Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible: Ezekiel

John Goldingay

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781467453844
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

This extract from the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible provides Goldingay's introduction to and concise commentary on Ezekiel. The  Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible presents, in nontechnical language, the best of modern scholarship on each book of the Bible, including the Apocrypha. Reader-friendly commentary complements succinct summaries of each section of the text and will be valuable to scholars, students, and general readers.
 
Rather than attempt a verse-by-verse analysis, these volumes work from larger sense units, highlighting the place of each passage within the overarching biblical story. Commentators focus on the genre of each text—parable, prophetic oracle, legal code, and so on—interpreting within the historical and literary context.
 
The volumes also address major issues within each biblical book—including the range of possible interpretations—and refer readers to the best resources for further discussions.

Ezekiel

John A. Goldingay

INTRODUCTION

Ezekiel the son of Buzi (1:3) was an Israelite priest in the deportee Israelite community in Babylonia. Dates in the book imply that he was born in Judah in 622 BC, just before Josiah’s reform, and thus lived through much of Jeremiah’s ministry there. He was married (24:18), was thirty years old when he began his ministry in 592 BC (1:1), and continued his ministry until at least 571 BC (29:17).

Nothing is known of how the book came into being or came to be accepted as canonical in the Second Temple community. There are varying views on how far the material in the book comes from Ezekiel himself. The book has been seen as coming entirely from him, or as having very little to do with a real prophet in Babylon, or as containing much material from him which has been supplemented to suggest its implications for people living later. Unevennesses in the book may make the first view seem unlikely, and the second may seem a priori implausible. In the case of the third view it is difficult to know where specifically Ezekiel’s work ends and the work of disciples begins, and I have not attempted to do so systematically, but I have sometimes drawn attention to examples of this approach.

The book is more clearly structured than most OT books:

Chs. 1–3	Introduction
Chs. 4–24	Warnings of Calamity to Come on Judah
Chs. 25–32	Warnings of Calamity to Come on Other Nations
Chs. 33–48	Promises of Judah’s Renewal and Protection

J. B. Taylor, W. Eichrodt, W. Zimmerli, J. Blenkinsopp, L. C. Allen, and M. Greenberg have written useful commentaries on Ezekiel (see Bibliography). Taylor, Eichrodt, and Blenkinsopp are briefer; Zimmerli, Taylor, and Greenberg are on a larger scale. Taylor, Eichrodt, Zimmerli, Blenkinsopp, and Allen are overtly Christian; Greenberg is overtly Jewish. Taylor, Blenkinsopp, and Greenberg work with the text as we have it; Eichrodt, Zimmerli, and Allen are also interested in distinguishing between Ezekiel’s own words and the process of subsequent expansion. Where these commentators are referred to simply by name, the allusion is to their treatment of the passage being discussed.

Ezekiel is at point after point like other prophets, only more so.

1. Other prophets had visionary experiences; Ezekiel’s are technicolor, wide-screen, virtual reality as he is again and again dazzled by awesome manifestations of Yahweh’s splendor. Other prophets were aware of this dazzling splendor; Ezekiel speaks of it nineteen times. It is difficult to distinguish between what Ezekiel experienced in his own mind or spirit and what he experienced outwardly. Presumably he alone saw the throne vision (though others might have seen the weather phenomena) and heard the voice; no one else would have seen the scroll he was aware of eating (and no one else in Jerusalem would have been aware of his subsequent “visits” there?), but people could have been aware of the extraordinary movements of 2:2; 3:12–15, like their equivalents in the stories of Elijah and Elisha (whom at points Ezekiel resembles more than he does the other well-known prophets). It might be that aspects of Ezekiel’s behavior seemed as strange to his audience as it may to us. Yet that audience would also recall the oddness of the stories told of Elijah and Elisha. Ezekiel stands in an odd but honored tradition.

2. Other prophets felt God’s presence, and some were seized, shaken, gripped, and impelled by the powerful, heavy, irresistible hand of Yahweh; this happens seven times to Ezekiel at key moments in connection with his being overwhelmed by extraordinary visions (1:3; 3:14, 22; 8:1; 33:22; 37:1; 40:1). He is again and again taken by the scruff of the neck, whisked from place to place, bowled over, and jerked to his feet. The delivery of Ezekiel’s message involves a four-act drama (chs. 4–5), preaching to an absent audience (ch. 6), scattergun poetry (ch. 7), and testimony to visionary transportation (chs. 8–11).

3. Other prophets had a sense of being propelled by the dynamic, unpredictable, irresistible spirit of Yahweh, which for Ezekiel is associated with the experience just noted or is another way of describing it. The fact that ruaḥ refers to breath, wind, and spirit is especially important in Ezekiel (see ch. 37), and it is sometimes difficult to be sure which English word to use (see 8:3; 11:1).

4. Other prophets acted as messengers, sensing that the word of Yahweh “came” to them (more lit. “was/became/happened”) for passing on to its intended recipients; Ezekiel speaks nearly fifty times of such a concrete experience of a message reaching him from the (heavenly) king which he is to pass on to his fellow subjects. Other prophets also act as heralds, commanding people to “listen to the word of Yahweh” (most frequently Jeremiah; cf., e.g., 22:2, 29) in the manner of a royal herald bringing the monarch’s words to people who are subjects or who are treated as such (e.g., Isa 36:13). In adopting this form of speech, Ezekiel adapts it to his speaking in the name of sovereign Yahweh. He uses it even though he is never physically facing those he overtly addresses (e.g., 6:3), so that it becomes a means of authoritative address to his actual audience in Babylon.

5. Other prophets used fables, folktales, and parables (e.g., 2 Samuel 12; Isaiah 5). Ezekiel turns a folktale motif into an allegory which occupies over four pages (ch. 16). Jeremiah includes a paragraph of critique of Israel’s leaders as shepherds of Yahweh’s flock (Jer 23:1–4); Ezekiel includes a sustained five-point allegorical exposition of this metaphor, turning it into a critique of shepherds and their flocks, a divine commitment to shepherding, and a promise of a faithful shepherd and of divine provision and protection for the flock (ch. 34). Something similar happens with Amos’s talk of an “end” having come (Amos 8:2); see Ezekiel 7. “Amos states that in one brief, bulky menacing phrase. Our prophet shapes the same theme into a fugue” (Eichrodt). Elsewhere his words come in the form of sustained poetic expositions of an image (e.g., chs. 19, 27).

6. Other prophets communicated via mimes or acted parables (e.g., Isaiah 20). As his speaking not only conveys information but puts Yahweh’s will into effect, so Ezekiel’s mimes not only illustrate his message but embody that will and thus further contribute to its implementation. Ezekiel’s mimes are particularly vivid, his allegories particularly complex. “As his visions outdo those of other prophets in their intricacy, so his symbolic actions are not to be tailored and trimmed along the simple lines of theirs. The possibility must be allowed that Ezekiel, the authentic Ezekiel, was baroque” (Greenberg: 219). Jeremiah senses Yahweh putting words in his mouth (1:9) and speaks in metaphor of enjoying the taste of Yahweh’s words; a metaphor in Jer 15:16 becomes an allegory in Ezekiel 2–3.

7. Other prophets concerned themselves with the destiny of the whole people. Ezekiel is more systematically concerned for “the house of Israel.” Earlier prophets had more often used the title “Israel” for the northern tribes. Ezekiel addresses a community comprising merely a deported remnant of the southern tribe, Judah, but he addresses it as “Israel.” They are the embodiment of Israel rather than mere castoffs, though he also envisions a glorious destiny for a truly comprehensive Israel (see chs. 36–37).

8. Other prophets naturally looked for themselves to be recognized and for Yahweh to be recognized. In Ezekiel this theme of recognition becomes of central significance. The phrases “they/you shall know that I am Yahweh” and similar expressions appear over seventy times. The knowledge for which Ezekiel, like other prophets, is concerned is not mere awareness of facts but acknowledgment of Yahweh which recognizes in life that Yahweh is the sovereign whose authority must be accepted (see on ch. 6). Ezekiel’s concern for Yahweh’s name also parallels and exceeds that of other prophets. He wishes to see Yahweh acknowledged by Israel and by the nations for the sake of Yahweh’s own name.

9. Other prophets became aware of the strange resistance of the community to Yahweh’s word, and may even have been aware of it when they were commissioned. Ezekiel knows from the beginning that the community is a stubbornly resistant, impudently hostile one (not only “house of Israel” but “house of rebellion”) and sees its resistance as characterizing its life from the very beginning (chs. 15; 16; 20; 23).

10. Other prophets were ignored. In part this was because the essence of their vocation was to say things that went contrary to the community’s own instincts. This applied to Ezekiel during his earlier ministry when he was claiming that there was worse trouble to come than the community had yet experienced. When that calamity arrived, it also applied when he brought the community unbelievable good news. When he began his ministry the community had the excuse, or lived with the further dilemma, that it knew of many prophets and that they all contradicted each other (see Jeremiah 27–29, stories told about this period). Beyond being ignored, other prophets pay a price for the exercise of their ministry. Ezekiel becomes himself a “sign” for Israel. In his own being he is an embodiment of their threatened fate (12:6; 24:24).

11. Other prophets indict the people and declare judgment on the community; Ezekiel acts as a lookout warning of imminent danger (ch. 3) with a message of judgment that is so extensive it fills both sides of God’s scroll (2:10); Ezekiel can take four chapters (chs. 8–11) where others might take four verses. Other prophets portray Israel as God’s unfaithful wife (see, e.g., Hosea 1–3). Ezekiel turns this portrayal into a late-night mini-series which respectable people hesitate to admit viewing, and after doing so go to bed with a bad taste in their mouth (see chs. 16; 23). Other prophets see Yahweh as smelting Israel to burn away the dross; Ezekiel sees smelting as establishing that dross is all there is (22:17–22).

12. Other prophets spoke of a glorious future the other side of judgment. Some of Ezekiel’s most elaborate visions picture the wondrous restoration of Davidic shepherding, the miraculous resuscitation of the people, and especially the laying out of a new temple at the center of a newly allocated land. This last vision is the focus of his most sustained influence on early Christian writers: see Revelation.

13. Other prophets affirm the sovereign lordship of Yahweh; Ezekiel uniquely uses the phrase “sovereign Yahweh” as his characteristic title for God. Translations such as “Lord GOD” obscure the fact that it combines the word for “sovereign” with God’s actual name, combining a sense of privilege and nearness in knowledge of God’s name with a sense of awesomeness because the name itself suggests something of the unpredictable enigma of the active presence of Yahweh. Ezekiel is the boldest of the prophets in attributing all that happens to Yahweh’s sovereignty. This includes the apostasy of the righteous (3:20), the delusion of the prophet (14:9), and the guidance offered by Babylonian divination (21:22–23). His apparently being often addressed by a heavenly aide rather than directly by God perhaps links with his sense of Yahweh’s transcendent awesomeness and his own earthly vulnerability. Yahweh’s correlative characteristic title for Ezekiel is “mortal man,” lit. “son of man,” a less odd term in Hebrew than in English. While other prophets are directly addressed by Yahweh, no one else is directly addressed so frequently; yet whereas some other prophets are addressed by name, Ezekiel is always addressed by this idiomatic expression meaning “human being.” Set over against “Lord Yahweh,” it suggests humanity in its creatureliness and frailty.

14. Other prophetic books provide us with chronological information. Ezekiel gives us a series of precise dates in terms of the deportation of 597 BC (1:2; 8:1; 20:1; 24:1; 26:1; 29:1, 17; 31:1; 32:1, 17; 33:21; 40:1). This is a new phenomenon in prophetic books, and Ezekiel is the only prophet who is said himself to give us dates (usually they come in the third person, like those in vv. 2–3, making explicit that it is editors who provide them). Chronological precision was often important to priestly ministry, though it would be important to prophets whenever they wanted their words recorded before witnesses against the moment of their fulfillment (e.g., Isaiah 8). It also conveys an impression of actuality (this is an event real enough to be dated) and a reminder that God’s word tends to be specific to particular moments and needs to be understood in relation to them.

The point at which we started is the major point at which Ezekiel is unlike most of the other prophets. He is a priest. This makes a most significant contribution to the nature of his prophetic ministry.

1. He is preoccupied by Yahweh’s holiness, which for him means Yahweh’s otherness or extraordinariness (see on 36:22–38). “The key to Ezekiel’s proclamation of God is this: God will not be mocked. God will not be presumed upon, trivialized, taken for granted, or drawn too close. God takes being God with utmost seriousness” (Brueggemann 1978: 53; his emphasis). That is God’s holiness.

2. He is appalled at specifically religious wrongdoing, though also at the violence which characterizes the community (for the combination, see, e.g., ch. 18).

3. He sees calamity as lying in Yahweh’s abandoning of the temple and in the temple’s destruction. It is for this calamity, a truly community-destroying event, that he seeks to prepare his people in Babylon who do not believe it can ever happen. The other side to this coin is that he sees restoration as lying in the renewing of the temple and in a reallocation of the land which now has the temple at its center.

COMMENTARY

Introducing 1:4–3:15 (1:1–3)

The book opens by relating an experience which came to a priest “in the thirtieth year”—presumably of his life, and therefore the year in which he might have taken up his ordained ministry (cf. Numbers 4). But he is not in Jerusalem to do that; he is a member of a refugee community in Babylon, one of the priests deported there among the Judean leadership in 597 BC (2 Kgs 24:10–16; Jer 29:1). It is the fifth year since that event, and high summer (on the assumption that the year starts in the spring).

Ezekiel’s community lives near the Chebar canal, part of the water system near Nippur in southern Babylonia, though he is elsewhere when he has his visionary experience (3:14–15). A community of refugees would provide a context in which a priest could exercise his ministry. The traditional sanctuary focus of a priest’s ministry would make him a standing reminder of the calamity which had come upon Jerusalem. Yet the moment which would see his beginning his ministry but does not do so (a sign of God’s judgment) sees his being granted a vision of God (a sign of God’s mercy).

Ezekiel’s experience is described in visual, aural, and physical terms. 1:1 introduces especially its visionary aspect, which is central in vv. 4–28a. Vv. 2–3 introduce its aural and physical aspects, which are interwoven in 1:28b–3:15.

Ezekiel before God as Visionary (1:4–28a)

A huge storm cloud approaches, ringed by the sun’s bright light and pierced by flashing lightning. It comes from the north, a natural meteorological fact, but this is also the direction from which invaders often came. More significantly, it is the traditional location of the divine dwelling (Ps 48:2; Isa 14:13). The cloud, light, and fire, too, suggest God’s presence, but the point and the centrality of 1:4 will not become explicit until vv. 26–28. The vision might have been prompted by scriptures which speak of God’s presence in terms of cloud, light, and fire (Exod 13:21–22; 20:18–21; Ps 18:7–15) and/or by actual weather phenomena. The awesomeness of God’s appearing is suggested by the impossibility of describing it—the vision focuses on the mere penumbra of God’s active reality (Job 26:14). Thus as 1:4–28 unfold, the fuller the description, the less significant the thing described; the briefer the description, the more the thing matters. Ch. 10 will add to our understanding of this vision.

From the cloud emerge four exotic creatures, each with four wings and four faces belonging to the highest of the natural species. Four crisscross wheels stand alongside them. All these features emphasize the mobility of the entourage, which faces and moves in any direction effortlessly, along the ground or in the air. It does so as a single united entity despite the fact that creatures, wheels, and throne are not physically linked; they are held together by one “spirit” or will. The description with its repetitions conveys the awesomeness of the vision, the richness of its elements, and the thunder of the sound as the creatures’ wings beat.

Standing above the creatures, wheels, and linked wings is a gleaming platform and a sapphire-blue throne seating a humanlike figure of fiery, rainbow-like splendor. 1:1 anticipatorily announced that this would be so, v. 4 hinted at it in its imagery, and vv. 5–25 built up anticipation of it, yet only now is the figure explicitly identified as a bodily representation of Yahweh’s own majesty. At this moment it thus meets the appropriate response from the priest (v. 28).

Ezekiel and Genesis, Then and Later

For God to be humanlike when appearing links with the Israelite conviction that humanity itself is Godlike. That conviction is explicit in Genesis 1, a passage which may be suggestively set alongside Ezekiel 1. The two chapters come from similar priestly circles in Babylon, and both address the refugee community under pressure. Both preface old Israelite tradition with a new vision which sets the familiar in a new context. Genesis 1 provides the traditional creation story with a fresh preface that sets it in a much more all-embracing perspective in its concern with God’s creative activity in the whole cosmos. Ezekiel 1 provides the traditional understanding of a prophet’s call with a fresh preface, setting it, too, in a much wider metaphysical perspective in its vision and suggesting the sovereign Yahweh’s capacity to appear in divine splendor anywhere, to implement heaven’s purpose or to meet with heaven’s agents.

The two passages’ venturesome flights of revelatory imagination led to both becoming suggestive stimuli to meditation over many centuries. Their influence can be seen in Jewish apocalypses, in rabbinic writin...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Ezekiel
• Get the complete commentary!