Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
Yahweh Is There
Ezekiel 48:1-35
1 “Now these are the names of the tribes: From the north end, beside the way of Hethlon to the entrance of Hamath, Hazar Enan at the border of Damascus, northward beside Hamath (and they shall have their sides east and west), Dan, one portion. · WEB
The tribes are laid out in equal strips around a holy portion, and the book ends by naming the city after the one fact that had been missing.
The allocation is described as a series of parallel bands running from the eastern border to the sea, one for each tribe, listed from north to south. Every tribe gets frontage on both boundaries and the same width of land. Whatever else this arrangement is, it is not the geography of Canaan, where the tribes had been fitted into hills, valleys and coastal plains of wildly unequal value. The plan is drawn on a principle rather than on terrain.
At the center is the holy portion, with the sanctuary in the middle of it, the priests to one side and the Levites to the other, and the city's land below. Judah lies immediately north of it and Benjamin immediately south, so the two tribes that had made up the surviving kingdom now stand as neighbors on either side of the sanctuary rather than one holding it. The tribes descended from the handmaids — Dan, Asher, Naphtali, Gad — are given full portions in the same series. No one is at the edge in the sense of being lesser.
The city itself is described last, and it is square, with three gates on each side named for the twelve tribes. Levi has a gate, though Levi has no tribal band. Joseph has a gate, though Joseph's portion was divided between his sons in the allocation. The gate list and the land list do not match, and both are given. Everyone who belongs has a way in, whether or not they hold territory.
The measurement of the circumference is the last number in a book full of them — eighteen thousand reeds around. And then the book ends on a name rather than a dimension: the name of the city from that day shall be, 'Yahweh is there.'
That is the answer to the sentence the whole book was written against. In a sealed room in chapter 8 the elders had said Yahweh doesn't see us. Yahweh has forsaken the land Ezekiel 8:12, and the people in Jerusalem had told the exiles to go far away from him. The glory had then been tracked leaving, stage by stage, until it stood on a mountain east of the city. Forty chapters later it comes back in by the gate it left through, and the last three words of the book are the city's new name. Nothing is said about its walls, its wealth or its king. What it is called is that God is in it.
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