Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
The Cedar That Rose Above the Rest
Ezekiel 31:1-18
1 In the eleventh year, in the third month, in the first day of the month, Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, · WEB
Pharaoh is asked whom he resembles, and is shown a greater empire that had already fallen for exactly the reason he is about to.
The chapter opens with a question rather than a charge: Whom are you like in your greatness? It is an invitation to make a comparison, and the comparison is then supplied. The Assyrian was a cedar in Lebanon, of high stature, its top among the thick boughs. Assyria had ruled the region within living memory and had been destroyed within Ezekiel's own lifetime, so the example chosen is recent and undeniable.
The description of the tree is generous and it is careful to name the source of the growth. The waters nourished it. The deep made it to grow. Its height was a consequence of what fed it, not of anything it did. All the birds nested in its boughs, every animal bore young under its branches, and great nations lived in its shade — which is the standard biblical picture of an empire providing genuine order and protection. Nothing here says the greatness was a fraud.
The attribution is then made explicit in a sentence easy to pass over: I made it beautiful by the multitude of its branches. The tree's magnificence was a gift, and the trees of Eden envied it. What went wrong is stated in one verse — the heart was lifted up because of its height — and the same fault has now been named of the prince of Tyre, the king of Tyre and Pharaoh in the space of four chapters. The book is describing a single mechanism, and it works the same way at every scale.
What is done about it is brief. The tree is given into the hand of the mighty one of the nations, cut down, and left on the mountains with the branches fallen in the valleys, and all the peoples who lived in its shadow go away from it. Then the birds settle on the ruin and the animals stand on its branches. And the stated purpose of the whole comparison is in the closing verses: it happened to the end that none of all the trees by the waters exalt themselves in their stature. Egypt is shown a felled cedar and asked to draw the obvious conclusion. The last line records that the conclusion was not drawn.
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