Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Mark on the Foreheads
Ezekiel 9:1-11
1 Then he cried in my ears with a loud voice, saying, “Cause those who are in charge of the city to draw near, each man with his destroying weapon in his hand.” · WEB
Before anyone is struck, a man with an inkhorn walks the city marking the people who grieved over what was being done in it.
Six men come from the direction of the upper gate, each with a weapon for slaughter. A seventh walks among them who is different in every respect. He is clothed in linen, the fabric of priestly service, and instead of a weapon he carries a writer's inkhorn at his side. Seven men are commissioned and one of them is a scribe, and the scribe goes first.
His instructions are precise about who is marked. Not the innocent, not the observant, not those who abstained: the men that sigh and that cry over all the abominations that are done within it. The qualification is grief. These are people who lived in the same city and saw the same things and could not stop them. Their only recorded response was to be broken by it. The book counts that as the distinguishing mark of the saved, and it counts nothing else.
Only then are the six sent, and two of their orders are hard to read past. The first is comprehensive — old man, young man, virgin, children, women — with the single exception that no one bearing the mark is to be touched. The second would have stopped the breath of anyone in that community: Begin at my sanctuary. And the executioners begin with the old men in front of the house. That is where the twenty-five sun-worshipers had been standing in the previous chapter. Judgment starts at the place the people believed made them safe, and among the men who had been leading them.
Ezekiel's own reaction is recorded and it is not stoicism. He falls on his face and cries out — Ah Lord Yahweh! Will you destroy all the residue of Israel? — which is the second time in six chapters that he has objected out loud, and the second time the objection is preserved rather than edited away. The answer given is not comfort but the reason. The land is full of blood and the city full of perversion. And the people are saying Yahweh has forsaken the land, and Yahweh doesn't see. That sentence was quoted in the sealed room a chapter earlier. What they believed about God's absence is the thing being answered, and the answer arrives in person. The chapter closes with the scribe reporting back — I have done as you have commanded me — and no number given for the marked.
settled What this mark means