An Inquiry Becomes a Reckoning with Israel’s Past

The date is August 591 BC, eleven months after 8:1. The tenth day of the fifth month is also the day Jeremiah 52:12 gives for the burning of the temple five years later, a coincidence of calendar the book does not remark on. This is the third time elders sit before Ezekiel (8:1; 14:1).

The reply comes at once, before anything the elders asked is written down. Each time elders have sat before Ezekiel, the visit has turned into an examination of the visitors, and this word does the same at far greater length.

“Enquire” is darash, to seek an oracle from God through a prophet. The refusal is sworn with “As I live”. The book later reverses it for a restored people: “I will yet for this be enquired of by the house of Israel” (36:37).

The doubled question works as a command, “Judge them!”, putting Ezekiel in the role of prosecutor. The same doubled form returns in 22:2 and 23:36. His task is not to give the elders an answer but to read them their family record.

“Chose” is bachar, the verb Deuteronomy uses for God’s choice of Israel (Deuteronomy 7:6), and this is the only place Ezekiel uses it of the nation. The raised hand is an oath, and Exodus 6:8 uses the same idiom in Egypt: the land “concerning the which I did swear”, literally lifted up my hand.

“Espied” is tur, the verb for the twelve spies searching out Canaan (Numbers 13:2, 16–17). Here God did the scouting himself before any spy set out. “The glory of all lands” uses tsevi, beauty or ornament, the word Daniel uses for “the pleasant land” and “the glorious land” (Daniel 8:9; 11:16).

Exodus records no command in Egypt to give up Egyptian gods, but Joshua 24:14 assumes one: “put away the gods which your fathers served... in Egypt.” “Abominations of his eyes” are detestable things a man fixes his gaze on, what he looks to with longing.

Exodus 6:9 says the people “hearkened not unto Moses for anguish of spirit”; Ezekiel reads that refusal as rebellion and reveals a threat of wrath in Egypt the book of Exodus never mentions. “Accomplish” is kalleh, to spend to the last, anger poured out until nothing is left.

The Egyptians saw what God did so that they would know him: “the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD” (Exodus 7:5). Abandoning Israel in Egypt would have profaned that name before the very watchers. “For my name’s sake” appears here for the first of four times in the chapter.

The whole exodus, plagues and sea crossing included, is compressed into one verse of two verbs. The destination named is not the promised land but the wilderness, which is where the rest of the history will be tried.

“Statutes” are chuqqot, from a verb meaning to engrave, fixed decrees; “judgments” are mishpatim, rulings for cases. Deuteronomy 4:1 pairs them in the same way. “Shewed” is literally “made known”, the same verb as God making himself known in verse 5.

Ezekiel quotes Exodus 31:13 almost exactly: “it is a sign between me and you... that ye may know that I am the LORD that doth sanctify you.” The plural “sabbaths” may include the festival rests as well as the weekly day.

“Greatly polluted” has instances behind it: people went out to gather manna on the seventh day (Exodus 16:27), and a man gathering sticks on the sabbath was stoned (Numbers 15:32–36). The fury is threatened “to consume them”, from the verb kalah, to finish off.

The refrain repeats verse 9 but shortens it. Moses had argued exactly this at Kadesh, when God threatened to destroy the people: the Egyptians “shall hear it”, and the nations would say the LORD could not bring them in (Numbers 14:13–16).

The oath of exclusion is the one in Numbers 14:28–30, where God swears by his own life that the carcases of that generation will fall in the wilderness. Psalm 95:11 remembers the same oath: “Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest.”

The acts are listed first, judgments despised, statutes ignored, sabbaths profaned, and the cause last: “their heart went after their idols.” At Sinai, within weeks of the covenant, the golden calf (Exodus 32) showed where that heart was pointing.

“Make an end” is kalah, the verb of “to consume them” in verse 13. The threatened finishing off does not happen. The first word, “Nevertheless”, carries the whole surprise of the verse: the generation dies in the wilderness, but the people as a whole are not ended.

“Statutes of your fathers” uses the very word God uses for his own statutes, but now for inherited custom. The second generation is addressed on its own, in the wilderness, before it has done anything, and told plainly which inheritance to refuse.

“I am the LORD your God” is the preface of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2). Three verbs follow, walk, keep and do, the same chain Deuteronomy 5:1 uses to call the second generation: “learn them, and keep, and do them.”

“Hallow” is the verb of the sabbath command, “to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8). In verse 12 God is the one who sanctifies Israel; here Israel is told to sanctify the sabbaths. The same root runs both ways across the sign.

The second generation’s great apostasy came at the very end of the forty years, at Shittim, when the people joined themselves to Baal-peor (Numbers 25). “Notwithstanding” marks that they had been given a fresh command in verses 18 to 20 and refused it anyway.

“Withdrew mine hand” is literally “turned back my hand”, a hand raised to strike and lowered. Lamentations 2:8 describes the reverse for Jerusalem’s fall: “he hath not withdrawn his hand from destroying.” The mercy of the wilderness is the thing that was not repeated in 586.

Psalm 106:26–27 says the same: God “lifted up his hand against them, to overthrow them in the wilderness: to overthrow their seed also among the nations, and to scatter them in the lands.” Leviticus 26:33 had written the threat of scattering into the covenant itself before Israel entered the land.

The eye is Ezekiel’s organ of idolatry, as in verse 7. Numbers 15:39 had given the tassels on garments so that Israel would not follow “your own eyes, after which ye use to go a whoring”. The idols here are “their fathers’”, so this generation looked back at the habits of the one that died.

The Hebrew for “statutes” here takes a masculine form, chuqqim, the form used of “the statutes of your fathers” in verse 18, while God’s own statutes throughout the chapter are the feminine chuqqot. The grammar quietly aligns these “not good” statutes with the fathers’ customs rather than with the law of verse 11.

“Gifts” are offerings. Micah 6:7 shows the question was live in Judah: “shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” The final purpose clause, “that they might know”, puts even this pollution inside the chapter’s aim of recognition.

“Blasphemed” is giddef, reviled, the verb Numbers 15:30 uses of the one who sins with a high hand and “reproacheth the LORD”. “Yet in this” means “still further in this”: what follows is added to the whole wilderness record, not a new start.

Deuteronomy 12:2 commanded Israel to destroy worship sites “upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree”; the settled nation did the opposite. “Offering” here is qorban, the word behind Corban in Mark 7:11. “Provocation of their offering” means gifts that angered the one they were supposed to please.

The question is a pun in Hebrew: mah habbamah asher attem habba’im, “what is the high place, bamah, where you go, ba’im?” Bamah is being mocked as a place people merely “go to”. The name had become an ordinary word for a shrine “unto this day”.

The question expects the answer yes. Its sting is “after the manner of your fathers”: the exiles in Egypt told Jeremiah they would keep burning incense to the queen of heaven “as we have done, we, and our fathers” (Jeremiah 44:17). Ancestral custom was their defence.

“Even unto this day” brings child sacrifice into the present tense. Whether exiles in Babylon still practised it or the charge covers the nation still in Judah is not stated; the address is to the house of Israel. The sworn refusal of verse 3 is repeated, framing everything between as the reason for it.

Deuteronomy threatened exile as a curse in exactly these words: “there ye shall serve gods, the work of men’s hands, wood and stone” (Deuteronomy 4:28; 28:64). The exiles now propose it as a plan. “Cometh into your mind” is literally “goes up upon your spirit”, a private intention spoken aloud.

“A mighty hand, and... a stretched out arm” is the exodus formula of Deuteronomy 4:34 and 26:8. Ezekiel adds a third phrase, “fury poured out”, which no exodus text contains. “I will rule” is emlokh, “I will be king”, and it is the one place in the book where God says it of himself.

The same triple phrase is repeated, fury included. The first exodus brought one people out of one land; this gathering is “out of the countries”, plural, from wherever they have been scattered. The verbs of gathering echo the promise of Deuteronomy 30:3–4.

“The wilderness of the people” is probably the desert between Mesopotamia and the land, which returning exiles had to cross. “Face to face” is the Sinai phrase: “The LORD talked with you face to face in the mount” (Deuteronomy 5:4). The new exodus has its own Sinai, and it is a courtroom.

The precedent is Kadesh, where the first generation was tried and sentenced to die in the desert while their children entered (Numbers 14:26–35). “The wilderness of the land of Egypt” is Sinai, the desert on Egypt’s border that the first generation never escaped.

A shepherd counted animals as they passed under his staff, and Leviticus 27:32 uses the phrase for tithing the herd: “whatsoever passeth under the rod, the tenth shall be holy.” “Bond” is masoret, a word found only here, probably a fetter or binding; the Greek reads it “by number”.

“Purge out” is barar, to sift or sort out as clean from refuse. “The country where they sojourn” uses the word for the patriarchs’ land of sojourning, “the land wherein thou art a stranger” (Genesis 17:8). Like the Kadesh generation, the rebels will leave exile and still never cross in.

The command is sarcasm, like Amos 4:4, “Come to Bethel, and transgress.” Go on, then, serve your idols. What God forbids is the mixture: gifts brought to him from the same hands that serve idols, which profanes “my holy name”.

“Require” is darash, the verb of “enquire” in verses 1, 3 and 31. God refused to be sought by the elders, but on his holy mountain he will seek their offerings. “All of them in the land” leaves no tribe out: north and south are one house again.

God being “sanctified in you before the heathen” is a thread through the rest of the book (28:25; 36:23; 38:16; 39:27): his holiness shown publicly by what he does with Israel. It answers verse 9, where the concern was his name being profaned before the same watching nations.

This is the seventh time the chapter mentions God’s lifted hand, the gesture of oath (verses 5, 6, 15, 23, 28, 42). The oaths have sworn a land, then excluded a generation, then threatened scattering. This last one returns to the first promise, made to the fathers.

“Lothe yourselves in your own sight” is literally “loathe your faces”, and the phrase occurs also in 6:9 and 36:31. The place of this remembering is “there”, in the land, after the return. The shame comes when they are safe, not as the price of getting home.

“Corrupt doings” uses the verb shachat, the word of Genesis 6:12, “all flesh had corrupted his way”. This is the last of the four “for my name’s sake” statements, and the only one that says outright what God is not acting by: their record.

The Hebrew Bible begins chapter 21 here, so its chapter 20 ends at verse 44 and its chapter 21 has five more verses than the English. The English division follows the Greek and Latin, which attach the burning forest to the end of this chapter.

Three different Hebrew words for south are used in one verse: teman, darom and negev. “Drop thy word” is to let speech drip, a verb for prophesying, as in Amos 7:16, “drop not thy word against the house of Isaac”. Babylon lies east, but the invaders came down on Judah from the north, so Judah was to the south of their route.

The Negeb was dry scrubland, not forest, so the forest is a figure for Judah. “Flaming flame” doubles two fire words, lahevet shalhevet; shalhevet is the word in the Song of Solomon 8:6 for love’s “most vehement flame”. “All faces” means every surface, scorched.

“All flesh” is all humankind. The fire will be recognised as God’s kindling, not as an accident of war. “It shall not be quenched” repeats the end of verse 47, and Jeremiah 17:27 had used the same words of a fire in Jerusalem’s gates.

“Ah Lord GOD!” is ahah, the cry of protest Ezekiel has used before (4:14; 9:8; 11:13). “Speak parables” is literally “make meshalim”: the people who coined proverbs in 12:22 and 18:2 now dismiss the prophet as a maker of proverbs, a man of figures and nothing more.