Introduction to Ezekiel

Title and authorship

The book names its author once, in the third verse, and the naming carries three facts: Yahweh's word came to Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, in the land of the Chaldeans by the river Chebar Ezekiel 1:3. He is a priest. He is somebody's son, in a country that kept priestly genealogies. And he is abroad.

That combination governs everything. A priest belonged to a building, a rota and an altar, and this one is a thousand miles from all three. Nothing he was trained to do can be done where he is, and the book's preoccupations follow directly from what a priest notices — clean and unclean, holy and common, what may approach and what may not, and the exact measurements of a house.

Everything after those two verses is written in the first person, and the book is unusually consistent about it. Where other prophetic books gather oracles from several periods and arrange them by subject, this one reads as a single sustained account by one man, dated as it goes, with the visions reported as he received them. Nothing in it requires a second hand to explain its shape.

One detail in the opening line is genuinely unexplained. The book begins in the thirtieth year Ezekiel 1:1 and then immediately supplies a different and precise date — the fifth year of Jehoiachin's captivity. What the thirtieth year counts from is never stated. A priest entered his service at thirty Numbers 4:3, and a man of that age standing by a foreign canal on the day he should have begun at the altar is a reading the text supports without confirming. Honest readers have long differed, and nothing in the book turns on it.

Date

This is the most precisely dated book in the prophets, and the dating system is itself a theological statement. Thirteen oracles carry a day, a month and a year, and the years are counted from the deportation of a king: the fifth year of King Jehoiachin's captivity Ezekiel 1:2. Not from a reigning monarch, not from a temple, not from a founding. The exiles' calendar begins at the moment they were carried off, and Ezekiel writes inside it.

The span is fixed at both ends. The call comes in the fifth year. The great temple vision is dated to the twenty-fifth year of our captivity... in the fourteenth year after the city was struck Ezekiel 40:1. And the latest dated word in the book, an oracle about Egypt, falls in the twenty-seventh year Ezekiel 29:17. That is a ministry of at least twenty-two years, and the last oracle is placed out of chronological order deliberately, beside the Tyre material it corrects.

One date divides the book in half. In the ninth year the siege of Jerusalem begins, and Ezekiel is told the day it starts while sitting in Babylon Ezekiel 24:1. In the twelfth year a survivor arrives with three words — The city has been defeated! Ezekiel 33:21 — and everything before that verse is warning while everything after it is restoration. The turn is not a change of theme but a change of situation, and the book is arranged around it.

The dates also settle what the first twenty-four chapters are doing. Jerusalem is standing throughout them, the temple is in use, and a community in Babylon is being told that both are finished. That is why the book spends so much energy on a city its readers could not see.

Backgrounds

The setting is a resettlement community. Ezekiel lives at Tel Aviv by the Chebar canal Ezekiel 3:15, among people deported with Jehoiachin — the officials, craftsmen and smiths taken in the second wave 2 Kings 24:14–16. They are not slaves. They have houses, they can be visited, and the book shows the elders of Judah sitting in the prophet's house to inquire of him on at least three occasions Ezekiel 8:1 Ezekiel 14:1 Ezekiel 20:1. It is a functioning community with leadership and a settled address in Babylon .

What that community believed is the target of the first half of the book. Jerusalem had not fallen. The temple was standing, the sacrifices continued, and a king of David's line still sat in the city. The natural conclusion was that the deportation had been a setback and the exiles would soon go home, and prophets among them were saying so. Ezekiel's whole first commission is to demolish that hope.

The visions of Jerusalem are therefore reported by a man who is not there. He is carried in vision to the temple courts and shown what is happening inside them — an image at the north gate, elders burning incense to creatures drawn on the walls, women weeping for Tammuz, men bowing eastward to the sun Ezekiel 8:5–16. Whatever the exiles imagined the sanctuary still was, they are told what it had become.

The political background is the same one Jeremiah records from the other end. Zedekiah rebels against Babylon on the strength of an Egyptian alliance; Ezekiel calls Egypt a reed that splinters in the hand of whoever leans on it Ezekiel 29:6–7; the city falls, the temple burns, and a third deportation follows. And the two prophets overlap in years without ever mentioning one another — Jeremiah in Jerusalem  telling the city to submit, Ezekiel in Babylon telling the deported that the city will not be spared.

Theology and purpose

The spine of the book is the movement of one thing, and it can be traced verse by verse. The glory of Yahweh appears to a priest beside a foreign canal Ezekiel 1:28. It is found in the temple, where it belongs Ezekiel 8:4. It rises from the cherub to the threshold of the house Ezekiel 9:3, stands over the threshold Ezekiel 10:4, departs from the threshold to the east gate Ezekiel 10:18–19, leaves the city altogether and stands on the mountain to its east Ezekiel 11:23 — and, twenty-five chapters later, returns from the way of the east and fills the house Ezekiel 43:2–5. Everything else in the book hangs on that itinerary. The temple was not captured while God was in it. He left first, in stages, slowly, and the destruction followed an absence rather than causing one.

The purpose of every event in the book is stated in a formula that occurs in fifty-seven verses: you will know that I am Yahweh. It is attached to judgments and to mercies without distinction, to Israel and to Egypt and to Tyre alike. The book is not primarily about punishment or restoration; it is about a knowledge being produced, and both halves are means to it.

What protects that from becoming mere power is the reason given for the restoration, which is the most God-centered sentence in the prophets: I don't do this for your sake, house of Israel, but for my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations Ezekiel 36:22. Israel's exile had made the nations think Yahweh too weak to keep his people; bringing them back answers that, and the answer is not owed to Israel. The passage says so twice, and adds be ashamed and confounded for your ways to a promise of total cleansing Ezekiel 36:32. Grace and shame are held in the same paragraph.

How the change is worked is stated in the plainest terms Scripture uses. Clean water sprinkled, a new heart given, the stony heart taken out and a heart of flesh put in, the Spirit put within so that the statutes are kept Ezekiel 36:25–27. Every verb is God's. This is the same remedy another prophet described as a law written on the heart Jeremiah 31:33, and the two books were written in the same generation at opposite ends of the same road.

Against that stands the book's insistence on individual responsibility, argued at chapter length against a proverb the exiles were using to blame their parents Ezekiel 18:2. The soul that sins will die; a wicked man who turns will live; a righteous man who turns away will not be credited with what he was. Held together with the watchman's charge Ezekiel 3:17–19, it produces the book's practical demand: God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, so the warning must be given and the turning is genuinely open.

Additional notes

Ezekiel is called son of man ninety-five times and by no other title. The phrase means simply a human being, a mortal, and it is the form of address used by the voice from the throne. A man who has just seen wheels full of eyes and a likeness on a sapphire throne is told, in effect, to stand up as what he is. The contrast is deliberate and it never lets up.

The message is frequently acted rather than spoken. He lies on his side for months facing a brick with a city drawn on it, shaves his head with a sword and divides the hair, digs through a wall at dusk with a bag on his shoulder, eats his bread trembling, and is forbidden to mourn his wife on the day she dies Ezekiel 4:1–8 Ezekiel 5:1–4 Ezekiel 12:3–7 Ezekiel 24:15–18. The signs are not illustrations of the message. In several cases they are the message, and the explanation is only given when someone asks.

He is mute for most of the first half. His tongue is made to stick to the roof of his mouth at the start Ezekiel 3:26, he speaks only when God opens his mouth for a specific word, and the silence is lifted on the night the fugitive arrives with news of the city Ezekiel 24:27 Ezekiel 33:22. The muteness is itself a sign: there is nothing to discuss until the thing announced has happened.

The temple vision of chapters 40 to 48 is the hardest passage in the prophets to place, and this is said plainly rather than smoothed over. It is given in exact measurements, it includes sacrifices and a prince, and it ends with a river and a city named Yahweh is there Ezekiel 48:35. What the text supplies is set out fully — the plan, the returning glory, the river, the boundaries — and where it does not supply a key, none is invented. The vision's own stated purpose is given at Ezekiel 43:10–11, and it is worth weighing before any theory about it: the plan is shown to a people so that they may be ashamed of their iniquities and keep the design.

Chapters 26 to 28 and 29 to 32 are read as addressed to the cities and rulers they name. Where the language passes beyond what any human king could be said to have been — as in the lament over the king of Tyre — the text's own terms are followed exactly and the reader is left with what it says.

Outline

How the book is built

The glory seen by the Chebar, and the glory filling the house inclusio 1:1-43:5

• A 1:1-28 By the river Chebar, in the land of the Chaldeans, the heavens open and a deported priest sees the likeness of the glory of Yahweh — and falls on his face.
• A′ 43:1-5 The glory of the God of Israel comes from the east, the earth shines with it, the prophet falls on his face again, and it fills the house — the same vision, arriving where it belongs.

The book opens with a priest in a foreign country seeing the glory of God where it had no business being, and closes its vision cycle with the same glory entering a temple by the east gate and filling it. The pairing is not imposed: when the glory returns, the text stops to say that this was the same sight, and names both earlier occasions — the vision of the city's destruction, and the vision by the river Chebar. Between the two members the glory is traced leaving in stages, from the cherub to the threshold, from the threshold to the east gate, from the gate to the mountain east of the city. What the frame establishes is that the exile was not the absence of God from his people but the presence of God away from his house, and that the return is a return to a building rather than to a nation that had earned one.

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