Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
The Watchman Restated
Ezekiel 33:1-20
1 Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, · WEB
The watchman's charge is given a second time, now with the people's own despairing question quoted, and the answer is an oath.
The commission from chapter 3 is repeated, and the setting has changed completely. The first time it was given to a man about to spend twenty years announcing a disaster. This time the disaster has arrived, and the same charge is reissued for what comes after it. Between the two statements the whole first half of the book has happened.
The restatement adds the people's side of the arrangement, which the first version did not spell out. A land takes a man and sets him as its watchman; if he blows the trumpet and a man does not take warning, his blood will be on his own head. Responsibility is distributed rather than pooled. The watchman owes a warning, and the hearer owes attention, and neither can discharge the other's duty.
What the people are saying is then quoted, and it is not defiance but despair: Our transgressions and our sins are on us, and we pine away in them. How then can we live? They have accepted the whole indictment. They agree that the judgment was deserved, and they have concluded that nothing further is possible. This is the most theologically correct thing anyone says in the book, and it is answered as an error.
The answer is put under oath, which happens rarely: As I live, says the Lord Yahweh, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. God swears by his own life about what he takes pleasure in. And the appeal that follows repeats a word twice, which is as near to pleading as the book comes: Turn, turn from your evil ways! For why will you die, house of Israel?
The rule from chapter 18 is then restated in the same shape, with one detail added that is easy to miss. When the wicked turns, what he does is specified — restore the pledge, give again that which he had taken by robbery, walk in the statutes of life. Repentance here has creditors. It involves handing property back to the people it was taken from, and the passage names that before it names anything else.
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