Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
Against the Mountains of Israel
Ezekiel 6:1-14
1 Yahweh’s word came to me, saying, · WEB
The oracle is addressed to the landscape rather than to the people, because the high places were built on it and the bones will be scattered around them.
The address is unusual and deliberate. Ezekiel is told to set his face toward the mountains of Israel and speak to them — to the mountains and the hills, the watercourses and the valleys. A prophet is preaching at geography. The reason is in the next line. The high places were on the hills, and the shrines were under the trees in the valleys, so the terrain itself had been enlisted, and a country's own contours had become its liturgy.
What follows is destruction described in a very specific order. The altars go desolate. The incense stands are broken. And then the detail that makes the judgment fit the offense: I will cast down your slain men before your idols. Bodies are laid in front of the images and bones are scattered around the altars. Nothing defiled a sanctuary in that world like a corpse, so the shrines are not merely demolished. They are permanently unusable, and by the people who worshiped at them.
The refrain that dominates this book appears four times in these fourteen verses, and its placement is the thing to watch: you will know that I am Yahweh. It is attached to the slain falling, to the remnant remembering, to the bodies among the idols, and to the desolate land. The judgment is not presented as an end in itself. Something is being made known by it, and the book will say the same about every mercy later on.
And in the middle of the destruction the survivors are described, in a sentence that reverses the direction of everything around it. Those who escape will remember God among the nations. They will understand how he I have been broken with their lewd heart — a startling verb, applied to God, describing what their unfaithfulness had done to him. And then they will loathe themselves in their own sight for what they have done. The remembering comes after the exile, not before, and the self-loathing is presented as a symptom of recovery rather than of despair. That order will govern the rest of the book.
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