The Glory Returns by the Way It Left

The guide returns Ezekiel to the east gate, where the outer measuring ended in 42:15. The glory had left in the vision of the sixth year (8:1; 11:23); this is the twenty-fifth. Some nineteen years separate the departure from the return, and in between the city fell.

“A noise of many waters” is how Ezekiel heard the living creatures’ wings in 1:24. Revelation 1:15 uses the same comparison for the voice of the risen Christ. “The glory of the God of Israel” is the title Ezekiel used as the glory withdrew (9:3; 10:19; 11:22); here it is used for the last time.

“When I came to destroy the city” puts the destruction in the prophet’s own mouth: his announcing was counted as the doing. A few Hebrew manuscripts and the Latin read “when he came”. Ezekiel ties together all three visions of the glory, at Chebar, over Jerusalem, and now.

The glory enters by the east gate. Because of this, 44:2 orders the gate shut for ever: “because the LORD, the God of Israel, hath entered in by it”. No one will ever use the entrance the LORD used.

When the glory filled Moses’ tabernacle (Exodus 40:34–35) and Solomon’s house (1 Kings 8:10–11), no one could stand inside. Ezekiel is set down in the inner court, not in the house; he watches the filling from the threshold of the priests’ court.

Two figures are carefully distinguished. The voice speaks “out of the house”, and the measuring man stands silently beside Ezekiel. The guide who has done all the talking since 40:4 now says nothing while the LORD speaks.

Jeremiah 3:16–17 said the ark would be forgotten and Jerusalem itself called “the throne of the LORD”. Here the house is the throne and the resting place of his feet, the role the ark once had as “footstool of our God” (1 Chronicles 28:2). No ark is needed where the whole house is the throne.

Solomon’s palace stood beside the temple in one royal complex, and took thirteen years to build against the temple’s seven (1 Kings 6:38; 7:1). A single wall separated the king’s house from the LORD’s. The new plan puts land between them, as chapter 45 will show.

Manasseh and Amon were buried “in the garden of Uzza”, in the palace grounds (2 Kings 21:18, 26), which is one reason some read “carcases” literally. The verse sets two phrases against each other: “far from me” and “in the midst of them”. Distance from the one is the condition of nearness to the other.

“Pattern” renders tokhnit, a rare word for a proportion or plan. Ezekiel’s only other use is 28:12, where the king of Tyre “sealest up the sum”, the model of perfection. Israel is to measure the pattern for themselves, taking the plan into their own hands.

Ezekiel is told to write. Earlier he wrote only a date (24:2) and names on sticks (37:16). Now he must set down the whole plan in writing “in their sight”. The list of forms, exits, entrances, ordinances and laws is so long that the Hebrew repeats “all the forms thereof” twice.

“This is the law of the house” opens and closes the verse, framing it. Torah here means instruction for a building. The phrase “most holy”, used in 41:4 for the inner room alone, now covers the whole precinct on the mountaintop.

The altar is measured by the same long cubit as the rest of the complex, defined again here. The “bottom” is a trough or channel a cubit deep round the base, where blood from the sacrifices would collect. The “border” is a span, half a cubit, a raised lip at its edge.

“The bottom upon the ground” is literally “the bosom of the earth”. Babylonian texts used a similar phrase, “bosom of the underworld”, for the foundation platform of a temple tower. The altar rises in stages, two cubits and then four, stepped like the ziggurats Ezekiel saw in Babylon.

The Hebrew uses two words for the altar here: har’el, “mountain of God”, and ari’el, the hearth. Isaiah 29:1 calls Jerusalem “Ariel, the city where David dwelt”, the city named for its altar hearth. The four horns at the corners follow Exodus 27:2.

The hearth is twelve cubits square. With the stages of verses 13 and 14, the whole altar stood about eleven cubits high, nearly six metres. Solomon’s bronze altar was larger, twenty cubits square and ten high (2 Chronicles 4:1).

Exodus 20:26 had forbidden steps up to the altar, but later priests wore linen breeches (Exodus 28:42; Ezekiel 44:18). The steps face east, so a priest climbing them faces west toward the house, the reverse of the men of 8:16 who turned their backs on the temple to worship the sun.

“In the day when they shall make it” is dedication language. Exodus 29:36–37 prescribed seven days of atonement for the first altar before it could be called “most holy”. Solomon also dedicated his altar over seven days (2 Chronicles 7:9). This altar will not be used before it has been set apart.

“Thou shalt give” makes Ezekiel the officiant, taking the part Moses played at the first consecration of priests and altar in Leviticus 8. Ezekiel, a priest who by most reckonings never served at Jerusalem’s altar, is given the role of consecrating the new one.

In Leviticus 8:15 Moses put the blood on the horns of the altar and “purified the altar”. “Cleanse and purge” are chitte’ and kipper; the second is the verb of atonement, here performed for an object, not a person. Even the new altar must be atoned for before use.

Leviticus 4:12 required a sin-offering bullock to be burned “without the camp”. Here it is burned in “the appointed place”, miphqad, a word that also names the Miphkad gate of Jerusalem in Nehemiah 3:31, perhaps the very spot.

On the second day a goat replaces the bullock, the animal Leviticus 4:23 prescribes for a ruler’s sin. The subject changes too: “they shall cleanse”. What Ezekiel did on the first day, the priests now do themselves.

Sin offering first, then burnt offering: the order of Leviticus 8:14–21 and 9:8–14. The altar is purified before anything is given upon it. The bullock and the ram are the two animals of the ordination offerings in Exodus 29.

Leviticus 2:13 requires salt with every grain offering: “neither shalt thou suffer the salt of the covenant of thy God to be lacking”. Numbers 18:19 speaks of “a covenant of salt for ever”. Here the salt is cast on the burnt offerings, extending the rule.

Priests were ordained over seven days: “seven days shall he consecrate you” (Leviticus 8:33). Each day of this week brings a goat, a bullock and a ram, so the altar receives some twenty animals before regular worship can begin.

“Consecrate themselves” is literally “fill its hand”, the Hebrew idiom for ordaining a priest (Exodus 28:41). The altar is ordained as though it were a priest. “Purge” and “purify” repeat the atonement vocabulary of verse 20.

In Leviticus 9:1 Aaron began to offer “on the eighth day”, after the seven days of ordination. “I will accept you” repeats the promise of 20:40–41: “there will I accept them... I will accept you with your sweet savour”. The promise made about the holy mountain is now spoken from the house upon it.