Inter-Varsity Press

CONTENTS

General preface

Author’s preface

Introduction

The book of Ezekiel

Ezekiel the man

Historical background

The message of Ezekiel

The text

Analysis

Commentary

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

Commentaries may be divided into two classes. Some are designed to help readers of the Bible to understand better the parts which they read. The others are designed to help the same people to tackle the parts they would otherwise ignore. The present commentary is intended to fall within this second category. To those who have grappled confidently with the problems of Ezekiel’s visions and who can spend happy hours working out the fulfilment of his prophecies, these pages have little to offer. But those who have done no more than dip tentatively into his forty-eight chapters will, I hope, be encouraged to be more venturesome. For their benefit I have tried to avoid undue technicalities and, even when I have felt it necessary to make reference to the original Hebrew, I have tried to make my comments clear and readable so that the complete layman will never feel himself at a loss. My success will be judged, therefore, not so much by the number of people who read this book as by the number who read Ezekiel as well. …

INTRODUCTION

1. The book of Ezekiel

For most Bible readers Ezekiel is almost a closed book. Their knowledge of him extends little further than his mysterious vision of God’s chariot-throne, with its wheels within wheels, and the vision of the valley of dry bones. Otherwise his book is as forbidding in its size as the prophet himself is in the complexity of his makeup.

In its structure, however, if not in its thought and language, the book of Ezekiel has a basic simplicity, and its orderly framework makes it easy to analyse. After the opening vision, in which Ezekiel sees the majesty of God on the plains of Babylon and receives his call to be a prophet to the house of Israel (1 – 3), there follows a long series of messages, some enacted symbolically but most expressed in spoken form, foretelling and justifying God’s intention to punish the holy city of Jerusalem and its inhabitants with destruction and death (4 – 24). Then, at the half-way mark in the book, when the fall of Jerusalem is represented as having actually taken place (though the news has still not percolated through to the exiles), the reader’s attention is diverted to the nations that surround Israel, and God’s judgment on them is pronounced in a series of oracles (25 – 32). By this time the reader is prepared for the bombshell of the news of Jerusalem’s destruction, and 32:21 tells of the fugitive’s statement, ‘The city has fallen!’ But already a new age is dawning and a new message is on Ezekiel’s lips. With a renewed commission and a promise that God is about to restore his people to their own land under godly leadership by a kind of national resurrection (33 – 37), Ezekiel leads on to describe in apocalyptic terms the final triumph of the people of God over the invading hordes from the north (38, 39). The book concludes, as it began, with an intricate vision, not this time of the Lord’s chariot throne moving over the empty wastes of Babylon, but of the new Jerusalem with its temple court and inner sanctuary where God would dwell among his people for ever (40 – 48).

It is not surprising, therefore, that most older commentators regarded Ezekiel as being free from the literary fragmentation that was imposed by critics upon the prophecies of Isaiah, Jeremiah and some of the twelve minor prophets. A. B. Davidson’s introduction to his commentary on Ezekiel (1892) began with the oft-quoted verdict: ‘The Book of Ezekiel is simpler and more perspicuous in its arrangement than any other of the great prophetical books. It was probably committed to writing late in the prophet’s life, and, unlike the prophecies of Isaiah, which were given out piecemeal, was issued in its complete form at once.’

Twenty years later G. B. Gray could still draw the conclusion that ‘no other book of the Old Testament is distinguished by such decisive marks of unity of authorship and integrity as this’. But by the time McFadyen wrote his Introduction to the Old Testament (1932 edition), he was having to use more cautious language: ‘We have in Ezekiel the rare satisfaction of studying a carefully elaborated prophecy whose authenticity has, till recently, been practically undisputed.’ The phrase ‘till recently’ refers to the work of scholars such as Kraetzschmar, Hölscher, C. C. Torrey and James Smith. But before we consider their views, let us briefly summarize the arguments on which the traditional view of the unity of Ezekiel has been based.

There are six main reasons for ascribing the book to a single author, the prophet Ezekiel.

1. The book has a balanced structure, as we have already observed, and this logical arrangement extends from chapter 1 to 48. There are no breaks in the continuity of the prophecy, except where (as in the case of the oracles against the nations, 25 – 32) this is done for deliberate effect. The only part that could readily be separated from the rest, the vision of the new temple (40 – 48), appears neatly to balance the opening vision of chapters 1 – 3 and is better regarded as a fitting conclusion to the whole, although manifestly of somewhat later date (cf. 40:1).

2. The message of the book has an inner consistency which fits in with the structural balance. The centre-point is the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. This is announced in 24:21ff. and reported in 33:21. From chapter 1 to 24 Ezekiel’s message is destructive and denunciatory: he is a watchman set to warn the people that this is the inevitable consequence of the nation’s sins. But from chapter 33 to 48, while he still regards himself as a watchman with a message of individual retribution and responsibility, his tone is encouraging and restorative. Before 587 BC, his theme was that the deportation of 597 BC in which he himself was one of the victims, was certainly not the end of God’s punishment upon his people: worse was to come, and the exiles must be prepared to face it. But after it had come, and the worst had happened, God would act to rebuild and restore his chastened Israel.

3. The book shows a remarkable uniformity of style and language. This is largely due to the repetitious phraseology used throughout the book. May gives a list of no fewer than 47 typical Ezekielian phrases which appear periodically in its pages, and many of these are peculiar to this prophet. This does not of course prove anything about the actual authorship, because an editor could easily have picked up phrases typical of Ezekiel and woven them into the additional material he incorporated, but it is strong evidence for the unity and coherence of the book in its final stage, and it suggests that the editor of the finished work, if he was not Ezekiel himself, identified himself closely with Ezekiel’s outlook and beliefs.

4. The book has a clear chronological sequence, with dates appearing at 1:1,2; 8:1; 20:1; 24:1; 26:1; 29:1; 30:20; 31:1,17; 33:21; 40:1. No other major prophet has this logical progression of dates, and only Haggai and Zechariah among the minor prophets afford any comparable pattern.

5. Unlike Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos and Zechariah, which all combine material in the first and third persons singular, a feature which is usually regarded as a sure sign of editorial compilation, Ezekiel is written autobiographically throughout. The only exception is the duplicate introduction (1:2, 3), which looks very much as if it was an editor’s explanation of an opening verse which clearly needed some kind of interpretation for his readers (see Commentary, p. 55). But this is the only such instance.

6. The picture of the character and personality of Ezekiel appears consistent through the whole of the book; there is the same earnestness, the same eccentricity, the same priestly love of symbolism, the same fastidious concern with detail, the same sense of the majesty and transcendence of God. …