Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Song of the Sword
Ezekiel 21:1-17
1 Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, · WEB
A sword is sharpened and polished in a chant, and the prophet is told to groan aloud so that people ask him why.
The chapter opens with an instruction to preach in a direction — set your face toward Jerusalem, and toward the sanctuary — and with an announcement that a sword is being drawn out of its sheath against righteous and wicked alike. That last phrase is uncomfortable and it is meant to be. A national catastrophe does not sort its casualties, and the book has already dealt with the individual question at length in chapter 18. Here it is describing what happens to a country.
Ezekiel is then told to sigh with a broken heart and with bitterness in front of them, and to keep doing it until they ask what is wrong. The answer he is given to hold in reserve is short: because of the news; when it comes every heart will melt and every hand be feeble. The pattern is the same one used with the baggage and the wall. He performs the coming grief until somebody asks, and the question is what opens the message.
The song itself is the strangest piece of writing in the book. A sword! A sword! It is sharpened, and also polished. Sharpened for slaughter, polished so that it flashes like lightning, given to be handled, put into the hand of the killer. It is a work song for an armorer, and it is being sung about the sword's use on the singer's own people. In the middle of it comes the line that stops the rhythm: Should we then make mirth?
The last verses turn the performance back on the prophet. He is to cry and wail, because the sword is on his people and on all the princes of Israel, and to beat your thigh and strike his hands together. Ezekiel is not permitted to deliver this at a distance. He announces the sword and mourns it in the same paragraph, and the chapter gives no indication that the two are in tension.
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