Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
Mount Seir and the Mountains of Israel
Ezekiel 35:1-36:15
1 Moreover Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, · WEB
Two mountains are addressed in turn — one that gloated over an empty land and one that is promised people again.
The pairing is the point, and the chapters are built to be read together. Mount Seir is Edom, and the mountains of Israel are the terrain of chapter 6, where the high places had stood. The same form of address is used for both, and the outcomes are opposite.
Edom's offense is stated in three parts. There was a perpetual enmity — an old grudge, and the two nations were descended from twin brothers. There was the handing over of Israel to the sword in the time of their calamity, which is the charge of taking advantage at the worst possible moment. And there was a sentence spoken about the two kingdoms: These two nations and these two countries will be mine, and we will possess it. Edom looked at an emptied land and made a claim on it.
The reply contains a clause that explains why the offense is treated so seriously: although Yahweh was there. The land was not vacant. Its owner had removed his people from it, and a third party read the removal as abandonment and moved in. That is the same mistake the sealed room in chapter 8 was built on, and the same mistake the inhabitants of Jerusalem made about the exiles.
Then the address turns, and the tone changes completely. The mountains of Israel are told that they have borne the shame of the nations and are taken up in the lips of talkers, and what is promised to them is entirely agricultural and demographic. Shoot out your branches. Yield your fruit. You will be tilled and sown. Men multiplied on you, cities inhabited, waste places built.
Two phrases in that promise are worth marking. The first is for they are at hand to come, which gives the land a reason to start growing again. The second is stranger and more generous: you will do better than at your beginnings. The restoration is not described as a return to a former condition. And the last line of the section promises the land itself that it will never again bereave its people of their children, which addresses the ground as if it were guilty of what happened on it.
settled What this mark means