Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
For My Name's Sake, in the Wilderness
Ezekiel 20:1-29
1 In the seventh year, in the fifth month, the tenth day of the month, some of the elders of Israel came to inquire of Yahweh, and sat before me. · WEB
Elders come to inquire and are given a history lesson instead, and its refrain is that God did not destroy Israel because of what the nations would have concluded.
The elders sit down to inquire and are refused: As I live... I will not be inquired of by you. What they get in place of an answer is the nation's history, retold in four movements. In Egypt. In the wilderness with the first generation. In the wilderness with the second. And in the land. Each movement has the same shape. A command is given, the people rebel, God says he will pour out his wrath, and then he does not.
The reason he does not is stated at each turn in the same words, and it is not the one a reader expects. But I worked for my name's sake, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations. Not because they repented, and not because he pitied them, though the book says elsewhere that he did. The restraint is exercised for a different reason. The watching nations would have drawn a conclusion about a God who brought a people out and then destroyed them.
One strand in the history is worth marking. In Egypt the command was to throw away the abominations of their eyes, and they didn't all throw away the abominations of their eyes. The rebellion is dated before the exodus. Whatever else the wilderness generation was, it was not a people corrupted after the rescue; it was a people who brought Egypt's idols out with them.
The Sabbath is named twice in the chapter as the covenant sign: I gave them my Sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am Yahweh who sanctifies them. It is also listed among the things they profaned, in the wilderness and in the land, alongside the statutes and ordinances. What the day signified is stated in that verse, and it is not what a reader might guess. It marks not their loyalty but his work on them.
The hardest verses in the chapter are the two about statutes that were not good and ordinances in which they couldn't live. The context settles what is meant. The people had refused the statutes by which a man lives Ezekiel 20:11, and had insisted on the practices of the nations. What follows is that they were given over to the ordinances they had chosen. The horror named is the one they were already committing: children passed through the fire, which the book states three times God had never commanded and which never entered his mind Jeremiah 7:31. God is not the author of a law demanding child sacrifice. The verse describes people handed over to what they insisted on, and the stated purpose is that they should be made desolate to the end that they might know that I am Yahweh.
held with reason What this mark means