Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
The Desire of His Eyes
Ezekiel 24:15-27
15 Also Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, · WEB
Ezekiel's wife dies in the evening, he is forbidden to mourn her, and the next morning he explains that the exiles will do the same over the temple.
The word comes in the morning and it is not softened. I will take away from you the desire of your eyes with one stroke; yet you shall neither mourn nor weep. The phrase is a term of affection and the book uses it without further comment. Then the funeral customs are forbidden one by one — no wailing, no bared head, no bare feet, no covered lip, no mourner's bread brought by neighbors. Each item is a public act. What is prohibited is not grief but its expression, and the single permitted response is to sigh, but not aloud.
What follows is one verse long and is the hardest sentence in the book to read: So I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died. So I did in the morning as I was commanded. He preached that day. His wife died that night. He obeyed the next morning. There is no lament recorded, no protest of the kind he made in chapters 9 and 11, and no description of what the obedience cost. The book that preserves his other objections preserves his silence here.
The silence works exactly as the signs are designed to. The people ask — Won't you tell us what these things mean to us, that you act like this? — and the question opens the message, as it did with the baggage and the wall. The answer is that God will profane his sanctuary, the pride of your power, the desire of your eyes, and that which your soul pities, and the same phrase used of a man's wife is used of the temple.
And the instruction given to them is the one he has just carried out. When it happens they will not mourn or weep. They will keep their turbans on and their sandals on and pine away in their iniquities, moaning to one another. Public mourning presumes a shared world in which loss can be named and neighbors can bring bread, and the passage says there will be none. What it does not say is that they should feel nothing. Ezekiel's own case is the interpretation: the grief is real, and it goes unexpressed. The chapter closes by naming the day the muteness will lift — when a fugitive arrives with the news — and the first half of the book ends there.
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