Summary: Bible - Book of Ezekiel

The GIST

Ezekiel is the strangest and most visual of the Bible's prophetic books. Its author, Ezekiel son of Buzi, was a priest from Jerusalem, carried off to Babylon in 597 BCE with the first large group of Judean captives. Five years later, among the exiles by the river Chebar, at about the age of thirty, he saw "that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God." The book records his visions and messages over the next twenty-two years, from 593 to 571 BCE. Midway through that period Jerusalem and its Temple were destroyed, and the whole book is organized around that catastrophe: why it had to happen, and what could possibly come after.

It stands third among the Latter Prophets of the Hebrew Bible and among the major prophets of the Christian Old Testament, after Isaiah and Jeremiah. Its plan is unusually clear. Chapters 1 to 24 pronounce judgment on Judah and Jerusalem. Chapters 25 to 32 turn to the foreign nations. Chapters 33 to 48 speak of hope, restoration and a new Temple. Running through all three is one concern that only a priest would put at the center: the glory of the LORD, the presence of God among his people, and where it has gone.

What It Says

The chariot and the call (chapters 1 to 3). The opening vision is among the most famous in Scripture. Out of the north comes a storm cloud, and in it four living creatures, each with four faces, those of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle, and four wings. Beside each is a wheel within a wheel, the rims full of eyes. Above them is a throne, and on the throne the appearance of the glory of God. This is God as a divine warrior on a throne that moves, and that is the point: he is not confined to the Temple in Jerusalem. He has come to the exiles in Babylon.

A voice addresses the prophet by the title he will bear throughout the book: "Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee." He is handed a scroll and told to eat it, "eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel." He is sent to a people who will not want to listen, and appointed their watchman, responsible for sounding the warning whether or not anyone heeds it.

Acting out the siege (chapters 4 to 7). Ezekiel's first messages are performances. He draws Jerusalem on a clay tile and lays siege to the picture, setting an iron pan between himself and the city like a wall. He lies on his left side for three hundred and ninety days and on his right for forty, a day for each year of the guilt of Israel and of Judah. The meaning is not left in doubt. The city will fall. Over and over, here and across the book, the oracles end with the same refrain: "ye shall know that I am the LORD."

The glory leaves (chapters 8 to 11). In the sixth year, as the elders of Judah sit before him in his house, Ezekiel is seized by a hand, lifted by a lock of his hair and carried in a vision to Jerusalem. There he is shown what is being done in the Temple itself: an idol at the gate, the image of jealousy, and other forms of worship offered to gods other than the LORD. Then he sees the thing every Israelite would have thought impossible. The glory of God rises on its chariot and departs from the Temple and from the city. Ezekiel puts the blame for the coming exile on this idolatry and on the people's injustice. The destruction of Jerusalem is presented as a terrible purification. Yet even here there is a promise that a remnant will remain faithful in exile and return.

Parables and arguments (chapters 12 to 24). The long central section drives the message home in image after image. Jerusalem is an abandoned newborn whom God found in a field, said "Live" to, raised and married, and who then became unfaithful; the language is harsh and deliberately shocking. Against those who blamed their troubles on earlier generations, quoting the proverb that the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge, Ezekiel insists on individual responsibility: "the soul that sinneth, it shall die." Each person answers for his own conduct. The section ends on a precise date. In the ninth year, the tenth month, the tenth day, the prophet is told to write the day down, for "the king of Babylon set himself against Jerusalem this same day." He tells a last parable, of a pot set boiling on the fire.

Against the nations (chapters 25 to 32). With Jerusalem under siege the book turns outward, to the peoples who have troubled Israel: the Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites and Philistines, the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon, and Egypt, which had proved, in the prophet's phrase, a staff of reed to lean on. They too will learn who the LORD is.

The turn to hope (chapters 33 to 39). The watchman theme returns, and with it a change of key. Ezekiel denounces the rulers who failed the people, "the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves," and the promise is given that the scattered people will be gathered again. The people are to be cleansed and given a new heart so that they are able to keep the commandments and live in the land. Then comes the vision for which the book is best known. The prophet is set down in a valley full of bones, very many and very dry. "Son of man, can these bones live?" he is asked, and he gives the only honest answer: "O Lord GOD, thou knowest." He is told to prophesy to them, "O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD," and the dead of the house of Israel stand up alive. It is a picture of a nation given up for dead and restored. Two chapters follow about Gog and Magog, a final assault by Israel's enemies that ends in their destruction and an age of peace.

The new Temple (chapters 40 to 48). The last vision is dated to the twenty-fifth year of the captivity, fourteen years after the city fell. Ezekiel is taken to a very high mountain in the land of Israel, where a man with the look of bronze, holding a measuring reed, leads him through a new Temple and measures every wall and gate. Then what was lost in chapter 11 is restored. "The glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the east," and "the glory of the LORD filled the house." From under the threshold a stream runs out eastward, ankle deep, then knee deep, then waist deep, until it is a river too wide to cross. The land is divided again among the tribes around the sanctuary, and the city receives a new name: the LORD is there.

Why It Matters

Ezekiel answered the question that could have ended Israel's faith. If the Temple was God's house and Jerusalem his city, their destruction looked like his defeat. The book insists it was the reverse. God left of his own accord before the Babylonians arrived, because of what was being done there, and he was never bound to one building. He could be met in a refugee settlement by a foreign river, and he could bring the dead back to life. That conviction helped a community survive exile with its faith intact.

His teaching on individual responsibility was also a turning point. Earlier writers stressed the guilt of the nation as a whole; Ezekiel insists that each person stands before God on his own account.

The book's afterlife has been enormous and sometimes uneasy. Its throne vision fed a tradition of Jewish mysticism in which the visionary ascends through the heavens, and it shaped the apocalyptic writing of Daniel and Zechariah. There was apparently some question about its place in the canon, since it is at points at odds with the Torah. In Christianity it is drawn on above all in the book of Revelation, which takes up Gog and Magog and ends, like Ezekiel, with a prophet on a high mountain watching a new Jerusalem being measured. The wheels and the dry bones have passed into spirituals and popular song.

Scholars today mostly accept that the book goes back to the prophet himself, and note that it is unusual among the prophets in being a written composition from the start. They also see the hand of later followers in it, and many would not claim to have the prophet's very words.

Who Should Read It

Read Ezekiel if you are drawn to visionary writing, or if you want to understand how faith survives the loss of everything that seemed to hold it up. It is demanding. The imagery can be bewildering, some passages are harsh, and the closing chapters are full of measurements. But the opening vision, the departure of the glory, the valley of bones and the river from the Temple are among the most powerful scenes in the Bible, and they reward the effort.