A Literary Approach to the books of two major prophets: Jeremiah (Yirmeyahuw) and Ezekiel (Yechezqe’l) – 2

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• The pervasive dominance of the “I” voice,
• the persistence of precise dates and of an almost purely sequential chronology,
• and the private, literate, and bookish manner of the language and idioms
• give the text much of the quality of a journal, with all the disjunction and heteroglossia that characterize journals.
• Otherwise we have few clues concerning the flesh-and-blood Ezekiel, though perhaps ever fewer grounds for disturbing the book’s own testimony.

• he was an astute observer of political events,
• possessing an extensive knowledge of
  • geography,
  • human commerce,
  • priestly lore,
  • and foreign literature and mythology.
• He was a philosopher of history of the first magnitude.

Whatever its historical authenticity and claims to prophecy, the book is a remarkable fiction, most of all in its own purported context, anticipating in imaginative power and in boldness of allegorical vision the major works of Dante, Milton, and Blake, to cite three on whom Ezekiel’s influence seems considerable.

• There, according to the prophet’s testimony, “the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.”
• The verses that follow (1:2-3) give the book’s sole narrative reference to Ezekiel in the third person (24:14 occurs within quoted speech),
• and we may, with a wide consensus of premodern and modern commentators, choose to regard it as a gloss: “In the fifth day of the month, which was the fifth year of King Jehoiachin’s captivity, The word of the Lord came expressly unto Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, in the land of Chaldeans by the river Chebar; and the hand of the Lord was there upon him.”
• But to call it a gloss misses the point of its presence: that someone in the book’s internal tradition knew that the prophet’s enigmatic formulation in 1:1—“in the thirtieth year”—meant the fifth year of the Captivity, that is, 593 B.C.E.
• Curiously, the dating system followed throughout the book—by Ezekiel himself, presumably—is that of 1:2-3, not of 1:1.
• The opening verse’s “in the thirtieth year,” if it is not a scribal error, is there for a reason.
• What, then, is meant by “the thirtieth year”?
  • Of what?
  • Why are obliqueness and ellipsis called for here?
  • Why start with a different calendrical system and then withdraw it?

• that the apparition occurs outside the land of Israel (while, despite the reference to exile, the nation’s sovereignty is intact and the Temple still stands),
• and that the word used for the divine presence is Kavod (“Glory”), the priestly term for a manifestation of the deity during the ongoing sacerdotal operations of the cult (see Lev. 9:6, 23).

The vision is here not, as is sometimes assumed, a proclamation or assurance that YHWH can manifest himself outside the land of Israel, for that possibility was taken for granted in ancient Israelite belief. Nor does it seem to announce a transplanting of the cult to foreign soil, since at the time of the vision the Jerusalem cult in fact still stood and would never, in the belief system of the priestly prophet, operate anywhere but Jerusalem (see chap. 6).

• that a scroll of woe tastes sweet (3:3),
• and that the prophet is instructed (2:8) not to disobey or balk at what is offered.

It helps to explain why Ezekiel, unlike Jeremiah, is so inseparable from the unfolding of his book, and yet simultaneously why he is so self-effacingly circumspect about his own feelings. He is not, as such, required to suppress his feelings, only to make their expression coextensive with what is written—to maintain a silence that is analogous to the silence of a text. The taste of honey thus signifies not a sensation of the prophet’s tastebuds, still less his reaction to the inscribed woes—only a typically emblematic and allegorical affirmation of the objective “sweetness” of that most precious commodity, obedience to divine imperative.

• He is first told that, as a watchman over Israel, he is personally responsible for the fate of his charges should he fail to warn one who is capable of repentance (3:17-21).
• He is then told (3:22-27) that he is to keep silent and remain within his house: “I will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth, that thou shalt be dumb.” Several times further in the book (see 24:27, 29:21, 33:22), the prophet’s dumbness is alluded to, and we must appreciate the puzzle in the fact that though prophetic messages flow aplenty through the prophet during his entire alleged period of silence, and even though we know that in fact the prophet does make public declarations during that time (indeed, is commanded to—see, for example, 14:6 and 20:3), some aspect of that ministry is held unrealized, is judged or ordained to be a type of muteness.

Are we too assume that Ezekiel is incurring the penalty of a negligent watchman, or that YHWH is contriving to punish the very man he commands? Or is this perhaps a way of saying that repentance is no longer possible—or, more pertinently, that the time ripest for repentance, the time when the watchman’s call can be heard, has not yet arrived?

• in 3:24-27 he is told to keep silent until God is ready;
• in 24:25-27, at the close of his prophecies on Israel and just before his prophecies on the surrounding nations, he is told that when news comes of the city’s fall, his mouth will be opened and he will no longer be dumb;
• in 33:21-22, at the close of his prophecies on the nations and the beginning of his prophecies of Israel’s  restoration, he records that “in the twelfth year of our captivity” (586 B.C.E.) a survivor of the debacle came to announce that the city has fallen, and we are told that the prophet’s mouth was hereby opened.

It is not the quantity of biographical material that is significant, but its placement. Still, the progression would amount to but a dry formalism were it not for one further biographical detail placed just before the second of the three announcements noted above:

• Ezekiel is not, as his visions might lead us to expect, a shamanistic recluse, but rather a devoted family man.
• He is a full sharer in the sufferings allotted to his people.
• The death of his eye’s delight, or desire, is now the text, an object lesson, as the adultery of a similarly precious companion had been for Hosea, and it must here serve as a sign of the precious city and Temple that will now fall.
• “Sigh, but not aloud” could be the watchword of the prophet’s entire career, and no phrase better captures the raging torrent of emotions that must, as when Abraham had told Isaac, “God will provide himself a lamb, my son” (Gen. 22:8 [AR]), remain unspoken.
• Paradoxically, Ezekiel’s enforced muteness concerning his personal loss coincides thematically with the opening of his mouth concerning the nation’s loss.
• The entire first half of the book is now revealed as the prehistory of a wider and more significant mission, to be unfolded in chapters 25-48, where we have the feeling that Ezekiel, whatever problems of expression might arise, is more in his element.

• He pictures Tyre as a huge ship with Lebanon’s cedars and Bashan’s oaks for its planks and oars; the men of Zidon and Arvad at the helm and among the rowers; those of Persia, Lud, and Phut, and Arvad manning troops and towers; Javan, Tubal, and Meshech trading bronze for merchandise (27:5-13).
• “The heart of the seas” teems with mariners, pilots, caulkers, and merchantmen, while the king, having enclosed himself “in Eden the garden of God” (28:13), and encrusted with an abundance of gemstones as the symbols of his royal status, believes himself as wise as a god. Pharaoh , for his part, is seen as a dragon of the Nile whom God will hook by the jaw, and as a verdant world-tree, rooted in the waters of the deep, shelter of birds and nations, whom the hand of foreigners will now fell.
• The section moves logically, surveying the neighboring countries from the more provincial and proximate—Ammon, Edom, and Philistia (chap. 25)—to the more maritime and cosmopolitan: Tyre (26:1-28:23) and Egypt (29:1-32:32).
• We must here recall the oracle in which God has promised Ezekiel that fromJerusalem will go fourth a fire that will consume in a progressively widening arc (3:4).
• That the bulk of invective is reserved for Egypt and its maritime armTyre is no surprise, for Ezekiel, like Jeremiah, sees Egypt’s duplicitous leading role in the abortive western cabal against Babylonia as the linchpin of Israel’s troubles.
• This perspective helps account for Ezekiel’s sense of Egypt as a place of depravity and vicious corruption.

Unlike Jeremiah, Ezekiel spares Babylon from censure, a measure of his different vantage point, and, unlike in Jeremiah, the censure of nations occupies a midpoint rather than the finale of the book.

• First, a good deal of textual space is still allotted to prophecies of woe or admonition. If a redemption is coming to birth, its birth pangs are still considerable, even before Gog’s appearance in chapter 38.
• Second, two contradictory attitudes toward the redemption seem to occur side by side:
  • on the other hand, divine judgment of righteous and unrighteous is Israel and a general mood of conditional divine blessing continue even as the people’s fortunes are restored (so, for example, 35:17-22 and 43:11);
  • on the other hand, the people’s perennial unrighteousness is no longer a stumbling block to their redemption—it is not for their sake that the God of Israel acts, but for his holy name (32:22-32; cf. 37:23).

Indeed, just as disaster was once necessary to create the conditions for repentance and soul-searching, now unmerited redemption is expected to do the same. We have, in a sense, been cut loose not only from our moorings in political facts and historical likelihoods, but from logic itself.

• Looked at one way, the book of Ezekiel is a silent tribute to his deceased wife;
• viewed in another way, it is an object lesson in which the prophet’s personal tragedy is but a sign of larger events.

• Thirty years before the inaugural vision in 593 was 623—the eve of Josiah’s reform.
• Twenty-five years after that, in 598, King Jehoiachin was exiled.
• Twenty-five years after that was Ezekiel’s Temple vision.
• Ezekiel’s affinities with the Code of Holiness are well known, and in that document (quite coincidentally, in Lev. 25) the laws of Sabbatical and Jubilee are set forth.
• There (25:9), the Jubilee is designated to begin on the Day of Atonement, that is, on the tenth day of the seventh (or New Year) month.
• The vision in Ezekiel 40-48 is likewise dated “in the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning [sic] of the year, on the tenth day of the month.” (The number 25 likewise appears motivically throughout the Temple vision.)
• In the Jubilee year,
  • all land and property must revert to their original owners.
  • Likewise, in the vision, the Land will return to Israel and to the protective aegis of Israel’s God.
  • It matters not whether the Jubilee reckoning (or even the Exilic reckoning in the headnote dates) was authentically Ezekiel’s—it is part of the book’s internal tradition, and it adds an extraordinary coherence to the reported events, setting Ezekiel’s era in a vaster framework of history and metahistory.
  • The Jubilee reckoning must remain unexplicit because, in the ritual-legal code of the priest, it is an ambiguous category: a fifty-year sacred cycle that was uncompleted in the Land, begun but not ended by the Israelite inhabitants, transferred from the custody of priestly law to the redemptive designs of the self-sanctifying deity.
  • If the more familiar contours of biblical (essentially, Deuteronomic) justice, of the human-centered cycles of reward and punishment, have fallen by the wayside and been replaced by a more apocalyptic causality, it is the extreme desperation of the era that has made it so.

If Ezekiel, consummate journeyer of the spirit, has left behind the flesh-and-blood environment of Land and people, he may be forgiven by force of events that have left him triply bereaved.