Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Whitewashed Wall
Ezekiel 13:1-23
1 Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, · WEB
The false prophets are charged with a failure to build and a success at decorating, and the storm is sent to find out which the wall was.
The charge is stated in one phrase before any image is used. They prophesy out of their own heart and have seen nothing — the offense is not error but invention. The book adds that they have made men hope the word would be confirmed. What is missing is stated as a failure of engineering: You have not gone up into the gaps or built up the wall for the house of Israel, to stand in the battle in Yahweh's day. A prophet's work is defined here as masonry on a defensive line, and these men have done none of it.
What they have done instead is the chapter's central image. Someone builds a flimsy wall, and the prophets come along and plaster it with whitewash. Whitewash is cheap, quick and entirely cosmetic. It makes a bad wall look like a good one. It makes the difference between them invisible until the weather comes. That is the most exact account of a comfortable message anyone has given. It does not build anything, and it removes the evidence that nothing has been built.
So the test is a storm — an overflowing shower, great hailstones, a stormy wind — and the question put afterward is the one that matters: Where is the plaster with which you have plastered it? The wall falls, and the plasterers fall with it, inside it. And the summary at the end of the section names their message in the same words another prophet used of it. They see visions of peace for her, and there is no peace Jeremiah 6:14.
The second half turns to women practicing a trade in the same market, and the details are unusual — magic bands sewn for the arms, veils made for heads of every size, souls hunted like birds. The price is named and it is pitiful: for handfuls of barley and for pieces of bread. But the charge against them is identical to the charge against the men, and it is stated in terms of effect rather than technique. They have grieved the heart of the righteous, whom I have not made sad. They have strengthened the hands of the wicked, that he should not return from his wicked way. Distress the people who should be reassured; reassure the people who should be disturbed. Both halves of the chapter measure a ministry by which way it moves people. Neither asks what the practitioners believed.
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