A Restored Land and a Heart That Can Answer

“Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord GOD” is exactly how chapter 6 began, when the mountains were told “I will bring a sword upon you”. The same address, to the same hills, now opens a promise. The book deliberately repeats its own opening of judgment to undo it.

“Aha” is the jeer of Ammon over the sanctuary in 25:3 and of Tyre over Jerusalem in 26:2. “Ancient high places” is bamot ‘olam, the everlasting heights, but bamot was also the word for the shrines chapter 6 condemned. The enemy claims the hills, shrines and all.

“Infamy” is dibbah, an evil report, the word used in Numbers 13:32 for the spies’ slander of the land. “Taken up in the lips of talkers” means the land became a byword. “Swallowed you up” may also be read as “trampled” or “panted after”, the Hebrew being uncertain.

Mountains, hills, ravines and valleys are the same four features addressed in 6:3, now joined by wastes and forsaken cities. “The residue of the heathen” means the nations left over after Babylon’s campaigns, survivors themselves who treated Israel’s ruin as an opportunity.

“My land” is the claim of Leviticus 25:23, “the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me”. “The fire of my jealousy” recurs in Zephaniah 1:18. “Despiteful minds” is the same phrase used of Philistia in 25:15, contempt from the depths of the self.

The landscape is listed once more, as though each hill and valley must hear its own name. “Jealousy” and “fury” stand side by side: the LORD’s zeal for what belongs to him, and his heat against those who mocked it. The mountains have “borne the shame of the heathen”, their insults.

The raised hand is the gesture of an oath, used in 20:5–6 when the LORD “lifted up mine hand” to bring Israel out of Egypt. The verb “bear” is the same as in verse 6: the shame the mountains carried is transferred to the nations who laid it on them.

“They are at hand to come” is remarkable for its nearness. Written around 585 BC, it was about half a century before the first returns under Cyrus in 538. The mountains are to start growing branches for a people still in Babylon.

“I am for you” renders words that elsewhere in Ezekiel mean “I am against you”, as in 13:8. Context alone decides. The LORD will “turn unto you”, face the land again, and the ground will be ploughed and sown, the first labour of settled life.

“All the house of Israel, even all of it” includes the northern tribes, lost to Assyria over a century earlier. Chapter 37 will make the same point with two sticks joined in one hand. The promise is not limited to Judah’s exiles in Babylon.

“Better unto you than at your beginnings” promises more than a return to the old days. “Old estates” means former times. Haggai 2:9 later makes a similar promise about the house: “The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former.”

“Bereave” is shakal, the word for losing children. Jacob uses it in Genesis 43:14: “If I be bereaved of my children, I am bereaved.” The land is pictured as a mother whose children kept dying, and now she will keep them.

The taunt repeats the spies’ report in Numbers 13:32, that Canaan was “a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof”. What the unbelieving spies said at the border, the nations now say of the ruins. “Thy nations” is an odd plural for Israel, perhaps meaning the tribes.

The Hebrew words for “bereave” (shakal) and “cause to stumble” (kashal) use the same three letters in a different order. The manuscripts waver between them here and in verse 15. Either way the land’s old reputation is revoked in its own words.

Three times the verse says “any more”, and it closes the address to the mountains that began in verse 1. Shame, reproach and stumbling are all named, and none of them is left standing. From verse 16 the word turns from the land to the people.

Ezekiel 36:16–38 is read in synagogues on Shabbat Parah, the sabbath before Passover when Numbers 19 and the red heifer are read. The pairing rests on verse 25, the sprinkled water of cleansing. A new word begins here, and it starts not with the future but with what went wrong.

Leviticus 18:24–28 warned that defiling the land would make it “vomit you out”. Here the land has been defiled, and the people have been expelled as warned. “Their way... their doings” is a pair Ezekiel repeats in verses 19 and 31, keeping attention on conduct.

Numbers 35:33 says blood “defileth the land” and can be cleansed only by the blood of the one who shed it. “Idols” is gillulim, Ezekiel’s favourite word for them, used some forty times; it may be a scornful coinage close to the word for dung pellets.

“I scattered them among the heathen” fulfils Leviticus 26:33, “I will scatter you among the heathen”. The judge’s standard is stated plainly: “according to their way and according to their doings”. The exile was a verdict, not an accident of war.

The Hebrew leaves open who does the profaning: the exiles by their very presence, or the nations by their comment. The comment itself is the sting: a god whose people had to leave his land looks like a god unable to keep them there.

“I had pity” is chamal, the verb the LORD refused again and again in the judgment chapters: “neither will I have any pity” (5:11; 7:4; 9:10). The pity withheld from the city is now spent on the name.

“For mine holy name’s sake” is the phrase that explained all of Israel’s history in chapter 20 (20:9, 14, 22, 44): God spared them in Egypt and the wilderness for his name’s sake, not theirs. The same motive that kept them alive then brings them home now.

Papyrus 967, one of the oldest Greek manuscripts of Ezekiel, lacks the text from the middle of this verse to the end of the chapter, and places chapter 37 after 38 and 39. Scholars debate whether the passage was added later or lost by accident; the standard Hebrew text has it in full.

Take, gather, bring: the three verbs repeat 11:17, 20:34 and 34:13. In this sequence the return comes first and the cleansing second, in verse 25. The people are not required to be clean before they can come home; they are cleansed once they are there.

“Sprinkle” is zaraq, a priest’s verb, used for dashing sacrificial blood against the altar. Numbers 19:17–19 prescribes sprinkled water mixed with the red heifer’s ashes to cleanse from contact with the dead. Ezekiel, a priest, describes the whole nation undergoing that rite.

In 18:31 the people were commanded: “make you a new heart and a new spirit”. Here God gives what he had commanded. The promise repeats 11:19 almost word for word. In Hebrew thought the heart was the seat of thinking and choosing, more than of feeling.

“Cause you to walk” is literally “I will make that you walk”. In 37:14 the promise returns inside the valley of bones: “I shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live”. The spirit placed within produces the keeping of statutes, rather than the statutes producing the spirit.

“Ye shall be my people, and I will be your God” first came together with the new heart in 11:20, and returns in 37:23 and 37:27. “The land that I gave to your fathers” ties the promise back to the patriarchs, whose inheritance the survivors in 33:24 had tried to claim.

“I will call for the corn” reverses 2 Kings 8:1, where Elisha says “the LORD hath called for a famine” of seven years. Grain comes when summoned, like a servant. Salvation “from all your uncleannesses” comes first in the verse; the harvest follows it.

“The fruit of the tree, and the increase of the field” is the blessing of Leviticus 26:4. In the ancient world a famine exposed a god as weak, and the nations mocked accordingly. Full barns silence that particular taunt.

“Lothe yourselves” uses the verb of 6:9 and 20:43. In Ezekiel shame follows restoration rather than preceding it: 16:63 has the same order, “that thou mayest remember, and be confounded... when I am pacified toward thee”. The gift comes first, and the clearer sight comes with it.

The verse repeats verse 22 almost word for word, framing the promises between two disclaimers. “Be it known unto you” adds emphasis. “Ashamed and confounded” is the pair bosh and kalam, embarrassment and humiliation, which also stand together in 16:52 and 16:63.

Resettlement is dated to “the day that I shall have cleansed you”. The two are made simultaneous: the rebuilding of cities is the outward sign of a cleansing no one can see. The verse repeats the promise of verse 10, that “the wastes shall be builded”.

Deuteronomy 29:22–24 foresaw the stranger passing by a ruined land and asking, “Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this land?” The passers-by who once read the ruins as judgment will now see tilled fields.

Eden appears in Ezekiel as the setting of fallen kings: the king of Tyre “in Eden the garden of God” (28:13) and the trees of Eden envying the cedar (31:9). Here the word returns to a restored countryside. “Fenced” means fortified, walled cities rather than garden hedges.

“Build” and “plant” are the two positive verbs of Jeremiah’s commission in Jeremiah 1:10, “to build, and to plant”. “The heathen that are left” are the neighbours who survived; they, not only Israel, will see who rebuilt the ruins.

In 20:3 and again in 20:31 the LORD swore to the elders, “I will not be enquired of by you”, and in 14:3 he asked whether he should be enquired of at all. Here he says, “I will yet for this be enquired of”. The door shut to men with idols in their hearts is opened again.

“The holy flock” means sacrificial animals. At Josiah’s Passover in 2 Chronicles 35:7 the king alone gave thirty thousand lambs and kids. The picture is Jerusalem crammed with flocks at a pilgrim feast, and the empty towns will be as crowded with people.