Blessing, Escalating Judgment, and a Covenant Remembered

Four words for objects of worship stand in one line: elilim, “idols”, a scornful term that sounds like “nothings”; pesel, a carved image; matstsevah, an upright pillar; and a “stone of display”, probably a carved slab. The chapter break is late: these two verses close the jubilee laws of chapter 25 as much as they open the blessings.

The same line, word for word, stood at 19:30. Sabbaths and sanctuary are paired because both are holy portions set apart, one of time and one of space, and the chapter will return to both when the land keeps the sabbaths Israel refused it.

“Walk” is the governing verb of the whole chapter. Israel is to walk in the statutes here; in verse 12 God walks among them; from verse 21 on, the walk turns “contrary”, the same verb bent against itself.

“Rain in due season” is literally “your rains in their times”: in the land of Canaan that meant the early rains of autumn for ploughing and the latter rains of spring to fill the grain. Egypt watered from the Nile; this land would drink from heaven.

The harvest calendar is stretched until its seasons collide. Threshing of barley and wheat ran through late spring and summer, the grape vintage came in late summer, and sowing began with the autumn rains. Each job would still be unfinished when the next one arrived.

“Peace” is shalom, wholeness more than the absence of war. Wild animals are a real threat named in its own right: Exodus 23:29 gave the slow pace of the conquest as a guard against the beasts multiplying on an emptied land.

The promise is of pursuit, not merely survival. The same picture is turned inside out in verse 17 and again in verse 36, where Israel is the one running and nobody is behind them.

The ratios do not even agree with one another: five to a hundred is one to twenty, but a hundred to ten thousand is one to a hundred. The larger the force, the greater the advantage, which is the opposite of how armies usually reckon.

“Have respect unto you” is literally “turn toward you”, the face of verse 17 pointed the other way. Fruitful and multiply are the words of Genesis 1:28 and 9:1, and “establish my covenant” is the phrase given to Noah and to Abraham.

The picture is of granaries still holding last year’s grain when the new harvest arrives, so the old has to be carried out to make space. Eating old store also means never being reduced to eating the seed corn.

“Tabernacle” here is mishkan, the dwelling place built in Exodus 25–40. “My soul shall not abhor you” uses ga’al, a word for loathing that the chapter will turn around in verses 15, 30, 43 and 44.

“Walk among you” uses the reflexive form of halak, the one used of God walking in the garden in Genesis 3:8. Paul quotes the line in 2 Corinthians 6:16 of the church as a temple. “I will be your God, and ye shall be my people” is the covenant formula in its fullest form.

The yoke’s “bands” were the wooden bars or pegs that held it on the neck. “Upright” translates qomemiyyut, a word found only here in the Old Testament: to walk with the head raised, the posture of people no longer under a load.

The conditions come as a pair, not hearing and not doing. The Hebrew verb shama means both to hear and to obey, so the first failure already contains the second.

Three verbs climb in intensity: despise, abhor, break. “Break my covenant” (hefer berit) means to annul or make void, the same phrase God refuses to do in verse 44. The people are pictured doing what God will not.

“Consumption” and “the burning ague” are wasting disease and fever, probably malarial. “Appoint over” is the verb used for setting an officer over a people: terror is installed like a governor. The word for sowing in vain is the same “in vain” that returns in verse 20.

Being ruled by those who hate you reverses the pursuit of verse 7. The last clause, fleeing when none pursues, is quoted almost exactly in Proverbs 28:1: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.”

“Seven times” is simply the number seven, sheva, used as a measure of completeness and intensity rather than a count of years. It will be said four times in the chapter (verses 18, 21, 24 and 28), once for each stage of refusal.

“The pride of your power” is the same phrase Ezekiel uses for Jerusalem’s temple and walls (Ezekiel 24:21, 33:28). Deuteronomy 28:23 repeats the iron and brass sky, but reverses the metals: there the heaven is brass and the earth iron.

The verse undoes verse 4 almost word for word, increase and fruit both withheld. “Spent in vain” pictures strength poured out and used up, the ploughman’s labour going into ground that returns nothing.

“Contrary” is qeri, a rare word found only in this chapter, seven times. It is related to a verb for chance or encounter, so it may mean walking at cross purposes or walking as if by chance, treating God as incidental. The rabbis took the second sense.

“Rob you of your children” is literally “make you childless”, the word Jacob uses in Genesis 43:14. The beasts kept out by verse 6 come back. Empty highways appear again in Judges 5:6, where in the days of Shamgar travellers kept to the byways.

“Be reformed” is the passive of yasar, to be disciplined or instructed, the verb of a father correcting a son. The judgments so far are presented as correction with a purpose, not yet as the end.

The one who says “I also will walk contrary unto you” is the same God who promised in verse 12 to walk among them. The walk continues; its direction has turned.

“Avenge the quarrel of my covenant” is literally “avenge the vengeance of the covenant”: the sword acts as the covenant’s own enforcer. Crowding into walled cities for safety from the sword only puts everyone within reach of plague.

Bread was the “staff” of life, what a person leaned on. Ten households sharing one oven means there is so little flour that one firing covers them all, and bread weighed out on scales is rationing. Ezekiel 4:16 takes up this exact phrase for besieged Jerusalem.

The fourth condition, now introduced with “for all this”. The escalation has run through disease, drought, beasts and siege, and the refusal to hear is unchanged.

“In fury” is added for the first time, and “I, even I” doubles the pronoun for emphasis. The verb is now yasar again, but this time God is the one chastising, where in verse 23 Israel refused to be chastised.

The two halves are set in a chiasm, sons eaten and daughters eaten, flesh at both ends. The horror is recorded as having happened at the sieges of Samaria (2 Kings 6:28–29) and Jerusalem (Lamentations 4:10).

“High places” (bamot) were raised shrines; “images” here are hammanim, probably incense altars or sun pillars. The bodies of the worshippers are thrown on the “carcases of your idols”, a mocking phrase for lifeless objects that fall like corpses. Ezekiel 6:4–5 reworks the verse.

“Sweet odours” is reah nihoah, the soothing aroma that the offerings of chapters 1–3 produced again and again. The same sacrifices that were once smelled with pleasure will now be ignored. The plural “sanctuaries” may mean the holy things of the one sanctuary, or the many shrines.

Enemies who settle the land are appalled by it. “Astonished” is shamem, the same root as “desolation” in the first clause: the land is made desolate and those who see it are made desolate with shock.

“Draw out a sword after you” is the sword unsheathed behind a fleeing people, a pursuit that follows them even out of the land. “Heathen” is goyim, the nations, not a comment on their religion.

The Hebrew verb for “enjoy” (ratsah) is the same verb used for God accepting a sacrifice; the land will receive its sabbaths, or have them made good. 2 Chronicles 36:21 quotes this verse to explain why Judah’s exile lasted as it did.

The last clause names the fault: the land did not rest “in your sabbaths”. The sabbath years of 25:1–7 were owed to the land, and the chapter treats them as a debt being collected.

“Faintness” (morekh) appears only here, a softness or timidity of heart. A shaken leaf is the smallest imaginable noise, a dry leaf skittering along the ground, and it is enough to set a whole company running.

“Fall one upon another” pictures a panicked crowd tripping over itself. “Power to stand” uses tequmah, from the same root as the upright walking of verse 13: the people once made to stand straight can no longer stand at all.

“Eat you up” gives the land a mouth. The spies will use the same phrase in Numbers 13:32, calling Canaan “a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof”.

“Pine away” is maqaq, to rot or melt away, the word for wounds that fester in Psalm 38:5. It is “in their iniquity” in two senses: they waste away under its guilt and inside its consequences.

The confession has three parts: their own iniquity, their fathers’ iniquity, and the admission that they have walked contrary. Nehemiah 9 and Daniel 9 are prayers of exactly this shape, confessing the sins of the fathers from inside exile.

The uncircumcised heart is a heart closed off, as uncircumcised lips in Exodus 6:12 are lips that cannot speak well. “Accept of the punishment” uses ratsah again, the verb of verse 34: as the land makes good its sabbaths, the people make good their iniquity.

The patriarchs are named in reverse, Jacob to Isaac to Abraham, reaching back through the generations. Jacob’s is the only name written in the Hebrew with a full spelling, a rare form found in just five places. The land itself is included in the remembering.

The verse repeats the land’s sabbaths and the people’s penalty side by side, and doubles its reason: “because, even because”. The last clause turns back the words of verse 15, despised judgments and a soul that abhorred statutes.

Every key verb of the threats is denied here: cast away, abhor, destroy, break. “Abhor” is ga’al, the word of verses 11, 15, 30 and 43. The people abhorred God’s statutes; God will not finally abhor them.

“Covenant of their ancestors” (literally “of the first ones”) points to the generation of the exodus, not the patriarchs of verse 42. The exodus was done “in the sight of the heathen”, as a public act, which is why it can be recalled on foreign soil.

A closing formula like 7:37–38. Three words stack up, statutes, judgments and laws (torot), and they are said to be “between him and the children of Israel”, the language of a two-party covenant rather than of decree alone.