Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ezekiel · About this commentary
What They Do in the Dark
Ezekiel 8:1-18
1 In the sixth year, in the sixth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I sat in my house, and the elders of Judah sat before me, the Lord Yahweh’s hand fell on me there. · WEB
Carried in vision to a temple he cannot reach, Ezekiel is shown four abominations in ascending order, and the last is performed with its back to the sanctuary.
The scene begins in Babylon with the elders of Judah sitting in the prophet's house, and it is worth pausing on that. There is a community here, with leaders who come to inquire. While they sit in front of him, he is taken by a lock of his hair and carried in the visions of God to Jerusalem. The men in the room see nothing. What he is shown is a temple still standing and still in use, nine hundred miles away, and the whole tour is conducted for the benefit of people who believed that building was their guarantee.
The four sights escalate, and each is introduced by the same formula: you will again see yet greater abominations than these. First, at the north gate of the inner court, an image of jealousy. It stands in the entry, where everyone coming in had to pass it. Second, and this one requires digging: a hole in the wall, a door behind it, and a room whose walls are painted with creeping things and abominable animals. Seventy elders stand in it with censers, one of them named — Jaazaniah the son of Shaphan, from the family that elsewhere protected prophets.
What those elders say is the reason the room is painted. Yahweh doesn't see us. Yahweh has forsaken the land. They are not atheists. They are men who have concluded that God has gone away, and who have arranged private worship in a sealed chamber. The irony is complete and the book leaves it uncommented. They are being watched, in the dark, by the prophet they cannot see, in a vision given by the God they think has left.
Third, at the north gate, women weeping for Tammuz — a seasonal mourning ritual for a dying vegetation god, held inside the courts of the God who gives the rain. Fourth and worst, between the porch and the altar, in the holiest ground a layman could stand on, about twenty-five men with their backs toward Yahweh's temple and their faces toward the east... worshiping the sun. Position is the whole indictment. To face the sunrise from that spot a man must turn his back on the sanctuary. The escalation the chapter has been building ends there — not in a stranger practice, but in the same practice performed with the exact posture of contempt.
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