Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
Digging Through the Wall at Dusk
Ezekiel 12:1-16
1 Yahweh’s word also came to me, saying, · WEB
Ezekiel packs a bag, breaks through his own wall at dusk and leaves with his face covered, and the detail nobody could have invented is fulfilled to the letter.
The diagnosis that opens the chapter is borrowed from the law and turned on the covenant people: they have eyes to see, and don't see... ears to hear, and don't hear. The failure is not of information. These are people with the facts and without the capacity. The remedy proposed is not another speech. It is a performance, staged where they cannot avoid watching it.
The instructions are staged in two halves, and the timing matters. By day he brings out his baggage in their sight. It is the bundle a refugee carries, packed in public so that everyone sees what kind of bundle it is. Then at evening he digs through the wall of his own house with his hands, carries the bag out through the hole on his shoulder, and covers his face so that he cannot see the land. The hope attached to it is stated plainly: It may be they will consider, though they are a rebellious house.
When the neighbors finally ask what he is doing — and the book notes that they do ask — the explanation names a man. This burden concerns the prince in Jerusalem. Zedekiah will carry his baggage out through a breach in the dark, and will cover his face, and will not see the land. Every element of the mime is assigned.
And then the clause that could not have been guessed: I will bring him to Babylon to the land of the Chaldeans; yet he will not see it, though he will die there. Brought to a city he will never see, and dying in it. What happened is recorded by the prophet at the other end of the same events. Zedekiah escaped by night through a breach in the wall and was captured. He was blinded at Riblah, then carried to Babylon, where he died in prison Jeremiah 39:4–7 Jeremiah 52:11. Two men, hundreds of miles apart, said things that sound contradictory about the same king. Both turned out to be exactly and awkwardly true.
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