Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
The King of Babylon at the Parting of the Way
Ezekiel 21:18-32
18 Yahweh’s word came to me again, saying, · WEB
A pagan king shakes arrows at a crossroads to decide which city to attack, and the lot that comes up is the one God had already determined.
Ezekiel is told to draw a map. Two roads leave one country, and at the fork he is to set up a signpost — one way to Rabbah of the Ammonites, the other to Jerusalem. Then the scene at the fork is described as it happens: the king of Babylon stood at the parting of the way... to use divination. He shook the arrows back and forth. He consulted the teraphim. He looked in the liver.
Three pagan techniques are named without comment. Marked arrows shaken in a quiver until one falls out, household images consulted, and the liver of a sacrificed animal read for markings. Nothing in the passage suggests these methods work. What it says is that the result was right: In his right hand was the lot for Jerusalem. A king using superstition to choose his next campaign arrives at the decision that had already been announced by a prophet a thousand miles away.
That is the same claim the book makes when it calls a foreign king a servant, and it is worth stating carefully. The passage does not endorse divination and does not say God spoke through the arrows. It says that a man free to choose, choosing by a method with no power in it, chose what God had determined. The verse that follows anticipates the objection from the city's side. To those in Jerusalem who had sworn oaths it will look like a false divination — an obvious fraud, easily dismissed — and they will be taken anyway.
The chapter then addresses the king of Judah directly, and the sentence on him is delivered in the vocabulary of a coronation reversed. Remove the turban, and take off the crown. This will not be as it was. And then a word repeated three times, which is as close to a shout as the book comes: I will overturn, overturn, overturn it. The last clause is the only thing left standing in the paragraph, and it is a promise rather than a threat — until he comes whose right it is; and I will give it. The crown is taken off, the office is emptied, and the emptiness is given a term. Somebody is coming who has a right to it, and the book does not say here who that is.
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