Ezekiel

Greek Fresco of Ezekiel XVI century

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Time line for destruction of Judah

Ezekiel Outline

 Oracles  Chariot  Performative Acts  Temple
 1-24 against Judah and Jerusalem  vision at the river Chebar (1)  Ezekiel eats the scroll (3), dramatizes the siege of Jerusalem (4), and cuts his hair and beard (5)  visions of abominations
   God's glory leaves the temple: the chariot ascends from Jerusalem and stops over the Mount of Olives and ends with Ezekiel back in Chaldea (10)

 Ezekiel packs his bags and leaves the city through a hole

The boiling pot of Jeremiah is dramatized in Ezekiel (24)

 
 25-32 against foreign nations      
 33-39 promising restoration    Ezekiel prophesies to dry bones and performs the drama of the two sticks (37)  
 40-49 visions of a new polity      Ezekiel measures the new temple (40-42)
       Ordinances governing the new temple (43-48)
The Divine Chariot: A visual Theology
Ezekiel
Ezekiel saw a wheel a-rolling,
Away in the middle of the air.
A wheel within a wheel a-rolling,
Away in the middle of the air.
And the big wheel ran by faith,
And the little wheel ran by the grace of God,
middle of the air.
Also:
Ezekiel saw a bell a-ringing
Ezekiel saw a light a-shining
Ezekiel saw a fire a-burning
Ezekiel saw a boy a-growing
EZEKIEL SAW THE WHEEL A-ROLLING
When Ezekiel saw the wheel-a-rolling
the great big wheel-a-turning over
Ezekiel saw the wheel-a-rolling
way in the middle of the earth.
Well great God of mine, I declare
Ezekiel saw the wheel in the middle of the air
the great big wheel and the little big wheel
the wheel turned over in the middle of the wheel
the good book says and the book don't lie
God told Ezekiel to prophesy
And my God spoke in Ezekiel's mind
he raised his voice and begin to cry
He cried:
Old bones old bones are walking
Great God showed me, old bones are talking.
Old bones bones won't you hear me now
old bones do hear the word of God.
Ezekiel...
Well God told Ezekiel to prophesy
he tried to do it and that's no lie
God sent the wind from the West and the East
Spirits shook him from his head to his feet.
He cried:
Old bones old bones are walking
Great God showed me, old bones are talking.
Old bones bones won't you hear me now
old bones do hear the word of God.
Ezekiel...
Well, old Ezekiel tried his best to do
the thing the Lord had told him to
he did his best that's all he can
after all Ziek was a natural man.
Ezekiel...
Lion Chimera
British Heraldry
American Presidential Seal
Roman legion
Assyrian Human Headed winged bull
Assyrian Eagle Headed deity
Babylonian Brick Lion Ishtar Gate
The Standard of Ur
Raphael's chariot
Message of Condemnation
 The Accused  God
 Wicked counselors think that the city is a pot that will protect the purity of the people and we are the protected meat (chapter 11)  God counters with the rusty boiling pot that eats the flesh off the meat (24)
 The False Prophets are jackals among ruins, saying peace when there is no peace and smearing white wash on the walls (chapter 13)  God counters by sending a rain storm to wash off the white wash (13:11).
 The daughters of the people prophesy out of their own imaginations disheartening the righteous and encouraging the wicked (13:17-19  God tears the bands off their arms and the veils from their heads (13:20ff)
 Jerusalem has been God's faithless bride who played the whore because of her fame (chapter 16)  God will gather all your lovers against her and uncover your nakedness and restore the fortunes of Sodom and Samaria that you may be be confounded and ashamed, and he will remember his covenant with her so that she may be confounded and ashamed.
 Jerusalem is the bloody city (22:1ff)  God will strike his hands together, and scatter his people, and be profaned in the sight of the nations (22:15-16)
 False shepherds have been eating the fat and clothing themselves with wool and not feeding the sheep (34)  God will rescue the sheep, he will seek them and make himself the shepherd of the sheep and set up his shepherd David.
Ezekiel makes visible that which Jeremiah sees in his mind's eye
Michael V. Fox , "The Rhetoric of Ezekiel's Vision of the Valley of the Bones" This place is too Small of Us: The Israelite Prophets in Recent Scholarship, edited by Robert P. Gordon (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1995) pp. 176-188:
Ezekiel sees the situation as intolerable not because it is miserable, for the misery he regards as punishment well-deserved. He sees it as intolerable because it could so easily become permanent, and that would mean the end of Israel as a people. It could become permanent because a nation that despairs of its future will do nothing to insure its continuation. Despair is tantamount to surrender, meaning absorption of the nation into its new environment, and surrender would be all the easier because of the relative benignity of that environment. p. 181
Rational argumentation could not give the people this kind of hope. Even if Ezekiel could convince the people that it was rational to expect restoration, intellectual conviction alone would not give the people the strength needed to carry them through the dark years. At any rate, there was no rational basis for hope. a reasonable man could see that Judah was in ruins and that only rags and tatters of the people were left in the homeland, and that at the same time Jews were rapidly adjusting to the conditions of exile. A young generation that scarcely knew the homeland had already grown up in exile. Since rational argumentation was hopeless, Ezekiel chose a rhetorical strategy at its polar opposite. He sought to create irrational expectations in his audience by making them believe in the reality for the irrational, by getting them to expect the unexpected, to accept the plausibility of the absurd. 182
Ezekiel's role is not messenger but spectator. Ezekiel is observing an event in which he is forcibly placed. p. 184
 

Dem Bones Gonna Rise Again
Jeremiah sees a vision of a pot boiling from the north (1:13)
On the 9th of Av, Ezekiel is commanded to get a pot, put water in it, place in it the choicest pieces of meat and mix them with spices, and pile logs under it. (24:1ff)
Jeremiah prophesies that a sword is coming (25:15 et al). Ezekiel takes a sword and shaves his beard and hair, burning 1/3, striking 1/3 with the sword, and scattering 1/3 to the wind ( 5:1ff).
God puts his word on Jeremiah's lips (1:9) and Jeremiah reminisces "Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy" (15:16); Ezekiel is made to eat the scroll which he finds to be as sweet as honey (3:1ff).
Jeremiah is told neither to marry nor to mourn (16:5); Ezekiel's wife dies and he is forbidden from mourning (24:15).
Jeremiah is appointed to pluck up and pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant (1:10); Ezekiel is plucked up and pulled down, he builds miniature battle scenes before which he play acts the future of Jerusalem (4:1-17). He measures out the building plan for the new Temple (41).
Jeremiah is told that the bones of the leaders of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem will be removed from their tombs and will be spread out to be scorched by the sun like dung on the surface of the ground (8:1-3). Ezekiel witnesses the transformation of dry bones to living and breathing fleshly bodies (37:1-14).
Even the casual reader's attention is arrested by the way God addresses Ezekiel as "Mortal" or "Son of Man." The Hebrew is ben-adam, son of Adam. Does the name God gives Ezekiel point to his status as the resurrected humanity? Does the language of ruah, so pronounced in this book, allude to the act of creation in Genesis 2?
One of the startling features of this enactment of Jeremiah is Ezekiel's physical participation. Jeremiah suffers at the hands of God's opponents. Ezekiel suffers at the hand of God.
Margaret S. Odell, "You are What you Eat: Ezekiel and the Scroll" JBL 117 (1998) pp. 244.
What Ezekiel eats, then, is not the message of divine judgment but the judgment itself. This interpretation resolves the apparent conflict that has long been noted between Ezekiel's message of judgment and the description of the scroll as lamentations. The scroll does indeed anticipate the judgment. However, what Ezekiel eats are not words that he must speak but the judgment itself and its consequences.
By eating the scroll, Ezekiel takes into his inner being the fate of his people. His act thus retains interesting similarities to the rite of ordination described in Leviticus 8-9. When the priests eat the sin offering, they take on the guilt of the people and thereby absolve it; as Milgrom notes, priestly purity swallow up and cancels out impurity. Similarly, when Ezekiel eats the scroll, he takes on the judgment of his people. Ezekiel thus retains the priestly dimensions of identifying with this people by ingesting a symbolic representation of their condition. But the very fact that it is a scroll and not a sacrifice demonstrates what he can no longer do and be as priest. separated from the temple, he cannot remove guilt. This point is further borne out by the symbolic act which requires that he "bear the guilt" of Judah and Israel (Ezek 4:4-8). Though he may be able to identify with his people, he is nevertheless helpless as a priest to deliver them. Thus, what was initially sweet to the taste becomes bitter poison. Ezekiel cannot avert the judgment,a and so he is left with a bellyful of inchoate mourning and pain (3:14-15).

Odell points to how Ezekiel's other symbolic acts also expose the paradox of Ezekiel's position. His binding symbolizes the captivity of the exile, but he is not able to intervene and atone for them as priest. Unable to speak, he cannot arbitrate between God and his people.
A New Standard of Responsibility
In Ezekiel's prophetic call the role of the prophet is articulated fully. The individual is accountable for his or her actions, but the prophet who fails to warn the individual of his or her iniquity becomes accountable as well (3:16-21).
Ezekiel 33 repeats this standard declaring Ezekiel, Israel's sentry and adds another aspect to his notion of accountability. God swears, "As I live, I have no pleasure in the death of with wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?" 33:11
This idea is expressed earlier in Ezekiel 18:32 "I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord, Turn, then, and live." Here is another aspect of the standard of responsibility. God repeats the proverb "The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge?" We might say, "The sins of the father is visited upon the children." The consequences of the irresponsibility of a generation is often felt by the next generation. For example, our children and our grandchildren will suffer the consequences of our failure to enact stricter fuel emissions standards.
In this vision of a new standard of accountability, those who are righteous shall live and will not suffer on account of the sins of others. In the context of the exile, this is a message of hope.
In the vision of the restored temple, holiness surrounds the temple. The holiness of the temple is protected by the people and is not simply the responsibility of the priests. Consequently, the priests must teach the people the difference between holy and common, clean and unclean. They must act as judges of the people. (44:23 ff)
From Kant to Ricoeur
From Lewis S. Mudge's introduction (p. 6-7) to Paul Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation
"For Kant, the role of religious symbols and representations is imaginatively to represent the limit beyond which the demand of conceptual knowledge for completeness cannot pass. For Kant we can think beyond the world of objects, but we cannot know that which is unconditioned by the object world." (p. 34)

The First Naïveté -- an unquestioned dwelling in a world of symbol

Kant, the philosopher, teaches us to account conceptually for the lived possibility of the believer's symbolic world. - the transcendental deduction of symbols "consists in justifying a concept by showing that it makes possible the construction of a domain of objectivity.' The philosopher tries to show that the symbol is in fact a reality detector, that it enables us to discern a human possibility that could not be discerned in any other way. "In fact, the symbol, used as a means of detecting and deciphering human reality, will have been verified by its power to raise up. To illuminate, to give order to that region of human experience..." (Ricoeur,The Symbolism of Evil . p. 35)

In the Temple visions, as in all his visions, Ezekiel becomes a witness to that which goes unseen.

Step two -- What does the text mean?

What is God's plan "If myth is really a projection on the level of representation, then it is first of all the reduction of what is beyond to what is on this side." (Paul Ricoeur, "Preface to Bultmann," p. 61.) Bultmann advocates a hermeneutic which he calls demytholization. Holiness and the temple cult is for Bultmann an attempt to live in a mythic reality rather than authentic existence. If we were to adopt Bultmann's methodology, we would ask, What then is the existential demand of the text? Bultmann would place an accent upon the need to let go of our false securities and our illusions of necessity. The text then calls us to a consciousness of our own condition. "Man must accept his existence with its troubles and danger whether he wants to or not" ("The Meaning of Christian Faith in Creation," Existence and Faith, p. 207). Our existence is not necessary, but rather it is due to an event. According to Bultmann, relinquishing our idolatry is being honest about our essential uneasiness about existence and affirming that we are subject to powers of which we cannot dispose. We cannot secure this life through religious rituals that we gain us immortality.

Paul Ricoeur believes that Bultmann leaps too quickly from the analytical act of recognizing that something is myth to the act of demytholization. "The reference of poetic language projects "ahead' of itself a world in which the reader is invited to dwell, thus finding a more authentic situation in being" (Mudge p. 25).

Ricoeur "My deepest conviction is that poetic language alone restores to us that participation in or belonging-to an order of things which precedes our capacity to oppose ourselves to things taken as objects opposed to a subject. Hence the function of poetic discourse is to bring about this emergence of a depth structure of belonging-to amid the ruins of descriptive discourse." "Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation" Essays on Biblical Interpretation, p. 101.

Examine the Temple Journeys and follow Ricoeur's Hermeneutic for Symbolism by exploring the mythological symbolism, moving to the analytic conceptualization, and attempting to enter a second naïveté.

Chapter 1 The first vision

Chapter 8

Chapter 9 - "Draw near, you executioners of the city, each with his destroying weapon in his hand."

The young man clothed in linen with a writing case at his side goes though the city and puts a mark on the foreheads of those who sigh and grown over the abominations." Then the executioners go through an kill. The Temple is defiled with the slain.

Chapter 10 - God's glory leaves - scattering the burning coals from the heavenly altar on the city.

Chapters 40-42 The vision of the New Temple - making blue prints for the new temple. Is this a "map without territory?"

Chapter 43 The Divine Glory returns - he sees that which cannot be seen.

Is Ezekiel 43:10-12 -- "As for you, mortal, describe the temple to the house of Israel, and let them measure the pattern; and let them be ashamed of their iniquities. When they are ashamed of all that they have done, make known to them the plan of the temple..." -- the key to understanding the purpose of this virtual tour. Are we to see what ought to be and feel a sense of shame for what has been?

The voice explains that the Temple is God's footstool.

Chapter44 the closed gate on the eastern wall

Chapter 45-46 Summary of laws

Chapter 47 Water flowing from the Temple to the east and the south and the north

Chapter 48 New allotment of the land.

Take a Virtual Tour
Tunnel Tour of Temple Mount
Virtual Tour of Jerusalem
Ancient Egypt Virtual Temple
Virtual Tour of Temple of Ramses III
Temple of Ramses II
Virtual Tour of the Temple
 
Remnant Theology
Message of Restoration