The City Keeps Its Festivals While the Book Stays Closed

Ezekiel 43:15-16 uses ari’el for the altar hearth, the top of the altar where the fire burned. “Where David dwelt” is literally “where David encamped”, chanah, the verb for pitching an army’s camp, and David first came to Jerusalem as a besieger, taking it from the Jebusites (2 Samuel 5:6-9). “Add ye year to year” lets the festival calendar keep turning.

“Heaviness and sorrow” is a rhyming pair in Hebrew, ta’aniyyah va’aniyyah, moaning and mourning. The last clause turns the name on the city: Jerusalem will be to God “as Ariel”, an altar hearth, the place where the sacrifices are slaughtered and burned. The city that offers the sacrifices will become one.

“Round about” is kaddur, “like a ring”; the Greek read the same letters as kedavid, “like David”, giving “I will encamp like David against thee”, the letters for r and d being easily confused. The “mount” is a siege ramp, like the one Sennacherib’s engineers built at Lachish, which can still be seen there.

The Hebrew alternates its words for the ground four times, earth, dust, earth, dust, as though the city lay buried and spoke up through the soil. When the woman at Endor called up Samuel, she said “I saw gods ascending out of the earth” (1 Samuel 28:13). The capital that shouted from its roofs in 22:1 now murmurs from underground.

“At an instant suddenly” is the pair petha pitom, which the book uses again in 30:13 of a wall that bulges and collapses, “whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant”. “Strangers” means foreigners, the invading armies. Small dust and blowing chaff are the two things nobody can hold on to.

“Visited” is paqad, here a visit in person, with a train of thunder, earthquake, storm and fire. It is the equipment of Sinai, where there were “thunders and lightnings” and “the whole mount quaked greatly” (Exodus 19:16-18), and of the wind, earthquake and fire that passed before Elijah (1 Kings 19:11-12).

“Munition” is 1611 English for a fortification, here the stronghold of Zion. Job 20:8 uses the same comparison for the wicked man’s vanishing: “He shall fly away as a dream... as a vision of the night.” The whole international army is reduced to something that happens only while the city sleeps.

“Soul” is nephesh, which can mean throat and appetite; “his soul is empty” means his stomach is. Sennacherib’s own annals boast that he shut Hezekiah in Jerusalem “like a bird in a cage”, but they never claim that he took the city. His record of the siege ends, like this dream, before the meal.

“Stay yourselves, and wonder” can also be rendered “blind yourselves, and be blind”, a play on a verb for smearing the eyes shut. It is the same verb as in the commission of 6:10, “shut their eyes”. The people are drunk on nothing, reeling without having touched a cup.

“Deep sleep” is tardemah, the sleep God cast on Adam before forming the woman (Genesis 2:21) and on Abraham before the covenant (Genesis 15:12). Paul quotes the verse in Romans 11:8, “God hath given them the spirit of slumber”. The seers, whose work is to see, are the ones whose eyes are covered.

“The vision of all” echoes the book’s own title, “The vision of Isaiah” (1:1). In 8:16 Isaiah sealed the testimony among his disciples to keep it safe; now the whole vision is sealed to everyone. A sealed document, like the deed Jeremiah bought his field with (Jeremiah 32:10-14), could be opened only by the right person.

“I am not learned” is literally “I do not know a book”, the scribe’s skill. Letters from Lachish, written shortly before Babylon’s attack, include one where an officer protests hotly that he has never needed anyone to read a letter to him. Reading was a skill worth boasting of, and many could not.

“Taught by the precept of men” is literally “a commandment of men, learned by rote”. The word for “taught” comes from the same root as limmudai, the “disciples” of 8:16: this is learning of the wrong kind. Jesus quotes the verse from the Greek, where the last line reads “in vain they do worship me”.

“I will proceed” is literally “I will add again”, God doing wonders again as at the exodus. “Prudent” is navon, the discerning; Solomon was given “a wise and an understanding heart” (1 Kings 3:12), the same two words that are here lost. The wisdom that is to perish is court wisdom, the counsellors’ stock in trade.

“Seek deep” is literally “make deep”, digging to bury a plan. The plan is most likely the secret approach to Egypt that chapter 30 exposes. “Who seeth us?” is what the elders of Jerusalem say in the dark in Ezekiel 8:12, “The LORD seeth us not”, and the wicked in Psalm 94:7.

The potter, yotser, is the one who forms, the participle of the verb used when “the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7). The book returns to the image in 64:8, “we are the clay, and thou our potter”. Jeremiah was later sent down to a potter’s house to watch the same lesson (Jeremiah 18:1-6).

“A fruitful field” is karmel, the word for orchard or garden land that also names Mount Carmel. Lebanon, the forest that stood for pride in 2:13 and 10:34, is turned into farmland, and the farmland grows up into forest. The world is turned the right way up, as the planners of verse 16 had turned it upside down.

The commission of 6:10 was to make ears heavy and shut eyes; this verse undoes it. The book promises the same in 35:5, “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped”, the lines Jesus sends back to John the Baptist in Matthew 11:5 as his answer.

“Increase their joy” is literally “add joy”, the verb of verse 14, where God said he would “add” to do wonders. God adds wonders and the meek add gladness. The meek are the anawim, the lowly, whom the shoot from Jesse was to judge with equity in 11:4.

“All that watch for iniquity” are “those wakeful for wickedness”, from shaqad, to keep watch, the verb of Jeremiah’s almond-tree pun, “I will hasten my word” (Jeremiah 1:11-12). These men lie awake scheming. The terrible one, the scorner and the watchers are three portraits of one class.

Amos 5:10 says of Samaria’s courts, “They hate him that rebuketh in the gate”, the same phrase as “him that reproveth in the gate”. “For a word” may mean convicting a man on a single word of testimony. “A thing of nought” is tohu, the emptiness of Genesis 1:2 and of the “city of confusion” in 24:10.

No other verse in the Old Testament speaks of God redeeming Abraham. Jewish tradition connected it with a legend that God rescued Abraham from a fiery furnace in Ur of the Chaldees, reading Ur as “fire”. “Wax pale” is to go white with shame, the colour that drains from a face.

“The Holy One of Jacob” occurs only here; everywhere else Isaiah says “the Holy One of Israel”. Jacob, the ancestor, looks at his descendants and sees God’s handiwork among them. “Sanctify” is said twice, the people treating as holy the name that the seraphim proclaimed holy in 6:3.

“They that murmured” are rogenim, grumblers, the verb of Israel muttering in its tents in the wilderness (Deuteronomy 1:27; Psalm 106:25). “Doctrine” is leqach, teaching received, the word in Proverbs 1:5, “a wise man will hear, and will increase learning”. The chapter ends with pupils who finally learn.