The End Interrupts Ordinary Business

What follows is among the most compressed Hebrew in the book, short clipped lines that sound more like a poem than a speech. The Greek Old Testament arranges verses 3–9 in a different order, a sign that its translators found the passage as difficult as modern readers do.

Amos had been shown a basket of summer fruit, qayits, and told “The end,” qets, “is come upon my people” (Amos 8:2). Ezekiel takes up Amos’s word and doubles it. “The four corners” are literally the four wings of the land, the same word as the wings of the living creatures.

“Thee” is feminine singular throughout: the land is addressed as a woman. Verses 3 and 4 are repeated almost word for word in 8 and 9, framing the cry of verses 5–7 like a refrain. “Ways” is the ordinary word for roads, the Hebrew picture of a life as a route travelled.

“Thine abominations shall be in the midst of thee” means the sins are not taken away but left inside to do their work, becoming the punishment themselves. “Recompense thy ways upon thee” is literally put thy ways upon thee, conduct handed back like a load to carry.

“An only evil” means a unique disaster, one of its kind. Some Hebrew manuscripts read “evil after evil”, one disaster following another, which differs by a single letter. Either way the line is only four words long in Hebrew.

There is a pun here: “the end”, qets, “watcheth for thee”, heqits, the verb for waking up. The end has come, the end has come, it has woken against you. The King James rendering “watcheth” loses the sound but keeps the idea of something no longer asleep.

“The sounding again of the mountains” renders a word found only here, probably related to the shout of grape treaders at harvest (Jeremiah 25:30; 48:33). No joyful harvest shouts will echo from the hills this year. The day comes instead of the vintage.

“Shortly” is literally from near, very soon. “Pour out my fury” is Ezekiel’s recurring phrase, fury imagined as liquid emptied from a vessel. When Ezekiel sees the slaughter in 9:8 he cries out against exactly this: “wilt thou destroy all… in thy pouring out of thy fury?”

The recognition formula is lengthened by a single Hebrew participle: “I am the LORD that smiteth.” At Marah God had introduced himself with the same construction and the opposite verb, “I am the LORD that healeth thee” (Exodus 15:26). The name is the same; the action is reversed.

When Aaron’s rod was left before the ark, it “brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms” (Numbers 17:8), the sign of God’s chosen priesthood. The same two verbs are here, but what blossoms is a rod of punishment and what buds is pride. “Rod” can also mean tribe in Hebrew.

The Hebrew of the middle line is a run of similar-sounding words, “not of them, not of their multitude, not of their wealth”, which falls like hammer strokes. “Wailing” renders a word found only here whose meaning is uncertain; some take it as eminence, so that none of their greatness remains.

During the siege, Jeremiah bought his cousin’s field at Anathoth, weighed out the silver and sealed the deed, as a sign that “Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land” (Jeremiah 32:6–15). Ezekiel’s oracle is the other half: for now, no sale will matter.

Under the law of jubilee, land that had been sold returned to its original family in the fiftieth year: “ye shall return every man unto his possession” (Leviticus 25:13). The seller here will not return, even if he lives to the jubilee. The mechanism that kept families on their land is suspended.

The law promised that when Israel blew an alarm with the trumpets before battle, “ye shall be remembered before the LORD your God, and ye shall be saved from your enemies” (Numbers 10:9). The trumpet is blown and everything made ready, but the promise that went with it does not hold.

Jeremiah 14:18 had pictured the same trap: “If I go forth into the field, then behold the slain with the sword! and if I enter into the city, then behold them that are sick with famine!” The field and the city are the only two places there are, and each has its own death.

Doves nest in clefts of the rock (Jeremiah 48:28), and their low call was heard as moaning: Hezekiah said in his illness, “I did mourn as a dove” (Isaiah 38:14). Survivors hide in the hills and make the same sound. “Every one for his iniquity” gives the mourning its reason.

“Weak as water” is literally all knees will go water. Many interpreters take it as a blunt description of men losing control of their bladders in terror. The phrase is repeated in 21:7, when the news of Babylon’s sword arrives. Feeble hands mean hands that hang down, unable to grip a weapon.

Amos 8:10 had already said: “I will bring up sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness upon every head.” Shaving the head was a mourning rite, though the law forbade Israel to make themselves bald for the dead (Deuteronomy 14:1). “Horror” is literally shuddering.

“Their gold shall be removed” is literally their gold shall be a niddah, an unclean thing, the word for menstrual impurity (Lamentations 1:17). Gold becomes something to fling away. Zephaniah 1:18 said nearly the same words: “Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the LORD’s wrath.”

At Sinai the people handed over their gold earrings and Aaron made a calf of them (Exodus 32:2–4). The ornaments God gave were remade into idols. “Set it far from them” again uses niddah, making it unclean to them, the same word the previous verse applied to their gold.

Daniel 1:2 records that Nebuchadnezzar carried part of the vessels of the house of God to Babylon and put them in the treasure house of his god. “Pollute” is to profane, to treat a holy thing as common, and the strangers do to the treasures what Israel had already done.

“My secret place” is tsefuni, my treasured or hidden place, most likely the holy of holies, which only the high priest entered once a year (Leviticus 16:2). “Robbers” is paritsim, violent men, the word Jeremiah used when he asked whether the temple had become “a den of robbers” (Jeremiah 7:11).

Prisoners were led away in chains; Jeremiah himself was found at Ramah “bound in chains among all that were carried away captive” (Jeremiah 40:1). The command may belong to another acted sign. “Bloody crimes” is literally judgment of bloods, meaning cases of bloodshed that went unpunished.

“The pomp of the strong” quotes Leviticus 26:19, where God warns, “I will break the pride of your power.” The “worst of the heathen” is a deliberately insulting description of Babylon’s armies, the most evil of nations taking the houses of the most privileged people.

The word for “Destruction” occurs only here, and may mean shuddering or anguish. Seeking peace and finding none answers the prophets who cried “Peace, peace; when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). Peace is the one thing everyone will look for and no one will find.

Jeremiah’s enemies had said, “the law shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet” (Jeremiah 18:18), confident that institutions would outlast him. Ezekiel reverses their three claims one by one. The word for “mischief” means ruin, disaster.

Ezekiel usually calls Judah’s ruler “prince” rather than king, and the Greek Old Testament lacks the words “The king shall mourn”. “Clothed with desolation” pictures despair worn like a garment. The chapter ends with the recognition formula as it has ended every section since 6:7.