A Sanctuary for Those Sent Far Away

Jaazaniah means the LORD hears, and a man of that name has now appeared in both halves of the vision, among the incense burners of 8:11 and among the princes at the gate. His father Azur shares a name with the father of Hananiah, the prophet who broke Jeremiah’s yoke (Jeremiah 28:1), though no family link is stated.

“Devise mischief” is literally think iniquity, the charge of Micah 2:1: “Woe to them that devise iniquity, and work evil upon their beds!” These men are the counsellors whose counsel 7:26 said would perish from the elders. They are the city’s policy makers.

Jeremiah had seen a “seething pot” tipped from the north as the sign of his call (Jeremiah 1:13), and he had told the exiles, “Build ye houses, and dwell in them” (29:5), because they would be in Babylon a long time. These leaders speak of building houses in Jerusalem, as if no pot were boiling.

The command is doubled, prophesy against them, prophesy, an urgency that stands out even in Ezekiel. He is in a vision, standing at a gate hundreds of miles from his body, and yet the prophesying he does there will have an effect in Jerusalem within ten verses.

“The things that come into your mind” is literally the steps of your spirit, using ma’alot, the word for stairs and the word in the titles of the Songs of Degrees (Psalms 120–134). God knows every step their thinking climbs. The capital S of “Spirit of the LORD” is the translators’ judgment.

2 Kings 24:4 says Manasseh “filled Jerusalem with innocent blood; which the LORD would not pardon”. The present leaders have added to it. “Your slain” may mean men killed in the streets, or the victims of judicial murder, as when Jehoiakim killed the prophet Urijah (Jeremiah 26:23).

Micah 3:2–3 had described Jerusalem’s rulers as butchers of their own people, who “chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the caldron.” God takes up the leaders’ image of the caldron exactly as Micah had used it: the meat is their victims.

Jeremiah 42:16 uses the same turn against those who fled to Egypt: “the sword, which ye feared, shall overtake you there.” The thing a man takes precautions against is what finds him. Fear of the sword is not the same as avoiding the reasons for it.

“Execute judgments” is the phrase for the punishments God executed on Egypt: “against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment” (Exodus 12:12). The leaders will receive the treatment once given to Pharaoh, at the hands of strangers, foreigners with no stake in them.

The fulfilment is recorded in Jeremiah 52:9–10 and 24–27: the princes of Judah were taken to Riblah, far to the north on Israel’s frontier, and put to death there. The oracle names the border, not the town.

Verse 11 undoes the proverb of verse 3 in its own words: not your caldron, not your flesh. Ezekiel often refutes a popular saying by quoting it and turning it round, as he will do with the proverbs of 12:22 and 18:2. The saying is answered with the saying.

Leviticus 18:3 had said, “After the doings of the land of Egypt… and after the doings of the land of Canaan… shall ye not do: neither shall ye walk in their ordinances.” The charge lays the leaders’ conduct against that command: statutes not walked in, judgments not kept, the neighbours’ ways copied instead.

Pelatiah means the LORD rescues, built on the same root as the “escape” and the escaped remnant of 6:8. When a man whose name promises rescue drops dead, Ezekiel hears it as the death of the remnant itself, and asks whether God will make “a full end”.

The answer to Ezekiel’s question comes as a fresh oracle, introduced by its own formula. God does not argue with the cry of verse 13; he redirects it. The remnant Ezekiel fears for is about to be located somewhere other than where he was looking.

“The men of thy kindred” is literally the men of thy redemption: the kinsmen with the legal right to buy back family land, as Jeremiah did when told “the right of redemption is thine” (Jeremiah 32:7; Leviticus 25:25). The people in Jerusalem claim the land; the law gives the right to redeem it to the exiles.

“A little sanctuary” can mean a sanctuary in small measure or a sanctuary for a little while. The Talmud (Megillah 29a) applied it to the synagogues and houses of study of Babylon, and many trace the synagogue’s beginnings to exactly this setting, worship without a temple.

Deuteronomy 30:3–4 promised that if Israel returned to the LORD in exile, he would “gather thee from all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath scattered thee”, even from “the outmost parts of heaven”. Ezekiel uses the same two verbs, gather and assemble, and the land is named as a gift again.

In chapter 8 it was the elders who carried the detestable things in. Here it is the returning exiles who take them out. The purging of the land is not done for them by an army or a reforming king; the people who come back do it themselves.

The Greek Old Testament reads “another heart” instead of “one heart”. Jeremiah 32:39 has the same promise, “I will give them one heart, and one way”. Ezekiel repeats this verse almost word for word in 36:26, where the new heart comes with clean water sprinkled on the people.

“They shall be my people, and I will be their God” is the covenant formula, first given in Exodus 6:7 and Leviticus 26:12 and repeated by Jeremiah (24:7; 31:33). Ezekiel uses it again in 14:11. It is the relationship the exiles were told they had lost.

The Hebrew is awkward on purpose: “to the heart of their detestable things their heart walketh”. The idols are given a heart, and the people’s heart follows it. Whatever a person’s heart walks after, it comes to resemble; the phrasing makes the idols the ones leading.

The cherubim lift their wings for the last time in this vision. The throne on the cherubim will not be seen again until the closing vision of the book, when the same glory returns to a new temple and Ezekiel falls on his face once more (43:2–5).

The mountain on the east of the city is the Mount of Olives, and Zechariah 14:4 pictures God’s feet standing there “in that day”. A rabbinic tradition (Lamentations Rabbah) says the divine presence lingered on that mountain for three and a half years, waiting for Jerusalem to repent.

“The vision… went up from me” uses the same verb as the glory that “went up from the midst of the city” in verse 23. Both leave by rising. Ezekiel never left his house in Babylon; the spirit returns him in the vision to where his body sat among the elders (8:1).

This closes the vision that began in 8:1, with the elders of Judah sitting before him, and it is one of the few places the book reports Ezekiel actually speaking to the exiles. How they took it is not recorded. The next verse addressed to him still calls them “a rebellious house” (12:2).