Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
One Shepherd, My Servant David
Ezekiel 34:17-31
17 “As for you, O my flock, the Lord Yahweh says: ‘Behold, I judge between sheep and sheep, the rams and the male goats. · WEB
The judgment moves from the shepherds to the sheep, and the fat sheep are charged with what they did to the pasture after they had eaten.
The chapter turns without warning from the leaders to the flock. Behold, I judge between sheep and sheep, the rams and the male goats. Removing corrupt shepherds does not by itself produce a healthy flock, and the second half of the chapter says why. The strong animals were doing their own damage.
The charge against them is remarkable for its precision. Does it seem a small thing to you to have fed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the residue of your pasture? And to have drunk of the clear waters, but must you foul the residue with your feet? The offense is not eating. It is what happens after eating — the grass trampled and the water muddied, so that what is left is unusable by whoever comes next. That is a description of a kind of wrong nobody has to intend, and the passage treats it as fully culpable.
The second charge is more active: thrusting with side and shoulder and pushing the diseased with the horns until they are scattered. Both together produce the picture of a flock in which the strong crowd the weak away from what they need, and the response is judicial in exactly those terms — I will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep.
Then the shepherd is named, and the naming is careful. I will set up one shepherd over them, and he will feed them, even my servant David. David had been dead four centuries. What is promised is not that king returning but one shepherd of his line and his character, and the emphasis falls on the number. After a chapter about many shepherds who scattered the sheep, there is one. The following verse holds two figures together without explanation — I, Yahweh, will be their God, and my servant David prince among them — and the arrangement is left as it stands.
What follows is a covenant of peace described almost entirely in terms of not being afraid. Wild animals gone, so that people can sleep in the woods and camp in the wilderness. Rain in its season. The tree yielding fruit and the ground its increase. Yokes broken. No one will make him afraid. And the last verse strips the metaphor away in a single line, in case the pastoral imagery has made anyone forget who is being discussed: You my sheep, the sheep of my pasture, are men, and I am your God.
held with reason What this mark means