Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
A Heart of Flesh, and the Glory Leaves the City
Ezekiel 11:1-25
1 Moreover the Spirit lifted me up and brought me to the east gate of Yahweh’s house, which looks eastward. Behold, twenty-five men were at the door of the gate; and I saw among them Jaazaniah the son of Azzur, and Pelatiah the son of Benaiah, princes of the people. · WEB
The men who felt safest in Jerusalem are told the city will not protect them, and the exiles they had written off are told God has become their sanctuary.
Twenty-five men stand at the east gate — the same number as the sun-worshipers a chapter earlier. These are named as princes and counselors. Their slogan is quoted, and it is a piece of grim confidence: This is the cauldron, and we are the meat. A pot protects what is inside it from the fire. They mean that the city walls will hold. They mean that they are the choice cuts left after the deportations. And they mean that there is no point building houses, because the situation is temporary.
The answer takes the metaphor apart from inside. The meat in the cauldron, they are told, is the men they have killed and left in the streets. And they themselves will be brought out of the middle of it. Being taken out of the pot is the one thing meat in a cauldron is safe from. They will be judged at the border of Israel rather than in the city. Their slogan promised containment. The reply grants the pot and removes them from it.
Then something happens that is unlike anything else in the book. When I prophesied, Pelatiah the son of Benaiah died — one of the two men named, dead as the words are spoken, in a vision. Ezekiel falls on his face and cries out for the second time in three chapters, asking whether God will make a full end of the remnant. The book keeps recording his protests, and it never presents them as faithlessness.
The answer is the turn the whole first half has been waiting for, and it begins by quoting an insult. The people still in Jerusalem had been saying of the deported, Go far away from Yahweh. This land has been given to us for a possession. Distance from the temple was read as distance from God, and the property had been redistributed accordingly. The reply concedes the geography and denies the conclusion: I will be to them a sanctuary for a little while in the countries where they have come. Not a substitute for the temple. A sanctuary, in the countries, to the people who had lost one.
What follows is the book's first statement of its central promise, given in brief here and in full later Ezekiel 36:26–27. One heart. A new spirit. The stony heart taken out and a heart of flesh put in, so that they may walk in my statutes. Every verb belongs to God, and the purpose clause is obedience rather than feeling. Then the chapter closes the movement it had been tracking. The cherubim lift their wings, and the glory goes up from the middle of the city and stands on the mountain to its east. God has left Jerusalem. The sentence immediately before said he had become a sanctuary in Chaldea.
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