Ezekiel

What Ezekiel is about

Ezekiel was a priest deported to Babylon in 597 BC, before Jerusalem fell. He never served in the temple. Instead, by a canal in a foreign country, he sees the heavens open — wheels within wheels, four living creatures, and above them a figure on a throne surrounded by something like a rainbow. He is thirty years old, the age priests began their service, and this is the ministry he gets.

The book is difficult and strange, and its strangeness is intentional. Ezekiel is told to act out his message: to lie on his side for months, to shave his head and divide the hair, to pack a bag and dig through a wall in front of witnesses, and — most terribly — to say nothing when his wife dies, as a sign of a grief too large for mourning. He is a spectacle because the message is not getting through any other way.

Its two halves turn on the fall of Jerusalem. Before it, Ezekiel insists the city will fall, and describes God’s glory leaving the temple in one of the most haunting sequences in scripture. After the news arrives, the tone changes entirely: God will gather his scattered people, replace their hearts of stone with hearts of flesh, and put his own Spirit in them. Ezekiel is set down in a valley full of dry bones and asked whether they can live; he says God knows, and then watches them stand up. The book closes with a vision of a new temple, a river flowing from it that deepens as it goes and heals whatever it touches, and a city renamed The LORD Is There.

Where it sits in the story

Ezekiel is a contemporary of Jeremiah, writing from the other end of the same catastrophe — Jeremiah in the burning city, Ezekiel among those already carried away. His imagery runs straight into the New Testament, particularly Revelation, whose throne visions, scroll, and river of life all draw on him. His promise of a new heart and God’s Spirit within is one of the Old Testament’s clearest anticipations of what the New Testament says has now happened.

How to read it

Slowly, and with a good study Bible for the symbolic sections. Chapters 1, 34, 36, 37, and 47 are the ones most readers find both accessible and unforgettable — and chapter 34, on shepherds who feed themselves instead of the flock, stands behind Jesus calling himself the good shepherd.