Idols in the Heart and Righteousness That Cannot Be Borrowed

In 8:1 they were “the elders of Judah”; here they are “the elders of Israel”, and the exiles in Babylon are addressed as Israel as a whole throughout the chapter. They come and sit, the posture of people waiting on a word. Their own question is never recorded.

The word comes to Ezekiel, not to the elders. The chain of consultation ran from inquirer to prophet and from prophet to God, and God speaks to the prophet about the inquirers before the prophet has said anything to them.

“Set up their idols in their heart” is literally made their idols go up upon their heart, the verb for raising something onto a pedestal and also for thoughts that rise in the mind (11:5). “Enquired of” is darash, the technical term for consulting God through a prophet, as Josiah’s men did with Huldah (2 Kings 22:13).

“Every man of the house of Israel that…” is the form of the case law in Leviticus 17 and 20, “Whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel”, which sets out an offence and then its penalty. Ezekiel is speaking in the voice of the priestly law, defining a case rather than addressing one elder.

“Take… in their own heart” is literally seize them by their heart, the verb for grabbing hold of someone. “Estranged” is from the root for a stranger or foreigner, the word used for the “strange fire” Nadab and Abihu offered (Leviticus 10:1). The people have made themselves foreign to their own God.

“Repent, and turn yourselves” uses the same Hebrew verb twice, turn and cause to turn; Ezekiel 18:30 repeats the command word for word. Their faces had been set toward the stumblingblock (verse 3), so they are told to turn their faces away. The first answer given to the idolaters is an invitation.

“Separateth himself” is from nazar, the root of Nazirite: the Nazirite was one who separated himself unto the LORD (Numbers 6:2). Here a man separates himself from the LORD. Like the laws of Leviticus 17:10 and 20:2, the case includes the resident stranger. “I… will answer him by myself” means in person, with no prophet between.

Leviticus 20:6 is the source: “the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits… I will even set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.” Ezekiel applies the law about consulting mediums to Israelites consulting a true prophet with idols in their hearts.

In Micaiah’s vision the LORD sent a lying spirit into the mouths of Ahab’s prophets (1 Kings 22:19–23). The verb for “deceived” means enticed or persuaded, and it is the one Jeremiah used in his complaint, “O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived” (Jeremiah 20:7).

“Bear the punishment of their iniquity” is the phrase Ezekiel acted out lying on his side for 390 days (4:4–6), bearing Israel’s iniquity. Deuteronomy 13 had made both the enticing prophet and those who followed him answerable; here the prophet and the man who seeks him are sentenced alike.

“Go astray” is the verb used of sheep wandering, as in “I have gone astray like a lost sheep” (Psalm 119:176) and “All we like sheep have gone astray” (Isaiah 53:6). Ezekiel will develop the shepherd image in chapter 34. The purpose of the whole judgment is stated as a return to belonging.

The second oracle of the chapter names no audience and gives no occasion. It is shaped like a legal case, “when the land sinneth”, setting out a general rule before verse 21 applies it to Jerusalem.

“Trespassing grievously” is ma’al, breach of faith, the word for sacrilege against holy things, used when Achan “committed a trespass in the accursed thing” (Joshua 7:1). “Man and beast”, which recurs in each case (verses 17, 19, 21), is the pairing of the flood, when God said he would destroy “both man, and beast” (Genesis 6:7).

Jeremiah was told something close to this: “Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my mind could not be toward this people” (Jeremiah 15:1). Jeremiah named two great intercessors; Ezekiel names three righteous men. “Their own souls” means their own lives.

“Noisome” in 1611 meant harmful, not smelly. When the Assyrians resettled Samaria with foreigners, “the LORD sent lions among them, which slew some of them” (2 Kings 17:25). A land emptied of people fills with wild animals until “no man may pass through”.

Job offered burnt offerings for each of his sons and daughters in case they had sinned (Job 1:5), and still they all died in one day when the house fell on them (1:18–19). Of the three men named, Job is the one whose righteousness demonstrably did not save his children. “As I live” turns the rule into an oath.

God addresses the sword as though it could hear: “Sword, go through the land.” Ezekiel 21 will give it a whole song, and Jeremiah 47:6 cries out to it, “O thou sword of the LORD, how long will it be ere thou be quiet?” The sword is an agent sent on an errand.

Abraham had bargained God down to ten: for ten righteous men, Sodom would have been spared (Genesis 18:32). Here even three of the most righteous men in memory cannot save their own sons and daughters. The case repeats verse 16 almost exactly, and the repetition is the argument.

“Pestilence” is deber, the word for the murrain that struck the cattle of Egypt in the fifth plague (Exodus 9:3), which is why it naturally falls on “man and beast”. “In blood” means in death; pestilence and blood are paired again in 5:17 and 28:23.

The first case said the three would deliver their own souls; the middle cases said sons and daughters. This last one narrows the plural to the singular, “neither son nor daughter”: not a single child. The three names return at the end to close the frame opened in verse 14.

“How much more” is the Hebrew form of an argument from lesser to greater: if one judgment could not be averted, what of four at once? Revelation 6:8 gives the fourth horseman power “to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth”, the same four.

“Brought forth” is the passive of the verb for going out: these survivors do not escape but are led out, as captives are. Jeremiah 52:29 counts 832 people carried from Jerusalem in the year of its fall. The survivors will arrive in Babylon, where the exiles can look at them.

“Comfort” is the verb of Isaiah 40:1, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people”, the great word later spoken to these same exiles. Here the comfort is of an odd kind: it comes by seeing, as the exiles understand from the survivors themselves why Jerusalem had to fall.