A Coat of Plaster Is Not a Wall

False prophets were not only in Jerusalem. Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles named two in Babylon, Ahab and Zedekiah, who “prophesy a lie unto you in my name”, and said Nebuchadrezzar would roast them in the fire (Jeremiah 29:21–23). Ezekiel’s audience had prophets of peace in their own settlements.

Jeremiah 23:16 makes the identical charge: “they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the LORD.” The Hebrew here piles up the root three times, prophesy against the prophets who prophesy, so that the word itself becomes the ground of the dispute.

“Foolish” is nabal, the fool who “hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Psalm 14:1), and the name of Abigail’s husband, of whom she said “Nabal is his name, and folly is with him” (1 Samuel 25:25). In Hebrew nevi’im, prophets, and nevalim, fools, sound close.

The foxes that appear in the Song of Songs are the ones to be caught, “the little foxes, that spoil the vines” (Song of Solomon 2:15). Foxes and jackals dig their dens in rubble. A prophet who thrives in ruins has a reason not to want the ruins rebuilt.

Psalm 106:23 remembers Moses standing “before him in the breach, to turn away his wrath”. In 22:30 God will say, “I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me… but I found none.” These prophets were supposed to be that man.

“Vanity” is shav, emptiness, the word of the third commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain” (Exodus 20:7). Saying “The LORD saith” over an empty word is exactly that. Jeremiah 23:21 puts it plainly: “I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran.”

The question leaves them no answer. Deuteronomy 18:20 set the penalty for a prophet who speaks in God’s name “a word which I have not commanded him to speak”: “even that prophet shall die.” The phrase “albeit I have not spoken” quotes the charge the law had already framed.

Jeremiah 23:30–32 has God declare three times in a row, “Behold, I am against the prophets, saith the LORD.” Ezekiel uses the same formula he has already turned on Jerusalem (5:8), and now aims it at those who claimed to speak for him.

“The writing of the house of Israel” is the register of citizens. When the exiles returned, lists were drawn up by family, and certain priests “sought their register… but it was not found: therefore were they, as polluted, put from the priesthood” (Ezra 2:62). To be missing from the list was to be outside.

The word for “wall” here is chayits, found nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible; it seems to mean a flimsy partition wall, not a city wall. The prophets are not strengthening fortifications; they are painting a screen. “Because, even because” doubles the Hebrew word for because, pressing the reason.

“Great hailstones” renders a word found only in Ezekiel (here, verse 13 and 38:22). The prophets are told that rain, hail and wind will come, and the hailstones are addressed directly. Jesus’ parable ends the same way: “the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew… and it fell” (Matthew 7:27).

The verb for daubing is the one Leviticus 14:42–45 uses for replastering a house with a spreading mould: if the plague returned after the plastering, the whole house had to be broken down, stones, timber and mortar. Fresh plaster over a diseased wall was the law’s own picture of a cover-up that fails.

The storm is now named as God’s, “in my fury”. The “stormy wind” is the same Hebrew phrase as the “whirlwind” in which the glory first came out of the north (1:4). The weather that brought the vision of the throne is the weather that brings the plastered wall down.

“Discovered” in 1611 meant uncovered, laid bare. Micah 1:6 had said of Samaria, “I will pour down the stones thereof into the valley, and I will discover the foundations thereof.” The plasterers are “consumed in the midst thereof”, buried under the wall they vouched for.

The wall is now qir, the ordinary word, as the partition becomes simply rubble. “The wall is no more, neither they that daubed it” is two short Hebrew negatives, no wall and no daubers, set side by side like an epitaph.

“To wit” is 1611 English for namely. Jeremiah met one of these prophets face to face: Hananiah announced that within two full years the exiles and the temple vessels would come home, and he died that same year (Jeremiah 28:3–4, 17). His was exactly such a vision of peace.

Israel had honoured prophetesses: Miriam, Deborah, and Huldah, whom Josiah’s officials consulted when the book of the law was found (2 Kings 22:14). This is the only passage in the Old Testament that condemns women prophets as a group, and the charge is the same as against the men, speaking “out of their own heart”.

“Souls” here is nefesh, a living person or a life, not an immaterial soul; they are hunting people. The word rendered “pillows” may be related to an Akkadian word for binding, suggesting cords or bands tied at the wrists, a practice known from Babylonian magical texts. That derivation is a scholarly suggestion.

Paying a seer was ordinary: Saul’s servant offered Samuel a quarter shekel (1 Samuel 9:8), and Jeroboam’s wife brought the prophet Ahijah ten loaves (1 Kings 14:3). The offence is what is being sold. Micah 3:5 had described prophets who cry “Peace” to whoever feeds them.

“To make them fly” is literally as birds, and the picture is of fowling, catching birds with snares. Psalm 124:7 gives the other side: “Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped.” God will break the snare.

“Deliver my people out of your hand” is the exodus phrase, as when God told Moses, “I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians” (Exodus 3:8). The women who hunted souls are placed where Pharaoh stood, and the people they held are called “my people” again.

Jeremiah 23:14 lays the same charge against the prophets of Jerusalem: “they strengthen also the hands of evildoers, that none doth return from his wickedness.” “Promising him life” is literally to keep him alive, a false assurance that he would survive whatever he did.

Divination, qesem, heads the list of practices forbidden in Deuteronomy 18:10–14, set against the true prophet God would raise up. The sentence ends their trade rather than their lives: “ye shall see no more vanity”. Each half of the chapter closes with the recognition formula.