The prophets in the bible

Unmovably Stubborn

Deported to Babylon. Like Jeremiah, he prophesied the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. He shouted God’s wrath to his people who had turned their backs on the Lord. Yet reconstruction was feasible, even in the colonies of the exiles, through observing all the precepts

by GIUSEPPE FRANGI

Ezekiel in Hebrew means “God is strong,” or “one whom God has made strong.” That strength was certainly very valuable to Ezekiel: he lived in an historical period when, for the Hebrew people, the humiliation of exile was compounded by a great confusion of faith. He was almost the same age as Jeremiah, but unlike that great prophet who had tried in vain to convince Jerusalem to yield to Nebuchadnezzar, Ezekiel was part of the first exile in 597 BC, when the Chaldean king had arrived in the land of Judah to deal with an early rebellion, after which Ezekiel was put on the list of deportees. With his hands tied behind his back, he had faced a desert crossing to arrive in the land, Babylon, where he would exercise his activity as prophet. He himself–so eccentric in his manner of self-expression and of prophesying, but so precise in reporting everything that happened to him–informs us of the time and place where he settled down: from the year 593 BC, he lived in a place called Tel Abib, on the banks of the Chebar canal, at the gates of Babylon.

A hard face
The type of person Ezekiel was can be deduced from some highly informative autobiographical hints he has left us. The Lord told him: “Behold, I have made your face hard against their [the Israelites’] faces, and your forehead against their foreheads. Adamant, harder than flint, have I made your forehead.” He was so hard as to stand firm without giving any sign of grief at the death of his wife, “the desire of his eyes.” In a nutshell, he was an unmovable hardhead, capable of the most incomprehensible acts in order to call his people back to the word of the Lord. He did some truly strange things, like when, to do penance for the sins of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, he lay on his left side for 190 days and then for 40 on his right. To ward off the temptation to move about, he had wrapped chains around himself. We can imagine the reaction of the exiles when they saw this prophet obstinately staying in that strange posture and, what is more, eating (at God’s command) “a barley cake, baking it in their sight on human dung.”

Mortal blow
What did Ezekiel want to communicate to his stubborn people? The same news that Jeremiah had tried in vain, from inside the walls of Jerusalem, to get across to the weak monarch Zedekiah, vassal of Nebuchadnezzar (but with an Egyptian prejudice, like all the higher echelons who were keeping the Jews remaining at home in line). The news was this: Jerusalem would fall, and the Temple–“a den of robbers” according to Jeremiah, a place of “loathsome things” for Ezekiel–would be destroyed. The two prophets cried out in vain; they knew that the wrath of God had already decided and that it was no longer possible to change direction. There was only one political position that could be taken: understanding that the irreversible had occurred and that all that could be done was to prevent too harsh a humiliation for the people and to avoid shedding too much “innocent blood.” Jerusalem held up under the siege of Nebuchadnezzar and deluded itself that with the arrival of its new allies, the Egyptians, it would be able to escape its fate. Instead, this did not happen. As Ezekiel wrote, Yahweh had “broken the arm of Pharaoh” and that arm would not be healed “to make it strong enough to wield the sword.” For Jerusalem, this was a mortal blow. The last weeks of the siege were tragic, as the pain-filled chronicles contained in Lamentations attest. Then in June of the year 586, the Chaldeans managed to open a breach in the city walls, and that was the end.
With his visions, Ezekiel, hundreds of miles away, had written a chronicle for his incredulous people. Struck dumb by God, he had continued to make known the contents of his revelations by noting them on clay tablets. “In the ninth year [after the captivity], on the tenth day of the tenth month, the word of Yahweh was addressed to me as follows: ‘Son of man, write down today’s date, yes, today’s, for this very day the king of Babylon began his attack on Jerusalem’” (Ez 24:1-2). Then with his somewhat odd ways, but efficacious for getting through to the hard heads of Israel, Ezekiel, who was still mute, took a pot, put some meat in it, and built up the fire under it. Then he showed his people a rusty cooking pot, which was Jerusalem. “Your filth is infamous… I have tried to purge you and you would not let yourself be purged of your filth” (Ez 24:13). Three years passed, and Ezekiel wrote, “In the twelfth year of our captivity, on the fifth day of the tenth month, a fugitive arrived from Jerusalem and said to me, ‘The city has been taken.’” From that moment, the tongue that had “cleaved to the roof of the mouth” was freed. The prophet was able to talk once again.

Grabbed by the hair
What was Jerusalem’s sin, to make Jeremiah and Ezekiel so sure of its punishment? In Chapter 8, the exiled prophet recounts that one day he was grabbed by the hair, lifted up between heaven and earth, and “in visions from God taken to Jerusalem.” What did Ezekiel see? A heap of loathsome things in the Temple, like “twenty-five men, with their backs to Yahweh’s sanctuary and their faces turned towards the east. They were prostrating themselves to the east, before the rising sun.” He saw the elders of the people, each one shut in his room, adoring his idol, and he saw the women weeping for Tammuz. In a word, their great sin was religious syncretism, it was having turned their backs on the only Lord. This is why destruction was inevitable.
But having fallen into the depths of the abyss, the greatest work for the prophet was beginning, that of reconstructing his people. “I shall be a sanctuary for them,” writes Ezekiel, struck by the dejection he read in the faces around him. God had told him that a small remnant of Israel would be left, and “when they come to you and you see their conduct and actions, you will take comfort in spite of the disaster which I have brought on Jerusalem… they will comfort you, when you see their conduct” (Ez 14:22-23). As Abbot Giuseppe Ricciotti reconstructs in a beautiful passage in his History of Israel, Ezekiel tenaciously rewove the threads between the colonies of exiles by making personal visits. He kept up the contacts with his fellow countrymen left in Palestine and urged everyone to observe all the precepts, beginning with circumcision. Respect for the Sabbath became the sign distinguishing them from their oppressors, who considered the Sabbath day to be unlucky. The great feasts, beginning with Passover, were respected. The prophet witnessed to this new faithfulness. Ricciotti writes, “Tenaciousness in observing all these practices is of the greatest importance because it shows a dual reaction on the exiles’ part: not only the reaction against the oppressors, but also another, much more profound and subtle one against themselves. It was, in essence, ‘penance’–that is, the state of mind that in Hebrew is called shubh, return.”

A meticulous lawyer
Ezekiel, whom the Lord had already called “a sentinel,” now also becomes a “signal.” “The emphatic prophet,” writes Ricciotti, “is transformed and becomes a methodical organizer, a meticulous lawyer, the first of Yahweh’s ‘scribes.’” In Chapters 40-48 of his book, in the “twenty-fifth year of our captivity,” Ezekiel begins to write down (in an irresistible surge of positivity) all the precise instructions the Lord has given him for rebuilding Israel. In his vision, the royal palace is at the service of the Temple. And the Temple is rebuilt in full respect of its fear-inspiring sacredness. As Paolo Sacchi, one of the leading Italian experts on Hebrew history, has written, Ezekiel removed from the reigning dynasty the task of opening a descendance toward the Messiah: “David goes from being an ancestor of the Messiah to a Messiah figure.” With respect to the legislation established in Deuteronomy, Ezekiel imposes a veer in the direction of strictness, to the point that for a long time he was regarded to be in conflict with the Torah, and there were those who wanted to exclude him from the Canon. It took the patience of a great rabbi, Hanania bel-Hizqiyyahu, who, after consuming 300 jars of oil in study vigils, demonstrated that Ezekiel’s legislation was compatible with the Torah. Ezekiel “does not refute it but adds another more elaborately engineered level on top of it; his aim is that the new nation be more rigorously guaranteed by the new legislation,” Ricciotti writes.

Yahweh is there
In his rush to rebuild, Ezekiel ends his book by proposing to change the name of Jerusalem: “The name of the city in future must be: ‘Yahweh-is-there.’”
As for him, he would never see the city again. He died in all probability in exile, without having time to live the season of the return, when, in 537 after Cyrus had liberated Babylon, a caravan of Israelites set out to return to the land of Canaan. The exile was over, and the Lord confirmed to that little remnant the promise made to the prophet: “They shall forget their shame, and all the treachery they have practiced against me, when they dwell securely in their land with none to make them afraid… and I will not hide my face any more from them” (Ez 39:26-29).