed.
44. Like mother, like daughter. The point of invoking this proverb here is that Israel’s waywardness is a long-standing practice, not something invented by the current generation. Authorized by the convention of representing cities and nations as women, Ezekiel continues through this section of the prophecy in his sharply gender-focused denunciation, invoking mothers and daughters and sisters.
45. Your mother is a Hittite and your father is an Amorite. This line from the very beginning of the prophecy is repeated here because Ezekiel will go on to say that the people of Judah resembles its neighbors in evil, only it is worse than they.
46. your big sister is Samaria. “Big” and “little” here refer not to age but to the size of the territory of each of these kingdoms.
she and her daughters. The Hebrew builds on an untranslatable pun: “daughters” also means the villages or hamlets around a city, the implied metaphor being that the city is the mother.
on your left … on your right. Left and right are, respectively, north and south, the imagined point of orientation being someone facing the east (one word for “east” also means “front” or “forward”).
48. surely Sodom and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done. The idea that Israel could turn into Sodom had some currency early in biblical literature (compare Judges 19 and Isaiah 1). Ezekiel, however, pushes the notion further by contending that Israel is worse than Sodom. In verse 49, it is explained that Sodom’s crime consisted in neglecting the needy through her complacent satisfaction with her own affluence. This scarcely accords with the representation of the Sodomites as vicious sexual predators in Genesis 19, but the prophet probably wants to reserve sexual misbehavior exclusively for his castigation of his own people.
51. and you made your sister look innocent. Zion’s offenses are compounded by the fact that they were so unspeakable that even the crimes of her neighbors to the north and south came to look innocent by comparison.
52. bear your disgrace for advocating for your sister. This is a rhetorical conceit: by setting a standard of evil that her neighbors could not equal, Judah became an inadvertent advocate for them.
55. And your sisters, Sodom and her daughters … and Samaria and her daughters shall be restored to their former state, and you and your daughters shall be restored to your former state. The prophet now gives his argument another peculiar twist. “Restoring the former state” (the idiom that appears in verse 55) is equally used to express the national restoration of the people of Israel after its punishment. Here, however, in keeping with “your mother is a Hittite and your father is an Amorite,” this restoration is not unique for Judah but part of a general pattern in the region.
56. a word of scorn. More literally, “a rumor.”
57. [you are] a disgrace to the daughters of Aram. The bracketed words do not appear in the Hebrew but are necessary for intelligibility and may have been dropped in scribal transmission. Some critics emend “Aram” to “Edom” (graphically similar in Hebrew) because the Edomites became eager allies of the Babylonian invaders.
60. But I on My part will recall My covenant with you. Even though Israel has been a faithless, adulterous wife, God remains committed to the everlasting covenant He has sealed with His people.
61. though they are not of your covenant. This clause reflects two rather cryptic Hebrew words, and the sense is uncertain.
63. you shall be unable to open your mouth. The literal sense is “you shall have no opening of the mouth.”
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, pose a riddle and frame a parable for the house of Israel. 3And you shall say to them, Thus said the Master, the LORD: The great eagle, great-winged, broad of pinion, full-plumaged, richly colored, came to Lebanon and took the crown of the cedar. 4Its topmost tendril he plucked and brought it to the land of Canaan, set it down in the city of traders. 5And he took from the seed of the land and put it in a seed-field, a slip by many waters, he set it down as a willow. 6And it flourished and became a vine, spreading in low stature, its branches turned toward him and its roots to be beneath him. And it became a vine, and it produced branches and sent forth boughs. 7And there was another great eagle, great-winged, abundant in plumage, and, look, this vine wrapped its roots around him and sent its boughs out to him to be watered in the bed where it was planted. 8In the goodly field, by many waters it was planted, to put forth branches to bear fruit, to become a majestic vine. 9Say, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Will it thrive? Will he not break off its roots and rot out its fruit that it wither, and all the leaves it sprouted will wither? And not with great power nor with many troops will it be pulled up by its roots. 10And, look, it is planted—will it thrive? Will it not surely wither when the east wind touches it? On the bed where it grew, it will wither.”
11And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 12“Pray, say to the house of rebellion: Do you know what these are? Say! Look, the king of Babylonia has come to Jerusalem and taken her king and her nobles and brought them to him in Babylonia. 13And he has taken one of the royal seed and sealed with him a pact and made him swear an oath, and he has taken away the leaders of the land, 14to make it a lowly kingdom, that it not be raised up, to keep his pact that it might endure. 15But he rebelled against him, sending his messengers to Egypt to give him horses and many troops. Will he thrive? Will he who does these things escape? Will he break the pact and escape? 16By My life, said the Master, the LORD, in the place of the king who made him king, whose oath he spurned and whose pact with him he broke, within Babylonia he shall surely die. 17And not with a great force nor with a large assembly shall Pharaoh deal with him in battle, piling up ramps and building siege-works to cut off many lives. 18But he has spurned the oath and broken the pact, and look, he gave his hand to it, but all these things he did. He shall not escape. 19Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: By My life, My oath that he has spurned and My pact that he has broken, I will put on his own head. 20And I will spread My net over him, and he shall be caught in My toils. And I will bring him to Babylonia and will come to judgment with him there for his betrayal of Me. 21And all his fugitives in all his battalions shall fall by the sword, and those left shall be scattered to every wind.”
22Thus said the Master, the LORD: “I Myself will take from the lofty crown of the cedar, from its topmost branches, a tender one I will pluck, and I Myself will plant it on a high and steep hill. 23On the mount of the height of Israel I will plant it, and it shall bear branches and put forth fruit and become a majestic cedar, and every winged bird shall dwell beneath it, in the shade of its boughs they shall dwell. 24And all the trees of the field shall know that I, the LORD, have brought low the high tree, have raised high the lowly tree, have made the moist tree wither and made the withered tree bloom. I, the LORD, have spoken and have done it.”
CHAPTER 17 NOTES
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2. pose a riddle and frame a parable. There is a semantic overlap between the two nouns here, ḥidah and mashal, and the bracketing of them at the beginning of the Book of Proverbs suggests that sometimes they were nearly synonymous. Ḥidah, as in the Samson story, does point to an enigmatic saying that requires deciphering. Mashal has a wider range of meanings, from allegorical “parable,” as here, to “proverb” and to “poetic burden,” as in Balaam’s oracles. Some scholars view the text that follows as formal verse, but it doesn’t scan very well, though it does employ a good many loosely parallel sentence structures. The poetic function, as is often the case in Ezekiel, would appear to be manifested not prosodically but chiefly in the use of allegorical imagery, the vehicle of the mashal.
3. The great eagle … came to Lebanon. The eagle is Nebuchadnezzar. Lebanon with its lofty cedars is, perhaps somewhat confusingly, Zion.
richly colored. The Hebrew uses the term that usually means “embroidered cloth.”
4. Its topmost tendril he plucked. This is the Judahite king Jehoiachin, taken captive and exiled by Nebuchadnezzar to Babylonia in 597 B.C.E.
brought it to the land of Canaan. Like “Lebanon,” this is a confusing reference because “Canaan” in the historical allegory has to mean Babylonia. Ezekiel is probably punning on the secondary meaning of “Canaanite” as “merchant,” making this phrase semantically parallel with “the city of traders.”
5. the seed of the land. The phrase indicates the royal seed, and the reference is to Zedekiah, whom Nebuchadnezzar installs as a vassal king.
a slip. The noun qaḥ occurs only here, but it is attested in three Semitic languages as a tree growing alongside streams, perhaps a variety of willow.
6. its branches turned toward him and its roots to be beneath him. Both these details are tokens of Zedekiah’s vassal status.
7. another great eagle. “Another,” aḥer, is the plausible reading of the Septuagint instead of the Masoretic eḥad, “one.” The second eagle is the Egyptian Pharaoh. The vine wrapping its roots around him indicates Zedekiah’s seeking an alliance with Egypt.
8. In the goodly field, by many waters it was planted. Nebuchadnezzar had seen to it that his vassal would enjoy comfortable circumstances and the majesty of kingship.
9. Will he not break off its roots. The “he” is Nebuchadnezzar, and we may assume that this prophecy antedates the actual destruction of Judah in 586 B.C.E.
not with great power. Ezekiel assumes that the Babylonians will not require a massive force to overwhelm Jerusalem.
10. the east wind. In biblical literature, the east wind, blowing from the desert, brings trouble. Nebuchadnezzar comes from the east.
12. Do you know what these are? Now the meaning of the parable, the nimshal of the mashal, is spelled out.
the king of Babylonia has come to Jerusalem. These are the events of 597 B.C.E., so now it is clear that “Lebanon” is Zion.
13. And he has taken one of the royal seed. This is Zedekiah.
made him swear an oath. The particular category of oath, ʾalah, is one in which a curse is pronounced on the party of the oath should he violate it.
14. that it might endure. There is an ambiguity as to whether “it” refers to the pact or the kingdom.
16. within Babylonia he shall surely die. This will prove to be the fate of Zedekiah, first blinded by Nebuchadnezzar and then brought captive to Babylonia. This is a reasonable prediction in light of Ezekiel’s understanding that it is folly to rebel, so one need not construe this as an ex eventu prophecy.
17. And not with a great force nor with a large assembly shall Pharaoh deal with him in battle. The ostensible historical reference is puzzling, and many critics assume that “Pharaoh” is a mistaken addition, the original reference being to Nebuchadnezzar, as in the parallel statement in verse 9.
19. My pact that he has broken. The Hebrew brit can mean either “pact,” which seems the appropriate sense for the political context of the verses above, or the more theological “covenant.” To preserve the parallelism of this passage with the preceding one, “pact” is again used here in the translation. However, the clear implication is that just as Zedekiah has broken his pact with Nebuchadnezzar, he has violated his covenant with God, and hence the punishment inflicted on him by Babylonia is also God’s punishment.
22. I Myself will take from the lofty crown of the cedar … and I Myself will plant it on a high and steep hill. God performs the same figurative action as the conquering Nebuchadnezzar, but now it is an act of restoring the kingdom of Judah.
23. put forth fruit. The cedar does not bear fruit, so this is a miraculous fulfillment.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“What is wrong with you, who recite this proverb on the soil of Israel, saying:
and the sons’ teeth were blunted.
3By My life, said the Master, the LORD, there shall be none reciting this proverb in Israel. 4Look, all lives are Mine, the life of the father and the son alike are Mine. The person offending, it is he shall die. 5And should a man be righteous and do what is just and right, 6he did not eat on the mountains nor lift his eyes to Israel’s foul things, and he did not defile his fellow man’s wife nor was intimate with a menstrual woman. 7And no man did he wrong; what is pawned in debt he returned; he did not rob; his bread he gave to the hungry and the naked he covered with clothes. 8He did not lend with advance interest nor accrued interest. He pulled his hand back from wrongdoing; he enacted true justice between one man and another. 9By My statutes he walked, and My laws he kept to act in truth. He is righteous, he shall surely live, said the Master, the LORD. 10And should he beget a brutish son, who sheds blood, and who does none of these things, 11and he did none of these things but ate on the mountains and defiled his fellow man’s wife, 12wronged the poor and the needy, robbed, did not return what was pawned and to the foul things lifted his eyes—abomination he did. 13He lent with advance interest and took accrued interest. He surely shall not live—all these abominations he did. He is doomed to die, his bloodguilt is upon him. 14And look, should he beget a son who sees all the offenses of his father, sees and does not do the like, 15on the mountains he does not eat nor does he lift his eyes to the abominations of the house of Israel. He does not defile his fellow man’s wife, 16nor does he wrong any man. He takes nothing in pawn, nor does he rob. His bread he gives to the hungry, and the naked he covers with garments. 17He draws his hand back from harming the poor, neither advance interest nor accrued interest does he take. He performs My laws, in My statutes he walks. He shall not die for his father’s crime—he shall surely live. 18As for his father, should he have committed fraud, robbed a brother, and what was not good should have done among his people, look, he shall die for his crime. 19And should you say, ‘Why does the son not bear the crime of the father?’ When the son has done justice and righteousness and kept My statutes and performed them, he shall surely live. 20The offending person, it is he who shall die. The son shall not bear the father’s crime, and the father shall not bear the son’s crime. The righteousness of the righteous man shall be on him, and the wickedness of the wicked man shall be on him. 21And the wicked man who turns back from all his offenses that he did and keeps all My statutes and does justice and righteousness, he shall surely live, he shall not die. 22All his wrongs that he did shall not be recalled against him. Through his righteousness that he has done he shall live. 23Do I really desire the death of the wicked, said the Master, the LORD, and not instead his turning back from his ways, that he may live? 24And when the righteous man turns back from his righteousness and does wrong like all the abominations that the wicked man did, will he do this and live? All his righteousness that he did shall not be recalled for him when he betrays and in his offense that he commits. For them he shall die. 25And should you say, ‘The way of the Master does not measure up,’ listen, pray, house of Israel. Does My way not measure up? Why, your way does not measure up! 26When the righteous man turns back from his righteousness and does wrong, he shall die for it. For his wrong that he has done he shall die. 27And when the wicked man turns back from his wickedness that he has done and does justice and righteousness, he shall preserve himself in life. 28And if he sees and turns back from all his trespasses that he committed, he shall surely live, he shall not die. 29And should the house of Israel say, ‘The way of the Master does not measure up,’ do My ways not measure up? Why, it is your ways that do not measure up! 30Therefore each according to his ways will I judge you, O house of Israel, said the Master, the LORD. Turn back altogether from your trespasses, and they shall not be a stumbling block of crime for you. 31Fling away from you all your trespasses that you have committed and make you a new heart and a new spirit. Why should you die, O house of Israel? 32For I do not desire anyone’s death, said the Master, the LORD, but turn back and live.”
CHAPTER 18 NOTES
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2. The fathers ate unripe fruit / and the sons’ teeth were blunted. This phrase is also quoted in Jeremiah 31:28, attesting to its circulation as a popularly invoked saying. Most translations read “unripe grapes,” with little warrant, for the term can mean any unripe fruit. Presumably, the hardness of the unripe fruit is what blunts the teeth (and that would scarcely work for grapes). The proverb as Ezekiel quotes it reflects the absurdity of thinking that the sons suffer for the crimes of the fathers because, obviously, no one could suffer the ill effects of someone else’s imprudence in biting down on unripe fruit.
6. he did not eat on the mountains. Since the clause that immediately follows mentions idolatry, the reference here is almost certainly to a sacrificial feast that was part of a pagan cult.
he did not defile his fellow man’s wife. The prophet moves without transition from cultic transgressions to sexual ones. In the next verse, he will go on to the economic wrongs, making all three categories part of a single package.
8. advance interest nor accrued interest. The first term, neshekh, has the literal sense of “bite”: hence, a chunk taken out from the loan extended. The second term, tarbit, etymologically suggests compounding or multiplying.
9. By My statutes he walked, and My laws he kept. Like a good many other phrases in this chapter, all this will be repeated. Repetition appears to be part of the prophet’s rhetorical strategy of didactic insistence in conveying the message that each person is solely responsible for the consequences of his acts.
10. who does none of these things. In the Hebrew, there is an intrusive ʾaḥ, “brother,” which is almost certainly a mistaken scribal duplication of the two middle consonants in the word that immediately follows, meʾeḥad, “one of.”
11. he did none of these things but ate. The wording is somewhat confusing, especially after the last clause of the previous verse. It is possible that a negative before the verb has been dropped out in the previous verse.
15. on the mountains he does not eat. The repetitiousness is especially pronounced here and through to the end of verse 17.
20. bear the … crime. This Hebrew idiom clearly means “bear the consequences of the crime.” In fact, ʿawon, “crime,” is often used interchangeably for “punishment” as well.
22. All his wrongs that he did shall not be recalled against him. This element of Ezekiel’s doctrine of divine justice surely addresses the condition of his audience of exiles. According to theological principle, their plight of exile is a consequence of their evil acts, and the prophet has been insistently castigating them for their behavior. But a person who turns away wholeheartedly from his misdeeds will qualify for God’s protection.
24. And when the righteous man turns back from his righteousness. The system is symmetrical: just as the wicked man has the power to reverse his fortunes, the righteous man can undo all the merit he has earned by slipping from the straight and narrow path to do evil.
25. does not measure up. There has been some dispute among interpreters about the meaning of the verb yitakhen. The clear biblical sense of this verbal stem is “to measure.” (Compare Isaiah 40:12: “and the heavens has gauged [tiken] with a span.”) The idea seems to be that in the eyes of Israel, God’s way makes no sense, has no good measure.
31. Fling away from you all your trespasses that you have committed and make you a new heart and a new spirit. A vivid image informs this sentence: a person’s trespasses weigh down on his very body—the Hebrew literally means “fling away from upon you.” Once this weight of evil acts is flung away, a person can regenerate from within, making a new heart and spirit for himself.
32. anyone’s death. More literally, “the death of him who dies.”
1And you, sound this lament over the princes of Israel, 2and say,
among lions!
She crouches among young lions,
she rears her cubs.
3She raised up one of her cubs,
and learned to go after prey,
a human did he eat.
4And nations heard of him,
and they brought him down in hooks
to the land of Egypt.
5And she saw that she waited in vain,
her hope was lost.
And she took another of her cubs,
made him a young lion.
6And he walked about among lions,
he became a young lion.
And he learned to go after prey,
a human did he eat.
7And he harrowed their bastions,
and their towns he destroyed.
And the land and its fullness were dumbfounded
by the sound of his roaring.
8And nations set upon him,
all the provinces round about,
and cast their net upon him,
in their pit he was caught.
9And they put him in a neck iron with hooks
and brought him to the king of Babylonia,
brought him in toils;
so that his voice would no more be heard
on the mountains of Israel.
10Your mother was like a vine
planted by waters,
fruitful and branching
from many waters.
11And she had mighty boughs,
for the scepters of rulers.
And its stature rose on high
to be among the clouds.
And it was seen in its height
with all its branches.
12But it was torn from its roots in fury,
to the ground it was flung,
and the east wind withered its fruit,
it fell apart and withered,
her mighty bough the fire consumed.
13And now she is planted in the desert,
in a parched and thirsty land.
14And a fire springs out from her boughs,
consumes her fruit
and no mighty bough is there within her,
a scepter for ruling.
—This is a lament, and has become a lament.
CHAPTER 19 NOTES
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1. sound this lament. What follows are two allegorical prophecies, one involving lions and the other a vine. Unlike the allegories that have preceded, this pair is cast in poetry because it is a “lament,” qinah, and it follows—loosely, it should be said—the lament meter of three accents in the first verset and two in the second.
the princes of Israel. These are the last kings of Judah, though precise identification of monarchs will become problematic.
2. your mother. After the plural “princes,” the poem switches to the singular, evidently having in mind one particular king.
She crouches among young lions. The fierce lion is a stock figure for monarchs in biblical poetry (as in many other cultures), being linked in the Blessing of Jacob (Genesis 49:9) with the royal tribe of Judah. But this proud image of the royal line will be quickly subverted here.
3. a young lion. It is the translator’s despair that there are five different words for “lion” in biblical Hebrew, and the distinctions among them are unclear. “Young lion” for kefir is the solution of the King James Version, perhaps in part because of this passage, even though elsewhere kefir is indistinguishable in meaning from the four other terms for “lion.”
4. pit. The Hebrew shaḥat everywhere else means “pit,” and so there is not much justification for rendering it here as “net,” which many modern interpreters do. Lions were sometimes trapped in pits, and then a restraining net was cast over them, which seems to be the case in verse 8.
they brought him down in hooks / to the land of Egypt. The one Judahite king who was carried off to Egypt was Jehoahaz son of Josiah and Hamutal. What remains somewhat problematic about this identification is that he reigned only three months before his deportation by Pharaoh Neco, which makes the representation of his ravening power in the previous verse look a bit odd. Perhaps any king once enthroned was imagined to be a fierce lion.
5. she took another of her cubs. At this point, the identification becomes ambiguous: two of Hamutal’s sons reigned successively, Jehoiachin and Zedekiah.
7. harrowed. The Hebrew seems to say “knew.” Many interpreters, medieval and modern, understand it in the sexual sense, meaning “rape” (although, despite its sexual sense, it is not a verb used for rape). Its object in the received text is ʾalmenotaw, “their [literally, its] widows.” All this seems improbable. ʾAlmenotaw has been emended here to ʾarmenotaw, “their bastions.” The verb is understood in the sense in which it is used in Judges 8:16. The verb as it appears in Judges is in a different conjugation, but the Masoretic vocalization here may be mistaken.
9. brought him to the king of Babylonia. This makes Jehoiachin, who was exiled to Babylonia in 597 B.C.E., the most likely candidate for the historical reference.
so that his voice would no more be heard / on the mountains of Israel. This line neatly joins vehicle and tenor: the captured lion will no longer strike terror in the terrain around him; the king of Judah will no longer exercise authority in his land.
10. Your mother was like a vine. The received text seems to say “Your mother like a vine in your blood.” This translation emends bedamkha, “in your blood,” to damta, “was like.” Rashi understands it this way without emendation.
like a vine. As the lion is a traditional image of the king, the vine is a traditional image of the people of Israel.
11. And she had mighty boughs / for the scepters of rulers. The branches of the vine are thick and strong, producing powerful kings.
12. But it was torn from its roots in fury. While the prophetic mode uses verbs that imply a completed action, this is a prediction of the final destruction of the kingdom.
13. the desert. The reference must be to the land of exile.
14. And a fire springs out from her boughs. No explanation is offered for the sudden appearance of fire in the vine, either here or in verse 12. The image may be used automatically because fire is a constant image of destruction, or the historical referent—the destruction of Jerusalem, put to the torch by the invaders—may have seeped into the allegorical image.
1And it happened in the seventh year, in the fifth month, on the tenth of the month, men of the elders of Israel came to inquire of the LORD and sat down before me. 2And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 3“Man, speak to the elders of Israel and say to them, Thus said the Master, the LORD: To inquire of Me do you come? By My life, I will not respond to your inquiry, said the LORD. 4Will you judge them, will you judge, man? Make known to them all the abominations of their fathers. 5And say to them, Thus said the Master, the LORD: On the day I chose Israel, I raised My hand to the seed of the house of Jacob and made Myself known to them in the land of Egypt, saying, I am the LORD your God. 6On that day I raised My hand to them to bring them out of the land of Egypt to a land that I had searched out for them, flowing with milk and honey, a splendor for all the lands. 7And I said to them: Let each man fling away the loathsome things that are before his eyes, and do not be defiled with the foul things of Egypt. I am the LORD your God. 8But they rebelled against Me and did not want to heed Me. Each man did not fling away the loathsome things that were before his eyes, and they did not forsake the foul things of Egypt. And I thought to pour out My wrath upon them, to exhaust My anger against them in the land of Egypt. 9But I acted for the sake of My name, that it not be profaned in the eyes of the nations in whose midst they were, as I had made Myself known before their eyes, to bring them out of the land of Egypt. 10And I brought them out of the land of Egypt and brought them into the wilderness. 11And I gave them My statutes and made My laws known to them, that a man should do them and live through them. 12And My sabbaths, too, I gave to them to be a sign between Me and them, to know that I am the LORD who hallows them. 13And the house of Israel rebelled against me in the wilderness. They did not follow My statutes, and they spurned My laws, that a man should do them and live. And My sabbaths they profaned grievously, and I thought to pour My wrath against them in the wilderness. 14But I acted for the sake of My name, not to profane it in the eyes of the nations before whose eyes I had brought them out. 15And I on My part raised My hand to them in the wilderness not to bring them to the land that I had given, flowing with milk and honey, a splendor to all the lands, 16inasmuch as they spurned My statutes, they had not followed them, and My sabbaths they had profaned, for after the foul things their heart had gone. 17But My eye had pity for them not to destroy them, and I did not make an end of them in the wilderness. 18And I said to their children in the wilderness: Do not follow the statues of your fathers and do not keep their laws and do not be defiled with their foul things. 19I am the LORD your God. Follow My statutes and keep My laws and do them. 20And hallow My sabbaths, that they be a sign between Me and you to know that I am the LORD your God. 21And the sons rebelled against Me, My statutes they did not follow and My laws they did not keep to do them, which a man does and lives through them. My sabbaths they profaned. And I thought to pour out My wrath on them, to exhaust My anger against them in the wilderness. 22But I pulled back My hand and acted for the sake of My name not to profane it in the eyes of the nations before whose eyes I had brought them out. 23I on My part raised My hand to them in the wilderness to disperse them among the nations and to scatter them in the lands. 24Inasmuch as they did not do My laws and they spurned My statutes and they profaned My sabbaths and their eyes went after the foul things of their fathers. 25And I on My part gave them statutes that were not good and laws through which they would not live. 26And I defiled them with their gifts when they passed every womb-breach in sacrifice, so that I might desolate them, so they might know that I am the LORD. 27Therefore speak to the house of Israel, man, and say to them, Thus said the LORD: In this, too, your fathers insulted Me in betraying Me. 28And I brought them to the land that I had raised My hand to give them, and they saw every high hill and every thick-branched tree and offered their sacrifices there and put their vexing offerings there and set their fragrant odors there and poured out their libations there. 29And I said to them, What is the high place to which you come? And its name has been called high place to this day. 30Therefore, say to the house of Israel, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Are you defiled in the way of your fathers, and do you whore after their loathsome things? 31And in bringing up your gifts, in passing your children through the fire you are defiled for all your foul things to this day. And shall I respond to your inquiry, house of Israel? By My life, said the Master, the LORD, I will not respond to you. 32And what occurs to your mind, it shall surely not come about, that you say, ‘We shall be like the nations, like the clans of the lands, to serve wood and stone.’ 33By My life, said the Master, the LORD, with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm and with outpoured wrath, I will surely reign over you. 34And I will bring you out from the peoples and gather you from the lands where you were scattered with a strong hand and with an outstretched hand and with outpoured wrath. 35And I will bring you to the desert of peoples and come to judgment with you there face-to-face. 36As I came to judgment with your fathers in the desert of the land of Egypt, so will I come to judgment with you, said the Master, the LORD. 37And I will make you pass under the rod and bring you into the bonds of the covenant. 38And I will purge from you the rebels and those who trespass against Me. I will bring them out of the land of their sojourning, but to the soil of Israel they shall not come, and you shall know that I am the LORD. 39And you, house of Israel, thus said the Master, the LORD: Each man go, worship his foul things, and afterward, if you do not heed Me… . But My holy name you shall no longer profane with your gifts and with your foul things. 40But on My holy mountain, on the mountain of the height of Israel, there shall all the house of Israel worship Me, all of it in the land. There will I favor them, and there will I require your offerings and your choice donations with all your sacred things. 41By a fragrant odor I will show favor to you when I bring you out from the peoples, and I will gather you from the lands where you were scattered, and I will be hallowed through you before the eyes of the nations. 42And you shall know that I am the LORD when I bring you to the soil of Israel, to the land for which I raised My hand to give it to your fathers. 43And you shall recall there your ways and all your acts through which you were defiled, and you shall be disgusted with yourselves for all your evils that you did. 44And you shall know that I am the LORD when I deal with you for the sake of My name, not according to your evil ways and your ruinous acts, O house of Israel,” said the Master, the LORD.
CHAPTER 20 NOTES
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1. in the seventh year, in the fifth month. As before, the reckoning is from the beginning of the exile of Jehoiachin, so the year is 591 B.C.E. The fifth month is Av, which occurs in midsummer.
came to inquire of the LORD. Though several theories have been proposed about the nature of the oracle they were seeking, there is no clear indication of what it might have been.
3. I will not respond to your inquiry. Given what is presumed to be the reprehensible behavior of the elders, God—or perhaps one should say, His spokesman the prophet—will issue no oracle but instead will castigate them for their misdeeds.
4. all the abominations of their fathers. Ezekiel, himself taken into exile with the Judahite king and nobles and seeing the imminence of a much more comprehensive exile and national disaster, here undertakes an extensive revision of the history of Israel. In his perception, the people’s reprehensible behavior is by no means limited to recent generations but goes all the way back to its origins in Egypt and is indelibly stamped in the national character.
5. I raised My hand. This is the gesture of someone taking a solemn vow (still used in courtrooms in our own society).
6. to a land that I had searched out for them. In this version, the episode of the twelve spies sent by Moses to search out the land is elided in order to emphasize God’s extravagant bountifulness to Israel.
8. Each man did not fling away the loathsome things. The idea that the Hebrews in Egypt were wallowing in the idolatrous practices of their Egyptian enslavers is nowhere hinted in Exodus.
9. But I acted for the sake of My name. This notion that God spared wayward Israel in order not to compromise His reputation among the nations is no more than hinted at in the Wilderness narrative, but Ezekiel gives it special prominence because in his dour view Israel has scarcely any redeeming features that would intrinsically justify its national survival.
12. And My sabbaths, too, I gave to them to be a sign between Me and them. In the late monarchic period and on into the era of exile, there was an increasing emphasis on the centrality of the sabbath, as attested in passages in Jeremiah and Trito-Isaiah as well as in Ezekiel. The portability of the sabbath as a community-affirming observance may have made it especially appealing in a time when the Temple was no longer accessible.
13. And My sabbaths they profaned grievously. In Exodus, it is one man who violates the sabbath, but Ezekiel accuses the whole people of such violation.
18. Do not follow the statues of your fathers … and do not be defiled with their foul things. Given that the Israelites, in Ezekiel’s revision of the national narrative, persisted in their Egyptian idolatry in the wilderness, they had no right to be brought into the land flowing with milk and honey. God nevertheless allows them to survive and come into the land, both for the sake of the divine name and because He chooses to give the next generation an opportunity—which they will reject—to turn away from the misdeeds of their fathers.
22. and acted for the sake of My name not to profane it in the eyes of the nations. As in the long prose prophecy of chapter 18, this prophecy is marked by didactic repetition.
25. And I on My part gave them statutes that were not good. This is a startling theological idea. In part it flows from the general assumption that since God is ultimately responsible for everything that happens, if Israel adopts perverse practices, it is because God has decreed it. A dynamic of punishment, however, is detectable here: if Israel stubbornly clings to pagan abominations, God will compound the guilt of the people by encouraging them to persist in their waywardness.
26. gifts. In this context, the term means “sacrifices,” gifts to a deity.
they passed every womb-breach in sacrifice. The prophets of this era so often inveigh against child sacrifice that one may reasonably infer it was actually widespread. “Womb-breach” is a term borrowed from Exodus as an epithet for the firstborn.
29. What is the high place to which you come? The Hebrew exhibits a derisive false etymology: “high place” is bamah; “what” is mah; the first syllable of “come” is ba. (James Moffatt, with some ingenuity and a little strain, conveys this in English as: “What is this high place you hie to?) The implication of the ad hoc etymology is that the very name bamah reflects the fact that it is something alien, scarcely comprehensible.
31. And shall I respond to your inquiry. This phrase loops back to the beginning of the prophecy (verse 3), suggesting that the elders do not deserve any oracular revelation because they are the representatives of an idolatrous people.
34. And I will bring you out from the peoples … with a strong hand. Momentarily, this sounds like a promise to bring them out from exile, but that illusion is shattered as God goes on to say that the people will be brought out into the desert to be destroyed (and note how “outpoured wrath” is held back until the end of the sentence).
35. the desert of peoples. This is the great Syrian desert to the west of Babylonia and contiguous with several countries.
36. As I came to judgment with your fathers in the desert of the land of Egypt. This is a mysterious reference, and it may be that Ezekiel is caught up here in the rhetorical momentum of his invective, reaching to invoke a historical parallel to the present moment. Egypt in the ancient period didn’t have a desert, and if it is the “desert” at the Sea of Reeds, Israel was saved there, not brought to judgment.
37. And I will make you pass under the rod. This is the notion of the shepherd counting his sheep. But “rod” also suggests punishment.
the bonds. The Hebrew masoret looks as though it were the word for “tradition,” though in its syntactical position that word would have been vocalized as mesoret. Most scholars plausibly conclude that it is an elliptical spelling of maʾasoret, a noun derived from the verb ʾasar, which means “to bind.”
38. I will purge from you the rebels. Ezekiel’s vision is quite implacable: before any return to Zion, the exiles will be taken out into the desert where many of them—implicitly, the majority—will be destroyed.
39. Each man go, worship his foul things. This is obviously sarcastic.
and afterward, if you do not heed Me… . The only way to save the received text is to assume, as several scholars have proposed, that a clause has dropped out that would have stipulated the dire consequences of not heeding God. The words that follow swivel around to imagine an Israel that puts aside the idolatrous ways of its fathers and returns to worship God in the proper place, on Mount Zion.
43. you shall be disgusted with yourselves for all your evils that you did. A psychological manifestation of the people’s true repentance is that it experiences deep revulsion in thinking of its past behavior—a revulsion clearly shaped by the prophet as he castigates Israel for its idolatry.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, set your face to the way of Teman and proclaim to the south, and prophesy to the wooded region of the Negeb. 3And you shall say to the wooded region of the Negeb: hear the word of the LORD. Thus said the Master, the LORD: I am about to light a fire in you, and it shall consume in you every moist tree and every dry tree. The white-hot flame shall not go out, and every face shall be scorched by it from south to north. 4And all flesh shall see that I the LORD kindled it, it shall not go out.” 5And I said, “Woe, O Master, LORD, they say to me, ‘Is he not just reciting parables?’” 6And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 7“Man, set your face to Jerusalem and proclaim concerning the sanctuaries and prophesy concerning the soil of Israel. 8And you shall say concerning the soil of Israel, Thus said the LORD: Here I am against you, and I will take out My sword from its sheath and cut off from you the righteous and the wicked. 9Inasmuch as I have cut off from you the righteous and the wicked, My sword shall come out from its sheath against all flesh from south to north. 10And all flesh shall know that I am the LORD. I have taken out My sword from its sheath, it shall no more turn back. 11And you, man, groan with shuddering loins and bitterly groan before their eyes. 12And should they say to you, ‘Why are you groaning?,’ you shall say, ‘For the tidings that have come.’ And every heart shall quail and all hands go slack and every spirit grow weak and all knees be wet. Look, it has come and has happened, said the Master, the LORD.”
13And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 14“Man, prophesy and say, Thus said the LORD:
and also it is burnished,
15to wreak slaughter it is whetted,
that it gleam it was burnished
[Or we rejoice for the rod, my son, spurning all blood.]
16And it was given to be burnished,
to be grasped in the hand.
For this the sword was whetted
and for this was burnished—
to be put in the hand of a killer.
17Scream and howl, O man,
it was against all Israel’s princes.
Felled by the sword were My people,
so clap upon the thigh.
18[For he probes and what if the rod, too, spurning shall not be?] said the LORD.
19And you, man, prophesy
and strike palm against palm.
Let the sword do double work and triple,
it is a sword for the slain,
a sword for many slain,
driving into them,
20so that the heart faint
and stumbling blocks abound.
At all their gates I set
slaughter by the sword
Ah, it is made to gleam,
burnished for the slaughter.
21Stay whetted! Lay about on the right and the left!
22And I, too, will strike palm against palm
and let My wrath come to rest.”
23And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 24“And you, man, set out for yourself two ways for the coming of the sword of the king of Babylonia from one land. The two of them shall go out, and clear away a space, and the crossroad of the way of the city, clear it. 25Set out a way for the coming of the sword against Rabbah of the Ammonites and against fortified Jerusalem in Judah. For the king of Babylonia has stood at the fork of the road, at the crossroad of the two ways, to perform divination, to shake out arrows, to inquire of the household gods, to inspect the liver. 26On its right lobe, was the omen of Jerusalem, to set up battering rams, to scream murder with full throat, to raise the voice in shouting, to set up battering rams against the gates, to pile up ramps, to build siege-towers. 27And it seemed in their eyes like an empty divination—they had oaths sworn to them, but it was a remembering of guilt for them to be caught. 28Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: Inasmuch as you have remembered your guilt as your trespasses are laid bare, for your offenses to be seen in all your acts, inasmuch as you have been remembered, you shall be caught in a grip. 29And you, profane in wickedness, O prince of Israel, whose day has come at the end-time of the guilt! 30Thus said the Master, the LORD: Take off the turban and lift off the diadem. This is not this—raise up what is low and bring down what is high. 31Ruins, ruins, ruins will I make it. This, too, has not come about, until the coming of him who has the judgment and will grant it to him. 32And you, man, prophesy and say, Thus said the Master, the LORD, to the Ammonites concerning their disgrace, and you shall say, ‘A sword, a sword unsheathed for slaughter, perfectly burnished to gleam, 33when empty visions were seen for you, when false divinations were cast for you concerning the necks of the profane wicked whose day has come at the end-time of guilt.’ 34Put it back in its sheath; in the place where you were created, in the land of your origin I will judge you. 35And I will pour out on you My anger, the fire of My fury I will fan against you and give you into the hand of hotheaded men, craftsmen of destruction. 36You shall be fuel for the fire. Your blood shall be in the land. You shall not be recalled. For I the LORD have spoken.”
CHAPTER 21 NOTES
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2. Teman … the south … Negeb. The Hebrew uses three different words that mean “south.” Although the territory of Judah is to the west of Ezekiel’s location in Babylonia, what this prophetic injunction has in view is a destruction of Judah that will begin from the south and sweep up through the north.
3. the wooded region. It is unclear whether the Negeb once had a wooded region. Some think this may be an area of low shrubs, but the next verse speaks of trees.
The white-hot flame. The joining of two Hebrew synonyms in the construct form (literally, “fire of flame”) is an intensifier.
5. Is he not just reciting parables? The adverb “just” has been added in the translation to bring out the sense of the Hebrew—that the people think the prophet is merely spinning out parables that have no relation to reality.
8. cut off from you the righteous and the wicked. The phrase essentially means “everyone.” It is a severe form of divine justice, in direct contradiction to the exchange between Abraham and God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18.
11. shuddering loins. More literally, “broken loins.”
12. all knees be wet. As above (7:17), the expression derisively indicates people wetting themselves in terror.
14. A sword, a sword is whetted. The sword is often used in biblical language as a metonymy for “military force” or “destructive power.” The special effectiveness of the poetry here is that it builds on this ordinary sense of “sword” but focuses with unusual concreteness on the weapon, unsheathed, whetted, burnished, and gleaming.
15. Or we rejoice for the rod. This entire bracketed sentence is unintelligible, even though each separate word is understandable. In the Hebrew, neither the syntax nor the grammar makes sense. It is hard to believe that Ezekiel could have written this sentence, at least in the form we have, though how these words got into the text is a mystery.
16. to be put in the hand of a killer. The spooky power of these lines is heightened by cloaking the identity of the killer in anonymity, but he is no doubt the fierce Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar.
17. for it was against My people. The “it” is feminine and refers to the sword, a feminine noun.
18. For he probes and what if the rod. This bracketed sentence has the same problems of intelligibility as the one in verse 15 and incorporates some of the same cryptic phrases.
21. Where do you turn? This question reinforces the sense of the sword slashing on every side.
22. let My wrath come to rest. After the sword has done its terrible work, God’s wrath against Israel will be completely spent, setting the stage for restoration.
24. two ways for the coming of the sword of the king of Babylonia. This prose prophecy, following the poetic one, more or less spells out the meaning of the oracle of the sword—here the sword comes together with its wielder, the king of Babylonia, across known geographical space. The two ways are evidently the trajectories to Rabbah of the Ammonites in trans-Jordan and to Jerusalem.
26. to perform divination, to shake out arrows. It was a regular practice in military campaigns in the ancient Near East to seek guidance through an oracle or divinatory devices in order to choose the proper route or strategy. The shaking out of arrows for divination involved writing alternatives—here, those might be “Rabbah” and “Jerusalem” on the shafts of different arrows. Inspecting patterns in animal livers was a very common divinatory procedure.
27. On its right lobe. The Hebrew says only “on its right,” but the clear reference is to the liver.
28. And it seemed in their eyes like an empty divination. The grammatical subject here refers either to Ezekiel’s audience of exiles or to the population in Judah. If it is the latter, they were imagined as somehow having got wind of the Babylonian divination.
they had oaths sworn to them. This is obscure. It might mean that the Judahites were confident in their safety because they thought God had sworn to protect them for all time.
it was a remembering of guilt for them to be caught. Perhaps: their confidence was a trap, involving their guilt or crime, in which they would be caught. The collocation “remembering of guilt” appears in Numbers 5:15 in the passage about the woman suspected of adultery, and the echo may be intended to suggest Israel’s whoring after other gods.
29. you have remembered your guilt. Or, “have called to mind your guilt”—that is, caused it to be remembered.
30. profane in wickedness. The phrase could also mean “corpse of uncleaness,” although that sense seems unlikely.
the end-time of the guilt. The literal order of the Hebrew is “the time of the end of the guilt [or punishment].” The obvious sense is: the time when you will have to pay for the guilt you have incurred.
31. This is not this. The three Hebrew words are a little obscure but probably mean: things as they are will no longer be the same.
32. until the coming of him who has the judgment and will grant it. This is another crabbed formulation, though the most likely reference is to Nebuchadnezzar, who is to be the instrument of divine judgment.
33. the Ammonites. Their capital city, Rabbah, is one of the two targets of the Babylonian assault.
34. when empty visions were seen for you. The Ammonites evidently trusted in false oracles that they would be saved from the Babylonians.
concerning the necks of the profane wicked. The Ammonites believed that the prophecy of destruction pertained only to the Judahites.
35. Put it back in its sheath. Once the ordained project of destruction has been completed, the sword must be sheathed again, for the Babylonian rampage cannot go on indefinitely. On the contrary, while they have served as God’s punishing instrument, they will now have to pay for their own excess of cruelty.
in the land of your origin I will judge you. It is the fate of conquering Babylon to become the victim of its conquerors.
36. hotheaded men. The Hebrew is probably a pun. Bo ʿarim can mean “ignorant” or “crude,” but it also means “burning.” Since fire is prominent in the immediate context, burning or heated temperament is probably the more salient meaning.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“And you, man, you shall surely judge the city of bloodshed and make known to her all her abominations. 3And you shall say, Thus said the Master, the LORD: O city shedding blood in its midst, to cause her time to come, and she makes foul things for herself in defilement. 4In your blood that you shed you are guilty, and in your foul things that you make you are defiled, and you bring your days close and come to the end of your years. Therefore do I make you a disgrace to the nations and a revilement to all the lands. 5Those near and those far shall revile you, O defiled in name, great in disorder. 6Look, the princes of Israel, each with his strong arm, were within you so as to shed blood. 7Father and mother they treated with contempt within you. Toward the sojourner they acted oppressively in your midst. Orphan and widow they wronged within you. 8My holiness you despised and My sabbaths you profaned. 9Slanderers there were within you so as to shed blood, and they ate on the mountains among you. Lewdness they did in your midst. 10A father’s nakedness was laid bare within you. The menstruant’s defilement they took by rape within you. 11And each man did an abomination with his fellow man’s wife, and each defiled his daughter-in-law in lewdness, and each took his sister, his father’s daughter, by rape. 12They took bribes within you, so as to shed blood. Advance interest and accrued interest you took, and you got ill gain from your fellow men through oppression. And Me you have forgotten, said the Master, the LORD. 13And look, I have struck My palm over your ill-gotten gain that you acquired and over your bloodguilt that was in your midst. 14Will your heart stand the test, will your hands be strong, in the days I am about to set against you? I am the LORD. I have spoken and I have done. 15And I will disperse you among the nations and scatter you in the lands, and I will wipe out your defilement from you. 16And you shall be dishonored before the eyes of the nations, and you shall know that I am the LORD.”
17And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 18“Man, the house of Israel has become dross to me. They are all bronze and tin and iron and lead, in a kiln of silver dross they are. 19Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: Inasmuch as they all have become dross, therefore will I gather them into Jerusalem, 20a gathering of silver and bronze and iron and lead and tin into the kiln to fan fire upon it for smelting. So will I gather My anger and My wrath and fan the fire and smelt you. 21And I will gather you in and fan the fire of My fury upon you, and you shall be smelted within it. 22As silver is smelted within a kiln, so shall you be smelted, and you shall know that I, the LORD, have poured out My wrath upon you.”
23And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 24“Man, say to her: You are an unclean land. She was not rain-washed on the day of anger. 25The plot of her prophets is in her midst. Like a roaring lion rending prey they devoured lives; treasure and riches they took, they made her widows many in her midst. 26Her priests outraged My teaching and profaned My sacred things. They did not distinguish between sacred and profane, they did not teach the difference between clean and unclean. They averted their eyes from My sabbaths, and I was profaned in their midst. 27Her nobles in her midst were like wolves rending prey, to shed blood, to destroy lives, so as to take ill-gotten gain. 28And her prophets daubed the walls with plaster, seeing empty visions and divining lies, saying, ‘Thus said the Master, the LORD’ when the LORD had not spoken. 29The people of the land committed oppression and robbed and wronged the poor and the needy and oppressed the sojourner lawlessly. 30And I sought from them a man to mend the fence and stand in the breach before Me for the sake of the land so as not to destroy it, and I found none. 31And I poured out My anger upon them, in the fire of My fury I made an end of them. Their way I paid back on their head,” said the Master, the LORD.
CHAPTER 22 NOTES
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3. in its midst. This phrase (a single word in the Hebrew) and one variant are constantly repeated in this prophecy, emphasizing the idea that the corruption has penetrated to the very heart of the city.
4. you bring your days close and come to the end of your years. The obvious reference is to the time of judgment; but the preposition rendered as “to” here, ʿad, is unusual, and a number of Hebrew manuscripts show instead ʿet, “the time of.” The phrase “the end” does not appear in the Hebrew but is assumed here to be implied.
7. Father and mother … sojourner … Orphan and widow. Although the prophet has begun with the sin of idolatry (“foul things”), he now moves on to violations of the familial order and the perpetration of social injustice. From this he will go on (verses 10–11) to acts of sexual indecency, something that appears to have particularly enraged him.
9. Slanderers … so as to shed blood. Slander is used as a weapon to condemn the innocent to death or to provoke acts of violence against them, either out of simple hatred or in order to seize the property of those whose blood is shed.
they ate on the mountains. As before, the reference is to a pagan ritual meal.
10. The menstruant’s defilement they took by rape. Sex with a menstruating woman is forbidden even when there is mutual consent. Here the prophet assumes that she would not agree to have sex during her period, so she is taken by force, two taboos thus violated in one fell swoop. The same situation pertains to the rape of the sister in the next verse.
11. his father’s daughter. In a polygamous marriage, she might well be only his half sister, but this is still incest.
18. dross. What follows might possibly be an elaborated allusion to Isaiah 1:22, “your silver has turned to dross.” In any case, it exemplifies Ezekiel’s penchant for adopting quasipoetic strategies in his prose prophecies. The metaphor of silver cheapened by dross is extended through verse 21.
19. Inasmuch as they all have become dross. What follows is an image of measure-for-measure justice: the people have debased their intrinsic value, turned silver into dross; now God will take together all this debased metal and burn it away in a fiery kiln.
20. fan the fire and smelt you. Since one of several synonyms for “anger” that are used here, ḥeimah, “wrath,” is derived from a root that means “heat,” the anger jibes nicely with the metaphor of the burning furnace.
21. you shall be smelted within it. As smelting is a process that burns away impurities, the suggestion is that the base elements of the people will be destroyed but a virtuous core will remain.
25. The plot of her prophets. The general meaning of the noun qesher (literally, “knot”) is “plot” or “conspiracy.” There is not much warrant to render it as “gang,” as does the New Jewish Publication Society. The Septuagint, however, reads ʾasher nesiʾeha, “that her princes,” which is attractive because it eliminates the duplication of “prophets” in verse 28 in this catalogue of miscreants.
they made her widows many. This is the obvious consequence of killing the husbands.
26. They did not distinguish between sacred and profane … between clean and unclean. This is the special responsibility of the priests, as Ezekiel, himself a priest, was keenly aware.
28. And her prophets daubed the walls with plaster. This covering up of cracks in the figurative wall of the people is inspired by the elaboration of that image in 13:10ff.
30. a man to mend the fence and stand in the breach. That man would be the authentic prophet, who speaks truth to the people and acts to turn them from their evil ways and thus averts God’s assault on the city through the very breaches that the people have made. Ezekiel, of course, is speaking about Jerusalem while himself prophesying in Babylonia. There is no recognition here of his older contemporary Jeremiah, surely a man who tried to stand in the breach. Ezekiel would have known, or at least heard about, Jeremiah before he himself was exiled in 597 B.C.E.
31. Their way I paid back on their head. The translation follows the contours of the Hebrew idiom (still more literally, “gave on their head”), which implies payback for misdeeds.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying,
2“Two women were there,
daughters of one mother.
3And they played the whore in Egypt, in their youth,
they played the whore there.
and there were their virgin teats fondled.
4And their names were Oholah, the elder, and Oholibah, her sister. And they became Mine and bore sons and daughters, and their names were Samaria, Oholah, and Jerusalem, Oholibah. 5And Oholah played the whore while she was Mine, and she was hot for her lovers, the warriors of Assyria, 6clothed in indigo, satraps and governors, all of them lovely young men, horsemen riding steeds. 7And she gave her whoring to them, the pick of Assyria all of them, and in everything she was hot for, in all their foul things, she was defiled. 8And her whoring from Egypt she did not abandon, for they had lain with her in her youth, and they fondled her virgin teats and spilled their whoring upon her. 9Therefore did I give her into the hand of her lovers, into the hand of the Assyrians for whom she was hot. 10They laid bare her nakedness. Her sons and her daughters they took, and her they slew with the sword. And she became a byword for women, and they exacted punishment upon her. 11And her sister Oholibah saw, and she made her hot lust more ruinous than hers and her whoring more than her sister’s whoring. 12For the Assyrians she was hot, satraps and governors, warriors clothed to perfection, horsemen riding steeds, lovely young men all of them. 13And I saw that she was defiled—a single way for the two of them. 14And she went further with her whoring, and she saw men etched on the wall, images of Chaldeans etched with vermillion, 15girded with belts around their waists, wrapped turbans on their heads, the look of captains all of them had, the image of the sons of Babylonia, Chaldeans, the land of their birth. 16And she was hot for them, for what her eyes saw, and she sent messengers to them in Chaldea. 17And the sons of Babylonia came to her for lovemaking and defiled her with their whoring. And she was defiled by them and disgusted by them. 18And she laid bare her whoring and laid bare her nakedness, and I was disgusted by her as I was disgusted by her sister. 19And she played the whore still more to recall the days of her youth when she played the whore in the land of Egypt. 20And she was hot for their consorts, whose flesh was the flesh of donkeys and whose members were like the members of stallions. 21And you went back to the lewdness of your youth when your teats were fondled by the Egyptians, your youthful breasts squeezed. 22Therefore, Oholibah, thus said the Master, the LORD: I am about to rouse your lovers against you, by whom you were disgusted, and I will bring them against you all around. 23The Babylonians and all the Chaldeans, Pekod and Shoa and Koa, all the Assyrians, those lovely young men, satraps and governors all of them, captains and marshaled fighters, riders of horses all of them. 24And they shall come against you, charger and chariot and wheel in an assembly of troops, buckler and shield and helmet. They shall set about against you all around, and I will set judgment before them, and they shall punish you with their judgments. 25And I will set My jealousy against you, and they shall deal with you in wrath. Your nose and your ears they shall lop off, and those left after you shall fall by the sword. They shall take your sons and your daughters, and those left after you shall be consumed by fire. 26And I will strip off your garments, and they shall take your splendid apparel. 27And I will end your lewdness and your whoring from the land of Egypt, and you shall not lift up your eyes to them, and Egypt shall you no more recall. 28For thus said the Master, the LORD, I am about to give you into the hand of those you hate, into the hand of those by whom you were disgusted. 29And they shall deal with you in hatred and take all your gain and abandon you stark naked, and your whoring nakedness and your lewdness and your whoring shall be laid bare—30the doing of these to you in your whoring after the nations, for your being defiled by their foul things. 31In the way of your sister you went, and I have given her cup in your hand.”
32Thus said the Master, the LORD:
Your sister’s cup you shall drink,
deep and wide.
It shall be a laughingstock and scorn.
Much does it hold.
33With drunkenness and sorrow you are filled,
the cup of devastation and desolation,
your sister’s cup, Samaria.
34And you shall drink it to the dregs,
and its shards you shall grind,
and your breasts you shall cut off.
For I have spoken, said the Master, the LORD.
35Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: “Inasmuch as you forgot Me and flung Me behind your back, even you shall bear your lewdness and your whoring.” 36And the LORD said to me, “Man, will you judge Oholah and Oholibah and tell them their abominations? 37For they committed adultery and there is blood on their hands, and they committed adultery with their foul things, and also their sons whom they bore for Me they gave over to be consumed. 38This besides they did to Me: they defiled My sanctuary on that day and My sabbaths they profaned. 39And they slaughtered their children to their foul things and came into My sanctuary on that day to profane it and, look, so did they do within My house. 40And even more, they sent for men coming from afar, to whom a messenger was sent, and, look, they came to you who bathed, put kohl around your eyes, and decked your self with jewels. 41And you sat on a sumptuous bed with a table set before it, and you put My incense and My oil on it. 42And the sound of a singing throng was in it, and to many men [you sent]. Drink was brought from the desert, and they put bracelets on their arms and splendid diadems on their heads. 43And I said to her worn out from adultery: now let them whore in her whoring. And she—. 44And they came to bed with her as one comes to bed with a whore-woman, so did they come to bed with Oholah and Oholibah, the lewd women. 45And righteous men, they shall judge them by the law of adulteresses and by the law of those who shed blood, for they are adulterers and there is blood on their hands. 46For thus said the Master, the LORD: Bring up against them a crowd and make them a horror and an object of scorn. 47And let the crowd stone them and cut them apart with their swords. Their sons and their daughters let them slay, and let them burn their houses in fire. 48And I will put an end to lewdness in the land, and all the women shall learn a lesson and not do like your lewdness. 49And they shall put your lewdness upon you, and you shall bear the offenses of your foul things. And you shall know that I am the Master, the LORD.”
CHAPTER 23 NOTES
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3. Their breasts were squeezed and there were their virgin teats fondled. As in chapter 16, Ezekiel takes the conventional metaphor of whoring as an image of idolatry (and also of alliances with foreign powers) and pushes it to a level of sexual explicitness as does no other biblical writer. Nowhere else in the Bible does one find this sort of direct reference to fondling breasts in sexual play, and nowhere else does one encounter an evocation of a concupiscent woman allured by the largeness of the male sexual organ (verse 20). There are passages in this prophecy where the allegorical referent of idolatry virtually disappears as the sexual foreground is flaunted. Ezekiel looks distinctly like a man morbidly obsessed with the female body and with female sexuality, exhibiting a horrified fascination with both. The word in the second verset of this line, dad, is represented by some as “nipple,” but on dubious grounds. It is a phonetic cousin of shad, the standard word for “breast.” It occurs only here and in Proverbs 5:19, where it does not seem to mean “nipple” either. In any case, “fondling” (the more general sense of the verb is “knead”) does not work well for nipples, although it is appropriate for breasts.
4. Oholah … Oholibah. No entirely convincing explanation for the choice of these names to designate, respectively, Samaria and Judah, has emerged. Both names have a component that suggests “tent,” ʾohel, and names close to these appear elsewhere in the Bible.
5. while she was Mine. Literally, “beneath Me,” that is, under My authority—a phrase used for adulterous wives. Ezekiel invokes the familiar trope that Israel is wedded to God.
7. all their foul things. In this polemic designation of idols, the referent of the metaphor briefly breaks through the sexual foreground of the figure.
8. her whoring from Egypt she did not abandon. Ezekiel persists in his notion that the Israelites first became idolators in Egypt, and, having become accustomed to the practice, never let go of it.
spilled their whoring upon her. In her case, “whoring” indicates her promiscuous readiness to give herself to all comers. In the case of the lovers, because the noun is the subject of the verb “spill,” there is a clear suggestion that it means “semen.”
10. They laid bare her nakedness. Usually, this idiom is used for incest. Here, it has a literal sense (they stripped her naked as an object of sexual exploitation) and a figurative one (she was utterly without defenses). What is represented by the figure is the destruction of the northern kingdom by Assyria.
12. lovely young men all of them. The warriors are good-looking, muscular young men, inciting the desire of Oholibah. They will, of course, destroy her.
14. she saw men etched on the wall. The peoples of Mesopotamia had a sophisticated art of bas-relief, sometimes outlining the figures in vermillion, as here. Oholibah is at once drawn to the visual art, to the heroic male figures it depicts, and to the pagan culture it embodies.
20. their consorts. Pilagshim, a loanword that elsewhere refers to concubines, here must refer to male lovers, an application encouraged by the fact that the plural ending of the word looks like a masculine plural.
the members. The noun zirmah, which occurs only here, is derived from a verbal stem that means “to flow.” It seems formally analogous to shufkhah, a term for the penis derived from a verb that means “to pour.” In both cases, the use to indicate the male member would be through metonymy. It is possible, however, that zirmah has the sense of the noun (not the verb) “ejaculate.” It is also possible that “flesh” in this verse is a euphemism for “penis.”
22. your lovers … by whom you were disgusted. It now emerges that the promiscuous Oholibah, having given herself to all these lovers, has discovered that they, or at least some of them, are distasteful.
23. Pekod and Shoa and Koa. These are obviously Babylonian ethnic groups, though precise identification, at least for the last two, is uncertain.
25. Your nose and your ears they shall lop off. Such mutilation was actually sometimes practiced against conquered populations, but in the sexual metaphor, the once alluring Oholibah will be hideously disfigured.
28. those you hate … those by whom you were disgusted. The evident idea is that these were foreign lovers with whom she had dalliances and then after the fact was revolted by them.
31. her cup. The cup or chalice of destruction or poison is such a stock image for the prophets that Ezekiel merely has to mention “cup” and the whole idea is evoked. Samaria was destroyed, and now it is the turn of Judah.
32. It shall be a laughingstock. An emendation of the suffix of the verb here would yield “you shall be.”
33. devastation and desolation. The Hebrew wordplay is shamah ushemamah.
34. your breasts you shall cut off. This ghastly self-mutilation follows the lopping off of ears and more above and provides a violent denouement to the breasts fondled by Egyptian lovers.
38. they defiled My sanctuary on that day. Ezekiel seems to have in mind a particular event in which a pagan cult was brought into the Jerusalem temple. A certain day in the reign of Manasseh might be a candidate for the reference.
40. they came to you who bathed, put kohl around your eyes, and decked your self with jewels. While Ezekiel may have in mind Judah’s seeking foreign alliances, the sexual metaphor once more occupies the foreground: like the seductress in Proverbs 7, Jerusalem prepares the bed where she will receive her lovers with rich fabrics, and lays out a feast for their enjoyment. All of this points to burning incense and offering sacrifices to strange gods in the Temple.
42. a singing throng. This translation emends the Masoretic shalew, “tranquil,” to shirim, “songs.”
bracelets on their arms. The suffix for “their” is feminine and hence refers to the women waiting for the foreigners. The Hebrew also veers from the second person to third person, as happens frequently in biblical usage.
43. her worn out from adultery. Through all her promiscuity, she has become a worn-out, faded thing, no longer alluring to men.
And she— This (a single Hebrew word) dangles at the end of the sentence, and it looks as if something has been lost in the text.
47. let the crowd stone them and cut them apart with their swords. Although this is a prophecy of the destruction of the kingdom of Judah, what remains in the foreground at the end is the image of the insatiable adulteress, stoned to death and hacked to pieces.
1And the word of the LORD came to me in the ninth year in the seventh month on the tenth of the month, saying, 2“Man, write you the name of the day, this very day. The king of Babylonia has laid siege against Jerusalem on this very day. 3And speak a parable to the house of rebellion and say to them, Thus said the Master, the LORD:
Put the pot on the fire
and pour water into it, too.
4Gather in it the cuts of meat,
every good cut,
thigh and shoulder,
with choice bones fill it.
5take the choice of the flock.
And burn the wood under it, too,
let it boil away,
and its bones, too, will be cooked within it.
6Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: Woe, city of bloodshed, pot with its filth within it, and its filth has not left it. Empty it cut by cut. No lot has fallen on it. 7For her blood has been within it. On bare rock she put it, she did not spill it on the ground to cover it with dirt. 8To raise up wrath, to wreak vengeance I have put her blood on bare rock so as not to be covered. 9Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: Woe, city of bloodshed. I on My part will make the pyre blaze. 10Pile on the wood, kindle the fire, let the meat be consumed, stir the broth, and let the bones be charred. 11And set it empty over its coals, that it grow hot and its copper heat up and its uncleanness melt within it, its filth be purged, 12but it will not leave it—the abundance of its filth, in the fire is its filth. 13In your lewd uncleanness, inasmuch as I cleansed you but you were not clean of your uncleanness, you shall no longer be clean until I have set My wrath upon you. 14I the LORD have spoken. It has come and I have done it. I will not revoke and will not show pity and will not repent. By your ways and by your acts they have judged you, said the Master, the LORD.”
15And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 16“Man, I am about to take from you by plague what is dear in your eyes, but you shall not lament and you shall not keen and no tear shall you shed. 17Groan silently. Perform no mourning for the dead. Wear your head-cloth, put your sandals on your feet, and do not cover your moustache, and do not eat the bread of other men.” 18And I spoke to the people in the morning, and my wife died in the evening, and the next morning I did as I had been charged. 19And the people said to me, “Will you not tell us what these things that you are doing mean for us?” 20And I said to them, “The word of the LORD came to me, saying, 21Say to the house of Israel, Thus said the Master, the LORD: ‘I am about to profane My sanctuary, the pride of your strength, what is dear in your eyes, what is cherished in your heart, and your sons and your daughters whom you abandoned shall fall by the sword. 22And you shall do as I have done: you shall not cover your moustache nor shall you eat the bread of other men. 23And your head-cloth shall be on your head and your sandals on your feet. You shall not lament and you shall not keen, and you shall rot in your crimes and moan to one another. 24And Ezekiel shall be a portent for you. As all that he did, you shall do when it comes, and you shall know that I am the Master, the LORD. 25And you, man, on the day I take from them their stronghold, the joy of their splendor, what is dear in their eyes, their heart’s longing, their sons and their daughters, 26will not on that day a fugitive come to you to let you hear with your own ears? 27On that day your mouth shall open to the fugitive and you shall no longer be mute, and you shall become a portent for them, and they shall know that I am the LORD.’”
CHAPTER 24 NOTES
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1. in the ninth year in the seventh month. This computes to January 587 B.C.E., which means that the final conquest of Jerusalem is only a year and a half in the future. Ezekiel could well have had word in Babylonia of the expeditionary force sent to take Jerusalem.
2. has laid siege. An unusual verb is used here that has the more common sense of “lean on” or “support.”
3. speak a parable. The fluid sense of the Hebrew mashal is in this instance close to “veiled saying.” That is, an image of uncertain reference is developed through the lines of poetry; then its meaning is spelled out in the prose that follows.
4. Gather in it the cuts of meat, / every good cut. The poetic parable unfolds through a false lead: it seems as though what is being evoked is the preparation of a sumptuous meat meal, but then the explication of the images will turn them into a portent of total destruction.
6. pot with its filth within it. Only now are we told that there is something disgusting in this pot of cooking meat.
No lot has fallen on it. This brief sentence is rather cryptic. Since lots were sometimes used to single out the guilty person in a crowd (see, for example, the story of Achan in Joshua 7), the meaning may be that here no lots were cast because everyone was guilty and everyone would be punished.
7. For her blood has been within it. In this prophecy, Ezekiel targets bloodshed rather than idolatry as the crime for which the city is condemned. Child sacrifice, of course, combines the two.
to cover it with dirt. This violates the injunction to cover spilled blood. Blood splashed on bare rock is painfully conspicuous, as is the crime of Judah in the eyes of the prophet.
10. let the meat be consumed, stir the broth, and let the bones be charred. In the poem, it seemed as if a proper meal were cooking in the pot. Now it emerges that the contents of the pot are to be cooked to death—the meat boiling until there is nothing left, the bones entirely charred. As the next verse spells out, only the destruction of the unclean matter within the pot will cleanse it, which is to say, the defilement of the people of Judah can be eradicated only by fiery annihilation.
12. but it will not leave it. The first Hebrew word of this verse, teʾunim, is unintelligible, and the second word, ḥelʾat, makes no syntactic sense. This translation assumes an erroneous scribal duplication here—teʾunim repeating and expanding the penultimate word of the previous verse, titom, and ḥelʾat repeating the last word of that verse, ḥelʾatah.
13. My wrath. The word for “wrath” suggests “heat,” and thus picks up the image of the burning pot.
14. It has come. “It” is the catastrophe.
16. what is dear in your eyes. It is not at first revealed to Ezekiel that the dear possession to be taken away is his wife. This is the first mention of the marital status of this prophet so morbidly obsessed with female sexuality. One may assume that the loss of his wife by plague is a biographical fact, but it is turned here into a portent of the destiny of the nation.
17. Wear your head-cloth. Going bareheaded was one of the practices of mourning.
do not cover your moustache. This is an odd-sounding gesture of mourning, but it is attested elsewhere (Leviticus 13:45).
do not eat the bread of other men. As in later Jewish practice, it was customary for mourners not to prepare their own food but to be fed by members of their community.
21. I am about to profane My sanctuary. Because God determines all things in this theological perspective, it is He Who decrees that the Babylonians should profane the Temple.
and your sons and your daughters whom you abandoned. What is suggested is that the panicked parents fled the city, leaving their children behind.
24. And Ezekiel shall be a portent for you. At this point, God, as it were, interrupts Ezekiel’s address to the exiles in order to comment on the meaning of the prophet’s acts.
25. their heart’s longing. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “their being’s longing.” (The same is true of “cherished in your heart” in verse 21.) The multipurpose noun nefesh is used here and in verse 21.
26. a fugitive come to you to let you hear with your own ears. Ezekiel has been constantly prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem, but now he will be confronted with an eyewitness account of the actual horror.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, set your face to the Ammonites and prophesy about them. 3And say to the Ammonites, ‘Listen to the word of the Master, the LORD. Thus said the master, the LORD: Inasmuch as you have said hurrah concerning My sanctuary when it was profaned and concerning the soil of Israel when it was desolated and concerning the house of Judah when they went into exile, 4therefore am I about to give you to the Easterners as an inheritance, and they shall set up their encampments within you and place their dwellings within you. They shall eat your fruit and they shall drink your milk. 5And I will turn Rabbah into a camel pasture and the Ammonite towns into a place where sheep bed down, and you shall know that I am the LORD. 6For thus said the Master, the LORD: Inasmuch as you have clapped your hands and stamped your feet and rejoiced in all your utmost spite over the soil of Israel, 7therefore, look, I have stretched out My hand against you and have made you spoil for the nations and have cut you off from among the peoples and made you perish from among the lands. I have destroyed you. And you shall know that I am the LORD.’”
8Thus said the Master, the LORD: “Inasmuch as Moab and Seir have said, ‘Look, the house of Judah is like all the nations,’ 9therefore will I expose the flank of Moab, its towns every one of them, the splendor of the land—Beth-Jeshimoth, Baal-Meon, and Kiriathaim 10to the Easterners, besides the Ammonites, I will give it as an inheritance, that the Ammonites be not recalled among the nations. 11And against Moab will I wreak punishment, and they shall know that I am the LORD.”
12Thus said the Master, the LORD, “Inasmuch as Edom has taken vengeance on the house of Judah and incurred guilt and wreaked vengeance upon them, 13therefore thus said the Master, the LORD: I will stretch out My hand against Edom and cut off from her man and beast and turn her into ruins, from Teman to Dedan they shall fall by the sword. 14And I will set My vengeance against Edom through the hand of My people of Israel, and they shall act against Edom according to My anger and according to My wrath; and they shall know My vengeance, said the Master, the LORD.”
15Thus said the Master, the LORD, “Inasmuch as the Philistines have acted in vengeance and wreaked vengeance in utmost spite as a destroyer, in age-old enmity, 16therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: I am about to stretch out My hand against the Philistines and I will cut off the Cherithites and destroy the remnant of the seacoast. 17And I will wreak great vengeance upon them in punishing wrath, and they shall know that I am the LORD when I exact vengeance from them.”
CHAPTER 25 NOTES
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2. set your face to the Ammonites and prophesy about them. Ezekiel now turns his attention from Israel to the surrounding peoples that have been hostile toward Israel, each now predicted to have its comeuppance. Four different peoples are singled out in this chapter, and the language used is stereotypical, varying only slightly from one prophecy to the next.
3. Listen to the word of the Master, the LORD. One may regard this direct address to the Ammonites as a kind of rhetorical fiction since it is virtually inconceivable that Ezekiel actually will speak to them.
you have said hurrah. The guilt of the Ammonites is in their open expression of schadenfreude at the destruction of Jerusalem. Given the context, it looks as if this sequence of prophecies was pronounced after 586 B.C.E.
4. the Easterners. These are nomadic tribes, chiefly Arab, living in the desert area east of the Jordan. Their nomadic character is indicated in their setting up “encampments,” not towns, in the conquered area of Ammon. The erasure of the urban nature of Ammon is spelled out in the next verse.
7. I have destroyed you. This phrase (a single Hebrew word) looks out of place syntactically and is a superfluous repetition of what immediately precedes.
10. besides the Ammonites. The evident sense is that Moab as well as Ammon will be given to the eastern tribes.
12. Edom has taken vengeance. Unlike the previously mentioned peoples, who gloated over the fall of Judah, Edom actually allied itself with the Babylonians and played an active role in Judah’s destruction. The anger against the Edomite collaboration with the Babylonian invaders is sharply registered in Psalm 137.
13. from Teman to Dedan. Though both are obviously Edomite towns and are mentioned elsewhere, their exact location has not been determined.
15. the Philistines. They were perennial enemies of the Israelites from the period of the Judges onward, a fact noted in the phrase “age-old enmity.”
16. the Cherithites. That is, the Cypriots. According to biblical tradition, the origin of the Philistines, who certainly came from the Greek sphere, was Cyprus.
the remnant of the seacoast. The Philistines, associated with the Sea Peoples who are mentioned in Egyptian sources, arrived via the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century B.C.E. and remained largely confined to a strip of territory close to the seacoast.
1And it happened in the eleventh year on the first of the month, the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, inasmuch as Tyre has said concerning Jerusalem ‘Hurrah! The doors of the peoples are broken. It has come round to me. Let me be filled from the city in ruins.’ 3Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: Here I am against you, Tyre, and I will bring up against you many nations as the sea brings up its waves. 4And they shall ruin the walls of Tyre and destroy her towers, and I will sweep away her earth from her and turn her into bare rock. 5A place for spreading fishnets she shall be within the sea, for I have spoken, said the Master, the LORD, and she shall become spoil for the nations. 6And her daughter-villages that are in the field shall be slain by the sword, and they shall know that I am the LORD. 7For thus said the Master, the LORD: I am about to bring against Tyre Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylonia, from the north, a king of kings, with horses and with chariots and with horsemen and an assembly and many troops. 8Your daughter-villages in the field he shall slay with the sword, and he shall set against you siege-towers and build against you siege-ramps and put up against you shields. 9And his assault catapults he shall set against your walls, and your towers he shall raze to ruins. 10In the rush of his horses he shall cover you with their dust. From the sound of horsemen and wheels and chariots your walls shall shake as he enters your gates as through the entrance of a breached town. 11With his horses’ hooves he shall trample all your streets. Your people he shall slay with the sword, and the pillars of your strength he shall bring down to the ground. 12And they shall loot your wealth and plunder your wares and destroy your walls, and your precious houses they shall raze, and your stones and your timber and your earth they shall plunge into the water. 13And I will bring an end to the murmur of your songs, and the sound of your lyres shall be heard no more. 14And I will turn you into bare rock, a place for spreading fishnets she shall be. She shall not be built again. For I the LORD have spoken, said the Master, the LORD. 15Thus said the Master, the LORD, to Tyre: Why, from the sound of your collapse, in the groaning of the slain, in the killing within you, the coastlands shall shudder. 16And all the princes of the seacoast shall come down from their thrones and take off their robes, and their embroidered garments they shall strip. They shall don shuddering. On the ground they shall sit, and they shall shudder moment by moment and be desolate over her. 17And they shall sound an elegy over you and say to you:
How you have perished, O settled from the seas,
the celebrated city
that was strong in the sea,
she and her dwellers,
who struck with terror
all dwelling in her.
18Now will the coastlands shudder
on the day of your collapse,
and the coastlands that are by the sea
are dismayed by your demise.
19For thus said the Master, the LORD: When I turn you into a city in ruins, like cities that were never settled, when I bring up over you the deep and many waters cover you, 20I will bring you down with the dwellers of the Pit, to the people of yore, with those who go down to the Pit, so that you shall not be settled and you shall not show splendor in the land of the living. 21I will turn you into horror, and you shall be sought and never found again, said the Master, the LORD.”
CHAPTER 26 NOTES
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1. the eleventh year on the first of the month. In the received text, the name of the month is missing. The eleventh year of Ezekiel’s exile brings us to 586 B.C.E., probably after the destruction of Jerusalem (although that would depend on the month), as the cries of schadenfreude noted here would seem to indicate. It could be that the month is the eleventh month, omitted by haplography, which would put this prophecy after the fall of Jerusalem.
2. Let me be filled from the city in ruins. In this dialogue attributed to the Phoenician city of Tyre, the city imagines herself looting the riches of Jerusalem that are left among the ruins.
3. as the sea brings up its waves. The simile is strategically chosen because Tyre is situated on an island.
4. turn her into bare rock. The flourishing island-city, after the invading army has swept over it, is imagined as desolate bare rock in the sea.
6. daughter-villages. The Hebrew banot means both “daughters” and the villages adjacent to a town. This translation adopts the solution of the Jewish Publication Society version by representing both meanings hyphenated. The slaying, of course, works better for “daughters” than for “villages.”
7. a king of kings. This is a title that had currency in Akkadian. As a Hebrew idiom, it has the force of a superlative, “the supreme king.”
8. put up against you shields. The whole sequence of assault here is realistic. First, arrows are shot into the city from the height of siege-towers. Then troops rush up to the top of the walls on the ramps they have built, protecting themselves with serried rows of shields.
11. With his horses’ hooves he shall trample all your streets. This vivid depiction of Nebuchadrezzar’s army swarming through the streets of Tyre and destroying everything in sight was not realized historically. The Babylonian siege of Tyre went on for a very long time—according to Josephus, for thirteen years—but the city was never taken.
12. And they shall loot your wealth and plunder your wares. Ezekiel’s language is nicely calibrated for Tyre. It was a mercantile city par excellence, its ships plying the Mediterranean. An unusual word is chosen for “wares,” rekhulet, a term derived from the more common rokhel, “trader.”
your stones and your timber and your earth. These are all building materials, especially for city walls.
14. I will turn you … She shall not be built again. The weaving between second person and third person is common in biblical usage.
16. all the princes of the seacoast. The Hebrew is literally “princes of the sea,” but the obvious reference is to the kingdoms by the sea or islands just offshore, such as Tyre.
They shall don shuddering. In a shrewd metaphorical move, the Tyrian princes, having shed all their finery, clothe themselves not in garments but in shudders.
On the ground they shall sit. This is a gesture of mourning as well as of dethronement.
17. settled from the seas. The preposition “from” probably indicates that people have come by the sea to settle in Tyre.
19. like cities that were never settled. While the ruins suggest that a city once stood here, the devastation is so complete that it is as if there had never been a settlement in this place.
20. I will bring you down. There is a pointed antithesis between bringing up the deep in the previous clause and bringing down the inhabitants of the city to the netherworld. Though drowning is a set trope for dying in biblical poetry, it is especially relevant to Tyre, an island washed by the waves.
you shall not show splendor. The wording of the Hebrew is a little difficult. It might seem to say, “I will give you (wenatati) splendor,” which does not make much sense. But the verb here could also be an archaic form of the second-person feminine singular, which is how it is understood in this translation, and the “not” of “you shall not be settled” could carry over to this verb that immediately follows.
21. I will turn you into horror, and you shall be sought and never found again. The meaning of “horror” is unpacked in the second clause: Tyre’s extinction will be so absolute an ending that no trace of her will remain.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“And you, man, sound a lament for Tyre. 3And say to Tyre, which sits at the gateways to the sea, trader to peoples, to many coastlands, thus said the Master, the LORD:
Tyre, you said,
‘I am perfect in beauty.’
4In the heart of the seas are your borders.
Your builders perfected your beauty.
5With cypress from Senir they built you—
all your panels.
Cedar from Lebanon they took
6Of oak from Bashan they made your oars,
your planks they made of ivory
inlaid in boxwood from the coastlands of Kittim.
7Embroidered linen from Egypt
were your sails
to be for you a banner.
Indigo and crimson from the isles of Elisha
were your canopy.
8The dwellers of Sidon and Arvad
were rowers for you.
Your skilled men, O Tyre, were within you,
they were your mariners.
9Gebal’s elders and skilled men
were within you repairing the crafts.
All the ships of the sea and their sailors
were within you to traffic in your wares.
10Peras and Lud and Put
were in your forces, your men of war.
Buckler and helmet they hung in you,
it is they who gave your glory.
11Men of Arvad and Helech were within your walls all around, and the Gammarites were on your towers. Their shields they hung on your walls all around, it is they who perfected your beauty. 12Tarshish traded with you. From all the great wealth of silver, tin, and lead, they deposited your goods. 13Javan, Tubal, and Meshech, they traded with you in human beings and copper vessels; they gave your wares. 14From Beth-Targemah, horses and horsemen and mules, they deposited your goods. 15The men of Dedan traded with you, many coastlands were traders under you. Ivory tusks and ebony they gave back as your tribute. 16Aram traded with you and all the things you made in malachite, purple cloth and embroidery and linen and coral and agate they gave for your deposited goods. 17Judah and the land of Israel traded with you in the wheat of Minnith and Paggo, and honey and oil and balm they gave for your wares. 18Damascus traded with you in all the things you made, from all the great wealth of Helbon wine and white wood. 19Vedan and Javan of Uzal for your deposited goods gave forged iron, cassia, and cane. For your wares it was. 20Dedan traded with you in saddle cloths for riding. 21Arabia and all the princes of Kedar were traders under you. Fat sheep and rams and he-goats of theirs were your trade. 22The traders of Sheba and Raamah traded with you in the choicest of all spices and precious stones and gold, they gave for your deposited goods. 23Haran and Canneh and Edom, the traders of Sheba, Assyria, and Cilmad traded with you. 24They traded with you in fine raiment, in indigo robes and bright-colored rugs bound in cords and packed tight among your wares. 25Tarshish ships were in the service of your trade.
And you were full and became greatly ladened
in the heart of the seas.
26Into many waters they brought you,
those rowing for you.
in the heart of the seas.
27Your wealth and your deposited goods, your wares, your sailors, the repairers of your ships and the supervisors of your wares and all your men of war who were within you and all your assembly that was within you shall fall into the heart of the seas on the day of your downfall.
28At the sound of the scream of your mariners
the breakers shall toss.
29And they shall come down from their ships,
all who wield the oar,
sailors, all the sea’s mariners
30And they shall make their voices heard over you
and scream bitterly,
and put dust upon their heads,
in ashes they shall wallow.
31And they shall shave their heads over you
and gird sackcloth
and keen over you most bitterly,
a bitter dirge.
32And their sons shall sound over you a lament
and lament over you:
within the sea?
33When your deposited goods went out from the seas, you sated many peoples with your great wealth, and with your wares you enriched the kings of the earth.
34When you were broken on the seas,
into the waters’ depths your wares
and all your assembly within you fell.
35All the coastland dwellers
were shocked over you,
and their kings were horrified,
and their faces were contorted.
36Traders among the peoples
hissed over you.
You are become a horror,
and you exist no more, forever.”
CHAPTER 27 NOTES
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3. trader to peoples. This epithet announces the central theme of the prophecy. The Phoenicians were famous as a maritime and mercantile people, developing trade routes far to the west in the Mediterranean and establishing colonies as distant as Carthage (present-day Tunisia) and Spain. Ezekiel will evoke the breadth and splendor of this mercantile empire as he forecasts its destruction.
5. Senir. A mountainous region mentioned in the Song of Songs 4:8 as adjacent to Mount Hermon to the north of Israel.
to make masts for you. At this point it becomes clear that the perfected beauty of Tyre is not chiefly in the structures of the city but in its ships, which become a kind of metonymy for the city that sends them far to the west.
6. your planks they made of ivory / inlaid in boxwood. Whether this description reflects the reality of Tyre’s merchant fleet or not, it represents the ships as not merely utilitarian vessels but as extravagantly luxurious constructions (“Your builders perfected your beauty” [verse 4]), with decks inlaid with ivory, sails made of embroidered Egyptian linen, and canopies of regal indigo and crimson cloth to shade the travelers.
7. the isles of Elisha. This may be Cyprus.
8. Your skilled men. The noun ḥakham usually means “wise man,” but it also has a general sense of someone skilled in a craft or trade.
10. Lud and Put. Although some want to identify Lud with Lydia in Asia Minor, both places are probably located in Africa, in proximity to Egypt, in the region of modern Libya. In Ezekiel’s vision, the reach of Tyre extends on the west to the Greek sphere, on the south to North Africa, on the east to Arabia and Mesopotamia.
it is they who gave your glory. The clear sense is that the army of Tyre was manned by mercenaries from these sundry far-off lands.
11. Men of Arvad. One should note that Ezekiel readily slips from poetry—virtually required by the qinah, the lament form—into prose, with no real change in content. This is not a prophet who is entirely comfortable in verse.
Gammarites. The received text shows “Gammadites,” but the known place-name is Gomer (the Hebrew letters for r and d are rather similar in shape, and there are many scribal confusions in the transcription of the two).
it is they who perfected your beauty. In this instance, the perfected beauty is linked not to the ships but to the city walls displaying the highly polished shields (compare Song of Songs 4:4).
12. Tarshish. Though frequently mentioned in the Bible, Tarshish has not been confidently identified, locations as different as Asia Minor, North Africa, and Spain having been proposed. All that is certain is that it is far to the west.
13. Javan. This name, which looks like the two that come after it, appears in the Table of Nations in Genesis, and is a Hebrew transliteration—yawan—of Ion or Ionia.
15. were traders under you. The literal sense is “were trade of your hand.” Since “hand” implies power, responsibility, oversight, it is assumed in this translation that the word suggests superiority in the trade relationship.
16. malachite. As elsewhere in the Bible, the identification of this and other precious stones in this verse is conjectural.
19. cassia, and cane. These are both aromatic substances.
25. Tarshish ships. As elsewhere, this is probably a designation not of ships built in Tarshish but of a particular kind of vessel constructed for long voyages.
26. The east wind broke you. The previous line initially seems to continue the evocation of Tyre’s dominance as a trader city over vast regions. Now, however, in a sudden transition, the prosperous city, emblematized by a ship, is shattered in the heart of the seas by an east wind, which in the Bible generally brings bad things.
28. At the sound of the scream of your mariners / the breakers shall toss. Tyre’s grandeur had been represented in this lament chiefly through the splendor of her sea vessels. Now the ships are shattered, engulfed by waves, and the crewmen terrified.
29. shall stand on the ground. This final verset seems rather flat for the depiction of a disaster at sea, conveying merely a sense of the sailors leaving the ship to stand on dry land. The move may be dictated by the desire to represent the sailors in the next three verses as assuming all the grief-stricken postures of mourning.
31. they shall shave their heads over you. Less familiar than the ashes and sackcloth, this is a gesture of mourning.
32. Who is like Tyre for silence / within the sea? The meaning of kedumah, “for silence,” is somewhat doubtful, but dumah, “silence,” is an epithet for the realm of death.
35. their faces were contorted. Though the Hebrew verb here, deriving from the word for thunder, sometimes suggests “anger,” that does not seem appropriate for this context.
36. Traders among the peoples / hissed over you. This is the final turn in Tyre’s reversal of fortunes. The many peoples of the region had enjoyed multiple trade relations with Tyre and had been willing to assume the role of subordinate partners in trade. Now these very partners in commerce are both shocked by and contemptuous of Tyre (both implied by the hissing).
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, say to the prince of Tyre, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Inasmuch as your heart was haughty and you said, ‘I am a god, enthroned like a god. I have sat in the heart of the seas.’—but you are human and not a god, and you thought your heart like the heart of a god! 3Why, you are wiser than Daniel. In all obscure things none can match you! 4Through your wisdom and through your discernment you have gained wealth, and you have gathered gold and silver in your treasure houses. 5Through all your wisdom in your trading you have made your wealth great, and your heart became haughty through your wealth. 6Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: Inasmuch as you have thought your heart like the heart of a god, 7therefore am I about to bring against you strangers, the fearsome ones of the nations, and they shall unsheathe their swords against the beauty of your wisdom and profane your splendor. 8To the Pit they shall bring you down, and you shall die the deaths of the slain in the heart of the seas. 9Will you really say, ‘I am a god’ before your killer? But you are human and not a god in the hand of him who slays you. 10The death of the uncircumcised you shall die by the hand of strangers, for I have spoken,” said the Master, the LORD.
11And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 12“Man, sound a lament over the king of Tyre and say to him, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Man, you are the sealer of the plan, full of wisdom, perfect in beauty. 13In Eden the garden of God you were. Every precious stone was in your raiment—carnelian, chrysolite, and amethyst, beryl, lapis lazuli, and jasper, sapphire, turquoise, and emerald and gold crafted to beautify you and your groves within you. On the day you were created they were made. 14You were a cherub anointed and sheltering. And I set you on a holy mountain. A god you were. Among stones of fire you walked about. 15Unblemished you were in your ways from the day you were created until wrongdoing was found in you. 16Through all your trading, you were filled with acts of outrage and offended, and I profaned you, not to be on the mountain of God, and made you wander, O sheltering cherub, far from the stones of fire. 17Your heart grew haughty through your beauty. You ruined your wisdom together with your splendor. I flung you to the ground; before kings I set you to be stared at. 18From all your crimes, through the wrongdoing of your trading, you profaned your sanctuaries, and I brought out fire from within you—it consumed you. And I turned you into ashes on the ground before the eyes of all who saw you. 19All who knew you among the peoples were shocked over you.
You are become a horror,
and you exist no more, forever.”
20And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 21“Man, set your face to Sidon and prophesy concerning her. 22And say, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Here I am against you, Sidon, and I will be honored in your midst, and they shall know that I am the LORD when I carry out punishments within her, and I will be hallowed in her. 23And I will send against her pestilence and blood in her streets, and the slain shall fall within her by the sword against her all around, and they shall know that I am the LORD. 24And the house of Israel shall no longer have stinging thistles and painful thorns from all around them who despise them, and they shall know that I am the LORD.”
25Thus said the Master, the LORD: “When I gather in the house of Israel from the peoples where they were scattered, I will be hallowed through them in the eyes of the nations, and they shall dwell on their soil that I gave to My servant Jacob. 26And they shall dwell on it secure and build houses and plant vineyards when I carry out punishments against all who despise them all around them, and they shall know that I am the LORD.”
CHAPTER 28 NOTES
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2. the prince of Tyre. Why Ezekiel should have directed all these prophecies of doom against Tyre is not entirely evident. The Phoenicians had been trading partners of the kingdom of Judah since the time of Solomon, and they were in no way allied with the Babylonians, as were the hated Edomites. The prophet’s objection to Tyre, as emerges in the second part of this verse and in what follows, appears to have been theological rather than political: this prosperous maritime kingdom, enjoying luxurious wealth from its trading activities, had in the prophet’s view committed the primal transgression of imagining that it was godlike.
your heart. Again, one must remember that the heart was thought of as the seat of intellection, which leads to the indictment of Tyre’s pride in its wisdom in the next verse.
3. wiser than Daniel. This is, of course, not the Daniel of the later biblical book but a wise and virtuous figure of Ugaritic—and, presumably, Canaanite—legend. It might be noted that though the Masoretic vocalization asks us to pronounce the name “Daniel,” the consonantal text shows danʾel (without the yod after the nun), which is how the name appears in the Ugaritic.
10. The death of the uncircumcised you shall die. This dire fate must be understood in light of the relatively widespread practice of circumcision among the peoples adjacent to ancient Israel. The act enjoined on Abraham and his descendants was not an innovation; what was new was the meaning imposed on the act. It is noteworthy that of all the surrounding groups, only the Philistines are given the repeated epithet “uncircumcised,” and the Philistines were not a Semitic people, having arrived on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean from the Greek realm in the thirteenth century B.C.E.
13. In Eden the garden of God you were. The prophet here chooses a somewhat surprising rhetorical strategy. In order to represent—hyperbolically—the perfect splendor enjoyed by Sidon, which will now be violently shorn from it, he imagines the king of Sidon living an angelic life in the Garden of Eden.
Every precious stone was in your raiment. The list of precious stones is the same as those on the breastplate of a high priest. In both cases, the precise identification of most of the stones is not possible. There is nothing whatever about bejeweled garments in the Garden story in Genesis—the first two humans walk about naked—so this is either a free elaboration on the part of Ezekiel or the reflection of a different tradition about Eden.
crafted to beautify you and your groves. The meaning of the entire string of phrases is doubtful.
14. You were a cherub anointed and sheltering. The Hebrew phrase is obscure, especially the word here conjecturally translated as “anointed.” In the Garden story, the only cherub mentioned appears at the moment of expulsion, wielding a fiery sword to block the way to Eden.
a holy mountain. There is no reference to a mountain in the Eden of Genesis, but perhaps Ezekiel introduces one here because of the conception of a mountain as the dwelling place of the gods in Syro-Canaanite tradition.
A god you were. This is, of course, an audacious assertion. It probably should be seen as a translation into poetic-mythological hyperbole of Tyre’s notion that it is a god.
Among stones of fire you walked about. Although this is meant to express the godlike invulnerability of the Edenic Sidon, it is still another detail never hinted at in the canonical Garden story. It could be a poetic invention, but one suspects that Ezekiel was tapping a tradition about Eden that has not survived elsewhere.
16. I profaned you, not to be on the mountain of God. “To be” is merely implied in the Hebrew.
17. Your heart grew haughty through your beauty. Just as Ezekiel rages against the seductive allure of the female body, the very presence of beauty—the finely wrought aesthetic objects made possible through Sidon’s wealth—seems to him a snare that catches its possessor in pride and arrogant self-regard.
22. I will be honored in your midst. God is honored, hallowed, by manifesting His overwhelming power to destroy a kingdom intoxicated with its own grandeur.
24. And the house of Israel shall no longer have stinging thistles and painful thorns. Historically, it is not clear how the Phoenicians were such tormentors of Israel, though Ezekiel seems persuaded that this was the case.
1In the tenth year, in the tenth month, on the twelfth of the month, the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, set your face to Pharaoh king of Egypt and prophesy concerning him and concerning all of Egypt. 3Speak and say, Thus said the Master, the LORD:
Here I am against you, Pharaoh,
king of Egypt,
who said, ‘My Nile is mine,
and I made it for myself.’
4I will put the hooks in your jaws
and make the fish of your rivers cling to your scales
and bring you up from your rivers,
and all the fish of your rivers shall cling to your scales.
5And I will abandon you in the desert,
you and all the fish of your rivers.
On the surface of the field you shall fall,
you shall not be gathered nor taken up.
To the beasts of the earth and to the fowl of the heavens
I will give you to be eaten.
6And all the dwellers of Egypt shall know
that I am the LORD
inasmuch as they have been
a reed staff to the house of Israel.
7When they grasp you with the palm, you shatter,
and you crack every shoulder among them.
And when they lean on you, you break,
and you wrench all loins among them.
8Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: I am about to bring the sword against you, and I will cut off from you man and beast. 9And the land of Egypt shall become a desolation and a ruin, and they shall know that I am the LORD, inasmuch as he said, ‘The Nile is mine and I made it.’ 10Therefore, here I am against you and against your Nile and its offshoots, and I will turn the land of Egypt into ruins, desolate parched ground, from Migdol to Seyene and to the border of Nubia. 11No human foot shall pass over it, and no beast’s foot shall pass over it, and it shall be unsettled for forty years. 12And I will make the land of Egypt a desolation among desolate lands, and its ruined cities shall be a desolation for forty years, and I will disperse Egypt among the nations and scatter them among the lands. 13For thus said the Master, the LORD: At the end of forty years I will gather Egypt from the peoples where they were dispersed. 14And I will restore the fortunes of Egypt and bring them back to the land of Patros, to the land of their origins, and they shall be there a lowly kingdom. 15Among the kingdoms she shall be lowly and shall no longer be raised up over the nations, and I will diminish them, that they not hold sway over the nations. 16And they shall no longer be for the house of Israel a place to trust, recalling crime when they turned toward them. And they shall know that I am the Master, the LORD.”
17And it happened in the twenty-seventh year, in the first month, on the first of the month, that the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 18“Man, Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylonia has made his forces labor mightily against Tyre. Every head is bald and every shoulder scraped. But no gain did he and his forces get from all the labor that he spent upon it. 19Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: I am about to give Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylonia the land of Egypt, and he shall carry away her abundance and take her spoil and seize her plunder, and she shall be gain for his forces. 20His wages for which he labored I will give him, the land of Egypt, for what they did to Me, said the Master, the LORD. 21On that day I will make a horn sprout for the house of Israel, and to you I will give freedom to speak in their midst, and they shall know that I am the LORD.”
CHAPTER 29 NOTES
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1. In the tenth year. This would be 587 B.C.E., roughly half a year before the conquest of Jerusalem.
2. Pharaoh king of Egypt. Like Jeremiah, Ezekiel saw a proposed alliance with Egypt against Babylonia as a self-destructive illusion, but Pharaoh, like the king of Tyre, is also excoriated for his overweening idea that he is a god.
3. the great crocodile. Although this same Hebrew word in Genesis and Psalms refers to a mythological sea beast, here it is the crocodile, whose habitat is the Nile, and who also is an emblem for Pharaoh. The “scales” or armor plates of the beast belong to the crocodile.
its rivers. The Hebrew is the plural of yeʾor, an Egyptian loanword designating the Nile. In biblical poetry it often has the general sense of “rivers,” although here the probable reference is to the seven tributaries of the Nile. “Rivers” in the following lines is again the plural of yeʾor.
4. make the fish of your rivers cling to your scales. This is a double disaster: the crocodile (Pharaoh) will be hauled out of the Nile after being caught with hooks, and the fish of the Nile—a vital source of sustenance for the Egyptians—will be hauled out with the crocodile, to die on dry land.
5. And I will abandon you in the desert. This is, of course, a place without water where neither the crocodile nor the fish can survive.
you shall not be gathered nor taken up. The probable reference is to being collected for burial. Not only will the crocodile-Pharaoh perish in the desert, but it will suffer the ignominy of denied burial and becoming food for scavengers.
6. a reed staff. The slender reed will of course break when a person tries to lean on it.
7. When they grasp you. The “you” is the reed, made clear in the Hebrew because it is masculine singular, like the word for “reed.”
you crack every shoulder. When the reed breaks, the shoulder of the person leaning on it as though it were a solid staff is wrenched. This is an image of the illusory trust in any alliance with Egypt.
you wrench all loins. Though the Hebrew haʿamadta looks as though it meant “made stand,” there is a reversal of consonants here (something Rashi already understood), and the meaning is the same as hamʿadta—literally, “cause to stumble.”
10. your Nile and its offshoots. While this is the same plural form for the word for “Nile” that is translated above as “rivers,” the pointed reference to “The Nile is mine” at the end of the previous verse is crucial, so the word “Nile” needs to be repeated. A very literal rendering would be “your Niles,” but of course there is only one Nile.
desolate parched ground. Egypt, watered by the Nile and its tributaries, was famous in the region for its lushness. Now it will become a desert.
from Migdol … to the border of Nubia. Migdol is on the northern border of Egypt, Nubia (Cush in the Hebrew) to its south.
11. unsettled for forty years. The formulaic number forty is invoked.
14. And I will restore the fortunes of Egypt. This amounts to an ironic use of this familiar phrase. When the fortunes of Israel are restored, it is returned in splendid triumph to its land. Egypt will be returned to its land, but only in a pitifully reduced state.
17. in the twenty-seventh year. This would be 571 B.C.E., making this the latest of all the precisely noted dates in Ezekiel.
18. Nebuchadrezzar … has made his forces labor mightily. Much earlier, Ezekiel had predicted the fall of Tyre. The siege had been very protracted (according to Josephus, thirteen years, but perhaps even longer), hence the laboring mightily of the troops.
Every head is bald. Although elsewhere this is translated as “shaven,” here it is not a sign of mourning but an indication that the soldiers are worn (or perhaps simply aged) through the long siege.
19. she shall be gain for his forces. The conquest of Egypt becomes a kind of consolation prize for the Babylonians. Unable to take Tyre, they are compensated—at least they have “gain” for their labors—by the opportunity to plunder Egypt.
20. for what they did to Me. The phrase is cryptic. It could mean “for what the Egyptians did in offending Me”; it could also mean “for what the Babylonians did in acting on My behalf.”
21. make a horn sprout. As throughout biblical literature, the horn—whether bull’s or ram’s horn—is an idiom for “strength.”
to you I will give freedom to speak. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “opening of the mouth.” The idea is that in the restored Israel the prophet will be able to speak without inhibition, and everyone will listen to him.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, prophesy and say, Thus said the Master, the LORD:
Wail ‘woe’ for the day.
3For the day is near and the night is near for the LORD.
A day of cloud, a day of nations it shall be.
4And a sword shall come against Egypt,
and there shall be shuddering in Nubia
when the slain fall in Egypt
and they take off her abundance, and her foundations shall be ruined.
5Nubia and Put and Lud and all the mixed throng
and Cub and the people from the land of the pact,
they shall fall by the sword.
6Thus said the LORD:
The supporters of Egypt shall fall,
and the pride of her strength shall come down.
by the sword they shall fall within her
—said the Master, the LORD.
7And they shall be desolate among desolate lands,
and its towns among ruined towns shall be.
8And they shall know that I am the LORD
when I set fire to Egypt,
and all who help her are broken.
9On that day messengers shall go out before Me in ships to strike secure Nubia with terror, and there shall be shuddering in them on the day of Egypt, for look, it is coming. 10For thus said the Master, the LORD: I will bring an end to the abundance of Egypt by the hand of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylonia. 11He and his troops with him, the fearsome ones of the nations, are to be brought to lay ruin to the land, and they shall unsheathe their swords against Egypt, and they shall fill the land with the slain. 12And I will turn the rivers into dry land and give over the land into the hand of evil men, and I will make the land and its fullness desolate by the hand of strangers. I, the LORD, have spoken. 13Thus said the Master, the LORD: I will destroy the foul things and bring an end to the ungods from Noph, and no prince shall there be from the land of Egypt, and I will set fire to the land of Egypt. 14And I will make Patros desolate and set fire to Zoan, and I will execute punishments in No. 15And I will pour out My wrath upon Sin, the stronghold of Egypt, and cut off the abundance of No. 16And I will set fire to Egypt. Sin shall surely shudder, and No shall be breached, and Noph, the foes by day. 17The young men of Aven and Pi-Beseth shall fall by the sword, and the cities shall go into captivity. 18And in Tahpanhes the day shall go dark when I break there the staffs of Egypt. And the pride of her strength shall end within her. As to her, a cloud shall cover her, and her daughters shall go into captivity. 19And I will execute punishments in Egypt, and they shall know that I am the LORD.”
20And it happened in the eleventh year in the first month on the seventh of the month that the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 21“Man, I have broken the arm of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and, look, it has not been bound up to heal, to put a dressing on it to bind it for strengthening it to grasp a sword. 22Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: Here I am against Pharaoh king of Egypt. I will break his arms, the strong one and the broken one and make the sword drop from his hand. 23And I will disperse Egypt among the nations and scatter them among the lands. 24And I will strengthen the arms of the king of Babylonia and put My sword in his hand, and I will break the arms of Pharaoh, and he shall groan as the slain groan before Me. 25And I will strengthen the arms of the king of Babylonia, but the arms of Pharaoh shall drop. And they shall know that I am the LORD when I put My sword in the hand of the king of Babylonia and he reaches it out against the land of Egypt. 26And I will disperse Egypt among the nations and scatter them among the lands, and they shall know that I am the LORD.”
CHAPTER 30 NOTES
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3. A day of cloud. Given the context of impending catastrophe, this is more than just a cloudy day. The day when God exacts retribution is here (compare verse 18), as in several other prophets, a day when the sky goes ominously dark.
4. shuddering in Nubia / when the slain fall in Egypt. The Hebrew features wordplay: “shuddering” is ḥalḥalah, “the slain” is ḥalal.
5. Nubia and Put and Lud and all the mixed throng / and Cub. These are all neighboring lands (though Cub has not been indentified) that were either allied with Egypt or provided mercenaries to the Egyptians.
the people from the land of the pact. The reference is somewhat obscure, but as part of a list of allies of Egypt, it probably indicates a country that had some sort of military pact with the Egyptians.
6. From Migdol to Seyene. As before, this is from north to south within Egypt.
8. all who help her. As with the “supporters” in verse 6, this is a term often used for those who provide military aid.
9. there shall be shuddering in them on the day of Egypt. This formulation conveys the idea that as retribution comes down on Egypt, it will engulf her neighboring allies as well.
12. I will turn the rivers into dry land. Again, “rivers” is literally “Niles,” meaning the Nile, its tributaries, and its canals.
14. No. This is a city in northern Egypt that at times served as a capital. “No” is a variant of “Noph”: the Hebrew sometimes uses one form and other times the other (e.g., in verse 16 below, as well as in Jeremiah 2:16).
15. the abundance of No. It should be noted that both here and in verses 4 and 10 above, the term hamon, “abundance” or “wealth,” can also mean “crowd.”
16. and Noph, the foes by day. The translation reproduces the obscurity of the Hebrew. Perhaps a preposition (“from,” “by”) was dropped.
18. Tahpanhes. Another prominent Egyptian city; like No, there are variant spellings in the Hebrew. This translation reflects that, sometimes using the spelling Tahpanes (e.g., Jeremiah 2:16).
go dark. The Masoretic Text reads ḥasakh, “hold back,” but many Hebrew manuscripts show the more plausible ḥashakh, “go dark.”
when I break there the staffs of Egypt. The staff is an emblem of sovereignty.
20. the eleventh year. This takes us back to 587 B.C.E. This historical moment, just before the final destruction of Jerusalem, seems to have been a time when Ezekiel was repeatedly moved to pronounce prophecies about the nations.
21. I have broken the arm of Pharaoh. The prophecy is a striking instance of the rhetorical strategy of resuscitating a dead metaphor. Repeatedly, “arm” is a term for “strength” or “power.” That is what it means here, but the literal sense of the word becomes salient: the arm is broken; it has been given no medical attention to heal it; dangling broken, it can no longer grasp a sword; then the other arm is broken, and the damaged one is broken a second time. The devastation of Egypt as a military power in this way is made painfully vivid.
22. make the sword drop from his hand. In keeping with the literalization of the metaphor of the arm, Pharaoh’s broken, pain-wracked arm, incapable of holding a sword, lets it drop from his grip.
24. And I will strengthen the arms of the king of Babylonia and put My sword in his hand. This is the final turn of the metaphor of the arm: while Pharaoh’s broken arms dangle, unable to wield any weapon, God makes Nebuchadnezzar’s arms strong and ready to grasp the sword. “My sword” does not refer to a divine or magical weapon but simply invokes the idea that the Babylonian king is acting on God’s behalf, or at God’s bidding.
26. And I will disperse Egypt among the nations and scatter them among the lands. One again sees the pronounced tendency in Ezekiel’s prose prophecies to deploy formulaic language and frequent repetition.
1And it happened in the eleventh year in the third month, on the first of the month, that the word of the LORD came to me, saying,
2“Man, say to Pharaoh king of Egypt and to his throng:
Whom were you like in your greatness?
3Look, Assyria was a cedar in Lebanon,
lovely in branches, a shady wood,
and lofty in stature,
among the clouds its crest.
4Water made it grow,
led its rivers round where it was planted
and sent out its channels
to all the trees of the field.
5Therefore did its stature grow higher
than all the trees of the field,
its branches grew long
from the many waters in its duct.
6On its boughs nested
all the fowl of the heavens,
and under its branches
all the beasts of the field spawned,
all the many nations.
7And it was lovely in its great size
in the length of its branches,
for its roots were
by many waters.
8Cedars did not match it
in the garden of God.
Cypresses did not equal
its boughs,
and plane trees did not have
the like of its boughs.
No tree in the garden of God
was like it in its beauty.
9Lovely did I make it
in all its boughs,
and all the trees of Eden envied it,
which were in the garden of God.
10Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: Inasmuch as it grew high in stature, and its crest was set among the clouds, and its heart became lofty through its height, 11I will give it into the hand of the fiercest of nations. He shall surely do to it according to its wickedness. I have banished it. 12And strangers, the most fearsome of nations, shall cut it off and abandon it in the mountains and in all the valleys. Its boughs shall fall and its branches shall break in all the watercourses of the earth, and all the peoples of the earth shall come away from its shade and abandon it. 13In the place of its downfall all the fowl of heavens shall dwell, and on its branches all the beasts of the field shall be, 14so that no trees by water be lofty in their stature and they not set their crests among the clouds, and no well-watered trees stand up to them in their height. For they are all given over to death, to the netherworld, in the midst of humans who go down to the Pit. 15Thus said the Master, the LORD: On the day it went down to Sheol, I dried up, covered the deep over it, and held back its rivers, and the many waters were blocked. And I made Lebanon grow dark over it, and all the trees of the forest languished over it. 16With the sound of its downfall I shook nations, when I brought it down to Sheol with those who go down to the Pit, and in the netherworld all the trees of Eden, the choicest and the best of Lebanon, all well-watered, took comfort. 17They, too, went down with it to Sheol, to the slain by the sword, its helpers who had dwelled in its shade in the midst of nations. 18To whom were you like in such glory and grandeur among the trees of Eden? But you were brought down with the trees of Eden to the netherworld. Among the uncircumcised you lie with those slain by the sword. This is about Pharaoh and all his throngs,” said the Master, the LORD.
CHAPTER 31 NOTES
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1. in the eleventh year in the third month. This would be June 587 B.C.E.
3. Look, Assyria was a cedar in Lebanon. Assyria had been the paradigmatic image of the towering, overweening imperial power that was brought down to the dust. The body of this prophecy will focus on the grandeur and downfall of Assyria, but it is all intended to serve as a monitory image of the fate that will now overtake arrogant Egypt.
4. the deep. Although tehom, “the deep,” often refers to the cosmic abyss of waters (as at the beginning of Genesis), here it indicates the groundwater that nurtures the tree.
5. boughs … branches. One might note that Ezekiel uses four different Hebrew words (one borrowed from the Aramaic) for “branches” in the course of this prophecy.
6. in its shade dwelled / all the many nations. The introduction of “many nations” is a clear indication that the towering tree is an image of Assyria’s imperial grandeur.
8. Cedars did not match it / in the garden of God. As in the prophecy concerning Egypt in chapter 28, Ezekiel pushes his hyperbole to the limit by bringing Eden into the picture, saying that even the perfect cedars of God’s garden were not the equal of this grand tree.
10. it grew high. The Masoretic Text reads “you grew high,” and perhaps the switch from second person to third person in this verse was accepted usage for Ezekiel, but it would be confusing in English. The Syriac shows the third person here, but there is no way of knowing whether it used a Hebrew text with the third person or whether the translators were regularizing the Hebrew.
11. I have banished it. This clause (a single word in the Hebrew) looks syntactically disjunct and may reflect a scribal error.
12. its branches shall break in all the watercourses of the earth. Previously, the many watercourses nurtured the tree and caused it to grow high. Now, the broken branches float down the streams, manifestly unable to be sustained in life by the water.
13. on its branches all the beasts of the field shall be. The tree has been shattered and the broken branches lie on the ground. Instead of birds nesting in the living branches, earthbound animals crouch over them.
14. well-watered trees. The Hebrew says literally “water-drinking trees.”
For they are all given over to death. The fact that trees, like human beings, die is an indication that empires, too—the grandest of trees—come to an end.
15. I dried up, covered the deep over it. The wording is a little confusing. Ordinarily, the deep is an inexhaustible source of water. Here, however, the deep is dried up—or, perhaps alternatively, its waters are “blocked”—so that when the great tree of the Assyrian empire descends into the netherworld, the “deep” or abyss that covers it serves to reinforce its withered state.
16. when I brought it down to Sheol … all the trees of Eden … took comfort. The somewhat complicated symbolic plot is as follows: Because trees, like humankind, are mortal, even the trees of Eden have gone down to Sheol. Now, when they see that the great tree of the Assyrian empire, which they were said to have envied, has joined them in the realm of death, they rejoice; the tree that towered over them has now been reduced to their equal.
17. the slain by the sword, its helpers. As is often the case with Ezekiel’s handling of allegorical figures, the referent here obtrudes into the allegorical image: “the slain by the sword” are fallen soldiers, and “helpers” would be Assyria’s military allies or mercenary troops.
18. Among the uncircumcised you lie. See the note on 28:10.
This is about Pharaoh and all his throngs. This notation at the very end of the prophecy betrays a certain awkwardness in the deployment of the allegory. The entire extended image of the towering tree has been a representation of the grandeur of the Assyrian empire. Now, however, the prophet must remind his audience that in fact Pharaoh is like Assyria in his greatness and that the whole prophecy is really about Pharaoh.
1And it happened in the twelfth year, in the twelfth month, on the first of the month, that the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, sound a lament over Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and say to him:
To a lion among nations were you likened,
but you were like a crocodile in the seas
churning through your rivers,
muddying waters with your feet,
trampling their rivers.
3Thus said the Master, the LORD: I will cast over you My net in the assembly of many peoples and bring you up in My toils. 4And I will abandon you on the ground and cast you on the surface of the field. And I will settle upon you all the fowl of the heavens and sate from you the beasts of the earth. 5And I will put your flesh on the mountains and will fill the valleys with your blood. 6And I will water the earth with what floods from you, from your blood on the mountains, and the channels shall fill from you. 7And I will cover the heavens with your going dark, and I will darken their stars. I will cover the sun with cloud, and the noon shall not shine its light. 8All the sources of light in the heavens will I darken upon you. And I will set darkness over your land, said the LORD. 9And I will vex the heart of many peoples when I bring your breaking among the nations, upon nations that you never knew. 10And I will shock many peoples over you, and their kings shall be horrified by you when I let My sword fly over their faces, and they shall tremble constantly, each for his life, on the day of your downfall. 11For thus said the Master, the LORD:
The sword of the king of Babylonia shall come upon you.
12By the swords of warriors will I make your throng fall.
Fearsome among the nations they all are,
and they shall plunder the pride of Egypt,
and all her throng shall be destroyed.
13And I will destroy all their cattle
from alongside many waters,
and no more shall human foot muddy them,
and the hooves of cattle shall not muddy them.
14Then will I sink their waters
and lead their rivers like oil
—said the Master, the LORD.
15When I make the land of Egypt a desolation
and the land and its fullness become desolate,
when I strike down the dwellers there,
they shall know that I am the LORD.
16It is a lament, and the daughters of Egypt lament it,
they shall lament it over Egypt,
and over all their throng they shall lament it.”
—said the Master, the LORD.
17And it happened in the twelfth year, on the fifteenth of the month, the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 18“Man, weep over the throng of Egypt and bring it down, you and the daughters of the nations:
The mighty to the netherworld
with those who go down to the Pit.
19More lovely than who were you? Go down!
and be laid with the uncircumcised.
20Among the slain by the sword they shall fall.
The sword is let loose. They have pulled down her and all her throngs.
21The mightiest warriors speak to him
from Sheol, together with his allies:
The uncircumcised have come down, they lie,
those slain by the sword.
22Assyria is there and all her assembly,
round her all her graves.
All of them are slain,
fallen by the sword,
23whose graves have been put
in the far reaches of the Pit.
And her assembly is round her gravesite,
all of them are slain,
fallen by the sword,
in the land of the living.
24Elam is there and all her throng
round her gravesite.
All of them are slain,
fallen by the sword,
who came down uncircumcised
to the netherworld,
who had sown terror
in the land of the living,
and they bear their disgrace
with those who go down to the Pit.
25Amidst the slain
they made her a place to lie
round her graves.
All of them are uncircumcised,
fallen by the sword.
For they had sown terror
in the land of the living,
and they bear their disgrace
with those who go down to the Pit.
26Meshech and Tubal are there and all their throng
round their graves.
All of them are uncircumcised,
For they had sown terror
in the land of the living.
27And they shall not lie with the warriors,
those fallen of the uncircumcised
who came down to Sheol with their weapons of war
and put their swords beneath their heads,
and their crimes were upon their bones,
for the terror of the warriors was upon the land of the living.
28As for you, in the midst of the uncircumcised you are broken,
and you lie with those slain by the sword.
29Edom is there and all her kings and all her princes, who despite their valor were put with those slain by the sword—they lie with the uncircumcised and with those who go down to the Pit. 30The princes of the north are all of them there and all the Sidonians, who have come down with the slain in their terror, shamed of their valor, and they lie with the uncircumcised, with those slain by the sword, and bear their disgrace with those who go down to the Pit. 31Pharaoh sees them and regrets all her throng. Pharaoh and all his force are slain by the sword, said the Master, the LORD. 32For he had sown terror in the land of the living and was laid down in the midst of the uncircumcised with those slain by the sword—Pharaoh and all her throng”—said the Master, the LORD.
CHAPTER 32 NOTES
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1. in the twelfth year, in the twelfth month. This sets the prophecy in 585 B.C.E., some months after the destruction of the kingdom of Judah.
2. To a lion among nations were you likened. The metaphor of the conquering king as a lion is conventional throughout the Near East and appears frequently in biblical poetry.
but you were like a crocodile in the seas. The crocodile, while perhaps fearsome, has little of the grandeur of the lion and is confined to his aqueous habitat (“the seas” here are the Nile and its tributaries). It can be caught with nets (verse 3), and when it is flung on dry land far from the water (verse 4), it cannot long survive.
5. with your blood. The Masoretic ramutekha is opaque. Some interpreters derive it from r-m-h, a verbal stem that means “to throw,” and so take it to indicate the body of Pharaoh thrown away in open country. Because that interpretation seems strained, this translation follows the Septuagint in reading damkha, “your blood,” which aptly matches “your flesh” in the first half of this sentence.
6. what floods from you. The single Hebrew word here is problematic, and so the translation is conjectural.
7. I will darken their stars. Although apocalyptic darkness is often part of prophecies of God’s day of judgment, the elaboration of engulfing darkness has special resonance here in relation to Pharaoh because it recalls the plague of darkness that descended on Egypt. “I will set darkness over your land” in verse 8 is an especially pointed allusion to Exodus.
10. when I let My sword fly over their faces. The horrendous power of God’s act of destruction is so sweeping that the surrounding peoples fear for their own lives, even though the wrath is not directed at them.
14. lead their rivers like oil. When poured, oil advances in a slow trickle.
16. the daughters of Egypt lament it. As elsewhere in the Bible, women figure as designated keeners crying over deaths.
18. you. This translation reads ʾatah, “you,” instead of the Masoretic ʾotah, “her.”
19. be laid with the uncircumcised. This again appears as a shameful fate. Circumcision was practiced in Egypt’s priestly class, and there may have been a difference between a circumcised elite and uncircumcised masses.
23. who had sown terror. The literal sense of the Hebrew verb here is “had given.” This is not a collocation that occurs elsewhere.
25. with all her throng. The “her” refers to Elam, in Persia, following the common biblical usage in which nations are represented in the feminine singular because of an implied personification of the nation as a woman.
26. Meshech and Tubal. These are peoples of Asia Minor, always paired together in the Bible. The Hebrew text does not have an “and” here and treats the two as a feminine singular, but they are in fact two distinct peoples.
pierced by the sword. There is a slight variation here in this highly repetitious text. In previous instances, the phrase was ḥaleley ḥerev, “slain by the sword,” whereas here a passive verb, meḥuleley, is used instead of the noun.
27. And they shall not lie with the warriors. That is, they shall be denied the dignity of a warrior’s burial.
who came down to Sheol with their weapons of war / and put their swords beneath their heads. This line invokes the widespread practice, abundantly confirmed by archaeology, in the Near East (and, indeed, elsewhere) of burying warriors with their weapons.
28. you are broken. This verb is often used for defeat or catastrophe, but here it probably indicates that the corpse in the grave is damaged or mutilated through violent death.
30. The princes of the north. Although “north” is used freely by the prophets to designate distant enemy powers, the mention here of the Sidonians makes this a reference to the Phoenicians.
31. Pharaoh sees them. Witnessing all these rulers who have descended to the netherworld in disgrace, Pharaoh is compelled to recognize that he shares their dire fate.
all her throng. As in the previous usages here, the feminine “her” refers to the nation, Egypt.
Pharaoh and all his force. This is virtually a formulaic phrase, occurring in a variant form in the destruction of the Egyptian army at the Sea of Reeds in Exodus 15.
32. he had sown terror. The Masoretic Text shows a first-person singular verb, but three ancient versions, more plausibly, have the third person.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, speak to the sons of your people and say to them: When I bring the sword against a land, the people of the land take one man from their best and make him a lookout for them. 3And when he sees the sword coming against the land, he blows the ram’s horn and warns the people. 4And whoever hears the sound of the ram’s horn and does not heed the warning and the sword comes and takes him, his blood is on his own head. 5The sound of the ram’s horn he heard but he did not heed the warning, his blood is upon him. But he who heeds the warning shall save his life. 6And the lookout who sees the sword coming and does not blow the ram’s horn and the people is not warned, and the sword comes and takes lives from them, the person is taken in his crime, but his blood will I demand of the lookout. 7And you, man, I have made you a lookout for the house of Israel, and you shall hear a word from My mouth and warn them from Me. 8When I say to the wicked: Wicked man, you are doomed to die, and you have not spoken to warn the wicked man of his way, he, the wicked man, shall die for his crime, but his blood I will seek out from you. 9And you, when you warn the wicked man of his way to turn back from it, and he does not turn back from it, he shall die for his crime, but you shall save your life. 10And you, man, say to the house of Israel: Thus you have said, saying, ‘Why, our trespasses and our offenses are upon us, and we rot in them, and how shall we survive?’ 11Say to them: By My life, said the Master, the LORD, I do not desire the death of the wicked but rather the turning back of the wicked from his way, that he may live. Turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why should you die, O house of Israel? 12And you, man, say to the sons of your people: The righteousness of the righteous shall not save him on the day of his trespass, and in the wickedness of the wicked he shall not stumble on the day he turns back from his wickedness. And the righteous cannot live by virtue of it on the day of his offense. 13When I say of the righteous, he shall surely live, and he trusts in his righteousness and does wrong, all his righteousness shall not be recalled, and for the wrong that he has done, he shall die. 14And when I say to the wicked, you are doomed to die, and he turns back from his offense and does justice and righteousness, 15if he gives back what is pledged, pays for what is robbed, goes by the statutes of life, not doing wrong, he shall surely live, he shall not die. 16All his offenses that he committed shall not be recalled for him. He has done justice and righteousness—he shall surely live. 17And should the sons of your people say, ‘The way of the Master does not measure up,’ it is they whose way does not measure up. 18When the righteous turns back from his righteousness and does wrong, he shall die for it. 19And when the wicked turns back from his wickedness and does justice and righteousness, for it he shall live. 20And you have said, ‘The way of the Master does not measure up.’ Each man of you will I judge for his ways, O house of Israel.”
21And it happened in the twelfth year of our exile in the eleventh month on the fifth of the month, a fugitive came to me from Jerusalem, saying, “The city has been struck down.” 22And the hand of the LORD was upon me in the evening before the fugitive came, and He opened my mouth, and I was no longer mute. 23And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 24“Man, these dwellers among the ruins on the soil of Israel are saying, ‘Abraham was but one, and he took hold of the land, and we are many. To us has the land been given as an inheritance.’ 25Therefore, say to them, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Over blood you eat, and your eyes you lift up to your foul things, and you shed blood. And shall you take hold of the land? 26You took your stand with your sword. You performed abominations, and each man defiled his fellow man’s wife. And shall you take hold of the land? 27Thus shall you say to them, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Those who are among the ruins shall surely fall by the sword, and those on the surface of the field I will give to the beasts as food, and those in the fortresses and in the caves shall die by pestilence. 28And I will turn the land into a desolation and a devastation, and the pride of its strength shall come to an end, and the mountains of Israel shall be desolate with no passerby. 29And they shall know that I am the LORD when I turn the land into a desolation and a destruction for all their abominations that they did. 30And you, man, the sons of your people who speak to each other about you by the walls and at the entrances of the houses, and one speaks to another, a man to his kinsman, saying, ‘Come, pray, and hear what is the word coming forth from the LORD.’ 31They shall come to you as the people are wont to come, and My people shall sit before you and hear your words, but these they do not do, for in the lust in their mouths they act, after their gain their heart goes. 32And look, you are for them a song of lust, lovely in sound and deftly played. And they hear your words but do not act on them. 33And when it comes—look, it comes—they shall know that a prophet was in their midst.”
CHAPTER 33 NOTES
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2. a lookout. The same metaphor for the role of the prophet is used in 3:17. Although this term could also be rendered as “watchman,” the connotation is clearly military: he is the person posted in a tower or on a height to look out for and warn the people of approaching armies, as the prophet sees and warns of impending disaster.
3. when he sees the sword coming against the land. This passage makes effective use of synecdoche: “the sword” clearly refers to the military force wielding swords, but the concrete image of a destructive sword descending upon the city is palpable.
the ram’s horn. The ram’s horn, with its sharp, penetrating sound, was used both to muster troops and to warn of an attack.
6. the person is taken in his crime, but his blood will I demand of the lookout. The offending person (the Hebrew says merely “he”), not having been warned by the prophet, will be punished by death, but the prophet, because he has failed to fulfill his calling, will bear responsibility for that death, and retribution will be exacted from him. Verse 8 essentially repeats this idea in slightly different language, Ezekiel’s penchant for repetition again in view.
11. I do not desire the death of the wicked. More than any other prophet, Ezekiel is repeatedly concerned with questions of divine justice and penitence. This sentence, for understandable reasons, was later incorporated in the liturgy for the Day of Atonement.
12. And the righteous cannot live by virtue of it. The “it,” though a little distant from its antecedent, refers to “the righteousness of the righteous.”
16. All his offenses that he committed shall not be recalled for him. In Ezekiel’s vision of divine justice, a person lives in a condition of constant existential choice: the wicked man can reverse the dire consequences of all his previous trespasses by deciding to do what is right, and the righteous man can cancel all the good effects of his acts of justice by sliding into acts of wickedness. The next four verses, hewing to Ezekiel’s characteristic style, go on to repeat this idea.
21. a fugitive came to me from Jerusalem. Since the notation of date at the beginning of the verse places this prophecy in 585 B.C.E., this would be a year after the destruction of Jerusalem.
22. And the hand of the LORD was upon me … and He opened my mouth. As elsewhere, Ezekiel represents his prophetic experience as a kind of bodily seizure by God in which he is virtually a passive instrument. One suspects that, more than the other prophets, he underwent extreme ecstatic states. He seems to imply here that prior to the night before the arrival of the fugitive, he had been plunged in a condition of muteness. By his own account, he had certainly prophesied several times in the period before and after the final conquest of the kingdom of Judah. It may be the case that he alternated between times of ecstatic prophecy and times of total silence.
24. these dwellers among the ruins. This phrase suggests that Ezekiel had already heard of the destruction of Jerusalem.
25. Over blood you eat. Consuming blood, or eating “over” blood, is explicitly prohibited (see Leviticus 19:26). There could also be a reference here to some sort of magical rite, as the invocation of idolatry in the next phrase might suggest. But then the end of the verse mentions shedding blood, so the blood forbidden to be eaten perhaps puns on the idea of murder—you eat as you are immersed in bloodshed.
27. among the ruins … on the surface of the field … in the fortresses and in the caves. This constitutes a panorama of where the survivors of the destruction of Jerusalem are to be found: some remain among the ruins of the city; some have fled to the open field; some have taken refuge outside the city in fortresses (whether actual fortresses or simply mountain crags) and caves.
28. a desolation and a devastation. The wordplay in the Hebrew is shemamah umeshamah.
30. by the walls and at the entrances of the houses. This is a realistic picture of people congregating on the streets outside their homes to speak to one another.
one speaks to another, a man to his kinsman. Since both phrases mean the same thing, this is probably one of those instances in which scribal tradition has incorporated in the text two alternate versions of the same phrase.
Come, pray, and hear what is the word coming forth from the LORD. As elsewhere, the people, despite the tension between them and the prophet, are anxious to hear from him what God’s word is, especially at this grim moment when they know that their homeland has been destroyed.
31. as the people are wont to come. Literally, “as the coming of the people.”
the lust in their mouths. While the expression sounds a bit strange (the Septuagint has instead “the lies of their mouth”), it is probably authentic, leading to the reference to “a song of lust” in the next verse. The people are scarcely ready to take in the word of the LORD spoken by the prophet, immersed as they are in concupiscence and greed (“after their gain their heart goes”).
32. you are for them a song of lust, lovely in sound and deftly played. The prophet speaks God’s imperative words, but all his listeners are capable of hearing is the sort of lewd song accompanying their own profligacy to which they are habituated.
33. And when it comes—look, it comes. The meaning “it” invoked is the disaster of which Ezekiel has prophesied—at this dark moment, a disaster compounding the catastrophe of material defeat.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel. Prophesy, and say to them, to the shepherds, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Woe, shepherds of Israel who were shepherding them. Will not the shepherds shepherd the flock? 3You eat the suet and wear the wool, slaughter the fat one. The flock you do not shepherd. 4You did not strengthen the weak ones, and the sick ones you did not heal nor bind up the one with a broken limb nor bring back the one that had wandered nor did seek out the one that was lost. And by force you held sway over them with crushing labor. 5And they scattered without a shepherd and became food for all the beasts of the field [and they were scattered]. 6My flock has strayed through all the mountains and on every high hill, and over the face of the earth has my flock scattered, and none searches and none seeks for them. 7Therefore, listen, O shepherds to the word of the LORD. 8As I live, said the Master, the LORD: My flock has surely become plunder, and My flock has become food for all the beasts of the field without a shepherd, and My shepherds have not sought out My flock, and the shepherds herded themselves, but My flock they did not herd. 9Therefore, O shepherds, listen to the word of the LORD. 10Thus said the Master, the LORD: Here I am against the shepherds, and I will demand My flock from their hand and stop them from herding the flock, and the shepherds shall not herd themselves anymore, and I will save My flock from their mouths, and they shall not be food for them. 11For thus said the Master, the LORD: Here I am, and I will seek out My flock and sort them. 12As a shepherd sorts his herd when there are ones that are separated within his flock, so will I sort My flock and save them from all the places where they were scattered on the day of cloud and gloom. 13And I will bring them out from the peoples and will gather them from the lands and bring them to their soil and herd them on the mountains of Israel by watercourses and in all the places of settlement of the land. 14On good pastures will I herd them, and on the mountains of the height of Israel their fold shall be. There shall they lie down in a good fold and feed in a rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. 15I Myself will herd My flock, and I Myself will bed them down, said the Master, the LORD. 16The lost one will I seek out, and the strayed one will I bring back, and the one with the broken limb will I bind up, and the weak one will I strengthen, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will herd it in justice. 17And you are My flock. Thus said the Master, the LORD: I am about to judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and he-goats. 18Is it not enough for you that you graze in the good pasture, and what is left of your pasture you trample with your feet, and you drink pools of water, and what is left you muddy with your feet? 19And My flock feeds on what your feet have trampled, and what your feet have muddied they drink. 20Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD, to them: Here I am, and I will judge between the fat sheep and the lean, 21inasmuch as you have shoved against flank and shoulder and gored with your horns all the weak ones till you scattered them abroad. 22And I will rescue My flock, and they shall no longer be plundered, and I will judge between sheep and sheep. 23And I will set up over you a single shepherd, and he shall herd them. My servant David, he shall herd them, and he shall be their shepherd. 24And I the LORD will be their God and My servant David a prince in their midst. I the LORD have spoken. 25And I will seal a covenant of peace with them and put an end to vicious beasts in the land, and they will dwell secure in the wilderness and sleep in the forests. 26And I will make them a blessing round My hill, and I will bring down the rain in its season, rains of blessing they shall be. 27And the trees of the field shall yield their fruit, and the land shall yield its produce, and they shall be secure upon their soil, and they shall know that I am the LORD when I break the shafts of their yoke and save them from the hand of their enslavers. 28And they shall no longer be plunder for the nations, and the beasts of the field shall not devour them, and they shall dwell secure with none to make them tremble. 29And I will set up for them an esteemed planting, and they shall no longer be swept away by famine in the land, and they shall no longer suffer the disgrace of the nations. 30And they shall know that I am the LORD your God with them, and they are My people, the house of Israel, said the Master, the LORD. 31And you My flock, the flock of My pasture, you are human beings. I am your God, said the Master, the LORD.”
CHAPTER 34 NOTES
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2. the shepherds of Israel. Since the equation between shepherds and leaders is a fixed trope, the prophet’s audience would immediately know about whom he was talking.
3. You eat the suet. The shepherds prey on their flocks, picking off the best sheep to feed their appetite, instead of looking after them.
4. And by force you held sway over them with crushing labor. As elsewhere, Ezekiel has some difficulty in keeping apart his metaphor and its referent. “Hold sway” and “crushing labor” direct us to the actual exploitation of the people by their leaders and are not phrases appropriate to shepherds and flocks.
5. [and they were scattered]. These words—only one word in the Hebrew—are bracketed because they seem to be an inadvertent scribal repetition of the beginning of the verse. The flock has just been said to be eaten by predators, so they could not now be scattered.
10. I will save My flock from their mouths. Though this expression looks back to the consumption by the shepherds of the choicest sheep mentioned in verse 3, the formulation also suggests that the shepherds themselves have been like the ravening beasts of the field preying on the flocks.
11. sort them. The Hebrew verb refers to the shepherd’s activity of surveying and counting his flock, seeing which sheep may be missing, which injured or ailing and hence needing special attention. This meaning is spelled out in the next verse.
12. the day of cloud and gloom. This is the day Jerusalem was conquered. The scattered flock, then, are the Judahites who either fled the city or were driven into exile. Exile is clearly the more salient sense.
13. watercourses. A reliable source of water is always necessary for the population to prosper.
16. but the fat and the strong I will destroy. This is another instance in which Ezekiel does not quite manage his metaphorical vehicle. These two terms are feminine and so must be part of the flock, tsʾ on, which is a feminine noun. But the reference is clearly to the predatory leaders, so at this point the shepherds have become part of the flock. Their metaphorical identity as belonging to the flock is spelled out in the next verse: “I am about to judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and he-goats.” A partial justification for this confusion is that God is now the shepherd and hence all Israel is the flock, but the switch is nevertheless awkward.
18. pools of water. The literal sense is “sinking of water.”
19. My flock feeds on what your feet have trampled. Previously, the leaders were predatory shepherds devouring the sheep. Now they are greedy sheep, taking all the good grass and water for themselves and leaving scarcely anything fit to eat or drink for the rest of the flock.
21. gored with your horns all the weak ones. Now it emerges that the leaders are not pacific sheep but rather rams and he-goats (see verse 17) that attack the sheep.
23. a single shepherd. Throughout this prophecy, God has been addressing a plurality of leaders—shepherds. In the restored Israel, there will be a single shepherd, a righteous king.
My servant David. This is surely a reference to a legitimate monarch from the line of David. While the actual narrative of David’s rise and reign in the Book of Samuel presents a decidedly mixed record, in the Book of Kings the retrospective references to David represent him as an ideal king, God’s “servant,” and Ezekiel is clearly drawing on that background.
he shall herd them. There is a nice convergence here of metaphor and literal reference because David began as an actual shepherd and then became the leader of his people.
25. they will dwell secure in the wilderness and sleep in the forests. The “peace” of the covenant implies security and tranquillity, so that the people of Israel feel safe even in dangerous places.
26. round My hill. The Masoretic Text has “and round My hill,” but the Septuagint plausibly deletes the “and.” The hill is Mount Zion.
31. And you My flock, the flock of My pasture, you are human beings. Once again, this looks awkward: Ezekiel, as if he were not altogether sure that his audience would understand that the flock all along has been the people of Israel, feels obliged to say at the end of the prophecy that what he is talking about is not sheep but human beings.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, set your face to Mount Seir and prophesy concerning it. 3And say to it, Thus said the Master the LORD:
Here I am against you, Mount Seir,
and I will reach out My hand against you
and turn you into a desolation and a devastation.
4Your towns I will make a ruin,
and you shall be a desolation,
and you shall know that I am the LORD.
5Inasmuch as you harbored age-old enmity and made the Israelites bleed with the sword in the time of their disaster, in the end-time of guilt. 6Therefore, as I live, said the Master, the LORD, I will surely turn you into blood, and blood shall pursue you. In blood did you hate, and blood shall surely pursue you. 7And I will turn Mount Seir into a desolation and a devastation and cut off from it anyone passing through or returning. 8And I will fill its mountains with its slain. Your hills and your valleys and all your watercourses—the slain by the sword shall fall in them.
9An everlasting desolation will I make you,
and none shall dwell in your towns,
and you shall know that I am the LORD.
10Inasmuch as you thought, ‘The two nations and the two lands shall be mine, and we shall take hold of them.’ But the LORD was there. 11Therefore, as I live, said the Master, the LORD: I will act according to your anger and according to your zeal as you acted from your hatred of them, and I will become known through them as I judge you. 12And you shall know that I am the LORD. I have heard all your jibes that you said of the mountains of Israel, saying, ‘A desolation! They have been given to us for food.’ 13And you were arrogant toward Me in your speech, and piled up words against Me. I have heard. 14Thus said the Master, the LORD: When all the earth rejoices, I will turn you into a desolation. 15Like your joy over the estate of the house of Israel for its becoming desolate, so will I do to you. Mount Seir shall be a desolation and all Edom, all of it, and they shall know that I am the LORD.”
CHAPTER 35 NOTES
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2. Mount Seir. This mountainous region in trans-Jordan was the territory of the Edomites.
5. you harbored age-old enmity. Hostile relations between Israel and Edom marked much of the period of the First Commonwealth.
made the Israelites bleed with the sword in the time of their disaster. Edom allied itself with Babylonia and played an eager role in the destruction of Jerusalem, as Psalm 137 vehemently recalls.
in the end-time of guilt. Ezekiel understands Israel’s violation of its covenant with God as the cause of national disaster, so the moment when Jerusalem is destroyed is the end-time when the people are doomed to pay the collective price for the guilt they have incurred.
6. I will surely turn you into blood, and blood shall pursue you. The Hebrew is terrifically compact and the meaning thus not entirely certain. What stands out is the triple insistence on “blood” in this verse. It is a way of emphasizing Edom’s bloodguilt: they shed the blood of Israelites, and now a fate of blood will befall them, bloodthirsty enemies will pursue them. The Hebrew for “blood,” dam, may play on Edom.
In blood did you hate. The Hebrew is literally “Blood did you hate,” and so the translation is somewhat conjectural.
10. The two nations and the two lands. These are Judah and Israel.
11. your hatred of them. That is, your hatred of Judah and Israel.
I will become known through them. This is a recurrent biblical theme: God’s fame is manifested to the nations as He shows His power through the destruction of the enemies of Israel.
12. A desolation! In this instance, the word appears to refer not to a landscape turned to desert but to a landscape emptied of human inhabitants. Thus the Edomites imagine that they will find or extract food on the mountains of Israel.
13. you were arrogant toward Me in your speech. Literally, “You were big against Me with your mouth.”
piled up. This translation takes the unusual verb he ʿetarta to derive from the Aramaic root ʿ-t-r, which indicates abundance or riches.
14. When all the earth rejoices. The probable reference is to the general rejoicing when Israel is restored to its land.
1And you, man, prophesy to the mountains of Israel and say, Mountains of Israel, heed the word of the LORD. 2Thus said the Master, the LORD: “Inasmuch as the enemy said of you, ‘Hurrah! The age-old high places have become an inheritance for us,’ 3therefore, prophesy and say, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Surely inasmuch as to devastate and trample you all round, that you become an inheritance for the remnant of the nations and come up on the tip of the tongue and in the people’s slander, 4therefore, hear the word of the Master, the LORD. Thus said the Master, the LORD, to the mountains and to the hills and to the watercourses and to the valleys and to the desolate ruins and to the deserted towns that had become a scorn and mockery for the remnant of the nations that were all round. 5Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: I have surely spoken in the fire of My zeal concerning the remnant of the nations and concerning all Edom that made My land an inheritance for themselves with the joy of every heart and with spite so as to take its fields in plunder. 6Therefore, prophesy concerning the soil of Israel and speak to the mountains and to the hills and to the watercourses. Thus said the Master, the LORD: Look, in My zeal and in My wrath I have spoken inasmuch as you have borne the disgrace of nations. 7Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: I Myself have raised My hand—the nations that are all round you shall surely bear their disgrace. 8And you, O mountains of Israel, you shall put forth your branches and bear your fruit for My people Israel, for soon shall they come. 9For here I am for you, and I will turn to you, and you shall be tilled and sown. 10And I will multiply humankind upon you, the whole house of Israel, all of it, and the towns shall be settled and the ruins shall be rebuilt. 11And I will multiply upon you man and beast, and they shall multiply and be fruitful, and I will settle you as you were before and do well by you more than in your beginnings, and you shall know that I am the LORD. 12And I will lead humankind upon you, My people, and they shall take hold of you, and you shall become for them an estate, and you no longer shall make them bereaved. 13Thus said the Master, the LORD: Inasmuch as they say of you, ‘You are a man-eater, and a bereaver of your nations you are,’ 14therefore, you shall no longer eat man, and you shall no longer bereave your nations. You no longer shall stumble, said the LORD. 15And I will no longer let the disgrace of the nations be heard against you, and the taunts of the people you shall no longer hear, and you shall no longer make your nations stumble,” said the Master, the LORD.
16And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 17“Man, the house of Israel dwell on their land and defile it through their way and through their acts. Like the defilement of the menstruant has their way been before Me. 18And I poured out My wrath upon them for the blood they shed on the land and for their foul things by which they defiled it. 19And I scattered them among the nations, and they were dispersed among the lands. According to their way and their acts have I judged them. 20And they came to the nations where they came and profaned My holy name when it was said to them, ‘These are the people of the LORD, and from His land they have gone out.’ 21But I had pity for My holy name that the house of Israel had profaned among the nations where they had come. 22Therefore, say to the house of Israel, Thus said the LORD: Not for your sake do I act, house of Israel, but for My holy name that you have profaned among the nations where you have come. 23And I will hallow My great name profaned among the nations that you profaned in their midst, and the nations shall know that I am the LORD, said the Master, the LORD, when I am hallowed through you before their eyes. 24And I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the lands and bring you to your soil. 25And I will cast upon you clean water, and you shall be cleansed of all your defilements, and of all your foul things I will cleanse you. 26And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit will I put within you, and I will take away the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh. 27And My spirit I will put within you, and I will act so that you go by My statutes and keep My laws, and you shall do it. 28And you shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall become My people, and I will be your God. 29And I will rescue you from all your defilements, and I will call forth the grain and make it abundant, and I will not set famine upon you. 30And I will make the fruit of the tree abundant and the yield of the field so that you no longer bear the disgrace of famine among the nations. 31And you shall recall your evil ways and your acts that were not good, and you shall be disgusted by your crimes and by your abominations. 32Not for your sake do I act, said the Master, the LORD. Let it be known to you—be ashamed and remorseful for your ways, O house of Israel.” 33Thus said the Master, the LORD: “On the day I cleanse you of all your crimes and settle the towns, and the ruins are rebuilt, 34and the desolate land is tilled after having been desolate before the eyes of every passerby, 35they shall say, ‘That desolate land has become like the garden of Eden, and the ruined and desolate and ravaged towns are settled, fortified.’ 36And the nations that shall remain all round about you shall know that I the LORD have rebuilt the ravaged towns, I have sown the desolate land. I the LORD have spoken and have done it.” 37Thus said the Master, the LORD: “For this, too, will I be sought out for the house of Israel to do for them—I will multiply humans like sheep. 38Like consecrated sheep, like the sheep of Jerusalem on its festivals, so shall the ruined towns be filled with human sheep, and they shall know that I am the LORD.”
CHAPTER 36 NOTES
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1. prophesy to the mountains of Israel. Ezekiel effects an interesting rhetorical switch here: the prophecy of consolation, instead of being directed to the conquered Judahites, is addressed to the mountains that have been occupied by the conquerors. This becomes a means of focusing the idea of the restoration of the land and its soil.
2. The age-old high places. Given the preceding invocation of mountains, the term here must refer to natural heights, not to hilltop altars.
3. trample. The verb shaʾaf can mean “to pant” or “intensely aspire to,” but it has a homonym that means “to trample” or “to crush,” and that is the more likely sense here.
4. to the desolate ruins and to the deserted towns. The series of places addressed by the prophet moves effectively from the natural landscape to the devastated places where the Judahites once lived.
scorn. The Masoretic Text shows baz, which usually means “plunder.” Either this should be revocalized as buz, “scorn,” or baz may also have the sense of “scorn.”
7. I Myself have raised My hand. As elsewhere, the raising of the hand is a gesture for making a solemn vow.
10. I will multiply humankind upon you. The mountains have been shorn of human population by the devastating conquest. Now they will again abound with people. The verb “multiply” and the term for “humankind,” ʾadam, obliquely recall the Creation story: the national restoration is to be a second Genesis.
11. man and beast. The Hebrew again uses ʾadam, “humankind,” but the translation preserves the proverbial collocation “man and beast.”
and they shall multiply and be fruitful. This is the most explicit echo in this chapter of the beginning of Genesis.
12. you no longer shall make them bereaved. The Judahites through their acts have brought disaster upon the nations and triggered widespread bereavement in the conquest by the Babylonians, but this will no longer be the case.
13. You are a man-eater. This continues the idea of the previous verse: Israel’s evil acts have had murderous consequences for its own population.
your nations. This evidently refers to Judah and Israel. This usage of the term is unique to Ezekiel.
14. You no longer shall stumble. If the first two consonants of the verb are reversed, as a few Hebrew manuscripts show, this would read “You no longer shall make bereaved,” both here and in verse 15.
17. Like the defilement of the menstruant. Although in biblical law the menstruant does impart ritual defilement, it is characteristic of Ezekiel’s troubled relation to the female body that he should invoke menstruation as the paradigmatic instance of defilement.
18. for the blood they shed on the land. This item reflects an associative connection with the menstrual blood.
their foul things. The excremental connotation of this pejorative epithet for idols is activated here because idolatry defiles or pollutes the land.
20. profaned My holy name. The people of Israel are supposed to be in the land God gave them as an inheritance. The mere fact of their exile is a profanation of God’s reputation, for it suggests to the nations that His power has failed.
22. Not for your sake do I act, house of Israel, but for My holy name. This is an odd theological twist, but it has an antecedent in the Wilderness narrative when God is tempted to wipe out Israel and is dissuaded by Moses. God decides to redeem Israel not for any merit in the people but because He does not want His standing in the eyes of the nations to be compromised.
24. your soil. The obvious sense of the Hebrew ʾadamah here and above is “land,” but the prophet, in using this term instead of ʾerets, emphasizes the arable soil that will again be cultivated. Moshe Greenberg makes the same translation choice in his rendering of the first twenty chapters of the book.
25. of all your foul things I will cleanse you. Once more, the suggestion of filth in gilulim, the term used for “idols,” is clearly activated.
26. I will take away the heart of stone from your body. The Hebrew term rendered as “body” is the same word as “flesh” in “heart of flesh” at the end of this verse. Although “flesh” is its more common meaning, it is sometimes used for “body,” and that is the less confusing sense here.
27. And My spirit I will put within you. In Ezekiel’s view, the perversity of the people is such that a kind of spiritual surgery is required: first its heart of stone has to be replaced by a heart of flesh, and then it can be infused with God’s spirit.
30. so that you no longer bear the disgrace of famine among the nations. A suffering nation, stricken with famine and other collective disasters, is viewed with contempt by other nations as a pitiful entity that must somehow be unworthy.
35. settled, fortified. Fortification is the emblem of a secure city.
37. will I be sought out. The passive form of this verb suggests that the people seek God and, now favorably disposed, He allows Himself to be found.
38. Like consecrated sheep, like the sheep of Jerusalem on its festivals. The reference is to sheep brought to be sacrificed in the Temple. At least according to the hyperbolic account in Kings, which Ezekiel probably knew, thousands upon thousands of sacrificial animals were brought to Jerusalem on the occasion of the festivals. The simile is not entirely apt because, even though it conveys the idea of a very large number, the sheep were destined to be slaughtered, which is hardly what the prophet means to suggest about the people.
1The hand of the LORD was upon me, and He took me out by the wind of the LORD and set me down in the valley, and it was filled with bones. 2And He made me pass by them all around, and, look, they were very many on the surface of the valley, and, look, they were very dry. 3And He said to me, “Man, can these bones live?” And I said, “O Master, LORD, it is You Who knows.” 4And He said, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘O dry bones, listen to the word of the LORD. 5Thus said the Master, the LORD, to the dry bones: I am about to bring breath into you and you shall live. 6And I will lay sinews over you and bring up flesh over you and stretch over you skin. And I will put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the LORD.’” 7And I prophesied as I was charged, and there was a sound as I prophesied and, look, a clatter, and the bones came together, one bone to another. 8And I saw, and, look, upon them were sinews, and flesh came up, and skin stretched out over them from above, but there was no breath in them. 9And He said to me: “Prophesy to the wind, prophesy, man, and say to the wind, ‘Thus said the Master, the LORD: From the four winds, come, wind, and blow into these slain that they may live.’” 10And I prophesied as He had charged me, and the breath came into them and they lived, and they stood up on their feet, a very very great legion. 11And He said to me, “Man, these bones are all the house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dry and our hope is lost. We have been cut off.’ 12Therefore prophesy and say to them, Thus said the Master, the LORD: I am about to open your graves, and I will bring you up, My people, from your graves and bring you to Israel’s soil. 13And you shall know that I am the LORD when I open your graves and when I bring you up from your graves, My people. 14And I will put My breath in you, and you shall live, and I will set you on your soil, and you shall know that I the LORD have spoken and have done it,” said the LORD.
15And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 16“And you, man, take you one stick and write upon it ‘For Judah and for Israel joined to him,’ and take another stick and write on it ‘For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and for the Israelites and all the house of Israel, joined to him.’ 17And put them together each to each as a single stick for you, and they shall be one in your hand. 18And when the sons of your people say to you, saying, ‘Will you not tell us, what are these to you?,’ 19speak to them, Thus said the Master, the LORD: I am about to take the stick of Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and those joined with him, the tribes of Israel, and I will set upon it the stick of Judah and make them a single stick, and they shall be one stick in My hand. 20And the sticks upon which you shall write shall be in your hand before their eyes, 21and speak to them, Thus said the Master, the LORD: I am about to take the Israelites from among the nations where they have gone, and I will gather them from all around and bring them to their soil. 22And I will make them a single nation in the land on the mountains of Israel, and a single king shall be their king, and they no more shall be two nations, and no more shall they be divided into two kingdoms. 23And they shall no more be defiled by their foul things and by their vile things and by all their trespasses. And I will rescue them in all the places of their habitation where they offended, and I will cleanse them, and they shall be My people, and I will be their God. 24And My servant David shall be king over them, and they shall all have a single shepherd. And by My laws they shall go, and My statutes they shall keep and do them. 25And they shall dwell in the land that I gave to My servant Jacob, where your fathers dwelled, and they shall dwell in it, they and their children and their children’s children evermore, and My servant David shall be prince over them evermore. 26And I will seal with them a covenant of peace, an everlasting covenant shall there be with them, and I will set them [as a blessing] and multiply them, and I will set My sanctuary in their midst evermore. 27And My dwelling place shall be over them, and I will be their God and they shall be My people. 28And the nations shall know that I am the LORD hallowing Israel when My sanctuary is in their midst evermore.”
CHAPTER 37 NOTES
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1. He took me out by the wind of the LORD. Throughout this prophecy, Ezekiel plays on the different senses of ruaḥ, which can mean “spirit,” “wind,” and “breath.” While many translators render the term here as “spirit,” the sense of “wind” fits much better with Ezekiel’s repeated pattern of being borne off physically by a palpable divine force. Compare 11:24, where it is precisely a wind that carries him to the place of revelation.
2. and, look, they were very dry. The remains of these dead are at a very great remove from life: they are not corpses but disarticulated bones and very dry, suggesting that the deaths occurred much earlier. This is an obvious way of amplifying the miraculous restoration to life.
3. Man, can these bones live? This prophecy is probably the most famous one in Ezekiel. Early Jewish and Christian interpreters took it as a prophecy of the resurrection of the dead, but it is quite doubtful that this is what Ezekiel meant. The scattered dry bones of the long dead are a symbolic image of the people of Israel in exile, its national existence violently ended by the conquest and destruction of the kingdom of Judah. The miraculous return to life of the bones figures the restoration of national existence in the homeland.
4. Prophesy to these bones. The startling extremeness of the prophecy of the bones is dramatically evident in the command to the prophet to address, as surely no prophet in the real world ever did, a message to dry bones.
5. breath. Here ruaḥ has to mean “breath,” not “wind” or “spirit.”
7. and the bones came together, one bone to another. This weird self-assembling of the disarticulated bones became the basis for the language of the famous Negro spiritual about this prophecy.
9. From the four winds, come, wind. The initial “winds” here has still another meaning: the four directions, or the four corners of the earth. In Genesis, God blows the breath of life into the inert clay of the first human. Here it is the four winds that perform this act of vivification, giving it a global scope that jibes with the implied idea that the exiles have been scattered to the four corners of the earth.
slain. Now we learn that these dead have met a violent end.
10. legion. The Hebrew ḥayil usually means “military force” (hence the King James Version’s “army”). Here it probably indicates the great number of the revived, but to translate it “multitude,” as some modern versions do, erases the martial connotation, that this vast number of the conquered dead has become a large army. “Legion” in English actually has both meanings.
12. I am about to open your graves. Ezekiel appears to have forgotten that the bones are scattered on the surface of the valley. Now the dead have been buried and will rise from their graves.
16. take you one stick. The Hebrew ʿets means “tree,” “wood,” or “stick.” Some modern interpreters see these as wooden tablets because we know that such tablets were sometimes used to write on. However, the joining together of the two to make one works better for sticks than for tablets, and in Numbers writing is inscribed on staffs, something close to sticks.
Judah … Joseph. These indicate the southern and northern kingdoms, sundered after the death of Solomon.
18. Will you not tell us, what are these to you? Unlike the visionary-allegorical prophecy of the dry bones, this is a rather traditional, and didactic, symbolic-prophetic show-and-tell. Its meaning is fairly apparent even before Ezekiel goes on to explain it.
22. I will make them a single nation. This is a utopian prophecy because by Ezekiel’s time there was no real trace of the northern kingdom, destroyed a century and a half earlier by the Assyrians.
on the mountains of Israel. Ezekiel, originating in Jerusalem, repeatedly imagines a mountainous landscape for his homeland, though in fact it extended to valleys and lowlands.
23. in all the places of their habitation. Many manuscripts show instead of the Masoretic moshvoteyhem, “their habitations,” meshuvoteyhem, “their rebelliousness.”
24. And My servant David shall be king over them. The reference is not to some sort of reincarnation of David but to a legitimate heir to the Davidic dynasty who embodies the ideal qualities attributed to him in the Book of Kings.
26. I will set them [as a blessing]. The received text has only “I will set them,” but it looks as if a predicate or adverbial qualifier such as the one supplied in brackets has dropped out of the text.
27. My dwelling place. This is a synonym for “sanctuary” in the preceding verse, and both terms refer to the Temple, which, restored, is to manifest God’s greatness in the world.
1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“Man, set your face to Gog in the land of Magog, supreme prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy about him. 3And say, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Here I am against you, Gog, supreme prince of Meshech and Tubal. 4I will lead you and put hooks in your jaws, and I will bring you out and all your force out, horses and riders, all of them clothed to perfection, a great assembly, with buckler and shield, all of them wielding swords. 5Persia, Nubia, and Put with them, all with shields and helmets. 6Gomer and all its divisions, Beth-Torgemah from the far reaches of the north with all its divisions, many peoples are with you. 7Be ready, and ready yourself and all your assembly gathering round you, and become their guard. 8After many days you shall be mustered, at the end of years you shall come to a land brought back from the sword, and gathered in from many peoples on the mountains of Israel that had become a perpetual ruin, and it was brought out from the peoples, and they all dwell secure. 9And you shall come up like a storm, like a cloud, to cover the land you shall be, and all your divisions and the many peoples with you. 10Thus said the Master, the LORD: On that day things shall come to mind for you, and you shall conceive a plan of evil. 11And you shall say: I will go up against a land of unfortified towns, I will come upon the tranquil folk dwelling secure, all of them dwelling without walls, neither bolt nor double doors do they have, 12to plunder and to loot, to put your hand against resettled ruins and against a people gathered from the nations, abounding in herds and possessions, dwelling in the heartland. 13Sheba and Dedan and the traders of Tarshish and all its leaders shall say to you, ‘Have you come to loot, have you assembled your throng to bear off silver and gold, to take herds and possessions, to plunder a great plunder?’ 14Therefore, prophesy, man, and say to Gog, Thus said the Master, the LORD: On that day, when My people Israel dwells secure, shall you not know? 15And you shall come from your place, from the far reaches of the north, you and the many peoples with you, all of them riding horses, a great assembly and a vast force. 16And you shall come up against My people Israel; like a cloud to cover the land, in the days afterward, you shall be. And I will bring you against My land so that the nations may know Me as I am hallowed through you, O Gog.” 17Thus said the Master, the LORD: “Are you the one of whom I spoke in former days through My servants, the prophets of Israel who were prophesying in those days for years, to bring you upon them? 18And it shall happen on that day when Gog comes against the soil of Israel, said the Master, the LORD, My wrath shall mount in My nostrils. 19And in My zeal, in the fire of My fury I have spoken: surely on that day there shall be a great earthquake on the soil of Israel. 20And the fish in the sea and the fowl in the heavens shall quake before Me, and the beasts of the field and every crawling thing that crawls on the earth, and every human who is on the face of the earth, and the mountains shall be destroyed and the cliffs shall fall, and every wall shall fall to the ground. 21And I will call forth the sword against him in all My mountains, said the Master, the LORD. Each man’s sword shall be against his brother. 22And I will wreak punishment upon him through pestilence and through blood and through pelting rain and hailstones; sulfurous fire will I rain down on him and on his divisions and on the many peoples that are with him. 23And I will be magnified and hallowed, and I will become known before the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am the LORD.”
CHAPTER 38 NOTES
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2. Gog in the land of Magog. The Hebrew syntax could also be construed as “Gog of the land of Magog.” Both names, which look quite foreign in the Hebrew, are mystifying and as such have encouraged the mythological readings of this prophecy prevalent in both Christian and Jewish tradition. Gog is sometimes linked by scholars with a King Gugu of Lydia in Asia Minor. Ezekiel does not appear to be referring to a historical figure—in contrast, for example, to Second Isaiah’s references to Cyrus—and may have embraced the name for its sheer strangeness. What is important is that Gog comes from the far north, the direction from which destruction traditionally descends upon Israel, as is repeatedly evident in Jeremiah.
supreme prince. The literal sense is “prince of the chief,” but when two synonyms are joined in a construct form, the effect is to indicate a superlative.
Meshech and Tubal. This kingdom, mentioned previously by Ezekiel, is in Asia Minor.
3. Here I am against you. Although Gog is sent by God on a mission of conquest, he is yanked along with hooks in his jaws and will come to a bad end.
5. Persia, Nubia, and Put. This suggests a vast array of mercenaries assembled by Gog from Persia in the east down to Nubia and Put south of Egypt.
7. assembly. This general term is repeatedly used by Ezekiel in a military sense.
8. a land brought back from the sword. The population of Judah, driven off by the sword, has now been brought back to its land.
9. And you shall come up like a storm. One of the peculiar features of this strange prophecy is that the people of Israel, after having been restored from bitter exile to their land, are to be subjected to still another horrendous assault.
11. a land of unfortified towns. The Judahites returned from exile are so confident of their safety that they leave their towns unfortified, with no walls and “neither bolt nor double doors.”
11–12. I will come upon the tranquil folk … to put your hand against resettled ruins. The switch here from first person (Gog speaking) to second person (Gog addressed) is fairly common in biblical usage.
12. the heartland. The Hebrew phrase tabur haʾarets occurs only here and in Judges 9:37. The Septuagint understood the obscure tabur to mean “navel,” and in that sense it was ensconced in later Hebrew.
13. its leaders. The literal sense is “its lions,” leaving a margin of doubt about the meaning. The translation follows an interpretive tradition going back to Late Antiquity, which essentially takes this as a metaphor for “leaders.”
14. shall you not know? As what follows makes clear, you will come to know the power of the God of Israel.
16. as I am hallowed through you, O Gog. It is Gog’s defeat, despite the overwhelming might of all his forces, that is to hallow God by making manifest God’s power.
17. Are you the one of whom I spoke. No actual mention of Gog appears in any of the earlier prophets, but he is represented here as the realization of the sundry vague prophecies of a dire enemy descending on Israel from the distant north.
18. My wrath shall mount in My nostrils. The second term here, ʾaf, is a synonym for “wrath” because smoke or fire is imagined to be exhaled from the nostrils of the infuriated deity. Here, the idiom is returned to its physical base, and God is imagined breathing fire (fire is mentioned at the beginning of the next verse).
20. the fish in the sea and the fowl in the heavens … the beasts of the field and every crawling thing. These terms all recall the Creation story in Genesis 1. It is as though the earthquake that will shake the whole land of Israel will be so cataclysmic that the work of creation itself will be undone. Such language strongly encouraged the apocalyptic reading of this prophecy, linking Gog with the cosmic upheavals of the end of days.
21. And I will call forth the sword against him. It had seemed as though the cataclysm was directed against Israel, but now it emerges that Gog and his vast army will be panicked and destroyed.
22. sulfurous fire. The literal sense is “fire and sulfur,” but this is most likely a hendiadys. In any case, Gog’s army is devastated both by fierce natural forces and by violent internal divisions. (Compare verse 21, “Each man’s sword shall be against his brother.”)
23. I will be magnified and hallowed. The two Hebrew words here, wehitgadalti wehitqadshti, expressing God’s glorification through the sweeping defeat of Gog’s army, are picked up as the first two words of the Kaddish, which is a prayer for the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth.
1And you, man, prophesy concerning Gog and say, “Thus said the Master, the LORD: Here I am against you, Gog, supreme prince of Meshech and Tubal. 2I will lead you and take you along and bring you up from the far reaches of the north and bring you to the mountains of Israel. 3And I will strike your bow from your left hand and will make your arrows drop from your right hand. 4On the mountains of Israel you shall fall, and all your divisions and the people that are with you. I will make you food for carrion birds, every winged thing, and for beasts of the field. 5On the surface of the field you shall fall, for I have spoken, said the Master, the LORD. 6And I will send fire against Magog and against those who dwell secure in the coastlands, and they shall know that I am the LORD. 7And My holy name I will make known in the midst of My people Israel, and I will no longer let My holy name be profaned, and the nations shall know that I am the LORD, the Holy One in Israel. 8Look, it has come and now it is, said the Master, the LORD, it is the day of which I spoke. 9And the dwellers of Israel’s towns shall go out and light fires with the weapons, the bucklers and shields, with the bows and with the arrows and with the clubs and with the spears, and they shall light fires with them for seven years. 10And they shall not carry off wood from the field nor cut down trees from the forests, for with weapons they shall light fires. And they shall plunder their plunderers and loot their looters, said the Master, the LORD. 11And it shall happen on that day that I will give Gog a burial place there in Israel, in the Valley of Those Who Pass Through, east of the sea, and it blocks those who pass through. And they shall bury Gog there with all his throng and call it the Valley of the Throng of Gog. 12And the house of Israel shall bury them so as to cleanse the land, for seven months. 13And all the people of the land shall do the burying, and the day I am granted glory shall be a famous thing for them, said the Master, the LORD. 14And perpetually appointed men shall separate those who pass through the land, burying those who pass through, the ones left on the surface of the land, to cleanse it. At the end of seven months they shall probe it. 15And those who pass through the land shall pass through, and should someone see a human bone, he shall build by it a marker till the buriers bury it in the Valley of the Throng of Gog. 16And the name of the town, too, is Throng. And they shall cleanse the land. 17And you, man, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Say to the birds, every winged thing, and to all the beasts of the field—Gather and come, assemble from all around for My sacrificial feast that I am about to sacrifice for you, a great sacrificial feast on the mountains of Israel. And you shall eat flesh and drink blood. 18The flesh of warriors you shall eat, and the blood of princes of the earth you shall drink, rams, lambs, and he-goats, bulls, all of them fatlings of Bashan. 19And you shall eat suet to satiety and drink blood to drunkenness, from My sacrificial feast that I have prepared for you. 20And you shall be sated at My table with horse and chariot, warrior and every man of war, said the Master, the LORD. 21And I will set out My glory among the nations, and all the nations shall see My judgment that I have done and My hand that I set against them. 22And all the house of Israel shall know that I am the LORD their God from that day onward. 23And the nations shall know that for their crime the house of Israel went into exile, because they betrayed Me and I hid My face from them and gave them into the hand of their foes, and they all fell by the sword. 24According to their defilement and according to their trespasses I dealt with them and hid My face from them. 25Therefore, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Now will I restore the fortunes of Jacob and show mercy to the house of Israel and be zealous for My holy name. 26And they shall forget their disgrace and all their betrayal that they committed against Me when they dwell secure upon their soil with none to make them tremble, 27when I lead them back from the peoples and gather them from the lands of their enemies. And I will be hallowed through them before the eyes of many nations. 28And they shall know that I am the LORD when having exiled them among the nations I gather them in upon their soil and do not leave any of them there anymore. 29And I will not hide My face from them anymore, as I have poured out My spirit upon the house of Israel,” said the Master, the LORD.
CHAPTER 39 NOTES
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2. I will lead you and take you along. This whole verse repeats the scenario of the previous chapter. However, the verb translated as “take you along” is unique to this text, so its meaning must be inferred from the context and from a possible Semitic cognate. The salient difference in this second account of Gog’s expedition to the land of Israel is that there is a much more detailed focus on his devastating defeat.
6. I will send fire against Magog. In this version, not only will Gog’s vast invading army be devastated on the mountains of Israel but also a second prong of divine destruction will be directed toward Gog’s distant homeland and toward its allies or colonies (“the coastlands”). It is worth noting that this entire vision of Israel’s triumph over its enemies is quite different from anything in the other Prophets. The characteristic Prophetic vision is of Israel restored to its land and dwelling in peace and prosperity after the bitter experience of defeat and exile. Only Ezekiel imagines that the people again ensconced in its land and living in tranquillity will be assaulted by a fearsome invading power which, however, will be utterly destroyed. Perhaps Ezekiel, himself an exile who had witnessed the dominant force of the Babylonian empire, and who also had in mind the earlier dominance of the Assyrians, could not easily conceive a simple peaceful national restoration. History was felt as a continuing cycle of violent imperial aggressions. In this prophetic version, an ultimate—virtually mythological—aggressor is drawn to the land of Israel where God will bring about his total destruction, at last making Israel genuinely secure. Through this scenario, all the nations of the earth finally “shall know that I am the LORD.”
9. they shall light fires with them for seven years. What is intended here is an extravagant hyperbole: the huge mass of arms left by the extinct army of Gog, mostly made of combustible materials (leather shields stretched on wooden frames, spears with wooden shafts, bows and arrows and clubs) is sufficient to provide firewood for seven years, obviating the need to bring wood from the forests.
11. the Valley of Those Who Pass Through. The meaning of the name is a little ambiguous. It would seem to refer to the searchers for corpses mentioned in verse 14 who pass through the land looking for dead enemy soldiers. But in verse 14 the same word is also attached to the invaders.
it blocks those who pass through. Perhaps the blockage is because of the vast quantity of corpses piled up in the valley.
12. so as to cleanse the land. Corpses are a source of ritual contamination.
14. perpetually appointed men. “Appointed” is merely implied.
At the end of seven months they shall probe it. That is, they shall check to make sure no corpses have been left unburied.
16. And the name of the town, too, is Throng. Evidently, there was a town in proximity to the valley.
17. sacrificial feast. This is a macabre idea—that the corpses to be consumed by scavengers and carrion birds are a grand sacrificial feast prepared for them by God. As the preceding reference to a discovered bone indicates, the bones picked clean by the scavengers would then still need to be buried.
18. rams, lambs, and he-goats. Since there would not be large flocks at hand, all these are metaphors for the sumptuous feast of corpses that the scavengers will enjoy.
20. horse and chariot. The chariot is obviously not edible but it goes along with “horse” as part of a fixed pair.
23. And the nations shall know that for their crime the house of Israel went into exile. This is an essential theological point for Ezekiel: Israel went into exile because of neither the sheer military power of its enemies nor any weakness in its God, but as a punishment—now come to an end—for betraying its God.
they all fell by the sword. As is often the case, Ezekiel’s language is not entirely precise. By no means all of the people were killed by the Babylonians: some stayed in Judah while many others were exiled rather than killed.
28. and do not leave any of them there. Ezekiel’s vision of a total return of the exiles to Zion was not fulfilled, as many of them chose to stay in Babylonia. From this point onward, the Jews would remain in part a diasporic people.
1In the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning of the year on the tenth of the month in the fourteenth year after the city was struck, on that very day, the hand of the LORD was upon me, and He brought me there. 2In divine vision He brought me to the land of Israel and set me down on a very high mountain, and upon it was like the shape of a city on the south. 3And He brought me there, and, look, a man, his appearance like the appearance of bronze, and a linen tassel in his hand, and a measuring rod, and he was standing in the gate. 4And the man spoke to me: “Man, see with your eyes and with your ears hear and pay mind to all that I show you, for in order that it should be shown you have you been brought here. Tell all that you see to the house of Israel.” 5And, look, there was a wall outside the house all around, and in the man’s hand a measuring rod six cubits and a handsbreadth in length, and he measured the depth of the building’s wall to be one rod and the height one rod. 6And he entered that gate facing toward the east and went up its steps and measured the threshold of the gate to be one rod in depth and the inner threshold one rod in depth. 7And each recess was one rod high and one rod deep, and there were five cubits between the recesses, and the threshold of the gate alongside the gate’s hall from within was one rod. 8And he measured the gate’s hall from within to be one rod. 9And he measured the gate’s hall to be eight cubits and its pillars two cubits, and the gate’s hall was within. 10And the recesses of the gate facing east were three on each side, a single measure for the three of them and a single measure for the pillars on each side. 11And he measured the depth of the gate entrance to be ten cubits. The height of the gate was thirteen cubits. 12And there was a partition in front of the recesses of one cubit, one cubit the partition on each side, and the recess was six cubits on each side. 13And he measured the gate from the ceiling of the recess to the ceiling of the opposite recess, the depth was twenty-five cubits, entrance facing entrance. 14And he measured the columns to be sixty cubits, and the column of the gate’s court all around. 15And in front of the gate was the entranceway, in front of the inner wall of the gate, fifty cubits. 16And the recesses had latticed windows, and toward their pillars inside the gate all around, and so it was for the halls, windows all around inside, and on each pillar palm designs. 17And he brought me to the water court, and look, there were chambers and a pavement fashioned for the court all around, thirty chambers for the pavement. 18And the pavement was up to the side of the gates and opposite the width of the gates was the lower pavement. 19And he measured the depth from in front of the lower gate in front of the inner court from outside to be a hundred cubits, the east and the north sides. 20And the gate that was facing north of the outer court, he measured its height and its depth. 21And its recess was three cubits on each side, and its pillars and its hall were as the measure of the first gate, fifty cubits long and twenty-five cubits wide. 22And its windows and its pillars and its palm designs as the measure of the gate facing out, and on seven steps they would go up to it with its pillars before them. 23And the inner court had a gate opposite the gate to the north and to the east, and he measured from gate to gate to be a hundred cubits. 24And he led me to the south side, and, look, there was a gate on the south side. And he measured its pillars and its halls according to these measures. 25And there were windows in its halls all around like these windows, fifty cubits long and twenty-five cubits wide. 26And there were seven steps going up to it, and its hall was in front of them, and its pillars had palm designs on each side. 27And the inner court had a gate on the south side. And he measured from gate to gate on the south side to be a hundred cubits. 28And he brought me to the inner court through the south gate, and he measured the south gate to be as these measures. 29And its recesses and its pillars and its halls were as these measurements, and its halls had windows all around, fifty cubits long and twenty-five cubits wide. 30And the halls all around were twenty-five cubits long and five cubits wide. 31And the outer court had a hall with its pillars, and eight steps going up. 32And he brought me to the inner court on the east side and measured the gate to be as these measurements. 33And its recesses and its pillars and its halls were as these measurements, and its halls had windows all around, fifty cubits long and twenty-five cubits wide. 34And the outer court had halls and palm designs on its pillars on each side and eight steps going up. 35And he brought me to the north gate and measured as these measures. 36Its recesses, its pillars and its halls and the windows it had all around, fifty cubits long and twenty-five cubits wide. 37And there were pillars for the outer court and palm designs on the pillars on both sides and eight steps going up. 38And there was a chamber with its entrance in the hall of the gates. There they would wash the sacrifice. 39And in the hall of the gate were two tables on each side on which to slaughter the burnt offering and the offense offering and the guilt offering. 40And on the flank outside the hall of the gate’s entrance to the north were two tables and on the other flank of the hall of the gate two tables. 41Four tables there were on each side of the flank of the gate—eight tables on which they did the slaughtering. 42And four tables of hewn stone for the burnt offering, one and a half cubits long and one and a half cubits wide and one cubit high. Upon them they would set the utensils with which they slaughtered the burnt offering and the sacrifice. 43And the spits, one handsbreadth, were set in the house all around, and upon the tables was the flesh of the sacrifice. 44And outside the inner gate were the chambers of the nobles, in the inner court that was by the flank of the northern gate, and they faced to the south, one by the flank of the eastern gate, facing to the north. 45And he spoke to me: “This is the chamber that faces to the south for the priests who keep the watch of the house. 46And the chamber that faces to the north is for the priests who keep the watch of the altar. They are the sons of Zadok from the sons of Levi who drew near to the LORD to serve Him.” 47And he measured the court to be a hundred cubits in length and a hundred cubits in width, square, and the altar was in front of the house. 48And he brought me to the hall of the house and measured the hall to be five hundred cubits on each side, and the width of the gate was three cubits on each side. 49The hall was twenty cubits long and eleven cubits wide, and one went up to it by steps. And there were columns by the pillars on each side.
CHAPTER 40 NOTES
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1. the twenty-fifth year of our exile. This locates the present prophecy in 572 B.C.E., as the text goes on to note, fourteen years after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple.
the hand of the LORD was upon me, and He brought me there. This formulation is in line with others in Ezekiel in which the visionary experience is registered as a virtual physical transportation from one place to another. But the term “divine vision” indicates this is a mental experience.
2. like the shape of a city. As in Ezekiel’s visions from chapter 1 onward, what he sees is represented not as the thing itself but as a semblance to or analogue of the real thing.
3. a man. As the next phrase makes clear, “the man” is in fact a divine emissary. Daniel will pick up this usage from Ezekiel.
5. there was a wall outside the house. Throughout, “the house” is the house of God—that is, the Temple. To the modern reader, it is certainly odd that Ezekiel’s book should end with nine chapters devoted to an intricate account of the architecture of the Temple and the procedures of the sacrificial cult. There is nothing quite like this in any of the other Prophets. There is no reason, however, to question the status of these chapters as an authentic production by Ezekiel. One should remember that he was a Jerusalem priest deported from the city where the Temple stood in the early, partial exile of 597 B.C.E. Now, a quarter of a century later, and fourteen years after the Temple was demolished in the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, he undertakes a kind of imaginative reconstruction of the Temple, and then of the cult, painstakingly laying out its sundry structures, gate by gate, hall by hall, recess to recess. For him, this amounts to a prophecy of consolation. All this, it must be said, is rather bewildering to follow, although various commentators have sought to provide charts and floor plans based on Ezekiel’s notations. There is, to begin with, a problem of architectural terms, many of which are uncertain in meaning. (The same is true of the account of Solomon’s temple in Kings.) At least a few terms actually fluctuate in meaning. The two Hebrew words that usually mean “width” and “length” at first appear to indicate “depth” and “height,” but later in the chapter they revert to their ordinary meaning. But even if we could be certain of all the architectural terms, the lineaments of the Temple are hard to make out. This commentary therefore will not attempt to elucidate the picture of the Temple. It should also be noted that Ezekiel’s description of the Temple does not altogether jibe with the one in the Book of Kings, nor does his account of the cult entirely match other biblical formulations. One must assume that he either was writing from imperfect memory of the Jerusalem scene he had left two and a half decades earlier or was projecting what he conceived as an ideal image of the Temple and the worship within it.
he measured the depth. The device of having all the measurements done by the divine emissary is a way of confirming their unvarying accuracy.
38. There they would wash the sacrifice. For Ezekiel the priest, the Temple is vital not only as a splendid architectural structure but because within it animal sacrifices can be offered daily—sacrifices that had been totally interrupted for the past fourteen years.
46. who drew near to the LORD. The verb here is used in its technical cultic sense: one who “draws near” is the priest who is authorized to enter into the sacred space of the Temple.
1And he brought me into the great hall and measured the pillars to be six cubits wide on each side, the width of the pillar. 2And the width of the entrance was ten cubits, and the supports of the entrance five cubits on each side. And he measured its length to be forty cubits and its width twenty cubits. 3And he came within and measured the pillars of the entrance to be two cubits and the entrance two cubits and the width of the entrance seven cubits. 4And he measured its length to be twenty cubits and the width twenty cubits facing the great hall. And he said to me, “This is the Holy of Holies.” 5And he measured the wall of the house to be six cubits and the width of the flank four cubits all around the house. 6And the flanks, one on top of another were thirty-three, and in the indentation of the wall of the house for the flanks all around to be fastened, and they were not fastened in the wall of the house. 7And it became wider as it went round higher and higher on the flanks, for the house turned all around higher and higher. Therefore the width of the house was greater above. And thus did we go up from the bottom level to the top level through the middle level. 8And I saw that the house had a raised pavement all around, the foundations of the flanks, a full rod’s length, six cubits. 9The width of the flank’s wall on the outside was five cubits, and there was a walkway between the flanks of the house. 10And between the chambers it was twenty cubits wide all around the house. 11And the entrance of the flank for the walkway, one entrance to the north and one entrance to the south, and the width of the place of the walkway was five cubits all around. 12And the structure facing the open space at the western corner was seventy cubits wide, and the wall of the structure was five hundred cubits wide all around, and its length was ninety cubits. 13And he measured the house to be a hundred cubits long, and the open space and the structure and its walls a hundred cubits long. 14And the width of the façade of the house and the open space to the east was a hundred cubits. 15And he measured the length of the structure facing the open space which was to the west with a passage on both sides, a hundred cubits. And the inner great hall and the halls of the court, 16the thresholds and the latticed windows and the passages around the three of them opposite the threshold, there was an overlay of wood all around from the ground to the windows, and the windows were covered. 17Up above the entrance as far as the inner house and outside on the entire wall all around, on the inner and on the outer, were carvings. 18And it was fashioned with cherubim and palm designs on both sides, and the palm design had a lion’s face on one side fashioned for the entire house all around. 19And the palm design had a human face on one side and a lion’s face on the other, fashioned for the entire house all around. 20From the ground to above the entrance there were cherubim and the fashioned palm designs, and on the wall of the great hall. 21And the great hall had four doorposts, and facing the sanctum a look like the look of 22the altar, of wood, three cubits high and twelve cubits its length, and it had corners, and its length and its walls were of wood. And he spoke to me: “That is the table that is before the LORD.” 23And the great hall and the sanctum had two doors. 24And the doors had two door panels, panels swinging open, two for each door. 25And fashioned for them on the doors of the great hall were cherubim and palm designs like the ones fashioned for the walls, and there was a wooden beam in the front of the hall on the outside. 26And the windows were latticed, and there were palm designs on both sides on the supports of the hall and the flanks and the beams.
CHAPTER 41 NOTES
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2. And the width of the entrance was ten cubits, and the supports of the entrance five cubits on each side. Most modern translations seek to impart coherence to this whole account of the layout of the Temple by choosing terms familiar in our own architecture—“vestibules,” “ledges,” “porticoes,” and the like—and rearranging the tangled syntax. But, in fact, even if we knew the precise meaning of these architectural terms, which we do not, Ezekiel’s report of spatial entities and their dimensions is quite bewildering. The clarity, then, of the modern translation is illusory, and the present translation is meant to replicate the bewilderment conveyed in the Hebrew. Verses 7 and 8 are a particularly striking instance of the impenetrability of Ezekiel’s description, but there are problems of comprehension throughout.
11. the walkway. The Hebrew munaḥ is one of the most elusive of the many architectural terms used, so this translation, like everyone else’s, is no more than a guess.
1And he took me out to the outer court. The way was to the north. And he brought me to the chamber that is opposite the open space and that is opposite the structure to the north. 2Its façade was a hundred cubits, the northern entrance, and the width fifty cubits. 3Opposite the twenty cubits of the inner court and opposite the pavement of the outer court was a passage. The façade of the passage had three levels. 4And in front of the chambers a walkway ten cubits wide to the inner court and a hundred cubits long, and their entrances were to the north. 5And the upper chambers were cut back, for the passages could not [fit?] in them from the lowest levels and from the middle levels of the structure. 6For they were triple-tiered, and they did not have columns like the columns of the courts. Therefore space was taken from the lowest levels and from the middle levels from the ground. 7And there was a barrier from the outside facing the chambers through the outer court to the front of the chambers fifty cubits long. 8For the length of the chambers of the outer court was fifty cubits, and at the front of the great hall a hundred cubits. 9And below these chambers an entrance from the east where one enters from the outer court, 10in width like the barrier of the court to the north facing the open space. And facing the structure were chambers. 11And the way in front of them was like the shape of the chambers on the northern side, both their length and their width and according to their arrangements were their exits and their entrances, 12and like the entrances of the chambers that were on the southern side, an entrance at the head each way, a way in front of the barriers to the garden on the east side where one entered. 13And he said to me, “The northern chambers and the southern chambers that are in front of the open space—they are the holy chambers in which the priests who are close to the LORD shall eat the holiest offerings. There shall they set the holiest offerings and the grain offering and the offense offering and the guilt offering, for the place is holy. 14When the priests come, they shall not go out from the sanctum to the outer court, and there they shall lay down their garments in which they minister, for they are consecrated, and they shall put on other garments, and they shall draw near to what is the people’s area.” 15And he finished the measurements of the inner house and brought me out through the gate that faces to the east and measured it all around. 16He measured the eastern side with the measuring rod to be five hundred cubits by the measuring rod all around. 17He measured the northern side to be five hundred cubits by the measuring rod all around. 18He measured the southern side to be five hundred cubits by the measuring rod. 19He turned round to the western side, measured it to be five hundred cubits by the measuring rod. 20On four sides he measured it. It had a wall all around five hundred cubits long and five hundred cubits wide to separate the holy from the profane.
CHAPTER 42 NOTES
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1. And he brought me to the chamber that is opposite the open space and that is opposite the structure to the north. The bafflements of Ezekiel’s floor plan of the Temple continue to proliferate, and no attempt will be made here to sort them out. Verses 5–6 are especially egregious. Rashi, perhaps the greatest of medieval Hebrew exegetes and an acute close reader, frankly confessed, “I was unable to understand at all these three phrases: What are these ʾatiqim [in the guess of this translation, “passages”], and how do they fit [eat?] from the lowest levels and from the middle ones, and the reason he gives, that they were triple-tiered and had no columns, I was unable to understand.” We shall follow Rashi in throwing up our hands in despair.
5. [fit?]. As indicated in the previous note, the Hebrew word represented in the translation within brackets and with a question mark is altogether opaque: yokhlu looks like a defective spelling of the word that means “eat,” but that makes no sense whatever, and so one can only guess about the meaning.
1And he led me to the gate, the gate that faces the eastern way. 2And, look, the glory of the God of Israel was coming from the eastern way, and its sound was like the sound of many waters, and the earth shone from His glory. 3And it was like the look of the sight that I had seen, like that sight that I had seen when I came to pronounce the destruction of the city, and sights like the sight I had seen by the Kebar Canal. And I fell on my face. 4And the glory of the LORD came into the house through the gate that faced the eastern way. 5And a wind bore me up and brought me to the inner court, and, look, the glory of the LORD filled the house. 6And I heard it speaking to me, and a man was standing by me. 7And he said to me, “Man, the place of My throne and the soles of My feet where I dwell in the midst of the Israelites forever! Nor shall the house of Israel defile My name anymore—they and their kings—with their whoring and with the corpses of their kings, their high places, 8when they set their threshold by My threshold and their doorpost by My doorpost, with the wall between them and Me, and they defiled My holy name with their abominations that they did, and I made an end to them in My wrath. 9Now let them put far from Me their whoring and the corpses of their kings, and I will dwell in their midst forever. 10You, man, tell the house of Israel about the house, and let them be ashamed of their crimes, and let them measure its design. 11And if they are ashamed of all that they have done, inform them of the plan of the house and its design and its exits and its entrances and all its plan and all its regulations [and inform them of all its designs and all its rules] and write them before their eyes that they may observe all its design and all its regulations and do them. 12This is the regulation for the house on the mountaintop, all its boundaries all around are holy of holies. Look, this is the regulation for the house. 13And these are the measurements of the altar in cubits, a cubit and a cubit and a handsbreadth, and the trench a cubit deep and its boundary at its edge all around one span and its depth one cubit. And this is the structure of the altar. 14From the trench in the ground to the lower level it is two cubits, and one cubit wide, and from the small level to the large level, four cubits and a cubit wide. 15And the altar hearth is four cubits, and from the altar hearth to above the horns on the altar four. 16And the altar hearth is twelve cubits long by twelve cubits wide, square on its four sides. 17And the level section is fourteen cubits long by fourteen cubits wide on its four sides, and the boundary around it is half a cubit, and it has a trench a cubit all around, and its steps face the east.” 18And he said to me, “Man, thus said the Master, the LORD: These are the statutes of the altar on the day it is made, to offer up on it a burnt offering and to cast blood upon it. 19And you shall give these to the levitical priests who are the seed of Zadok, who may draw near to Me, said the Master, the LORD, to minister unto Me, a bull from the herd for an offense offering. 20And you shall take from its blood and put it on the four horns of the altar and at the four corners of the level section and on the boundary all around, and you shall purify and purge it. 21And you shall take the bull of the offense offering and burn it in the set place of the house outside the sanctuary. 22On the second day you shall sacrifice an unblemished he-goat as an offense offering, and they shall purify the altar as they purified with the bull. 23When you finish purifying, you shall sacrifice an unblemished bull from the herd and an unblemished ram from the flock. 24And you shall sacrifice them before the LORD, and the priests shall cast salt upon them and offer them up as a burnt offering to the LORD. 25Seven days you shall do a goat for offense offering each day and a bull from the herd and a ram from the flock. Unblemished shall they be. 26Seven days they shall purge the altar and make it clean and consecrate it, 27and the days shall be completed. And it shall happen from the eighth day onward that the priests shall do their burnt offerings and their well-being sacrifices on the altar, and I will accept them favorably, said the Master, the LORD.”
CHAPTER 43 NOTES
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2. the glory of the God of Israel. This phrase marks the beginning of another of Ezekiel’s epiphanies. The “glory” is the dazzling manifestation of the divine presence before the eyes of the prophet. It is possible that the glory here is identical with the divine chariot of chapter 1, but there is no unambiguous indication in the text that this is the case.
3. that sight that I had seen when I came to pronounce the destruction of the city. The Hebrew says merely “when I came to destroy the city,” but the prophet is not the agent of destruction, so it is assumed in this translation that he is referring to his prophecies of destruction in chapters 8–11.
and sights like the sight I had seen by the Kebar Canal. This phrase does take us back to the vision in chapter 1, which is located on the banks of the Kebar Canal.
5. the glory of the LORD filled the house. This clause is reminiscent of the epiphany in Isaiah 6. Here, as throughout these chapters, “the house” means “the house of the LORD,” which is to say, the Temple.
6. speaking to me. The Hebrew, at least as it is vocalized in the Masoretic Text, does not actually say “speaking,” medaber, but uses an unusual reflexive form of this verb, midaber, which would appear to suggest a kind of mediated activity of speech rather than direct address to the prophet. The somewhat paraphrastic but semantically correct solution of the New Jewish Publication Society translation is “speech addressed to me.”
7. the place of My throne. The noun phrase here is preceded by the accusative particle ʾet, leading us to expect a verb, but none appears in this sentence. Some understand the ʾet as indicating emphasis. This translation replicates the syntactic incompleteness of the Hebrew. It should be noted that the “man” addressing Ezekiel is now clearly God.
with their whoring and with the corpses of their kings. As elsewhere, the probable reference of “whoring” is idolatry. The “corpses of their kings” refers to the practice of the last several Judahite kings of using the Garden of Uzza, in proximity to the Temple, as a royal burial ground. Corpses impart ritual defilement. The threshold and doorposts of the next verse would thus be the threshold and doorposts of the royal mausoleums.
10. let them measure its design. For Ezekiel, there is a seamless connection between grand visions of a restored temple and a restored monarchy with the cubit-by-cubit measurements of the Temple that is to be rebuilt. It is as if, as he contemplates the Temple that has been in ruins for two decades, the reality of its rebuilding becomes palpable for him by his tracing all the details of its measurements that the builders are to follow.
11. [and inform them of all its designs and all its rules]. Although Ezekiel’s prose is prone to repetition, the repetition in this instance is so excessive that one suspects the bracketed clause to be an inadvertent scribal duplication.
13. a cubit and a cubit and a handsbreadth. As before, the indications of the measurements and the architectural terms are bewildering.
18. the altar on the day it is made. This phrase clearly indicates that this is a plan which the builders are to implement as they proceed with the reconstruction of the destroyed temple.
19. And you shall give these to the levitical priests. Now Ezekiel moves from architectural instructions to instructions about the sacrifices to be performed within the rebuilt temple.
20. the four horns of the altar. The ancient altars had hornlike protuberances, probably symbolizing power, at their four corners.
27. from the eighth day onward that the priests shall do their burnt offerings. After seven days during which the rebuilt altar is purified and sanctified, the priests will take up their set regimen of regular offerings.
1And he brought me back through the outer gate of the sanctuary facing eastward, but it was closed. 2And the LORD said to me, “This gate shall be closed. It shall not be opened, and no man shall enter it, for the LORD God of Israel has entered it, and it has become closed. 3The prince, he, the prince—it is he who shall sit in it to eat bread before the LORD. By the way of the gate hall he shall come in and by its way he shall go out.” 4And He brought me through the gate of the north in front of the house, and I saw and, look, the glory of the LORD filled the house, and I fell on my face. 5And the LORD said to me, “Man, pay mind and see with your eyes and with your ears hear all that I speak to you about all the statutes of the house of the LORD and about all its regulations, and you shall pay mind to the entrance of the house and to all the exits of the sanctuary. 6And you shall say to the rebels, to the house of Israel, Thus said the Master, the LORD: Enough for you of all your abominations, house of Israel, 7when you bring foreigners, uncircumcised of heart and uncircumcised of flesh, to be in My sanctuary to profane My house when you offer up the food, suet, and blood, and they violate My covenant with all their abominations! 8And you have not kept My holy watch, but you have set them for yourselves as keepers of My watch in My sanctuary. 9Thus said the Master, the LORD: No foreigner uncircumcised of heart and uncircumcised of flesh shall enter My sanctuary, no foreigner who is among the Israelites, 10but only the Levites, who went far away from Me when Israel strayed, as they strayed from Me after their foul things, and they shall bear their punishment. 11And they shall minister in My sanctuary, in appointed office, at the gates of the house, ministering in the house. They shall slaughter the burnt offering and the sacrifice for the people, and they shall stand before them to minister to them. 12Inasmuch as they ministered to them before their foul things and became a stumbling block of crime for the house of Israel, therefore I have sworn concerning them, said the Master, the LORD, that they shall bear their punishment. 13And they shall not approach Me to serve as priests to Me, to approach all My consecrated things, to the Holy of Holies. And they shall bear their disgrace and their abominations that they did. 14And I will make them keepers of the watch of the house in all its service and in all that they do within it. 15But the levitical priests, the sons of Zadok, who kept the watch of My house when the Israelites strayed from Me, they shall draw near to minister to Me and stand before Me to offer up suet and blood, said the Master, the LORD. 16They shall enter My sanctuary and they shall draw near to My table to minister to Me, and they shall keep My watch. 17And it shall happen when they enter the gate of the inner court, they shall wear linen garments, and no wool shall be upon them when they minister in the gates of the inner court and within. 18Linen headdresses shall be on their heads and linen trousers shall be on their loins, and they shall not gird what causes sweat. 19And when they go out to the outer court, to the outer court, to the people, they shall remove their garments in which they have ministered and lay them in the sacred chamber and don other garments, lest they consecrate the people through their garments. 20Their heads they shall not shave, nor shall they let their hair grow long. They shall surely trim their hair. 21And no priest shall drink wine when he comes into the inner court. 22Nor shall they take for themselves a widow or a divorced woman as wife but only a virgin from the seed of the house of Israel, or a widow who is widow of a priest they may take. 23And My people they shall teach, what is between sacred and profane and between unclean and clean they shall inform them. 24And concerning a legal dispute they shall stand to judge by My laws and judge it. And My teachings and My statutes in all My appointed times they shall keep, and My sabbaths they shall hallow. 25And no human corpse shall they approach because of the uncleanness, but for a father or a mother or a son or a daughter or a brother or a sister who is unmarried they may become unclean. 26And after he has become clean, they shall count seven days for him. 27And on the day he comes into the sanctuary, into the inner court, to minister in the sanctuary, he shall offer his offense offering, said the Master, the LORD. 28And it shall be an estate for them. I am their estate. And you shall not give them a holding in Israel. I am their holding. 29As to the grain offering and the offense offering and the guilt offering, they shall eat them, and whatever is consecrated in Israel shall be theirs. 30And the best of all first fruits and all gifts whatsoever shall be the priests’, and the best of your kneading troughs you shall give to the priests so as to settle blessing on your home. 31No carrion nor preyed-upon animal, whether fowl or beast, shall the priests eat.”
CHAPTER 44 NOTES
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6. And you shall say to the rebels, to the house of Israel. Until this point, the prophet seemed to be focused on laying out all the regulations of the use of the Temple. Now, however, a theme of castigation is introduced: before the destruction of the First Temple, its sanctity had been repeatedly violated in ways that Ezekiel will spell out; in the restored Temple, things must be set right.
7. when you bring foreigners, uncircumcised of heart and uncircumcised of flesh, to be in My sanctuary. Ezekiel appears to refer to an actual practice of using foreigners to perform menial tasks in the Temple. In his view, the state of ritual unfitness of someone who is uncircumcised is correlative to a state of spiritual or moral unfitness (“uncircumcised of heart”).
they violate My covenant. The verb here might conceivably have a causative sense: “they cause My covenant to be violated.”
8. My holy watch. This is the Temple cult with all its intricate procedures designed to preserve the sanctity of the place and of the service.
10. but only the Levites, who went far away from Me. The Levites, because of their pedigree, will be allowed back in the sanctuary, but because they were complicit in the sins of Israel, they are to be demoted in function as the prophet will spell out. The verb, “went far away,” raḥaqu, is the antonym of qarvu, “drew close,” the technical term used for the officials who can enter the sanctuary.
11. They shall slaughter the burnt offering and the sacrifice for the people. The sacerdotal function of these Levites is limited to preparing the sacrifices for the people, but they are barred from the Holy of Holies as punishment for their past acts.
15. the levitical priests, the sons of Zadok, who kept the watch of My house. It is not clear whether Ezekiel had reliable knowledge that the Zadokite priests were not complicit in compromising the sanctity of the cult or whether he is merely inclined to see them as a legitimate priestly elite for genealogical reasons.
stand before Me. This idiom has both its literal meaning and the sense of “to serve.”
16. They shall enter My sanctuary. This is in contrast to the Levites, who are to remain in the court of the Temple.
My table. This is an epithet for the altar.
17. they shall wear linen garments. This is in keeping with the stipulations about priestly dress in Leviticus. Perhaps linen was thought of as a purer fabric than wool because it did not come from an animal. In any case, a linen garment would have been cooler, less likely to induce sweating, a concern stated at the end of the next verse.
19. to the outer court, to the outer court. The repetition may be a scribal error (dittography).
lest they consecrate the people through their garments. This appears to be an idea peculiar to Ezekiel: Just as ritual uncleanness is imparted by contact with an unclean object, sacredness is imagined to be imparted by contact with anything that has been consecrated. For Ezekiel, who is after all a priest and preoccupied with drawing the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, it is essential that the condition of consecration not spread among the people. Hence the consecrated garments must be removed and left inside the sacred chamber.
20. trim their hair. More literally, “trim their head.”
22. Nor shall they take for themselves a widow or a divorced woman. In Leviticus, this prohibition is for the high priest, not for the whole priestly caste. The motive is to ensure the genealogical purity of the priestly line. Perhaps it is feared that the widow or divorced woman might have conceived by her first husband, before that marriage was ended by death or divorce. Alternately, her sexual contact with a man not of the priestly line might have been thought of as contaminating.
24. My appointed times. This is a fixed idiom for the festivals.
26. And after he has become clean, they shall count seven days for him. After the priest has cleansed himself through the prescribed ablutions, he must wait seven days before again entering the sanctuary.
27. his offense offering. This is one of the many indications in the biblical corpus that the ḥata’t is not a “sin offering,” as it is usually translated. The priest has committed no sin. He has merely been in a state of ritual uncleanness, which would be an offense or violation of the sacred space of the sanctuary.
28. I am their estate … I am their holding. The priest needs no crop-producing tribal territory because his sustenance is provided through the animal and grain offerings brought to the Temple.
31. No carrion nor preyed-upon animal … shall the priests eat. These are taboo to all Israelites, but there is contextual justification for mentioning them here for the priests: their food comes from the best of what the Israelites bring, and thus it is all the more unthinkable that they would ever resort to carrion and animals torn by beasts of prey.
1And when you cast lots for the land as estate, you shall give a donation to the LORD, sacred from the land, twenty-five thousand cubits long and ten thousand cubits wide. It is to be sacred through all its boundary all around. 2From this, for the sanctuary, shall be five hundred cubits square all around, and fifty cubits for an open space all around it. 3And by this measure you shall measure it: twenty-five thousand cubits long and ten thousand cubits wide, and within it shall be the sanctuary, the holy of holies. 4It shall be sacred from the land for the priests who minister in the sanctuary, who draw near to minister to the LORD, and it shall be for them a place for houses and a consecration for the sanctuary. 5And twenty-five thousand cubits long and ten thousand cubits wide shall be for the Levites who minister in the house. Theirs it shall be as a holding, twenty chambers. 6And the city’s holding you shall give—five thousand cubits wide and twenty-five thousand cubits long corresponding to the sacred donation. It shall be for the whole house of Israel. 7And for the prince on both sides of the sacred donation and to the city’s holding facing the sacred donation and facing the city’s holding from the western side westward and from the eastern side eastward and the length corresponding to one of the sections from the western border to the eastern border for the land. 8It shall be a holding in Israel for him, and My princes shall no longer cheat My people, and the land they shall give to the house of Israel by their tribes.
9Thus said the Master, the LORD: “Enough for you, princes of Israel. Put aside outrage and plunder and do justice and righteousness. Take away your banishments from My people, said the Master, the LORD. 10Just scales and a just ephah and a just bat shall you have. 11The ephah and the bat shall have a single measure, the bat to contain a tenth of a homer, the ephah a tenth of the homer shall its measure be. 12And the shekel shall be twenty gerahs. Twenty shekels, twenty-five shekels, fifteen shekels shall the minah be for you. 13This is the donation that you shall make: a sixth of an ephah from each homer of wheat and a sixth of an ephah from each homer of barley. 14And the regulations for oil, the oil by the bat, a tenth of a bat for each kor, ten bats are a homer, [for ten bats are a homer]. 15And one sheep from the flock from every two hundred from Israel’s well-watered pastures as a grain offering and as a burnt offering and as well-being sacrifice to atone for them, said the Master, the LORD. 16All the people of the land shall be with the prince of Israel for this donation. 17And upon the prince shall be the burnt offerings and the grain offerings and the libation on the festivals and on the new moons and on the sabbaths. On all the appointed times of the house of Israel he shall do the offense offering and the grain offering and the burnt offering and the well-being sacrifice to atone for the house of Israel.”
18Thus said the Master, the LORD: “In the first month, on the first of the month, you shall take an unblemished bull from the herd and purify the sanctuary. 19And the priest shall take from the blood of the offense offering and put it on the lintel of the house and on the four corners of the level space on the altar and on the lintel of the gate of the inner court. 20And thus shall you do on the seventh of the month for the errant man and for the unwitting, and you shall purge the house. 21In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, you shall have the Passover, a festival of seven days. Flatbread shall be eaten. 22And the prince shall do for himself and for all the people of the land an offense-offering bull. 23And the seven days of the festival he shall do a burnt offering to the LORD, seven unblemished bulls and seven unblemished rams each day of the seven days and an offense offering of a he-goat each day. 24And a grain offering, an ephah for each bull and an ephah for each ram he shall do, and oil, a hin for each ephah. 25In the seventh month, on the fifteenth day of the month, on the festival he shall do like these for seven days, the offense offering and the burnt offering and the grain offering and the oil alike.”
CHAPTER 45 NOTES
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1. cast lots for the land. The idiom used here harks back to Joshua, where a system of casting lots is used in order to divide up the tribal territories.
a donation to the LORD. The area designated is to be set aside for the Temple, the Levites, and the priests.
4. It shall be sacred from the land. That is, it shall be set off from the rest of the land as consecrated ground.
5. twenty chambers. This is the reading of the Masoretic Text, ʿesrim leshakhot, but it is puzzling what chambers are doing out in this open area. Perhaps one should adopt the Septuagint’s reading, which is ʿarim lashavet, “towns in which to dwell.”
7. And for the prince. Throughout, “the prince” is the king.
8. My princes shall no longer cheat My people. With these clear demarcations of what area belongs to the crown, what to the priests and Levites, and what to the people, royal expropriation of lands belonging to the people will cease.
9. outrage and plunder. This could be construed as a hendiadys, having the sense “outrageous plunder.”
Take away your banishments. The grammatical form of the noun that derives from the verbal stem meaning “to banish” is peculiar, but, given the context of royal exploitation of the people, the probable sense is eviction of people from lands that have been expropriated by the crown.
10. a just ephah and a just bat. The ephah is a dry measure, the bat a liquid measure. The ḥomer, as is spelled out at the end of the next verse, is a dry measure ten times the size of an ephah.
12. shekel. This word means “weight”—its cognate is used in several other Semitic languages—and it is not, as in later usage, a coin. Although equivalents in modern measurements are often proposed by scholars for all these terms of weight and volume, there appears to have been some fluctuation of their values in different times and regions.
14. [for ten bats are a homer]. This clause is bracketed because it appears to be an inadvertent duplication of the immediately preceding clause.
15. well-watered pastures. The Hebrew mashqeh usually means “offering drink,” so the translation is a surmise based on context.
17. And upon the prince shall be the burnt offerings. Since it is the duty of the priests, not of the king, to perform the actual rite of sacrifice, this must mean that it is the prince’s obligation to oversee the arrangements for the sacrifices and to make sure they are done in the appropriate ways at the appropriate times.
18. the first month. This is Nissan, approximately corresponding to April.
purify the sanctuary. This was done by sprinkling the blood of the slaughtered bull on the altar. The blood, as Jacob Milgrom puts it, was thought of as a kind of detergent.
19. on the lintel of the gate of the inner court. In Leviticus, the rite of purification was restricted to the altar. Ezekiel, preoccupied as he is with purity, extends it here to the inner court.
20. for the errant man and for the unwitting. These would be people who without intending to do so have brought ritual uncleanness into the sacred zone of the Temple. The impurity has to be purged.
25. In the seventh month, on the fifteenth day of the month. This is the month of Tishrei, corresponding to September–October. The festival in question is the fall holiday of Succoth. Between the two festivals mentioned here, Passover is the holiday that affirms belonging to the community of Israel, whereas Succoth, which takes place at the completion of the work of harvesting, is the holiday for which the greatest number of pilgrims came to Jerusalem.
1Thus said the Master, the LORD: “The gate of the inner court facing eastward shall be closed during the six workdays, and on the sabbath day it shall be open and on the day of the new moon it shall be open. 2And the prince shall come through the gate hall from outside and stand by the lintel of the gate, and the priest shall do his burnt offerings and his well-being sacrifices, and he shall bow down on the threshold of the gate and go out, and the gate shall not be closed until evening. 3And the people of the land shall bow down before the LORD at the entrance of that gate on sabbaths and on new moons. 4And the burnt offering that the prince shall offer to the LORD on the sabbath day shall be six unblemished sheep and an unblemished ram. 5And a grain offering, an ephah for each ram, and for the sheep, a grain offering, the gift of his hand, and oil, a hin to the ephah. 6And on the day of the new moon, an unblemished bull from the herd and six sheep and a ram. Unblemished shall they be. 7And an ephah for each bull and an ephah for each ram he shall do as a grain offering, and for the sheep, as his hand may attain, and oil, a hin to the ephah. 8And when the prince enters, through the gate hall he shall enter and by way of it he shall go out. 9And when the people of the land enter before the LORD on the appointed times, who enters through the northern gate to bow down shall go out through the southern gate, and who enters through the southern gate shall go out through the northern gate, and he shall not go back through the gate by which he entered, but straight ahead of him he shall go out. 10As for the prince, in their midst when they enter he shall enter, and where they go out he shall go out. 11And on the festivals and on the appointed times the grain offering shall be an ephah for each bull and an ephah for each ram and for the sheep the gift of his hand, and oil, a hin to the ephah. 12And should the prince do a freewill offering, whether burnt offering or well-being sacrifices, a freewill offering to the LORD, he shall open the gate facing eastward and do his burnt offering and his well-being sacrifices as he does on the sabbath day, and he shall go out and close the gate after he has gone out. 13And a yearling unblemished sheep he shall do on the sabbath day, a burnt offering to the LORD for the day, each morning you shall do it. 14And a grain offering you shall do together with it, each morning, the sixth of an ephah, and oil, the third of a hin, to sprinkle on the fine flour, a grain offering to the LORD, an everlasting perpetual statute. 15And they shall do the sheep and the grain offering and the oil every morning, a perpetual burnt offering. 16Thus said the Master, the LORD: Should the prince give a gift to one of his sons, it shall be his estate, to his sons shall their holding be, it comes in estate. 17And should he give a gift from his estate to one of his servants, it shall be his till the year of release and shall go back to the prince. His estate must surely belong to his sons. 18And the prince shall not take from the estate of the people to cheat them of their holding. From his own holding he shall bequeath to his sons, so that My people be not scattered each man from his holding.”
19And he brought me into the entrance that is on the side of the gate to the sacred chambers for the priests that face northward, and, look, there was a place in the far corner to the west. 20And he said to me, “This is the place in which the priests prepare the guilt offering and the offense offering, where they bake the grain offering so as not to bring it out to the outer court to consecrate the people.” 21And He took me out to the outer court and made me pass by the four corners of the court, and, look, there was an enclosure in each corner of the court. 22In the four corners of the court there were enclosures without roofs, forty cubits long and thirty cubits wide the measure of each of the four corners. 23And there was a row of bricks within all around for the four of them, and cooking utensils fashioned beneath the rows all around. 24And He said to me, “These are the kitchens where the ministrants of the house cook the sacrifices of the people.”
CHAPTER 46 NOTES
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1. on the sabbath day it shall be open and on the day of the new moon it shall be open. The obvious reason for opening the gate, as becomes clear in the next verse, is so that the prince can enter through it.
2. and he shall bow down. As is usually the case in ritual contexts, this verb carries both its literal sense and, through a kind of synecdoche, designates the act of worship.
7. as his hand may attain. This idiom, taken from the sacrificial laws of the Torah, indicates a category of offering in which the number or quantity is not fixed but determined by the economic capacity of the person who brings it to the Temple.
9. who enters through the northern … shall go out through the southern gate. It is not clear whether this instruction has some ritual or symbolic justification or is simply a means of regulating foot traffic within the Temple.
13. each morning you shall do it. The switch from “he” (the prince) to “you” (singular) is slightly disorienting, but it may reflect the fluidity with which biblical Hebrew switches grammatical person, rather than being the result of a scribal error.
14. oil, the third of a hin, to sprinkle on the fine flour. The reason for this instruction is culinary rather than strictly ritual: the grain offering is to be baked, and so the flour needs to be suffused with oil to make it into dough.
16. it shall be his estate. That is, the gift shall become the inheritance of the son to whom it has been given.
17. one of his servants. In royal contexts, “servants” usually means “courtiers.” A royal gift to a courtier for exemplary service rendered would be fairly common.
the year of release. This might be the jubilee year. In any case, it is a set year in which slaves are freed and property that has been assigned to others reverts to its original owners. Thus the king’s gift to his courtiers, unlike the gift to his sons, is not permanent.
18. so that My people be not scattered each man from his holding. As in earlier biblical literature, Ezekiel envisages an agrarian society in which stability and prosperity are contingent on possessing arable land. It is for this reason that the king is sternly prohibited from expropriating land from his subjects.
20. so as not to bring it out … to consecrate the people. As before, consecration is conceived as a kind of contagious condition. The consecrated grain offering must be prepared by the priests within their chambers and should not come in contact with the people.
21. an enclosure. This is the same Hebrew word that is rendered as “court” at the beginning of this verse, but it has a secondary sense of “enclosure.”
22. each of the four corners. The Masoretic Text reads “in each of the four of them mehuqatsʿot.” This last word is not intelligible and in fact is marked by the Masoretes with dots over it, a way of indicating that a word is textually suspect. This translation adopts the emendation proposed by Rimon Kasher, leʾarbaʿat hamiqtsqaʿot.
23. a row of bricks. The Hebrew merely says “row,” but what is indicated is a low inner wall of bricks or perhaps of stones.
1And he brought me back to the entrance of the house, and, look, water was coming out from under the threshold of the house to the east, for the front of the house was on the east, and the water was going down from the right side of the house from south of the altar. 2And he took me out through the gate to the north and turned me around outside the gate on the way facing eastward, and, look, water was seeping from the right side. 3When the man came out to the east, there was a line in his hand, and he measured out a thousand cubits and made me cross through the water, ankle-deep water. 4And he measured out a thousand cubits and made me cross through the water, knee-deep water, and he measured out a thousand cubits and made me cross through waist-deep water. 5And he measured out a thousand cubits—a stream which I could not cross for the water was surging, water to swim in, a stream that could not be crossed. 6And he said to me, “Do you see, man?” and he led me and brought me back to the bank of the stream. 7When I came back, look, on the bank of the stream were very many trees on both sides. 8And he said to me, “This water is going out to the eastern area and will go down to the Arabah and enter the sea, the sea of filthy water, and the water shall become clean. 9And it shall be that every living creature that swarms, all that enters there in the double stream shall live, and there shall be very many fish there, for this water has entered there and it has become clean. And all that enters there in the stream shall live. 10And it shall be that fishermen shall stand over it from Ein-Gedi to Ein-Eglaim, a place for spreading nets. There shall be fish of all kinds, like the fish of the Great Sea, very many. 11Its swamps and its marshes shall not become clean—for salt shall they be set aside. 12And by the stream, on its bank, on both sides every fruit-bearing tree shall spring up. Their leaf shall not wither, their fruit shall not cease. They shall yield new fruit month after month, for their water comes out from the sanctuary, and their fruit shall be for eating and their leaf for healing.”
13Thus said the Master, the LORD: “These are the boundaries by which you shall inherit the land for the twelve tribes. For Joseph—two portions. 14And you shall inherit it, each man like his fellow, as I have sworn to give it to your fathers, and this land shall fall in lots to you as an estate. 15And these are the boundaries of the land: at the northern end from the Great Sea by way of Hethlon, Lebo-Hamath, Zedad, 16Berathah, Sibraim, which is between the border of Damascus and the border of Hamath, Hazer-Hatticun, which is on the border of Hauran. 17And the boundary shall be from the Sea to Hazer-Enan, north of the border of Damascus, and the border of Hamath to the north. This is the northern limit. 18And the eastern limit is from Hauran to Damascus and from Gilead to the Land of Israel, the Jordan a border. To the eastern sea you shall measure. And this is the eastern limit. 19And the southern limit is south of Tamar to the waters Meriboth-Kadesh, along the wadi to the Great Sea. This is the southern limit. 20And the western limit is the Great Sea, the border as far as opposite Lebo-Hamath. This is the western limit. 21And you shall share out this land for yourselves for the tribes of Israel. 22And it shall be that you shall let lots fall in estate for yourselves and for the sojourners who sojourn in your midst who have begotten children in your midst. And they shall become for you like the native-born of the Israelites. With you they shall share in estate in the midst of the tribes of Israel. 23And it shall be that in the tribe in which the sojourner sojourns, there you shall grant his estate, said the Master, the LORD.”
CHAPTER 47 NOTES
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1. water was coming out from under the threshold of the house. In the midst of all the technical reports of temple floor plans and sacrifices, to be followed later in this chapter by a listing of the borders of the land, Ezekiel offers the last of his entirely original visionary experiences. At first blush, this looks like it might be merely some underground spring beneath the Temple from which water is seeping, but the miraculous nature of the flow of water quickly becomes apparent.
2. seeping. The verb mefakim occurs only here. The probable root is p-k-h, and it has been suggested that it is related to the noun pakh, a jar from which liquid would pour out in a thin stream.
3. there was a line in his hand. The line for measuring looks back to the elaborate measurements of the Temple carried out by “the man” earlier, but in this case he will measure only the extent of the stream, which deepens after every thousand cubits.
5. a stream which I could not cross. The familiar pattern, manifested in quite a few biblical stories and in folktales outside the Bible, is three (or in some instances, three plus one) with a difference at the end: in this case, an intensification from one to three (the deepening water), concluding in the unfordable depth of the stream. The pattern thus conveys the miraculous character of the vision—water seeping out from under the Temple somehow turns into a deep surging stream.
7. very many trees. While the Hebrew uses a singular form, it is clearly a collective noun. The abundant trees alongside the stream are a foreshadowing of the vision of fruitfulness in the culmination of this prophecy.
8. This water is going out to the eastern area and will go down to the Arabah. The water flows downhill from Mount Zion eastward to the Arabah, the rift of the Jordan Valley. From there it will continue downward to the Dead Sea, which is more than 435 feet below sea level and the lowest place on the face of the earth.
the sea. This lowercased body of water is the Dead Sea, in contrast to the uppercased Sea in verse 17, which is the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean, referred to in verse 10 in the Hebrew as the Great Sea, constitutes the sea par excellence for the Land of Israel—hence the capital S.
the sea of filthy water. The designation is somewhat imprecise, motivated by the awareness that the saline content of the Dead Sea is so high that nothing can live in it.
become clean. The literal sense of the Hebrew verb is “be healed,” but the biblical term for healing is often used for restoring a person or substance to a condition of wholeness. “Clean” water is water in which life can now survive. This meaning is spelled out in the last sentence of the next verse: “And all that enters there in the stream shall live.”
9. every living creature that swarms. The phrasal echo of the Creation story evokes the idea of abundant proliferating life-forms and perhaps of Eden itself.
the double stream. The vocalization of this noun in the Hebrew is a doublative form. This could be a scribal error, but perhaps it might be meant to intensify “stream.”
there shall be very many fish there. This is the focus of Ezekiel’s vision of an eschatological restoration of the devastated homeland: the Dead Sea, where nothing can live, will be transformed by these miraculous waters seeping out from the Temple into fresh water pullulating with life, suggesting a new Eden.
10. from Ein-Gedi to Ein-Eglaim. Ein-Gedi is an oasis overlooking the northern reaches of the Dead Sea (ein means “spring”), and Ein-Eglaim is presumably somewhere to the south in this same region.
a place for spreading nets. The establishment of marine life in this hitherto lifeless body of water also provides sustenance to the people living nearby.
11. for salt shall they be set aside. The Dead Sea was no doubt drawn on as a source of salt, and since salt is a necessary substance, the marshlands along its borders will be excluded from the cleansing and continue to provide salt.
12. every fruit-bearing tree. This is another phrase that recalls the Creation narrative.
They shall yield new fruit month after month. Complementing the miracle of the cleansed waters, the trees along the banks of the stream will be miraculously fruitful, not just in one season but month after month. This, too, is an edenic motif.
their leaf for healing. In fact, leaves, especially from the Dead Sea region, were often used as herbal medication.
13. These. For the Masoretic geh, which is not comprehensible, we read here with the ancient versions zeh, “this” or “these.”
These are the boundaries. Ezekiel’s prophecy of national restoration now returns to its preoccupation with measurements and demarcations—in this case, the sundry boundaries of the land.
For Joseph—two portions. The tribe of Joseph is the exception because it comprises two half-tribes, Ephraim and Manasseh.
15. Lebo-Hamath. The received text says only Lebo, not a place-name, but the Septuagint has Lebo-Hamath, and the second component of this name evidently was displaced to the beginning of the next verse, where it does not belong.
18. the eastern sea. This is the Dead Sea, the Mediterranean being the western sea.
22. and for the sojourners who sojourn in your midst. In Joshua, the sojourners, or resident aliens, are not given territory, so this is an innovation of Ezekiel’s. It may reflect a demographic reality in which there was a substantial population of resident aliens and in which the tribes as distinctive entities had largely disappeared.
who have begotten children in your midst. Ezekiel stipulates that the sojourners would have to be longtime residents in the Israelite community.
1And these are the names of the tribes: From the northern end by the way of Hethlon, Lebo-Hamath, Hazar-Enan, the border of Damascus to the north, and from the eastern side to the west—Dan, one. 2And by the boundary of Dan from the eastern end to the western end—Asher, one. 3And by the boundary of Asher from the eastern end to the western end—Naphtali, one. 4And by the boundary of Naphtali from the eastern end to the western end—Manasseh, one. 5And by the boundary of Manasseh from the eastern end to the western end—Ephraim, one. 6And by the boundary of Ephraim from the eastern end to the western end—Reuben, one. 7And by the boundary of Reuben from the eastern end to the western end—Judah, one. 8And by the boundary of Judah from the eastern end to the western end there shall be a donation that you shall set aside—twenty-five thousand cubits in width and length like one of the portions from the eastern end to the western end, and the sanctuary shall be within it. 9The donation that you shall set aside for the LORD is to be twenty-five thousand cubits long and ten thousand cubits wide. 10And for these shall the sacred donation be: for the priests on the north twenty-five thousand cubits long and to the west ten thousand cubits wide and to the east ten thousand cubits wide and to the south twenty-five thousand cubits long, and the LORD’s sanctuary shall be within it, 11for the consecrated priests of the sons of Zadok, who kept My watch, who did not stray when the Israelites strayed as the Levites strayed. 12And it shall be a donation to them from the donation of the land, holy of holies, by the territory of the Levites. 13And the Levites are opposite the territory of the priests, twenty-five thousand cubits long and ten thousand cubits wide, the whole length twenty-five thousand cubits and the whole width ten thousand cubits. 14And they shall not sell any of it nor shall they exchange nor shall it be transferred. It is the best of the land, sacred to the LORD. 15And the remaining five thousand cubits in width by twenty-five thousand in length is profane ground for the city for dwellings and for open fields, and the city shall be within it. 16And these are its measurements: on the north side four thousand five hundred cubits and on the south side four thousand five hundred cubits and on the east side four thousand five hundred cubits and on the west side four thousand five hundred cubits. 17And there shall be an open field for the city to the north, two hundred fifty cubits, and to the south, two hundred fifty cubits and to the east, two hundred fifty cubits and to the west, two hundred fifty cubits. 18And the remaining area in length opposite the sacred donation shall be ten thousand cubits on the east and ten thousand cubits on the west, and it shall be opposite the sacred donation. And its produce shall be for bread for the city workers. 19And the city workers shall work in it from all the tribes of Israel. 20The whole donation, twenty-five thousand cubits by twenty-five thousand cubits square, you shall set aside as a sacred donation in addition to the city’s holding. 21And what is remaining is for the prince on both sides of the sacred donation and of the city’s holding, facing the twenty-five thousand cubits of the donation to the eastern and western borders facing the twenty-five thousand cubits on the western border opposite the tribal portions. This is the prince’s, and the sacred donation and the sanctuary of the house shall be within it. 22And the Levites’ holding and the city’s holding shall be within what is the prince’s between the territory of Judah and the territory of Benjamin. For the prince it shall be. 23As for the remaining tribes, from the eastern end to the western end: Benjamin, one. 24And by the territory of Benjamin from the eastern end to the western end: Simeon, one. 25And by the territory of Simeon from the eastern end to the western end: Issachar, one. 26And by the territory of Issachar from the eastern end to the western end: Zebulun, one. 27And by the territory of Zebulun from the eastern end to the western end: Gad, one. 28And by the territory of Gad to the southern end, the boundary shall be from Tamar to the waters of Meribath-Kodesh, to the wadi, as far as the Great Sea. 29This is the land that you shall cast in lots for the tribes of Israel, and these are its portions, said the Master, the LORD. 30And this is the span of the city: from the eastern side four thousand five hundred cubits in measure. 31And the gates of the city are after the names of the tribes of Israel: three gates on the north—the Gate of Reuben, one; the Gate of Judah, one; the Gate of Levi, one. 32And on the eastern side, four thousand five hundred cubits and three gates—the Gate of Joseph, one; the Gate of Benjamin, one; the Gate of Dan, one. 33And the southern side, four thousand five hundred cubits and three gates—the Gate of Simeon, one; the Gate of Issachar, one; the gate of Zebulun, one. 34The western side, four thousand five hundred cubits. Their gates are three—the Gate of Gad, one; the Gate of Asher, one; the Gate of Naphtali, one. 35All around it is eighteen thousand cubits. And the name of the city from that day shall be “The LORD Is There.”
CHAPTER 48 NOTES
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1. And these are the names of the tribes. For modern readers, this catalogue of the tribal territories, including a delineation of the sectors of Jerusalem, is likely to be an uninspiring conclusion to a book of prophecy. One suspects that for Ezekiel, on the contrary, these dry listings were inspiring because they constituted a geometrical representation of a vision of national restoration. It should be noted that almost none of this corresponds to the historical realities of the land but is rather an eschatological imagining of the land. All the demarcations are symmetrical—equal borders for each of the tribes; Jerusalem is divided into symmetrical sectors for the priests, the Levites, the king, and the common people; the four walls of the city with gates named for three tribes on each side.
Dan. Another manifestation of the eschatological character of Ezekiel’s report of tribal borders is that it is careful to include all twelve tribes, even though the ten northern tribes had ceased to exist a century and a half before this prophecy.
2. Asher, one. The evident sense of “one” is “one share in the division of the land.” The unvarying repetition of this formula for each of the twelve tribes conveys the idea that each receives an equal portion—again, in contradiction to the preceding historical reality.
8. And by the boundary of Judah … there shall be a donation that you shall set aside. For Judah, there is a break in the series of formulaic repetitions because Jerusalem is in the tribal territory of Judah, and so here the prophet reverts to his delineation of the borders of sacred space around the Temple. “Donation,” which elsewhere in the Bible refers to a kind of sacrifice, is throughout these concluding chapters a large plot of land reserved for priestly use.
and the sanctuary shall be within it. In Ezekiel’s priestly vision, the city and the whole land are centered around the sanctuary.
15. open fields. Israelite cities had open fields, migrashim, around them, chiefly used to pasture herds and cultivate crops.
18. bread for the city workers. As elsewhere, bread is a synecdoche for food.
19. And the city workers shall work in it from all the tribes of Israel. Because Jerusalem is the site of both the Temple and the royal bureaucracy, its maintenance is an obligation of the entire people, the exaction of labor being a kind of taxation.
23. As for the remaining tribes. Having detailed the sundry divisions within Jerusalem triggered by the mention of Judah, the prophet now returns to his formulaic catalogue of tribal boundaries.
29. This is the land that you shall cast in lots … said the Master, the LORD. This sentence uses two rather different formulations: the verb at the beginning, which suggests the casting of lots, harks back to the procedure said to be used for the division of the land in Joshua, but the LORD’s “saying” how the land should be divided implies the symmetrical, preordained plan of division evident here.
30. And this is the span of the city. Having finished with the tribal territories, Ezekiel returns to his overriding preoccupation with the dimensions of the city, his vision constantly centered on Jerusalem.
35. And the name of the city from that day shall be “The LORD Is There.” This concluding flourish underscores the grand eschatological character of this vision of the restored city and land: in the rebuilt, carefully demarcated, symmetrical Jerusalem, with the sanctuary at its center, the very name of the city will express God’s constant presence in the place where He has chosen to dwell.
