Ezekiel Lesson 1 INTRODUCTION to EZEKIEL

Ezekiel Lesson 1 INTRODUCTION TO EZEKIEL 1) Ezekiel: the Man. a) His family. i) He was a priest, the son of Buzi. His father was (probably) of the line of Zadok (1;3; 40:46; 44:15), which had taken the place of the house of Abiathar (1 Kings 2:26-27, 35). ii) He was married. His wife died at the time of Jerusalem’s fall. (24:16-18.) b) His history and character. i) He may have had some wealth and was a man of influence because the elders of the exiles met in his home and consulted him. (3:24; 8:1; 14:1; 20:1.) ii) He was taken captive in 597 BC when the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, captured Jerusalem after a brief siege. (1) He was exiled to Babylonia by Nebuchadnezzar, along with King Jehoiachin and the upper classes of Jerusalem (10,000 captives went into exile. 2 Ki. 24:14). (2) These 10,000 were regarded as the “good figs”; Zedekiah, King of Judah, his princes, the remnant of Jerusalem who remain in this land, and those who dwell in the land of Egypt are “bad figs” (Jeremiah 24; 29). iii) Nothing is known of his life except what is revealed in his book. Unlike other prophets, there is no Jewish tradition to tell us how or when he died. iv) In response to some critics accusations that Ezekiel is hard of heart and/or mentally defective is various ways, it may be observed: (1) Abnormality of some sort is the rule and not the exception with Old Testament prophets. Beyond that, however, one dare not go. It ill becomes critics, most without any professional training to do so, to diagnose mental illness centuries after Ezekiel lived and wrote. (2) His sensitivity can be judged from the brief description of his feelings for his wife (24:15-18), by his earnest plea that God will spare His people and not destroy them completely (9:8; 11:13), and by the tenderness of his description of God as the Shepherd of His sheep (34:11-16). v) One cannot study Ezekiel’s prophecy without realizing that he possessed the priest’s sense of the holiness of God, the prophet’s sense of the message that had been entrusted to him, and the preacher’s sense of responsibility for his people. 2) Ezekiel: the Ministry. a) Ezekiel was 30 years old when God called him to be a prophet (1:1). i) His home was Tel-abib, the primary location of the exiles, on the river Chebar, generally identified with the Grand Canal southeast of Babylon. ii) His mission was to be God’s spokesman and watchman to the exiles. (chs. 2, 3.) iii) His ministry lasted from the 5th year of Jehoiachin’s exile (592 B.C.) to the 27th year (570 B.C.). (1:2; 29:17.) b) Ezekiel had a tough message, made the more difficult because he loved his people. i) Before the fall of Jerusalem in 586, he was primarily a preacher of repentance and judgment (chs. 1-24). ii) He delivered constant warning to a people who rebelled against God and who succumbed to a pagan environment. (2:3ff; 3:4-11; 13; 14:1ff; 18:2, 25; 20:1ff.) iii) It is difficult to oppose your enemies; it is more difficult to oppose your friends. 3) Ezekiel: the Message. a) The book of Ezekiel is to many a difficult book, hard to understand. i) For most it is almost a closed book – their knowledge of it extends little further than its mysterious vision of God’s chariot-throne, with its wheels within wheels, and the vision of the valley of dry bones. ii) Otherwise his book is as forbidding in its size as the prophet himself is in the complexity of his make-up. iii) From antiquity ordinary readers have found its language, images, and theology puzzling; scholars have been embarrassed by the contents of the book and by their inability to produce commentary on it. iv) Jerome’s (ca. A.D. 340-420) commentaries are filled with apologies for his inability to clarify obscure passages. v) In Jewish tradition the interpretation of Ezekiel has been particularly difficult because they believe that some of the legal material in chaps. 40-48 contradicts the laws of the Torah. (1) The Babylonian Talmud reports that this fact caused some rabbis to advocate withdrawing the book from circulation, a fate that was avoided only through the extraordinary efforts of Hananiah son of Hezekiah, who successfully reconciled the contradictions. (2) Equally troublesome to the rabbis was the vision of God’s glory described in Ezekiel 1, a passage that they feared might lead to dangerous mystical speculations or even destroy the interpreter who probed too deeply into its mysteries. (3) According to the Talmud, Hananiah son of Hezekiah was again able to persuade his colleagues not to withdraw Ezekiel, although Jerome reports that some rabbis prohibited the reading of the beginning and end of the book by anyone under the age of thirty. vi) Despite the difficulties associated with the book and the occasional efforts to withdraw it from circulation, there is no indication that early Jewish or Christian interpreters ever questioned the canonicity or divine inspiration of the book. vii) While the difficulties of the book cannot be denied, many of them can be minimized by keeping in mind the historical, sociological, and religious settings in which the book was produced and by cultivating sensitivity to the book’s structure and peculiar literary style. b) 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 analyze. i) Structure of Ezekiel. (1) In the opening vision, 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). (2) This is followed by 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). (3) Then, at the half-way mark in the book, when the fall of Jerusalem is represented as having actually taken place (thought the news has still not reached the exiles), attention is diverted to the nations that surround Israel and God’s judgment on them is pronounced in a series of oracles (25 – 32). (4) By this time Ezekiel’s audience is prepared for the news of Jerusalem’s destruction (33:31). (5) At this point a new message falls from 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 describes in apocalyptic language the final triumph of the people of God over the invading hordes from the north (38, 39). (6) 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). ii) Another commentator suggests that the book divides itself into four sections: (1) Jerusalem must fall. Chs. 1-24. (2) Foreign nations must fall. Chs. 25-32. (3) A bridge between chs. 1-24 and chs. 34-48. Ch. 33. (4) Jerusalem (and its people) must be comforted. Chs. 34-48. iii) Three major structural devices are used to give coherent shape to the book of Ezekiel. (1) It makes extensive use of dates to mark important events and oracles, and these dates indicate that the book is organized chronologically. (2) The chronological ordering of material is reinforced by the arrangement of oracles and visions according to content. (a) Between the first and last sections of the book (Jerusalem perishes and Jerusalem’s promises) Ezekiel inserts a pronouncement of doom against foreign nations. (b) While these devices give the major shape to the book, they are not followed slavishly and are not without exception. (3) Finally, a measure of structure is achieved in the book by the use of repetitive images and words. (a) This device is used on many levels, but the most obvious example is the verbatim repetition of part of the prophet’s call narrative (3:16-21; 33:1-9), the second occurrence of which marks a crucial shift in the prophet’s message. (b) The various literary devices reinforce each other so that the reader’s overall impression is one of unity. iv) It is not surprising, therefore that most older commentators regarded Ezekiel as being free from the literary fragmentation that was imposed by critics upon Isaiah, Jeremiah, and some of the minor prophets. v) Given the overall impression of the unity of the book, it is not surprising that since antiquity interpreters have treated the book as the work of a single author. (1) Even with the rise of modern critical scholarship in the middle of the nineteenth century, the book managed to escape scholarly dissection. (2) When the challenge finally came, it came not one literary grounds, but on religious grounds related to the concept that prophets must be ecstatic, and, while ecstatic, must be poetic. (3) Prose such as Ezekiel’s could not qualify and must therefore be questioned. (4) The only comment that I will make on this concept is that those who make it cannot agree among themselves on the portions that belong to Ezekiel and those that do not.

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