Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
Silver in the Streets
Ezekiel 7:14-27
14 They have blown the trumpet, and have made all ready; but no one goes to the battle, for my wrath is on all its multitude. · WEB
The trumpet sounds and nobody comes, and the wealth that was supposed to buy safety is thrown into the road as garbage.
The first picture is of a mobilization that fails. They have blown the trumpet, and have made all ready; but no one goes to the battle. The alarm works, the preparations are complete, and the men do not move. That is not cowardice so much as the removal of the will to fight. The reason given is short: the wrath is on the whole multitude. A nation can be defeated before an enemy arrives.
Then the exits are counted and there are none. The sword is outside, and the pestilence and the famine within. A man in the field dies by the sword; a man in the city dies of famine and disease. Those who do escape reach the hills and are compared to doves of the valleys, moaning. They are birds displaced from their nesting places, making a sound that is neither song nor speech. Every one of them, the text adds, in his own iniquity.
The strongest verse in the chapter concerns money, and it is worth reading slowly. They will cast their silver in the streets, and their gold will be as an unclean thing. Not stolen, not confiscated. Thrown away by its owners, in the road, as a thing you would not want to touch. The reason is given plainly. It cannot deliver them in the day of Yahweh's wrath, and it cannot satisfy a soul or fill a belly. Precious metal has exactly one function in a famine, which is none, and the collapse of its value is described as a revelation rather than a loss.
And the same verse names what the silver had actually been: the stumbling block of their iniquity. The wealth had not merely failed to help; it had been the thing they tripped over. The chapter ends by taking away the three sources a nation consults when it is frightened — the prophet's vision, the priest's law, the elders' counsel — and reporting all three as failed. King and prince are left mourning and desolate, and the last clause is the book's constant one: according to their own judgments I will judge them. Then they will know that I am Yahweh.
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