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Home , Jeremiah 4

THE SPECIAL FORM- AND TRADITIO-HISTORICAL CHARACTER OF EZEKIEL'S PROPHECY

BY

W.ZIMMERLI Göttingen

In spite of all the work that has been done on the Ezekiel, his prophecy still remains difficult to comprehend. In the following paper 1) we will not presume to illuminate all of those difficulties. Rather, we will take up the more modest task of presenting certain facts about the form and material of Ezekiel's message, and on the basis of these, draw several conclusions about the personal character of this prophet and the background of his traditions. We will proceed in this task from the opinion that even though a complex redactional work can be recognized in the , it preserves for us on the whole the peculiar characteristics of the prophet. Thus, the critical work of H6LSCHER, MESSEL, TORREY, IRWIN, and others appears to me not to do proper justice to the text. When one considers the book of Ezekiel according to its form, he is immediately struck by the consistent recurrence of speeches by the prophet in the first person. Only the superscription in i 3a, which has been secondarily inserted into the text, is in the third person. VON RABENAU 2) has shown how deeply this structure has penetrated into the substance of the book, so that it can by no means be stripped away as a secondary redactional veil. Of the 52 units which I find in the book, only one can be considered strictly a narrative without a word of proclamation. This is xxxiii 21-22, the account of the arrival of the news that had fallen. Because of the peculiarity of this form, the news of the fall of Jerusalem receives unusually strong emphasis. Five of the units then are accounts of visions 3). All of the remaining

1) Paper read at the Bangor meeting of the society for Study, July 22, 1964. 2) K. VONRABENAU, "Die Entstehung des Buches Ezechiel in formgeschicht- licher Sicht" (WissenschaftlicheZeitschrift der Martin-Lutber-Universität Halle- Wittenberg, ges.-spr. wiss. Reihe 5, 1955/56, 569-683). 3) i 1- iii 15; iii 22 - v 17; viii 1- xi 25; xxxvii 1-14; xl 1- xlviii 35. 516

46 units, with the single exception of the qinah in Chapter xix 1), are introduced with the sentence ?17? This sentence is formally an element of narrative. In many texts in and Kings 2), we find it in a narrative context, reporting in the third person that the word of Yahweh had confronted a prophet. Apart from secondary superscriptions, the formula does not appear in the earlier classical down to . In Jeremiah it appears again in narrative texts 3). However, it can be seen here that this short sentence, formulated in the third person, is a simple intro- duction formula of a prophetic speech. This recalls the fact that the prophetic word does not express a timeless knowledge of Yahweh but is in fact an event, an intrusion of divine reality into the prophet's life. Along with the narrative formula in the third person, the first person formulation of the sentence is also found in Jeremiah 4). And this is the form which appears exclusively in Ezekiel. By means of this personal account, Ezekiel subordinates everything else to the intrusion of the divine word and vision. And in light of this, all else recedes into the background. Thus we learn nothing of a circle of disciples such as we do in Isaiah, although the book of Ezekiel clearly betrays the work of a group of students who were responsible for handing his prophecy down to subsequent generations. Neither do we know of a figure which would correspond to Jeremiah's Baruch. The message in this prophet is dominated completely by the event of the divine word to which he refers in the first person. This strong accent of personal encouter with the word of Yahweh might well allow us to presume that Ezekiel goes his own original way and finds original forms for his proclamation. But such is not the case. In reality, his proclamation shows a completely different picture. We discover first a clear line which leads back from Ezekiel to the manner of expression and the world of ideas of pre-classical prophecy. This is best shown in the visions. All five are introduced by the stereo- typed expression: "the hand of Yahweh came or fell over me". The phrase "the hand of Yahweh" appears only once in Isaiah (viii 11) and once in Jeremiah (xv 17). But the most common place

1) Cf. my Commentary, p. 420.429. 2) Cf. O. GRETHER,Name und Wort Gottes im Alten Testament, BZAW 64 (1934), G7 ff. 3) Jer. i 2; xiv 1; xxviii 12 et al. 4) Jer. i 4.11.13; ii 1 et al.