Ezekiel

Ezekiel was a priest, son of Buzi, and he was deported to Babylonia in 597 with King Jehoiachin and the first wave of exiles, before the city fell. His call comes in the fifth year of that exile, 593, by the River Kebar (spelled Chebar in older translations), a canal-like waterway known from Babylonian documents in the region of Nippur. Note what that means about his career. A priest is usually reckoned to have become eligible to serve at thirty, on the strength of Numbers 4:3, and he was taken away before the temple he had trained for was destroyed in 587. Everything he says about sanctuary, purity, glory and altar, he says as a man qualified for a building he will never work in.

The book is the most precisely dated in the prophetic corpus. Depending on how the superscriptions are counted, thirteen or fourteen oracles carry a day, month and year, running from 593 to the twenty-seventh year in 571. He lives in a settlement of deportees that 3:15 calls Tel-abib. That world is no longer only a literary one: a large corpus of cuneiform tablets, published in recent years, documents Judean exiles living, farming, borrowing and paying taxes in Babylonian towns, one of them called the town of Judah, bearing names compounded with the name of Israel's God. Ezekiel's audience had addresses.

Chapter 1 is the vision that has intimidated readers for two and a half thousand years. A storm out of the north, four living creatures each with four faces and four wings, wheels beside them with rims full of eyes, wheels within wheels, an expanse above them, a throne of sapphire (the stone is generally taken to be lapis lazuli), and on it a figure like that of a man, surrounded by fire and a rainbow. Then verse 28, and this is the line to teach: 'This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD.' (The BSB prints the pronoun in the sentence just before it, 'all around Him,' with a capital, as it does 'His waist' in verse 27; that is the translators' way of marking the figure as God. Hebrew has no capitals.) Count the hedges. The appearance of the likeness of the glory. Three layers of insulation between the reader and the subject. Ezekiel is not describing God. He is describing the outermost visible edge of something he has no vocabulary for, and he tells you that is what he is doing.

Later tradition called this the merkabah, the chariot, though the word chariot does not appear in Ezekiel 1; the label is already in Ben Sira around 180 BC and becomes standard in rabbinic usage. It also became restricted reading. The Mishnah, in Hagigah, limits who may expound the chapter of the Chariot, and the Talmud preserves a memory that the sages considered withdrawing Ezekiel from circulation because its words appeared to contradict the Torah, until Hananiah son of Hezekiah reportedly sat in an upper room with three hundred jars of oil and reconciled them. Whether or not that happened as told, it records something true: this book was felt to be difficult by the people closest to it, and the Talmud (Menachot 45a) leaves certain laws in the last nine chapters for Elijah to explain at the end of days.

For the teacher, the value of that history is permission. You are allowed to find Ezekiel hard. The tradition found it hard. What you are not allowed to do is use its strangeness as entertainment, which brings us to the two sections that follow.

The architecture of the whole book is one movement out and one movement back, and if a student grasps nothing else about Ezekiel, this is the thing to grasp. The Hebrew word at the centre of it is kavod, glory, with a root sense of weight. In the Torah it is what fills the tabernacle and settles on Sinai. In Ezekiel it moves.

Chapters 8 to 11 are a single guided tour. Ezekiel is transported in vision to Jerusalem and shown, room by room, what is happening in the temple: an image set up at the gate, seventy elders burning incense in a chamber decorated with creatures, women weeping for Tammuz, men in the inner court bowing eastward to the sun. Then judgment is ordered, and the departure begins, and it is reported in slow deliberate stages. The glory rises from above the cherubim to the threshold of the temple in 9:3 and again in 10:4. It moves away from the threshold and stands above the cherubim in 10:18. It stops at the entrance of the east gate in 10:19. And finally, in 11:23, 'the glory of the LORD rose up from within the city and stood over the mountain east of the city.' That is the Mount of Olives. God leaves his own house by the front door, pausing at every step, in the direction of the exiles.

Do not rush past the pacing. A narrator who wanted only to announce abandonment would say it once. This narrator makes you watch the leaving happen in four instalments, the way you watch someone you love walk down a road and keep looking back. And the direction matters: the glory goes east, which is where Ezekiel and his congregation are sitting. The theology underneath the whole book is that God is not confined to the building, which is simultaneously the most frightening and the most consoling thing that could be said in 587.

The return is at 43:1 to 5. Ezekiel is brought to the east gate of the new temple, 'and I saw the glory of the God of Israel coming from the east,' and it enters the house by the gate facing east, the gate it left by. Then 44:2 says that gate is to be shut and stay shut, because the LORD has entered by it. And the final words of the book, in 48:35, name the city: YHWH shammah, the LORD Is There.

That is the shape: present, departing, absent, returning, resident. It is worth writing on a board. It is also the shape the New Testament reaches for when John says the Word became flesh and pitched a tent among us, and the shape Revelation reaches for when it ends with a city whose distinguishing feature is that God lives in it. Teach Ezekiel's own version first and thoroughly, and those later texts will land harder.

Ezekiel is commanded to do things. He builds a model siege against a brick. He lies on his left side for 390 days and his right for 40, one day for each year of the two kingdoms' guilt. He eats rationed bread of mixed grain baked over dung, and when he protests as a priest that he has never eaten anything defiled, the command is modified from human dung to cow dung, which is the one negotiation in the book. He shaves his head and beard with a sword, weighs the hair, burns a third, strikes a third and scatters a third. He digs through the wall of his house at dusk and carries baggage out with his face covered. He eats his bread with trembling. He groans on command. He is struck dumb until the news of the city's fall arrives. And in 24:15 to 27 his wife dies, the desire of his eyes, and he is told not to mourn her publicly.

This material attracts two bad kinds of teaching. The first treats it as a freak show, a tour of weird Bible stories, which is a way of enjoying a text without being addressed by it. The second sanitises it into gentle metaphor and loses the fact that a man really did these things in front of neighbours. Both failures come from missing what a sign-act is, which is that a sign-act is communication. Every one of them has an interpretation supplied inside the text, usually introduced with the words that tell the audience what they have just watched. They exist because words had stopped working: an exile community that would not believe Jerusalem was finished had heard plenty of sentences. What they had not seen was a man spend more than a year on the ground. So the first rule for teaching them is to always pair the act with the interpretation the chapter gives, and never perform the act as a curiosity on its own.

The second rule is to notice that nearly every one of them is aimed at Ezekiel's priesthood. The defiled food, the shaved head and beard, the suppressed mourning rites: these are precisely the things a priest is forbidden or required to do in Leviticus. The horror is not generic weirdness. It is the deliberate violation of this particular man's vocation, so that his body carries the meaning of a nation whose worship has been suspended. He is not performing eccentricity. He is performing loss, and the cost is charged to him.

The third rule is not to tidy up chapter 24. Ezekiel's wife dies and he is told to make no lament, and the text puts God in the position of announcing the death in advance. That is genuinely disturbing, and a teacher who explains it into comfort has taught the students to distrust him the next time. Two honest things can be said. The point being made is that Jerusalem's fall will be too deep for the community's ordinary rituals of grief, and the prophet is made to go first. And the book does not congratulate him or draw a moral; it just records that in the evening his wife died and in the morning he did as he was commanded. Let the flatness of that stand.

One more thing belongs here. A stream of twentieth-century scholarship tried to diagnose Ezekiel, most famously Edwin Broome in a 1946 article arguing for schizophrenia, and later David Halperin in a psychoanalytic study. The objection is not that it is impious but that it is unfalsifiable: you cannot examine a patient through a stylised literary text edited by other hands. More recent work has moved to firmer ground by reading the book as a response to collective catastrophe, with Ruth Poser's study of Ezekiel as trauma literature a leading example. That frame explains the features better without pretending to a diagnosis, and it is what to hand a student who asks whether the prophet was unwell.

Ezekiel 18 opens with a proverb the exiles were quoting: 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the children are set on edge.' Jeremiah 31:29 to 30 quotes the same saying, which suggests it was current on both sides of the deportation. The meaning is fatalistic. We are paying for what our grandparents did, so nothing we do now makes any difference.

Ezekiel's answer is a flat prohibition of the proverb and then a worked example in three generations. A righteous man lives. His wicked son dies. His righteous grandson lives. The refrain is at verses 4 and 20: 'The soul who sins is the one who will die,' and 'A son will not bear the iniquity of his father, and a father will not bear the iniquity of his son.' The chapter ends at verse 32 with 'So repent and live!' The difficulty is obvious as soon as you set that beside the Ten Words. Exodus 20:5, repeated at Exodus 34:7 and Deuteronomy 5:9, says God visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation. So does Ezekiel contradict the Torah? The sages, as we saw, wondered. Here are the serious answers, each at its strongest.

The first says yes, and calls it development. On this reading the canon contains a real revision: an earlier corporate conception, in which a family or a nation is the moral unit, is deliberately corrected by Jeremiah and Ezekiel under the pressure of exile, when a corporate verdict had become unbearable. This reading was once tied to H. Wheeler Robinson's theory of corporate personality in ancient Israel, though that theory has been substantially criticised since, notably by John Rogerson, and the developmental reading no longer depends on it. Its strength is that it takes both texts to mean what they say.

The second says the two texts speak in different registers. The Exodus formula describes how consequence actually propagates through history and families, which anyone who has worked with a third generation of addiction will recognise as descriptively true; Ezekiel 18 addresses judicial standing before God, which is a different question. The strong support for this is that the Torah itself already separates them: Deuteronomy 24:16 forbids human courts from executing children for their fathers' crimes, and 2 Kings 14:6 shows a king applying that law. So the principle Ezekiel presses is not new legislation; it is an older principle turned against a fatalistic misuse of the older formula.

The third reading is rhetorical and pastoral. Ezekiel is not writing a treatise on moral philosophy; he is answering a specific sentence that a specific demoralised congregation was using as an excuse. The proverb was functioning as a reason to do nothing. Against that use, the answer is you are not trapped, and the passage should be read for its aim. Two things guard this from becoming cheap. Chapter 18 cuts against the comfortable as hard as it comforts the despairing: the righteous man who turns is not credited with his past. And Ezekiel elsewhere is one of the most relentlessly corporate books in the Bible, with chapters 16, 20 and 36 narrating the nation as a single guilty person. Chapter 18 is not a charter for individualism. It is a refusal to let inherited guilt become an alibi.

Chapter 37 is the most quoted passage in Ezekiel and among the most misread. The prophet is set down in a valley with a great many bones on its floor, all of them very dry. He is asked whether they can live and gives the only honest answer, which is that God knows. He prophesies to the bones and they assemble with a noise, tendons and flesh and skin come on them, and they stand there, an army of corpses with no breath. Then he prophesies to the breath, and it comes, and they live.

The interpretation is not left to the reader. Verse 11 supplies it: 'Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Look, they are saying, "Our bones are dried up, and our hope has perished; we are cut off."' Verse 12 spells out the referent: 'O My people, I will open your graves and bring you up from them, and I will bring you back to the land of Israel.' The graves are the exile. The resurrection is the restoration of a nation that has given up on itself. That is the passage's own stated meaning, and it should be taught first, at length, and without apology.

The engine of the chapter is one Hebrew word used in every sense it has. Ruach means wind, breath and spirit, and the chapter cycles through all three. Verse 9 tells the prophet to summon the ruach from the four ruachot, the four winds, so that these slain may live; the bodies lack ruach in the sense of breath; and verse 14 says, 'I will put My Spirit in you and you will live,' where Spirit renders the same ruach. The BSB shows the choice it is making: it prints breath in verses 5, 6, 9 and 10, with a footnote at verse 5, 'Or spirit,' and prints a capital-S Spirit in verse 14. The capital is the translators' judgment that God's own Spirit is meant there; the Hebrew has no capitals and uses one word throughout, which is the point of the wordplay. The wordplay is not decoration. It says that the wind that reanimates a nation and the Spirit that God gives are the same thing, and it deliberately echoes the breath blown into the first human being in Genesis 2.

Only after that should the resurrection question come up, and then it should be handled precisely. Ezekiel 37 is not a proof text for individual bodily resurrection; the clearest Old Testament statement of that is Daniel 12:2. But the image did feed the hope, in both traditions. The third-century synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria has a wall painting of this vision. In Judaism the chapter is read as the prophetic reading on the intermediate Sabbath of Passover, the festival of a nation brought out of a grave. Christian liturgies read it toward Easter and Pentecost.

The right formulation is that the metaphor presupposes something. To say that national restoration is like a resurrection of the dead only works as an image if resurrection is intelligible to the audience as the outer limit of what God could do. So the passage is neither a doctrine of resurrection nor unrelated to one; it is a national promise cast in the most extreme terms available. Teach it in that order, national first, and students will get both meanings. Teach it as a funeral text first, and they will never notice that it is about a people who said out loud that their hope was gone, and were told they were wrong.