EZEKIEL
Ezekiel was one of the priests of Jerusalem who was carried off to
Babylonia with King Jehoiachin in the deportation of 597 B.C. Those
who were thus deported were the upper classes, including, of course,
the royal family and the court and the aristocracy of the priesthood,
and skilled artisans, particularly the smiths (armorers). Having thus
removed the natural leaders of the rebellious people, Nebuchadnezzar
made Zedekiah, an uncle of Jehoiachin, king in his stead and gave
Judah another trial. The eight or ten thousand Jews with their
families who were removed to Babylonia were colonized at different
points, Ezekiel repeatedly mentions the river Chebar, that is,
probably, the grand canal in the vicinity of Nippur. The patricians in
exile thought very poorly of the new lords who had stepped into their
shoes in Jerusalem, and they flattered themselves that events would
soon take such a turn that they would return to Judæa and to power.
They had prophets and diviners among them who encouraged them in this
expectation. When Zedekiah revolted and the Babylonian armies a second
time besieged Jerusalem, their faith in the inviolability of Zion,
confirmed, rather than shaken, by the outcome of things in 597 B.C.,
when Jehoiachin surrendered and the holy city took no harm, made them
refuse hearing to Ezekiel's prediction of ruin; they may even have
dreamed that Nebuchadnezzar would find out his mistake and restore to
Judah its legitimate rulers, chastened by experience, and pack
Zedekiah and his advisers into exile in their place.
Against this vain and superstitious optimism Ezekiel had to contend
until the disastrous issue made a rude end of all their dreams and
threw the exiles into the depths of hopelessness: Bel had triumphed
over Jehovah, and it was all over with the nation. Thenceforth
Ezekiel's task was to save them from despair by the assurance that God
still had a purpose to fulfil with them, and that, in his own time,
when they had been thoroughly purged from their old sins and filled
with a new spirit, he would restore them to their own land and bring
to life again the dead nation.
These two periods of the prophet's mission sharply divide the Book of
Ezekiel. To the day when the word came to him that the Babylonian
armies had invested Jerusalem (Ezek. 24) he combats delusion; from the
arrival of the tidings of the fall of the city (xxxiii. 21 ff.) he
combats despair. The first part is all menace, the second is full of
promise. Numerous dated oracles serve as landmarks, especially in the
first part.
Between the two, in the two years of suspense, when about his own
people the prophet is dumb, is placed the group of prophecies against
foreign nations (cc. 25-32), beginning with oracles against the
neighbours of Judah who held true to Nebuchadnezzar in this crisis and
had their reward at Judah's cost--Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and
Philistines. These are followed by long predictions of the ruin of
Tyre, over whose calamity the prophet exults more loudly than the
grievance of Jerusalem (Ezek. xxvi. 2) seems to justify.
Nebuchadnezzar did in fact besiege Tyre for thirteen years (585-572
B.C.), and doubtless inflicted upon it great losses; but the island
city, with its command of the sea, he could not take. Ezekiel himself,
in a remarkable passage which is perhaps his latest word in the book,
admits that his predictions of the capture of Tyre (xxvi. 7-14) had
not been fulfilled--Nebuchadnezzar had had to raise the long and
ineffectual siege--but he promises that Jehovah will reward him for
these fruitless labours in the Lord's service by giving him Egypt
instead (xxix. 17-21). The animosity against Egypt which finds
expression in the predictions of the Babylonian subjugation of that
country is more easily explained. Egypt had been the evil genius of
Judah, instigating rebellion against the Babylonian suzerainty, and
promising armed aid which always failed in the decisive hour; it was
meet that it should taste the cup of humiliation itself. In c. 32 the
descent of Egypt to the hell of fallen nations is vividly depicted; a
similar picture of the descent of the Babylonian king in Isa. 14 has
already been noted. Not improbably Babylonian notions of the nether
world may have influenced the imagery of both, as a myth of paradise
seems to have suggested the imagery of Tyre in Eden (xxviii. 12 ff.).
Outside this group is an oracle against Edom (c. 35), and the great
prophecy of the irruption of Gog and his hordes and their fate (cc.
38 f.).
A conspicuous feature of the Book of Ezekiel are the extended visions
and the elaborated symbolical actions. In the inaugural vision (Ezek.
i.-iii. 15), for instance, God appears, a veritable _deus ex machina_,
on a high seat in a curious motor car made up of animated wheels and
winged monsters. In a later vision (c. 10) he sees God leave the
doomed temple in Jerusalem and mount this cherubim car, in which he is
whirled away through the air to the east; and in the great vision of
the new temple in the golden age God returns to his abode in the same
conveyance (c. 43). Striking examples of symbolical actions may be
found in Ezek. 4, and in xii. 1-20. They are of such an extraordinary
character as to raise the question whether they were really enacted
before the eyes of the people or only described in discourse.
Ezekiel's visions are sometimes ecstatic states, in which he is
instantaneously translated from place to place. At the end of the
inaugural vision, "the spirit" lifted him up and took him away,
setting him down in amazement among the colonists at Tell-Abib. In
viii. 1 ff., as he sat in his own house in the midst of a company of
the elders of Judah, the spirit, which is described as a strange
luminous creature, took him up by the hair of his head and wafted him
"in the visions of God" to Jerusalem, where his conductor showed him
all the idolatrous cults and the abominable mysteries that were
practised in the temple under the very eyes of "the glory of the God
of Israel" (c. 8); after seeing God take his flight from the
desecrated sanctuary, the prophet is translated by the spirit to
Chaldæa again. Another such vision in ecstasy is the famous scene in
the valley of dry bones (Ezek. 37). In such cases it is impossible to
say how much is actually the experience of the visionary, how much
literary form.
In the great vision of the restoration, cc. 40-48, which also is
introduced as an ecstasy with the translation of the prophet to
Palestine, we may be pretty sure that the element of conscious
composition predominates. The chapters contain a programme for the
coming age when all the twelve tribes, gathered together from exile
and dispersion, shall reoccupy the holy land, with a new, geometrical
division of the territory, with a new plan for the city of Jerusalem,
a new constitution for the state, a new temple after the old model, a
reorganized ministry of religion, and a reformed worship. The ruling
idea which runs through all is to make impossible those sins against
the holiness of God, his land, his house, his people, which had been
the cause of former ruin.
The Book of Ezekiel seems to have been arranged and published by the
author, and though some derangements and repetitions may be observed,
it has not been much meddled with by later editors, and, to whatever
reason it may be attributed, exhibits none of the phenomena of
compilation and amplification which we have found in Isaiah and
Jeremiah. The Hebrew text, however, has suffered more than most books
in transmission, and has reached us in an unusually corrupt state. The
author has a style of his own, which can rise to eloquence (as in the
oracles against Tyre), but is generally pedestrian and sometimes
clumsy. He has plenty of imagination, not always regulated by taste or
restrained by decency. His drastic figures of the unfaithfulness of
Israel and Judah are often unfit to translate.