Ezekiel

Ezekiel the Prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures is depicted on a 1510 Sistine Chapel fresco by Michelangelo.

Ezekiel or Yechezkel (Hebrew: יְחֶזְקֵאל — "God will strengthen") was a major prophet in the Hebrew Bible. His prophetic ministry spanned the period between 592 to 570 B.C.E., and he is regarded as the author of much of the biblical Book of Ezekiel.

Ezekiel was the most important prophet of the Jewish exile in Babylon. He was a younger contemporary of the Jerusalem-based Jeremiah, he bemoaned the fate of Israel and Judah and called for a revival of faith centering on the hope of a rebuilt Temple of Jerusalem and the revival of the Davidic kingdom. Although his book gives a good deal of attention to priestly issues, its more lasting contributions deal with the moral principles of what later become known as ethical monotheism. Ezekiel also gave spiritual encouragement to the exiles, assuring them that God had not abandoned them and that the sins of their immediate ancestors will not be held against them (Ezek. 18).

Many of Ezekiel's prophecies take the form of poetry. He participated viscerally in his prophetic pronouncements through fasts and other mortifications of the flesh. His expressions of God's pain and anger are striking, even disturbing, to modern readers in the violent sexual imagery the prophet uses to describe God's rage against Israel's idolatrous "fornication" (Ezek. 16, 23).

More than any other prophet, Ezekiel was a visionary. His several visions of angelic beings and vehicles are particularly vivid (Ezek. 1, 10). These later became important elements in the mystical traditions of the kabbalah. His revelation of the restored Temple of Jerusalem goes into minute architectural detail (Ezek. 40-44). Moreover, his vision of the Valley of Dry Bones (Ezek. 37), although originally referring to the revival of Israel as a people, became an important basis for the belief in the resurrection of the dead, both in Jewish and Christian traditons.

The exiled elders of Judah consulted Ezekiel, although it is debateable whether his prophecies had much immediate impact on the consciousness of exile community. His writings certainly became very important in later Jewish life as well as in both Jewish and Christian apocalypticism. Indeed, his prophecies outlined many of the central themes that defined the Jewish people.

Biography

Ezekiel was the son of Buzi, a priest of Jerusalem and descendant of Zadok. As such, he was among the aristocracy whom Nebuchadnezzar (597 B.C.E.) carried off as exiles in Babylon. He lived among a colony of exiles in a place called Tel-aviv, after which the modern Israeli city was named. Life for most of the exiles did not involve physical suffering or slavery. Ezekiel himself was married and lived in his own house. One of his main complaints against his countrymen was that they were too complacement and willing to adopt Babylonian customs.

In the fifth year of his exile, sitting on the banks of a river, he received his prohetic calling together with his first recorded revelation.

"I will not be inquired of by you," Ezekiel declares to Israel's elders in exile. (Ezek. 20)

Several additional visions are recorded in the Book of Ezekiel. However, it would be a mistake to consider him mainly as a visionary.

The main focus of his ministry was to urge the exiles to repent for their sins and live in accordance with God's law. He expressed considerable frustration both with their response and often denounced the behavior of the Jews still living in Judea and its environs. The elders of the exiles repeatedly visited him (chapters 8, 14, and 22). However, he was not satisfied with their response, repeatedly calling a "rebellious house" (ii. 5, 6, 8; iii. 9, 26, 27; and elsewhere and complaining that, although they came in great numbers to hear him, they fail to take his words seriously.(xxxiii. 30-33). He often compared Israel and Judah to adulterous women and prostitutes because of their faithlessness. Ezekiel interpreted his own wife's sudden death as being related to Nebuchadrezzer's destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, which the prophet believed was God's punishment for Judah's sins. He even claimed to have been ordered by God to eat bread cooked over fires fueled by human dung. Despite such lapses into depression and despair bordering on the pathological, Ezekiel also expressed a powerful hope for the redemption of God's people. This is exempliefied in such prophecies as the coming of the messianic king, the re-union of God and His people as husband and wife, the rebuilding of the Temple, and the resurrection of dead (also interpreted as the spiritual resurrection of Israel.)

Ezekiel's prophecies extended over twenty-two years.

Ezekiel occupies a distinct and unique position among the Hebrew Prophets. He stands midway between two epochs, drawing his conclusions from the one and pointing out the path toward the other. Through the destruction of the city and the Temple, the downfall of the state, and the banishment of the people the natural development of Israel was forcibly interrupted. Prior to these events Israel was a united and homogeneous nation. True, it was characterized by a spirit totally unlike that of any other people; and the consciousness of this difference had ever been present in the best and noblest spirits of Israel. The demands of state and people, however, had to be fulfilled, and to this end the monarchical principle was established. There is undoubtedly an element of truth in the opinion that the human monarchy was antagonistic to the dominion of God, and that the political life of Israel would tend to estrange the nation from its eternal spiritual mission. The prophecy of the pre-exilic period was compelled to take these factors into account, and ever addressed itself either to the people as a nation or to its leaders—king, princes, priests—and sometimes to a distinguished individual, such as Shebna, the minister of the royal house mentioned in Isa xxii. 15-25; so that the opinion arose that the Prophets themselves were merely a sort of statesmen.

His Teachings

Like all the Hebrew prophets, Ezekiel's main concern was to bring God's people back into alignment with the principles monotheism and biblical ethics. He was particularly concerned with this countrymen's lapses into idolatry, which he equated with the sin of fornication. The imagery he used to depict this sin is sometimes shocking:

She became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. (Ezek. 23:19-20)

His description of God's attitude toward Israel's sins is likewise disturbing:

I handed her over to her lovers, the Assyrians, for whom she lusted. 10 They stripped her naked, took away her sons and daughters and killed her with the sword. (Ezek. 23:9-10)

Such passages may be offensive to the modern reader, but for the prophet they were a meant to shock the hearer out of his complacency and bring him into repentance. Ultimately, Ezekiel's God is not a male chauvinist monster, but a loving husband:

I will now bring Jacob back from captivity and will have compassion on all the people of Israel, and I will be zealous for my holy name. They will forget their shame and all the unfaithfulness they showed toward me when they lived in safety in their land with no one to make them afraid... Then they will know that I am the Lord their God, for though I sent them into exile among the nations, I will gather them to their own land, not leaving any behind. I will no longer hide my face from them... (Ezekiel 39:25-29)

Like Jeremiah before him, Ezekiel saw Babylon as the instrument of God's wrath against Judah on account of her sins. God's people were therefore not to resist their captivity, but to sumit to the Babylonian yoke. Only repentance and obeidence to God's laws would win their redemption.

The hope of redemption in Ezekiel's view involved Israel's liberation from captivity, the rebuilding of the Temple and the coming of the Davidic Messiah, whom he describe in very certain terms:

I will set up one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them, even my servant David; he shall feed them, and he shall be their shepherd. And I the Lord will be their God, and my servant David a prince among them; I the Lord have spoken it. (Ezek 34:23-24)

It should be remembered that in Ezekiel's day, the Davidic line of kings had only very recently been dethroned by the Babylonian power. Indeed, during his early prophecies a Davidic king — though not one obedient to God in the prophetic view — still reign in Jerusalem. The idea of a revived Davidic monarchy was not, for Ezekiel and his contemporaries, a supernatural event.

Even though he held the nation collectively responsible for its sin, Ezekiel also emphasized the idea of individual responsibility for sin and rejected the idea of ancestral sin. He directly refuted the Deuteronomic idea that God holds the sons responsible for the sins of their fathers for several generations (Deut. ).

The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against him. (Ezek 18)

Almost important to Ezekiel was the priestly tradition. Several of his prophecies deal with priestly concerns, especially the rebuilding of the Temple, which he describes in minute architectural detail. He envisioned the liberation of Israel from its Babylonian captivity and the redemption of its people to live as a "kingdom of priests" as described in the Book of Exodus.

He also prophesied against the non-Israelite peoples, such as the inhabitants of Ammon, Edom, Tyre, Sidon, and Egypt. (Ezek. 25-32)

Visions and Acts

Ezekiel's message is often overwhelmed by the imagery of his visions and symbolic acts. His first such recorded revelation is remarkable in that it describes not only the appearance of angelic beings and their vehicles but even of God Himself:

I saw that from what appeared to be his waist up he looked like glowing metal, as if full of fire, and that from there down he looked like fire; and brilliant light surrounded him. 28 Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.

File:Ezekiel-Lying.jpg

Ezekiel lies on his side during his 390-day period of "bearing the sin of Israel."

Later God commands him to build a scale model of the Babylonian seige of Jerusalem and to lie on his side before it for 390 days, to "bear the sin of the house of Israel." (Ezek. 4:5) God commands Ezekiel to eat a scanty diet of bread cooked over a fire fueled with human dung. The prophet here countradicts the Lord, saying that to do so would violate his commitment to ritual purity. God relents, saying, "Very well. I will let you bake your bread over cow manure instead of human excrement." (4:15)

Next, God commands Ezekiel to cut his hair and beard in order to perform various symbolic acts when the days of the seige of Jerusalem are finished. (Ezek 8)

Another vision involved an experience of being spiritually transported to Jerusalem, where Ezekiel witnessed idolatry and pagan worship being practiced in the Temple. (Ezek 9-10) This revelation also includes Ezekiel's famous vision of the supernatural vehicle with its awe-inspiring angelic riders and whirling, intersecting wheels.

I looked, and I saw beside the cherubim four wheels, one beside each of the cherubim; the wheels sparkled like chrysolite. As for their appearance, the four of them looked alike; each was like a wheel intersecting a wheel... Their entire bodies, including their backs, their hands and their wings, were completely full of eyes, as were their four wheels... Each of the cherubim had four faces: One face was that of a cherub, the second the face of a man, the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle.

God then instructs Ezekiel to pack his things, blindfold himself, and dig through the wall of his house as a sign pertaining to the future captivity of the remaining Jerusalemites and their king, who would later be blinded and brought in chains to Babylon. (Ezek 12.)

Ezekiel also reports a vision in which God predicts the sudden death of the prophet's wife.

The word of the Lord came to me: "Son of man, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes. Yet do not lament or weep or shed any tears. Groan quietly; do not mourn for the dead..." So I spoke to the people in the morning, and in the evening my wife died. The next morning I did as I had been commanded. (Ezek. 24:16-18)

File:Ezekiel-Bones.jpg

Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones.

The reason for God's seemingly cruel treatment of his prophet, once again, is that Ezekiel is to act as a sign for God's people. As Ezekiel is to refrain from mourning for his wife, so the people are to refrain from mourning for the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. In both cases it is "the sovereign Lord" who brings the destruction — in the Temple's case on account of the nation's sin, and in the case of Ezekiel's wife to become a symbol. The proper posture in both cases is thus humility, repentance, and obedience — not mourning.

Ezekiel's most famous vision is that of the Valley of Dry Bones. Here the prophet envisions an entire valled of bones reassembling and coming back to life again. God explains the vision as being both symbolic and actual:

"These bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, 'Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.' ...I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel." (Ezek. 37:11-12)

Ezekiel's final vision is a long prophecy concerning the rebuilding of the Temple. It incluldes a detailed description, including architectual plans, dimensions, building materials, rooms for priests, ritual practices, festivals, priestly traditions, holy days, and the division of the land among the Israelites tribes. (Ezek. 40-48)

Ezekiel's personality

Ezekiel personality strongly colors both his minstry and his prophecies. Nowhere else in the bible are the personal experiences of the prophets described in such vivid detail as in Ezekiel. He takes his mission very personally and acts it out in dramatic fasion. Other prophets did likewise (Isaiah walked with in public for three years with his buttocks exposed, Jeremiah did not marry, and Hosea took a prostitute for a wife — all as symbolic acts related to their prophetic messages) but with Jeremiah, this prophetic acting-out seems to dominate his entire life.

He conceives it as his prophetic mission to strive to reach his compatriots individually and to win them back to God; and he considers himself personally responsible for them.

Yet another feature of Ezekiel's personality is the pathological. With no other prophet are visions and ecstasy so prominent; and he repeatedly refers to symptoms of severe maladies, such as paralysis of the limbs and of the tongue (3:25 et seq.), from which infirmities he is relieved only upon the announcement of the downfall of Jerusalem (24:27, 33:22). Ezekiel also engages in graphic sexual imagery to describe God's frsutration with his people, and describe God as a an abusive husband who responds to his wife's infidelity in violent rage. Some modern commentators have suggested that he may have been the victim of epilepsy, schizophrenia, or both.

We can certainly recognize that the pressures of living in exile, enaging in long periods of fasting and other mortifications, and being suddenly widowed by what he believed was an act of God in order to make him an example to his compatriots may have taken a psychological toll on Ezekiel. However, to write off his religious experiences as the mere product of psychosis is to ignore both his genius and his prophetic calling. In the end, we can only admit that although he is clearly a trouble soul, he is also an inspired one.

Ezekiel in Jewish literature

Ezekiel, like Jeremiah, is said to have been a descendant of Joshua by his marriage with the proselyte Rahab (Talmud Meg. 14b; Midrash Sifre, Num. 78). He was already active as a prophet while in Palestine, and he retained this gift when he was exiled with Jehoiachin and the nobles of the country to Babylon (Josephus, Ant. x. 6, § 3: "while he was still a boy"; comp. Rashi on Sanh. 92b, above).

Although his own descriptions imply the oppositie, the rabbincal view is that Ezekiel, like all the other prophets, beheld only a blurred reflection of the divine majesty, just as a poor mirror reflects objects only imperfectly (Midrash Lev. Rabbah i. 14, toward the end).

According to midrash Canticles Rabbah, it was Ezekiel whom the three pious men, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, (Shadrach, Miesheck, and Obednigo in Christian Bibles) asked for advice as to whether they should resist Nebuchadnezzar's command and choose death by fire rather than worship his idol. At first God revealed to the prophet that they could not hope for a miraculous rescue; whereupon the prophet was greatly grieved, since these three men constituted the "remnant of Judah." But after they had left the house of the prophet, fully determined to sacrifice their lives to God, Ezekiel received this revelation that God would indeed protect them from their firey ordeal. (Midrash Canticles Rabbah vii. 8).

One tradition holds that Ezekiel literally performed a miracle of resurrecting the dead in the Valley of the Dry Bones, based on the passage: "So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet." (Ezek. 37:10 As early as the second century, however, some authorities declared this resurrection of the dead was a prophetic vision. This opinion was regarded by Maimonides (Guide for the Perplexed, II:46) and his followers as the only rational explanation of the Biblical passage.

Ezekiel the Tragedian

There was another ancient Jewish Ezekiel, other than the one discussed above, who according to Eusebius wrote Greek tragedies on biblical matters, including one called Exagoge, recounting the Exodus, of which fragments have survived.

Ezekiel and Other Faiths

Some Muslims believe that Ezekiel may be Dhul-Kifl, a figure who is mentioned in the following Qur'anic verse:

"And (remember) Ismail (Ishmael) and Idris (Enoch) and Dhul-Kifl, all were from among those who observe patience." (Surah 21: 85-86)

Other Muslims believe Dhul-Kifl may be the same person as Gautama Buddha, taking 'Kifl' to be the Arabic pronunciation of Kapilvastu, a place where he spent 30 years of his life, and use this as evidence to describe the Buddha as a prophet.

Ezekiel and Epilepsy

Some scholars have suggested that Ezekiel may have suffered from epilepsy. Specifically, it is claimed that Ezekiel may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, which has several characteristic symptoms that are apparent from his writing. These symptoms include hypergraphia, hyperreligiosity, fainting spells, mutism and pedantism, often collectively ascribed to a condition known as Geschwind syndrome.

See also

• Book of Ezekiel, a book in the Hebrew (Tanakh) and Christian Bibles.
• List of names referring to El.
• The Prophecy That Is Shaping History: New Research on Ezekiel's Vision of the End, 2003[1]

Notes

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Ezekiel  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "Ezekiel"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.