A Sweet Scroll and a Silent Watchman

“Eat that thou findest” recalls Jeremiah 15:16: “Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart.” What Jeremiah said as a figure of speech, Ezekiel is made to do.

“He caused me to eat” is the same causative verb Moses used of the manna, “fed thee with manna… that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only” (Deuteronomy 8:3). Ezekiel opens his mouth, but the feeding is done to him.

Psalm 119:103 says, “How sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” “Belly” and “bowels” take the scroll all the way down: it is to be digested, not tasted and spat out. The sweetness is recorded before a single word of the message is spoken.

“Speak with my words” is literally speak in my words, as if the words themselves are the material Ezekiel speaks with. “Go, get thee” translates two verbs, go and come, the Hebrew for setting out. The commission of 2:3 is repeated now that he has eaten.

“Strange speech and hard language” is literally deep of lip and heavy of tongue. Heavy of tongue is exactly how Moses described himself when he tried to refuse his call: “I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue” (Exodus 4:10). Isaiah 33:19 uses the deep lip of a foreign invader.

The Book of Jonah shows the very thing this verse claims: a foreign city, hearing a reluctant Hebrew prophet preach one sentence, repents from king to cattle. Jesus later made the same comparison, “The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation” (Matthew 12:41).

When Israel demanded a king, God told Samuel, “they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me” (1 Samuel 8:7). The same logic applies here. “Impudent” this time is literally strong of forehead, the exact body part God is about to strengthen in Ezekiel.

Jeremiah too was made hard for a hard assignment: “I have made thee this day a defenced city, and an iron pillar, and brasen walls against the whole land” (Jeremiah 1:18). The Hebrew is blunt: your face strong against their faces, forehead against forehead, like two rams.

“Adamant” is shamir, a stone harder than flint, perhaps emery or diamond; Jeremiah 17:1 speaks of Judah’s sin engraved “with the point of a diamond”, the same word. Zechariah 7:12 says the people made their own hearts “as an adamant stone”. Isaiah 50:7 sets the servant’s face “like a flint”.

The order is heart first, then ears, the reverse of the order one would expect. The words are to be taken in before they are even heard out. “All my words” leaves no room for selection; Ezekiel may not keep the pleasant ones and drop the rest.

“Them of the captivity” renders golah, the technical Hebrew term for the exile community as a body, used across Ezekiel, Ezra and Nehemiah. It names people by what happened to them. The commission ends with the same open outcome as 2:5 and 2:7.

Jewish liturgy sets this line beside Isaiah 6:3 in the Kedushah, the prayer of sanctification: “Holy, holy, holy” and then “Blessed be the glory of the LORD from his place.” Many scholars think the Hebrew originally read “as the glory of the LORD rose from its place”, one letter different.

“Touched one another” is literally kissing one another, the wings brushing at the tips. The Hebrew piles up three noises, of wings, of wheels, and of “a great rushing”, the sound of the vision moving off. Ezekiel hears it behind him and does not see it go.

“Heat” is chemah, the word the book will use again and again for God’s fury, as in 5:13. The prophet goes off burning with the same word as the anger he has been told to announce. Whether his heat is shared indignation or his own distress is not said.

Tel-abib probably represents the Babylonian til abubi, a mound left by the flood, the name for an ancient ruin; in Hebrew it sounds like hill of spring grain. Modern Tel Aviv took its name from this verse. Seven days was also the length of a priest’s ordination (Leviticus 8:33), an echo some have seen here.

Seven days of silence end with the formula that will open section after section of this book, “the word of the LORD came unto me”. The count of days is precise, as Ezekiel’s dates are throughout; he tells the reader when as carefully as what.

A watchman stood on the city wall or gate tower and called out what he saw coming, as the watchman did when the runners came to David at Mahanaim (2 Samuel 18:24–27). Ezekiel 33:1–9 repeats this charge almost word for word, just before news of Jerusalem’s fall arrives.

“Thou shalt surely die” is the doubled Hebrew phrase of Genesis 2:17, spoken over the tree in Eden. “His blood will I require at thine hand” is the language of bloodguilt from Genesis 9:5: “at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man.” Silence is counted as a share in the death.

“Delivered thy soul” means saved your own life. The wicked man is described twice, turning not “from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way”, his condition and his course of conduct. Neither the warning nor its refusal changes what happens to him; it changes what happens to the watchman.

“Stumblingblock” is mikhshol, a word Ezekiel returns to several times, nearly always of idols: “the stumblingblock of their iniquity” (7:19; 14:3–7). “His righteousness” is plural in Hebrew, his righteous deeds, the separate acts that will not be counted to him.

“He shall surely live” is the doubled Hebrew form that answers “thou shalt surely die” in verse 18, living he shall live. The last of the four cases is the only one with a good end for both people: the warned man lives, and the watchman has saved himself.

“The plain” is the biq’ah, a broad valley floor. The glory appears in the same kind of place in 8:4, and the valley of dry bones in 37:1 is the same Hebrew word. Ezekiel is called out of the settlement to open ground to be spoken to.

“As the glory which I saw by the river of Chebar” sets the pattern for the book: every later sighting is measured against an earlier one (8:4; 10:15, 22; 43:3). The glory is not bound to one place. It came to him at the canal, and now it waits for him on the plain.

Ezekiel has a house among the exiles, as Jeremiah had told them to “build ye houses, and dwell in them” (Jeremiah 29:5). The elders of Judah will come and sit before him in it (8:1). Being shut up in it makes his home the only place anyone can hear him.

“They” is not identified; it may mean the people, or it may be an impersonal way of saying he will be bound. In 4:8 God says, “I will lay bands upon thee.” Whether the bands are rope or restraint, the verse makes him unable to walk among the exiles.

A “reprover” is ish mokhiach, a man who argues a case or arbitrates between parties; Job wished for such a “daysman” between himself and God (Job 9:33). The muteness is lifted only when a survivor arrives with the news that Jerusalem has fallen (24:27; 33:21–22), roughly seven years later.

“He that heareth, let him hear” has a long afterlife in the words of Jesus, “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear” (Matthew 11:15), and in the letters of Revelation 2 and 3. Here it is followed at once by its opposite: “he that forbeareth, let him forbear.”