Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
No One to Stand in the Gap
Ezekiel 22:17-31
17 Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, · WEB
Every office in the country is surveyed and found corrupt, and the search that follows is for one man to stand in a breach.
The first image is a refiner's furnace, and it is a bitter one. Silver ore is heated so that the base metals separate out and the silver is left. Here the whole nation is described as what comes off the top: All of them are bronze, tin, iron, and lead in the middle of the furnace. They are the dross of silver. And the siege is described as the smelting — gathered into the middle of Jerusalem, blown on with fire, melted. Ordinarily a refining separates something worth keeping. This one is a process with no silver at the end of it.
The survey that follows takes each office in turn, and it should be read as a complete audit. The prophets are a conspiracy, devouring souls like a lion and taking treasure. The priests have done violence to the law and profaned holy things, and their specific failure is technical and devastating — they made no distinction between the holy and the common, and did not teach anyone to tell clean from unclean. That was the priest's actual job. Teaching the difference between categories is what a priest was for, and its collapse is why everything else in the list is possible.
The princes are wolves who tear prey for dishonest gain. The prophets appear a second time, plastering with whitewash and saying The Lord Yahweh says when Yahweh has not spoken. And then the people of the land, who are not excused as victims of their leaders: they have used oppression, exercised robbery, troubled the poor and needy, and wronged the foreigner. Four ranks, and no rank is clean.
The last two verses are the most quoted in the chapter and the most easily sentimentalized. I sought for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I would not destroy it; but I found no one. The image is from the previous chapter's masonry — a breach in a defensive wall, and a man standing in it. It is intercession described as a job with a location. What the verse asserts is that one such man would have been enough, that the search was real, and that it failed. Moses had stood in exactly that position and the nation survived it Psalms 106:23. Here nobody is standing there, and the sentence follows.
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