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[This is from a book we highly recommend not only as MUST READ but MUST HAVE, for any serious student of the Hebrew Scriptures.–Admin1].
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Ezekiel
Joel Rosenberg
Ezekiel is simultaneously more homogeneous a composition than Jeremiah and more opaque about the origins of its components.
As in the case with practically every other biblical book, there is widespread disagreement on Ezekiel’s unity, authorship, and historicity. Nevertheless, a significant number of modern interpreters recognize throughout the distinctive stamp of an individual mind.
- 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.
Whether or not Ezekiel lived when and where he says,
- 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.
It may be best to begin where Ezekiel himself begins, on 31 July, 593B.C.E., along the banks of the Babylonian Chebar canal.
- 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?
We may leave this question unanswered until the full trajectory of the book justifies the answer.
We may also allow the text’s details of the prophet’s vision to speak for themselves, for the text addresses itself amply and uninhibitedly to the lineaments of the divine chariot-throne and its angelic bearers.
Let us confine ourselves to two matters comprehended by the account:
- 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).
No, this quasi-cultic manifestation can be seen only as an extraordinary occurrence, one not welcomed by the prophet, and which we could call a state of emergency. Not until chapters 8-11 does it become fully clear that a presence of the Kavod in Babylon foretokens its removal from Jerusalem, and nowhere in chapters 1-7 does the prophet say—dare to say—that the punishment of Israel will entail the end of its chief site of worship.
People might suffer, surely—about this Ezekiel is unhesitatingly precise: “parents shall eat their children, and children shall eat their parents” (5:10 [AT]). But his delicacy and restraint regarding the effects on the divine Glory itself are all the more striking, and they flow from the deepest and most sensitive taboo in the priestly tradition: the inviolability of the sacred site par excellence, the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem sanctuary.
Only a shocking and unprecedented change in Israel’s historical situation could bring the unthinkable into the open, and when the prophet comes to describe the Glory’s awesome departure, in 10:18-22 and 11:22-23, there is a mood of almost hypnotic calm in his words, as if the grounds for this event were by now self-evident . No wail of mourning, no heightened expression whatever, accompanies the report. It is the book’s first firmly unequivocal declaration that the national sovereignty has come to an end.
Much has been speculated on the prophet’s psyche and personality, but, restricting ourselves to the plane of literary expression, we need note only that the book, at certain crucial junctures, stops distinctly short of revealing the prophet’s feelings, despite its lush generosity in rendering divine pathos, and even despite its willingness otherwise to render the prophet’s astonishment and dismay over things coming to pass. This radical subordination of the prophet’s human feelings to divine intention is already implicit in the mode of address that prevails in divine speech throughout the book: ben-‘adam (“human being,” literally, “son of Adam”), a term hierarchic in force, and one that accentuates the prophet’s mortal, earthbound, and subservient status.
It is implicit as well in the first symbolic act commanded of the prophet: his eating of a scroll (or book) containing “lamentations, and mourning, and woe” (2:10; see 2:8-3:3), whose ingestion yields a taste “as sweet as honey.”
There is much that we could say about the semiotic subtleties inherent in this merger of the prophet with his message (or, given the contents of the scroll, with Jeremiah’s) but let us focus on the paradoxical skewing of the affective domain described here:
- 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.
This terrifying reign of objectivity in Israel’s darkest hour sets the tone for the entire book, transcending all alleged sources and genres. As we shall see, the prophet’s personal life is not irrelevant to the book’s argument, but it gains its relevance and poignancy only as a sign within the argument—“for I have set thee for a sign unto the house of Israel” (12:6).
Our sense of paradox is compounded in chapter 3, where the prophet received two diametrically opposed commands.
- 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?
Before the watchman can be heard, the heart must first be broken; the seal of sovereignty must be ripped away.
Understanding the book in this manner helps make clear much that is otherwise peculiar about its contents or design. It explains, for example, the overwhelmingly legal orientation of the book’s doom oracles in a work otherwise so preoccupied with repentance, mercy, and restoration.
Unlike Jeremiah’s, Ezekiel’s discourses commence not with pleas for turning, but with pronouncements of punishment that may, somewhere far down the line, elicit a retrospective repentance. Virtually all of the discourses, however elaborate and however varied in theme, unfold in the same basic rhetorical pattern, constructed out of the words ya’an (“because”) and lakhen (“therefore”). Expansions of this elegant structure are afforded by the many phrases that underscore the casual nexus thereby proclaimed between action and consequence: “and when they ask you why … you shall say…,” “for thus says the Lord God” “and now behold, I shall…,” and, above all, the most ubiquitous of the book’s motivically repeated phrases, “and they [or you] shall know that I am the Lord.”
Only completion of the trajectory of promise and fulfillment can truly convince those capable of being saved where their true interests lie, and who YHWH is.
Ezekiel is perhaps unique and unprecedented in its preoccupation with the condition of repentance. No prophetic book has formulated the problem in such a nuanced manner. So many of Ezekiel’s discourses in the first half of the book—before the destruction of Jerusalem—are retrospective visions: Israel’s whole pre-Exilic history is repeatedly reviewed, as if in a kind of premature postmortem.
The house of Israel is given a hindsighted depiction of its life in the Land, which will make full sense only once the dire predictions come to pass and the people—their remnant—are sufficiently motivated to reflect backward and understand.
This expository strategy helps explain why a number of the deity’s anticipations of repentance among the populace are envisaged only after the punishment has run its course—and thus why the prophet’s mouth is not yet fully opened:
Yet will I leave a remnant, that ye may have some that shall escape the sword among the nations, when ye shall be scattered through the countries. And they that escape of you shall remember me among the nations … and they shall lothe themselves for the evils which they have committed in all their abominations. And they shall know that I am the Lord, and that I have not said in vain that I would do this evil unto them. (6:8-10)
But did Ezekiel preach this, and if so, where?
There is some suggestion that Ezekiel was in regular contact with the elders among his own Exilic community in Babylon, and on numerous occasions was compelled to preach to them or to their constituents things they might not have liked to hear about the fate of their homeland (see 14:1-11 and 20:1-44). Any preaching “for Israel,” that is, for the Land and its inhabitants, was just as relevant to the ears of his colleagues and compatriots in Babylon. This double applicability flows from the unique situation of the exiles of 598 B.C.E.
Those deported with King Jehoiachin were not in exile in the fuller sense of the term that prevailed after 587, but were a kind of hostage community of leading citizens, who were apparently valued enough by at least some of the population who remained that their detention could be used to enforce the submission of the home populace to Nebuchadnezzar’s political sway (see 2 Kings 24:10-17). In such a setting, eyes and ears among the exiles were, at least from 598 to 587, trained on the land of Israel and its fate, and all preaching to them was, literally or figuratively, a preaching to the land and to Jerusalem. And for the time being (given what we know of Jeremiah’s experience), the detainees alone, among the nation as a whole, could be in a position to hear or appreciate the prophet’s message. Only they had the foretaste of exile; only they knew firsthand the might (or even, given their relatively lenient treatment, the “sweetness”) of the Babylonian yoke.
Given this anomalous audience, Ezekiel, unlike Amos, Isaiah, or the poetic Jeremiah, rarely surveys his contemporary Judean society with the detailed eye of the social commentator or of the anguished deity, for the historical setting in which such a survey would have force and cogency has passed away. It is not the trial but the moment of sentencing that most animates the prophet, and the post-sentencing search for perspective and insight over what has been lost. Curiously, Ezekiel’s most expansive poetry, verses in the grand manner of his great predecessors, occurs not in the Israelite phase of his mission, but in his diatribe on foreign nations (which we must assume to have been spoken to his own countrymen), where he could be more uninhibited (though still retrospective) in his invective, and more certain of enlisting the agreement of his listeners.
This last matter brings us one step closer to understanding both the structure of the book and the special character of Ezekiel’s symbolic discourses in the book’s first half, especially the parables of Israelite history. Both phenomena flow from the unique conditions of the first Exilic community, as we have seen. This group was torn by great dissension. The exiles had no way of knowing what would come about for themselves, or how history would turn. A bad but eloquent prophet might easily be preferred to a good but blunt one. A priestly prophet was by heritage and training a conciliator, a consoler, a sealer of consensus. It was at times necessary for a blunt prophet, one with an adamantine brow such as Ezekiel’s (see 2:9), to moderate or disguise his message for the ears of his less reflective constituents by fashioning a discourse difficult to pin down, addressed past the emotional multitudes to those who shared his concerns. Whence the riddle (hidah), the proverb (mashal), and the dirge (qinah), all of which are oblique discourses. This is not to say that Ezekiel was comfortable with the role of esoterist; indeed, he chafed under criticism by his contemporaries of his abstractness and indirection: “Ah, Lord God, they are saying to me, ‘Is he not [just] another maker of allegories?’” (20:49). (Allegory, parable, and proverb are the same word in Hebrew, mashal). We may see more than dismay at persecution shaping this discouragement: the prophet is straining at the bit. For all their analogical brilliance, the parabolic addresses in chapters 13-24 seem crabbed and claustrophobic.
Ezekiel is prevented from exercising his most cherished priestly mission, one for which his birth and schooling have most conditioned him to serve, as dispenser of absolution and consolation. For this his mouth is closed, his hands are tied. It is significant that just before his complaint about the ridicule of his allegories we encounter Ezekiel’s masterful effort (in chap. 20) at abandoning the mashal mode and expounding the nimshal, the thing analogized.
Such, at any rate, is what emerges from the scant biographical hints throughout the book’s first half (chaps. 1-24). The book’s structure requires this interpretation, for the beginning and end of his so-called silence are very clearly marked:
- 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:
Also the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke; yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down. Sigh, but not aloud [RSV] ; make no mourning for the dead, bind the tire of thine head upon thee, and put on thy shoes upon thy feet, and cover not thy lips, and eat not the bread of men. So I spake unto the people in the morning: and at even my wife died; and I did in the morning as I was commanded.
And the people said unto me, Wilt thou not tell us what these things are to us, that thou doest so? Then I answered them, The word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Speak to the house of Israel. Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I will profane my sanctuary, the excellence of your strength, the desire of your eyes, and that which your soul pitieth; and you sons and your daughters whom ye have left shall fall by the sword. (24:15-21; see 24:22-27)
The stoic silence and lucidity of Ezekiel that man are here most astonishing—as is the grotesqueness of his didactic exchange with the people. (It is difficult here to imagine how this scene would have played with flesh-and-blood actors.)
This is the only place in the book where the prophet’s domestic life is brought into view, and it rounds out our vision of the man in an unexpected way.
- 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.
As noted earlier, the “nations” oracles are among Ezekiel’s richest poetry, in a narrower sense of that term. Translators are accustomed to render most of Ezekiel in prose rather than in strophic format, but it is clear that much of what they have deemed prose is capable of being cast as verse. Yet even by the conventional reckoning, chapters 25-32 abound in verse, and here we find Ezekiel’s masterful command of geography, commerce, and mythology.
- 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.
At least one of the oracles (29:17-21) is dated after the book’s final oracles—indeed, is the latest of the book’s dates, 571 B.C.E.—and it is doubly interesting for being the book’s sole indicator that Ezekiel’s prophecies on Tyre and Egypt were left unfulfilled. Whether this frankness emanated from Ezekiel or an editor is unclear (it is a decidedly Ezekieian touch), but it has the effect of making 29:17-21 the centerpiece of the foreign oracles, and indeed of the entire book.
Curiously, this lone contradictory oracle strengthens rather than weakens the force of what surrounds it, for we are thus notified that Ezekiel has left the realm of his normally astute political and historical wisdom and entered, true to his preferred mission, into the riskier realm of utopian fantasy, magic, and myth—though myth here is a vehicle of satire and belittling, not yet the more earnest paradisiacal consciousness that will dominate chapters 40-48.
We have here (especially at 28:12-19) what seems an older, more mythological prototype of the Garden story, not yet pressed into the cadences of homily and fable, but unequivocal in its rejection of false paradises. The motifs of cosmic centers that are prominent in these chapters throw into relief one glaring omission: the panorama embraces the two maritime powers flanking Israel but omitsIsrael, the geographic center. This omission sets the stage for the final use of cosmic-center imagery in chapter 47, where from the Temple threshold flows a river eastward to the Dead Sea, fostering teeming new life in its hitherto uninhabitable waters. But in this last image there is an instructive difference, which we should now consider in the context of Ezekiel’s restorative visions as a whole.
It has been customary to view chapters 33-48 as the third and final movement of the book, comprising in its broadest sense a body of redemptive prophecies for Israel of an unprecedentedly radical, supernaturalist cast. This interpretation needs some qualification.
- 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.
We find the God of Israel sanctifying himself before a world audience in a setting that no longer bears the familiar earmarks of a world. From here on the representational powers of language, even allegorical language, break down. Myth, which came alive so palpably in the foreign oracles, is no longer serviceable, and what replaces it, whatever its origins and its outlandish lineaments, is not mythic—a type of gnosis, to be sure, but one mobilizing contradictory potentials in the prophet’s imagination: a severe and solemn precision, on the one hand, as in the measuring out, down to the cubit and the handbreadth, of the dimensions of the restored Temple (40:5-44:3); and at the same time an airy insubstantiality about the whole, a kind of abstractness, going all the way back to chapter 33, that somehow seems related to the odd fact that Jerusalem’s fall per se is unrepresented—it is signified only by an announcement from without (33:21-22).
In this Exilic perspective, we are far from the ambience of Lamentations and the poetic Jeremiah. We find instead a baroquely artificial diction, a frenzy of labeling and cataloguing—a celebration, almost, of the naked functionality of language, somewhat analogous to our modern architectural style, rooted in Vladimir Tatlin, that allows pipes, tanks, and service scaffolds to play a role in a building’s artistic form.
Yet there is no faltering here in the expository structure of the book. This dramatic shift in the role of language, while anticipated as far back as the opening chapters, is comprehensible solely in the light of the limitations imposed on the prophet in 24:15-17. Just as the city’s cries cannot be heard, the prophet remains ever apart from his newfound freedom of pronouncement. We have, in the fullest sense, a “sigh, but not aloud.”
For this reason, even the momentous miracles of chapters 37-39 have a kind of geometric starkness and paradoxicality, which are further sustained in chapters 40-48. Though the bones of Israel are clothed with flesh and animated by the spirit, they remain nameless, faceless soldiers in the army of YHWH. Gog and his infamous hordes are slain in a mysterious conflagration that leaves the Land strewn with the invaders’ corpses but also leaves the inhabitants strangely unscathed. The Land is purified, but only by suffering the grosses of defilements. The invaders are buried, but they are also carrion for birds and beasts.
The Temple sanctuary is readied for the return of the Glory, but only after the deity himself, glutting the maw of chaos, offers “sacrifice” of flesh and drunkenness of blood to the scavenging animals (39:17-20). Later, the Land is allotted to the renewed tribes, but according to no known geographic or historical imperatives.
Clearly, the world has been turned upside down; no familiar norms of mimetic representation or prophetic tradition now prevail, and the mythic language of chapters 28 and 31 now appears as the crudest kind of literalism, the language of the historically ephemeral. With his array of charts and blueprints, the prophet moves into uncharted domains for biblical tradition—the audacious textuality of a broadly architectonic allegory. It remains tantalizingly uncertain whether it is the national or the personal loss that most guides him.
- 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.
One further key to the meaning of the book’s final chapters (40-48) is found, naturally enough, in the section’s headnote: the date “in the twenty-fifth year of our exile,” namely in 573 B.C.E. Here, we may take a simple but important suggestion from medieval Jewish exegesis. As Rashi notes on 1:1, the mysterious “thirtieth year” is that of Israel’s final Jubilee cycle—one begun but not ended in the Land.
- 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.
We may think of his book as a form of farewell to the household, priestly calling, and land he has known and loved.
It is a form of silent sigh, and it had the benefit, perhaps unforeseen by Ezekiel, of nurturing within his fellow Israelites a concretely restorative hope.
