Theopedia

Book of Ezekiel

“And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.”

— Ezekiel 11:19 (ESV)

Overview

The Book of Ezekiel is a prophetic book of the Old Testament, written by the priest-prophet Ezekiel to the Judean exiles carried to Babylon in 597 BC.1 Where Isaiah and Jeremiah prophesied chiefly in Jerusalem, Ezekiel was called and consecrated to the prophetic office among the captives themselves, at Tel Abib on the river Chebar.2 His book moves from oracles of judgment against Jerusalem, through oracles against the surrounding nations, to visions of Israel’s future restoration, including the valley of dry bones and a detailed vision of a new temple.3

Author and Date

Ezekiel identifies himself as “the priest, the son of Buzi” (Ezek. 1:3), one of the “captives of the better class” deported with King Jehoiachin (2 Kings 24:8-16).2 He was called to the prophetic office “in the fifth year of king Jehoiachin’s captivity” (Ezek. 1:2), a date from which he reckons throughout the book, corresponding to roughly 593 BC.2 The latest date his prophecies supply is the twenty-seventh year of that same captivity, some twenty-two years later, though how much longer he continued prophesying is not recorded.2 Ezekiel’s fellow exiles regarded him as a genuine prophet of God: they assembled at his house to inquire of the Lord through him, even while, by his own report, they heard his words as entertainment without doing them (Ezek. 8:1; 14:1; 20:1; 33:30-32).2

His style is marked by the Chaldaisms natural to a prophet writing under Babylonian rule, and by a distinctive abundance of allegory, symbol, and vivid imagery, so much so that Jerome called the book “an ocean and labyrinth of the mysteries of God.”4

Historical and Literary Context

Ezekiel prophesied entirely from exile, addressing a community that had already lost its king, its land, and much of its national life, and that would lose its temple as well partway through his ministry. The book’s first half (chapters 1-24) consists of prophecies delivered before Jerusalem’s fall, warning that the city’s remaining sins would bring the judgment already begun in 597 BC to completion.5 The turning point comes at Ezekiel 33:21, where news reaches the exiles that Jerusalem has fallen; from that point the tone of the book shifts from judgment to the future restoration of God’s people.3 Ezekiel’s audience needed reassurance on two fronts at once: that Jerusalem’s destruction was neither an accident nor a defeat of the LORD by Babylon’s gods, and that his own departure from the city and the exiles did not mean he had abandoned them for good.

Structure

Dividing Ezekiel’s forty-eight chapters roughly in half yields the book’s three major movements.3

Judgment oracles against Judah and Jerusalem (chapters 1-24). After Ezekiel’s inaugural vision of the glory of the LORD (chapter 1), the book presents a chronological series of visions, symbolic actions, and direct addresses describing Jerusalem’s sins and the judgment about to fall on her, interspersed with denunciations of the false prophets who flattered the people in their sin.5

Oracles against the nations (chapters 25-32). These prophecies, not arranged in chronological order, address Ammon, Moab, Edom, and Philistia in brief, then Tyre and Sidon at greater length, then Egypt, all nations through whom, like Judah, the Chaldean power executed God’s judgment.5

Restoration oracles (chapters 33-48). Once news of Jerusalem’s fall reaches the exiles (33:21), Ezekiel’s message turns to the future glory of Zion, including the vision of the valley of dry bones (chapter 37) and, in the book’s final nine chapters, an extended vision of a new temple, its priests and worship, and the land divided anew among the returning tribes.3 Ezekiel himself signals that this temple vision is not a literal blueprint for rebuilding Solomon’s temple: several of its features make plain it depicts, in symbol, the coming enlargement of God’s church rather than the physical structure the exiles would in fact rebuild after the captivity.6

Major Themes

The glory of the LORD departs and returns. Ezekiel’s inaugural vision (chapter 1) and his account of Jerusalem’s judgment both turn on the presence of the LORD’s glory, pictured moving in stages out of the temple: from the cherub to the threshold, where it lingers as though inviting the nation’s repentance, then from the threshold to a position over the cherubim, then out of the city to the mountain on its east side, “as if loth to depart, and abandon the place and people” (Ezek. 9:3; 10:18; 11:23).7 Stephen Charnock reads this slow, staged withdrawal as an expression of God’s patience rather than mere severity: God’s “slowness to” wrath, unwilling to leave until every invitation to repent had gone unanswered.8 The book’s closing vision answers this departure: the glory of the LORD is shown returning to fill the new temple from the east, the same direction by which it had gone out (Ezek. 43:1-5).

Individual responsibility (Ezekiel 18). Against the exiles’ proverb “the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Ezek. 18:2), the LORD declares that proverb will no longer be used in Israel: “the soul that sins shall die” (Ezek. 18:4, 20). John Gill, addressing an objection to the imputation of Adam’s sin drawn from this chapter, argues the passage does not speak to Adam’s sin or its consequences for his posterity at all; rather it concerns “good men and just men, that do not follow their fathers’ evil ways,” and is restrained to a particular case and time among the exiles themselves, who were blaming their own sins on their fathers’ guilt rather than repenting of them.9 Ezekiel 18 addresses each exile’s present accountability before God for his own sin, not the doctrine of original sin.

The new heart and new spirit (Ezekiel 36). The LORD promises the exiles, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh… And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezek. 36:26-27).10 Matthew Barrett treats this promise, together with its counterpart in Ezekiel 11:19, as a picture of regeneration as God’s own sovereign work: God does not merely offer the new heart in response to the sinner’s own initiative but gives it, and only then does the changed heart walk in obedience.11 Ezekiel later appeals to the same gift as the ground of Israel’s own responsibility to repent: “Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezek. 18:31).

The valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37). In a vision the Spirit sets Ezekiel down in a valley full of dry bones and asks whether they can live; at the LORD’s command Ezekiel prophesies over them, and the bones come together, are covered with flesh, and are given breath and life (Ezek. 37:1-10). The vision is explicitly interpreted within the text as a promise of Israel’s national restoration from exile: “these bones are the whole house of Israel… I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people” (Ezek. 37:11-12). Barrett places this vision alongside the new-heart promise of Ezekiel 36 as one of Scripture’s own pictures of the sovereign, life-giving character of regeneration, the same divine act that raises what is spiritually dead.12

Related Doctrines

Multimedia

  • Ezekiel (QuickTime), by Douglas Stuart

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 315-317. ↩

  2. Barrows, 317. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  3. Barrows, 320-321. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Barrows, 318-319. ↩

  5. Barrows, 320. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Barrows, 321. ↩

  7. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 2, “Discourse XIV: On God’s Patience,” 494-495: “The glory of God goes first from the cherub to the threshold of the house, and stays there, as if he had a mind to be invited back again; then it goes from the threshold of the house, and stands over the cherubims, as if upon a penitent call it would drop down again to its ancient station.” ↩

  8. Charnock, 495. ↩

  9. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 3, chap. 10, “Of the Imputation of Adam’s Sin to All His Posterity”: “The text in Ezekiel 18:2-4 is not to the purpose… since this speaks not a word of Adam, and his sin, nor of his posterity suffering for it; nor even of such men that commit the same sins their fathers have; but of good men and just men, that do not follow their fathers’ evil ways.” ↩

  10. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, 220, quoting Ezek. 36:25-27. ↩

  11. Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Scriptural Affirmation of Monergistic Regeneration,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 187-188. ↩

  12. Barrett, 188. ↩